How Bad Is The Crime In The 'Chocolate City' OF Chicago

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

Thomas Jefferson's "Commonplace Book," 1774-1776, quoting from On Crimes and Punishment, by criminologist Cesare Beccaria, 1764

After the last election, we need ask -- Where has our common sense gone.

Chicago, just a single city in the United States, all by itself experienced twice as many shootings and killings of Americans as did the entire nation of Iraq over recent months:

125 Shot Dead In Chicago Over Summer
Total Is About Double The U.S. Troop Death Toll In Iraq

CHICAGO (CBS) -- An estimated 125 people were shot and killed over the summer. That's nearly double the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq over the same time period.

n May, cbs2chicago.com began tracking city shootings and posting them on Google maps. Information compiled from our reporters, wire service reports and the Chicago Police Major Incidents log indicated that 125 people were shot and killed throughout the city between the start of Memorial Day weekend on May 26, and the end of Labor Day on Sept. 1.

Here is an interesting google mashup map Of the killings.

I wonder what is going on in the city of Chicago?

Bond said gang-related violence presents the most serious danger to Chicago residents.

Aww man, the same old drug gangs protecting their turf in the 'hood. Same old lame excuse for the police not doing their job you hear over and over. So what is the status of citizens having CCWs? Do you have to ask?

Americans Know ‘American Idol’ Star Better than American History

More than twice as many Americans – 56 percent -- know that Paula Abdul is a judge on “American Idol” as know that the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people” comes from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (21 percent) -- a phrase President-elect Barack Obama used in his election-night victory speech.

The average American is nearly illiterate when it comes to basic principles of American history, government and economics, according to a new report from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute – and politicians are even worse.

More than 2,000 people were administered a 33-question test this Spring on American history and our political and economic institutions. Of them, 71 percent -- college and non-college educated alike – got a failing mark, ISI’s Josiah Bunting III said, presenting the study at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Thursday. “It can truly be said that we are suffering from an epidemic of civic ignorance,” Bunting said. “The extent of failure is pervasive, cutting across every segment of the American population.

“Young Americans failed, but so did the elderly,” said Bunting. “Men and women, rich and poor, liberals and conservatives, Republican and Democratic, white, black, yellow and brown – all were united in their inability to master the basic features of America’s constitutional form of government.”

What Americans don’t know about civics – a subject that used to be required for high school graduation -- is shocking:

-- Less than half of Americans can name all three branches of government.

-- Only 27 percent of Americans know that the Bill of Rights prohibits the government from establishing an official religion in the U.S.

-- 54 percent do not know that the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the president.

Politicians, however, scored five points lower than the Average Joe, a performance that former Deputy Secretary of Education Eugene W. Hickok labeled “abysmal and alarming.”

-- Seventy-nine (79) percent of elected officeholders did not know that the Bill of Rights expressly forbids the government establishment of an official religion.

-- A large number (43 percent) of politicians did not know what the Electoral College does.

Only 32 percent of politicians can actually define what the free-enterprise system is – even though many of them may have campaigned for office pledging to defend it.

More here. Take the test here.

What Has Populism Done for You Lately?

The Case for Repealing the 17th Amendment

By: Chad Jimenez(Claremont Institute)

At the turn of the century, the Populists and Progressives passed many pieces of revolutionary legislation, one of which was the 17th amendment. The 17th amendment, ratified in 1913, provided for the direct election of senators by the people, bypassing the Constitutional provision that the state legislatures elect senators. On the surface, the 17th amendment seems like an excellent idea. Instead of having greedy politicians elect senators, the people would be able to hold their senators directly accountable. In our democratic society, it only makes sense that the people get to participate in the democratic process more often. The 17th amendment, however, was a bad idea and needs repealing. Indirect election of senators was essential for the practice of federalism, which is one of the basic principles of our Constitution, and one that we are in danger of losing.

Ninety-two years after its ratification, many people, including former Georgia Senator Zell Miller, are noticing the damage the 17th amendment has done. First, it has destroyed many of the essential purposes of bicameralism. These purposes include the prevention of poor legislation and the protection of states from federal intrusion on their power. The point of having a Senate is that no law can be passed without a majority of the representatives of the states. The Senate makes it difficult for the federal government to assume too much power because the senators who represent the interests of their states vote to protect their states' rights. Direct election abolished the idea that senators are supposed to represent their state governments.

Another problem with the direct election of senators is that it made both houses of the legislature subject to direct popular pressure. Before the 17th amendment, the Senate was the place were a politician could afford to do what was right for the country, and not just what was popular at the time. Instead of creating a more enlightened form of government, the 17th amendment turned the Senate into just another echo chamber of popular passion, which is exactly what the founders were trying to avoid.

In the early 20th century, proponents of the 17th amendment argued that it would get rid of the corruption involved in senatorial election. If bribery was their main concern, however, they only added to the problem by increasing the amount of people a senator had to bribe to win an election. Providing for the popular election of senators only increased the amount of lobbying in Washington, and with it the influence of special interests in politics, something the public complained about 90 years ago and still deals with today.

Another reason for the passage of the 17th amendment was legislative deadlock. State legislatures would many times reach a deadlock in electing a senator and not send anyone to Washington, sometimes going as long as 4 years without representation. Lack of representation due to deadlock should not be a problem, however. If the 17th amendment were repealed, states could make provisions in their own constitutions so that if the state legislature cannot agree on a candidate by a certain time, the governor could appoint a senator. This type of election process would encourage less-partisan politics by forcing both parties to work together to elect responsible leadership.

Repealing the 17th amendment would renew America's lost federalism and restore a more responsible form of government. Just as we have a firm belief in the independence and strength of the individual, the founders had a firm belief in the strength and independence of the states. Our country was not built on the idea of a strong federal government that undermined and bullied states into accepting restrictions on their powers, but rather the idea of balance between the federal and state governments. The founding fathers sought to preserve the balance of power throughout American government, and one way they did this was by giving state governments a voice in the federal government. Federalism is served not by directly-elected senators, but by senators elected by the representatives of the people in each of the state legislatures. Election of senators by the state legislatures would get the people more interested and involved in their own state politics and take senators' focus away from federal government expansion.

Arctic Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs in the Arctic? Has anyone else seen the documentary on NOVA, “Arctic Dinosaurs“? It is about the discovery of at least 8 different species of dinosaur bones found on the North Slope of Alaska, only a stone’s through from the Arctic Ocean. How can that be?

The original discovery was made in 1961 by Shell Oil geologist Robert Liscomb who came across a large fossil. He sent the specimen back to his office, intending to have it classified by a paleontologist.

Unfortunately, Liscomb died the next year, in a rock slide, so they were in a Shell warehouse until about the mid-1980s, when Shell was cleaning house, and they sent them to the U.S.G.S. There, a paleontologist by the name of Charles Repenning, found the bones and immediately recognized that they were dinosaur bones.

Early March 2008, Alaska's North Slope, the frozen Colville River: a team of scientists has pitched camp here, at the base of these cliffs, willing to brave the perilous polar winter to investigate a startling discovery.

They've unearthed dinosaur bones near the North Pole. The animal was called Edmontosaurus, a gentle giant, a 35-foot-long, four-ton, duck-billed plant eater, a member of the Hadrosaur family, found in 70-million-year-old rock, a mere 50 miles from the Arctic Ocean, where temperatures can drop as low as minus-60 degrees Fahrenheit. According to conventional wisdom, it shouldn't be here, because this is how dinosaurs are typically pictured: cold-blooded reptiles living in tropical climes, not in cold, arctic environments like this one. And the Hadrosaur is not alone.

In two sites along Alaska's Colville River, paleontologists have recently unearthed eight distinct species, represented by hundreds of fossils.

Dinosaurs living in the Arctic, a few miles from the current Arctic Ocean. How can that be? Well one things seems sure, it was considerably warmer on Earth when this was going on. Similar have been made discoverys, at about the same time in Earth's history, have been made near the South Pole in Antarctic.

Another interesting thing is conifers and ferns grew right up to the shore of the Arctic Ocean. Finds in the permafrost regarding about the vegetation of the region shows the area was much warmer than today. This implies a temperature that is about 30 degrees warmer than it was today. It means that 70 million plus years ago, when things were warm, dinosaurs were living in the area excavated. They would not be able to survive there today, because of the colder temperatures.

Two-hundred-thirty-million years ago, the Earth was even warmer than it was at the end of the age of dinosaurs. Those conditions fostered a great flowering of diversity, including the evolution of dozens of species which came to dominate the land, the air, the water, and eventually filled every corner of the globe.

And then, 65-million years ago: a devastating blow to the planet...a massive asteroid impact. The prevailing theory is that the resulting explosion threw massive clouds of gas and ash into the air and plunged the Earth into a global winter. The theory held that dinosaurs, tropical animals, were unable to cope with the darkness and the cold that followed. But the discovery that dinosaurs already lived in non-tropical conditions, enduring long periods of darkness, suggests that there must be more to the story.

Who knew that dinosaurs roamed the shores of the Arctic Ocean 70 million years ago, and 230 million years ago it was considerably warmer than it was 65 million years ago, and it was considerably warmed then than it is today. Since about 5 million years ago, Earth has cycled between an ice age and what is referred to as an interglacial period -- Which is what the condidtions are today ... And Interglacial Perido, soon to be followed by a period of glaciation.

There is an online viewable video at the NOVA site.

Celebrate Jim Jones

Thirty years ago today more than 900 followers of Jim Jones committed "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid. The lessons to be learned from that, should be studied by all. Jim Jones was an evangelical communist who became a minister to infiltrate the church with the gospel according to Marx and Lenin.

Dan Flynn has written a piece, "Don't Drink the Kool-Aid on Jonestown" where he explores how liberal pols and liberal media enabled the Jonestown tragedy in a Guyanese jungle clearing.

The scary quote:

On November 17, 1978, Jim Jones was a hero to American leftists. On November 18, 1978, Jones orchestrated the killings of 918 people and strangely morphed in the eyes of American leftists into an evangelical Christian fanatic.

...

It's worth remembering that before the people of Peoples Temple drank Jim Jones's Kool-Aid, the leftist political establishment of San Francisco gulped it down. And without the latter, the former would have never happened.

Are we living a repeat, Barack Obama, another creepy messiah of the new "People's Temple", only this time we are talking about the whole of America?

Refresher video



Newsbusters on the CNN documentary about Jonestown, with the part about the Democrat connections strangely absent.

What Global Warming Causes

If this film version isn't enough, you can get all the things global warming causes, at least according to what was formerly known as the news media, from this list.

Reject Obamism in all it's forms.

Must Watch Video On Climate Change by Roger Helmer MEP

In Alaska, winter's chill comes early as Fairbanks records fourth-coldest October

The colder weather froze Interior lakes quicker and deeper than usual, but rivers are still in the process of freezing solid, said Larry Rundquist at the National River Forecast Center in Anchorage.

The ice on the Yukon River has stopped moving in several Interior villages, including Circle, Galena, Tanana and Nulato, Rundquist reported. The ice on the Tanana River at Manley stopped running on Oct. 23, he said.

The early part of winter has been much colder this year than normal in terms of “freezing degree days,” which Rundquist said are the driver for freeze-up and ice thickness. Freezing degree days are accumulated when the average daily temperature drops below 32 degrees. One freezing degree day is the equivalent of one degree below freezing. For example, if the average daily temperature is 22 degrees, it equals 10 freezing degree days.

Hottest Hoax Around

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by global warming alarmist James Hansen, has been a chief source of the world's "data" to support climate hysteria. Repeatedly, though, GISS data have been shown to be flawed, if not fraudulent. Now, it's happened again:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

As the scientific evidence continues to accumulate, it becomes increasingly clear that "global warming" hysteria is based on a combination of bad science and fraud. It is also easy to spot the outright fraud that is taking place these days, when you consider Arctic sea ice growth in the Arctic Ocean, that's the ocean just north of the very same Siberia where the hottest temperatures were recorded, has been at record rates. One wonders, how can you possible square those two statements, when you can watch on satellites the ice growth. All we have for surface temperature is the word from fraudulent hoax propagating government scientists.

Consider this before deciding if spending trillions of your money on a fraud is really the right thing to do.

Gov Palin At The RGA

Isn't It Coincidental

That the Barack Obama channel's parent company, GE, just got their $139 billion dollar bailout.

The US Government also agreed to insure as much as $US139 billion in debt for GE Capital Corp, the capital lending arm of GE.

Coincidence I'm sure.

Remember the original bailout, if we don't do this the sky will fall? So we did it, and the sky continues to fall. Was it all just an election ruse?