THE HORROR OF CHICAGO – AT 8:16 A.M. ET:  The president's home town has become a living hell for many of its residents.  From Daily Beast:   

There have been more than 1,400 shootings and nearly 300 homicides in Chicago in 2016 already, and there is little hope the shooters will ever be caught.

CHICAGO — Abe Simmons sat down on a bus bench at the corner of Chicago and Leclaire late Saturday, watching as police worked one of dozens of shooting scenes that played out across the city over the holiday weekend.

Chicago’s ghost shooters—charged in only 26 percent of the city’s homicides last year—wreaked havoc on summer’s unofficial kickoff weekend, a three day period that saw at least 36 shot and four killed by Sunday morning, according to the Chicago Tribune. There have been more than 1,400 shootings and nearly 300 homicides in 2016 so far.

“I’m tired of this. I’m tired of this city, man,” Simmons, 36, said. “It’s messed up, man.”

The country wants to know why. Media descends on holiday weekends to track the violence and attempt to put it in perspective. But for many in Chicago, the mayhem is simply a part of life.

“This is every day in Englewood,” said Terrell, who declined to give his last name, at the scene of a homicide on the city’s southwest side Friday night just down the street from his new home.

The father of two young girls came to West 75th place—a quiet block of stout brick bungalows in a neighborhood where many police officers live—from Englewood, one of the city’s most violent areas. He moved in Friday and was watching a body being pulled from a car Friday night.

“This makes me think twice,” he said.

COMMENT:  There has to be a will to win in order to overcome crime.  That will existed in New York when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, and declared that murder had to stop.  He and his successor, Mike Bloomberg, working through a vastly improved and modernized New York Police Department, lowered the murder rate by 80%.   And one of Rudy's best characteristics was that he refused to bow down to "community leaders."

In Chicago, the top politicians do plenty of bowing down.  Local hacks have little incentive to lower crime rates, especially if it means greater incarceration of their "constituents."  Indeed, it can be argued that many minority leaders actually benefit from high crime rates.  The sheer spectre of violence gives them a kind of power.  They become the "go to" guys for cooling things off, and the go-to guys always want their cut of the "social program" funds. 

It's a business.  Political commerce...in human lives.

June 1, 2016