No, Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Doesn’t Need More Funding. It Needs You to Support Police

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On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump tweeted the early crime statistics for Chicago in 2017, noting that murders are already “up 24% from 2016” in the city. Trump warned that if Chicago leaders fail to effectively address the city’s skyrocketing murder rate, he will have the federal government intervene:

Tuesday’s tweet marked the second time this month that Trump has called attention to the city’s disgraceful body count and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s failure to effectively address it. Trump tweeted the 2016 crime statistics for Chicago earlier this month, again with a vague, yet ominous warning of federal intervention:

On Wednesday, Rahm Emanuel —Chicago’s progressive mayor, and former Obama chief of staff — offered a smug response to Trump’s criticism: If federal intervention means more money, bring it on.

“Chicago, like other cities that are dealing with gun violence, wants to partner with federal law enforcement entities in a more significant way than we are today — whether that’s the FBI, the DEA, and the ATF,” Emanuel said, per USA Today.

“I still firmly believe that part of that solution is resources to police and resources that can come in technology and that space. Over the years, the federal government when it comes to after school (programs), summer jobs and investment in kids has walked away, while we’ve had to step up and take responsibility.”

Emanuel has used the “not enough funding” excuse countless times during his mayoral tenure, raising taxes and passing expensive gun control legislation that has drained the already-bankrupt city, with virtually nothing to show for it.

Chicago’s crime epidemic has little to do with money and everything to do with the failure of city officials to support police. Because of this failure, the Chicago Police Department has experienced what City Journal contributing editor Heather Mac Donald calls “the Ferguson effect: the phenomenon of police officers in high-crime areas backing off of proactive policing, resulting in the emboldening of criminals.”

Many officers have commented on the stifling effect this abandonment has had on department morale. Speaking to The New York Times last month, Dean Angelo Sr., president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police union, condemned what he perceives to be the politicization of policing by city officials. He added that many Chicago leaders are “more anti-police in their platform as opposed to being anti-crime.”

Poor community-police relations are just part of the many cultural problems the city of Chicago is facing. Other issues include family breakdown, gang culture, failing public schools, and apathetic and/or clueless community leaders. All of this points to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s gross failure to “step up and take responsibility” (to use his own words) for the citizens of Chicago.

The best thing the Trump administration can do is continue to call attention to Rahm Emanuel’s failure to serve the people of Chicago, and to be a strong advocate for police everywhere. It’s something the Obama administration certainly failed to do, and it wouldn’t involve lining the greedy pockets of the notorious Chicago political machine. (For more from the author of “No, Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Doesn’t Need More Funding. It Needs You to Support Police” please click HERE)

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Dept. Of Ed. Admits More Money Isn’t Fixing America’s Schools. Will We Change Course?

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There’s an old joke about a drunk man, stumbling about under a streetlamp looking for a dropped set of keys. When a helpful passerby asks if that’s where he dropped them, the drunk replies, “No, but the light’s better over here.” It’s hard not to feel that government bureaucrats take a similar approach to tackling the problem of education. They throw money at the problem, not because that’s what works, but because that’s what they know how to do.

A recent report from the Department of Education concluded that, after $7 billion of new federal spending since the end of the Bush administration, student outcomes haven’t improved at all. No Child Left Behind, Head Start, Race to the Top, Common Core, all the ridiculous federal initiatives we were told needed to be imposed on us “for the children” have amount to a big fat pile of nothing.

And we’re $7 billion poorer for it.

This report is not an outlier or an anomaly. Previous research has concluded the same thing. A study from the Cato Institute found that 40 years of increased education spending hasn’t resulted in positive changes in student performance. The Head Start program, in its own self-evaluation, concluded that any benefits conferred by the program on early childhood performance disappear over time.

So what are we to conclude after pouring billions of dollars into education and getting nothing in return? We know what the Democrats’ answer will be. It’s the same as ever. It’s not that spending doesn’t work, it’s that we haven’t spent enough. Never mind that the U.S. already has the highest per-student spending of almost any country in the world. Only an endless flow of cash can make our children smarter.

Or, we could take a more rational approach, realize that what we’re doing isn’t working, and try something else. Only a fool throws good money after bad. Only a mad man does the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. Instead of continuing to tax the people to pay for a bloated Department of Education that doesn’t, and can’t deliver on its promises, we should close down the entire failed institution. Maybe we should let states, localities, and parents decide how to educate their children free from the influence of federal meddling.

Democrats make a big show of being practical, empirical, science-based, and doing what works. How many more studies will it take to convince them that the Department of Education has failed our children long enough? (For more from the author of “Dept. Of Ed. Admits More Money Isn’t Fixing America’s Schools. Will We Change Course?” please click HERE)

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The Left’s Politics: Exclusion in the Name of Inclusion

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Politics is, in part, a mathematical art: Its practitioners only win by accruing enough voters to carry elections.

It is therefore odd that the Left continues to subtract voters from its ranks. Deliberately. And it does so in the name of “inclusion.”

In a Gallup Poll taken in May 2016, 41 percent of Democrats identified as moderate or conservative on social issues. Yet clearly, the national Democratic Party is veering hard Left on such matters as abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgender “rights.”

Rejecting Life

Consider the 2016 Democratic Party platform on abortion. It reads as if written by a clenched fist in a mailed glove: “We believe unequivocally … that every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion — regardless of where she lives, how much money she makes, or how she is insured. We believe that reproductive health is core to women’s, men’s, and young people’s health and well-being. We will continue to stand up to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood health centers. … We will continue to oppose — and seek to overturn — federal and state laws and policies that impede a woman’s access to abortion, including by repealing the Hyde Amendment.”

1984’s Ministry of Truth could not have decreed it better.

Federal funding for abortion. An end of all state restrictions on abortion-on-demand, through the ninth month of pregnancy (even Roe allows for the possibility of state laws against such). And abortion (“reproductive health”) is “core” to “health and well-being.” This is chillingly reminiscent of a statement by the co-founder of what became the National Abortion Rights Action League, Lawrence Lader, who wrote in 1973 that abortion is “central to everything in life and how we want to live it.”

Abortion is the most wrenching and disturbing example of the Democrats’ sharp turn to the Left, yet in terms of the political calculus employed by the DNC, it is emblematic of a certain stubborn denial of reality.

A Marist College poll released on January 23 found that “there is a clear bi-partisan consensus on limiting abortion to — at most — the first trimester, with a majority of Clinton supporters (55 percent) and more than nine in 10 Trump supporters (91 percent) saying they support such limits.”

The poll also found that “Among Americans overall, nearly three-quarters (74 percent) want abortion restricted to, at most, the first trimester. Among those who want restrictions, 74 percent want the Supreme Court to rule in favor of those restrictions. This equates to about 55 percent of Americans who support such action by the court.”

Based on these data, is it hard to surmise why Hillary Clinton and her denizens could not win in the Midwest, large regions of the industrial North, or, of course, the South?

Rejecting Labor

Social issues are just one aspect of the Democrats’ battle plan of subtraction. President Trump is now making substantial inroads with the leaders of organized labor, traditionally one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituencies. “Today, President Donald J. Trump gave continued hope to thousands of skilled craft construction professionals in America’s heartland for whom the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects have been an economic lifeline,” said North America’s Building Trade Unions in a statement following their meeting with the President on January 24.

This follows former President Obama’s cancellation of these key energy projects over the past few months.

This follows the widely-reported abandonment of millions of lower-middle income voters to the Republican Party. As long-time Democrat insider Tad Devine said in a National Public Radio interview shortly after the November election, “those middle-class workers thought that our party was not speaking to them, to their issues, to their concerns, to their priorities — that we were not in touch with them the way we should have been.”

Those workers didn’t just think that — they knew it. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a man of the Left, wrote right after the Trump victory, “Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security.”

The political viability of the Democratic Party is dubious, at best. “Obama … managed to hold a coalition of leftist and centrist Democrats together, but that is already crumbling,” writes David Graham in The Atlantic. “There will be great pressure for the party to adopt a vision that draws on the populist success of both Trump and Sanders, but that pressure will meet opposition from party insiders as well as from the educated, well-to-do whites on whom the party increasingly depends.”

In 2013, President Obama rescinded his invitation to respected Evangelical pastor Louis Giglio to pray at his second inauguration because Giglio had once preached that marriage is the union of one man and one woman (a position held by orthodox Jews and Christians since the beginning of their faiths). Because he was not “inclusive” enough, Giglio was excluded.

Exclusion is not how to build winning political coalitions. But in taking radical stances on a host of issues, alienation has become the Democrats’ stock-in-trade.

It is far too premature to write the final obituary of the party of FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But a first draft, at least, might be worth having on hand. (For more from the author of “The Left’s Politics: Exclusion in the Name of Inclusion” please click HERE)

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Remembering Auschwitz: Survivors Lay Wreath at Execution Wall in Memory of Holocaust Victims

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I’ve seen nothing close … to Belsen. The dead and the dying lay close together. I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice that rose above the gentle, undulating moaning. I found a girl. She was a living skeleton. Impossible to gauge her age, for she had practically no hair left on her head and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm, and gasping something. It was ‘English, English, medicine, medicine.’ And she was trying to cry but had not enough strength. And beyond her, down the passage and in the hut, there were the convulsive movements of dying people. Too weak to raise themselves from the floor. They were crawling with lice and smeared with filth. … I had to look hard to see who was alive and who was dead. — Richard Dimbleby, reporter for the BBC, touring Belsen Concentration Camp just after it was liberated by the British, 1945

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, in memory of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, 72 years ago today, by troops of the Soviet Union. It’s more than that, though. It’s also in memory of the 6 million Jews (1.1 million at Auschwitz alone) who lost their lives during Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier pointed out that the name “Auschwitz” represents all the death camps and the whole of Nazi “persecution and murder machinery” that still stand as part of Germany’s history, reported The Telegraph.

During the height of Hitler’s regime, about 12,000 Jews were slaughtered daily by shooting and gassing — others died of starvation or disease. Dimbleby reported that thousands were dying from typhus, typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia, dysentery or childbirth fever and 25,000 were starving. There was a “smell, sickly and thick, the smell of death and decay, corruption and filth,” he said.

Today, inside the gate that says “Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free), about 40 Auschwitz survivors placed wreaths at the execution wall, lit candles, prayed and remembered those who died there so many years ago. Survivors wore striped scarves, to commemorate the prison uniforms the Jews were given upon their arrival at the camp.

Janina Malec’s parents were killed at the execution wall. She survived the camp. Malec told the PAP news agency that, “as long as I live I will come here,” adding that the trip each year is a “pilgrimage.” The former Auschwitz concentration camp is now the world’s largest cemetery.

Israeli Vice-ambassador Ruth Cohen-Dar attended a separate commemoration at Warsaw’s Ghetto Heroes Memorial. Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo wrote a letter to Friday’s participants in the ceremony, stating, “As each year, on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi-German Concentration and Death Camp, we bow our heads before the victims of Nazi terror and genocide, and unite in joint remembrance and mature responsibility for such events never to occur again.” She then paid homage to her countrymen who tried to save Jews from the concentration camps, calling them “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Cohen-Dar reminded attendees that 6 million Jews (1.5 million children) were killed during the Holocaust and it is “a duty to preserve the memory of the victims, also for future generations.” She wondered aloud, “We can only imagine what Poland and Warsaw would be like if they were all with us today.” (For more from the author of “Remembering Auschwitz: Survivors Lay Wreath at Execution Wall in Memory of Holocaust Victims” please click HERE)

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Trump Pledges ‘Lasting Support’ to US Relations With Britain

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President Donald Trump on Friday pledged America’s “lasting support” to the U.S.’ historic “special relationship” with Britain after he emerged from his first meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May, leader of an ally who seeks to nudge the populist president toward the political mainstream.

May, who said the meeting was the start to building their relationship, announced that Trump had accepted an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II for a state visit later this year with his wife, first lady Melania Trump.

Trump sought to charm May, noting during his first news conference as president that, “by the way, my mother was born in Scotland.” (Read more from “Trump Pledges ‘Lasting Support’ to US Relations With Britain” HERE)

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On March for Life Week, Trump and Congress Take Steps to Defend Life

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This was a big week for the pro-life community.

President Donald Trump and the House of Representatives started the week by taking action to defend life and ensure that taxpayer dollars are not entangled with abortion, both at home and abroad. Then on Friday, tens of thousands of Americans converged on Washington, D.C., for the 44th annual March for Life.

On Monday, Trump reinstated the life-affirming Mexico City policy, which ensures that American taxpayers do not fund international organizations that perform or promote abortions. Since 1984, this policy has been enforced by every Republican president and rescinded by every Democratic president.

Trump’s recently published presidential memorandum indicates that not only is he reinstating the Mexico City policy, he is strengthening it.

As explained by The Daily Signal, it is long-standing policy for the United States to prohibit funding for abortion in international programs.

Without the Mexico City policy, abortion giants like the International Planned Parenthood Federation are eligible to receive millions of taxpayer dollars designated for non-abortion-related activities—but, because money is fungible, this frees up other funds for performing or promoting abortion abroad.

The Mexico City policy closes this loophole by requiring recipients of U.S. aid dollars to certify that they will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning.

Previous iterations of the policy have applied to U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department funds. The Trump memo expands the policy by instructing the secretary of state and secretary of health and human services to extend the policy to funds “furnished by all departments or agencies.”

Likewise, previous iterations of the policy have applied to nongovernmental organizations that provide services abroad. The Trump memo indicates that the policy will also apply to other international organizations, such as the United Nations Population Fund.

The memo directs the secretary of state to ensure U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that “support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

Trump is right to include this direction in the memo. During the Obama administration, the U.S. sent over $250 million in taxpayer dollars to the United Nations Population Fund, despite continued assertions that the fund has been involved in China’s coercive two-child policy.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act by a bipartisan vote of 238-183.

In a speech on the House floor, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., explained that the legislation makes the Hyde Amendment and other current abortion funding prohibitions permanent and government-wide; ensures that Obamacare (until it is repealed) conforms with the Hyde Amendment; and until a new plan year begins, ensures full disclosure, transparency, and the prominent display of the extent to which any health insurance plan on the exchange covers abortion to empower people to opt out.

Smith also noted that H.R. 7 passed the House in 2014 and 2015, under veto threat from President Barack Obama. The Trump administration, on the other hand, released a statement saying that if presented with H.R. 7, Trump would sign the bill into law.

The majority of the American people do not support the use of tax dollars to fund abortion in the U.S., and it is now time for the Senate to act and permanently codify this life-saving policy.

The tens of thousands of Americans who gathered for the March for Life on Friday came with a message of compassion, hope, and expectation. They are creating a culture of life in America, and they expect their government to reflect this by passing robust policies that respect the dignity of every human being. (For more from the author of “On March for Life Week, Trump and Congress Take Steps to Defend Life” please click HERE)

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At March for Life, Pence Pledges Restoration of ‘Culture of Life’ in US

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“Life is winning again in America.”

That was the message Vice President Mike Pence told the thousands gathered for the March for Life in Washington, D.C., Friday.

“Along with you, we will not grow weary, we will not rest until we restore a culture of life in America for ourselves and our posterity,” Pence said.

The vice president, who was introduced by the nation’s second lady, Karen Pence, made history Friday as the first vice president to attend and address the March for Life, which has been held annually since 1974.

“I am deeply humbled to be the first vice president of the United States to ever have the privilege to attend this historic event,” he said.

He also spoke of the Trump administration’s plan for achieving pro-life victories.

“On Monday, President [Donald] Trump reinstated the Mexico City policy to prevent foreign aid from funding organizations that provide or promote abortions worldwide,” Pence said, adding that “this administration will work with the Congress to end taxpayer funding of abortion and abortion providers.”

He also pledged that Trump’s Supreme Court pick would “uphold the God-given liberties enshrined in our Constitution in the tradition of the late, great Justice Antonin Scalia.”

In his remarks, Pence cited the Founding Fathers, saying: “More than 240 years ago, our Founders wrote words that have echoed through the ages. They declared these truths to be self-evident: that we are, all of us, endowed by our creator, with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Alluding to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, Pence added, “Forty-four years ago, our Supreme Court turned away from the first of these timeless ideas.”

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager turned presidential counselor, kicked off the event by reassuring the attendees that the new administration hears them, saying, “Steps away from here, in the White House, a president and a vice president sit at their desks and make decisions for a nation. As they sit there, they stand here with you.”

“This is a new day, a new dawn for life,” Conway said. She closed her speech with a note of encouragement, saying, “We hear you, see you, we respect you, and we look forward to working with you.” (For more from the author of “At March for Life, Pence Pledges Restoration of ‘Culture of Life’ in US” please click HERE)

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Republicans Express Doubts over Obamacare ‘Repeal and Replace’ Plan

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Some Republican lawmakers are beginning to have doubts about the GOP’s plans to repeal and replace Obamacare, they revealed in a closed-door gathering Thursday in Philadelphia.

But those lawmakers find themselves at odds with conservatives who have for years pushed for repeal of the Affordable Care Act—as well as the top Republican in the House.

“We have to repeal it,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said of Obamacare in an interview with The Daily Signal. “That’s what we told voters we’re going to do, and we have to repeal all of it. Every mandate. Every regulation.”

The Washington Post reported Friday that some Republicans appeared to be wavering over how to follow through on their long-held promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

The Post obtained a recording of a session on health care held Thursday at House and Senate Republicans’ joint retreat at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel.

Some lawmakers in the meeting expressed concerns over tackling major issues accompanying repeal of the health care law, including how to craft a replacement plan in a timely manner and whether to include a measure to defund Planned Parenthood in the repeal legislation.

Reps. Tom McClintock of California, John Faso of New York, and Tom MacArthur of New Jersey were among those The Post identified on the recording.

Despite their hesitations, however, House Speaker Paul Ryan reaffirmed the GOP’s commitment to rolling back the health care law this year.

“We have to move quickly because we’re in the midst of collapse [of the health care law],” Ryan said during an event Friday organized by Politico.

“We have a moral obligation to fix this problem. Period,” he said.

In a meeting with fellow Republicans in Philadelphia, Ryan mapped out a timeline for repealing and replacing the health care law. He told lawmakers that Congress would pass the bill repealing Obamacare by March or April.

Republicans initially planned to pass a repeal bill shortly after President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

That legislation—passed through a budget tool called reconciliation—also would include parts of a replacement.

For years, conservatives such as Jordan, who previously chaired the roughly 40-member House Freedom Caucus, have made a target of Obamacare—which Congress passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote.

Now that Republicans have the numbers to successfully repeal the health care law, Jordan is calling for Congress to move quickly.

“I want to do it as soon as we possibly can, because I start from the very fundamental premise that health care will be better and cost less when Obamacare is gone,” the Ohio Republican said. “So let’s get rid of it as quickly as we can.”

Despite a commitment to repealing Obamacare in coming weeks, some Republicans are skeptical that ending taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, should be included in that action.

That provision was part of the bill Republicans sent to President Barack Obama’s desk early last year to roll back major provisions of Obamacare.

Obama vetoed that bill. But with Republican control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, conservatives are pushing for the new repeal bill to at a minimum mirror the legislation passed last year.

Ryan said earlier this month that the House will include Planned Parenthood’s defunding in the budget reconciliation bill the chamber takes up this year.

And conservative lawmakers are urging the House speaker to follow through on that pledge.

“The repeal should include the Planned Parenthood defund language as well because, for goodness sake, that was in the bill we put on President Obama’s desk,” Jordan told The Daily Signal. “Are we going to put something less on President Trump’s desk than what we put on President Obama’s desk?”

“Of course the Planned Parenthood funding should be dealt with in that bill,” he said. (For more from the author of “Republicans Express Doubts over Obamacare ‘Repeal and Replace’ Plan” please click HERE)

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Meet the Feminists at the March for Life

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If you ask Aimee Murphy, executive director of Life Matters Journal, pro-life feminists have been around for awhile. Only recently, however, are people starting to pay attention to them. At the 2017 annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., The Daily Signal caught up with Murphy to find out what it means in her eyes to be pro-life and a feminist.

(For more from the author of “Meet the Feminists at the March for Life” please click HERE)

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Feds Investigating Obama Administration for Illegally Hacking Georgia’s Election System

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Federal officials have launched an investigation into why the Department of Homeland Security hacked into the Georgia state governmental network, including its election system, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

John Roth, inspector general for DHS, wants to know why the agency broke protocol on its way to 10 unprecedented attacks on the system overseen by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp — who is also one of the most vocal critics about the Obama administration’s attempt to designate local and state election machinery as part of federal “critical infrastructure.”

A Jan. 17 letter from Roth notified Kemp his office was officially “investigating a series of ten alleged scanning events of the Georgia Secretary of State’s network that may have originated from DHS-affiliated IP addresses.” A firewall in Georgia’s system thwarted each attempt.

Former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and Kemp have clashed over a federal government designation of election systems as “critical infrastructure.” Kemp called it “political power play to federalize elections.”

The “scans” are attacks to test security weaknesses in a network. It’s called the electronic equivalent of “rattling doorknobs” to see if they’re unlocked — or on a darker side, to send a message to a recipient. (Read more from “Feds Investigating Obama Administration for Illegally Hacking Georgia’s Election System” HERE)

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