Infrastructure! Infrastructure! Infrastructure! (VIDEO)

The statistics are truly mind-boggling!

Portland's seen an 800 percent increase in homicides since last year --- 800 percent! --- and polls are showing that voters are rejecting the soft-on-crime policies of the morally-bankrupt leadership in America's Democrat-run cities. It's pretty freaky, actually. I mean, gearing up for the 2022 election, I can't imagine Democrats having the slightest chance of hanging onto their slim congressional majorities. 

It's gonna be great, and even better if Donald J. Trump is in the running in 2024, even if just for the G.O.P. nomination. Should Trump opt out, Governor Ron DeSantis is looking like the man to beat at this point. I have no idea if Trump could prevail in the general election, but I won't be surprised if Kamala Harris steps aside for Joe Biden because of health reasons. Then the general election, pitting Trump vs. Harris, will be lit! 

Various reports indicate the Dems are in for an epic shellacking, and I'm here for it, lol.

See, "Surging crime rate spells trouble for Democrats in 2022 elections."

A roundup, at LAT, "L.A. cut millions from the LAPD after George Floyd. Here’s where that money is going," and "Biden’s infrastructure plan: Where does the money go, and where does it come from?"

And New York Mag, "Democrats’ Odds of Keeping the House Are Slimming Fast."

At NYT, "The Persistent Grip of Social Class on College Admissions."

As WaPo, "White House to propose $6 trillion budget plan, as administration seeks to reshape economy, safety net."

And USA Today, "Biden declares his 'economic plan is working,' pushes infrastructure plan as the next step."

I'd link WSJ but it's behind the paywall, "Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime."

See also, Heather Mac Donald, "Mostly Peaceful Mayhem: Turning a blind eye to violence in Miami Beach, the New York Times previews its post-Floyd-trial coverage."

Eric Adams for New York City Mayor! (VIDEO)

No need to block-quote the whole thing.

This dude's the real deal, and while I have no idea whether he'll take the top executive office in the Big Apple, it'd be a very good thing if he did.

Tucker featured him at his opening segment last week, and I was stunned at this mofo's creds. Wow, what a change this would be, and I don't even live in New York! 

At NYT, "Eric Adams Says He Has Something to Prove. Becoming Mayor Might Help: Mr. Adams is a top fund-raiser in the New York City mayoral race, with key endorsements and strong polling, but he still faces questions about his preparedness for the job."

Watch:

Pete Buttigieg Was Rising. Then Came South Bend's Policing Crisis

Identity politics. You can never win.

At McClatchy, via Memeorandum, "plans to beef up campaign staff."

And NYT:

Pete Buttigieg Was Rising. Then Came South Bend’s Policing Crisis. https://t.co/cpVPX0dUCR

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) August 31, 2019

Trump Targets Cities as Bastions of Crime, Poverty, and Corruption

Democrat crime, corruption, and poverty. If leftists stick with Democrats on this issue, you know politics isn't about improving the lives of people. It's only about stroking your fellow ideologues and tribalists.

At LAT, "It’s not just Baltimore; Trump is running against America’s cities":

.@Michael_Nutter told me efforts to demotivate black voters may do the opposite.

“In 2016, people just couldn’t believe that this kind of bizarro character had any possible chance.. Now, I think that folks’ eyes are wide open. People are fully woke.”https://t.co/2ZXkJb1JpQ

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) August 3, 2019

WASHINGTON —  He was born in Queens and lives on Fifth Avenue. His skyscrapers dot city skylines on several continents. But President Trump is increasingly intent on disparaging urban areas, depicting them as blighted and overrun by criminals and homelessness — all part of a divisive reelection strategy heading into 2020.

Trump’s denigration of cities is part of an effort to animate a base of rural, mostly white supporters while depressing minority turnout in places like Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — a repeat of the two-pronged strategy that helped him to a surprising electoral college victory in 2016 and could be determinative again four years later.

“No one has paid a higher price for the far-left destructive agenda than Americans living in our nation’s inner cities,” Trump said Thursday night at a rally in Cincinnati, drawing cheers from the mostly white crowd. “We send billions and billions and billions for years and years, and it’s stolen money, and it’s wasted money.”

“For 100 years it’s been one party control, and look at them,” he continued. “We can name one after another, but I won’t do that because I don’t want to be controversial.”

In reality, the country’s largest urban areas are major engines of the national economy and generate more tax money than they receive from the federal government. By contrast, most rural areas receive more from Washington than they generate.

The president singled out California and two of its largest cities, commenting on a homelessness problem that he laid at the feet of the state’s leaders.

“Nearly half of all the homeless people living in the streets in America happen to live in the state of California. What they are doing to our beautiful California is a disgrace to our country. It’s a shame,” he said.

“Look at Los Angeles with the tents, and the horrible, horrible disgusting conditions. Look at San Francisco, look at some of your other cities,” Trump added.

Trump’s administration has not made homelessness a priority and has offered no new policy ideas for dealing with the problem.

After a skirmish in the crowd, as Trump supporters swarmed around a small group of protesters who had unfurled a sign that read “Immigrants Built America,” the president took the opportunity to punctuate his chosen message.

“Cincinnati, do you have a Democrat mayor?” Trump asked the crowd. “Well, that’s what happens.”

Last weekend, Trump tweeted more than 30 times about Baltimore, the nation’s 30th largest city, calling it a “very dangerous & filthy place” where “no human being would want to live.”

He blamed Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee that is investigating the administration on multiple fronts, and described his district, which includes parts of Baltimore as well as its suburbs, as a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.”

A Trump campaign aide defended the president against critics who called those statements racist.

“It’s notable that no one has challenged the President’s descriptions of the problems in Baltimore and other cities. Critics would rather focus on the word ‘infested,’ which is the very same word Congressman Cummings used to describe his own city’s drug problems in a congressional hearing 20 years ago,” said Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump’s reelection campaign.

“After all this time, why hasn’t it gotten better? It’s completely legitimate to call out the leadership in cities where conditions haven’t improved decade after decade.”

“When the nation and our economy are clearly on the right track, why would we turn the country over to the same political party whose ideas have failed so many of our city residents?” Murtaugh added, noting, as the president often does, that African-American unemployment is dropping.

While Trump avoided mentioning Cummings by name at the rally Thursday night, he did assert that Baltimore’s homicide rate was higher than several Central American countries...

The Prosperity Paradox

From Ronald Brownstein, at CNN, "The prosperity paradox is dividing the country in two":

"The big blue metros believe their eco success is threatened by the Trump agenda of hostility to immigration & free trade, prioritization of tax cuts over investments in education & scientific research,the stoking of racial tensions" & SALT deduction limit https://t.co/BmTuqHfZNL

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) January 23, 2018

While President Donald Trump relentlessly claims credit for the strengthening economy, the nation's economic growth is being driven overwhelmingly by the places that are most resistant to him.

Counties that voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 accounted for nearly three-fourths of the nation's increased economic output and almost two-thirds of its new jobs in the years leading up to his election, according to previously unpublished findings provided to CNN by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

That imbalance looks even starker when considering that Clinton won less than one-sixth of the nation's counties. Trump carried more counties than any candidate in either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Yet it is the diverse major metropolitan areas that voted in preponderant numbers against Trump that have clearly emerged as the nation's engines of growth. In the process, the big blue metros have pulled further away from the small town and rural communities that provide the foundation of Trump's support.

The key to this divergence has been the large metro areas' dominance of the job opportunities created by the diffusion of digital technologies, largely in white-collar industries from business consulting to software development. Meanwhile, smaller places remain much more reliant on resource extraction (like oil and gas production), manufacturing and agriculture, which have not grown nearly as reliably, or explosively, as the digital economy.

"We have two quite different economies, and what is happening in recent years is growth is largely emanating from these big county metros," says Mark Muro, director of policy at the Metropolitan Policy Program. "These are not political trends. They are deep economic and technological long waves. And while we are in the midst of this long wave, we are not near the end of it."

These trends long predate Trump's presidency. But the President's policy agenda, which prioritizes reviving manufacturing and promoting energy development, generally favors the smaller places over the large metros -- many of which feel threatened by his initiatives, from restricting immigration and trade to limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes.

Muro, like many economic analysts, is dubious that anything Trump does can meaningfully unwind the consolidation of economic opportunity into the largest metropolitan areas. If anything, Muro says, the tilt toward the big blue metros has intensified in recent years. "We think this is a fundamental sea change," he says.

This pattern creates what could be called the prosperity paradox. Even as economic growth is concentrating in Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas thriving in the information economy, Republicans rooted in non-urban communities largely excluded from those opportunities now control all the levers of power in Washington and in most states. That disjuncture raises a pointed long-term question: How long can the places that are mostly lagging in the economy dictate the terms of politics and policy to the places that are mostly succeeding?

Generally through American history, political power has followed economic power. From the Civil War through the Great Depression, Republicans controlled the White House for 56 of 72 years as the party of the rapidly industrializing and urbanizing Northeast and Midwest. During that era, Democrats were marginalized politically as the champions of the agricultural and resource-producing South and West that felt sublimated by the Northern-based industrial and financial economic order.

In the decades just before and after World War II, Franklin Roosevelt built an impregnable New Deal Democratic coalition that married support from traditionally internationalist Eastern business and finance interests with new efforts to integrate the South and West into the national economy (through mechanisms ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the World War II defense buildup). Similarly, the shift of economic clout to the Sun Belt after World War II prefigured the conservative movement's resurgence from the 1960s through the 1990s around Republicans Barry Goldwater of Arizona and Ronald Reagan of California.

Today the nation's core economic divide is less between regions than within them. After mostly declining through the late 20th century, the large metropolitan areas have restored their position as the locus of growth across the country by emerging as the epicenter of the information economy.

That advantage has allowed many metropolitan areas to achieve booming levels of growth and investment unmatched for decades: Tim Burgess, who served as acting Seattle mayor last fall, for instance, recently told me that the city is now enjoying its best economy since the Klondike gold rush in the 1890s. The intense nationwide competition for the second Amazon headquarters -- which produced finalists located solely in large metropolitan areas -- underscores how digital technologies are concentrating economic opportunity into the nation's biggest places.

Data from Muro and Brookings research assistant Jacob Whiton quantify the dramatic extent of that shift.

In 2016, Clinton won fewer than 500 counties and Trump won more than 2,600. But the counties that Clinton carried accounted for 72% of the nation's increased economic output from 2014 through 2016, the most recent years for which figures are available, according to Brookings. The Clinton counties accounted for 66% of the new job growth over that period as well.

In both output and employment the Clinton counties over that recent period accounted for an even higher percentage of the new growth than they did from 2010 through 2016, the full period of recovery from the financial crash of 2008.

The tilt away from Trump is even more pronounced at the very top of the economic pyramid. Of the 30 counties that generated the largest share of new jobs from 2014 through 2016, Trump carried only two: Collin County (north of Dallas) and Maricopa (Arizona), where Republican-leaning suburbs slightly outvoted a strongly Democratic metro core in Phoenix.

Clinton carried all the other places leading the employment growth list. That included not only such blue state behemoths as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Seattle, but also the economic hubs in purple and even Republican-leaning states, from Miami, Oakland County (outside Detroit), to Mecklenburg (Charlotte) and Wake (Raleigh) counties in North Carolina, and Dallas, Bexar (San Antonio) and Travis counties (Austin) in Texas.

In all, Brookings calculated, Clinton won 79 of the 100 counties that contributed the most to economic growth from 2014 to 2016, and 76 of the 100 that generated the most job growth...

These are the fault lines of the next American civil war. When and how it all goes to hell, who knows? But something this fundamentally radical will bring an eruption at some point, and those who anticipate the collapse will be better prepared for the fighting and the fallout.

Still more.

William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears [BUMPED]

Professor Wilson's work is increasingly in vogue. Lots of folks are citing it, from J.D. Vance to Katherine S. Newman and Hella Winston.

I have a copy of the book on my living room bookshelf.

Time to crack it out again!

At Amazon, William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor.

Joel Kotkin, The Human City

New, from Joel Kotkin, at Amazon, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.

Plus, The New Class Conflict.

Freddie Gray Protests Erupt as Hearing Held for Indicted Baltimore Police Officers (VIDEO)

Here's the background, at Baltimore Sun, "Judge orders six separate trials for the officers charged in #FreddieGray's death," and "Baltimore Police suit up in tactical gear as protesters gather near Inner Harbor amid Freddie Gray hearing."

And watch, at CBS News 13 Baltimore, "SPECIAL REPORT: Protester Arrested As Demonstrations Begin Downtown," and "1 Officer Injured, 1 Protester Arrested During Demonstration."

And related, at the Guardian UK, "Freddie Gray trial judge denies motion to remove Marilyn Mosby from case."

Democrats Stoking Black Anger (Which May Mean Riots) to Keep White House in 2016

No doubt.

From Steve Sailer, at VDare.

The Culture War Returns

Well, it's not just now returning, although no doubt he's onto something.

From Jacob Heilbrunn, at the National Interest":

1968 IS BACK. A growing chorus of voices on the right is arguing that the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson are ushering in a new round of the culture wars. On the website Breitbart, for example, Robert W. Patterson, a former George W. Bush administration official, wrote, “The Grand Old Party must decide: Go libertarian, and sympathize with the protesters and rioters? Or does it want to be conservative, and side with the police, the rule of law, and the forces of order? The lessons of the 1960s suggest the latter is the path to victory.” William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, observed during the recent riots in Ferguson, “It does feel like a Nixon ’68 moment. Who will speak for the Silent Majority?”

It was a revealing question. In 1968, Richard Nixon tapped into white working-class antipathy toward student and black radicalism to defeat Hubert Humphrey. The Southern Strategy was born. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had won election as governor of California by denouncing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and promising to “throw the bums off welfare.” Reagan would go on to midwife what became a potent alliance between the emerging neoconservative movement and traditional conservatives. The neocons began to share the traditionalists’ belief that, as Burke put it, “Men of intemperate mind can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

The maiden neocons had themselves emerged from the intensely partisan milieu of the 1930s to become respected public intellectuals. They viewed the scaturient passions of the New Left that had suddenly emerged in the 1960s as a clear and present danger—what the literary critic Lionel Trilling deemed an “adversary culture.”

Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and a number of other neoconservatives were deeply influenced by Trilling’s criticism of liberalism from inside the movement. They were also influenced—Kristol and Himmelfarb in particular—by the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who had fled Nazi Germany. Strauss believed that the culprit for much of what had gone wrong in Western civilization could be traced back to Machiavelli, who had lowered man’s sights away from a transcendent good. The result was the rise of relativism, in which one view of how humans should behave is as good as another. Strauss, by contrast, promulgated a different message, one that resonated with the new generation of conservatives—a return, after centuries of neglect, to classical virtue.

Kristol assailed what he called a “new class” of managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and social workers who promoted new issues such as women’s rights, sexual liberation and minority rights. Himmelfarb’s numerous books lauded the idea of Victorian virtue, stressed self-help and charity, and argued that the public dole had profoundly corrosive moral effects, foremost among them creating a culture of dependency on government.

Though it has tended to be scanted in recent years, neoconservatives—“Liberals mugged by reality,” as Kristol once put it—were initially much less preoccupied with foreign than domestic issues. Domestic policy is where they made their bones. Kristol and Daniel Bell founded the Public Interest in 1965 (though Bell ended up resigning as coeditor in 1973). The National Interest didn’t appear until 1985, just as the Cold War was beginning to reach its terminal phase. Political scientist James Q. Wilson, a regular contributor to Commentary and the Public Interest, devised the “broken windows” theory, which holds that stopping petty crimes is a vital step toward preventing major ones from occurring. RIOTING IN the inner cities in 1968, the disintegration of New York City, the rise of black militants and the introduction of affirmative action hardened neocon attitudes. Nathan Glazer called affirmative action “affirmative discrimination.” In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report warning about the collapse of the black family. Two years later, he delivered a speech to the Americans for Democratic Action stating that “liberals must somehow overcome the curious condescension that takes the form of defending and explaining away everything, however outrageous, which Negroes, individually or collectively, might do.” Other neocons blamed a new antinomianism for America’s ills. The emphasis on individual needs and wants—feminism, multiculturalism and the like—meant that the idea of a common civic good was disappearing. In their view, it was being replaced by a society of disgruntled supplicants.

Neocon apprehensions about crime and the sexual revolution were also acutely reflected in literary form. In novels like Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow vividly evoked the racial tensions of the 1970s, prompting charges that he was himself a racist. The Dean’s December focuses on the murder of a white graduate student named Rick Lester by a black hoodlum and a female prostitute. The protagonist Alfred Corde, a dean at the University of Chicago, registers his sympathy with the underclass but suggests that the basic problem is insoluble:

We do not know how to approach this population. We haven’t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there’s nothing but death before it. Maybe we’ve already made our decision. Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don’t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves.

Sounds familiar.

But keep reading.

C-Span of the Streets

At the New York Times, FWIW, "Glare of Video Is Shifting Public’s View of Police."

This is a terrible report, mainly because it (deliberately) fails to put the police videos into context, even including the Mike Brown case, which was completely debunked by the federal grand jury.

Yes, more videos provide greater accountability, and they may help rein-in police misconduct. But the left doesn't want accountability, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement is essentially a revolutionary communist program to take down the "racist" "imperialist" police system altogether.

The Berkshire Eagle Under Fire for Publishing Perfectly Reasonable Op-Ed on the Breakdown of America's Black Community

Seen just now at Memeorandum, from D.R. Tucker, at the Washington Monthly, "All the Views Unfit to Print."

It turns out that the Berkshire Eagle, a small-town paper in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is regretting its decision to have conservative Steven Nikitas write a bi-weekly column for its op-ed pages. Pittsfield, apparently a progressive New England community, didn't react well to a conservative bringing down the hammer of cold harsh reality on the breakdown of black America, and so there's been a revolt at the commentary pages.

The Boston Globe reports, "Column on race by Berkshires official sparks debate."

And here's the offending op-ed from Mr. Nikitas, "Here's the solution for black America":

After the burning and looting in Baltimore and Ferguson we are seeing endless media hand-wringing that somehow "we" must all do something more to help black America. And "we" means white people, taxpayers, businesses, the criminal justice system, the universities and the government. But blacks must now pull themselves up. "We" have done far too much already with tens of trillions in handouts in the last 50 years, and it has backfired badly.

Conservatives and Republicans have offered sure-fire solutions for black America and they have been rejected repeatedly. Our advice has been for African-Americans to discard the leadership of the Democrat party and charlatans like Al Sharpton. After all, far-left liberalism has obviously failed. The proof is everywhere.

END BLAME GAME

Conservatives have recommended over and over that blacks reform their culture from top to bottom by respecting marriage and the family and the law, returning to their churches, embracing education and hard work, avoiding violence and debased rap music, speaking clearly, shunning drugs and profanity, and pulling up their pants. And to stop blaming all of their problems on everyone else. That is immature, cowardly and counterproductive.

What respectable business owner would hire a young black male from the "hood" who won't even show up for work? What successful enterprise is going to establish itself in crime-ridden inner cities? Isn't looting and burning self-defeating?

Now some media commentators are lamenting that there are too many rundown buildings in Baltimore and that they must be demolished and rebuilt new. That is code language meaning that taxpayers should fund more free housing while the rational response is that blacks must rebuild their Baltimore neighborhoods themselves because self-reliance is their only hope. And it always works. White people in Baltimore are doing it every day.

The violence there is part of a self-destructive pattern that is largely a result of blacks following the wrong leaders. Demagogues like Sharpton merely incite rather than instruct. Democrats have constructed a fortress welfare state that has extinguished black self-improvement while Republicans have warned that it is a dead end and have stressed economic opportunity and a work ethic instead.

The teacher unions and their political cronies control the frightening inner-city schools with an iron grip, while conservatives have sought charter schools, vouchers and educational choice. Liberals say that single motherhood is a valid way of life but Republicans vehemently disagree, with distressing poverty statistics about single mothers and their children to prove the case. And on and on. Yet every day conservatives are vilified as the bad guys of race relations.

Nonsense. The Republican Party was the staunch ally of blacks for 100 years. It was established in 1854 as the anti-slavery party. Evangelical Christians fought in the forefront to abolish slavery here, and in England in the person of the legendary William Wilberforce. Republican president Abraham Lincoln emancipated the slaves. Every black elected official after the Civil War was a Republican. Virtually all blacks were Republicans up until the 1950s including Martin Luther King and his father.

But in the 1960s white liberals told blacks that they would fight together for "civil rights" and sold them a destructive bill of social permissiveness along with it, buying them off with mountains of taxpayer cash...

There's still more, but you get the picture.

Nikitas is too brutally honest for his own good, and his reward is to be attacked as "racist" by this idiot D.R. Tucker. Note that Tucker doesn't rebut a single point made by Nikitas. Instead he sticks his nose up in the air and declares Nikitas' views outside the realm of respectable "progressive" discussion. Indeed, Tucker attacks the Berkshire Eagle for deigning to give this flyover ruffian "valuable space" on the op-ed pages.

We have here once again a sharp-eyed focus on what's wrong not just with black America, but what's wrong with American politics altogether: Political correctness, and the abject fear of leftists in particular to speak honestly about all that's wrong with the culture. You ask any honest businessman and they'll tell you they just can't employ people who wear sagging baggy pants hanging halfway down past the buttocks. We still have standards of professionalism, amazingly, but to call out such things as part of the solution to black America's woes is "racist."

Nikitas nailed it. We are indeed no longer a single nation united under common shared beliefs. We are a divided nation, being ripped apart by the politicization of everything, the ascendance of regressive depravity as society's moral norms, and by a Democrat Party that cares only about its own power, not about the genuine improvement for the lives of those most endangered by all of this dysfunction.

It's very sad. And indeed, it's why more and more commonsense Americans are turning away from politics, removing themselves to the private realm of family, faith, and local community.

Additional commentary at Memeorandum.

Brace Yourself: Huge Majority Expects Nationwide Racial Unrest This Summer

The poll's from April, "Baltimore Riots: Poll Finds 96% Expect More Racially-Charged Unrest Nationwide."

But John Fund's picked up on it, at National Review, "Most Americans Expect a Long, Hot Summer of Racial Unrest. Moynihan Would Not Be Surprised."

No justice. No peace.

Most Americans Expect a Long, Hot Summer of Racial Unrest. Moynihan Would Not Be Surprised. http://t.co/lYFZqntNUi pic.twitter.com/PgtPZA31B5

— National Review (@NRO) June 15, 2015

Leftists Explain Away 'Ferguson Effect' Crime Wave

This is one of those "just wow" pieces that makes you shake your head. Man, I still get flabbergasted as the left's shameless depravity.

From Heather Mac Donald, at the Wall Street Journal, "Explaining Away the New Crime Wave."

Hat Tip: Elizabeth Price Foley, at Instapundit, "NOTHING TO SEE HERE, KEEP MOVING: Explaining away the Ferguson Effect. Heather MacDonald explains the price of anti-police agitation by the political left."

Also at Memeorandum.

Ferguson Businesses Struggle to Rebound After Radical Left-Wing Riots and Destruction

One more of the "Ferguson effects" now savaging communities across the United States. Of course, in this case, it is Ferguson, struggling to overcome the left's revolutionary anarchy and violence.

At the Wall Street Journal, "In Ferguson, Mo., a Long Road Getting Back to Business":

FERGUSON, Mo.—Idowu Ajibola, 57, opened a pharmacy in this area eight years ago, tapping savings, family money and funds from his retirement plan. He added a beauty-supply business to the premises in 2008.

Mr. Ajibola’s fortunes changed last year after the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer. During a period of widespread unrest, looters cleaned him out of high-price items, such as packages of hair extensions that sold for around $200 each. Mr. Ajibola estimates the rioting cost him $50,000 in stolen or destroyed merchandise; another $50,000 in fixtures were ruined.

“I lost quite a few customers,” said Mr. Ajibola. “People wouldn’t come in. It was a bad situation.”

Ten months after Mr. Brown’s death, businesses are still struggling to rebound in this suburb of St. Louis whose population of 21,000 is two-thirds African-American and has a median household income of less than $40,000.

With sales and traffic down on West Florissant Avenue, the Ferguson area that bore the brunt of looting and vandalism, Mr. Ajibola, who emigrated from Western Nigeria more than 30 years ago, decided to convert his wrecked beauty-supply shop into a dollar store. The new place sells items such as coffee mugs and kitchen supplies—goods less likely to attract shoplifters or looters.

Nearly half of the roughly 500 businesses operating in Ferguson and adjacent communities, such as Dellwood and Jennings, suffered property damage or lost revenue as a result of the unrest, according to the regional development association, North County Inc. Sixteen businesses closed. Seven of those have yet to reopen, while four have relocated, according to a city tally.

In April, the nation was again reminded of the emotional and physical scars that can result from civil unrest. The death of a 25-year-old Baltimore black man, Freddie Gray, who died after being arrested, set off another wave of protests, riots and looting. Close to 400 businesses, most of them small, suffered some kind of property damage or inventory loss, according to the Baltimore Development Corp.

And yet the cities’ challenges are different. Baltimore has a larger tax base spread out over a diverse, stable middle class. It also enjoys a strategic location near the nation’s capital. As for Ferguson, “it’s going to be harder” to recover, said Bruce Katz, founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Katz notes that Ferguson has a relatively weak local economy. Local government in the region is split among dozens of municipalities with limited authority and funding, making it more difficult to spur growth.

Sales tax distributions to Ferguson fell 3.5% to $2.6 million in the period between August 2014 and May 2015 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the Missouri Department of Revenue. This figure likely understates the pain felt by local business owners, since it includes receipts from Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other big-box stores that contribute a substantial portion of the total.

In December, Moody’s Investors Service assigned a “negative outlook” to Ferguson, which could mean a downgrade to its credit rating later on. A lower rating could affect rates at which the city can borrow money in the future...

The damage in Ferguson is just a fraction of the devastation the left is inflicting on America.

The truth is coming out.

Keep reading.

Mayor Bill de Blasio Is Unpopular With White Voters

Heh.

The Democrat-left, still dividing the country along racial lines and pissing off voters. Good job progs!

At WSH, "New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Is Unpopular With White Voters: Stark racial divide keeps widening over policing and income inequality; administration is ‘mindful’ of gap":

They are worried about crime. They don’t want to pay any more taxes. And they really, really miss Michael Bloomberg.
But to understand why many white voters are so down on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, consider that some of them said they believed the feeling was mutual.

“He’s so down on me,” said Gene Reilly, a 71-year-old Democrat from Manhattan’s Cooper Square neighborhood who is white. “He’s looking out for the poor.”

Mr. de Blasio, also a Democrat, rode into office on a landslide in 2013, taking 73% of the vote. But the racial divide was there from the beginning. While winning 85% of Hispanic voters and 96% of black voters, he captured just 54% of the white vote.

A year and a half later, the mayor’s approval rating among whites is at 32%, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC 4-Marist Poll in May. That compares with a 49% approval rating among Hispanics and 59% among blacks.

The heart of the mayor’s political support, in his campaign and in his administration, has been New Yorkers of color and liberals. They responded to his calls to address income inequality and de-emphasize long-standing policies that had a disproportionate impact on the poor and minorities, including the street-policing tactic known as stop-and-frisk.

Yet in interviews, many white voters said they were increasingly concerned about crime, and they faulted the mayor for how he had handled policing issues.

And many said the mayor’s loyalty to his base and his liberal agenda had left them uneasy.

Some cited his decision to continue a losing battle last year to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for his prekindergarten program even after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had made state funding available.

“He thinks it’s all the fault of the rich,” said Aida Gurwicz, a 69-year-old retiree on the Upper East Side.

Some said they felt overlooked or even abandoned by the mayor.

“I think he has good intentions…yes, I’m glad you’re giving something to the lower class. But what about the middle class? He has to deliver something for us,” said Ellen Warmstein, 62, of Rockaway Beach.

And many white voters said they struggled to identify with Mr. de Blasio, who followed two mayors with deep reserves of white support— Rudolph Giuliani among the working class and Mr. Bloomberg among the well-to-do business set.

“He’s almost a social-communist,” Rochelle Weinberg, a Democrat from the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, said of the mayor. “He’s out of town all the time. He’s disrespectful and shows up late. I can’t stand him. Everything he does makes me angry.”

"Almost" a social-communist? Actually, De Blasio is a social-communist.

But keep reading.

Democrat-Funded Law Firm, the 'Bronx Defenders', Involved in Rap Video Calling for Police to Be Killed

At the Los Angeles Times, "New York City-funded law firm involved in video calling for police to be killed":

Bronx law firm that receives city funding has been linked to a controversial music video that called for police officers to be killed, according to findings made public Thursday.

According to a report released by the New York City Department of Investigation, at least two attorneys with the Bronx Defenders appear in the video, titled “Hands Up,” which contains images of two singers pointing handguns at the head of a man dressed up as a police officer.

One of the artists raps early in the video “for Mike Brown and Sean Bell, a cop gotta get killed,” referring to two police killings involving the Ferguson, Mo. and New York City police departments.

The entire video, which was released by rappers Uncle Murda & Maino in conjunction with the website WorldStar Hip Hop in December, can be viewed here.

Portions of the video were shot at the offices of the Bronx Defenders, a law firm that provides criminal defense attorneys to low-income defendants, and receives roughly $20 million in city funding each year, according to the report.

The law firm is described as a sponsor in the closing credits of the clip. Two attorneys, identified as Kumar Rao and Ryan Napoli, suggested the agency become involved in the video and can be seen in the final cut. A third Bronx Defenders employee was present for the video's filming but was not on camera.

The Department of Investigation, a city government watchdog panel, also accused Bronx Defenders Executive Director Robin Steinberg of failing to adequately discipline the staff members involved in the video. The panel has submitted its findings to New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s office and the city attorney for review.

“The Bronx Defenders abhors the use of violence against the police under any circumstance. We have always been an organization that is committed to preserving life, dignity and respect for all people,” read a statement posted to the law firm's website on Thursday. “The Bronx Defenders never approved the music video 'Hands Up,' and never saw it before it went online. We deeply regret any involvement with this video.”

Steinberg told city investigators her office did not see a final version of the video before it was released, according to the report. Investigators contend the law firm made no effort to obtain a copy of the video to review before it was released.

Attorneys Rao and Napoli could not be reached for comment.

The report marks the latest in a series of police-related controversies in New York City. In December, a grand jury declined to indict white Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the apparent chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black Staten Island man. The decision set off weeks of protests from thousands who believed Pantaleo should face criminal charges.

Weeks later, New York City police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were shot and killed in an ambush by 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who had promised to kill cops as revenge for the deaths of Garner and Brown in a rant on social media that same day.

Patrick Lynch, head of New York City's largest police union, called for the city to immediately stop funding Bronx Defenders on Thursday.

“It is clear that Bronx Defenders, who knowingly participated in this despicable video calling for the murder of police officers, have violated their oath as officers of the court and should be disbarred as a result,” Lynch said in a statement.

This is the Democrat Party ideology in action. Killing cops. "Hands up" has been a lie and a scam the whole time, and leftist disinformation has gotten people killed. This goes all the way up to the Obama administation, according to the Daily Signal:

Bronx Defenders, which received at least $1.5 million from the Obama Justice Department since 2009, says on its website that assistance from Emery’s firm, Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady, “makes the work we do possible.”

The Daily Signal first reported the series of federal grants last week...

New Jersey High School Student Slams 62-Year-Old Teacher to Floor Over Cellphone

It's something that I would never do (confiscating a phone), since a student's phone is private property. But that said, this is absolutely over the top.

At the Paterson Record/Herald News, "Paterson freshman charged with assault after classroom attack on teacher."

Here's the video, "STUDENT SLAMS TEACHER FOR TAKING HIS PHONE AWAY" (via Weasel Zippers).

Note that's a black student. He'd be right at home with the Ferguson looting mobs.

Insane Ferguson Looting Video

When law enforcement is completely absent, anarchy reigns. And there is no moral force powerful enough to restrain the literally primitive black animals scavenging for grub at Dellwood Market.

Via Aleister, at Legal Insurrection, "New #Ferguson Video Released: Looters Invade Market Because #Justice," and Noah Rothman, at Hot Air, "Police release insane Ferguson looting video, are criticized for transparency":

This closed-circuit security camera footage is absolutely amazing. In a video recently released by local police in Missouri, at least 180 looters are shown pillaging a market in the city of Dellwood, a town neighboring Ferguson that was subject to violent riots in the wake of a grand jury decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown.

The images of the violent property destruction showcased in that video are positively astonishing...

New York Arrests Plummet Following Execution of Cops

This is exactly what the anti-cop protests are all about --- hindering police effectiveness (which allows crime to flourish) and seeing more police officers killed.

At the New York Post:

Arrests for minor offenses have plummeted following the execution of two cops http://t.co/H0CiKNd3y5
— New York Post (@nypost) December 30, 2014