The Blaisdell Blog

Our current Asterisk-in-Chief likes to justify his paucity of accomplishments by blaming the fact that he can’t work with a Republican controlled House and Senate.   This, of course, totally ignores his first two years when he had a solid majority of Democrats in both Houses of Congress and couldn’t even get a budget passed.   He did get his signature Obamacare bulldozed through however, which is why he didn’t have those Democrat majorities thereafter.   But my opinion is no better than anyone else.    History is something a little more definitive.   So, I went to my computer and looked up all the other Presidents who had to deal with a House and Senate that was controlled by the opposition.        There have been four Democrat Presidents and six Republican Presidents who faced a Congress of the opposite party.        Wilson managed to pass the 19 th Amendment giving women the right to vote. ...

I like facts more than opinion, but facts are stubborn things that don’t fit easily into preassigned molds.   Out of every 100,000 black men in this country 34 will be killed by guns in 2016; just half that many, 17 white men, will die the same way.   If you are a young adult (age 20-29) the numbers are even more dramatic.    Humans of that age have incomplete brain development.   They have limited ability to project consequences and are governed by hormones more than logic.   That shows in their bad choices and emotional volatility.   From 2011-2013 ninety young black men per 100,000 population died by gunshot compared to just 20 white young adults. The cause of these gun deaths also shows an instructive difference.   The vast majority of white gun deaths (77%) are suicides and only 19% are homicide.   In the black population the numbers are flipped: 14% suicide and 82% homicide.   The much publicized shooting of blacks by po...

I love Chicago.   The Second City has culture, science, commerce and brawn and loves them all equally.   It is a city where you can find a die-hard Cubs fan who also takes visitors to see the “Picasso” thing in Daly Plaza.   Sure, the city runs on corruption.   The famous Chicago columnist, Mike Royko, used to say that in Chicago an honest judge was one who, once he was “fixed” stayed “fixed.”   The whole city runs that way and I doubt it would operate at all if you had to depend on merit and probity, but it is the city of broad shoulders.      Chicago is also the most segregated city in the United States of America.   While segregation by race has lessened over the last decade it is still true that 1 in 4 blacks, 1 in 6 Hispanics and 1 in 13 whites live in high poverty areas.   Of course, that also means that 3 in 4 blacks, 5 in 6 Hispanics and 12 of 13 whites do not live in these areas—which is good news.  But these ar...