Obama Seeks to "Punish" Russia: The Obama administration is close to announcing a number of measures it intends to take in order to "punish" Russia for its "interference" in the 2016 presidential election. According to Ellen Nakashima at the Washington Post, the administration is currently in the process of finalizing the measures to be taken which include economic sanctions, diplomatic censure, and possible covert operations which include cyber-operations. An announcement regarding the public elements of the response may be released this week.
Chicago Gun-Deaths Rival Iraq War: In the past few years, Chicago Illinois has gained considerable notoriety as a hub of gun violence despite it highly regulated gun-control policies. Awr Hawkins of Breitbart News reports just under 4,230 Americans lost their lives in the Iraq War during George W. Bush's time in office. Nearly that many-3,903- have died in Chicago alone since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Violent crime seems to be a persistent problem for the city.
Chicago Gun-Deaths Rival Iraq War: In the past few years, Chicago Illinois has gained considerable notoriety as a hub of gun violence despite it highly regulated gun-control policies. Awr Hawkins of Breitbart News reports just under 4,230 Americans lost their lives in the Iraq War during George W. Bush's time in office. Nearly that many-3,903- have died in Chicago alone since Barack Obama took office in 2009. Violent crime seems to be a persistent problem for the city.
Why the quotation marks around "punish" and "interference" in the first blurb? Do you question the consensus of US intelligence agencies that Russia engaged in hacking that interfered with the election?
And the crime stats in the second blurb are misleading, when you consider that the biggest spike in homicides in Chicago occurred in 2000 (see attached article with graph), but this is what you get citing Breitbart News.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trump-clinton-debate-updates-homicides-in-chicago-have-decreased-1474941840-htmlstory.html
Rather than a source of helpful information for prosecutors about legal developments, which is what this blog used to be, it has increasingly become a right-wing echo chamber.
The various bloggers here have their own style and emphasis, and I don't alter the posts unless they are really out of line.
I think the use of quotes on "punish" is defensible given that it is widely reported that the actions are not really all that punishing. The Wall Street Journal, for example, says that they are "largely symbolic."
Quotes on "interference" are a closer call, but I can see using them to distance ourselves from the hyperventilating in much of the media. From the way many press reports are worded, one would think that the Russians had hacked into the voting machines and stuffed the digital ballot box. What they actually did (or probably did, given that all we have to this point are leaks) was hack some emails from the DNC. Hacking is a crime and investigation is warranted, but what the hacking exposed was merely dirty politics involving associates of the candidate, a relatively minor scandal in comparison to the much, much greater scandal of the grossly reckless mishandling of highly classified material by the candidate herself. It is far-fetched to think that this altered the course of the election, as much use of the word "interference" seems to imply.
That said, I do think that with the election over we should refocus the blog more on its core mission, and I have asked our bloggers to do so. The crime/politics line became blurred, to some extent necessarily, but I think we can and should move toward a greater separation.
Regarding how many years of Chicago statistics ought to be considered in discussing the present crisis, that is debatable. The LA Times graph might also be considered misleading. There really wasn't a spike in 2000. Rates were trending down at that point from the horrific levels of the 1990s, as a longer term graph shows.