QUESTION ASKED: Can Trump Fix the Carnage That Is Chicago?

But Trump is about more than crime when it comes to the nation’s urban centers. There are his promises to revive America’s deteriorating inner cities, of which Chicago has a surfeit. And if Trump intends to more broadly redefine the federal-city relationship by stepping in where the locals have failed, then he might also want to look into Chicago’s calamitous finances that have crippled the police department, schools and other vital municipal services while flogging its taxpayers.

The City of Sloping Shoulders would be the perfect laboratory for Trump’s promised repair work. Its schools are broke, yet it gives teachers raises and allows the Chicago Teachers Union to cap the number of charter schools the district can have. Extravagant pensions for public employees are crushing taxpayers and cutting into vital services. Neighborhood infrastructure is wanting. Residents and businesses are hightailing it out of the city and state.

The left ridicules Trump’s use of the word “carnage,” but it doesn’t do Chicago justice. “Catastrophic” and “calamitous” also should be thrown into the mix.

It ought to be Chicago’s job to fix Chicago, else it’s just a new kind of bailout under a different name.

UPDATE (From Glenn): Normally I’d agree, but a lot of Chicago’s problems — e.g., housing projects and welfare and gangs — had significant federal inputs. And a “bailout” that requires significant reforms might even be worth it. I’m not saying that’s the case, necessarily, but I can imagine that it might be.

WELL, GOOD: OMB Nominee Vows to Tell Trump Truth on Entitlements, Deficit.

There is indeed “a lot of ruin in a nation,” and a hundred trillion dollars or so in unfunded liabilities is probably it.

COMPARED TO WHAT THE V.A. DOES TO VETS? Hiring Freeze And Obamacare Repeal Could Clobber Veterans Affairs.

POTEMKIN MISSILE: Is Putin’s Deadliest Weapons Program in Trouble?

The RS-28 Sarmat ICBM is supposed to be capable of delivering 10-16 nuclear warheads past Western missile defenses, but right now Russia is having trouble just getting one out of a test silo.

JUSTICE? Navy sailor in jail for submarine photos pleads for mercy from Trump.

[Petty Officer First Class Kristian] Saucier, who served as a machinist’s mate aboard the USS Alexandria from 2007 to 2012, used his cellphone to photograph parts of the submarine’s nuclear propulsion system while it was docked at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton, Conn.

Saucier, who is married and has a 2-year-old daughter, began his 12-month sentence in October at the Federal Medical Center at Fort Devens, Mass.

He was convicted of unauthorized retention of national defense information, which is a felony, and received an “other-than-honorable” discharge from the Navy. He faced a possible 10 years in jail, his lawyers said.

His problems began when a worker at the naval base found Saucier’s cellphone near a Dumpster and, while going through it, found the photographs. The worker brought the cellphone to a retired Navy petty officer, who then notified federal agencies about the sensitive submarine pictures.

Saucier has a point about the “light of treatment afforded former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her illegal private email server, and former President Obama’s granting of clemency to Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who leaked classified information.” On the other hand, taking and possession of photos of an attack submarine’s nuclear plant is a serious security breach.

Trump Foes Egged Me On to Support Him.. “While walking to an inaugural ball, I heard shouts — and felt yolk run down my hair.”

Then:

I froze. Emily Post is silent on the proper way for a lady in a ball gown to respond to an aerial assault. I had to wing it. First, I yelled back. I had spent six years living here, I shouted, and Washington was as much my city as the place I now call home. But then I, too, began to crack, and the egg yolk on my face mixed with tears.

Somehow—it might have been the crying and hollering—my predicament captured the attention of a more-casually attired fairy-god-couple. These kind people must have been liberal Democrats (not that it matters), given where they confessed to working as they helped me. Nonetheless, they asked if I was all right, gently took my arm, and led me to their nearby apartment to clean off. Then they let me out the back door.

At best, I had been a lukewarm and silent Trump supporter, a Goldwater-Reagan-George W. Bush girl who had decided to attend the ball mostly for the opportunity to wear a fancy dress. But when my heels hit the sidewalk that second time, I committed: I would now back President Trump.

There’s been a lot of that kind of decision-making lately, and the Progressive Left has no one to blame but themselves.

WHY MUST THE LEFT THREATEN AND INTIMIDATE POWERFUL AND SUCCESSFUL WOMEN? Kellyanne Conway Gets Secret Service Protection After Receiving Threatening Packages.

IT COULDN’T GET MUCH WORSE: The Future of Air Travel Is Bliss — Really.

When the taxi drops you off at the airport, you notice your flight doesn’t begin boarding for another 20 minutes — plenty of time. Entering the terminal, you flash a big smile at the discreetly placed infrared cameras that are sending a scan of your gorgeous mug to security central, where facial recognition software matches your likeness to the one on file. You attach the routing tags you printed at home to your Tumi and dump the bag onto the luggage belt, confident you’ll see your rollie again in this lifetime, thanks to the tracking app on your smartphone. You zip through a series of checkpoints: Some read the personal profile on your phone like it’s an airport E-ZPass; at others you stare into an iris-scanning camera or touch a fingerprint-reading pad. A few leisurely minutes later, you step on the plane and greet the flight attendant.

It’s then that you realize you’ve just had your first human interaction since you tipped the cabbie.

So this is really about recognition technology improving and streamlining the airport experience, which is often the worst part of flying. But the airliner of most recent vintage I’ve flown on had so little hip and legroom that even my skinny, 5’10” frame was crowded — and that was the aisle seat.

TO BE FAIR, THERE’S A LOT OF COMPETITION. The $7 billion school improvement grant program: Greatest failure in the history of the US Department of Education?

Despite its gargantuan price tag, SIG generated no academic gains for the students it was meant to help. Failing schools that received multi-year grants from the program to “turn around” ended up with results no better than similar schools that received zero dollars from the program. To be clear: Billions spent had no effect.

When Washington spends billions of dollars on something, it’s reasonable to assume it will do some good, especially when the Secretary of Education promises “transformation not tinkering.” But not with SIG.

No matter how the researchers crunched the numbers, the abysmal results were the same. SIG didn’t improve math scores. Or reading scores. Or high school graduation rates. Or college enrollment. SIG didn’t improve elementary or secondary schools. It didn’t help schools in Race-to-the-Top states or non-Race-to-the-Top states.

The results are almost too much to believe.

Oh, you’ll believe them.

SELF-DEFENSE: Pizza Delivery Man Shot, Returns Fire.

WOW: Fox’s Tucker Carlson nearly doubling Kelly’s prime-time ratings.

Carlson’s initial ratings boost of about 10% could have been brushed off as a temporary surge of people checking out a new show. But these numbers suggest he may have real prime-time staying power.

THAT’S A RELIEF: Fukushima residents exposed to far less radiation than thought.

21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Humanoid beer-and-pizza-fetching robot is charmingly retro.

Combine this “Fundroid” with affordable sexbot technology, and traditional marriage will face its toughest challenge yet.

VIDEO: Al Gore Dodges a Question About Why His ’10 Year’ Warning Was an Inconvenient Falsehood.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

JAYVEE: ISIS Unveils Weaponized Drone Program in New Video.

I’ve linked to stories about this before, but this is the first video I’m aware of.

MORE ON THAT SECRET SERVICE AGENT WHO SUGGESTED SHE WOULDN’T “TAKE A BULLET” FOR TRUMP: Glenn beat me to the punch on this one, but there’s another angle worth considering. It takes a special kind of commitment to join the Secret Service. You have to be willing to die — not for a noble cause, not for your home or family, not for a comrade in war, but for a person, a stranger, simply because they hold a particular office. I’m not certain I could make that kind of commitment, which is why I would never consider a job with the Secret Service. If Kerry O’Grady can’t make that kind of commitment, she needs to reconsider her job.

THIS IS NOT THE CHANGE I WAS HOPING FOR: James Comey will reportedly stay on as FBI director in Trump’s administration.

Also, Democrats will argue that Trump is keeping Comey to reward him for “sabotaging” Hillary Clinton.

LOVE TRUMPS HATE: Gold Star family members say they were assaulted during inaugural ball festivities.

BOYS NOT WELCOME: A Tale of Two Photos at the Women’s March.

IT’S ALMOST AS THOUGH ALL THAT TALK ABOUT BEING A “WOMEN’S HEALTH CARE PROVIDER” IS JUST A SMOKE SCREEN FOR CONTINUED GOVERNMENT FUNDING: Planned Parenthood Caught Denying Women Prenatal Care: 92 of 97 Abortion Clinics Turned Them Away.

DENNIS PRAGER: America’s Second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents’ offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism — which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism — is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don’t call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Read the whole thing, although I’d add that the Right (and liberals) are finally acknowledging the anti-American campaign — an anti-liberal campaign — the Left has been waging for half a century or longer.

SMALL WARS JOURNAL: Toward an Afghan End State.

As President Trump inherits the war in Afghanistan, the best piece of advice anyone can give him is that this is about as good as it is going to get. The government controls the major population areas and the Taliban controls some largely Pashtun dominated swaths of territory along the Pakistani border. Warlords of various ethnic origins control large areas in the north and the west. None of this is an immediate threat to the vital security interests of the United States. The Taliban will not overrun the major cities, nor will the government be able to exert true control over the more remote areas of the country due to its lack of usable roads and communications.

We got into the war in Afghanistan because we wanted transnational radical Islamists out. Al Qaeda is largely gone, and although ISIS would like in, there are no indications they are welcomed by any of the major Afghan players. This does not mean that we should leave Afghanistan entirely, but it does mean that the nation building phase of that war is over.

There should never have been a nation-building phase. Afghanistan isn’t and never was a nation — it’s a spot on the map where bordering nations aren’t.

SIZE MATTERS NOT: Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary says banks should not be overseen based on size alone.

Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin said banks should be regulated based on their “complexity and activity, not simply size” and addressed other regulatory issues in written answers submitted to members of the Senate Finance Committee after his confirmation hearing last week.

“I believe in a regulatory framework that is determined by complexity and activity, not simply size,” he wrote, addressing a question about the $50 billion asset threshold at which banks face tougher regulation under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law. Many lawmakers and regulators want to change the line.

Mnuchin’s proposal seems more sensible than just moving the “too big to fail” line up or down.

MICHAEL WALSH: Trump, Senate Ready to Rumble Over Spending Cuts.

Reagan ran against big government in general; Trump has run against corrupt Washington — and the fat cats of the GOP — very specifically. As previous presidents have learned, there’s something to be gained from placating powerful senators; but as LBJ showed, there’s even more to be achieved by beating them into submission by any means necessary. let’s hope Trump takes the latter course — losing even a symbolic round over discretionary spending to the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party at this point would be a serious error, especially given the big battles to come.

If Trump governs like a one-term president, he’ll be a two-term president. Vice-versa, and his own base will dump him in 2020.

Any governing coalition which has grown as large as the GOP has is going to feature serious fault lines — and bigly winners and losers as the faults settle.

Trump seems like the kind of fellow who prefers winning.