Trump aides would blame Chicago than try to address Las Vegas situation

I’m Chicago-centric enough that I really didn’t want to write anything about the mass-shooting incident that occurred this week in Las Vegas.

The home-town perception

Yes, I’m aware there were Chicago-area people – including some members of the Illinois General Assembly, who were in Vegas at the time of the incident where a somewhat-wealthy white guy decided to start firing gunshots into a crowd of people attending a country music event.

BUT IT SEEMS trite to rant and rage about such an incident to say how tragic or sad or depressing it is. Yes, it’s a shame that some 59 people are now dead and more than 500 suffered injuries while visiting a city that I personally find depressing even when people aren’t getting hurt.

But the reality is that it is highly likely nothing significant will change in the way we as a society handle things. Our public officials are so split in their ways this isn’t going to push us toward any kind of consensus.

Will we do anything?

For all I know, there are a significant number of people who think that the “tragic” part of the incident is that people in the crowd who were being fired upon weren’t themselves armed. As though the key to our public security circumstances is to arm everybody so that outbursts can turn into gun battles.

With the best shot surviving.

SO I WASN’T really surprised to learn that aides to President Donald J. Trump felt compelled to try to change the subject of the Las Vegas violence by bringing up Chicago – which has already had more than 500 homicides this year.

Does it really all come back to 9/11?

Presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made a point Monday of deflecting questions about possible tougher federal laws (that might attract bipartisan political cooperation) by claiming that attempts at tough laws in Chicago have failed.

Or at least the Trump-types want to believe have failed – even though it could be argued that many of them got struck down by courts that let their own politically-partisan leanings interfere with the situation.

As Sanders put it, “I think if you look to Chicago, where you had over 4,000 victims of gun-related crimes last year, they have the strictest gun laws in the country. That certainly hasn’t helped there, so I think we have to … look at things that may actually have that real impact.”

THE ACTUAL HOMICIDE total for Chicago for 2016 is 762, although I’m sure there is some way of exaggerating the total number of victims for each incident so that you could get a figure in the thousands. So I’m not necessarily calling out presidential aides for their numerical exaggeration.

Besides, I don’t doubt that political people of all partisan persuasions will find ways of spouting off rhetoric meant to create the impression they’re concerned, without actually having to do anything to try to improve conditions

That’s what we’re going to get in coming days and weeks – a whole lot of talk that is cheap.

If anything, the most interesting thing I have encountered in relation to this incident were Twitter posts by Caleb Keeter, who is the guitar player for the Jason Aldean band that was playing on stage at the time of the shooting incident.

 

The perception from DubaiD

AS KEETER PUT it, his band had security with members carrying concealed weapons on their person and the permits required to use them. “They were useless,” he wrote. “We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us.

“A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of fire power Enough is enough,” he wrote.

The other intriguing bit was how, early on, terrorist interests in the Middle East tried claiming responsibility for the incident as some sort of statement against the decadence of Western society – only to have officials who actually comprehend what they’re talking about discredit such speculation.

While as for Trump himself? He showed an incredible grasp of the obvious when he stated the shooter was “sick” and “demented.” Beyond that, his visit to Las Vegas on Wednesday is likely to produce little more than a chance to check up on the namesake hotel and casino his company operates in the Nevada desert.

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Cubs do Vegas, Sox see San Diego

Let’s be honest. If it were up to the minds of the individual Chicago Cubs ballplayers, they wouldn’t even bother to show up for the beginning of the season.

Once a Padres prospect who played ball in Las Vegas

For they were in Las Vegas on Thursday and Friday – playing a pair of exhibition games against the New York Mets that bring to an end this year’s spring training session.

BOTH THE CUBS and Chicago White Sox begin playing games that matter in the standings come Monday. I suspect this is the high point of 2016 for the Cubs – everybody goes about talking about how wonderful a ball club they are without them having to do anything to prove it.

And they got what many people would consider to be a fantasy vacation – a two-day trip to Vegas. They had to play ballgames Thursday night and Friday afternoon.

But surely they were able to spend some of their time in the casinos during the rest of their stay. Let’s only hope they didn’t bust themselves financially.

Or then again, maybe it’s better if they do. Because that could make them eager to receive the next paycheck that they will get for playing baseball for the first of 162 games,

WE’RE ON THE verge of the regular season, the games don’t count yet. But spring training proper is ovah (as The Hawk would say)!

The Cubs broke camp in Mesa, Ariz,, while the White Sox said so long to Glendale Heights (as in suburban Phoenix). They’re in that part of the schedule where historically ball clubs headed back to their home cities would play a few exhibitions in places that usually don’t get to see major league teams in action.

Hence, the Cubs are in Las Vegas for a couple of days and also will play one game Sunday in Anaheim, Calif., before beginning the regular season schedule – oddly enough, in Anaheim against the Los Angeles Angels.

While the White Sox will get to play their just-before-the-season-starts exhibitions in San Diego against the Padres. Once, that would have been a novelty, playing a National League ball club.

YET NOW, THAT is just another team they get to play every few years through Interleague play. I have to wonder how many San Diegans think this a boring way to kick off their season.

It certainly isn’t the type of pre-season jolt the White Sox would like to have prior to their Monday first game in Oakland against the Athletics.

Of course, the key to comprehending 2016 is the home Openers – this Friday for the White Sox against the Cleveland Indians and April 11 for the Cubs against the Cincinnati Reds. Our first dose of baseball in months that hasn’t been seen on television will come from the Ohio ball clubs.

This has the potential to be an intriguing year for Chicago baseball – particularly if the Cubs actually live up to all the pre-season hype (which is never a safe bet for the Cubs).

ALTHOUGH SOME POINT out that even the White Sox managed to have a winning record during their spring training exhibitions. Though people with sense realize that winning and losing in the Arizona sunshine doesn’t mean a thing about how the ball club will do during the regular season.

It certainly isn’t something that ought to make us think Chicago will get its first all-city series as a World Series in 110 years.

Which probably would be the ultimate nightmare for Cubs fans-types – going through all the hassle of winning a National League championship (the first since 1945) only to know it could be undermined by a loss to the Sox in the World Series!

110 years (and counting) since last all-Chicago World Series

But that’s probably a long-shot scenario anyways. It’s enough to make the Cubs wish things could remain as they are now – all the potential in the world, and a trip to Las Vegas.

  -30-

Powerball prize just a myth? At least it seems like a great big one to me!

As I write this, I’m preparing to pick up my parents from the airport (Midway) as they return from a weekend trip to the casinos of Las Vegas, Nev.

My loser ticket. I don't feel need for another

At that time, I’ll be able to tell them they lost again – at Powerball. Although I’m sure they already realize they’re not big winners, they didn’t win that drawing last week.

THE ONE THAT could have paid out about $800 million!

Which results in the prize rolling over, and some estimates saying it could be a $1.4 billion prize to a single winner when the next drawing is held.

Now my interest in this is literally that I’m holding a Powerball ticket from the Saturday drawing that nobody won. In my case, I bought five chances (a $10 bet) and only came up with one matching number.

I bought the ticket for my father, who literally called me from Las Vegas on Saturday to ask me to make the purchase.

MAYBE HE THOUGHT he’d have something big to come home to if his losing streak in Nevada continued throughout the weekend. It seems I placed a crummy bet.

Which is why I have to admit all the enthusiasm and ecstasy that some people feel about gambling is totally lost on me. I don’t get why people are so eager to dump a few bucks of their hard-earned money on tickets.

As I see it, the $800 million promise of last weekend was a myth. Whereas the $10 bill I had in my wallet was real, and all I have to show for it now is a slip of paper laced with some sort of chemical that if I tried to eat my losses, I’d get a rancid taste in my mouth.

Then again, it’s not just lottery tickets that lose me. The whole casino experience leaves me dry – even though the last time I set foot in one, I actually walked out with about $50 more than I walked in there with.

MY THANKS TO the people of the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Ind., for that little financial boost. Although I also have embedded in my mind the sight of a woman who tried three different credit cards in a cash machine and wound up having all of them rejected – because she had bet so much and lost.

Thank goodness for the activist-types who often get derided for ruining people’s fun for saving that woman from losing even more cash that day.

In my own case, part of my lack of enthusiasm for gambling is that I’m cheap. You have to be willing to bet big, and often, in order to boost your chances of winning a significant prize – and I’m just not willing to do that.

Realize that I’m fully aware of the fact that my step-mother (if she ever reads this) will regard such thoughts as heresy. For all I know, I may get disowned from the family. Or at least uninvited to the next family get-together.

AFTER ALL, THE reason she and my father were in Las Vegas this past weekend was a birthday celebration. I won’t find out until Tuesday whether she really had a Happy Birthday!, but I suspect somehow she did.

She really does find a joy in the casino experience that is just lost on me. Or on the gambling experience in general. Somehow, seeing “dream books” piled up by the Illinois Lottery ticket machine at the convenience store in suburban Hazel Crest where I bought last week’s Powerball ticket just seemed sad.

Which is why I won’t be among those getting all giddy at the thought of a Wednesday prize that could make me a billionaire!?! Because all I’d get was another loser because I didn’t buy a dream book to tell me what number I should play because I dreamed of my brother, Chris, and I sitting in the stands at a ballgame.

Maybe if I had, my father would have some winnings to come home to.

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Since when does safety harm freedom?

It was a good week, and a bad one, for the concept of common sense in Chicago when it comes to the balance between public safety and public freedom.

On the one hand, a U.S. District judge for northern Illinois upheld the concept that the city’s ban on people using cellular telephones while driving their cars ought to be illegal.

BUT WE IN Chicago also had to put up with the Libertarian nitwits of “Reason” magazine, which conducted a study that claims Chicago to be the “most restrictive” city in the United States. And one of the examples they give of Chicago being overbearing towards its residents is that it would dare to suggest that people who talk on their hand-held cell phones while driving a car are knuckleheads.

I get easily irritated whenever people try to make the accusation that the freedom of U.S. residents is threatened because of laws meant to protect the public safety. It’s as though they have never heard that old cliché “your right to swing your arms about ends at the tip of my nose.”

Or perhaps these are just the grade-school bullies of old, now all grown up and being offended that they are no longer being allowed to terrorize other people with their behavior – as though their “freedom” (I would call it recklessness) must be imposed on other people.

That honestly is how I always perceived the notion of banning cell phone use while driving a car.

PERHAPS I AM just sensitized to the issue now because I spent a four-hour period of time this week in traffic safety school (working off a conviction for a speeding ticket received earlier this year in unincorporated southern Cook County).

I got to see examples of people insisting on using their telephones and trying to conduct some sort of all-important (to them, at least) business. The end result was that they were not paying full attention, and while many were able to avert accidents, they were still engaged in near-hits.

Why should we, the people of Chicago (and those who happen to be passing through our wonderful city) have to be subjected to the half-attention of motorists, just because some knucklehead thinks his or her personal conversation is so important that we have to pay extra attention to their vehicle so as to avoid having it hit us.

It was good to read Judge Ruben Castillo refer to Chicago’s ban, which has been in effect for nearly three years, as “rational.”

AND IT WAS good to see the knuckleheads who think their phone call home to make sure the spouse picked up their dry cleaning is so important are actually a threat to, “the safety of the people on the city’s streets.”

Now I know the attorney who was leading the effort behind this lawsuit claimed he was offended at the way the city allegedly did not inform people in Chicago of the fact that the cell phone ban was now a law.

He claims he would have had no problem had signs posted all over the city made it clear what the law was. I’m skeptical.

That reasoning sounds like a legalese attempt to find any reason that an ideologically inspired judge (and let’s be honest, “judicial activism” these days is practiced mostly by conservative judges) could use to strike down the law.

THAT WOULD ALLOW the knuckleheads to make ridiculous claims that their “freedom” was restored, while also allowing the attorney to earn a significant legal fee for his efforts. In short, it is ridiculous, as was the argument made by “Reason” magazine that freedom in Chicago is impaired because we only have about 1,300 taverns in the city, compared to about 7,000 that existed during and just after the Second World War.

What the magazine, in a commentary published in the Chicago Tribune in defense of their study, describes as “suffocating paternalism” is merely the attempt to balance out the individual rights of all residents of a society. It is what living in civilization is all about.

For those who want to go off and live in a cave somewhere where they can be the supreme ruler over their personal domain, I suppose that’s their personal choice. But just because one thinks the Unabomber’s pre-incarceration lifestyle is the ideal does not mean they have the right to drag the rest of us into it.

So the notion that there is something “wrong” and un-Democratic about bans on tobacco smoking in public places is absurd. So were the magazine’s complaints about the number of traffic signals with special cameras attached to catch motorists whose violations might otherwise go undetected.

WHAT I FOUND particularly ridiculous was the notion of the magazine’s “free-est’ city – Las Vegas, Nev.

The overgrown Nevada town in the middle of the desert may be a nice place to visit (if losing all your money to slot machines and other games of chance is your idea of a perfect vacation) for a few days.

But Las Vegas with its excess of gambling and local economy that consists of few jobs that aren’t of the menial sort of work provided by casinos is hardly the ideal place where anyone would live, unless you happened to be born and raised there and have few opportunities to set up a life elsewhere.

WHILE I REALIZE the days of old when the casinos of Las Vegas were run by the criminal elements of Chicago are gone, one can make an argument that its lack of regulation today makes it hardly the place to want to be.

The ideologues who compiled the study for “Reason” may view Chicago regulation as “treating its citizens like children,” but I would argue that Las Vegas lack of regulation is more like letting the bratty children run amok and cause problems for everybody else.

If Chicago is an overbearing parent, does that make Las Vegas the equivalent of a bad mom who gets investigated by the Department of Children and Family Services for child neglect?

SO ON THIS day when we reflect on our nation’s independence (and all the high-minded ideals of freedom and Democracy that we’d like to think the United States stands for), we need to think seriously about what we really want the definition of “freedom” to be.

Do we really want to think of the oaf who insists on blowing his tobacco smoke on others in a restaurant, using his cell phone to order a pizza to be delivered to his house while he is still en route home from work and bellowing that those cameras installed on traffic signals to catch traffic violations are spying on him when they catch him ignoring a "red" light, as being the ideal that those “patriots” fought and died for when they sought the concept of an independent American nation more than two centuries ago.

Or is he just a blowhard who is best ignored?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: There won’t be any refunds anytime soon of (http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/07/03/Judge_dismisses_cell_phone_lawsuit/UPI-10731215100742/) all the monies collected by Chicago in fines for violations of the city ordinances against cellular telephone use while driving a car.

What "Reason" magazine thinks of as Chicago turned sissified may (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-chicago-sin-perspective,0,1437711.story) very well be an outburst of common sense.

I hardly view the rural Illinois officials who are refusing to enforce a statewide ban on smoking in public places as standing up for (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-downstate-smokingjun30,0,2717342.story) freedom.” I’m not alone in thinking (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-080703smoke_briefs,0,3949801.story) this way.