Tammany Hall, the greatest criminal organization of its age, spanning the era from Aaron Burr to Boss Tweed to Boss Croker and Charlie Murphy, was the perfect marriage of Democrat Party politics and organized crime. Though thought dead and buried with Carmine DeSapio, it never really went away. In the 1930s, it molted and set up shop in the small city of Hot Springs, Ark., where gangster Owney Madden established a Tammany South, an open city that welcomed gangsters like Frank Costello and politicians like Sen. John McClellan alike, and sent a young William Jefferson Clinton back as its gift to America.

Thinly veiled — and sometimes not so thinly veiled — shakedowns were a way of life for Tammany politicians. At first they were backed up by the power of muscle, of Tammany’s fleet of thugs and gangsters who made sure their voters got to the polls and made equally sure the other guy’s stayed well away. In New York, informal precinct bosses — called “sheriffs” — were recruited from the city’s notorious street gangs, including the Eastmans, the Five Points Gang (whence sprang Al Capone) and Madden’s own Gophers, the terrors of the west wide in what is now Chelsea. The New Black Panthers, standing outside that Philly polling place with billy clubs, are nothing new in American politics. If you knew what was good for you, you voted for the Tiger early and often and you gave and gave and gave.

Illegal? So what? Effective? You bet. (more…)

They say a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged, but for years Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has adamantly refused to accept the evidence of his own senses, and steadfastly hewed to the usual leftist blatherskite, even as he’s groped, however asymptotically, toward the truth.

Maybe he’s finally been mugged once too often. His latest column is called, “Did Liberals Get It Wrong On Crime?” –

This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation — in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty — my view at one time — have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.

Bad news, huh? Why? Cohen never really explains, although the implication is clear: whenever your world-view is based on a fantasy of the way the world should work, instead of the reality of how it actually operates, the day of reckoning is never very pleasant. (more…)

The Better Government Association, a busy Chicago-based watchdog group that has its work cut out for it, recently released its “Hall of Shame” report that details the nearly 150 county officials who have gone to jail for corruption in Barack Obama’s Cook County. And that doesn’t even include the more than one hundred Chicago officials who have also gone to jail over the last few decades.

Because of the high level of corruption and the large and ever-growing roster of jailed county officials, in its press release, the BGA bitingly asks, “[I]s it any surprise this multi-billion dollar labyrinth of governmental entities is referred to disparagingly as ‘Crook County?’”

The scams took place over the past four decades in the courts; the offices of the Assessor, Sheriff and Treasurer; and the President’s Office of Employment and Training. They involve bribes, payoffs, rip-offs, padded contracts, ghost payrollers and the wholesale subversion of the judicial system. The perpetrators include elected officials at the highest and lowest levels of city, county and state government; judges, lawyers and lobbyists.

(more…)

Pollster Frank Luntz is trying to hawk his new poll on gun laws commissioned by the left-wing group, Mayors Against Illegal Guns. He’s trying to sell the concept that NRA members are just as interested in “common-sense gun policies” as anti-gun nuts and that legislators should take this into account when crafting future anti-gun legislation. The problem is that this poll (.pdf at link) is misleading in some important ways, and the fact that the devil is in the details is totally glossed over.

In an op ed in the Los Angeles Times written by Luntz and Tom Barrett, gun owners are compared favorably with non-gun owners over their feelings on gun banning laws. “The culture war over the right to bear arms isn’t much of a war after all,” the pair tells us. “As it turns out, there is a lot everyone agrees on.”

And this main point serves as the biggest problem with Luntz’s poll. Of course everyone will claim he’s for “common-sense” firearms laws. But the first thing that anyone will find out when discussing concrete policies is that disagreement quickly reigns when people start getting specific. An assumption that everyone “agrees” on just what common sense means disappears pretty quickly when the details are laid out. (more…)