News & Features

While the overall unemployment rate in Chicago has declined since the recession ended, the rate in African-American communities has remained high. The citywide unemployment rate was 8.4 percent in 2014, but it has been well into the double digits in neighborhoods like Austin, North Lawndale, Englewood and Garfield Park, according to a Reporter analysis. The interconnection between unemployment and incarceration has made these communities least likely to share in the economic recovery.

Four-Year Myth, a report from the national nonprofit, Complete College America, declares that a 4-year degree has become a myth in American higher education. The study finds that the majority of full-time American college students do not graduate on time, costing them thousands of dollars in extra college-related expenses. Policy experts who analyzed the statistics believe a more realistic benchmark for graduation is six years for a bachelor’s degree and three years for a “two-year” certificate.

Our public school system employs about 46,000 full-time and 36,000 part-time officers across the country. In theory, these officers supervise lunchrooms, coach sports, teach drug and alcohol awareness and, in many situations, become confidants to kids who need an ally at school or don’t have the support they need at home due to myriad different reasons. But, as the incident in South Carolina indications, the existence of SROs in schools is not always positive.

The aim was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate. Republicans got what they wanted when their phony accusations against her of cover-up and incompetence got tons of media chatter and focus and raised the first shadow of public doubt. The doubt quickly ballooned into the image of Clinton in the mind of many as a shifty-eyed and shifty-talking candidate who every time she opened her mouth grew a Pinocchio-length nose. 

Ted Cruz follows in his father’s footsteps. His idea—that the separation of Church and State has to be done away with—is consistent with the ideological worldview that characterizes dictatorships in the Hispanic world. Francisco Franco embodied the Catholic Church during his reign of intolerance; Fidel Castro replaced faith in God with faith in himself when Cuba became officially atheist.

The universally recognized and celebrated defining moment in Jackie Robinson’s life is the moment that he stepped to the batter’s plate at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn on April 15, 1947. That Robinson attained immortality by breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball. The annual rite of sports passage in the decades since is to mark the opening day of the baseball season with glowing tributes, remembrances, and much pageantry about the day, Robinson, and how it and he changed sports forever.

So let's tell the truth. The truth is that the Clinton crime bill was a strategic answer from the Democratic Party to the charge that it was "soft on crime," a charge that had dogged the party since Lee Atwater's famous Willie Horton ad that crushed the presidential campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. The crime bill was passed by a Democratic-controlled House run by Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) and a Democratic-controlled Senate run by Majority Leader George Mitchell. The Newt Gingrich Republican takeover didn't start until 1995.  

Bernie Sanders has gone from a charming, engaging, provoking, and supremely principled Democratic presidential candidate to a scheming, conniving, devious, supremely unprincipled Democratic presidential contender. In quick succession, Sanders has been accused of being a tax cheat, a special-interest money-grabber, a foreign policy dimwit, a Nixonian dirty trickster, and a racial bigot.