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Plans for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park are being firmed up largely out of public view, and one watchdog group is sounding the alarm about the lack of transparency.

Decisions on the design of the center, the parks golf course and even whether to eliminate some roads in the park are being worked out by the Obama Foundation, City Hall and the Chicago Park District.

Jackson Park Watch has sent a letter to City Hall outlining their concerns.

What groups have the Park District, the Chicago Department of Transportation, and the Obama Foundation been meeting with? How were they selected? How representative are they? And what data have they been given to review? Where is the open, public process that is appropriate for consideration of changes to public parks? Brenda Nelms and Margaret Schmid, coordinators for Jackson Park Watch, wrote in an Aug. 8 letter to Deputy Mayor Andrea Zopp, who is overseeing the massive developments.

There have been four community meetings in June and July with more to come but thats not the whole story on whats going behind the scenes. The public will learn some details about proposed street changes Wednesday and Thursday when the Chicago Department of Transportation hosts open houses at the South Shore Cultural Center, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. both days.

The Park District also will have meetings at the cultural center, on Sept. 21 and Sept. 25, to gather input.

The Chicago Park District wants to merge the Jackson Park (shown) and South Shore golf courses. | Sun-Times file photo

At an invitation-only Aug. 15 briefing at its Hyde Park headquarters, foundation officials left the impression the foundation will now pay for an underground parking garage, a change from the presentation by former President Barack Obama in May.

Some questions Jackson Park Watch is raising involve basic information the group believes should have been made public by now.

Among the questions the Sun-Times asked the Foundation last week and that the Foundation declined to answer:

For months, the Chicago Sun-Times has been asking the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Department of Transportation to put a price tag on the roadway and infrastructure changes tied to the Obama Center and the proposal to merge the Jackson Park and South Shore golf courses into a single championship-caliber course. The Sun-Times also wants to know where the taxpayer money to pay that bill would come from. Both agencies have refused to provide details.

Those changes include closing Cornell Drive and Marquette Drive, building a pair of new underpasses at 67th Street and South Shore Drive and at Jeffery Boulevard and 66th Street and possibly building an underground garage and improving the shoreline to allow spectacular lakefront holes at the new course.

Now that the course layout calls for displacing tennis courts and the South Shore Nature Sanctuary, Jackson Park residents are demanding to know where the treasured bird and butterfly preserve will be relocated and how that work will be paid for.

The laundry list of possible projects also includes: a new Metra station; a new Jackson Park fieldhouse; a rebuilt Clarence Darrow Bridge; a new headquarters for the Chicago Police Departments mounted unit now located at the park adjacent to the South Shore Country Club; and a host of recreational amenities, including sledding hills, biking paths and the possibility of an outdoor concert venue.

On Monday, CDOT spokesman Mike Claffey issued a statement that continued to talk only vaguely about the taxpayer contribution.

The Chicago Department of Transportation is developing proposed roadway improvements that will be needed to mitigate the impacts of proposed road closures within Jackson Park, Claffey wrote.

This weeks meetings are intended to share details and solicit public feedback from community residents and stakeholders about these proposed roadway improvements. Cost estimates will be developed once we have determined the scope of the investments that are needed.

City Hall sources privately acknowledge that transportation, park and infrastructure improvements tied to the Obama library and golf course merger could easily top $100 million.

The golf course merger is estimated to cost $30 million, and 20 percent of that will be paid for by taxpayers. Its unclear if that includes a new clubhouse.

But sources maintain those projects would be built over a six-year period and the massive costs could be incorporated into the annual capital budgets for CDOT and the Chicago Park District. Implied but not stated is the fact that other projects would have to be shelved to make way for the Obama Foundations wish list.

Theyre planning to spend tens of millions anyway, said a source familiar with the project, who asked to remain anonymous. Theyll just spend it in a different way.

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Jackson Park advocates voice worries about Obama center planning - Chicago Sun-Times

The nation's deportation chief warned Tuesday that illegals who knew they were "home free" under former President Obama's open border policies are no longer safe from getting the boot.

"For those who get by the Border Patrol, they need to understand there's no safe haven in the United States," said Thomas Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "They got to understand, if you get by the Border Patrol, ICE is looking for you," added Homan.

He spoke to reporters on Air Force One as it carried Trump and other officials to Arizona for a rally and focus on illegal immigration.

Homan has taken Trump's immigration orders and run with them, enforcing laws Obama overlooked. The result has been a dramatic decrease in illegals crossing the border and a spike in arrests of illegals, especially those with additional criminal records, in interior United States.

Homan, who has worked in federal immigration since the Reagan years, was a top ICE official under Obama, giving him an unusual perspective in the war on illegal immigrants and how it's changed under Trump.

"Look, immigration enforcement is more meaningful when you have a true interior enforcement strategy, which we have under this president," he said.

Homan, whose name is among those many believe Trump is considering to be secretary of Homeland Security, told reporters, "I think the message being sent on interior enforcement -- which wasn't part of the last administration, not to the extent it is now -- interior enforcement is sending that clear message that if you are lucky enough to get by the Border Patrol, in the last administration you're home free unless you commit yet another crime and get arrested and get put in jail, and get convicted of that crime. Now the message is clear: If you're in the United States illegally, if you happen to get by the Border Patrol, someone is looking for you. And that message is clear and I think it has a direct impact on the decrease in apprehensions."

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com

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ICE Chief: Illegals 'home free' under Obama have 'no safe haven' under Trump - Washington Examiner

The crisis that erupted last week in Charlottesville is simply an extension of the one that began last summer, when the Republican Party , instead of opposing Donald Trump , decided to go all in on his side. Its absurd now, for instance, to witness hand-wringing over what Charlottesville reveals about the extent or even the existence of Trumps racism . Birtherism, Trumps brutal cause, was the most overtly racist movement in contemporary American political lifean attempt to discredit the legitimacy of a black President by insisting not merely that he is not an American but that he is an African, as part of a script written often and deeply in every racist tract of our nation, in which Africans are the eternal Evil Other. It was an effort to symbolically stop and frisk a black man by suggesting that he was vulnerable as an alien.

With a patience wholly admirable and, in some ways, almost saintly, Barack Obama chose to ignore Trumps attempt to delegitimize him by treating Trump, during the post-election transition, as if he might be a normal politician engaged in a normal exchange of power, apparently in the hope that acting as though it might be so would make it so. Since then, despite all attempts to pretend otherwise, Trumps assault on the premises and the principles of democratic government has been ongoing, and Obamas silence has been increasingly puzzling to many of his admirers, and not made better by his occasional appearance looking carefree on holiday. The appetite for Obamas leadership is as real as ever, not merely among liberals but among Americans of many political stripes and sides; he left office, after all, with nearly record-high approval, and would almost certainly have been relected had the law allowed it. The extraordinary, historic retweeting if one can now use the word historic about retweetsof Obamas apropos quote from Nelson Mandela after Charlottesville, officially the most-liked tweet ever, is typical.

This truth raises a question that cant be avoided: Will Obama step forward to help lead the opposition to Trump? His reluctance to act too hastily has honorable reasons. His hatred of drama leads him at times to underestimate moments when dramatic crises demand dramatic acts, and his love of and natural instinct for reason make it hard for him to fully credit the depth of unreason in others. This incapacity, as likable as it is at times almost pathological, led him to such errors of misplaced good faith as his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, in what was clearly the sincere belief that a Justice pre-vetted by Republican worthies would actually have a chance of being treated seriously. (In retrospect, Obama missed an opportunity to nominate a candidate whose contemptuous rejection by the Republican Senate might have provided a more advantageous political lever.) And historians may speak critically, and perhaps worse than that, of his caution last year surrounding possible Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, and the role that members of the Trump campaign may have played in them.

Obamas logic of self-restraint is sympathetic. He first of all clearly believes that one President should grant another a period of grace, as Presidents almost always doGeorge W. Bush, to his credit, lent a long one to himand that is, in anything resembling a normal oscillation of political power, appropriate and correct. But this is not a normal time; it is a national emergency. Trump long ago disposed of the notion of normal constitutional courtesy when, without a shred of evidence or truth, he accused Obama of wiretapping him i.e., committing a grave crime. To pretend, as Obama was almost visibly willing himself to do throughout the grim months of last November, December, and January, that Trump in any way resembles a normal, democratic-minded leader is folly.

Obama also doubtless thinks, with some wisdom, that his reappearance as a beacon to some would serve to make him once again a target to many. Much of Trumps and the Republican Partys program is no more than crude Obama-trolling, as in the departure from the Paris climate accord, or in the health-care fiasco , where the sole logic in putting forward a program that even Republicans hated was to placate the base by undoing what the black President had done. For Obama to make himself more visible would only supply a convenient enemy at a time when Trump and his followers seem to be self-destructing on their own. Obama may also believe that the crisis has not come yetthe real, full-blown constitutional crisis that may arrive when the special counsel, Robert Mueller, acts, or if Trump attempts to act against him, or if another terrorist incident happens, and a voice of reason is not only useful but existentially essential. Obamas only hope of leading then is to depoliticize himself now. And both Barack and Michelle Obama would surely like a break from the relentless presence of politics in their lives; it has always been a sign of Obamas essential sanity that the appetite for power seems to blow hot and cold in his life, rather thanas it must be said it seems to do for Bill and Hillary Clintonas a perpetual propelling wind.

Against all thisas admirable and, in some ways, impeccably logical as it may beis that national emergency, and the need for leadership among the coalition of leftists, liberals, independents, and conservatives of integrity who oppose Trump, especially as we move ever closer to the frightening possibility of continuing violent confrontations, a possibility that the catastrophic open-carry state laws have only made more likely. That the instigation of the violence in Charlottesville was exclusively at the hands of the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates does not alter the truth that, historically, one sides violence produces anothers. Leftists, infatuated as they are sometimes tempted to be with a renewed rhetoric of street action, need to be reminded that such violence in American history has always worked to the advantage of the wrong side. As the political scientist Omar Wasow, of Princeton University, reminded us not long ago, it was, above all, the fear of street violence in the nineteen-sixties that got Richard Nixon electedand then relected. In liberal democracies, non-violent mass protest can be an astonishingly efficient engine of reform; the threat or fact of violence empowers only its enemies.

What the dissenting, or resisting, side needs is exactly what Obama can help supply: principled leadership from as close to a universally respected figure as one could hope to find. At a moment when the leadership of the congressional Democrats is desperately uninspired, and the next generation of liberal voices has yet to emerge or remains uncertain of purpose, the opposition is in need of real leadership, meaning what real leadership always is: a voice of reason lit by passion.

No one wants, or expects, deliverance. The purpose of leadership is neither to be messianic or to encourage blind obedience. Good leaders dont make followers; they make participants. Much needs to be done, but even more needs to be said. The window of meaning needs to be widened. One imagines Obama, with his usual rhetorical deftness, making the point that the neo-secessionists and the neo-Nazis are not merely extraneous, obnoxious fringe groupsthey represent exactly the enemies whom Americans united to defeat in their two most consequential wars. We are not merely combatting the enemy within; we are reaffirming what unifies us in history by carrying the fight forward.

One can hear in ones headand even directly in ones ear from impatient othersthe objection that Obamas is already a voice of the past. But history does not work with such relentless linear direction. Figures long dismissed arise to lead when necessaryChurchill being the most obvious exampleand lights gone dark often reappear to illuminate a new time. Obviously, we need new generations of leaders and the ascent of newer voices. Yet coalitions of the kind that this emergency demands need voices capable of speaking to the many, not the few, articulating values held in common, not in contest. It could be that Barack Obamas true historical moment will arrive, with an irony of a kind that American history specializes in, not during his Presidency but after it.

Link:
Why Obama Should Lead the Opposition to Trump - The New Yorker

President Donald Trumps new Afghanistan strategy -- more troops, pressure on Pakistan and diplomatic outreach to the Taliban -- relies on tactics his predecessors tried without success to get out of Americas longest-running war.

Theres little reason to think Trumps approach will produce better results.

But with Afghanistans government losing control of wide swaths of the country and Islamic State and Taliban forces on the move, Trump and his top advisers are betting the formula will work this time. And they are vowing not to set any deadlines, criticizing President Barack Obamas public timetables for withdrawal.

American strategy in Afghanistan and South Asia will change dramatically, Trump said in a nationally televised speech Monday night from Fort Myer, Virginia. A core pillar of our new strategy is a shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions.

Elected in part on his vow to wind down Americas foreign wars, Obama signaled his intention to withdraw troops even as he was boosting forces. That led the Taliban to believe it could simply outlast the U.S.

Read a QuickTake on why Afghanistan is the war that never ends

Obamas timelines sent a very negative message to both friends and enemies in Afghanistan, said Ahmad Majidyar, a fellow at the Middle East Institute, ahead of Trumps speech. They were saying we cannot side with the U.S. government or the military. It also encouraged the Taliban to just wait out the U.S. forces instead of coming to the negotiating table.

Rather than trying to retake territory, the U.S. focus would be on training Afghan special forces.

Photographer: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Trump is now the third U.S. president to struggle with how to get out of Afghanistan, a country beset by ethnic, religious, cultural and tribal factions that have stymied foreign armies for centuries. The mixture is amplified by the involvement of powers including the U.S. as well as neighboring Pakistan and Russia.

Since President George W. Bush first sent special forces to Afghanistan to help oust the Taliban government and track down al-Qaeda terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the war has cost the U.S. more than $714 billion and several thousand lives.

Saying that micromanagement from Washington, D.C. does not win battles, Trump said hes already given Defense Secretary James Mattis the authority to raise troops levels and target the terrorist and criminal networks that sow violence and chaos throughout Afghanistan.

U.S. troop levels may have the smallest impact on determining Afghanistans future. Even with about 100,000 U.S. soldiers in the country in 2011, and tens of thousand of additional NATO troops, the Taliban managed to survive and plot their comeback. In his final year, Obama put off a plan to reduce the U.S. presence to 5,500 troops, leaving about 8,400 in the country.

Now, under Trump, that number is expected to climb by about 50 percent. Rather than trying to retake territory, their focus would be on training Afghan special forces troops, a strategy pursued with some success in the past. The key difference under Trump would be an added emphasis on training for the broader Afghan army.

We did 3 1/2 years of intensive training and we pulled people out in the middle of battles and started going home, and that left the Afghans unable to finish the job, said Ronald Neumann, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan in 2005-2007.

Afghanistan analysts say that may still not be enough.

"I really dont think the deployment of 3,000 or 5,000 troops can overcome security challenges," said Abdul Qader Zazai, first secretary and a lawmaker in the Afghan parliament.

For Trump, the troop increase and giving greater discretion to commanders on the ground is just part of a plan that includes providing continued support -- but no blank check -- for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and pressuring Pakistan. In his remarks, the U.S. president singled out Pakistan for often giving safe haven to agents of chaos, violence and terror.

We can no longer be silent about Pakistans safe havens for terrorist organizations, the Taliban, and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond, Trump said. Pakistan has much to gain from partnering with our effort in Afghanistan. It has much to lose by continuing to harbor terrorists.

Pakistans intelligence service has long nurtured ties with the Taliban while undermining U.S.-backed governments in Kabul.

Pakistan argues that it maintains contacts with the Taliban to prod it toward participation in peace talks. The Taliban have said talks can occur when foreign forces withdraw from the country. The perception that Pakistan controls the Taliban has led to unrealistic expectations," Sartaj Aziz, Pakistans foreign affairs adviser, has said.

Trump will still have to find a way to overcome hurdles that prevented both the Obama and Bush administrations from getting Pakistan to fully sign on to U.S. goals in Afghanistan, even at the risk of losing military or economic aid.

There is pressure on Pakistan to change, said Scott Worden, the director of Afghanistan and Central Asia programs at the U.S. Institute for Peace. Thats been tried in the past. A lot will depend on what carrots and sticks are offered to see whether it marks a change."

Under Obama last year, the U.S. withheld $300 million to Pakistan after Defense Secretary Ash Carter found he couldnt certify that enough action had been taken against the Haqqani Network, which has been blamed for attacks on U.S. and NATO forces.

Relations between Pakistan and the U.S. almost collapsed in 2011 after U.S. special forces found and killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden near a key Pakistani military academy, where he had lived for years.

Another part of the Trump plan is to bring the Taliban back to the negotiating table.

The Taliban has a path to peace and political legitimacy through a negotiated political settlement to end the war, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement after Trumps speech. We stand ready to support peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban without preconditions.

The Obama administration made similar overtures, with little success. And Taliban gains in Afghanistan -- the central government now controls only about 60 percent of the country, according to the U.S. -- may make the group less inclined to sit down for talks.

Its not as if youre seeing the Taliban laying down arms and saying this country is in a bad way and were ready to have a negotiating process, said Alyssa Ayres, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

At the same time, a group affiliated with Islamic State has laid down roots in the country, part of a broad deterioration that has seen a record number of Afghan civilians killed. U.S. engagement has eroded as a result, with personnel hunkered down behind blast walls, the U.S. inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said in a report this month.

While Trump said his instincts during the campaign were to completely pull out of Afghanistan, that deteriorating situation on the ground and the difficult realities of being commander-in-chief changed his calculus.

But he also signaled the limits of his approach.

We are not asking others to change their way of life, but to pursue common goals that allow our children to live better and safer lives, Trump said. We are not nation-building again, we are killing terrorists."

With assistance by Eltaf Najafizada

Continue reading here:
Trump Leans on Afghanistan Tactics That Failed Under Bush, Obama - Bloomberg

An Idaho state lawmaker is facing backlashfor sharing a conspiracy theory that former President Obama helped to orchestrate the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., as part of a plot to take down President Trump.

Idaho Rep. Bryan Zollinger on Friday posted a story on Facebook that suggested Obama and other top Democrats like billionaire George Soros and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe were part of a conspiracy to set up the rally, the Post Register reported.

Im not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible, Zollinger wrote on Facebook.

The story claims that Obama has set up a war room to fight against the Trump administration a claim that has largely been debunked and that Charlottesville was a part of his plan.

The lawmaker later told the Idaho Statesman that it was maybe a mistake to share the story but doubled down on his statement that the claims were plausible.

The Charlottesville rally turned violent when white supremacist groups, including neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members, clashed with counterprotesters. A woman was killed when a car was driven into counterprotesters. The alleged driver has ties to white supremacist groups.

Trump faced harsh criticism for his initial response to the violence, when he blamed "many sides" for the violence. Days later, he criticized white supremacists, but then later reverted to his initial stance, blaming "both sides" and specifically accusingthe "alt-left" ofprovoking violence.

The rest is here:
Idaho state rep shares conspiracy theory accusing Obama of staging Charlottesville - The Hill (blog)