[Vision2020] Obama's Hug-a-Thug Crime Policy

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Obama's Hug-a-Thug Crime Policy
By Paul Sperry
FrontPageMagazine.com | 11/3/2008

The triple homicide of actress-singer Jennifer Hudson's kin has thrown
crime into the national spotlight — along with Barack Obama's
hometown, which is the new murder capital of the U.S. Chicago has seen
more murders this year than both New York and Los Angeles.

Yet you won't hear Obama talk about crime or his policy to fight it.
That's because he doesn't have one — unless you call hugging thugs a
crime policy.

One of the first things Obama would do as president is repeal
mandatory minimum sentences for crack and other drug offenders to
"reduce the ineffective warehousing" of such criminals, according to
his website. He favors "drug rehabilitation" over incarceration for
even "a second-time offender," according to a 2007 interview he gave
to the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit's second-largest African-American
newspaper.

Decriminalizing pot is also on the table. "We need to rethink and
decriminalize our marijuana laws," said Obama, who admits to smoking
weed and doing "a little blow" as a young man.

As an Illinois state senator, Obama voted to weaken penalties on
gangbangers who deal drugs in schools.

He also wants to rehabilitate inmates through prison-to-work programs.
Obama's pet charity, ACORN, has such a program. It hired 59 inmates at
its Las Vegas office this year. They proceeded to fraudulently
register voters using the names of Dallas Cowboys football stars. A
police affidavit quoted a supervisor describing them as "lazy
crack-heads" who just wanted money for drugs.

ACORN and Obama have been working to restore voting rights for felons,
which would be another priority of his administration. "At a minimum,"
Obama told the black Detroit paper, "those who serve their sentences
should be re-enfranchised."

In Illinois, he unsuccessfully sponsored a measure to expunge some
criminal records. He thinks they are used as a "stigma" against
blacks.

Obama also wants to outlaw police use of racial descriptions as a
means to capture suspects, including Middle-Eastern terrorists. As a
U.S. senator, he's already co-sponsored federal legislation to ban
"racial profiling."

At the same time, he wants to limit your right to protect yourself
from criminals by permanently banning assault weapons, among other
gun-control measures to de-"cling" you from your guns.

As a state lawmaker, Obama supported a ban on the sale and transfer of
all forms of semi-automatic firearms, along with a bill limiting
handgun purchases to one a month. In a 1996 questionnaire supplied by
a liberal Chicago nonprofit group, he answered "yes" to supporting
legislation to "ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns."

Obama fought a bill in the Illinois senate that would send youth who
commit a second violent felony to prison. He fought to keep even the
most violent juvenile offenders out of the adult system.

Instead, "We must provide more ladders to success for young men who
fall into lives of crime," he said at the Denver convention. One
ladder he has in mind is funding contractors who train "ex-felons on
projects that can benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes
and offices to make them energy-efficient, perhaps."

Terrorists could also catch a break. "I would vote to repeal the U.S.
Patriot Act," he said in 2003. Now he says he would merely repeal the
parts of it that are "just plain wrong," whatever those are.

Obama, who would as president have the power to pardon criminals,
isn't a big fan of U.S. laws in general, at least not as currently
written. He thinks they are racist, along with the courts.

"We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime
you commit than on what you look like," he told Howard University
students last year. "It's time to seek a new dawn of justice."

"Laws are sometimes malleable," he wrote two years ago, and he plans
to "fix" what he sees as a "broken" criminal justice system. And he
favors judges with the "empathy to understand what it's like to be
poor or African-American."

That worries some legal analysts. "If Obama wins," warns Northwestern
University law professor Steven Calabresi, "we could possibly see the
abolition of capital punishment and mass freeing of criminal
defendants."

In fact, Obama in the 1996 questionnaire responded "no" to supporting
capital punishment. His website now calls for unspecified "reform" of
the death penalty, which he contended in his book "does little to
deter crime."

Obama will, however, get tough on "hate crimes." He plans to pack the
criminal section of Justice's Civil Rights Division with
African-American prosecutors, and make "hate crime a priority."

He will "reinvigorate federal civil-rights enforcement" by prosecuting
alleged civil-rights abuses by local officials, such as the Jena, La.,
district attorney. "As president," his website says, "Obama will
ensure that the section vigorously pursues such cases."

Suburban employers won't be safe from Obama's race cops, either.

"Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer needed should
pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area and
count the number of blacks employed there," Obama complained in his
2006 autobiography.

And woe to suspected disenfranchisers. "When fliers are placed in our
neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day, that won't only
be an injustice, it will be a crime," he promised black graduates at
Howard.

Also, "I will crack down on predatory lenders who all too often target
the African-American community," Obama vowed, "with tough penalties
that treat mortgage fraud like the crime it is."

It's plain where Obama's priorities lie.

"Jesus has a soft spot for thugs," preaches Rev. Otis Moss, the
"wonderful young pastor," as Obama described him, who took over the
pulpit from retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright at Obama's longtime church in
Chicago.

Apparently so does Obama.
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