From the Chicago Tribune:

Golf Comes to the Killing Fields Obama and the Age of Missing the Point. 11:33 AM, JAN 13, 2017 | By ANDREW FERGUSON A good way to look at the Obama era is as a giant experiment in misdirection—the Age of Missing the Point. … Now comes another example of cluelessness, when on Friday the Justice Department releases a “major report” about policing in Chicago. Anyone unfamiliar with the Obama administration would assume such a report would address the gruesome question of how police can stop the ongoing slaughter of Chicagoans on the city’s South and West sides. Last year an average of ten Chicagoans were shot and wounded every day, most of them young men, most of them concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. Homicides averaged two a day. So of course the Justice Department has spent countless dollars and man hours to study…civil rights violations by the Chicago Police Department. First things first! An almost comical case of point-missing arose again this week in Chicago, when the city awarded a $1.1 million preliminary planning contract to an engineering firm for a project in Woodlawn, one of the South Side neighborhoods that has become a killing field. Of course the neighborhood is starved for capital investment, private employers, good jobs, and safe schools that empower children with a useful education. So Mayor Rahm Emanuel had an idea. He wants to raise tens of millions of dollars to…watch out…build a luxury golf course in Woodlawn’s Jackson Park. Emanuel, of course, is President Obama’s former chief of staff and the man credited with bringing the Obama presidential library to the South Side. Indeed the library and the golf course will be adjacent to one another. So the project is being presented as a kind of two-fer: the library will bring tourists to the South Side and the golf course will give them something to do once they get there, besides pay tribute to Obama and dodge gunfire.

From The Weekly Standard:Obama’s old colleagues are talking about turning 27 short holes (18 at Jackson Park, 9 next door at South Shore) into 18 long ones. Presumably, the new expensive golf course would be named after Obama.

It’s another manifestation of the trend toward less capacious but more elitist public amenities, like the ballpark used by the Cleveland Indians now seating less than half as many fans as its predecessor did in 1948.

They could build a great 18th hole by routing a Cape hole from the promontory out in Lake Michigan (right edge of the aerial photo below) over the South Shore beach to a green in front of the huge old clubhouse (with the red tile roof).

But that would require closing the public beach for the sake of safety, which even a golf course nut like myself wouldn’t recommend.

A better idea would be to suspend the ban that has been in place since the first Mayor Daley on anymore landfill in Lake Michigan. (Most of Chicago’s great lakefront amenities like the 18 mile bikepath and the beaches are built on landfill). But as more people got views of the lakefront from high rises, they didn’t want to blocked by new high rises built on landfill. So the first Daley simply banned all landfill.

But if Chicago would allow low-lying amenities like a parks and golf courses to be built out in the lake on new landfill where they’d enhance views from existing highrises, that would be a win-win.

But of course the first priority ought to be to stop the slaughter in the community that the community organizer is leaving behind.

[Comment at Unz.com]