This week I provide seven headlines from articles about Baltimore’s troubles, along with summaries of the texts below them. Readers are free to judge the value of each.

1. Obama urges country to do ‘soul searching’ in wake of Baltimore riots

Two Washington Post reporters write that “President Obama made an impassioned call Tuesday for Americans to do ‘some soul searching’, arguing the U.S. has faced “a slow-rolling crisis” over race and economic opportunity in urban areas.”

That sounds as if our president is talking about a justifiable protest, but he also says this about the people in the street: “They’re not protesting. They’re not making a statement. They’re stealing.” The president believes violent protesters should be “treated as criminals” but suggests that others share the guilt, i.e., Americans, including the news media and some politicians, who have failed “to address the chronic problems of men, women and children who live in poverty and find their opportunities limited because of poor schools or long stints in prison.”

2. Debunking Obama’s Bilious Baltimore Babble

Michelle Malkin’s article reveals a sharp and severe dissent from the president’s prescriptions. She shows no enthusiasm for his proposals to address those problems.

“After dispensing with an obligatory wrist-slap for the toilet paper- and Oreo-filching “protesters” who are burning Charm City to the ground…he got down to his usual business: hectoring his political opponents and grousing that America hasn’t forked over enough money for him to make the “massive investments” needed to “make a difference right now.”

Michelle goes on to examine programs already funded in the hundreds of billions and finds the result pitiful or non-existent.

3. Bowdoin grad says coverage of Baltimore riots misses root cause

Beth Brogan at the Bangor Daily News reports on the views of Bowdoin graduate and Baltimore native, DeRay Mckesson. He asserts that the violence and rioting reflects a community in pain, not a siege by lawless terrorists or unruly thugs.

Mckesson, we read, “dismisses the notion of ‘black rage,’ as presented by many media outlets. Instead, he describes the protests as outlets for the cumulative effect of black people and culture being marginalized by authority figures, many of whom are white.”

4. Riot-Plagued Baltimore Is a Catastrophe Entirely of the Democratic Party’s Own Making

The National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson points out that Baltimore’s authority figures have almost all been Democrats. There have been two Republicans in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. He maintains that it functions as a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

5. Baltimore Is a Democrat Problem, Not America’s Problem

John Nolte of Breitbart agrees and provides additional data about the apparent lack of the “many” white authority figures detected by Baltimore native Mckesson: “In 2012 President Obama won 87.4 percent of the Baltimore City vote…. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have only been only been two Republican governors of the State of Maryland…Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years….Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.

His conclusion does not appear to coincide exactly with Mckesson’s, i.e.,”Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting, suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.”

6. Goodbye to Freddie Gray and Goodbye to Quietly Accepting Injustice

Writing in the New York Times, Georgetown University professor of sociology, Michael Eric Dyson, “a veteran of public mourning over fallen folk in our community,” tells his readers that “the black youths who took to the streets have been hit so often with unacknowledged assaults — from racial profiling to poor schooling — that their violent responses are often viewed through a haze of social stigma that penalizes them without regard for context.”

He regrets the reinforcement of “the unjust stereotypes of poor blacks as inherently violent while the powers that be overlooked the social neglect that sparked the outrage,” but makes no mention of who has had responsibility for the deplorable social neglect. If he has a different rogue’s gallery of neglectful villains then Williamson and Nolte, he does not name them.

He goes on to express the hope that “we were saying goodbye to….the silent acquiescence of young people without jobs, without good schools, without what they need to build a life that takes them beyond suffering. Why are they doing that? Let’s find out — not when the fires are raging, but when calm has returned, when it is most likely, as President Obama said yesterday, that we will ‘feign concern until it goes away and then we go about our business as usual'”

7. Why Baltimore? An American Tragedy

Roger L Simon finds the root cause in the fact that 72 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock according to the Centers for Disease Control. His argument is that the Democrats’ Great Society programs bear a heavy responsibility for that outcome. This is a confession for Mr. Simon since he used to be a liberal supporter of those programs.

Professor John Frary of Farmington, Maine is a former US Congress candidate and retired history professor, a Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United and publisher of www.fraryhomecompanion.com and can be reached at: jfrary8070@aol.com