So, not only are there 47 cities in the U.S. that are more dangerous than Chicago, there is a city in Arizona (John McCain's home state) that is just about as dangerous.

Even more interesting are the murder rates in U.S. States:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-1996-2007

Residents of the home states of John McCain, Sarah Palin, and George Bush are more likely to be murdered than residents of Illinois.

That site also shows that states with no death penalty have MUCH lower murder rates than those with death penalty. Unfortunately all the major candidates (other than Green and Independents) are pro-death penalty: http://deathpenalty.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=1741

The number of soldiers currently in Iraq is about 200,000.

The population of Chicago is 2,836,658

So, the 292 murdered in Chicago indicates that for the six month period, 1 out of every 10,000 people in the city was murdered. In Iraq, the rate was TEN TIMES that high – one out of every 1000 U.S. soldiers was killed. There is really no comparison. If there were as many Americans in Iraq as Chicago residents, then over 3000 of them would have been killed in the same period at the current rate. It’s not at all fair to say that more people were killed in Chicago than killed in Iraq. You could also truthfully say that while only 221 soldiers were killed in Iraq this year, 18,000 people were murdered in the U.S, and only about 30 were murdered in Compton!

The email then went on to state that Cook County has the nation's highest county tax rate. I didn't bother looking this up, but I did look up state sales taxes:
http://www.fairtaxation.org/facts/sales_tax_rank.php

Obama’s state is behind Bush’s and McCain’s (and Hillary’s). The state of Washington has the second highest state sales tax? Who knew?

Kudos to Governor Palin for using that oil revenue to virtually eliminate state sales tax, but what’s up with Joe Biden’s state having no state sales tax??

Next the email talks about state pension problems. In fact, my research here showed that state pensions are facing serious problems all across the country. States have been borrowing wildly from them for years and will soon have to do something about it However, Illinois is not the worst offender. In fact, Illinois has a far less serious threat than some other states, first among which is ALASKA!

Alaska has a state pension deficit of $8.5 billion. I’ll admit that $8.5 billion doesn’t begin to compare to $44 billion, but when you look at the state pension deficit per person:

Alaska: $12,436.39 per person

Illinois: $3423.44 per person

The AFL/CIO rates threats to state pensions at this site: www.cwapublicandhealthcare.org/pensions/st-pension-threat-levels.html Threats to state pension deficits are rated as as red, orange and yellow depending on the threat level. THE NUMBER ONE AND TWO STATES WITH THE WORST THREATS TO THEIR STATE PENSION SYSTEMS ARE ALASKA AND ARIZONA (Palin and McCain’s states). California is number three. Illinois is number NINE and is an orange state.

SUMMARY: Numbers by themselves are rarely meaningful. You have to put them into context to understand them. I came up with these statistics by doing some very simple googling. Note that these results are the first matches I found. I didn’t have to dig around to find this. It’s just plain simple fact. I didn’t know what I would find when I did my googling. For all I knew Chicago and Illinois would have the number 1 crime rate in the country. The only reason I did the searches was because the numbers were presented with no context, making me want to know how they compare to the rest of the country.

I cite all my references and put the numbers in context by comparing them to other relevant numbers. This is the way responsible people distribute facts. Emails with scary facts or numbers that make no effort to reveal all the facts are obvious scare tactics and need to be researched before we put any credence into them. Also, any time you see an email with something that seems to be unbelievable, it probably is! A little bit of research is usually enough to find the truth.