It’s Wednesday, May 25th, 2016…but before we begin, here’s a Thought for the Day:

Could it be because the vast majority of firearms-related murder and mayhem are Black-on-Black…and thus cannot be attributed to the individuals responsible because their anti-social actions are solely the result of the legacy of slavery?!?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in a related item courtesy of the WSJ, Heather MacDonald warns us that…

The Nationwide Crime Wave Is Building

As the homicide rate keeps rising in many cities, even some who dismissed the ‘Ferguson effect’ admit the phenomenon is real.

 

“Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey has again drawn the wrath of the White House for calling attention to the rising violence in urban areas. Homicides increased 9% in the largest 63 cities in the first quarter of 2016; nonfatal shootings were up 21%, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association survey. Those increases come on top of last year’s 17% rise in homicides in the 56 biggest U.S. cities, with 10 heavily black cities showing murder spikes above 60%.

“I was very worried about it last fall,” Mr. Comey told a May 11 news conference. “And I am in many ways more worried” now, he said, because the violent-crime rate is going up even faster this year.

Mr. Comey’s sin, according to the White House, was to posit that this climbing urban violence was the result of a falloff in proactive policing, a hypothesis I first put forward in these pages last year, dubbing it the “Ferguson effect.” The FBI director used the term “viral video effect,” but it is a distinction without a difference. “There’s a perception,” Mr. Comey said during his news conference, “that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime—the getting out of your car at 2 in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”

The reaction to Mr. Comey’s heresy was swift. White House spokesman Josh Earnest immediately accused the FBI director of being “irresponsible and ultimately counterproductive” by drawing “conclusions based on anecdotal evidence.”

…But the evidence is not looking good for those who dismiss the Ferguson effect, from the president on down. That group once included Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, who was an early and influential critic. Mr. Rosenfeld has changed his mind after taking a closer look at the worsening crime statistics. “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian recently. “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase.”

A study published this year in the Journal of Criminal Justice found that homicides in the 12 months after the Michael Brown shooting rose significantly in cities with large black populations and already high rates of violence, which is precisely what the Ferguson effect would predict.

A study of gun violence in Baltimore by crime analyst Jeff Asher showed an inverse correlation with proactive drug arrests: When Baltimore cops virtually stopped making drug arrests last year after the rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, shootings soared. In Chicago, where pedestrian stops have fallen nearly 90%, homicides this year are up 60% compared with the same period last year. Compared with the first four and half months of 2014, homicides in Chicago are up 95%, according to the police department. Even the liberal website Vox has grudgingly concluded that “the Ferguson effect theory is narrowly correct, at least in some cities.”

…Accountability is not the problem; officers in most departments are accustomed to multiple layers of review and public oversight. The problem is the activist-stoked hostility toward the police on the streets and ungrounded criticism of law enforcement that has flowed from the Obama administration and has been amplified by the media.

“In my 19 years in law enforcement, I haven’t seen this kind of hatred towards the police,” a Chicago cop who works on the tough South Side tells me. “People want to fight you. ‘F— the police. We don’t have to listen,’ they say.” A police officer in Los Angeles reports: “Several years ago I could use a reasonable and justified amount of force and not be cursed and jeered at. Now our officers are getting surrounded every time they put handcuffs on someone.” Resistance to arrest is up, cops across the country say, and officers are getting injured…”

Though we can say with complete confidence there’s ONE clown…

…who couldn’t care less how many cops get capped, ‘cuz he gets his laughs professing concern…while playing for the other side!

As we noted at the conclusion of an earlier item regarding the utterly idiotic claim Blacks don’t visit America’s national parks because they associate trees with lynchings, the accelerating breakdown of our urban centers is just one more reason we’re happy to be living in the woods!

Since we’re on the subject of The Obamao’s deliberate decimation of the rule of law, courtesy again of the WSJ, here’s another verse in what’s become an all-too familiar refrain:

The Miscarriage of Justice Department

A federal judge slams U.S. lawyers for deceiving the courts on immigrant deportations.

 

“The constitutional challenge to President Obama’s executive action on immigration keeps getting more remarkable. A federal judge has now exposed how the Justice Department systematically deceived lower courts about the Administration’s conduct, and he has imposed unprecedented legal measures to attempt to sterilize this ethics rot.

On Thursday District Judge Andrew Hanen of Texas found that Obama Administration lawyers committed misconduct that he called “intentional, serious and material.” In 2015 he issued an injunction—now in front of the Supreme Court—blocking Mr. Obama’s 2014 order that rewrote immigration law to award legal status and federal and state benefits to nearly five million aliens.

When 26 states sued to block the order in December 2014, Justice repeatedly assured Judge Hanen that the Department of Homeland Security would not start processing applications until February 2015 at the earliest. Two weeks after the injunction came down, in March, Justice was forced to admit that DHS had already granted or renewed more than 100,000 permits.

Justice has also conceded in legal filings that all its lawyers knew all along that the DHS program was underway, despite what they said in briefs and hearings. One DOJ lawyer told Judge Hanen that “I really would not expect anything between now and the date of the hearing.” As the judge notes, “How the government can categorize the granting of over 100,000 applications as not being ‘anything’ is beyond comprehension.”

Justice’s only explanation is that its lawyers either “lost focus on the fact” or “the fact receded in memory or awareness”—the fact here being realities that the DOJ was required to disclose to the court. The states weren’t able to make certain arguments or seek certain legal remedies because the program supposedly hadn’t been implemented, leaving them in a weaker legal position.

More to the point, an attorney’s first and most basic judicial obligation is to tell the truth. Judge Hanen concludes that the misrepresentations “were made in bad faith” and “it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.” Many a lawyer has been disbarred for less…”

Including one…

…William Jefferson Clinton!

Speaking of lying Liberal lawyers, NRO‘s Andrew McCarthy wonders whether, when it comes to the…

Clinton E-mails: Is the Fix In?

Obama’s Justice Department shields Cheryl Mills from FBI’s questions

 

“…That brings us to the most intriguing part of the Post’s report. Again, the Post says the FBI tried to ask Mills about “the procedure used to produce [Clinton’s] e-mails to the State Department.” Mills’s lawyer promptly called timeout, leaving the room with Mills so they could consult. When they returned, Mills was not required to answer the FBI’s question on this crucial topic. It turns out the Justice Department’s lawyers had made an agreement with Mills’ lawyer — seemingly unbeknownst to the FBI — that this topic would be off-limits due to “attorney-client privilege.”

Why would the Justice Department agree to such a restriction? Here, the Post kicks up some sand, tossing into the mix that Mills is “an attorney herself.” But as someone once said, what difference, at this point, does that make?

Mills was not Clinton’s lawyer — not at the State Department and not in the production of the e-mails to the State Department nearly two years later. Mills was a government official when the improper e-mail communications arrangement was in use. Her own actions and communications with Clinton and others in connection with the production — and destruction — of e-mails is highly relevant.

Moreover, absent a written waiver from the government, the rules of professional ethics forbid a lawyer who has been a public official from representing a client “in connection with a matter in which the lawyer participated personally and substantially as a public officer or employee.” This rule would bar Mills from acting as Clinton’s lawyer even if another obvious conflict of interest did not already prevent such an arrangement (namely, the fact that they are joint participants in potentially criminal transactions under investigation).

Remember, Clinton, Mills, and other top Clinton staffers knew that Clinton’s e-mails were not preserved in State Department files. They knew this notwithstanding that federal law and procedure, which discourage any use of private e-mail accounts for government business (let alone systematic use of private e-mail), require that, if private e-mail is used for an official communication, a copy of that communication must be placed in government files. Clinton and Mills well knew that this was not done. The e-mails remained stored on Clinton’s private server for nearly two years after Clinton and Mills left the State Department at the end of President Obama’s first term in early 2013.

…How can it be possible that the FBI is not being permitted by the Justice Department to ask a key witness — an accomplice witness — about one of the central transactions under investigation?

The Post rationalizes that “it is not completely unknown for FBI agents and prosecutors to diverge on interview tactics and approach.” That’s ridiculous. This was not tactical. This was not a disagreement over whether to play “good cop/bad cop.” This was a disagreement about the substance of the case, about what the FBI is permitted to investigate. And by the way, if (as I suspect) Mills has been given some form of qualified immunity, part of the rationale for doing that is to have a free-flowing interview with no fact matters under investigation excluded from inquiry.

So on what basis could the Justice Department have sided with Mills’s attorney against the FBI? The answer may be found by carefully parsing (as one must always do with the Clintons) an unsworn statement Clinton’s office put out last October.

The statement claims that, upon receiving the State Department’s December 2014 request that she provide any government records she kept when she left, “Secretary Clinton directed her attorneys to assist by identifying and preserving all emails that could potentially be federal records.” The statement then shifts to the passive voice, such that we are told about how this and that search “was conducted” — but not by whom, and with no light shed about communications during the process, particularly in connection with the thousands of e-mails Clinton tried to erase from her server.

Shannen Coffin has previously noted Clinton’s desperate attempt to blame her attorneys for her misconduct. But do she and Cheryl Mills really believe that by involving lawyers in their joint activities — activities that were fraught with potential improprieties and were undertaken in conjunction with people who were not their lawyers — they can shield those activities from criminal investigation under a haze of “attorney-client privilege”?

More important, does the Obama Justice Department believe that?

If so, somebody ought to let the local mafia boss know that if he wants to avoid federal prosecution, all he needs to do is bring his lawyers along the next time the goodfellas get together to divide the spoils and decide who needs to get “whacked.”

Or could it be it’s just the Hillary Clinton case in which the Obama Justice Department is playing for the wrong team?“

Think about it; it’s Barack Hussein Obama’s Justice Department.  Why would or should it be any different than any other part of this most anti-American of Administrations?!?

Since we’re on the subject of would-be dictators with delusions of grandeur, writing at The Weekly Standard, Steve Hayes offers his insight into Trump’s…

Runaway Train

 

“Yes, it’s a con. In the three weeks since Donald Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee the remains of modern American conservatism have decayed at an alarming rate.

Three months ago, most GOP officeholders and conservative opinion leaders understood Trump to be an ignoramus and a boor, a vain reality-television star and a longtime donor to Democrats who had built his candidacy on the kind of progressive populism most of them had spent their careers fighting. Today, many of those same Republican elected officials and prominent conservatives are hailing Trump as the future of their party and the ideological movement it houses and excoriating anti-Trump conservatives who hold to the same position they took just a few weeks ago.

What’s changed? Not Trump.

…Last fall, Trump mocked GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson on Twitter. “Sheldon Adelson is looking to give big dollars to Rubio because he feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Last week, Trump celebrated Adelson’s commitment to support his candidacy with up to $100 million.

So the candidate who won the Republican nomination as an “outsider” and who claimed to be self-funding to avoid the taint of political money is setting up a sophisticated finance operation that will allow him to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the very special interests, lobbyists, and major donors he used as foils in the primary.

Yes, of course it’s a con.

It’s possible, likely even, that this aggressive hypocrisy will have a negligible short-term effect on Trump. As he’s said about his own supporters, they’ll back him regardless of what he says or does. But what about the long term? And what about elected Republicans and prominent conservatives, many of them previously skeptical of Trump, who are willing to set aside their concerns and climb aboard the Trump train in the interest of winning?

Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, has twice used her column in recent days to scold conservatives who won’t support Trump, despite having written, just a month ago, that Trump, preoccupied with subjects “small, petty, [and] unworthy,” was “nutty.” She begins her most recent column with a plea for Republicans to exhibit “a kind of heroic fairness” in times like these and, rejecting her own advice, concludes by sharing her suspicion that some conservatives who continue to oppose Trump for reasons of conscience don’t really mean it. (Noonan might have noted that she’s held some of the policy positions that she imagines her anti-Trump villains all share.)

Senator Bob Corker, who praised Trump’s incoherent foreign policy speech and is now reportedly under strong consideration to be his running mate (Yes, the same Senator Bob Corker who almost single-handedly made the Iran “deal” possible!), wants Trump skeptics “to chill.”

With respect, Corker and Noonan and Abbott are confused. There’s no reason to chill when a con man turns his marks, particularly people who know better, into accomplices. There’s no obligation in the name of fairness, heroic or otherwise, to normalize a crazy man because he’s won the support of 5 percent of the voting-eligible public. And, finally, while Abbott is right that the 2016 race has caused many conservatives to abandon their principles in support of a favored candidate, he’s wrong about which conservatives have been willing to do so and wrong about which candidate they’re supporting.”

Sorry Trumpeteers; come November, and it’s The Donald v. Hillary, we’ll vote for him.  But until then, we won’t pretend to support him.

In the meantime, the Journal‘s Jason Riley offers some sobering facts on The Donald’s recent positive polling:

The Rough Road Ahead for Trump

If he wins, it won’t be pretty, because the conventional route tilts heavily in Hillary Clinton’s favor.

 

“…Several recent national polls show Mr. Trump narrowing the gap with Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee.

…Still, there is less here than meets the eye. State-level polling matters more than national surveys, and polling in large battleground states that President Obama won in 2012 matters most. Mr. Trump ultimately must prevail in the Electoral College, and nothing in the current state polls predicts that happening. According to Real Clear Politics, Mrs. Clinton leads in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan—all of which went Democratic four years ago. If Mr. Trump isn’t competitive in these states, he likely loses.

In recent decades, the Republican coalition has included free-market advocates, military hawks and social conservatives, and Mr. Trump’s complicated relationships with all three factions has been on full display. Instead of unifying the party in the traditional sense, he wants to construct a different coalition centered largely around white blue-collar voters who have been economically marginalized by globalization and scorned by liberal elites.

…Mrs. Clinton’s clumsy, dutiful attempts to relate to this crowd couldn’t be less authentic. Candidate Trump, by contrast, empathizes to the max. His read is that these voters are fueled by anger and resentment of elites, minorities and the Washington establishment. And he is betting that there are enough of them to form a majority coalition and scramble the political map. It’s only May and there is a long way to go, but so far he is wrong. National polls notwithstanding, there isn’t a single state that Mitt Romney lost in which Mr. Trump is ahead…”

Oh,…and Trump’s moderation of his stance on a temporary halt to the resettlement of Muslim refugees couldn’t have come at a more opportune time…

State Department sets new single-day record for Syrian refugee approvals

 

“Give us your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to blow us to kingdom come!”

…at least for those of us who have always questioned his commitment to any position he’s ever held! 

Which brings us to the Totally Tone Deaf segment, and comments recently made by VA Secretary Robert McDonald with few equals in the annals of asininity:

VA secretary: Disney doesn’t measure wait times, so why should VA?

 

“Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald on Monday compared the length of time veterans wait to receive health care at the VA to the length of time people wait for rides at Disneyland, and said his agency shouldn’t use wait times as a measure of success because Disney doesn’t either.

“When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said Monday during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”

McDonald’s comments angered House Speaker Paul Ryan, who tweeted out Monday afternoon, “This is not make-believe, Mr. Secretary. Veterans have died waiting in those lines”…”

You’ll recall this is the same Robert McDonald who lied repeatedly…

…about his military service.  Which means he’s likely to stay on at the VA should The Heroine of Bosnia…

…win the White House!  Until then, this incredible nincompoop is prepared to apologize…

…provided of course he was either misunderstood…or said the wrong thing.  Uh, Bob…will you apologize for being a total and complete bureaucratic douchebag?!?

Next up, another unbelievable tale in what we can only describe as a cross betwixt News of the Bizarre and the Environmental Moment; we report, you decide!

Tied in heat all day, angry camel severs owner’s head

 

Left in the heat with its legs tied all day, a camel attacked its owner and severed his head in anger in Rajasthan’s Barmer district on Saturday. About 25 villagers struggled for 6 hours to calm the animal down.

Urjaram of Mangta village was entertaining guests at his house on Saturday night when he suddenly realised that his camel had been out in the heat all day with its legs tied. He was attacked when he tried to untie the annoyed animal. “The animal lifted him by the neck and threw him on to the ground, chewed the body and severed the head,” villager Thakara Ram said. Villagers revealed that the camel had attacked Urjaram in the past as well.

That’s one decidedly distressed dromedary…and yet another anthropogenic-climate-change-related fatality!

Turning now to The Lighter Side…

Then there’s this from our old pal Wink Martindale:

Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with the Ignorance Is Bliss segment, courtesy of the half-witted hostesses on The View:

Whoopi: Divorce Is ‘Nowhere In the Bible’ or 10 Commandments

 

“…Goldberg began the segment by bringing up Khloe Kardashian’s split with husband Lamar Odom. As a Christian, Kardashian doesn’t believe in divorce, Whoopi explained, “but she realized she had to do it for her own mental and emotional well-being and thinks God’s okay with that.”

“I mean, why wouldn’t God be okay with that?” Goldberg prompted. “It’s nowhere in the Bible.”

Except of course in Malachi 2:16, where the Lord, the God of Israel, the creator of the universe, rather affirmatively states:

“For I hate divorce!“

And Matthew 5:32, in which His only begotten Son, Christ Jesus himself, decisively declares:

“But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.”

Decisions, decisions: the uninformed feelings of Khloe Kardashian and Whoopi Goldberg…or the unambiguous direction of the living God and his Son.  Talk about a classic Hobson’s choice! 

Magoo