RUTHFULLY YOURS

Early in the Obama presidency, National Review’s Jim Geraghty observed that all of Barack Obama’s promises come with an expiration date.

By that, Geraghty meant that Obama tended to have strongly held convictions, up until the moment they became politically inconvenient.

It turns out that President Obama’s few accomplishments are just as ephemeral.

Lacking Senate votes to ratify a treaty with Iran, Obama instead made a personal promise to honor the Iran deal. Last week, President Trump reversed that decision.

Obama long claimed he lacked authority to provide amnesty to illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Then he did it anyway. The so-called Dreamers remain in political limbo, relying on the federal government to continue to ignore the law.

Obama signed the U.S. up for a climate change plan that won’t do anything to slow climate change. Trump took us out of it.

Blocked by Congress, Obama passed his Clean Power Plan by executive order and net neutrality through the FCC. What he did with “a phone and a pen,” Trump is undoing.

Obama’s signature health care law remains in place, but Congress repealed the individual mandate at its core. The damage it did to our health care system remains.

Barack Obama built his castles out of sand. He should not be surprised that they are being washed away by the next tide.

Australia has always been generous to those who come here seeking respectability and wealth, as the transported criminals who prospered after being shipped to their innocent new land came to appreciate. It’s a fine tradition — one Foreign Minister Julie Bishop appears keen to honour and to advertise. Hence the Facebook picture above, which Ms Bishop proudly posted this very Saturday morning on her Facebook page after the duo chinwagged about “empowering women”.

Mrs Clinton undoubtedly shares that enthusiasm for the opportunities to be grasped in Australia, as well she might in light of the many hundreds of millions of dollars poured into Clinton charities by Julia Gillard and, more recently, by Ms Bishop herself.

Such warmth! And, perhaps, a just-us-girls briefing as well.

You see, Mrs Clinton will be sitting down with the ABC’s Leigh Sales on Monday for a chat. Being a hugely well paid priestess in the national broadcaster’s temple of truth, the the 7.30 hostess might choose to explore topics like

the Clintons’ involvement with Haiti
running the State Department from an unsecured server in the basement bathroom closet
making 30,000 emails disappear
the remarkable series of coincidences that saw Bill Clinton pocket enormously lucrative speaking fees from companies and nations whose cases and causes were before the State Department, followed by the subsequent granting of those supplicants’ dearest wishes
her campaign’s funding of the so-called Russian Dossier

In the aftermath of last month’s shooting of Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill man menacing Brooklyn pedestrians with a tool that looked like a gun, Chirlane McCray conceded that “New Yorkers are right to ask if their city is doing enough to support [those] struggling with severe mental illness.” The answer is “no.” Continued tragedies prove that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature mental-health plan, ThriveNYC, is not helping those with the most serious mental illnesses.

The mayor and his wife have boasted about committing more than $850 million in funding over four years to ThriveNYC, which launched in 2015, but New York’s mental- health commissioner, Gary Belkin, admitted last year that just $165 million had been allocated to those with serious mental illness. Belkin has failed to specify how those funds were spent. In 2015, de Blasio also announced NYC Safe, a program specifically intended for the seriously mentally ill, who use a disproportionate amount of hospital or police services. But the city has published little data on the initiative other than to say that it is a small program, budgeted at $22 million a year.

In 2015, police received 150,000 calls about “emotionally disturbed persons,” or EDPs. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the mayor’s focus on the problem of mental illness, that number is now up to 165,000 calls. The mayor’s misallocation of mental- health spending has made police officers the first responders to incidents of acute mental illness, putting cops in the precarious position of negotiating with unstable individuals, who may be violent and irrational. These situations can be dangerous for everyone involved: of the 3,523 assaults on NYPD officers in 2016, 18.3 percent resulted from encounters with EDP. Last year, one of these encounters led to the death of Officer Miosotis Familia, shot by a schizophrenic man who had stopped taking his medication. And by offloading responsibility for dealing with the seriously mentally ill to the police, the city also puts patients at risk. Though the NYPD responds to the majority of EDP calls successfully and humanely, almost half of the department’s 501 Taser deployments in 2016 were in response to EDPs.

Criminal justice cannot be reformed unless there is serious bail reform. Minor offenders who cannot post bail must remain in prison until sentencing, and the length of that unendurable wait is often longer than the sentence which will ultimately by handed down. Men and women waiting for a hearing and sentencing lose jobs, leave families. Something requires change…..rsk
Criminal justice reform is returning to political prominence, thanks to Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of its most ardent advocates. Ordinarily, that might be good news. But once again, the legislation at issue is so badly flawed that passage would cost taxpayers billions, yield little in the way of public safety or relief for the federal prison system and—at least according to liberal prison reformers—little reform.

The House Judiciary Committee, in a rare burst of bipartisan energy, last week passed the latest rendition of this recurrent theme. In an unusual non-party line 25-5vote, HR 5682, a watered-down version of legislation that has been kicking around Congress for several years, advanced toward consideration by the full House. Supporters hope the bill—which is also known as the FIRST STEP Act—will have a vote in the next couple of weeks.

HR 5682 would require the Federal Bureau of Prisons to provide more resources to reduce the likelihood of recidivism and ease reentry of prisoners back into society. A companion bill was introduced in the Senate but has yet to be taken up by the Judiciary Committee. A very different bill, encompassing a considerably wider array of reform, did pass the Senate Judiciary Committee several months ago over the objection of five Republican members.

The current bill has, not surprisingly, a wide list of supporters and opponents. To try to gain supporters, some of the most objectionable provisions of older legislation were left out and several new provisions added. Kushner has been able to secure White House backing, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions strongly opposes it. Several libertarian right-of-center groups, including those controlled by the Koch brothers, are strong supporters, while a number of left-wing groups, including the ACLU, People for the American Way and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human rights strongly oppose the legislation because it doesn’t go far enough.