RUTHFULLY YOURS

When some major police incident occurs, it is most often my practice to withhold comment until I can be sure that most of the facts surrounding it have been revealed. A horrific event like a school shooting like that which occurred in Parkland, Fla., arouses the impulse to weigh in with opinions based on incomplete or even false information. It is best to resist this impulse.

Others, of course, with endless hours of air time to fill, and with agendas to push along, are unable to resist it. There may be more egregious examples of this, but I don’t see how anyone can compete with the CNN’s recent “town hall,” at which Sen. Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch were mocked and browbeaten by what amounted to little more than an angry mob.

Which is not to say the people in attendance didn’t have reason to be angry. The crowd was made up of students, parents, and teachers from Stoneman Douglas High School, where days earlier 31 students and staff members had been shot, 17 of them fatally. From a high school student’s limited perspective and experience, he knows only that something horrific has occurred in his world, something that by all rights should not have. With his nerves still raw and exposed, he sees before him on the stage a conservative senator and a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, each of whom he perceives, in that limited perspective and experience, to have contributed to the trauma he has experienced.

Fine. One expects as much from young people, but with the understanding that their outrage, however well founded, will have limited influence in the formulation of public policy. What I found most interesting in the CNN broadcast, aside from the graciousness shown by Sen. Rubio and Ms. Loesch, was how Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel came to be a crowd favorite, echoing as he did their loudly expressed passion for stricter gun control, all the while eliding the apparent failures of his own department. Interrupting Ms. Loesch at one point, Sheriff Israel said to her, “You just told this group of people that you are standing up for them. You’re not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’” This statement, though meaningless, was of course intended to be an applause line, and indeed it was greeted with a standing ovation. CONTINUE AT SITE

The federal government is threatening to limit treatment options for doctors fighting cancer. A regulatory decision due Wednesday from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could undermine the care delivered to the more than 1.6 million Americans who are diagnosed with cancer each year.

At issue is whether reimbursements will be available to most physicians, hospitals and patients for a diagnostic technology known as next-generation sequencing. A cornerstone of the emerging field of precision medicine, NGS tests analyze molecular changes that occur in cancerous tumors and show up in biopsies.

To fight tumors, DNA-sequencing-based tests can determine how genes and mutations differ from one patient to the next. NGS tests enable oncologists to prescribe and administer customized, highly targeted drug therapies. The technology limits patients’ exposure to unnecessary toxic drugs and helps doctors make vital treatment decisions. Hundreds of thousands of cancer patients have already received NGS testing.

The proposed new CMS policy would abruptly change the way NGS testing is regulated and administered. It would drastically limit insurance coverage by requiring that tests be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Current NGS tests are conducted at accredited clinical laboratories and premier academic medical centers under strict regulation. They are as accurate and reliable as FDA-approved testing. There is no evidence that restricting reimbursement to FDA-approved tests would improve care.

Under the proposed policy, only one of hundreds of laboratories that currently offer NGS testing would meet all the new reimbursement requirements. The policy would in effect force clinicians and institutions to send all NGS testing to a single vendor, Foundation Medicine .

The House Intelligence Committee on Saturday released the long-awaited Democratic response to allegations the FBI abused its surveillance powers during the 2016 election. Committee Chairman Devin Nunes owes ranking Democrat Adam Schiff a thank you for assisting his case.

The 10-page Democratic memo begins by declaring that “The FBI and DOJ officials did not ‘abuse’ the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) process, omit material information, or subvert this vital tool to spy on the Trump campaign.” Yet the facts it lays out show the opposite.

In particular the memo confirms that the FBI used an opposition-research document paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee as part of its application to surveil Carter Page, who was associated with the Donald Trump campaign.

Democrats dispute the degree to which the FBI relied on the dossier created by opposition-researcher Christopher Steele in applying for its FISA court order, but that’s beside the point. If the FBI had as much “compelling evidence” and “probable cause” as the memo asserts, it would not have needed to cite the Steele document. And the Democrats do not dispute that the Steele dossier was the FBI’s only source in its initial FISA application for its allegation that Mr. Page met with suspect Russians in Moscow in July 2016.

The Democratic memo makes no attempt to rebut the widely reported news that former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told Congress that the FBI would not have sought a surveillance warrant without the dossier. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes claimed on “Fox News Sunday” that Mr. McCabe never said that, but then why not put that in the memo?

During Wednesday’s horrible fiasco of a “Town Hall”, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel spelled it out:

What I’m asking the law makers to give police all over this country is more power.

I was sufficiently struck by the above to write it down – because it was clear even then that Sheriff Israel is an incompetent deployer of the power he already has. The scale of his department’s appalling failure in the Parkland massacre gets worse almost hourly. I was on air with Tucker Carlson when I heard that Stoneman Douglas High’s on-site “school resource officer” – Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, uniformed, trained and armed – had declined to enter the building and had stayed safely outside until Nikolas Cruz had finished killing everybody.

After a day on supension without pay, Deputy Peterson has now “retired”, which assuredly comes with pay.

But, as I said, it gets worse. Three of his fellow deputies, from Sheriff Israel’s department, then showed up at the school and also decided not to enter the building but to remain crouched behind their vehicles until the shooting had stopped:

When Coral Springs police officers arrived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on February 14 in the midst of the school shooting crisis, many officers were surprised to find not only that Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson, the armed school resource officer, had not entered the building, but that three other Broward County Sheriff’s deputies were also outside the school and had not entered, Coral Springs sources tell CNN. The deputies had their pistols drawn and were behind their vehicles, the sources said, and not one of them had gone into the school.

With direction from the Broward deputies who were outside, Coral Springs police soon entered the building where the shooter was. New Broward County Sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene, and two of those deputies and an officer from Sunrise, Florida, joined the Coral Springs police as they went into the building.

By my arithmetic, that sounds like at least seven of Sheriff Israel’s deputies were at the school, but only two entered the building. Still, it seems to be a crackerjack police department in terms of response time: They’re first on the scene – and then they just sit back and watch at a safe distance. Or as Dr Jesse Kelly tweets:

“911, what’s your emergency?”

“There’s someone breaking into my house. Could you send the Broward County Sheriff’s Department to water my garden while I kill the intruder?”