RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez appears to be gaining on Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota in the increasingly fractious race for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.

That things are bad out there for Democrats is part of South Carolina party chairman Jaime Harrison’s stump speech. “We like to say, if Jesus Christ came back and ran in some of these districts as a Democrat, he couldn’t win.”

The jihad-friendly Ellison is still considered to be the frontrunner over Perez who joined the chaotic contest in December, the month after Ellison launched his own campaign to become the public face of the Democratic Party. Ellison is reportedly leading Perez and all the other DNC candidates in fundraising. The 447-member DNC is scheduled to choose its next chairman Feb. 23 in Atlanta.

The travelling freak show that is the DNC’s caravan of candidate forums is part of the ongoing meltdown among Democrats in deep denial that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. Democrats are doubling down on the rampant anti-white racism and identity politics that marked the past eight years of incessant race-baiting and guilt-tripping by former President Obama.

The DNC doesn’t support free speech. DNC chairman candidate Vincent Tolliver was kicked out of the race by interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile for speaking truth to power regarding Islam. He got into hot water at a candidates’ forum on Saturday for saying Ellison should not become DNC chief because he is “a Muslim” and “being gay is a direct violation” of Islamic law. “In some Muslim countries being gay is a crime punishable by death.” Brazile said the comments were “disgusting.” Tolliver told Breitbart News he intends to sue over this “violation of my First Amendment right.”

From conservatives’ point of view the race between the two leading candidates could be likened to Operation Barbarossa: both sides represent abhorrent ideologies that aim to strangle freedom. Both Ellison and Perez are proudly, fiercely radical, race-baiting, class-warfare-loving, community-organizing lawyers owned by the labor unions.

Both are onboard with the DNC, which officially endorses the racist, terroristic Black Lives Matter movement whose paranoid radical left-wing members accuse police nationwide of systemic anti-black racism and brutality against black suspects. In 2015 the DNC, the party’s governing body, adopted a resolution accusing American police of “extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children.” In a recent candidates’ forum, Ellison said would-be murderer Trayvon Martin had been “executed.”

Perez, the outspoken champion of illegal aliens, comes across in speeches as more sophisticated and articulate – and at least superficially reasonable – compared to Ellison. Ellison, with his ties to the Nation of Islam and other fringe groups, is significantly more abrasive, in-your-face, and arguably threatening in the eyes of the average voter. Both have close ties to the HAMAS front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Endorsements have been stacking up for the two candidates.

Perez has been endorsed by Rep. Filemon Vela Jr. (Texas) along with four governors – former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe (Virginia), John Hickenlooper (Colorado), Gina Raimondo (Rhode Island), and John Bel Edwards (Louisiana). The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, United Farm Workers, International Association of Fire Fighters, and the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipefitting Industry also support Perez.

Ellison has been endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York), Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Reps. John Lewis (Georgia) and Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii), and Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton. The AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Communications Workers of America, and UNITE HERE also back Ellison.

The seeming surge in fatal shootings by police officers has become one of America’s most divisive issues in recent years. From Ferguson to Baton Rouge, from North Charleston to Minneapolis, from Charlotte to Chicago, communities have been rocked by protests and demonstrations after local police officers shot and killed people, many of them minorities, some completely unarmed. Images of some of the most egregious cases have shocked the national conscience.

As the former chief of internal affairs for the New York Police Department for almost two decades, I was personally involved in the investigation of hundreds of these incidents, including such controversial cases as the 1999 shooting of the unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo and the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell. Perhaps no one knows better than I do that some cops, when using their weapons, make mistakes, disregard their training, succumb to panic or even act with outright malice.

But I also know that, despite the impression often created by TV news and social media, not all but many law-enforcement agencies have dramatically reduced the number of officer-involved shooting incidents.

The NYPD is a case in point. Consider the numbers. In 1971, the first year that the department began compiling detailed data on police shootings, officers shot 314 people, 93 of them fatally. Two decades later, in 1991, the number of NYPD shootings had decreased to 108, with 27 fatalities—a significant reduction but still a disturbingly high number. By 2015 (the last year for which complete official statistics are available), the number of people intentionally shot by NYPD cops had plummeted to 23, with eight resulting in a fatality—a reduction of more than 90% over the previous 4½ decades.

Let me put that in context. In a city of 8.2 million people—and in a police department of more than 35,000 armed officers who in 2015 responded to more than 66,000 calls involving weapons—NYPD cops shot and killed eight criminal suspects. All of these individuals had prior arrest histories, five were carrying a gun or pellet gun, one was stabbing an officer with a knife, and two were violently struggling with cops to avoid arrest.

All of a sudden the press is filled with stories about Republicans supposedly retreating from their promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Liberals are claiming vindication and conservatives are getting nervous, but the stampede to declare failure is premature. The orderly transition to a more stable and affordable health-care system is merely beginning.

As with much else in the Donald Trump era, people should avoid rushing to conclusions. Too much significance is attributed to Republicans adding the word “repair” to their vocabulary, as if this represents a policy change. The insurance markets really do need repair, and doing nothing isn’t realistic amid ObamaCare’s downward spiral.

Likewise, the GOP retreat in Philadelphia last month was contentious, according to leaked audio, but debating the merits of different ideas is how political parties form a strategy. Republicans now recognize that they can’t blame President Obama for insurance disruptions, even if his Administration caused them. They also increasingly understand that they’ve been handed an armed bomb and need to be careful and serious when defusing it.

The exchanges are ailing and fragile—beset by high and rising premiums and a wave of insurer exits. The Health and Human Services Department announced Friday that final enrollment on the federal exchanges for 2017 dropped by about 400,000 from last year. “In spite of the best intentions of Washington and the industry, the intended goals of the ACA have not been achieved. Millions of Americans remain uninsured, and still lack access to affordable health care,” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said on an investor call, expressing the business consensus.

Uncertainty is inevitably priced into premiums, and benefits and rates for 2018 started to be designed and set months ago. They’ll be approved by regulators in the spring, so Mr. Trump’s HHS nominees, Tom Price and Seema Verma, need to move fast to bring more predictability to the markets.

One of the President’s first acts was to sign an executive order to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay” rules that burden individuals, states and business in order to “create a more free and open health-care market.” The specifics are waiting in an HHS proposed rule about “market stabilization” now under review by the White House budget office.

This rule likely includes short-term measures to deregulate ObamaCare’s most onerous provisions. Technical reforms could be immediately reflected in lower premiums. These include relaxing the essential benefits mandate or the price controls that limit how much rates can vary from person to person. The Obama HHS turned the individual mandate into swiss cheese, creating “special enrollment periods” that allow people to dip in and out of insurance at will. Ensuring continuous coverage may be a priority.

Another useful interim change to reduce gaming would be to shorten the ObamaCare “grace period,” a 90-day window that requires insurers to cover consumers who aren’t paying their premiums. A McKinsey study found one of five exchange enrollees stop paying at some point during the year, and half of them re-enrolled in the same plan the next year, availing themselves of three months of “free” coverage.

Congress could also help stabilize the exchanges by suspending the 10-year $145 billion tax on the insurance industry. The costs will be passed on to consumers in higher rates, which is why Congress and the Obama White House agreed to a one-year suspension for 2017. Oliver Wyman estimates that another delay would offer immediate premium relief of 3% for 2018. This would buy some goodwill amid debates about who owes who what in various ObamaCare reimbursement programs.

The violent uprising at UC Berkeley last week, sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos’s Freedom Center-sponsored speech on “sanctuary campuses,” could have been put down by authorities by enforcing existing federal law, but they didn’t act.

They let Berkeley burn.

Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin (D) seemed to green-light the riots, employing the twisted leftist logic of the radicals who turned the campus into a war zone.

“Using speech to silence marginalized communities and promote bigotry is unacceptable,” he tweeted, in a reference to Yiannopoulos. “Hate speech isn’t welcome in our community.”

Hours into the rioting Wednesday no arrests had been made by the police. In all, only three arrests were made.

The Daily Californian, the Berkeley student newspaper, along with much of the media, downplayed the politically motivated violence. Of the three arrests, reporter Chantelle Lee wrote, “UCPD has arrested one suspect at the Milo Yiannopoulos protests Wednesday night and two suspects in an unrelated incident Thursday morning.”

She wrote that 19-year-old Edward Thomas Kuo, “who is not affiliated with the campus, was arrested Wednesday night on suspicion of remaining ‘in the place of a riot,’” according to a UCPD spokeswoman. “We had given a dispersal order,” the spokeswoman said. “He remained in the area and was blocking the path of the police, who were trying to move a skirmish line along.”

The “unrelated incident Thursday” Lee writes of wasn’t unrelated at all. Officers arrested Oakland resident Devonte Gaskin, 28, and San Francisco resident Sean Seuss, 27, when they were observed “assaulting two (individuals who) self-identified as Berkeley College Republicans, who were giving interviews to the media on Sproul Plaza.”

And whatever may the campus Republicans have been talking to the media about? Take a guess.

The rioting was all too predictable. Berkeley campus police gave the rioters permission to run amok by following a no-arrest policy, Yiannopoulos’s tour security coordinator Tej Gill told Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM satellite radio. “The police effectively did nothing, nothing while we were there,” he said.

Gill, a U.S. Navy SEAL, continued:

It just fuels the fire, the no arrest thing, hands off policy, every time they do this and they do it successfully with no arrest, no trouble, there’s no consequences and if there’s no consequences why stop? Each time they’re gonna get stronger and stronger.

Preventing riots isn’t hard, according to Gill.

It’s simple, enforce the law. That’s it. Just enforce the law. When we go to the conservative campuses the police departments there are amazing, the shows go off without a hitch, they’re orderly, they give the protesters room to protest and they give the Milo supporters room to support Milo then they keep everybody separated. Liberal campuses have effectively emasculated the police forces there. They’ve totally been politicized, they don’t let them do their job, they actually have a hands off and no arrests policy, one of the guys at Berkeley told me this.

Police are not powerless in the face of left-wing protesters hell-bent on destruction, but their political masters refuse to let them do their jobs.

The good news for Democrats is that the apathy of many of their voters — which contributed to Hillary Clinton’s losing in November — is gone now that Donald Trump is president.

“We have never in living memory seen an electorate as fired up and angry and engaged as they are right now, Ben Wikler, Washington director of the left-wing group Moveon.org, told RealClearPolitics.

The bad news for Democrats is that the fires of protest could burn so brightly that they alienate moderate voters and threaten any Democrats who decline to throw gasoline on the fires.

The anger of the liberal base is such that “a firestorm of criticism . . . awaits [Democratic lawmakers] when they don’t stand up to Trump,” Wikler says. As for primary challenges for Democrats who won’t confront Trump at every turn: “Everything is on the table.”

It certainly has been when it comes to the ceaseless efforts to delegitimize Trump. As soon as the election was over, state recounts were mounted, with the approval of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, angry demands were made that members of the Electoral College go against the results of their state votes and dump Trump, and wild charges were hurled that Russian hacking swung the election. FBI chief James Comey, an Obama appointee, was accused of tilting the election against Clinton, and blue-collar voters in the Midwest were smeared as “racists” who were easily manipulated by Trump.

Of course, missing in the progressive reaction to Trump’s victory was anything more than cursory mention of why the Left, during Obama’s eight years, had failed to fulfill promises of “hope and change,” address rising income inequality and middle-class stagnation, or win the respect of either America’s friends or adversaries.

A few Democrats have recently begun to question the party’s relentless choice of a negative, obstructionist tone. “I’d leave [Trump] out of the message and appeal to his base with a meaningful jobs plan,” Craig Crawford, an adviser to former Democratic senator Jim Webb of Virginia, told U.S. News and World Report, adding:

Don’t take his bait. Braying donkeys only make noise. Democrats should present a shadow government agenda that gives working-class Americans jobs and hope. Democrats should learn something from their futile efforts of the Reagan years, attacking the man instead of winning back his voter base with a positive message.