RUTHFULLY YOURS

As expected, Trump’s refusal to make a pledge accepting the outcome of the election stirred up the usual hysteria on the left and the right. According to the New York Times, Trump’s response was “a remarkable statement that seemed to cast doubt on American democracy.” The other P.R. firm for progressives, the Associated Press, said Trump was “threatening to upend a fundamental pillar of American democracy.” Prominent NeverTrumper John Podhoretz was even more vehement: “It was a shocking and cravenly irresponsible thing to say, the sort of thing that threatens to rend our national fabric, and for that alone, Trump has earned his place in the history of American ignominy.” Right alongside Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth, I guess.

All these hyperbolic responses are curiously similar to Hillary’s during the debate. Sniffing political opportunity with all the olfactory acuity of an outhouse rat, Hillary thundered, “Horrifying . . . He is denigrating [sic]. He is talking down our democracy. And I for one am appalled that someone the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.” As opposed to trading uranium mines to a Russian firm in exchange for donations to her family foundation? Once again, over-the-top rhetoric that serves political interest substitutes for clear thinking and moral distinctions when it comes to Donald Trump.

Indeed, these preposterous claims of “threat to democracy” and an unprecedented violation of a “democratic tradition” conjure up apocalyptic scenes of Alt-Right and KKK and Survivalist battalions swarming from basements and Klaverns and foothills with their gun-show “assault rifles” to spark a civil war in the streets, while Vladimir crawls out of his coffin in the Kremlin and dispatches legions of little green bats to destroy the Republic and anoint Donald “Renfeld” Trump as dictator. All the while that Hillary’s corruption and subversion of the Constitution––genuine threats to democracy––are tsk-tsked then swamped by anti-Trump hysteria.

Not that Trump should be let off the hook for his typically thoughtless reply, a bad habit that might cost him the election. Chris Wallace’s question was ambiguous, asking if Trump “will absolutely accept the result of the selection” and claiming “no matter how hard fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner.” But what did Wallace mean? After the results of the voting have been certified by the states, according to each state’s laws? Or after results are announced by the media and the states, but not yet certified? And doesn’t the “campaign end” on November 7, which suggests Wallace meant the latter?

“46 police officers have been shot to death in the United States so far this year, a staggering 55 percent increase over the number seen at this time in 2015”

Writing in the Washington Post thirteen months ago, Radley Balko assured his readers that, contrary to widespread belief, there was no “war on cops.” He cited a Rasmussen poll taken the week before that found 58 percent of respondents believed there was indeed such a war while just 27 percent did not. Public opinion was at odds with the truth, Balko wrote, and he had the data to support his position: FBI statistics showed that officer deaths from gunfire and non-fatal assaults on police had been declining for years. Balko wrote that 2015 was “shaping up to be the second safest year for police ever, after 2013.”

It’s good to be reminded when the actual statistics run counter to public perception. Police work is after all concerned with seeking the truth, and law enforcement is not served when hysteria is fomented by misleading information. That said, what would Balko say about this year? Has the war whose existence he denied last year now begun?

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, 46 police officers have been shot to death in the United States so far this year, a staggering 55 percent increase over the number seen at this time in 2015. Balko would perhaps argue that this is an aberration, a statistical blip on an otherwise downward trend, like a brief rally in a long-term bear market. And maybe it is, but whatever the multi-year trend may be, a 55 percent increase surely bears examination. Even the skeptics of the “war on cops” must admit that there has been a change in attitudes regarding crime and policing over the last several years, a change that became all the more pronounced with the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Lest we forget, the officer who shot Brown was acting completely within the law when he did so. Despite this, the Brown shooting brought the Black Lives Matter movement to prominence, and despite its origins in the poisonous lie of “hands up, don’t shoot,” it continues to shape both perceptions and policy in American policing.

FOR NEWS ON NEW YORK CHECK OUT THIS GREAT SITE: REPORT: www.empirereportnewyork.com

http://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2016/10/trump-foundation-investigation-offers-no-parallels-to-clinton-for-schneiderman-106520

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said on Wednesday that Donald Trump’s foundation is “responding professionally” to his requests to cease and desist fundraising activities in the state, and said calls for a similar investigation into the family foundation of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, are without merit.
Earlier this week, Schneiderman’s office announced that the Donald J. Trump Foundation had agreed to halt fundraising, after attorneys in the attorney general’s office determined the foundation was out of compliance with reporting standards. The foundation asked for an extension to file financial paperwork, including audits, that was granted by the attorney general’s office.

“As far as I can tell, the Trump lawyers are handling things professionally,” Schneiderman told POLITICO New York after an unrelated event in Manhattan.
A Trump campaign spokesman had accused Schneiderman of being a “partisan hack” for investigating the foundation, saying it amounted to “nothing more than another left-wing hit job.” The two have sparred publicly in the past over Schneiderman’s investigation of Trump’s defunct real estate academy, Trump University.
Schneiderman said concerns about the Clinton Foundation’s fundraising did not rise to the level of an investigation.
He said compliance issues with the Clintons’ foundation amounted to “ministerial, routines stuff” such as late filings or missing paperwork, and that the foundation “is properly registered and properly filed,” unlike Trump’s foundation.
Critics of the Clinton Foundation have called for an examination of the hundreds of millions of dollars from individuals who met with the then-secretary of state after either donating or promising to donate in the future, which included funding from foreign governments.

Schneiderman said that the rules for reporting government funds have not been found to apply to foreign governments.

“No New York State attorney general, Republican or Democrat, has ever interpreted that [rule] to require foundations to report on funding from foreign governments,” Schneiderman said. “We’re not in a position to check that out and enforce it. We leave that to our federal counterparts.”

The Affordable Care Act was never designed to be a permanent solution. Obamacare’s architects predicted that the law’s success would prove the government could be trusted to federalize health care, paving the way for a single-payer system. Reality has not been kind to their best-laid plans: Faced with failing exchanges and fleeing insurers, President Obama has urged Congress to “revisit a public plan to compete alongside private insurers.” Make no mistake: This is not a “tweak” or “reform,” but a grudging admission that Obamacare has unraveled way ahead of schedule.

During the early debates over the president’s signature legislative achievement in 2009, a schism formed among Democrats. The House’s bill would have allowed the federal government to sell a Medicare-like policy on the newly created exchanges. Although Senate majority leader Harry Reid supported the House’s so-called public option, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut steadfastly opposed it. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else,” Lieberman said, “is just asking for trouble.” Needing all 60 members of his caucus to clear the filibuster threshold, Reid ultimately eliminated the House’s provision from the Senate bill.

But that defeat did not foreclose the Left’s dreams of a public option. Instead, those dreams were tabled as the Plan B. MIT Professor and Obamacare mastermind Jonathan Gruber predicted that whether the law succeeded or failed, the end result would be the same. On one hand, Gruber argued that a successful implementation of the ACA would build confidence and support for nationalized health care, assuring liberals that “if you like single payer, then Obamacare has to succeed.” On the other hand, he warned that the ACA was “the last, best hope for private insurance,” and that if it didn’t work, we would “have to rip it up” and “revisit some kind of single-payer system.” Heads I win, tails you lose. (Indeed, through Wikileaks we’ve recently learned of Hillary Clinton’s active supports for a revision that “begins the unraveling of the ACA.”)

Unsurprisingly, after only three years, Obamacare is currently spiraling down the latter pathway. In a brief moment of candor, former-president Clinton called the ACA’s collapse “the craziest thing in the world,” and lamented that people who liked their insurance have found their “premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.” The law wasn’t supposed to implode so quickly. Its success was supposed to pave the way for advocates to enact universal health care in five or ten years, but that didn’t pan out. So now, never letting a crisis go to waste, President Obama and Hillary Clinton are prematurely scurrying to back “a public plan to compete alongside private insurers.”