FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Ambush-style killings of police up 300% in first half of year.

The report found that from January to July 20 this year, 14 police officers were shot and killed in ambushes, seven while stopping a suspicious person and five were killed while “executing a tactical arrest or high-risk warrants.”

The report, which was published at the end of July and covers only the first half of 2016, does not include the two officers who were shot and killed in an apparent ambush in Iowa on Wednesday. Both officers were gunned down in their patrol cars after responding to a report of gunfire in Des Moines.

The only good news out of this report is that despite the huge percentage increase, the actual numbers are still small.

MICHAEL WALSH: Gender Gap? What Gender Gap?

JOURNALISM: “I’m enjoying the daily “Hillary’s corruption is the fault of others” pieces in the NYT. Yesterday: GOP. Today: Men.” That’s a preview of how they’ll cover everything if Hillary’s elected and thus, ironically, is an argument for why Trump will be a safer, more constrained choice. The NYT won’t be making excuses for him.

PLEASE LET IT BE TRUE: This Is The Least Important Election Of Our Lifetimes.

David Harsanyi:

Yes, government’s increasing involvement in the economic and moral lives of citizens have made political stakes high. It’s true that 2016 features the two suckiest candidates probably ever. It’s also true that our collective vision of the American project has frayed, perhaps beyond repair. With the intense scrutiny of contemporary political coverage, more people are invested in the daily grind of elections, which intensifies the sting of losing. This anger compounds every cycle (although winning brings its own disappointment with its unfulfilled promises).

That’s not to say our constitutional republic isn’t slowly dying. It probably is. This condition isn’t contingent on an election’s outcome, but on widespread problems with our institutions, politics, and voters. Whatever you believe the future of governance should look like, one election is not going make or break it.

During yesterday’s Right Angle taping, Bill Whittle argued that while Trump isn’t a cure, he might at least be a tourniquet.

“SMART DIPLOMACY” UPDATE: Malaysia Cozies Up to China. “Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is in Beijing this week to sign off on the purchase of Chinese patrol vessels, the first major defense deal between the two countries. As the New York Times notes, the visit is another blow to the Obama administration’s Asia policy.” And if the Times is noting it the week before an election then you know it’s bad.

Plus:

Najib’s overture to China is spurred in part by anger over U.S. Department of Justice investigations into the country’s scandalous sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB. That controversy has damaged Najib’s international reputation and sent him straight into Beijing’s arms, as China has helpfully agreed to buy the fund’s power assets. Now, that gesture is starting to pay off. China and Malaysia started joint military exercises last year, and reports suggest that Najib will sign agreements on high-speed rail and port projects during his trip to Beijing.

The Malaysian pivot to China is especially embarrassing given President Obama’s clear efforts to court Najib. In 2014, Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Malaysia in nearly 50 years; later that year, Najib was the president’s golf buddy during his vacation in Hawaii. Yet that personal outreach cannot disguise the fact that the promises of the Obama administration’s pivot, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), have failed to come through. Like Duterte, Najib has apparently made the calculation that Beijing has more to offer than Washington—and unlike Duterte, this decision cannot be dismissed as the impulses of an anti-American demagogue.

They see China as the strong horse, and America as fundamentally transformed.

MICROSOFT CLAIM: Russian hackers are exploiting Windows flaw exposed by Google.

THE INSTA-WIFE: Surrounded by feminists, but holding her own.

BUT OF COURSE: The Story of Obama’s Ransom Payment to Iran Gets Worse.

The president was returning $400 million in Iran’s “Foreign Military Sales” (FMS) account with the Pentagon, plus $1.3 billion in interest, but he failed to mention that in 1981, when Iran filed its claim before the Claims Tribunal at The Hague, the U.S. had responded with a counterclaim for $817 million for Iran’s violations of its obligations under the FMS program. In 2016, with both the claim and the counterclaim still pending, it was possible that Iran owed billions of dollars to the U.S., not the reverse.

Nor did the president mention the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and stipulating that Iran’s FMS account could not be refunded until court judgments held by the U.S. government against Iran for damages from terrorist acts against American citizens were resolved to America’s satisfaction. Those judgments, including interest accumulated between 2001 and 2016, totaled about $1 billion. The president did not explain how, under the 2000 law, with those judgments still outstanding, he could pay Iran anything at all.

Because he had a pen and a phone, and mostly because he wanted to.

Read the whole thing, which exposes the Obama Administration’s foreign policy for the criminal and anti-American enterprise it’s always been.

CANADA: British Columbia’s Highest Court Unanimously Approves Canada’s First Christian Law School, Says Religious Freedom To Ban Student Sex Outside Of Heterosexual Marriage Trumps LGBTQ Rights.

CHANGE: Pope Francis Warns Nations Not to Take in More Refugees Than They Can Assimilate.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Faculty, Students To Sue Indiana Tech For Fraud In Law School’s Closure.

THOUGHTS INSPIRED BY THE NEW REPUBLIC: When you have “three decades of scholarship on whiteness as a race” then it’s likely that we’ll wind up “talking about everyday white Americans who, perhaps for the first time, are racially conscious.”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Don’t trust Clinton to avoid stupid wars: The world she had a big hand in making as Secretary of State doesn’t look very peaceful.

POLITICO: Hill Republicans raring to investigate Clinton from Day One.

If the GOP wins either or both chambers of Congress next week, and Clinton takes the White House, she’s likely to come under investigation by Capitol Hill from Day One, or possibly before she’s even sworn in. FBI Director James Comey’s recent decision to revisit the probe of her email setup, and an assortment of Justice sources who’ve leaked to the press since Friday, have armed GOP lawmakers with more than enough ammunition to rev up their own investigations, say Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

The dynamic could sour relations between Clinton and Capitol Hill from the get-go, dousing any hope of even a brief honeymoon for Clinton should she defeat Donald Trump next week.

Why should a full-court investigation be contingent on her winning?

CHANGE: Post-ABC Tracking poll finds race tied, as Trump opens up an 8-point edge on honesty.

YES, THIS IS A POINT I MADE IN MY LAST USA TODAY COLUMN: Holman Jenkins: Hillary, Once Peddled As The Safe Choice, Is Now The High-Risk Candidate.

Donald Trump (or any candidate) may not be a solution in himself, but an outsider at least can be an instrument to dislodge an elite and replace it, for a while, with an elite less habituated to using public power to favor and enrich itself. With Mrs. Clinton, as with Mr. Obama, a voter naturally struggles to understand what the overarching vision is. There isn’t one. They exist to deliver the wish-list of Democratic lobby groups for more power over the people of the United States. Period.

A few weeks ago Mrs. Clinton was the “safe hands” candidate. If she wins, it now appears hers will be an embattled and investigated presidency from day one. Moderates will flee. Republicans will find it hard to cooperate with her.

She will be forced back on the hard left of her party. The same who already are drawing up “blacklists” of potential appointees suspected of sympathy for the private sector. The same who hesitate least about using government power to attack enemies (see Exxon). The same who are most comfortable relying on administrative diktat to impose policies the public doesn’t support and never voted for.

Her party’s most ferocious warriors will run the Clinton administration because they’re the ones willing to be most unhinged in savaging her enemies. It might seem far-fetched now that President Obama, after Election Day, would try to clear President Clinton’s path by issuing a pardon for offenses committed while secretary of state, but crazier miscalculations have been made by the players in this drama.

Yep.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 50% Of Law Schools Selected For Random ABA Audit Flunked Placement Data Documentation. “Schools were flagged for not being able to show documentation to support important parts of reported employment data, or if investigators found evidence key pieces of employment data were incomplete, inaccurate or misleading.”

REPORT: WIKILEAKS OUTS JOHN PODESTA’S ADVICE: COMPARE YOUR OPPONENT TO HITLER.

Well, that’s been the Democrat playbook ever since FDR described the laissez-faire Coolidge era as “the spirit of fascism” and Harry Truman explicitly compared Tom Dewey to Hitler in the final weeks of the ’48 campaign.

PROTEST: Leader of Oregon standoff vows to “continue to stand”

Ammon Bundy told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a phone call from the Multnomah County Detention Center on Monday that it was their duty to stand.

“We did it peacefully,” Bundy said. “We did it legally, and the jury’s verdicts confirmed that.”

Bundy said the trial ended in “another example of the government not following the law” when U.S. marshals arrested his attorney for challenging the judge’s order to keep him in custody.

Bundy remains in jail because he still faces charges in the 2014 standoff at his father’s Nevada ranch. He said he had expected to be transferred to Nevada on Tuesday with brother Ryan Bundy, but U.S. marshals in Las Vegas would not comment about the move.

Ornery juries are vital to the health of a republic.

ASHE SCHOW: Why do liberals glorify JFK’s promiscuity?

Apparently it’s not only women’s magazines that spout terrible advice on how to look and act.

In the November issue of Men’s Health magazine, author Eric Spitznagel interviews Steven Watts, a history professor at the University of Missouri. Watts wrote a book about John F. Kennedy as a cultural icon rather than a political figure.

Spitznagel begins his own commentary in the article (which does not appear to be online right now) by talking about Kennedy in political terms, but wonders why “politicians love comparing themselves to him.”

“It can’t be the sex, can it?” Spitznagel asks. “OK, maybe it’s a little bit the sex.”

He then introduces Watts, who wrote in his book, JFK and the Masculine Mystique, that Kennedy promised to “revive the modern American man as youthful and individualistic, cool and vigorous, masculine and urban, tough-minded and athletic, and a sexual conquistador.”

Well, that’s one way to describe a notorious philanderer who allegedly hosted prostitute hotel parties while president.

This doesn’t seem to concern Watts, who admits that it is “a mind-blower to think that the leader of a global power like the United States would get away with something like that.” Yet to Spitznagel’s very next question, about whether there is “anything” about Kennedy that men should emulate, Watts responds: “He had a cool detachment that was remarkable.”

Watts claimed Kennedy could “take the emotion” out of anything, whether it was politics or his infidelity. . . .

This kind of glorification of Kennedy continues to make me laugh, because it’s not just magazine authors and professors who do it. Democrats continue to hold him (and Bill Clinton) up as paragons of their party while claiming Republicans are the anti-women party.

Now we have an entire book telling men that being like Kennedy is the cool thing to do.

New advice: Be Like Ike.

DEAN OBEIDALLAH: Donald Trump Can’t Merely Be Defeated—He and His Deplorables Must Be Crushed.

Will Dean, who bills himself as a comic, suffer any consequences for his vile, eliminationist rhetoric?

ALL LIVES MATTER: 2 police officers killed in ‘ambush’ attacks.

Police from Urbandale and Des Moines departments responded to a report of gunfire at the intersection of 70th Street and Aurora Avenue at about 1:06 a.m.

The first officers arriving on the scene found an Urbandale officer shot. The officer, whose name has not been released, died, said Des Moines Police Sgt. Paul Parizek in a news release.

At about 1:26 a.m., a Des Moines police officer was shot and killed near the intersection of Merle Hay Road and Sheridan Drive while responding to the scene where the Urbandale officer was shot.

Both officers were gunned down in their patrol cars.

Good lord.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): They’ve captured a suspect, who doesn’t look much like a Black Lives Matter activist.

POSTMODERN URBANISM: Venezuelan Government Tells City Residents to Grow Their Own Food.

Must be more of that bad luck.

IS ANTHONY WEINER INVOLVED? Democratic Groups Go After Young in Indiana Senate Race.