ROGER SIMON ON “ISIS ENVY IN DALLAS:”

The truth was clear and it was truly ugly and depressing:  the raging Dallas cop killers suffered from ISIS Envy.   Whether consciously or not, they wanted to be like ISIS. It was almost clinical, not far from all those other Freudian envies.

Specifically, they wanted to have that shining hour in the sun—to have their evil psychotic rage trumpeted out loud and justified (at least to themselves).  Baghdadi was cool, but they could be cooler.  ISIS and  al Qaeda one-upping each other was being recapitulated on our own soil. Will some new group emerge to top them all?  (As I type this, as if to prove my point, a “Black Power” group has claimed responsibility for Dallas, threatening more.)

Read the whole thing.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1156.

GOVERNMENT-RUN TRANSIT IS GREAT:

Commuters here faced delays and crowded trains Tuesday after a third of regional rail cars were abruptly pulled out of service over the weekend when a major defect was discovered in part of the fleet.

Officials at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority said inspectors had found cracks in the suspension systems of most of the commuter railroad’s relatively new Silverliner V cars. The repairs could take weeks — a signal that the misery may not end before the Democratic National Convention here later this month.

The suspension systems were still under warranty, and Hyundai Rotem, the rail car manufacturer, is working to address the problems, the transit agency said. Officials at Hyundai Rotem could not be reached for comment.

This is something people rely on to get to work, but — like the DC metro, or BART — it sucks.

When Hyundai Rotem first bid for the SEPTA contract, many noted that it had little experience building trains in the United States. But Hyundai Rotem’s price was substantially lower than anyone else’s, and so it got the contract.

Building public transit in America costs several times as much as in Europe, and that puts pressure on state governments to agree to unwise cost-cutting measures such as hiring inexperienced contractors like Hyundai Rotem.

Whether Hyundai’s inexperience is a cause of the present troubles or not remains unclear, but it’s certainly the case that the way American state and local governments go about public transit is terribly inefficient—ill-advised savings up front, while operating, repair, and maintenance costs get kicked down the road.

The NYT reports that when SEPTA’s general manager was asked if it would take months for things to be sorted out, he replied, “It could. We hope not.” So do tens of thousands of SEPTA riders.

We could try to make it cheaper to build these systems, but that would cut down on union featherbedding, cronyism, and graft.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Clinton-Style Corruption Is the Inevitable Result When You Mix Big Government and Sleazy People.

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CELL PHONE VIDEO WITH DALLAS SNIPER: This Dallas Morning News report includes a cell phone video showing a sniper coming out of hiding during the gun battle. The report has several other gripping videos.

JUST THINK OF THEM ALL AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Celebrating Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely as a Journalist: “Regardless of their impact on Dean Eramo’s lawsuit, the release of the Rolling Stone affidavits leave little doubt that Sabrina Rubin Erdely isn’t a very good reporter. She had her thesis—existence of a campus ‘rape culture’—in advance. As Cathy Young noted, the spine of the article, Jackie’s story, ‘had more red flags than a Soviet military parade.’ It’s easy to see how people could have been horrified by the article. But it’s remarkable to observe how many high-caliber editors and reporters praised the quality of Erdely’s journalism. It seems their agreement with Erdely’s thesis blinded them to her flaws—a consistent problem in how most of the mainstream media has approached campus sexual assault.”

Read the whole thing.

THAT’S THE CHICAGO WAY: Flashback 1982. Chicago Progressives Pass What They Call Common Sense Gun Legislation. Made Member of Mob Gets Elected to City Council Pushes Handgun Ban on the Citizens of Chicago.

Former alderman Fred Roti’s Wikipedia profile reads like the first script outline of pretty good Michael Mann or Scorsese movie.

1968, WITHOUT EVEN THE REDEMPTION OF APOLLO 8:

Latest: Snipers kill 5 cops at Dallas protest. “Three people, including a woman, were in custody before the fourth suspect’s death, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said Friday morning.”

Plus: President Obama on the Fatal Shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

Also: Obama: ‘When people say Black Lives Matter, that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter.’ I dunno, I’m pretty sure it was racist to say that yesterday. And why is Obama talking about police officers’ “collective bargaining rights” at a time like this?

Related: Donald Trump’s statement.

Also:

Not everyone favors civil society.

UPDATE: Dallas Shooting Suspect Targeted White Officers, Was Killed When Officials Detonated Bomb.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Counterargument:

ALSO:

WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXISM? Obama White House still pays women less than men.

If activists are going to use median annual salaries to claim women are paid less than men, then they ought to be consistent and call out President Obama’s White House.

Female staffers in the White House earn 89 cents for ever dollar that male staffers earn. That’s on par with one of the numbers often reported for the misleading “gender wage gap,” which finds women earning 77 or 78 or 89 cents to a man’s dollar.

American Enterprise Scholar Mark J. Perry, who analyzed the White House data, found the median salary for the White House’s 271 female staffers to be $68,658, while the median salary for the 198 male staffers was $76,928 in 2016.

“Therefore, female staffers in the Obama White House currently earn 89.25% of the median salary for male staffers, or 89.25 cents for every $1 men earn, and there is a 10.75% gender pay gap at the Obama White House,” Perry wrote. “That pay gap is slightly smaller than the 15.8% gender pay gap at the White House last year, but is still more than 2.5 times greater than the average gender pay gap for the Washington, D.C., labor market of only 4% according to the most recent data available from the Department of Labor.” . . .

Activists, naturally, don’t want to acknowledge that Obama’s White House pays women less because, as they’re almost exclusively all Leftists. They would have to tie themselves in knots to explain how this pay gap is different from some other pay gap.

But it’s not different — it uses the same over-simplistic measurement as all similar derivations of the gap. The main reason women earn less in the Obama White House is that more senior positions are occupied by men and more junior positions are occupied by women. You can judge the intention here for yourself, but if you’re going to make excuses for Obama, you might want to apply the same excuses to any other employer where this is the case.

If it weren’t for double standards, “activists” would have no standards at all. But remember: They don’t care about people, they care about power.

GREAT MOMENTS IN GOVERNMENT PLANNING: California’s Self-Inflicted Energy Shortage.

It goes well with California’s self-inflicted water shortage. Take a bow, Sacramento!

IT’S COME TO THIS: Watch James Comey Defend Hillary Clinton By Implying that She’s Not All that Bright (VIDEO).

Shades of the legendary Roman Hruska’s defense G. Harrold Carswell, Nixon’s would-be Supreme Court nominee in 1970: “Even if [she] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos.”

WELL, YES: How ‘dad deprivation’ could be eroding modern society. For some that’s a bug, for others, a feature.

ANALYSIS: TRUE:

“Boeing is signing a deal with an Iranian aviation company and an industry complicit in the regime’s weapons proliferation and destabilizing adventurism,” Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based public policy group, testified at the hearing.

Dubowitz said that Iran Air made three trips to Syria just last month carrying weapons and supplies for Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria that’s opposed by the U.S.

“The deal between Boeing and Iran risks implicating major U.S. companies in the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorism and regional adventurism,” said Dubowitz, who has advocated tough sanctions against Iran and helped lawmakers craft them.

—Boeing’s Agreement With Iran Comes Under Congressional Scrutiny, Bloomberg.com.

THE NOT-SO-FINAL COUNTDOWN: Flashing back to James Hansen’s multiple failed global warming doomsday ultimatums.

QUESTION ASKED: Who Sold Felon Alton Sterling His Illegally-Acquired Gun?

I AGREE, AND IF I WERE A MEMBER OF CONGRESS I’D INTRODUCE LEGISLATION BANNING POLICE UNIONS AND ENDING QUALIFIED IMMUNITY FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS: Obama: ‘All Americans should be deeply troubled’ by police shootings.

President Obama said Thursday he shares the “anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling” about this week’s police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota.

“All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota,” Obama wrote in a Facebook post. “We’ve seen such tragedies far too many times.”

Obama’s first reaction to the shootings was published on the social media site while he was flying on Air Force One to a NATO summit in Poland.

Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was pinned down by two white police officers and shot dead on Tuesday in Baton Rouge, La. Castile, 32 and also black, was fatally shot by an officer during a traffic stop on Wednesday.

Parts of both incidents were caught on video, but Obama did not say if has viewed the footage.

He declined to comment on the specifics of both cases, but he praised the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the Louisiana shooting. It is also weighing a probe of the Minnesota incident.

The twin shootings stirred nationwide anger about police violence against black men.

I would also, however, remind the Party Of Science^TM that research indicates that police are actually slower to use lethal force against black suspects.

And for those with a serious interest, read this piece by my University of Tennessee Law School colleague Tom Davies, on how the Framers were much tougher on arresting officers than modern courts are. “Framing-era arrest standards and the Cokean understanding of due process were lost when nineteenth-century state courts relaxed arrest standards to bare probable cause, thereby drastically expanding governmental investigatory powers. The Supreme Court then reinvented search-and-seizure under the Fourth Amendment, and created the modern reasonableness standard, during the early twentieth century. Thus, the authentic history involves lost understandings and drastic doctrinal discontinuities.”

OH, THAT FERGUSON EFFECT:

● Baltimore saw steep fall in police numbers as murder rate soared.

—Reuters.

● Chicago on the Brink.

—Heather Mac Donald, City Journal.

As Jack Dunphy has written, “Murder rates are soaring in Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Baltimore and elsewhere as the police in those cities, acutely aware of the politics of the moment, attune their behavior so as to minimize risk – not the risk to life and limb, which they accept and prepare for as part of the job, but the risk to their livelihood that arises when the tactical decisions they make in the blink of an eye are viewed through a political prism for months or even years.  There is no amount of training that can prepare a cop for that risk; there is only the choice to avoid it… Crime is up and will go higher.  Don’t expect this to change any time soon.”

JUST NBC THE INEVITABLE CONCERN TROLLING REPUBLICAN OVERREACH HEADLINE! Analysis: Republicans Risk Playing into Clinton’s Hands With Comey Hearing.

As Allahpundit noted in 2013, in a post titled “Actual NYT headline: ‘IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP an Issue to Seize On,’ You know this routine by now: If it’s a scandal involving Republicans, the story is the scandal. If it’s a scandal involving Democrats, the story — or at least a significant part of it — is whether and how Republicans will ‘politicize’ the scandal for their advantage…That LA Times headline that I screencapped last week is a textbook example of the genre: ‘Partisan politics dominates House Benghazi hearing,’ as if the big takeaway from Greg Hicks’s testimony was nothing-to-see-here politics-as-usual squabbling between Republicans and Democrats.”

As with her husband in the 1990s, the DNC-MSM has no desire to fully investigate Hillary’s high crimes and misdemeanors (to flashback to the 1998 book that launched Ann Coulter’s career) as if she was someone with an (R) after her name*, thus the inevitable Republican overreach stories.

* With the exception of 2008, when Hillary needed to be destroyed in the Democratic primaries to make way for Obama, and was treated, for once in her life, as a de facto Republican by the MSM. Or as NBC’s Keith Olbermann infamously quipped at the time, wishing Hillary would drop out, the Democrats needed “Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out.”

THE RACIST HISTORY OF GUN CONTROL, IN THE ATLANTIC: The Second Amendment’s Second-Class Citizens. Unlike Philandro Castile, Alton Sterling was a felon, and thus not allowed to have a gun — which the article glosses over somewhat — though it’s true that the police probably couldn’t have known that.

NEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED: Justice ends funding to ‘sanctuary cities’ in huge House GOP victory. “It is a huge victory for Culberson, chairman of the Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee on Appropriations, and others who sought to shut down the once secret system in cities. The practice of taking federal money then refusing to give up criminal illegals became public after the 2015 San Francisco killing of Kate Steinle allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been deported for crimes several times.”

IF I REPRESENTED PEOPLE IN CASES LIKE THIS I’D RIDE IT HARD: Clinton email decision seen as lifeline for those facing similar charges.

The FBI recommendation not to prosecute Hillary Clinton and her staff on charges of mishandling classified information will give those accused of flouting national security rules a new line of defense even as it highlights a dual standard in how senior government officials are treated, several experts said Wednesday.

FBI Director James Comey recommended Tuesday that no charges be filed against Clinton or her team for their handling of classified information while she was secretary of state, even though she was “extremely careless” in using a private email address and servers. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced Wednesday that she agreed with Comey’s assessment.

Lawyers who specialize in representing government and military officials who’ve had security clearances revoked said Comey’s recommendation offered them a new tactic in seeking to rehabilitate their clients, especially if Clinton is elected president in November.

“I intend to use the Hillary defense,” said Sean M. Bigley, a lawyer whose firm handles dozens of cases a year involving national security clearances. “I really question how any agency can say someone is a security risk if the president of the United States did something similar.”

He added, “We’ve had people lose 20-year careers for doing less than what she did.”

To be fair, she’s not President yet. But the law-enforcement apparat doesn’t seem to be doing anything to prevent that.

FIFTH OFFICER DEAD, DALLAS MORNING NEWS REPORTS.

DALLAS PD NEGOTIATING WITH SUSPECT IN PARKING GARAGE, The Blaze reports:

Dallas Police Chief David Brown said officers are in the middle of negotiations with a suspect inside a parking garage following a shooting that left four officers dead and several others injured. He said the gunman exchanged fire with police.

The suspect told officers the “end is coming,” threatened to “hurt and kill” more officers and claimed there were “bombs” planted throughout downtown Dallas.

Dallas police also said they are questioning two occupants of a Mercedes that sped off after an officer saw someone throw a camouflage bag into the back.

Brown said he still isn’t confident that all shooting suspects are in custody.

Michelle Malkin tweets a link to an NBC report that “FAA issues flight restriction over downtown Dallas mass shooting attack scene as situation develops,” and adds, “FAA flight restriction now? This is feeling less like a mass police ambush and more like a full-blown terror attack.”

UPDATE (3:24 AM EDT): Fox 4 KDFW reporting “shooting suspect involved in standoff at El Centro with DPD has shot himself.”