OBAMA: A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! Al Sharpton and Jack Dunphy, PJM’s man on the beat share a rare bipartisan consensus, though obviously for different reasons. First up, Officer Dunphy:

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.

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Crime is up and will go higher.  Don’t expect this to change any time soon.

—“Confirmed: Demoralized Cops Equal Higher Crime,” Dunphy’s latest article at PJM.

Read the whole thing, it goes without saying, which makes for quite a juxtaposition with:

● SHARPTON: I FEAR FOR THE STREETS AFTER OBAMA LEAVES…

Headline, the Drudge Report yesterday, which Drudge juxtaposed with another headline that Al is likely losing no sleep over: “CHICAGOLAND: City off to deadliest start in two decades…”

If Al is losing any sleep (after his nightly visits to the swank Grand Havana Room cigar club and restaurant 39 stories above Fifth Avenue), it’s that he’ll have very little White House access under a Cruz or Trump administration.

Incidentally, the Venn diagram between the two power-suited, implausibly coiffured New York blowhards is a fascinating one, considering that Sharpton’s public debut was in the late 1980s having seemingly nightly television dust-ups with liberal poseur Morton Downey Jr. In 2016, Trump’s gutter brand of faux-conservatism seems very much like a continuation of Downey’s show.