"The definitive chronicler of proactive policing, the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald, spotlighted the Ferguson effect in a Wall Street Journal article in May 2015. She noted that arrests were sharply down in cities such as St. Louis and Baltimore because the 'incessant drumbeat against the police' across the country had 'officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric.'

"Those encouraging such rhetoric include President Obama and his first attorney general, Eric Holder -- even though an intensive Justice Department investigation of Brown's killing in Ferguson cleared the officer involved and made clear that charges that Brown had put up his hands and surrendered were baseless.

"Obama has since said that 'there's no data to support' a Ferguson effect. That puts him at odds with his appointee FBI Director James Comey, who says that his conversations with police officials around the country convinced him there are 'marginal pullbacks by lots and lots of police officers.' ...

"Black Americans were the primary victims of the huge crime increase starting in the late 1960s, and they will be the primary victims again if the Ferguson effect continues to result in more homicides. Can't we prevent this awful history from repeating itself?"

"In one of the most devastating critiques I have ever read of the misbehavior of lawyers at the U.S. Justice Department, a federal judge has issued an order imposing sanctions in U.S. v. Texas, the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states that is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Andrew Hanen of the Southern District of Texas, which is the federal trial court where the lawsuit was originally filed, released a 28-page opinion on May 19 that takes the Justice Department and its lawyers to task for violating multiple ethics and court rules by intentionally misleading and lying to the court. ...

"Hanen lists the specific statements made by DOJ lawyers in court and on conference calls that were outright lies, and then he lists all of the applicable ethics rules that the DOJ lawyers violated. Those misleading statements put 'to rest any doubt regarding misconduct.' Hanen said the representations were made in 'bad faith' by DOJ lawyers and breached Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b), which makes such conduct sanctionable.

"The ethics and conduct rules require a lawyer to '(1) tell the truth; (2) do not mislead the Court; and (3) do not allow the Court to be misled.' According to Hanen, the 'Government's lawyers failed on all three fronts' because their behavior was 'intentionally deceptive.' In fact, said Hanen, 'it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.'"

"The Clinton Administration was no free market paradise. And arguably his worst economic-policy instinct was making his wife 'co-President' for health care -- though the implosion of the new entitlement she tried to create helped usher in the Gingrich Congress, which pulled Mr. Clinton to the political center.

"The point is that Mrs. Clinton really is now running to be co-President, but this time her ex-President partner won't be the Bill everybody remembers from the 1990s. At least on economics, her co-President will be Mr. Obama, whose policy results everybody can see in stagnant paychecks and diminished economic prospects. Once was enough."

"Unfortunately, many state and local governments have ... not been setting aside nearly enough each year to fund their pension commitments. ...

"Puerto Rico's pension plans are only 7 percent funded, resulting in some $47.6 billion of pension liability compared to $70 billion of municipal debt. The Obama administration has relentlessly pressed Congress to enact legislation that would explicitly allow Puerto Rico's pension liabilities to leapfrog all its municipal bonds, even the portion that has a constitutional priority over all other liabilities. Republican Reps. Sean Duffy of Wisconsin and Rob Bishop of Utah are sponsoring legislation in the House that would do just that.

"Proponents of such legislation falsely proclaim that its enactment would be irrelevant to the market for non-Puerto Rico bonds. This does not pass the 'straight-face' test. ...

"If Congress plays along, every municipal bond issuer in the country will pay the price going forward, and state and local pensions will be even less likely to become properly funded."

"The most enduring and destructive superstition about American politics is that the president is 'in charge of' the economy, and so it was no surprise to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday say that she'd put her husband 'in charge of revitalizing the economy.' As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke points out, this is an example of 'talismanic' thinking, that what makes the world go 'round is having the tribal chieftain do that voodoo that he does so well.

"There are some obvious problems with this line of thinking, the main one being that it is complete and utter undiluted poppycock. ...

"Maybe you think that Bill Clinton can turn around the U.S. economy because, as Mrs. Clinton insists, 'he knows how to do it.'

"If he does, why didn't he tell President Obama?"

"President Obama came into office seven years ago pledging to end the wars of his predecessor, George W. Bush. On May 6, with eight months left before he vacates the White House, Mr. Obama passed a somber, little-noticed milestone: He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president.

"If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama's term -- a near-certainty given the president'€™s recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria -- he will leave behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war.

"Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln."

"Socialism is having a moment.

"I'm not just referring to Bernie Sanders's surprisingly strong showing in the Democratic primaries. Various polls show that Millennials have a more favorable view of socialism than of capitalism. And Millennials generally are the only age group that views socialism more favorably than unfavorably. ...

"Writing in The Federalist, Emily Ekins and Joy Pullmann note that many of these young people think socialism is federally mandated niceness. A 2014 Reason-Rupe survey asked Millennials to define socialism. They had in mind a more generous safety net, more kindness and, as one put it, more 'being together.' ...

"Young people understandably are drawn by the promise of 'being together.' But they think the federal government can make it happen. If government planners can't even provide goods and services efficiently, how will they ever provide togetherness?"

"Liberals will far outnumber conservatives as college commencement speakers this year, the latest sign of higher education's censoring of speech, according to the latest tally from the Young America's Foundation.

"YAF's 24th annual Commencement Speakers Survey found 45 liberal speakers and 12 conservatives scheduled to speak at the nation's top 100 universities."

"Brian Pagliano's e-mails have gone missing, the State Department confirmed this week. Is anyone really surprised that the guy Hillary Clinton hired to keep her communications secret also seems to have scrubbed his own?

"Back in 2009, Clinton hired Pagliano to set up and maintain that now-infamous home-brewed e-mail server. She also had him hired at State -- whose bureaucrats were more than a bit befuddled at having the first-ever political appointee in the IT department....

"The Clinton campaign has yet to comment on the news. Hey, it takes time to make up even a bad lie for a mess this bad."

"Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential 'trending' news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site's users.

"Several former Facebook 'news curators,' as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially 'inject' selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren't popular enough to warrant inclusion -- or in some cases weren't trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module. ...

"The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. 'I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,' the former curator said."