Urban beat: Behind the Cop Shortage
“In the past year, city police departments across the country have reported a dramatic drop in manpower, as cops retire, resign or leave for the suburbs,” reports Charles Fain Lehman at City Journal. Why? “Since last year’s explosive protests, they no longer feel that they have the support of the public or of civilian officials.” A survey showed more than 2,000 injuries to cops between May and July alone, “even as gun-carrying soared.” One cop says every time you answer a call you’re “rolling the dice.” Yet now, in addition, police are “villainized” for answering those calls and doing their jobs. Cops blame “a sustained assault on policing by politicians and journalists looking to score points.” The results “have already proved deadly.”
Conservative: The Left’s Faux Heroes
“The Democratic Party boasts so many heroes, it’s sometimes hard to keep up,” Grace Curley snarks at Spectator USA. Liberals elevate every incident and every political battle to the level of “existential” drama, with predictably ridiculous results: “Rep. Andy Kim revealed that he will be donating his J. Crew wool suit to the Smithsonian Institute. An AP photographer captured the congressman in the Rotunda picking up some trash after the Jan. 6 riots.” Then there is the Texas exodus, which saw “more than 50 Texas lawmakers flee the state in order to avoid voting on a Republican-sponsored election reform bill.” They sang “We Shall Overcome.” “These self-congratulatory moments shed light on the state of the Democratic Party. The left needs heroes, no matter how pathetic, because its bizarro-alternate universe is in constant need of saving.”
From the left: Sad Trombone for Biden
President Biden took office six months ago, vowing to “demonstrate that government still works — able to deliver for its people better than rising autocracies such as China — and so convince a doubting world that America is back,” writes The Guardian’s David Smith. “Yet the euphoria of Biden’s first hundred days inevitably cooled as reality crept in. A massive investment in infrastructure . . . is stuck in the Washington sausage-making machine.” Other “reforms” have “hit a wall.” Bottom line: “In many ways America remains as fractured as ever.”
Libertarian: Feds’ Creepy Social-Media Collusion
The federal government seems to be “stepping up its effort to purge the Internet of COVID-19 ‘misinformation,’ ” reports Reason’s Robby Soave, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling on Facebook to ban a dozen specific anti-vaccine accounts. Yes, dictates like the Department of Health and Human Services’ recent instruction that social-media platforms deprioritize false COVID information in their algorithms are “essentially strongly worded suggestions.” But all the same, “Facebook’s CEO must feel tremendous pressure to give federal health bureaucrats exactly what they’re asking for, or else.” Instead of “defending the rights of private companies to set their own moderation policies,” politicians are “taking the opportunity to further erode Facebook’s autonomy.”
Justice beat: Supremes’ Healthy Consensus
It turns out that “the US Supreme Court is not as ideologically tilted as some have led the country to believe” and “claims of the court’s center-left demise have been grossly exaggerated,” notes Jeremy Dys at The Hill. In the most recent term, justices appointed by Presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump came to a unanimous decision nearly half the time and were “divided into ideological extremes” on only 15 percent of decisions. That there “was little disagreement” on even controversial matters proves that “we should not trust anyone to predict the outcome of future Supreme Court decisions or listen to fearmongering.” With “the Supreme Court functioning as it should,” partisan groups that try to “manipulate the court and reduce its independence” should be rejected. “As the last safeguard for civil liberties, our independent judiciary is essential” — and “no one should politically tinker” with it.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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