RUTHFULLY YOURS

FBI Director James Comey has again defied the official White House line on policing and the Black Lives Matter movement. The “narrative that policing is biased and violent and unfair” is resulting in “more dead young black men,” Mr. Comey warned in an Oct. 16 address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego. That narrative, he added, also “threatens the future of policing.”

Mr. Comey has spoken out before. In October 2015, after he observed that rising violent crime was likely the result of officers backing off proactive policing, President Obama obliquely accused the FBI director of “cherry-pick[ing] data” and “feed[ing] political agendas.”

But as much as Mr. Obama has tried to dismiss the violent crime increase that began after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the data are clear.

Last year’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century. The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed last year compared with the previous year, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males, according to a Guardian study. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of Sept. 16, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster.

More police are being killed this year too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through Oct. 21, compared with the same period the previous year. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. In the last two weeks, four California officers have been deliberately murdered.

Gangbanger John Felix prepared for his lethal attack on two Palm Springs officers on Oct. 8 by setting a trap and ambushing them as they stood outside his door. Two days earlier, parolee Trenton Trevon Lovell shot Los Angeles Sheriff’s Sgt. Steve Owen in the face as he investigated a burglary call. Lovell then stood over Sgt. Owen and fired four additional rounds into his body. A planned assassination of two officers on coffee break in Vallejo, Calif., on Oct. 17 failed only when the assault rifle used in the attack jammed. In Indianapolis on Oct. 13, police headquarters were sprayed with bullets by a car that then fled, echoing a similar attack on Oct. 4 against the same police station.

American citizens are in for a double whammy of speech restrictions, and even of censorship. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) want to ratchet up the pressures on freedom of speech.

Two independent news blogs have bravely reported developments in this realm when they stand a chance of being “lawfully” obliterated by the government: The Daily Signal, and Accuracy in Media.

On the one hand, the FEC is a government agency that should not even exist. But it was pushed and encouraged by Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive, and so the initial legislation was introduced and passed by Congress, on the premise that regulating Big Business was the natural thing to do (re the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 of 1890, and other Federal regulations)

As early as 1905, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the need for campaign finance reform and called for legislation to ban corporate contributions for political purposes. In response, the United States Congress enacted the Tillman Act of 1907, named for its sponsor Senator Benjamin Tillman, banning corporate contributions. Further regulation followed in the Federal Corrupt Practices Act enacted in 1910, and subsequent amendments in 1910 and 1925, the Hatch Act, the Smith-Connally Act of 1943, and the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. These Acts sought to regulate corporate and union spending in campaigns for federal office, and mandated public disclosure of campaign donors.

But the urge to regulate corporate contributions during political campaigns can be dated to the immediate post-Civil War period.

Although attempts to regulate campaign finance by legislation date back to 1867, the modern era of “campaign finance reform” in the United States begins with the passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971 and, more importantly, 1974 amendments to that Act. The 1971 FECA required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditures. The 1974 Amendments essentially rewrote the Act from top to bottom. The 1974 Amendments placed statutory limits on contributions by individuals for the first time, and created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as an independent enforcement agency. It provided for broad new disclosure requirements, and limited the amounts that candidates could spend on their campaigns, or that citizens could spend separate from candidate campaigns to promote their political views.

Fred Lucas in The Daily Signal article of October 20th writes:

Books, movies, satellite radio shows, and streaming video about real-life politics aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press, some government officials argue.

The Federal Election Commission hasn’t proposed banning books or movies, but in a 3-3 vote last month along party lines, the six-member panel left the regulatory option on the table.