RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Obama assumed office in 2009, there were high hopes that the first African American president with bi-racial parents would be able to bridge the racial divide and foster unity in the country. Those hopes were soon dashed. Nearly eight years later, the nation is more polarized than ever, as devastating race riots grip large metropolitan cities with alarming frequency.

Instead of offering hope, Obama gave us demagoguery. Instead of fostering unity he stoked and encouraged divisiveness. Instead of providing concrete solutions, he issued speeches laced with empty rhetoric and platitudes. Instead of calming the nation in times of crisis, he engaged in race baiting.

The first test of Obama’s seriousness in addressing race relations came just six months after being sworn in. Police officers in Cambridge Massachusetts received a call of a possible burglary in progress and responded. When arriving at the scene, they found Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. trying to force his way into his house through a malfunctioning door. The police were unfamiliar with his identity and asked for identification to establish residency. Gates instantly became irate, indignant and uncooperative. It went downhill from there. Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct, though the charges were later dropped.

An event that was essentially a misunderstanding and a local matter was suddenly thrust into the spotlight and propelled to the national stage. You see, Gates, an African American, cried racism. He also happened to be pals with Obama. Obama could have told Gates to work things out with the police or file a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board if he felt slighted. Instead, Obama stoked the flames of hate by publicly siding with Gates, claiming the police “acted stupidly.”

Before ascertaining the facts, Obama rushed to judgment and immediately condemned those entrusted with safeguarding our security. His asinine response would set the administration’s tone for the next seven years. Obama later backtracked on his rush to judgment and offered the arresting police officer, Sgt. James Crowley, a beer but the damage had already been done. The only thing that the African American community took away from the encounter was that the police acted “stupidly,” thus reinforcing preexisting negative perceptions so prevalent within that community.

There is no doubt that some level of tension exists between various police departments and members of the African American community but the president has a responsibility to calm frayed nerves and foster understanding and outreach. Instead, Obama has done the opposite. Race-baiting, tax cheats and serial liars like Al Sharpton are frequent guests of the White House. According to official records, Sharpton visited the White House on more than 100 occasions and that number excludes official administration visits to him.

Murders in the U.S. jumped 10.8% in 2015, according to figures released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation—a sharp increase that could fuel concerns that the nation’s two-decade trend of falling crime may be ending.

The figures had been expected to rise, after preliminary data released earlier this year indicated violent crime and murders were climbing. But the double-digit increase in murders dwarfed any of the past 20 years, in which the biggest one-year jump was 3.7% in 2005.

In 2014, the FBI recorded violent crimes of all types narrowly falling, by 0.2%. In 2015, the number of violent crimes rose 3.9%, though the number of property crimes fell 2.6%, the FBI said.

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a key driver of the jump in murders may be increasing distrust of police in major cities where controversial officer shootings of African-American residents have led to protests.

Members of minority and poor communities may be more reluctant to talk to police and help them solve crimes, part of the “Ferguson effect”—a term used by law-enforcement officials referring to the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed, black 18-year-old man in Ferguson, Mo., by a policeman in 2014.

Some law-enforcement officials, including FBI Director James Comey, have said that since the Ferguson shooting and protests, some officers may be more reluctant to get out of their patrol cars and engage in the kind of difficult work that reduces street crime, out of fear they may be videotaped and criticized publicly.

“This rise is concentrated in certain large cities where police-community tensions have been notable,’’ said Mr. Rosenfeld, citing Cleveland, Baltimore, and St. Louis as examples. The increase isn’t spread evenly around America, he pointed out, but centered on big cities with large black populations.

In all, there were 15,696 instances of murder and nonnegligence manslaughter in the U.S. last year, the FBI said.

The anaphylactic political shock over EpiPen prices continues, and last week a House committee dragged in the company CEO. But some outrage should land on the Food and Drug Administration, which won’t approve a generic stinger that would end Mylan’s monopoly power. Instead, the agency is finishing regulation that will restrict competition precisely as patients are demanding cheaper medicines.

The FDA will next year complete a new rule on labeling generic drugs, which are chemically no different from brand-name versions but sell at an average 80% discount. One reason generics are so much cheaper is that the drugs are approved under an expedited FDA process and bear identical labels to branded equivalents—side effects and so on. The FDA would allow generic producers to alter their own labels to include “up-to-date” safety risks, as the agency puts it.

That sounds innocuous, but here’s the fine print: Generic producers would be exposed to a crush of new lawsuits. The Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that generic drug makers are shielded from torts that accuse a company of failing to warn consumers of risks. The reason for the dispensation is that generic producers are not at liberty to tweak their labels. The FDA’s rule would skirt that precedent, and the law: The 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act requires branded and generic drugs to be identical “in all respects—including labeling,” to borrow from a 2014 letter from Congress to the FDA.

Unleashing the trial lawyers would increase generics spending by $5.6 billion in 2017, and the figure reaches $8.6 billion in 2024, according to a report by Alex Brill of Matrix Global Advisors. Consumers will pay for legal fees and settlements through higher drug prices. Small companies may not be able to absorb the expense. Even large firms will suffer because he industry sells its generic products near marginal cost. The result is likely to be less of the competition that drives down prices: A patient pays a mere 20% of the brand-name cost when eight generic firms are battling for market share, an FDA analysis found.