Donald Trump is not ruling out a run for president as an independent if things go south for the front-runner in the Republican race.

"I'm going to have to see what happens," he told George Stephanopoulos in an interview that aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "I will see what happens. I have to be treated fairly."

Trump was responding to a Wall Street Journal report that Republican operatives are considering banding together donors from the other GOP campaigns in a bid to knock Trump off the top spot.
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If Republican operatives succeed in knocking Trump off his perch, their plan could backfire if he then runs as an independent.

A July Washington Post-ABC News poll found that in a hypothetical general election matchup between Bush and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Clinton led 50 percent to 44 percent. But throw a third-party Trump run into the mix, and the poll found that he would tear support away Bush and give Clinton a 16-point lead.

It happens that I started a new day job as a principal engineer a couple of weeks ago. It's for a Very Large Company, VLC. It has a health insurance plan that is, if not the absolute best one I've ever had, a nicely adequate one. It's what's called a "high deductible" plan, but that means a $1500 deductible, with both a health savings account to which the company contributes, and a flexible spending account. Looked good to me. With my contributions to max out both the HSA and the FSA, my net deduction from my pay is around $600 a month -- but remember, that's almost entirely pre-tax money going into accounts I can use to pay for health care of various sorts.

Because of the ACA, however, they were required to notify me I could opt out of their plans, and choose instead a plan from the health insurance exchanges.

Okay, so just to reassure everyone I haven't completely lost my mind, when this option was offered, I immediately said "you mean I can opt to buy my own expensive and inadequate coverage instead of going with the company's plan they pay for?" And, reassuringly, the HR person explaining these plans answered, "Yes, that's about it."

I did get curious, though: what would that option be?

So I went to Connect for Health Colorado, the Colorado exchange website and ... well, tried to sign up. After filling in a long page of personal information, I tried to submit it, and got an error

The latest batch of nationwide FBI crime data, released Monday, shows that in 2014, violent crime in the U.S. continued its long decline. The murder rate was down. The robbery rate was down, too.

"The story is actually better than we all anticipated it would be," says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center. "Violence is down a little bit. Property crime is down a lot… and all of this suggests that crime in America is continuing to move in the right direction.”

Earlier this month, I joined a number of fact-checkers in pointing out that a breathless New York Times story, "Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities," was misleading. The 30 cities cited by the Times weren't randomly selected; rather, they appeared to suggest their own selection because they were cities that had experienced a recent rise in killings.

That the Times got that story wrong mattered because it appeared right in the middle of a debate over the existence of a so-called “Ferguson Effect”—the (false) idea that the Black Lives Matter movement has somehow been emboldening criminals. But a Vera Institute of Justice senior research fellow looked at the most recent homicide data from 16 of the 20 most populous U.S. cities, and found that just three showed a statistically significant increase. And homicide rates often fluctuate; in recent years, Chicago's has moved both up and down, pointing to no real trend at all.

The primary purpose of a government constitution is to recognize and protect individual rights. Such a sacred document should only be amended when absolutely necessary, and only in the case of expanding rights, not limiting them. This was the case with the Bill of Rights -- the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Every once in awhile, misguided populist sentiment forces constitutional amendments to be rammed through that limit rights, instead of expand them. This was the case with the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allowed for the Prohibition of alcohol, until it was rightfully repealed by the 21st Amendment, some thirteen years later. This was also the case with Article III, Section 28 of the Idaho Constitution, banning certain people from getting married.

The United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and the Supreme Court of the United States of America has affirmed that it does indeed protect the right of all adults to enjoy all the benefits of marriage. The U.S. Constitution also trumps state constitutions, whenever the latter violate those rights. It's time to remove that obsolete, hateful language from the Idaho Constitution and restore freedom and dignity to Idaho.