The Race Industry's DOJ Sponsored Lynching Of George Zimmerman

The Holder DOJ, at the urging of their partners in the racial grievance industry have reopened an investigation into whether George Zimmerman acted with racial animus when he shot Trayvon Martin. The partners want Zimmerman charged with violation of Martin's civil rights. The DOJ has ostentatiously set up a tip line for anyone to provide evidence of Zimmerman's racial animus.

Setting up a tip line in an investigation is nothing new. It is often done when police are trying to solve a crime. But this is justice turned on its head. This is a tip line set up after the FBI has already investigated and concluded definitively that there was no evidence Zimmerman acted with racial animus. Setting up a tip line at this point in an already concluded investigation is, to my knowledge, unprecedented. And this isn't the local police, this is the DOJ - an organization that is supposed to represent everyone in this country. This is not the investigation of a crime. It is a government approved attempted lynching of George Zimmerman as a sacrifice on the alter of racial politics.

The facts show that George Zimmerman was in fact the poster child for what race relations should be in America. First, just to note, Zimmerman himself is half Hispanic, part white, and part black - indeed, black enough to qualify as black before any college admissions board in the country. One could note that Zimmerman is less white, if you will, than President Obama, the man for whom Zimmerman, a Democrat, voted in the Presidential elections. The facts show that Zimmerman went out of his way to befriend and support people of every race in his neighborhood. For years he mentored local black children. And, in an act of what has turned out to be the purest irony, Zimmerman went on a one man crusade on behalf of a homeless black person who had been beaten by a white teen.

This country, white and black, should be seething with anger at what is happening in today's America. As Thomas Sowell opined at Townhall, this attempt to sacrifice Zimmerman on the alter of racial politics has been nothing short of a complete perversion of our legal system.

The outrage should be palpable. Whites should be outraged at the utter travesty the left is making of our politics and legal system, all for political gain. Blacks should in addition be outraged that the left and "black leaders" have a wholly unsupportable laser focus on Zimmerman case while studiously ignoring, for years and decades, all of the real problems of the black community. None of those problem have to do with white racism. Unfortunately, the reality seems to be otherwise, as I am hearing from very few, white or black, in positions of power in government or the media taking this head on. None of our Congress critters are calling Obama, his DOJ, Rev. Al, the NAACP or the Congressional Black Caucus to account. As Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Two columns are related to my post and worthy of note. The first is by Dennis Praeger, writing at the American Spectator:

The greatest hope most Americans -- including Republicans -- had when Barack Obama was elected president was that the election of a black person as the country's president would reduce, if not come close to eliminating, the racial tensions that have plagued America for generations.

This has not happened. The election, and even the re-election, of a black man as president, in a country that is 87 percent non-black -- a first in human history -- has had no impact on what are called "racial tensions."

In case there was any doubt about this, the reactions to the George Zimmerman trial have made it clear. The talk about "open season" on blacks, about blacks like Trayvon Martin being victims of nothing more than racial profiling and about a racist criminal justice system, has permeated black life and the left-wing mainstream media.

I put quotation marks around the term "racial tensions" because the term is a falsehood.

This term is stated as if whites and blacks are equally responsible for these tensions, as if the mistrust is morally and factually equivalent.

But this is not at all the case.

"Racial tensions" is a lie perpetrated by the left. A superb example is when the New York Times described the 1991 black anti-Semitic riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as "racial tensions." . . .

Since neither black animosity nor the left's falsehood of "racial tensions" is based on the actual behavior of the vast majority of white Americans, nothing white America could do will affect either many blacks' perceptions or the leftist libel.

That is why hopes that the election of black president would reduce "racial tensions" were naive. Though a white person is far more likely to be murdered by a black person than vice versa, all it took was one tragic death of a black kid to reignite the hatred that many blacks and virtually all black leaders have toward white America.

Let's put this in perspective. Ben Jealous of the NAACP, Al Sharpton of MSNBC, Jesse Jackson, and the left-wing media compete to incite hatred of America generally and white America specifically. Over what? A tragic incident in which a Hispanic man (regularly labeled "white") said, with all physical evidence to support him, that fearing for his life, he killed a black 17-year-old (regularly labeled "a child").

The very fact that George Zimmerman -- who is as white as Barack Obama -- is labeled "white" bears testimony to the left-wing agenda of blaming white America and to the desire of many blacks to vent anger at whites. . . .

The second column of note is by Jennifer Rubin at WaPo:

Holder went to speak to the NAACP on Tuesday. It took him no time to denounce the “stand your ground” laws, the Florida version of which was not invoked in the Trayvon Martin case. But of course to denounce laws of self-defense, on which the case did turn, would be both inane and unhelpful in stirring the base. So grab an issue, associate it with a hot-button topic and demagogue to audiences prepared to cast doubt on the justice system that Holder is sworn to uphold.

But the intellectual dishonesty did not stop there. As his own Justice Department quietly tells reporters, there is no evidence of racism on which to base a civil rights case. Yet Holder bonds with his audience over another round of racial aggrievement and anger. He shares innocuous incidents (he was pulled over twice in his car and questioned while running to a movie) to involve race and establish his bona fides with those already incensed about the George Zimmerman acquittal. Does it matter the jury found ample doubt and no evidence of racism? Does it matter there was no evidence of racism unearthed by the FBI? Facts are irrelevant when you are stirring the pot of racial antagonism. . . .

If Holder were an MSNBC talking head or lefty pundit parroting the racial angle and averting his eyes from the facts, it would be nothing extraordinary. Intellectual dishonesty is the order of the day. But he is the attorney general of the United States, for goodness sakes. He has a higher obligation to the truth and to promoting respect for the courts. Instead, he chooses to bend and twist the facts to deliver an indictment of American justice and his fellow citizens that casts them as menacing, unfair and biased.

No wonder that Holder, the left and the racial grievance-mongers could not accept the proposition that the states previously under the watchful eye of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act have changed in 50 years. No, no, you see, the bias is there — it has to be. Just like Zimmerman has to be racist. They are convinced that the stain of racism never fades. The absence of evidence is not going to get in their way.

The need to perpetuate a false narrative to sustain the appearance of racism is as endemic on the left as it is reprehensible. And leading the charge, alas, is the attorney general.

Let me add in conclusion, it is not just enough to fulminate over this. This needs to end - and step one is to get our people in Congress to man up and take this issue head on - for the benefit of all America, and especially the black community.

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Our Non-Democratic Bureaucratic Government

George Washington Univ. Law Prof. Johnathan Turley, writing at the Wapo, has had an epiphany:

[Our federal government] is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency. . . .

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. . . .

Welcome to the party Prof. Turley. Or as Stephen Heyward srites at Powerline of the professor, In Praise Of Slow Learners. As I wrote last year in a detailed post, End The Tyranny - Stop Regulation Without Representation, this as the single greatest systemic threat to our form of government.

To his credit, Prof. Turley concludes likewise:

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

The problem is that this is completely off the radar screen in our national discourse.

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Kirsten Powers & The Left's War On Truth

For the past six years, the right has been railing against the mainstream media for wholly ignoring all stories that would be problematic for Obama and the left. The worm has finally turned with Benghazi, the IRS scandals (targeting conservative 501(c)4's and targeted auditing), and the DOJ's investigations into Fox News and the AP over national security leaks.

And yet, the efforts of the most vile on the left is not to seek the truth, but to try and spin this all either as mere Republican partisan spin, Republican hatred of Obama, or Republican overreaching - or indeed, in the innocuous case of wording difference in some of the Benghazi e-mails, as pure right wing fabrication. It is so far beyond the pale as to cross a real boundary line where any thought of fair and open debate with these people is simply no longer an option. That said, certainly not all on the left fit this mold - Kirsten Powers being perhaps the most shining example of an intellectually honest left of center reporter. And today, she took the Obama administration and her fellow journalists on the left to task for their scurrilous acts in an exceptional column:

It’s instructive to go back to the dawn of Hope and Change. It was 2009, and the new administration decided it was appropriate to use the prestige of the White House to viciously attack a news organization—Fox News—and the journalists who work there. Remember, President Obama had barely been in office and had enjoyed the most laudatory press of any new president in modern history. Yet even one outlet that allowed dissent or criticism of the president was one too many. This should have been a red flag to everyone, regardless of what they thought of Fox News. The math was simple: if the administration would abuse its power to try and intimidate one media outlet, what made anyone think they weren’t next?

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.

"What I think is fair to say about Fox … is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," said Anita Dunn, White House communications director, on CNN. “[L]et's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is." On ABC’s “This Week” White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Fox is "not really a news station." It wasn’t just that Fox News was “not a news organization,” White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel told CNN’s John King, but, “more [important], is [to] not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …”

These series of “warnings” to the Fourth Estate were what you might expect to hear from some third-rate dictator, not from the senior staff of Hope and Change, Inc.

Yet only one mainstream media reporter—Jake Tapper, then of ABC News—ever raised a serious objection to the White House’s egregious and chilling behavior. Tapper asked future MSNBC commentator and then White House press secretary Robert Gibbs: “[W]hy is [it] appropriate for the White House to say” that “thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a ‘news organization’?” The spokesman for the president of the United States was unrepentant, saying: “That's our opinion.”

Trashing reporters comes easy in Obama-land. Behind the scenes, Obama-centric Democratic operatives brand any reporter who questions the administration as a closet conservative, because what other explanation could there be for a reporter critically reporting on the government?

Now, the Democratic advocacy group Media Matters—which is always mysteriously in sync with the administration despite ostensibly operating independently—has launched a smear campaign against ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl for his reporting on Benghazi. It’s the kind of character assassination that would make Joseph McCarthy blush. The main page of the Media Matters website has six stories attacking Karl for a single mistake in an otherwise correct report about the State Department's myriad changes to talking points they previously claimed to have barely touched. See, the problem isn’t the repeated obfuscating from the administration about the Benghazi attack; the problem is Jonathan Karl. Hence, the now-familiar campaign of de-legitimization. This gross media intimidation is courtesy of tax-deductable donations from the Democratic Party’s liberal donor base, which provides a whopping $20 million a year for Media Matters to harass reporters who won’t fall in line.

In what is surely just a huge coincidence, the liberal media monitoring organization Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) is also on a quest to delegitimize Karl. It dug through his past and discovered that in college he allegedly—horrors!—associated with conservatives. Because of this, FAIR declared Karl “a right wing mole at ABC News.” Setting aside the veracity of FAIR’s crazy claim, isn’t the fact that it was made in the first place vindication for those who assert a liberal media bias in the mainstream media? If the existence of a person who allegedly associates with conservatives is a “mole,” then what does that tell us about the rest of the media?

What all of us in the media need to remember—whatever our politics—is that we need to hold government actions to the same standard, whether they’re aimed at friends or foes. If not, there’s no one but ourselves to blame when the administration takes aim at us.

In the video below, Ms. Powers points out not only the outrageousness of the DOJ's investigation of Fox News' James Rosen, but also the Obama administration practice of punishing and prosecuting whistleblowers while letting pass all leaks of national security information which paintw the Obama administration in a favorable light.



My respect for Ms. Powers has long been full and complete. Meanwhile, three of the most vile left wing journalists, Jonathan Capehart, Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein, were yesterday seen filing into the West Wing, no doubt for a journolist meeting with Carney, if not Obama.

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Finally: The DOJ Charges S&P With Fraud In Rating Sub-Prime Backed Securities

The DOJ is going after S&P for giving sub-prime mortgage backed securities AAA ratings in the run-up to our economic meltdown in 2008. This move is getting panned by many on the right as payback against S&P for downgrading U.S. credit rating to AA in 2011 - and that certainly is a reasonable conclusion, given that the DOJ has not similarly targeted either Moody's or Fitch, both of which were equally guilty of vastly over-rating sub-prime mortgage backed securities.

Regardless, this is a lawsuit that I sincerely hope plays out in public. The fraud perpetrated by the ratings agencies was wholly intertwined with an insane government policy to force banks into making loans that did not meet traditional colorblind lending criteria. The ratings agencies were both complicit in and victims of this policy. There are a lot of facts that need to come out. Moreover, it is an issue with direct application to today, as the Obama administration not merely continues, but actually has strengthened the same insane government policies that gave rise to the the subprime crisis and our 2008 economic meltdown.

To explain, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was used by the left for 16 years to destroy color-blind lending standards and force banks to make sub-prime loans. Fannie and Freddie were used to create a massive market for these loans. Still, none of this would have worked if the credit rating agencies had not given AAA ratings to the securities containing these mortgages, as most if not all banks were limited to purchasing securities with AAA ratings. That is how the sub-prime contagion spread throughout world markets.

In 2008, I wrote a long post explaining the origins of our melt-down. As to the ratings agencies, I opined at the time:

One of the most questionable aspects of the subprime meltdown is how mortgage backed securities being pumped out by Fannie Mae and others, were vastly underrated as to the actual risk they represented. This is another horror story that centers on the tearing down of "outdated and arbitrary" lending criteria. From the information available today, it appears that, when the old standards were labled "racist" under Clinton, the rating agencies tried to adapt to the new "market innovations" without reliance on old standards. This from Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas:

[Why were] the rating agencies were willing to give [risky loans] AAA ratings? . . .

[T]he housing price bubble that was caused in part by these relaxed underwriting standards tended to reduced defaults and obscure the impact of the standards while prices were rising because almost no one would default when they could, instead, easily sell the house at a profit. Rating agencies could suggest that these loans were no more risky than the old antiquated loans and provide empirical support for that conclusion, given the still low default rates at the time, although to do so was short sighted to the point of incompetence.

In fact, the rating agencies seemed overly concerned with the trees and lost sight of the forest. For example, a Wall Street Journal article (which is the basis for the following three quotes) reports on rating agencies’ benign treatment of piggyback mortgages (taking out a second mortgage to cover the downpayment required by the first mortgage). In previous decades, mortgage applicants unable to come up with the full downpayment and therefore thought to be more at risk of default, were required to pay ‘mortgage insurance’ which raised the interest rate on the loan. Piggyback loans allowed borrowers to avoid this mechanism, thus presumably making the loan riskier. Nevertheless, the article reports that rating agencies did not consider these loans more risky:

Data provided by lenders showed that loans with piggybacks performed like standard mortgages. The finding was unexpected, wrote S&P credit analyst Michael Stock in a 2000 research note. He nonetheless concluded the loans weren't necessarily very risky.

The finding was unexpected because it contradicted what had generally been known about mortgages by a prior generation of mortgage lenders—that when applicants made smaller downpayments, increasing the loan-to-value ratio, the probability of default increased. This finding contradicted common sense. Further, these measurements were being made at the front end of a housing price bubble (Figure 1 below shows that prices were rising smartly in 2000), likely biasing downward any default statistics. Relaxed lending standards also had a short enough track record that rating agencies could not know how they would perform in the long run or in adverse conditions, meaning that it isn’t clear that sufficient information existed to even rate these securities. So how did the rating agencies defend their counterintuitive ratings?

One money manager, James Kragenbring, says he had five to 10 conversations with S&P and Moody's in late 2005 and 2006, discussing whether they should be tougher because of looser lending standards… Other analysts recall being told that ratings could also be revised if the market deteriorated. Said an S&P spokesman: "The market can go with its gut; we have to go with the facts."

Whether such a myopic view of the “facts” was responsible for all or most of the excessively high ratings I cannot say, but these ratings were consistent with the views of the relaxed lending standards crowd. The real facts, of course, eventually soured the view of the rating agencies:

By 2006, S&P was making its own study of such loans' performance. It singled out 639,981 loans made in 2002 to see if its benign assumptions had held up. They hadn't. Loans with piggybacks were 43% more likely to default than other loans, S&P found.

In spite of their inaccurate ratings, the rating agencies, nevertheless, were making great profits from rating mortgage-backed securities, a quasi-sinecure created by the government which required many financial organizations (e.g., insurance companies and money market funds) to invest only in highly rated securities as certified by government (Security and Exchange Commission) approved rating agencies (NRSROs). There were only three such approved rating agencies for most of the last decade (S&P, Moody’s and Fitch). Given that government-approved rating agencies were protected from free competition, it might be expected that these agencies would not want to create political waves by rocking the mortgage boat, endangering a potential loss of their protected profits.

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Holder Celebrates Strong Arming 3,000 Bankers For Imaginary Racism

This from IBD:

In an end-of-year press release — posted under the banner headline "Accomplishments Under the Leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder" — the Justice Department boasts of charging "nearly 3,000" bankers with lending discrimination and fraud.

This could not be more screwed. One, the way the DOJ is "proving" discrimination is by nothing more than a statistical analysis under a disparate impact theory - the same theory the Supreme Court held unconstitutional in the employment context in the 2009 Ricci decision. Under a disparate impact theory, if statistics show that blacks are being denied loans at a greater rate or at less favorable rates than whites at any particular bank, then that is legally deemed "proof" of racism. The DOJ needn't show even a single case of actual racism. The burden then shifts to the Defendant to prove it made legitimate, color blind decisions in each case - with potential litigation costs being astronomical.

The DOJ uses this scam to strong arm lenders, then directs a substantial portion of all multi-million dollar settlements to fund left wing activist organizations. This was the ACORN model in the Clinton years. Unfortunately, lenders almost uniformly fold when faced with the litigation costs of trying to defend these bogus law suits. This is something that cries out for a hearing before the Supreme Court.

More from IBD;

. . . none of the race-bias cases highlighted by the administration was litigated in court. Evidence was never presented or tested, nor guilt ever proven. What's more, no incident of discrimination was ever specified, and no individual complainants or victims of discrimination were ever identified.

All the major defendants — Bank of America, Wells Fargo and SunTrust Mortgage — settled while strongly denying Holder's allegations that they charged blacks and Latinos a "racial surcharge" for mortgages simply because of the color of their skin. In court documents, they argued that if Holder's civil-rights prosecutors conducted an "appropriate analysis" of their loan data and loan-file documentation, it would have shown no disparate impact in product placement against African-Americans or Hispanics. They argued that any differences in loan pricing were attributable to legitimate, nondiscriminatory factors, such as poor credit.

When one defendant recently fought back in court, the administration admitted in a little-noticed court filing that, indeed, it had not considered all the credit factors that went into the lender's decisions to charge higher rates for loans to minorities whose credit history left them unqualified for prime loans.

GFI Mortgage Bankers Inc. last summer asked a federal judge to dismiss a lending discrimination complaint filed by Holder. The New York-based lender argued that the government failed to establish a link between its policies and lending disparities outlined in the suit.

When Justice opposed GFI's motion, it revealed a serious flaw in its "statistical regression analyses" used in almost every race-bias case filed against lenders under this administration.

It acknowledged that its models do not account for all factors related to borrowers' credit risk and loan characteristics — factors that could explain disparities in loan pricing by race.

In the court filing, Justice Department official Thomas Perez, chief of the civil-rights division, said the sum total of the government's proof was "statistical evidence" that did not include all elements of creditworthiness. But he argued that the government did not need to control "all measurable variables" to prove discrimination, that it "need not prove discrimination with scientific certainty."

In other words, Holders' diversity police relied on incomplete statistics as evidence to prove intentional discrimination. They failed to compare apples to apples. There could have been legitimate business reasons for what they construed from the limited data as racism. Yet they didn't bother to look further.

GFI's attorney Andrew Sandler complained that Justice has been using an overly broad and "now discredited interpretation" of civil-rights law known as "disparate impact." But GFI happened to draw an Obama-appointed judge to hear its motion to dismiss what looked to be groundless charges against it.

With that judicial leaning in mind, GFI agreed to settle the case. It will fork over more than $3.5 million to as-yet unidentified black and Latino victims of alleged mortgage discrimination and also "qualified organization(s) that provide programs targeted at African-Americans and Hispanic potential and former homeowners."

It also agrees to implement over the next 4-1/2 years a "fair lending monitoring program" to make management and its employees more sensitive to the "credit needs" of the minority community.

Only in the race-obsessed Obama administration is a racist "witch hunt" worthy of celebration.

But it gets far worse. Of vastly greater importance, this type of litigation under the Community Reinvestment Act was the "but for" cause of our financial collapse in 2008. It eviscerated bank lending standards As I summarized in a long, 2008 post identifying the causes of our financial collapse:

During the period 1977-2000, most of the elements of our current fiscal crisis were put in place. President Clinton turned a little known law from the Carter-era, the Community Reinvestment Act, into a tool of massive socialist engineering. Color-blind lending standards were eviscerated and new standards were enforced by the police powers of the government and through the enlistment of community organizers and their ilk. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were made the engines of the new social engineering, creating an ever-expanding market for mortgages founded upon the new "innovative" lending standards. [And indeed, under the new lending standards, subprime loans were bundled as AAA investments and sold throughout the world financial markets.] All attempts by Republicans to attack this cancer failed. The left deliegitimized and beat back every attempt to reform the CRA by recasting such efforts as racist.

And here we sit today, with the same "race based" cancer still being spread through our financial system. It has been a gross distortion of reality that the left was able to sell the massive lie that the meltdown was caused by the "failed policies" of the Bush administration, coupled with vague references to "Wall St. greed" and "deregulation." They rarely, if ever, get any more specific in their charges than that.

It should also be noted that a lot of what went on in the lead up to our financial meltdown was pure old fashioned fraud. As I wrote in a recent post:

The economic meltdown from the housing bubble should have led to a whole host of criminal prosecutions for fraud. When sub-prime loans were being bundled and resold with a AAA rating, that was not within the realm of reasonable opinion, that was criminal. When Goldman Sachs marketed four sets of complex mortgage securities to banks and other investors without warning of the high risk, or when they "secretly bet against the investors' positions and deceived the investors about its own positions to shift risk from its balance sheet to theirs," that is fraud. Yet the Obama DOJ refused to prosecute Goldman Sachs or anyone else.

As near as I can tell, no one from the economic melt-down of 2007 has been criminally prosecuted by Obama - and its not hard to understand why. That melt-down was caused by Democrat policies over a period of two decades - ones fought by Bush, McCain and most other Republicans. To prosecute anyone for the crimes that occurred in the creation of the melt-down would shine a bright light on the facts - as well as the utter canard that the melt-down was caused by Republican economic policies or de-regulation.

Strong arming 3,000 bankers with false charges of racism is not something Holder and the left should be celebrating with press releases. It should be something they contemplate while trying to scrape the tar and feathers off their bodies.

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The IG Report On Fast & Furious - It Ain't Over

The IG Report on Fast and Furious - the Holder ATF / DOJ program that purposefully allowed purchasers for Mexico's drug cartels to buy weapons inside the U.S. in bulk, then did not trace the weapons, did not stop the weapons before getting into cartel hands, did not coordinate or even inform the government of Mexico of the program, and justified this insanity on the grounds that DOJ would be able to find out where the guns ended up by tracing guns that were left at the scene of crimes - has been released. This from a report summarizing the IG findings and the immediate effect of its release:

A bombshell report released Wednesday on Operation Fast and Furious faulted a range of federal agencies for the failed anti-gunrunning program and accused officials in charge of a "disregard" for public safety. In the wake of the report, one Justice Department official resigned and another retired.

The sprawling report by the department's inspector general is the most comprehensive account yet on the deadly operation which allowed weapons to "walk" across the U.S.-Mexico border and resulted in hundreds of firearms turning up at crime scenes in both countries.

The report says Attorney General Eric Holder was not made aware of potential flaws in the program until February of last year. But the report cites 14 other department employees -- including Criminal Division head Lanny Breuer -- for potential wrongdoing, recommending the department consider disciplinary action against them. One congressional source told Fox News the report was "more brutal than was expected."

The report marked Jason Weinstein, the deputy assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, as the highest-ranking DOJ employee in a position to stop the program. Weinstein, who disputes the findings, is resigning in the wake of the report.

Another official criticized for not asking enough questions about the Furious operation, former ATF acting director Kenneth Melson, retired after the report came down.

Congressman Issa appeared on Fox News last night to point out the fact that the report is not anywhere near a completed investigation:



And this is Congressman Issa questioning the IG today, pointing out DOJ's unlawful refusal to provide 90% of documents relevant to Fast and Furious to Congress, as well as the refusal of government employees outside of the DOJ with relevant knowledge to answer questions from the IG.



Now that the IG Report is finished, Issa needs to dust off all of the old document subpoenas which Holder refused to comply with on the ground of an on-going IG investigation and resubmit them. Immediately.

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End The Tyranny - No Regulation Without Representation (Updated)

Update: The House has proposed passage of the REINS Act. After reviewing the entire text, I am satisfied that it is the solution needed to restore the Constitutional balance between Congress and the Executive on this most critical issue.

In a dictatorship, laws are passed by unelected government bureaucrats without reference to the will of the people, nor subject to review by elected representatives. So what's the difference between that and our form of government? Today, not so much.

Our Founding fathers created by the Constitution a republic. In Art. I, Sec. I of the Constitution, they vested all legislative powers of our republic in Congress. The Founders further provided a framework that allowed Congress to, at any time, review prior law and, if appropriate, vote to repeal it. And most importantly, the Founding Fathers provided that each Congressman voting for or against the laws was directly subject to the ballot box. We no longer live in that world.

Today, Congress does not solely wield the legislative power of our nation. Indeed, Congress is very far from even being the most important source of our legislation.   Our nation now most clearly resembles the socialist regulatory bureaucracy of the EU, where mountains of regulations with the full force and effect of law are passed by unelected bureacrats.  In our nation today, individuals, businesses, and private and public organizations can be fined, sanctioned, forced to close, and jailed for violating federal regulations that have never been subject to a vote by our elected representatives, nor signed into law by the President. The genius of our Constitutional system of checks and balances is wholly obliterated in the tyranny of our modern the regulatory bureaucracy.

This is a grave issue under Obama, but it is also much bigger than just his wholesale abuse of the regulatory bureaucracy. The growth and dictatorial power of the regulatory bureaucracy is a systemic toxin overlaid upon our government by FDR, and its substantial growth now threatens to wholly undermine our form of government, taking our most important legislation completely outside the purview of our elected representatives.

This has reached crisis proportions under Obama and his administration, who have utterly run amok, passing mountains of regulations drastically effecting our nation, all of which have bypassed Congress.

Under Obama, the size of the Federal Register, wherein all new regulations and modifications to existing regulations are published, grew from 68,000 pages in 2009 to over 82,000 pages in 2011. And Obama is just warming up. A tsunami of new regulations wait in the wings from Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the FCC and the EPA, none of which will ever be voted upon by a single elected representative. This from Heritage:

During the first three years of the Obama Administration, 106 new major federal regulations added more than $46 billion per year in new costs for Americans. This is almost four times the number—and more than five times the cost—of the major regulations issued by George W. Bush during his first three years. Hundreds more regulations are winding through the rulemaking pipeline as a consequence of the Dodd–Frank financial-regulation law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming crusade, threatening to further weaken an anemic economy and job creation.

The most important consideration as regards these regulations is that, almost to a virtual certainty, none of the major regulations promulgated under Obama could ever have passed Congress to become law - even during the first two years of Obama's administration when Democrats controlled Congress. A partial list of the extra-constitutional regulations and executive actions of Obama's regulatory agencies includes:

- The EPA's decision to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, despite lack of any Congressional authority and in the face of Congress's refusal to pass the proposed energy bill which would in fact have authorized such regulation.

- The EPA's promulgation of the Boiler MACT rules that will cost our nation an estimated $20 billion to reduce certain pollutants emitted from boilers. The regulation was made without reference to health risk thresholds for the pollutants.

- The EPA's promulgation of the Cross State Air Pollution rule requiring 27 states "to cut their sulfur dioxide emissions from 8.8 million tons per year to 2.4 million tons per year (73 percent) and their nitrogen oxides emissions from 2.6 million tons per year to 1.2 million tons per year (54 percent)," at an estimated cost of "up to $120 billion by 2015" and a reduction in the nation’s power supply by more than 55 gigawatts (almost 4 percent), according to the Brattle Group, an economic consulting firm."

- The EPA's promulgation of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards "which could cost an estimated $100 billion by 2017," require modification of over 700 electrical generating plants, and because "it will not be technically possible for some coal-fired power plants to comply, roughly 1 percent of U.S. net electrical capacity will be shuttered."  These new standards were not made in reference to health risk thresholds.

- The EPA, in what can only be described as a war on coal (which provides roughly 50% of our nation's electricity) has through its permitting process, virtually - and unlawfully - shut down all applications for new coal mines. In one particularly egregious case, the EPA cancelled a permit issued in 2007 after it reinterpreted its own regulations.

- The EPA has made yet another power grab, assuming the authority to unilaterally issue fuel standards for vehicles, providing that in 2025, vehicles must get an average of 54.5 mpg.

- The EPA, as part of its rules on biofuels has provided that oil refiners must pay a significant penalty if they fail to mix cellulosic biofuels with their gas.  Cellulosic biofuels, while mandated, are not being produced commercially, thus rendering compliance impossible.  

- The Interior Dept.'s Gulf oil drilling unlawful permatorium in the Gulf after their falsification of a report to justify imposing the permatorium.

- The Interior Dept.'s decision to unilaterally put the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic coast, and the Pacific coast off limits for development, effectively banning drilling in those areas for the next seven years.

- The Interior Dept.'s decision to unilaterally cancel 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah.

- The Interior Dept.'s decision to break an agreement with Utah done in settlement of a lawsuit and reinstate an ambitious nationwide plan to unilaterally take more land and ocean territory under federal government control, putting the land off limits for development.

- The FCC power grab, without any grant of authority by Congress, to assume the right to regulate the internet.

- The FCC decision to order the the big wireless providers to sign ‘data-roaming’ agreements with smaller carriers, thus allowing smaller carriers to free-ride on the mammoth investments by the big carriers. "In addition, the FCC made it clear that it is willing to set the price for each data roaming agreement if it doesn’t like what the big carriers are offering–effectively reinstituting price regulation for the most dynamic sector of the economy."

- The DOE's war on Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository that is still continuing. "In 2009, Administration arbitrarily broke federal law and derailed the most studied energy project in American history when DOE announced intent to withdraw 8,000 page Yucca Mountain licensing application with prejudice. American people have paid more than $31 billion (including interest) through percentages of electric rate fees towards the project and taxpayers have footed an addition $200 million in legal fees and over $2 billion in judgments against the DOE for breaking contracts associated with Yucca Mountain."  Note as an aside that Obama's NRC appointee, Gregory Jaczko, did all in his power to thwart the Yucca Mountain project, including quashing an NRC staff report, altering a scientific staff report on the safety of the Yucca site, and withholding critical information from fellow commissioners.  Jaczko, like Holder, still inexplicably retains his position.

- An EEOC letter stating that businesses may be violating a job applicant's rights under the ADA if they require that the applicant have graduated from high school.  

- New DOJ regulations that require, at significant cost, every public pool in America be fitted with a permanent lift for disabled individuals or face stiff fines.

- The NLRB decision to file a frivolous complaint against Boeing for making the decision to open up a plant in right to work South Carolina, thus strong-arming Boeing into a sweetheart deal with the closed union shop plant in Washington.

- The NLRB decision to institute Card Check via the back door, thus dispensing with the right of employees to demand a secret ballot on whether to organize and thus making the union organizing system ripe for coercion and corruption.

- The NLRB, in what poses to be a particularly insidious decision, has approved micro-union organizing of workers holding the same job title in a businesses, regardless whether the majority of employees in the business reject the union.

- The NLRB, in cases where unionizing elections are held, has now provided for "snap elections" by shortening the time frame for such elections to 10 to 21 days after notice to the employers demanding a vote.  This severely prejudices the ability of employers to make the case against unionization among their employees.

- The decision of the National Mediation Board to to make it easier for unions to organize the railroad and airline industries.  "The law, as written by Congress, clearly requires a support of a majority of a group of employees before their employer can be forced to bargain with their union. For 75 years, the NMB interpreted it the same way.  At the AFL-CIO’s request, the NMB changed the rule. There is now no requirement that a union ever demonstrate that it has the majority support of all the employees it will represent.

- The decision of the Dept. of Education to circumvent Congress and make unilateral changes to the No Child Left Behind Law.

- The HHS Mandate that will require religious individuals and institutions who are employers to fully fund free contraception and abortion plan B pills for female employees, irrespective of whether it violates their 1st Amendment rights of conscience.

- An IRS power grab to require that all tax preparers be licensed by the IRS. "The IRS wasn't granted the authority to do this by Congress, they just decided to go for it."

This is out of control and tyrannical.  It is near the polar opposite of what our Founding Fathers envisioned when they drafted our Constitution.  It must end or it will destroy our nation.

How we got here is the story of FDR and a Supreme Court that has utterly failed to defend the plain language of our Constitution. As one Cato Institute expert, Jerry Taylor, pointed out in testimony before Congress in 1996:

Before the New Deal, wholesale delegation of legislative authority to the executive was largely unknown in the United States, at least during peacetime. With the coming of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought sweeping authority to manage the U.S. economy. With the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, he got it. The NIRA authorized industrial and trade associations to draw up codes designed to raise prices and restrict production; if the president found the codes acceptable, he was empowered to immediately issue and enforce them. Upon hearing of the NIRA, Benito Mussolini exclaimed, "Ecco un ditatore!" ("Behold a dictator!")

In 1935 the Supreme Court emphatically rejected the industrial code provisions of the NIRA in A.L.A. Schecter Poultry Corp. v. United States. The Court, led by Chief Justice Hughes, argued that "Congress is not permitted. to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested." In his concurring opinion, Justice Cardozo famously characterized the industrial code provisions as "delegation running riot." But after Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to subvert the judiciary's independence by enlarging the Court, the Court never again struck down a New Deal statute on delegation grounds. Fear of Court-packing concentrated the mind wonderfully, and the judiciary chose not to stand in the path of the administrative state.

And so it has been ever since. In the 1944 case Yakus v. U.S., the Supreme Court put the final imprimatur on their Constitutional retreat, holding that "Congress could delegate to an executive agent the power to set maximum prices for virtually all goods throughout the economy." They rendered Art. I Sec. I of our Constitution a nullity.

But there was more to come. The final nail in our coffin came with the 1983 Supreme Court decision in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. In that case, the Court granted "extraordinary deference to administrative agencies interpretations of their own authority." The Court held that "when a statute is silent on a particular issue, Congress can be understood to have delegated the power to make the law to the agency." That decision grants deeply non-democratic regulatory agencies vast power - and we can see its effect today in the many power grabs enumerated above in this post.

As Mr. Taylor summed up in his testimony before Congress:

With the judiciary's abdication of its constitutional role, we are left with a legal status quo that effectively centralizes all governing functions in the executive branch agency: Congress passes a statute endorsing a high-minded goal--accommodation of the handicapped, safe drinking water, protection of wildlife--the executive branch agency then issues and enforces the rules governing individual behavior; the judicial branch, for its part, grants "controlling weight" to the agency's interpretations of its own authority. In this way, the modern administrative state comes perilously close to realizing the Framers' definition of despotic government, articulated by James Madison in the Federalist 47: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self- appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Newt Gingrich oversaw passage of the Congressional Review Act during his term as Speaker. It is a law meant to give Congress the authority to quickly stop burdensome regulations. Unfortunately, it has not proven effective. Under the Act, Congress can raise an objection to a regulation within 60 days of its passage. Only a majority in the House and in the Senate are required to quash the regulation - but only if their joint resolution to quash is signed by the President. That makes the Congressional Review Act virtually useless.

The whole problem is a President governing our nation like a dictatorship through the regulatory agencies that are directly, or in some case indirectly, under his control. Thus the Cong. Review Act must be amended to remove the role of the President, requiring only an act of the elected body with "all legislative powers" to decide whether a regulation is to be approved or quashed.

Further, all regulations should be treated precisely as laws. As it stands today, regulations enjoy what amounts to a presumption of treatment as if they were a duly enacted law by Congress. In other words, it will remain in place unless repealed by an act of Congress that passes the House and a super-majority in the Senate.

Regulations should not be easier for government to create and leave in place than the laws of Congress itself. If an objection to a regulation is raised by a member of Congress, then that regulation should only pass into force - or remain in force - if Congress votes to approve it subject to the same standards as any law. That means it must be approved by a majority in both Houses, and as to the Senate, by a super majority if a filibuster is invoked.

Lastly, the time frame of 60 days to object to a regulation must be removed. Just as all laws are subject to being withdrawn by Congress at any time, so must all regulations be forever subject to Congressional review under the framework above.

The above recommendations would do nothing more than put regulations on the same footing as all other laws in our Constitutional system. Let there be no regulation without representation. Our nation's fate hangs on it.

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Thomas Sowell Blasts The Obama Administration's Use Of The Race Card

What is happening in black inner city schools is a tragedy.  Black school children are stuck in incredibly poor schools and are not getting an education that will allow them to become competitive.  Although Obama sends his two children to the best DC private schools, one of his first acts in office was to end a program that would have given DC's poor the same option for their children.  And now, in an election year effort to take the focus of blacks off the poor state of education - and the fact that Obama and the left are wholly complicit with it - the DOJ and the Dept. of Education are conducting a campaign to punish schools that punish black males statistically more frequently than whites. This from Prof. Sowell:

[T]he biggest hoax of the past two generations is still going strong -- namely, the hoax that statistical differences in outcomes for different groups are due to the way other people treat those groups.

The latest example of this hoax is the joint crusade of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against schools that discipline black males more often than other students. According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, this disparity in punishment violates the "promise" of "equity."

Just who made this promise remains unclear, and why equity should mean equal outcomes despite differences in behavior is even more unclear. This crusade by Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is only the latest in a long line of fraudulent arguments based on statistics.

If black males get punished more often than Asian American females, does that mean that it is somebody else's fault? That it is impossible that black males are behaving differently from Asian American females? Nobody in his right mind believes that. But that is the unspoken premise, without which the punishment statistics prove nothing about "equity."

What is the purpose or effect of this whole exercise by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice? To help black students or to secure the black vote in an election year by seeming to be coming to the rescue of blacks from white oppression?

Among the many serious problems of ghetto schools is the legal difficulty of getting rid of disruptive hoodlums, a mere handful of whom can be enough to destroy the education of a far larger number of other black students -- and with it destroy their chances for a better life.

Judges have already imposed too many legalistic procedures on schools that are more appropriate for a courtroom. "Due process" rules that are essential for courts can readily become "undue process" in a school setting, when letting clowns and thugs run amok, while legalistic procedures to suspend or expel them drag on. It is a formula for educational and social disaster.

Now Secretary Duncan and Attorney General Holder want to play the race card in an election year, at the expense of the education of black students. Make no mistake about it, the black students who go to school to get an education are the main victims of the classroom disrupters whom Duncan and Holder are trying to protect.

What they are more fundamentally trying to protect are the black votes which are essential for Democrats. For that, blacks must be constantly depicted as under siege from whites, so that Democrats can be seen as their rescuers.

Promoting paranoia translates into votes. It is a very cynical political game, despite all the lofty rhetoric used to disguise it.

Whether the current generation of black students get a decent education is infinitely more important than whether the current generation of Democratic politicians hang on to their jobs.

Too many of the intelligentsia -- both black and white -- jump on the statistical bandwagon, and see statistical differences as proof of maltreatment, not only in schools but in jobs, in mortgage lending and in many other things.

Some act as if their role is to protect the image of blacks by blaming their problems on whites. But the truth is far more important than racial image.

Wherever we want to go, we can only get there from where we are. Not where we think we are, or wish we are, or where we want others to think we are, but where we are in fact right now.

But political spin and pious euphemisms don't tell us where we are. After a while, such rhetorical exercises don't even fool others.

If we don't have the truth, we don't have anything to start with and build on. A big start toward the truth would be getting rid of the kinds of statistical hoaxes being promoted by Secretary of Education Duncan and Attorney General Holder.

And on a final note, it was the social engineering justified on the grounds of statistical differences in loans received by blacks that destroyed credit standards, put Fannie and Freddie on steroids, and was the direct cause of our economic meltdown of the past five years. That same social engineering was strengthened and made a permanent part of our laws with the passage of Dodd Frank. This use of statistics alone to create the impression of racism where none exists is a systemic malignancy that must be ended.

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Holder's DOJ Drops The Race Card On Texas's Voter ID Law

Our race baiting Attorney General, who has directly compared any attempt at insuring the sanctity of the ballot with a return to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes, has struck again. The Justice Department today officially "objected to a new photo ID requirement for voters in Texas because many Hispanic voters lack state-issued identification."

This from Politico:

[T]he new law, known as S.B. 14 and signed by Gov. Rick Perry last May, requires that the state issue special free IDs for voting. However, there would still be a cost to individuals who lack the required underlying documentation, like a birth certificate, Perry wrote.

"There is a statistically significant correlation between the Hispanic population percentage of a county and the percentage of a county’s population that lives below the poverty line. The legislature tabled amendments that would have prohibited state agencies from charging for any underlying documents needed to obtain an acceptable form of photographic identification," Perez noted.

Perez said many voters were likely to have difficulty getting to a Department of Public Safety office to get an ID, either because of distance or limited hours.

"Even after submitting data that show over 600,000 registered voters do not have either a driver’s license or personal identification card issued by DPS – and that a disproportionate share of those registered voters are Hispanic – the state has failed to propose, much less adopt, any program for individuals who have to travel a significant distance to a DPS office, who have limited access to transportation, or who are unable to get to a DPS office during their hours of operation," Perez wrote.

So there are 600,000 people, largely hispanic, registered to vote in Texas for whom there is no proof of their citizenship. Yet the DOJ's concern is not with the sanctity of the ballot box, but with insuring that 600,000 people are able to vote without even minimal proof of citizenship. And on top of that, Holder's DOJ justifies this travesty it on civil rights ground. The true irony here is that, in a democracy, the penultimate civil right is the right to vote and, equally, to have that vote fully count. Vote fraud insures that valid votes do not fully count.

As Stacey McCain has weighed in on this, writing:

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, “civil rights” has become a code phrase for “whatever Democrats want,” so that anyone who disagrees with Democrats is said to be “anti-civil rights.” . . .

Isn’t the Justice Department’s entire rationale for opposing the Texas voter ID law an extension of the belief that the partisan interests of the Democratic Party are coterminous with “civil rights”? Democrats actually believe they have the right to win elections, even by blatantly illegal means, and so any measure that might prevent ineligible people from voting is a violation of “civil rights.”

Now you know why “corrupt Democrat” is redundant: No honest person would ever get involved in the Democratic Party.

Also a worthwhile read as regards vote fraud was an NRO column by Hans A. von Spakovsky, "Not A Race Card." As he points out, vote fraud has a long and ignominious tradition in the U.S., and minimal efforts to protect the sanctity of the vote are both warranted and do not amount to an attack on minorities.

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Former CIA Chief Hayden Bathing In Schadenfreude Over AG Holder

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has been so overcome by his schadenfreude over the many problems now besetting AG Eric Holder that Hayden had to share it with the world or burst. As you read this, you can almost hear Hayden laughing and rubbing his hands in glee at the poetic justice being dealt to Eric Holder. It really makes for a fun read.

 This from Gen. Hayden writing at CNN:

Schadenfreude -- joy at the misfortune of others -- is a bad thing.

So I've been trying to resist temptation these past months as I watch Attorney General Eric Holder deal with public and congressional reaction to the "Fast and Furious" scheme, the failed attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to seed and then track U.S. firearms to Mexican drug cartels. Fast and Furious was a secretive, high-risk operation seemingly intended to deal with an intractable problem abroad. . . .

. . . Now Holder , , , must defend himself against some very tough accusations, including one by some skeptics that the operation was intended principally to discredit, and thereby justify further regulation of, firearms dealers. This is where the schadenfreude comes in.

After the congressional elections of 2006, the CIA was forced to defend edgy (often controversial and sometimes unsuccessful) actions in a tough political environment. President George W. Bush was politically weakened, the Senate and the House were under Democratic control and a presidential election was in the offing.

On the Hill, the questions were aggressive, often partisan and, in my view, sometimes even deeply mean-spirited and unfair to the many intelligence professionals who were putting their lives and careers on the line in a very successful effort to protect America from further attack. The agency dealt with the committees as best a nonpolitical organization could, fully recognizing that, although congressional oversight was a necessary instrument, it could sometimes be a difficult one.

But any personal instinct toward some common "executive branch" empathy for Holder is muted not only by the dubious character of Fast and Furious, but by some of the attorney general's other actions, as well. While out of office, for example, he famously called for a "reckoning" for CIA officers and other officials who authorized and conducted operations that were edgy and risky and intended to deal with difficult circumstances.

Once in office, he launched a "reckoning" of CIA renditions, detentions and interrogations of terrorists by directing the Justice Department to reopen investigations closed years before by career prosecutors. This decision was opposed by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his predecessors, and Holder reportedly made the decision without reading detailed memos prepared by those career prosecutors declining to pursue further proceedings.

The CIA officers affected by this may be forgiven some feelings of irony when they now hear the attorney general repudiating some of the charges made against his officers by stating: "Those who serve in the ranks of law enforcement are our nation's heroes and deserve our nation's thanks, not the disrespect that is being heaped on them by those who see political advantage."

Of course, it was also Holder who decided in 2009 to release what had been secret DOJ memos outlining the details and providing the legal justification for the Bush administration's interrogation program. The release was defended by the administration as part of a broad commitment to "transparency."

Holder may have had even more in mind though as, according to a contemporary Newsweek account of the decision, the leadership of the Department of Justice calculated that "if the public knew the details, ... there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe," and that when the decision to release those memos had been made, the attorney general and his leadership team "celebrated quietly, and waited for the national outrage to begin."

Later that summer, Holder also released a previously classified CIA inspector general report on the interrogation program as the administration seemed to be actively shaping this story to put its predecessor's actions in the worst possible light.

As I said, schadenfreude is a bad thing. But it is sometimes hard to avoid, especially when life seems to come full circle.

Attorney General Eric Holder has made it clear that he thinks he has been subjected to a heavily politicized process over Fast and Furious.

If he has -- and that's still an if -- I suspect that some folks at CIA know exactly how he feels.

You have to love how he refuses to give Holder the benefit of the doubt as to whether he is actually being subject to an unjust process. I had almost as fun reading this as I am sure Hayden had in writing it.

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Support Your Local Democrats - Vote Early, Vote Often

As our administration has concluded, the attack by various groups on neutral laws designed to prevent voter fraud are a deliberate and systemic attempt to open the door for millions of ineligible votes to be cast, all in an effort to circumvent the bedrock foundation of our nation, the democratic process, and to elect the Democrat of their choice.

Attorney General Eric Holder, Speech at the LBJ Library, 12 Dec. 2011
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Just Joking . . .

As Congressman John Lewis described it, in a speech on the House floor this summer, the voting rights that he worked throughout his life – and nearly gave his life – to ensure are, “under attack… [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.

Attorney General Eric Holder, Speech at the LBJ Library, 12 Dec. 2011
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Not Joking . . .

Unfortunately the second quote is real, coming from the national disgrace that is our nation's highest law enforcement official, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder. Or at least he represents a portion of our nation. If you are a Democrat or one of their core victim groups, Holder's your man. His speech, and his plan to attack election fraud laws as well as redistricting plans, was laid out in a NYT article here.

Just how radical was Holder's speech? How about this - Holder doesn't merely want to attack election laws generally, he wants, as John Hinderaker points out at Powerline, to do away entirely with having to register to vote in elections. Can you think of anything more amenable to fraud?

The only reason our government has the slightest legitimacy is because of the belief that each vote counts. That stops being true when there is electoral fraud, and legitimate votes are diluted by fraudulent ones. If and when it happens on a large enough scale, you will get blood in the street.

As it stands, the most onerous election laws of any state in the nation today would require showing a picture i.d. at the polls to vote. That's it. Indeed, in 2008, the Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board to uphold such a picture i.d. requirement. As the Court reasoned:

. . . For most voters who need them, the inconvenience of making a trip to the BMV, gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.

So upon what possible legal basis is the Obama administration going to challenge the latest voter fraud prevention laws? And indeed, where is there the slightest bit of proof that such neutral laws operate to disenfranchise even a single person?

You will find more on the tenor of Holder's speech and the national ramifications of his plans from J. Christian Adams at PJM.

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AIDS & The DOJ

HIV/AIDS is still, ultimately, a death sentence. It is listed as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is our moden black plague. But it is an issue of "civil rights" and "gay rights" for those on the left of our government - and that includes the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. They can't or won't enforce laws to insure that our ballot boxes remain inviolate, but they can pursue a policy that will surely condemn numerous people to new HIV infections.

South Carolina has a policy in its prisons to test new prisoners for the HIV virus before placing them in the general prison population. If a person is found infected, they are placed in a special facility for the HIV infected where they can immediatly start receiving treatment and councilling. Approximately 50% of those found infected by the initial screening did not know they were infected.

This policy has been virtually foolproof in stopping the spread of HIV through the South Carolina prison population. In humanitarian terms, it is a policy that has insured that the infected get treatment. The policy actually costs South Carolina approximately $2 million per year.

Yet, according to J. Christian Adams, Obama's DOJ is quite willing to place all of South Carolina's prison population - and ultimately the larger population in South Carolina and its environs - in danger in order to vindicate the "civil rights" of those people infected with AIDS. This from Mr. Adams:

. . . South Carolina received a letter from the now-infamous Civil Rights Division that the policy of keeping infected inmates at a designated facility, instead of scattered across the state in the general prison population, may unfairly stigmatize infected prisoners. To the Obama political appointees in the Civil Rights Division, this constitutes discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
The Justice Department objects to separate living facilities and specialized medical treatment for the HIV/AIDS prison population. Naturally, DOJ has threatened a lawsuit.

. . . The DOJ is in a lose-lose situation. Even if DOJ wins a lawsuit, sources tell me South Carolina is simply going to cancel all of the special testing, treatment and counseling, thereby saving the state $2 million a year.

Instead, the state will dump infected prisoners into the general population, and nobody will know they have AIDS. Worse, prisoners who come to prison with HIV/AIDS will never know they have the disease and their lives will be shortened because the testing program will end.

Special counseling would end, too. . . .

Justice raises three primary objections to this effective and humane approach. First, it prevents infected prisoners "from participating in activities and jobs of their choosing." Leave it to bureaucrats in Washington to concoct the grievance that prisoners have choices when it comes to activities in the first place.

Second, DOJ claims the South Carolina program is unconstitutional, something the courts have repeatedly rejected. Once again we see the rule of law falling by the wayside when it comes to decisions of this Civil Rights Division. This is the same Civil Rights Division that was sanctioned more than $4 million during the Clinton administration for bringing cases as frivolous as the one against South Carolina prisons.

Third, with all the pragmatism of a sociology lecture at Harvard, DOJ argues that the separation of the HIV/AIDS prisoners "stigmatizes" the prisoners. Ozmint responds, "Prison is a voluntary activity; breaking the law, earning a criminal record, and wearing 'state issue,' all stigmatize. Since one purpose of prison is punishment, this stigmatization is somewhat intentional." How refreshing. . . .

It is one thing to protect the rights of "minorities" from baseless discrimination. But concern about HIV/AIDS is anything but baseless. The Civil Rights division is simply out of control. At a minimum, people in jail have an 8th Amendment Right to be free from "cruel and unusual" punishment which, I am sure most courts would define to include the likelihood of HIV transmission. Adams is right. The Civil Rights Division is out of control. As is virtually the entire Obama administration.

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DOJ, Voting Laws, & The Left In Full Moral Outrage

EJ Dionne, writing at the Washington Post, is outraged that anyone is paying any attention to either DOJ whistleblower J. Christian Adams or the Dept. of Justice's decision to drop charges in the case of the New Black Panthers. He is in equaly incoherent rage that anyone is paying any attention to Fox News. Eugene Robinson has likewise written the same in his most recent op-ed at the Washington Post, tossing in a charge of racism for even raising the issue that the DOJ may be racist in its application of the law:

After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there's no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation's first African American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down. . . .

Then there is Bob Herbert at the NYT, as well as their resident drama queen, Frank Rich - and do see see this ridiculous piece by Brian Stetler. Each one of those pieces, and I dare say hundereds of others throughout the nation this past week, hits precisely the same talking points. They are:

- Fox is racist propagana machine which no other media outlet should follow

- Fox played a central role in getting Shirley Sherrod fired (all studiously ignoring that Fox News Channel never mentioned Sherrod's name prior to her being fired)

- The DOJ's refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation is not merely meaningless, but to even ask that the matter be investigated is racist

- J. Christian Adams was once a poll watcher for the Bush administration and thus he has no legitimacy.

This is damage control by the left because the race card is losing its legitimacy. They want to make the charges of reverse racism at the DOJ go the way of Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the election campaign - just fade away. It is a blatant attempt to stifle any discussion of the issues raised by Mr. Adams. The fact that they can work in an ad hominem attack against Fox News is, to them, just an added bennie.

Let's review the charges that have been raised against the Obama DOJ, taking not that they go far beyond just the New Black Panther matter.

1. The DOJ's prosecution of the New Black Panther case was dismissed after a judgment of guilt had been entered. There was no apparent reason for this dismissal.

1A. The DOJ has flatly refused to honor lawful subpoenas to answer questions before the Civil Rights Commission investigating whether the dismissal was based on racial preference.

1B. In addition, the DOJ has transferred the key witness who was handling the New Black Panther case, Christopher Coates, to South Carolina, outside the reach of the subpoena power of the Civil Rights Commission.

2. A very serious charge has been leveled that the DOJ, again on grounds of race, is refusing to enforce Secion 8 of the Voting Rights Act - that part of the motor voter law that requires states to periodically update their voting roles by purging the rolls of the deceased, felons, and others ineligible to vote.

2A. J. Christian Adams has testified under oath that by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes that "We're not interested in those kind of cases. What do they have to do with helping increase minority access and turnout? We want to increase access to the ballot, not limit it." The only possible way this could increase access to the ballot would be to invite vote fraud.

2B. In March, 2009, the the Obama DOJ dropped a case filed in 2006 against Missouri, for that state's refusal to clean up its voting rolls. The suit alleged that over 33% of Missouri counties had more registered voters than residents of voting age. The state had done nothing to clean up the voting rolls when the suit was dismissed.

3. According to Abigail Thernstrom, there is also reason to be concerned that the Obama DOJ is going to improperly use its powers under the Voting Rights Act to force race conscious drawing of political districts following the 2010 Census.

4. The DOJ is apparently stonewalling implementation of the MOVE act designed to insure that the votes of our soldiers deployed outside of their home states are counted. In the 2008 election, 17,000 military votes went uncounted. According to Eric Eversole in today's Washington Times, because of the DOJ's refusal to enforce the Move act, military voters will again face widespread disenfranchisement in the 2010 election. (H/T Instapundit)

There is more than ample cause to be concerned that Obama's Dept. of Justice is acting unlawfully by deliberate and racially unequal application of the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, the charges made above go directly to the sanctity of the ballot box - and thus to the very foundation of legitimacy of our form of government.

The left's desire to push this aside using the race card is scandalous. All of this is deserving of a thorough investigation. There is no doubt that allegations of this type of conduct by the DOJ during the Bush years would have seen the MSM clear cutting entire old growth forests to get enough paper to handle the avalanche of outraged opinion pieces and supposedly objective news articles decrying the DOJ. And indeed, on charges of "politicization," the left spent months destroying the carreer of Bush AG Alberto Gonzalez. "Politicization" is a meaningless charge. Racism in the unequal application of our voting laws is not.
To add an addendum, there has been much back and forth of late on the right regarding whether or not the right should be pursuing the New Black Panther matter. Abigail Thernstrom of the Civil Rights Commission believes that the matter is too small to warrant much attention and that conservatives are blowing it out of proportion. Andrew McCarthy and Peter Kirsanow strongly disagree. Interestingly, Paul Mirengoff of Powerline has concluded that the dismissal itself of the New Black Panther case may have been justified, though he takes no position on whether the dismissal itself was motivated by improper considerations of race. Scott Johnson of Powerline argues that it is the motivation that makes this a serious issue, and Hans Von Spakovsky, a voting rights expert, disagrees strongly with Paul's conclusion. It makes for fascinating reading. I include the links below:

Abigail Thernstrom - The New Black Panther Case: A Conservative Dissent

Andrew McCarthy - The Case Against the New Black Panthers (responding to Thernstrom)

Abigail Thernstrom - Yes, the Black Panther Case Is Small Potatoes (reply to McCarthy)

Peter Kirsanow - A Response to Thernstrom on the New Black Panther Case (H/T Instapundit)

Scott Johnson (Powerline) - The New Black Panther Party Case: Just Blow It

Paul Mirengoff (Powerline) - The New Black Panther Party Case: My Final(?) Look

Hans A. von Spakovsky - Dissenting with Paul Mirengoff: New Black Panther Case Should Not Have Been Dismissed

Paul Mirengoff (Powerline) - The New Black Panther Party Case: A Reply to Hans von Spakovsky

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