Stand Your Ground: Holder's Pandering And The Reality Of The Black Community

Eric Holder's latest paen to the vociferous racial grievance industry is to suggest that Stand Your Ground laws play an unfair role in violence against blacks. As I said the moment Holder made the claim, the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus will eat this up. It will give many in their constituency the illusion that their leaders are taking a firm stand against something implicated in imaginary rampant white racism. Of much greater import, I opined that those who would be most hurt by removing Stand Your Ground laws would of necessity be blacks - that group of people far more likely to suffer violent crime, and indeed, to suffer it from other blacks. And lo and behold, this from the Daily Caller:

African Americans benefit from Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law at a rate far out of proportion to their presence in the state’s population, despite an assertion by Attorney General Eric Holder that repealing “Stand Your Ground” would help African Americans.

Black Floridians have made about a third of the state’s total “Stand Your Ground” claims in homicide cases, a rate nearly double the black percentage of Florida’s population. The majority of those claims have been successful, a success rate that exceeds that for Florida whites. . . .

But approximately one third of Florida “Stand Your Ground” claims in fatal cases have been made by black defendants, and they have used the defense successfully 55 percent of the time, at the same rate as the population at large and at a higher rate than white defendants, according to a Daily Caller analysis of a database maintained by the Tampa Bay Times. Additionally, the majority of victims in Florida “Stand Your Ground” cases have been white.

African Americans used “Stand Your Ground” defenses at nearly twice the rate of their presence in the Florida population, which was listed at 16.6 percent in 2012.

So Hodler takes a law to task as racist that actually protects law abiding blacks most of all. What a nightmare.

There are several inexcusable obscenities in American society. One is the endless cycle of poverty, single parent homes, criminality and poor education effecting a large strata of black society. Another is the racial grievance industry that does NOTHING beyond paying lip service to these conditions. It paints a picture of America still in 1950's Selma with the deeply racist Bull Connor Democrats still in control. I truly hope that there is a special place in hell for the leaders of the racial grievance industry. They are causing untold harm to our nation and, even worse, they are devastating to black culture and society.

Related: Speak of the devil, I just now saw this from The Hill:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) are readying a flurry of bills in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal on charges in last year’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin.

The lawmakers are drafting proposals intended to rein in racial profiling; scrap state stand-your-ground laws; and promote better training for the nation’s neighborhood watch volunteers, among other anti-violence measures. CBC members had remained largely silent throughout the trial, but following the verdict, argued forcefully that, decades after the civil rights movement, the nation’s criminal justice system still discriminates against blacks and other minorities.

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), an icon of the civil rights era, said the decision “seems to justify the stalking and killing of innocent black boys and deny them any avenue of self-defense.” Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), head of the CBC, decried “the presumption of guilt so often associated with people of color.”

“George Zimmerman targeted Trayvon Martin as a potential criminal because Trayvon Martin is black,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told MSNBC Monday.

“Anyone who denies that racism isn’t alive today, particularly in the so-called justice system, is exceedingly delusional,” said Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), who wore a hoodie on the House floor last year in a demonstration.

“This verdict points to the reality that there are far too many walking America’s streets wearing a hoodie, carrying snacks and soft drink, which can result in a ‘death sentence’ particularly if they are young, black and male.”

Leading the legislative charge is Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a CBC member, who for years has pushed legislation to curtail racial profiling in the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Conyers’s proposal is still being crafted, but past iterations have barred any law enforcement agent from targeting people based solely on race, gender or religion. It would also mandate race-sensitive training as a condition of receiving federal funding and require the Justice Department to provide Congress with periodic reports detailing discriminatory profiling practices.

Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), a CBC member who represents the district where Martin lived, said problems would persist until Congress acts.

“Until we pass meaningful laws against profiling, Americans will continue to be singled out and arrested for driving while black, shopping while black, walking while black and just plain being black,” said Wilson, who’s also working on the racial profiling bill. “My own children, and nearly all of the young men I know, have been stopped by the police at least once, for no apparent reason.”

Right - because laws against profiling will help blacks every bit as much as repeal of stand your ground laws. Compare and contrast the black murder capital of America, Chicago, a place more deadly than for Americans than Afghanistan and a place that studiously does not "profile," with, and I hate to say it, but Nanny Bloomberg's New York City. Under Bloomberg, NYC has instituted a highly aggressive stop and frisk program - something that clearly falls in the CBC's definition of profiling. That program has had a tremendously positive impact on crime in NYC, to the benefit of all but, particularly, to blacks and hispanics. This from NPR:

Closing arguments are set to take place Monday in the federal class action trial involving New York City's stop-and-frisk policy. The trial has been going on for two months in Manhattan.

Plaintiffs in Floyd v. City of New York claim the New York Police Department, its supervisors and its union pressured police officers to stop, question and frisk hundreds of thousands of people each year, even establishing quotas. They argue that 88 percent of the stops involved blacks and Hispanics, mostly men, and were in fact a form of racial profiling.

The police and the city argued that these policies were goals, not quotas, and have made New York the safest big city in America.

"I can't imagine any rational person saying that the techniques are not working and that we should stop them," says Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The city also argued that these stops took place in high crime areas where the crime was often black on black or Hispanic on Hispanic. As NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told public radio station WNYC: "Ninety-six percent of the shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. Crime is down in this city in the last two decades 80 percent."

So the CBC and Eric Holder want to ritually sacrifice George Zimmerman, they want to repeal all stand your ground laws, and they want to end "racial profiling." Not a single one of those actions will help, in any way, the black population of our nation. To the contrary, each in their own way will do significant damage to the black population - including the sacrifice of the racially innocent George Zimmerman. But all will help the racial grievance industry to gather money and stay in power. Bastards. Absolutely worthless bastards.

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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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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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Outrageous: Justice Dept. Publicly Fingers Key Figure Behind Anti-Muslim Film (Updated)

This is perhaps the single most outrageous act of the Obama administration and Eric Holder's Justice Dept. to date - and that is saying a lot.

Federal authorities have identified a southern California man once convicted of financial crimes as the key figure behind the anti-Muslim film that ignited mob violence against U.S. embassies across the Mideast, a U.S. law enforcement official said Thursday.

Attorney General Eric Holder said that Justice Department officials had opened a criminal investigation into the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other diplomats killed during an attack on the American mission in Benghazi. It was not immediately clear whether authorities were focusing on the California filmmaker as part of that probe.

The "key figure" had used an alias in making the film for his own personal security. The AP article quoted above goes on to provide the actual name of "key figure." I will not repeat it here.

To be clear, it doesn't matter WHO produced this film. It is not a crime. So what possible justification is there for the FBI to publicly identify the "key figure" behind this film? There is none. Our 1st Amendment absolutely forbids any legal action against this man. This is thuggery in its purest form - endangering the life of the person fingered and sending a message to anyone else in the U.S. who might want to make their feelings on Islam known but are too afraid to exercise their rights without anonymity because some Salafi nut job might behead them.

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Update: Instapundit has gone nuclear over this in a series of long posts and round-ups, opining that "Barack Obama should resign." See here, here, here and here. -------------

You want to know the true canard of the Obama administration. Its that this film trailer, available world wide on Youtube for two months, was anything other than a pretext for the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood to organize violence against the U.S. on 9-11. What our government should be doing is naming those bastards, either as part of an arrest or as notification of their next of kin. Instead, we apologize to them for our freedom of speech and now publicly finger the "key figure" behind the movie.

The modern left has nothing but contempt for "free speech" - at least to the extent that it is speech with which they personally disagree. The left's support of Islam does not arise out of respect for religion, but out of a common cause to undermine the Christian foundations of our society. Does Holder and the left really want to play this game of making "blasphemy" a crime in the U.S.? The same people who denigrate Christianity at seemingly every available opportunity want to make "blasphemy" a crime? Does this mean we can prosecute the "key figure" behind "Religuous?"

Salafi Islam and Iran's own version of it, the veleyat-e-faqi, are not religions, they are cults. The "Allah" they worship is immoral and bloodthirsty, barbaric and pitiless, irrational and intent on the destruction of all things not Islamic. Unless Salafi Islam, and indeed, all of Arab culture goes through a "rennasaince" and "reformation," we are ultimately headed towards a genocidal conflict not of our choosing. The only other alternative is to mobilize public opinion on a massive scale by unapologetically shining a blinding spotlight on these cults - the ones' that believe it is fine to assassinate anyone who leaves their religion, or who disagrees with their interpretation of the Koran, or that murdering 3,000 innocent people on a single day eleven years ago was a good thing, and that the perpetrators are in heaven enjoying non-stop sex and wine. We can fight this with guns or the pressure of public opinion on a world wide scale. But we are going to fight it one way or the other. Eric Holder and Obama would have it be with guns.

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Update: ABC News is now reporting that the film maker might face jail time for his movie. The only "crime" here is that the Obama administration wants to deflect the reality of today's radicalized Middle East onto the film maker. This is the most blatant and grotesque violation of the First Amendment I can ever recall. It is Orwellian in its purest sense. And it really is a red line. If he spends a day in jail over this, this country needs not an election, but a revolution. -------------

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Vote Fraud - A White Eric Holder Votes In The DC Primary

The left's claim that vote fraud does not exist, and thus that virtually no safeguards need to be put in place, is itself a fraud. Exhibit One comes from James O'Keefe:



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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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Protecting The Racial Spoils System

Last month, in an appearance at Columbia University, his alma mater, [Attorney General Eric] Holder made a jarring statement in support of racial preferences, saying he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” “Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” he declared. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin. . . . When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

John Fund, Infinite Affirmative Action, NRO, 6 March 2012

Where did that come from? We've had affirmative action for over sixty years. It has been, as Thomas Sowell points out here, here and here, largely ineffective and unintentionally damaging. It is, in today's America, as pointed out by Victor Davis Hanson, ludicrous as a means of supposedly redressing wrongs. And, as pointed out by former Senator Jim Webb, affirmative action is grossly unfair and wholly repugnant to the proposition of equality. So how and why can Holder possibly make such outrageous remarks?

As a threshold matter, not that Holder's remarks come on the heels of an expose from Breitbart.com showing a young Barry Obama hugging and promoting Dr. Derrick Bell, the creator of "critical race theory." It also comes on the heels of the revelation that Prof. Obama, teaching Constitutional Law at Univ. of Chicago law school, made Derrick Bell required reading for his class.

Promoting the canard of wide spread racism - and racial entitlement - in the U.S. is utterly central to the left's survival. It is a foundational source of votes, money and political patronage for the left. In the fantasy world painted by the left, it is always 1950 - with the important exception to historical reality being that it is the conservative right, not the Democrats, who are the font of the racism. If the edifice created by the left cracks, if they don't get 90% of the black vote in every election, the Democrats are in serious trouble.

In the near total absence of any overt racism today, the left last resort is to the claim that racism, even if not conscious, is none the less inherent and endemic. That is at the heart of the ludicrous theory of "color blind racism" now being expoused by the left. And it is at the heart of Derrick Bell's "critical race theory" (CRT). Both ultimately reject Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s call for equality of all races, arguing that because of permanent racism, blacks will always require special treatment. Skin color is not irrelevant to these people, rather it is the defining characteristic.

A description of Critical Race Theory was memorialized by now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in her notes from a 1993 lecture on the topic:

Pervasiveness of racism: First, CRT takes as a given -- as its first premise -- that racism infects every aspect of American law and American life. That racism is deep and pervasive -- some would go so far as to say inevitable and permanent.

"Neutral" law as mechanism of racial subordination: Second, CRT attempts to show that the claims of the legal system to neutrality, to impartiality, and to objectivity are false claims. CRT attempts to show that the law -- even when it seems neutral and even-handed -- in fact works in the interest of dominant groups in American society and particularly in the interest of dominant racial groups. CRT attempts to show that the so-called "logic of the law," that so-called "neutral principles" are a sort of cover for a deeply ingrained system of racial domination.

Critical of civil rights strategies: Third, CRT generally is extremely critical of the activity -- the strategy and even the goals -- of the traditional civil rights movement. The thinking here is that the traditional civil rights movement believed that all that needed to be done was to make the laws neutral-- to end legal segregation in the schools, for example -- in order to achieve racial equality in America. But such reforms, critical race theorists say, were ineffectual, and necessarily so -- because they ignored the way even neutral laws could effect racial subordination. In addition, it might be said that critical race theorists see the civil rights movement as too "reformist," too "gradualist," not sufficiently committed to the broad-scale social transformations necessary to achieve racial equality.

Insistence on incorporation of minority perspectives and use of stories: Fourth, and relatedly, critical race theory insists that the law --legal doctrines of all sorts -- be reformulated, fundamentally altered, to reflect and incorporate the perspectives and experiences of so-called "outsider groups," who have known racism and racial subordination at first hand. Critical race theorists often write not in traditional, lawyerly terms, but with parables, and stories, and dialogues. The thinking is that these techniques can better demonstrate the actual experiences of members of minority group -- experiences which should be accepted by and incorporated in the law. In addition, the decision to spurn traditional techniques of legal argument reflects the belief that these apparently neutral techniques are not neutral at all -- that they have been the means of promoting not some objective system of truth and justice, but instead a system based on racial power.

Finally, Kagan demonstrated that Derrick Bell is an "examplar" of critical race theory:

Derrick Bell as examplar:

Now Derrick Bell's writing illustrates each of these four aspects of critical race theory. He believes that racism is a pervasive-- and a permanent --aspect of American society. Read 1. He believes that the legal system is a means of promoting a system of racial subordination--even, or perhaps especially, when it makes claims to objectivity and neutrality. Read 2. He is deeply critical of the strategies and goals of the traditional civil rights movement--of which he used to be a part. And he insists that law must take into account the experiences of minorities, which he attempts to explicate through dialogues and stories.

Is anyone in the least surprised that the same man who was BFF with unrepentant anti-American terrorists or who sat in the pews of a vile reverse racist for 20 years would embrace Critical Race Theory and Dr. Bell? And is anyone surprised that no administration in history has been so race-centric? Is anyone surprised that Obama, who campaigned on healing the racial divide, is actually intent on promoting the canard of wide spread racism and protecting, if not actually expanding, the racial spoils system?

Let's conclude with Dr. Thomas Sowell's thoughts on Derrick Bell from 1990:

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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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From Our Pockets To Far Left Activist Groups - Democrat Corruption At Work

That stench of corruption you smell is most likely the odor emanating from Obama Administration and Attorney General Eric Holder's Office. At least a portion of what you are smelling is how the Democrats are funneling tax dollars and bank fines to far left community activist organizations - for these organization to then in turn use in support of Democrats. It is as corrupt a practice as you will find in any banana republic.

It works like this. Democrats pass a law, take Dodd Frank for example, which could also reasonably be called the ACORN Full Employment Act. In it, the Democrats specify that a portion of our tax dollars are to be used to fund local organizations, ostensibly to conduct education and counseling of minorities or the elderly on financial matters. The government than enters into a multi-year contract with one of the many far left activist organizations for millions of dollars. A variety of far left organizations wholly survive on our tax dollars through this scam, the most infamous being, until their recent dissolution, ACORN.  It is completely legal.  It is utterly corrupt.  And because of contractual obligations, the Democrats are able to keep this scam going even during periods of Republican control of Congress.

But that is not the only method by which Democrats funnel millions in funds to partisan left wing groups. A variant on the above theme is for the Justice Department to direct that banks owing fines for "race discrimination" have to pay a portion of the fines directly to whatever private radical left organization the Justice Department directs. This too is ostensibly justified on the grounds of educating minorities.  The difference here, as the IBD article below makes clear, is that the left are on far shakier legal grounds when going this route.

Just as an aside, these shakedowns of banks for "racism" in lending practices are precisely what led to our economic meltdown in 2008 by destroying credit standards. Invariably in these cases, no single act of racial discrimination is ever proven to have occurred. Rather a bank is held liable if its lending practices show a disparate impact on minorities. That means that statistically, a bank did not make enough loans to minorities - irrespective of how colorblind the bank's lending standards are, irrespective of its outreach to minorities, and indeed, irrespective of whether it statistically rejected more applications from whites than minorities. It is a travesty. This use of disparate impact theory was held, for all intents and purposes, unlawful by the Supreme Court in the employment context in the pivotal 2010 Ricci v. Destafano case. It should be unlawful in all contexts. There is no place for racism in our society, but the disparate impact theory doesn't punish racism, it punishes institutions for results wholly irrespective of actual racism and thus it deeply distorts our economy.

At any rate, back to the topic at hand. It is the Justice Department funneling fines to left wing organizations that is rearing its ugly head today. This from IBD:

Last week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith fired off a three-page letter to Attorney General Eric Holder warning that his recent punishment of Bank of America's mortgage unit seemed political. In fact, he may have abused his power.

As IBD first reported Jan. 4, 'BofA Must Pay Excess Settlement Funds To Acorn Clones," the $335 million lending-bias deal requires BofA to fork over a chunk of the payout to leftist groups not connected to the suit.

The unusual term is part of a secret Justice program to redistribute millions in settlement cash to third parties instead of alleged victims.

Critics told IBD it's a "political backdoor" to subsidize Democrat-tied bank shakedown groups. . . .

Under the order, excess funds will be handed to groups that "provide education, counseling and other assistance to low-income and minority borrowers."

The corrupt group, [ACORN,] which has re-emerged under other names after coming under investigation in 2009, continues to receive federal funds. Acorn Housing Corp. got some $700,000 in federal money after changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America.

Last year, Holder also ordered two AIG-owned banks to pay a minimum of $1 million to "qualified organizations" that help "African-American borrowers."

More recently, he ordered C&F Mortgage Corp. of Virginia to reward such groups. As of 2010, some $7.6 million was waiting to be handed out from his unsupervised grant program. Recipients aren't restricted in how they use the money. In 2008, Acorn bankrolled get-out-the-vote operations for Obama.

Justice would not provide a complete list of approved nonprofits, but a spokeswoman told IBD the National Urban League and Operation Hope are eligible for cash from the AIG case. Urban League has lobbied to water down credit standards. Operation Hope founder John Bryant serves on Obama's financial advisory council.

Smith demands that Holder furnish a full list of "qualified organizations," along with an audit of payments. Hearings are in order if his response is unsatisfactory.

Hats off to IBD for following up on this like a dog with a bone and getting the Republicans in congress to finally move off their posteriors.  Nothing that I am aware of authorizes the Justice Department to direct that fines otherwise payable to the government be directed to non-party organizations.

I am waiting for the day when a financial institution finally appeals the use of disparate impact theory in lending to the Supreme Court. This is social engineering at its worst, it was the "but for" cause of the 2008 economic crash and our continuing economic woes, and yet the Obama administration and the Holder Justice Department are pushing it harder than ever before. It is setting us on a second course for disaster.

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Eric Holder & "Voting Correctly"

To listen to Attorney General Eric Holder tell it, Republican minimalist efforts to insure the integrity of the vote are unnecessary and motivated purely by racism. And yet:

[In upstate New York,] a widespread investigation . . . has implicated eight Democrats, including county and city elected officials and party operatives [for vote fraud]. Four defendants have already pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, and what has already unfolded exposes just how easy it could be for political insiders to illegally manipulate the electoral system.

Voters told Fox News they never filled out absentee ballot applications for the 2009 Working Families Party primary, and were later stunned to learn the applications were, in fact, turned in to the Board of Elections, with ballots cast in their names. Democratic candidates routinely try to secure the Working Families electoral line to obtain more votes in the general election. The party was associated with the now-defunct community group ACORN.

"Jackals prey upon the weakest member of the herd. That's what happened here," LoPorto's attorney Michael Feit said of the guilty pleas in which former officials admitted forging ballot applications and submitting them as legitimate votes. Feit concedes "there is no question" that someone tried to steal the election. "It is awful, it's despicable, it's terrible," he added. . . .

Two veteran Democratic political operatives in Troy said voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections, and faking absentee ballots was commonplace.

Anthony DeFiglio, a Democratic Committeeman who pleaded guilty to falsifying business records, told state police investigators that such fraud is actually "an ongoing scheme and it occurs on both sides of the aisle. The people who are targeted live in low-income housing and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions... What appears as a huge conspiracy to nonpolitical persons is really a normal political tactic."

Anthony Renna, another longtime Democratic operative and party committeeman, admitted to forging an absentee ballot application. He said the process of handing in forged ballots and fake votes ensures that "ballots are voted correctly."

"I knew that the actual voters had not voted the ballots or signed the envelopes, but that did not concern me. I am not the ballot police," Renna said in a statement to police. "I have been present when 'ballots were voted correctly' by party operatives. Voted correctly is a term used for a forged application or ballot." . . .

Tell me, is there any other way to interpret the left's war on insuring the integrity of the vote than that they want to insure, in the upcoming election, that the ballots are voted correctly?

And what makes this particularly despicable, in my eyes at least, is that they are using the race card to justify it.  A lot of people died to insure that blacks could vote vote and that their vote counted.  It seems that our modern day race hustlers have come full circle.

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Holder Playing A Devalued Race Card

This from the Daily Caller:

Attorney General Eric Holder accused his growing chorus of critics of racist motivations in a Sunday interview published in the New York Times. When reached by The Daily Caller Monday morning, the Department of Justice provided no evidence to support the attorney general’s claims.

Holder said some unspecified faction — what he refers to as the “more extreme segment” — is driven to criticize both him and President Barack Obama due to the color of their skin. Holder did not appear to elaborate on who he considered to make up the “more extreme segment.”

“This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said, according to the Times. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

Whomever said that the Constitution is the last refuge of the scoundrel had it wrong. Its the use of the race card.

In truth, probably the greatest contribution that the Obama Administration has made to America has been the devaluing of the race card to the point that it is now largely worthless. There was a day when the race card trumped all - when playing the race card would send one's critics scurrying for cover. It grossly distorted our political system for decades. Those days are over. Holder is, at best, incompetent. The fact that he is black is only incidental, and should play no role whatsoever in his treatment. Indeed, is there anyone in America who could possibly think that the charges being raised against Holder have even the smallest iota of basis in racism?

Holder needs to be called to account for making this charge, that it is the color of his skin rather than his incompetence and bias for which he is being called to account. I really want to see Issa go after him on this. I want to see Holder justify his claim. I want to hear Holder justify special treatment on account of his skin color. It is far beyond time that the race card be challenged in all public forums.

Update: Rep. Allen West has weighed in on the above issue:

Florida Republican Rep. Allen West told The Daily Caller on Monday that Attorney General Eric Holder’s use of the race card as a way to attack those who are criticizing him is “reprehensible.”

“I think this is absolutely the last card in the deck, and that shows how weak their ground is,” West said in a phone interview. “But, what that means is they want to make white individuals afraid of continuing to put the pressure on Eric Holder because they don’t want to be seen as racist, and that is something that we have got to move beyond.”

Amen.

(H/T This Ain't Hell)

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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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Holder Tap Dances Fast & Furiously

If you haven't seen it, do click over to Right Scoop to watch the explosive questioning of Atty. Gen. Eric Holder by Rep. Daryl Issa during today's Fast and Furious hearings.

The point Issa makes, that there have been NO e-mails released from the Atty Gen. himself relevant to Fast & Furious, is simply atrocious. Holder tries to tap dance around it and, in the end, says that some e-mails "might" have been withheld that were part of other ongoing investigations. That is an answer of supreme bull shit - as is any attempt to use the IG investigation as an excuse not to produce Holder's own e-mails. I swear to God, this administration truly is a thugocracy operating outside of the law.

A second point is also worthy of note - Holder's dual incompetence and ignorance defense, paraphrased as "I know nothing, and neither did my direct subordinates because, when they were briefed on this operation, they weren't briefed on any of the tactical specifics and didn't ask," simply doesn't pass the smell test. The particulars of this operation were straightforward, and it does not seem in any way possible to brief on the operation without explaining the specifics. It is long past time to get Eric Holder under oath, along the subordinates we know received briefings on Fast and Furious, and get some answers.

Lastly, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who repeatedly interrupted the questioning in order to buy time for Eric Holder, should have been removed from the Chamber. Hell, she is an abomination who should be censured by the House.

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Fast & Furious Gun Control

I always thought that the only reasonable explanation  for Fast & Furious was as a back door effort to promote gun control, but I never thought anyone in the government would be so incredibly stupid as to actually make a record of it.  Silly me.

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Krauthammer On Obama's Complete Withdrawal From The War Of Ideas

Charles Krauthammer used his Wasington Post column last week to address the Obama administration's refusal to identify those with whom we are at war - what should be step one if we are to engage in and win the war on terror. This from Mr. Krauthammer:

The Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber, the Times Square attacker. On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.): Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?

Attorney General Eric Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. . . .

Smith: Okay, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people --

Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.

Potentially, mind you. This went on until the questioner gave up in exasperation.

A similar question arose last week in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad:

"One has to understand where I'm coming from . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier."

Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as SoA: Soldier of Allah.

Holder's avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism.

Instead, President Obama's National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy -- how else do you define those seeking your destruction? -- "a loose network of violent extremists." But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don't, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences. . . .

I am glad to see a major columnist finally address this issue. It is simply amazing to me that in the U.S., nine years after 9-11, we still have our government pretending that Islam generally is unrelated to terrorism, let alone the real facts, that it is Wahhabi/Salafi Islam and the sects it has heavilly influenced, including Khomei Shia'ism, that are the driving forces behind Islamic terrorism. I have been driving this point home for years, including most recently in National Security At The End Of Obama's First Year:

The physical war on terror is necessary to stop the immediate attacks. But it is in the war of ideas that the true battle lies, for if we do not stop the radicalization of Muslims, then the war on terror will never end. . . .

The threshold issue in the war of ideas is to identify who, as a group, constitutes “radicalized Muslims.” Islam, like Christianity, is subdivided into numerous different sects, many of which, such as Sufi for example, are peaceful and counsel coexistence. Individually, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world, most of whom would make good citizens, good friends, good neighbors and good family members in the West. Only a portion of them become “radicalized” whether as members of al Qaeda or some of the other radical Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and Jamat-I-Islami to name but a few. Those who belong to these groups do in fact share a common thread – virtually all are adherents to the Salafi/Wahhabi school of Islam or a school, such as Deobandi, that has been heavily influenced in all relevant respects by Salafism. . . .

. . . In the war of ideas, one of the most important steps that Obama could take would be to publicly shine a light on Salafism, both as the feeder for radical Islam and for the barbarity of some of its dogma. That would go very far to starting the type of discussion that could actually bring some semblance of evolution and peaceful change to Salafism. Ignoring Salafism - which, according to ex-CIA agent Bob Baer we have done ever since the 1970's when the Saudi's first began to buy influence in the American body politic - allows it to metastasize in the dark. And it is metastasizing at rapid speed today on the back of Saudi petrodollars. That is a recipe for disaster.

(links ommitted)

This is a critical issue that will mean losses in American blood and gold until we begin to engage in the war of ideas. The tack taken by the Obama administration is 180 degrees of wrong.

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Michael Mukasey - Shovel Ready

Michael Mukasey was the U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009 and the presiding judge at initial proceedings against Jose Padilla in 2002. He appears in the pages of the Washington Post today to shovel away the incredible amounts of bull excreta piled high onto the counterterrorism issue by Attorney General Eric Holder and Whitehouse Counterterrorism Advisor John Brennan. Specifically, Mukasey rebuts many of the outrageous claims made by Eric Holder in his letter to Mitch McConnell and the equally outragous charges made by John Brennan in his Sunday morning show appearance and his USA Today opinion piece. This from Mr. Mukasey:

. . . When Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb concealed in his undershorts, he committed a crime; no doubt about that. He could not have acted alone; no doubt about that either. The bomb was not the sort of infernal device readily produced by someone of his background, and he quickly confirmed that he had been trained and sent by al-Qaeda in Yemen.

What to do and who should do it? It was entirely reasonable for the FBI to be contacted and for that agency to take him into custody. But contrary to what some in government have suggested, that Abdulmutallab was taken into custody by the FBI did not mean, legally or as a matter of policy, that he had to be treated as a criminal defendant at any point. Consider: In 1942, German saboteurs landed on Long Island and in Florida. That they were eventually captured by the FBI did not stop President Franklin Roosevelt from directing that they be treated as unlawful enemy combatants. They were ultimately tried before a military commission in Washington and executed. Their status had nothing to do with who held them, and their treatment was upheld in all respects by the Supreme Court.

. . . Guidelines put in place in 2003 and revised in September 2008 "do not require that the FBI's information gathering activities be differentially labeled as 'criminal investigations,' 'national security investigations,' or 'foreign intelligence collections,' or that the categories of FBI personnel who carry out investigations be segregated from each other based on the subject areas in which they operate. Rather, all of the FBI's legal authorities are available for deployment in all cases to which they apply to protect the public from crimes and threats to the national security and to further the United States' foreign intelligence objectives." . . .

Contrary to what the White House homeland security adviser and the attorney general have suggested, if not said outright, not only was there no authority or policy in place under the Bush administration requiring that all those detained in the United States be treated as criminal defendants, but relevant authority was and is the opposite. The Supreme Court held in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that "indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized" but also said in the same case that detention for the purpose of neutralizing an unlawful enemy combatant is permissible and that the only right of such a combatant -- even if he is a citizen, and Abdulmutallab is not -- is to challenge his classification as such a combatant in a habeas corpus proceeding. This does not include the right to remain silent or the right to a lawyer, but only such legal assistance as may be necessary to file a habeas corpus petition within a reasonable time. That was the basis for my ruling in Padilla v. Rumsfeld that, as a convenience to the court and not for any constitutionally based reason, he had to consult with a lawyer for the limited purpose of filing a habeas petition, but that interrogation need not stop.

What of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," who was warned of his Miranda rights and prosecuted in a civilian court? He was arrested in December 2001, before procedures were put in place that would have allowed for an outcome that might have included not only conviction but also exploitation of his intelligence value, if possible. His case does not recommend the same procedure in Abdulmutallab's.

The struggle against Islamist extremists is unlike any other war we have fought. Osama bin Laden and those like-minded intend to make plain that our government cannot keep us safe, and have sought our retreat from the Islamic world and our relinquishment of the idea that human rather than their version of divine law must control our activities. This movement is not driven by finite grievances or by poverty. The enemy does not occupy a particular location or have an infrastructure that can be identified and attacked but, rather, lives in many places and purposely hides among civilian populations. The only way to prevail is to gather intelligence on who is doing what where and to take the initiative to stop it.

There was thus no legal or policy compulsion to treat Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant, at least initially, and every reason to treat him as an intelligence asset to be exploited promptly. The way to do that was not simply to have locally available field agents question him but, rather, to get in the room people who knew about al-Qaeda in Yemen, people who could obtain information, check that information against other available data and perhaps get feedback from others in the field before going back to Abdulmutallab to follow up where necessary, all the while keeping secret the fact of his cooperation. Once his former cohorts know he is providing information, they can act to make that information useless.

Nor is it an answer to say that Abdulmutallab resumed his cooperation even after he was warned of his rights. He did that after five weeks, when his family was flown here from Nigeria. The time was lost, and with it possibly useful information. Disclosing that he had resumed talking only compounded the problem by letting his former cohorts know that they had better cover their tracks.

Many of the points Mukasey raises above I have raised in prior posts, including the two posts I link in the opening paragraph of this post. Regardless, the bottom line is that the Obama counterterrorism effort is a farce. The only thing more farcial is watching Holder and Brennan go on the offensive, attempting to claim that using the criminal justice system to gain wartime intelligence is superior and that, in any event, it was necessary. These people will get Americans killed.

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We Are All Al Qaeda Sympathizers Now

Apparently, taking issue with the Obama Administration's threee-stoogesesque counterterrorism effort is now tantamount to supporting al Qaeda. Yes, yes, it's true. That according to John Brennan, Obama's counterterrorism advisor, who tells us in the USA Today that "[p]olitically motivated criticism and unfounded fear-mongering only serve the goals of al-Qaeda." Given that the Christmas Day attempted bombing failed to kill hundreds of Americans solely because of jihadi incompetence and that every intelligence chief expects with certainty another al Qaeda effort at a mass casulaty attack in the U.S. in the next six months, it would seem Mr. Brennan has a rather unique definition of "fear mongering." Apparently anything other than blind, unquestioning faith in the Dear Leader's ability to keep us safe based on counterintuitive policies is now "fear mongering."

Be that as it may, the Obama administration is in a full court press to make it seem that the administration acted responsibly when it gave Miranda rights and a lawyer to the Christmas Day Undiebomber, Adbulmutallab, within hours of his arrest, after less than two hours of interrogation, and without notifying or receiving input from the heads of our nation's intelligence and counterterrorism entities. It truly is trying to make chicken salad from the vilest of chicken excreta.

Over the weekend, Brennan appeared on Meet The Press, claiming that the fact Republicans were briefly notified that Abdulmutallab was in custody of the FBI and talking, that these same people should have immediately understood that Abdulmutallab would soon mirandized and given a lawyer. That is a real leap in logic.

One would expect that a terrorist captured in the U.S. to be taken into custody by the FBI. But we are a nation at war as the result of Congressional authorization. We can lawfully hold Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant, and thus the decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab was certainly not required. The mere fact that FBI standard operating procedures require Miranda Warnings when capturing a common criminal does abosolutely nothing to negate those facts. Mirandizing Abdulmutallab was a choice, and to claim it an inexorable logical step to be divined from the mere fact that he was taken into FBI custody is facetious.

But that is hardly the only disingenouos statement made by John Brennan of late. His op-ed in the USA Today is a string of them.

Immediately after the failed Christmas Day attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was thoroughly interrogated . . .

One, possibly two sessions of interrogation lasting a grand total of under two hours and conducted by local FBI agents without speicalized background in the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda constituties "thoroughly interrogated?" How dumb does this joker think we are?

Senior counterterrorism officials from the White House, the intelligence community and the military were all actively discussing this case before he was Mirandized and supported the decision to charge him in criminal court.

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't every one of the heads of our intelligence and counterintelligence agencies testify before Congress that they were never consulted about Abdulmutallab prior to his being mirandized. And didn't AG Eric Holder, a man who has only an ancillary role in counterintelligence, state that the decision to mirandize Abdulmutallab was his and his alone? It would seem that Mr. Brennan is making things up as he goes along.

The most important breakthrough occurred after Abdulmutallab was read his rights, a long-standing FBI policy that was reaffirmed under Michael Mukasey, President Bush's attorney general. The critics who want the FBI to ignore this long-established practice also ignore the lessons we have learned in waging this war: Terrorists such as Jose Padilla and Saleh al-Mari did not cooperate when transferred to military custody, which can harden one's determination to resist cooperation.

This is utterly ridiculous. It is only through treating terrorists as common criminals that we can hope to gain intelligence? Did Padilla and al-Mari, who were both taken into FBI custody initially, cooperate while in FBI custody? What about KSM, whose first request upon being taken into custody was for his lawyer? What about the five weeks lost in gathering intel when Abdulmutallab was given a lawyer?

It's naive to think that transferring Abdulmutallab to military custody would have caused an outpouring of information. There is little difference between military and civilian custody, other than an interrogator with a uniform. The suspect gets access to a lawyer, and interrogation rules are nearly identical.

Let's see, under the military, Abdulmutallab would have had no right not to answer questions, nor a right to have a lawyer present during questioning. We would be under no compulsion to forgo interrogation when Abdulmutallab decided he didn't want to talk any more. And indeed, his sole recourse to a lawyer would have been to challenge his status as an enemy combatant . . . somehow I find those factors to be pretty substantive. And as to the interrogation rules, that is kind of like the story of the boy that killed his parents then asked for leniency from the Court because he was now an orphan. We have known for eight years that the interrogation tactics used by the police - and in 2002 mirrored by the military - were insufficient to induce most terrorists to talk. That is why the CIA developed enhanced interrorgation techniques - the same one's that Obama took from our inventory with a stroke of the pen a year ago. For Brennan now to use that as a reason to treat Abdulmutallab as a common criminal is mind numbing.

Cries to try terrorists only in military courts lack foundation. There have been three convictions of terrorists in the military tribunal system since 9/11, and hundreds in the criminal justice system — including high-profile terrorists such as Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarius Moussaoui.

This paragraph from Brennan is significantly disingengous and deceptive in equal measure. There have been three convictions in the military tribunal system because of, one, court challenges during the Bush administration, and once those were finally concluded, the fact that Obama stopped all tribunal proceedings. Further, we are under no compulsion to prosecute anyone. Under the law of war, we can hold all captured enemy combatants until the conclusion of hostilities. Lastly, this claim to "hundreds" of convictions in the "criminal justice system," that is mystifying. As Byron York points out, the administration keeps making this claim, but they have yet to back it up with any facts.

This administration's efforts have disrupted dozens of terrorist plots against the homeland and been responsible for killing and capturing hundreds of hard-core terrorists, including senior leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond — far more than in 2008.

Much of this statement is simply unverifiable. To the extent it is based on an increased tempo of drone attacks - that is merely the continuation a Bush policy from 2008. As to captured individuals, considering we do not even have a High Value Interrogtion Team yet constituted, I'd really like to see the facts underlying that claim and just what we are doing with them.

Brennan concludes this piece of fiction with the statement, "We need no lectures about the fact that this nation is at war." There is no question in my mind that, unless there is intercession by a higher power, we will see Americans killed by terrorist acts over the next three years. And when the next mass casualty event comes, particularly if it is out of Yemen, I expect that the entire population of the U.S. will be providing the lectures to this administration.

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