Top 10 Eric Holder scandals (to date)

Eric Holder, please step down, go away and don't come back.

Here's a list of the Top 10 scandals associated with Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States, just because we need a reminder that the current scandal is not the only one.  If you aren't familiar with the specific scandals, links have been included to details of each scandal.  The question is, with 10 scandals associated with the Attorney General, why is he still in that role?

(10) The Holy Land Foundation. (2009-2012) Never heard of it?  Most people haven't but it has to do with the financing of terrorism.

Members of the House Judiciary Committee on oversight on Thursday called on U.S. Attorney General to provide documents and evidence relating to the landmark Holy Land Foundation trial – the largest terrorism financing trial in U.S. history.

The committee made a nearly identical request more than a year ago, however, the documents were never made available by Holder or his department, lawmakers say.

Following court proceedings, the Holy Land Foundation was found guilty of providing millions of dollars in funding to Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations in 2008. Named as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the trial were the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Both have documented ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood…which then have ties to the Obama administration, but I digress.

Lawmakers, like Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), are again asking to see the evidence presented in that trial, a request that Holder does not seem to be in a hurry to fulfill. In an impassioned speech, the congressman challenged Holder to uphold his oath to “justice.”

(9) Perjury (2013) Tied into other elements of the list, it appears Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States, lied in testimony. There's nothing wrong with that if you are a Democrat; Bill Clinton set the standard.

...Pay particular attention to this statement made by Eric Holder during sworn testimony last week before Congress:

In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.

...The problem for Holder is that we now know he personally signed off on the order to get a subpoena for Fox News’ James Rosen’s phone records. The entire basis of the warrant for those records relies on Rosen being a potential conspirator and therefore potentially prosecuted.

...I’m sure Holder and his allies will say that they never intended to prosecute Rosen, but that’s 1) not the point and 2) even worse. If that’s their defense, they knowingly lied to the judge who would, hopefully, reject the request if they admitted it was just a fishing expedition for information.

They’re stuck. Either he (by signing the request for the records) lied to the judge or Holder lied directly to Congress.

This guy again?

(8) Contempt of Congress (2012)  Note to Mr. Holder - you are the Attorney General.  You are not supposed to perjure yourself or get yourself held in contempt of Congress.  Again, related to another scandal in this list (proving that when Holder gets in trouble, he lies), Eric Holder demonstrates he clearly does not respect Congress.

The House has voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over his failure to turn over documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal, the first time Congress has taken such a dramatic move against a sitting Cabinet official.

The vote was 255-67, with 17 Democrats voting in support of a criminal contempt resolution, which authorizes Republicans leaders to seek criminal charges against Holder. This Democratic support came despite a round of behind-the-scenes lobbying by senior White House and Justice officials - as well as pressure from party leaders - to support Holder.

Two Republicans, Reps. Steve LaTourette (Ohio) Scott Rigell (Va.), voted against the contempt resolution.

Another civil contempt resolution, giving the green light for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to sue the Justice Department to get the Fast and Furious documents, passed by a 258-95 margin.

(7) Drone Strikes (2009-2013)  Holder believes that it's okay to drone strike American citizens.  I understand the need to get terrorists.  But for an Attorney General to not care about the rights of actual citizens while being concerned about giving civilian trials to terrorists (yes, another scandal in this list) just seems like severely misplaced priorities.

Holder literally believes the U.S. government has the right to assassinate anyone, including U.S. citizens, without ever having to explain to anyone why they did it. As Obama continues to add names to his "kill list," Holder remains his most stalwart defender. According to Justice Department memos, the President (and any president that comes after him) can kill you just because he decides it would be a good idea.

The Constitution, of course, guarantees that no-one can be subject to punishment without due process. Holder famously redefined the term, saying "'Due process' and 'judicial process' are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security." Never mind that this flies completely counter to both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution...

(6) HSBC Money Laundering  need not be prosecuted. Seriously?  Forget contempt of Congress, this guys has contempt for his own job.  He's taken to task for it by the very liberal New York Times no less:

...Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, asked for more information on why federal and state authorities chose not to indict HSBC after it acknowledged laundering money for Mexican drug cartels, helping rogue states avoid international sanctions and working closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorist organizations.

Mr. Holder said: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

It’s nice and all that Mr. Holder cares about the stability of the global financial system, but that is not Mr. Holder’s job. As attorney general he is the country’s top law enforcement officer, and in that capacity he should prosecute criminals and criminal institutions.

As we wrote in an editorial after the no-indict decision, “when prosecutors choose not to prosecute to the full extent of the law in a case as egregious as this, the law itself is diminished. The deterrence that comes from the threat of criminal prosecution is weakened, if not lost.”

(5) Civilian Trials for Terrorists Remember when Eric Holder was all for trying terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the four other al Qaeda planners of 9/11 in a civilian trial in New York?

Attorney General Eric Holder, who dropped this legal bomb on New York yesterday, called his decision to move their trial on war crimes from a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay to American soil "the toughest" he has had to make. Other words come to mind. For starters, intellectually and morally confused, dangerous and political to a fault.

This decision befits President Obama's rushed and misguided announcement on his second day in office that he would close Gitmo within a year. This was before the Administration had thought through what to do with the 215 prisoners there, though it did win him applause in Europe and on the American left. Yesterday's decision rids Gitmo of these meddlesome detainee cases in order to speed up this entirely political shutdown.

Thankfully it ended up not happening, but it was certainly scandalous at the time of the announcement. Holder ended up backing down.

(4) Non-prosecution of Black Panthers.  When Black Panthers stood outside a polling station to intimidate white voters from entering to place their votes in 2008. They were charged for their actions.  But they were not prosecuted.  In fact, Eric Holder apparently insisted they not be prosecuted.  Via Western Journalism:

A former Justice Department attorney who quit his job to protest the Obama administration’s handling of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case is accusing Attorney General Eric Holder of dropping the charges for racially motivated reasons.

J. Christian Adams, now an attorney in Virginia and a conservative blogger for Pajamas Media, says he and the other Justice Department lawyers working on the case were ordered to dismiss it.

“I mean we were told, ‘Drop the charges against the New Black Panther Party,’” Adams told Fox News, adding that political appointees Loretta King, acting head of the civil rights division, and Steve Rosenbaum, an attorney with the division since 2003, ordered the dismissal.

(3) America, "nation of cowards" A scandal that does not involve the courts, Eric Holder actually referred to America as a nation of cowards:

In his speech, Holder expressed a brazen skepticism of the concept of America as a “melting pot,” seeing that as a form of self-deception. Despite the achievements of the civil rights struggle, Holder argued, racism and segregation had in some ways increased:

Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.

Holder’s contradictory ideas—celebrating “positive” race consciousness while decrying continued segregation—are a tempered though familiar version of Bell’s radical idea that the civil rights movement had, in many ways, entrenched white supremacy in America.

(2) Fast and Furious  Since people died as a result of this horribly bad idea, arguably it should be the number one Eric Holder scandal. This is Eric Holder's Benghazi - it resulted in American deaths (not to mention numerous Mexican deaths). 

The "Fast & Furious" investigation was catalyzed on December 14, 2010, when U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a shootout with Mexican cartel members in a remote Arizona canyon. The bullet that killed Terry came from a gun that was part of the multi-agency government operation called "Fast & Furious." In addition to Terry, hundreds of U.S. and Mexican citizens have been killed by cartel members wielding one of the more than 2,000 weapons paid for by government funds and sent to Mexico during the 2009-2011 "Fast & Furious" operation.

...Brian Terry died in December 2010, fatally wounded by a gun that was purchased by an ATF-semi-supervised "Fast & Furious" gun runner in January 2010, with money the FBI gave him in November 2009. None of those events could have been authorized by Mike Mukasey, the last Attorney General under George W. Bush; both left office January 20, 2009.

"Fast & Furious" is all about Eric Holder, who was Attorney General during all three of the Terry-related events, and who has denied knowledge just as Nixon's campaign chair and Attorney General John Mitchell did about Watergate from 1972 to the end of his life. 

Eric Holder really could be Obama's version of John Mitchell, who went from war hero and "Top Cop" to felon in disgrace.

(1) Press prosecution (AP, and Fox) After going after AP for phone records, the scandal that could take down Eric Holder expanded to a focus on a Fox News reporter.  Who knows how much deeper it goes.  But because this scandal has grown to the point where even many liberals are calling for his resignation and it might result in him losing his job, this will eventually rank as Eric Holder's biggest scandal.

What exactly happened? First, the Associated Press scandal hit the news:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. 

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls. 

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters. 

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

But the story expanded beyond that and gave Holder little room to extricate himself from his previous misleading statements:

In his speech at the National Defense University Thursday, President Obama said, “Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs. Our focus must be on those who break the law.”

Maybe it’s time for the president to have a heart-to-heart with his attorney general, Eric Holder. 

NBC News is reporting that Mr. Holder “signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a ‘possible co-conspirator’ in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails,” per NBC conversations with a law enforcement official. 

In the case of the government’s subpoena for the phone records of as many as 100 Associated Press editors and writers, Mr Holder left the decision for a deputy to make after he recused himself. 

But if NBC News is right, then the attorney general himself green-lighted the FBI to seek a subpoena for Mr. Rosen’s private emails in the spring of 2010.

With so many scandals, averaging about 2 per year so far, Eric Holder is not up to the job as Attorney General. Not only does he need to resign, he needs to be prosecuted himself for some of these.  

Important happenings

Coming into the home stretch of the 2012 election cycle, and hopefully the Obama presidency, I've suddenly  but not unexpectedly, gotten pretty busy with a tense work situation.  Consequently I've had far less time over the past week or so to blog about some pretty important events and situations than I'd really hoped to be able to discuss.  Nevertheless it's important to point out for the less informed among the American electorate, so I'm still striving to do my part.  That's true even though readers here are typically very well informed and the uninformed voters don't know this blog exists among the 150 million other blogs on the planet, a third of which I'm sure are probably odes to Justin Beiber.

Here are the recent critical events that I'm talking about, squeezed into one post.

So many things wrong with this I don't know where to start

Politico has a story today about the Republican pizza store owner who was visited by Obama and is now facing a boycott of his pizza restaurant.  There are so many things wrong with this story, I don't know where to begin in my critique, so let me just jump right in:

The owner of a Florida pizza shop says people are boycotting his business because he bear-hugged President Barack Obama on Sunday.

“People are saying a lot of bad things and boycotting my restaurant,” Scott Van Duzer, 46, told POLITICO. “There’s no middle line anymore, and that’s exactly what’s wrong with our country right now.”

A new message - Restoring trust in government

That has to be the message that the Republican party must adapt for 2014, 2016 and perhaps beyond.

The Democrat party is the party of big government.  The Republican party is supposed to have been the party of limited government. They haven't been entirely successful at that message, and worse still at explaining why limited government is in the best interest of people of all creeds and ethnicities.  They have failed to fully capitalize on the notion that the party of big government has become the party of Big Brother.

Just trust me and you'll be okay, alright? Uh, I think I'll pass on that.

The flaws of big intrusive government are staring America in the face.  Heck, they are slapping America in the face. Big government invites fascism but people just aren't getting it.  

Still if the message is not getting through we have two things we can change - the messenger or the message. Since there is no Ronald Reagan on the horizon who can cut through the morass of biased liberal media, and take the case to the American people in a straightforward and engaging manner.  What's worse, is that conservatives can't even agree on who the messenger should be.  That leaves the message.  And the message needs a face lift.

We conservatives can all agree that government is an out of control behemoth.  But how we take that message to 'centrist' voters can be done far more effectively by simply tweaking how we say it.  And now is an extremely opportune time to do it. With the scandals tripping over each other for headlines - IRS favoritism, NSA telephone and email eavesdropping on everyone, the deaths and cover up of government ineptitude in Benghazi and the Fast and Furious debacles, and the government's snooping and potential persecution of news agencies and individuals - there is no better time to plant the seeds of a new message.

The message needed is simple.

We must restore America's trust in government.

That's pretty simple.  It appeals (or should) across party lines.  It doesn't say we need to reduce the size of government, but it does not preclude it. It acknowledges that mistakes have been made but does not need to affix blame.  It's forward looking and has a ring to it that hints of change (and hope). It implies that bipartisanship is needed but does not mandate it.

The same points could be made for other messages, certainly, but it allows a lot of flexibility while not being so vague as hope and change as to not address any specific problem.  Conservatives know restoring trust in government means that bureaucratic departments must be answerable to a watchdog and ultimately the

American people. Liberals on the other hand would be grateful for the transparency that Obama promised but has steadfastly avoided.

As a political point, the message is simple, memorable and not even something Obama could argue against except by saying there is no need to restore trust in government I/we are already trustworthy.  Really? That's a head-in-the-sand response and not one likely to carry any weight with most voters but particularly younger voters who seem to have a libertarian bent to their liberalism or conservatism.  Further on the political front it makes a great foil to Hillary Clinton and where "what does it matter" defense of the administration's bungling and cover-up on the September 11th Benghazi attack.

Carpe Diem GOP, carpe diem.

It's hard to be a security hawk these days.

OMG, I've gone hippie! Or not.

Back in 2003, conservatives rallied around president Bush when the decision to go into Iraq was made.  Even many Democrats who later disavowed denied their initial position rallied behind the decision.  Back then, so close after the events of 9/11, it was easy to believe that Iraq and Afghanistan were necessary endeavors.  In fact it was hard to argue that they were not. But after a decade of war, war-weariness has set in for much of the country.  In addition, there has been a diminishing rationale for the continued effort, especially in light of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.   What's a national security hawk to do? Give up on a robust national defense force? No.  Give up on the the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters?  Yes.  


There's a way to consolidate the GOP base and force an Obama stumble in one move - guess what it is.

2012 - Putting Obama on defense

Right.

The way to win an election, no matter who the GOP nominee turns out to be, is to not let the Obama campaign make this election cycle about the Republican candidate or allow the president to get traction on the notion that the recovery is underway finally and that Bush left a much worse mess than he realized. If the election becomes about the Republican nominee, Obama will win. If the president can make the case that the recovery is now kicking in (remember Recovery Summer in 2009 2010 2011?), then people will start to think that it took too long but the president was right, so we should now stay the course.

When Wealthy Liberals Abandon America

(Soft) Money talks.

The Internet can be a wonderful thing.  It used to be that when a news story broke without a lot of context, it was difficult to get the right sort of background and context to be able to understand the implications of the story. In fact, if there was a somewhat related story days, weeks or years before, you'd have to remember it and link the two points together - a pretty rare feat for most of us.  But that is not necessary any longer with the availability of information via the Internet.  Case in point - socialite Denise Rich.  Wait, who?  It turns out she's an Obama donor and tied to less than upstanding goings-on.

Is it bitter partisanship to dislike Obama personally?

Maybe it’s because I’m not evolved, but I dislike the president personally. I think I have good reason for that, but maybe I’m wrong. I’m not racist. I’m not a birther or a kook. I’m not looking to see him out of office by any means other than through an Electoral College victory by his opponent (the less-than-adorable Mitt Romney). I don’t wish him any ill or harm. But I don’t like Barack Obama personally and I think I have some pretty good reasons for that.

What Does $2.2 Trillion Buy You These Days?

Cap and Trade - the government counts it as revenue, but to the public it's a tax, and according to bill, "A “cap-and-trade” program would generate a total of $645.7 billion by 2019".  Then there's the $787 billion from the ARRA recovery clunker. And the $410 billion Omnibus bill that passed. And the roughly $1 trillion dollars to be spent on the health care reform bill if it ever passes.  All of that is coming out of your wallets.  Or in large part, more likely your children and grandchildren's wallets to pay back the Chinese with dollars that will require interest on top of it, with American dollars that will surely be devalued by that time.  No doubt the total amount will be more than doubled by the time it gets paid off, if ever.

But let's be unrealistically conservative and say that these costs are completely static.  They represent $2.843 trillion dollars in new costs to the American taxpayer in just 10 months on the job for the new Congress, Senate and President.  They must be proud. I say that because they seem to want to keep doing more. That works out to $284 billion dollars in new gouging of Americans PER MONTH so far. Or $9.5 billion PER DAY. President Bush at his worst created an unholy deficit of $400 billion.  We thought that was bad.

Gee America, I hope you're getting your money's worth.  Let's look only at the spending portion of that money - $2.2 trillion.

What could $2.2 trillion dollars do if spent in other ways?  Here's some back-of-the-napkin math.  Feel free to do some math of your own and contribute some ideas in the comments section.

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  It could pay for the entire Gross Domestic Product of Russia, with the Omnibus bill left over to spare.
  
  
  
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  China is building a high speed rail system (bullet trains) with a total length of track of 16,000 miles, for a cost of $300 billion.  For that price the President could have built 117,333 miles of track for high speed trains.  In China the project created 110,000 construction jobs - the U.S. job would create over 800,000 jobs.
  
  
  
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  Pay for NASA at it's historical budget rate, for the next 146 years.
  
  
  
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  Pay off (if that were possible) 38% of the public portion of the national debt as it stood in 2008
  
  
  
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  China's Three Gorges Dam cost anywhere from $25 billion (officially) to $75 billion (estimated).  The dam generates 18.2 million kilowatts of power.  At an average of  $50 billion For the money Obama has spent, the United States could have built 44 of these dams, providing over 800 million kilowatts of power for the country.  That is, assuming there were enough rivers to dam up like that. 
  
  
  
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  Alternatively, a nuclear power plant costs anywhere from $3 to $10 billion to build (estimates vary).  At the highest end of that scale, the country could build 220 nuclear power plants that generate say 837 MegaWatts (as in the case of Three Mile Island) each.  That represents 184,140 new Megawatts of power.  If a small city of 50,000 needs 3 MegaWatts per day, and the U.S. population is 306 million, the country apparently requires roughly 18,360 MW of power per day. That's one tenth of what could be produced by adding new nuclear power.
  
  
  
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  Based on Market Capitlization as at September 2008, the U.S. government could buy up 5.5% of all publicly traded companies in the world
  
  
  
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  Based on 2006 census data, purchase 10.8% of all real estate in the entire United States or 94% of all real estate in China.
  
  
  

That's just a few examples. How much oil drilling could the nation do?  How much of a national border fence or wall could be built along the Mexican border?  The point is that it is an enormous amount of money. It is beyond the scope of what is needed.  And because these new bills are coming fast and furious, there's no time to question any of them.  Just like none of them are likely to be well thought out.  But Rahm Emmanuel's theory of not letting a crisis go to waste is serving another Democrat purpose - it's keeping any reasonable questioning, any opposition groups from having time to evaluate the spending.  Each one is more egregious than the previous, so none get the attention they deserve.

Voters should be howling mad at this.

Does the liberal media protect Obama? Why yes.

So says Sharyl Attkisson, former CBS reporter, dishing dirt in her new book.  Attkinsson is no fan of the Republicans but she is more about finding the the truth than most.

Via the New York Post,

Calling herself “politically agnostic,” Attkisson, a five-time Emmy winner, says she simply follows the story, and the money, wherever it leads her...

She says the stories the media puts out are designed to fit an existing worldview.

Often they dream up stories beforehand and turn the reporters into “casting agents,” told “we need to find someone who will say . . .” that a given policy is good or bad. “We’re asked to create a reality that fits their New York image of what they believe,” she writes.

And that worldview infects the way they operate.

One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.” “And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way,” says Attkisson, “she might rewrite the script to label him a ‘right-wing’ analyst.”

And we're not talking small potatoes here either.

The administration, with the full cooperation of the media, has successfully turned “Benghazi” into a word associated with nutters, like “Roswell” or “grassy knoll,” but Attkisson notes that “the truth is that most of the damaging information came from Obama administration insiders. From government documents. From sources who were outraged by their own government’s behavior and what they viewed as a coverup.”

Similarly, though the major media can’t mention the Fast and Furious scandal without a world-weary eyeroll, Attkisson points out that the story led to the resignation of a US attorney and the head of the ATF and led President Obama to invoke for the first time “executive privilege” to stanch the flow of damaging information.

So if you are wondering why the GOP and conservatives are fighting an uphill battle, now you know why. But you probably weren't wondering that. If you are a conservative you already knew. And if you are a liberal, you still refuse to believe it.

But if you've ever wondered why the GOP keeps trying to win over the media when they won't change their opinion of conservatives, that's a valid concern. The GOP needs a different way to communicate with people that bypasses the media. But that's not news either.

Battle of the intellectual super powers

You heard it here first - the effort by the liberal mainstream media to pump up Mitt Romney's first debate victory is deliberate, and it's being done with the intent to aggrandize president Obama.  I know, you're reading that and thinking I'm about as bright a bulb as Joe Biden in this clip.

But hear me out. 

Eric Holder plays the panic card

I'm Alright Jack.

I guess it could be classified as a sub-category of the race card.  Eric Holder is busy ginning up fear among African American pastors in order to gin up fear among African American voters that their right to vote is under attack by conservative boogymen.

Via Politico;

Attorney General Eric Holder told a council of African American church leaders Wednesday that the "sacred" right to vote is under assault nationwide, with federal lawsuits and at least a dozen state laws that could hinder - or block – minorities’ access to the ballot box this fall.

"In my travels across this country, I’ve heard a consistent drumbeat of concern from citizens, who – often for the first time in their lives – now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up to one of our nation’s most noble ideals,” Holder said in a speech before the Council of Black Churches. The threats of legal assaults and lingering discrimination, he added, means that “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement now hang in the balance.”

As if to underscore the point, however, a voting rights group is worried that Holder and the Justice Department aren’t acting quickly enough to stop Florida’s Republican governor from continuing a purge of registered voters from the state’s rolls because they lack proof of U.S. citizenship.

Not only is that a spurious argument regarding voter disenfranchisement, both Holder and the Politico piece completely ignore the questionable tactic of getting churches to preach politics.  As Rush Limbaugh points out, they are doing an end run around IRS rules:

Representative Emanuel Cleaver (Democrat-Missouri), said, quote, "We will have representatives from nine denominations who actually pastor somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 million people, and we’re going to first of all equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501(c)(3) status with the IRS. In fact, we’re going to have the IRS administrator there, we’re going to have the Attorney General Eric Holder there, we’re going to have the lawyers’ organization from around the country, the ACLU -- all giving ministers guidance about what they can and cannot do."

They're gonna tell 'em just how close they can get to the line. They're probably gonna tell 'em how they can jump over the line a couple times. What's funny about this is Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson. These guys fund-raise from the pulpit! They pass the plate for campaign donations from the pulpit. It's been reported, but nobody does anything about it because nobody's got the guts to. Who wants to criticize black churches for being engaged in politics?

Indeed.

Churches get involved in politics fairly regularly.  Some churches do at least - remember Jeremiah Wright?  There's certainly a line there somewhere that is not supposed to be crossed, but note that some leeway is intentionally allowed for whatever reason.  That's not the real issue.  The real issue is that the Attorney General of the United States is out there trying to smudge whatever that line already is by pressing it as much as he can, for purely partisan political reasons.  You don't think he's blurring it?  Forget for a second about how far away from this a responsible Attorney General would stay from this sort of activity.  Go instead back to the intention of Holder being there in the first place.

Via the Conservative Review:

Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose Congressional Black Caucus, says quite plainly what his little project is all about.

Cleaver said they would not tell pastors which candidate to support. They will let them know who to regard as the bad guys, though (hint: not Democrats).

“President Obama is going to get 95 percent of the [African American] vote,” and wants to keep that turnout high.

And using the Attorney General of the United States and the IRS to directly do that constitutes multiple violations of the Hatch Act. The most obvious one is this:

May not knowingly solicit or discourage the participation in any political activity of anyone who has business pending before their employing office.

Every one of these churches (and the churches not getting the special “advice,” for that matter), by virtue of their tax exempt status, perpetually has business pending before the IRS. That’s what makes this particular and blatant partisan encouragement of black churches to pontificate on policy so egregious.

Never heard of the Hatch Act? It would seem not only are those pastors at risk, under the Hatch Act, Holder himself may be crossing that line.  Don't worry though liberals, everyone seems to be afraid to raise concerns about it.  No complaint, no foul.  With it looking lately like Mitt Romney has some electoral momentum, conservatives may not care as much about this as they otherwise would, but they should.  Eric Holder has consistently displayed a preference for liberal agenda over legal scrutability in his decisions.  Either we stand on principle, or we just allow the notion of the rule of law to slowly evaporate bit by painful bit.  Personally, I prefer the former course of action.  That means Holder must be taken to task for these actions, as well as others like his role in the Fast and Furious scandal.  The same goes for those ministers who would simply do his bidding.

3 reasons the Obama victory predictor could be wrong

There’s a pretty reliable prediction out that President Obama will win re-election in 2012. As reported by Allahpundit over at Hot Air, the Keys System sees Obama. Predictive modelling, while not my forte, is something right up my alley. I’m quite familiar with the design and upkeep of models in my day job - I work with them regularly and have even built one or two.  Without a great deal of insight into the specifics of the model, I can see few potential problems with the predicted outcome.

Hey left, you screwed up.

You had the media. We on the right are onto that. You had the web, we're onto that too. You had the courts. We're working on that one. With all of those advances by conservatives to combat your underhanded tactics at tricking the public into voting for your progressive liberal candidates, it's only natural you'd be looking for new ways to own the voters.

Sure, some tried and true methods like public schools and unions still represent strongholds for you but they aren't enough. Your agenda requires a complete web of misinformation. You need more tactics to employ. This is especially true in the time of Obama where the screw-ups come at us in a fast and furious way. You need to run cover for the president and more importantly for the agenda.

So it's only natural I suppose that we'd see you try to juice the polls to mount a voter suppression effort. It's ironic that liberals scream about the voter suppression of voter ID laws proposed by conservatives but are more than willing to use dubious polls to disenfranchise voters.

As an aside, it's also ironic that as the party of big government you deem requiring people to present some official form of documentation to be allowed to vote as bad. You'd think you'd be all for another government issued ID for voters and perhaps another agency to manage the whole system.

But with the speed of the news cycle in the era of the Internet, we're onto you on the poll trickery much more quickly than we were with the other things you've done. While it might have some limited success short term, it won't last. Every time you try a new tactic, we will counter it. Alinsky's playbook is a set of guidelines you can no longer rely on. Everything it advocates can be countered.

You pushed us too far and we are no longer going to stand idly by and let it continue. That's ultimately where you really screwed up. Whether it takes a generation or two or three to fix, we're on it now.

Obamacare's 1-800-F-U

This is for real.  This is also rich, ironic and emblematic of the Obamacare program (and most everything to do with this scandal-ridden administration);

Need health insurance? The Obama administration has you covered. Simply dial 1-800-FUCKYO to reach the next available health-care provider.

Far from being a mistype, that’s the official number that Health and Human Services wants Americans to dial when seeking health care. Obamacare’s national call center really did list its number as 1-800-318-2596, helpfully spelling out President Barack Obama’s tendency to blatantly flip the bird in plain view.

After allowing for the lack of letters attached to 1 on a traditional American telephone keypad, the number spells out a clear message. For every duped voter, every young invincible weighing the cost of a penalty versus a newly tripled yearly deductible, every ailing old granny in a wheelchair (whom, remember, Paul Ryan wants to push off a cliff) who needs adequate and affordable health care...

It should come as no surprise that this was not vetted.  Not when dating back to the likes of Bill Richardson and Tim Geithner, right through to Obamacare itself, the Fast and Furious 'plan', and a host of other seat-of-the-pants decisions made by this administration.  This is just business as usual.

Mexcican Female Vigilante Killing Bus Drivers

Yikes.

Mexican prosecutors said Monday they are investigating claims that a woman who killed two bus drivers last week in this northern border city was seeking revenge for alleged sexual abuse of female passengers.

The claims made in an e-mail from the self-styled "bus driver hunter" echoed deeply in Ciudad Juarez, which has a grim history of sexual violence against women aboard buses.

A woman wearing a blond wig — or dyed hair — boarded one of the school bus-style vehicles that serve as transport in Ciudad Juarez on Wednesday morning. She approached the driver, took out a pistol, shot him in the head and left the bus. The next day, apparently the same woman did exactly the same thing to another driver on the same route.

Over the weekend, media outlets began receiving e-mails from the address "Diana the hunter of bus drivers."

"I myself and other women have suffered in silence but we can't stay quiet anymore," the e-mail said. "We were victims of sexual violence by the drivers on the night shift on the routes to the maquilas," a reference to the border assembly plants that employ many residents in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. "I am the instrument of vengeance for several women."

The newspaper Diario de Juarez reported that a witness quoted the killer as telling the second victim, "You guys think you're real bad, don't you?" before shooting him.

Vigilantism is not something that should be condoned but this does underscore the point that there is a level of lawlessness in Mexico that has yet to be contained by Mexican authorities. Women in Mexico have been subject to a lot of violence.  That is not new.  But it is in reality just a symptom of a society that cannot afford to properly dispense justice and provide basic protections for its citizens.

The reason I bring this story up is because it serves as a reminder that allowing guns to cross the border into Mexico under the Fast and Furious program was a uniquely terrible idea. How the FBI thought they could keep control of that operation is beyond comprehension. The idea was astoundingly dumb. And yet the scandal has quietly and slowly disappeared.

Scandalous behavior

Via Truth Revolt, the growing political myopia of president Obama is apparently contagious among some Hollywood liberals.  Shonda Rhimes, producer of the show Scandal, holding  fundraiser for president Obama at her home (as he traipses around the country raising money for not-another-run-for-president, while a number of crises erupt both at home and abroad), failed to see the scandal beginning to engulf the president's disinterest in the apparent emergencies.

As President Obama arrives in Los Angeles for his $32,000 per plate fundraiser at the home of Shonda Rhimes this week, a local street artist is pointing out the irony of the producer of the hit TV show Scandal, a show about a Washington public relations firm that specializes in managing political scandals, hosting the producer of such actual scandals as the cover-up surrounding the Benghazi attack, the lost hard-drives of IRS officials targeting conservatives, and the Fast and Furious gun running scheme.

Posters went up Monday night all over Hollywood around Rhimes's Hancock Park home and the Sunset Gower Studios where Scandal is filmed. 

The posters feature a modified version of the Scandal logo, which now reads “Scandals” and a quote from Rhimes's infamous commencement speech at Dartmouth where she urged graduates, “Don’t be an asshole.” The artist added a hashtag to the epithet in a seeming nod to another part of Rhimes's speech in which the producer called out online social movements like Michelle Obama's #SaveOurGirls as being faux-activism. “A hashtag is not a movement,” Rhimes declared.

Now her show has been brought into the discussion.  Her own political myopia is not likely to have an impact on her show.  But perhaps  even without that, drawing some attention to it might shake her out of it.

Sunday Reading Linkage

Happy Father's Day to everyone.  As a special Father's Day edition, I'm linking to some new blogs (for me) in addition to a number of my regular reads.  It'll be a short set of linkage today, as I'm due to get served a coffee from my son momentarily.  It'll be his first brewing of coffee and making of a cup.  I'm sure it will taste great.

Maggie's Notebook covers Project Gun Runner (aka Gunwalker, aka Fast and Furious)with precision. My two cents as to whether Holder knew, which I strongly suspect he did, he will have some type of plausible deniability.

For more on Gunwalker, King Shamus frames the Eric Holder background and helps the 'why he knew' case with a plausible motive.  

Proof Positive has the Klaven comparison of Obama and Ryan on the economy.

Conservative Pup eloquently addresses the alarming, unabated effort to remove religion from the country in contravention of the founders' intent.

Rational Nation USA's Les Carpenter III looks at the nation's historical IQ, and the results are double plus ungood. Watch the video at the end if you want to be particularly taken aback.

Moonbattery has a quick note on Sheila Jackson Lee's reflexive ability to do no right.  This time it has to do with somehow confusing Islamic terrorists with Christian militants. (Hat Tip to Paul Mitchell aka Mean Ol' Meany).

Wednesday Warren Warning - A triple decker day.

Decoy?

It's been about a month since I've updated some of the Elizabeth Warren news in the regular weekly feature as a result of the focus on the midterms. I thought I'd have some catch-up to do, but there's enough this week to actually bring three recent items to your attention. These three disparate items come together as a thread that is cause for concern, not because of Warren, but rather because of Hillary Clinton.

First item: Liz goes to Israel.

Elizabeth Warren’s trip to Israel and other Middle East countries is likely more an indication of the senator’s fast rise within the Democratic Party than a sign that she is rethinking her political future, longtime Democratic observers of the Massachusetts senator said Monday.

Warren is the lone lawmaker on the trip organized by the State Department and the Senate Banking Committee, of which she is a member.

This is a profile building trip pure and simple and it means at least some powerfully placed Democrats want her to be more visible either as the nominee or as the token opposition to Hillary Clinton.

Second item: Warren Wages War on Wall Street

Getting her grassroots bona fides in place she tears into the Federal Reserve's William Dudley. Libertarian viewers might support Warren on this one, but consider the source. Warren is a purveyor of class warfare pure and simple. If you don't like the Federal Reserve, you still don't need an ally like Warren. She sees a more effective Fed as a more powerful tool to control the big banks. For her, a more effective Fed is a more powerful instrument.

If video does not load, click link here: Elizabeth Warren Hammers New York Fed Head

Third item: This one really scares me.

Look how far left she is on Obama's nominee for Treasury nominee. This is particularly revealing on her far left progressivism, and it may explain why she's being set up as the alternative to Hillary Clinton - she'll be really easy to tear down come the primaries. It will allow Hillary to consume vast swaths of the supposed center and give her gleaming coverage in juxtaposition to this:

Less than 48 hours after President Obama nominated Antonio F. Weiss, a longtime adviser on mergers at the investment bank Lazard and a Democratic supporter, to become the under secretary of Treasury for domestic finance, Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced the appointment and said that she would vote against his confirmation.

“Enough is enough,” Senator Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, declared.

She said she was furious that the president would nominate someone from Wall Street. “It’s time for the Obama administration to loosen the hold that Wall Street banks have over economic policy-making,” she wrote on The Huffington Post .

Specifically, she took Mr. Weiss to task for working as an adviser on Burger King’s merger with Tim Hortons, which will result in a combined company based in Canada, which she suggested should disqualify him....

let’s start with Mr. Weiss. He is hardly the prototypical banker...

He has been a staunch supporter — and campaign donation bundler — for President Obama and is considered relatively progressive, especially by Wall Street standards.

Oddly enough, Mr. Weiss is one of the few people within financial circles who might have been friends with Ms. Warren.

Warren's outrage on this issue is a disqualifier for president, even the NYT defend the Tim Horton's Burger King deal as not particularly a tax inversion deal. This is simply anti-business. Her anti-business stance makes her un-electable, and Hillary Clinton that much more electable by comparison. That's really the scary part.

Bloggus Interruptus

Today there are a lot of things to write about - Romney's win in Nevada, Gingrich's plan to make it to the convention, Santorum's Colorado gambit, Ron Paul's strong showing in the desert, Obama's war on religion, the fact that if Fast and Furious were a Bush scandal it would have been front page headline news for months now, Iran and Israel seemingly headed for a conflict, the chaos that has come from Obama's Middle East non-policy, the economy, etc.  But it's Super Bowl day.  Posting is probably going to be light today.

I'm busy making chili and getting ready to enjoy the game, the pre-game, the commercials, the half-time show (even though it's Madonna) and the general atmosphere of Super Bowl Sunday.  Neither of the teams in the game were teams I was cheering for this year, but in the past I have followed both teams at times.  Not being in an NFL city (yet), I have the luxury of shifting allegiances at will, though I typically follow a team for a few years before moving on.  That said, it's difficult to cheer against a team with name Patriots.

Enjoy the game everyone!