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First article although long is recommended reading.
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"Dissenting with Paul Mirengoff: New Black Panther Case Should Not Have Been Dismissed
Former DOJ Civil Rights Division lawyer Hans A. von Spakovsky rebuts a post by our esteemed colleague._____
"The New Black Panther Party case -- a reply to Hans von Spakovsky
Poor Algore couldn't get attention when he wanted it for global warming, now can't can't stay out of the spotlight. 
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"Does Al Gore Have A Thing For Massage Therapists?
July 21, 2010 Posted by John at 7:41 PM
Source Powerlineblog.com
The National Enquirer has another scoop: two more massage therapists have accused him of scandalous behavior. ......."
For everyone who hated corporate welfare Obama makes it permanent.
They get to reap profit, we get taxed for their mistakes.
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"Wall Street reform that isn't
President Obama lauded Senate passage of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, saying that "because of this bill, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street's mistakes." That statement is untrue. Instead of ending tax-paid bailouts of politically favored corporations that are "too big to fail," Dodd-Frank makes the process permanent. The only thing Dodd-Frank has changed on bailouts is this: Before the bill was passed, bailouts had to be approved by Congress, as with the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program first proposed by President Bush and then extended by Obama. But in the future, thanks to Dodd-Frank, instead of congressional votes, Treasury Department bureaucrats will unilaterally decide under the bill's "orderly liquidation process" how much of the taxpayers' money to hand out to troubled firms.
Worse yet, according to the Judicial Conference of the United States, Dodd-Frank makes tax-paid bailouts of selected corporations permanent in a manner that overrides the bankruptcy process established by the U.S. Constitution. "This is a substantial change from the bankruptcy law because it would create a new structure within bankruptcy court and remove a class of cases from the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy code," the conference said in a recent letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. To paraphrase Mark Twain, despite consuming more than 2,300 pages, Dodd-Frank bears the same relationship to reform as "lightning" does to "lightning bug." The terms sound like they are connected but in reality are entirely different.
So Dodd-Frank does not remedy the fundamental cause of the economic meltdown of 2008, which was the government's decision to shift the costs of bad investment decisions from corporate executives to taxpayers. Nor does the bill do anything to remove the elephant in the living room, the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout. The costs of this will reach nearly $400 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and could approach $1 trillion before all is said and done. Roughly 70 percent of all U.S. mortgages are held by Fannie and Freddie, which between them hold $5 trillion in their investment portfolios. Fannie and Freddie are still losing billions by the month on bad mortgage investments and taxpayers are still on the hook. This means the housing crisis is far from being resolved, and, thanks to the continuing high rate of foreclosures, could plunge the economy back into recession at any time. No wonder four out of five Americans, according to a recent Bloomberg News survey, believe the reform bill Obama hailed as historic is anything but."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Wall-Street-reform-that-isn_t-1001080-98624969.html
I'm in favor of education money following the child to the school of the parent's choosing. Neal seems to believe this is a referendum on that choice which teacher's unions adamantly oppose. I tend to agree given each and every one of Roy Barnes political ads.
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"American politics has caught the British disease
Under Barack Obama, the phenomenon of class resentment is a live political issue, says Janet Daley.
By Janet Daley
Published: 9:00PM BST 17 Jul 2010Source Telegraph.co.uk
"When David Cameron visits the United States this week, he will find a country whose national political argument has become more like our own in Britain than probably he – and certainly I – would ever have imagined. For America has learned, thanks to Barack Obama's crash course in European-style government, about the titanic force of class differences. The president's determination to transform the US into a social democracy, complete with a centrally run healthcare programme and a redistributive tax system, has collided rather magnificently with America's history as a nation of displaced people who were prepared to risk their futures on a bid to be free from the power of the state.
They are talking a lot about this in the US now. Suddenly the phenomenon of class resentment is a live political issue. Some commentators describe it as the Democrats' "middle-class problem", which means that there has been a spectacular collapse of support for the administration among the core blue-collar voters who should constitute its base. (This terminology may be confusing: the "middle class" in the US means the skilled working, or lower middle, class. University-educated professionals are described as the "upper middle class" which, in this country, tends to mean a notch or two below titled aristocracy.)
There was a warning of what was to come during the election campaign with Joe the Plumber, to whom Mr Obama unwisely confided his intention to "spread the wealth around". Americans who have risen from poverty to become qualified tradesmen or entrepreneurs generally believe that they have a right to put what wealth they produce back into their own businesses, rather than trusting governments to spread it around among those judged to be deserving.
But Joe's warning was not heeded. Most of the constituency whose instincts were the same as his voted for Obama, and have now lived to regret it. This in itself is not especially surprising: it could simply be seen as the self-interested politics of personal survival. What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) "enlightened" class with the poor and deprived.
America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.
Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort".
The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed "ambition" as a form of gaucherie: the opposite of having ambition was being a bum, a good-for-nothing who would waste the opportunities that the new country offered for self-improvement.
But now the British Lefties who – like so many Jane Austen heroines looking down on those "in trade" – used to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as "a grocer's daughter", have their counterparts in the US, where virtually everybody's family started poor. Our "white van man" is their Tea Party activist, and the insult war is getting very vicious. It is becoming commonplace now for liberals in the US to label the Tea Party movement as racist, the most damaging insult of all in respectable American life.
So the Democrats, who once represented the interests of ferociously self-respecting blue-collar America, are now seen – under their highly educated president, who wholeheartedly embraces the orthodoxy of the liberal salon – as having abandoned their traditional following. Which is precisely what Labour did here when it turned its back on what used to be called "the respectable working class" because of its embarrassing resentments and "prejudices" against welfare claimants, immigrants, and anti-social youths. Bizarrely, among people who see themselves as profoundly empathetic, there was an utter failure to understand why the spirit of benevolent understanding and tolerance did not flourish among those whose daily lives were directly affected by a mass influx of foreign workers, or local delinquency, or a welfare system that rewarded inertia.
So who will speak – both here and over there – for the aspiring, the enterprising, the law-abiding, and, perhaps most important of all in these economic times, the productive classes? Mr Cameron seems unsure whether he wishes to recapture the Thatcher constituency of C1s and C2s, or to cultivate the liberal drawing rooms with a green/overseas aid/gay marriage portfolio. He speaks warmly of the virtuous and hard-working, but his tax policies will make them pay off most of the national deficit out of their own pockets.
In the US, there is probably no going back for the Obama administration. It has definitively lost faith with the "little guy" voters who once thought of a Democratic presidency as a form of divine protection, and this president does not seem to have the ingenious flexibility of a Bill Clinton, who swung Right after his first disastrous years in office, partly under pressure from a Republican Congress.
What is most depressing about this – apart from the injustice of it – is that the people who have been disenfranchised and disowned are the very ones on whom both countries' economic recovery depends."
"Neal Boortz: Enjoy paying bill for president’s PR
"Maybe it’s time to get into the sign business.
This week we learned that the Imperial Federal Government has squandered around $20 million dollars on signs. That $20 million? Well, that was stimulus money. The signs? They simply said, “Hey, y’all! We’re spending stimulus money here! Ain’t that cool?”
OK, so the wording may not be exact. The signs actually say something about “The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act” and contain that wonderful phrase “Putting America Back to Work.” Yeah, putting America back to work painting signs that say we’re putting America back to work. That probably works for the average Democrat voter. But not for me.
The National Tax Foundation has released a report setting the average annual tax burden per household to be about $17,000. That’s no small amount of change, and considering that about one-half of households pay nothing, you can imagine how high the burden is for some. Let’s pick on one particular sign — one erected by the Washington Airports Authority. ABC News reports that this authority spent $10,000 on one sign near Dulles International Airport telling anyone who cared to read it that a runway improvement project was being funded by stimulus funds.
Why the signs? The ABC investigation shows a political motivation: The Obama administration issued “General Guidelines for Emblem and Logo Applications” for signs touting stimulus projects. According to the leaked document the signs and logos — similar to the Obama 2008 campaign logo — were designed to be “a symbol of President Obama’s commitment to the American people to invest their tax dollars wisely and put Americans back to work.” Yeah, right. That’s $20 million for Obama PR.
The sign at Dulles costs $10,000. So let’s find a family who’s federal tax burden mirrors the average: $17,000. We’ll look for a family that might be having a problem paying some bills. They’re having trouble making their mortgage payments, and foreclosure is being threatened. There have been some recent health problems that wiped out their savings. Their eldest daughter is in college, and that’s costing about $25,000 a year. The roof needs repairing, the car doesn’t run all that well, and the septic tank needs cleaning. This is a family that could use an extra 10 grand right about now, maybe 10 grand cut from their federal tax bill.
So, here’s what I would like the Great and Powerful Community Organizer to do. We’ll make a media event out of it — you know how much the Chosen One loves grand media events. We’ll take the family and televise a meeting between them and Obama. First the financially beleaguered couple can tell Obama of all the things they could do right now with an extra $10,000. They can detail the home repairs that are waiting, how much it would take to catch their mortgage up to date, and how their daughter is planning to pack up and head home from college if they can’t rustle up the rest of her tuition. Then, after our compassionate and caring ruler absorbs all of this information, I want to hear him tell this family that they can’t have that $10,000 they worked for and earned. They can’t have that money because it was oh so desperately needed to put a sign up near Washington’s airport so everyone would know how much their president cares about spending their tax dollars wisely.
Using the police power of government to seize money from the person who earned it so that you can spend the money to erect a sign telling the person who earned the money that you’re spending the money wisely to put them back to work. That perverse logic can only work for a politician. The politician who cannot defend their spending face-to-face with the person who’s money they have seized needs to find another way to earn a living. We can arrange that."
Listen to Neal Boortz live from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays on AM750 WSB Radio.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/neal-boortz-enjoy-paying-572320.html
You decide.
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Cameron said he will press ahead with a proposal set out in the coalition government’s program to establish a “Big Society Bank” to finance moves by charitable groups and not-for-profit companies to take over jobs currently done by the government.
“These unclaimed assets, alongside the private-sector investment that we will leverage, will mean that the Big Society Bank will over time make available hundreds of millions of pounds of new finance to some of the most dynamic social organizations in our country,” Cameron said in a speech in Liverpool, northwest England, today.
Cameron said the idea ties in with his plans for a general overhaul of the public services, as the government tries to narrow a record budget deficit. The new Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that 490,000 public-sector jobs will be lost by April 2015.
“We’ve got to get rid of the centralized bureaucracy that wastes money and undermines morale,” Cameron said. “In its place, we’ve got to give professionals much more freedom and open up public services to new providers like charities, social enterprises and private companies so we get more innovation, diversity and responsiveness to public need.”
Existing Legislation
A law passed in 2008 under Gordon Brown’s Labour government allows the government to use money from dormant bank and building-society accounts “for social or environmental purposes.” An account is dormant if the holder has made no transactions over a period of 15 years.
A senior Labour lawmaker, Tessa Jowell, said in an e-mailed statement that Cameron’s proposals are “simply a brass-necked rebranding of programs already put in place.”
The coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats elected in May is maintaining pressure on the financial-services industry following the bailout of Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Lloyds Banking Group by Labour.
Parliament’s Treasury Committee announced a probe into banking to run alongside a government panel looking at the future of the industry. Cable has attacked the level of interest charged by banks, saying lenders in Britain face less competition now and can keep costs higher.
‘Bigger Temptation’
“One of the negative side effects of this crisis is that our banking system that was already very concentrated, is now even more concentrated so there’s less competition, less choice and a bigger temptation for banks to earn margins at the expense of their customers,” Cable told BBC television’s Panorama program, which will be broadcast this evening.
“When we talk about restructuring the banks, what’s going to come out of this is a more competitive system where the customers are not ripped off,” Cable said.
He went on to attack the culture of bonuses. “Unacceptable bonuses are continuing and that is something we want to try to stop,” he said. “That reflects the lack of moral compass.”
Cousin emailed this. Gorgeous cat and dog ..... one of those awwwwwww things.
"Huge toxic release at BP Texas refinery just before Gulf blowout
By Lynn Herrmann"Texas City - A huge release of toxic chemicals from BP’s Texas City refinery, lasting for 40 days, occurred just two weeks before the energy giant began making headlines with its Gulf of Mexico catastrophe.
"The New Black Panther Party case: Just blow it
"Paul Mirengoff has been deliberating over the proper weight to be accorded the story involving the dismissal the case against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia by the powers-that- be in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. I'm one of those who thought it was a big story, not so much because of the dismissal per se as because of the rationale underlying it. According to whistleblower J. Christian Adams, the dismissal derived from the Obama Department of Justice's view that voting rights cases should be pursued depending on the race of the victim and/or the perpetrator.
Adams served as a career attorney working the case. He was in a position to evaluate its merits and to ascertain why the case was treated as it was. He has resigned in protest of the department's treatment of the case. He has written columns about the case for Pajamas Media. He has also testified under oath before the Civil Rights Commission on the case, and the powers-that-be in the Department of Justice have refused to allow serving attorneys to respond to the commission's subpoenas.
The exile of Adams's colleague Christopher Coates to South Carolina tends to support Adams's testimony. Coates is the former chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department; he was relieved of his post on January 5 and "transferred" to South Carolina for an 18-month assignment with the U.S. attorney's office.
Jennifer Rubin provided a concise summary of the case in her Weekly Standard article on it. I think this should be a big story, and I know it would be viewed as a scandal of epic proportions to which we would be treated on a daily basis if a similar story arose in a Republican administration. It is the sickening double standard of the mainstream media that adds the frisson of disgust to what is otherwise an interesting story in itself.
Has the story been overblown by conservative commentators on the Internet and/or underblown by the mainstream media? To Paul's discussions we can now add the contribution of Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander.
Alexander considers whether the the Washington Post was right to have ignored the story until last week. Alexander judges that the Post should have attended to the story "because it's a controversy that screams for clarity that The Post should provide. If Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and his department are not colorblind in enforcing civil rights laws, they should be nailed. If the Commission on Civil Rights' investigation is purely partisan, that should be revealed. If Adams is pursuing a right-wing agenda, he should be exposed." Alexander's judgment is somewhat reserved at this point.
Why did the Post sit on the story until last week? Here Alexander relays the testimony of National Editor Kevin Merida. Merida termed the controversy "significant" and said he wished the Post had written about it sooner. "The delay was a result of limited staffing and a heavy volume of other news on the Justice Department beat, he said." Unfortunately, Alexander reserves his judgment on this excuse as well.
FOOTNOTE: Roger L. Simon is not favorably impressed with Merida's excuse. And it should be noted that CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford plays the story straight in this report.
JOHN adds: I think it is significant that the case had already been won--the defendants had defaulted--when Holder directed that the proceeding be dismissed. So his act had nothing to do with enforcement priorities; rather, it was a politically or ideologically motivated intervention on behalf of the New Black Panther Party."
"Friends in High Places
The Obama Justice Department went to bat for the New Black Panther party—and then covered it up.
BY Jennifer Rubin
Source The Weekly Standard"The case is straightforward. On Election Day 2008, two members of the New Black Panther party (NBPP) dressed in military garb were captured on videotape at a Philadelphia polling place spouting racial epithets and menacing voters. One, Minister King Samir Shabazz, wielded a nightstick. It was a textbook case of voter intimidation and clearly covered under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
A Department of Justice trial team was assigned to investigate. They gathered affidavits from witnesses—one of the poll watchers was called a “white devil” and a “cracker.” A Panther told him he would be “ruled by the black man.” The trial team, all career Justice attorneys and headed by voting section chief Chris Coates, filed a case against the two Panthers caught on tape. Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of the national NBPP, and the party itself were also named based on evidence the party had planned the deployment of 300 members on Election Day and on statements after the incident in which the NBPP endorsed the intimidation at the Philadelphia polling station.
The trial team quickly obtained a default judgment—meaning it had won the case because the New Black Panther party failed to defend itself. Yet in May 2009, Obama Justice Department lawyers, appointed temporarily to fill top positions in the civil rights division, ordered the case against the NBPP dismissed. An administration that has pledged itself to stepping-up civil rights enforcement dropped the case and, for over a year, has prevented the trial team lawyers from telling their story.
But on June 4, J. Christian Adams, a veteran lawyer in Justice’s voting section and a key member of the trial team, resigned. His reasons were spelled out in a letter that also noted that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which was investigating the dismissal, had subpoenaed him and Coates, but their superiors, in violation of federal law, had ordered them not to testify. He noted that “the defendants in the New Black Panther lawsuit have become increasingly belligerent in their rhetoric toward the attorneys who brought the case. . . . Their grievances toward us generally echo the assertions [by Justice Department officials] that the facts and law did not support the lawsuit against them.” Coates, too, has left the Voting Section, moving to South Carolina to work in the U.S. attorney’s office. Last Friday, the civil rights commission’s general counsel, David Blackwood, announced that he had received an email from Christian Adams’s attorney stating that Adams is now available to provide information to the commission. Commissioner Todd Graziano said they would schedule Adams’s appearance at a public hearing as soon as possible as the commission had been seeking his testimony for many months.
With Adams’s resignation and letter, a clearer picture is finally emerging of what led to the dismissal of the case, the actions of DoJ political appointees, the department’s misrepresentations about the case, and the Obama administration’s approach to civil rights enforcement.
Based on documents obtained by The Weekly Standard and interviews with Justice personnel, we now know far more about the sequence of events surrounding the dismissal. The then-acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Grace Chung Becker, signed off on the case as the Bush administration was leaving office in January 2009. She confirms that the decision to file the case was an easy one. In response to my questions, she was emphatic that this was a serious case of voter intimidation. The trial team, which also included attorneys Robert Popper and Spencer Fisher, conducted its investigation and on January 8, 2009, filed suit against the NBPP. As the Panthers did not respond to the lawsuit, the department had a slam-dunk victory.
The trial team was poised to enter a default judgment in late April 2009. An order for a default of judgment was drafted and sent to the voting section management. On the morning of April 29, the acting deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, Steven Rosenbaum, sent an email to Coates about the case. It was the first indication by any department official that something was amiss. “I have serious doubts about the merits of the motion for entry of a default judgment and the request for injunctive relief,” Rosenbaum, an Obama appointee, wrote. “Most significantly, this case raises serious First Amendment issues, but the papers make no mention of the First Amendment.” Rosenbaum asked Coates a series of questions—whether “the defendants make any statements threatening physical harm to voters or persons aiding voters,” for example, and what was the “factual predicate for enjoining the Party, as opposed to individual defendants”—which indicated that he was not familiar with the case and had not read the detailed memorandum accompanying the draft order.
The trial team assumed that Rosenbaum was simply confused about the applicable law. The notion that this was a problematic case would have been outlandish. With video evidence, multiple witnesses, and clear case law, it was one the easiest cases on which any of the trial team attorneys—who had more than 75 years of collective experience—had worked.
After sending the response, Coates and Robert Popper met with Rosenbaum and the then acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Loretta King. People familiar with the discussions describe “two days of shouting.” The trial team now knew that DoJ political appointees were serious about undermining the case by using whatever arguments they could dream up, including First Amendment concerns. The team prepared a detailed memo dated May 6 explaining the factual and legal basis for the case. In 13 pages, the attorneys meticulously analyzed the law and the facts and rebutted any notion that the First Amendment could insulate the Panthers. The memo made clear that Rosenbaum’s and King’s arguments for dismissing the case were spurious. Rosenbaum and King, for example, argued that legal precedent involving protestors at abortion clinics would undermine the case. The trial team pointed out, however, that these cases were either inapplicable or actually supported the issuance of an injunction when there was a significant government interest (such as the protection of voting rights) at stake.
The arguments continued after the May 6 memo was submitted. During one meeting in a conference room on the 5th floor of the Main Justice building, Coates became so exasperated he threw the memo at Rosenbaum who had admitted not reading the trial team’s detailed briefing on the issues.
Rosenbaum and King sent a request to the appellate section asking their opinion of the case. The appellate attorneys sided with the trial team on May 13. Coates announced this to his team with the words “Good news.” They all agreed it would be unthinkable for their superiors to nix the case. They were wrong. On May 15, Coates received an order to dismiss the case against everyone but the baton-menacing Shabazz. And they were ordered to scale back the injunction against him to cover only the display of a weapon within 100 feet of a Philadelphia polling place until 2012. (No other behavior was enjoined.)
The actions of King and Rosenbaum were unprecedented in the collective experience of the trial team. They were not alone in that assessment. A former associate attorney general for the civil division Greg Katsas testified before the civil rights commission on April 23, 2010, and termed the Panthers’ actions a blatant case of voter intimidation. He said it was a “straightforward and overwhelmingly strong case” and that the Panthers’ conduct was “egregious and intentional.” As for the party itself and its leadership, Katsas said that under “general principles of agency law” they were liable.
From the onset, Justice has denied that any political appointees were involved in the decision to dismiss the case. This line was repeated in multiple letters to and face-to-face meetings with Republican representatives Frank Wolf and Lamar Smith and in statements to the media. We now know that this is incorrect. In interrogatory answers supplied to the civil rights commission, the department acknowledged that Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed on the decision to dismiss the case and that the number three man in Justice, Associate Attorney General Tom Perrelli, was consulted as well. Katsas testified, “Certainly DoJ’s decision to abandon all claims against the party, Malik Shabazz, and Mr. Jackson [the second polling place intimidator], despite their refusal to even defend the case, would have qualified as important enough for the leadership of the Civil Rights Division to raise with [Perrelli].” The same is true of the decision to seek only a narrow injunction against the billy club-wielding defendant. He notes that the filing of the case may have been routine, but the decision to dismiss it was so extraordinary that someone of Perrelli’s rank must certainly have played an “active role.”
The department is, moreover, trying to characterize King and Rosenbaum, who instructed the trial team to dismiss the case, as “career attorneys with over 60 years of experience.” It is true that they both served in career positions at Justice in the past. But under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, as soon as someone is appointed to fill a political position—as Rosenbaum and King were early in the Obama administration—they are political appointees.
Neither King nor Rosenbaum has directly worked on a voting rights case since the mid-1990s and both have received sanctions of hundreds of thousands of dollars by federal court judges for bringing unmeritorious cases and for failing to respond to court orders. In January 2010, a federal court judge in Kansas fined King and Rosenbaum for failing to respond to interrogatories in a housing discrimination case. Former civil rights division attorney Hans von Spakovsky has written: “That particular sanction is also very unusual—I have never seen a sanction order directed at individual lawyers that specifically says their employer is not responsible for paying the costs. . . . During the Bush administration, when liberals claim there was politicization going on in the division, I am not aware of a single such sanction.” King and the Justice Department were also ordered to pay $587,000 in attorneys’ fees and fines for bringing an unmeritorious claim during the Clinton administration in Johnson v. Miller. (In that case the court also took DoJ and King to task for allowing the ACLU to unduly affect the litigation decisions of the department.)
The administration’s internal investigation also appears to have been fraudulent. Under ongoing pressure from Representatives Smith and Wolf, an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) was finally ordered to commence in July 2009. Until a few days before Adams’s resignation, however, none of the trial team had been interviewed by OPR investigators.
Furthermore the department has been less than candid in congressional testimony. In December 2009, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez testified before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, and he either did not understand the case fully or chose to disregard the documentation the trial team had put together. Perez said, for example, that Shabazz had received the “maximum penalty.” An experienced voting rights lawyer scoffs at the statement. “The maximum penalty is Leavenworth.” Perez then suggested that the attorneys on the trial team might have violated Federal Rule 11, which prohibits lawyers from bringing frivolous actions. The trial team was angered at the public insinuation that they had been derelict in their professional responsibilities.
While the interference by political appointees in the NBPP case has been egregious, there is a critical issue with implications far beyond this single case: Whether the attorneys who populate the civil rights division of the Justice Department believe that civil rights laws exist only to protect minorities from discrimination and intimidation by whites. In a farewell address to his colleagues before his reassignment to a U.S. attorney’s office, Coates spoke about this widespread sentiment and why it was antithetical to the department’s mission to seek equal enforcement of federal laws.
Former voting rights attorneys confirm that the belief is omnipresent in the Justice Department. DoJ attorneys openly criticized the Panther case, objecting not to any lack of evidence or to the legal arguments but to the notion that any discrimination case should be filed against black defendants. There are instances of attorneys refusing to work on cases against minority defendants. In 2005, for example, Coates pursued, filed, and won a case (upheld on appeal to the Fifth Circuit in 2009) of egregious voter discrimination by black officials in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Colleagues criticized Coates for filing the case and refused to work on it.
Liberal civil rights lawyers argue that because “a history of official discrimination” can be one subsidiary factor in voting cases it “wipes out every other factor” and prohibits cases from being brought against blacks. And further, that since “socio-economic” factors can be considered in determining whether voting discrimination has occurred, these cases cannot be brought against black defendants until there is economic parity between blacks and whites. Such attorneys use phrases like “traditional civil rights cases” and “traditional civil rights victims” to signal that only minority victims and white perpetrators concern them. Justice sources tell me that career attorneys have been “assured” that cases against minority defendants won’t be brought. In testimony before the civil rights commission, Thomas Perez denied he was aware of any such conversations or sentiments.
To date the Democratic Congress has exercised virtually no oversight over either the Panther case or the department’s civil rights enforcement approach generally. The OPR investigation shows no sign of completion. Neither Holder nor Perrelli has been questioned in depth about his participation in the case or about the allegations that Justice attorneys don’t intend to enforce civil rights laws against anyone other than white defendants.
Smith and Wolf, who just this week fired off two-dozen questions to Attorney General Eric Holder, continue to pursue the case, but without Democratic support they cannot subpoena either witnesses or documents. That may change after the November election. If the House of Representatives or Senate flips to Republican control and new committee chairmen decide to engage in actual oversight, Perrelli and Holder may find themselves forced by subpoenas to tell the complete NBPP story and explain why Obama’s Justice Department believes the civil rights laws exist only to protect citizens of certain races."
"Financial Reform's Empty Promises
By Sen. Tom Coburn"With President Obama expected to sign financial reform legislation into law in the next few days the public is hearing grandiose rhetoric about the bill's merits. The president has promised the bill will "end an era of irresponsibility" while Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the bill will clean up Wall Street and "fix the system that caused the recession."
The public isn't buying these arguments. Four out of five Americans have little or no confidence in the bill, according to a Bloomberg Poll. Respondents also said the plan is more likely to help the financial industry than individual consumers, a fact that was confirmed by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein during congressional hearings on the financial crisis. I asked Blankfein point blank if he supported the financial reform bill. He said, "on the whole, financial reform is, absolutely is essential ... the biggest beneficiaries of reform will be Wall Street itself."
In other words, the CEO of a financial institution the majority spent months demonizing supports the bill that supposedly reins in his firm. Still, the bill's backers won't acknowledge the massive disconnect between their rhetoric and their legislative product. If the CEO of Goldman Sachs supports the bill, it's no wonder the public is skeptical.
An even bigger problem than lending institutions that are too big to fail is a Congress the public views as too incompetent to succeed. The bill was written by career politicians, lobbyists and staff who have virtually no real world experience in business or investing and who, in many cases, are beholden to special interests. Few members of Congress will read the 2,300 page bill before voting on it and fewer will understand its implications.
The public doesn't trust Congress, an institution that can't pass a budget and is responsible for our $13 trillion debt, to manage and fix the dysfunctional and complex financial relationships on Wall Street. The public is also skeptical that a Congress that refuses to make rational borrowing decisions is going to effectively oversee the establishment of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection that will be responsible for micromanaging millions of borrowing decisions. Besides, of all the problems facing our economy, a shortage of government agencies is not near the top.
The bill has three key flaws.
First, the bill does not "fix the system." The bill fails to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which incentivized banks to offer loans people couldn't afford. These entities have already cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts with no end in sight. As we've learned from the Gulf oil spill debacle, saying the spill is stopped doesn't stop the spill. Similarly, this bill's promises of grand reform do little to stop or prevent toxic assets from spewing into the economy now or in the future.
Second, the bills "fixes" are more likely to create uncertainty rather than financial stability. For instance, while pursuing the legitimate goal of regulating derivatives - the financial tools used to manage risk that Wall Street firms abused - Congress ended up writing a bill that treats companies like Home Depot, John Deere and Coca Cola like Goldman Sachs.
My colleague, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, is warning that "requiring businesses that provide credit to our nation's producers (like the Farm Credit System Banks or John Deere Credit) to clear their interest-rate derivatives will result in higher interest rates being charged to our farmers, ranchers, electric cooperatives and renewable fuel facilities for business and equipment loans." In others words, the bill's fixes will create higher prices and fewer jobs.
The bill's fixes will also require years of complex rule making by government agencies which will create even more uncertainty and anxiety between lenders, companies and consumers at the worst possible time. Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the SEC, aptly calls the bill "The Lawyers' and Lobbyists' Full Employment Act." The coming regulatory scramble will undoubtedly pit smaller firms against larger firms and will favor the big firms.
Finally, the bill was fast-tracked before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission could finish its work. The commission was created to find out what went wrong so we could prevent a similar crisis. Yet, we're passing a bill for political purposes rather than solving the problem. Congress has made an indefensible choice. Instead of passing a bill that could have created stability in the financial sector for a generation, Congress has passed a bill for an election.
In the real world no crisis is like the last one. The next financial crisis could be a liquidity crisis, a debt crisis, a crisis concerning the value of the dollar, or something else. This bill will not only fail to prevent the next crisis, but will create an economy that is weakened and less able to withstand the next crisis. Unfortunately, the financial reform bill shows the era of irresponsibility in Washington is far from over."
Tom Coburn is a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/07/15/financial_reforms_empty_promises_106324.html