Freedom Line Blog

With the news today that Eric Holder has told Kentucky’s U.S. Sen. Rand Paul that President Obama “has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial,” it is now apparent that this man is criminally out of control, and a menace to society. This chilling, outrageous, tyrannical assertion of power comes on top of a stunning assertion that he himself is entirely above the law giving Congress the power to oversee federal agencies and to enforce said power — which derives directly from the Constitution — via the ability to hold scofflaws officially in contempt. Here’s what he said about the members of an elected, co-equal branch of government, when they held him in contempt: “ I have to tell you that for me to really be affected by what happened, I’d have to have respect for the people who voted in that way,” Holder told ABC News. “And I didn’t, so it didn’t have that huge an impact on me.” Note that the contempt vote against Holder was not just a partisan exercise: Seventeen Democrats also voted to hold him in contempt, for his refusal to share information (and for prevaricating) about the murderous “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. This is lawlessness upon lawlessness upon lawlessness — from a thoroughly mendacious man who already was running a lawless department. The list of Holder’s outrages through the years is so long as to defy belief… but today’s letter to Rand Paul is by far the most frightening, most despicable chapter in Holder’s reign of proto-criminality.

In his letter, this Attorney Generally Hideous wrote that he can indeed imagine a scenario in which “it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.” This would trample over all tradition, over due process, and also almost certainly over the Posse Comitatus Act.

This man — and probably his boss, the president, if Mr. Obama agrees with Mr. Holder — is a menace to society. One wonders whether now, finally, the civil liberties-left — in Congress, and in the establishment media — will finally hold Holder to something approaching the standard they held George Bush when Bush merely wanted to use enhanced — barely enhanced — interrogation techniques on foreign enemy combatants.

If the chief law enforcement officer of the land actually believes in such raw tyranny, we are all in danger.

Jim Treacher of The Daily Caller does a public service by compiling all the data points on the man who started the booing of Paul Ryan as the latter walked to Barack Obama’s second inauguration.

Dan Freeman, a civil service (i.e. technically non-political) hire at the Department of Justice’s Voting Rights section, said on his Facebook page that he “Just started the booing when Paul Ryan came out.”  Helpfully, Freeman gave his location as “United States Capitol.”

Sleuthing by the blogosphere netted biographical nuggets like Freeman’s involvement in the Yale Law Democrats, and internships for liberal activist groups.  Among his responsibilities was undermining the Bush Administration’s national security strategy by challenging the state secrets privilege in court.  He also helped defend terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

If you’re wondering when Freeman had time to learn federal election law, he didn’t.  But at Eric Holder’s Justice Department, the relevant experience was met checking all the liberal activist boxes.

And, thanks to civil service protection, Freeman will have his position for as long as he wants it, regardless of who becomes the Attorney General, or for that matter, President of the United States.

With Fox News reporting that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will “stay around” for another year before stepping down, names are already circulating about his possible replacement.

Among those mentioned is Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, the official told Fox News.

Other names being mention on Capitol Hill are Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a former state attorney general.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s name also has been mentioned, a source told Fox News.

Of these, my bet would be on Deval Patrick.  In his second term as Massachusetts’ governor, he’s probably looking for something else to do now that he’s put Romneycare on the way to bankruptcy.  Also, as a former Clinton era Department of Justice official, Patrick’s resume checks the right box to lead DOJ.

Most importantly, would Patrick be worse than Holder?  That’s hard to imagine.  In the Obama Administration, that’s a potential improvement worth supporting; the sooner the better.

As regular readers know, I’m something of a collector of asinine punditry. In the past, Tom Friedman, Joe Klein, and Gail Collins have all secured their place in my pantheon. But look out for the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, who has been breaking land speed records for inanity of late. Here’s an excerpt from his latest, defending U.N. Ambassador (and likely Secretary of State nominee) Susan Rice:

… Are [Republicans] really considering filibustering the president’s choice to be the nation’s leading diplomat? That would constitute, among other things, an interesting form of minority outreach from the party that now says it’s so serious about winning over people of color. That party’s only two targets right now are Rice and Attorney General Eric Holder. Gee, what might they have in common, d’you think?

A couple points:

• Ignoring professional incompetence on the basis of race is not a form of ‘minority outreach.’ It’s a form of moral cowardice.

• These rabid right-wing bigots are masters of disguise. Tea Party enthusiasm for the likes of Allen West, Mia Love, and Herman Cain was obviously an elaborate misdirect. And we should probably add Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Susana Martinez to that list, since the hatred must extend to brown people as well.

The rest of Tomasky’s analysis has to be read to be believed.

He defends the choice of Rice to be the Administration’s public face on Benghazi (despite the president’s concession that she had nothing to do with the issue) by noting that “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should have been the one to do those shows, and she was asked first, but she said no.” Oh, well, that explains that. Of course, why wouldn’t the Secretary of State be indisposed to respond to a security disaster involving American diplomats?

Defending Rice’s complete misrepresentation of what happened in Benghazi, Tomasky trots out the Administration’s excuse de jure: “David Petraus has confirmed that while he knew or sensed from the start that it was a terrorist attack, America’s 16 intelligence agencies weren’t ready to say that publicly, mostly for fear of tipping off the bad guys. So Rice said what she was told to say.”

It doesn’t matter if it came from Petraeus or not — this is an incredibly stupid excuse. You worry about tipping off terrorists when you have intel before an attack and think that keeping it quiet could thwart the plot and/or bring the terrorists to justice. You don’t do it after an attack, when said terrorist group is telling you they did it. Acting like you don’t know who’s responsible at that point doesn’t make you calculating; it makes you an idiot. And if the Administration wants to claim that it knew what was going on all along, then it behooves them to explain why they chose an affirmative lie rather than a policy of relative silence.

The upshot for Tomasky: ‘Benghazi … was a terribly sad tragedy, but the kind of thing that, in a dangerous world, happens.” A man who responds to avoidable homicide with fatalistic detachment. That about says it all.

Sounds like the Contempt of Congress citation and ongoing Fast and Furious litigation is getting to the Attorney General:

“That’s something that I’m in the process now of trying to determine,” Holder said. “I have to think about, can I contribute in a second term?”

…

“[I have to] really ask myself the question about, do I think there are things that I still want to do? Do I have gas left in the tank? It’s been an interesting and tough four years, so I really just don’t know,” Holder told [a group of law] students.

If Alberto Gonzalez can be hounded into resigning for firing federal prosecutors who work for him, then Eric Holder can be shown the door for hiding his role in a gun-walking program that killed dozens of Mexicans and at least one American Border Patrol agent.

Assuming Holder leaves, the next question is whether Obama can find his version of Michael Mukasey to replace him.

If so, it would be one of a series of smart moves the President could do to get his second term off to a bipartisan start.

H/T: CBS News

Politico: “A House committee’s lawsuit against Attorney General Eric Holder over his refusal to turn over some documents related to the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious will move forward at a faster pace than the parties requested, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

“The Justice Department moved on Oct. 15 to throw out the lawsuit brought by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and agreed with the House panel that it’s lawyers could have two months to respond to that motion. However, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected that proposal on Wednesday, saying that the House committee should file its response by Nov. 16.”

The quicker review means that the next step in the Fast and Furious scandal – whether President Obama can be compelled to hand over documents relating to the Mexican gun-running operation – won’t get buried in the last days of the lame duck session.

Good for Judge Berman.  America needs a timely resolution to this issue.

The Daily Caller reports that “Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan agrees with presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s call for Attorney General Eric Holder to resign, or for President Barack Obama to fire him, over Operation Fast and Furious.”

Ryan is now the 131^st member of Congress to say Holder should resign or be fired.

This is about more than politics.

Now that Univision has uncovered evidence that a massacre of 14 teenagers in Ciudad Juarez was perpetrated with Fast and Furious guns, and identified “57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during Operation Fast and Furious, and then recovered in Mexico in sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre,” it is now impossible to let Holder escape responsibility for a program he claims he knew nothing about.

Even though the Department of Justice’s non-partisan Inspector General could find no direct evidence of Holder’s knowledge, the same IG told congressional investigators that “we struggle to understand how an operation of this size, of this importance, that impacted another country like it did, could not have been briefed up to the attorney general of the United states.  It should have been, in our view.  It was that kind of a case.”

And let’s not forget that Holder’s Contempt of Congress citation was directly linked to the White House’s dubious extension of executive privilege to cover a cabinet member.

So, either Eric Holder is being shielded from culpability because of the White House’s refusal to provide the relevant documents, or the U.S. Attorney General didn’t know about a major program that could, and did, jeopardize America’s relationship with Mexico.

Either way, Romney and Ryan would do voters a service by highlighting this colossal failure of leadership by key people in the Obama Administration.  If Holder’s job is safe, and the President is reelected, no one should be surprised if we get more of the same for the next four years.

Lachlan Markay of the Heritage Foundation excerpts the top five findings of the Justice Department non-partisan Inspector General’s Fast and Furious report:

1)      The report singles out top Department of Justice officials for wrongdoing

2)      The report appears to contradict sworn testimony by Attorney General Eric Holder

3)      The report faults top Justice Department leadership with failing to adequately respond to the murder of an American border patrol agent

4)      The White House refused to disclose any internal communications to the inspector general

5)      The report fails to consider evidence that a top DOJ official knew the department misled Congress

The fallout has been swift.  On the day the report was released Kenneth Melson, the former acting head of ATF – the DOJ bureau in charge of Fast and Furious – retired, while the DOJ’s Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, resigned.

So far, Attorney General Eric Holder has escaped culpability for the gun-walking program that originated on his watch.

We’ll see if congressional Republican investigators use the IG’s report to close the books on Fast and Furious, or use the Obama White House’s refusal to cooperate as proof that more sleuthing needs to be done.

John Fund tossed in this nugget when comparing America’s scandal-plagued voting system with other countries:

Mexico — which just last week carried off a national election with a universal photo-ID requirement for voting — spends roughly 10 times more per capita on elections than the U.S. and has virtually eliminated charges of voter fraud or incompetence. We can vastly improve our system with much smaller investments. (Emphasis added)

I wonder how U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder would react if he knew this.

At CFIF, we’ve hammered Holder for equating photo-ID for voting with racism.

With his blessing, the Department of Justice denied photo-ID requirements passed in South Carolina and Texas on the grounds that they violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an Act ensuring minorities of their right to vote.  By refusing to sign-off on the South Carolina and Texas laws, Holder’s DOJ is saying the photo-ID laws are racist.

The fact that photo-ID laws have been supported by Jimmy Carter and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as “unquestionably relevant to the State’s interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process” are of no importance to Holder & Co.

America is a nation of “cowards” and racists, says the AG, so requiring photo-ID must be just another name for Jim Crow.

And yet here we have Mexico, a country familiar with historic racial tension amongst descendents of the Aztecs, Spanish settlers, and their offspring, conducting a free and fair election that peacefully transitioned power between political rivals.

Could it be that Mexico’s photo-ID requirement – like South Carolina and Texas – had a purpose other than disenfranchising a racial minority?

Maybe the next time Holder gets blasted by the Mexican government for not informing them of Fast and Furious he can change the subject with some pointed questions about Mexico’s racist photo-ID laws.  I’m sure he’d get a fair hearing…

The following is an excerpt from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s media briefing earlier today, where he was dogged by questions about President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in the Fast and Furious case:

Q: Jay, you said to an earlier question that there was no White House cover-up involved in these documents that the President had declared privilege on. And you also said that, just again, that the President is just trying to protect the constitutionally enshrined power of the executive power to make decisions independently. In the documents in question is there any information that if put on the public record would jeopardize national security interest or embarrass the White House?

MR. CARNEY: Well, those are — (audience laughter) — I’m not going to give you a readout of documents that are under question here and relate to the assertion of privilege. What I can tell you is that there is nothing in these documents that pertains to the Fast and Furious operation. And I would simply note and have you ponder the fact that the Attorney General referred this to the Inspector General for investigation, and the Inspector General has access to all documentation as a member of the executive branch.

Q I guess the question is are you declaring it mostly on principle to ensure the separation of power or is there an issue of national security —

MR. CARNEY: Thank you for phrasing that. This is entirely about principle. It has nothing to do — (audience laughter) — no, no, this has nothing to do — we have been absolutely clear about the fact that this operation used a tactic that originated in a field office that was flawed, that was wrong, and that had terrible consequences for the Terry family, and should not have been employed. And this Attorney General, when he learned about it, put an end to it and referred it for investigation.

There was a time when the Briefing Room media wouldn’t have laid a finger on the president over something like this. Now they’re laughing in his Press Secretary’s face.

Probably not a bad time to update that resume, Jay. And Barack, you might want to have a spare handy too.

Nancy Pelosi today made the risible claim that the contempt citation against Eric Holder is part of an effort at voter suppression. What bunk. But it is true that Holder is heavily involved with the flip side of vote suppression, which is that he is deliberately taking steps that enable vote fraud, via his lawsuits against Texas, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, etcetera, concerning voter ID and cleaning up voter rolls.

Well, here is the little-known background to all this:

It goes back to the Clinton Administration’s very first big battle — which wasn’t about health care, or energy taxes, or spending. The first battle involved the Motor Voter bill, which Democrats in Congress introduced on the very first legislative day in 1993, several weeks before Bill Clinton was inaugurated. Motor Voter was assigned to the House Administration Committee – and Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston, the committee’s ranking Republican, had the job of deciding whether to object. I happened to be Livingston’s press secretary back then…. Livingston didn’t object to registration at drivers’-license bureaus, but he argued that other bill provisions (too numerous to list here) would promote vote fraud. Livingston’s legislative aide Tripp Funderburk had the brilliant idea to say that “Motor Voter” would better be described as “Auto Fraudo.” Using Tripp’s new catch-phrase, I started a media pushback, including a column in the Washington Times and many radio appearances for Livingston.

The pushback failed to kill the bill – but it did succeed in forcing acceptance of some anti-fraud provisions into the bill’s Section 8…. But, as reported by whistleblowers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates, DoJ official Julie Fernandes announced in late 2009 that the department would refuse to enforce Section 8’s anti-fraud provisions because “it has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.” Now that Florida is doing its job to enforce it anyway, DoJ is trying to stop the state’s efforts.

As an update to my previous post, here’s the latest from The Hill:

A House panel voted Wednesday to place Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena, defying an assertion of executive privilege from President Obama.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.), approved a resolution along party lines to place Holder in contempt after battling him for months over access to internal agency documents about the gun-tracking operation Fast and Furious.

…

All 23 Republicans on the committee voted for the contempt resolution, while all 17 Democrats voted against it. Every member of the panel was present for the vote.

There are still many off-ramps on the road towards Eric Holder being perp walked into federal prison for being found guilty of contempt of Congress.

Next week the full House will vote on the Oversight Committee’s contempt citation.  If it passes, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia will convene a grand jury to decide on an indictment.  If that is successful, then Holder would have to be found guilty by another jury.  Only then would he be eligible to serve the one-year sentence for refusing to comply with Issa’s repeated requests for documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal.

The process is lengthy, and anyway is beside the point.  The reason Issa and the Republicans are pushing the contempt process forward isn’t to see the U.S. Attorney General go to prison.  It’s to apply the necessary pressure on a recalcitrant Obama administration to release information about one of the dumbest and most tragic federal misadventures in recent memory.

Hiding behind eleventh hour claims of executive privilege won’t make that task any easier.  If Holder and President Barack Obama want to avoid letting Fast and Furious become this administration’s Iran Contra, Holder better personally deliver assurances to Issa that he’s ready to fully cooperate.

And if he can’t because there’s damning information about a DOJ-White House cover-up, get ready for a Watergate role reversal with Republicans in Congress making a Democratic president’s life miserable.

Today marks a dramatic turn in the Fast and Furious scandal with the Obama White House announcing this morning that the documents sought by House Republicans are protected from disclosure by executive privilege.

For the first time since news broke of the Department of Justice gun-walking fiasco, the President of the United States is claiming an interest in DOJ’s internal deliberations about a program that purposefully armed Mexican drug cartels and ultimately allowed a drug runner to murder a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

In the short term, the president’s announcement may make House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s contempt vote closer than it would have been, if some members decide that an executive privilege claim inoculates Holder from punishment.  My guess is that Obama’s announcement will embolden Republicans on the committee to go ahead with the contempt vote and give Democrats a talking point after they lose.

In the long term, today’s executive privilege claim finally elevates Fast and Furious into a surefire campaign topic for the fall.  As long as the scandal was defended as a policy decision gone bad – especially one that was until today linked to the previous Republican administration – it was unlikely that conservatives would make Fast and Furious into a campaign theme.

But now that’s changed for two reasons.  First, as of today DOJ has rescinded its claim that Bush’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey knew about Fast and Furious, thus admitting that the idea and its consequences belong completely to the Obama administration.  Second, Obama’s claim of executive privilege means that he is now claiming ownership of the program.

I suspect that the documents being withheld would make the case for the resignation or impeachment of Eric Holder or another high-ranking DOJ official.  Claiming executive privilege helps delay the reckoning, but it opens the door for Mitt Romney and others – most notably Issa and other congressional investigators – to ask White House officials directly – and President Obama indirectly – about the president’s knowledge, involvement, and approval of Fast and Furious.

Game on.

It’s not just on “Fast and Furious.” Eric Holder and his politicized Justice Department, along with the Obama administration overall, has consistently evaded the law and refused to provide documents on a number of controversial fronts, all while claiming privileges that don’t even exist. Peter Kirsanow details some of the ways in a great NRO post today, here. Please do follow that link; it’s important.

I wrote on the broader topic of Obama stonewalling (at DoJ and elsewhere) at the Washington Times nearly three years ago, here. Others, too, have chimed in on this topic. It all adds up to a pattern of obstruction, prevarication, and lawlessness. That’s why U.S. Sen. John Cornyn today was moved to demand Holder’s resignation.

It is a call that surely will be echoed by others in Congress in days to come.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

Mr. Holder’s racial incitement strategy. If Mr. Obama is going to win those swing states again, he needs another burst of minority turnout. If hope won’t get them to vote for Mr. Obama again, then how about fear?…. The courts will eventually expose much of this as meritless, but it’s a shame the media won’t call Mr. Holder on this strategy before the election. Imagine the uproar if a Republican AG pursued a similar strategy. It’s worse than a shame that America’s first black Attorney General is using his considerable power to inflame racial antagonism.

On a subject near and dear to my heart, protecting the country from massive vote fraud of the sort actively encouraged by the Obamites in and out of government, columnist Thomas Sowell lays it on the line:

When a white man with no identification can go to a voting site, impersonate a black man who lives in that district, and get his ballot offered to him, then it is far too easy to commit voter fraud.

Does not Attorney General Eric Holder understand that? Of course he understands it! The man is not stupid, despite his other failings.

Holder’s pooh-poohing of voter fraud dangers, and hyping the “threat” of denying minorities “access” to the voting booth, are completely consistent with his drive to (1) maximize the number of votes by black Democrats and (2) spread as much fear as possible among minorities that they are under siege, and that the Democrats are their only protection and salvation.

It is a political protection racket, with payoffs in votes.

Sowell also promotes the single most important book released in the past year:

The book is titled “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.” It names names, dates and places around the country where the Department of Justice stopped its own attorneys from pursuing cases of voter fraud and intimidation, when it was blacks who were accused of these crimes.

If Mr. Adams is lying, he has taken a huge risk in citing individuals by name and quoting them directly. Yet, despite the fact that most of those he accuses are lawyers, apparently no one has sued him. Moreover, Adams has also testified under oath before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on the racial double standard at the Department of Justice, when it comes to voting rights.

Not a single word of Adams’ book has come close to having been refuted. Everybody should read it. It will make you fear for our republic — unless we stop the deliberate lawlessness of Eric Holder’s [In]Justice Department.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) explains on the House floor why his bill to cut $1 million from the Department of Justice’s appropriation is justified in light of Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to hand over documents related to the Fast and Furious scandal:

“For those watching at home, what would happen to them if they ignored a summons for jury duty? What would happen for them if they ignored a grand jury subpoena? What would happen if a committee of Congress demanded documents [from them] and they summarily refused to cooperate?”

Gowdy said that if any ordinary American citizen obstructed subpoenas the way Holder has, they “would be sanctioned, fined and probably jailed.”

America is a nation of laws, not men.  It reflects well on the House of Representatives that Gowdy’s bill passed by voice vote, indicating it had lots of support.

H/T: The Daily Caller

As has been chronicled at length here at CFIF, one of the hallmarks of Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been its insistence on injecting race into the public square as often as possible. And one of the areas where this has played out in department policy has been in the DOJ’s repeated threats to crack down on police and fire forces for what it claims are racially discriminatory employment practices.

In 2009, for example, the New Haven, Connecticut, Fire Department threw out the results of a standardized test aimed at measuring candidates’ suitability for promotion when the number of African-American candidates who passed was deemed insufficiently high. The department was motivated in part by fear of a Justice Department lawsuit — a fear that proved to be well-founded when the DOJ filed suit against the state of New Jersey the following year because white test-takers had a higher passage rate (89 percent) than black (73 percent) or Hispanic (77 percent) candidates in an exam for police promotions.

Neither of these cases featured allegations that the tests or the promotion processes were inherently racist. Rather, they simply rested on the DOJ’s notion that unequal outcomes are inherently unjust; that the fact of disparate results was sufficient, in and of itself, to reveal systemic injustice.

So far, the results of DOJ pressure have been mixed. The New Haven firefighters whose successful test results were thrown out took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in their favor, 5-4. In New Jersey, however, the DOJ’s bullying tactics won the day, with the state agreeing to revise the exam and issue back pay to minority officers (many of whom resented the feds’ “help”).

Yet that inconsistent track record isn’t keeping the department from going at it again. This time they’re taking the show to Jacksonville, Florida. Per a DOJ release from yesterday:

The Justice Department today filed a lawsuit against the city of Jacksonville, Fla., alleging that the city is engaged in a pattern or practice of employment discrimination against African-Americans in its fire and rescue department in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The lawsuit challenges the fire department’s use of written examinations for the promotion of firefighters to four ranks – Lieutenant, Captain, and District Chief, all in the suppression line, and Engineer…

The United States’ complaint alleges that the examinations impact African-American candidates in two ways.  First, African-American candidates for promotion to the four positions pass the examinations at significantly lower rates than white candidates.  Second, even those African-Americans who pass the examinations are rarely promoted because the fire department selects candidates for promotion in descending rank-order based primarily upon each candidate’s written examination score and African-American candidates score significantly lower than whites.

Notice that there’s nothing in there that any fair observer could characterize as bias. Rather, the complaint is, in essence, that the Jacksonville Fire Department is too objective.

As the police officers in New Jersey noted in the piece linked above, even a successful outcome for the DOJ will not have the effect of helping out minority officers, whose qualifications will now be called into question on the basis of de facto affirmative action.

If the feds really wanted to help out, they would examine the underlying causes of why the tests exhibit racial disparities in the first place. Could it be that America’s public schools — rotting as the result of the influence of teachers unions — have disproportionately failed minority communities? Could it be that the social pathologies subsidized in perpetuity by the welfare state have thwarted upward mobility in poor neighborhoods?

Answering those questions, of course, would require some real soul-searching. And it might also require giving up the notion that good intent is sufficient to make Democrats the perpetual guardians of America’s minority communities, no matter what kind of havoc their policies wreak in reality. But that’s a level of introspection we shouldn’t expect from this Administration. In Eric Holder’s DOJ, it’s easier to just file a lawsuit and assume that the other guy’s a racist.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano may have perjured herself twice in testimony before Congress about what she knew about the Fast & Furious scandal, and when she knew it.

In a new book by Human Events political editor Katie Pavlich, sources tell the author that Napolitano was lying when she told Congress – twice – that she never discussed the illegal gun-walking scandal with Attorney General Eric Holder and Dennis Burke, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona.

According to Pavlich’s sources…

• “There are five emails linking [Napolitano] to [Attorney General Eric] Holder.  They go back two days after it happened – the first email was two days after Brian was killed.” (Referencing the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s by Mexican drug cartel members armed with at least one Fast & Furious gun.)

• “…Napolitano was briefed regularly by an agent from another of her agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.” (ICE was involved in Fast & Furious because it has jurisdiction over the U.S.-Mexico border and thus had to sign-off on guns walking over the border.)

• “There was an ICE agent assigned specifically to be the co-case agent of Fast & Furious.  He had to [file] an ICE report that either mirrored or referenced every ATF report that was done.”

Based on the preview, Pavlich’s book seems like a must-read for anyone appalled by the disregard for the rule of law and basic safety manifested by the Secretary for Homeland Security and the Attorney General.

When all the facts are known, the fall-out from the Fast & Furious fiasco will likely be huge.  From Human Events:

Pavlich makes a strong case that when people are finally charged with crimes, Napolitano will have to answer for her perjury to Congress.

“Let me tell you something about Janet,” another source said to the author. “Janet will be lucky not to go to prison.”

Today at The American Spectator I blogged at length about how Eric Holder’s Justice Department uses flagrant racial double-standards in enforcing the law.

The same habit infects the news media, and apparently some police departments as well: If the perpetrators are black, it is A) not news, and B) sometimes not investigated, much less prosecuted. J. Christian Adams has a new example here. In this case, a motorist was targeted by a black biker gang. Result: Nada. Adams writes:

Boyd tells me he contacted the crime beat reporter at the Birmingham News and told her about his story. “Not newsworthy,” was her response. Boyd also tells me that law enforcement officials told Boyd they “don’t mess with the Outcasts of Alabama.”  Comforting.

Had the attackers been the Confederate Hammerskins, and the victim been different, we all know (at a minimum) the Birmingham News would have covered the story. DOJ lawyers would be checking on the contract air carrier from Washington to Birmingham. I’ll wager even Soledad O’Brien would have spent at least one show on the attack.

It is precarious when the law, and attention from the media, are so out of balance. When state law enforcement officials flinch from prosecutions of the black Outcasts of Alabama, and national media organizations ignore some violence while elevating other incidents to month-long stories, the rule of law suffers.

Shame on the Birmingham News. Shame on any police who don’t follow up on such cases. Shame on all of us for letting race affect how we deal with important issues and events, in any direction.