Freedom Line Blog

Please allow for a personal sentiment: I have no respect for Barack Hussein Obama. None.

Yes, I respect the office of the presidency. But I have no respect whatsoever for its current occupant.

There is a good reason why Mark Halperin used a nasty word to describe Obama after Obama’s press conference yesterday: because, if a not-so-nasty but otherwise entirely synonymous word had been used, Halperin would have been right on target. So was Sen. Marco Rubio.  This hugely egotistical man, Obama, has nothing to offer but demagoguery; has offered no leadership; has saddled us with debt; has no personal grace when challenged; has no dignity, but only petulance, when in the fray; has no respect for constitutional limits on his own power or those of his political appointees; has no real love for what this country is or has been but only for what he wants it to be after he “transforms” it; has little respect for the actual views of the American citizenry; has a dangerously radical belief in subjugating ethics for the sake of power; is fundamentally dishonest, not to mention horribly hypocritical on subjects ranging from the debt ceiling to the War Powers Act and plenty of other issues as well.

This is not a man who has ever achieved anything OTHER than self-advancement — indeed, he himself has admitted that he accomplished little as a community organizer; his legislative record is incredibly thin; and his presidency has been, in terms of results, disastrous.

In short, this is not a man to emulate either on the basis of character or significant attainments of any sort that are not self-aggrandizing.

There: ‘Nuff said.

One of the important contributors to the ongoing recession is the Consumer Products Safety Commission, which continues to take an unbelievably godawful law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by an entirely clueless president Bush, and then make the law even worse by repeatedly using (and sometimes abusing) its discretionary powers to implement the worst — most burdensome, most costly, most bureaucratic, most job-killing — regulations that could possibly be issued in pursuit of Congress’ already idiotic mandates. (WHEW! — What a sentence!)

Yesterday, the Commission made things even worse, yet again. In a public statement for the record, dissenting Commissioner Anne Northup, an excellent former Member of Congress from Kentucky, explained why the Commission’s new rules for baby cribs are causing retailers to lose tens of millions of dollars unnecessarily:

The seeds for the majority’s decision were planted last fall when a six-month effective date for the new mandatory crib standard was set with insufficient consideration of its impact on retailers. The likelihood that retailers would be left with substantial unsellable stock at the end of the six months was increased when the Commission’s outreach efforts subsequent to the rulemaking failed to target retailers. Significant losses to retailers became almost inevitable when, in response to appeals for relief from the effective date, the Commission’s leadership failed to take adequate action to address the impending harm. Finally, the unjustifiable economic waste was assured when, after a bare majority of Commissioners agreed to hold a public briefing and vote on the issue, the Commission’s leadership directed insufficient resources toward understanding the scope of the problem. Simply put, the Democratic majority of this Commission is unmoved by economic harm to retailers….

In addition to the anecdotal accounts contained in these letters, NINFRA surveyed its members and 37 provided data on their numbers of noncompliant cribs in stock. Those 37 crib retailers had a total of 17,800 noncompliant cribs as of late May 2011. NINFRA’s representative also reported that their average wholesale cost was approximately $275 per crib….as of May 2011, a small fraction of the total retailer community still had at least 117,800 noncompliant cribs in inventory. Had I not asked during the hearing to have the data presented, it would not have been discussed. Incredibly, even after the data was introduced, the Chair asserted that she could not support an extension for “only 17,000 cribs” – completely ignoring both the Commission’s own survey, and the fact that our data was unquestionably incomplete….The Impact Report and oral staff presentation also failed to provide any estimate of the economic harm that would be suffered by the retailers maintaining noncompliant stock. Yet, I elicited through questioning the fact that staff was aware that the average wholesale cost of the cribs in inventory was $275. While I recognize that the Commission’s anecdotal data could not support a statistically significant extrapolation of the total potential loss, and that some number of additional cribs would likely be sold in the short time between when our data was obtained and the effective date of the rule, it would have been a simple matter to calculate the known potential losses: 117,800 X $275 = $32,395,000.

Again, these are cribs that while not compliant with the new regulations are also ones that have NOT been found unsafe. Yet the CPSC is requiring manufacturers to destroy them all. And this money-wasting, product-wasting, job-killing assault on slightly old baby cribs is just one facet of the CPSC’s war against scores of perfectly safe products of daily life. Follow the links within this blog post to learn more. If this isn’t an area that cries out for commonsense reform, and for some liberals Commissioners to be put in their own playpen without any power, then I don’t know what is.

Former Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, the best “unknown” governor of the last few decades of any state in the union, had a rather bad motorcycle accident yesterday in Alaska. The good news is that he is expected to make a full recovery, although it sounds like he is more than a little bunged up and his injuries sound painful. The bad news is that this ruins the second half of a trip he had dreamed about for years.

Some of us wished that Gov. Riley had run for president this cycle. I personally know him as a good and decent man, kind and well-motivated. He did a great job for Alabama. Here’s hoping for a rapid recovery, and many good and enjoyable years ahead.

The great Michael Barone has (as usual) a wonderful column out about the latest outrage from what probably should be renamed the Obama/Holder “Department of (in)Justice, Political Hit Jobs and Racialist Authoritarianism” (DoIPHRA). It appears that DoIPHRA isn’t merely content with covering up for New Black Panthers, telling black voters they are too stupid to know their own interests, forcing seniors to accept Medicare coverage they don’t even want, putting up roadblocks against expanded military voting opportunities, and making a fetish of fighting anti-gay “bullying” without real authority to do so. Nor is it satisfied with screwing up the matter of detention of enemy combatants or refusing to defend the law of the land (DOMA), nor, in a burgeoning scandal, of providing guns to Mexican drug runners which were used to kill an American official.

Now, as Barone reports, the Obamites have given a tacit push to the terrorizing speech czars on college campuses to outlaw flirting, sexual double-entendres, and other highly typical behaviors of collegians:

What the seemingly misnamed Office of Civil Rights is doing here is demanding the setting up of kangaroo courts and the dispensing of what I would call Marsupial Justice against students who are disfavored by campus denizens because of their gender or race or political attitude. “Alice in Wonderland’s” Red Queen would approve….

Again, do read the entirety of Barone’s column. It’s one more example of how these radicals with frightening powers are trying to cram their agendas down our throats.

A hat tip to Michelle Malkin’s indispensable web site for this jaw-dropping report. It turns out that the Obama administration is encouraging the national immigration service to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in order NOT to deport illegal aliens if, among other reasons, they are involved in a fight for union privileges.

To avoid deterring individuals from reporting crimes and from pursuing actions to protect their civil rights, ICE officers, special agents, and attorneys are reminded to exercise all appropriate discretion on a case-by-case basis when making detention and enforcement decisions in the case of victims of crime, witnesses to crime, and individuals pursuing legitimate civil rights complaints. Particular attention should be paid to:…. individuals engaging in a protected activity related to civil or other rights (for example, union organizing or complaining to authorities about employment discrimination or housing conditions)….

Holy Union Thuggery, Batman!!!  Since when is “union organizing” a “right” for somebody who isn’t even a citizen or legal resident of the United States?!?  Break our laws by violating our borders, stay here illegally, and start agitating for union representation against your employer, and suddenly you are untouchable! You’re now a protected class of lawbreaker. Nice deal, eh? What’s next — forgiveness in American courts for all breaking-and-entering offenses as long as the violator is in favor of card check?

Words fail. This administration now is managing to combine two of its pernicious initiatives, amnesty and feathering the nests of union bosses, in one fell swoop. Unionizing is now equated with a civil right; lawlessness is now a “discretionary” concept. This should be all over the front pages of all the big papers; it should lead the nightly newscasts; it should be the subject of congressional hearings — and it should get people fired, because it is an abomination.

Medicare Part D is a good model for the Ryan Medicare plan.

To be clear up front: Congress was wrong to pass Medicare Part D, the prescription drug program, without more broadly reforming Medicare. As a new entitlement, it is extremely costly, and has exacerbated the government’s debt problem.

That said, the free-market aspects of the plan — the private-sector competition part of it, without a government option — have worked beyond almost the wildest dreams of free marketers.  The liberals were so sure that costs to seniors and the government would rise astronomically without government there to “negotiate” premium” prices that they originally proposed to have government “set” the premium price at $35 with a built-in hike each year for inflation. Lo and behold, in the third year of the program it turned out that the average premium price was still down below $25, ten dollars less than what the libs had wanted to set as the base price. In other words, competition worked to keep prices about 30% lower than government planners had predicted.  What the libs wanted as a limit would instead have been a huge burden.  When the libs in 2007 tried desperately to append a government “negotiation” provision to the program, the attempt was filibustered to death in large part based on those amazing early results.  Thank goodness. Competition, as usual, had worked wonders, and it was not to be messed with — which is why the Dems made no serious attempts thereafter to force the government negotiation option back onto the table. Even four years later, the average premium still is $30, or five dollars below what the libs assumed could be achieved only by government intervention.

It is true that some people have cherry-picked statistics to claim that premiums are skyrocketing, but that’s only because they pick the sorts of plans whose costs have risen, not the average of all plans. James Capretta explains it well today at NRO.

Meanwhile, as Capretta explains, the cost to government — meaning to you and I, Joe Taxpayers — is a whopping 31% less than had been projected. Now, granted, that’s still a ton of money that should not have been spent unless it was part of a larger Medicare overhaul that used competition to save money on the rest of the program as well, but even so, the overall lower costs are a tribute to the virtues of competition.

Moreover, as Rick Santorum explained in the GOP presidential debate last week, the Medicare reforms in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal are based largely on the competitive aspects of Medicare Part D. They basically apply Part D’s system to all of Medicare — which means they could serve to produce a huge majority of seniors who are satisfied with the program, at a remarkably lower cost.

That’s why and how the Ryan plan can be politically sellable — because seniors happy with Part D can be expected to react at least somewhat favorably to a plan modeled on Part D, as long as the connection is made clear.

This story today is why so many Americans absolutely hate government. Montgomery County fined parents $500 because their children, just outside of the US Open at Congressional County Club, were selling lemonade without a permit. Several times a year a story like this pops up; it absolutely boggles the mind that bureaucrats can feel so threatened by children. Somebody should fine those bureaucrats $500 today for every time they drink a glass of water or a Coke or whatever. No, forget that; somebody should fire the bureaucrats for obnoxious officiousness — which perhaps should itself be a crime.

This is the sort of thing that Philip K. Howard of Common Good repeatedly warns about, including in his books The Death of Common Sense and Life Without Lawyers. We are a nation choked by laws, ruined by rules, cowered into inactivity by idiotic lawsuits. All levels of government are too intrusive, too abusive, and too obtuse. Shutting down lemonade stands is beyond the pale. For shame.

At NRO today, Yuval Levin has an incredibly important analysis of a new poll on Medicare. The money paragraph is here:

At the very least, this suggests that at this point the Republican Medicare proposal is far less of a problem for Republicans than Obamacare is for Democrats. Like a slew of other polls, it also suggests that public opinion about Medicare reform is undefined and malleable. Maybe that means the Democrats will be able to work people up into a rage about premium support, but that certainly doesn’t seem all that clear so far.

But do read the whole thing.  It explains an incredibly important thing that I and a number of other conservative analysts have felt in our bones and sensed from the public: Medicare reform along the lines of Paul Ryan’s plan is not the surefire loser that the Democrats and the media seem to think it is, and there are even scenarios that could make it a slight net political winner. Even if it is a wash or very close to a wash, that means conservatives and Republicans should embrace it, because the country needs the reforms in order to remain solvent. In other words, doing right is also doing good, politically and ethically.

As I argued here the other day, taking the initiative by accurately redefining reform as “MediChoice” could really turn the tables politically and make it a winner. (Again, credit for this idea goes to former longtime Hill aide Jim Guirard, via columnist Deroy Murdock.)

FreedomWorks also has a good piece on how to sell Ryan’s plan. It’s one of those handy “10 Reasons” sort of lists.

Look, the cow is out of the barn.  All but four Republicans in the House had the guts to vote for Ryan’s budget. Republicans are now politically tied to it, hip to hip, for at least the next two years. On policy, they are right to be tied to it. If they can’t escape it, and they are right on policy anyway, they darn well ought to go out and sell it with every political skill and every bit of enthusiasm they’ve got. The only way to win a debate is to engage in it.

No, not London, England.  Herb London, one of the wisest and truest conservatives in the conservative movement, goes against the “Romney vs. Bachmann” storyline of the week to suggest that the man conservatives really should embrace for president is Rick Santorum: “I can assert with confidence that if he is the nominee, the Republican party flag will wave with pride. A genuine patriot and a fiscal conservative will give the faithful a real shot at winning the highest office in the land.”

Interesting perspective.

Deroy Murdock has a great column up this week. He credits my wise friend Jim Guirard, veteran of many a battle on Capitol Hill, for proposing better marketing language for Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal (or variations thereof).

Jim Guirard, long-time chief of staff to the late Sen. Russell Long (D., La.), runs the TrueSpeak Institute (TrueSpeak.org). He advises the GOP to market “MediChoice.” Unlike the head-scratching that “premium support” inspires, MediChoice signals that Republicans would give seniors choice in medical coverage. Just as the GI Bill helps veterans pay tuition at schools that match their interests, MediChoice would help future Medicare recipients (now 54 or younger) buy coverage that suits their circumstances.

Guirard urges Republicans to call today’s Medicare system “MediCrash.” The Democrats’ policy — snatching $520 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare and pretending that the program is the platonic form of fiscal health — invites financial catastrophe. By Sept. 30, 2020, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts, Medicare’s Trust Fund will be “exhausted.” Republicans should reiterate that Democrats — not the greedy, granny-killing GOP — perpetrated a half-trillion-dollar heist against Medicare’s coffers to underwrite Obamacare. Democrats pitifully refuse to do anything to prevent this calamity. What will their negligence yield in just over nine years? The CBO predicts: MediCrash.

Note, in the Murdock column, his photo at the bottom of a potential MediChoice notice that every senior citizen would receive.  Talk about bringing home to them the essential idea that THEY and nobody else controls their choice of a health-care plan!  Great idea.

In the debate last night, Rick Santorum made the excellent point that what Ryan proposes is what ALREADY is working, in popular fashion, in the otherwise problematic Medicare Part D.  If seniors can make such an individual-option plan work for prescription drugs, why not for their whole health-care coverage?

I noted the same analogy here, back on May 5. As I also explained:

[B]ecause of very similar, consumer-based, market-oriented provisions, has cost the government far less money than projected while costing consumers remarkably less in premiums than even the most optimistic number-crunchers expected. In short, the experience of Medicare Part D suggests that Ryan is hardly being outlandish to say that giving control back to consumers in a market-based system can save money without harming benefits – and thus preserve Medicare for future generations.

Now, back to Murdock. As he noted, Ryan’s plan is hardly radical:

Republicans should remind mewling Democrats that economists in liberal thinks tanks came up with the idea in the first place. The Brookings Institution’s Henry J. Aaron and the Urban Institute’s Robert Reischauer fathered “premium support” in 1995.

Former senator John Breaux (D., La.) promoted this reform as co-chairman of President Clinton’s bipartisan Medicare-overhaul commission…. Former senator Bob Kerrey (D., Neb.) echoed Breaux. As he told Reuters in May 1999: “You’re much better off letting 50 million people make decisions on their own than having [Washington] decide things from the top down.”

Santorum was right to take up the gantlet on this issue last night (and earlier), and Newt Gingrich is incredibly wrongheaded to run away from it.  Meanwhile, with some smart use of language, as per Jim Guirard, MediChoice might be a real political winner.

Actually, it’s not the bureaucrats who individually are necessarily incompetent; it’s the system that causes so much rigmarole that truly idiotic mistakes get made. Whatever the reason, the truth is that private companies that consistently screw up rarely stay in business, whereas bureaucracies that screw up not only stay in business, but often add more bureaucrats to try to “correct” the problems that themselves are caused by too many hands in the pie and too many regulations being promulgated by too many people already.

What brings on all these musings? Here’s the latest: People whose entire houses have been blown away by tornadoes who nevertheless are denied FEMA aid because their houses supposedly showed “insufficient damage.” FEMA continues to make these sorts of mistakes even though “A pending lawsuit accusing FEMA of improperly denying thousands of farm workers in Texas money to repair their homes after Hurricane Dolly struck in 2008 based on the insufficient damage finding claims that FEMA used a concept called ‘deferred maintenance’ to back the rejections.”

Note, too, that it wasn’t an American establishment media outlet which outed this story; it was a British paper.  Don’t look to the MSM to question bureaucratic incompetence when the administration is Democratic.

Anyway, the question should arise: What happens if mistaken denials like this do not apply to somebody’s health, but to somebody’s life-saving surgery or life-saving drug treatment?  Hello, Obamacare.

Blame Obama for high gas prices. Sorry for the cross-link, but the info is here.

Drudge has been all over this one today, but it bears comment anyway.  This is the sort of thing that should never, ever happen in a free society.  Armed, officious, thuggish bureaucrats in a pre-dawn raid burst into a man’s home and handcuff him in front of his children because his estranged wife is late on student loan repayments.  This is sick. It is outrageous.  It is inexcusable.  The bureaucrats, the SWAT team itself, ought to be thrown in jail for this type of behavior.

This is an increasing problem.  It is the sort of thing that ended up with a small town’s mayor’s dogs killed and his mother-in-law terrified within an inch of her life in a mistaken raid in Maryland a few years ago. And there are a horrific number of similar stories, all indicative of the fact that we are all subject, at the whim of idiots without any good reason to carry arms, to tactics reminiscent of a terrible police state.

When I was at The Washington Times, exactly one year ago yesterday, I wrote about the proliferation of armed agents in federal departments that shouldn’t let any of its workers within BB-gun distance of a real firearm. Why, for instance, do the Small Business Administration and the Railroad Retirement Board have armed agents?!?  How about the IRS: Isn’t that agency scary enough, and doesn’t it have enough access to regular law enforcement, without arming its own agents?

Congress is utterly at fault here. Congress should de-arm federal agents. It also should stop overcriminalizing honest mistakes or clerical errors, and weed out thousands of criminal laws from the federal code. Congress is shirking its responsibility to keep federal power in check, and thus to protect individual freedom.

Words cannot express how dangerous it is for these sorts of abuses to continue unchecked. Again, it is the SWAT teams, and the bureaucrats who order them, who ought to suffer, and face imprisonment, for these abuses.

I’ll write more about this locally, because it is a scandal of incompetence, but…. if ANYbody wonders why most Americans don’t want government functionaries controlling access to medical care or insurance, I had a perfect reminder this morning.  Having just relocated back to my wife’s home city of Mobile, AL, I went this morning (with her) to the driver’s license office, run by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, just to transfer my license from Virginia back to Alabama. Since they still had my old Alabama license on file in their computer system from five years ago, and I moved back to the same address, it should have been a snap.

Think again.

Amidst some of the worst-organized, most inefficient, most confusing, most inattentive “service” I have EVER seen in any government office (and boy oh boy, is THAT saying a lot!), I watched as they processed about six people per hour in my little area (simple license transfers rather than new drivers who needed driving tests, etc.) for the first two hours.  Eventually, my wife and I made it out of there after THREE HOURS AND THIRTY-NINE MINUTES.

This is what happens when there is NO incentive for service people to actually provide decent service.  I watched as noly one window of four went unserviced for more than an hour; I watched as “workers” who had sat at their windows for no more than about 90 minutes then picked up their purses and left the building for extended breaks; and I sat there, agape, as the one thing nobody ever asked me was to show any sign of Alabama residency: Just about the only info they SHOULD require (for something that establishes, among other things, voting eligibility) was the one thing they didn’t ask for.  (No wonder we conservatives worry about vote fraud!)

This is what happens when government entities run things. This is why government shouldn’t run much of anything.  It is certainly why government functionaries in far-flung locales shouldn’t be making decisions about whether we do or don’t qualify for certain medical treatments.

Last week I blogged twice here about what should be a major scandal involving hiring at the Department of Justice.  Now it’s starting to get attention, of the right sort (meaning not the fawning, Holder-is-God type of stuff the New York Times does), from bigger publications. This is the lede: “The Justice Department’s Civil-Rights Division has hired dozens of Democratic-affiliated lawyers from organizations that have a huge financial stake in the agency’s decisions and policies.”  To give credit where it is due, J. Christian Adams and Pajamas Media both have been all over this topic for months, and I think the Washington Times actually was the first in print on it, way back last October.

The question is, where the heck is the Washington Post on this scandal. As the WashTimes noted, it was the Post that first laid down the marker:

On Sept. 9, 2009, The Washington Post editorialized: “Mr. Holder must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. If it was wrong then to fill career slots only with ‘loyal Bushies,’ it would be wrong now to reserve slots only for committed liberals seeking to make up for lost time.” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s team deserves to be blasted now that it’s implementing exactly such an injustice.

Now that it is clear Holder is doing just what the Post warned against, the Post ought to be calling for a major investigation. We eagerly await its editorial (but we’re not holding our breaths).

Now, just to throw a note of perhaps-overheated (but not really implausible) worry into this situation, note what James Carville said the other day (as reported by the excellent Jeffrey Poor) about what might happen if the economy doesn’t improve: civil unrest.

How is this related? Well, I have long posited that civil unrest actually would play into Obama’s hands, if Obama is as much of an Alinskyite as he appears to be. Civil unrest gives Obama the chance to demand (or just assume) expanded executive authority to “maintain order.”  And…. now who, exactly, would be asked first to decide how to deal with the unrest, and to decide what authority the president does and doesn’t have? Yes, the Department of Justice, probably its Civil Rights Division, rapidly filling up with lefties who will do exactly Obama’s bidding without a second thought.

This isn’t the fox watching the henhouse, it’s the wolves policing themselves.  Last I checked, wolves weren’t much interested in being policed.

Herewith, some updates to my post earlier today on what should be (but isn’t being treated as) a major scandal at the Justice Department. Updates (or, rather, links to other important coverage with great information) are here, here, and here.

The rot in the Obama/Holder Justice Department, especially in its Civil Rights Division, is a particularly important topic to me, and a big sore spot (as well as a threat to the constitutional order).

Thus I was particularly aghast to see the New York Times the other day run a truly bizarre story attempting, somehow, to show that the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice has been wonderfully de-politicized by the Obamites.  The story is bizarre because the facts cited within the article show precisely the opposite.

Here’s how the NYT (via reporter Charlie Savage) frames the story:  “Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed a pattern of systematically hiring conservative lawyers with little experience in civil rights, the practice that caused a scandal over politicization during the Bush administration.” The Times then goes to great lengths to explain that those hired by the Obama team came from law schools with higher “ranks” than did the Bush hires (“more selective law schools,” in another description), and that those hires had far more “experience in civil rights.”

Bosh.

Having a “background in civil rights” is a self-defining criterion — as defined by the Left.  As the story itself explained it, the definition of “civil rights” experience is self-limiting, because it encompasses (only) “traditional civil rights organizations with liberal reputations, like the American Civil Liberties Union or the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.”

Of course, all sorts of right-leaning organizations also are concerned with civil rights, as are lawyers in private firms who fight against absurd actions by these liberal groups that purport to be in favor of “civil rights” but that in conservative understandings actually undermine civil rights.  If one defines “experience in civil rights” as encompassing only lefty versions of civil rights, then, of course, more Obamite hires will show such “experience” on their resumes. But that does NOT mean that they are the only ones who have done legal work dealing with civil rights issues.

Here are the key facts, dutifully reported by the Times but buried and spun so that the real import is hidden:

At the same time, there was a change in the political leanings of organizations listed on the résumés, where discernible. Nearly a quarter of the hires of the Bush group had conservative credentials like membership in the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, while only 7 percent had liberal ones.

By contrast, during the first two Obama years, none of the new hires listed conservative organizations, while more than 60 percent had liberal credentials. They consisted overwhelmingly of prior employment or internships with a traditional civil rights group, like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Look at that again. Not one single new hire for a “career” position by the Obamites had any prior conservative associations. Not one. If that isn’t a sign of true politicization, nothing is.  There is quite literally no way that an apolitical hiring practice could fail to snag at least a single conservative, from 120 hires, in a nation that is majority center-right and with a very large conservative plurality.

If the establishment media had an ounce of intellectual integrity — yeah, I know, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride — then this report would be treated as a major scandal.

This topic merits far lengthier exposition and discussion, but for now suffice it to say that a Civil Rights Division that absolutely excludes conservatives is a sign of viewpoint discrimination that itself should trigger a civil rights investigation — and investigation into the Civil Rights Division itself, one which ought to take some real scalps, starting with that of flagrantly dishonest division chief Thomas E, Perez.

Meanwhile, in sad news that further indicts the DoJ, Hans von Spakovsky writes that whistleblower Christopher Coates, with a tremendous amount of terrific “civil rights experience,” effectively has been hounded out of the Justice Department that he has served with great distinction for nearly two decades.  This comes after he first was, in effect, banished from Washington, all for the sin of trying to enforce laws against racist New Black Panthers to the letter of the law.

Today at the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz was referring more to the terrorism-related actions/inactions of DOJ than to the other Civil Rights Division problems when she wrote that a good Republican candidate for president “would do well to give time and all due detail—the material is rich—on the activities of the Justice Department under President Obama, the most ideologically driven one in U.S. history. He would make the connection between the nature of this Justice Department and the president’s view of the American nation.” But her advice applies across the board, including and especially to the Civil Rights Division.

My latest column at The American Spectator gets around, eventually, to discussing why restoration of the American civic order is coming not from DC but from all the good Americans outside of the upper East Coast bubble.

There’s lots else in the column, so I do urge you to read it, but here’s the good news:

Now that I’ve escaped Washington, I am becoming aware that official Washington has somewhat, ever-so-slightly, improved. It did so because people here out in the hinterlands forced it to do so. Americans proved they love their country. The Tea Party movement played the largest role in sending four score and seven freshmen Republicans to the House even though the RNC was chaired by a bumbling, solipsistic embarrassment. And, while too many of those 87 freshmen and their Tea Party backers sometimes miss the difference between constructive compromise and craven capitulation, the courage of an entire caucus standing firm for entitlement reform is a glorious thing to behold. With the people leading, the politicians are following not sheepishly but with verve….

Eventually, I get around to discussing what I call “the Madisonian ideal for responsible citizenship.” I hope I’m right that this ideal is gaining new adherents.

NRO today reports the amazing news, via this blog post by Roger Clegg and Hans von Spakovsky, that the Atlanta J-C’s columnist Cynthia Tucker is having second thoughts about racial gerrymandering. Glory be! The big question is, will the rest of the Left follow suit, thus enabling all of us to end this pernicious practice even though the Obama-Holder Justice Department remains radically wedded to it and to related legal stances? Abigail Thernstrom wrote a great piece (one of many on this topic she has written through the years) at NRO last month.

I have been writing on this and related Voting Rights Act Section 5 issues for at least ten years now (I think even longer), and for what it’s worth I thought I’d share some of those pieces (some of which I acted as lead drafter of, on behalf of full editorial boards, whose opinions they represent rather than being my own personal columns). Here and here and here and here and here are some of them. Oh, and if you read ANY of them, please read this one, because it addresses the issue most directly.

Now The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack has gotten into the fray on the DNC Chair’s false claims that the Ryan Medicare plan could deny seniors coverage of pre-existing conditions. He goes even further in tracking down the supposed source of the claims, and in definitively refuting them. Good stuff.