Freedom Line Blog

The budget compromise reached between Congressional leaders and the White House a few weeks ago has been analyzed, dissected and commented upon exhaustively.  While the “deal” may have averted a government shutdown, it ended up being a disappointment to taxpayers, who were overwhelmingly demanding meaningful spending cuts this year. 

In an attempt to help the American people better understand what transpired, Mike Bates of 1330 AM WEBY, Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio, prepared and recently read the following analysis of the “deal” on the air. 

The Budget Agreement is Nothing to Celebrate
 
The “government shutdown” was avoided when Republicans and Democrats in Washington agreed to a budget compromise to cut $38.5 billion from the proposed $3.8 trillion budget.
 
Though it’s been touted by both parties and the press, this is no cause for celebration.  Why not?
 
A few quick facts:
 
Our national debt is $14.2 trillion.
This year’s budget calls for $3.8 trillion in spending.
Our government will borrow $1.6 trillion to do this.
That means we are borrowing 42 cents of every dollar we spend.
We are spending $1.6 trillion dollars more than we are taking in.
The Republicans wanted to cut $45 billion from the budget.
The Democrats wanted to cut $33 billion from the budget.
The Republicans and Democrats were arguing over $12 billion.
They agreed to cut $38.5 billion.
 
Few people comprehend how bad our nation’s finances are.  Just how much is a trillion dollars?
 
If you laid one trillion one-dollar bills end to end, it would extend from the Earth to just past the Sun.  It would stretch to the moon 394 times.  And that trillion dollars would wrap around the Earth 3787 times.  But money is not understood as a measurement of distance.
 
If you spend one dollar every second, it would take you 32,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.  But money is not a measurement of time.

Money is a measurement of value.  So I broke down the budget into terms we can all understand.
 
A husband and wife have accumulated debt of $373,684.
They have a household income of $58,000.
They plan to spend $100,000 this year.
So they’ll have to borrow $42,000 to do this.
That means they are borrowing 42 cents of every dollar they spend.
One spouse proposed that they cut $1184 from the budget.
The other spouse proposed that they cut $868 from the budget.
The husband and wife were arguing over $316.
They agreed to cut $1013.
 
How long can that couple keep borrowing and spending like that?  How long can our government keep borrowing and spending like that?
 
The budget agreement is nothing to celebrate.
 
But wait!  It gets worse.  Within a week of the budget deal, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the actual savings of the claimed “$38.5 billion” in cuts could be as little as $352 million.  If that turns out to be true, the couple above just saved a pathetic nine dollars and twenty six cents.

As we prepare for the beginning of the era of the Federal Reserve as PR machine, we can anticipate a glut of federal statistics hand-picked to convince the public that the growing evidence of inflation is psychosomatic. Of course, it helps that the Fed’s core measure of inflation excludes such basic staples as food and energy. But as Jeffery Lord points out at the American Spectator, the main street indices tell a sharply different story than the Wall Street rationalizations:

Milk. A gallon of skim. At the local Giant in Central Pennsylvania:

January 11, 2011: $3.20
February 28, 2011: $3.24
March 6, 2011: $3.34
April 23. 2011: $3.48

That would be a 28 cent rise in a mere 102 days, from January to April of this year. The third year of the Obama misadventure.

Then there’s the celery. Same sized bag. Same store.

January 11, 2011: $1.99 a bag.
March 6, 2011: $2.49 a bag.

A rise of 50 cents in 54 days.

If this trend continues, the Fed will have to find an even more counterintuitive metric for gaging inflation. Perhaps one that doesn’t include prices.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

Because the U.S. Census shows it has a lower percentage of population relative to other states, Massachusetts is one of the states losing a U.S. House seat during its redistricting process this year.  But before Bay State cartographers can put pen to paper, they have to solve a simple math problem: what to do with 10 members who want 9 seats?

According to Roll Call, the Democratic Party may be expected to dust off its Joe Sestak file on how (not) to coax a candidate into swapping a campaign for a cushy administration job.  Here’s what one operative had to say about a potential match-up of Democratic incumbents:

“I think that’s unlikely to happen unless there’s some decision made at a higher level that such should be the case,” said Philip Johnston, former chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, who also suggested national party leaders would have to find a soft landing for either of those Members, such as an ambassadorship, in order for them to willingly leave their seats.

If you were a voter, would you want to be represented by someone who’s willing to be bought into retirement instead of fighting for reelection?  Besides, how long would an ambassadorship last if President Barack Obama gets beat in 18 months?  As most of the Massachusetts Democratic Congressional delegation knows, winning a seat in Congress virtually assures one of lifetime tenure.

Trading a long-term job for a short-term payoff isn’t a graceful exit.  It’s an explicit admission that representing a constituency isn’t worth the price of fighting a competitive campaign.

Along with lying about the size of the budget deficit and imposing a steep rise in the car tax, California Governor Gray Davis did something else to guarantee his historic recall: impose a pay-to-play “donation” schedule on groups wanting to do state business.  Want a permit from the Coastal Commission?  How about a government contract to manage welfare cases?

For Davis & Co. there was only one question: How much did you contribute to my campaign?

Former Federal Elections Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky obtained a draft executive order that would implement the substance of the Disclose Act, a bill promising to chill corporate political speech before it was defeated in Congress last year.

According to von Spakovsky, the proposed executive order claims to “increase transparency and accountability,”

Yet this proposed Executive Order would require government contractors to disclose:

(a) All contributions or expenditures to or on behalf of federal candidates, parties or party committees made by the bidding entity, its directors or officers, or any affiliates or subsidiaries within its control.

(b) Any contributions made to third party entities with the intention or reasonable expectation that parties would use those contributions to make independent expenditures or electioneering communications.

In layman’s terms, that means the federal government wants to know which political groups you’ve been giving money to before it will consider awarding a government contract.

In an editorial today, the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) notes that the order exempts federal employee labor unions and the recipients of federal grants, both dues paying members of the Democratic Party.

At the moment, the Right is deploring the president’s last-ditch effort to silence dissenting political views after losses in the courts, Congress, and the FEC.  (Especially since Obama’s executive order specifically targets only those entities most likely to disagree with him.)

However, the Left should be leery of this latest version of gangster government.   There’s only a hair’s breadth of difference between punishing “bad” political expenditures, and demanding “good” ones.  As the deposed Gray Davis showed in California, a government nosy enough to punish its enemies, is a government powerful enough to tax its friends.

In my last post, I explained that Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) would cut far more Medicare services, without giving patients any real choice in the matter, than Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would ever do — and that Ryan’s would give patients control, whereas IPAB would leave them at the mercy of bureaucrats far removed from the scene. Again, the issue is, who decides?

That’s the theme in areas other than IPAB, too. Indeed, it is the central question of Obamacare. Obama’s system and its corollaries leave all authority in the hands of central planners — disembodied persons, as far as the patient is concerned, for whom the patients are little more than statistics on a spread sheet.

Fox news contributor and former Reagan-Bush in-house thinker James Pinkerton is rightly banging the drum for more options for patients and providers alike. In what he calls a “Serious Medicine Strategy,” Pinkerton explains that the best way to keep costs down is to encourage the development of cures rather than of merely managed treatments. As Pinkerton says, healthy people are less expensive than sick people. Therefore, intellectual property rights for researchers should be protected better, or longer, than they are now. The FDA should be more lenient, or more rapid, in approving medicines — at least for trial use, with appropriate warnings, perhaps. And so on. The idea is to provide more chances for more cures, and more choices for everybody involved — mostly through the free market.

There is a lot more to say on this and related topics. Again, though, the central message is this: Where bureaucrats and central planners exert too much control, or interfere too much, the ultimate provision of services is likely to be either worse, or more expensive, or both. But if people are freed to pursue their own best interests. They will. More on this as the weeks go by.

John Fund gives an excellent distillation for the reasons California businesses are relocating en masse to Texas:

Andy Puzder, the CEO of Hardee’s Restaurants, was one of many witnesses to bemoan California’s hostile regulatory climate. He said it takes six months to two years to secure permits to build a new Carl’s Jr. restaurant in the Golden State, versus the six weeks it takes in Texas. California is also one of only three states that demands overtime pay after an eight-hour day, rather than after a 40-hour week. Such rules wreak havoc on flexible work schedules based on actual need. If there’s a line out the door at a Carl’s Jr. while employees are seen resting, it’s because they aren’t allowed to help: Break time is mandatory.

Indeed, California policymakers are enjoying an extended break from economic reality by focusing on everything else but job creation.

If the trend of 4.7 businesses a week abandoning California continues, pretty soon the great weather will be the only reason to visit the once Golden State.

Byron York continues sounding a lone alarm over the connection between ballooning welfare spending and shrinking defense budgets.  With the United States largely abstaining from the lethal aspects of NATO’s Libyan adventure, entitlement-heavy countries like Britain and France are running out of missiles.

The reason?  Decades of budget decisions that favored butter over guns.

On a trip to Libya, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) reopens the straight talk express:

“…it’s a sobering fact that many NATO countries, even some of the big ones, are simply weak. They’ve been cutting their defense budgets for years as their welfare state commitments grew bigger and bigger. Now, they can’t mount much of a fight, even by the small-scale standards of the Libyan action. “No one will admit it, but both the British and the French are running out of precision-guided weapons,” says McCain. “They simply do not have the assets.”

Not that this evidence is convincing to modern liberals.  York also points out that members of Congress’ Progressive Caucus recently proposed a “People’s Budget” that raises taxes to expand entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while “reducing strategic capabilities, conventional forces, procurement, and research & development programs.”

We’ve seen the future, and it’s the near military impotence of Britain and France.  The United States can and must do better.

Ruth Marcus focuses on the silver lining surrounding Standard & Poor’s downgrading the United States’ credit rating:

The more shake-’em-up warnings that could prod the political system into action, the better. From the Obama administration’s point of view, you don’t want the financial markets overreacting to the news and therefore making economic matters worse – hence Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s round of interviews saying that S&P was overly gloomy about the prospects for political agreement. At the same time, as long as the markets remain reasonably calm, as appears to be the case, the administration is happy to have the political classes riled up. Problem is, the administration has different messages for the two audiences but only a single microphone. (Emphasis added)

In this case, the Obama Administration isn’t suffering from a lack of transparency – it’s deleterious contradictions are all-too-easy to see as it walks America’s financial future right off a cliff.

According to CBS News, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson announced today that he is officially running for the GOP presidential nomination.  Though other higher profile potential candidates like former governors Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) and Mitt Romney (R-MA) have announced the launch of exploratory committees, Johnson is the first to make it official.

As governor, Johnson reduced the state workforce and downsized the budget.  He’s also known for libertarian positions on foreign affairs, drug legalization, and social issues.

In his announcement, Johnson promised to take his nickname “Governor Veto” to the next level:

“America needs a ‘President Veto’ right now,” Johnson said in his statement today, “someone who will say ‘no’ to insane spending and stop the madness that has become Washington.”

Who decides? That is the most important question when it comes to Medicare savings. First, some background:

Conservatives suddenly are abuzz again with talk of an Obamacare “death panel,” and in substance they have a point: If the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) works anything like its model in Oregon… and if government health-care programs effectively crowd out private options so that the bureaucratic decision-makers in the government program are, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate arbiters of who receives which treatments… then people have serious reason to worry that their lives could be foreshortened by government fiat. Employing the phrase “death panel” has its advantages and disadvantages (the biggest of the latter is that it keeps the establishment media from giving the complaint any credence, even though the problems with IPAB are both real and acute), but the board’s potential for harm is evident in the fact that 72 Democratic House members last year joined Republicans in asking for the panel to be removed from the bill.

Meanwhile, the anti-Obamacare lawsuit which takes on IPAB directly (among other things), led by the Goldwater Institue, seems to me absolutely on target in challenging how the board is set up to be a power unto itself with no congressional oversight of any relevance or weight. That suit merits far more attention, via full columns rather than quick blog mentions, and conservatives are foolish not to rally in support of it.

With all the anti-IPAB talk bubbling up right now, though, the talk has been strangely disconnected from the budget debate that has been front and center of the American political universe for weeks. Yet with President “Don’t Interrupt Me” Obama jetting all over the country to spread demagogic scare tactics against the Medicare portion of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, those on the right really haven’t done much to parry the specifics of his attacks on the “voucherization” or “privatization” of Medicare. Yet the fact is that the president aims to save almost as much money from Medicare as Ryan does — except that he wants to use IPAB to do it.

That’s why conservatives should take up his challenge. We should answer that it is he, not we, who is (/are) for “cutting” Medicare. He does it by giving vast powers to unelected bureaucrats almost entirely unanswerable to Congress. We achieve savings, which may not involve actual cuts in care at all, by giving power to the patients themselves. Conservatives should do a very specific poll on Medicare Part D. If, as I suspect, it is still a highly successful program, then conservatives should say that all Ryan wants to do is to make all of Medicare work the same way that Part D does — except without the doughnut hole. The idea is to allow seniors themselves to achieve savings while finding the best care they can.

We save; Obama cuts. More importantly, we give the power to the patients; he gives it to bureaucrats with a mandate to chop costs by unaccountable orders.

So the question is, Who decides: The individual patient, or the government commissars?

When phrased like that, conservatives don’t even need to say the phrase “death panel.” For most listeners, the scary implications of Obama’s approach will be clear.

Roll Call says Club for Growth President Chris Chocola is readying his group for another take-down effort of a moderate GOP senator.

Chocola, a former Congressman from Indiana who served in the House from 2003 to 2007, told ABC’s “Top Line” that his fiscally conservative organization is considering getting involved in Lugar’s 2012 re-election campaign in the Hoosier State. The club has already met with Lugar’s primary opponent, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R).

Club for Growth already helped scare former Senator Arlen Specter into switching parties rather than face one-time CG president Pat Toomey in a primary.  Specter wound up losing the Democratic nomination to former Rep. Joe Sestak.  Toomey ultimately prevailed in the general election.

With Lugar’s (lack of) residency in Indiana and tutelage of President Barack Obama likely to become campaign issues, Indiana just might elect a conservative the rest of America deserves.

The Daily Caller reports that House Government Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is being ignored by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) in his demand for documents pertaining to two ATF initiatives: Operation Gunrunner, and Project Fast & Furious.

No, I’m not making this up.  Here’s the thinking behind Operation Gunrunner:

…ATF allowed American guns to be smuggled into Mexico and sold to Mexican drug cartels. The goal of the program was to track the illegal weapons and drug markets after they were used in crimes and abandoned using ballistics information and serial numbers for the guns.

Operation Gunrunner is gaining particular notoriety on Capitol Hill because of the connection between tracked guns and American deaths.  William LaJeunesse of Fox News reported in March that a Gunrunner firearm was linked to the killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

At the time, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) complained of “getting the runaround” from the Department of Justice on its partnership with ATF on Gunrunner.  The Department of Homeland Security has also been tied to the scandal.

No wonder.  Whoever thought it would be a neat idea to intentionally sell weapons to drug lords and follow the mayhem should at least be hauled in for a congressional hearing.

Unfortunately, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) won’t allow Grassley to post the latter’s extensive documentation of the operation and cover-up, nor will he commence an investigation.

Enter Darrell Issa.  In his fight for more transparency from the Obama Administration, Issa may have found an out-of-control operation linked directly to deaths stemming from Mexico’s undeclared civil war.

If the revelations about Operation Gunrunner continue their trajectory, it may not be long before commentators see Iran-Contra in a new light.  At least then the federal government was trying to free hostages while supporting anti-Marxist guerillas.

Following up on my column today on the execrable Obama response to last year’s Gulf oil spill, it’s worth reading pieces in the New Orleans Times-Picayune today so as to remind us of certain realities. First, as the caption accompanying this editorial notes (and as has been reported numerous times), this disaster hardly came out of nowhere. Instead, workers and mid-level supervisors had been reporting problems on this particular well for weeks.

Both widows including Courtney Kemp, of Jonesville, La. told committee members that their husbands, Shane Roshto and Wyatt Kemp, had told them in the weeks before the explosion about problems they had in controlling the well. “This well was different in the fact that they were having so many problems, and so many things were happening, and it was just kind of out of hand,” said Kemp.

Other reports confirm that these truths:

The AP recently obtained documents showing that a BP drilling engineer who worked closely on the blown-out well kept quiet about his misgivings in the weeks leading up to the accident.

In an email message to his wife on March 11, 2010, Brian Morel said his team aboard the rig was “out of control.”

“I can’t take it, so I am staying away from the issues today,” he wrote.

A few weeks earlier, the company had reprimanded Morel in a performance evaluation, cautioning him to pick his battles and “learn when to push and when to concede.”

In other words, this was eminently preventable. Warning signs were missed. Decision-making was terrible. And BP had a reputation, at least in some quarters, for cutting corners on safety.

What this means is that the risks of something like this happening again are very, very slim. If it hasn’t happened for many decades, and then when it does happen it turns out to have been preventable, and if everybody is now on the lookout for signs of trouble, and if new safety equipment and well-capping equipment has been developed and are ready at hand… well, then, it stands to reason that all other would-be drillers, and all the businesses and individuals who depend on the wells for their livelihoods, should not be punished by a “permitorium” on offshore drilling. Nor should American consumers nationwide, who are seeing energy prices (especially prices at the pump) rise to near-record levels.

Meanwhile, the T-P’s Bob Marshall (who was my boss nearly a quarter-century ago) updates us all on the continuing efforts to analyze the long-term ecological damages from the spill. This is crucial work. Conservatives rightly skeptical of EPA overreach on matters large and small, and property owners justly angry at the federal government’s assault on private property in the name of protecting “wetlands” that are no more than “prairie potholes,” sometimes forget that some ecological causes are indeed important. I have always argued that the most important of those are the health of the oceans and seas and the fisheries within them, which also means protecting the coastal eco-systems (actual wetlands/marshlands) that serve as the nurseries for those fisheries. Hunters and fishermen, innately conservative on so many levels, understand these things.

The trick to protecting these precious resources held in common is not to regulate people half to death, but to provide incentives for (or remove disincentives from) proper husbandry of the wetlands and seas. Government wetlands replenishment projects, to make up for the effects of government levee-building and canal-dredging, also are appropriate in some places — and they are less expensive than are disaster-relief costs to make up for damages caused by hurricanes whose effects would be far less fierce if healthy wetlands were still available to absorb some of the rising floodwaters and otherwise cushion the blow.

Nobody really needs a heavy hand from government; heavy hands too often come down with the force of a Rocky Marciano clenched fist. What is needed is a government that is responsive and smart, one which reacts quickly (Obama’s administration did not) but that does not overreact in ways that further punish the victims (which is what Obama did).

Future blowouts can be prevented without killing the regional or national economies. Again, the BP disaster was an anomaly. As my colleague Renee Giachino said on this site last week, the whole airline industry isn’t closed down when one plane crashes. Why should energy exploration be treated any differently?

Faced with the decline and eventual insolvency of America’s welfare state, congressional Republicans led by Paul Ryan laid out a 73- page plan to reform entitlements for a new generation and right America’s economic course. Democrats, on the other hand, cut this ad, a new low in demagoguery:

I don’t ever want to hear another Democrat refer to the GOP as “The Party of No”.

The Washington Post has a helpful – and short – explanation of the debt ceiling debate, along with some interesting facts.  *My comments in ( )

• Prior to 1917, Congress had to approve borrowing each time it came up (meaning that WWI combined with Progressive Era big spending made raising the debt much easier)

• Members of Congress will most likely wait use July 8^th as the drop-dead date (unfortunately, federal pensioners will see government contributions to their retirement funds halted when the U.S. passes the real deadline on May 16^th)

• The debt ceiling was less than $1 trillion in the 1980s, then $6 trillion in the 1990s; today it stands at $14.6 trillion and rising (and no, simple inflation is not the reason – it’s spending increases)

• The budgets presented by President Barack Obama and Rep. Paul Ryan would both require a raise in the debt ceiling (Obama by $2.2 trillion; Ryan by $1.9 trillion)

Read the entire synopsis here.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner says that although many Republicans will be tempted to let the debt ceiling debate go down to the wire, most of them will eventually vote to raise it.

The bottom line is, the debt ceiling issue won’t be settled before an extended game of chicken, one in which Republicans will undoubtedly win some concessions but will, in the end, have to give in.

With the Tea Party still licking its wounds after a much less-than-expected cut in current federal spending, don’t be surprised if raising the debt ceiling becomes the issue upon which many activists base their support for Republican members of Congress.

You probably don’t need any more sources of gloom on this tax day. But what you do need is an understanding of just how destructive America’s current tax regime is. And for that you couldn’t do much better than the words of conservative economist extraordinaire Arthur Laffer, who writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government.

To start with, individuals and businesses must pay the government the $1 in revenue plus the costs of their own time spent filing and complying with the tax code; plus the tax collection costs of the IRS; plus the tax compliance outlays that individuals and businesses pay to help them file their taxes.

In a study published last week by the Laffer Center, my colleagues Wayne Winegarden, John Childs and I estimate that these costs alone are a staggering $431 billion annually. This is a cost markup of 30 cents on every dollar paid in taxes.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the equivalent of a 30% tax on … well, paying taxes.

Standard and Poor’s spooked markets and sent news rooms scrambling today with its decision to downgrade the long-term outlook for the U.S.’s credit rating to “negative” from “stable.”  In a statement released this morning, the ratings agency wrote:

Because the U.S. has, relative to its ‘AAA’ peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable.

We believe there is a material risk that U.S. policymakers might not reach an agreement on how to address medium- and long-term budgetary challenges by 2013; if an agreement is not reached and meaningful implementation is not begun by then, this would in our view render the U.S. fiscal profile meaningfully weaker than that of peer ‘AAA’ sovereigns.

The White House swiftly responded, calling the decision a “political judgment” with which it disagrees. 

Really?  The national debt is more than $14 trillion and climbing.  The federal government borrows more than 40 cents for every dollar it spends.  Entitlement spending is spiraling out of control.  And last week, the federal government was within minutes of shutting down because President Obama and Congressional leaders were haggling over what ended up being a paltry few hundred million dollars in spending cuts from this year’s projected $1.65 trillion deficit. 

While the credit outlook downgrade is being reported as a surprise, it shouldn’t surprise anyone. All S&P has done is acknowledge the obvious.  Let’s hope President Obama and Congressional leaders get serious about doing the same.

Ashton this past weekend noted the latest failure of Eric Holder’s Justice Department. A spate of reports last week indicates that some of the Holder team’s other areas of inaction are even worse — and that its actions in still other areas are at least as bad as the areas of inaction.

In terms of inaction, there was the report from Pajamas Media, borderline frightening in its implications, that the Obama/Holder team is failing or, worse, refusing to prosecute instances of terror financing:

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts.

Then there is the Holder team’s highly politicized hiring practices, which are actually worse — more slanted in one direction, and deliberately so — than anything the much-maligned Bush DoJ did. J. Christian Adams updated the story at the Washington Examiner, which both he and the Washington Times had earlier (at different times) brought to light. As the WashTimes noted last October:

Among the new hires are: Sharyn Tejani comes from the National Partnership for Women and Families, a hotbed of liberal activism, where she served as one of the lead attorneys filing a Supreme Court brief supporting an explicitly race-based refusal to promote white firemen in New Haven, Conn. Aaron Schuham comes directly from Americans United for Separation of Church and State – a group so leftist, it has argued the Obama administration isn’t liberal enough. Audrey Wiggins comes from another liberal bastion, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which also filed a brief against the white firefighters. Bryan Sells comes from the American Civil Liberties Union, as does Meredith Bell-Platts.

As Adams concluded:

Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division should be legal technicians, not activists. The division is the only division of the Justice Department where cases are initiated and brought by low-level line attorneys.Every other division is reactive, not proactive. If adopting the agenda of outside activist groups constitutes “reinvigorating” the Civil Rights Division, the next Republican president needs to deinvigorate it soon after taking office.

Earlier in his column, he reported these bizarrities ignored by the establishment media:

Other bizarre cases have come out of the Holder Civil Rights Division. DOJ stopped the debut of the Amazon Kindle because it was not in Braille. It attacked South Carolina for providing special treatment to inmates infected with AIDS. It demanded that Dayton, Ohio, hire black police officers who failed the competency examination.

Then there’s this from former DoJ official Hans von Spakovsky, writing in the Washington Times, reminding us of two lawless, race-based actions by the Holder DoJ, both involving the jettisoning of neutral, fair entrance exams for police and firefighters. Von Spakovsky also has this over at his Heritage Foundation home, telling about DoJ’s abuse of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Finally (for now), while the news in the following case is more about bad judging than about any new DoJ shenanigans, the whole case on the Arizona immigration law stemmed from DoJ shenanigans in the first place. Again, von Spakovsky reports.

The Holder team is willfully abusive of the law as written and traditionally interpreted. It is a disgrace.