Eric Holder's Law

Hugh Hewitt / Townhall Columnist

When President Obama refused to endorse same sex marriage in the 2008 presidential campaign, was he as bigoted as a defender of Jim Crow in 1948, six years before "separate but equal" was struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court?

That's what Attorney General Eric Holder would have you believe based on his remarks about same sex marriage on Monday.
 
From The New York Times' account of an interview with the Attorney General:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday injected the Obama administration into the emotional and politicized debate over the future of state same-sex marriage bans, declaring in an interview that state attorneys general are not obligated to defend laws that they believe are discriminatory….

Mr. Holder said when laws touch on core constitutional issues like equal protection, an attorney general should apply the highest level of scrutiny before reaching a decision on whether to defend it. He said the decision should never be political or based on policy objections.

“Engaging in that process and making that determination is something that’s appropriate for an attorney general to do,” Mr. Holder said.

As an example, Mr. Holder cited the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which forced public school integration in 1954.

“If I were attorney general in Kansas in 1953, I would not have defended a Kansas statute that put in place separate-but-equal facilities,” Mr. Holder said.

The nation’s first black attorney general, Mr. Holder has said he views today’s gay-rights campaigns as a continuation of the civil rights movement that won rights for black Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. He has called gay rights one of “the defining civil rights challenges of our time.”

This is astonishing and troubling, and of a piece with the president and the Administration's growing lawlessness. There is no precedent for the idea that states' attorneys generals ought to pick and choose among the laws they defend, just as there is no precedent for the president's decision to serially alter his signature legislative "achievement" as he has done with Obamacare, or to empower his agencies to regulate far in advance of authority granted them by the Congress.

For the benefit of AG Holder, let's jump in the way-back machine to far, far ago: November 2, 2008:

Obama told MTV he believes marriage is "between a man and a woman" and that he is "not in favor of gay marriage."

At the same time, Obama reiterated his opposition to Proposition 8, the California ballot measure which would eliminate a right to same-sex marriage that the state’s Supreme Court recently recognized.

"I’ve stated my opposition to this. I think it’s unnecessary," Obama told MTV. "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that’s not what America’s about."

"Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don’t contract them," he added.

Now back to the present day. Attorney General Holder is demanding that the nation's elected chief law enforcement officers of every state reach a conclusion that the president hadn't reached less than six years ago and further, that she or he impose it on their states despite their sworn oaths to uphold and defend the constitutions of their states.

Less than two years ago, North Carolina voters passed a ban on same sex marriage by a 60 to 40% vote, becoming the 30th state to do so, and yet the United States Attorney General argues that North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, who favors same sex marriage, should refuse to defend the law that the citizens of his state passed overwhelmingly less than two years ago. A handful of state attorneys general have arrogated to themselves this right to pick and chose among their state's laws --the Times asserts this has happened in California, Illinois, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia-- but it is unclear if any of these "leaders" announced their intent to nullify state law before their elections or only after they had safely negotiated their first appeal for votes. President Obama's decision to strike his pose came only in a desperate campaign for re-election when he jettisoned his old position for a new one tailored to turn out his base. AG Holder's "bold" declaration also comes as his lame duck status advances to end-stage and he looks out to speaking events and future board seats to feather his retirement.

Holder's position is far removed from a courageous decision to risk political future for principled stance. There is no risk on his part, just as there was no risk on the president's part. Both are posing, and in posing, sanitize a deep lawlessness.

If an attorney general can refuse to defend one portion of his state's constitution, why not another? Will the Attorney General encourage pro-life attorneys general to stop defending abortion clinics beset by protesters? Will he encourage district attorneys convinced that heroin addiction is a disease and the use of heroin wrongly classified as a crime to cease prosecuting offenders brought by their law enforcement officials to their jails?

Laws exist to guide even the most noble-minded elected official and certainly to cabin the ambitions of the worst of the lot. The rule of law protects everyone and channels everyone's desire for change into political activity, not into gaining office from which unilateral decrees might issue.

The Attorney General's latest encouragement to lawlessness ought to press an answer from every attorney general candidate before every election: Will you uphold your oath and defend the laws of the state as you swear to do, or do you not take such things as oaths seriously?

The 'Fairness' Fraud

Thomas Sowell / Townhall Columnist

It seems as if, everywhere you turn these days, there are studies claiming to show that America has lost its upward mobility for people born in the lower socioeconomic levels. But there is a sharp difference between upward "mobility," defined as an opportunity to rise, and mobility defined as actually having risen.

That distinction is seldom even mentioned in most of the studies. It is as if everybody is chomping at the bit to get ahead, and the ones that don't rise have been stopped by "barriers" created by "society."

When statistics show that sons of high school dropouts don't become doctors or scientists nearly as often as the sons of Ph.D.s, that is taken as a sign that American society is not "fair."

If equal probabilities of achieving some goal is your definition of fairness, then we should all get together -- people of every race, color, creed, national origin, political ideology and sexual preference -- and stipulate that life has never been fair, anywhere or any time in all the millennia of recorded history.

Then we can begin at last to talk sense.

I know that I never had an equal chance to become a great ballet dancer like Rudolph Nureyev. The thought of becoming a ballet dancer never once crossed my mind in all the years when I was growing up in Harlem. I suspect that the same thought never crossed the minds of most of the guys growing up on New York's lower east side.

Does that mean that there were unfair barriers keeping us from following in the footsteps of Rudolph Nureyev?

A very distinguished scholar once mentioned at a social gathering that, as a young man, he was not thinking of going to college until someone else, who recognized his ability, urged him to do so.

Another very distinguished scholar told me that, although his parents were anti-Semitic, it was the fact that he went to a school with many Jewish children that got him interested in intellectual matters and led him into an academic career.

All groups, families and cultures are not even trying to do the same things, so the fact that they do not all end up equally represented everywhere can hardly be automatically attributed to "barriers" created by "society."

Barriers are external obstacles, as distinguished from internal values and aspirations -- unless you are going to play the kind of word games that redefine achievements as "privileges" and treat an absence of evidence of discrimination as only proof of how diabolically clever and covert the discrimination is.

The front page of a local newspaper in northern California featured the headline "The Promise Denied," lamenting the under-representation of women in computer engineering. The continuation of this long article on an inside page had the headline, "Who is to blame for this?"

In other words, the fact that reality does not match the preconceptions of the intelligentsia shows that there is something wrong with reality, for which somebody must be blamed. Apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

Women, like so many other groups, seem not to be dedicated to fulfilling the prevailing fetish among the intelligentsia that every demographic group should be equally represented in all sorts of places.

Women have their own agendas, and if these agendas do not usually include computer engineering, what is to be done? Draft women into engineering schools to satisfy the preconceptions of our self-anointed saviors? Or will a propaganda campaign be sufficient to satisfy those who think that they should be making other people's choices for them?

That kind of thinking is how we got ObamaCare.

At least one of the recent celebrated statistical studies of social mobility leaves out Asian Americans. Immigrants from Asia are among a number of groups, including American-born Mormons, whose achievements totally undermine the notion that upward mobility can seldom be realized in America.

Those who preach this counterproductive message will probably never think that the envy, resentment and hopelessness they preach, and the welfare state they promote, are among the factors keeping people down.

New Islamophobia vaccine to be ready by 2015!

Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

 

WASHINGTON, DC PARODY CENTRAL, February 23 —

Researchers at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding announced Monday that they had perfected a new vaccine for Islamophobia and submitted it for FDA approval. After that approval is granted, the vaccine is expected to be mass-marketed in early 2015.

John Esposito, director of the Saudi-funded Center, announced at a press conference unveiling the vaccine: “The vaccine comes in handy sugar cube form. So when your bigoted, hateful uncle starts mouthing off at Christmas dinner about the need to resist Islamic jihad, just offer to sweeten up his tea — and presto! In no time he’ll be subscribing to Aslan Media!”

Nihad Awad, Director of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: “CAIR applauds the new Islamophobia vaccine. We have tested it in a clinical trial on some of the nation’s greasiest Islamophobes. We gave the subjects the vaccine, then showed them footage of Islamic jihad attacks, complete with the jihadis brandishing Qur’ans and rifles and screaming ‘Allahu akbar’ as they torched churches and beheaded non-Muslims. The results were immediate and immensely gratifying.”

Corey Saylor, Hamas-linked CAIR’s Director of Hounding Counter-Jihadists and Stirring Up “Islamophobia” Hysteria, elaborated: “Instead of calling for resistance to jihad terror, and the monitoring of mosques, and programs in those mosques to teach against jihad violence and the interpretation of Islamic texts and teachings that jihadis use to justify that violence, once the vaccine kicked in these former greasy Islamophobes began saying very different things. They’d see these jihad attacks and say things like, ‘I fear there will be a backlash against innocent Muslims,’ and ‘We need to address the poverty and inequality that gives rise to the resentments that fuel attacks like these.’ Best of all, some of them even started saying, ‘We need to send money to CAIR so they can buy more billboards saying that jihad is romping through the daisies. That’s the Islamic reform we need!’”

Reza Aslan of Aslan Media declared: “I’m an expert on the new Islamophobia drug. I have a Ph.D. in it. I had a big hand in its development, in fact. I was present when we made participants at clinical trials, all seriously greasy Islamophobes, spit at and trample upon photos of those Islamophobic f**ks Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. I knew then that the vaccine was a success.”

Ibrahim Hooper, Hamas-linked CAIR’s Director of Taqiyya Advancement, added: “The big breakthrough came when CAIR researchers discovered that we could equate honest investigation of how jihadis use Islamic teachings to justify violence and supremacism with attacks on innocent Muslims, and classify both as ‘Islamophobia,’ a clinical disorder. After that, it was only a matter of time before our researchers would develop an antidote. Part LSD, part valium, part cannibis sativa, our new Islamophobia vaccine’s full recipe is as closely guarded secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola.

But one thing we can reveal: this vaccine makes you feel very, very good. We think it could challenge Ecstasy as the new party drug. After all, what other drug makes you stop worrying and love the jihad?”

It's Bowe Tuesday...again. Hey Obama...get Bowe home NOW...GWB would have!!!

Op-ed: 
Cuts to our military and Susan Rice's arrogance have me actually seething
By: Diane Sori

"Secretary Hagel has been clear that, while we do not want to, we ultimately must slow the growth of military pay and compensation." - Admiral John Kirby, Defense Department spokesman

Seething...I'm actually seething as once again the very people who lay their lives on the line to keep us safe and free at home are being both dishonored and put in harm's way as muslim sympathizing, Obama-loving Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is recommending major cuts to our military... especially to the Army. And he's adding in for good measure a one-year freeze on military pay raises for officers, higher out-of-pocket costs for health-care benefits, and less monies for housing allowances for both our returning troops and our vets, in an all out effort to cut billions of dollars from our defense budget.

Wanting to downsize our military to pre-WWII levels (in 1940 the Army had 267,000 active-duty members but by 1941 it increased to 1.46 million as we approached America's entry into World War II)...this downsizing includes the loss of battleships and fighter planes including the retiring of older weapons such as the U-2 spy plane and the A-10 attack aircraft...leaving the U.S. homeland and our foreign interests more vulnerable to enemy attacks. And these cuts are disproportionately being done to our military budget over any and all other department's budget cuts...can't dare cut the freebie and handout programs now can they...and are 'supposedly' being done based on the assumption the U.S. military will NOT ever engage in ground wars again.

Hate to tell Hagel but that same erroneous assumption was made after WWII when cuts were done and look how that turned out...do the words Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan ring a bell...guess NOT.

And the Army, the largest of our armed services, currently with 522,000 active-duty soldiers is now scheduled to be downsized to 490,000 by 2015 from its wartime high of 570,000. And to make matters worse, Hagel wants to actually make even more cuts to stabilize levels to between 420,000 and 450,000...very dangerous to say the least.

In fact, some, like Army Chief-of-Staff General Ray Odierno, have said that "an army of 420,000 would be too small for a world that has such an uncertain national security landscape." The minimum size, he believes, should be NO lower than 450,000. He said shrinking to 420,000 would make a big difference in the capabilities of the force.

In other words meaning that our troops might NOT be able to go toe-to-toe with an enemy out to kill us all...well maybe NOT all of us as Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his merry band of miscreants and traitors do side with said enemy after all.

So if this is NOT an act of treason I don't know what is as the first duty of the president and those elected or appointed to office...after protecting and defending the Constitution of course...is to assure the health, safety, and welfare of the American people, and these cuts put NOT only American lives here at home in danger but put our troops themselves and Americans overseas in even graver danger.

And Obama and crew know this and just do NOT care.

So what are we going to do about this...are we going to sit back and allow Barack HUSSEIN Obama to cut our military forces to dangerous levels leaving us vulnerable to an attack on our own soil and leaving our troops vulnerable to major attacks when stationed overseas...or are we finally going to collectively in a loud and clear voice say "enough" and demand this most traitorous of presidents and his equally traitorous minions be removed from office immediately...as in ARREST the bast*rds now!

I sure hope it's the latter.

And to further add to my seething is that this past Sunday on Meet the Press, Susan Rice, the very woman who towed the Obama line last September when she made the talk show circuit rounds saying that Benghazi was a direct result of a poorly made YouTube video that defamed islam and mohamed ...a video by the way that NO one in the region had seen....had the audacity...had the unmitigated gall...to say she had NO regrets...NO regrets at all about anything she previously said about Benghazi ...grrrrrrr...

And when David Gregory directly looked her in the eye and asked her why she had NO regrets about Benghazi, Rice said, "What I said to you that morning, and what I did every day since, was to share the best information that we had at the time...the information I provided, which I explained to you, was what we had at the moment. It could change. I commented that this was based on what we knew on that morning, was provided to me and my colleagues and indeed to Congress by the intelligence community, and that’s been well validated in many different ways since." 

Translation: this miserable excuse of a woman has NO regrets whatsoever about LYING to the American people two months before a presidential election just so Benghazi would NOT tarnish the Obama media-created myth that he was and is the 'savior' of us all. Boy would I love to bitch-slap her upside her LYING head!

And then the infamous blame game kicked into high gear with Rice's words that it was “patently false” to allege that the White House deliberately misled the American people.

'Misled' my eye as the White House...as Barack HUSSEIN Obama...as Hillary Clinton...blatantly and with malice LIED about the deaths of four Americans...LIED about the reasons for those deaths...LIED about what was actually ILLEGALLY going on within the Benghazi compound...and then covered it all up with even more LIES...LIES that Susan Rice helped spread.

And as Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Doherty's deaths mean NOTHING to this miserable administration...they mean EVERYTHING to their parents and loved ones left behind...and to 'We the People'...yet we are still left with NO answers...NO truths...and that is the saddest thing of all next to these LYING bast*rds still NOT being in jail that is.

Can you say "beyond seething"...