While Attorney General Eric Holder continues to “stonewall,” as Congressman Issa (R-CA) describes it, and make excuses concerning Operation Fast and Furious, the Mexican Government is making arrests.  According to the LA Times, over the weekend Mexican authorities arrested Jose Antonia Torres Marrufo, “a reputed enforcer for the country’s most powerful drug cartel — a man also alleged to have amassed weapons from the U.S. government’s failed Fast and Furious gun-smuggling operation.” (Italics mine)

Torres  “was in charge of operations in the border state of Chihuahua,” which includes the crime-ridden city of Juarez: a city that is just across the border from El Paso, TX, and one to which Fast and Furious weapons were believed to have been transported. Moreover, Torres, “[who] was wanted in connection with numerous crimes including murder, extortion, kidnapping and the sale and distribution of drugs,” had “two assault rifles and two  [semi-automatic] pistols” with him.

I can’t help but wonder, “Where did Torres get the rifles and the pistols?” Let’s see, he was “alleged to have amassed weapons” via Fast and Furious and he admits to taking over “armed operations for the organization in Chihuahua during the last two to three years.” Hmmm…it doesn’t seem like it should be difficult to figure this one out.

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On October 18, 2010, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer sent communiqués to Attorney General Eric Holder alerting the A.G. that indictments over Fast and Furious could be forthcoming.  This alert came on the heels of briefings on Fast and Furious which were sent to Holder at least as early July 2010. Yet although Fast and Furious was the topic of such correspondence and the focus of such briefings, in February 2011 Breuer told Congress he knew nothing about the gun walking tactics which had been used in the operation. His contention was that he only learned of the tactics once Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry had been killed in December 2010.

More recently, however, Breuer has decided he knew about the gun walking aspects of Fast and Furious as early as April 2010. But he continues to carry water for the DOJ by saying that although he knew, he never took the time to tell Holder about the gun walking.

How many lies can these people tell before someone changes the locks on their office doors and takes away their parking credentials?

Senator Charles Grassley, for one, has had enough, and just today officially called for Breuer’s resignation from the Senate floor. (more…)

As you will recall, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senate and Congressional investigators on Friday, October 7^th. It was a self-serving attempt to get Congressman Issa and Senator Charles Grassley to call off the chase that was clearly leading investigators to Holder’s front door.

To make a long story short, I just received an email from Congressman Issa’s office that proves the investigators are not only going to continue their pursuit, but that Holder is their central focus.

The email contained a copy of an absolutely scathing letter which Issa has sent in response to Holder’s not-so-veiled attempt he stall the investigation last Friday.

Here are pertinent excerpts:

Dear Attorney General Holder:

From the beginning of the congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, the Department of Justice has offered a roving set of ever-changing explanations to justify its involvement in this reckless and deadly program.  These defenses have been aimed at undermining the investigation.  From the start, the Department insisted that no wrongdoing had occurred and asked Senator Grassley and me to defer our oversight responsibilities over its concerns about our purported interference with its ongoing criminal investigations.  Additionally, the Department steadfastly insisted that gunwalking did not occur.

Once documentary and testimonial evidence strongly contradicted these claims, the Department attempted to limit the fallout from Fast and Furious to the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).  When that effort also proved unsuccessful, the Department next argued that Fast and Furious resided only within ATF itself, before eventually also assigning blame to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.  All of these efforts were designed to circle the wagons around DOJ and its political appointees.

To that end, just last month, you claimed that Fast and Furious did not reach the upper levels of the Justice Department.  Documents discovered through the course of the investigation, however, have proved each and every one of these claims advanced by the Department to be untrue.

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While the mainstream media continues to cover important stories about the “racist” Tea Party, the need to tax the ultra-rich, or Michelle Obama’s recent shopping spree at Target, details of Fast and Furious continue to effervesce below the surface.  And while Obama tweaks his jobs plan for the umpteenth time, takes a few more vacations, and blames the American people for the misery he himself has caused, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) continue to demand answers as to who knew what and when regarding the 2,500 weapons that were sold to straw purchasers and then carried into Mexico without so much as a whimper from ATF supervisors.

Let me make a correction: part of the news that’s effervescing is that all the weapons weren’t sold to civilian straw purchasers. We now know that some of them were sold to ATF agents who paid cash for the weapons and then turned around and sold them to men with proven criminal ties.

Of course, this raises a whole new problem for the ATF supervisors and DOJ officials who are doing their best to stonewall Issa and Grassley’s investigation into this monstrously criminal action: and that new problem is that the funds ATF agents used to purchase the weapons were taxpayer funds.

Read that again and let it soak in – taxpayer monies were used to buy at least some of guns that were purchased during Fast and Furious (and which were then passed on to criminals).

How could this happen? It could happen because this was not a bottom up operation. It was top down, and those at the top had access to funding and the power to keep those beneath them from blowing the lid off of it (for a while at least).

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Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama — who began his Presidency, as nearly all new first-term Presidents do, high in the polls. At that time, Obama’s approval ratings were, in fact, in the stratosphere. In the last twelve months, however, they have fallen further and faster than those of any President since polling began; and, and, as developments in Massachusetts suggest, his party is now in danger of suffering in November an historic defeat — which is likely to rival its fate in 1938, 1966, and 1994 if the Democrats do not, as I believe they may, do even worse. In a poll released on Thursday, the National Journal reports that half of the adults sampled responded that, if new Presidential elections were held right now, they would vote against Barack Obama, and less than a quarter of those questioned indicated that they would vote to re-elect the President. It is an appropriate time in which to pose this question: Why have Obama and his supporters fallen so far and so fast?

We must, I think, begin before the beginning. The Obama campaign was predicated on a fraud. With a skill that was breathtaking, Barack Obama managed during that campaign to signal to the left within the Democratic Party with a wink and a nod that he was their man and that he meant business — that he really intended to “transform” America. To those in the middle and on the right who are ashamed of the nation’s historic sins in matters of race, he offered absolution, and he promised that the penance that they would have to perform after leaving the confessional would not be harsh. He was not, he said, a tax-and-spend liberal.

I was not taken in. Late in 2008, after reviewing the page proofs of Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, I persuaded my editor to allow me to add the following to the book:

Once again, as in the 1920s, rational administration has failed us. As on that other occasion, the Federal Reserve Board and the Department of the Treasury pursued over an extended period under more than one administration an easy-money policy bound in the end to give rise to “irrational exuberance” in the markets and to a bubble followed by a catastrophic decline in prices and a collapse of the credit markets. And, to make matters worse, we responded to this set of circumstances precisely as we did on that earlier occasion — by electing a president and choosing a Congress intent on dramatically increasing the scale and scope of the administrative state.

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Writing for Forbes, Bruce Bartlett puts forth an interesting hypothesis that healthcare legislation could have been made better (hopefully he meant to write “less destructive”) if the GOP had been willing to compromise with Democrats:

Democrats desperately wanted a bipartisan bill and would have given a lot to get a few Republicans on board. This undoubtedly would have led to enactment of a better health bill than the one we are likely to get. But Republicans never put forward an alternative health proposal. Instead, they took the position that our current health system is perfect just as it is.

Bruce makes several compelling points in the article, especially when he notes that it will be virtually impossible to repeal a bad bill after 2010 or 2012, but there are good reasons to disagree with his analysis. First, he is wrong in stating that Republicans were united against any compromise. Several GOP senators spent months trying to negotiate something less objectionable, but those discussions were futile. Also, I’m not sure it’s correct to assert Republicans took a the-current-system-is-perfect position.

They may not have offered a full alternative (they did have a few good reforms such as allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines), but their main message was that the Democrats were going to make the current system worse. Strikes me as a perfectly reasonable position, one that I imagine Bruce shares. But let’s further explore Bruce’s core hypothesis: Would compromise have generated a better bill? It’s possible, to be sure, but there are also several reasons why that approach may have backfired:

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With Democratic support coalescing around Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mt.) health care reform proposal, passage of a comprehensive overhaul now appears more likely than ever.  Opponents had their summer of protests.  But, Democrats have shown a renewed sense of energy since discrediting Sarah Palin’s “death panels” and Sen. Charles Grassley’s claim that ObamaCare would “pull the plug on grandma.” Still, while those charges may have been a little overwrought, there is plenty to be concerned about with the Democratic health reform effort.

As I explain in a new Competitive Enterprise Institute paper, “A Cure Worse than the Disease: Obama Care Won’t Cut Costs, But May Cut Quality,” most of the alleged cost-cutting measures in the Baucus bill merely shift costs from the federal government onto the states or private payers, without affecting long-term health care inflation.  The only measures that could reduce the annual rate of growth in health care costs would erect government barriers between patients and their doctors, while jeopardizing long-term medical innovation.

Skeptics have made hay arguing that the so-called Sustainable Growth Rate can’t be counted on to cut $245-billion in Medicare spending. But Senate Finance Committee negotiators have designed a Medicare Commission—what the White House previously called an Independent Medicare Advisory Commission—to make similar cuts in physician and hospital payment rates in a more opaque way.

In an April New York Times interview, President Obama suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost…the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives.”  That’s not exactly a death panel roving the country to pull the plug on innocent grandmas who’ve survived past their sell-by dates, but the effects could be equally pernicious.

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FINAL UPDATE 9/24/2009 6:50 PM Eastern time

The senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), asked the IRS to probe ACORN – and asked that ACORN be dropped from the Combined Federal Campaign, a charitable program for government workers.

Grassley, long known as Capitol Hill’s foremost policeman of the nonprofit community, is expected to make his formal announcement this evening. In a letter the senator indicated he has been concerned about ACORN since at least 2006.

Grassley sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman earlier today and a separate, shorter letter to John Berry, Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Both letters are available here.

In the letter to Berry, he asks that the ACORN Institute “and any other ACORN affiliates, particularly any of those reviewed by my staff, be prohibited from participating in the CFC. The acts perpetrated by ACORN employees were impermissible and should not be supported with CFC dollars.”

CFC refers to the Combined Federal Campaign, which bills itself as “the world’s largest and most successful annual workplace charity campaign.” CFC is a federally administered program that channels donations from federal civilian, postal and military employees into causes deemed worthwhile. It is unclear how much money the ACORN network receives through CFC. (more…)