As the campaign cycle progresses we are going to hear a lot about what one candidate or another is going to do about this or that. We will, to the point of weariness, be inundated with campaign promise after campaign promise, albeit, between gratuitous attacks, both political and personal. This is politicking and the American electorate – for better or for worse – has come to accept a certain amount of it from the people in the political class. But expecting grandiose pledges and believing in the unattainable, well, those are two different things. It is the truly foolish who believe half of what a political candidate says he can deliver, and the blame for that foolishness must fall on the shoulders of the individual voter.

While Presidents sign legislation into law, it is Congress – the House and the Senate; the Legislative Branch – that actually crafts and passes legislation. Therefore, any promise made on the campaign trail by a presidential candidate, be it by the incumbent or the challenger (or the field of candidates vying to be the challenger), is subject to the debate and acquiescence of those in the Legislative Branch; in Congress. It is because of this that any promise made by a presidential candidate must be received by the voting public as more of an intention, rather than a promise. To accept a campaign promise as an impending reality is to set oneself up for almost certain disappointment. And to blame a successful candidate for not living up to those campaign promises requires a level of certainty that the promise was actually ignored, not thwarted.

A good example of campaign promises thwarted comes in the form of the Republican TEA Party supported congressional freshman class who, during the 2010 Mid-Term Elections, promised to “repeal or defund Obamacare” and to “bring fiscal responsibility to Washington.” Each of those elected sincerely believed that they would be able to succeed in doing what they promised. In fact, HR2 of the 112th Congress did, in fact, attempt to repeal Obamacare and many of the TEA Party supported members of the House took it straight on the chin during the debt, deficit and budget debates. But for all of their good intentions and actions, the freshmen Republicans of the 112th Congress learned that unless you have a veto-proof majority in the House, a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a friendly inhabitant in the White House, absolutes in campaign promises do not exist.

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Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2011 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The members of the House of Representatives on the list, in alphabetical order, include:

• Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL)
• Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL)
• Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
• Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)
• Rep. David Rivera (R-FL)
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
• Rep. Don Young (R-AK)

Dishonorable Mentions for 2011 include:

• Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)
• Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
• Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
• Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)
• Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY)

Spencer Bachus (R-AL): He has become the face of a congressional “insider trading” scandal that has rocked the Washington establishment as 2011 draws to a close. Rep. Spencer Bachus, Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was one of the principal targets of a 60 Minutes investigative report on the scandal, which aired on CBS in September 2011.

The report was based, at least in part, on the book Throw Them All Out by author Peter Schweizer, which outed a slew of members of Congress who allegedly profited in the financial markets by trading on insider information. Bachus was not the only congressman cited by 60 Minutes, others included Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, but the Alabama Republican stood out for his remarkable “good fortune” in shorting the stock market. (more…)

Something fishy is going on over at the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ). And it very well could threaten the integrity of the 2012 elections.

As you may recall, Judicial Watch investigated a partnership between the DOJ and ACORN-connected Project Vote to use the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) to register more individuals on public assistance, widely considered a key voting demographic for the Obama 2012 campaign. (Remember, President Obama previously worked for Project Vote.)

Well, this week we obtained some new records courtesy of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed on August 19, 2011. The records detail communications between the DOJ and Estelle Rogers, a former ACORN attorney currently serving as Director of Advocacy for Project Vote. These documents leave no doubt that a suspiciously close relationship between Project Vote and the DOJ is developing behind closed doors. Our friend J. Christian Adams summed up the records in a recent column:

Judicial Watch has done it again. It has produced-following a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the United States Department of Justice​ (DOJ)-documents that suggest extensive coordination and communications between the DOJ Voting Section and former ACORN affiliate Project Vote.

Project Vote appears to be directing DOJ resources toward particular states; is having meetings with DOJ staff; and is even recommending lawyers to work in the Justice Department Voting Section that will oversee the 2012 presidential election.

Now, let’s review what we know about the activist Estelle Rogers before we get into the meat of these records.

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Judicial Watch uncovered hundreds of documents from the City of Dayton, Ohio, showing that Department of Justice (DOJ) officials pressured the Dayton Police and Fire Departments to lower testing standards because not enough African-American candidates passed the written exam. On May 25, Judicial Watch also filed a lawsuit against the DOJ to obtain additional records related to the Dayton program after the DOJ failed to respond to a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 11-971)).

Here’s how messed up the situation has gotten at the Obama DOJ when it comes to racial discrimination.  As you may recall, the DOJ abandoned its own lawsuit against members of the radical New Black Panther Party who threatened and intimidated white voters on Election Day 2008.  (The leftist NAACP appears to have helped call the shots on the case dismissal.)

And now these new documents detail a scheme by DOJ officials to bully the City of Dayton, Ohio, into lowering testing standards for firefighter and police recruits because minority candidates did not perform well enough on the written exam.  (One of the most shocking claims by the DOJ is that it’s not all that important for firefighters to be able to read and write!)

This “racial quota” scheme, while clearly shameless in its intent, also seems to violate laws against discrimination and Supreme Court precedent.

On June 29, 2009, the Supreme Court ruled that city officials in New Haven, Connecticut, violated the rights of white firefighters when they discarded the results of a promotions test because minority firefighters performed poorly on the test.  “The city rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.  (Ricci et al. v. DeStefano et al. (No. 07–1428)).

But that didn’t stop the Obama DOJ.

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In one move in February, Barack Obama and Eric Holder overruled the U.S. Constitution and redefined the institution of marriage. And Judicial Watch wants to know everything about how and why this decision was made.

That’s why we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Obama Justice Department (DOJ) on April 29, 2011. We want access to any DOJ records pertaining to the agency’s decision not to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. (You may recall DOMA, as it is called, breezed through Congress with a vote of 85–14 in the Senate and a vote of 342–67 in the House. President Clinton signed the act into law by on September 21, 1996. It has been the law of the land now for almost 15 years.)

Now we know what the Obama administration has said publicly about its decision.

On February 23, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Congress announcing that the Obama Justice Department would no longer defend the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (which defines marriage for federal purposes as the union of a man and a woman) in two recently-filed cases: Pederson v. Office of Personnel Management and Windsor v. United States.

The Attorney General then took it a step further, announcing the Justice Department would not defend DOMA as applied to same-sex married couples in any other pending or future litigation:

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Over the past month and a half, seven members of Congress–six of whom are members of the Democratic Socialists of America–have written letters to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama on behalf of radical extremists whose homes were raided by the FBI last September.

The raids took place in Chicago and Minnesota, where 23 individuals were targeted by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The individuals are anti-war and international solidarity activists with possible links to funding Hamas and other terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah and the Marxist F.A.R.C. (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

U.S. Representatives and Democratic Socialists of America members; Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), John Conyers (D-MI), Danny Davis (D-IL), Jim McDermott (D-WA), and Keith Ellison (D-MN) have all written letters to either President Obama or Eric Holder regarding the status of the ongoing investigation. Representative David Price (D-NC) has also joined these socialist members of Congress on behalf of the radical extremists.

The letters refer to the anti-war and social-justice activists as “peaceful.” However you can see recent footage of Andy Thayer, one of these so-called “peaceful activists” targeted in the investigation, in the video below. Just this past March, Thayer called for revolution at an anti-war/pro-socialist revolution protest in Chicago. Unfortunately in a time when most Americans struggle to find any adequate representation from their elected members of Congress, these radicals seem to have just the right representatives to turn to.

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When Americans voted in Barack Obama in 2008, they thought they were getting a “post-racial,” “post-partisan” President.  For Barack Obama himself had declared that having merely won the Democratic nomination, “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  What Americans didn’t realize however was that Barack Obama was only to be President for certain subsets of the population; this new era of good feeling was only to be for those of a select few classes, races and ethnicities.  This was to be a world in which all of the old injustices would be righted not by tolerance for all, but with intolerance for the presumed intolerant, with the vengeful Barack Obama correcting past wrongs with his redistributive justice.

And so in America today if you are black, a union member, Muslim, Hispanic, gay and/or profligate you can expect preferential treatment from this administration.  For most everyone else, tough luck.  I know of no other way to interpret the pattern of the words and actions of this President and his cronies.  We need not judge Obama on the Bill Ayers, Edward Said/Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright influences.  The true instincts of this administration show quite clearly in its deafening silence on so many true injustices, only to be outdone by its knee-jerk reactions to issues either not germane to it, or on which it consistently sides against the majority of Americans.

Witness the fact that the President cannot help but interject when it comes to the actions of a white cop in Cambridge, a mosque being built by Islamic supremacists near Ground Zero, a Governor trying to return his state to fiscal sanity by taking on an obfuscatory union or the evil fat cats trying to make their undeserved profits, nor can Eric Holder admit that perhaps even the word “jihad” exists, let alone that the nightstick-wielding Black Panthers in Philadelphia were anything more than “inappropriate,” though they threatened the citizenry in the very way that his “people” were threatened decades ago.  The notion of the keeper of justice defending above all his “people” poses a challenge to Justice Sotomayor’s wise Latina women quip in the volumes it speaks with regard to the “soft” bigotry of this administration.

This administration does not represent the people, but only the narrow majority which elected it, save for a handful of Independents they have thrown under the bus along the way.  But as Lenin said, “if you want to make an omelet, you have to be willing to break a few eggs.”

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Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that politics had anything to do with its Justice Department’s (DOJ) decision to abandon its lawsuit against the Black Panthers, a “civil rights” group that brandished weapons, blocked a polling station and hurled racial insults at voters on Election Day 2008. In fact, at least one Justice Department official swore to it under oath.

But according to evidence uncovered by Judicial Watch, this is yet another Obama administration falsehood.

On September 21, released a draft Vaughn index prepared by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that shows that the two top political appointees at the DOJ were involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense (NBPP).

The index, which we acquired pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, describes documents the government is withholding from the public. Among those documents are internal DOJ emails regarding the Black Panther case between the highest political appointees inside the DOJ, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and the Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the second and third ranking officials at the DOJ.

Here’s one example: A May 10, 2009, email from Associate Attorney General Perrelli to Deputy Associate Attorney General and former Democratic election lawyer Sam Hirsh. “Where are we on the Black Panther case?” Perrelli asks in the subject header. The email also includes Deputy Attorney General Ogden’s “current thoughts on the case.”

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Everyone has their favorite lawyer joke.  Most end up rather poorly for the lawyers.

I understand the public outcry against lawyers, recently stoked by the situation at the Department of Justice (DOJ).  For those not familiar with this news, Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder is in a pitched battle with members of the Senate over the backgrounds of nine attorneys working at DOJ.  Apparently, each of those attorneys have either represented or advocated for terrorist detainees.  Two have been identified: Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal was lead counsel for Guantanamo detainees in the Supreme Court case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld; Jennifer Daskal advocated for Guantanamo detainees with Human Rights Watch (HRW).

A little background on their background:

Hamdan focused on the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) established under Executive Order by former President George W. Bush in 2001.  CSRT determination was crucial to understanding detainee rights under the Geneva Conventions (adopted by the US), which grant specific rights to lawful enemy combatants (see Article 4) and are silent in regards to unlawful enemy combatants (see Article 5).  CSRTs were a form of military commission.  The main problem the Supreme Court had with CSRTs is that they were not “regularly constituted courts” under the Geneva Convention because our Constitution grants Congress the power of establishing courts.  So Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which was partially struck down by the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush (but that is a story for another day).

HRW is “dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world.”  It sounds nice, but the group admits to “targeted advocacy.”  Started in 1978, HRW focused on the atrocities committed by the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. When the Evil Empire collapsed in 1991, HRW decided to shift its main attention to the “Evil Republic” of the US.  I suppose HRW decided it could not fire the vast amount of people needed to identify atrocities committed by the Evil Empire, and there was only one major power left.  I also gather that it is a little easier to address “atrocities” committed by the US, as opposed to atrocities committed by China or Russia.

AG Holder refuses to identify the remaining seven lawyers, and in fact, there may be more lawyers with similar backgrounds.

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On conservative talk shows, defenders of President Obama have frequently asserted that it is too soon into the term of the new administration to fairly judge the policies and performance of our President.  Well, nearly a full year has elapsed since the Obama administration took office and we’ve now all had plenty of chance to “give Obama a chance.”  The oft-repeated mantras that “It’s too soon to tell” and “It’s all George Bush’s fault” won’t hold beer any longer.   If his plummeting poll numbers are any indication, many who fell for Obama’s neatly packaged utopian vapors of hope, change, and transformation are finally starting to emerge from their media-induced slumber.  And, while many of us could easily predict that the shallowness residing at the core of Barack Obama would soon lead to a precipitous disillusionment, the speed with which that is taking place is actually quite breathtaking.

Despite what European Socialists may think of us, Americans are not entirely stupid.  While the well-oiled hype machine of the Left-biased news media and the air headed Hollywood crowd helped to induce the large scale brain freeze that got Obama elected, as his serious failures of policy have mounted and the significant impact of those failures is felt, no amount of propaganda will suffice to resurrect the messianic fervor that once surrounded the heady days of Obama’s campaign.  Daily some new facet of the administration’s incompetence (at best) and fecklessness (at worst) is displayed, and increasing numbers of those who initially fell under his thrall are awakening to the profound danger Obama’s Presidency poses to both world peace and our American way of life. (more…)

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