It’s a curious thing, the sudden and bizarre demonization of true constitutional conservatives like Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tennessee) by some conservative online agitants.

Most conservatives understand that Rep. Blackburn is one of the more reliably intelligent and sober figures in contemporary politics.  That’s particularly true when it comes to technology policy.  While most political leaders speak in simplistic talking points, Rep. Blackburn is known for developing real knowledge about, and applies her steady conservative principles to, the issues.

As the most prominent example, Rep. Blackburn remains one of the most steadfast and informed opponents of so-called “Net Neutrality,” which truly will launch governmental micromanagement of Internet service.

So it’s especially odd and ironic that some conservatives suddenly slur her.  Said RedState’s (and CNN’s) Erick Erickson, “I am pledging right now that I will do everything in my power to defeat her in her 2012 re-election bid.”  His rationale?  Erickson has joined the likes of MoveOn.org, Demand Progress, the Marxist group Free Press and others on the left in fanatically opposing legislation to stop foreign Internet piracy, H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).  In doing so, he and other generally reliable conservatives are promoting lawlessness and outright theft by foreign pirates over constitutionally protected property rights.

So what is SOPA, and why all of the fuss?

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Just when you thought Attorney General Eric Holder couldn’t get more sordid and arrogant, he has.  His testimony last week before the House Judiciary Committee took the scandal plagued Justice Department into territory not traveled since John Mitchell worked overtime to conceal administration wrongdoing nearly four decades ago.  Even Chairman Darrell Issa recognizes the comparison is appropriate.

On Tuesday, Americans will have a rare chance to voice their disdain of the corruption and lies flowing from this Justice Department.  They will have a chance to speak out against the radical and racialist law enforcement priorities of this Justice Department.  Eric Holder comes to Austin, Texas to make a major announcement about voting laws, probably to acquiesce to some loud demand of the NAACP to block state efforts to ensure voter integrity. But a counter-rally organized by Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote will greet Eric Holder’s appearance in Austin, Texas at the LBJ Library at 4 p.m.  America is invited, and here is a flier with details.

You have a First Amendment right to petition your government for redress of grievances.  Use it.  So rarely has so much been worth grieving.

As bad as Watergate was, it didn’t involve hundreds of murders, dead American law enforcement agents, and the illegal distribution of thousands of firearms.  How long has it been since an Attorney General appeared before Congress and words such as “contempt” and “impeachment” were used by members as they were last week?

The Fast and Furious scandal isn’t the only mess overseen by Eric Holder.  His entire tenure has been characterized by racialist radicalism, disguised to some critics as mere incompetence.  But it is far worse than incompetence, and to think otherwise is a mistake. From the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against racist anti-Semitic New Black Panther thugs, to the Mirandizing of battlefield captures in Afghanistan, Holder has presided over a systemic radicalization of the most powerful federal agency.  This isn’t incompetence.  It is radicalism.

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From CBSNews:

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation “Fast and Furious” to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the “big fish.” But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called “gunwalking,” and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.

ATF officials didn’t intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called “Demand Letter 3″. That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or “long guns.” Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.

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Americans are familiar with the favors that Eric Holder’s Justice Department extended to Jerry Jackson and the New Black Panther Party.  The voter intimidation case against Jackson and two other defendants was dismissed and the inside story is the subject of two chapters of my book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.  What most people don’t know is that Eric Holder’s DOJ appears to be extending special favors to New Black Panther Jerry Jackson still – namely keeping him out of jail for violating federal firearms laws.

Jackson has a long violent criminal history.  He is also a Democratic Party elected official in Philadelphia, not that those two facts have anything in common, of course.  He was elected in May 2010 to a seat on the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee in the 14^th Ward.  No word if he will be in Charlotte for the 2012 DNC convention.

It is illegal under federal law (18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1)) for any felon to possess a firearm.  As one federal prosecutor told me, “these cases are among the simplest to win.  It’s like taking candy from a baby.  Did a felon hold a gun, or not?  Period.”  It matters not if the gun was loaded, or even works.

Did New Black Panther Jerry Jackson possess a firearm?  Behold:

King Samir Shabazz (L) and Jackson (R)

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I was once told by someone involved in a federal investigation not to let any identified federal law enforcement officer into your house without: a) a warrant and b) your lawyer present. At the time, this notion seemed a bit less than cooperative. Shouldn’t law-abiding citizens be able to live their lives free from the fear that our own government would underhandedly manipulate our rights in their pursuit of an investigation? After all, the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution enumerates a limitation on the federal government, one that prevents “unreasonable search and seizure.” Today, this enumerated protection is being ignored by – of all institutions – the U.S. Justice Department, under the darkened shadow of Attorney General Eric Holder.

A recent column by The Atlantic’s Emily Berman, a Furman Fellow and Brennan Center Fellow at NYU School of Law, informs the citizenry:

It just got easier for the federal government to collect information about innocent Americans — and those Americans have had surprisingly little say in the matter.

On October 15, the FBI reportedly implemented new rules that relax restrictions on, and oversight of, the FBI’s intelligence collection activities. Although they are not available to the public, reports indicate the changes permit FBI agents to search an individual’s trash with the goal of finding material that might pressure him into becoming a government informant, grant agents the authority to search commercial or law enforcement databases without first opening an investigation, and reduce the type of investigations subjected to heightened oversight because of their relationship to protected First Amendment expression, association, or religious practice.

This is the third modification of the FBI’s intelligence collection authorities since September 11, 2001. First in 2002, again in 2008, and finally, just last week, amendments were adopted with scant public attention and with minimal — if any — congressional involvement. Groups and communities concerned about the new rules’ impact on civil liberties, particularly the risk of religious or ethnic profiling, also had no constructive input.

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“The Department of Energy made these decisions based on their best judgment.” – President Barack Obama speaking on Solyndra scandal, Oct. 6, 2011

New e-mails show that Energy Department bureaucrats were warned that their $535 million loan restructuring plan to aid a collapsing solar firm called Solyndra could violate federal law and should be cleared through the Department of Justice.  According to DOE officials, the advice was ignored and instead, “career lawyers in the loan program based on a careful analysis of the statute” determined the legality of the deal.

Last month, Chairman of the House Energy Committee, Cliff Stearns (R-FL) described the loan restructuring as an “illegal act” as it put private investors ahead of tax payers for any loan pay-outs that might occur.  Those private investors given priority over tax payers included hedge funds connected with major Obama fundraiser George Kaiser.

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New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

The images, presented below, also renew doubts about the transparency of the White House’s guest logs–in particular, whether Panther National Chief Malik Zulu Shabazz is the same “Malik Shabazz” listed among the Obama administration’s early visitors.

Tomorrow, J. Christian Adams, the Department of Justice whistleblower in the New Black Panther Party case, will release his new book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery).

The book exposes Obama administration corruption far beyond the Panther dismissal, and reveals how the institutional Left has turned the power of the DOJ into an ideological weapon.

Adams’s book also describes, in detail, the Selma march at which then-Senator Obama was joined by a group of Panthers who had come to support his candidacy.

Among those appearing with Obama was Shabazz, the Panther leader who was one of the defendants in the voter intimidation case that Attorney General Eric Holder dismissed. Also present was the Panthers’ “Minister of War,” Najee Muhammed, who had called for murdering Dekalb County, Georgia, police officers with AK-47’s and then mocking their widows in this video (7:20 – 8:29).

Injustice includes a disturbing photo of Shabazz and the Panthers marching behind Obama with raised fists in the “Black Power” salute.

There are even more photographs.

I have learned that Regnery initially received approval from a person who took pictures of the events in Selma to publish these additional photographs in Injustice.

After the photographer wrote Regnery reversing his permission to include the photographs in Injustice, the images were removed from the photographer’s Flickr account.  Yet we were able to capture them before they disappeared.

The photographs show Obama sharing the same podium at the event with the Panthers.

In the first image, Shabazz stands at the podium, surrounded by uniformed Panthers, including Muhammed. In the second photograph, Obama commands the same podium.

Here are the images:

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The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day. (more…)

From The Los Angeles Times:

In the fall of 2009, ATF agents installed a secret phone line and hidden cameras in a ceiling panel and wall at Andre Howard’s Lone Wolf gun store. They gave him one basic instruction: Sell guns to every illegal purchaser who walks through the door.

For 15 months, Howard did as he was told. To customers with phony IDs or wads of cash he normally would have turned away, he sold pistols, rifles and semiautomatics. He was assured by the ATF that they would follow the guns, and that the surveillance would lead the agents to the violent Mexican drug cartels on the Southwest border.

When Howard heard nothing about any arrests, he questioned the agents. Keep selling, they told him. So hundreds of thousands of dollars more in weapons, including .50-caliber sniper rifles, walked out of the front door of his store in a Glendale, Ariz., strip mall.

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Documents obtained exclusively by Fox News Channel suggest a third gun linked to “Operation Fast and Furious” was found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder, according to the network’s exclusive report Friday. Further, those documents appear to contradict earlier assertions by federal agencies that police found only two weapons tied to the federal government’s now infamous gun interdiction scandal, and network sources say emails support their contention that the FBI concealed evidence to protect a confidential informant. But is this a unique occurrence? One man says, “No.”

Jesse Trentadue has seen similar behavior during his investigation of the Oklahoma City Bombing, an effort he hoped would lead to the truth about the death of his brother, Kenneth Trentadue several months after the bombing while in custody at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City.

Via the Freedom of Information Act, Trentadue has, for more than three years, sought copies of the videotape images captured by more than 20 surveillance cameras operating in the vicinity of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City prior to 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995. In addition, he’s tried to obtain a copy of the original videotape taken by the dashboard camera on Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Charles Hanger’s vehicle showing the arrest of Timothy McVeigh a short time later on the same morning.

While the FBI did produce tapes from the buildings around the Murrah Building, the tapes had been edited, Trentadue said. As for the tapes from the cameras on the Murrah Building, the contents of which are describe in a timeline prepared by the Secret Service, the FBI claims it cannot find.

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It is not uncommon to hear of lawsuits being filed against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Citizens and states might sue the EPA for overregulation of an industry that could lead to lost jobs and revenues.  Green groups might sue the EPA because they feel it hasn’t done enough to over-regulate businesses or to expand enforcement of current environmental laws.

But it is important to note that in many cases the EPA and Treasury Department are required to award attorney’s fees to those plaintiffs that successfully dispute the EPA.  And because the Justice Department is what defends the EPA in court cases, your tax dollars are what are used to pay the opposing sides’ attorneys.

Facts on just how much taxpayer money is spent on these environmental court cases and who benefits wasn’t well known until Senators Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., and David Vitter, R-La., and a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), shed some light on the subject.

The GAO report found that in addition to attorney’s fees awarded, the Justice Department spent at least $43 million in taxpayer dollars defending EPA in court from 1998 to 2010.  That doesn’t include the fact that Treasury paid about $14.2 million from fiscal year 2003 through 2010 and the EPA paid approximately $1.4 million from fiscal year 2006 through 2010.

Because most people don’t have millions of dollars on hand to sue the EPA if need be, these statutes were put into place so citizens and industries could afford to bring charges against the federal government.  However, less than 20 percent of awarded money has been given to private industries, citizens, state agencies and associations combined.  This begs the question, what were the largest beneficiaries of these payouts?

The three primary beneficiaries from 1998 to 2010 were: Sierra Club, Earthjustice and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  Total amounts these organizations received from all attorney fees paid to EPA litigants combined was at least 41 percent of the total payouts.  Earthjustice alone received 32 percent, as indicated by this report.

Go figure that the primary beneficiaries of statutes set to protect citizens and private industries would instead be awarded to environmental groups that want nothing more than to extend the power and grasp of the federal government’s EPA.

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From the Associated Press:

Justice Department officials say they’ve filed suit to block AT&T’s $39 billion deal to buy T-Mobile USA.

The government contends that the acquisition of the No. 4 wireless carrier in the country by No. 2 AT&T would reduce competition and raise prices.

At a news conference Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the combination would result in tens of millions of consumers facing higher prices, fewer choices and lower quality products.

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Federal authorities entered the warehouse brandishing automatic weapons. Employees were separated and interrogated. The Fed seized over half a million dollars of product.

What was the Obama Administration after? Weapons grade plutonium? Heroin? No…something much more sinister.

Guitar fingerboards.

In apparent effort to lose the musician vote, the Obama Administration has launched not one but TWO Kafkaesque raids on one of America’s iconic brands – Gibson Guitars, makers of such classis insturments as the Les Paul, SG, ES-335 and the brand new Firebird X.

Listen to my exclusive with Gibson CEO Henry E. Juszkiewicz

Here’s Gibson’s official press release…

The Justice department bullies Gibson without filing charges

The Federal Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. has suggested that the use of wood from India that is not finished by Indian workers is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because it is the Justice Department’s interpretation of a law in India. (If the same wood from the same tree was finished by Indian workers, the material would be legal.) This action was taken without the support and consent of the government in India.

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Recently in downtown Los Angeles, NAACP President Ben Jealous held a press conference to kick off his group’s 102^nd annual convention. His remarks came just two days before our newly formed South Central L.A. Tea Party held a major rally to expose the lies and racism of the NAACP. During the press conference Jealous was asked about the black-led Tea Party group and about details of a recent closed-door meeting he and other liberal black leaders had with President Barack Obama.

What you will see in the following video and read from the partial transcript are blatant lies from the desperate leader of an outdated civil-rights group trying to stay relevant by scaring black Americans. In the video Jealous claims the rights of black voters are being threatened and that racial “discrimination 2.0” is holding them back. It’s a shameless attempt to keep black Americans focused on ‘racism’ in order to keep them angry and on Obama’s Democrat plantation.

The NAACP president began by stating:

“The rights of everybody are under attack everywhere all the time. The rights of workers to organize, a women’s right to choose, access to the ballot box itself. In this past year we’ve seen perhaps the greatest attempt to limit access to the ballot box since 1896….”

The NAACP leader compares the tough economic times and high unemployment for blacks to the Rodney King beating:

“…As a Californian it’s hard to forget that this year is the 20^th anniversary of the Rodney King tragedy. And this moment is too much like that. The underlying anxieties of chronic high unemployment are still there, the short-term stress and recession is with us again and our people are even more incarcerated than they were then….”

Jealous explains that the Obama administration is focused on ending what he calls “employment discrimination 2.0” to ensure that people with bad credit, those with prison records, and the long-term unemployed are not being discriminated against:

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Ten oil rigs have left the Gulf of Mexico since the Obama Administration imposed a moratorium on deepwater oil and gas drilling in May 2010, according to documentation the Pelican Institute obtained from Sen. David Vitter’s (R-La.) office.

The ten rigs named in the document are: Marinas, Discover Americas, Ocean Endeavor, Ocean Confidence, Stena Forth, Clyde Bourdeaux, Ensco 8503, Deep Ocean Clarion, Discover Spirit, and Amirante. The rigs have left the Gulf for locations in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria and Brazil.

“This highlights the problem we have with losing domestic energy production as a result of the drilling moratorium and the slow permitting,” David Kreutzer, a research fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change at the Heritage Foundation, said. “We must also keep in mind that the impacts are not instantaneous, the rigs may be idle for a while, but once they move it’s going to be difficult to move them back once they are drilling in say Nigeria or Brazil.  The oil companies must have confidence they can move forward with their drilling plans and to know these plans won’t be revoked. Only certainty will bring them back.”

Although federal officials announced they were lifting the restrictions last October, a “de-facto moratorium” remains in effect that stifles energy production and undermines large and small businesses in the Gulf region, industry officials have argued. (more…)

With the real unemployment rate above 16 percent, it is a perfect time to throw a lavish party for high paid federal employees at Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.  At least Eric Holder thinks so.

The Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department, the same unit that dismissed the slam dunk voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party and forced Dayton (OH) to hire firefighters who flunked employment tests, is throwing an alcohol-fueled bash during work hours for 815 employees.

I have obtained the invitation posted internally to all 815 Civil Rights Division employees.  It reads:

“It’s Time to Get Together, So Save the Date – It’s time to open up and let the sun shine in!”

I’ll wager if a Freedom of Information Act request was sent to DOJ about the costs of the beer bash and lost employee time, there wouldn’t be much sunshine.

The invitation continues:

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On April 15, a day now known as “Black Friday”, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) effectively shut down three major online poker websites by seizing their domain names. The DOJ’s heavy-handed prosecution of the websites, all of which are based abroad, has made a mockery of America’s stated commitment to Internet freedom. The seizures have also hindered the online gambling operations in nations where Internet poker is completely lawful and the U.S. government has no jurisdiction.

Given that the seized poker websites are housed and regulated by foreign nations—Poker Stars is registered in the Isle of Man, Full Tilt in Ireland, and Absolute Poker in Antigua—how could the U.S. government unilaterally seize their domain names? The short answer is that all of the sites end in “.com.” All such domains are registered in the U.S. and, hence, are subject to U.S. civil forfeiture laws.

Author and legal scholar Larry Downes has critiqued civil asset forfeiture laws on the Technology Liberation Front blog. He argues that the laws are actually intended to punish suspects before they are convicted. “The purpose of forfeiture laws,” Downes laments, “is to help prosecutors fit the punishment to the crime, especially when restitution of the victims or of the cost of prosecution is otherwise unlikely to have a deterrent effect.” Domain name seizures often occur without a trial and often without any warning to the owners, as was the case in Black Friday’s seizure of poker domains.

The government’s move has reignited the controversy over U.S. federal agencies using domain seizures to punish foreign entities allegedly in violation of U.S. laws. While the DOJ did not technically “take down” the poker websites, federal agents obtained a court order that compelled Verisign, the global operator of the .com registry, to reroute the poker sites’ domain names to a government page featuring intimidating federal logos notifying users of the seizure. As a result of the seizure, no computer in the world—even those in countries where poker is explicitly legal—could access the poker sites via their domain names.

This latest round of seizures follows a series of similar actions taken in recent months by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has seized the domain names of dozens of websites alleged to be engaged in copyright infringement. One such site, the Spain-based Rojadirecta.com, had actually been deemed legal by Spanish courts.

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From The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. government lawyers in December argued that Google hadn’t received an important security clearance for a suite of online applications despite the company’s statements to the contrary, according to a court filing unsealed last week.

But it’s unclear whether that assertion–which was pointed out by Microsoft, and which Google disputes–will have much impact on the companies’ continuing tussle over government customers.

Google has been trying to displace Microsoft in government agencies that have long used that company’s Office applications. It’s scored some wins; in December, for example, the General Services Administration–better known as GSA–awarded a $6.7 million contract to Unisys as part of a deal that will provide the agency’s more than 15,000 employees with Google’s Gmail, word processing and other services over five years.

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Cross-Posts listed at: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)

Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post:

In a five-page letter, Smith notes that there has been “little oversight” as to how the civil rights division has used its budget increases ($22 million in FYI 2010 and $17 million requested in FYI 2011) and why the need for some 164 new positions.

He then gets to the heart of the matter. As I and other outlets have reported, he notes that in the New Black Panther Party case investigation, it came to light that a political appointee, Julie Fernandes, directed Justice Department attorneys “not to bring cases against black defendants for the benefit of white victims.”

Smith then details allegations by former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams that the department declined to enforce the National Voter Registration Act and its provisions relating to “voter integrity.”

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Glenn Reynolds in today’s Washington Examiner:

But I have a different character in mind. The more I watch this administration at work, the more I think we’re seeing the first Nigel Tufnel presidency.

Nigel Tufnel, many will remember, was the fictitious heavy metal guitarist in the fictional “rockumentary” “This Is Spinal Tap.” In a classic scene, he displays his guitar collection and his special amplifier that — unlike all other amplifiers in existence — has knobs that go all the way up to 11, instead of just 10.

And that’s what Obama has done: In his first two years as president, he’s taken us to 11 in so many ways.

Under Bush and the Republican Congress from 2000-2006 federal spending was bad, and many people groused. But Obama has turned it up to 11, running up trillion-dollar-plus deficits that dwarf the worst we saw under Bush and the congressional Republicans, and producing open revolt from Tea Partiers and others.

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