Eric Holder’s 2014 Racial Politics

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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesFor Eric Holder, American racial history is frozen in the 1960s. The Supreme Court ruled in June that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is no longer justified due to racial progress, but the U.S. Attorney General has launched a campaign to undo the decision state-by-state. His latest target is North Carolina, which he seems to think is run from the grave by the early version of George Wallace.

The real current Governor, Republican Pat McCrory, signed a law in August that requires voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polling station, including a state driver’s license or military ID. Voters who show up without one can still cast a provisional ballot pending their return with a photo ID. The law also shortens early voting to 10 days from 17 and ends a program that preregistered high school students before they were eligible to vote.

According to Mr. Holder, this amounts to a shocking return to the Jim Crow era. He describes these modest measures to secure the integrity of the ballot as “aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African Americans.” And he is suing the state to bring it back under the federal supervision of the Voting Rights Act for all of its future voting-law changes.

The Supreme Court held in June that such federal “preclearance” under Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act had outlived its usefulness in states where black and white voter registration and participation rates are roughly equal. That should have been good news, but now Mr. Holder wants to haul North Carolina and Texas back into long-term federal supervision through a back door.

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Issa: ‘There’s a Reason to Fear’ Obama Agencies (+videos)

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Photo Credit: APRepublican California Rep. Darrell Issa, the GOP’s top government watchdog, warns that we have entered a time to “love my country, fear my government.”

“Right now, there’s a reason to fear the IRS and other agencies, including the EPA, who are loaded with people who feel empowered to bend the rules against those they disagree with,” the California Republican explained.

Issa has been investigating the Internal Revenue Service since Lois Lerner’s May 2013 admission that the agency treated conservative groups differently, and his Sept. 17 committee report details the committee’s progress and findings to date.


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ATF Tries to Block Whistleblowing Agent’s ‘Fast and Furious’ Book

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Photo Credit: APThe Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is blocking the main whistleblower in the Fast and Furious case from publishing a book for pay, claiming his retelling of the Mexico “gun-walking” scandal will hurt morale inside the embattled law enforcement agency, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times.

ATF’s dispute with Special Agent John Dodson is setting up a First Amendment showdown that is poised to bring together liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and conservatives in Congress who have championed Mr. Dodson’s protection as a whistleblower.

The ACLU is slated to become involved in the case Monday, informing ATF it is representing Mr. Dodson and filing a formal protest to the decision to reject his request to publish the already written book, sources told The Times, speaking only on the condition of anonymity.

The battle also could have repercussions on Capitol Hill, where the two lead investigators who helped uncover the Fast and Furious scandal, Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell E. Issa, Calif. Republican, had written a foreword to the book, the sources said.

ATF officials declined Sunday night to discuss Mr. Dodson’s specific matter, citing personnel privacy. But the officials said it was possible for an agent to be rejected for publishing a book for pay but get permission to publish it for free. No manuscript for any Fast and Furious book has received approval for unpaid publication, however, the officials said.

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Video: Fox News’ Chris Wallace Rips into Treasury Secretary Jack Lew: ‘Your History is Wrong,’ Obama’s Refusal to Negotiate is ‘Unprecedented’

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Photo Credit: YouTube ScreenshotBy Oliver Darcy.

Fox News’ Chris Wallace grilled Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Sunday, repeatedly asking him questions regarding the president’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans in Congress over the budget.

“I know the direction is bad,” Lew said about what would happen if the U.S. government defaulted on its debt. “There is a range of how bad. It is irresponsible and it is reckless to take that chance.”

“Despite these stakes, the president is refusing to negotiate,” Wallace countered, noting presidents have negotiated with Congress in the past over a variety of topics. “What’s unprecedented is not Congress tying strings; what’s unprecedented is a president refusing to negotiate.”

“Frankly, I think your history is wrong,” Lew said.

“With all due respect, your history is wrong,” Wallace responded. “This has happened over and over again, and presidents have negotiated.”

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Treasury Secretary Lew: Congress ‘Reckless’ if Debt Ceiling Not Raised

By Greg Richter.

Saying that the U.S. government is “just too important to the world,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew urged Congress to raise the country’s debt ceiling by an Oct. 17 deadline because he has “run out of tricks” to keep it operating past that date.

Lew said it will be “dangerous” and “reckless” for Congress to pass an October deadline without raising the government’s borrowing limit.

Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Lew said he has been using “extraordinary measures” to make room to borrow money since the United States hit its debt ceiling in May.

“I have no more,” Lew said he wrote in a letter to Congress last week. The government has $30 billion of cash on hand, but on any given day it can have a $50 billion-$60 billion positive or negative cash flow.

“It won’t last very long,” he said of the reserves.

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Shutdown: 83% of Government Still Operating

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Everyone knows the phrase “government shutdown” doesn’t mean the entire U.S. government is shut down. So in a partial government shutdown, like the one underway at the moment, how much of the government is actually shut down, and how much is not?…

I asked a Republican source on the Senate Budget Committee for an estimate. This was the answer: “Based on estimates drawn from CBO and OMB data, 83 percent of government operations will continue. This figure assumes that the government pays amounts due on appropriations obligated before the shutdown ($512 billion), spends $225 billion on exempted military and civilian personnel, pays entitlement benefits for those found eligible before the shutdown (about $2 trillion), and pays interest costs when due ($237 billion). This is about 83 percent of projected 2014 spending of $3.6 trillion.” So the government shutdown, at least as measured by money spent, is really a 17 percent government shutdown.

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Libya Demands Explanation for ‘Kidnapping’ of Citizen by US Forces

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Photo Credit: US Navy/AlamyLibya has demanded an explanation for the “kidnapping” of one of its citizens by American special forces, hours after a separate US military raid on a terrorist target in Somalia ended in apparent failure and retreat.

In Tripoli the US Army’s Delta force seized alleged al-Qaida leader Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Abu Anas al-Liby and wanted for the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 220 people.

The New York Times reported that Liby was being held in military custody and interrogated on board a navy ship, the USS Antonio, in the Mediterranean.

But US Navy Seals suffered a major setback when they launched an amphibious assault to capture an Islamist militant leader said to be Ahmed Godane, described as Africa’s most wanted man and the architect of last month’s attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya. The elite Seals were beaten back by heavy fire and apparently abandoned equipment that the Somali militants photographed and posted on the internet.

As dramatic details of Saturday’s twin operations emerged, US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that terrorists “can run but they can’t hide” , but faced growing questions about America’s military reach in Africa and the consequences of unilateral aggression.

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John Kerry On Special Forces Raids: Terrorists ‘Can Run But They Can’t Hide’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: GettyU.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday that a pair of U.S. military raids against militants in North Africa sends the message that terrorists “can run but they can’t hide.”

In raids in Somalia and in Libya’s capital, U.S. special forces on Saturday struck against Islamic extremists who have carried out terrorist attacks in East Africa. They captured a Libyan al Qaeda leader allegedly involved in the bombings of U.S. embassies 15 years ago.

After a fierce firefight, a U.S. Navy SEAL team in Somalia aborted a mission to capture a terrorist suspect linked to last month’s Nairobi shopping mall attack.

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Welcome to the Era of Unlimited Government!

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Photo Credit: Reason.comTelling coincidence that the latest scandalous revelation about the National Security Agency (NSA) is hitting the front pages just as the enrollment period specified by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is getting started.

Each of these things underscores different but related aspects of the virtually unlimited state that has ruined the peaceful slumber of libertarian-minded Americans for decades. Whether we’re talking about surveilling citizens without any sort of serious legal oversight or forcing them to participate in economic activity in the name of health care über alles, the answer always seems to favor the growth and power of the state to control more and more aspects of our lives. Is it any wonder that a record-high percentage of Americans think the federal government is too powerful?

In an explosive story, The New York Times detailed the ways in which the NSA, which was originally supposed to spy on communications among foreign agents and provide intelligence on threats posed by noncitizen actors and governments, is increasingly focused on domestic activities. Since 2010, according to an NSA memo obtained by the Times, “The agency was authorized [by officials in the Obama administration] to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier.”

Through a process known as “contact chaining,” the NSA is able to suck up all sorts of email addresses, phone numbers, social-media-network information, and more without regard to the physical location or citizenship of each data point. The agency, reports the Times, then “enriches” that metadata “with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information,” and more. The result, as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr puts it, is “the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The only restriction on the practice appears to be that the NSA must make a claim that their data-gathering serves a foreign-policy justification. Which is never a problem for the agency since, as a spokesperson told the Times, “All of NSA’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose.” While it’s clear that the contact chaining results in vast webs of information that rope in Americans completely uninvolved in terrorism, the NSA refuses to divulge any relevant numbers or incidents.

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Analysis: IT Experts Question Architecture of Obamacare Website

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Joe SkipperDays after the launch of the federal government’s Obamacare website, millions of Americans looking for information on new health insurance plans were still locked out of the system even though its designers scrambled to add capacity.

Government officials blame the persistent glitches on an overwhelming crush of users – 8.6 million unique visitors by Friday – trying to visit the HealthCare.gov website this week.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw development of the site, declined to make any of its IT experts available for interviews. CGI Group Inc, the Canadian contractor that built HealthCare.gov, is “declining to comment at this time,” said spokeswoman Linda Odorisio.

Five outside technology experts interviewed by Reuters, however, say they believe flaws in system architecture, not traffic alone, contributed to the problems.

For instance, when a user tries to create an account on HealthCare.gov, which serves insurance exchanges in 36 states, it prompts the computer to load an unusually large amount of files and software, overwhelming the browser, experts said.

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Maher Mocks WWII Vets Visiting Closed Memorial: ‘Nobody Said They Were the Brightest Generation’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APLiberal comedian Bill Maher ridiculed the group of World War II veterans for visiting the barricaded World War II memorial, telling his audience that the Greatest Generation wasn’t the “brightest generation.”

“The other that was apparently so important for the Republicans to keep open was the World War II Memorial in Washington. That was closed, so a bunch of the World War II vets knocked down the barriers and stormed it,” Maher said on his Friday HBO “Real Time” program, making a sardonic face at the audience.

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