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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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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Obamacare’s Implementation Threatens A Golden Age For The Healing Arts

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Photo Credit: WikipediaMedical practice and healthcare policy are on a collision course. From an intellectual perspective, we are entering a golden age of the healing arts. The full promise of genomic medicine informing diagnosis and treatment beckons from just over the horizon. Younger physicians, just entering practice, have the ability to alleviate human suffering that no generation of doctors has ever previously known.

But not so fast.

The administration of health care policy, and ultimately dollars, are also undergoing a generational shift. But this shift is founded on some of the most irrational politics this country has ever seen. Future generations observing the political changes of the past five years will invariably say, “what were they thinking?”

The Affordable Care Act was not the product of any informed or learned group, it was a hastily contrived political farce that was literally cobbled together at the last possible minute. It was never intended to become law — except that it did. For the past 3 1/2 years literally “all the kings horses, and all of the kings men” have pushed and prodded to give it the appearance of workability. We are on the threshold of finding out if they were successful.

In medicine, we sometimes talk about the compression of morbidities, how the ravages of time and multiple maladies may overwhelm the patient at the end of life. That compression sequence also seems to describe afflictions of the Affordable Care Act as it careens towards implementation.

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Dangerous Times: The Crisis-Monger

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Photo Credit: BeckyFObama thrives on crises, not solutions.

That’s the key to this whole administration.

The budget crisis today is the direct result of five years of over-the-top deficit spending, all demanded by Obama, who doesn’t really care if the economy gets better or not. Either way, he will blame the Republicans, with the unanimous support of our Soviet-style media. He believes that politically he can’t lose with a completely obedient media spinning everything his way.

As long as Americans are suckered by our monopoly media, we will never solve any real problems. Instead, we will be drawn into phony crises instigated by Obama and the Democrats. Any real dangers, like nuclear proliferation and the Jihad War, will be ignored as long as Democrats are in power.

The only permanent solution is to fire the mendacious media, and that is completely up to you.

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The Sadistic Strategy of Obama and Reid – Alinsky 101

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Photo Credit: genetew

Photo Credit: genetew

In the showdown over the shutdown of the U.S. government, the Obamaites tipped their hand yesterday as what their strategy is.

Taking a page out of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” the plan is to maximize the people’s pain – to maximize the political damage to the enemy, the Republican Party.

What else explains it?

Consider this: Asked Wednesday if there were any danger of America defaulting on her debt, President Obama rushed to assure a reporter that, yes, indeed, there certainly is such a peril.

Why would a president act in so perverse a manner, were he not trying deliberately to rattle or panic the markets?

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How ObamaCare Wrecks the Work Ethic

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Photo Credit: Casey Mulligan

Photo Credit: Casey Mulligan

A new wave of redistribution will arrive in America on Jan. 1, primarily thanks to the Affordable Care Act. The president’s health-insurance plan forces those who hire, work and produce to pay full price for health care, while creating generous discounts for practically everyone else.

This second redistributionist wave of the Obama era will follow a first wave of tax hikes, additional unemployment benefits, food-stamp expansions, waived work requirements for welfare benefits, etc. These measures were supposed to be temporary, intended to help people cope with the recession. The recession officially ended in mid-2009, but many of the administration’s measures continue.

Regardless of whether redistribution is achieved by collecting more taxes from families with high incomes, levying employment taxes on businesses, providing more subsidies to families with low incomes, or all of the above, an essential consequence is the same: a reduction in the reward for working. In a National Bureau of Economic Research paper issued in August, I quantify the combined effect of the two redistribution waves and higher payroll taxes on the financial reward for working…

The 2009-10 peak for marginal tax rates comes from various provisions of the “stimulus” programs in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the extension of unemployment benefits to 99 weeks in some states. At the end of 2012, the marginal tax rate index reached its lowest value since 2008: 43.9%. A little over a year later (January 2014), the index will be close to 50%, driven up by the expiration of the payroll tax cut and multiple provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The ACA employer penalty, delayed until 2015, adds more than a percentage point in that year alone, while other ACA provisions strengthen their disincentives for the various reasons cited above.

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Obamacare Just Gave Me A Death Sentence

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Photo Credit: fedupusa.org

Photo Credit: fedupusa.org

Sounds like hyperbole, right? Well, depends upon your perspective after you read what I have to say.

Long time readers of FedUpUSA know me to some degree or another. I’m a real person. I’m not wealthy. I’m not special. I’m just your average person who happens to be rather opinionated and I share those opinions here on the Internets. The following is my reality after Obamacare smacked me upside the head last week. I’m prompted to share this rather personal story in the hopes that it will wake up a few more people.

I’ve had Blue-Cross/Blue-Shield of Michigan through my employer for more than 10 years. My first reality won’t really be felt until April, but it’s a doozy. With the implementation of Obamacare, my employer’s healthcare coverage is considered a ‘Cadillac’ plan. This means that I will be taxed on the net value of what my employer pays for my insurance plan. This happens to be about $12,000/year. I have been fortunate enough to pay nothing out of pocket for this premium, but it is part of the reason I took my job in the first place. However, now, instead of being taxed on my actual salary of $35,000/year*, I will be taxed on a salary of $47,000/year.

Well, guess what? That pushes me into a much higher tax bracket. So, besides paying for my co-pay ($3,000/year) I’m going to have to pay the government more than $4,000 extra per year in taxes. So, where once I was paying $3,000 annually for medical expenses, I’m now going to be paying $7,000, $4,000 of which I will have to pay even if I don’t ever receive another medical service in my life again. Yet, my actual take-home salary will remain $35,000. So, how do you think this math works out for me and my family?

Yeah, we’ll be lucky if we keep our house or we can eat….because $4,000 of my annual salary is now being redistributed to purportedly cover those who don’t have health insurance. Yet, now I can’t afford to eat!!! How many households in this country can just suddenly assume a $4,000 annual increase in expenses? Not many, according to the most recent polls that say more than 70% of Americans don’t even have savings equal to one month of expenses. Now, this is bad enough, but worse yet is the following:

Photo Credit: fedupusa.org

Photo Credit: fedupusa.org

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Napolitano: Our Secretive, Witch-Hunting Government

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Photo Credit: infomatique

Photo Credit: infomatique

While the nation’s political class has been fixated on a government shutdown in Washington this week, the NSA has continued to spy on all Americans and by its ambiguity and shrewd silence seems to be acknowledging slowly that the scope of its spying is truly breathtaking.

The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone anywhere. The president believes that federal statutes enable the secret FISA Court to authorize the NSA to capture any information it desires about any persons without identifying the persons and without a showing of probable cause of criminal behavior on the part of the persons to be spied upon. This is the same mindset the British government had with respect to the colonists. It, too, believed that British law permitted a judge in secret in Britain to issue general warrants to be executed in the colonies at the whim of British agents.

General warrants do not state the name of the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized, and they do not have the necessity of individualized probable cause as their linchpin. They simply authorize the bearer to search wherever he wishes for whatever he wants. General warrants were universally condemned by colonial leaders across the ideological spectrum – from those as radical as Sam Adams to those as establishment as George Washington, and from those as individualistic as Thomas Jefferson to those as big-government as Alexander Hamilton. We know from the literature of the times that the whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment – with its requirements of individualized probable cause and specifically identifying the target – is to prohibit general warrants.

And yet, the FISA Court has been issuing general warrants and the NSA executing them since at least 2004.

Last week we learned in a curious colloquy between members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and Gen. Keith Alexander and Deputy Attorney General James Cole that it is more likely than not that the FISA Court has permitted the NSA to seize not only telephone, Internet and texting records, but also utility bills, credit card bills, banking records, social media records and digital images of mail, and that there is no upper limit on the number of Americans’ records seized or the nature of those records.

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Why Weren’t Guns Behaving Violently 100 Years Ago?

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Photo Credit: Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious

Photo Credit: Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious

Every time there’s a shooting tragedy, there are more calls for gun control. Let’s examine a few historical facts. By 1910, the National Rifle Association had succeeded in establishing 73 NRA-affiliated high-school rifle clubs. The 1911 second edition of the Boy Scout Handbook made qualification in NRA’s junior marksmanship program a prerequisite for obtaining a BSA merit badge in marksmanship. In 1918, the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. established its own Winchester Junior Rifle Corps. The program grew to 135,000 members by 1925. In New York City, gun clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. With so many guns in the hands of youngsters, did we see today’s level of youth violence?

What about gun availability? Catalogs and magazines from the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s were full of gun advertisements directed to children and parents. For example, “What Every Parent Should Know When a Boy or Girl Wants a Gun” was published by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The 1902 Sears mail-order catalog had 35 pages of firearm advertisements. People just sent in their money, and a firearm was shipped. For most of our history, a person could simply walk into a hardware store, virtually anywhere in our country, and buy a gun. Few states bothered to have even age restrictions on buying guns.

Those and other historical facts should force us to ask ourselves: Why – at a time in our history when guns were readily available, when a person could just walk into a store or order a gun through the mail, when there were no FBI background checks, no waiting periods, no licensing requirements – was there not the frequency and kind of gun violence that we sometimes see today, when access to guns is more restricted? Guns are guns. If they were capable of behavior, as some people seem to suggest, they should have been doing then what they’re doing now.

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The Government Is Closed, But America Is Still Open

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Photo Credit: Lauri Väin

Photo Credit: Lauri Väin

Shutdown: The government is shut and the sky hasn’t fallen, just as the sequester didn’t invite Armageddon. It’s time to realize just how much of government can be permanently furloughed.

‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan said after taking the oath of office.

He pointed out that “we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present.”

Sound familiar? And that was in 1981, when the deficit was under $80 billion, not $1 trillion as today; and the national debt was less than $1 trillion, not $17 trillion.

Government — more of it than ever — remains the problem today, more than it ever has.

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