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Soon it will be Christmas Eve, that one night of the year when politicos young and old lay their heads down to dream of the treasure that may await in stockings hung with care. But some on the American political scene have been a little nicer than others and Pundit Claus has been making notes all year before deciding how to best distribute the wealth. Here’s a peek at some of the decisions he has made on his 2010 Naughty and Nice list.

Of course, if you have any of your own ideas about Pundit Claus’ list, be sure to make suggestions in the comments below. Pundit Claus is always listening.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)

As the brightest member among Leader Boehner’s handpicked appointments to the President’s Deficit Commission, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and a minority conservative voice on the gateway House committees of Budget and Ways & Means, Ryan has pulled more than his fair share. Ryan’s work in envisioning an economic course for the government that sets the country on a course toward greater freedom and stability. Perhaps most notable, in Washington, D.C., where the primary economic industry seems to be the production of heated oxygen, Ryan created an actual plan. For actually doing the work his constituents deserve to have done on their behalf, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin tops the nice list for 2010.

House Minority Leader and Speaker-elect John Boehner

“Hell, no!” doesn’t seem like the sort of exclamation that should get positive recognition on the holiest of birthdays, but Rep. John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) emotionally-charged desperate howl on Christmas Eve 2009 continued to resonate through 2010. Just the prospect of replacing Speaker Nancy Pelosi with Boehner became a lucrative fundraising slogan for Republicans. His continued vocal opposition to the sweeping Democratic agenda will continue to serve as a critical aid for ideological navigation in the tumultuous months ahead.

GOP Old Guard Appropriators

In the case of GOP dinosaurs – Sens. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), Thad Cochrane (R-Miss.), Kit Bond (R-Mo.) being leaders of the pack – handing them a bag of coal is an elegant act of regifting what they have already dumped in the laps of the American taxpayer. Despite serious warnings from all corners of the political sphere that spiraling debt represents a threat to national security, this dedicated block of tax-and-spend Republicans earned their lumps this year by helping to increase the peril.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

Attorney General Eric Holder has earned his lumps in 2010 more than perhaps any other Washington insider except for Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano. From his indecision and clumsy defense of the administration’s flawed policy to try cases against dangerous terrorists in civilian courts, to stonewalling the U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s requests pertaining to the controversial dismissal of voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party, to aggressively challenging Arizona’s SB1070 despite admitting to never having read the law, Holder is certainly among the naughtiest in the Obama administration.

Gaia’ s Over-Protective Big Brother, Al Gore

Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner is quoted as saying, “The way positive reinforcement is carried out is more important than the amount.” One candy cane for former veep Al Gore, and here’s why.

Gore’s relative silence in 2010 has more to do with a spate of personal difficulties including a separation from wife Tipper and a sexual assault charge involving a Portland, Oreg. masseuse that was eventually dismissed. Or it could be the calming of global warming hysteria, noted by a significant mellowing in acceptance of Gore’s belief in an approaching environmental catastrophe is based in sound science. Whatever the causes of Gore’s silence, one candy cane is a good training tool. Stay on the path, Al, and next year’s reward could be larger.

The Republican National Committee

While Republican candidates were hitting the campaign trail to connect with voter angst about fiscal excesses and irresponsibility, the RNC treasury was being treated as a cash machine for the over-privileged consultant class. Only weeks after a damaging revelation that the RNC reimbursed expenses for a leather-and-chains junket to an L.A. bondage club, Chairman Michael Steele’s own credibility was weakened by the disclosure of a flurry of questionable spending and allegations that he had suggested purchasing a private jet to use for his own travel.

Julian Assange ( x 10¹⁰⁰)

That’s right – a googolplex of coal lumps for the man whose aim is to singlehandedly bring down an entire nation, and that may not even be enough. The Wikileaks founder has yet to face charges relating to the release of diplomatic and military secrets of the U.S. government during the past year, document dumps for which the extent of damage may never be fully known. Let’s just hope that yours truly [Pundit Claus] can still find this megamaniac now that the British court has seen fit to grant him bail.

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[Cross-posted by author from Pundit League.]

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Hearing Scheduled for Friday Morning Regarding Dismissal of Black Panther Voter Intimidation Case

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is scheduled to convene its hearing at Friday (9:30 a.m. Eastern) on the matter of the Department of Justice’s dismissal last year of a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and two of its members. The order to drop the charges came after prosecuting attorneys had drafted a motion of default judgment to secure a conviction.

A pattern of meetings between White House officials and key political attorneys leading up the actual decision to spike the case and a code of secrecy within Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department concerning any details has left a trail of questions. Rigid stonewalling by Department officials has been successful in quarantining all information, leading some to believe that the Obama administration may have a toxic issue they are working very hard to hide.

The Civil Rights Commission hearings come after months of unfulfilled requests to gain access to case documents and Justice Department attorneys and staff who worked on the prosecution of an alleged polling place incident in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008 in which the defendants were accused of having used racial slurs and brandished a weapon, purportedly to harass and scare off targeted voters.

Despite being aware of the charges and having legal representation, the defendants elected not to respond or appear at court proceedings and yet, after a flurry of meetings involving Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli and White House officials – some as-yet unnamed – the command was given to raise the white flag when a conviction had all but been won.

Videotape from the scene clearly shows the two Black Panthers standing at the entrance to a voting location, each dressed in paramilitary garb and combat boots. One of the men carries a nightstick in full view.

In a sworn affidavit, Bartle Bull, an eyewitness at the polling place and a notable civil rights lawyer who campaigned for Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, declared that aggressive language was used by the New Black Panthers including racially-charged incitations such as “cracker.” Bull also gave his account to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in a televised interview. The videotaped evidence of one citizen journalist’s encounter with the Philadelphia Panthers is part of the Bull interview segment:

Among other eyewitnesses, Bull is slated to appear at the Commission hearing, as are U.S Congressman Wolf, who has been active in the House in urging for full transparency about the case, and Acting Associate Attorney General Gregory Katsas.

At issue for the Civil Rights Commission is whether the decision by political appointees in the Justice Department to drop three of four criminal charges against the men and the NBPP (the fourth was pled out with minimal impact to the defendant), at a time when career attorneys handling the case were poised to deliver a motion for default judgment, was politically motivated. Because the case was filed not only against the individual defendants who were present at the scene, but against the national New Black Panther Party, Commissioners have also been interested to learn if prosecutors found evidence of similar incidents.

Still unknown is the identity of an unnamed White House official with whom Perrelli met on two occasions just prior to the decision to spike the case was made and handed down to the prosecuting team.

We know from forty years of grading Presidential scandals that it is not the deed that does in the chief executive, it is the cover-up. We can only hope that President Obama and Attorney General Holder have sent their representative to the Commission to supply what the American public deserves — the unvarnished truth.

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Previous Articles

• The Obama Administration and The Black Panthers: Postcards From Post-Racial America
• Sources: Black Panther voter intimidation case hearing rescheduled

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[Article first appeared at Red County.]

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Since the Obama administration tapped Liu to fill the open seat on the outlier appellate court, the choice has been controversial. Even before diving into his views on the role of the judiciary, Liu’s applied work with constitutional law is simply non-existent. Proceeding further than the basic elements of his biography and resume has been a process made more difficult by the nominee’s failure to provide complete records of his writings, appearances, and other notable events relating to his work as an attorney or legal scholar.

The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), issued a tersely-worded statement last week affirming that Republican members would continue to press on Sen. Leahy for time to ingest the stack of new material citing his impressions from a quick skim of the contents as sufficient cause. Sen. Leahy offered an equally brusque rebuke, asserting that there would be no postponement in essence rewarding either ineptness or cleverness by Liu while also punishing the American public by reducing the transparency of the confirmation process.

Sen. Sessions wrote that Liu’s omissions were "particularly severe because many of them shed greater light on Liu’s most controversial and troubling views—such as his support for racial quotas and his belief that government welfare is a constitutional right."

Within the totality of the materials Liu has provided, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans have found that the nominee has expressed views to support the right of citizens to receive welfare and government assistance, arguing for an even broader interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment than has been established in current case law. The documents also reveal the reiteration of positive and negative liberties that became a stumbling point for President Obama during the presidential campaign.

“[C]ontrary to the conventional wisdom that ‘the Constitution is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties,’ the social citizenship tradition assigns equal constitutional status to negative rights against government oppression and positive rights to government assistance on the ground that both are essential to liberty.”

Republicans have also caught Liu offering a rationale for using foreign law as a basis for interpreting the Constitution. In Liu’s words:

“[T]he use of foreign authority in American constitutional law is a judicial practice that has been very controversial in recent years. The U.S. Supreme Court has cited foreign authority in cases limiting the death penalty and invalidating criminal laws against homosexual sodomy, among others. The resistance to this practice is difficult for me to grasp, since the United States can hardly claim to have a monopoly on wise solutions to common legal problems faced by constitutional democracies around the world.”

Ed Whelan of the National Review online’s Bench Memos blog has written meticulously about the substance in the ever-increasing stack of paper on Liu. Whelan’s perspective as a former Department of Justice staffer and Harvard Law grad to deconstructing the extremely liberal judicial philosophy espoused by Liu, has made him the favorite target of two sycophantic websites spawned to combat his serious and substantive discussion of Liu’s unsuitability for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court.

The response from Liu’s supporters has been weak and sycophantic. In the guise of fact checking, the Support Goodwin Liu and Confirm Goodwin Liu blogs have resorted to throwing sand in the face of Whelan’s legitimate criticism and analysis of Liu’s extreme comments pertaining to case law and constitutional theory. Both blogs borrow heavily from each other, squelch direct rebuttal of their ineffective campaign to debunk Whelan by having a no comment policy, and most recently use the nifty trick of enlisting among Liu’s supporters people who have not actually endorsed the nominee.

Former Republican congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr was featured in a post at SupportGoodwinLiu.com under the bold headline "Barr on Board." The post featured an excerpt from a Barr’s blog at the Atlanta Journal Constitution online where he called for a more reasonable analysis of a piece Liu wrote about the death penalty. Although Support Goodwin Liu clearly meant to imply that Barr had jumped into the pool to back Liu, Barr affirmed by email that he is not taking any position on the Liu nomination and was only attempting to keep the debate “principled and honest ” and “without distortions.”

What are the stakes of Liu’s confirmation? A campaign is already underway to promote Liu as a future candidate to sit on the Supreme Court, but a short-term objective must certainly bethe incremental drive to advance the Obama agenda. Taken as a whole, President Barack Obama’s domestic and foreign policies are the New Parochialism, a dangerous fusion of big government liberalism at home and a deliberate contraction of American power abroad during a highly unstable period in terms of our national security. Nominating liberal judges to key positions on the courts is a critical piece of the overall strategy.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has a unique position of being a mandatory waypoint for judicial appointees en route to lifetime seats on our highest courts; it is the natural strategic target of those who seek to realign the behavior of government with a set of values unlike those most Americans have taken for granted.

In that sense, the Committee occupies the crucial position on the road President Obama must travel on his crusade to transform America into something more like the European model admired by so many on the left.  A president able to control this valuable political territory defines not only the current political direction of the government, but can alter the overarching rubric for how government behaves in ways that extend far beyond the time when their influence can be directly applied.

The battle Republicans are waging over the Liu nomination is a prelude to the upcoming clash over President Obama’s soon-to-be-named replacement for retiring Supreme Court justice John P. Stevens.

Professor Liu’s nomination hearing is scheduled for Friday, April 16 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings time.

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[This article first appeared at Red County.]

Related Articles

New York Times | Appeals Court Nominee Sparks a Partisan Battle

Michelle Malkin | Goodwin Liu’s sins of omissions

Hot Air | Liu nomination “in jeopardy” after “dozens” of omissions from questionnaire

Ace of Spades | Goodwin Liu "Forgets" To Include His Most Controversial Work on Senate Questionaire

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Success breeds contempt, and the Tea Party movement now has its pockets full of both. In that the Tea Parties appear to be a response to an overreaching federal government, it was certainly predictable that their sudden influence on the body politic would be challenged with an equal or greater intensity by the forces seeking an expansion of big government authority. Heeding the clarion call emanating from the organized Left for demonizing, dishonesty, and disinformation about the Tea Party, a deliberate and desperate attempt to disperse the citizen-led grassroots movement, all of the minions of chaos have obediently begun to converge.

Last week, I reported about one anarchist website firing up its organizing machine to stage counterdemonstrations during the Tea Party’s April 15^th rallies. My region of the country is well acquainted with the anarchists work, having witnessed the embarrassing display of lawlessness and destruction they unleashed on the beautiful Emerald City of Seattle during the World Trade Organization ministerial conference in 1999.

Now, joining the anarchists in the effort to derail a diverse and legitimate Tea Party movement is a timid little group, “Crash the Tea Party.” The group claims to represent a phantom majority that has yet to show up in public opinion polls, and may have ancillary ties to the notorious pan-Northwest conclave of anarchists in Oregon and Washington state.

What is the goal of “Crash the Tea Party?” It’s front and center on the relatively Spartan home page of their website. Aside from a donation button, their misleading manifesto of misinformation is there for all to see:

WHO WE ARE: A nationwide network of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are sick and tired of that loose affiliation of racists, homophobes, and morons; who constitute the fake grass-roots movement that calls itself “The Tea Party.”

WHAT WE WANT: To dismantle and demolish the Tea Party by any non-violent means necessary.

HOW WE WILL SUCCEED: By infiltrating the Tea Party itself! In an effort to propagate their pre-existing propensity for paranoia and suspicion…We have already sat quietly in the meetings and observed their rallies.

Whenever possible we will act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.) to further distance them from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them. We will also use the inside information that we have gained in order to disrupt and derail their plans.

“Nationwide network?” Really? As of this post, the site had generated a membership of 32. Far from being a national association of wannabe radicals, that’s not even enough leeching undergrads to make an undersized flash mob.

Of course, the very premise of the current smear strategy against the Tea Party is an example of why we should reinstitute logic course requirements in our high school curriculums. If Tea Parties are so outrageously extreme, exhibiting hatred toward so many different groups, why would it even be necessary to spoof that behavior? When I want to take a picture of a gorilla, I can reliably find one at the zoo, I don’t have to send a stooge in with a furry suit to jump in the enclosure. If Tea Parties are akin to Klan rallies or meetings of the John Birch Society then there’s no need for the elaborate frame-up, just bring a video camera and let it roll. But even subpar agent provocateurs such as these are artists of deception, not exaggeration; they manufacture negative impressions that would not otherwise be made if it were not for their presence.

These merchants of confusion were also present during the early days of the Tea Parties, when the Northwest’s own Liberty Belle – who many believe to be the originator of Tea Party sentiment – began organizing rallies at Seattle’s Westlake Square to protest the failed stimulus spending package. In most cases their bark was worse than their bite. After talking tough for days on their personal blogs in preparation for last year’s April 15^th rallies, they implemented their ingenious infiltration strategy. From my position at the edge of the crowd I witnessed a trio of would-be sleeper agents milling about timidly.

One of the two males among them carried a sign covered with a black garbage sack, and after the three of them had traded whispered remarks and snide gestures for an embarrassing period of time, he pulled off the bag. Although my memory is too foggy to recall what the sign said, only that it fell into the category of extreme right-wing hate. He waded into the crowd, holding his handmade propaganda tool high above the heads of the audience around him.

What is crystal clear from my recollection was the response by the crowd. There was no pushing, shoving, yelling, or tearing apart of the agitator or his signage, and yet the Tea Partiers around him were acutely aware of the intent of this young man and how to deal with it effectively. Slowly, the men near him who also had signs closed in around him. Without even overtly acknowledging the stray element in their midst, the group positioned their own signs to shield the offensive placard from view, sealing him off from the rest of the crowd as antibodies might circle the source of bodily infection.

Of course, “Crash the Tea Party,” and its creator who goes by the handle “MadHatter” and whose avatar if the Guy Fawkes mask popularized by the celluloid epic of violent anarchy, V for Vendetta, are a nuisance just like the meek example I cited. Their Romper Room-variety chaos is just the kind of situation real domestic terrorists seek, an environment teeming with confrontation that provides a useful veil of confusion in which evildoers can operate.

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Related articles:

Michelle Malkin | Crash course: Your illustrated guide to the Tea Party saboteurs

Hot Air | Too dumb to check: Lefties publicly advertising plans to frame tea partiers as racist

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[Article first appeared at Red County.]

In a twist of fate tailored for headline writers at the New York Post, nominee for the Ninth Circuit Court, Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, has once again been caught trying to sneak his homework into the teacher’s grading stack well beyond the due date.

On Monday, Liu delivered another supplement to his initial questionnaire from the Senate Judiciary Committee. The delivery marks the fourth such amendment since the first installment on February 24. The newly submitted pages include 117 items missing from his third revision that was delivered on March 20, well after legitimate concerns about Liu’s qualifications and ideology had begun to spark debate about the Liu nomination by bloggers on both sides of the political spectrum.

In Liu’s cover letter to Monday’s document dump, the current darling of the Left offered his "sincere and humblest apology" to the Committee for his earlier omissions. He also submitted a detailed set of reasons for not having included such a large number of pertinent items in the first place. Liu did not, however, extend to the Committee any offer to postpone the hearing currently scheduled for April 16 in order to give them time to review the substantial docket of new information.

(The entire collection of Liu’s nomination materials can be viewed here. The cover letter begins on page 84, and a list of new materials begins on page 112.)

Among a litany of excuses for his lapses, Liu wrote, "I did not think to include various occasions when I spoke at informal seminars, brown bag lunches, or student or alumni gatherings on campus or elsewhere because I viewed those occasions as part of my day-to-day work as a faculty member, akin to teaching class or meeting with students. I now understand that those should have been included as well."

That explanation plus a sappy-eyed little puppy on a greeting card might get Liu out of a kindergarten teacher’s dog house, but it didn’t pass muster with ranking Republican on the Committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). Along with other Republicans on the Committee, Sessions sent a sternly worded letter to committee chair Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on Tuesday.

"At best, this nominee’s extraordinary disregard for the Committee’s constitutional role demonstrates incompetence,” they wrote. “[A]t worst, it creates the impression that he knowingly attempted to hide his most controversial work from the Committee."

"These are not minor omissions," they wrote. "[Liu’s] participation in and comments during each [event] are crucial to this Committee’s review of his nomination."

Leahy responded to the Republicans’ concerns by stating that he saw “no reason to further delay [Liu’s] opportunity to appear before the Committee.”

On Wednesday, Sessions continued to press on Leahy for a postponement of next week’s hearing. Sessions stated in an official release, “Given the alarming nature of Liu’s writings and speeches, and the fact that he withheld them from our Committee, it is critical that we have sufficient time to study the newly uncovered material and determine what else may be missing.”

In the honeymooning bliss of the Obama administration’s early days, incompetence of this variety was carelessly swallowed with a grain of salt; a freshman White House team frequently gets graded on a pass/fail basis against a very shallow curve when it comes to getting the feel for the bureaucratic machine under their control. Now that the champagne-soaked halcyon first 100 days have given way to a 300-plus day hangover, the even Democratic apologists need to consider abandoning support for the Liu nomination.

A network of blogs including Red County (here, here, and here) have vigorously pursued Liu’s background since his nomination was quietly offered by the White House earlier this year. Although endorsements from traditional media — the Los Angeles Times has been a particularly proud bell-ringer for Liu — and groups advocating liberal judicial principles continue to patch holes in Liu’s foundering boat, the bilge is filling faster than it can be pumped.

Evidence of Liu’s support for racial reparations (even if only in concept), his extremely flexible standard for interpreting the Constitution, and his support for using social justice – not the written law – as a basis for passing judgment have been positively documented, and should be reason enough to put the Liu nomination in the shredder. Even reasonable Democrats averse to waded into troubling ideological waters should have little trouble explaining a vote to reject a candidate who, by his own account, has never written a judicial opinion, and whose practical experience as an attorney was brief by standards previously set for appointments to the top appellate court bench. As details of Liu’s speaking engagements and panel participation continue bubbling to the surface, his curriculum vitae as a left-wing legal ideologue expands, but his nuts and bolts skill set for being a judge remains static and unsatisfactory.

The reaction of Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to Liu’s exclusions may be less than charitable due to the emergence of pattern among many of President Obama’s nominees of withholding vital information during the confirmation process. A response has yet to be received from a March 8 request to Second Circuit Court nominee Judge Robert Chatigny for details germane to his nomination. Questions about Attorney General Eric Holder’s serious omissions with regard to legal work done on behalf of terror suspects comprises an implicit allegation of a serious conflict of interest in the chief lawman’s oversight of cases involving terror suspects.

The Committee’s function — to advise and consent — is critically impaired when it is prevented from fully exercising due diligence. Circuit court judges and attorneys general are obviously not low-grade posts, and in many cases preside over decisions in which life and death are potential outcomes. The standard for complete disclosure is one that one would have assumed would not need clarification, particularly for someone who has achieved as much academically as Liu.

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Related articles

Michelle Malkin ¦ Goodwin Liu’s sins of omissions

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[Article first appeared at Red County.]

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Such has been the behavior of the establishment press, by and large, in response to accusations made by Democratic lawmakers that protests by tea partiers on the Capitol steps two Sundays ago against Obamacare legislation included the hurling of racial slurs (the N-word) at members of Congress. Married with anecdotal “field reports” that tea parties feature signs with depictions of President Obama as a Hitler-esque or totalitarian figure and violent seditionist rhetoric, the briefing to the corps of journalists was a call to action.

Axes in hand, hungry reporters in a starving industry arrive on the scene to find no smoke, no fire, and a sprung fire alarm with Democratic Party fingerprints all over it. The screamed epithets can’t be heard on any of the recordings made during the time of the alleged incident. If any evidence has remained undisclosed, certainly Andrew Breitbart’s offer to give $100,000 to the United Negro Scholarship Fund in exchange for proof should have been sufficient incentive, and yet no documentary evidence has been brought forward.

Unlike real firefighters, truly brave men and women, when the supposed pursuers of truth in our press stumbled upon the false alarm instead of vindicating the betrayal by their agitators they chose to protect their reputations, or egos, or both. Why? Because none of us like to be duped, but when being duped carries professional consequences revealing the truth is to be avoided.

In the pure Chicago-style, left-wing attack politics begins with identifying fringe elements clinging to the edges of a group and exaggerating their influence over the group as a whole. For months since the tea parties began in February of 2009 in reaction to the $787 billion stimulus package, operatives of the Left have been methodically stitching scraps and bits of decaying humanity to the tea party’s image in an attempt to turn the movement into a Frankenstein’s monster that will frighten voters and disrupt the dampening effect tea parties have had on the Democrat’s agenda of European socialization and putting American individualism into terminal decline.

One pernicious example of media laziness has been the frequent attribution to tea partiers for creating the poster of President Obama with a square, Hitler-like moustache by major media outlets. The poster is the creation of Lyndon Larouche’s political action committee, a very radical group that espouses conspiratorial views. You need to study string theory to develop a conceptual way of describing where Larouchies fit on any political spectrum. They have always operated as grifters of a sort, stationing themselves at all places where large numbers of people pass by or congregate. They are a barnacle clinging to the side of the tea party ship, not a ticketed passenger on it, and an annoyance that must be tolerated in order to preserve the right of free speech for all people.

Having sewn the Larouchies, mythical racist signage, the fiction that tea parties are not diverse, and a host of other red herrings over the true complexion of the tea party, only daily jolts of electricity from the dynamo of the left-wing sympathetic faction in the media to keep the monstrous consolidation of smears and baseless accusations moving forward.

But even more damaging to the reporter’s esteem than being revealed as a fool is being proven to be a hypocrite. At the core of a journalist’s credibility is their ability to be consistent, to maintain a standard for judging all situations using a common ethical and moral baseline. Based on their actions during this historic period of American political unrest, modern news organizations are nailing their own coffin shut.

Take the case in point of mainstream media’s handling of widespread Bush Derangement Syndrome. The video below (NSFW) is a garden variety sampling of what could be found on most Saturday morning street corners during the Bush years. The tone and structure of what the extremists have to say in this video is not unlike the extreme speech being freely and incorrectly associated with the tea parties. It is also an example of what the media routinely characterized as free speech, not a clear and present danger as media elites have tended to characterize current vocal opposition to the policies of President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

Watch the video and judge for yourself if there is a deplorable hypocrisy in how the media treated Bush Derangement Syndrome and how it treats vehement disapproval of the current president’s agenda.

When nearly an entire industry doubles down in repeating the lie in order to protect its collective status it risks an all-out collapse of public faith in the institution. Based on polls showing reasonably broad support for tea party ideals, and historically low regard for the integrity of news providers, this potential cave-in of trust is a very real possibility.

Faith with the public can be restored by returning to solid standards of journalistic integrity, standards that really don’t deviate too much from the basic tenets of society in general. Tell the truth, seek the truth, challenge all facts, and always get an opposing viewpoint. In fact, those all happen to be values I have seen represented in the tea party itself, so if any journalists are looking for a close approximation to a Lazy Journalist’s twelve-step program, there’s always room at the next event.

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Really, it was only a matter of time before the anarchists realized that their number was up in the Left’s quiet draft to raise an army to intimidate and oppose tea party activists.

A web site called Infoshop News – described on its banner as offering “anarchist news, opinion and much more” – is issuing a rallying cry to its readers to begin organizing aggressive counterdemonstrations to pushback against a tea party movement that growing across the country. Specifically, Infoshop News is signaling that April 15 protests will be a major focus of their efforts, a day when tea parties are planned in cities and towns across the country.

Tea party organizers have typically developed and disseminated protocols for handling incidents of aggressive and provocative confrontations by other agitators at larger gatherings. The number one rule of thumb has always been that a handheld video camera or cell phone with video capture is like garlic to a vampire when it comes to warding off actual violence.

A page on the Infoshop News site titled “Crash the tea parties!” houses planning tools, pointers to websites on which to gather intelligence about tea party planning, and a laundry list of smears about the character of tea party activists.

Aside from the basic set of slurs hurled at tea partiers – fascists, racists, homophobes – Infoshop News adds the tag of anti-Semite to the mix, a head-scratcher to be sure. If simultaneous straw polls could be taken among tea partiers and among President Obama’s staff on the questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I think the vicious allegation of anti-Semitism would never be brought up again.)

Methinks thou doth project too much. There has long been a clear crossing of paths by anarchists seeking to disrupt global commerce at events like the World Trade Organization ministerial conferences and anti-Semitic promoters of Zionist conspiracies that contend Jewish-dominated institutions are running the world’s economy. But that’s a subject for another post.

But if the goals of tea partiers were met – less government, more freedom – it would seem to be a step in the direction of the anarchists’ desired outcome, even if an incomplete one. But this isn’t your slightly older brother’s anarchist anti-statist movement. The neo-anarchists don’t even seem to have the conviction of their recent ancestors, the ones who wrought mayhem and destruction on the city of Seattle in 1999 during the notorious riots during the World Trade Organization conference. By their own words, it would seem that their chief concern about tea partiers (aside from the fear that the liberty movement will be successful) is that they might take away the comforting pacifier that comes from – wait for it – big government.

Yes, that’s right, the biggest fear of today’s anarchist is the loss of the nanny state. From the Infoshop News site:

If the tea party movement takes over this country they will really hurt poor people by getting rid of social programs like food stamps, unemployment benefits, disability benefits, student aid, free health care, etc. The tea party movement will say these programs must be gotten rid of because hard-working taxpayers cannot afford to pay for these things especially when the economy is in a depression.

At least when, in the past, we observed these anti-establishment types taking kamikaze runs into the wall of civilized culture, their intent to create chaos to kick off the disintegration of organized society could be respected for its logical consistency. Lest some clever anarchist attempt to engage in a thrust-and-parry over the particulars of hyphenated forms of watered down anarchism, let me respond to all such arguments as follows: I don’t care.

For a look at what anarchists can do when they decide to act on their strong political opinions, Seattle Post-Intelligencer photog Mike Urban’s shot of a WTO delegate being mauled by a mob of what left-wing revisionist whitewashing has attempted to redefine as peaceful protestors is as real as it gets. And, yes, that is a wound on the cheek of the delegate inflicted during the struggle.Having seen what motivated anarchists can do in a highly-charged atmosphere, I sincerely hope that all steps will be taken by city and county law enforcement agencies to disrupt any planned acts of violence and protect the safety of those people wishing to exercise First Amendment rights.

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[Note: For reasons of copyright, the cartoon image is not in this post but can be found in links in the article below.]

As MSNBC.com’s resident cartoonist, Daryl Cagle is about as close to being the Obama administration czar of mockery and hyperbole as it gets. I follow his tweets (@dcagle) for the purpose of remaining open-minded and staying in touch with what’s happening across the political spectrum.

One of Cagle’s tweets today erases the distinction between Cagle as a legitimate member of the media and any simple, slavering liberal, hate-inciting troll.

Cagle’s tweet read:

Tough cartoon about the racial bigotry that seems apparent in the Tea Party http://bit.ly/afFzvz #p2 Fair cartoon?

Seeing the key phrases “racial bigotry,” “apparent,” and “Tea Party,” I took the bait, clicked and found myself looking at a cartoon by Milt Priggee posted on Cagle’s blog that caused my jaw to hit the keyboard.

Priggee’s rough-edged scrawling depicts a mob of people holding vitriolic signs and standing around a tree on which the words “Health Care Reform” are written. From the sturdiest branch of the tree hangs a noose, the rope held by a man who says, “Well – if this is Waterloo… where’s the nigger?” [Emphasis mine.]

Because I won’t tempt a lawsuit, I can’t give you an image but you can go to Cagle’s post yourself and take a look.

The icons and language are effective because Priggee’s purpose is to malign a group that threatens to derail the agenda of the American Left. The mob is how the Left sees tea partiers, or at least how they want the uninformed public to see them. Tea partiers, having rallied around opposition to healthcare, might just want to kill the president while they’re at it, the cartoon clearly implies.

I do not claim to be a tea partier, but I did attend tea party rallies over the last year as a journalist and a concerned citizen. I never saw anything that even approached the kind of racism being alleged in a current wave of reporting by the mainstream media, a phenomenon not unlike passing vicious notes in middle school. In fact, one of my favorite photos from the tea parties is the one below in which an Asian-American man proudly and enthusiastically paced through a crowd of nearly one thousand in Bellevue, Wash., carrying two masts with historic protest flags, and the American flag raised higher than all others (just out of frame in this photo).

There can easily be made the argument that Priggee’s cartoon slaps a bull’s eye on the back of tea partiers for blacks to target, and should the Left refuse to disavow inciting hatred with such image they are guilty of hypocrisy of the highest order.

Building on predetermined and exaggerated assumptions –a practice that although not explicitly prohibited by the Society of Journalists ethical code, but almost certainly in opposition to the spirit of journalist’s core requirement to pursue the truth – Priggee adds to a culture of bullying and intimidation that Washington Examiner senior political analyst Michael Barone wrote of in October 2008 as “the coming liberal thugocracy.”

The thing is, this isn’t the first time that Priggee’s particular brand of artistic offense has caused a stir. The people of Western Washington still remember what happened on the day after Thanksgiving 2009 when Maurice Clemmons walked into a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington and brutally gunned down four police officers where they sat. Priggee’s first visual comment was an image of four bodies, laying lifeless on a café floor, with blood spattered everywhere. Written on the backs of the four corpses were “Huckabee’s Presidential Future,” “Arkansas Parole System,” “Pierce County Bail System,” and “…If Only They Were Armed NRA Mentality.” A more brazen and disgusting example of a man using the tragic deaths of others as a convenient billboard on which to make a political statement is hard to find.

Again, for reasons of protecting myself against copyright infringement, I won’t post the actual cartoon, but you can see it here on the website of the Seattlepi.com where it remains available for people to see.

Milt Priggee is a man whose intellect has not developed the ability to distinguish his long list of hated enemies from each other. Nazis and the KKK fall in the same category as Obamacare opponents and those who feel that more government spending is bad for America.

As Priggee probably knows, what most tea partiers have in common is a distaste for the politics of race used by Democrats to pacify minority populations who are troubled by economic and social dysfunction. That is not racism, but is, in fact, the absence of it.

Tea partiers are feared by Priggee and Cagle’s friends in the Democratic Party mostly because they actually seek out the facts, read proposed legislation, and demand transparency. In response to this blatant and unfair attack on their character, tea partiers should make sure that these cartoonists are reminded of those traits. Contact your local newspaper and inquire about whether either of these two men are published in your hometown. In keeping with the spirit of the Tea Party movement, what you do with the answer to that question is your choice.

[Update 3/26/10 10:07 a.m. PDT: Michelle Malkin's column today, "How the Left fakes hate: A primer," is a great expose of the kind of tricks Cagle and Priggee are at the least cheerleaders to the deception being made to the American public. Give it a read.]

[Update 3/26/10 1:13 p.m. PDT: This post and Priggee's cartoon are the subject of a post on the Huckleberries Online blog of Spokane's Spokesman Review. Glad to see at least one traditional media outlet giving the controversy some mention.]

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[Article first appeared at Red County.]

Liu

From the onset, President Obama’s choice of Liu for nomination to the circuit court received criticism along many vectors. Although Liu possesses impressive academic credentials, the Berkeley law professor has never sat as a judge on a court at any level and his time as a practicing attorney is extremely brief relative to other judges seated on the nation’s highest court of appeal. His affiliation with liberal legal groups such as the American Constitution Society (the mirror image of the conservative Federalist Society) and the American Civil Liberties Union raised eyebrows among conservatives.

Since the announcement of Liu’s nomination on February 24, additional questions have arisen about his judicial philosophy. Evidenced by his writings, he subscribes to a very liberal interpretation of constitutional law specifically as it pertains to issues of so-called "societal inequities."

Only this morning, I wrote that Liu’s nomination should be blocked by any and all means after a video recently surfaced in which the nominee makes statements that can be interpreted as his support for making reparations for past racially-based injustices.

In response to the procedural gridlock, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) issued a fiery statement, blasting Republicans for what he called "tactics of obstruction," and making a non sequitur allusion to the battle over health insurance reform legislation. Within Leahy’s litany of accusations was that Republicans were also playing games with the nomination of Judge Robert Chatigny to the Second Circuit Court. What constitutes a game has been significantly altered since Inauguration Day 2009. That must be in the sections of the Hope and Change Handbook that I haven’t read yet.

In fact, the average time span between nomination and hearing for President Bush’s circuit judge nominees when Democrats controlled the Congress was 116 days according to The Brookings Instute. In contrast, Liu’s nomination is just 30 days old, and Judge Chastigny’s hearing date was set for last week after only 14 days had passed since his nomination was announced. Republicans requested to delay Chastigny’s hearing so that they could have time to prepare, a request that was considered and approved by Sen. Leahy’s committee. The Democrats’ benchmark for the obstruction of judicial appointments, set between 2006 and 2008, is still quite solid.

The screeching by Leahy that Republicans are stonewalling nominees not only fails to pass the sniff test, it smacks of rank hypocrisy in light of the last-minute postponement of Attorney General Eric Holder’s oversight hearing Monday. Although the head of the Justice Department has a duty to report to congressional committee members, Sen. Leahy has allowed Holder to continue play hookie instead of coming to class to deliver his testimony. Holder’s delay in appearing before the Committee has been facilitated by Sen. Leahy even while a growing list of disturbing questions about what is going on at Justice remain unanswered. Included on that list are the Attorney General’s inability to come to a decision on the proper venue and location for the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegations of unequal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act as may have occurred in the fog-enshrouded decision to dismiss the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation case, and the concern over Holder’s failure to disclose to the Committee amicus briefs filed in support of convicted terrorist Jose Padilla.

More curious still is Sen. Leahy’s apparent amnesia as to his party’s majority in the Senate. A party-line vote could allow Democrats to leap right over this hurdle and get on to placing Liu before a panel of Senators who each have a list of pressing questions leading to speculation that there may be other reasons for Democrats to be sitting back for a time-out on this controversial nomination.

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[This post first appeared at Red County.]

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[Article first appeared at Red County.]

Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu’s comments from a 2008 documentary film panel reveal startling insights on appellate court nominee’s views

Liu

Now, a video has surfaced in which Liu outlines a case for racially-based reparations and also suggests that an individual’s guilt need not be predicated on their having committed the wrongful act. Senate members reviewing the video will have little choice but to conclude that Liu is no garden variety liberal nominee to the federal appellate court. Their proper course of action should be to head off his confirmation by any and all means necessary.

Earlier this month, I evidenced just some of Liu’s liberal credentials and judicial philosophy (read “Goodwin Liu: Obama’s Newest Deconstructionist Nominee”) as reason enough for Senate members to aggressively challenge his nomination. Specifically, his adherence to a philosophy of “constitutional fidelity” — really just a dressed up version of the living document view of the Constitution — would tip the Notorious Ninth even further toward the progressive ideal of a bench dominated by activist judges secure to use their judicial high ground to affect radical social change. This estimation of Liu as a profoundly liberal candidate has also been written on extensively by Ed Whelan, the expert keeper of National Review Online’s bench memos blog.

I suggested also in my March 4 piece that any attempt by the Senate to use secret holds or to erect other obstacles could be seen as hypocritical by some. Strict constructionists who would otherwise be allied with the cause against Liu could see parliamentary stonewalling as exceeding the upper chamber’s role to advise and consent. I put forward, therefore, that the Senate should vigorously dissect Liu’s views during the public hearings, attempt to create pressure on the White House to withdraw his nomination, but should the president fail to withdraw, confirm him as is their role by strict definition.

In our digital age it is not surprising that a video was the catalyst to bring me to my senses. I was wrong and Liu’s nomination should be forcefully opposed.

It was while performing research for this column on Monday that I stumbled upon the video posted at the notable Verum Serum blog. In 2008, Liu was a participant on a discussion panel at a screening of the documentary film “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.” The film told the story of the filmmaker’s own discovery that her ancestors were among the most active slave traders in United States history, and the topic of black slavery launched a conversation on the subject of race-based reparations. Liu did not hesitate for a moment to enthusiastically state his opinion.

Speaking directly to the problem of identifying a party or parties on whom to assign blame, Liu explicitly outlined a legal framework for dispensing with the problem of assigning guilt to those who would bear the cost of repair. If Liu’s musings were acted upon, the principles of American jurisprudence would quite simply be torn to shreds.

“So what I would do is I think I would draw a distinction between a concept of guilt, which locates accountability in a sort of limited set of wrongdoers, and on the other hand a concept of responsibility," Liu says. “Which I think is a more broad suggestion that all of us – whatever our lineage, whatever our ancestry, whatever our complicity – still have a moral duty to…make things right. And that’s a moral duty that’s incumbent on everybody who inherits this nation regardless of whatever the history is.”

Liu continues: “And I think to add one more point on top of that, the exercise of that responsibility… necessarily requires the answer to the question, ‘What are  we willing to give up to make things right?’ Because it’s going to require us to give up something. Whether it is the seat at Harvard, the seat at Princeton… or is it going to require us to give up our segregated neighborhoods, our segregated schools. Is it going to require us to give up our… money? It’s going to require giving up something.”

More shocking than the revelation that Liu is an advocate for racial reparations, is his suggestion that a finding of guilt does not necessarily require any direct causation between a criminal act and the individual or group accused of committing said act. Liu’s indiscrete standard of what constitutes guilt for an individual in connection with crimes is a dangerous one of the sort on which, in its extreme application, states have rationalized their own unjust and inhumane acts.

On a more mundane point of his ability to function as a high court judge, how could Liu, prone to reconciling the cultural ‘balance sheets’ of all parties to a given cause of action, be expected to rule on cases in accordance with established law?

Perhaps the events of the past week also contribute to the need to blockade Liu. The roughshod passage of unpopular and economically destructive healthcare legislation demonstrated that two-thirds of the federal government is under iron-fisted control of the Democrats; the only check and balance remaining against potential Democratic tyranny, from a macro perspective, is the judiciary. In the micro, within the legislative body, the one power that prevents complete single-party rule over all branches of government is the power of the minority party in the Senate to block judicial appointments.

Republicans and level-headed Democrats in the Senate should act aggressively and use every tool available to expose Liu’s liberal judicial philosophy. If the President fails to withdraw the nomination – a highly probable outcome – Liu’s confirmation should be blocked by all parliamentary means available.

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