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Roger Simon posts on Eric Holder.
Of all the malfeasances of William Jefferson Clinton the one that would have most justified a removal from office was not the Monica hijinks, even with the attendant lying under oath and absurd parsings of the word “is,” but the pardoning of Marc Rich — the billionaire international commodities trader and mammoth contributor to, er, Clinton. Luckily for Bill, this action occurred on the last day of his presidency, making anything like impeachment moot, even though it was an example of political corruption that would have made Boss Tweed envious. For those who don’t recall the details, here’s Wikipedia: …
… Until, on January 20, 2001, literally in the final minutes of his presidency, Rich was granted a pardon by Clinton, a pardon pushed through a reluctant judge on the determined “recommendation” of then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder.
Yes, that’s the same Eric Holder who lectures us about race and calls Americans “cowards.” In reality, he was a political bagman, a low rent consigliere whose unquestioning obedience to power was evidently appreciated by Barack Obama and rewarded with the full position of attorney general. …
Sharyl Atkisson has Holder thoughts too.
… Holder declined my repeated interview requests over the years. In a recent interview with ABC News, Holder said, “It is the honor of my professional life to serve the American people as attorney general. I hope I’ve done a good job. I’ve certainly tried to do as good a job as I can.”
Holder has served a little more than five years and seven months in office as the nation’s first black attorney general. He is also the first attorney general to be held in criminal contempt of Congress.
As the country’s lead law enforcement official but also a political appointee with great latitude to steer policy, no attorneys general escape controversy. Holder’s activist stance often proved polarizing. From the start, he made clear that he intended for civil rights protection—specifically combating the unequal treatment of black Americans—to be a top priority during his tenure.
The shooting of an unarmed, 18-year-old black suspect by a white policeman in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9 provided Holder a prime opportunity to make his mark. His intervention drew both praise and criticism.
Holder took the unusual step of taking over a police investigation before there was any evidence of that the local police had mishandled, or would mishandle it. It was a step that the Los Angeles Times called “unusually aggressive” writing, on Aug. 20, that “Holder appears locked in an odd and unsteady competition with Missouri officials over which of them, if either, will prosecute Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson first.” …
We’ll close the Holder section with Nick Gillespie in Time magazine.
… he was a thoroughly typical attorney general, a cabinet position that has long been held by individuals whose first loyalty is to the president that appointed them rather than to the Constitution they swear to defend.
From A. Mitchell Palmer (who rounded up and deported real and imagined Communists) to John Mitchell (convicted on perjury charges related to Watergate) to Janet Reno (who ordered the disastrous assault on the Branch Davidians and spent years threatening to censor cable TV), the position has long been a holding tank for low-performing miscreants. …
… Arguably more disturbing was Holder’s central role in signing off on the secret monitoring of Fox News’ James Rosen and other journalists and his staunch defense of National Security Agency surveillance programs (even when federal oversight boards decreed them unconstitutional and ineffective). It took a 13-hour filibuster by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to get Holder to acknowledge in plain language that there were in fact limits to the president’s secret kill list (the existence of which is itself deeply disturbing). …
Kevin Williamson says free markets keep the environment cleaner. It’s governments that are the worst polluters.
… The fullest and most comprehensive attempts to impose socialism on a society happened in the twentieth century in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and like-minded enterprises. “Communism” is what socialists call socialism that they do not want to talk about, but in the interest of fairness I should emphasize that I do not believe that the USSR is what Ms. Sawant et al. have in mind when they talk about socialism. But the USSR wasn’t what the Russian revolutionaries had in mind, either, and it probably is not really what Lenin or even Stalin desired. Almost nobody sets out to impoverish, oppress, starve, and murder millions of people, but that is what happened, and that it happened is not a mere coincidence deriving from defects within Russian culture or Mao’s management style. It probably is not the case that the Russians failed socialism, but that socialism failed the Russians.
Under a system that imposed heavy government regimentation upon the economy, direct government ownership of the “commanding heights” of the economy (and the commanded heights, too), a socialist vision of property, etc., the environmental results were nothing short of catastrophic. Setting aside the direct human costs of socialist environmental policy in the twentieth century — the famines, the deformations, the horrific birth defects — socialism was a disaster from the purely environmental point of view, too.
Consider the Aral Sea disaster, in which one of the world’s largest lakes was converted into a toxic desert, with the husks of ships still floating upon the sand dunes — not by accident, but as a matter of government policy, implemented not by the famous monster Stalin, but by Nikita Khrushchev, by comparison a reformer. Like our contemporary socialists, the Soviets of the Khrushchev era hoped to fundamentally transform the economy with a series of careful “investments” and infrastructure projects, in this case by turning a great deal of marginal land into a cotton-producing powerhouse that would substantially raise exports. Water headed for the Aral Sea was diverted in the service of this government infrastructure investment, and the seabed became a desert. …
WSJ Editorial on the government campaign to put for-profit colleges out of business.
The Department of Education this summer drove the for-profit Corinthian Colleges out of business. Now the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is trying to wipe out the company’s shareholders and creditors by suing the for-profit for predatory lending. There ought to be a law against predatory regulating.
Last week the CFPB sued the Santa Ana-based for-profit for inducing “prospective students to incur the loan obligations necessary to enroll by promising career training and graduate employment opportunities.” Corinthian’s crime, in other words, was creating a private-alternative to the government-loan monopoly. …
… All of this resembles a hyena pack dismembering a wildebeest carcass, which seems to be the point. The Obama Administration wants to show other for-profit operators what could happen if they resist its new regulations. The real tragedy is that the destruction of Corinthian will make it harder for graduates to get a job.
Conservative HQ posts on the campaign to silence Rush Limbaugh.
You may have heard about the so-called “grassroots movement” to force local advertisers to stop advertising on the Rush Limbaugh program, allegedly because of consumer opposition to Rush’s conservative views.
It turns out that this so-called Stop Rush campaign isn’t a grassroots campaign at all, but a carefully crafted conspiracy of a small group of radical leftwing activists to bully advertisers into dropping Rush’s program and muffle one of the most effective conservative voices in America in the lead-up to the 2014 midterms and silence him permanently before the 2016 presidential election.
There is now stunning proof that only a small group of radical Leftists connected with Media Matters are involved in the “Stop Rush” campaign – NOT masses of Americans. Radical leftwing advocacy group Media Matters’ disgusting attempts to silence our viewpoints are nothing new – but now the dirty tactics of Media Matters have been revealed, and they are more deceptive than you can imagine.
We don’t use the term “conspiracy” lightly, and we here at CHQ generally lean toward skepticism when friends bring us tales of unseen forces manipulating major events. But in this case the evidence (links below) proves that only a few radicals at leftwing advocacy organization Media Matters are running and participating in this effort to intimidate both local radio stations that carry Rush, and local “Mom-and-Pop” businesses that advertise on his show.
They have used technology to create tweets from people who don’t exist, to use abuse accounts on Facebook, and to intimidate small businesses who advertise on conservative shows. Media Matters is vicious, and dangerous to your freedom as few other domestic threats have been. …