Congratulations to the editors at the Washington Post.  Seventeen months after the Eric Holder Justice Department dismissed a slam-dunk case against the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, the Post gets around to printing a thorough vetting of the dismissal.  The story is slated for Saturday’s print edition.  While other media like Breitbart/The Bigs, Fox News, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard, Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Investors Business Daily, Pajamas Media, and Drudge have had dozens of stories on the corrupt New Black Panther dismissal, the Washington Post at last is in the game.

The story is a shocker too.  The shock comes from the middle of the road and factual nature of the story.

There are small problems with the story.  For one, the Washington Post is the only outlet that calls King Samir Shabazz by his old “slave name” (Shabazz’s own words) of Maruse Heath.  Even Heath doesn’t call himself Heath.  Of course this takes some of the sting off Shabazz’s rants against Jews and calls to kill “cracker babies in their crib.”

The Post’s decision to change a man’s name for him is controversial.  It has no place.

But overall, the story is very bad news for Eric Holder.  It debunks many of the myths spun by the administration.  Inside DOJ sources describe deep hostility to protecting whites at Justice.  DOJ sources say panther prosecutor Christian Adams never allowed his conservative views to influence his work, contradicting administration spin.  And perhaps most damning of all to Holder, sources defending the administration defend the idea that whites aren’t protected by the Civil Rights laws.  The latter is the blockbuster news in the Post piece. (more…)

Over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol tries to control his inner optimist:

It would be unbecoming for us at The Weekly -Standard​—we do have to uphold standards, after all!—to chortle with glee as the Democratic party melts down. It would be unkind to whoop at the top of our lungs as Obama White House big shots quit or get fired, and to cheer with gusto as the GOP leadership behaves sensibly, the Tea Party goes from strength to strength, and momentum builds towards a huge Election Day repudiation of big government liberalism.

So, instead, we’ll simply point out, calmly and quietly, that the Democratic party is in meltdown, the Obama White House is in disarray, and the voters are in rebellion against both of them.

… Meanwhile, much to the amazement of experienced laborers in conservative and Republican causes, the Republicans aren’t blowing it.

Yes, yes… don’t want to get too cocky, don’t want to count our chickens, etc. Still… (more…)

Sure the news stinks: Obama (of course) has come out foursquare for the Ground Zero mosque, the economy is in the dumps and Dustin Pedroia is still on the DL.  But look on the bright side: the snarling, vicious, fascist Left is starting to crack up!

Don ‘t take it from us — take it from Bill Kristol:

The left has collapsed.

Its political support has collapsed. Public opinion polls point to a historic repudiation of the president and the Democratic party this fall—something on the order of a 60-seat Republican gain in the House. The GOP has an outside shot at taking the Senate as well.

Its claim to intellectual integrity has collapsed. Paul Krugman—Ivy League professor, New York Times columnist, and Nobel laureate (the holy trinity of the liberal establishment)—has humiliated himself with a startlingly dishonest attack on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Krugman, called out by Ryan, rebuked by honest analysts, and unwilling to concede his errors, has retreated into uncharacteristic abashed silence.

Lenin and Stalin, Democrat role models

Its Leninist discipline has collapsed. Last week, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs complained about the craziness of the “professional left” in the punditocracy. “Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs explained. “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality. .  .  . They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.” Members of the professional left hit back at Gibbs, dubbing the Obama White House the “amateur left.”

Naturally, it’s a complete coincidence that no less than seventy members of the current Congress — all “Democrats,” naturally — are members of the Socialist Party of America (and we bet you can name half of them without even peeking). Not that there’s anything wrong with that — after all, they have the best interests of the country at heart. It’s just that their notion of America bears absolutely no resemblance to that of the Founders.  Or yours, for that matter.

More Bill: (more…)

What was once just a worry, then a fear, is now beginning to speak its name. Here’s Bill Kristol in the pages of the Weekly Standard on the pretty pass at which we find ourselves:

We are not now quite at a founding moment, or even a re-founding moment. But we have arrived at a genuine crisis, or a set of crises, and we may well be at a decisive moment for the country…

Of course, the leaders of the Democratic party don’t want to come to grips with the present moment. Committed to stale progressive policies, they’re doing their very best to push more of them through, even as the failure of those policies becomes ever more evident. Serious reflection on the failure of their favored policies, both at home and abroad, would be too painful. It would require a rethinking too consequential and too disruptive to be willingly undertaken. After all, experience has shown that liberals are more disposed to have the rest of us suffer, than to right themselves by rethinking the dogmas by which they are enthralled.

But it’s increasingly clear that “the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government,” in our case welfare state liberalism, is no longer sufferable. Out-of-control spending and debt really do threaten our economic future. Weakness and timidity abroad really do threaten a world in which terrorists and fanatics possess, and use, nuclear weapons. The nanny state, at once all-intrusive and all thumbs, really does threaten the future of self-government. The dogmas of multiculturalism really do threaten the strength of a free society.

(more…)

Jonathan Capehart, the pride of Carleton College,  rarely  has anything to say that’s worth reading, listening to (he’s a regular on Morning Joe) or thinking about, but occasionally he blunders into something, willy-nilly, as in this piece for the Washington Post blog, “Post Partisan,” about Palin’s recent speech at the Susan B. Anthony dinner:

The last time I saw Sarah Palin speak live was in 2008 when she accepted the Republican Party nomination for vice president. And she gave the performance of her life. The ensuing 20 months for me have been like watching the political equivalent of an actor on ER playing a surgeon. Get that “surgeon” off her lines, and she can’t possibly speak intelligently, if at all, about the intricacies of an operating room. Palin speaks in such broad generalities (“time-tested truths” or “common-sense solutions”) that you’d be crazy to even think about putting the body politic into her care.

This is what passes for thinking among the left these days: why, with this sort of analysis, Capehart has a real chance to become the next Frank Rich. Never mind that Palin’s positions on the issues are far more in tune with what the American public is thinking at the moment. As Matthew Continetti noted in the Weekly Standard:

As I listened to the speech, I was struck by how Palin’s positions are widely shared. She opposes the health care law — so does the public. She’s concerned about the federal deficit — so is the public (see question 10b). She supports the Arizona illegal immigration law — so does the public. She supports the right to life — and the public is moving toward her. She supports the Afghanistan surge and the current course in Iraq — both Obama administration policies.

The problem, as Continetti notes, is that Palin’s negatives are so high (wonder why): (more…)

The latest: Michael Meehan, the Coakley staffer involved in last night’s scuffle, no make that a stumble, let’s try it one more time, the shoving incident with a Weekly Standard reporter, has now apologized:

Last evening I was a little too aggressive in the confusion of trying to help the Attorney General get to her car and catch a flight.

I clearly did not intend to cause John McCormack to trip and fall over that low fence.  As the video shows and he confirms in his blog, I stopped to help him up and make sure he was OK.

I talked with Mr. McCormack this afternoon and apologized for my part.

Maybe the AP won’t be quite so ready to go into Democrat-protective mode next time.

Original post:

Last night, while trying to ask a question of the slumping “Massachusette” herself, Martha Coakley, The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack found himself on the ground after an apparent altercation.

With her campaign moving into full panic mode as the polls tighten, this is the last thing the woman who aspires to “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” needs.  Of course, the campaign says that McCormack fell.  You be the judge: (more…)