The Necropolitan Sentinel

He's one of the hardest working men in the 'sphere, and he's falling behind on his goals. Here, he's talking about why the NSA stuff resonates so much with young people.

You'll probably have read this elsewhere, but the State Department's goons have been cracking down on whistleblowers prying the cover off of suppressed investigation of diplomatic corps wrongdoing. More on that from Ace. I expect that if I were to peek in on Treacher at Daily Caller or on FB, I'd find him connecting that to the jackass that screwed up his knee and left him holding the bag and a jaywalking ticket.

Jeff disagrees with J. Christian Adams's analysis of the Arizona voter registration decision by the Supreme Court, which I blogged about earlier today, but even if I'm going with Adams on that score, because I figure he's in a much better place to gauge what it means, there's a lot of great stuff at PW today, including Gerald Walpin's observations on the IRS IG's audit and how the Sequester is the proximate cause for rape and murder. In IG George's case, it has seemed to me that he's been trying to walk a tightrope. That shouldn't be his job. In the case of Dumbass Dan Maffei's comments, as Jeff intimates, it's exactly his POV that not handing government any amount of money they desire is tantamount to rape and murder. These guys don't want to get to the bottom of it, very much. That's why, as far as we know, FBI investigators still haven't contacted any of the targeted TEA Party groups. And that's impartial justice under the Holder DoJ. Andrew Napolitano's a little concerned by the way the FBI has become politicized. It was clear from the beginning of the administration that the FBI was being made the senior organization over the CIA, because the ideological bias worked in the direction of regarding US security as dependent on police action. The FBI fiasco following the Benghazi atrocity demonstrated just how screwed up things are.

ICYMI, the story of a pro football player who got raped by his rape accuser. Brian Banks is a better man than I.

All kinds of messed up: transgender MS woman charged with second 'depraved heart murder' by lethal buttocks injection. More here. Don't know why Stacy's not on this. Get over to Viral Read and put something in the comments. It's pitiful. Almost as bad as comments are here.

Our new Syrian allies are a lovely bunch.

RT @sentedcruz: Anyone know if President Obama intends to perform background checks on the Syrian rebels before providing them weapons?

— Malvenue (@Malvenue) June 18, 2013

Just RTWT:

The revelations about the extent of domestic surveillance have been a big story since they broke earlier this month. And the story keeps getting bigger: MSN reports that the IRS is “acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records.” Soon it will have your health-insurance information, too.

Yet the tight focus on electronic surveillance keeps the bigger story out of the frame.

The bigger story concerns the increasingly asymmetric relationship between citizens and the state. The formerly secret program of domestic spying neatly illuminates one aspect of that asymmetry: The government knows, or can know, an awful lot about you. But you are not supposed to know even that it knows, let alone what it knows.

More of what the government does is classified than ever before. If you do not know what the government is doing then, obviously, you have no say over its activities. This flies in the face of the Declaration of Independence, which states that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” How can you consent to something you know nothing of?

The principle animating democratic and republican government is accountability to the governed. Yet more and more government action lies beyond the citizens’ reach.

Via Insty.

J. Christian Adams breaks it down, but the big breakthrough is that states can opt to use their own forms, including verification of citizenship requirements:

The decision today uncorks state power. The Left wanted state power stripped and they lost.

First, Arizona can simply push the state forms in all state offices and online, and keep those federal forms in the back room gathering dust. When you submit a state form, you have to prove citizenship. Thanks to Justice Scalia, that option is perfectly acceptable. Loss for the Left. Victory for election integrity.

You might say, “That’s a small victory.” Nonsense. This was the whole ballgame to the groups pushing the Arizona lawsuit. They lost, period.

Next, when voters use a state, as opposed to a federal, form, they can still be required to prove citizenship. The federal form is irrelevant in that circumstance.

After the decision today, states have a green light to do double- and triple-checking even if a registrant uses the federal form. The Left wanted the submission of a federal form to mean automatic no-questions-asked registration. This is a big loss for the Left because now states can put suspect forms in limbo while they run checks against non-citizen databases and jury-response forms. Another significant victory in today’s decision. The Left wanted to strip them of that double-checking power.

The decision today is a great example of how conservatives can be distracted by squirrels running past. It is understandable and forgivable because they aren’t daily immersed in the long-term election-process agenda of the left-wing groups. Nor do they daily involve themselves with the details of election process. But having been in the “preemption wars” for nearly a decade, I can assure you this case is a big win, even if it doesn’t appear so at first glance.

I'll probably be adding to this later.

While you're waiting (with bated breath) for that, check out this excerpt from The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking:

Every skyjacker was an optimist at heart, supremely confident that his story would be the one to touch Castro’s heart.

Thanks to Blackmailers Don't Shoot for the link to Meep in the usual excellent round-up.

Some US forest fires may be deliberately set by jihadis. Not that this will turn the environmentalists against them, because they have no inkling of the incoherence of their ideology, but I think Colorado Springs might be on their radar. That's via @SissyWillis.

Pethokoukis: Where's my damn flying car?

[T]he past 50 years of federal regulations have reduced real GDP by roughly two percentage points a year, or nearly $40 trillion.

You may recall that the DoJ made a deal with St. Paul, Minnesota, so that the city wouldn't take a 'disparate impact' case to court, where this Pigford-like tool of racialist fraud-based redistribution could be challenged and possibly struck down.

Now there's another case.

In what could neutralize a key Obama administration weapon to sue home lenders for discrimination, the Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a case challenging the use of a questionable civil-rights theory.

The bench's conservative majority has been spoiling to strike down so-called disparate impact liability claims in housing and lending bias cases, legal experts say. It was poised to do so last year, but administration officials pressured a petitioner into dropping the case just weeks before the court was scheduled to hear oral arguments.

In the case now before the court — Mt. Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action — a New Jersey town argues it was unfairly sued for discrimination under a disparate impact claim, which carries a low standard of proof. Activists representing blacks and Latinos claim a town plan to redevelop a high-crime neighborhood is racist simply because it impacts more minorities than whites, regardless of any intent to discriminate. They say it's a violation of the Fair Housing Act.

*******

However, unlike other anti-discrimination laws, the FHA does not explicitly cover disparate impact claims. Nor does the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

Yet the administration has cited both acts in bringing a record number of disparate-impact claims against mortgage lenders. Since 2009, the Justice Department and HUD have extracted $600 million in settlements, including loan set-asides and cash payouts for minority borrowers.

I hope Holder has his ass handed to him.
 

VDH is generally well worth reading, but this post pulls together a lot of material, and notices some patterns:

There is currently a climate of fear growing throughout the United States. Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department.

Why?

These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs.  But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment — and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt.

Ask who now is sitting in prison — a shyster video-maker who had nothing to do with the deaths of four Americans, or their five known terrorist killers lounging about in North Africa? Apparently, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, like EPA director Lisa Jackson, was guilty of creating a fake persona. Like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, he had a lien on his business. Like former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he had some unpaid taxes. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had been visited by government investigators. Like Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, he lied to federal authorities — although they were not quite as high as those in the U.S. Congress. And unlike all of the above, he was therefore jailed.

USA Today actually has been doing a very good job keeping up with the IRS scandal, and here's an article that shows the agency is having a little bit of trouble keeping their story straight. Holly Paz has a lot of excuses. She says that the agency used the term "TEA Party" generically to mean any organization that might be a little too political for the 501(c)(4) designation, the way that someone might use Coke to cover all forms of soft drink, or Kleenex for tissues, and regardless of political orientation. The argument has elsewhere been that TEA Party-style organizations were all placed in a single grouping, to ensure that all of those within that grouping got equal treatment . . . no matter how much the treatment of that grouping might have differed from other organizations or other possible groupings. So, that was consistency, see? Paz also states that the folks in DC were just confused about what was going on in Cincinnati, because communications weren't very good, although agents in Cincinnati have reported that they repeatedly requested guidance from their superiors in DC. Also, she was sometimes on maternity leave and stuff. And they may have denied a liberal organization tax-exempt status, though Paz can't seem to name it. That's all blown out of the water by Elizabeth Hofacre, who worked under Paz and Paz's supervisor, Lois Lerner, but USA Today wasn't having any of it anyway:

But Elizabeth Hofacre, the agency's emerging issues coordinator in Cincinnati when the targeting began, has told investigators that she kicked out any progressive groups that other agents tried to put in with the Tea Party cases. She said she understood the term to mean conservative or Republican groups. "I was tasked to do Tea Parties, and I wasn't — I wasn't equipped or set up to do anything else."

A USA TODAY analysis of IRS data shows that dozens of liberal groups received tax-exempt approval in the 27 months that Tea Party groups sat in limbo, even though the liberal groups were engaging in similar kids of activity. Groups applying for the exemption are supposed to be primarily focusing on social welfare, not political activity.

USA Today also did a piece on all the special deals tucked away in the Gang of 8 immigration monstrosity that you should read, if you're keeping an eye on that . . . as you should. Related: Byron York's piece on how the Gang of 8 bill actually treats immigrants with criminal records, despite all the tough talk. The takeaway is that Napolitan has the right to confer citizenship on anyone she wants to, for whatever reasons she likes. Oh, and USA Today also has a great interview with three guys who tried to go through those approved channels that most congressmen think Snowden should have used, and got stiff-armed, when the tried to alert people to those NSA hoovering programs. Court ruled NSA spying violated Constitution, got caved anyway. More on how information about those programs was suppressed back in 2006.

Bob Belvedere turned me on to this piece in The American Spectator, about the ways in which Mad Men panders to proggie sensibilities by showing what cavemen people like Don Draper were back in the Sixties, to flatter all of us who are so much more evolved. I've not watched the show, and Bob says he ditched it midway through the second season, but you might find it interesting, anyway, because this paradigm is so pervasive, even if particularly well illustrated by that show.

John Hawkins has the outlandish story about how conservative Arizona blogger Rachel Alexander has been hounded out of the law profession on trumped up charges from the Arizona Bar, all because she and her boss tried to expose some corruption. This is an important story, and I urge you to support her. Speaking of people who have lost their employment as the result of the machinations of vicious lefty douchebags, Aaron Walker has a fascinating piece on the ways that convicted domestic terrorist Brett Kimberlin may have used Bill Schmalfeldt, aka Neckless Feckless, to try to entrap him.

Orson Welles was a much more interesting kind of looney toons than Schmalfeldt. San Francisco Court of Appeals says it's okay for prisoner to have lycanthrope erotica, holding forth on the innate artistic merit, which is Tolstoyesque, particularly thematically. From that same blog, a piece on the way the 'epidemic' of 'scare quotes' is 'threatening' to 'kill' our 'civil society.'

President Jackass went to Belfast and opined that Catholic schools might sow social division and sectarian strife, threatens to veto legislation to ban late-term abortion. That will teach the Pope not to mention the Armenian genocide, Oh, hey, another horrible truth teller. I guess. Irish-born Samantha Power cravenly wept in apology to pro-Israel lobbyists designed to save her career.

You can read about the latest hideous State Department scandal here, and you probably should.

If this story is true, and I have no reason to believe that it isn't, AT&T will be bringing ObamAlerts to their subscribers, along with Amber Alerts and Emergency Alerts. The difference is that you can turn off the Amber Alerts and the Emergency Alerts. The ObamAlerts will be mandatory. So, if AT&T is your carrier, and if you get texts beginning with "Make no mistake" or urging you to "get in their faces," you'll have a pretty good idea from whence they come. If the text informs you that some hypothetical policy built entirely of straw, or just plain "failure," is "not an option," or that scarecrow opponents are presenting a "false choice" that the administration is debunking, you'll get to laugh and laugh. Because, irony. Lucky you.

AT&T already has immunity from prosecution for sharing whatever data the NSA requires them to fork over, so what the terms of this new deal with the administration are, I don't know; but it does follow the pattern early set with the Obama administration, if you remember the Stimulus! signs that they placed at all those shovel-ready infrastructure projects that were going to bootstrap America's lagging economy in the early days of the administration, or going even further back, how Obama created his own pResidential shield to hang on the podium wherever he was TelePrompTed. Over the weekend, the NLRB once again had their asses handed to them by a judge, who politely informed them that they were not specially empowered to hang union propaganda in any old workplace they wanted. The assertion, "you didn't build that," was supposed to have smoothed the way.

In a way, such assertions of the Will to Blather amount to a campaign of Troll Rights on the part of an administration that thinks it has carte blanche to spam your text messages, your timeline, or your comments section or any other aspect of your life, whether in cyber or meatspace. Your bandwidth belongs to them, just as, it would seem, the walls of your business do. Does it amount to an in-kind contribution on the part of AT&T to an administration that's constantly in campaign mode? I mean, given the centrality to Obama's 'style of government' of fund-raising, is the argument that AT&T's allowing them to use its facilities to advance their agenda amounts to a political contribution more or less ridiculous than the administration's claim that a congressional recess is whatever they say it is? Well, it's not your place to make such calls, is it?

I will say this: there's probably a class action suit in here that would at least permit people who didn't want to get the President's text messages to walk away from AT&T contracts without penalty, and I think that someone should take up the cause. If private businesses can be restrained from spamming people on their cell phones, and if those people have the right to place themselves on a "Do Not Call" list, then I don't really see why Obama gets a pass to blurt out his propaganda on devices for which consumers pay. Personally, I'm stuck with AT&T, because it's the only carrier that reaches into my Vermont Fortress of Solitude, as long as I'm willing to stand on my porch in February. Shouldn't this be an opt-in matter? These guys don't really care much for freedom of choice, unless it's their own freedom to choose which laws to enforce and which not.

There was a little joke going around when the NSA news broke, that we all had ObamaPhones, now. It was funny because it was kind of true. Now it's kind of truer, but you can bet that you're not going to get extra credit from NSA analysts for receiving ObamaSpam. On the other hand, if you refuse it you might be the kind of shady character in whom they take a special interest. Eh, what's a little data mining between friends? Right, friend?