From historian Andrew Roberts, in The Wall Street Journal, comes this:
There is a long and honorable history of the civilized world treating those dictators who use poison gas as qualitatively different from the normal ruck of tyrants whose careers have so stained the 20th and 21st centuries.
President Obama, who talks endlessly of the importance of civilized values, must now uphold this one.
What he said. RTWT.
…have against equal opportunity?
The Justice Department is trying to stop a school vouchers program in Louisiana that attempts to help families send their children to independent schools instead of under-performing public schools.
The agency wants to stop the program, led by Republican Gov Bobby Jindal, in any school district that remains under a desegregation court order.
Because, you know, helping students actually to do better so that they can be effectively integrated with their age peers is a Bad Thing.
The federal government argues that allowing students to attend independent schools under the voucher system could create a racial imbalance in public school systems protected by desegregation orders.
After all, parents of underperforming students might wind up aggregating them into schools that actually teach and get academic results in their students. Since most of the underperforming students in Louisiana tend to be minority children, especially black children, this might tend to aggregate black children into those successful voucher schools rather than leave them trapped in Louisiana’s failing public school system.
Eric Holder’s DoJ made their argument with a straight face. Consummate actors, they are.
Let’s look at that “minority” status in the Louisiana schools, though.
The New Orleans public school system is 88% African-American. Now, how could allowing 570 kids to flee the public school system possibly “create a racial imbalance”?
Oh, it’s those minority white students, who would become even more concentrated, that Holder is worrying about. Yeah, that’s the ticket. We’ll go with that.
Jindal had this about Holder’s move:
After generations of being denied a choice, parents finally can choose a school for their child, but now the federal government is stepping in to prevent parents from exercising this right. Shame on them. Parents should have the ability to decide where to send their child to school.
Can you say disparate impact? This is the racist outcome—intended or not—of using this meme, even sotto voce.
The Justice Department said Thursday that it will sue Texas over its voter ID law and, separately, look for ways to intervene in a lawsuit over the state’s redistricting policies
It’s just one harassment of a State after another by a Federal government disgruntled that it can’t get its way just for the demanding. Attorney General Eric Holder justified the attack, saying this is just part of DoJ’s
continuing effort to protect the voting rights of all eligible Americans. We will not allow the Supreme Court’s recent decision [that Congress must update its Voting Rights Act pre-clearance criteria] to be interpreted as open season for states to pursue measures that suppress voting rights.
Emphasis on that “We will not allow.” Holder will not allow the Supreme Court decision to have effect; the United States’ chief lawyer will simply ignore it. Never mind that his actions are designed to attack the voting rights of all eligible Americans by preventing states from ensuring that only eligible Americans vote. Indeed,
[f]ollowing the [Supreme Court] ruling, Holder called the court’s decision and its reasoning behind it “flawed,” and vowed to find other ways within the law to challenge the ruling.
This is rank rule by law—cynically using law (or creating it, which is not, strictly speaking, the case here) to achieve government ends, rather than living within law the We the People have made through our elected representatives in order to protect us…from government, among others.
As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the center of other criticisms of states’ voter ID laws is a claim like Colin Powell’s: “there is no voter fraud.” Even if this were true, there’d be no harm in taking steps to keep it that way. As the objectors know; hence their objection plainly centers on their need for the ineligible to be able to vote early and often.
…with just a tinge of pink.
Since Obama declared last August that chemical weapons would constitute a “red line,” the administration this past June did conclude that the government used chemical weapons.
Now, a year later, and after additional CW attacks (which our allies have tended to confirm, even though our government will not admit of this), comes this:
…Syrian activists are accusing Bashar Assad’s forces of killing hundreds in a gas attack—in what would be the worst and deadliest chemical attack to date.
The attack raises new concerns that the so-called “red line” in Syria has been crossed, violated and effectively ignored.
That a major gas attack, with hundreds of casualties, occurred has been confirmed by video, symptom suites, and eye witness accounts. Intelligence sources confirm that the Syrian rebels are very unlikely to be capable of mounting a chemical attack of this magnitude. Beyond that, the political consequences, even in Syria, of being found out render a rebel CW attack of this size even more unlikely.
President Barack Obama, though, had this to say, through his secondary spokesman, Josh Earnest:
The United States strongly condemns any and all use of chemical weapons. Those responsible for the use of chemical weapons must be held accountable. Today, we are formally requesting that the United Nations urgently investigate this new allegation. The UN investigative team, which is currently in Syria, is prepared to do so, and that is consistent with its purpose and mandate.
Yeah, that’ll show ’em. Assad is shaking in his loafers.
What do “held accountable” or “unacceptable” (another favorite Obamatalk word) mean when there are no consequences?
…on the relationship between Progressives and their plantation hands of a certain group. Here‘s Louisiana State Senator Elbert Lee Guillory (erstwhile Democrat, now Republican):
It’s no longer the American Dream, it’s the American nightmare of relying on a monthly government check.
And
Only capitalism can provide the upward mobility for the meekest among us to break the shackles of poverty and rise into the middle class. This is what we call “The American Dream.”
Guillory has more here.
The Free at Last PAC also looks like a group worth serious consideration.