Sunday, July 18, 2010

Denver Judge Promotes Fraud

There's a federal judge in Denver suffering from a severe case of rectal-cranial inversion. Judge Robert E Blackburn ruled the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional, claiming it violates the First Amendment's guarantees of free speech. He thinks it's fine for a slimeball to pretend to be a wounded Iraq war vet as part of his scheme to defraud people. He dropped all charges against the fraud merchant.

The judge has clearly not thought this through. Look for other criminals to challenge the laws they're charged under. First up will be those charged with impersonating a police officer. And if they're successful, there will be a lot more victims.

Arizona Immigration Law Lawsuits

So President Barack Obama, and his crony at the Justice Department Eric Holder, have filed suit against Arizona over SB1070 — Arizona's immigration law. They might as well have titled their lawsuit the United States Government vs. the People of the United States since a majority support the Arizona law and another proportion thinks it doesn't go far enough.

I've already written of what I think about the law itself, and about the duplicity and dishonesty of most of the arguments against it. That includes the ones I heard this morning on Meet the Press.

The Obama Administration and the Holder Justice Department pretend they are just trying to avoid having a patchwork of immigration laws across the country. This is disingenuous in the extreme. As the Los Angeles Times reports, that patchwork exists now — largely because of the federal government's refusal to enforce the current laws, or to even encourage cities (& etc.) simply to avoid flouting the law.

The DOJ lawsuit also claims the Arizona law interferes with federal enforcement of the federal immigration laws it mirrors. But that's a logical impossibility — you can't interfere with something the federal government is not doing and has no intention of doing.

It seems the issue is really that Obama and Holder assert they know better than the Congress and the people. They think they can determine what laws to ignore and what laws (existing or nonexistent) to enforce.

So here's my suggestion to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer — Countersue! Sue for two things:

  1. Specific performance, a court order ordering the federal government to enforce the law. (Of course, the Administration will probably ignore that court order, just as it has ignored others.)
  2. Damages to repay the state and its people for the costs of the federal dereliction of duty, probably on the order of $2 trillion.

Just a suggestion.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Obama vs. Rule of Law

President Barack Obama really wants to be a dictator. He wishes he could be a tyrant whose every word stands in place of the law and is carried out by his cronies.

If there was ever any doubt about that, consider the Obama Administration's deep-water drilling moratorium. In striking it down, Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman noted that it was justified on the basis of false statements by the Secretary of the Interior that abused "reason and common sense." He also blasted the Administration for lying about the views of the experts brought in to evaluate the situation.

(He) said the government, without justification, arbitrarily made the sweeping conclusion that 'all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us in a universal threat of irreparable harm.' That arbitrary conclusion already was causing irreparable economic harm to the Gulf region, he said.
It was abritrary and capricious. And here's why: The Obama people didn't care about reality or about legitimate justifications — they only cared about getting what they wanted and doing whatever was necessary to accomplish that.

They didn't like Judge Feldman's decision, so they appealed it. So far, so good. But even before the Court of Appeals heard the case, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced he would issue a new, slightly different moratorium order. In other words, Barack Obama and his fellow travelers don't care about the courts or the rule of law. They just want their way.

And now they have carried out their threat and issued a new moratorium order that "amounts to the exact same ban", functionally idential to the ban the courts threw out as unjustified. And the deep-water drilling rigs have started leaving American waters, going places they won't have to fight "the Obama Administration’s nonstop bid to halt production" in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is incredible arrogance, as well as deliberate disregard for a foundational American governing principle. That shouhd have Secretary Salazar summoned into court immediately to attempt to explain to Judge Feldman why he chose to deliberately flout the judge's order (even though it was upheld on appeal) and why he shouldn't be jailed for contempt of court. And in my view Secretary Salazar should be in jail, and kept there until his (Obama's) unjustified moratorium is ended and the Interior Department ends its orders halting all new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico (which the Department is denying even though it has been implementing it even to the point of rescinding permits granted just the day before.

We truly are being ruled by a rogue regime.