“Of course he wants to vote the Democratic ticket!” (Harpers, 1876)

Party labels are essential in elections in order to assure black democrats win. If black democrats don’t win, and black Republicans should accidentally be elected, black voters are being deprived of their electoral will, according to Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

Welcome to the post-racial America we were assured would come into being upon the election of America’s first black president.

Washington Times:

Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

Several federal and local politicians would like the city to challenge the decision in court. They say voter apathy is the largest barrier to black voters’ election of candidates they prefer and that the Justice Department has gone too far in trying to influence election results here.

Stephen LaRoque, a former Republican state lawmaker who led the drive to end partisan local elections, called the Justice Department’s decision “racial as well as partisan.”

“On top of that, you have an unelected bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., overturning a valid election,” he said. “That is un-American.”

The decision, made by the same Justice official who ordered the dismissal of a voting rights case against members of the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, has irritated other locals as well. They bristle at federal interference in this city of nearly 23,000 people, two-thirds of whom are black.

Andrew looks smug in his Atlantic logo illustration. It’s nice having friends in high places.

Remember George W. Bush?

We used to have a president so rigidly righteous that he actually refused to pardon Lewis Libby for defending his own administration and thus becoming the target of a special prosecutor and winding up convicted of perjury (in a case where no crime was really ever proven to have occurred) by a DC jury.

Now we have Barack Obama, who is not like that at all.

Intimidate voters, brandishing billy clubs in Philadelphia? You don’t get prosecuted if you were an Obama supporter. Eric Holder’s Justice Department will overrule career prosecutors for you.

Are you a governor or state official taking campaign contributions in exchange for contracts? If you’re a democrat, you are OK. Eric Holder’s Justice Department will drop the investigation.

Suppose you are a homosexual leftwing blogger, who also happens to be a non-US-citizen, in danger of getting into trouble with immigration if you are convicted of a misdemeanor for smoking marijuana on a Cape Cod Beach? You have a Get Out of Jail Free card, if you are, as Andrew Sullivan is, a faithful defender of Barack Obama and his policies. The US Attorney’s Office will go right on prosecuting non-Obama-supporting-bloggers coming before the court for the identical complaint, but will shock the court by giving you a special pass.

Andrew himself is declining to comment on the advice of counsel.

Boston Globe

Some News Agency

John Hinderaker has a comment.

John H. Durham

Barack Obama may be happily vacationing on Martha’s Vinyard, but his administration swerved suddenly left and hit the accelerator hard yesterday, when Attorney-General Eric Holder announced that he was bringing in a big gun, and turning him loose on the CIA officers and contractors who questioned captured Al Qaeda terrorists and prevented the repetition of successful mass terrorist attacks in the aftermath of 9/11.

Holder is feeding red meat to the irredentist leftwing base of the democrat party, at the expense of US Intelligence. Whom do you suppose they’re going to be able to get to take the risk of performing any Intelligence-related job that could be argued to be a crime by the most hydrophobic US-hating Marxist in Berkeley after this?

Intelligence operations do very commonly feature activities which are illegal somewhere or are which potentially illegal by some standards or from some perspective. That is kind of why Intelligence operations tend to be covert.

We already have physicians in this country forced to practice defensive medicine in order to avoid the personal risk of falling into the clutches of the US Tort Bar. Now, we are going to have an Intelligence service whose officers will need to practice defensive operations, for as the Bible says (Matthew 10:36): “a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.”

(Attorney General Eric H.) Holder (Jr.) has named longtime prosecutor John H. Durham, who has parachuted into crisis situations for both political parties over three decades, to open an early review of nearly a dozen cases of alleged detainee mistreatment at the hands of CIA interrogators and contractors.

The announcement raised fresh tensions in an intelligence community fearful that it will bear the brunt of the punishment for Bush-era national security policy, and it immediately provoked criticism from congressional Republicans. …

In a statement Monday afternoon, Holder cautioned that the inquiry is far from a full-blown criminal investigation. Rather, he said, it is unknown whether indictments or prosecutions of CIA contractors and employees will follow. …

“I fully realize that my decision to commence this preliminary review will be controversial,” Holder added. “As attorney general, my duty is to examine the facts and to follow the law. In this case, given all of the information currently available, it is clear to me that this review is the only responsible course of action for me to take.”

Obama’s new Attorney General Eric Holder has always supported “reasonable regulation” of firearms. Guess what? As Deputy Attorney General, he also favored “reasonable restrictions… reasonable regulations on how people interact on the Internet.”

0:39 video

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Jake Tapper tells us he helped Janet Reno cry over sending jack-booted stormtroopers to take Elian Gonzales from his family and ship him home to Uncle Fidel.

In April 2000, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder appeared on “Good Morning America” where he discussed the controversial raid on the home of Elian Gonzalez’s Miami relatives to seize the child and return him to Cuba.

And he told Diane Sawyer about an unusual behind-the-scenes moment he shared with Attorney General Janet Reno.

“At the conclusion of this, I closed the door, at the time of the raid, and I held the attorney general in my arms, and she wept,” Holder said. “She did not want this to happen. She cares a great deal about that community, and hoped and prayed that there was a way in which this thing could have been worked out, short of the enforcement action that she very reluctantly had to order.”