Kevin Williamson notes how, from Texas to Wisconsin to the US Senate, democrats today are proving eager to manipulate the law to target political opponents.

Texas, as I argued in the March 23 edition of National Review, has a corruption problem—from its police to its universities. One of Texas’s acute corruption problems is the fact that the Travis County district attorney’s office, which prosecutes corruption cases, is absurdly, comically corrupt—by which I do not mean the “Hey can you get my dopey kid into UT law?” level of corruption that is commonplace in Texas, but Boss Hogg levels of corruption. You wouldn’t know it from the typically witless and servile reporting of the Austin American-Statesman, but the drunk-driving conviction of Travis County district attorney Rosemary Lehmberg is the least of that office’s problems—much more significant is the fact that is she recorded on camera threatening legal retaliation against the police who booked her. She is as explicit as can be about this: “You’re going to be in jail,” she said.

The same prosecutor is trying to put former governor Rick Perry in jail for having vetoed funding for her office. Why did he veto the funding? Because the corruption prosecutor is grossly corrupt and a convicted criminal to boot. She went to jail, for pity’s sake.

The Texas state house understandably has passed a bill that will curtail the Travis County district attorney’s special role in prosecuting ethics and corruption cases against elected and appointed officials. Instead, those cases will be investigated by the Texas Rangers. (Old punishment: jail. New punishment: Ranger roundhouse kick! Okay, not really, but that would be kind of awesome.) Naturally, Texas Democrats have sought to block that reform. And a handful of Republicans have, to their discredit, joined them, which is inexplicable.

Why do Democrats want to keep things in Austin? Because Democrats control Travis County, which is home to the state capitol and the University of Texas, and Democrats generally dominate jurisdictions where there are lots of government employees. (Shocking, right? It’s almost as if people do not cease to be self-interested profit-seekers when they go into government.) And they have long enjoyed using Travis County prosecutors as political weapons: Lehmberg’s office under Ronnie Earle was responsible for the risible and corrupt prosecution of Tom DeLay, which ultimately was laughed out of court, but not before ruining his political career and upending his life—which, of course, was the point. The issue is not successful prosecution; it’s successful persecution. If you want to really appreciate what Democrats with guns and badges at their disposal will do in furthering their political interests, you will not find a more terrifying story than David French’s recent account of the Gestapo tactics used by Democratic prosecutors in Wisconsin against Scott Walker and conservative activists. It is nearly impossible to believe that this sort of thing is going on in the United States of America in 2015, but it is. We aren’t talking about petty politics here—we’re talking about using battering rams to knock down people’s doors and sticking guns in their faces because they supported a ballot initiative displeasing to Democratic authorities.

Harry Reid—and every Democrat in the Senate—voted to repeal the First Amendment to render the Supreme Court powerless to protect Americans from this sort of abuse. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to put Americans in prison for disagreeing with him about global warming—and many so-called progressives agree with him. Under the Obama administration, we have seen a weaponized IRS targeting conservative groups for persecution and a weaponized FBI leaning on conservative activists, followed up by a weaponized ATF.

And Democrats, individually and collectively, have supported and enabled every one of these gross abuses of power.

Except, it did. David French, at National Review, describes the Wisconsin reign of terror which occurred when democrat Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm used John Doe warrants to send police raiding the homes, and confiscating the personal computers and cell phones, of conservative supporters of Governor Scott Walker.

They came with a battering ram.” Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking. She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram. She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door. “I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.

“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.” She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.

“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.” They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off. The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.” Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Obama did not need white coal miners’ votes to win in 2012.

Paul Waldman argues that democrats can win presidential elections via the gentry/welfare minorities/hipsters alliance. They may not get most white working class votes, but they only need to pick up a small percentage of those and they win.

Few questions in American political debate recur with the regularity of this one: Can Democrats win the white working class?

As soon as it’s time to start contemplating the next election, commentators begin to ask this question, demanding of Democrats that they explain why this time will be different and they’ll be able to win over those white voters. I’m going to argue that Democrats don’t have to win the white working class, so they shouldn’t worry themselves too much about it. …

here’s the good news for Clinton: It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t need to win the white vote, working-class or otherwise, in order to become president. The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of the white vote was 1964. Yet they’ve managed to win five elections since then.

We spend so much time contemplating what different demographic groups find appealing and repellent that it’s almost as though we forget that a vote is a vote. For instance, Democrats are often scolded for their unpopularity among voters in rural areas and small towns, because of a mythos that says those are the most virtuous and true Americans and therefore their votes are somehow more desirable than those of people who live in suburbs and cities. But they aren’t. The vote of a tattooed 20-something hipster in Des Moines is no less helpful than that of the 60-something farmer who lives a hundred miles north.

Demographics, of course, are obviously important. For instance, Republicans’ struggles with Hispanic voters are meaningful because they’ve managed to alienate all of those voters at once, and that has ended up costing them millions of votes. But is there something Hillary Clinton (or some other Democrat) could do that would cause huge numbers of working-class white voters to vote differently than they had before? Probably not. The plain truth is that she’s likely to get more of their votes than Barack Obama did just because she’s white (though not so many more that it will make her unbeatable). But there isn’t some magical key to unlocking the votes of that entire demographic category that can be found and deployed.

What Democrats need to do is offer an agenda, particularly on the economy, that appeals to a broad spectrum of Americans. That’s both simple and complicated. But if and when they put that agenda together, lots of white working class voters still won’t respond, because they’re Republicans. And that’s okay. Democrats don’t need them all. What they need is about the same proportion of those votes that they got in the last couple of presidential elections. More would be nice, but the same amount would work fine. Because you may remember who won those elections.

Read the whole thing.

James Mitchell, the CIA interrogator who interviewed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who also beheaded Daniel Pearl, told Fox News that KSM predicted what the liberals would do and warned him.

“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told me personally, ‘Your country will turn on you, the liberal media will turn on you, the people will grow tired of this, they will turn on you, and when they do, you are going to be abandoned.’ ”

Poor Diane Feinstein! Poor Andrew Sullivan!

Left-wing bleeding heart democrats were looking to produce a big stink with the partisan Senate “Torture” report released last week. CIA officers were supposed to be found scrambling for pardons, and Dick Cheney was supposed to be consigned permanently to the dog house.

Instead, the CIA essentially shrugged and Dick Cheney went on television and called the report “crap.”

Today, the Washington Post looks at the latest polling from Pew on national attitudes toward enhanced interrogation and reports that waterboarding & Dick Cheney are a lot more popular than Barack Obama.

Muslim jihadis attacked a school in Peshawar today killing over a hundred people, mostly teachers and children. Normal Americans generally tend to think that waterboarding is actually too good for these kinds of people.

Spence (Sean Bean): – lnterrogation.

Sam: -Let’s see… That’s two part gin, two part brandy, one part crème de menthe…

–“Ronin” (1998).

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What Sam mockingly tells the pretender Spence in “Ronin” (1998) is a truth generally recognized by all adults in the military & the intelligence community: Nobody can resist all forms of coercive interrogation indefinitely.

There is, however, serious dissent on this obvious truth from the left-wing democrat party establishment, and particularly from prominent portions of the Gay commentariat.

Democrats, having just lost control of the Senate, are leaving power in the manner of dead skunk, leaving a terrible odor behind them, with today’s cynical publication of a totally partisan official intelligence report, concluding that enhanced interrogation (not even the trained attack caterpillar!) never worked, the CIA allegedly misinformed the rest of the government about the results of enhanced interrogation, the CIA roughed up some of the prisoners in manners and forms displeasing to the sensibilities of Senate democrats, confinement conditions were bleak, and the CIA was generally naughty, misleading, evasive, and destructive both to good government and the standing of the US in the world(!).

It is a total hatchet job, and it will be interesting to watch over time what the CIA does to democrats, particularly to Nancy Pelosi, in response.

Jose A. Rodriquez Jr. ran the CIA Interrogation Program, and he responded, back in April, to what was obviously coming.

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify and release hundreds of pages of its report on U.S. terrorist interrogation practices. Certain senators have proclaimed how devastating the findings are, saying the CIA’s program was unproductive, badly managed and misleadingly sold. Unlike the committee’s staff, I don’t have to examine the program through a rearview mirror. I was responsible for administering it, and I know that it produced critical intelligence that helped decimate al-Qaeda and save American lives.

The committee’s staff members started with a conclusion in 2009 and have chased supportive evidence ever since. They never spoke to me or other top CIA leaders involved in the program, or let us see the report.

In other words, that report is just a partisan crock.

Politico: Dems’ final insult: Landrieu crushed: Cassidy trounces incumbent with Republicans set to control 54 Senate seats in the next Congress.

Walter Russell Mead has intelligent things to say about immigration and American history and predicts that Barack Obama’s shameless ploy to capture Hispanics as a permanent democrat constituency is based on flawed and grossly oversimplified thinking. All this, he contends, is going to backfire on democrats and Barack Obama is carving out a place for himself in presidential history below Jimmy Carter’s.

President Obama’s new initiative is unlikely to succeed politically—in part because Democrats are overconfident that rising Hispanic immigration will deliver them a permanent, left-leaning majority.

Frank Fukuyama, no howling partisan, has tagged President Obama’s decision to circumvent Congress on immigration as a “bad call,” and while the President’s limited offer of a three-year temporary work authorization for people in the country illegally was not the worst or the most radical step he could have taken, Frank is right. This was the wrong step at the wrong time. At the very minimum, the President should have given the new Congress ninety days to act before going it alone. Failing to do so isn’t just a slap in the face of his Republican opponents; it is a slap in the face of the voters who no longer trust the President and his party on the big issues of national life.

If the new Congress proved unable or unwilling to act, the President’s step would have had at least an element of political legitimacy to it. As it is, this half-hearted, hobbled amnesty will likely join President Obama’s flawed health care law as a toxic legacy that will haunt the Democratic Party for years to come. Just as the President’s poor reputation was a millstone around the neck of many Democratic candidates in 2014, future Democratic candidates are going to run away from Obama’s memory, and their opponents will work to tag them with the heavy burden of a presidency that most Americans will want to forget. As a political brand, the name “Barack Obama” now risks drifting into Jimmy Carter territory and becoming a label that blights the prospects of the Democratic party and its candidates for years.

Moreover, as with the health care law, the President’s immigration policy doesn’t solve the underlying problems it addresses and makes the task of real reform more difficult.

Dan Greenfield points to the divisions in the democrat party which are likely to ensure that Republicans can continue to win.

There are really two Democratic parties.

One is the old corrupt party of thieves and crooks. Its politicians, black and white, are the products of political machines. They believe in absolutely nothing. They can go from being Dixiecrats to crying racism, from running on family values to pushing gay marriage and the War on Women.

They will say absolutely anything to get elected.

Cunning, but not bright, they are able campaigners. Reformers underestimate them at their own peril because they are determined to win at all costs.

The other Democratic Party is progressive. Its members are radical leftists working within the system. They are natural technocrats and their agendas are full of big projects. They function as community organizers, radicalizing and transforming neighborhoods, cities, states and even the country.

They want to win, but it’s a subset of their bigger agenda. Their goal is to transform the country. If they can do that by winning elections, they’ll win them. But if they can’t, they’ll still follow their agenda.

Sometimes the two Democratic parties blend together really well. Bill Clinton combined the good ol’ boy corruption and radical leftist politics of both parties into one package. The secret to his success was that he understood that most Democrats, voters or politicians, didn’t care about his politics, they wanted more practical things. He made sure that his leftist radicalism played second fiddle to their corruption.

Bill Clinton convinced old Dems that he was their man first. Obama stopped pretending to be anything but a hard core progressive. …

The left isn’t interested in being a political flirtation. It nukes any attempt at centrism to send the message that its allies will not be allowed any other alternative except to live or die by its agenda. …

[In the 2014 election,] Republicans benefited from a Democratic civil war. They were running a traditional campaign against a more traditional part of the Democratic Party. They didn’t really beat the left. They beat the old Dems.

The old Dems were crippled by the progressive agenda. They were pretending to be moderates while ObamaCare, illegal alien amnesty and gay marriage were looking over their shoulders. They married Obama and it was too late for them to get a divorce. And it doesn’t look any better down the road. …

The old Dems have no ideas and no agenda. The progressives want to get as much of their agenda done even if it’s by executive order and even if it makes them even more unpopular than they are now. The old Dems have realized that they are the ones who will pay a political price for progressive radicalism.

And waiting in the wings is the 2016 election.

Read the whole thing.

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Barack Obama was a unique event. Along came a smooth-taking leftist radical with pop star quality, able on the basis of his mixed racial heritage to push our national race-obsessed buttons.

Prior to the arrival of Obama, the GOP seemed to have a perennial winning hand, based simply on the fact that the democrat party nationally would always find itself under the thumb of its radical left-wing base and was doomed therefore to nominate national candidates too left-wing ever to win in a center-right country.

Barack Obama broke the democrat’s logjam by adding intense pop cultural appeal to the political mix. Barack Obama was not just another left-wing democrat. He was the flavor-of-the-month, an instant pop culture star, embodying all sorts of powerful impulses deeply rooted in the national subconscious. Electing Barack Obama would not just be voting for another politician. Electing him would be voting down the nation’s guilt for slavery and segregation. Electing him would be voting for a dazzling new post-racial future in which America’s promise would be finally realized and all men would live as brothers. Normally, only a certain typically older, politically-engaged portion of the population votes. For Obama, all of Hollywood, all the readers of supermarket tabloids, all the student idealists, all the 15-year-old girls of every age turned out to vote.

But they have just one Obama and he is now a lame duck president. After Obama, we’re going right back to the old dynamic in which the democrat base forces that party to nominate ordinary mortal non-celebrities who are too far left politically to win nationally. The portion of the Obama electoral base which made the difference and won him his elections will not be interested in participating in ordinary elections.

Jim Geraghty responds to actual WaPo column headline.

The real problem for Democrats is that “smug” isn’t really their strategy; it’s how they emotionally react to their conclusion that their viewpoint is better, more moral, smarter, wiser, fairer, more sensitive, more compassionate, and so on than the opposition. It’s not a campaign issue; it’s a character issue.

Karin McQuillan, at American Thinker, thinks Ebola can be lethal politically as well as epidemiologically.

The Democrat/Progressive Party may be signing their own death certificate in the 2014 elections with their mishandling of Ebola. One and half million people are quarantined in Sierra Leone. The first case has hit America. And all Obama has done is make a speech saying everything is fine here, but he’s sending American troops into harm’s way there. A ghastly virus that kills 50-100% of its victims and has no known treatment is something people notice. It is something women notice. Ebola is creating an epidemic of fear, for good reason. The Democrat ruling elite’s complacency, incompetence and leftist pieties are losing them the public trust.

Have you seen the photos from the TV Dallas/Fort Worth chopper of workers cleaning the Ebola victim’s vomit from the sidewalk in front of his apartment building? The CDC has it under control — they ordered the vomit to be power washed. The area is not cordoned off, the workers have no protective clothing, and passers-by are tracking through the water in sandals. The blogger who posted them comments: “from the casualness of the guys doing the power-washing, it is unlikely that (1) they put any disinfectants in the power-washer or (2) they were even told what they were cleaning.”

The decontamination of the sick man’s apartment, including dirty sheets and towels, has not begun, even though his girlfriend, her son and two grown nephews are confined there. This is a nightmare for them. The CDC only learned from a CNN report that the sick man’s sweat-soaked sheets were still on the bed. They had done nothing to help the quarantined people.

Trust the government to keep us safe? Tell that to Duncan’s neighbors, the EMT workers now in quarantine, and the five men from the Sheriff’s department, all allowed to enter the apartment without protective garb. They went there to serve the official quarantine papers – also done a day late.

Read the whole thing.