One can find any number of rightwing bloggers spittle-flecking over this non-issue, and reporting it without knowing the facts. That's not news. Most of these blogs rant about issues that have no basis in fact, and when facts are produced, they delete them and call them B.S., because for rightwingers, the truth is B.S. LOL!
If you're getting your information from rightwing blogs or FOX News, you're not getting the facts.
Here's what ACTUALLY happened in the Black Panther "intimidation" case:
Bush DOJ decided New Black Panthers no major case
5:12 pm July 12, 2010, by ctucker
"Several of you have clamored for me to say something about the alleged voter intimidation case in Philadelphia, which involves a thuggish group who call themselves the “New Black Panthers.” (While I was no fan of the original Black Panthers, they don’t deserve to have their reputation further befouled by this group. The two groups are in no way related.)
I was loathe to comment since I know that no rational discussion will follow. How could it? It was clear from the beginning that this was not a case of voter intimidation against anyone who might vote for John McCain. As many observers noted on that day, no matter how badly those two New Black Panters were behaving (and the police were called and responded), it’s a HEAVILY DEMOCRATIC PRECINCT. As blogger Ben Smith noted way back then, “You don’t typically intimidate your own voters.”
But solid reporting from Media Matters and Adam Serwer of The American Prospect ought to put this nonsense to rest (it won’t, but it should). The charges against the New Black Panthers were downgraded by the Bush Department of Justice:
The decision not to file a criminal case occurred before Obama was even in office.
This means that the case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division."
Do we need to repeat this? Let me say this really, really slowly so that the hysterical bloggers on the right who spread slander and lies about Mr. Obama on this issue can understand:
"...the case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division."
Keep reading those idiotic rightwing blogs and keep yourself uninformed.
From Media Matters:
# Adams has admitted that he does not have first-hand knowledge of the events, conversations, and decisions that he is citing to advance his accusations;
# The Bush administration’s Justice Department — not the Obama administration — made the decision not to pursue criminal charges against members of the New Black Panther Party for alleged voter intimidation at a polling center in Philadelphia in 2008;
# The Obama administration successfully obtained default judgment against Samir Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party carrying a nightstick outside the Philadelphia polling center on Election Day 2008;
# The Bush administration DOJ chose not to pursue similar charges against members of the Minutemen, one of whom allegedly carried a weapon while harassing Hispanic voters in Arizona in 2006;
# No voters have come forward to claim that they were intimidated from voting on account of the New Black Panthers standing outside the polling center in 2008;
So, no matter how many times J. Christian Adams declares that the Obama administration refuses to protect the rights of white people — and no matter how many times Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh repeat it — it’s not true."
25 comments:
Even Malik Shabazz admitted that Holder was the one who dropped the case. Remember, the DOJ had a default victory there for the taking, and they even dropped that. In other words, you are lying.
Ooops.
I apologize for the mess.
The formatting was wrong and Blogger had some issues with postings so I thought those posts failed. Had to delete them.
In any case, here's the version with correct formatting:
The Bush administration downgraded the charges from criminal to civil charges, true, but this is not really the same as dropping or "refusing" to prosecute. This glop comes from Cynthia Tucker's scribblings over at the AJC. She implies that the Bush administration dropped this ball and that should therefore be the end of that. Even if correct regarding Bush, why will Holder not pick the ball up and pursue, eh?
Is it because of the implied perception that turnabout is some fair play in this game?
http://www.floppingaces.net/2010/06/27/politics...
Then she quoted Media Matters regarding allegations that Minutemen members toting firearms around to cause some kind of similar trouble or to allegedly harass Hispanic voters, but no verifiable claims have been in the works against anyone regarding such, gun-oriented or otherwise. In any case, the Media Matters' implication of the Bush Administration's advocacy of the Minutemen is absurd. Bush could not stand those guys, derided and sneered at them, and did everything he could to undermine the movement this movement's emphasis on better border security, and was himself actually close to the current administration on the illegal migration stance.
As one writer placed the issue:
"(I)f Bush felt like he could convict the Minutemen of voter intimidation, he would have had his DOJ prosecute them. OTOH, as Adams and others have pointed out, the New Black Panther Party figures were as good as convicted by their chosen lack of participation in their own case, and the Obama DOJ refused to accept victory."
So, Media Matters' take on this simply does not follow.
Not sure where Tucker was going overall, other than just finding a trump card to toss down to trash the Obama administration's numerous detractors and critics, but if you've lived in Atlanta and seen her columns, this is not really anything new. She's all over the map. No doubt she thinks this cross-comparison with the Minutemen crowd was clever. I take it as a given, however, that (unlike the Minutemen accusations) the whole "Kill the white babies" motif for the NBP is something to note, no?
Thanks for something next to nothing, bud.
I'm supposing this bunch of nothing about Holder's advice to drop the case after actually winning the civil part be default when the two crazies didn't show up in court, is so much of a nothing to worry about that this is the reason a former Justice Department official has resigned in protest after being told to leave the issue alone?
Also regarding the Bush administration's reduced charges, in a highly-charged political climate that quite literally occurred in the last days of his presidency, I doubt for a variety of reasons Bush wanted to go down this route.
But Obama's Justice Department should have every incentive to prosecute on behalf of fairness. Or, so you'd think in a time of real justice and "new transparency" in government, eh?
Guess not.
http://patterico.com/2010/07/03/new-black-panth...
Of course, Media Matters also claims that Adams is just making stuff up or relying on pure hearsay.
Guess they've not seen the widely-available videos.
Fox News host Megyn Kelly and GOP activist J. Christian Adams deceptively cited Justice Department official Thomas Perez's testimony to accuse the DOJ of racially motivated corruption in its handling of a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.
Who is J. Christian Adams?
Adams is a longtime conservative activist reportedly hired by Bush appointee who politicized the Justice Department. A December 2, 2009, article on the legal news website Main Justice reported that Adams "was hired in 2005 by then-Civil Rights Division political appointee Bradley Schlozman, according to a person familiar with the situation" and that "Schlozman was found in this joint investigation [PDF] of the Justice Department's Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to have violated civil service rules by improperly taking political and ideological affiliations into account when making career attorney hires." The article also reported that Adams volunteered with a Republican group that "trains lawyers to fight on the front lines of often racially tinged battles over voting rights."
The people on the Right have been calling for Obama to fail before he took office and have been acting like hyenas trying to drag off a chunk of bleeding meat ever since.
Everyday I hear or read some aggrieved rightwinger calling for Obama's impeachment, accusing him of destroying the country, accusing him of turning the country into a communist state, accusing him of being a reverse racist, accusing him of hating America, and just recently, an actual member of Congress, Michele Bachmann, opens her ridiculously stupid mouth and claims Mr. Obama is turning the American people into slaves.
The Right has lost whatever it had for a mind.
It has cried wolf over this president so many times that they have lost all credibility.
If Mr. Obama's administration's does something egregious, who would listen, since all we've heard since before he took the oath of office is that the right wants him to fail.
I believe this who New Black Panther issues is nothing more than one more cut in the thousand cuts the right continues to inflict to take this president down.
To Anonymous,
The Bush Administration dropped the case. You apparently can't read.
I saw that post over at malconents blog where he's popping vein mad--as ususal. All he does is harangue and rant, offers no ideas, facts, or evidence.
A perfectr example of a nitwit witha a blog.
Oh boy.
A link to Flopping Aces a post by Mike's America, One of the head Floppers. Among the very floppiest of the floppy.
Sorry Wakefield Tolbert but your 'sources' reveal a very great deal.
I urge you to go back into Mike's archives and read some of his 'personal contact' stuff with the Clintons. Mike's a real DC 'insider' and his 'insights' are invaluable.
Hilarious.
There is so much out there on the Black Panthers and the New Black Panthers it's hard to tell what's true and what isn't.
I did hear that this Shabazz character isn't allowed to vote until 2012. Not sure if that's true or not. If it is, then that means, under Holder, this case wasn't dropped and the guy was punished. Whether everyone will agree with the punishment is another story. We could argue all day about that--I'm sure!
To Shaw: Yes, I can read. And you are wrong. Tolbert described the truth to a "T". And that "punishment" meted out to Shabazz can't even be called punishment.
Media Matters has the darndest take on things.
Golly gee wilkers, gang.
Even if what was claimed from that highly-charge politicized atmosphere was true as now told by some of the above commenter (Bush "dropped" the charges completely) word might have been found, but is NOT actually found in the Cynthia Tucker story.
Yes, a web search will pull up results on that phrase, but so far as I can tell they merely parrot what Tucker said. While she's wrong in trying to do a verbal kung-fu on the issue, at least from Tucker we have enough honesty to point out that the Bush administration downgraded the issue. That's not the same thing as saying the civil case would not have gone through had Obama not come to power, or if Bush were not about to leave office, etc.
In point of fact, the case WAS picked up by Team Obama, and that's where things just sort of really petered out. It was his DOJ that dropped the issue finally after having at least the civil charges in hand. And two in the hand is better than one in the bush. No puns.
But that's not the way Holder's department sees things.
As stated in the New York Times:
"“In January 2009, less than two weeks before the Bush administration left office, the civil rights division invoked a rarely used section of the Voting Rights Act to file a civil lawsuit alleging voter intimidation by both men, the party chairman and the party.
In April 2009, the division seemed to win the case by default because the New Black Panthers failed to show up in court. But the following month, a longtime Justice official, Loretta King — who was then the acting head of the division — decided to reduce the scope of the case.
The department dropped the charges against the party, its chairman and the man who was not carrying a club. It pressed forward with the lawsuit against the man with the club, obtaining an injunction that forbids him from carrying a weapon near an open polling place in Philadelphia through 2012.”"
So, if the charges were completely "dropped" on the civil aspect (by Bush), how did it even get to Obama's Justice Department in the first place?
So, Holder just picked things back up--and then dropped them again??!! If Bush had just dropped things, then why bother picking up this scrap heap of nothing, only to toss it down again?!?!
Also, we still have a question that begs the need for an answer--is it true or not that these jackals from Philly's NBP party are not to be prosecuted at all?
There are two answers at this point:
"Yes"
or "NO."
The answer appears to be NO.
If that's the case, then Holder dropped the ball on the issue. Not Bush. Because Holder had it won were it not for the final drop of the case. He got handed this baton, if you prefer that anology--and lost it.
Holder had every power in the world to pick this ball up and return it to the goal line to demonstrate his magisterial fairness.
After the two fools failed to show up and defend themselves and a de fact default prosecution was in the works, he too dropped the ball.
The question at this point is not IF, but rather WHY?
That's more difficult to answer, but has it even occured to people that perhaps this administration feels turnabout is fair play on face issues? This is the administration of the guy who once race-baited the issue of "wealthy white executive" wishing to flee the inner city so as allegedly not to pay for the social services of miniorities, etc.
So who knows the pressue applied to leave things alone here?
The rest is just the facts of the matter here.
So, at the very least Holder is no better on this than Bush's alleged foibles in the case.
Unless perhaps Holder gets a free pass on this issue?
That's a rather odd legal precedent, no?
Nice try. Media Matters no doubt gives good ammo sometimes.
But on the fairness issue, not quite good enough.
And even if you don't like Mike's place for linkage, he's no worse for the info and context than MMFA, and certainly the Patterico blog has the goods you need to see--and the vital context on where Tucker and MMFA failed.
has it even occured to people that perhaps this administration feels turnabout is fair play on face issues?
RACE issues. Not "face" issues.
Yawn.
Yet another example of the right wing echo chamber's unwillingness to accept the results of the 2008 Presidential election. Stories like this one, the entire Bill Ayers fantasy and ACORN, to name but three, are emblematic of the contribution from the right side of the aisle to solving the very real problems the nation faces. Toss in death panels and Americans hoping to spend the rest of their lives on unemployment rather than moving to Nebraska where all the jobs are and we are left with the completely cynical politics of the GOP.
So yeah, there's your "death panel", though that's of course never what these "Medical Advisory Board" type outfits are called in the socialized med nations that DO ration care at the end stages of life as well as all along to hold costs down, and in doing so effectively nullify the whole argument about expanding medical availability in the first place.
See also:
http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/08/inconvenient-truth-about-death-panel.html
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=9040
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/12/22/death-panels-sarah-palin-was-right/
Now, it may be that in some contexts under private insurance, granny has to kick the bucket and the costs mount.
But the feds are now the arbiters of this. And that's NOT a good sign, and has not been in those nations that now tell people the inherent value of life.
Personally, I'd rather give it a go and be in hock than dead because somebody needs to pass my info through a bureaucracy in DC to make final decisions, whereas it should be between me and the Doc.
Socialized meds are an affront to notions of free choice, and a horrible price to pay on liberty for taking what is actually a limited problem of affordability (even the NYT, on page A-38, acknowledges that 77% of us are happy with current plans) and then making this gigantic bureaucratic edifice to filter all this, promising against all historical evidence that it will lead to cost savings, and better care. Bull.
No, Arthur, it's "emblematic" of the refusal in some areas to be consistent in justice.
It has nothing to do with your lurid fantasy take on things, or your perceptions of the "issues" at hand. Though while on that topic, you might do a double-take on the notion that now that we have 10% unemployment, the impending de fact legitimization of 11 million illegal aliens as the new voting block (immigrants, legal or otherwise, gravitate to the party of government and bureaucracy and handouts and other grab-bag goodies) along with the moral squalor introduced by sister organizations and sockpuppets of SDS outfits like ACORN, among many others. Then we truly have Lost in Space moments with the gutting of NASA other than the new-fangled Muslim outreach program to assuage feelings, the great Apology Tour, the utter incomprehension regarding how to handle the War on Terror and immigration issues, and not to mention this man-child has accomplished little in politics beyond writing books here and there and speaking in grand glittering generalities as a sales tactic, and accusing people of claiming this or that. Meanwhile, the real damage to the Republic goes unnoticed in a thousand points of massive government spending, bureaucracy, and the aggrandizement of government increasingly at private expense. (Government workers now make on average 76% more than their private counterparts for comparable work, and most of the economy is now safely in...well...government hands and regulation.)
Against this ludicrous backdrop comes the equally absurdist Wonderland claim that there will be no rationing of health care, and that expense will go down due to the wise historical governance of medical issues the bureaucracy is so famous for, eh?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703746604574461610985243066.html
Yeah--what a real yawner, eh?
http://wakepedia.blogspot.com/2010/05/from-told-ya-so-department.html
Guess that's nothing to fret over.
And yes, Kathleen Sebelius sat on a major report's findings from the OMA about how the CBO numbers on health care were going to be bunk, gamed the systems, and decided that adding a trillion smackeroos to the budget deficit makes it smaller. Target rich environment there, brother. But then, it's the FEELING about the "issues" that counts, eh--the visceral.
http://www.stoptheaclu.com/2008/10/23/obamas-1995-race-baiting-interview-white-executives-who-dont-want-to-pay-taxes-to-inner-city-children-for-them-to-go-to-school/
Full context of the Anointed Voice:
I think that whether you are a white executive living out in the suburbs, who doesn’t want to pay taxes to inner-city children for them to go to school, or you’re an inner-city child who doesn’t want to take responsibility for keeping your street safe and clean, both of those groups have to take some responsibility if we’re going to get beyond the kinds of divisions that we face right now.
See. Two can play this game. Must be some sort of primal grievance factor at work.
WT: And even if you don't like Mike's place for linkage, he's no worse for the info and context than MMFA,"
I stopped reading anything more you typed after that WT. I used to post at Mike's blog and all he and his commmenters did was call me "Commie Shaw."
Mentally, Mike is a pre-pubescent child, living in his past "glory" of having been an "aide" in Reagan's administration over 20 years ago.
I have no problem with what the DoJ did in this case. None.
What I wrote previously still stands, that the Right wants to nullify the election of 2008, as it did the elections of 1991 and 1995.
I don't recall any Bush DoJ inquiry into the charges of voter fraud in electronic voting machines in Ohio in the 2004 elections.
Also, I'm wondering, WT, were you as outraged at charges of injustice in the DoJ when this happened:
"...two years ago when Bush feared Democratic victories in congressional races, the President “spoke with Attorney General [Alberto] Gonzales in October 2006 about their concerns over voter fraud,” according to a Justice Department Inspector General’s reported released earlier this month.
In 2006, the White House and some congressional Republicans also put pressure on the Justice Department and U.S. Attorneys around the country to bring last-minute indictments against pro-Democratic voter registration drives.
When some federal prosecutors balked because they found a lack of evidence, they were purged as part of an unprecedented firing of nine U.S. Attorneys, who were deemed not “loyal Bushies.”
That “prosecutor-gate” scandal led to the resignations of several senior White House and Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Gonzales. President Bush then asserted broad executive privilege to block testimony by Karl Rove and other top White House officials."
Source
What is quoted above appears to be a tad more serious to our democracy than a couple of guys with clubs standing in a heavily Democratic precinct.
Those guys, IMHO, were overplaying their roles, but what they did hardly comes close to the crimes committed in the above quoted article.
Yawn.
Sorry Wakefield but I'm certainly not so credulous as to accept your reactionary talking points and I don't think many others around here are either.
But keep typing!
Mike might put you on as a 'special correspondent'. If you know anything about dahlias that wouldn't hurt either.
You're a better speller. But I think you need to throw in a bit of the 'birther' material. Your crowd laps that stuff up. Never forget that the 'Real American' stuff can never, ever be overdone.
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