Booker makes government invasion of the family and ghoulish delight in fetal murder a campaign pillar

Dems creating new government bureaucracies is nothing new, but the one Corey Booker has in mind is a doozy:

Senator Cory Booker (D., N.J.) announced on Wednesday that he will create a “White House Office of Reproductive Freedom” if he triumphs in the expansive Democratic primary field and is elected president in 2020.

According to a plan released by Booker’s campaign, the office would coordinate with officials from multiple agencies to ensure the fulfillment of his administration’s reproductive-health priorities, including, among other things, access to abortion, contraception, paid family leave, and pregnancy care.

“Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country are mounting a coordinated attack on abortion access and reproductive rights,” Booker said in a statement. “A coordinated attack requires a coordinated response. That’s why on day one of my presidency, I will immediately and decisively take executive action to respond to these relentless efforts to erode Americans’ rights to control their own bodies. I will also pursue a legislative response, including legislation to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.”

As part of this effort, Booker also vowed to reinstate funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which focuses on promoting global reproductive health. He also would reverse the Trump administration’s Mexico City policy, which prohibits clinics that receive federal funding under Title X from providing or promoting abortion overseas.

It checks off a lot of cultural-poison boxes, that's for sure: celebration of the killing of people who aren't born yet, perpetuation of the falsehood that contraception is hard to obtain, government telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs, and ceding US sovereignty to the hopelessly rotten United Nations.

Post-America is a weird place, but its voting population is not so far gone that it would put someone with this agenda in the Oval Office.

Education thoughts

I have to give lefties thanks when it's due for bringing things onto my radar that might not otherwise show up.

Today, several rants showed up on my Facebook newsfeed about Betsy DeVos and her views on budget and funding matters for her department. I'd been busy thinking about Kim Foxx and the implosion of the Southern Poverty Law Center and missed coverage of DeVos' appearance before a House committee.

Here's a fairly objective report about it:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday defended deep cuts to programs meant to help students and others, including eliminating $18 million to support Special Olympics, while urging Congress to spend millions more on charter schools.

"We are not doing our children any favors when we borrow from their future in order to invest in systems and policies that are not yielding better results," DeVos said in prepared testimony before a House subcommittee considering the Department of Education's budget request for the next fiscal year.
It was the first time that DeVos, a wealthy former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and school choice advocate, had been called before a Democratic-led panel in the U.S. House to explain President Donald Trump's spending priorities.

While proposing to add $60 million more to charter school funding and create a tax credit for individual and companies that donate to scholarships for private schools, DeVos' budget proposal would still cut more than $7 billion from the Education Department, about 10 percent of its current budget. President Trump proposed a $4.7 trillion overall budget this month with an annual deficit expected to run about $1 trillion.

It calls for eliminating billions in grants to improve student achievement by reducing class sizes and funding professional development for teachers as well as cutting funds dedicated to increasing the use of technology in schools and improving school conditions. In many cases, DeVos said the purpose of the grants has been found to be redundant or ineffective.

In the case of the $17.6 million cut to help fund the Special Olympics, a program designed to help children and adults with disabilities, DeVos suggested it is better supported by philanthropy and added, "We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget." 

A fair number of the FB rants focused on the Special Olympics cuts.  I did not see any of the ranters address her assertion that that enterprise is better supported by philanthropy. And that leads me to a very basic question: Why should the federal government be in the Special Olympics business at all?

Seriously. What the hell does it have to do with the core functions of government outlined in the Constitution?

Which in turn leads to the larger question I've asked for years: What justification is there for a federal Department of Education?

In my coverage of local government for some radio stations and a website, I am constantly amazed at the number of local things that happen - some in the education area, but also in stuff like bridge construction and community corrections staffing - as a result of federal grants.

I suppose there's a tilting-at-windmills element involved in asking why that money couldn't stay in our city and county in the first place and not be run through the DC filter where various layers of bureaucracy take their cut for - well, indeed, for what? I guess to come up with the acronyms for the programs by which they send it back to us. The whole scheme is so entrenched in our way of operating as a nation that no one seriously proposes looking at dismantling the whole apparatus, even though it would be the sensible way to proceed.

With the table thus set, may I recommend a piece by the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess at Forbes entitled "The Problem With Senator Harris' Proposal to Have Uncle Sam Boost Teacher Pay." He says that teachers, many of whom do indeed deserve more pay, ought to look at what really erodes their chances of getting it: good old administrative bloat:

. . . here’s the bizarre dynamic at the heart of the challenge: Teachers have a legitimate gripe about take-home pay, even though school spending has steadily gone up over time. Nationally, after-inflation teacher pay actually declined by two percent from 1992 to 2014, even as real per-pupil spending grew by 27%. This disparity is mostly a product of two realities. The first is that schools have added staff—particularly support staff—at a rate that far outpaces growth in student enrollment. Nationally, between 1992 and 2014, student enrollment grew by 20%, the number of teachers by 29%—and non-teaching staff by 47%. The second is that the cost of teacher pensions and health care have eroded paychecks. Nationally, between 2003 and 2014, even as teacher salaries declined, the per-teacher cost of benefits rocketed from $14,000 to $21,000. That’s $7,000 a year that would, other things equal, be showing up in teacher paychecks.

And federalizing teacher pay is only going to add more bureaucrats to the mix.

The first step in curing post-America's education problems is for someone somewhere to quit taking for granted that the federal gravy train ought to be ridden, since it's there. It would take guts, but everything about returning post-America to its previous identity as the United States of America is going to take guts.

And I daresay that hopping off the gravy train would go a long way to rectify the damage being done by the social-justice jackboots. They'll get weeded out as local taxpayers insist on some accountability. Teachers aren't going to be as likely to stand at the front of the classroom and prattle on about gender fluidity and the global climate being in some kind of trouble if no one is goading them with federal dollars.

And people who personally know Special Olympic athletes and care about them and cheer them on in competition would feel a greater sense of connection, since there would be no faraway filter between their dollars and the games and meets.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to any alternative. It also has a far greater human touch.

In a good think tank, the scholars won't march in lockstep

I'd been rather concerned- distressed, I guess, would not be inaccurately severe -  with the fact that the American Enterprise Insititute, long one of the very top tier of freedom-defending think tanks in the nation, was collaborating with the Brookings Institution to draft a report predicated on the notion that the need for paid family leave is a given. The report was issued this week.  AEI economic-policy specialist Aparna Mathur was the that organization's signatory.

Thus it was with relief and delight that I saw a piece today at AEI Ideas by AEI resident scholar Benjamin Zycher taking issue with the basic premise as well as some of the points Mathur thinks she is substantiating it with.

Check this out:

From a purely analytic standpoint, there is no difference between an expansion of paid leave and, say, a “free” limousine ride to and from work each day.  After all, the latter too would be very nice, but is unlikely to be worth the unavoidable cost in terms of other employment conditions and parameters that also are desirable.

And this:

 . . . what does it mean to say that the costs of such a policy might be “shared across society?”  Does that mean that everyone not benefitting from the policy would bear an equal share of the costs?  That is impossible given the myriad differences among individuals in terms of consumption patterns, employment conditions, ad infinitum.  If taxes are used to finance expanded leave, then it is obvious that the costs (“incidence”) of the taxes would vary dramatically depending on the particular tax applied, and demand and supply conditions in the attendant markets.  If “cutting spending in some [other] areas” is the financing source, then it is the beneficiaries of those programs who would bear the burden, and a vague allusion to the virtues of sharing the costs “across society” is little more than an obfuscation.

Whatever “socializing the costs” comes to mean, it is inevitable that the proponents of such a policy, unconcerned with the expansion of government power, will demand that businesses give something up in exchange for being relieved of the paid-leave burden itself assumed rather than demonstrated to be efficient by Mathur.  So much again, for the free-lunch atmospherics: Such increases in costs will reduce employment, and with it the expanded paid leave itself.

Which brings us to the final assertion: “In some areas, markets fail or may underprovide a benefit.”  Wow.  What does “underprovide” mean?  Clearly: Less than Mathur believes is appropriate.  Sadly, opinions inexorably will differ on what is appropriate, and there are only two basic approaches to answering that question.  The first: the outcomes emerging from competitive markets, in this case the amount of paid leave employers offer to employees and the amount that employees are willing to accept as part of total compensation, including working conditions defined broadly.  Mathur simply rejects that outcome as too little.  The second: Political determination of the appropriate amount of paid leave, in which majorities impose their will on everyone regardless of individual preferences.  Why stop at paid leave?  Why not have voters determine wages, vacation policies, dress codes, and everything else?  And are voters really qualified to do so?  Why not… such experts as Mathur?

Zycher mentions in conclusion that Mathur herself has conceded from the get-go that paid family leave "goes against the idea of limited government."

Exit question: Then why the hell even consider it?

 

Clueless Hillionaire takes the Freedom-Haters' planned-decline agenda before a decidedly unreceptive audience

File under: What was she thinking?

Hillary Clinton said that her policies would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” during Sunday night’s Ohio town hall on CNN.

Clinton was asked by TVOne’s Roland Martin about her Democratic primary success in states that tend to vote Republican in general elections, and he wondered how she could carry such states once matched up with a Republican rather than a far-left candidate like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).

Clinton has struggled against Sanders in states that voted for Barack Obama in 2012, losing such contests as Michigan, New Hampshire, Colorado, Minnesota and Maine.

“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country, because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right, Tim? and we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people,” Clinton said.

“Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

Clinton went on to say she had put forward specific plans on how to incentivize more jobs and invest more in poorer communities.

I don't think her feigned pity is going to resonate well.

And, if you fire up your translation app, you'll see that "invest more in poorer communities" translates from Freedom-Hater to Normal People as "the federal Leviathan sticking its nose into local matters."

Ted, get all over this, now.

Why the Department of Education must be dismantled yet tonight and why the odds of post-America being restored to its status as the USA are not good

So much for local control of the introduction of the nation's young tabula rasa to the contour of this wayward universe. And so much for sanity regarding human sexuality. And so much for human freedom.

Ground zero: Chicago:

Illinois' largest high school district violated federal law by barring a transgender student from using the girls' locker room, authorities concluded Monday.

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights spent nearly two years investigating Palatine-based Township High School District 211 and found "a preponderance of evidence" that school officials did not comply with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

The student, who has identified as a girl for a number of years, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in late 2013 after she was denied unrestricted access to the girls' locker room. District and federal officials negotiated for months, and a solution appeared imminent as recently as last week, when the district put up privacy curtains in the locker room.

But talks stalled after school officials said the student would be required to use the private area, as opposed to offering her a choice to use it. Although the student said she intends to use the private area or a locker room bathroom stall to change, the stipulation constitutes "blatant discrimination," said John Knight, director of the LGBT and AIDS Project at ACLU of Illinois, which is representing the student.

Ben Shapiro puts the implications in stark relief:

So here, in a nutshell, is the government’s new policy with regard to sex and sexuality among youngsters:

• If you’re a boy who shows a picture of your penis to a girl in your class, you have likely violated both federal child pornography laws as well as local sexual harassment laws. If this happens consistently in your school, the school has violated Title IX.
• If you’re a boy who says he’s a girl, the girl must be placed in position to see your penis and testicles. If the school does not allow this, the school has violated Title IX.
• If you’re an adult who sexually touches a child with the consent of the child, you have committed a crime, since children are incapable of consent.
• If you’re an adult who gives a child hormone therapy or surgery to prevent normal development of the genitals, with the consent of the child, you are a hero.

If this all makes sense to you, you should be working for the federal Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.

This is what happens when a society loses its moral moorings. In its quest to destroy God, the left unhitched its wagon from eternal truths and, instead, decided to substitute its own idea of utopia. To reach that utopia – freedom from social expectations and standards – objectivity itself had to be destroyed, so as to avoid blame. Objective truth lost all meaning; only subjectivity mattered. Science became the enemy, since it establishes provable truths; it had to be quashed and quelled. Language became the enemy, since definitions exclude people and things not covered by those definitions; it had to be perverted and hijacked.

And so we now live through the looking glass, waiting for the next philosophically incoherent ruling from our masters of time and space. Or mistresses. Or whatever.

The death rattle of a stiff-necked people/

How the nutrition jackboots co-opted the food companies

Worked with the health-insurance companies, so why wouldn't food makers conclude that letting Leviathan tell them what products to make and how to make them was where the gravy is?

The crap gets thrown out, but the companies get paid first, so, hey, who's complaining?

Some of the companies victimized by Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch guidelines have “quietly backed away” from their opposition to the regulations, reports Politico.  The reason? They’ve “done a bang up business since the requirements took effect by adapting their products for the $10 billion market.”

What kind of market are we talking about? It’s certainly not a free market, as schools are forced to serve products that conform to government “nutritional guidelines” and to purchase products from companies that are forced to make them. So yes, businesses do well when the government forces entities to purchase their products.

Some of the revamped recipes include “whole-grain rich Pillsbury breakfast cinnamon rolls, reduced-sodium Schwan’s Big Daddy’s pizza and reduced-fat Doritos.

There is an interest among some groups in looking into "high costs and increased plate waste."

Hey, why mess with a model with so many satisfied stakeholders? The companies make out nicely, Mrs. Food Desert consolidates her power, and her useful idiots get to congratulate themselves on their good intentions.

There is the kids themselves, but when did a totalitarian regime ever actually worry about the masses on whom its programs are inflicted?

 

The Most Equal Comrade outdoes himself

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about how Trump's political style and the resulting adulation he's receiving, coming as it does on the heels of a similar phenomenon over the past seven or eight years with the Most Equal Comrade as the focal point, raises the nasty possibility that post-America has entered an age of Caesarism.

Lately, given the scale on which Trump has been consuming oxygen, it's been understandable that the MEC's doubling down on his uniquely warped brand of tyranny has not had the exposure it should be getting.

Let us here contribute to that exposure by passing along the news that the MEC - the Lightworker-in-Chief, he who would quell the rise of the oceans - has unilaterally renamed Mount McKinley.  That's right. Henceforth, its official name is to be Denali, which means "the high one" in the  Athabascan language.

Obama's move to strip the mountain of its name honoring former President William McKinley, a son of Ohio, drew loud condemnations from Ohio lawmakers, including House Speaker John Boehner, who said he was "deeply disappointed" in the decision.

"This political stunt is insulting to all Ohioans, and I will be working with the House Committee on Natural Resources to determine what can be done to prevent this action," added Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio.

The announcement comes as he embarks on a trip to Alaska, where he will grandstand about melting permafrost and receding glaciers and preen about the supposedly moral decision to keep Alaskans from extracting oil from ANWR. (By the way, the lie that the global climate is in any kind of trouble grows more flimsy by the day.)

Tell the Inupiat people, particularly Benjamin Nageak, about how moral and wonderful that decision is.

The Inupiat people, who live in ANWR on the northern coastal plain, also oppose Mr. Obama’s proposal because they support energy development on their own lands. Arctic Slope Regional Corp., an Alaska Native regional corporation, owns subsurface rights to land within ANWR, and Kaktovik Inupiat Corp. owns the surface rights.

Alaska state Rep. Benjamin Nageak, a Barrow Democrat who was born in ANWR and is a member of the Inupiat tribe, objected to the president’s proposal when it was announced earlier this year.

“We have thousands and thousands of acres of land that our people in the state of Alaska, especially in ANWR, have title to, and [they] cannot even use that resource to enrich themselves,” Mr. Nageak said. “That is wrong. When you give the people the ability to enrich themselves, you don’t lock up their lands so they don’t do anything else but just sit on it, and nothing comes out of it except the renewable resources that we depend on.”

Leaders in the actual-energy-rather-than-play-like energy industry, as well as in Alaskan government see plainly that the Most Equal Comrade is in no-longer-have-to-give-a-s--- mode:

“There has been a very clear shift in the administration’s position,” said Louis Finkel, vice president of government relations at the American Petroleum Institute. “In the first four years, you heard a lot of rhetoric about an ‘all of the above’ energy policy. The administration’s lost sight of that. The administration clearly is looking at everything they do through a Paris lens.”
Alaska Gov. Bill Walker said he wants to talk to the president about the state’s “economic climate change,” a reference to the drop in global oil prices and the resulting hit to the state’s budget. The governor has been pushing the Obama administration to allow more oil and gas production in Alaska, and has accused Mr. Obama of “declaring war on Alaska’s future” by seeking to block oil and gas exploration in huge swaths of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

“We have an excellent pipeline in Alaska, except it is three-quarters empty,” Mr. Walker, a Republican-turned-independent, told reporters last week. “So I’ll talk to him about what we need to do to put more oil in the pipeline.” 

Anybody with a modicum of perceptivity could see this coming years ago.

Take heed, post-America. Learn how to smell a love of personal power and run like hell in the other direction when you smell it.

The Most Equal Comrade out-vulgars himself

For starters, there's the attempt to conflate executive-order amnesty for illegal aliens with the Selma march 50 years ago:

On Friday, President Barack Obama implied that not granting illegal immigrants the same rights as U.S. citizens violates the spirit of the “Bloody Sunday” march 50 years ago, when black Americans were beaten while demanding voting rights they were being denied as U.S. citizens.

Obama, who has enacted two executive amnesty programs for illegal immigrants since 2012, said that deporting DREAMers “is not true to the spirit” of the civil rights movement.

“The notion that some kid that was brought here when he was two or three years old might somehow be deported at the age of 20 or 25 even though they’ve grown up as American, that’s not who we are,” he reportedly said in an interview with Sirius XM’s Joe Madison, according to The Hill. “That’s not true to the spirit of what the march on Selma was about.”

Then, he makes a sweeping assumption that racial bigotry is endemic in post-America's municipal police departments:

President Obama said the type of racial discrimination found in Ferguson, Missouri, is not unique to that police department, and he cast law enforcement reform as a chief struggle for today's civil rights movement.

Obama said improving civil rights and civil liberties with police is one of the areas that 'requires collective action and mobilization' 50 years after pivotal civil rights marches brought change to the country. 

The president made his first remarks about this week's Justice Department report of racial bias in Ferguson, which found officers routinely discriminating against blacks by using excessive force.

The Justice Department refused to prosecute Ferguson cop Darren Wilson despite compiling a 350,000-page report on racial profiling in the Missouri city which 'led to' him fatally shooting unarmed black teen Michael Brown on August 9, 2014.

By the way, about that DoJ report (which, by the overlords' lights, had to come out simultaneously with the finding that Darren Wilson was innocent), Heather MacDonald has a piece at NRO about what a lot of hooey the notion of disparate impact is:

In Ferguson, blacks accounted for 86 percent of traffic stops in 2013 but make up 63 percent of the population, reports the New York Times. Such numbers are meaningless as a measure of police behavior, unless one considers the underlying rate of traffic offenses. If blacks are disproportionately represented among speeders, red-light runners, and drivers without updated vehicle registration, say, then their higher rate of being stopped simply means that the police are applying the traffic laws neutrally to lawbreakers. Do not expect the Justice Department to have performed such an analysis of driving behavior, however. And discovering the underlying rate of driving offenses is just the beginning of the analysis. The demographics of roadways can differ enormously from the residential population surrounding those roadways and even vary according to the time of day and the day of the week. Using a residential-population benchmark to evaluate traffic enforcement — which the Justice Department is certain to do — is illegitimate as either a research or a legal strategy.

The New York Times also notes that black drivers in Ferguson were twice as likely to be searched, even though searches of white drivers were more likely to turn up contraband. Again, such a statistic is meaningless unless one knows the underlying rate at which black and white drivers had outstanding warrants — which will trigger a search — and what their behavior was upon being stopped. The absence of a valid benchmark for evaluating traffic enforcement undercuts any intentional-discrimination claim against the police. But the use of disparate-impact analysis could make it irrelevant to know whether blacks violate the traffic laws at a higher rate; the neutral application of those laws would nevertheless be a form of discrimination if blacks are disproportionately penalized under those laws. If that is in fact the tack that the Justice Department takes in the case, the Department is nevertheless certain to imply that the Ferguson police department is also deliberately discriminating against black drivers, because that is what the Democrats’ base demands. 

Predictably, the New York Times also throws out the hoary chestnut that the Ferguson police department is mostly white in a majority-black town, ignoring, as usual, the inconvenient fact that majority-black law-enforcement bodies have been accused by no less than the federal government of severe civil-rights abuses against blacks. See, for example, the corrections officers and administrators in New York’s Rikers Island jail complex — the local U.S. attorney charges them with having a “culture of violence” against adolescent inmates — the Detroit police department, and the New Orleans police department. Expect the DOJ to make a similar complaint about the racial composition of the Ferguson department. 

The whole point is to involve the federal government in the affairs of towns and cities in post-America. As always, the issue is never the issue.  The issue is centralized control by the overlords.

Clarke smacks down Holder

Perhaps you've heard about Eric Holder's plan to have the D0J sue Ferguson, Missouri and stick its nose into that town's police department practices.

Perhaps you've been hoping to see a ringing refutation of the move.  Herewith Milwaukee County, Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke:

“Well, it’s more of the same from Eric Holder,” Clarke said. “Look this is an abuse of power. Eric Holder has gone 15 for 15 in terms of indicting police departments of some sort of wrongdoing. That doesn’t pass the smell test. There’s no objectivity in his investigations and oftentimes the conclusion is written before the investigation even starts. If I were the city of Ferguson I would fight this. Look, the Ferguson grand jury got it right. Officer Darren Wilson acted reasonably in defending his life against Mike Brown. It was a tragedy, we all know that. But Eric Holder early on before that investigation had started said we’ll get this right and the fact that the grand jury ruled not the way he thought they should have, he’s still going to try to extract his pound of flesh. But Brian, these investigations are costly and not only the investigation but when they put you under consent decree this is nothing more than an exercise in writing reports for law enforcement officers. That takes up time — valuable time that takes them away from the street for driving in high crime communities and servicing the people of the city of Ferguson, MO.”

Clarke explained that the end of the Holder era at the DOJ couldn’t come soon enough.

“It’s a typical politics of Eric Holder and the United States Department of Justice — at least under his tenure. You know, we can’t see this guy out the door soon enough. I know he’s leaving. I just hope that the next attorney general that comes in, whoever that might be, won’t be Eric Holder 2.0. It will be a little more open minded and more supportive of local law enforcement. Look, the city of Ferguson has problems, just like any other city in America. Milwaukee is no different. But these things should be solve and settled and discussed at the local level without federal interference.

Exactly.

And speaking of centralization and state control . . .

Andrew McCarthy explains that that is what drives Eric Holder's civil-rights investigations into local law-enforcement incidents:

The law of civil rights requires the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, usually driven by racial prejudice, willfully acted — violently in these cases — with the evil purpose to deprive a person of specific federal rights. Let’s put aside the utter absence of proof that race had any bearing on what happened in Staten Island, for example, where police supervised by an African-American officer came to the scene because of complaints about Garner by local business owners. It is virtually impossible to prove a civil-rights violation when there is no denying that police were engaged in a good-faith arrest and were put in the position of using force because a suspect resisted.

In Ferguson, Michael Brown did not merely resist arrest. Having just robbed a store, he was the aggressor in a confrontation with a police officer, who was made to fear for his life. And in Staten Island, there may be a real question about whether one police officer used excessive force under the circumstances; but there is no question that some quantum of force was appropriate in arresting a physically imposing suspect who insisted he would not be taken into custody and waved his arms to prevent the cops from cuffing him.

Federal civil-rights cases are much harder to make than state homicide cases. They are supposed to be. They were conceived as a rare federal intrusion on the sovereign police power a state exercises within its territory. When police are engaged in an arrest because a crime really has been committed, and they use force because the suspect really does resist, the claim that they were actually scheming to deprive the suspect of his civil rights is asinine. The time to worry about the deprivation of civil rights, as Messrs. Williamson, Cooke, and Goldbergpoint out, is when progressives enact overbearing laws that criminalize things like untaxed cigarette sales, not when police dutifully carry them out.

Eric Holder knows this as well as anyone. The bloviating he is doing today about Ferguson and Staten Island is of a piece with the bloviating he was doing two years ago about Sanford, Fla. As I observed of the Trayvon Martin killing at the time, the attorney general huffed and puffed about bringing a civil-rights case against “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, but he was never actually going to file one. It would have been even more embarrassing than the trumped-up murder case he and Sharpton browbeat Florida into charging — the one the jury threw out in nothing flat.

Holder and his constitutional-scholar boss are not banging the civil-rights drum because they believe these are prosecutable cases. It is just a pretext for unleashing Justice Department community organizers on state and municipal police departments.

Stamp out anything local, anything private.  Inject the narrative of an aggrieved minority whenever the opportunity arises.  Find targets to demonize.  Breed cynicism and create doubt that the motives of anyone other than the overlords are pure.

Fundamentally transform America.