Yes, unlike the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ that Hillary Clinton invented, such a thing really does exist.

As we have been on the topic of Greenpeace, we’ll start with them. They’re a prominent player in the plot. At its website, under ‘Training’, it has this:

Do we have a reading list?

To encourage students to become more analytical and strategic campaigners, students will read books and articles on topics including campaign strategy, strategic messaging, the theory of organizing, and issue-specific reports and documents. Students are expected to complete daily reading assignments and fully participate in regular book club discussions. Past readings have included:

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky, 1971.

So Saul Alinsky – Hillary Clinton’s Marxist mentor and an inspiration to Barack Obama – is an acknowledged Greenpeace teacher. Here is his prescription for change:

An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.

And:

You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.

What the international Left has, and is doing what it can with, is the ‘scientific’ claim that industrial activity is causing the planet to overheat.

It ‘s a Chicken Little kind of panic, yet multitudes have been persuaded to believe it. Huge commercial enterprises have been launched by it. Governmental programs have been established to deal with it.

How do we know that the Chicken Little sponsors are using this issue  – some credulously , some cynically – to achieve their collectivist ends?

It is no secret. The Club of Rome (for instance), a leftist conspiracy if ever there was one, openly aimed for world socialist government, and admitted in a 1974 publication titled Mankind at the Turning Point, that they intended to use global warming as a grand pretext to achieve their aim.

The tactic is this. A problem has to be chosen that can be presented as so urgent that it obviously must take priority over other considerations. It has to be something so big, so overwhelmingly dangerous, that ‘the masses’ will be prepared to make huge sacrificies to save themselves. It has to be an Uberthreat (to venture a bilingual coinage). Nothing less than the survival of the planet as a life-sustaining environment will do. Rather than see all life on earth being snuffed out, they – the masses –  will accept poorer lives, more constricted lives, even totally unfree lives, anything rather than extinction. They must be made to feel confused, uncertain, at a loss. Then they will voluntarily turn to those who offer solutions. They will accept being told what to do, and they will do it.

And there is more. If enough people can be made to believe that the calamity looming up has been caused by themselves, they will be desperate not only for a cure but for absolution and redemption from guilt. The panic-rousers rub in the guilt by calling the crisis ‘Manmade Global Warming’. Panic and guilt and a mood for groveling obedience among the masses world-wide! What a gift to the would-be Controllers, the World Community Organizers! They, the panic-rousers, are ready with their solution, their golden panacea: centralized control of all human activity – World Government.

They came damn near to achieving it too at Copenhagen in December 2009.

Thanks to one of the great heroes of history, one who can truly to be said to have saved mankind, but whose name is not yet known, who simply published the email evidence of the conspiracy and the fraud, the plot failed.

(Now we await diagnoses of paranoia from those innocent humanitarians of the Left.)

An angry commenter on our post below, The evil that Greenpeace does, raises two points in criticism of our and Paul Driessen’s accusations.

First, he declares that Greenpeace gets no government money. We are trying to find out if this is true. In the article we quote, Paul Driessen states that Greenpeace and other eco-activist organizations receive grants through Obama’s Climate Czar, Carol Browner. We have asked him for his source, and we will post what we learn if we get an answer.

Next the commenter defends Greenpeace’s attempts to embargo genetically modified grains by pointing to a recent study showing that certain modified seeds produced by Monsanto cause organ failure. There is such a study, and there is controversy over its conclusions.

Whatever the truth of these contentions turns out to be cannot modify our opinion that Greenpeace  is responsible for much suffering and death in the Third World, for instance by its all too successful opposition to the use of DDT which could protect millions from the killing disease of malaria.

From an article in Discover, January 13, 2010:

Few things bring out the hyperbole like genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and that was true again with a study making the rounds yesterday and today.

In the International Journal of Biological Studies, a team examined three genetically modified corn varieties created by Monsanto. The study’s authors say they see evidence of possible toxicity to the kidney and liver, “possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn.” However, the findings became over-hyped headlines like the Huffington Post’s “Monsanto GMO Corn Linked to Organ Failure, Study Reveals.”

That’s a pretty big leap from the not entirely convincing finding of a potentially questionable study. What actually happened is that the research team, led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, re-analyzed data from tests that Monsanto scientists themselves conducted on rats eating these three varieties of corn—data that, to be fair, the team had to scratch and claw and sue to get their hands on. In their statistical analysis, Séralini’s team says that Monsanto interpreted its own data incorrectly, and that its new analysis shows potential for toxicity.

But the scientists themselves give significant caveats that make such bold headlines a bit of a reach: “Clearly, the statistically significant effects observed here for all three GM maize varieties investigated are signs of toxicity rather than proofs of toxicity”—that is, the evidence isn’t rock solid, and not enough to warrant a bunch of alarmist headlines. The researchers argue that more research is necessary to settle the question either way: “In conclusion, our data presented here strongly recommend that additional long-term (up to 2 years) animal feeding studies be performed in at least three species, preferably also multi-generational, to provide true scientifically valid data on the acute and chronic toxic effects of GM crops, feed and foods.”

In addition, there are a couple issues that make the study itself seem a little fishy:

1. Funding. “Greenpeace contributed to the start of the investigations by funding first statistical analyses in 2006, the results were then processed further and evaluated independently by the authors,” the scientists write. Certainly one can’t oppose a huge corporation like Monsanto without funding, but drawing those funds from a political lightning rod like Greenpeace can paint conclusions in a bad light …

2. The journal: The International Journal of Biological Sciences is somewhat obscure, with an “unofficial”–that is, self-assigned–impact factor of 3.24. “In other words, it has not been assessed for impact or quality,” Ronald says. Again, that doesn’t mean Séralini’s team is wrong, but it suggests that jumping to conclusions would be unwise.

The actual data analysis of the paper has started an in-depth back-and-forth on the the statistical analysis. We’ll continue following this story to see how the analysis shakes out.

In our post Pacifists for jihad (January 13, 2010), we considered what might motivate the Code Pink women, suggesting ignorance, stupidity, and malice. On further thought, we would put hate at the top of the list.

Recently some Code Pink members tried to enter Gaza through Egypt. An Israeli woman journalist, Amira Hass, wrote a sympathetic account of the adventure which did not go quite according to plan.

(A note of passing interest: Hass is the German word for hate.)

Here’s Caroline Glick:

Last month, 1,300 pro-Palestinian activists from the US and Europe came to the region in the name of peace and social justice to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. Led by the self-declared feminist, antiwar group Code Pink, the demonstrators’ plan was to enter Gaza from the Egyptian border at Rafah and deliver “humanitarian aid” to the Hamas terrorist organization.

But it was not to be. Led by Code Pink founder and California Democratic fund-raiser Jodie Evans, the demonstrators were not welcomed by Egyptian authorities. Many were surrounded by riot police and barbed wire as they demonstrated outside the US and French embassies and the UN Development Program’s headquarters. Others were barred from leaving their hotels.

Those who managed to escape their hotels and the bullpens outside the embassies were barred from staging night protests in solidarity with Hamas on the Nile. In the end, as the militant Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Amira Hass chronicled in Haaretz last week, all but 100 of them were barred from travelling to Gaza. …

[Bernadine] Dohrn, the woman who has called for a “revolutionary war” to destroy the US, felt that the Egyptian authorities’ behavior was nothing but an unfortunate diversion from their mission…

Unfortunately for the lucky 100 who were permitted to enter Hamastan, the diversions didn’t end at the Egyptians border. Hamas immediately placed them under siege. The Palestinian champions had planned to enjoy home hospitality from friends in Gaza. But once there they were prohibited from leaving the Hamas-owned Commodore Hotel and from having any contact with local Gazans without a Hamas escort.

Rather than being permitted to judge the situation in Gaza for themselves, they were carted onto Hamas buses and taken on “devastation tours” of what their Hamas tour guides claimed was damage caused by the IDF during Operation Cast Lead. …

But they didn’t really mind. Reacting to her effective imprisonment in the Hamas-owned hotel, one of the demonstrators, an American woman named Poya Pakzad*, cooed on her blog that the Commodore Hotel was “the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at, in my life.”

Pakzad did complain, however, about what she acknowledged was the “farce” devastation tour she was taken on. She claimed that her Hamas guides were ignorant. In her studied view, they understated the number of Palestinians rendered homeless by the IDF counterterror offensive last year by some 60 percent…

Hass’s participation in the pro-Hamas propaganda trip is a bit surprising. In November 2008, she was forced to flee from Gaza to Israel after Hamas threatened to kill her. At the time, Hass appealed to the Israeli military – which she has spent the better part of her career bashing – and asked to be allowed to enter Israel from Gaza, after sailing illegally to Gaza from Cyprus on a ferry chartered by the pro-Hamas Free Gaza outfit.

Hass’s behavior is actually more revealing than surprising. The truth is that Hass and her fellow demonstrators were willing to be used as media props by Hamas precisely because it isn’t the Palestinians’ welfare that concerns them. If they cared about the Palestinians they would be demonstrating against Hamas, which prohibited local women from participating in their march to the Israeli border, and which barred non-Hamas members from speaking with them. It would offend their sensitivities that Hamas goons beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe in Islamic potato sacks. It would bother them that Hamas executes its political opponents by among other things throwing them off the roofs of apartment buildings.

The demonstrators did not come to Gaza to demonstrate their support for the Palestinians, but rather their hatred for Israel and for their own Western governments that refuse to join Hamas in its war against Israel. As one of the organizers told Hass as she sat corralled by Egyptian riot police … “In our presence here, we are saying that we are not casting the blame on Egypt. The responsibility for the shameless and obscene Israeli siege on Gaza rests squarely with our own countries.”

By happily collaborating with Hamas in its propaganda extravaganza, these demonstrators demonstrated that the rights of Palestinians are not their concern. Their concern is waging war against their own societies and against Israel. They are more than happy to have their pictures taken with the likes of Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh…

The Free Gaza movement members are but a chip off the old psychopathic block of nearly a century of far-left Western activists whose hatred for their own countries motivated them to hide the crimes of mass murderers from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh to Daniel Ortega and Saddam Hussein…

These fanatics are usually dismissed as fringe elements. But the truth is that … the distance between these true believers and the centers of state power has not been very great…

Code Pink … is welcome at the Obama White House. Its leader Evans was an official fund-raiser for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Evans visited the White House after travelling to Gaza last June. While there she met with Hamas leaders who gave her a letter for Obama. Evans met Obama himself at a donor dinner in San Francisco last October where, while standing in front of cameras, she gave him documents she received in Afghanistan, where she met with Taliban officials.

Then, too, among the board members of the Free Gaza movement is former US senator James Abourezk. Abourezk is reputedly close to Obama and according to knowledgeable sources has been a key figure in shaping Obama’s policy towards Israel… Dohrn and her husband [William] Ayres are also friendly with the president of the United States. Dohrn and Ayres have been Obama’s political patrons since he launched his first campaign for the Illinois state Senate in 1996. In White House visitors’ logs, Ayres is listed as having twice visited the building since Obama’s inauguration…

*We were in error quoting that Poya Pakzad is an American woman. Poya Pakzad is a Danish man. He has drawn our attention to the mistake in a comment. Our apologies to him.  1/19/2010

Speaking of self-righteous busybodies – which we were below, see On our masters and commanders – one of the most egregious is Greenpeace. Wielding  amazing power to influence political decisions internationally, these bigoted prigs cause millions of the world’s poorest to die by preventing them from having the means to save themselves. Their unproven and in any case imbecilic excuse is that the marvelous saving products of science and technology are harmful to Nature.

It could be argued – and we do – that they are committing mass-murder by moral arrogance.

Who makes it possible for them to work their evil?

For one, the Obama administration.

Paul Driessen writes at Townhall:

Climate-Czar Carol Browner and other federal agency heads continue to fork over large sums of taxpayer money to Greenpeace and similar eco-activists, to subsidize their anti-corporate, global warming, “sustainable” energy and regulatory thumbscrew campaigns… [Greenpeace’s] truly odious ethical violations, however, involve activities that directly damage the livelihoods and lives of innocent people, particularly in impoverished countries.

Greenpeace justifies its anti-energy ideologies by claiming they are preserving rivers, avoiding dangerous radiation and preventing “runaway” global warming… Even in the midst of a global cooling period and widening Climategate scandal, Greenpeace is still clinging to its tired fabrications and storylines…

In Britain, France and elsewhere, Greenpeace vandals have destroyed bio-engineered crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research to develop food plants that require fewer pesticides, are more nutritious, reduce dangerous mold toxins, withstand floods and droughts, and increase crop yields. The people who would benefit most from this research are the poorest, most malnourished on Earth. They could improve their lives, simply by planting different, better corn, cotton or soybean seeds..

In fact, Bt corn [where it has been used despite Greenpeace’s opposition] has enabled farmers [eg in South Africa] … to cut pesticide use and expenses by 75%, triple their profits, save 35-49 days per season working in fields, and save enough to buy a refrigerator or even a new house. And yet rich-country Greenpeace activists oppose the technology.

Greenpeace campaigns against insecticides and insect-repelling DDT are even more lethal. These chemicals could prevent malaria, which kills a million people annually and leaves millions more brain-damaged…

But Greenpeace claims “some researchers think” DDT “could be inhibiting lactation because of its estrogen-like effects and may be contributing to lactation failure throughout the world.” No peer-reviewed medical studies back up these claims, and lactation problems are definitely associated with the malaria and malnutrition that would be reduced by technologies the Warriors oppose.

Worldwide, 1.5 billion people still don’t have electricity for lights, refrigerators, stoves, schools, shops, hospitals and factories that would bring health, opportunity and prosperity. Yet Greenpeace continues to battle hydrocarbon, hydroelectric and nuclear power, telling people they should be content with solar panels or wind turbines that provide intermittent, insufficient energy – and guarantee sustained poverty.

It was Paul Driessen’s Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) that last December, during the farcical UN climate conference in Copenhagen, ‘unfurled a “Propaganda Warrior” banner from the rails of the Rainbow Warrior ship, and a “Ship of Lies” banner from Greenpeace’s other vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, as they lay anchored in Copenhagen harbor’.

So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a

creator. But if the universe is completely self-contained, having no

boundary or edge, it would neither be created nor destroyed… it would

simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

– Stephen Hawking

… coming down the road at us? It’s a dangerous oxymoron.

Its drover-in-chief is the president of the United States.

It’s name is Forced Voluntarism.

It’s descending on everyone in America. Right now, some high school students are being told that in order to graduate they must put in a certain number of hours of ‘voluntary’ work.

But while it may be virtuous to give freely of your labor / to help  a struggling neighbor, it is illegal for anyone to be compelled to do so.

The Thirteenth Amendment says so:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Never one to be deterred by the Constitution, Obama has a plan to enslave us all.

How?  Apparently by means of an army of our fellow citizens.

The civilian national security force was already in place long before last July’s public proposal. …

The General of this national security force is not out in the field in Iraq or Afghanistan, but running the troops from the White House. Meet First Lady Michelle Obama, General of Public Allies New Leadership for New Times.

Public Allies, modeled after Saul Alinsky’s “Peoples Organizations”, operating under General Michelle Obama, has an alleged operating budget of more than $75-million a year, and an impressive list of donors… Naturally, it also receives grants from federal, state and municipal sources.

One third of Public Allies’ annual budget comes from AmeriCorps. To get an idea of this combo’s people power: “By early April, Obama will sign landmark legislation expanding AmeriCorps from 75,000 participants to 250,000 over the next few years.” (NewsWeek).

According to a Fact Sheet About Public Allies, Obama was a member of the founding advisory board of the non-profit organization. Michelle was the founding Executive Director of Public Allies Chicago from Spring, 1993 until Fall 1996 (italics CFP’s). She served on Public Allies national board of directors from 1997 until 2001. …

That information comes from Judi McCleod at Canada Free Press.  So does the following. The two articles we quote from may be found here and here.

It’s 2010 and you are already redefined in a new word. You are now, as far your political masters are concerned, a “communitarian”. …

In the Marxist lexicon you will never hear the pseudonym for the name communitarian: serf.

Americans being pushed into One World Government by their own president will recognize communitarianism in AmeriCorps, more correctly defined as forced voluntarism. …

Howard Dean declares that the debate between Capitalism and Socialism is over and explains that “We are going to have both”. Dean unabashedly told a roomful of people in an April 2009 video of a talk he gave in Paris that the synthesis between capitalism and socialism is called “communitarism”.

This is what communitarism disciple former U.S. President Bill Clinton told crowds in two eastern Canadian provinces last year. There has to be more public involvement in solving the world’s problems.

“Clinton spoke first on Thursday in St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, and coined his own term—communitarianism—for personal involvement, the city’s Telegram newspaper reported.” (United Press International, May 29, 2009).

“All of us need to think of our citizenship in terms of what we can do in our communities and halfway around the world,” he said. “The truth is, cynicism and pessimism is an excuse to do nothing.” …

No matter how they spin it, communitarism is not based on altruism. It is social activism with a new name and its message is being spread world wide.

Communitarianism is Communism under another name. It is totalitarianism under another name.

Will the Thirteenth Amendment protect Americans from it?

Why do some people want power over the lives of others?

Theodore Dalrymple writes in a discussion of privileged eduction in France and whether the state should provide ‘equality of opportunity’ – which is to say, a discussion of socialist thinking – that he is mystified by this question.

The heart of the problem lies in the unassailability of the term ‘equality of opportunity,’ and the unthinking assent it commands. I was once asked on Dutch TV whether I was in favour of it, the interviewer assuming that I must be so in spite of all my other appalling opinions; and when I said that I was not, and indeed that I thought it was a truly hideous notion, his eyes opened with surprise. I thought he was going to slip off his chair.

Only under conditions reminiscent of those of Brave New World could there be equality of opportunity. But, of course, the very unattainability of equality of opportunity (in any sense other than that of an absence of formal, legal impediments to social advance) is precisely what recommends it as an ideal to politicians such as President Sarkozy, and indeed to most other western politicians, virtually irrespective of their putative political stripe. The fact that, reform notwithstanding, there are always differences in outcomes for different groups or classes of human beings in any society means that there is always scope, in the name of equality of opportunity, for further interference and control by politicians and bureaucrats. Not permanent revolution (to change the communist metaphor from Stalinism to Trotskyism), but permanent reform is the modern western politico-bureaucratic class’s route to lasting power and control.

Why anyone should want lasting power and control is to me a mystery: I suppose it must be the answer to a deep and insatiable inner emptiness.

And Bill Whittle at PJTV (here) seeks an answer to the question: ‘What type of person wants to run for office?’ He cites two men in history who attained supreme power and did not cling to it. Each of them saw his position as a temporary job, the exercise of power as a duty he owed to the people, and when he had done what was needed, stepped down from high office and returned to private life. One was the (5th.century B.C.E.) Roman leader Cincinnatus, and the other was George Washington.

If there are any politicians now who consider taking on elected office only as a service, they would be found (and it’s really not very likely that they exist) on the conservative right. Leftist politicians want above all to command, manipulate, control people, even force them to change their nature. There’s an old and ongoing debate among political philosophers of the left as to whether The Revolution will bring about a transformation of human nature, or whether it is necessary for human nature to be reconstructed first in order for The Revolution to be accomplished. (An infamous example of a Commie who fretted over this artifiical problem is Herbert Marcuse, guru of the 1968 New Left in Europe.)

Right now, ‘progressive’ bureaucrats in New York see it as their  business – and of course their pleasure – to interfere not just in New Yorkers’ but the whole nation’s private lives by dictating what people may eat or not eat.

Daniel Compton writes in OpenMarket.org:

On Monday, city officials rolled out an initiative to curb the salt content in manufactured and packaged foods. But the idea behind it — that salt intake has reached extreme levels in America — is a myth, and this “solution” wouldn’t work, anyway.

City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley aims to lead a national campaign to reduce the amount of salt in manufactured foods by 25 percent over the next five years. Cutting salt intake is supposed to reduce hypertension-related health problems. But while doctors may advise particular patients to cut down on salt, the science tells us that this is not a public-health problem. …

In other words, Farley’s trying to fight a problem that doesn’t exist. Worse, his new guidelines say that daily sodium intake for most people shouldn’t exceed 1,500 mg — which is a ridiculous 45 percent below the bottom of the normal consumption range [a] UC Davis study identified, and a full 60 percent lower than the worldwide average. …

The UC Davis study also cites surveys showing that sodium intake in the United Kingdom has “varied minimally” over the last 25 years, despite a major government campaign to reduce it.

Overall, the researchers found, salt intake “is unlikely to be malleable by public policy initiatives,” and attempts to change it would “expend valuable national and personal resources against unachievable goals.”

The New York guidelines are voluntary — for now. But the city’s ban on trans fats started that way, too. And the federal Food and Drug Administration has also been looking to get in on the action — it may classify it as a “food additive,” subject to regulation, sometime this year.

Then he comes to what all this regulation-for-our-own-good is really all about:

But this campaign isn’t about public health — it’s about grandstanding on a pseudo-issue ginned up by activists, when science clearly shows that there’s neither a crisis nor a way for the government to actually alter our salt intake.

All these initiatives do is win headlines for ambitious policymakers (New York’s last health commissioner parlayed his trans-fat activism into a promotion to FDA chief), while making food slightly more costly and leaving a bad taste in the mouths of consumers — literally.

Of course, if (or is it when?) the state is the sole provider of health care, it will claim justification for dictating to us what we may eat and how we must live, on the grounds that as it pays for our cures it has the right or the duty to instruct us to stay healthy. That’s why Obama and the Democrats so desperately want their health care legislation to be passed: not really to help keep us alive, but to have the means and the pretext for controlling us. As always with the left, they will boss us about in the name of a benign intention and an essential need.

The despotic personality is hard if not impossible for libertarians to understand. Individualists are appalled by the totalitarian vision of collectivists. Speaking for ourselves, in no conceivable circumstances would we want to organize a community. We find in the weakness of our unreconstructed human nature that it’s hard enough to run even one life – each our own.

Commenting on our post below, America gets a Council of Governors – for what?, one of our readers, Neitrick, provides this ominous information:

Even scarier…..a coworker of my husband’s just this week said that one of the reasons he chose to leave the military after two tours in Iraq was the shift in training exercises. According to him they had been doing training exercises in replicas of Iraqi villages but in April switched. They are now training US military in replicas of US suburbs. I found that information terrifying of not all that surprising. In light of this article, all I can do is hope people wake up to what’s coming.

… or ‘Holdering  justice’  – seems to amount to the same thing.

With Attorney General Eric Holder at the head of it, the US Justice Department would be better named the Injustice Department.

This from the Washington Times shows why:

The Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday rejected by a 15-14 vote a resolution of inquiry that would have forced the Justice Department to tell Congress why it dismissed a civil complaint against members of the New Black Panther Party who disrupted a Philadelphia polling place in the November 2008 election.

The party-line vote had been sought by Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican, who, along with Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said they have been unable to get information from the department on the complaint’s dismissal.

“I am deeply disappointed that the Judiciary Committee defeated my resolution of inquiry on a party-line vote. There has been no oversight, no accountability and certainly no transparency with regard to this attorney general and this Department of Justice,” Mr. Wolf said. “Where is the ‘unprecedented transparency’ that this administration promised? Where is the honesty and openness that the majority party pledged? The American people deserve better,” he said….

Rep. Dan Lungren, California Republican, described the dismissal of the complaint as “a denial of justice” and Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, said the resolution was an attempt to hold the Justice Department accountable to Congress.

The 15 Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, sent the resolution to the House floor with an adverse recommendation, voting it “unfavorably” out of committee. …

Mr. Wolf said that after ignoring seven letters over seven months seeking information on the case and failing to comply with subpoenas from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he decided to seek the resolution. He said Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. continues to “thwart all efforts to compel an explanation for the dismissal.” …

Mr. Wolf, ranking Republican on the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice, science and related agencies that funds the Justice Department, also said that while the Justice Department is claiming broad privileges to avoid disclosing any new information regarding the case, many legal scholars have challenged the department’s assertions of privilege. He said the committee’s failure to approve his resolution had set a “troubling precedent.”

“Is it going to continue to blindly defer to all unsubstantiated claims of privilege from the department?” he asked. “The Justice Department has gone as far as to claim privilege and redact seven pages of a letter I sent to the attorney general and released publicly on July 31, 2009.

“I sincerely question the judgment of the Civil Rights Division leadership — both in its dismissal of this case and its stonewalling of this Congress and the Commission on Civil Rights,” he said.

Mr. Wolf argued that the complaint was “inexplicably dismissed” earlier this year over the objections of the career attorneys overseeing the case as well as the departments own appeal office. He said he regretted resorting to an oversight resolution, but “Congress and the American people have a right to know why this case was not prosecuted.” …

We think praying is ridiculous.

President Harry Truman may not have been an atheist but he had a healthy suspicion of the religious:

“When I hear them praying extra loud, I always go out and check the lock

on the smokehouse.”