Judge Stephen C. Robinson

The Washington Post explains it. It ‘s all about race.

The court-ordered election that allowed [some] residents of one New York town to flip the lever six times for one candidate – and produced a Hispanic winner - could expand to other towns where minorities complain their voices aren’t being heard. …

The unusual election was imposed on Port Chester after a federal judge determined that Hispanics were being treated unfairly.

The 2010 Census is expected to show large increases in Latino populations and lawsuits alleging discrimination are likely to increase, said Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit election research and reform group.

“The country’s been changing in a lot of places, with minority growth in exurbs and commuter cities, and there will be a realization that those minorities can’t elect candidates of choice,” Richie said.

That will leave minority groups, federal prosecutors and municipalities looking for ways to keep elections from violating the federal Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities’ constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

In Port Chester, trustees had been elected two at a time every two years, with conventional at-large voting. Most voters were white, and there were always six white trustees even though Hispanics made up half the population and nearly a quarter of the voters. Judge Stephen Robinson concluded the system violated U.S. law by diluting Hispanics’ votes.

The standard remedy was to break a municipality into districts, with one district including many from the minority, thereby increasing the chances for a candidate backed by the minority group. The Justice Department proposed that solution for Port Chester.

But the village of about 30,000 objected to districts. It suggested instead a system called cumulative voting. All six trustees would be elected at once and the voters could apportion their six votes as they wished – all six to one candidate, one each to six candidates or any combination.

The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota and Texas, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Judge Robinson went for it, and cumulative voting was used for the first time in a New York municipality.

And surely not the last time. Obviously this idea has legs. It could become a peaceful caring way of disenfranchising despised classes and races, such as white males, Jews, Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, individualists, soldiers, libertarians, anti-feminists, capitalists, free-marketeers, patriots, the rich, Iraq war approvers, habitual Rush Limbaugh listeners, global warming skeptics, big business executives, bankers, SUV drivers, fatties, Mormons, smokers, tobacconists, hunters, non-recyclers, furriers, gun-owners …

Note: This post needs correction. Please see comments by Malachi and Jillian Becker.

The liberals’ politics of fake compassion bring about, perfectly logically, the cult of fake victimhood. Self-designated victims lay claim to special consideration and special treatment. Often a bizarre rivalry arises between claimants – a “more victimized than thou” competition.

Of course they’d hate to be victims in reality. They’re not in need of help and compensation. They’re after privileges. They milk compassion out of their neighbors. Its a power-drive that is sometimes turned into tyranny: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It’s also blackmail of a kind: the blackmailing of good people with their own consciences. That it works so well for so many groups in America  - feminists for instance – proves the genuine kindness and generosity of most Americans. Those who give in to the special demands are probably aware they’re being played for suckers by the whimpering “look what you’ve done to me now” complainants, but feel it’s better to risk being exploited than to refuse pity and charity in case it’s really needed.

Fake victimization can bring cash rewards through law suits. And it can bring political advantage, as no doubt Democratic Congressmen Carson, Lewis, and Cleaver were hoping when they claimed recently that they’d been subjected to verbal abuse by protestors against the health-care legislation.

Mark Steyn comments:

On March 20th, something truly extraordinary happened. On the eve of the health care vote, a group of black Democrat Congressmen (eschewing the private tunnels they usually use to cross from their offices to the Capitol) chose to walk en masse through a crowd of protesters, confident that the knuckledragging Tea Party goons they and their media pals have reviled for a year now would respond with racial epithets.

And then, when the crowd didn’t, the black Congressmen made it up anyway. …

But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to – faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they’re not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.

Isn’t that what societies with functioning media used to call “a story”?

Apparently not. As they did at Duke, the brain-dead press went along with it – and so, predictably enough, did much of the Republican leadership.

We have only just found out that this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is co-sponsored by the John Birch Society.

Is this harmful to the cause of conservatism?

Here is an interesting and seemingly objective account of the John Birch Society. What emerges from it is that if this organization is not as bad as it has been painted at the worst, it is also not as guiltless of bigotry, especially of a racist and anti-Semitic slant, as its apologists have claimed. It propagates ideas – anti-communism, anti-collectivism, anti-world government – that most conservatives would agree with; but it also propagates conspiracy theories that place it in the “cranky” category.

Furthermore, its reputation for being guilty of “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, and “anti-Semitism”, whether fully or only partially or even unfairly deserved, should be an impediment to any close association with it unless and until it can prove its innocence – perhaps by emphatically and repeatedly denouncing such opinions. Mere denials, or statements to the effect that only “some members” held these views, won’t do.

All this considered, we’d say … yes – the conservative cause is more likely to be harmed than helped by this sponsorship.

And why give ammunition to the enemy on the left?

Reward should go to the deserving. But the judges who award the Nobel Peace Prize have bestowed it on the most undeserving, notably the terrorist (Yasser Arafat), and con-men (the authors of the IPCC report and Al Gore).

The following is from a chain email that has been going the rounds since 2008.

We are posting it here chiefly for what it says in the last 3 lines.

There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena Sendler.

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive.

She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews (being German).

Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack for larger kids.

She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.

She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it to reunite the families.

Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

Last year [2007] Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was not selected.

Al Gore won — for a film on Global Warming.

Footnote: Thanks to one of our readers, Kelly, we learn that the essentials of the story of Irena Sendler are confirmed as true by this obituary.

She was Polish, not German. And we’re very glad to read that she was honored in her lifetime, and touched that she was nursed in her old age by one of the children she had saved.

More on the death throes of Britain, where PC once stood for the friendly, sturdy, common-sensical Police Constable, but now stands for the disease of which Britain is dying.

From the MailOnline:

A wealthy businessman was arrested at home in front of his wife and young son over an email which council officials deemed ‘offensive’ to gipsies – but which he had not even written.

And which was not said or written to a gipsy, and which no gipsy needed to have seen or read.

And it wasn’t even an ‘offensive term’ – it only rhymed with a term that is deemed offensive (and that we’ve never heard before).

The email, concerning a planning appeal by a gipsy, included the phrase: ‘It’s the ‘do as you likey’ attitude that I am against.’

Council staff believed the email was offensive because ‘likey’ rhymes with the derogatory term ‘pikey’.

What does ‘pikey’ mean? We’ve never heard it before. It is hinted in the story that it is a term that can hurt the feelings of some Irishmen.

The 45-year-old IT boss was held in a police cell for four hours until it was established he had nothing to do with the email, which had been sent by one of his then workers ….

But police had taken his DNA and later confirmed they would be holding it indefinitely.

The arraignment of this menacing criminal suspect cost thousands.

The businessman, who has asked not to be named, was also fingerprinted in the police investigation estimated to have cost taxpayers up to £12,000 [about $19,400].

He said two uniformed officers came to his house on a Sunday afternoon and said he would be handcuffed if he did not accompany them to the police station.

His computer and other internet equipment were also seized.

The email, from a computer at his company, was sent last August to a website at Rother District Council, in East Sussex, on which the public can comment on planning applications.

It was to record an objection to the gipsy’s mobile hme (mobile no longer) being concreted down ‘ in an area of outstanding beauty overlooking the Battle of Hastings site’.

The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute the man who actually sent the email, although he too was arrested by the  Sussex Police on  ‘suspicion of committing a racial or religious-aggravated offence’.

The police officer who made the decision to make the arrests is a female. If you call her a silly cow, which she is, you would probably be arrested in Britain for a ‘gender-aggravated offence’.

Chief Inspector Heather Keating said: ‘Sussex Police have a legal duty to promote community cohesion and tackle unlawful discrimination.

‘We are satisfied we acted appropriately in identifying the owner of the computer used and through this, the identity of the writer of the offending line.’

At the Battle of Hastings the Normans conquered the Saxons in 1066. Between 1066 and 2010 Britain rose to rule over the greatest empire the world has even seen and then dwindled to a sick little idiocracy.

From Instapundit:

I think Obama’s “charisma” was based on voter narcissism — people excited not just about electing a black President, but about themselves, voting for a black President. Now that’s over, and they’re stuck just with him, and emptied of their own narcissism there’s not much there to fill out the suit.

We have had the same thought. We call it moral vanity. And racism.

Read the devastatingly revealing bio of Valerie Jarrett – Obama’s closest adviser and the person who got Van Jones into the White House – by Ben Johnson at Front Page Magazine. It concludes:

An international, rootless wanderer abandoned by his father, and occasionally his mother, in search of authenticity, he [Obama] never felt at home until he found his roots, and himself, in the milieu of Hyde Park – a neighborhood big enough to encompass everyone from Marilyn Katz [see below] to Bill Ayers, from Tony Rezko’s vacant adjoining property to Louis Farrakhan’s wandering “security” force. And Valerie Jarrett. Is this what Jarrett reminds the Obamas of: the neighborhood that has been the president’s only true home and shaped or reinforced their values and identity? An elitist sanctuary of pampered radicals, racists, and terrorists, liberated of working class stiffs who bitterly cling to their guns and religion? Increasingly, it seems as though this is what “makes them who they are,” and is becoming the atmosphere Obama, with Jarrett’s help, is recreating in his administration.

Who is Marilyn Katz?

Who is this person to whom Jarrett is so indebted – and whom, we shall see, she calls a personal friend? Marilyn Katz provided “security” for Students for a Democratic Society at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Undercover Chicago policeman William Frapolly told prosecutors that during the Days of Rage, Katz showed protesters a new weapon to use against the police: “a cluster of nails that were sharpened at both ends, and they were fastened in the center.” Police later reported being hit by golf balls with nails through them, as well as excrement. Years later, Katz would insist her “guerrilla nails” were merely “a defensive weapon” to prevent “possible bad behavior by the police.”

Paul Greenberg writes in Townhall:

The outstanding example of … cynical manipulation of justice is how a case against the New Black Panthers, which the Department of Justice described as a “black super-racist organization,” has been quickly and quietly shelved with minimal attention to the law and the Constitution. The evidence is right there on the videos recorded Election Day, 2008, when uniformed members of the Black Panthers showed up at a Philadelphia polling station, one of them wielding a billy club. They shouted insults and made threats: “Cracker, you about to be ruled by a black man,” one of the Panthers informed a voter. Two Republican poll watchers, a black couple, were called traitors to their race …

Thank goodness for modern technology, which can make any citizen with an iPhone and its camera a crusading reporter. When all this made the Internet, not even the Obama administration’s Justice Department could ignore what had happened on Philadelphia’s streets. Particularly after the department’s own investigation revealed that the New Black Panthers had called for “300 members to be deployed” at various polling places across the country.

So early this year, the Department of Justice proceeded to file a complaint against the Black Panthers, and specifically against the stormtroopers who were captured on video. So far, so fair.

A lawyer and survivor of many a legal battle for civil rights, Bartle Bull, filed an affidavit in support of the Justice Department’s complaint. He characterized the incident in Philadelphia as “the most blatant form of intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, even going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s.”

But the Black Panthers didn’t even bother to respond to the charges – as if they were above the law. And maybe they are. Because after a court had ordered a default judgment against them, including one of their national leaders, the Justice Department caved. It dropped all charges against the Panthers except one, and that one was settled with a light tap on the wrist…

There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for this perversion of justice except the Panthers’ political pull with this new administration. This case is no longer about the Black Panthers so much as it is about a newly politicized Justice Department. At some point the career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division changed their minds about pressing charges — or had their minds changed for them. By whom? Why? Those questions need answering. Under oath.

The same voices that once complained about the politicization of the Justice Department under a previous administration have fallen noticeably silent. For once Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s senior nudnik, has nothing to say. And the only excuse the Department of Justice offers for its cave-in is that it didn’t want to interfere with the Black Panthers’ freedom of speech. That “explanation” is scarcely good law, but it deserves first prize for sheer chutzpah – even in a city as full of it as Washington, D.C. Shouting racial imprecations at voters, wielding nightsticks, dispatching bully boys in military-looking uniforms to polling places … all that is now exercising freedom of speech? In America? It sounds more like the kind of electioneering practiced by Iran’s supreme leader and holy fraud.

The leading lights of the Democratic Party in and out of Congress may have turned a blind eye to this outrage, but the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hasn’t. In a letter to the attorney general, it has demanded an explanation for this kind of “justice” from the Justice Department:

“We believe the Department’s defense of its actions thus far undermines respect for rule of law and raises other serious questions about the department’s law enforcement decisions.”

It sounds as if the commission is getting some subpoenas ready for high Justice Department officials, and it should be…

Nothing may actually be done to protect Philadelphia’s voters under this administration, but at least there ought to be a full investigation and comprehensive report by somebody official, even if it has to be somebody outside Congress. The record needs to show just how cynical this president and his attorney general can be when it comes to their promises about upholding the rule of law. Not to mention every American voter’s right to cast a secret ballot without being harassed.

Why hasn’t there been a greater sense outrage, betrayal or just disgust at the administration’s handling of this case? My theory: Because none of this comes as a surprise. What else could be expected when The People in their wisdom elect a president of the United States who’s a product of Chicago’s machine politics?

H. L. Mencken said it: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Thomas Sowell writes against the notion that Obama is a ‘post-racial’ president:

For “community organizers” … racial resentments are a stock in trade. President Obama’s background as a community organizer has received far too little attention, though it should have been a high-alert warning that this was no post-racial figure.

What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.

To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.

Mark Steyn, interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, says of Obama’s comment on the arrest of Professor Gates:

I think the President of the United States has absolutely no business intervening in a matter for the Cambridge Police Department, and should it happen to come to that, whatever court in the city of Cambridge it comes down to. This was disgraceful by him, and he should be ashamed of himself in intervening in that in a national press conference. It’s unbecoming to the President, and it was a disgusting moment.

We urge you to read Mark Steyn’s column in OCregister on this same subject, above all for the pleasure of its humor:

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/gates-professor-black-2506786-racism-sgt