The scandal related to the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to drop voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party is expanding, according to a Washington Times editorial.

The Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee today on a vote of 13 to 6.

Sotomayor is a truly awful selection, as I wrote previously at the American Spectator. The recent confirmation hearings in which she openly and shamelessly misrepresented her past statements only provided more proof that she isn’t fit for the high court — and possibly for any court.

On July 16, 2009, Roger Aronoff and Don Irvine interviewed Matthew Vadum on “Take AIM,” which is the new BlogTalkRadio program of Accuracy in Media (AIM), a media watchdog group.

Vadum discussed the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the radical group ACORN. The segment runs from 30:40 to the end of the show. The podcast is available here on our website.

Frank Rich is surely the most dishonest writer and the biggest bigot working at the New York Times today.

In his latest column this haughty bloviator who must every passing day mourn his decreasing relevance to modern political discourse as his newspaper fades away into insignificance tries to turn the tables by accusing Republican senators who grilled Judge Sonia Sotomayor during her confirmation proceeding of being the real racists.

He writes

Yet the Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent. [...]

Much of the audience was surely driven away by the sheer boredom of watching white guys incessantly parse the nominee’s “wise Latina” remark. This badgering was their last-ditch effort to prove that Gingrich was right when he called Sotomayor a racist at the start of the nomination process. She confronted that overheated controversy directly. “I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,” Sotomayor testified.

And of course on this point the hopelessly incompetent Sotomayor lied through her teeth. She made the comment repeatedly before and only backed away from it during her confirmation hearings. But her perfunctory explanation was more than enough to absolve her in Rich’s eyes.

Rich continues

It’s the American way that we judge people as individuals, not as groups. And by that standard we can say unequivocally that this particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better conclusion than the individual white males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past.

Rich is correct in saying that “It’s the American way that we judge people as individuals, not as groups.” This is probably why Rich avoids discussing Sotomayor’s vile ruling in Ricci v. DeStefano, which centered around a case in which New Haven, Connecticut discriminated against a group of firefighters precisely because they belonged to the wrong race.

One of the plaintiffs discriminated against, firefighter Ben Vargas, who like Sotomayor claims Latino heritage, testified at the hearings. Vargas said

I am Hispanic and proud of the heritage and background that Judge Sotomayor and I share. And I congratulate Judge Sotomayor on her nomination.

But the focus should not have been on me being Hispanic. The focus should have been on what I did to our new promotion to captain and how my own government and some courts responded to that. In short, they didn’t care. I think it important for you to know what I did, that I played by the rules and then endured a long process of asking the courts to enforce those rules. [...]

I was shocked when I was not rewarded for this hard work and sacrifice, but I actually was penalized for it. I became not Ben Vargas, the fire lieutenant who proved themselves qualified to be captain, but a racist statistic. I had to make decisions whether to join those who wanted promotions to be based on race and ethnicity or join those who would insist on being judged solely on their qualifications and the content of their character. [...]

So Rich ignored the fact that the hearings weren’t only about aggrieved white men. At least one Latino man was victimized by Sotomayor but Rich couldn’t care less because he considers it his mission to defend Sotomayor at all costs. 

Imagine the cognitive dissonance that must cloud Rich’s troubled mind: A member of the “Latino” victim class gets thrown under the bus by Rich in his zeal to protect “a wise Latina.”

And only a truly ambitious liar like Rich can attempt to portray a hearing at which the nominee’s blatant, in-your-face racism was challenged (for the most part feebly) by members of the opposition party as an event that showcased the opposition party’s racism.

In the same column he insults black Americans and Republicans by describing Michael Steele as “the G.O.P.’s token black.”

Rich is the same fellow who tried to incite hatred against conservatives in a recent column on the DHS report on “rightwing extremism.”

You may also recall that it was the pathologically obsessive Rich who in 2004 couldn’t help attacking President Reagan while he lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. “Although mourners paying their respects to Reagan were often touted as representative of the entire nation, you could nod off counting the white visitors before a black person appeared.” Rich argued that the massive outpouring of grief regarding Reagan was phony and that media coverage of the death strongly resembled the saturation coverage of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

The fact that the Old Gray Lady keeps Rich on staff is just more proof that the newspaper left the news business long ago.

“She’s making Harriet Miers look good.”

-Ann Coulter talking about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a few minutes ago on the “Glenn Beck Program”

Embezzler Bernard Madoff, who swindled clients out of at least $50 billion, was sentenced to 150 years imprisonment today.

Very few media reports have focused on the damage that Madoff did to left-leaning foundations and political causes.

I wrote about this topic in the American Spectator in January.

The record-breaking fraud has forced the closing of the JEHT and Picower foundations, longtime supporters of leftist groups.

Left-wing groups funded by those charities include ACORN, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Alliance for Justice.

Judicial Watch has released a report on LatinoJustice PRLDEF (formerly the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund or PRLDEF), the racist left-wing group that at one time had Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor on its board.

The Judicial Watch report, available here, notes that the group has long been been involved in the racial grievance industry and took many controversial positions while Sotomayor was deeply involved with it. (The report quotes my research at page 1.)

Excerpts: 

In 1980, when then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch criticized a Supreme Court decision that upheld racial quotas, the PRLDEF signed a statement characterizing the comments as “”ill-informed, rhetorically excessive and unnecessarily divisive.” [...]

In 1981, the PRLDEF applauded a decision by a federal judge that forced teachers at an Ann Arbor Michigan elementary school to undergo “consciousness raising” about a dialect spoken by young black children called “Black English.” The training program cost taxpayers $44,000. The civil rights attorney who handled the case, Gabe Kaimowitz, worked for the PRLDEF. He said his intent was to make the lawsuit the “basis of suits against schools in Chicago and New York, and to extend the suit to embrace not only poor blacks but poor Puerto Rican students,” who supposedly spoke a dialect known as “Spanglish.” [...]

In 1988, the PRLDEF engaged in a battle with the New York City Police Department over its “racist” promotion exam, ultimately presiding over a radical redesign to allow more minorities to achieve a passing grade. According to The New York Times: “The new test, a four-part exam prepared with the help of an expert designated by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund…involved changes in format, including the addition of open-book questions and a video portion.”

In 1990, the PRLDEF attacked then-New York Mayor David Dinkins after the mayor labeled three Puerto Rican “nationalists” who shot five members of Congress in 1954 “assassins.” The radicals were members of a violent Puerto Rican terrorist group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN). The PRLDEF said the mayor’s comments “lacked sensitivity.” Reuben Franco, President of the PRLDEF said: “[Mayor Dinkins] doesn’t recognize that to many people in Puerto Rico, these are fighters for freedom and justice, for liberation, just as is Nelson Mandela, who himself advocated bearing arms.” [...]

Of course, ACORN has already endorsed Sotomayor’s nomination for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.

Was this photo taken at Shining Path headquarters? (just kidding) Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke (left) and ACORN enabler Drummond Pike (right) in an undated photo taken in Peru. On the wall is a large poster of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (photo: Pike’s blog)

* * * * *

John Podesta’s left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund has invited many liberal and radical groups to a meeting Thursday morning to discuss how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption. One of the groups, Alliance for Justice, is advertising the crisis management meeting called “Reframing the Attack on Voter Registration” on its website.

The intrepid investigative journalist Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner reports

Nearly a dozen left-wing advocacy groups are meeting Thursday at the Center for American Progress (CAP)  to discuss how to respond to a growing barrage of damaging news reports and editorial criticism of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform (NOW). [sic]

The strategy meeting at the liberal think tank is being described as a “briefing and discussion” on how to respond to the negative coverage. ACORN is currently under investigation for voter registration fraud and related allegations in at least 14 states.

Among the organizations expected to attend the strategy session are: Advancement Project, Alliance for Justice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, Common Cause, Fair Elections Legal Network, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and People for the American Way.

Bertha Lewis, billed as “ACORN’s new chief organizer and CEO,” is a featured speaker. [...]

Lewis is the ACORN executive who lied to Lou Dobbs on CNN last month. Lewis can’t stand controversial Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and she said he claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As Newsmax reported:

What Arpaio actually said was that whenever he tried to enforce U.S. immigration laws, activists on the left accused him of being a racist, like a member of the Klu Klux Klan. He then went on to say he didn’t let the insults bother him.

Lewis refused to back down from her malicious lie, which is not surprising because when confronted, ACORN officials routinely lie, lie, and lie some more.

I suspect that ACORN and its allies will play the race card. Useful idiot Adam Serwer of the American Prospect summed up last fall what they’re likely to say in coming days:

The allegations against ACORN are part of a tangle of misinformation and insinuation that is being played out across the media, and within the Justice Department. ACORN, because of its advocacy on behalf of low-income and minority families, and its efforts to register voters in poor and minority districts, has become a focus for the right’s racial anxieties.

They’ll say conservatives and Republicans are sinister, racist scum who don’t want minorities to vote, and all the negative publicity is the result of a vast conspiracy that originated among scab health care workers on the planet Klendathu who all belong to country clubs that frown on same-sex marriage unless it’s solemnized by a non-union pastor who dines on endangered species and who enjoys maximizing his carbon footprint, yada yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We’ve heard this fanciful narrative before but the difference is now a surprisingly large segment of the population is paying attention to ACORN’s illicit activities.

Surprise, surprise. The radical left-wing activist group ACORN lauds President Obama’s selection of Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court.

ACORN released this statement from its vice president, Maria Polanco:

ACORN members across the country are inspired by President Obama’s historic nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the pending vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor brings a wealth of not only judicial experience, but experience in the real world as well. As a longtime practitioner of the law as private litigator, public prosecutor, and judge, Sonia Sotomayor has a profound understanding of how the law affects real families in real situations.

Judge Sotomayor’s incredible history of rising to the top of the legal profession from humble roots resonates deeply with ACORN members who work every day to open up opportunities for those in challenging circumstances. Coming from an immigrant family living in a public housing project in the Bronx, she called herself “an ordinary woman who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences” She may be an ordinary woman in some ways, but she is an extraordinary choice to serve as the next Supreme Court Justice.

As a Latina woman from the Bronx myself, I know today’s historic nomination will provide inspiration to millions of young girls and boys across the country, and provide renewed faith in a justice system that has often failed the poor and powerless. ACORN looks forward to a fair and even-handed confirmation process, and to welcoming Judge Sotomayor’s brilliant mind and critical perspective to the Supreme Court by its fall session.

We profiled ACORN in the November editions of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch.

For what it’s worth, President Obama’s radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. (White House backgrounder)

Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition against President George W. Bush’s 2001 nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate filibustered the nomination and Estrada withdrew from consideration in 2003.

A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, LatinoJustice PRLDEF hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis of her ethno-cultural heritage. “As the second largest and fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate for the president to nominate a Hispanic,” the group said in a written statement. (PDF)

According to the group’s website, it gets some of its funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

A search of philanthropy databases reveals other significant donors to LatinoJustice to be Carnegie Corporation of New York ($1,025,000 since 2000), Ford Foundation ($2,280,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Foundation ($1,275,000 since 2000), and JPMorganChase Foundation ($70,000 since 2001).

Among radical left-wing groups, it has a fairly garden-variety agenda. A captive of identity politics, it pushes for multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual public education, race-based gerrymandering of electoral districts, race-based employment quotas, tenants’ rights, and illegal immigrants’ rights.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF was known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund until last year when it filed Articles of Amendment with New York State to change its name. (See pages 35 to 41 of its IRS Form 990 for the group for Tax Year 2007.)

(Note: This blog post was updated several times on the day it was posted.)

Brace yourself for an onslaught of vile propaganda from the “living Constitution” crowd after President Obama today nominated the manifestly unqualified, politically correct, leftist judge Sonia Sotomayor to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sotomayor’s main qualifications are that she is a woman and that she is a Latina (of Puerto Rican ancestry).

Sotomayor also has ties to the race-obsessed left-wing grievance group/shakedown operation known as the National Council of La Raza, which Kevin Mooney profiled in the December 2007 Foundation Watch.

Ed Whelan writes at National Review Online that Sotomayor gave a speech that became a law review article in which she expressed her “hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life” when each is acting as a judge “in deciding cases.”

There is not much room for misinterpretation here. This is a racist statement. Sotomayor is arguing that her race gives her unique insights and makes her a better judge.

Don’t expect to hear a peep about this from the mainstream media though.

But just imagine if the president had selected a white man who wrote that it was his “hope that a wise man of Anglo-Saxon descent with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Puerto Rican female who hasn’t lived that life” when each is acting as a judge “in deciding cases.”

Imagine how the liberals and the race grievance industry would howl.

On TV liberal pundits such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin are already tripping over each other to praise the Sotomayor pick. It’s only going to get worse.

The Supreme Court announced Monday it plans to hear a case brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Free Enterprise Fund challenging the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), CEI said in a press release.

According to CEI, the Appointments Clause of the Constitution specifies that “officers of the United States” be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. But the officers serving on the PCAOB, with tremendous power to impose criminal and civil penalties on people and companies accused of violating accounting regulations, were not appointed that way.

“The Founding Fathers wanted powerful government officials to be vetted by the President and the Senate, to help ensure agencies remain accountable to elected officials and ultimately the American people,” said Sam Kazman, CEI’s general counsel.  “The PCAOB imposes massive regulatory burdens on public companies, under threat of criminal and civil penalties, yet the regulators are completely unaccountable to the people, the President or the Senate.”

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, giving it authority to set accounting standards, impose its own set of taxes, and open investigations of accounting firms big and small. Yet unlike counterparts wielding similar authority, such as the IRS commissioner and Federal Reserve governors, PCAOB members are never vetted by the president or by the Senate, as neither of these bodies have a say in who will be appointed.

CEI reports that the PCAOB’s interpretation of Sarbanes-Oxley’s section 404 has cost public companies more than $35 billion a year, has proved especially burdensome to smaller public companies, and has cost the economy as a whole over a trillion dollars, according to a Brookings-AEI study.  Bipartisan critics have observed that the PCAOB standards have burdened firms with minutiae while overlooking many of the practices that led to the subprime shenanigans.

Attorneys working for the taxpayer-funded Legal Services Corporation may soon be free to litigate in an effort to make government bigger, writes John Carlisle, director of policy at the National Legal and Policy Center, a nonprofit foundation based in Falls Church, Virginia.

Carlisle, a former editor of Capital Research Center’s Organization Trends and Foundation Watch, writes in the American Spectator that

The Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress may soon gain another valuable ally in their effort to radically expand government. On March 26, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced legislation that ends the restrictions on the ability of legal services organizations, funded by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), to file ideologically motivated lawsuits. In addition, Harkin’s bill, “The Civil Access to Justice Act of 2009,” nearly doubles the LSC budget from $390 million to $750 million. If Harkin’s bill is enacted, thousands of legal services lawyers will unleash a barrage of lawsuits in the nation’s federal and state courts to advance a liberal political agenda.

The Harkin bill comes as no surprise. Liberal groups started lobbying Congress at the beginning of the year on LSC’s behalf. On January 6, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights sent a letter to members of Congress calling for the abolition of restrictions on LSC-funded activism. The Washington Post ran an editorial on March 14 calling on lawmakers to “unshackle Legal Services from congressionally-imposed restrictions that have kept it from working more efficiently and broadly.”

The restrictions were enacted by Congress in 1996 in response to legal services lawyers systematically using taxpayer money to advance liberal policies. These restrictions included bans on representing undocumented aliens, abortion-related litigation, prisoner advocacy, class action lawsuits, challenges to welfare reform, and congressional redistricting cases.

The restrictions did have a significant effect in reducing LSC-funded activism. However, legal services lawyers were still able to push a political agenda within the confines of the law. In several cases, they brazenly violated the restrictions. For example, in 2008 the LSC inspector general subpoenaed client records from California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) to determine if it violated the restriction on representing undocumented aliens. A former CRLA lawyer said the organization had a policy of providing aid to illegal aliens. CRLA refused to release the names to the inspector general, citing attorney-client confidentiality. [...] 

President Obama’s nominee for U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder, is hostile to gun rights, notes the Independent Institute’s Stephen P. Halbrook. Halbrook is the author of The Founder’s Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms.

Halbrook testified at Holder’s confirmation hearing earlier this month that Holder’s “denial that law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes is exemplified by his support for draconian proposal to criminalize, with severe felony penalties, exercise of that constitutional right.”

While Holder was a senior Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, the DOJ backed bureaucratic rules that would have buried lawful gun owners and sellers under a mountain of red tape.

Halbrook points out that Holder participated in a pro-gun control amicus curiae brief in the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller. In the case last year the Supreme Court struck down the District’s oppressive handgun ban, finding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms. 

Despite his hostility to a basic civil right, Holder has reportedly secured the support of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania), an endorsement that probably clears the way for his approval by the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow.

In recent years 61 terrorists released by the United States have returned to their careers, Reuters reports.

AFP reports today that two former inmates at Guantanamo Bay have become part of al-Qaeda’s propaganda effort since being released from U.S. custody. The duo appear in a terrorist video.  

We have the Center for Constitutional Rights and other far-left groups that have used the courts to weaken America’s ability to defend itself to thank for this.

The up to $50 billion fraud perpetrated by Wall Street’s Bernard Madoff has hurt a number of charitable foundations, Reuters reports.

According to Reuters, one of them is the JEHT Foundation which ”said it will close next month because its donors, Jeanne Levy-Church and Kenneth Levy-Church, were investors in the Madoff business.”

JEHT is a reliable funder of left-wing causes. According to foundationsearch.com, JEHT has given $72,159,020 in grants since 2000.

We found some of JEHT’s most odious grantees. It gave $4,256,600 since 2001 to the Tides Foundation and its affiliates.

It gave $839,500 since 2002 to the anti-American law firm Center for Constitutional Rights. It gave $55,000 since 2002 to the Alliance for Justice, a group that distorted judges’ records in an effort to block their elevation to higher courts.

JEHT Foundation also gave $250,000 in 2003 to the ACORN affiliate, American Institute for Social Justice.

Nick Gillespie of Reason TV has an excellent little video on Hollywood’s pathological infatuation with executed mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Guevara, as we’ve noted previously, is idolized by communist lawyer Michael Ratner of the anti-American law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Here is the video:

Was Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden serious last week when he said that an Obama administration would be willing to prosecute Bush administration officials for their supposed crimes? According to a video posted on YouTube, an audience member at a Florida campaign event asked:

I’m not going to say ‘yes we can,’ I’m going to say ‘yes we will,’ OK, and when we do, I’d like to know if you guys are going to pursue the violations that have been made against our Constitution by the present administration and restore the Constitution to its rightful place in our society?

Biden responded:

Yes. Now look, here’s the deal. My colleagues can tell you, particularly Henry Waxman, one of the things that happens, is, you know there’s a phrase in the law, those of you who are lawyers, sometimes you’re estopped from being able to pursue something, meaning your failing to have act [sic] in the past precludes you having the right to act in the future. We will not be estopped from pursuing any criminal offense that’s occurred. Now here’s what happening: Patrick Leahy and the Judiciary Committee and Henry Waxman from California and his oversight committee as well as John Conyers and his Judiciary Committee, what they’re doing is they’re doing the right thing. They’re not making false accusations about anything. They’re not making unfounded accusations. They’re collecting data, they are subpoenaeing records, they’re building the file, and they’re going through it and we’ll go through it with a finetooth comb. If there has been a basis upon which you could pursue someone for a criminal violation, they will be pursued. Not out of vengeance, not out of retribution. Out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one, is above the law. It sounds trite.

Obama said something similar in April. The Philadelphia Daily News’s Will Bunch asked Obama the following question (as lifted from Bunch’s column):

“I know you’ve talked about reconciliation and moving on, but there’s also the issue of justice, and a lot of people — certainly around the world and certainly within this country — feel that crimes were possibly committed” regarding torture, rendition, and illegal wiretapping. I wanted to know how whether his Justice Department “would aggressively go after and investigate whether crimes have been committed.”

Obama responded:

What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.

So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.

Later, Biden seemed to distance himself from his previous answer when a Fox News personality asked him if an Obama administration would prosecute Bush administration officials. According to the Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp blog,

“That is not true,” Biden said to a question of pursuing criminal charges against members of the Bush administration. “I don’t know where that report is coming from.

“What is true is the United States Congress is trying to preserve records on questions that relate to whether or not the law has been violated by anyone,” Biden said. “No one is talking about President Bush. I never heard anyone mention President Bush in that context.

“No one is talking about pursuing President Bush criminally.”

So was Biden just attempting to shore up support among the Daily Kos-Code Pink lunatic fringe of his party? Who knows.

The Constitution provides a simple remedy for an out-of-control chief executive: impeachment. Congress has, so far, failed to pursue this option. Going after a president once he leaves office is the way they do it in banana republics.

Of course lefty nutters like the lawyers at the George Soros-funded Center for Constitutional Rights strongly support putting President George W. Bush on trial. They already had a practice run.

In 2006 the so-called International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration found President Bush and his administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. One of the “jurists” in the show trial was Ann Wright, the former U.S. army officer who quit the State Department to pursue a career as an anti-war activist. Wright helped fellow peacenik Cindy Sheehan run Camp Casey, the protest site outside the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. A preface to the verdict was written by Marxist historian Howard Zinn.

At the opening of the faux proceeding in New York City’s Riverside Church, a famed sanctuary of the lunatic left, Center for Constitutional Rights president Michael Ratner, a communist who wrote a book praising Che Guevara, laid out what he hoped this bit of political theater would accomplish:

It’s a real opening for us but it is not simply to go back to the normal. It’s not simply to save a remnant of democracy. The malady is much deeper than that. We need a radical transformation of our society. My hopes for today and for the future are that the truth will arouse resistance and with resistance there will be some change. I mean resistance of every sort, mobilizing, protesting, disobeying and disobedience.

Maybe Ratner should consider a second career as a community organizer.

Terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian is out of prison thanks to the efforts of his attorneys, the Washington Post reports. His chief counsel, Jonathan Turley, who is also a professor at George Washington University Law School, said “We are obviously relieved and delighted.”

Amazingly, immigration authorities decided that Al-Arian, a non-U.S. citizen, was not a flight risk, even though his wife, son, and daughter have moved to Egypt. His daughter, Laila Al-Arian, acknowledges that her father could be deported to Egypt and wants it to happen:

We know that the Egyptian government has already accepted for him to be basically deported there and that he would be welcomed there as a citizen of the world, really, and as someone who can contribute so much to the entire world once this whole ordeal is over. And that’s what we really hope will happen at this point.

Sami Al-Arian previously pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

As Andy McCarthy at National Review Online’s The Corner blog points out, when Judge James Moody Jr. sentenced Al-Arian in 2006, he threw the book at him, giving him the maximum allowed, 57 months. The New York Sun reported it this way:

    “You are a master manipulator. You looked your neighbors in the eyes and said you had nothing to do with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This trial exposed that as a lie,” Judge Moody said. “The evidence was clear in the this case that you were a leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”

    When evidence emerged at the trial of Al-Arian’s contacts with leaders of the terror group, his attorneys argued that he was involved solely in the group’s nonviolent wing and that his fund-raising activities were charitable in nature.

    Judge Moody also called that account “a lie.” He noted that Al-Arian worked intensely to restructure Palestinian Islamic Jihad to preserve financial support from Iran. However, the judge said Al-Arian did nothing to oppose the group’s terrorist acts and even laughed when discussing the suicide bombings in conversations secretly wiretapped by the FBI. “When it came to blowing up women and children, did you leap into action then?” Judge Moody asked rhetorically. “No. You lifted not one finger, made not one phone call.”

    Judge Moody faulted Al-Arian for condoning terrorist bombings in the Middle East, while raising his children comfortably in America. “Your children attend the finest universities this country had to offer while you raise money to blow up the children of others,” the judge said.

Al-Arian completed a nearly five-year prison sentence on the terrorism charge and has been ordered deported. He remains under house arrest in the U.S. pending trial for refusing to testify before a grand jury about other Islamic radicals despite having been granted prosecutorial immunity.

We’ve published research previously on Al-Arian. In the August 2005 issue of Organization Trends, Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha referenced Al-Arian’s terrorism trial in an article called, “The Council on American-Islamic Relations: The benign public face of America’s ‘Wahhabi Lobby.’” The liberal American Association of University Professors defended Al-Arian, as Malcolm A. Kline wrote in the April 2005 issue of Organization Trends. The article was entitled, ”The American Association of University Professors: To the AAUP, some academics deserve more ‘academic freedom’ than others.”

Another convicted terrorist, former lawyer Lynne Stewart, also remains at liberty. The disgraced Stewart now poses as a victim of an overreaching government, giving speeches about how she was supposedly mistreated by the government. The anti-American public interest law firm, Center for Constitutional Rights, publicly embraced Stewart, a Maoist and vocal supporter of Islamic fundamentalism. I wrote a profile of CCR that ran in the September 2006 issue of Organization Trends.

Michael Ratner (above, holding document) of the Center for Constitutional Rights rants against the country he hates most: the United States.

* * * * * 

Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court’s lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush that gives America’s terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen.*

The nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is deeply enmeshed in the politics of terrorism (take one guess on whose side) and has even taken money from groups linked to terrorism. CCR donors include the Ohio branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Safa Trust Inc., and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, all of which have been accused of connections to Islamist terror groups.

CCR is now jumping for joy, absurdly hailing the June 12 decision as a great triumph for the Constitution. (I profiled CCR two years ago, noting that the disturbingly effective group was at the forefront of the legal left’s push to give due process rights to America’s terrorist enemies.)

And yet the media doesn’t care to investigate CCR and its terrorist money trail, treating the fifth column law firm as a legitimate player in constitutional jurisprudence.

Media outlets’ descriptions of CCR are innocuous. Following the Boumediene decision, media described the Center as: “a public interest law firm that represented 37 detainees before the Supreme Court”(Baltimore Sun, no link); the firm that “has represented Guantanamo Bay detainees since 2002″ (Washington Post); the firm that has “filed the first lawsuits challenging the detentions” (Houston Chronicle); and, as a firm that “supports habeas corpus cases” (Philadelphia Daily News).

The Center, founded by radical attorney William Kunstler in 1966, has spent more than four decades trying to obstruct U.S. foreign policy and is anything but innocuous.

The Center scored a major legal victory in 2004 when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Rasul v. Bush that its clients, 16 foreign nationals captured during U.S. hostilities with the Taliban in Afghanistan, had the legal right to challenge their detentions in U.S. civilian courts.

CCR is now using the courts to pick the deep pockets of corporations in order to undermine national security and advance its foreign policy agenda. In one transparently vexatious lawsuit, the Center sued heavy-machinery maker Caterpillar, Inc., after an American protester was run over by an Israeli military Caterpillar D9 bulldozer on a mission in the “no man’s land” near the Egyptian border in 2003. CCR has also sued private contractors CACI International Inc. and Titan International for their alleged connection to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is headed by Michael Ratner, a wealthy communist who wrote a book praising mass murderer Che Guevara. Ratner, who is brother of New Jersey Nets owner/eminent domain abuser Bruce Ratner and journalist Ellen Ratner, recruited hundreds of pro bono lawyers to represent those held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. He favors putting the U.S. on trial for war crimes but opposed doing the same to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “If you want any kind of sense of legitimacy or fairness, you can’t just go after Saddam Hussein,” he told “Democracy Now” in 2003.

Ratner has said Cuba’s “accomplishments” under Castro have been “great,” and has denounced the U.S. “onslaught against the Cuban Revolution,” and the prosecution of the Cuban Five, spies convicted in Miami in 2001. He calls the late President Ronald Reagan a murderer.

Ratner addressed an exercise in extremist political theater, the “International Commission of Inquiry On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration,” at which he compared the president to Adolf Hitler and accused him of formulating a “plan for what has to be called a coup-d’etat in America.”

CCR also employs the granddaughter of the executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs, under the direction of the KGB, helped pass U.S. atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. CCR publicly embraced radical human rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, a vocal supporter of Islamic fundamentalism who was convicted of providing material support for Islamic terrorists.

CCR is funded by liberals, socialists, air-headed utopian idealists, communists, America haters, and traitors. The firm has received donations from George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Progressive Insurance’s Peter B. Lewis, intellectual Noam Chomsky, actors Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, “Stalin’s songbird” folk singer Pete Seeger, and the late Isabel Johnson Hiss (second wife of the late Soviet spy Alger Hiss).

Surely such an interesting law firm deserves a critical examination by the media.

*(John Yoo had an excellent op-ed entitled “The Supreme Court Goes to War” in the June 17 Wall Street Journal, and on the other side the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin wrote a ridiculous, orgiastic, ahistorical ballad in which he grossly misrepresents the views of the Founding Fathers.)

(Cross-posted from NewsBusters, this blog post is an expanded version of an earlier CRC blog post)

Much has already been written of the U.S. Supreme Court’s lawless, nonsensical decision in Boumediene v. Bush, the ruling that gives America’s terrorist enemies unprecedented access to our civilian court system, but little has been written about the aggressively anti-American public interest law firm that helped to make it happen. (You can’t miss the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin’s idiotic, ahistorical ballad in which he grossly misrepresents the views of the Founding Fathers.)

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which acted as co-counsel in the case, is jumping for joy, hailing the decision handed down this week as a great triumph for the Constitution. I profiled CCR two years ago, noting that the frighteningly effective group was at the forefront of the legal left’s push to give due process rights to America’s terrorist enemies.

The group is headed by Michael Ratner, a wealthy communist who wrote a book praising mass murderer Che Guevara.

It should surprise absolutely no one that since 2002 George Soros’s Open Society Institute has given CCR as much as $200,000.

POST SCRIPT June 17: John Yoo has an excellent op-ed entitled “The Supreme Court Goes to War” in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Supporters of Islamic totalitarianism are using courts to silence their critics and advance their agendas as the American mainstream media barely take notice.

Take the case of the billionaire alleged funder of terrorism, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, and his dogged critic, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld. Their story has been chronicled here by the Moving Picture Institute. (The sheikh defends himself at his own website.)

The litigious bin Mahfouz, a Saudi citizen, manufactured his own cause of action and then sued Ehrenfeld, a criminologist who wrote a book on terrorism financing, for libel in a British court, and –astonishingly— won. According to Ehrenfeld, a citizen of the United States, bin Mahfouz is “not a key figure in the book.”Ehrenfeld does not reside in the United Kingdom, is not a U.K. citizen, and did not offer her book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed—and How to Stop It, for sale in Britain.

She says bin Mahfouz gamed the legal system, arranging for 23 copies of her book to be imported into the U.K. in order to give that country’s courts jurisdiction. She did not defend the action, explaining that she refused to recognize the jurisdiction of a British court over her freedom of speech. In 2005 bin Mahfouz won a default judgment and the court ordered Ehrenfeld to pay 30,000 British pounds, publish an apology, and keep her books out of the U.K.

It should be noted that the British have very strange ideas about defamation. In the topsy-turvy world of British libel law, it is assumed that the statements alleged to have harmed the plaintiff’s reputation are false, which places the burden of proof squarely on the defendant. To digress for just a moment, the prospect of bringing such a legal regime to the U.S. would undoubtedly stimulate the salivary glands of members of the ambulance-chasing set also known as the American Trial Lawyers Association (a group that in a deft public relations move renamed itself the more respectable-sounding “American Association for Justice”).

As law professor Richard N. Winfield explains, fans of Islamic radicalism have discovered the loose libel laws of Jolly Olde England, which had led to the so-called “Arab Effect,” a term that describes “the surge of libel suits brought in recent years in English courts by wealthy Arab plaintiffs…[but] More important[ly], it describes the impact of these suits on the law and on coverage of the war on terrorism.” Winfield continues: 

“Despite negligible ties to England, and in some cases, despite minuscule publication of the offending coverage in England, the Arab plaintiffs found jurisdictional homes in the open arms of the English courts. And once jurisdiction was firmly established, the Arab plaintiffs exploited every advantage offered by England’s notoriously plaintiff-friendly libel laws.”

Clearly, bin Mahfouz is contributing to the “Arab Effect.” He has “he filed more than thirty-six lawsuits in London against various media and publishers, many of them American,” says Ehrenfeld. The publisher of American journalist Craig Unger was intimidated into not publishing his best-selling book House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties, in Britain. The publisher refused to publish the book in that green and pleasant land out of fear of being sued.

Stateside, Ehrenfeld is fighting back. She is suing bin Mahfouz in the U..S. court system and hopes to establish a precedent that would block foreign courts from exercising authority over American authors.

That Islamofascists have discovered the importance of legal forum isn’t all that shocking. Islamists and other enemies of Western civilization have been using the U.S. court system for years, with the enthusiastic complicity of useful idiot lawyers such as those at Greenwich Village’s Center for Constitutional Rights.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media have said next to nil about Ehrenfeld’s plight. A three-month Nexis search for mentions of “Rachel Ehrenfeld” yields only a handful of hits, among them: a 696-word AP article (Nov. 15), a 478-word item in The Economist (Nov. 8), a 715-word op-ed by two professors in the New York Times (Oct. 11), a 1,606-word New York Times book review focusing on bin Mahfouz’s adventures (Oct. 7), and a 721-word op-ed in the Washington Times (Oct. 19).

Given that the U.S. is fighting two wars against Islamism overseas, you’d think a courageous author’s struggle to uncover the truth about who is funding terrorist groups might merit a bit more attention from our press.