Tag Archives: Lawfare

News

Group behind indictment of Governor Rick Perry got 500K donation from George Soros

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Here’s an article from Commentary magazine, which talks about how Democrats are trying to smear Republicans with fake charges.

Excerpt:

On April 13, 2013, Rosemary Lehmberg was pulled over for dangerous driving. She was found with an open bottle of vodka in the car, which is against the law, and her blood-alcohol level was .239 percent. (The legal limit is .08 percent. As a rule of thumb, at .1 you’re happy, at .2 you’re drunk, at .3 you’re passed out, and at .4 you’re dead. In other words, to use the technical term, she was blotto.) Taken to the police station, she was abusive and uncooperative to the point of being put in handcuffs and leg irons. She pled guilty to DWI and was sentenced to 45 days in jail and a $4000 fine. She served 20 days. Her license was suspended for 180 days.

This sort of thing happens every night in every city in the country. What made this unusual was that Lehmberg is the district attorney of Travis County, Texas, which is the county where Austin, the state capital, is located. That gives the district attorney of Travis County a lot of power to investigate public corruption. Indeed she heads the state’s Public Corruption unit.

Governor Rick Perry, not unreasonably, thought she had disgraced herself and should resign her office. She refused. To force her out, he threatened to veto the appropriation for the Public Corruption unit and, when she stilled refused, vetoed it.

For this the governor was indicted by a special prosecutor on two felony counts that, in theory, could send him to jail for the rest of his life.

[…]This is about as blatantly a political indictment as can be imagined. Jonathan Chait, no fan of Rick Perry, calls it unbelievably ridiculous. Even David Axelrod called the indictment “pretty sketchy.” Indeed the blow back from left, right, and center is so intense that Perry may well be the first public official to actually gain political clout from being indicted.

So now, if a governor vetoes a bill, it’s life imprisonment. In Texas.

But who brought this charge? A shadowy group called “Texans for Public Justice”:

Sometimes it seems like there isn’t a single political issue that a Soros-funded group isn’t involved in. Texans for Public Justice, one of the groups behind Rick Perry’s indictment charges, is part of a “progressive” coalition that has received $500,000 from liberal billionaire George Soros.

[…]According to an Open Society Institute press release, OSI has given $500,000 to help form a coalition that “could change the way the progressive community engages public policy in Texas.” Besides Texans for Public Justice, this coalition includes Texans Together, the Sierra Club, Texas Legal Services, La Fe Policy Research and Education Center, Public Citizen, and the Center for Public Policy.

This kind of judicial persecution of conservative politicians seems to happen a lot in Texas, though.

Remember Tom Delay?

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay on Monday sharply criticized the local prosecutor’s office that indicted both him and more recently fellow Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, calling it a “vendetta” and another example of the “criminalization of politics.”

In an interview with FoxNews.com, DeLay attacked nearly every aspect of the prosecution’s case against Perry — suggesting it was political retribution for the governor’s attempt to remove a county district attorney with a criminal record and a “conspiracy” likely traceable to Washington Democrats.

“There is no doubt [the case] is politically motivated,” the former House majority leader said. “Once again, the district attorney of Travis County presented a case, not unlike mine, that was very weak, if it was a case at all. … It’s a conspiracy to use the legal system to politicize politics.”

DeLay was indicted in 2005 by a Travis County grand jury for allegedly conspiring to break election laws several years earlier in a case that involved charges of money laundering.

He was convicted in January 2011 and sentenced to three years in prison. But he was allowed free on bail while appealing his conviction. The Texas Court of Appeals ruled in Sept. 2013 that the evidence in the case was “legally insufficient” to sustain the convictions and DeLay was formally acquitted.

It seems a slam dunk that Perry will be acquitted, too. But where does he go to get his reputation back before the 2016 election? Or is the legal system just there for leftists to use in order to criminalize people who disagree with them on policy?

News

Maine demands that pro-marriage group reveal donor names

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ABC News reports.

Excerpt:

Maine’s ethics panel fined a national anti-gay marriage group more than $50,000 on Wednesday and ordered it to reveal the donors who backed its efforts to repeal the state’s gay marriage law.

The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices found that the National Organization for Marriage violated campaign finance laws by failing to properly register as a ballot question committee and file financial reports in the 2009 referendum that struck down gay marriage. Same-sex unions were legalized by voters in 2012.

The commission also ruled that the organization must file a campaign finance report, which would force it to disclose the names of its donors. The National Organization for Marriage has fought for years to keep its donor list secret, saying doing so would put its contributors at risk for harassment and intimidation.

[…]”We didn’t create a scheme, we tried to follow the law,” Brian Brown, president of the Washington, D.C.-based organization, told the four-member panel on Wednesday.

Brown, who served as executive director of the National Organization for Marriage in 2009, was one of three members of the committee that led the Stand for Marriage Maine PAC.

Commissioners said his dual role and the fact that the national group controlled a majority of the PAC’s funds was problematic for its argument that the funds weren’t raised to influence the Maine campaign.

The group says that it’s being targeted because of its stance on gay marriage and that groups on the other side of the issue — such as the Human Rights Campaign — followed the same guidelines.

State investigators said that its examination of the National Organization for Marriage actions was brought by a specific complaint and that the organization could have sought a similar investigation into the Human Rights Campaign.

John Eastman, a National Organization for Marriage lawyer, said that it intends to file a complaint against HRC in addition to filing an appeal.

The Human Rights Campaign mentioned in the article called the Family Research Council a “hate group”. The FRC was the target of an act of domestic terrorism by a gay activist who also thought that the Family Research Council was a “hate group”. The Human Rights Campaign was also implicated in the IRS leak of NOM donors.

What will gay activists do with the list of donor names? Ask Brendan Eich what they will do with it.

News

How far will global warming alarmists go to destroy critics like Mark Steyn?

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A post from Free Think U tells you everything you need to know about whether global warming is based in evidence or intimidation.

Excerpt:

The critical point in this campaign is a defamation lawsuit by global warming promoter Michael Mann against Mark Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

[…] Consider the specific argument Mann is making, as summed up in the report I linked to above.

“In the articles, Mann says in his lawsuit, the think tank and the publication ignored more than half a dozen investigations that found no scientific wrongdoing, focusing almost exclusively on the Penn State inquiry in order to call him a fraud. CEI also mentioned the National Academy of Science’s investigation, but dismissed those findings by saying the body had obtained information from Penn State, meaning the inquiry was ‘not truly independent.’ The basis mentioned by CEI to call the Penn State investigation a whitewash was stating it had only interviewed Mann, and ‘seemingly ignored the content of the emails.’”

Even more ominous, the DC Superior Court, which let the suit proceed, embraced this reasoning in its ruling.

“The CEI Defendants’ persistence despite the EPA and other investigative bodies’ conclusion that Plaintiff’s work is accurate (or that there is no evidence of data manipulation) is equal to a blatant disregard for the falsity of their statements.”

In other words, Steyn’s evaluation of Mann’s scientific claims can be legally suppressed because Steyn dares to question the conclusions of established scientific institutions connected to the government. On this basis, the DC Superior Court arrives at the preposterous conclusion that it is a violation of Mann’s rights to “question his intellect and reasoning.” That’s an awfully nice prerogative to be granted by government: an exemption against any challenge to your reasoning.

[…]Mann is attempting to install himself as a kind of American Lysenko. Trofim Lysenko was the Soviet scientist who ingratiated himself to Joseph Stalin and got his crackpot theories on genetics installed as official dogma, effectively killing the study of biology in the Soviet Union. Under Lysenko, the state had an established and official scientific doctrine, and you risked persecution if you questioned it. Mann’s libel suit is an attempt to establish that same principle here.

Mann has recently declared himself to be both a scientist and a political activist. But in attempting to intimidate his critics and suppress free debate on global warming, he is violating the fundamental rules of both science and politics. If it is a sin to doubt, then there is no science. If it is a crime to dissent, then there is no politics.

In one way I think the tactics of censors in general are interesting because they show us how Darwinism came to be accepted as “science” despite the back that it is at odds with the evidence from origin of life studies and the Cambrian explosion, not to mention molecular machinery in the cell. The science doesn’t matter if the government and the courts make it illegal to question the dogma.

Another reason never to write under your real name. Use an alias, because these people don’t play games. They will go after you in your work place and destroy your ability to earn a living. Don’t make it easy for them.