Laws are for little people.

Nancy Pelosi violates traffic laws to shop at shoe store.

U.S. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is above the law, as St. Helena, California residents learned last month.

Local Paul Smith wrote in to the St. Helena Starin June to describe Pelosi’s recent shoe shopping excursion at a fancy boutique, prompting a response from police chief Bill Imboden about the former House Speaker’s special status.

“Last Saturday afternoon (June 4) I’m standing on the west side of Main Street directly across from the Hunt Avenue intersection chatting with friends. Of course, traffic was heavy in both directions,” Smith wrote.

“A large perfectly polished and gleaming black SUV is attempting a left turn from Hunt onto southbound Main (not easy). Suddenly blue/red lights are flashing from the windshield area of the SUV (like you would see in an official fire/police vehicle),” he continued. “I said to my friends, I’ve never seen that before on a ‘regular’ vehicle and I’d think that’s illegal and dangerous. They agreed.”

That’s when the large black SUV jolted across two lanes of traffic, lights flashing, to park in front of a fire hydrant at the high end shoe boutique Footcandy.

“A St. Helena police car happens to be going northbound and pulls into the center lane and the officer starts shaking his arm and hollering at the driver of the SUV. While this goes on a man exits the SUV assisting a woman from the vehicle. She dashes off to Footcandy while he waits by the SUV in the red zone,” Smith explained.

The police officer then drove off without confronting the driver, he wrote.

“My friends and I are puzzled, say goodbye and I walk south on Main. As I approach Footcandy, Nancy Pelosi comes out with her shopping bags and the man assists her into the awaiting SUV. The SUV, with lights flashing, bursts back into southbound traffic,” Smith said.

“Wow! Privilege? Power? Whose SUV, taxpayers?” he questioned. “Say it ain’t so, Nancy.”

Laws are for the little people.


IRS Now Claims It Has ‘Lost’ Lois Lerner’s Emails

Isn’t this convenient?

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS has “lost” two years of emails belonging to former head of tax exempt organizations Lois Lerner. The IRS doesn’t have a record of her emails from January 2009 through April 2011, conveniently encompassing some of the same time when tea party groups were being targeted for extra scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution. The IRS says the loss of emails is due to a “computer crash” and claims emails from or to Lerner from the White House, Democratic members of Congress, the Treasury Department and Department of Justice cannot be located.

We can add obstruction of justice to the long list of crimes and misdemeanors committed by this administration.

Government backs up everything. Everything. They’ve probably got back-ups of your emails. This is the IRS we’re talking about here. If you can’t produce whatever record they want, they can turn the screws to you. It’s practically an administration of anal accountants. Yet we’re to believe that it just lost two years’ of emails to and from the central figure in the agency’s worst scandal?

The way to bet on this is that the administration stalled on turning over those emails long enough to locate them all and all copies of them and destroy all of them. If that’s what happened, that’s destruction of evidence.

Like Benghazi, a select committee is going to be necessary to get to the bottom of this. The IRS has not cooperated. The Democrats in Congress, some of whom may have been in on the targeting, have stonewalled the Republicans in Congress. If there was a deletion of the evidence as there appears to have been, multiple people would have to have known about it.

Laws are for the little people...

...or white males...

...or something.

Democrat Attorney General Shuts Down Corruption Investigation After Catching Democrats Accepting Cash Bribes, Because Racism

In 2010, when he was still attorney general of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, now its Republican governor, launched a corruption investigation targeting politicians in Philadelphia. The operation caught at least four of them, all Democrats, allegedly accepting bribes of cash and gifts adding up to at least $18,000. But after Democrat Kathleen Kane was elected attorney general in 2012, she reportedly shut down the investigation. Via The Inquirer of Philadelphia:

In a statement to The Inquirer on Friday, Kane called the investigation poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism, saying it had targeted African Americans.

Those who favored the sting believe Kane killed a solid investigation, led by experienced prosecutor Frank G. Fina, that had ensnared several public officials and had the potential to capture more. They said they were outraged at Kane's allegation that race had played a role in the case.

According to The Inquirer, prosecutors collected hundreds of hours of audio and video tape of the Democrats accepting bribes in the stings that the attorney general’s office ran. Sources close to the investigation also insist that the sting targeted both Democrats and Republicans, but that only Democrats were interested in learning more about the opportunity for corruption.

The investigation relied on lobbyist Tyron Ali, who reportedly agreed to wear a wire after being arrested for fraud. When Kane nixed the investigation, the attorney general’s office secretly dropped charges against Ali. The four politicians reportedly caught taking bribes were state representatives Louise Bishop (District 192), Vanessa Brown (District 190), Michelle Brownlee (District 195), and Ronald Waters (District 191). A now former traffic court judge, Thomasine Tynes, was also accused of accepting a Tiffany’s bracelet and not reporting it. According to The Inquirer, Waters said he may have gotten something for his birthday (the tape reportedly shows him accepting cash from Ali on his birthday), Brown declined to talk about the allegations, Brownlee claimed she couldn’t remember whether she took a bribe or not, while Bishop denied the allegation. The Inquirer has more on what the four said here.

It’s not just a race card Kane played. She appears to have played the gender card too. A statement from her office claimed reporting on the kyboshed investigation amounted to “nothing more than the Good Ol’ Boys club playing political games to discredit me.” It sounds like Kane’s fitting right into that club. Read The Inquirer’s whole report here.

Obamacare - Good enough for you...

...but not good enough for the guy who wrote it.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, one of Obamacare's architects and staunchest supporters, is also the only top congressional leader to exempt some of his staff from having to buy insurance through the law's new exchanges.

Reid is the exception among the other top congressional leaders. GOP House Speaker John Boehner, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell have all directed their staffs to join the exchange, their aides said.
After website woes, President pushes benefits of Obamacare

In the charged atmosphere surrounding Obamacare, Reid's decision only gives Republicans more ammo to attack Democrats already suffering politically from the law's botched rollout.

In September, Reid told reporters, "Let's stop these really juvenile political games -- the one dealing with health care for senators and House members and our staff. We are going to be part of exchanges, that's what the law says and we'll be part of that."

Any non-leftist would be kissing law school good-bye.

Leftist Hate-crime hoaxer now attends law school:

The latest criminal saga involving former University of Wyoming student Meghan Lanker-Simons has come to an end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Lanker-Simons announced her intention to plead no contest to a misdemeanor charge of interfering with a peace officer, reports the Laramie Boomerang.

In exchange for the plea, the strident leftist will receive a “minimal” fine and no prison sentence. The maximum penalty would have been a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.

The charge relates to a social media hoax police say Lanker-Simons perpetrated back in April by authoring an unsigned posting on a Facebook page called UW Crushes reading:

“I want to hatefuck Meg Lanker Simons so hard. That chick runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its so hot and makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican bitch.”

The posting brought national attention. There was an angry rally. Initially, the administration stood firmly behind Lanker-Simons. A school official denounced “rape culture.”

Laws are for the little people...

...not for our government aristocracy.

//If you dream of never paying another traffic ticket for the rest of your life, become a government employee in California. The OC Register reports that, thanks to a long obsolete program, hundreds of thousands of drivers in California can run red lights, drive down toll lanes without paying, and park illegally—with total impunity.

Those drivers have special license plates that were introduced 30 years ago to ensure police anonymity and protection; cars bearing them are registered without any home address appearing on DMV records. They eventually became unnecessary once laws were passed making all DMV information confidential. But the plates have since become a widespread perk of government employment: hundreds of thousands of judges, district attorneys, jail guards, National Park Service rangers, city council members, city attorneys, lawmakers, and other officials who face little threat of being targeted by criminals now enjoy the privilege:

“They’ve exempted themselves from the rules they’re enforcing,” said Chad Dornsife, director of the Best Highway Safety Practices Institute. “They know it, is what’s really sick about this. This isn’t some surprise that when the camera comes out they don’t have to worry about it.”…

“It’s a courtesy, law enforcement to law enforcement,” San Francisco Police Sgt. Tom Lee said. “We let it go.”

The plates have sometimes served as a perk negotiated by unions for members:
In some cases the secret plates have been negotiated as part of a labor contract. For example, museum security officers were added as part of an employment agreement with the state’s public safety union in 2001.

Officials can pass the plates to spouses and children, keep them when they retire, and can even retain them for three years after switching  to private sector work. And government oversight is so ineffectual that protected plates have been obtained by people with no connection whatsoever to government employment. One woman with the plates was found not to be a government employee nor related to one. She committed 411 violations without penalty.

It seems that in blue California, some people are more equal than others. Our guess is that similar shenanigans are taking place in other states, red as well as blue. Journalists should be on the lookout for routine abuses of power like this. If not exposed and kept in check, the culture of entitlement behind them will grow, feeding higher level corruption.

More "laws are for the little people"

Jonathan Turley writes:

I previously wrote a column how our country seems to have developed separate rules for the ruling elite and the rest of us. There is no better example than the lack of response of the Senate to the admitted perjury of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before Congress. While the Justice Department has prosecuted people for the smallest departure from the truth, including testimony before Congress, no one in the Senate is calling for an investigation, let alone a prosecution, of Clapper. For his part, Attorney General Eric Holder is continuing his political approach to enforcing the law and declining to even acknowledge the admitted perjury of Clapper. Now, in a truly bizarre moment, Clapper has written a letter of apology like an errant schoolboy to excuse his commission of a felony crime . . . and it appears to have been accepted. What is curious is that we do not have letters from senators like Dianne Feinstein apologizing to doing nothing when they were all aware that Clapper was lying in his public testimony. Welcome to America’s Animal Farm.

Laws are for the little people.

Progressive diva and Massachusetts' Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warrent practiced law without a license, and collected more than $200,000, while keeping her day job at Harvard. But you should pay more in taxes because you didn't build the roads or somesuch.

Professor Jacobson writes:

Soon after my original post, Elizabeth Warren’s law license problem, Mark Thompson at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen wrote a post taking an opposite view, No, Elizabeth Warren Did Not Engage in the Unauthorized Practice of Law.
That post by Thompson was cited far and wide, including at Memeorandum as well as at friendly conservative blogs which wanted to present the case for Warren to provide balance.
In light of my post this morning that Warren represented a Massachusetts client in Massachusetts on an issue related to Massachusetts law, Thompson has concluded in a new post today:

Professor Jacobson has uncovered this morning a case in which Elizabeth Warren entered an appearance in a federal appellate court as a representative of a Massachusetts client in a case that appears to have clearly implicated Massachusetts law. Although this is still a federal appellate court, because we’re dealing with a Massachusetts client and issues of Massachusetts law, this looks really, really bad for Professor Warren. With this bombshell, I would no longer view the case against her as weak.

Thompson also has updated his original post:

UPDATE 4 9/27: Professor Jacobson has uncovered new facts that I view as a gamechanger. Although I stand by my above analysis as applied to the facts known at the time, Professor Jacobson’s discovery this morning answers my objections to his arguments.

Making progress.
More to come.
Update: Thompson emails, for attribution:

Professor Jacobson:
I couldn’t figure out how to leave this as a comment at your site, but I wanted to let you know ASAP that I concede that your discovery this morning answers all of my arguments and is a gamechanger. Your diligence in investigating this matter is commendable.
Regards,
Mark Thompson

Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms adds:

Prof Jacobson, on his blog Legal Insurrection, is in line for an Ethics Hero award with his tenacity regarding Elizabeth Warren’s dubious qualifications to engage in the practice of law in Massachusetts. The overwhelming reaction by his colleagues in legal academia, and mine in the legal ethics community, has been to airily dismiss his arguments as trivial, far-fetched and thinly disguised political warfare, since Jacobson is an unapologetic conservative blogger (and a distinguished one.) Meanwhile, the mainstream media has, I think it is fair to say, completely ignored the story….
The rude brush off Prof. Jacobson is getting in this wagon-circling exercise is wrong in every way, and does injustice to every person and institution involved, including the Massachusetts legal establishment, the legal profession, ethical lawyers (which, believe it or not, the vast majority of them are), Senator Brown, the U.S. Senate, Massachusetts voters, and the American public….