Author: Andrew Sullivan

by Dave Weigel

Well, no, that headline is a joke. Adam Serwer, who's worked like the devil to debunk theories about why the Department of Justice isn't gunning for the New Black Panther Party, makes an important find:

[T]he case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division.

Conservative activist and former Voting Section Attorney J. Christian Adams identified United States Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli as the person who ordered the case dismissed, but he wasn't confirmed until March, three months after the case was downgraded. Adams also said that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes declared, “Never bring another lawsuit against a black or other national minority, apparently no matter what they do.” But according to the Raben Group, a progressive PR firm Fernades worked for prior to the Justice Department, she didn't leave her job with them until June 22, 2009, more than six months after the criminal case against the NBPP members was dropped. Even if she did say that — and none of my sources in the Voting Section ever heard her say anything of the sort — it wouldn't have had any bearing on the NBPP case, because she wasn't there when it was dismissed.

The conservative narrative goes like this: Eric Holder's DOJ got into office and skunked a successful case against the racist fringe New Black Panther Party because it doesn't want to defend white voting rights. (If anyone has a bunch of examples of white voters being repressed in the Obama era, please, send 'em my way.) In several segments about the case, Glenn Beck has tied the Panthers to Bill Ayers, Charles Ogletree, and Van Jones as the latest "militant group" pulling the strings on Obama policies. A simple issue — whether the Panthers should be prosecuted further for briefly showing off their nightsticks and glowering at voters outside of a mostly-black Philadelphia polling place — has been conflated into a catch-all storyline that really makes no sense.

by David Frum

Today, July 12, is not only Orange Day, but also the birthday of my paternal grandfather Saul Frum. Born in the Czarist empire in 1904, he migrated to Canada with his wife, my grandmother, in 1930. My father was born the next year. That lucky bit of timing is the reason I am typing at this computer today: Those in his family who remained behind in Europe were all murdered, with only one survivor. 

I think of my grandfather often, more and more as I near the age when I knew him. My own son is named for him. Saul was a man of little formal education, but considerable acquired culture. He would have greatly enjoyed the new Jewish Review of Books, a very exciting new magazine that has just published its second issue. An ardent Zionist (he died in Israel in 1978), he would I think have especially liked the contribution by Walter Russell Mead reviewing a study of Christian Zionism. 

[T]he establishment of the state of Israel was not just a Jewish project. Jews did the heavy lifting: the settlement of Palestine, defense of the Jewish community, and the development of national institutions were Jewish achievements. But the contribution of the Anglo-Protestant world to the rise of the Jewish state was not limited to occasional interventions by heavily lobbied political leaders. British and American Protestant support was more than an ace in the hole that Zionists were able to deploy at key moments like the Balfour Declaration or Truman's recognition of Israeli independence. …

All of this needs to be remembered. Neglect of the crucial and strategic contribution of gentiles to the success of the Zionist movement can lead to an impoverished and unrealistic understanding of Israel's history. It contributes to the view today that support for Israel by the United States reflects the occult power of Jews in American society. When a historical idea is false, and when it contributes to anti-Semitic ideas around the world, it is time for a new look at an old story.

by Chris Bodenner

It's really not fair to other advertisers to have Japan compete in this category:

by David Frum

Australia's Labor government acts to limit spending of welfare benefits on alcohol and drugs. (h/t Tim Montgomerie)

by Chris Bodenner

The latest FEC filings for SarahPAC – ostensibly to support conservative candidates – show a politician serious about building a campaign of her own. Kenneth Vogel parses the huge haul:

[P]erhaps most indicative of a more traditional, robust political operation were the $330,000 in fundraising costs reflected in the report, including $154,000 to HSP Direct, a direct-mail vendor that put together SarahPAC’s first direct-mail campaign. Palin had previously used primarily online fundraising techniques, which tend to have lower overhead but cannot necessarily equal the return rate of a well-targeted but more expensive traditional direct-mail campaign.

Reid Wilson digs deeper:

What's most notable is the number of small contributors Palin has attracted. More than 3/4 of her donations are listed as unitemized, meaning the individuals who wrote checks sent in less than $200. Much of Pres. Obama's fundraising success in '08 came from these small-dollar donors, meaning Palin has a grassroots folllowing — one she's started to build significantly earlier than Obama did.

Jay Newton-Small connects the dots of her of burgeoning campaign and notes that it "flies in the face of the MSM group think inside the Beltway." Ben Smith begins to come around:

This is a big political story, and one that has me rethinking Palin's future a bit

by Patrick Appel

Ambinder reported on Friday that Obama is in no rush. Jim Burroway wants the administration to appeal and for the case to go all the way to the Supreme Court:

There are only three ways to get rid of DOMA nationwide. Barring appeals by Obama’s Department of Justice, the first option is to get another forty-nine sets of similar rulings by federal judges in forty-nine more states. While it’s true that these Massachusetts rulings would serve as a precedent for subsequent rulings by other federal judges, those judges aren’t bound by them in the same way they would be a Supreme Court ruling. So the practical message the Obama administration would be sending if they chose not to appeal this case would be, “Congratulations, now go win 49 more. (And keep going if you want D.C., Puerto Rico and the other territories.)” I just don’t see that happening.

Should it get there, Andrew Koppelman thinks the case "has a good chance to squeak by with five votes."

St. Louis, Missouri, 10.43 am

by David Frum

We had some excitement on the FrumForum blog this weekend. One of your young bloggers, Alex Knepper, got into a controversy with the folks over at the NewsRealBlog. You can read the backstory here.

The NewsRealBlog folks posted ferocious denunciations on their site, accusing our young blogger of sexual perversion among other offenses. For good measure, they posted on his own Facebook page as well.

How do you deal with this kind of thing? Here's perspective from a former leftie, now mainstream liberal, who sometimes blogs under the pseudonym, Eugene Debs:

You’re like some mainstream liberal, circa 1969, having dialogues with the Bill Ayers of that day–in which Ayers is telling you that if you don’t agree with him that “we” should all “off the pigs”, and lead an armed revolution, then it is you who is betraying the “true” left.  Except for one thing–Ayers, Dohrn, etc. were kids then, in their early 20s.  But, in this case, you have mature, middle aged people as the heart of the crazy movement–it’s kids like Alex Knepper who are your only hope.  This is both good and bad–good in that youth has time on its side, bad in that the middle aged Tea Party/love Palin/call-Obama-a-socialist-Nazi lunatics are already in positions of influence throughout the media and, to some extent, political office, too (the Pauls come to mind). … I don’t know how you create a sane movement, but I guess it happens one day at a time.

by Dave Weigel

The Associated Press reported the death of Nate Henn this way.

Explosions tore through crowds watching the World Cup final at a rugby club and an Ethiopian restaurant, killing at least 74 people, including a Delaware man. Police feared an al-Qaida-linked Somali militant group was behind the attacks, as Uganda's president declared today, "We shall get them wherever they are." Invisible Children, a San Diego, California-based aid group that helps child soldiers, identified the dead American as one of its workers, Nate Henn, 25, who was killed on the rugby field. The group said Henn called Delaware home and had played rugby at the University of Delaware while studying psychology.

Reading that, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I talked to Nate. How long had he been in Uganda? Quite a while, because his Facebook feed was basically all Africa all the time. That wasn't surprising. Growing up in Delaware, Nate was part of a circle of friends who gathered at Bethel Baptist Church more than once a week. (I went to another church but liked to get together with my friends at Bethel.) He was younger than me, three years behind me at a rival high school, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s he was the overeager, energy-to-burn kid who was first to jump in the pool, first to put up his hand in a discussion, first to screw around. The image locked in my mind is him smiling victoriously after making someone exasperated.

But it didn't surprise me that he devoted his life to charity work. This was an extraordinary circle of friends, fun as hell, obsessed with pop culture, but absolutely devoted to living for Jesus Christ. Religious work, charity, mission work — this was simply what people did. The walls of the church were decorated with photographs and letters from families doing mission work in Africa or Asia.Many of us went to Bible college, and some of us became pastors.

Obviously I wasn't one of them. I left Delaware for England in 1998, left England for Chicago in 2000, and left Chicago for Washington in 2004. I spent four summers back in the state. During three of those summers one of my other friends directed three full-length action movies, casting Nate as a henchman in one of them. One of them was "premiered" at Bethel; all of them managed to pack in fight scenes, surrealism and pop culture references while driving home clear moral lessons. (I stand by the pop culture references in these films; one of the people Nate's character was henching for was a DVD bootlegger who can't unload his trunk of "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.) This was the most time I spent with Nate since high school, and I was struck by how much more serious he was, how excited he was about sports and school — before, he hadn't really seemed interested in either of those things.

It wasn't a surprise that Nate continued doing this, growing more and more serious about what he wanted to spend his life doing. I'm devastated by what happened. A lot of people loved Nate and depended on him, and it hurts to watch them post on his Facebook wall promises to "see you soon." It shouldn't hurt. They'll donate to the charity he worked for. They know he spent his last years on earth liberating children from war and terror, and that he is at peace and at rest with his Lord.

by Chris Bodenner

Before you ask a coworker to create a "missing" poster, make sure he doesn't hate cats. Or you.