I will be on the nationwide Rusty Humphries radio show today at 6:45 ET to talk about military voting and my latest at Pajamas Media: DOJ tells soldiers, Go Bother Someone Else!

here.

“Yehoshea and Fradel Rothstein were arrested Feb. 10 and charged with forgery, offering a false instrument for filing and false registration, felonies. Yehoshea Rothstein made his first appearance in village court Wednesday, and the case was adjourned to May 11.”  Full story at the Times Herald Record.

The Department of Justice has launched a new PR effort to help military voters, or at least lead people to believe they are helping military voters.  Full story here.

AP: “An ex-school superintendent and former county clerk are facing decades in federal prison for conspiring with a former judge and others to gain power and control politics in an eastern Kentucky county.”

Here.

The Richmond Times Dispatch has an editorial today picking up on the story first broken at Pajamas Media on disparate treatment of Freedom of Information Requests inside the Civil Rights Division at Justice.  The editorial concludes:

“The story raises two serious concerns. The first is a pattern of politicization at the Justice Department — witness, e.g., the squelching of an inquiry into possible voter intimidation in Philadelphia in 2008. Where is all the alarm about impartiality that arose when the Bush administration allegedly was dismissing U.S. attorneys for political reasons?

The second concern is the integrity of the FOIA process. If the department has indeed given FOIA requests disparate treatment for ideological reasons, that is despicable — regardless of which direction the favoritism flows. Stonewalling liberal groups would be just as bad as stonewalling conservative ones.”

The Press of Atlantic City has more.

Charles Bullock and Keith Gaddie have an article at Southern Political Report.  It has a dire prediction if jurisdictions avoid submitting redistricting plans (or voter ID laws for that matter) to the Justice Department and go straight to district court instead:

“If hundreds (or thousands) of jurisdictions doubted the fairness of DOJ and went to court, the limited number of judges would quickly become overwhelmed. DOJ’s resources would also be stretched as its attorneys respond to interrogatories, depose opposition witnesses, review expert reports, prepare their own witnesses to testify, and participate in trials. The judicial system could not cope should even a small fraction of the preclearance jurisdictions go to court.”

You don’t say.  That might be one more reason for states to pursue going to court instead, because DOJ will be ill equipped to handle the litigation as much as the Courts will.   The solution proposed in the article.:

“To avoid the potential of a judicial log-jam, DOJ attorneys would be well-served to signal to submitting authorities that they can expect treatment free of partisan overtones if they follow the administrative route to preclearance. “

Are you kidding?  What do you expect them to say, to “signal”?  Of course they will say this, but a scorpion will remain a scorpion no matter what it tells the frog.  Perhaps the frog will remind the scorpion of some cases the scorpion was involved in, including Johnson v. Miller, Hays v. Louisiana, Scott v. Department of Justice and Smith v. Beasley.

The Dispatch.