Whenever you start something in life–something that comes from a deep-seeded passion for thing–you naturally begin to trek down that sober and lonely path that most of us have only recently identified as arrogance.

Arrogance–by definition–is an offensive display of superiority or self-importance wrought forth by overbearing pride.

So sue me.

I’m arrogant. I’ve been called such. But I’m also a world-class asshole by others–a hateful, spiteful little man who knows nothing about what he does, only that he thinks he knows.

(Yeah. Okay. I’m feeling the love there…!)

And the truth is, I don’t care how people view me. Looks, appearances, whatever you like to call it…I’m not bothered by it. I used to be. Not too long ago. But I’ve grown accustomed to the way I am. You could call me a slob and I would just simply shrug.

Or a pig.

Whatever floats your boat. And to be honest, I’ve heard these kinds of words or phrases hurled in my direction all my life. When you’ve been in my shoes, seen the things that I’ve seen, you quickly learn ways to protect and shield yourself from all the verbal abuse that comes your way.

You withdraw from things, from people, from life itself and just live in a vacuum.

No…this isn’t a pity party on my part. I’m simply explaining things the best I can. In the real world, I have few friends. Not because I’ve alienated myself from people. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: I just lose touch and track of people over time.

During my job tenures, I established close knit family ties with some of the people I’ve worked with, always stayed on as being part of the “team”, but I’m always by myself. Always alone. I don’t socialize very well because I’m afraid to open up.

So I keep things to myself. I keep things bottled up for as long as possible.

Such things would ruin normal people. But I’ve learned to adapt and adjust to my surroundings in my own way. The stress. The anxiety. The depression. Everything that wracks the human psyche and spits out the unsavory pieces afterwards…

It’s how I’ve lived my life. And along the way I’ve picked up and honed traits that have pissed the wrong people off time and again. And I’ve gotten in trouble for it. Paid the price. Accepted the consequences as they came.

As one of my contacts said: “…you will always fail.”

And in truth…? I’ve always failed. Success for me is an alien concept–because such a moment in time doesn’t last very long. It comes and it goes. And if I ever truly became successful, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

I’m arrogant at times because I choose to be arrogant. Not because I like to be a total prick of the world either. But because I choose to be. Because I have this overpowering faith in my abilities as a writer whenever I look at my writing.

I see the potential that is there. I see the possibilities that have yet to exist. I look beyond the box that everyone else is presently in and see things that life has always hinted at in both fantasy and dreams.

What I write becomes a part of my experience, my quest to unlock the hidden treasures of the known universe. You can’t simply gain knowledge by a wave of a magic wand. You have to earn it.

Nobody gave me the keys to becoming a successful writer. I had to learn the craft on my own–through reading and books. I applied what I knew to my craft wherever I could, but never thought of myself as superior to everyone.

Just a good writer. My blind faith in myself become my source of arrogance. Because nobody else had faith in me. Few didn’t think I could cut it as a writer. Only because fewer still understood what it took to become one.

Like they say all over cyberspace, the road to being a writer is a lonely one. No one is your friend. No one is an ally. But you’re surrounded by enemies left and right who would rather cut you down than support you on your quest.

I accept that.

I’ve known that my path wouldn’t win me that many friends. But it would generate a lot of enemies because I was always writing against the grain of civilization. The foundation of writing and publishing. I would be challenging doctrine and established dogma that has stood for well over 100 years.

I knew what I was getting myself into the moment that I started writing. The moment my imagination took hold and brought me to this point many years later. I knew that what I was doing wouldn’t be accepted by a lot of people. 

But I did it anyway. My only mistake along the way was trying to get people to understand my position. I thought that if I did that, it would make my job all that easier. Turns out I was wrong. (And still am.)

The people that control the purse strings don’t want their absolute authority challenged. Only that it is accepted as blind faith in itself. A show of arrogance that is well placed because it is part of their mandate–a well established line of obedience and acceptance in a long line of storied tradition.

I only found out this through years of pursuing what I had hoped would be a quick jaunt into traditional publishing. These people are so set in their ways, that nothing (and I mean nothing) could ever upset that.

They despise the new writer as much as they despise new direction and new ideas. They don’t like conformity so long as they are the ones that are doing the conforming.

Do or die. It’s that simple.

But as Master Yoda once said: “Do or do not. There is no try.”

So I do it. I decided one day that I won’t play by the same rules as everyone else. I decided to lash out at people and out at the mainstream.

I decided on whether or not I want to be arrogant.

However, pride also has its price. I still remain alienated from the writer community. I can’t conform to their way of thinking and doing because it’s simply not mine. Like two opposing forces, we’ll never meet on equal terms.

We’re both dead set in our ways and our mode of thinking. Neither one of us plans to back down anytime soon.

I realize that I’ll never become famous, never make a shit load of money off my books, but that’s not the reason why I write these 330,000+ word novels. Why I spend months and years hashing things out on my own until I’m sure that it’s going to work.

Because nobody else will do the work for me.

I am alone in my endeavor. I am alone because it’s the only way I can be assured that I will succeed at some point in my life–no matter how much time it takes. With too many people, too many voices, both the idea and the dream can be easily corrupted and/or destroyed.

Leaving you with only bits and pieces to show for your effort.

I can’t allow that to happen.

So in writing, I’m only projecting my fierce passion and determination for my work. Only I can make it happen. Only I can finish these mammoth projects and go onto the next.

Being arrogant, being a jerk are just facets of my life. But you can never go through it by simply being nice 24/7.

Sometimes…you have to let your dark side come out and play every once in awhile too.

It’s the only way we survive. It’s the only way we’ll be able to win in the end.

(I strongly suspect that the REASON why Ron Paul doesn’t want to deal with his newsletters is because he doesn’t want to openly acknowledge how much of a racist bigot he is and a conspiracy nut to boot.)

Newt Gingrich Presses Ron Paul to Explain Racist Newsletters

Newt Gingrich on Friday challenged GOP rival Ron Paul to explain more than a decade’s worth of incendiary newsletters that he has disavowed.

The newsletters contain bigotry against black, Jews, and gays and an obsession with conspiracies.

“These things are really nasty, and he didn’t know about it, wasn’t aware of it,” said Gingrich adding “But he’s sufficiently ready to be president? It strikes me it raises some fundamental questions about him.”

Ron Paul has tried since 2001 to disassociate himself from the newsletters which starting in 1985 bore the name “Ron Paul Investment Letter”, “Ron Paul Survival Report,” and the “Ron Paul Political Report.”

Paul this week told ABC News’ Jon Karl that he “disavowed those messages” and added that he was practicing medicine at the time and that other people wrote part of the letters for him.

He even walked out of an interview on CNN on Wednesday claiming that he didn’t write the newsletters.

But Paul has indicated that he knew of the newsletters as far back as 1995 and even vouched for the accuracy and admitted writing at least some of the passages in 1996.

During a bruising 1996 Congressional campaign, Paul’s Democratic opponent Charles “lefty” Morris surfaced a 1992 newsletter which stated that 95 percent of black men in Washington “are criminal or entirely criminal.”

Paul told the Dallas Morning News in 1996 that he was being taken out of context and the columns should be read in their entirety.

The 1992 newsletter also stated that “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenage male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be.”

Paul did not deny to Dallas paper that he made the statement about the swiftness of black men.

“If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” Paul said.

Paul again vouched for a 1993 edition of the “Ron Paul Survival Report” addressed to “Dear Frightened American” warns of a “national emergency” when the government will close all banks and seize accounts to pay off debts, particularly for the war on drugs.”

According to The Austin American Statesman, the newsletter went on to urge readers to buy foreign passports to better hide their assets from the federal government.

Paul countered at the time to the San Antonio Express-News that he has given readers of his newsletters legal and investment and personal security advice for some time.

“For Lefty to question the right of Americans to provide for their safety from terrorists and for financial security through legal means tells you where Lefty is coming from,” Paul told the San Antonio Express-News.

Paul again in 1996 acknowledged that he wrote a 1992 newsletter that calls the late Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected from the south to the U.S. House, a “fraud” and an “empress without clothes.”

Paul told the Austin American Statesman paper he was contrasting Jordan’s political views with his own.

“The causes she so strongly advocated were for more government, more and more regulations and more and more taxes,” said Paul.

It wasn’t until 2001 that Paul began to deny that the words in the newsletters weren’t his, telling the Texas Monthly that others had written it because it was “too confusing.”

“I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me,” Paul said.

“It wasn’t my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around.”

(I love how Ron Paul claims that he never wrote these things in his newsletters and then published them UNDER HIS NAME. So…he has an evil twin who’s barking mad? lol)

In ad for newsletter, Ron Paul forecast “race war”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A direct-mail solicitation for Ron Paul’s political and investment newsletters two decades ago warned of a “coming race war in our big cities” and of a “federal-homosexual cover-up” to play down the impact of AIDS.

The eight-page letter, which appears to carry Paul’s signature at the end, also warns that the U.S. government’s redesign of currency to include different colors – a move aimed at thwarting counterfeiters – actually was part of a plot to allow the government to track Americans using the “new money.”

The letter urges readers to subscribe to Paul’s newsletters so that he could “tell you how you can save yourself and your family” from an overbearing government.

The letter’s details emerge at a time when Paul, now a contender for the Republican nomination for president, is under fire over reports that his newsletters contained racist, anti-homosexual and anti-Israel rants.

Reports of the newsletters’ contents have Paul’s campaign scrambling to deny that he wrote the inflammatory articles.

Among other things, the articles called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a “world-class philanderer,” criticized the U.S. holiday bearing King’s name as “Hate Whitey Day,” and said that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

As Paul made a campaign stop in Manchester, Iowa, on Thursday, his Iowa chairman, Drew Ivers, repeated Paul’s assertions that he did not write the articles that resurfaced this week in a report in the Weekly Standard magazine.

Paul has said that he is not sure who wrote the articles that were published under his name. He has said the articles do not reflect his views, and noted that his public stances – supporting gays in the military for example – have run counter to the incendiary statements in the newsletters.

In an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger on Wednesday, Paul said of the newsletter’s articles: “I didn’t write them. I didn’t read them at the time and I disavow them.”

When Borger continued to pursue the subject, Paul removed his microphone and walked out of the interview.

“It is ridiculous to imply that Ron Paul is a bigot, racist, or unethical,” Ivers said.

However, Ivers said, Paul does not deny or retract material that Paul has written under his own signature, such as the letter promoting Paul’s newsletters.

When asked whether that meant Paul believed there was a government conspiracy to cover up the impact of AIDS, Ivers said, “I don’t think he embraces that.”

Paul’s newsletters “showed good factual information and investment information,” Ivers said. “It was a public service, helping people understand and equip them to avoid an unsound monetary policy.”

“EXTRAORDINARY SOURCES”

The letter promoting Paul’s newsletters was written about 1993. It was during a period in which Paul – who left Congress in 1985 after serving about eight years – returned to Washington after a decade’s absence.

The letter was provided to Reuters by James Kirchick, a contributing editor for The New Republic magazine. He says he found the letter in archives of political literature maintained by the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Early in the 2008 presidential campaign – in which Paul was a candidate – Kirchick published an article in The New Republic in which he described Paul as “not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing – but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.”

The letter promoting Paul’s newsletters claims that Paul – through what he describes as a network of “extraordinary sources” in Congress, the White House, the Treasury and Justice departments, the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service – had acquired unique insider information that would his subscribers to “neutralize” the plans of “powerbrokers.”

Paul’s letter went on to describe various plots and schemes that he had “unmasked,” including a “plot for world government, world money and world central banking.” He also claimed to have exposed a plan by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to “suspend the Constitution” in a falsely declared national emergency.

Despite being “told not to talk,” Paul wrote that his newsletters also “laid bare” the “Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica,” and a “federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS.”

Paul claimed that his “training as a physician” helped him “see through” this alleged cover-up.

Paul also suggested that a planned U.S. currency with new notes designed to curb counterfeiting and money laundering would result in the distribution of “totalitarian bills” that “were tinted pink and blue and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads and chemical alarms.”

Paul said the money was designed to allow authorities to “keep track of American cash and American citizens.”

He urged the letter’s readers to send in $99, which would buy subscriptions to his monthly political and investment newsletters, a copy of his book “Surviving the New Money,” an investment manual and access to the “unlisted phone number of my Financial Hotline for fast breaking news.”

Judge rules against Arizona sheriff in immigrant stops

(Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday barred high profile Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio from detaining people simply for being in the country illegally, in a ruling that faulted the local lawman for enforcing federal immigration law.

The 40-page written opinion by U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow came on the same day he issued legal sanctions against Arpaio over destroyed documents.

The decisions come as a further blow for the controversial sheriff, who already has faced rebukes from the U.S. Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

Both rulings by Snow stemmed from a 2007 civil lawsuit against Arpaio and his agency, which accuses his officers of racial profiling of Latinos in traffic stops the judge found were conducted as immigration sweeps.

The judge also said officers with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department (MCSO), which covers Phoenix and surrounding areas, circulated emails that “compared Mexicans to dogs” and portrayed them “as drunks.”

“Local law enforcement agencies, such as MCSO, may not enforce civil federal immigration law,” Snow said in his written opinion.

He added that the sheriff’s agency was “hereby enjoined” from detaining “any person based only on knowledge or reasonable belief, without more, that the person is unlawfully present within the United States.”

In his ruling, Snow also granted a request by plaintiffs to certify the lawsuit as a class action.

He defined the class action as encompassing all Latinos “stopped, detained, questioned or searched” by Arpaio’s officers “while driving or sitting in a vehicle” on roads or parking areas in Maricopa County.

EVIDENCE DESTRUCTION

Snow also cited the admitted destruction of emails and patrol records by Arpaio’s office related to the case. He noted the sheriff’s agency never contested those documents were shredded rather than lost.

Further proceedings in the case are expected to be decided by Snow rather than a jury because the plaintiffs have not requested a jury trial.

Snow’s sanctions against Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office were outlined in written opinions issued a day after the judge heard oral arguments on the matter.

Separately last week, the U.S. Justice Department issued a scathing report accusing Arpaio and his deputies of engaging in a “pervasive culture of discriminatory bias” and violating civil rights laws by singling out Latinos for unlawful detention and arrests.

The same day, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security barred Arpaio’s deputies from screening jail inmates for their immigration status.

Arpaio was given until January 4 to agree to negotiations addressing the abuses cited by the Justice Department or face a request for a court order requiring compliance.

The Justice Department’s report and the similar allegations raised in the lawsuit relate to Arpaio’s controversial efforts to crack down on illegal immigration in Maricopa County.

Those efforts have earned him accolades in conservative political circles. Several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination sought his endorsement, which ultimately went to Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Arpaio has denied that his department engages in racial profiling and accused the Justice Department under President Barack Obama of undermining immigration enforcement.

A lawyer for Arpaio was not available for comment.

The sheriff was a strong supporter of controversial new Arizona law SB 1070, requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain and suspect of being in the country illegally.

That law is under challenge by the Obama administration in a case the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide next year.

Aside from the allegation of racial profiling, Arpaio also faces a firestorm over media reports that his office might have given short shrift to hundreds of sex-crime investigations.

(For once, I’d wish the Republicans would SHOW some evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country–instead of trying to limit people’s right to vote through laws that oppress and discriminate against the poor and minorities…)

Obama administration blocks South Carolina voter ID law

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration on Friday blocked a new South Carolina law that requires voters to have photo identification because of concerns it would hurt minorities’ ability to cast a ballot.

Republican Governor Nikki Haley in May signed into law a measure that says voters must show a driver’s license, passport or military identification along with their voter registration card in order to vote.

Under the law, anyone who wants to vote but does not have a photo identification must obtain a new voter registration card that includes a photo. A birth certificate can be used to prove identity.

The Justice Department said the requirement could harm the right to vote of tens of thousands of people, noting that just over a third of the state’s minorities who are registered voters did not have a driver’s license.

“The state’s data demonstrate that non-white voters are both significantly burdened” by the law and “disproportionately unlikely to possess the most common types of photo identification” needed, Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in a letter to the state.

Governor Haley called the Justice Department’s move “outrageous.”

“We plan to look at every possible option to get this terrible, clearly political decision overturned so we can protect the integrity of our electoral process,” she said in an emailed statement.

The NAACP, a civil rights group, was pleased with the decision.

“While the ID may have been free, the underlying documents were not,” said the group, which called getting the voting documents sometimes “extremely complex and cost prohibitive.”

“While some may quibble over the intent, there is no doubt the effect of this law would disproportionately block black South Carolinians from voting,” the group said.

FRAUD VERSUS SUPPRESSION

Democrats have described the law as a “voter suppression” effort against minorities who historically do not always have photo identification cards. Republicans countered that their goal was to prevent voter fraud.

However, Perez said that South Carolina’s submission to the Justice Department did not offer any evidence of voter fraud that was not addressed by existing law and that “arguably could be deterred by requiring voters to present only photo identification at the polls.”

The Justice Department said plans by state officials to provide exemptions to the photo identification requirement were incomplete and vague. The state also has not finalized education and training materials.

If those issues were addressed, the Justice Department said the state could resubmit its plans and officials would consider revising its position.

The Justice Department move marks an escalation in the battle between the Obama administration and Republicans who control the legislatures in some states just 11 months before the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.

Obama lost South Carolina in the 2008 presidential race by a nine-point margin to his Republican opponent John McCain.

Under the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, certain states like South Carolina must seek approval from the Justice Department or the federal courts for changes made to state voting laws and boundaries for voting districts.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this month said his team was reviewing changes to voting laws in other states including Florida and Texas and will challenge any that are discriminatory in violation of the federal voting rights law.

“The reality is that – in jurisdictions across the country – both overt and subtle forms of discrimination remain all too common,” he said in a speech in Austin, Texas.

The Justice Department has also challenged a new election map drawn by Republicans in Texas, arguing that it does not fairly represent the exponential growth in Hispanic voters. Hispanics largely have supported Democrats in past elections.

(From what I could tell, Boehner was NOT happy.^_^)

Democrats turn tables on GOP as Boehner relents on payroll-tax deal

In a stunning reversal, House Speaker John Boehner late Thursday abandoned a bid to force Senate Democrats to the bargaining table to resolve an impasse over the expiring payroll tax cut – a strategy that had risked tax hike for some 160 million American workers.

In the end, carrying on the fight was a losing proposition for a party that took back the House in 2011 on a pledge never to raise taxes. And – in a new development – Democrats learned to say, “No.”

The deal marks a capitulation by the speaker, who appeared at the podium alone to announce the agreement, worked out with Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada and endorsed by President Obama.

It also marks a breakthrough for Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama, who said “no” from the start of this impasse – and stuck with it.

As a result, near empty chambers in the House and Senate on Friday will pass by unanimous consent a slightly modified version of a Senate bill that extends by two months the payroll-tax cut and other expiring measures, congressional leaders hope.

If the bill passes Friday, Obama will sign it before joining his family for vacation in Hawaii. If any member objects, the next step would be to call the full House or Senate back into session next week, when the measure is all but certain to pass.

This agreement means that the payroll tax cut, worth about $40 on the average paycheck, will remain in effect through February. Federal jobless benefits up to 99 weeks will also continue, and a proposed 27.4 percent payment cut for physicians serving Medicare patients will not take place on Jan. 1.

For five days, House Republicans struggled for traction to get the Senate to the negotiating table to take up the House version of that bill, which extended expiring provisions for a full year, and the so-called “doc fix” by two years. But by midweek, they found themselves isolated and fighting alone.

In contrast with previous standoffs, this time the White House and Senate majority leader Harry Reid didn’t budge or even blink.

“Democrats learned to say, ‘no,’ and it worked for them,” says Stan Collender, a longtime federal budget analyst now with Qorvis Communications in Washington.

When Speaker Boehner on Thursday renewed calls for the Senate to appoint conferees to work out a one-year bill, Senator Reid declined. “Once the House passes the Senate’s bipartisan compromise to hold middle-class families harmless while we work out our differences, I will be happy to restart the negotiating process to forge a year-long extension,” Reid said.

When Boehner rang up Obama, requesting that he send advisers to Capitol Hill to discuss flaws in the Senate plan, the president declined. “Enough is enough,” he said at a rally with Americans concerned about a payroll tax hike. “The people standing with me today can’t afford any more games.”

“The House needs to pass a short-term version of this compromise, and then we should negotiate an agreement as quickly as possible to extend the payroll-tax cut and unemployment insurance for the rest of 2012,” he added.

In a final blow, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday broke silence to urge Republicans to accept the Senate plan and for Democrats to name negotiators to an eventual conference over a one-year extension. That proposal became, in effect, the compromise that broke the impasse.

Up until this week, House Republicans, backed by a strong freshmen class stared down Senate Democrats and the Obama White House in one clash after another. With the new GOP House majority, the conversation on Capitol Hill shifted from stimulus spending to deficit cutting, from new green energy to fossil fuels. Deficit was cutting in.

Tax hikes, including for the highest income taxpayers, was out.

The president tried to compromise with the new majority and Senate Democrats capitulated, dismaying elements of the Democratic base. Republicans won every encounter.

House Republicans threatened to shut down the government over unfinished spending bills for fiscal year 2011 – a standoff that was settled after Democrats agreed to billions in spending cuts.

Boehner announced a new rule for raising the national debt limit – that any hike in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by at least equal spending cuts – and took the nation to the brink of a first-ever default on the national debt to hold that line. Negotiations between Boehner and Obama broke down after GOP conservatives rebelled at reports that the Speaker had agreed to $800 billion in revenue hikes.

Until now, House Republicans had stopped the Democratic agenda cold. Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget and jobs program were blocked in the House, and his legacy from the last Congress – health-care and Wall Street reforms – placed under permanent siege.

But by late August, Democrats were weary of appearing rolled the by the tea-party wing of the House Republican caucus – and heartened by signs that the public mood was turning against them.

The debt-ceiling debacle, which produced the first-ever downgrade of the US credit rating, battered the reputation of Congress, now at record low levels. It also battered public perception of the tea-party movement and of House Republicans, who were especially blamed for the brinkmanship in Congress.

“Our data shows that Americans want compromise in Washington more than sticking to principle,” says Frank Newport, editor of the Gallup Poll.

After the debt-ceiling crisis in August, “We saw a big drop in several measures,” he adds. “Economic confidence dropped nearly 20 points. Faith in Congress is so low now it’s discouraging in a democracy.” In a survey of the perceived honesty of various professions, Congress ranked dead last with lobbyists and car salesmen.

Boehner appeared to recognize that shift in public mood. In a two-hour conference call on Saturday, Boehner called the Senate bill to extend expiring measures a victory. But conservatives strongly objected. They called on Boehner to reject the Senate’s two-month extension and hold the line for the one-year House extension, including approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and a reduction of unemployment benefits from 99 to 59 weeks.

The House on Tuesday voted, 229 to 193, to reject the Senate bill and hold out for a new negotiation with the Senate over a one-year extension. But this time, Senate Democrats had resolved not to cave.

“Republicans and Democrats already negotiated an agreement and there is no time and no need to haggle over this any further,” says Sen. Charles Schumer (D) of New York in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday.

Even the editorial board of conservative-leaning The Wall Street Journal turned against them, dubbing GOP strategy over the expiring payroll-tax cuts “a fiasco.” Provoking a crisis over an expiring tax cut affecting 160 million Americans was a tough sell. Most Americans supported extending the payroll-tax cut. By rejecting a Senate bill to extend those cuts, House Republicans, for the first time, appeared to be on the side of a tax hike.

Democrats saw the payroll tax clash as an opportunity to end a disappointing year on offense.”It was opportunistic,” says analyst Mr. Collender. “Shortly after the debt-ceiling fight in August was the point at which ‘no’ for Democrats started to be an acceptable answer.”

Until that point, Democrats were “reflecting the president,” he adds. “The president was trying to compromise, but each time they found that House Republicans kept raising the bar, and they were getting hurt with their base by appearing to be weak.”

But with the sharp turn in public-approval ratings after the debt-ceiling debacle, Democrats grew bolder in opposition and, in the end, left House GOP leaders no place to go but over a cliff.

“Support for Congress in general is close to its lowest point ever. Republicans are generally getting blamed for that, and support for the tea party is at its lowest point since the 2010 election. Put that together, and what’s the down side for Democrats in taking a strong position?” Collender adds.

(If the states want, they can secede from the Union and enforce whatever law they want. Then let’s see how long they last without the help or aid of the federal government and all their precious funded tax-paying monies…)

Judge blocks parts of South Carolina immigration law

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – South Carolina is barred from enforcing several key areas of its new law aimed to curb illegal immigration, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, the sixth state to have an immigration law stymied by the courts.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel temporarily blocked parts of South Carolina’s measure. He ruled that the federal government has exclusive constitutional authority to regulate immigration and the state’s law would disrupt federal enforcement operations.

The U.S. Department of Justice and a coalition of civil rights groups had sued to keep some aspects of the law from going into effect on January 1.

The judge said South Carolina could not require police officers to check the immigration status of a person they stop for even a minor traffic violation if they have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally.

This “state-mandated scrutiny is without consideration of federal enforcement priorities and unquestionably vastly expands the persons targeted for immigration enforcement action,” Gergel said.

Gergel also barred South Carolina from making it a felony for anyone knowingly to harbor or transport an undocumented person.

The state cannot require immigrants to carry federal alien registration documents because such registration is under the exclusive control of the federal government, the judge said.

The state Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions about whether it will appeal the ruling.

GET TOUGH

South Carolina is among the states that have enacted tough new laws against illegal immigration in the last two years, citing inaction by the federal government that has left a void in immigration policy.
But federal judges have consistently blocked the attempts, halting key parts of other immigration laws passed in Alabama, Georgia, Arizona, Utah and Indiana.

There are an estimated 11.2 million illegal immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Gergel said South Carolina’s law would cause irreparable harm to U.S. foreign policy and relations.

“No credible national sovereign can allow an individual state to embark on an independent immigration policy,” wrote the judge, who heard oral arguments in the case in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced this month that it will hear arguments in the Arizona immigration case next spring.

“If the feds were doing their job, we wouldn’t have had to address illegal immigration reform at the state level,” said Rob Godfrey, spokesman for South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley. “But, until they do, we’re going to keep fighting in South Carolina to be able to enforce our laws.”

Opponents of the South Carolina measure applauded the judge’s ruling as a “further setback” for such state legislation.

“We are pleased that the judge has blocked the most problematic provisions of South Carolina’s law, recognizing that this would have caused serious harm,” said Andre Segura, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.