Saturday, June 30, 2012

Political Roundtable: Supreme Court Rulings on Health Care and SB 1070, Fast and Furious & More!

Posted By on Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 9:54 AM

On this week's Political Roundtable, Tucson Tea Party founder Trent Humphries and Pima County Democratic Party chairman Jeff Rogers discuss the U.S. Supreme Court rulings on health care and SB 1070, unpack the Fast and Furious scandal that has led to contempt of Congress charges for U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, Secretary of State Ken Bennett's decision to reject petitions for an initiative to extend the state's one-cent sales tax, the Rosemont Mine's future and more!

Special bonus content: Rogers mentioned a Fortune story about Fast and Furious that provided background about how the entire mess got started. You can find it here. An excerpt:


Quite simply, there's a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It's a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson's anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general's report is submitted.)

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