The Curious Case of Ms. Rahinah Ibrahim

The story around the detention of Rahinah Ibrahim is so astounding a person of normal cognitive capacity might be unable to actually comprehend it.    She was stopped, detained, searched, hand-cuffed and then placed on a no-fly list back in 2005.   She sued the U.S. government to find out why:

After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error. (link)

The Error:  An FBI agent/investigator named Kevin Kelly was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he mistakenly checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list.   Kelly simply checked the wrong box on a generic administrative form.

What followed is almost nine years of *EXTREME* governmental denial, by some of the biggest well known names in DOJ, NSA, and Homeland Security.   They, on behalf of the U.S. government, used every national security avoidance argument, all of it, all.of.it, simply to cover-up a simple clerical mistake. (more…)

Don’t hold your breath and wait for the national media to report the story, it doesn’t fit their desired narrative….

NEW ORLEANS – Jurors deliberated for just six and a half hours.  Although he faced 21 charges involving a complex cast of characters and schemes, most of them revolved around a single question: Did Ray Nagin believe the jury knew the things of value he was getting were meant to influence him.

As Judge Berrigan’s instructions to the jury showed, a bribe has been committed if the public official taking the thing of value does so knowing that the giver wants something in return. The jurors in this case clearly did not believe that Nagin did not know what was going on.

Count 1: Conspiracy – Guilty

The charge: Creating, through a variety of bribes and kickbacks, “a scheme and artifice to defraud” the residents of New Orleans of his honest services as a public official. Many of the individual elements of this scheme make up the other 20 crimes with which Nagin was charged. Maximum prison term: 5 years (more…)

People are saying they shoulda got this, and they shoulda asked for that…. blah, blah, blah… Do you want to know my opinion ?

Imagine if they had simply said:  “we’ll raise the debt ceiling on the same date we see the president’s budget” !  [constitutionally the POTUS budget proposal is supposed to be delivered to congress on Feb 1st of each year – yeah, as in 11 days ago] Think about it.

(Reuters) – Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday caved in to demands by President Barack Obama and agreed to advance legislation raising Washington’s borrowing authority without conditions.

House Speaker John Boehner, announcing to reporters the plan to advance a “clean” debt limit bill to the House floor on Wednesday, said: “We’ll let the Democrats put the votes up. We’ll (Republicans) put a minimum number of votes up to get it passed.”  (link)

UPDATE:  (NBC News) – The House has passed a “clean” extension of the debt limit.   Twenty-eight Republicans joined all but two Democrats to approve the extension of the debt limit until March 2015 — without any additional legislative wish list items attached.

The vote was 221-201.  The Senate is expected to take up the debt limit extension before the end of the week.  (link)

…”I’ve got something way, way, better than scotch and cigarettes buddy;  wait right here little buddy and I’ll be right back, ok”…

Advocating to Reinstitute Voting Rights Because A Felon is Black is Just As Racist As Denying Reinstitution Because A Felon Is Black

The media-avoided issue inherent within the position of Eric Holder is his open racist intent.   Were he to be in a position of advocacy for all released felons based on the premise their collective debt to society is paid in full, and voting rights should be reinstated, it would be a reasonable discussion.   However, that’s not the framework.   No, this Attorney General is framing his position around the race of one single group of felons, blacks.

WASHINGTON DC – Attorney General Eric Holder is urging states to restore voting rights to former prison inmates.

Holder says 11 states continue to restrict voting rights after a person has served a prison sentence and is no longer on probation or parole.   He says nearly one in 13 African-American adults is banned from voting because of these laws.

Holder’s remarks, delivered at a symposium on the nation’s criminal justice system, are part of his initiative seeking fundamental changes to the system.

Last August, Holder instructed federal prosecutors to stop charging many nonviolent drug defendants with offenses that carry mandatory minimum sentences. He said long mandatory terms have flooded the nation’s prisons with low-level drug offenders and diverted money away for crime fighting. Holder is working with Congress to address the problem.  (read more)

HatTip Stormy – (who shares)  Did you see the segment on Kelly Files about the other little nugget that Beezlebub’s Administration put in the new regulations: small business owners cannot, under penalty of perjury, change the numbers of employees, or the hours of their employees in order to get into a more advantageous group for the Obamacare mandates.

Those free-citizen small business owners have to provide a sworn affidavit to the IRS to that effect.

Welcome to 1984.

https://www.foxnews.com/on-air/the-kelly-file/index.html#/v/3183622188001

WASHINGTON DC – U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will  step down this year, he said in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jeffrey  Toobin in the magazine’s Feb. 17 edition.

In a feature article, Mr. Holder said he  plans on staying in his position “well into” the year.   Last November, Mr. Holder, the first black  attorney general, told CBS News he didn’t have “any plans” to step down.

(Left – Vivian Malone-Jones first day at University of Alabama.  She later went on to become the sister-in-law of current U.S. AG Eric Holder.   Right – Alabama Democrat Governor George Wallace who opposed integration) 

Mr. Holder has made voting rights the test  case of his tenure, the New Yorker reported. He has been a vocal critic of the  Supreme Court case that invalidated key  parts of the Voting Rights Act and has supported Congressional action to renew  and revise the law. (read more)

Valerie Jarrett, Dr Sharon Malone and her hubby AG Eric Holder

In the final analysis the intellectually honest observer would admit the GOP and the Democrats are generally aligned in favor of government control of Healthcare and Immigration, ie. amnesty.

In a recent New York Times article titled “Chastened G.O.P. Tries to Foil Insurgents at Primary Level” you find a typical narrative; Tea Party is EXTREME and GOP is moderate. Searching for an outlier to use as representative Tea Party imagery the Times select Virginian whacko Richard H Black to broad stroke conservatives, while framing ‘moderation’ as the best political course.

Nothing is more annoying than the constant drumbeat to connect outliers in the Alinsky-ization of grass roots concern. Isolate, Ridicule and Marginalize. Then wash, rinse, repeat.

What the GOP fear more than defeat against democrats is losing internal power over Big Business and Big Government. Establishment class Republicans, like those found inside the rolls of the Chamber of Commerce, will fight for their own power hungry ideology with a desperate intent.

(Times Excerpt) […] In House and Senate races across the country, many of the traditional and influential centers of power within the party are taking sides in primaries, overwhelming challengers on the right with television ads and, in some cases, retaliating against those who are helping the insurgents. In Mr. Black’s case, one by one, powerful Republicans started backing his rival, Barbara J. Comstock, a member of the State House of Delegates. First Mitt Romney endorsed her. Then came Citizens United and the president of Americans for Prosperity, the group financed by the wealthy Koch brothers. (more…)

The Washington Free Beacon has a great outline worth spending some time digesting:

The Clinton Files

On May 12, 1992, Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake, top pollsters for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, issued a confidential memo. The memo’s subject was “Research on Hillary Clinton.”

Voters admired the strength of the Arkansas first couple, the pollsters wrote. However, “they also fear that only someone too politically ambitious, too strong, and too ruthless could survive such controversy so well.”

Their conclusion: “What voters find slick in Bill Clinton, they find ruthless in Hillary.”

The full memo is one of many previously unpublished documents contained in the archive of one of Hillary Clinton’s best friends and advisers, documents that portray the former first lady, secretary of State, and potential 2016 presidential candidate as a strong, ambitious, and ruthless Democratic operative. (more…)

Given what Senator Clinton formerly said about General “Betrayus”, and given the backstory of former CIA Analytical Director Mike Morell’s admitted manipulation of talking points and stand-in status for Petraeus; and given the fact that Petraeus gave testimony to congress that he didn’t know who changed the Benghazi talking points but claimed it was not the CIA; and given the fact Eric Holder was investigating Petraeus over the affair with Paula Broadwell at the time of Benghazi, well, something is three dimensional Machiavellian about this latest water-carrying. 

(Via MediaIte)  In the new book HRC, by The Hill’s Amie Parnes and Bloomberg’s Jonathan Allen, General David Petraeus praised Hillary Clinton as a potential president, specifically citing what many consider her biggest obstacle as a candidate: her role as Secretary of State overseeing the American compound in Benghazi when it was attacked in 2012.

“She’d make a tremendous president,” Petraeus said. “Like a lot of great leaders, her most impressive qualities were most visible during tough times. In the wake of the Benghazi attacks, for example, she was extraordinarily resolute, determined, and controlled.”

On This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Jon Karl brought this up to Representative Tom Cole (R-OK) and asked if it “took the wind out of the sails” of Benghazi as an anti-Hillary talking point.  (read more with video)

David Simon, a former police beat reporter in Baltimore, MD and creator of the popular television series, “The Wire” implies that Libertarians in America are “greedy” and decries Libertarianism as a “juvenile” idea that he “just can’t get past….”  

Clearly upset that Fabian ideology is not taking root in the 20-somethings community, while the Libertarian movement is growing as an identified political affiliation in the cohort,  he gave a speech in Australia in November, 2013 at the “Dangerous Ideas” conference declaring “Libertarianism in my country is now being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought… it’s astonishing to me… ” (around the 8:00 – 10:00 mark) and then goes on a screed to deliberately disparage and attempt to dismiss the Libertarian school of thought – including the assertion that Libertarians are “anti-government” (as Moyers chuckles along in agreement…)  Fraidy cat!

(more…)