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…)

D’oh – Even after President Milli Vanilli has been shown to lip-sync (teleprompter needed) in an effort to make appearance of actual intellect, the band brand management continues to maintain the ruse of competency.

(Daily Caller) White House officials have quietly changed an official transcript to hide President Barack Obama’s embarrassing historical error during his international press conference with French President Francois Hollande.

Obama’s error came when he misnamed Alexis de Tocqueville, a clear-eyed Frenchman who explained the subtle miracle of American culture and democracy in the 1830s. His book is a classic, partly because his insights about Americans’ social equality and civic society have become commonplace among centrists and conservatives.

But Obama called him “Alex” in front of the French and U.S. press, and while facing banks of TV cameras. (more…)

(Via Newsbusters) Fifty years to the day after The Beatles’ first concert in the United States, NBC’s Shawna Thomas could have been mistaken for one of the screaming fan girls at the Washington Coliseum. But instead of idolizing the rock and roll band, the network’s White House producer shouted for joy over Michelle Obama’s gown, which the First Lady wore to Tuesday’s state dinner for French President Francois Hollande.

(more…)

This one will be interesting to see if there is a follow-up.   The question I have is why would the pentagon destroy the pictures?   The court would, most likely, be on their side if they took a position of national security as reason for denial – so why destroy them?   Something not passing the sniff test…. 

WASHINGTON DC – Judicial Watch announced Monday that it received documents through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showing that Admiral William McRaven ordered the immediate destruction of any photos of Osama bin Laden’s death within hours of a Judicial Watch FOIA request.

According to the Pentagon documents, McRaven sent his email on “Friday, May 13, 2011 5:09 PM.” The documents do not detail what documents, if any, were destroyed in response to the McRaven directive. The Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit seeking the documents was filed in the United States Court for the District of Columbia only hours earlier. Judicial Watch also announced the filing at a morning press conference. […]

The move by McRaven to purge the photos appears to have come, at least in part, in response to aggressive efforts by Judicial Watch to obtain images of the deceased bin Laden that President Obama, in a rewrite of federal open records law, had refused to disclose.

In addition to its May 2, 2011, FOIA request with the Pentagon Judicial Watch filed an identical request on May 3, 2011, with the CIA. When neither the Defense Department nor the CIA complied with the FOIA requests, Judicial Watch, in June 2011, filed FOIA lawsuits against both agencies. In the course of the litigation, the Pentagon claimed that it had “no records responsive to plaintiff’s request.”   (CONTINUE READING)

Apparently all of the random non-corrupt smidgens were identical…. Identically opposite to progressives.   What are the odds?   Go figure..

WASHINGTON DC – A Republican House committee chairman said the Internal Revenue Service targeted tax-exempt conservative groups for audits, widening the scope of GOP ire over the agency’s oversight of political activities.

House Democrats pushed back, saying Republicans were seeking to use the IRS controversy to score political points with their conservative base in an election year.

The IRS has been under scrutiny since an inspector general’s report last May found that the agency had targeted conservative groups for lengthy and heavy-handed review of their applications to become tax-exempt organizations under section 501(c) 4 of the tax code. The controversy led to significant management shakeups at the IRS and generated a slew of congressional investigations, some of which are still going on. (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”…

Famous for his insufferable naiveté surrounding Trayvon Martin, actor Jamie Fox joins a peace walk in Miami Gardens.   The profound stupidity of the entire fiasco is exemplified in the fact that Trayvon Martin’s father, Tracy “Fruit” Martin, was specifically the one engaged with his son to discuss purchasing a handgun for him. 

…Yet there he is, in the front row, nodding and clapping away !    

The information about Trayvon’s father and guns was hidden from the general public by the media refusing to cover it.  It was discovered during a late night evidentiary proffer hearing when the contents of Trayvon’s phone were being argued as admissible or not.

(Via Truth Revolt)  This past Saturday in Miami Gardens, actor Jamie Foxx helped lead a peace walk through the streets to a local complex where a rally was held in remembrance of Trayvon Martin.  During his remarks, Foxx suggested that gun violence is mostly a problem for black Americans.

“The blood that flows through America that is from gun violence is mostly African-American, and yet you young black folk sit here mute and ya’ll don’t say nothing about it.”

Foxx is not one to shy from controversy. The actor wore a “Know Justice, Know Peace” shirt with Trayvon’s face on it to the 2013 MTV Movie Awards.

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…)