A recent review of another Washington Post article discussing Attorney General Eric Holder’s goal to reinstate voting rights of convicted felons shows an odd progressive disconnect. 

Essentially, the post article outlines the goal is really to get black Democrats their right to vote in key swing states.    {Insert a generically obtuse “DUH” sound here}   But what strikes as odd is the unspoken reality:

Holy smokes more than 20% of black people have committed felonies ?

(Washington Post)  Reason Why Holder Suddenly Wants Felons To Vote: More Than 20% of Blacks In Swing States Can’t Vote Because They’ve Been Convicted of a Felony.

In Florida, more than one in five black adults can’t vote. Not because they lack citizenship or haven’t registered, but because they have, at some point, been convicted of a felony.

The Sunshine State’s not alone. As in Florida, more than 20 percent of black adults have lost their right to vote in Kentucky and Virginia, too, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for reforms to sentencing policy that reduces racial disparities. (more…)

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…)

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…)

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.

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

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)

Just like everything from this administration, their leadership boils down to: “trust us”.

WASHINGTON DC – Does President Obama’s nominee for ambassador to Argentina, a campaign bundler who has never visited the country, even speak Spanish? The State Department doesn’t know.

“I don’t have his personal biography in front of me, but what I will convey is that,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki replied when asked by ABC’s Jon Karl if Noah Mamet, whose nomination to the crucial diplomatic post was considered by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, speaks Spanish.

“Judging somebody’s effectiveness, or what role they’ll play, or how strong of an ambassador they’ll be — you can’t do [that] until they’ve spent some time working in the job in the country,” she added.

In other words, you have to confirm the ambassador to Argentina to know what’s in the ambassador to Argentina.  (READ MORE)

Shortly after a congressional hearing yesterday morning, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Elijah Cummings. The complaint alleges the Congressman intimidated her and and her group. The Congressman had done some cable news shows alleging incorrect facts about True the Vote. In the hearing yesterday, Cummings accused True the Vote of racism saying that they were trying to suppress the vote.

“Franky, Megyn, the thought of having to sit before my accuser and be silent in the face of what he did was unconscionable. He [Cummings] filed over a period of months in 2012, he filed three letters that he sent to me asserting that he was opening an investigation. He sent this on House Oversight and Government Reform letterhead.”