News/Politics 4-24-13

What’s interesting out there today?

Open Thread, as always.

Me…. I’m beating that horse again. From Boston.com

“Russian authorities alerted the FBI not once but “multiple’’ times over their  concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev — including a second time nearly a year after he was first interviewed by FBI agents in Boston — raising new questions about whether the FBI should have focused more attention on the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, according to US senators briefed on the probe Tuesday.”

More on the mosque they attended here. From USAToday

“The mosque attended by the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombing has been associated with other terrorist suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to extremism.

Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque’s first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince.”

Check out the link. This place has a long list of radicals that have spoken there. And many of them have also been investigated for terrorism ties.

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The Ricin letters suspect has been released. From NBCNews

“Charges were dropped Tuesday against the Mississippi man suspected of mailing ricin-laced letters to President Obama and other public officials — as authorities searched the home of another man hoping to find clues in the expanding investigation.

“I respect President Obama and love my country. I would never do anything to pose a threat to him or any other U.S. official,” Paul Kevin Curtis said at a news conference Tuesday.”

More from FoxNews

“The Mississippi man charged with sending ricin-laced letters to President Obama  was released on bond Tuesday, as the FBI searched the Mississippi home of a  possible second suspect amid an apparent probe into whether the first suspect  might have been framed. ”

“Shortly afterward, FBI searched the home of a possible second suspect. The FBI  zeroed in on this individual earlier in the day, a source told Fox News.”

More on another possible Ricin attack, from  WaPo 

“Federal authorities are investigating another potential ricin attack at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling in Southeast Washington, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday.”

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Some pretty disturbing details are emerging in the Texas plant explosion. If true, arrests and prosecutions need to happen. From TheNYPost

“The fertilizer plant that exploded and wiped out much of a small Texas town last week once stored 1,350 times the amount of ammonium nitrate that typically triggers federal safety oversight, officials said.

Yet a person familiar with Department of Homeland Security operations said the company that owns the plant, West Fertilizer, failed to tell the agency about the potentially explosive fertilizer it stored last year, as required.”

Much more here from HuffPo/Reuters

“Fertilizer plants and depots must report to the DHS when  they hold 400 lb (180 kg) or more of the substance. Filings this  year with the Texas Department of State Health Services, which  weren’t shared with DHS, show the plant had 270 tons of it on  hand last year.

A U.S. congressman and several safety experts called into  question on Friday whether incomplete disclosure or regulatory  gridlock may have contributed to the disaster.

“It seems this manufacturer was willfully off the grid,”  Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-MS), ranking member of the House  Committee on Homeland Security, said in a statement. “This  facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold  amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility  Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS  did not even know the plant existed until it blew up.””

With a Hat Tip to HRW

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Several charges against Kermit Gosnell have been dropped by the judge. From LifeSiteNews

“A federal judge has dropped nine charges – including three murder charges and one count of infanticide – against Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell, as his trial resumed this morning.

Local media report the judge has determined Gosnell will not face three counts of murder, one count of infanticide, and five counts of abuse of a corpse. The latter charges related to Gosnell’s keeping the severed feet of aborted babies in jars in his clinic.

Gosnell still faces the remaining four charges of first degree murder in the deaths of newborn babies, and an additional charge of third degree murder over the death of one of his abortion clients.”

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“What difference does it make?”

Well now we know why she wasn’t concerned with the truth getting out and was reluctant to answer questions. It was to protect herself and the White House. The House has issued it’s Benghazi report, which blames Hillary Clinton. From TheWashingtonExaminer

“A critical report drafted by five GOP-led House committees has determined that reduced security at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in the days leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack was approved by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The report also found that White House and high-ranking officials at the State Department changed CIA talking points following the attacks, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, in order to shield the State Department from “criticism for inadequate security levels” on the ground in Benghazi.

The 46-page report provides a timeline of events leading up to the attacks in Benghazi and investigation that followed.”

A larger view of the report can be viewed here at Scribd.com

And it also appears that like her husband, she has lied under oath. From TheWashingtonExaminer

“House Republicans released their report on the investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attack, having concluded that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she told Congress that she wasn’t aware that officials at the U.S. mission in Benghazi had requested extra security.

“The specific security requests pertaining to Benghazi, you know were handled by the security professionals in the department,” Clinton told Congress in January. “I didn’t see those requests, they didn’t come to me, I didn’t approve them, I didn’t deny them.”

The House report suggests that Clinton received a request for more security from Gene Cretz, who preceded Christopher Stevens as ambassador to Libya.

Not only did she receive and see the request, her signature was on the response cable which denied the request.

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Democrats have been insisting the last few days that we need to pass the immigration/amnesty bill to protect against terrorism. It would do nothing of the sort. It’s what it really does that they are in a hurry to get done. From Politico

“The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s  political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new  Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current  trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple  Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

Beneath the philosophical debates about amnesty and border security, there  are brass-tacks partisan calculations driving the thinking of lawmakers in both  parties over comprehensive immigration reform, which in its current form offers  a pathway to citizenship — and full voting rights — for a group of undocumented  residents that roughly equals the population of Ohio, the nation’s  seventh-largest state.”

“If these people had been on the voting rolls in 2012 and voted along the same  lines as other Hispanic voters did last fall, President Barack Obama’s  relatively narrow victory last fall would have been considerably wider, a  POLITICO analysis showed.”

THIS is the goal. It always has been.

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8 thoughts on “News/Politics 4-24-13

  1. I am left speechless and sputtering that ANY charges were dropped against Gosnell, but then again, I am not suprised. Of course they would drop charges. I mean IT wasn’t really human was it?????

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  2. Jed Babbin in The American Spectator.

    “We cannot defeat Islamist extremism by killing scattered terrorist leaders. If we are to win, we must first identify the enemy and fight in a manner calculated to defeat the ideology that drives him. We are not, and should not be, at war with every believer in Islam. But there is no possibility to peacefully coexist with Islamist terrorists and those nations that harbor them.”
    “The answer is to meet Islamists in ideological battle. Our object should be not to win hearts and minds, but to remind the world of bankruptcy of an ideology that refuses basic human freedoms. George Bush shied away from the ideological war, which has resulted in more than a decade lost, and Obama has preemptively surrendered.”

    Sounds like a job for the missionaries. I think Babbin is correct. However, we are dealing with religious convictions that have permeated the souls of those who want jihad. And until we realize that jihad is not merely an inner struggle, but a struggle against infidels in the name of Allah, we’re fighting an enemy we don’t understand; we are the dar al harb, house of war. Bush thought he could democratize a nation that cannot be democratized. Their religion won’t permit it.

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  3. Well, well, well…it looks like the Halappanavar case wasn’t at all what the pro-abortionists made it out to be…

    http://www.worldmag.com/2013/04/pro_life_laws_not_cause_of_ireland_miscarriage_death

    ” The Irish woman who died in October 2012 during a difficult pregnancy did not lose her life because doctors refused to abort her baby.

    Although pro-abortion advocates in Ireland rallied around 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar’s death as an impetus to change the country’s pro-life laws, a jury found Friday that the hospital’s mismanagement of sepsis, a severe blood infection, actually caused her death.”

    “Niamh Uí Bhriain of the Life Institute, an Irish pro-life group, said after Halappanavar’s death it was sad to see “abortion campaigners rush to exploit this case to further their own agenda.”

    “The tragic loss of Savita Halappanavar’s life was not caused by Ireland’s ban on abortion. We need to ensure that mothers and babies are best protected, and abortion is not part of best medical practice. It is medieval medicine.””

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  4. Rand Paul filibustered the congress old school a few months back over drones but in this interview he seems to approve of drones in America. His law and order rhetoric seems to have trumped his libertarian sympathies.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmOGeBQzj4g&feature=player_embedded

    Voters are strange creatures. It may appear Hispanics are a Democratic goldmine right now but they like any other voters could easily be swayed. Of course current Republican behavior makes that highly unlikely in the short term. Amnesty and a path to citizenship make far more sense than to continue the current policy which leads to depressed wages, payroll tax evasion, etc.

    One can have a viable policy against illegal immigration without focusing on the poor sap only trying to make money to feed his family. Republicans should focus on the employers not the migrants without the lure of jobs they wouldn’t be in the US.

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  5. Ricky,

    And that same muslim Major was in contact by mail and internet with a terrorist on the most wanted list. The Army said it was OK because it was for “research”. We know how that worked out. But then, like now, they ignore the muslim ties and terrorists in the picture. It’s disgusting.

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