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To: Jim McMannis who wrote (305110)4/6/2011 1:26:12 AM
From: tejekRespond to of 306849
 
Thanks John Boner.



To: Jim McMannis who wrote (305110)4/6/2011 11:45:13 AM
From: joseffyRespond to of 306849
 
After assuring a Promised Land under Barack Obama, the left appears naked, with no answers anywhere in the cupboard.

No water-turned-into-wine, no manna from heaven, no Holy Grail.

All that remains are false promises from a false messiah made in the Left's own image.

From Iran to Egypt to Libya, there are no solutions.

This wasn't supposed to be.




To: Jim McMannis who wrote (305110)4/6/2011 11:47:13 AM
From: joseffyRespond to of 306849
 
Our Dangerous Attorney General
...............................................
by Human Events 04/04/2011
humanevents.com

Eric Holder should never have been confirmed as attorney general. Any man who would, as he did, urge President Bill Clinton to grant clemency to 16 members of the Puerto Rican domestic terrorist outfit FALN (a Spanish acronym for Armed Forces of National Liberation) was not only unfit to be America’s lawyer, but he himself should have been investigated.

Yet Holder is, indeed, our attorney general, and his priorities are exactly where we’d expect them to be: dangerous.

Consider that righteous retribution against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his 9/11 cohorts remains in limbo as Holder’s Justice Department continues to seek out ways to try them in civilian courts.

Moreover, Holder refuses to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, a bipartisan bill passed by Congress and signed into law by a Democratic President.

What’s more, under congressional questioning, he declined even to suggest that there are radical elements within Islam that contribute to anti-Americanism and terrorist activity around the world.

And that’s just off the top of our head.

Now comes a story that will have you wondering whether Holder is suffering from a debilitating mental breakdown.

Let’s meet Safoorah Khan. Khan was a nontenured computer math lab teacher at the Berkeley School District in Illinois up until she resigned her position in November of 2008. She resigned because the superintendent of the school district denied her request for an unpaid leave of absence from Dec. 1, 2008, to Dec. 19, 2008, so that she could make a hajj, the pilgramage made by Muslims to Mecca. It turns out that the 19 days of leave Khan requested came during a critical time in the school semester: examinations. And not only was it a crucial time of the year, but Khan was brought on specifically to assist with test preparation. At the time her request was made, Khan had been employed by the district for only nine months.

If you’re keeping tabs, a Muslim woman who was hired to help students prepare for state tests and who didn’t even have a year under her belt at a Chicago suburban school district sought her supervisor’s blessing to ditch the classroom during the exact time that the test-taking would occur in the hope that she could jump on a plane to Mecca.

And when the supervisor said no (we know—shocker), Khan filed a religious discrimination charge with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC thought the case had enough merit to zip it over to the Justice Department, which has decided to sue the small school district for forcing Khan “to choose between her job and her faith.”

The Justice Department is asking an Illinois federal court to grant Khan “back pay with interest and reinstatement with accompanying benefits, including retroactive seniority” as well as to award damages to her “to fully compensate her for pain and suffering” caused by the resignation.

Holder’s case is unfathomably absurd.

U.S. law requires an employer to reasonably accommodate an employee’s request for time off to fulfill his or her religious obligation. If, however, that accommodation would create an undue hardship on the employer (like, for instance, failing to provide extra tutoring during exam week for students), then it doesn’t have to be met. There’s also no reference in the Koran that says, “Fulfill this requisite Muslim journey in December of 2008 or else face the wrath of Allah,” so Khan herself should’ve kept her cool.

The Justice Department defends its lawsuit by claiming that Khan’s appeal was “a profoundly personal request by a person of faith.” If that’s the new standard now for religious accommodations, watch out. There’s about to be an avalanche of truant employees. Heck, perhaps the next time the teachers union organizes a walkout, it can justify it all under the rubric of the Islamic hajj.

Holder knows that this lawsuit doesn’t stand a chance. But that’s not his goal. He wants to energize the Left’s demoralized base leading up to the 2012 election. That’s why he’s flouting a law on the books by not defending the Defense of Marriage Act and why he’s taking this politically correct stance that hopscotching to Mecca at any time should be enshrined in all American business employee handbooks.




To: Jim McMannis who wrote (305110)4/6/2011 11:48:56 AM
From: joseffyRespond to of 306849
 
Holder's ungracious punt
...........................................
April 5, 2011
nypost.com

It took 500 days, but President Obama yesterday abandoned his ill-conceived effort to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom.

Attorney General Eric Holder was none too gracious about it, however.

It was back in November 2009 that Obama and Holder docketed KSM and four confederates for trial in New York.

An uproar ensued -- understandably -- and Congress promptly outlawed the movement of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the US. There the matter stood for some 15 months -- until yesterday, when Holder announced that the deadly quintet will now return to military commissions at Gitmo, right where they started, and right where they belong.

AP

Attorney General Eric Holder



The AG, however, felt compelled to wag his middle finger at Congress, the CIA and the American people: "Members of Congress simply do not have access to the evidence" to determine where the trials should be held.

Asked by reporters whether Congress reflected the will and wisdom of its 300 million constituents, Holder smoldered: "Do I know better than them? Yes."

He next accused critics of using the trials to "scor[e] political points."

(Politics? He should know. Yesterday's announcement came on the very day that Team Obama kicked off its 2012 reelection bid -- and getting KSM & Co. off the radar screen won't hurt that effort.)

Then Holder sullied the CIA:

"There is no other tool that has demonstrated the ability to both incapacitate terrorists and collect intelligence from them . . . as our justice system."

That's a breathtaking claim, without a shred of evidence to support it, as far as foreign terrorists are concerned.

And it's also an astonishing slap at the intelligence agents who captured, interrogated and collected intelligence from KSM -- and who have moved mountains to protect this nation from harm.

That is, Holder scoffed at the very people who delivered KSM for prosecution.

For sheer arrogance, few public officials could surpass the attorney general.

For sheer incompetence, too.

Trying KSM in civilian courts could have been a disaster, given their strict rules of evidence. During Obama's first civilian trial of a Gitmo detainee last year, key evidence was barred and the country was treated to an ugly spectacle.

A terrorist responsible for the 1998 US embassy bombing in Tanzania was acquitted on 280 counts. Holder's team got him on a single, lesser charge -- meaning they went about 1 for 280.

That was an unacceptable outcome then -- and, given the stakes, a far more terrifying prospect in KSM's trial.

Make no mistake: Restoring the 9/11 trials to the military system was the right choice -- the only choice.

The victims and families afflicted on 9/11 deserve far better than the administration's performance to date.

America deserves far better.

But today everybody can be thankful the trial is no longer in Eric Holder's shaky hands.

Read more: nypost.com




To: Jim McMannis who wrote (305110)4/6/2011 11:49:52 AM
From: joseffyRespond to of 306849
 
Justice Deserves Better Than Holder
..........................................................
By John Ransom
finance.townhall.com

On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, will finally face a military tribunal under rules set up by the Bush administration. If convicted, Mohammed could face the death penalty.

Holder, who has opposed using a military tribunal for the trial, made the announcement with the kind of wild partisanship that we’ve come to expect from the top justice official for the administration.

It’s not that justice isn’t blind with Holder, it’s just that he’s kind of selective about what he turns a blind eye to.

You got the feeling that Holder, an opponent of the death penalty, knew he couldn’t just announce he had insufficient evidence to prosecute the 9-11 case, as he did in the Black Panther voter intimidation case, as much as he might want to.

But the press conference was certainly squirm-worthy for Holder, who is now stuck with a case he doesn’t want, in a venue he objects to.

If they weren’t so wrong on issue after issue, I’d almost feel sorry for the Obama administration. But instead, I feel nothing but contempt for the most arrogant, self-centered and self-aggrandizing set of elitists to ever administer our country.

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed saga is yet another administration debacle that can best be explained by words that go roughly like these: “The Obama administration ended a year of indecision with a major reversal…”

It’s getting to the point that ending indecision with major reversal of policy is one of the acts that Obama is best at.

If not a third term, the Bush administration policies on issues of war and peace are at suddenly enjoying something of a renaissance in the Obama White House.

In the terror case it does a great justice in our country, even if Holder and the administration can take credit for delivering that justice with the poorest of all possible grace. If you though the administration acted like poor winners over the last two years, they’ve also shown that they are poor losers too.

In making the announcement, Holder acknowledged what a bipartisan coalition, united in the desire for justice, realized long ago- that Americans don’t care about the politics of the trial, they just want a trial that ensures justice in an environment that won’t make it circus.

Even so, Holder acted with the bad grace that we’ve come to expect from him, chastising the rest of us on points of law, shaking his finger at the victims who have shown patience for ten years, calling out Congress for being nincompoops. Not content to enforce laws, Holder had to be the giver of law too.

Ten years after 9-11, American families are still waiting for the most politically driven Attorney General in the history of the country to prosecute those responsible for a politically-motivated act of war that led to the deaths of 3,000 men, women and children.

To make things perfectly clear, Holder let the world know that the decision to have the 9-11 perpetrators face a tribunal was distasteful to him, that he would rather not be forced to make this choice.

The victims deserved better than that Mr. Holder; the families deserved better; and so did justice itself.