Looks like the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, is in a bit of hot water for lying to Congress. Holder was asked about when he knew of the US government gun running operation known as Fast and Furious. In May of this year Holder indicated that he had heard about it in the past few weeks.

Documents obtained under a lawsuit and finally released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), indicate that Holder knew about the operation and might have had a bit more involvement than he is letting on, in July of 2010. This directly contradicts what Holder told Congress.

Holder now claims he misunderstood the question but his answer was straight forward and leaves no doubt that he was answering about when he knew about the operation.

Holder lied to Congress. While this should not surprise anyone given the way Holder has run Justice, it is high time he is held accountable for his law breaking. If you or I lied to Congress we would be in a fix. Hell, look at how baseball players who lied about steroid use were treated and that is over an issue Congress has no business being involved in.

Eric Holder has been playing fast and furious with the laws of this nation while using his race based policies to push an agenda.

It is time to take this man down and ensure he does hard time in a federal prison.

And if you think this is a waste of time then why is the White House and DOJ screaming at a reporter who is covering this? Piece of advice to the White House; claiming that it must not be newsworthy because the Washington Post, NYT and LA Times are not covering it is disingenuous. They are part of the state run media.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.

The Obama Regime has a bunch of know nothings in it. I don’t mean they are not educated or that they are not smart people (just not as smart as they or their worshippers think), I mean they conveniently know nothing when scandal hits. Since scandal, wrongdoing and corruption hits each and every day, there are a lot of people who suddenly “know nothing.”

The Chicago Tribune has an article about the growing green energy scandal where Obama and his regime doled out a half a billion dollars to Solyndra as a good investment in green energy (a loan the Bush administration decided against because it was too risky) only to watch as the company went bankrupt and billions in taxpayer dollars were whizzed down the drain. The Trib calls this nothing more than the Chicago Way, something they are used to in Obama’s stomping grounds.

The cover up begins as Obama and those in his regime try to counter claims of political favor for people who contributed to little Barry. There will be investigations as communications are uncovered daily. These show that Obama and his people worked to streamline the process while ignoring all the warnings. The major concern was not over whether taxpayer dollars would be wasted (they were) but that it would hit during the 2012 campaign and damage Obama.

Rahm Emanuel, former Obama chief of staff and part of the Chicago political machine, says he does not remember anything about Solyndra. Yep, twinkle toes Emanuel is claiming that he can’t remember anything about the shady deal involving the company that went belly up costing taxpayers half a billion dollars.

The guy who remembers all political infractions and wages war against opponents based on his long memory now can’t recall a single thing about Solyndra. Funny, there are emails from his assistants regarding the issue. How is it that Rahm can’t remember?

Please liberals don’t tell me that the assistants did this without his knowledge. If that is the case he should have never been in a leadership position and he should not be the mayor of Chicago.

This is nothing more than Emanuel distancing himself from a scandal he was involved in. He did that with the Blagojevich pay to play scandal that involved Obama’s vacated US Senate seat. Emanuel was involved in that just as he is involved in the Solyndra scandal but he claims he can’t remember anything.

That is the typical Chicago political response:

“I know nothing!” SGT Schultz would be proud.

Cave canem!
Never surrender, never submit.

Last year Joe Sestak told America he had been offered a job to drop out of the Senate primary that pitted him against Arlen Specter. Sestak, when asked about the job offer, never varied in what he said. His accounts were identical and, according to him, involved multiple (that means more than one) overtures from the Obama regime. The allegations resulted in an absolute denial from the White House:

A White House spokesman this morning strongly denied an offer had been made to Sestak. Before the spokesman issued the denial, a senior Pennsylvania Democrat said Sestak’s account was met with anger by White House officials yesterday. Philly.com

Strongly denied. This response tells us that an offer had NOT been made. Sestak went on to defeat Specter and the controversy reignited. Obama was asked about it and said that information would soon be released. Within a few days the statement came out and lo and behold, a job offer was made. The White House, despite initial denials, now says a job offer was made but it was a non paying job and that nothing inappropriate happened. If nothing inappropriate happened then why the initial denial? If this was not a problem, why did they have to bring in Clinton to clean up the mess?

The White House is stonewalling efforts to get to the bottom of this as Obama’s toadies circle the wagons and repeat their mantra that there is nothing to see here so we should all move along.

The problem is that this is not the only allegation of a quid pro quo. Late last year it was revealed that Democrat Senate Candidate Andrew Romanoff of Colorado was offered a job if he would leave the primary race. Romanoff was cagey in his responses to the matter (perhaps he understood the illegality better than Sestak) and the matter was forgotten.

Now that the White House has admitted that it did in fact offer Sestak a job and that it lied about doing so, the allegations involving Romanoff have resurfaced. The AP is reporting that its sources in the regime have stated that a job was in fact offered to Romanoff to drop out:

The Obama administration dangled the possibility of a government job for former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff last year in hopes he would forgo a challenge to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, officials said Wednesday, just days after the White House admitted orchestrating a job offer in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

This is an interesting twist because some are still denying that a job was ever offered. Are we to believe that assertion given that the regime lied about the Sestak offer?

Obama brought Chicago style politics to DC and the thuggery on a national level is not sitting well with the public.

It is against the law to offer a job to someone in exchange for some action that will affect an election. There are several laws that explicitly spell this out and it looks like the Obama regime violated them. Only an independent investigation will bear this out but that idea is meeting resistance. If nothing wrong took place then why object to an independent review of the matter?

If this whole sordid mess that Obama’s regime has been involved in is only business as usual (something he told us would not happen if he were elected) then why is former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich facing many years in prison for shopping the Senate seat Obama held around? All Blago did was shop the seat around to see what deals were out there. He looked for deals that would benefit him.

This is no different than what the Obama regime has been doing. They shopped job offers to get deals they thought benefited them.

While the liberals who fawn over Obama and hang on his every word eagerly anticipating the next bit of brilliance to come from his mouth are rabidly defending him, the American public is looking at the pattern of abuse and lawbreaking that seems to come at an increased rate and it is not happy.

The cover-up of Watergate brought down the Nixon Presidency because the cover-up is always worse than the crime and the cover-up is where people get tripped up.

Obama and his minions are involved in a cover-up.

This will end Sestak’s journey to the Senate and could end up derailing hope and change.

Never surrender, never submit.

Attorney General and terrorist sympathizer Eric Holder seems to have neglected to include about seven legal briefs he signed in the packet of stuff he provided to the Senate when he went through the confirmation process.

I understand that a politician lawyer like Holder is busy and probably signs a lot of things but two of the briefs involved appeals to the Supreme Court. A lot of attorneys go through their entire career and do not submit stuff to the SCOTUS so one would think this is not the kind of stuff that would be forgotten. What else could make him neglect to send them?

Two of the briefs involved appeals to the Supreme Court for Jose Padilla, who sought release from a military prison in South Carolina where he was being held after then-President George W. Bush designated him an “enemy combatant.” al-Reuters

Oh, more on the terror support front, got it.

Holder is a little weasel. He has been involved in a number of pardons of bad people like Marc Rich, members of the FALN and of the Weather Underground (yes the Bill Ayers terrorist group). He is just a low life weasel who has little regard for the law and sees it more as a vehicle to enact social justice.

Yes, he has a sordid past and yes he deliberately withheld information from the Senate.

He is a pathetic little man who should resign his position and slither back under the rock he emerged from.

And he can save some room for that cretin Obama as well.

Other Holder hits:
OKC Bombing cover-up
Waco cover-up
Torture of US Citizen cover-up

How do we allow pieces of cow dung like this guy to be anywhere near our political system?

Senator Specter’s payoff for betraying his party: betrayal of his state

We now know one of the payoffs that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter received for being one of three Republican Senators who allowed President Obama’s trillion-dollar Spendulus bill to become law. WPXI in Pittsburgh reports that Specter has a 5.5 million dollar earmark for the crescent-shaped Flight 93 memorial in the omnibus spending bill just passed by the Senate.

Much as the people of Pennsylvania want to see a fitting memorial built, they yanked support for the crescent design in August 2007 after Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 hero Tom Jr., started warning the country that the memorial design is STILL packed to the gills with Islamic symbolism. Since that time the Memorial Project has hardly raised a dime, and a September 2007 interview with State Senator Jane Orie, who sponsors the Hearts of Steel memorial fund, makes clear that concerns about Islamic symbolism predominate. Here is her exchange with Pittsburgh talk-radio host Fred Honsberger:

Orie: “No matter who it is, and no matter where I went today for 9/11 events, everybody brought up this crescent. Whether it is intentional or not, it is disturbing to people.”

Honsberger: “So everyone is bringing it up to you.”

Orie: “Absolutely.”

Orie is talking here about the so-called “redesign.” The people of Pennsylvania know that the giant crescent, which the redesign was supposed to remove, is still there. The Park Service calls it “Circle of Embrace” now, but the circle is still broken, and the unbroken part of the circle——what is symbolically left standing in the wake of 9/11——remains exactly as it was in the original Crescent of Embrace (pictured above). Architect Paul Murdoch’s design is still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.

Pennsylvanians have voted with their pocketbooks to reject this memorial to the terrorists, but Arlen Specter is determined to cram it down their throats anyway, the same way he helped Obama cram a trillion dollars of socialist pork down America’s throat.

Specter knows better than any other politician not just that the giant Islamic-shaped crescent is still there, but that it points to Mecca

Our group was actually very hopeful back in 2007 that Senator Specter might put and end to the memorial debacle. After Mr. Burnett’s public appeal, Specter’s office wanted a briefing on the Islamic symbolism that we have found in the crescent design. One of our most knowledgeable people then spent 45 minutes with Stan Caldwell, Executive Director of Senator Specter’s Pittsburgh office, explaining in detail the Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism.

Caldwell had no trouble understanding our graphical proof that the giant crescent points almost exactly at Mecca:

A person standing between the tips of the Crescent of Embrace and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) will be facing within two degrees of the Muslim prayer direction (qibla), which is calculated as the great circle direction to Mecca. (Green qibla graphic produced by the Mecca-direction calculator at Islam.com. Another calculator is available at QiblaLocator.com.)

Caldwell also had no trouble understanding that the giant crescent is still there. All the redesign did was place an extra arc of trees out behind the mouth of the crescent, an arc of trees that according to the Park Service’s own website explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle:

Animation starts with the bare naked Crescent of Embrace. The re-colored Circle of Embrace site plan is superimposed on top, then everything but the changes are removed. The only change is extra arc of trees (flashing) that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle. Every particle of the original Crescent of Embrace design remains completely intact.

Our man also explained the significance of the Mecca orientation: that it turns the giant Islamic-shaped crescent into a mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built). The planned memorial is actually the world’s largest mosque, and Arlen Specter’s office is fully aware of it.

Do Specter and Caldwell have some explanation? The press will never ask, but we can:

DC Phone: 202-224-4254

DC Fax: 202-228-1229

Another Washington Post cover-up

Dan Eggen reports how Families of Flight 93 (an adjunct to the Memorial Project, representing only those families who are backing the crescent design) have been in Washington seeking federal money. He includes no mention of WHY the private fundraising effort has failed. But State Senator Orie’s discussion of her fundraising difficulties is not hard to find. Any reporter doing a story on the memorial’s fundraising problems would presumably start here:

The whole first page of search results is our blogburst post about Orie. (“Fundraising difficulties” yields the same result.)

Either Dan Eggen is completely incompetent, or the Post is taking sides, refusing to report the facts that don’t support the terrorist memorializing side.

Perhaps ombudsman Andrew Alexander should weigh in on this. The Post has NEVER reported on Mr. Burnett’s long battle to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent atop his son’s grave. Mr. Burnett left a long comment on Dan Eggen’s article which Eggen simply ignored, along with private offers to talk.

So which is it Mr. Alexander? Is the Post incompetently ignorant of a controversy that has raged for years, or is it intentionally suppressing the facts about the giant Mecca-oriented crescent?

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Barack Obama has the media in his hip-hop pocket. They have carried his water for two years and helped to quash any negative story, and there were many, that arose over that time. When the Blagojevich story broke Obama was quick to say neither he nor his staff had anything to do with the situation and the media bought that, until it was revealed that Rahm Emanuel had contact regarding the open Senate seat.

Obama and his camp went into damage control mode and decided to conduct an internal investigation. The investigation was completed last week and they, reportedly at the request of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, held the results. They are supposed to be released this week, maybe as soon as today (I bet it will be tomorrow). How convenient the report will be released while Obama is at a plush Hawaiian retreat many miles away. The internal review will show that there were no contacts that were inappropriate (as opposed to NO contacts). The media will accept this as gospel and move on to Christmas parties and other social gatherings. Accepting the results as closing the issue is like allowing a person to conduct his own tax audit. I bet Major League Baseball wished it had been allowed to conduct its own audit into steroid abuse and have it accepted as the final word.

Republican consultant Ron Bonjean, however, believes that the report will set off a flurry of activity from reporters eager to discover the independent truth:

“The contacts are a potential Pandora’s box,” Mr. Bonjean said. “They’ll take reporters in all different directions, like having dozens of little rabbits running around the White House.” WSJ

The only activity will be reporters running around eager to prove what Obama concluded was true. They will not dig into anything that might discredit their chosen one and will do whatever it takes to validate their support. Chris Matthews said it was his job to ensure Obama was successful. His job, as well as most in the media, was to ensure Bush was unsuccessful but with The One, it is different because they all backed him. The media went to bat for Obama and carried his water through every potential scandal.

Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and Tony Rezko (and many others) all had associations with Obama that bore further scrutiny but the media were asleep at the wheel. The birth certificate issue is valid but the media refuses to run with it and that includes those who report from the right. The media have failed to exercise due diligence in reporting and vetting Barack Obama and it will likely not exercise journalistic integrity until something happens that cannot be ignored. They did the same with Bill Clinton whose character was in question from the start. Michael Isikoff was prepared to break the Monica Lewinsky story but Newsweek killed it. If Drudge had not published it there would likely not have been the flurry of activity that followed.

Obama will enjoy much of the same treatment until he is involved in something that cannot be ignored so indicating that reporters will be running around like rabbits following the Obama report’s conclusions is being generous with regard to American journalists.

It is very likely that Obama’s people had contact with Blagojevich and that the Senate seat was discussed. If Obama’s report is not complete in all dealings in the matter and it is discovered that other contacts were made then he will be tainted from the start (OK, more tainted). The MSM cannot allow this to happen.

It will be a fun four years watching the media fall all over Obama though I imagine some of his shine is beginning to fade. He has already ticked off the gays and has Barney Frank talking negatively about him.

The media might still love him in the end but they might be the only ones.

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The question of Obama’s citizenship will not end, and rightly so. I know the left and the Obama-bots say that he has proven he is eligible to be president but he has not really satisfied the requirement because he has not shown a vault copy of his birth certificate demonstrating he is “natural born.” The statement from the Hawaii official was nuanced (perhaps to avoid charges of lying) record on file. Hawaii allowed foreign births to be registered and the COLB (Obama’s “proof”) was is issued for that.

Here are the facts:

The only thing Americans want is for Obama to prove he is eleigible to hold the office of the presidency. If he produces the proof then all is said and done and we can move on. By not producing a vault copy of his birth certificate (and spending a lot of money to fight releasing it) he is giving the appearance of guilt and demonstrating (once more) contempt for the Constitution.

The left said that George Bush was illigitimate from day one because they could not accept his victory which they believed the court handed him. Obama is illigitimate until there is proof that he is qualified to hold the office.

Our Constitution still matters.

Big Dog Salute to Wild Thing.

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…While Republicans tired to get tighter control and more regulation.

This video is 8:37 in length and it is worth every second it takes to watch. The Republicans are expressing concern over Fannie and Freddie and the Democrats are telling everyone that there is no problem. They keep saying that nothing is wrong and that all is well. All of them say there is no, nor will there be any, problem.

Watch this video and send a link to every person you know. Let them see just who is to blame for this mess. I watched the Democrats last night and this morning discussing how this is the “Bush Bailout” and how they had nothing to do with the problems. This is patently wrong, as this video demonstrates.

So when Nancy Pelosi says this mess belongs to Republicans and the Democrats have nothing to do with it SHE IS LYING.

Additionally, the Democrats are trying to syphon your tax dollars to support ACORN and other liberal organizations.

Do not let them get away with it. VOTE THEM ALL OUT OF OFFICE.

There is currently a lot of buzz throughout the blogosphere regarding Barack Obama’s website. Obama had a couple of items on his site that were disturbing to say the least. Pam at Atlas Shrugs has a list of the items with screen shots. The screen shots were necessary because as soon as the information started making the rounds it started disappearing from Obama’s site. The Obama folks have worked to have every trace of the offensive items disappear and there is word, though I have yet to see proof, that the lefty loons at Google are helping to get rid of the offensive stuff.

Obama’s site had items up with statements about Jews that one might expect from an anti Semite such as Mahmoud Amadinejad or about any other Muslim. It was typical stuff about Jews owning the media, Jews owning Congress, how politicians better do what the Jews say or else and all that kind of stuff. There was a page with support from Muslim terrorist supporters like Jemaah Islamiyah who is happy to support Obama because he will talk to Amadinejad, a man who has been misunderstood. There is also the obligatory tribute and support from the Black Panthers, the Jews were behind 9/11 and all kinds of other vile stuff.

Obama’s folks have been really busy today trying to get this stuff down and trying to make sure that no trace of it exists. I am no web guru but I have read in several places that a number of things are taking place to ensure that no archive, no cache, no record of any kind exists. The campaign wants to be able to deny any of it but folks like Pam Geller, Charles Johnson and Fausta have screen shots of the site.

I wonder if the MSM will be reporting on this mess. I wonder if anyone will ask Obama about the attempts at covering this up. I wonder if anyone will ask how it got posted in the first place and why some of the material has been up since at least March of this year.

Don’t hold your breath. It will be up to people like those mentioned above.

I can’t wait to hear Obama tell us that his webmaster is “not the webmaster I knew.”

Blogburst blockbuster: Professor who white-washed the Crescent of Embrace was Paul Murdoch’s classmate at UCLA

An excerpt from the Park Service investigation into the Flight 93 memorial identifies one of their consultants as a scholar from MIT who “wishes to remain anonymous.” Another document identifies this person as a religious scholar or a professor of Islamic architecture. MIT does not have a religion department, and they only have one professor of Islamic architecture: Professor Nassar Rabbat, who has confirmed that he is the Park Service consultant.

A check of Rabbat’s background shows that he was a classmate of Paul Murdoch, both getting masters degrees in architecture from UCLA in 1984 and both doing their masters work on Middle Easter subjects. Murdoch wrote a “masters project” titled: “A museum for Haifa, Israel.” Rabbat did a masters thesis titled: “House-form, climactic response and lifestyle: a study of the 17-19th century courthouse houses in Cairo and Damascus.”

This connection between Murdoch and Rabbat raises the possibility that Murdoch himself orchestrated the Park Service investigation into warnings about his own design. Rabbat denies knowing Murdoch, but given the blatant dishonesty of what he told the Park Service, that denial cannot be trusted.

Rabbat lied about something that every practicing Muslim knows

Rabbat’s first “major talking point” (from the Memorial Project’s White Paper, towards the bottom) is a blatantly dishonest excuse for why the Park Service should not be concerned about the almost exact Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. Rabbat assures the Park Service that because the Mecca orientation of the Crescent of Embrace is inexact, it can’t be seen as a mihrab:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

Absolutely false, and Rabbat certainly knows it. This goes to the most basic principle of mosque design: that all mosques are expressions of Muhammad’s prototype.

Muhammad’s original mosque in Medina was not oriented precisely on Mecca. It was built to face Jerusalem. Later in his career Muhammad changed the direction that Muslims were to face for prayer (their qibla direction). Instead of facing north from Medina to Jerusalem they were to face south, towards Mecca (Koran 2.142-145). To effect this change, Muhammad just started using the southerly wall of his mosque as his “qibla wall” instead of the northerly wall, even though this wall had not been built to face Mecca.

In the abstract, Muhammad held the qibla direction from Medina to be “south.” But Mecca is not quite due south from Medina either. Thus both in practice and in the abstract, Muhammad was not particular about an exact orientation on Mecca, and in Islam, what is good enough for Muhammad has to be good enough for everyone. He is the model.

This leeway to face only roughly towards Mecca for prayer is not some obscure bit of doctrine. Every practicing Muslim knows that qibla orientation does not have to be exact because they all have to avail themselves of this allowance pretty much every day as they seek walls that are oriented not too far off of Mecca which they can face into for their frequent prayers.

Rabbat just flat out lied about something that every practicing Muslim knows, and this is an expert in Mosque design. He knows better than anyone the historic leeway afforded in Mecca orientation.

Is Rabbat the source of Patrick White’s foolishness?

Rabbat’s dishonest report to the Park Service may explain an amazing argument made by Patrick White, Vice President of Families of Flight 93. At the July 2007 public meeting of the Memorial Project, White argued in a private conversation that the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent cannot be intended as a tribute to Islam because the inexactness of it would be “disrespectful to Islam.”

At the same time as White was privately making excuses for the almost exact Mecca orientation of the crescent, he was telling the newspapers that the Mecca orientation claim was false and preposterous, so he certainly cannot be absolved. But it is possible that he himself was misled about how Muslims would regard an inexactly oriented mihrab.

The Memorial Project received Rabbat’s comments about a year earlier, and Patrick White certainly had access to them. It seems likely that when White said that an inexact orientation on Mecca would be “disrespectful to Islam,” he was following Rabbat’s “can’t be off” lead.

The crescent design also includes an exact Mecca orientation

If Nassar Rabbat actually read the information that Alec Rawls sent to the Memorial Project, he would know that in addition to the physical crescent, the Crescent of Embrace design also includes a thematic crescent, defined by architect Paul Murdoch himself. The upper tip of this thematic crescent is the point where, in Murdoch’s explanation, the flight path breaks the circle. If this thematic or “true” upper crescent tip is used to define the orientation of the crescent, then the crescent points exactly to Mecca.

If Rabbat really thinks that exactness is what matters, he would have been alarmed to see that this thematic crescent is oriented exactly on Mecca. Instead, he ignored it.

The Park Service already knew about the Mecca orientation of the crescent

The Park Service’s other Islamic scholar, Kevin Jaques, did the same thing as Rabbat. He admitted the similarity between the giant Mecca oriented crescent and a traditional Islamic mihrab, then concocted a blatantly dishonest excuse for why the Park Service shouldn’t be concerned about it. Jaques assured the Park Service that there was no reason to worry because no one had ever seen a mihrab this big before:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

If Jaques and Rabbat were willing to engage in such blatantly dishonest excuse-making, why did they start out by admitting that the giant crescent was geometrically close to a perfect mihrab? Because the Park Service already knew that the giant crescent was oriented almost exactly on Mecca, and that a crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is the central feature around which every mosque is built.

Advisory Commission member Tim Baird would admit this explicitly in 2007, but it was obvious much earlier. What the Park Service wanted when it conducted its internal investigation in the spring and summer of 2006 was excuses not to be concerned about these damning facts, and that is what Jaques and Rabbat provided. Similarly for the egregious Daniel Griffith, the “professor of geospatial information,” who told the newspapers that “anything can point to Mecca, because the earth is round.”

The Park Service knew this was all fraudulent. Griffith’s “anything can point to Mecca” and Rabbat’s “it has to be exact” were complete contradictions of each other, but the Park Service gladly embraced both as excuses to pretend that there was nothing to worry about.

If these government functionaries were this desperate for a cover up, it is certainly plausible that they would accept any help they could get from Paul Murdoch. Not that it is hard to find radically dishonest, America-hating academics, but these three frauds are outliers even by worst standards.

More dishonest excuse-making from Rabbat

Rabbat’s next talking point is more of the same dishonest excuse-making:

Besides, in the US, a debate has been going on as to which is the right Mecca orientation: the one going through the North Pole or the one that follows a flat representation of the globe.

The orientation “through the North Pole” (55.2° clockwise from north, to be precise) is the great-circle direction to Mecca. This great circle direction to Mecca is the orientation of the Crescent of Embrace (almost exactly), and it is the direction in which almost all Muslims pray.

A few dissenters pray in the rhumb-line direction to Mecca (the direction of constant compass heading, which spirals down the globe in an east-southeasterly direction from North America). Rabbat pretends that the existence of these few dissenters somehow makes the whole matter of the Mecca oriented crescent a non-issue.

If anything, the debate over qibla direction shows the flexibility of the qibla direction, giving the lie to Rabbat’s earlier assertion that mihrab orientation “can’t be off.”

Rabbat certainly knows that the great-circle direction to Mecca is the dominant qibla direction. (It won out over the rhumb line direction for the very good reason that a person facing in the rhumb-line direction to Mecca is not actually facing Mecca, since the rhumb-line follows a curved path.) But don’t worry about a little thing like the crescent facing in the dominant qibla direction. Rabbat has plenty of lame excuses why you don’t need to care.

Tom Burnett’s call for a Congressional investigation

The Park Service won’t say how they came up with Griffith, Jaques and Rabbat so we have to force them. A lot of People must be forced to answer these and a lot of other hard questions, and the only way to do it is to heed Tom Burnett’s call for a Congressional Investigation.