Just common sense - Peter King's long-overdue hearings on Muslim radicalism in U.S. gets backing from an unexpected ally at The WaPo: Ruth Marcus

Above, 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta's Florida Driver's License

While living in Arlington County, I followed the 9/11 Commission hearings VERY closely, more than just about anyone I knew, watching or taping many of them off of C-SPAN, and, consequently, often staying-up late at night to catch up on their activities. Though it seems obvious now, while I'd heard from many sources that some of the hijackers had used Broward County Library computers to access the Internet to send messages -and book their flights- it never dawned on me to think about where, specifically, they had lived in South Florida.

But despite how much of the hearings I watched, I couldn't see everything, so it wasn't until another Washington-area friend who worked on Capitol Hill -also originally from Florida- pointed it out to me one night at a sports bar, that I found out that 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta lived in Hollywood.
In fact, 4.6 miles from my father's home in Hallandale Beach.

(Not the subject of the column below, true, but just wanted to mention it all the same. Also relevant: On the morning of 9/11, I was working directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Dept. of Justice, the FBI and The National Archives. I was working on a litigation project for the law firm Crowell & Moring, a project involving DOD that was supposed to send me and my team to Dayton for a few weeks that Fall, but that was cancelled for obvious reasons.
From the firm's large windows facing Pennsylvania Avenue -and even more so from the large balcony that overlooked the street that were clearly perfect viewing for Inauguration Day festivities- I and the dozens of us on my flooor could clearly see the dark smoke arising in the SW from The Pentagon, just past our view looking towards the Old Post Office.
More about my 9/11 experiences in Washington, D.C. here, from a Sept. 2011 post, 
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html)

Well, I've been sitting on them for a while now.
Wondering, wondering, wondering just when to run them in this space, but this excellent common sense perspective by liberal columnist Ruth Marcus in today's Washington Post about voluble Rep. Peter King of Long Island, and his resolve to finally have some long overdue congressional hearings on radical Islam in the U.S., despite protests from the usual suspects and however an imperfect a vehicle for that overdue development she thinks he might be, just might be the sign I've been waiting for.

So what's the them?
My sign to let you know that coming soon to the blog will be some delicious articles, columns and video about Islamic radicalism and not-so-democratic Muslim immigrants (not at all interested in assimilation) that I guarantee you you haven't seen or heard about elsewhere in the American Mainstream Media.

At least, as represented by the Miami Heralds and NPRs of the world, where news stories and real-life actualities that don't fit their political or social template never see the light of day in print or make the airwaves.

That's largely because even some liberals can see the lie of the fiction long articulated by the MSM, in the U.S. as well as in Europe, that EVERY Muslim -esp. immigrants- are just like Jane & John Q. Public, whether they live in Northern Virginia, Queens, London, Paris or Malmö.
Nope.

Some are but more than you think are NOT.
Just because the press wants it to be so doesn't change reality -or human behavior.

I know something of this first-hand because my first roommate at IU was a great guy named Salim who just also happened to be a Kenyan-born Muslim from Oman, who was at school on a World Health Organization (WHO) scholarship.

Salim was very appreciative of the opportunity he had to live and study in the United States and loved IU and the beauty and friendliness of Bloomington more than many of my other friends, who were blase about it, and because of his personality and willingness to talk about what he knew about growing-up in a life different than ours, Salim made friends easily.

A later roommate in the Washington area was a completely different story. I had known many Iranian-born friends as a kid growing-up in North Miami Beach, even seeing Grease at a drive-in with two -count 'em two- ridiculously cute and vibrant Iranian sisters in our family's convertible when I was in high school.

Their brother was a soccer teammate of mine and as I've related here previously, I sometimes went with him and his family to anti-Shah rallies at the JFK Torch of Freedom on Biscayne Blvd. in downtown Miami because members of his own family had been tortured or killed by the Savak. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912364,00.html

The Iranian-born medical student I was somewhat forced to live with in Arlington once another roommate moved-out just weeks before the lease was up -a know-it-all with with a real superiority complex- told me plenty of amazing stories about ways that Iranian students he knew played the State Dept. reps in Europe at the embassy or consulates for fools, in order to get visas.
They accomplished this by telling them the appropriate narrative that would allow them to be admitted into the country.

He said there even was a list of which State Dept. consular offices were more easy to fool than others, and since it was important to get to the U.S., they didn't mind the additional costs of flying out of whatever European country they might be living in in order to get to a consular office with a reputation for letting people in. Fly from Germany to Copenhagen or Portugal or... He knew that for a fact because it worked for HIM.

If college students knew how to game the system, do you honestly think that well-trained people with nefarious intentions and unlimited resources can't do even more?

Some people can never let go of their internal anger, never really want to fit in and are keenly disposed to wreck havoc on civil society wherever they can, even if that means corrupting freedoms or denying other people's guaranteed rights.

And when they're caught on film, they... yes, often celebrate their anti-social behavior.
That is, until they realize that it will make them look bad once it is shown on TV or the Internet. That moment of clarity is always a sight to see!

As you will soon see here for yourself, there's almost nothing better on TV then when the often-dubious world of Reality TV slams head-first into the behavior of the 'Real World' that the Left and its apologists in the media has been making excuses for for years.

That it happened in Sweden is not so surprising, sorry to say, but I can't help but think that if it had happened on a British TV show, where the conversation would've been in engelska, we'd all have long since seen the video by now and that it would be sure-fire water cooler conversation once 20/20 or Nightline or Sixty Minutes highlighted the behavior for Americans.

That is, if people still really have water cooler conversation as shown on The Office, instead of sipping their dopey Five-Hour drinks and $4 fruity organic drinks from their desk when there's a perfectly good cold Dr. Pepper in the soda machine looking to add drinking satisfaction.

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The Washington Post
Islamic radicalism: The questions that Rep. Peter King is right to ask
By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, March 9, 2011

One of the odder exchanges I've ever seen during a congressional hearing involved Attorney General Eric Holder, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith and the phrase "radical Islam."

Smith, at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee last May, cited three recent terrorist incidents: the Fort Hood shooting rampage, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. "Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?" he asked Holder.

The attorney general did his best not to go there.
"There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions," he said.
"I think you have to look at each individual case."

Smith tried again - and again.
Holder repeatedly resisted, before grudgingly acknowledging the obvious. "I certainly think that it's possible that people who espouse a radical version of Islam have had an ability to have an impact on people like" the accused Times Square bomber, he said.

Read the rest of the excellent column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030804487.html

----

Dr. Pepper TV commercial, 1960's
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpByXzdMQfk

When I first got to Bloomington in August of 1979 and told people I met at my dorm, Briscoe Quad, or people I met on and off the IU campus that I was from North Miami Beach, it was very quickly obvious that they imagined that my life down here in high school on weekends was probably not unlike the end of this commercial, albeit many years later, with grill parties at the beach, throwing frisbees and footballs around and cute girls prancing around everywhere...

Believe me, it was very disappointing to have to tell them the truth about how boring and mundane late 1970's life in NMB was, or how many great opportunities or locales were wasted.

Haulover Beach on the Intercoastal side could get crazy on weekends, but it was never fun like life depicted in films or TV about teen life in SoCal, whom I envied.
You know, where people describe every other thing they go to as "epic"?
If only we had had cell phones and digital cameras and the Internet then...

DCWATCH kindly reminds us how ineffectual Eric Holder was as U.S. Attorney for D.C.

Sunday, December 14, 2008 
5:25 PM

As a longtime reader of dcwatch.com -and more recently, an actual subscriber via email- I just wanted to send up another flare to you re Eric Holder, like some of my previous head's up,
where dcwatch was the first to really ring the bell on the Cult of Michelle Rhee and her failure to produce "any measurable improvement in student performance" in D.C., the lack of national media attention shown to Mayor Adrian Fenty's autocratic ways, etc., which you'd think even the cablenets would've noticed by now, once the election was over.

But no, and certainly not now that we all have Rod Blagojevich to keep the cablenets yakking.
Anger and Indignation http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-02-03.htm
A City of Enemies http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-08-20.htm
Practice Makes Imperfect http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2008/08-12-03.htm

They have been all over the Michelle Rhee story in a way that nobody else in the country has been, even while columnists all over the country, who are unaware of the reality, jump on her media bandwagon and join the flack army with nary a thought.

I remember when I first read the Washington City Paper story below about Eric Holder eleven years ago. It immediately reminded me of another one of the corruption stories I heard about shortly after I moved to Capitol Hill, ironically, across the street from Sen. and Mrs. Moynihan, the man who first publicly defined deviancy down.
Right near the intersection of East Capitol Street and S.E. 7th Street where an early DC friend of mine who worked at the State Dept. was beaten robbed at gunpoint my first summer on 'the Hill.'

It was one of those news stories that made me stop and think, "Only in DC!," in the same incredulous way I'd always though about certain things being "Only in South Florida!" from having grown up done here and being deeply involved in Dade and state politics at an early age in the '70's -and having a father who worked as a Dade County policeman for over 25 years.
Usually, the "Only in South Florida!" story had the requisite foreign intrigue angle or something about crates marked bananas actually being weapons being smuggled out towards some distant war zone, or allegations about someone really being either a foreign spy or CIA or...

The DC Public Schools had decided to create a summer program for employees who were cafeteria workers at schools eight months out of the year.
The idea was to supplement their pay by during the summer to ensure they stayed afloat financially and ensure they'd be available once school started up in August.
Now as I recall it, once you signed up, you were assured of getting a paycheck, regardless of whether you actually were called in to do some work over the course of the summer.

Well, naturally, things being what they were in DC at the time, with little advance thought given to the overall process or what sort of audit control system they'd have, other than names being written down on a list -somewhere- things went about as bad as possible.
If there were X amount of legitimate workers entitled to be in the system, DCPS was actually paying something along the lines of 2.3X in checks, with hundreds of people who weren't legit actually receiving govt. checks for months on end.
Result: Most people getting DCPS' summer checks didn't actually work for the school system.

I don't recall now if there were any federal funds attached to the summer worker program, though my guess is yes, since the DC school system then wasn't exactly a great incubator of bright ideas or overflowing with cash.

It's also important to grasp a point the article hints at: DC juries then were a notoriously bad way to try to prosecute crime and corruption, because to many, the whole city was tainted, and not a place that respected the rule of law but rather the law of opportunity, with no judgment given or taken for how people got their hands on money.

Over 15 years of living in the area, I had my fair share of friends who served on DC juries who later told me that it was one of the worst experiences they ever went thru, largely because of the number of people on the jury with them who were not the least bit interested in upholding their responsibility.
Or, even in paying attention.
It literally scared them to death to think about all the people whose fates had been left up to such dis-interested DC residents, a subject they'd never hertofore considered, their personality and politics being what it was.
And if you don't think that experiences like this give people pause, and cause them to re-think their decision to eschew the suburbs for the city, for some abstract idea of living in a diverse urban village, you're very much mistaken.
Actually, in two specific cases I can think of, it proved to be the last straw, and led to them moving the family out towards me in Northern Virginia.

This laissez-faire attitude towards crime and corruption was brough home to me personally by a very brilliant and dedicated friend who was a prosecutor under Holder, but someone who, initially, took DC's culture of crime, cronyism and corruption a little too personally.
I felt like Jack McCoy trying to shake her out of her funk.

After I met her and we'd become trusted friends, I started attending her trials whenever I could manage, which -shocker!- often involved gangs, guns and lots of mayhem.
She later told me she thought it was odd that local DC media, who always seemed to be camped outside of the courthouse, and who came to recognize who all the other courthouse "regulars" were, never thought to wonder aloud on the air or in print, why so many young teens were always congregating inside the courthouse who didn't have a legitimate reason to be there.

She was right of course, as the sense of obliviousness by so-called security in the courthouse was palpable to anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention.

Yeah, witness intimidation was yet another thing that if not exactly winked at, got MUCH less
attention -and media attention- than it rightfully deserved then.
It finally got to the point that once she'd arrived at the Metro train station closest to our neighborhood, she'd walk thru a very large office building lobby, so she could be sure that nobody was following her home from the courthouse.

Having first heard and then seen what I had, what was I going to do, tell her that she was wrong to be concerned, when there was ample evidence she was right?

Personally, I think unless he's prepared to put the whole thing around President Clinton's neck, the more that Eric Holder tries to describe his own role in the Marc Rich pardon, the more difficult his nomination will be to swallow whole by the Senate.
Plus, there's the prospect of him having to discuss Elián González...
_______________________________________________
excerpt from the latest dcwatch.com posting

Partying in the mail, December 10, 2008
Dear Partiers:

For some reason, which is unrelated to local DC affairs and which we therefore won't mention (Blagojevich), we've been thinking about government corruption a lot today.
The problem with political corruption in the District of Columbia, as opposed to some other unnamed states (Illinois), is that political corruption is almost never prosecuted here, and there aren't any negative consequences for engaging in it. (The DC workers who stole from the Office of Tax and Revenue weren't engaged in government corruption; they were practicing just plain old-fashioned thievery.)
One of the best examples of official overlooking of official corruption occurred in the last term of Mayor Marion Barry. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia for three-and-a-half years of that term never prosecuted a single instance of official corruption, and his inattentiveness didn't seem to hurt his career (see Stephanie Mencimer, "Placeholder?", http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207). _________________________________________________
Washington City Paper
PlaceHolder?
With 12 years' experience prosecuting public corruption at the Justice Department, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder was a perfect choice to clean up a corrupt city. But after three and a half years, he may be moving on, and D.C. is still one of the most crooked cities in the nation.
By Stephanie Mencimer
Mar. 7 - 13, 1997 (Vol. 17, #10)

When President Bill Clinton tapped Eric Holder to be U.S. Attorney for D.C. in 1993, he immediately became the District's black sheriff in the white hat. The first African-American ever to hold the job, Holder's appointment broke a stretch of 12 years of white Republicans overseeing the predominantly black city. Not only was Holder representative of the city's majority population, but the former D.C. Superior Court judge had gone straight from Columbia Law School to the Justice Department's public integrity section, where he had spent 12 years successfully prosecuting corrupt public officials. Many people in the District were thrilled; Holder arrived with both exceptional qualifications and the moral authority to crack down on public corruption without the taint of racism that derailed his predecessors.

Up to that time, the city's relationship with the U.S. Attorney's office had been an awkward one. During the 1980s, the city watched as former U.S. Attorneys Jay Stephens and Joseph diGenova went after Mayor Marion Barry and his cronies only to be thwarted by juries that saw their prosecutions as politically and racially motivated crusades aimed at bringing down a popularly elected black mayor. Not only did Barry prevail in court, he came back and then some, reclaiming his old job in 1995. In spite of his history of personal malfeasance, a majority of city residents were willing to give Barry the benefit of the doubt. But many drew confidence from the fact that when Barry moved into 1 Judiciary Square, Holder would be a block away, looking over his shoulder. Holder seemed like a gold-plated insurance policy promising that Barry wouldn't get one over on the city. After all, Holder knew as much about prosecuting corruption as Barry seemed to know about perpetrating it.

After three and a half years on the job, Holder is still revered in the city's halls of power and widely respected by his peers in the legal field. He is the presumptive nominee to replace outgoing U.S. Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, a major plum position. He is infinitely qualified by all accounts, and his appointment would be a historic one, since the position has never been held by an African-American. But for all the love Holder has engendered in the community as U.S. Attorney, he has had precious little impact on the city's endemic municipal corruption. Barry has returned to his old tricks, nudging contracts and city jobs to old cronies and new girlfriends. Holder is apparently leaving, and he hasn't thrown a punch.
It isn't for lack of targets.

To read the rest of this great article, go to
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=12207

Stephanie Mencimer is now at Mother Jones.
For her more recent work, go to
http://www.motherjones.com/people/Stephanie-Mencimer.html