Post Benghazi Update- State Department Insists Deadly Consulate Attack was 'Spontaneous' Demonstration; Filmmaker Identified, Questioned by Authorities

Violent protests and attacks on American embassies throughout the Middle East continued on Friday and over the weekend. Demonstrators in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan and Yemen had stormed the grounds of US diplomatic missions, set fires and tore down the stars and stripes while hoisting a black islamist flag with arabic script.

The continued unrest comes as the White House and State Department repeatedly denied that the deadly attack on the Benghazi consulate was premeditated in any way. The attacks that killed US Ambassador Chris Stevens, Diplomatic Security officers and former Navy SEALS Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty and information officer Sean Smith took place on the 11th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.

While President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton maintain that the mob that had stormed the grounds of the US Consulate in Benghazi had formed 'spontaneously' in response to a short anti-Islam film that appeared on YouTube, Libyan officials have claimed otherwise. In an interview with NPR, Libyan president President Mohammed el-Megarif said the Benghazi assault was a military-style attack that used heavy weaponry such as RPGs and mortars to assault the consulate and safehouses as well as keep reinforcements at bay. Such an attack, el-Megarif points out, would require comprehensive advanced planning. Egyptian PM Hesham Kandil said that at least some of the rioters in Cairo who were arrested after clashes with police in front of the US Embassy there had confessed to being paid to show up. In the face of all that, White House Press spokesman Jay Carney claimed that the protests, arson, looting and murders directed at American diplomats throughout the Middle East and arab world somehow aren't directed at the USA, but rather a visceral reaction to the anti-Muslim video circulating online.

Curiously, a few days prior to the American consulate in Benghazi being overrun, Canada had announced they were closing down their embassy in Tehran and expelling all Iranian diplomatic personnel from Canada. The Canadian government cited their official designation of Iran as a terrorist-sponsoring state, their continued support of the Syrian regime's military crackdown on its citizens and an attack against the British Embassy in Tehran that the UK insists was orchestrated by Iran's ruling mullahs. I thought Canada's Foreign Affairs ministry was newsworthy in and of itself at the time, but it's taken on greater significance since the murder of American diplomats on September 11.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration, State Department and US Media's response to the slaughter in Benghazi has been disheartening at best.

While insisting that an attack utilizing heavy weaponry such as RPGs and mortars WASN'T pre-planned, the Obama Administration and American media outlets quickly went on the counterattack- not against the people who murdered our ambassadors and torched our diplomatic posts, but rather Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the purported filmmaker.

A number of press outlets immediately jumped on Romney shortly after he issued a statement criticizing a message from the State Department that the Administration themselves had backed away from. So as Obama flew out to a Las Vegas campaign fundraiser as American embassies throughout the middle East were burning, there was the matter of a compliant media coordinating questions shortly before a press conference former governor Romney's non-existent gaffe and 'jumping the gun' to the point while President Obama briefly issued a statement and took no questions before leaving to continue his re-election campaign in Nevada.

However, that paled in comparison to what took place in Southern California on Friday night when Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies showed up at the house of one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to take him into custody. Nakoula, who made The Innocence of Muslims film under the pseudonym Sam Basile, was identified as a Coptic Christian who emigrated here from Egypt and was sentenced to 20 month in prison after being arrested in a 2009 check-kiting scam. Nakoula had also reportedly agreed to become a government informant after his 2009 arrest in exchange for a sentence reduction. Reportedly the deputies were there to escort him to an interview with federal probation officials. However, the late night visit by deputies only came after calls from Islamist groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to prosecute the filmmaker for insulting the prophet Muhammed.

Over the weekend, images of Nakoula with his face hidden and flanked by deputies had circulated throughout the web. Curiously, some of Obama's more prominent supporters [in the entertainment industry of all places- NANESB!] had come out in favor of prosecuting Nakoula on ambiguous 'hate crimes' charges.

Meanwhile, the press had thoughtfully taken it upon themselves to reveal Nakoula's face and home address to the world. Unsurprisingly, Nakoula and his family have fled their Cerritos, CA home to an undisclosed location. Google- which is the parent company of YouTube- has since rejected a White House request to take down the offending video.

Voting Machines on Auto-Pilot? Irregularities Showing At Early Polling in Nevada, North Carolina, Texas

Well, they couldn't get the absentee ballots off in time in New York or Illinois, so why on earth would any of us think the early polling go any better elsewhere?

Early voting for the Nov. 2nd mid-terms got off to a rocky start in some jurisdictions this week.

By Tuesday night, there were reports that polling stations in at least two counties in North Carolina were experiencing problems with the touchscreen voting machines.

Laughinghouse cast his ballot at the [Craven] county administration building at about 2:30 p.m., he said. After voting, he located a Republican worker on site and asked to speak with her about his voting machine issue. A man interrupted, he said, directing Laughinghouse to talk with him instead. That man said the machine likely needed to be calibrated, Laughinghouse said, and set about the method to do so

Nearby New Hanover County also experienced similar problems on the first day of One Stop Voting earlier this month.

Out in Nevada, there have been reports coming in from Las Vegas and elsewhere in Clark County that voters have found their touchscreen voting machines had already checked Harry Reid's name.

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

"Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."

As it turns out, the technicians for the voting machines are represented by SEIU Local 1107, which has supported Reid's bid for a fifth term as senator. Perhaps even more ominously, Reid's son Rory also happens to be the chairman of the Clark County Commission and is running for governor of Nevada.

In Texas, there have been reports of votes for Republican Gubernatorial candidate Rick Perry being switched to the Green Party's Deb Shafto and votes for Democrat candidate Bill White being shifted to show Rick Perry, again using touchscreen technology.

And in Troy, NY, New York State Police investigators have taken DNA samples from a Troy city councilman and the city clerk as part of an ongoing absentee voter registration fraud case from last year. The two officials are suspected of forging dozens of absentee ballots and attributing them to voters who had no role in filling them out.


As an aside, I worked as an election worker in a statewide special election a few years back. The only position that was available at the time was to set up and inspect the touchscreen voting machine. I was assigned to a polling station in a village of about 1800 and maybe 40 people showed up all day. The county gives you the choice of paper ballot or the touchscreen, and none of the voters who showed up wanted to use the touchscreen, so I was basically the Maytag repairman throughout the day. And even though nobody used the machine, we had to secure the memory card and printout with the paper ballots as though there really were votes to be tallied on there before handing them off the the Sheriff's department.

So with that in mind, the million dollar question is "Do each of these jurisdictions offer a choice between paper ballot or the touchscreen, or is it exclusive touchscreen voting?". Although clearly not 100% tamper-proof, I would prefer to use a paper ballot myself come election day in light of recent events.

US Media Attempting to Establish Non-Existent Links Between Tea Party Opposition to Obama and Very Real Acts of Violence?

In all honesty, myself and others saw this coming as far back as the 2008 Presidential campaign; certain elements of the press and blogosphere were attempting to establish the narrative that anybody who opposed Obama was likely a racist, if not a dangerous fringe militia type. It was a pretty transparent attempt to put the onus on the Illinois Democrat's critics to explain exactly why they weren't racist fringe wingnuts instead of dwelling on such niceties like Obama's lack of foreign policy or legislative experience or his long-standing association with a rogue's gallery of outspoken America-haters and criminals such as Jerimaih Wright, Tony Rezko or William Ayers.

The sad part, as you can see, is that it was all too effective.

About a month into the administration, CNBC on-air editor Rick Santelli accused the Obama administration of rewarding bad behavior with the administration's Homeowner Affordibility and Stability Plan. While live on the air from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Santelli raised the possibility of a latter-day 'Tea Party' movement in Chicago, which is widely believed to be the genesis of the Tea Party movement's name.

A little over a month after Santelli's on-air remarks, on April 4th, 2009 Pittsburgh Police officers Eric Kelly, Paul Sciullo and Stephen Mayhle were murdered in the line of duty while responding to a domestic disturbance call involving a mother and her adult son. The perpetrator, 22 year old Richard Poplawski was later found out to have been discharged from the Marine Corps before even completing boot camp and was a regular visitor to white-supremacist websites ranting about ZOG (neo-nazi shorthand for Zionist Occupation Government). After a 4-hour standoff, he eventually surrendered to police.

Curiously, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette managed to slip this little aside in on the day of the shooting and standoff:

Mr. Poplawski had supported Republican candidate John McCain in the presidential election and had "very spirited debates" about Democratic candidate Barack Obama

Wow- I know I'm about 18 months too late with this newsflash, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is about as moderate as they come for the Republicans....and some would say politicians in general. Maybe it's just me, but the underlying implication seems to be 'even supporters of moderate Republicans are unstable and potentially dangerous cop-killers'.

Also keep in mind that, the Pittsburgh shootings were the latest in a string of high profile mass-murders in the span of a few weeks. On March 21, 2009, convicted felon and child-rapist Lovelle Mixon shot and killed Oakland Police motorcycle patrolmen Mark Dunakin and John Hege during a routine traffic stop before fleeing to his sister's apartment and ambushing Oakland SWAT officers Ervin Romans and Daniel Sakai before Mixon himself was cut down by return fire. The day before the Pittsburgh shooting, a disgruntled Vietnamese immigrant named Jiverly Wong used a car to barricade the door of an American Civic Association Center in Binghampton, NY before fatally shooting 13 people inside and turning the gun on himself.

Yet at no point did we hear about the political leanings of Mixon or Wong from the mainstream media. It was probably considered not relevant at the time, unlike speculation about Poplawski's political preferences.

Then, in April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law-enforcement againcies throughout the country warning about a rise in "rightwing extremist activity", broadly defining returning veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan and US citicizens opposed to gun control, abortion and illegal immigration as potential extremists. The report drew criticism from conservative bloggers and the American Leigon and although the DHS claimed the work that went into compiling the report began in the last months of the Bush Administration, many of the report's key findings factored in the current recession and election of Obama as President.

The authors of the report seemed to be vindicated when Dr. George Tiller was gunned down in a Witchita, KS church on May 31st 2009 by an anti-abortion activist. The killing drew condemnation from the President, who issued a statement within hours. Attourney General Holder ordered US Marshalls to provide additional security at abortion clinics across the country the day of Dr. Tiller's murder. However, barely 24 hours later, Pvt. William Andrew Long of Conway, AR was shot and killed and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula of Jacksonville, AR was wounded in a shooting targeting the US Army Recruiter's office in Little Rock, AR. The gunman, 24 year old Abdulhakim Muhammed, was a convert to Islam and had spent time in Yemen. As vindicated as proponents of the DHS report might've felt after the Tiller murder, they were remarkably silent after the Little Rock shootings.

And for the remainer of 2009 the Mainstream Media would only notice the Tea Parties long enough to remind us how dangerous and enigmatic they were and the DHS report failed to take into account the actions of terrorists like Nidal Malik Hasan or Umar Frouk Abdulmutallab while DHS secretary Napolitano assured us 'the system worked'.

So let us flip the calendar forward to 2010, where we've aleady had a few high profile acts of violence and we're not even through the month of Febuary. On January 4th 2010, a gunman opened fire inside of the Las Vegas, NV Federal Building, killing a security guard and wounding a US Marshall before being cut down by return fire. Now given how the racially diverse MSNBC personalities were assuring us it was only a matter of time before the racist, unhinged anti-government individuals that made up the Tea Party movement began lashing out in a murderous fashion- and what better place for them to lash out than a Federal building? Only, it turned out that the shooter, 66 year old Johnny Lee Wicks, was angry at his reduced Social Security benefits. Wicks, who was black, had earlier sued the Social Security Administration claiming racial discrimination and set his condo on fire before his Federal building rampage.

Then, on Febuary 12th, 2010, University of Alabama Huntsville biology professor Amy Bishop allegedly opened fire during a faculty meeting on campus, killing three of her colleagues and wounding three more. Perhaps even more disturbing about the shooting was the string of previous incidents involving Bishop, starting with the fatal shooting of her brother in 1986.

And last week, there was the case of Jospeh Stack III, who deliberately flew his single-engine aircraft into a building in Austin, TX housing an IRS field office after torching his own house and posting a lengthy online screed. Stack and one person in the office building were killed. And since the other two incidents were likely considered 'false-starts', the Mainstream Media has decided to go for the gusto and try and portray Jospeh Stack III as a regular attendee of the Tea Party rallies, cherry-picking his tirade for quotes that sound like something 'those gosh-darn teabaggers would say' when he seemed just as upset at the Catholic Church, GW Bush and the fact that obamacare didn't pass as he was at the IRS

Out of the three aforementioned high-profile acts of violence in 2010, I would have to say Professor Amy Bishop would come the closest to being politically motivated. Whether or not her murder spree at Huntsville was politically motivated is up for debate, but other bloggers and certain Boston area media outlets have done a yoeman's job in bringing to light several troubling aspects of Amy Bishop's past that would have most people in jail or unemployable for the rest of their days. In 1986, Bishop was arrested in Braintree, MA after fatally shooting her brother with a shotgun and brandishing it at employees of a nearby Ford dealership before she was arrested. Questions were raised about the case some 23 and a half years later when it was learned she was released to her mother's custody before she was booked. Bishop's mother was a Braintree town official and then-Norfolk County DA Bill Delahunt ruled the shooting accidental. The files from the case had gone missing until fairly recently and the current Norfolk County DA's office ruled that sufficent evidence existed in 1986 to charge Amy Bishop with assault with a deadly weapon.

Delahunt (D-MA) is now a US Congressman from Massachusett's 10th district, although this month he announced he's contemplating retirement. Although a spokesman from the tHugo Chavez-allied Democrat's office said such considerations are routine, it's pretty safe to say he wasn't so sure about calling it a career before Scott Brown stomped Martha Coakley in the January special election or the spoiled brat his office kicked lose some 20+ years ago killed again.

In 1993, Bishop and her husband James Anderson were considered 'persons of interest' by ATF and U.S. Postal inspectors when a Harvard Medical School Professor recieved in the mail two pipe bombs that failed to detonate. However, charges were never filed by the Feds due to lack of evidence.

In 2002, Bishop was arrested for assault and battery at a Peabody, MA IHOP when she found out another family dining in the resturant had the last booster seat. According to the Peabody Police report, an enraged Bishop let loose a profanity-laced tirade at the mother of the family with the booster seat before punching her in the head and shouting "I am Amy Bishop!". She was found guilty of misdemanor battery charges and sentenced to take anger-management classes, which she skipped out on.....

According to the Boston Herald, family sources indicated Bishop was a leftist 'obsessed with President Obama to the point of being off-putting' and certainly benefitted from preferntial treatment by the Braintree Police and Norfolk County DA's office. This begs the question that no matter how 'book-smart' Amy Bishop may have been, what the hell was she doing a free woman, let alone an assistant professor seeking tenure?

But the million dollar question is, if the tea party-people are as dangerous as the mainstream media has been advertising, wouldn't we have had more than one high-profile violent incident attributed to them by now? I mean....surely a dangeous and reactionary group that Newsweek and MSNBC has been describing would've lashed out violently at the object of their unjutified rage by now.....or would the press that's been breathlessly warning the rest of us what a dangerous and violent fringe movement it is have to stoop to creating nonexistant links?

[Hat tip to LoppyD and New Class Traitor for the detailed background info on Amy Bishop]