Joy Reid on Bush in 2009: 'Investigate The Bastard'

    In 2009, Joy Reid posted the below article on her blog using a photoshopped picture of President Bush holding the flag and giving the finger. [The Internet Archive appears to have deleted old The Reid Report archives now.] The article was about a poll regarding investigating allegations of torture by the CIA under Bush.

    Earlier today I wrote about Reid referencing a malicious rumor about an affair between Bush and his secretary of Condoleezza Rice. Reid has apologized for some of her old posts, but has yet to address either of these.

Joy Reid's Old Blog Photo: 'Condi Rice with (future political baby daddy?) John McCain'

    On her now-defunct The Reid Report blog in 2008, Joy Reid went after George W. Bush's secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. As then-presidential candidate John McCain was considering his vice presidential choice, former Bush administration Dan Senor floated Rice's name as a possibility for the position ultimately filled by Sarah Palin. Reid posted a photo of McCain and Rice with the caption "Condi Rice with (future political baby daddy?) John McCain."

    Earlier in 2008, Reid referenced a vicious, left-wing conspiracy theory regarding an alleged affair between Rice and President Bush. Reid wrote:

[Rice] has been a middling secretary of state, with few real accomplishments to show for her sojourn with George W. Bush (then again, nobody who's hung around that clod has much to show for it after nearly two terms.) We don't know much more about her than that (unless you believe the stuff about her being Dubya's girlfriend ... she'd have to have pretty poor taste in men...) [screenshot below]

    Reid has apologized for some of her old posts after suggesting hackers had written the more controversial passages that were found on archived copies of her blog. The Wayback Machine (archive.org) seems to have since deleted at least some of the archives, but other copies remain elsewhere as of this date [at this point, I am not linking to those archives to avoid further scrubbing of the record.]

    Personally, I have no desire to see Reid fired from her current position at MSNBC, but rather simply take responsibility, apologize when necessary, and show a willingness (along with the rest of the media and the public) to forgive old, intemperate or immature remarks. Who knows, I may need similar consideration someday myself. 

Joy Reid's 2008 Anti-Hillary Blog: Mahatma Hillary

    In 2008, as Hillary Clinton battled Barack Obama for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Joy Reid threw her support behind Obama. Part of Reid's efforts to support Obama was a satirical website entitled "MahatmaHillary.com."
    Reid's site declared that is was "dedicated to all of those who have been put off by Senator Clinton's negative campaign for the White House. Its purpose is to try and recapture the warmth of HRC, while giving a nod to her grandiosity and historic accomplishments over 35-plus years of service. Most of you probably don't know all the good that Hillary has done. Hell, I know I didn't..."

    The site was short-lived, consisting only of 11 entries, but placed Hillary, Forrest-Gump-like in various historical settings, such as the moon landing and Nixon's trip to China:

    When Clinton suspended her campaign in June 2008, Reid finished out the blog with a conciliatory post, noting:

"I have been a harsh critic of the Clinton campaign, having come into the primary last January as a die-hard Clinton Democrat, who became both incredibly inspired by Barack Obama and sorely disappointed with the negative trajectory of the race, which I feel was driven by the former president and the Senator from New York, as well as by some of her senior advisers. Today, I think Hillary took a step back toward the grace that people like me had long expected of her."

    Reid linked to the MahatmaHillary blog from her also defunct and much more controversial Reid Report blog that has landed Reid in so much hot water lately.

    The MahatmaHillary blog is still accessible (as of this posting) via the Internet Archive, unlike the Reid Report blog which appears to have been scrubbed by the Wayback Machine:

    However, I saved some screenshots of a few rather shocking Reid Report blog posts that I will be posting soon. Stay tuned.

Farrakhan in 2015: "We Must Rise Up and Kill Those Who Kill Us Outside of the Law of Justice"

    In 2015, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan organized a "Justice or Else" rally on the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, DC to mark the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March. A month before the rally, Mr. Farrakhan was interviewed by Roland Martin,NewsOne Now’s Roland Martin. In the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the year before, Mr. Farrakhan called for "10,000 Fearless Men" to help end violence in the black community, by going "into Black neighborhoods [to] stand between Black people aiming guns at other Black people." However, Mr. Martin told Mr. Farrakhan that "a number of conservative sites are suggesting that you are calling for the killing of police[.]" In his lengthy and rather rambling answer, Mr. Farrakhan clearly went beyond the pacifist-like mission he seemed to be describing earlier:

"Yes, white folks jumped all over that and said Farrakhan is calling for 10,000 fearless black men to go out and kill white people. Now I'm passionate, but I'm not stupid. To call for 10,000 black men to go out and kill white people, what would that bring on us? Can we stand that kind of heat? Where are the weapons? Who has the weapons? This is a well-armed country. 350 million guns among the American people. How many black people are allowed to have guns legally? And most of the guns in the inner-city are illegal. No I'm not calling for that. So they rushed to say I'm going to kill white people, but here's what I really meant. You know and I know and black people know that white policemen kill us, the prosecutors are liars, the judges are liars, the forensics specialists... all are conspiratorial in getting a white people off. They have killed us, but they've never had to pay the price. The law of retaliation that's in the Bible and in the Koran says, it is a prescription. You don't go to the hospital or the doctor with a malady and he doesn't give you a prescription? A prescription for us is, those who kill us and seem to get away with it, we cannot allow it to continue. We must rise up and kill those who kill us outside of the law of justice and when they feel death like we feel death, when they feel pain at the burying of their dead like we feel it, then maybe we can sit down to a table and act like civilized people. That's why I said if the federal government; that's the monster, the federal government has never interceded to see that black men and women tried and killed get justice so when we come to Washington, we're not coming to play with the government, we're not coming to play with the forces that take take life out of us, but neither are we going to play with the life in the black community that's killing us, so I said I wanted 10,000 fearless, we're going to be inside our community, standing between the guns of the gangs. We're asking for 10,000, but you got to accept to be trained by the Nation of Islam and the fruit of Islam so that we can teach you how to be with your people. We are not killers of our people. No Nation of Islam member carries a weapon. We don't believe in the carnal weapons of this world. However, we have to be trained to go into our community with the love that we have for our own people and stand in the gap. But I tell you brother Roland, when we go in our community to stand in the gap you will find there are rogue policeman that suck the life out of our community. Now the police department, you know this, and if you don't know it, you will know it, because all the rogue cops want to be in the black community. Darren Wilson didn't want to be in the white community, policing white people. He wanted to be in the black community where the action is. Police know where the drugs are, they go in and raid; there may be $200,000 on the table, and they take $160[,000] or $170[,000] and put $30,000 back in the police thing and then they divide the money up. They kill are people too, they put our young people out there to sell drugs as well."

    This is the man many politicians and progressive activists are struggling to avoid having to denounce and cut long-standing ties with. See my two commentaries in the Wall Street Journal for further details.

Iran President Rouhani's Private 2013 Dinner Photos: Louis Farrakhan, Rep. Gregory Meeks

UPDATE: The headline has been updated to remove Rep. Andre Carson who said he was invited to the meeting but did not attend. I have also updated the text below.
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    In 2013 when then-newly elected President Hassan Rouhani came to New York to speak to the United Nations General Assembly, he held a private dinner and time of discussion at the One UN Hotel in Manhattan where the Iranian delegation was staying. On Friday, February 9, 2018, the Wall Street Journal published my commentary entitled "Keith Ellison, Louis Farrakhan and Iran," a follow-up to the prior week's "The Dems’ Farrakhan Problem." My new piece revealed that the 2013 event, previously reported as a gathering of US Muslim leaders, including Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan, also included Rep. Keith Ellison (M-MN), Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), and Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN).
    In attempting to debunk the story Saturday, the Iranian government Saturday inadvertently confirmed it. The Fars News agency reported that Iranian Vice-President for Communications and Information Parviz Esmayeeli denied that Rouhani meet with the congressman. But the evidence provided by Esmayeeli not only shows that Ellison and Meeks were present, but added the detail that Ellison and Farrakhan sat nearly directly across from one another, facing one another during the event.

    Below are photos from The Final Call (a Nation of Islam publication) and the Islamic House of Wisdom (an Islamic center in Dearborn Heights, Michigan,) as well as photos that appear on the government website of the President of Iran.
    The juxtaposition of these photos from various sources lay to rest the idea that, as Parviz Esmayeeli put it, the 2013 meeting of Rouhani and the congressmen is a "sheer lie." 

    The first three photos below are drawn from the Islamic House of Wisdom site. 

    In this photo, Rouhani can be seen in the top-center and the very back of Louis Farrakhan's head can be seen on the left.

    Here, Farrakhan is seen across the table near the center of the photo, and Rep. Gregory Meeks on the right of the photo with Rouhani visible just above Meeks's head.

    This photo is a little wider shot of the previous photo with Farrakhan still visible across the table and again Rep. Meeks on the right. Rep. Carson does not appear in the photos, only being mentioned as a participant in the text of the Final Call and Islamic House of Wisdom reports on the meeting.

    The remaining photos come from The Final Call.

    This close up of Farrakhan shows his face more clearly along with the two men on either side of him, matching the wider shots in the earlier photos.

    The final two photos, which The Final Call posted as a set, shows Meeks more clearly, and also includes the gentleman to Meeks's right who is captured in the wider-angle photos above. The photo of Ellison does not line up with the previous wider-angle views, but the flowers in the foreground and the blue curtain behind him match the decor from the other photos of the meeting.
    Finally, below are photos from the official website of Iranian President Rouhani. The Fars article reporting the denial the the congressmen attended the dinner included the link to the photos.

    The above photos shows a wide shot of the entire group of attendees at the dinner. The positions of the participants match the photos on The Final Call and Islamic House of Wisdom sites. (This shot also includes a videographer visible on the left suggesting a video record of the meeting may exist.)

    These two photos focus on the front right corner of the room, to the left of President Rouhani. The gentleman with the white hair and beard can also be seen sitting to Ellison's right in the close-up of Ellison that appears at The Final Call. The final photo below is a zoomed clip of the center-right portion of the photo above, and it focuses on the place card on the table to the left of the white haired gentleman.

    The first two letters are unclear, but the rest of the portion of the card that is visible reads "Rep Keit", the remainder having been cut out of the photo. The place card is obviously that of Rep. Keith Ellison, matching his position in the other photos.

    It is unclear at this point who took these photos and whether more than one person was involved. I contacted Askia Muhammad, the photographer who took the picture of then-Senator Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan that was suppressed for 13 years before being released last month. Muhammad told me, " I did attend two New York dinners on successive years when President Rouhani spoke at the U.N. Minister Farrakhan attended one meeting. I never saw Keith Ellison at either of those events." Muhammad did not say which years he attended. Rouhani has addressed the UN in New York each of the five years he has served as Iran's president (2013-2017.)
    As of Saturday evening, Rep. Meeks is the only congressman to have responded. As I mentioned in the Journal, Meeks's press secretary, when asked if Rep. Meeks wished to respond to my request for details of the meeting replied via email, "We do not. Thanks."
    Now that the Iranian government has weighed in with a risible denial, additional questions must be asked. Why is the Iranian government so anxious to deny meeting with the congressmen in question? Why are the congressmen avoiding questions about the meeting? Was Andre Carson indeed present as The Final Call and the Islamic House of Wisdom reported? What was discussed at the meeting? Is video of the meeting available? Did the congressmen and Louis Farrakhan interact with each other at the meeting?
    Finally, will the Democratic Party finally demand that its members make a clear and public break with a man that even the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a Black Separatist and leader of a group that, in Ellison's own words, spreads "hatred and division, including, anti-Semitism[.]"? Will this be the final straw?

Is President Trump Spiking Maiden Names? Speak With Authority Investigates!

    Let me just say up front: this is trivial.

    OK, now that that is out of the way: Remember that story about Donald Trump asking GOP Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel to drop her maiden name because "Rommey" bugs him? Via the Washington Post:

Before Ronna Romney McDaniel took over as Republican National Committee chairwoman earlier this year, President Trump had a request: Would she be willing to stop using her middle name publicly? 

Trump followed up by saying in a lighthearted way that McDaniel, the niece of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, could do what she wanted, according to two people familiar with the comments. But the change was soon plain for all to see. Though she had used her maiden name for years in Michigan, where her grandfather George W. Romney had been governor, McDaniel dropped “Romney” from most official party communications and has rarely used it since.

    Turns out that all the way through July 6, 2017, Ms. McDaniel had her name on the GOPChairwoman Twitter account as "Ronna RomneyMcDaniel":

    By July 12 (the next archived version available), the Romney was gone! Now it looks like this:

    I contacted the GOP about the change, but to my great surprise, I received no response. Nothing leaped out at me when perusing the news during the week of the change that would explain the timing.
    So what are we to make of this maiden name eliding (elidation?)? If Mike Huckabee goes off the Trump reservation, will @SarahHuckabee suddenly become SarahSanders? Bate your breath!

In California, Undercover Video of Abortion Clinics, Bad; But For Smog Tests, Great!

    This week, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra charged two pro-life activists from the Center for Medical Progress who recorded secret video of Planned Parenthood representatives discussing selling baby parts from abortion. The two are charged with 15 felonies for violating privacy laws (a questionable decision in and of itself, as I noted on Twitter.)
    Becerra replaced Kamala Harris as CA's attorney general when Harris was elected to the US Senate in 2016. Harris began the investigation of the CMP's secret videos, including arranging an FBI raid of one of the defendant's homes.
    Harris, however, has not always taken a dim view of undercover video. In a 2014, Harris used undercover surveillance video to nab a... smog test scofflaw (scoughlaw?).

    So undercover video to reveal abortion industry misconduct and fraud: bad! Smog test fraud? Good! Thanks, California.