Day: April 12, 2023
Pennsylvania: Restaurant asks waitress to remove hijab, restaurant is inundated with death threats
BY LARRY ESTAVAN
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
Michael’s Family Restaurant in Glenside, Pennsylvania has been receiving death threats all day. Hundreds of threatening phone calls have reduced the owner’s mother to tears, and the restaurant is pleading for people to see reason.
This all stems from a manager who sent a waitress home when she would not remove her hijab. Michael’s Family Restaurant has since fired the manager and apologized. But as WTXF reporter Ellen Kolodziej says, that might not be enough, as protesters began to assemble outside the eatery.
Listening to Tameka Beverly, the aunt of the employee, it is not clear if her niece wore the hijab to the job interview.
Her first day she wore it. She showed up for training, she wore it. Then they told my sister she couldn’t wear it when she came back, but she wore it anyway. In no way should anybody be discriminated against and made to feel less and pushed into a corner where they have to remove their hijab.
The combination of a televised hijab crisis involving a restaurant strongly suggests the presence of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Indeed, when WPVI ABC6 read a statement from the restaurant, the station omitted the last sentence.
Michael’s Family Restaurant in Glenside released a statement Saturday:
“Michael’s Family Restaurant has been serving Glenside for over 15 years and have always taken pride in our quality of service, respect for our customers, and the diversity of our employee and customer base.
A video posted online on Friday, April 7, 2023 recorded one of our employees violating the values of our establishment. Our leadership team evaluated facts of the case and we would like our community to know that, effective Friday April 7, 2023 this employee is no longer affiliated with Michael’s Family Restaurant in Glenside.
We thank everyone who reached out to our Restaurant to record their disappointment. We share their sentiments and would like to underline that we value and respect every background that we proudly serve, including our Muslim-American customers. We are saddened that this incident disrupted their peaceful observance of the month of Ramadan. Needless to note, our beloved employee will be able to work here with her khimar should she wish to do so.
Additionally, we commit to meeting with Muslim-American community members to listen to them and also have our staff go through a sensitivity training to ensure an incident like this never repeats.”
The last sentence read:
We will work with CAIR-Philadelphia and other leaders to achieve these goals.
This is the second TV attack by CAIR this month and the eleventh of the year. Which is on pace for over 30 incidents this year.
This year’s victims so far:
WATCH: Pentagon Official Confronted Over Military’s 5 Consecutive Failed Audits
Jon Stewart SHREDS ‘Corrupt’ Pentagon During Scathing Defense Secretary Interview
Jon Stewart spoke with Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks at the 2023 War Horse Symposium. Stewart confronted Hicks about the difficulty of auditing the Defense Department. Stewart alludes to the size of the budget relative to the salaries of Defense Department staffers who are living off of food stamps and not making a living wage. Stewart begins by asking Hicks about the Defense Department's inability to pass an audit for the past 20 years. Hicks explains that the department has been working to improve its auditing process, but that it is a complex task. Stewart then asks Hicks about the salaries of Defense Department staffers. He points out that the department has a budget of over $800 billion, but that many of its employees are living below the poverty line. Hicks acknowledges that this is a problem, and says that the department is working to address it. Stewart concludes by saying that he believes the Defense Department's inability to audit itself is "corruption." He says that the department is not being held accountable for its spending and that this is a problem that needs to be addressed.
LONG VIDEO:
BY BEN BARTEE
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
The U.S. military suffers from a severe accounting deficiency.
Via Responsible Statecraft, Nov. 2022:
Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit…
The Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets…
The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.
But what did raise some eyebrows was the fact that DoD made almost no progress in this year’s bookkeeping: Of the 27 areas investigated, only seven earned a clean bill of financial health…
The Pentagon’s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote in 2020, the lead vessel for every one of the Navy’s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs.
Conservatives who want the state to run like a business should be rightfully outraged that the U.S. military, with its $886 billion effective budget request for 2023, expects that it can skate by with five consecutive failed audits and somehow still escape any kind of fiscal reckoning from the institutions of public trust tasked with its oversight.
Related: Leak of Classified Documents on Ukraine, China, and the Middle East a ‘Nightmare’ Says Pentagon
Jon Stewart recently pressed Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks on this issue. Unforthcoming, defensive, and condescending, she came out looking less than stellar. If her mission was to assuage public concerns over how her bosses put to use the hundreds of billions of dollars with which they are entrusted, she failed.
The entire six-minute clip is worth watching, if for no other reason than to gain a deeper appreciation of the hubris and disdain that bureaucrats like Hicks have for the media and the public that consumes it. No one in a position of authority has reminded them that they are public servants for years, and so naturally they are offended by probing questions about their publicly-funded activities.
Here is a truncated version of Stewart’s questioning, as transcribed via Task & Purpose:
Now, I may not understand exactly the ins and outs, and the incredible magic of an audit. But I’m a human being who lives on the Earth and can’t figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. To me, that’s f***ing corruption. And I’m sorry. And, if like, that blows your mind and you think that’s like a crazy agenda for me to have, I really think that that’s institutional thinking.
Bombshell Docs Show Biden White House Directly Coordinated With FBI to Set up Trump Raid
Biden admin officials were reportedly involved in Mar-a-Lago raid
BY MATT MARGOLIS
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
New information is being uncovered regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s unprecedented raid of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last year. According to America First Legal (AFL), a judicial watchdog, an investigation of the raid confirmed that the FBI gained access to NARA records through a “special access request” made by the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice.
“On August 8, 2022, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted an unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago on the ground that potentially classified records existed there. According to press reports, Biden Administration aides were “stunned” to hear of this development,” AFL begins in a press release. “However, new NARA records obtained through America First Legal’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirmed that the FBI obtained access to these records through a ‘special access request’ from the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice (DOJ).”
According to AFL, it appears that “the Biden White House and DOJ coordinated to obtain the Trump records and perhaps create a pretext for the law enforcement raid by way of the ‘special access request.'”
In addition to confirming that the White House was involved in setting up Trump, AFL also proves that the National Archives misled Congress about the role the White House played in the raid.
“This stunning revelation suggests that NARA was misleading Congress about the White House’s role in the shocking raid of President Trump’s home, and the fact that the Biden White House was acting “on behalf of” the DOJ raises significant legal concerns,” explains AFL. “The special access statute authorizes special access requests to an incumbent president only when the records in question are needed for ‘the conduct of current business’ of the White House. Providing documents to the DOJ for purposes of a criminal investigation is not the ‘current business’ of the White House.”
AFL is now urging the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to disclose all records related to the Biden administration’s role in the politically motivated raid of former President Trump’s home.
“The evidence suggests that the ostensibly nonpartisan National Archives and Records Administration misled Congress about the Biden White House’s responsibility for the FBI’s raid of former President Trump’s home,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations. “The evidence further suggests that Biden officials in the Executive Office of the President and the Department of Justice unlawfully abused their power and then lied about it to the American people. This government, it seems, acknowledges no limits on its power to harass, intimidate, and silence its political opponents.”