Month: July 2016

Baja Bust

by digby

Here’s Trump’s latest:

After people pointed out that the Star of David was a bad choice they changed it to a circle.

Speaking of corrupt:

The Baja resort was supposed to cover 17 acres of oceanfront property on bluffs 10 miles south of the U.S. border. The 525 condos cost $275,000 to $3 million; Simms’ was $506,900. Buyers were required to make a 30% deposit in several installments.

As the Trumps and their partners promoted the condos with sleek brochures and what they called “VIP” cocktail receptions in San Diego County, they often left the impression — or said outright — that Trump was one of the developers. Their marketing team determined that the Trump name was the No. 1 draw for buyers, according to documents that surfaced in the lawsuit.

“We are developing a world-class resort befitting of the Trump brand,” Ivanka Trump said in a video on the Trump Baja website. “I’m very excited about it. I actually chose to buy a unit in the first tower.”

Her father appeared in the same video saying he was proud “that when I build, I have investors that follow me all over.”

“They invest in what I build, and that’s why I’m so excited about Trump Ocean resort,” he said.

Simms, in a video appearance she now regrets, was also shown praising Trump’s “wonderful reputation” at a VIP reception hosted by Ivanka Trump at L’Auberge Hotel in Del Mar. “The Trump name is synonymous with quality,” Simms said in the video.

Simms, 50, and Sapol, who went to the same party with her husband, Jeff, remembered meeting Ivanka Trump as waiters served canapés.

“She was joking around that she was my upstairs neighbor, and she could borrow sugar from me,” Simms recalled.

A few weeks later, Donald Trump Jr. met potential buyers at a similar event at the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego. A Trump Baja newsletter, sent by the sales team to those who put down deposits, reported that he “flew in from New York to purchase a suite at the event and meet with fellow buyers.”

In fact, according to court documents, Trump Jr. did not buy a condo at the Baja resort.

Garten, the Trump counsel, did not respond directly when asked by email why condo buyers were told that Trump Jr. had bought a unit. In general, Garten said, allegations in the lawsuit “were never proven.”

A July 2007 newsletter sent to condo buyers also stated that the resort was being “developed by one of the most respected names in real estate, Donald J. Trump.”

Further buttressing buyers’ belief that Trump was one of the developers, not just a brand name, Trump personally signed an August 2007 letter to condo buyers that identified him as exactly that. It was on the letterhead of P.B. Impulsores, the Mexican company named in unit purchase documents as the resort developer.

The letter, co-signed by Jason Grosfeld of Irongate, urged buyers to read an attached “Frequently Asked Questions” sheet about the project. This time, Trump and Irongate were listed as the developers.

There’s much more at the link. He did this scam in Florida too.

My father lived in Baja California, down the road a few miles from where this project was supposed to be built. There is no doubt that people believed it was being built by Trump. Everyone in the neighborhood assumed this meant their property values were about to go through the roof because Trump was involved.

And, by the way, the Trump kids everyone says are such lovely wonderful people? It looks like they’re in on the con.

Rush is askeered

by digby

Crazy left wing hippies

The left is gearing up for violence:

Right. Because it’s the left that’s buying up AR-15s like they’re going out of style. 


But you have to laugh. These are people who spent the Clinton years saying “he is not my president” and then spent the Obama years saying “he’s not a legitimate president.” And when they stole the election in 2000, they smugly told everyone to “get over it.”

I think a better question would be, what are all these armed to the teeth Trump-lovers going to do if he doesn’t get elected?




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His pants are made of napalm

by digby

It’s probably best to just assume he’s lying. He actually lies more than he tells the truth:

PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking outlet based in Florida, is out today with its mid-year report on the 2016 election. It’s an attempt to take a step back from the day-to-day grind of the campaign and see which candidates are telling the truth and which aren’t.

Donald Trump isn’t.

Of the 158 Trump claims that PolitiFact has checked out, 95 have been rated either “False” or “Pants on Fire.” That’s 60 percent of all Trump claims. As PolitiFact notes, if you include the Trump statements rated “mostly false” in that group, 78 percent of all of Trump’s fact-checked claims have been scored “mostly false” or worse.

That’s not even the most amazing fact in the PolitiFact report. That honor goes to this: “Trump has more statements rated Pants on Fire, 30, than the 21 other candidates for president we’ve fact-checked this cycle combined.” Ben Carson comes in second in “Pants on Fire” ratings — with four!

Now, there’s some context that’s necessary here. Trump was the most fact-checked of all the 2016 candidates. Of the 650 fact checks PolitiFact conducted, 158 were on Trump — good for 24 percent of the total. Hillary Clinton was fact-checked 120 times over that same period, approximately 18 percent of the total. As PolitiFact notes, the number of Trump fact checks is to be expected because “he made himself more available on television in the early part of his campaign than his Democratic or Republican rivals. Trump also participated in more debates (11 by our count) than either of the top Democratic contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.”

So, yes, Trump has been fact-checked 38 more times than Clinton. And, yes, PolitiFact was the one deciding what statements to fact check. This is not a comprehensive guide to the relative truthfulness of every word uttered by Trump or Clinton in this campaign. But, the number of times his statements have been ruled “false” or “pants on fire” is still substantially higher than it is for her.

PolitiFact is not alone in finding Trump as a much more significant bender/breaker of the truth than the people he ran or is running against.

As of July 1, The Washington Post Fact Checker — the duo of Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee — has fact-checked 46 statements by Donald Trump. Thirty-two of those (70 percent) have been awarded Four Pinocchios, meaning that the statement is a “whopper” as defined by Kessler and Lee. (You can see all of Trump’s Four Pinocchio claims here.)

Kessler writes:

Most politicians tend to earn Four Pinocchios 10 to 20 percent of the time. (Moreover, most of the remaining ratings for Trump are Three Pinocchios.)

… Since Trump never takes anything back — and often repeats the same false claims — voters are likely to hear these time and again during the campaign season.

And we have.

Fact checkers, as you probably have figured out by now, don’t mean much to Trump. In fact, the very idea that the “mainstream media” says he isn’t telling the truth regularly is all the evidence many of his backers need to be convinced that he is the only one telling the truth.

Which is fine. But numbers don’t lie. And these numbers suggest Trump does.

We’ve been going down this road for a while. The right wing noise machine creates an alternate reality and now social media makes it possible for people to live inside their own bubble where people reinforce each others biases.

But Trump is on a whole other level.

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Warren broadens her attack
by Tom Sullivan

Last Saturday’s post addressed ways to disrupt commercial the forces undermining our democracy. Ways to restore balance to the Force, if you will. Today, please look at Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s speech to New America’s Open Markets meeting. Warren attacks consolidation itself, not just in finance but across industries including the tech sector, as an anti-competitive trend that must be stopped by more hard-headed regulation.

Earlier this week I mentioned Warren’s roll as principled antagonist for all the right corporate lapdogs in Congress. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism echoes those thoughts in response to Warren’s Open Markets speech:

Warren is continuing to be a thorn in the side of powerful interests. And even though bona fide progressives are disappointed on her support of our misadventures in the Middle East, and her general fealty to feckless Team Dem positions outside her particularly interests, the concentration of economic power and the resulting high corporate profit share of GDP is a big part of why capitalists are partying while workers struggle. Warren is taking on a central topic that is starting to mainstream traction. Even if Warren falls well short of being the Great Progressive Hope, it’s a mistake to disregard how she uses her bully pulpit to undermine a key justification for the rise of inequality in our society: that the operation of markets is always and ever virtuous and therefore outsized pay and profits are justly earned. The more monopolist wannabes are seen as parasites, the better off we will be.

Paul Glastris writes at Washington Monthly:

Warren is, of course, famous for her attacks on too-big-to-fail banks. But in her address yesterday, entitled “Reigniting Competition in the American Economy,” she extended her critique to the entire economy, noting that, as a result of three decades of weakened federal antitrust regulation, virtually every industrial sector today—from airlines to telecom to agriculture to retail to social media—is under the control of a handful of oligopolistic corporations. This widespread consolidation is “hiding in plain sight all across the American economy,” she said, and “threatens our markets, threatens our economy, and threatens our democracy.”

That should be obvious, and it drives the widespread feeling that democracy itself is slipping through our fingers. But that feeling among workers needs the validation of spokespersons of Warren’s stature. By repeating validating their concerns, Warren amplifies them. After citing the market reasons industry consolidation is harmful, she gets the to the democratic reasons:

Finally, concentration has contributed to the decline of what was once a strong, robust middle class in this country. As corporations get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, a handful of managers get richer, and richer, and richer. And god-bless—in America, we celebrate success. But what about everybody else? What about small business owners and community bankers – people who used to be able to hold their own with big guys but now find it harder and harder to keep up with the armies of corporate lawyers and lobbyists determined to rig the economy against them? What about the employees at Wal-Mart who scrape by on help from the food pantry and Medicaid, but who never have enough money to build any security? What about them? They are stuck.

Concentration is not the only reason for rising economic insecurity, but it is one of them. Concentrated industries result in concentrated profits. It’s the ultimate price squeeze. When markets are not competitive, big businesses are able to extract monopoly profits by setting prices that are higher and higher above the cost of making an item or providing a service. In 2014, the top 500 largest firms pocketed 45 percent of the global profits of ALL American businesses. And the vast majority of those profits went to the wealthiest of the wealthy. As of 2013, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans held nearly half of all the stock and mutual fund assets held by all Americans.

And who gets a shot at their own dream? When big business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting.

As a model of what might be done about that, Warren references the trust-busting efforts of a century ago that built the strong middle class that many Americans now see themselves falling out of. She calls for a new team of Executive branch regulators who will “stand tall and say no” to consolidation and for “revival of the movement that created the antitrust laws in the first place.”

This speech might not “change the course of the presidential contest,” as Glastris suggests. It is too wonky for that – not as plain-spoken as her famous “There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody.” Nor as in-your-face as Roosevelt’s “economic royalists” rhetoric. But the fact that Elizabeth Warren is out there, week after week, using her bully pulpit to advocate for people Donald Trump thinks of as losers to be exploited means she just might help ignite the “revival of the movement that created the antitrust laws” that she called for this week.

Friday Night Soother: humpbacks for days!

by digby

San Francisco:

A couple hundred yards off Mussel Rock, the guano-caked landmark just south of the Daly City cliffs where the paragliders take off, the waters were roiling.

One, two, … four, five … maybe as many as seven humpbacks were romping in the waves, exhaling in great geysers of whale breath. The dark, curved backs rose out the surf and then disappeared into the depths. Gulls circled overhead, waiting for them to return for air.

Every now and then, three would breach together, leaping out of the water together like outfielders converging for a full-body bump.

Those whale sightings occurred a couple of weeks ago, but since early May unprecedented numbers of the marine mammals, mostly humpbacks but some grays and even a few blues — the largest creatures on earth, have been gathering off the shores of San Francisco, Marin County and San Mateo County.

Dr. Jaime Jahncke, California Current group director for Point Blue Conservation Science, told Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, that he saw 30 to 80 whales every day during an eight-day research expedition in May.

“This is the first time we’ve had such great numbers [of whale sightings] this early in the year,” Jahncke said. “Generally, the peak numbers have appeared in July. Historically, large numbers are expected in the fall and not in the summer.”

So why are so many whales congregating off the coast so early this year?

Anchovies.

Humpbacks love anchovies, and Dr. Sara Allen, who heads the Ocean and Coastal Resources Program for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, thinks an abundance of the silvery fish, along with other prey, is attracting them.

“You’ve got a tremendous narrow passage into the estuary so everything is compressed; physically it concentrates the prey [along the tidal zones],” Allen told Golden Gate Parks Conservancy.

So basically, the Golden Gate Strait and surrounding waters have become one giant cetacean seafood buffet.

La Nina conditions may be stirring up nutrients that fish can’t resist. The small fry in turn are devoured by humpbacks, which unlike blue whales supplement their krill diet with the likes of anchovies, sardines and other schooling fish. The closer humpbacks are too the coast, the more likely they are feeding on fish.

But there could be other explanations. The whales’ presence could also indicate an inadequate krill population, forcing the humpbacks to look elsewhere for food, Jahncke said.

Or a scarcity of krill and fish at the whales’ breeding grounds off Mexico and Central America could have induced the creatures to head north earlier than usual, he said.

by digby

shiver ….

“I basically agree with Trump’s speech on trade.”

Lol, lol…

Here’s Newt in 1993:

In sharp contrast to the approval of Clinton’s economic package last summer, which was passed without the vote of a single House Republican, Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (Ga.), usually a confrontational leader, rallied House Republicans to support NAFTA. “This is a vote for history, larger than politics, larger than reelection, larger than personal ego,” said Gingrich, who is to be his party’s House leader in 1995.

 And here he is talking about it later:

The Libertarian Philosophy of Freedom and Free Markets

INTERVIEWER: Philosophically speaking, what was the wellspring of your ideas? Were you influenced by people like Friedman or Hayek?  

NEWT GINGRICH: No, I think I was influenced more by Adam Smith and by the founding fathers — Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington — and to some extent by the Whig historians of the 19th century. I was very much influenced by Goldwater’s “Conscience of a Conservative” and by Reagan’s speeches starting with “A Time for Choosing” in October of 1964. I actually came to Hayek backwards through Reagan, rather than the other way. In my mind, at least, what you had was a clear overdevelopment of the state in the 20th century as a vehicle for humans to organize their lives, so you needed a party of freedom that was committed, almost in the British 19th-century liberal tradition, to argue for personal choice for markets, for private property rights, and for taking Bismarck’s insurance state and transferring it into a personal insurance system, as we’re trying to do now on social security. 

What I saw was a deviation from the long 18th- and 19th-century rise of freedom in the Whig tradition with four different patterns: the regulatory state in response to industrialization, where Theodore Roosevelt is probably the leading American developer of it; Fabian socialism with its British class warfare style, which never fit America, but the underlying anti-wealth, anti-achievement patterns did, [such as the] distrust of private property and private activity; third was Bismarck’s insurance state, which gradually spread across the industrial world and which is essentially right if you can organize it so that people are insuring themselves rather than as a paternalistic bureaucracy trying to take care of you; and then finally, with Ludendorff’s war economy in Germany in 1917, you really get what shapes John Kenneth Galbraith and a whole generation of younger economists, including Keynes, and that is the power of the state for a very short time to mobilize power and wealth remarkably. What they didn’t realize was that while you can do that for about the length of the second world war, which in the American experience is not quite four years, if you do it much longer than that, it creates its own internal distortions. [This] is exactly what Hayek writes about it and what Smith understood: that a combination of politics, bureaucracy, [and] the distortion of power in the long run is radically less effective than the market as a place to allocate resources. So you had, from 1917, compounded by Leninism and then by Maoism, this affection of the left for the state as an organizing system, which when I was a young person in the late ’50s was really close to its peak. There was a sense [that] this is the intelligent, sophisticated future, and those of you who favor free markets and private property represent this obsolete past. What all of us who believed in freedom felt was that in the long run centralized commanding control systems decay and collapse, and that’s a historic pattern. You have to concede at least that Reagan was far more right than most of his left-wing critics in his understanding of the Soviet empire and the fact that in the end it just couldn’t keep functioning. 

INTERVIEWER: Do you make a connection between free markets and personal freedom, personal liberty? 

NEWT GINGRICH: Absolutely. In fact, so did all the founding fathers. That goes back to the English Civil War, which is really the wellspring from which the American model of freedom emerges. It is the English Civil War and the effort of people to protect themselves from judges who are instruments of the state, not instruments of justice, to protect themselves from troops in their houses, to protect themselves from the king’s right to kill you. And it’s out of that English Civil War that you begin to have the rise of what we now call freedom, [the] first truly mass democratic societies in history, even more than the Roman republic. I think it’s inextricable if you read Locke, if you read Jefferson, if you read the founding fathers, it is inextricable that if you don’t have the right to private property, if you don’t have the right to trial by jury, if you don’t have the right to vote and fire the people to whom you loan power, you don’t have freedom. The idea of a socialist free society in the long run, as Hayek points out, is an impossibility. 

INTERVIEWER: How did you deal with conservatives in your party who opposed NAFTA? 

NEWT GINGRICH: It wasn’t necessarily conservatives. It was more protectionist versus free market. Many of the most conservative members of our party are very free market and were Reaganites, and so they were for it. Our big problem was to try to narrow down the number of folks who [were against it] either because they had textiles or they had something [like] tomatoes in Florida. There were a number of very specific problems, and what we tried to do was either find [a] solution or sweet-talk them. You didn’t always win, but we were able to with tremendous help from the business community, an effort that was led by Ken Cole at Allied Signal, there was just a brilliant grass-roots effort and really the most effective I’d worked with, frankly, in Congress. We were able to get across the notion that in the long run you were going to have lower prices in the U.S., more jobs in the U.S., and that if you’re going to have overseas production, it’s better to have it overseas in Mexico than have it overseas in Thailand or China.

INTERVIEWER: Why?

NEWT GINGRICH: Because it increases the wealth of your nearest neighbor, and it’s very much to America’s interest to have a healthy, productive Mexico with a very high standard of living. Any time you have 100 million people next door, if you have the level of income differential we now have, you have to expect ultimately for a quarter of Mexico to move north. On the other hand, if they are earning a very good living, if they’re your customers, if they’re enjoying stability and freedom and safety, then you have a natural migration both ways — Americans who may retire to Mexico or may go to work in Mexico, or who may teach in Mexico; Mexicans who come here. But it’s a much healthier relationship, just like living in a neighborhood where you’d like to have neighbors who are able to come over for dinner and you’re able to go to their place for dinner and the gap isn’t so wide that there’s any hostility.

INTERVIEWER: Does globalization make that kind of protectionist impulse irrelevant?

NEWT GINGRICH: No, it’s not irrelevant. You always have the right to rule in your country, and there are a number of cases in history where countries have been ruined by their political leaders. It’s amazing what Perón, for example, did to Argentina — lowered its standard of living dramatically compared to most of the other countries around. Look at Russia: Bad economic policy in Russia [was made] at the expense of every other Russian for a decade. So I wouldn’t say that it’s inevitable, but I do think the argument for a worldwide market and the argument for the ability to buy and sell worldwide is that more people will be wealthier, the environment will be safer and healthier, and the health of the human race will be better. There is no sound intellectual argument against that.

I could be wrong, but it sounds as though Newt had a pretty well thought-out philosophy about all this.  But now he wants to be Trump’s VP.  So he’s a born-again protectionist and a populist. 

by digby

This thing just gets stranger by the minute. To catch you up, Josh Marshall has been reporting that the Trump campaign has been soliciting donations from foreign politicians all over the world.  This is illegal, needless to say.  But the assumption is that it’s just a standard Trump campaign screw up born of the fact that they are only now trying to get donations and they don’t know how to do it properly. Marshall speculated that they bought an email list and didn’t cull it properly for foreign email addresses. Making that kind of mistake isn’t really excusable but for some reason Trump is allowed to flagrantly violate laws all over the place and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and say, “that’s the Donald!”

Marshall has an update that makes it even weirder than it already was. The fundraising letters are still going out:

They weren’t actually just from Trump. One was from the Trump campaign. The other was from a pro-Trump Super Pac called Crippled America PAC. 

Now, normally (i.e., completely separate from anything to do with Trump) it would be entirely unremarkable that someone was getting fundraising emails both from a campaign and also Super PACs supporting the campaign. They’re likely both buying lists from the same vendor or even different vendors of likely Trump voters. 

But remember, Tim is a foreign citizen and part of the government in another country. We’ve already speculated about the various ways all these foreign legislators could have ended up on Trump’s list. The more we’ve looked into it, it seems increasingly implausible that he got this list from a list vendor. Not impossible just not likely at all. It now seems more probable that the Trump Organization simply had these emails in some business related database and decided to dump them into the email hopper for the fundraising blitz or just found some site that had a zip file of foreign government officials and used that. 

As I’ve said, all of these possibilities are outlandish and ridiculous. But we know for a fact that he has and continues to spam members of Parliament in the UK, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland and Iceland and possibly others. So one of these completely preposterous set of facts has to be true. 

And here’s where we get to coordination, which is a big no no. 

Given what I’ve said above, the existence of this list almost has to originate in Trump Derpland. A virtual certainty. So how did the same list end up in the hands of a Trump SuperPac? I looked up Crippled America PAC and as of their last filing just a couple weeks ago, they’re total budget was $40. No m or b after that $ sign, forty bucks, the price of a fancy dinner. So obviously CAP was just stood up and actually started operating just now. And now they’re showing up in Tim’s inbox. 

Again, normally you’d just say, they’re both buying the list from the same vendor. I’m also pretty sure that a good campaign finance lawyer could find a way to get lists from a campaign to its supportive SuperPacs without running afoul of the rules against campaigns coordinating with SuperPacs. But let’s be honest, does any of this look like its done by anyone who has the slightest clue about fundraising or campaign finance law? Of course, not.

The letters are from Trump’s son. Maybe someone could track him down and ask him about it?

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[the author of “Crisis of Character” former uniformed secret service agent Gary Byrne] appeared on conspiracy monger Alex Jones’ radio program and, in so doing, “put [his] life on the line.” Jones thanked him for appearing, then said that “I hope you don’t have any car accidents or airplane accidents or anything because the Clintons are organized criminals in my view and there’s a lot of death around them.” 

“I really hope you’ve got a big insurance policy taken out for your family,” he added, to which Byrne replied that he and his family “knew what we were getting into and we’ve taken our precautions and did our due diligence. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.” 

Byrne outlined some of the stories he heard from unnamed sources in Arkansas about all the people the Clintons had murdered before reaching the White House. “This guy was as serious as a heart attack,” Byrne told Jones. 

“He told me all these bizarre stories about all these rumors of people that have had accidents, the stuff that you were referring to before,” Byrne added. “I definitely think that if she gets elected that we’re going to see the crazy stuff we’ve seen for the last eight years is going to, unfortunately, look like a walk in the park.”

Right wingers love to give all their money to con-men so there’s definitely an opportunity here.  Might I suggest that the “Bill Clinton is gay” rumors have not been adequately explored?  I think there might be some big bucks available in that one, especially since it tracks so perfectly with the well known fact that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian.

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Today in history the battle of Gettysburg began

by digby

From the Smithsonian:

The culmination of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s second invasion of the northern United States, over 160,000 Union and Confederate soldiers met on the field at Gettysburg in a massive battle which changed the course of the war. General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac repulsed the Confederate invasion, shattering the invincible reputation of Lee’s army while inflicting higher casualties, forcing a retreat back in to Virginia, and dashing Southern hopes that European powers might provide military aid. 

In his Gettysburg Address, a November 1863 speech to dedicate the Soldiers’ National Cemetery, President Lincoln recast the Civil War as a second American revolution, a rebirth of freedom. While the states did reunite in 1865, the Battle of Gettysburg remained a scar on the national psyche. The battlefields of Gettysburg became a site for reflection and remembrance, where veterans built monuments to their fallen comrades and Americans came, as they still do today, to try to make sense of the human toll of the Civil War.

If you’ve never been to the Gettysburg memorial it’s really worth seeing. Amidst incredibly beautiful Pennsylvania countryside the picture of this horror will be indelible on your memory.

I went there last year and posted some pictures. It’s been nearly 150 years but it isn’t entirely over yet:

I wrote about all that here.

Beating the disabled at the security checkpoint

by digby

Welp, this is the worst story you’ll hear today:

A disabled woman was beaten bloody by federal agents during an airport security screening while on her way to undergo treatment for a brain tumor.

Hannah Cohen set off the metal detector at a security checkpoint at the Memphis International Airport, and she was led away for additional screening, reported WREG-TV.

“They wanted to do further scanning, (but) she was reluctant — she didn’t understand what they were about to do,” said her mother, Shirley Cohen.

Cohen said she tried to tell agents with the Transportation Security Administration that her 19-year-old daughter is partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed and easily confused — but she said police kept her away from the security agents.

The confused and terrified young woman tried to run away, her mother said, and agents violently took her to the ground.

“She’s trying to get away from them, but in the next instant, one of them had her down on the ground and hit her head on the floor,” Cohen said. “There was blood everywhere.”

The young woman, who was returning home after finishing treatment for the brain tumor at St. Jude Hospital, was arrested and booked into jail.

Authorities eventually threw out the charges against Hannah Cohen, but her family has filed a lawsuit against Memphis police, airport police and the TSA.

Neither police department commented on the suit, but a spokesperson for the TSA said passengers should notify agents ahead of time if they have special needs.

“Passengers can call ahead of time to learn more about the screening process for their particular needs or medical situation,” said TSA spokesperson Sari Koshetz.

The death of common sense. The idea that a disoriented, confused 19 year old woman travelling with her mother (who was telling them that she was disabled) was a likely terrorist of some kind is ridiculous. But when it comes to security, rulz is rulz…

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