OK, I am filing this one in my “what the hell?” file.

As I understand it, the guy tries to board a plane.  He passes a backpack through the airport scanner and they see books, box cutter, papers, lint…wait, box cutter?

So they inspect and find a book with a hollowed out inner compartment (ala Shawshank Redemption) in which a box cutter was concealed.

His excuse?  “Oops! I forget it was there.”

Michelle Malkin starts us off:

Whoops. He just forgot it was there!

The Clearwater man pleads guilty, saying he had forgotten about the box cutter.

The X-ray image of a box cutter inside Benjamin Baines Jr.’s backpack caught the attention of federal officers Sunday morning at Tampa International Airport.

But it was the packaging that really jolted them: a hollowed-out book that hid the razor-sharp tool. Also inside the backpack: a Koran, a Holy Bible and rap music lyrics referencing police, drugs and guns.

It was all a misunderstanding, of course–and don’t forget to scream “RACIAL PROFILING!:”

Baines studies various religions, say relatives. They insist he’s no terrorist. “He’s not militant,” said James Layne, a 28-year-old cousin.

“He’s not a crazy blow-yourself-up kind of guy. It’s all a major misunderstanding.”

Butler said his nephew forgot the box cutter, which he used at his former job at the Sandpearl, was in the backpack.  ^{(Ethean Butler, his uncle ~ LSU)}

I have to ask…when he used it at Sandpearl, was that where he stored it?  Not in a pocket?

He recalls his nephew packing the book in a duffle bag that was checked as luggage. The police report tells the story this way. On Sunday, Baines was scheduled to fly Southwest Airlines Flight 338 to Jacksonville at 7:45 a.m., then catch another plane to Las Vegas, where his father lives. He reached security screening at Airside C at 7:30 a.m. An X-ray operator spotted the box cutter.

Hat tip to Beth at Blue Star Chronicles:

Michelle Obama offered the following as a non-explanation of her remarks about not being proud of her country ….

Asked by WJAR-TV if she would like to clarify her comment, Obama replied that she has been struck by the number of people going to rallies and watching debates, as well as record voter turnouts.

“What I was clearly talking about was that I’m proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process,” she said.

“For the first time in my lifetime, I’m seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven’t seen and really trying to figure this out - and that’s the source of pride that I was talking about,” she added.

OOooohhh. Okay. She misspoke. She meant she’s never been proud of the POLITICAL PROCESS in this country. Wow. How silly of everyone to think she meant what she said and said what she meant.

She made these prepared statements in at least two speeches. She said it deliberately as part of her speech. She is a Princeton and Harvard trained attorney who has had a successful career. Attorneys make their careers as masters of language. Attorneys are never careless in how they word statements and/or questions. Yet, she misspoke these carefully prepared statements.

Typical of the LearJet Liberals to whom she was gearing her speech, its not cool to be proud of her country. Its also cool to hang around in their mansions and discuss how horrible the United States is for being an ‘empire’ and imposing its will on the rest of the world. She knew exactly who she was talking to and she knew what they like to hear. Communism is what they imagine to be the utopia form of government. Never mind its failed in every country that has ever tried it. She is Ive League educated, after all. She knows exactly what the intellectual elite expect from their politicians.