World Net Daily: Still Peddling Teh Birther Crazie

As it's been a week or so since we took a peek into birther central, World Net Daily, I thought it might be a good idea to take another peek.

Man oh man oh man, you will not believe what they're peddling now.

On June 2, Politico reported:

White House Counsel Bob Bauer will step down from his post and return to private practice, where he will assist President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, the White House announced Thursday.

Kathryn Ruemmler, the current principal deputy counsel to the president, will take Bauer’s place when he returns to the Washington office of the Perkins Coie law firm.

Bauer will resume the role he had during Obama’s 2008 presidential run, serving as general counsel to the campaign and to the Democratic National Committee, and as personal lawyer to Obama, the White House said. The change will allow him to help Obama’s reelection campaign navigate an increasingly complex legal thicket created by a recent Supreme Court ruling that allowed more corporate spending on politics and by the prospect of new, well-funded political committees trying to shape the 2012 presidential race.

Pretty cut and dried, right?

Not so much for Jerome Corsi, PhD. From WND:

The author of the best-selling "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible To Be President" charged today the resignation of White House counsel Bob Bauer is the result of his participation in the release of Barack Obama's "Certificate of Live Birth," which he fears would not stand up to the scrutiny of any serious investigation by the FBI, Congress or the media.

And here's Corsi's conspiracy:

But Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., who authored the "Where's the Birth Certificate?" book that debuted at No. 6 on the New York Times best-sellers list after reaching No. 1 several weeks earlier at Amazon.com, said, "I think Bauer's resignation marks the beginning of the Obama eligibility cover-up starting to unwind."

Corsi believes Bauer "felt compelled" to resign because of the growing substance to worries that the eligibility issue will blow up into a full-scale investigation.

"Bauer sent Perkins and Coie attorneys to Honolulu to pick up from the Hawaii Department of Health what he believed would be two certified copies of Obama's 1961 long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate," Corsi said.

"When the White House released to the public the birth certificate in the form of a PDF computer file obviously created on Adobe software and a Xerox copy, Bauer realized the Hawaii DOH had participated in the fraud," Corsi charged.

Corsi said he had been tipped off early in February that a long-form birth document for Obama had been forged and that the document was to be released.

See, the story is that before the long form certificate was released the birthers believed that the long form certificate said something different than the short form released in 2007.

Now that it's known that the long form and the short form tell the same tale, the long form, according to Corsi and the birthers, must be a forgery.

It's all so simple, isn't it?

As a footnote, the birthers at WND are moving to another area of research - Obama's passport.

Take a look:

In this era of tight airport security, the Transportation Safety Administration typically will not allow a passenger to board an airplane if the name printed on the ticket differs from the way it appears on government-issued identification.

Now that the White House has released President Obama's purported long-form birth certificate, a question arises as to why the name on that document does not match the name on his State Department passport.

It says "Barack Hussein Obama II" on the birth certificates but only "Barack Hussein Obama" on the passport!

As the State Department takes the info off of whatever embossed birth certificates are submitted, there's now a question as to why they don't match. From WND:

Presumably, the State Department intends to use the full name presented on the birth certificate as the name presented on the passport.

Since Obama has refused to release his passport records, it is impossible to determine what documents were submitted to the State Department to obtain the passport.

WND: Crazie, crazier, craziest.

The Zombie Lies That NEVER Die (World Net Daily and the Obama Birth Certificate)

When times get boring, just head on over to World Net Daily to see what teh crazies' up to.

Did you know they're still flogging the Birth Certificate? They're still putting it in irony quotation marks so it shows up like this: Obama's "birth certificate".

As of this date and time (7:14 am on May 25) we see these articles in this order:

Above the date there's this non-Birth Certificate story:

U.K. celebrates Obamas, but Michael Savage is another story

The rest is red meat for the birthers:

A QUESTION OF ELIGIBILITY
WND Exclusive
Trump pumps Corsi
for latest on Obama
Requests information from author
of 'Where's the Birth Certificate?'

WND POLL
Combing over the facts
What is Donald Trump up to now with his questioning of Jerome Corsi?

A Poll asking WND readers what they think of the previous story.

WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Store clerk: Best-selling book probing Obama 'withdrawn'
Borders representative bases answer on fake Esquire article

A story on Corsi's book being out of stock in one Borders in California.

WND Exclusive
Obama camp pushes to sell birth-certificate images
'Don't miss out on this chance to get yours'

A story on how the "push" to sell "birth-certificate images" has actually driven up the sales of Corsi's book.

WND Exclusive
'Criminal' Obama secret gets no media attention
'Hawaiian' president has mysterious Connecticut Social Security Number

A story on the back-up birther story: Obama's Connecticut Social Security number

WND POLL
Coverage you can't count on
Why are news media paying no attention to Obama's Connecticut Social Security Number?

A reader poll on the previous story.

WND Exclusive
Now popular Republicans 'not natural-born citizens'
Rising stars of GOP in doubt because parents from overseas

A tangental birther story. How Governors Rubio and Jindal might not be natural born citizens (even though they were born in the US) because, like Obama, both men's parents were not American citizens.

WND
Corsi interview on Clear Channel Radio
Listen now to what Obama and crew are trying to hide

An interview with Jerome Corsi on Obama's birth certificate.

WND.COMMENTARY
What it'll take to resolve natural-born-citizen issue
Exclusive: Monte Kuligowski offers process for assuring justice in 2012 election

As of this writing, this is a broken link. But by the title we see it's still about Obama's "natural-born-citizen issue."B

ETWEEN THE LINES
Obama's 'Made in the USA' campaign
Exclusive: Joseph Farah applies apt definitions to word re-election effort is touting

From Farah himself. A story on how the phrase "Made in the USA" and how it actually hints at Obama not being a real American

WND Exclusive
'The Obama code': Hidden messages in birth document?
Computer experts find anomalies embedded in White House release

Story on some computer manipulation of the Long Form Birth Certificate that proves it's a forgery - or something like that

WND Exclusive
It's out! The book that proves Obama's ineligible
Today's the day Corsi is unleashed to tell all about that 'birth certificate'

Ad for Jerome Corsi's book on the Obama's Birth Certificate

WND Exclusive
From A to Z: What's wrong with Obama's birth certificate?
Examine for yourself mounting evidence that president's document isn't genuine

A primer on the birth certificate story.

THE FULL STORY
WND Exclusive
Is Obama constitutionally eligible to serve?
WND's complete archive of news reports on the issue

Birth Certificate again - WND's complete "reporting"

WND Exclusive
Obama's day of reckoning could end his presidency
Free, landmark summary explains eligibility issue clearly, suggests what you should do

Another primer on the Birth Certificate

DEALS OF THE DAY
Corsi No. 1 bestseller 'Obama Nation' $4.95 today only!
Fantastic $23 discount on other book most hated by Team Obama

Another ad for Jerome Corsi's book on Obama's birth certificate.

Most politically incorrect film of the decade
Documentary explores forbidden issue of president's legal qualifications

Ad for an anti-Obama documentary.

And so on
WND - Birther Central

Still.

It will never end

If anyone thinks that President Obama's release of his long form certificate of birth will stop the birthers, think again. Twenty percent of the hits we got on this blog yesterday and so far today are people going to a post we wrote back in August of 2009. How did they get there? Apparently, when you google "obama birth certificate fake" and hit "Images" this comes up as the second image on that search:


It's a fake Kenyan Obama birth certificate -- one that Queen Birther Orly Taitz was shopping around in 2009.

Needless to say, the visitors who come to 2pj from that image don't stick around too long.

President Obama Releases Long Form Birth Certificate

For the birthers:


(Click to enlarge)


(Please hold on to your heads)
UPDATE: Jesus H Christ, Trump is on my teevee taking credit for this. Douchebag. Oh, God! He's saying we have to look at it and see if it's really "real" and now we can get back to the issues. Fucking douchebag. He's saying it's "amazing" that it's "finally materialized." He keeps saying he's honored.

UPDATE 2: Good Lord! Now Trump is pimping his teevee show.

(h/t to Talking Points Memo)

The GOP is The Birther Party

As much as I heartily employ some local conservative republicans' outright rejection of the birther conspiracy theory, I have to point out that the theory, such as it is, is going mainstream GOP.

From Chris Matthews:



He said:

A plurality of Republican voters, 47 percent, said they believed Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was born in another country; 22 percent said they did not know where he was born, and 32 percent said they believed he was born in the United States.

The numbers come from this CBS/NYTimes poll (though it's actually 45% and not 47% who "know" Obama wasn't born in the US).

That's still very close to 7 out of 10 republicans who don't know that the President of the United States was born in Hawaii.

Here's a thought: any Republican you meet on the street you should ask them if they're a birther, because chances are, they are.

Any of my Republican friends want to chime in here?

What a sad state of affairs for a once great political party.

Sorry Ruth Ann, But You're Wrong. Again.

From Ruth Ann Dailey's column this week:

It's been perfectly clear for about three years now that questions about Mr. Obama's nationality have no traction. Whether he is a native-born American or has a valid birth certificate or (most recently, thanks to Mr. Trump) was born at a particular hospital -- reasonable people have long since felt the matter settled.

The only ones being hurt by the regular roiling of these waters are those who oppose Mr. Obama on a higher plane -- namely, the majority of Republicans and independents who do not dwell on the lunatic fringe.

While it's true that reasonable people have long felt the matter settled, what about, you know, Republicans?

In a recent poll by Public Policy Polling of 416 Republican primary voters in Iowa, when asked "Do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States?" 48% said no. 26% were unsure. That's 74% who have not settled the matter, Ruth Ann.

But maybe that's just one state. What does it look like nationwide?

In another recent poll by PPP, 400 Republican primary voters were asked, "Do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States? 51% said no and 21% were not sure. That's 72% who haven't settled the matter either, Ruth Ann.

Maybe it's the Polling company. So let's look around a little.

Last August in a CNN/Opinion Research poll, when asked, "Do you think Barack Obama was definitely born in the United States, probably born in the United States, probably born in another country, or definitely born in another country? 44% of the Republicans got it wrong. 27% said he was "probably born in another country" while 14% said he was "definitely born in another country" and 3% had no opinion.

That's 44% of polled Republicans who haven't settled the matter, Ruth Ann. Or at least they hadn't settled it in August of 2010.

Does this mean that Ruth Ann Dailey thinks that nearly half of the GOP isn't reasonable?

UPDATE - Straightened out the grammar of that last sentence.

Frank Gaffney - Fear Monger

This past Friday I found my self strolling, as I am sometimes fond of doing at lunchtime, towards Market Square dahn-tahn.

Needless to say I was surprised to stumble over a tea party rally being held there.

For the news details here's McNulty of the P-G:

Entering its second year, Pittsburgh's tea party movement had its now-traditional tax day rally in Market Square today, attended by roughly 500 supporters and a gaggle of counter-demonstrators.

Alas, by the time I got there the gaggle had dispersed leaving the 500 or so tea partiers to be kept wide-eyed and entertained by none other than Rose ("Obama may be the devil because he attracts flies and rats") Tennant.

An interesting morsel from the P-G follow up the next day:

Underscoring the tea party's role in the GOP, [Pittsburgh tea party organizer Patti] Weaver, a former candidate for Allegheny County executive, invited fellow GOP candidates Chuck McCullough and D. Raja onto the stage.

Chuck McCullough was there? I wonder if someone from this anti-establishment crowd asked him about his impeding trial. I wonder if anyone in the crowd asked him about his being charged with taking money from an elderly client to make political donations in her name but without her authorization.

I wonder.

I didn't see that if it happened. What I did see was blazing fear mongering by Center for Security Policy President, Frank Gaffney. Some things to keep in mind when ascertaining the credibility of Mr Gaffney:

• He's a birther. In 2008 Gaffney wrote:

Another question yet to be resolved is whether Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen of the United States, a prerequisite pursuant to the U.S. Constitution. There is evidence Mr. Obama was born in Kenya rather than, as he claims, Hawaii. There is also a registration document for a school in Indonesia where the would-be president studied for four years, on which he was identified not only as a Muslim but as an Indonesian. If correct, the latter could give rise to another potential problem with respect to his eligibility to be president.

Curiously, Mr. Obama has, to date, failed to provide an authentic birth certificate which could clear up the matter.

• His Center for Security Policy is heavily supported by foundations controlled by our very good friend Richard Mellon Scaife:

$175,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2009.
$300,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2008.
$300,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2007.
$350,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2006.
$350,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2005.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2004.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2003.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2002.
$325,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation in 2001.

Nice to know that such a grass roots movement can host a crazie speaker connected to some very old school conservative money.

Then there's Gaffney's certainty about Saddam's WMD.

Now that we've established Frank Gaffney as completely infected with teh crazie, let's move on to what he was talking about. Gaffney's yelled, screamed, and ranted about how SHARIA LAW IS RUINING THIS COUNTRY.

Sharia's EVERYWHERE! AND IT'S TAKING OVER!

Except it's not. From Reinbach at the Huffingtonpost:

Here's how Gaffney described what he calls the threat to the New York Senate's Homeland Security and Military Affairs Committee on April 8th: ."The threat...is best described, I believe, as a politico-legal-military threat whose express purpose is to have it imposed world-wide, subject to a theocratic ruler called a Caliph. That is of course a program that is completely at odds with our Constitution, our form of government, our way of life, our freedoms."

I'll admit that sounds pretty grim. Even if it does seem a lot like the threat of Global Communism I used to hear about as a kid.

The truth? Sharia is religious law, and no religious law can be imposed on the US without amending the Constitution -- twice -- to repeal both the opening clause of the First Amendment, and the Supremacy Clause in Article 6.

Something he never got round to telling the crowd. Here's the opening clause of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion

And here's the Supremacy Clause:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.

Huh. I thought the tea partiers knew the Constitution.

I guess when it comes to billionaire-funded WMD finding birthers like Frank Gaffney, the truth is something to be jettisoned in favor of fear.

More Birther Crazie

Check this portrait of teh crazie from Public Policy Polling.

After looking at the results I have to ask, What the heck happened to the GOP? It used to be a party of ideas. Granted, few of those ideas I agreed with but at least William F. Buckley knew BS when he saw it. He wrote about the Birchers' "paranoid and unpatriotic drivel" way back in 1965.

There were level headed adults in the GOP back then, it seems.

Not so much these days. PPP interviewed 400 Republican Primary voters and found that when asked this question:

Do you think Barack Obama was born in the United States?

Only 28% said yes. 51% said no and 21% were not sure.

Think of that for a minute. A well documented historical event, (meaning there's official paper work to support the report) and 72% of Republican primary voters don't accept its validity.

Bertrand Russell wrote about how to rate the appropriate level skepticism for historical events his solution was to imagine what would unknown stuff would have to be right in order for a well documented event to be false. He didn't use this example, but try to imagine what would have to be true in order for this statement "Abraham Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theatre in April of 1865." to be false. Once you do that, reality is easy to accept.

Think of what conspiracy has to be in place in order for the statement "Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961." in order to be false. That's what that majority of GOPers must believe.

What happened to the GOP?

One last thing. If you're sitting at a table where there are 4 Republicans who say they'll be voting in their state's upcoming primary, there's a good chance that 2 of them are out-right birthers and another is too clueless to know better.

What happened to the GOP?

Update From Teh Crazie Birther Front

From CNN:

The Supreme Court has again cast aside an appeal that raised doubts about President Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, a grass-roots legal issue that has gained little legal or political footing, but continues to persist in the courts.

The justices without comment Monday rejected a challenge from Charles Kerchner Jr., a Pennsylvania man who sought a trial in federal court forcing the president to produce documents regarding his birth and citizenship.

And:

Kerchner, a retired military officer who describes himself on his website as a "genetic genealogy pioneer," argues the framers of the 1789 document intended a "natural-born" citizen to mean someone born in the U.S. to parents who were both American citizens.

Needless to say, teh crazies are still pounding away at this "argument":

"I don't think the court helped heal the country," said Mario Apuzzo, the New Jersey attorney who argued the case on behalf of retired Navy CDR Charles Kerchner. "We still don't know Mr. Obama's status. … The court is supposed to take cases that are important, and I can't imagine a case more important than this one."

"You need justice to resolve conflicts between people, and when justice is denied people continue to go after each other in a savage way. We did not get justice, " Apuzzo told WND. "For the court to deny our justice sets the country back terribly."

And from Kerchner himself:

"This matter should have been addressed by the media and political parties early in the spring of 2008 during the primaries. It wasn't," wrote Kerchner Monday morning. "Congress should have addressed this when asked and when constitutionally it was required to. It didn't. The courts should have addressed the merits of the questions when appealed to early on. They didn't. Everyone in our system of government chose appeasement over confrontation and punted the ball to someone else."

"Now it is far worse," Kerchner continued. "The Supreme Court has chosen appeasement and inaction over action and dealing with the issue and questions openly in a court of law under the rules of evidence and law. Our constitutional republic and legal system is now compromised and broken."

But this is the part I lo-o-o-o-ve!:

Kerchner v. Obama argued that Mr. Obama is not a "natural born citizen," which article II, section 1 of the constitution requires any U.S. president to be. According to Swiss political theorist Emer de Vattel, whose writings heavily influenced the founding fathers, an American "natural born citizen" must be the child of two parents who were both American citizens. Mr. Obama's father was a British subject, a Kenyan student living temporarily in the United States.

Never mind that the Constitution says nothing about the parentage of a citizen. Here's Amendment XIV, Section 1, Clause 1 of the Constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Since when does the wingnut right take the word of a foreigner when it comes to interpreting the US Constitution?

Birther Crazie.

Special Comment About The Election

Since I have nothing original to say (ever), I found some snippets of what some other folks have written around the blogosphere to reflect what I am thinking right now.

David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars:

...I blame the geniuses in the Democratic Party -- both in the White House and elsewhere -- who failed to establish firmly the narrative after the election that needed to be hammered home daily and relentlessly and fearlessly: that Americans had repudiated conservative rule because it had manifestly proven itself a failure. Instead, Democrats thought "bipartisanship" was more important. Sure it was.

This clearly was The Fox Election. This was a political victory entirely engineered by a fake "news network" that in reality is a relentless and powerful right-wing propaganda machine. Democrats need to wake up and figure out how they're going to beat it.

Then from a few days before the election there was Jodi Jacobson at Reality Check. She starts out saying she was a "soccer mom" for Obama but now has hung up her cleats (it's a metaphor - it means the Dems have lost her support).

She explains her disappointment with the Obama administration.

I never thought for a split second that it would be easy for Obama to turn things around after eight years, or that any of it would happen over night.

I certainly never thought it would happen without a fight.

But the bottom line is I expected him to fight. I expected him to understand that the change many of us sought was the use of political power for good, that we had delivered this Administration and the Democratic Party massive election turnout and a Democratic House and Senate to lead effectively, proactively, strongly, and vocally on economic change, health reform, climate change, energy use, education, women's rights, gay rights, science and evidence. This was not wishful thinking--Obama was on the record for every one of these things in the campaign. [Italics in original]

She goes on:

I did expect him to take action, not to spend months--in fact nearly two years--vacillating between preemptive compromises with a Republican party that set out on November 3rd, 2008 to destroy him before he even took the oath and continuous pleading with them to give him "their ideas." I think we already knew what those ideas were.

One more on "bipartisanship" with the GOP:

I did expect him to put John Boehner, Mitch McConnel and the rest of the wrecking crew in their place, making them compromise with him, instead of the other way around.

If there was an "enthusiasm gap" it's found in places described by Neiwart and Jacobson. Add to that the noise emanating from the propaganda machine known as Fox "News" and the Democratic Party's apparent lack of interest in denouncing every "death panel" lie, every "Obama raised taxes on everyone" lie and you get something close to last night's results.

Not surprising, really. But they blew it. Blew it big time. The biggest Congressional margins in decades and they blew it because they didn't realize that the GOP was never looking to play nice with them in the first place.

And because of that, for the next two years (at the very least) we'll be seeing House hearings on Climate-gate, Hawaiian Birth Certificates, and how Obama's racist Department of Justice turns a blind eye to voter intimidation when the intimidators are two black men in Philadelphia. We may even see hearings on how George Soros funded all that ACORN voter fraud.

And no compromises, no bipartisanship whatsoever from the GOP. John Boehner has already promised that one.

They blew it.