text:
!! History Commons Alert, Exciting News
This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event (June 14, 2008): Fake Email Details 'Obama Death List'. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be.
Masthead of one of Ron Paul's newsletters. [Source: Foundation for Rational Economics and Education]A number of newsletters released by Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), a self-described libertarian and strict Constitutionalist, contain what many believe to be racially objectionable remarks and claims. Paul's monthly newsletters are published under a variety of names, including "Ron Paul's Freedom Report," "Ron Paul Political Report," and "The Ron Paul Survival Report." The newsletters are published by several organizations, including Paul's non-profit group the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, and a group called Ron Paul & Associates. For a time, Ron Paul & Associates also publishes "The Ron Paul Investment Letter." In 1996, a challenger for Paul's House seat, Charles "Lefty" Morris (D-TX) makes public some of the racially inflammatory content in Paul's newsletters. The newsletters will be publicly exposed in a 2008 article in the New Republic (see January 8-15, 2008). The content, culled from years of newsletters, includes such claims and observations as: From a 1992 newsletter: "[O]pinion polls consistently show only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action." Politically "sensible" blacks are outnumbered "as decent people." The same report claims that 85 percent of all black men in the District of Columbia have been arrested, and continues: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the 'criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.… [W]e are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, [but] it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers." The same 1992 edition has Paul claiming that the government should lower the age at which accused juvenile criminals can be prosecuted as adults. "We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23," the newsletter states. "That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary, and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such." The newsletter also asserts that sophisticated crimes such as "complex embezzling" are conducted exclusively by non-blacks: "What else do we need to know about the political establishment than that it refuses to discuss the crimes that terrify Americans on grounds that doing so is racist? Why isn't that true of complex embezzling, which is 100 percent white and Asian?" Another 1992 newsletter states, "[I]f you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be." An undated newsletter excerpt states that US Representative Barbara Jordan (D-TX), who is African-American, is "the archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism." The newsletters often use disparaging nicknames and descriptions for lawmakers. Jordan is called "Barbara Morondon." Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton is a "black pinko." Donna Shalala, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton administration, is a "short lesbian." Ron Brown, the head of the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration, is a "racial victimologist." Roberta Achtenberg, the first openly gay public official confirmed by the US Senate, is a "far-left, normal-hating lesbian activist." Newsletter items through the early 1990s attack Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., renaming him "X-Rated Martin Luther King" and labeling him a "world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One newsletter ridicules black activists who wanted to rename New York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown," "Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same year, King is described as "a comsymp [Communist sympathizer], if not an actual party member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration." One 1990 excerpt says of the King holiday: "I voted against this outrage time and again as a congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day!" An undated excerpt from a newsletter entry titled "Needlin'" says: "'Needlin',' a new form of racial terrorism, has struck New York City streets on the tony Upper West Side. At least 39 white women have been stuck with used hypodermic needles—perhaps infected with AIDS—by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14. The New York Times didn't find this fit to print for weeks and weeks, until its candidate David Dinkins [New York City's first African-American mayor] was safely elected. Even then the story was very low key, with race mentioned many paragraphs into it. Who can doubt that if this situation were reversed, if white girls had done this to black women, we would have been subjected to months-long nationwide propaganda campaign on the evils of white America? The double standard strikes again." The excerpt is presumably published sometime after 1989, when Dinkins is elected mayor of New York City. In 2011, NewsOne reporter Casey Gane-McCalla will write, "I could find no evidence of this 'epidemic' and the article seems to have no point other than to make white people scared of black people." A December 1989 "special issue" of the Investment Letter addresses what it calls "racial terrorism," and tells readers what to expect from the 1990s: "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" In February 1990, another newsletter warns of "The Coming Race War." In November 1990, an item advises readers: "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood is titled, "Animals Take Over the DC Zoo," calling the disturbances "the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s." In June 1992, the Ron Paul Political Report publishes a "special issue" that explains the Los Angeles riots, claiming, "Order was only restored in LA when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began." The looting, the newsletter writes, is a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black TV shows, black TV anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda." It also denounces "the media" for believing that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks." The newsletter praises Asian merchants in Los Angeles for having the fortitude to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans, the newsletter writes, are "the only people to act like real Americans" during the riots, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England." Another newsletter entry from around the same time strikes some of the same chords in writing about riots in Chicago after the NBA's Chicago Bulls win the championship: "[B]lacks poured into the streets in celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows of stores to loot, even breaking through protective steel shutters with crowbars to steal everything in sight." The entry goes on to claim that black rioters burned down buildings all along Chicago's "Magnificent Mile," destroyed two taxicabs, "shot or otherwise injured 95 police officers," killed five people including a liquor-store owner, and injured over 100 others. "Police arrested more than 1,000 blacks," the newsletter claims. In 2011, Gane-McCalla will write that the newsletter entry falsely accuses blacks of perpetuating all of the violence, when in reality, the violence was perpetuated by people of all ethnicities. One thousand people—not 1,000 blacks—were arrested. And, he will write, "two officers suffered minor gunshot wounds and that 95 were injured in total, but the way Paul phrased it, it would seem most of the 95 officers injured were shot." An undated newsletter entry says that "black talk radio" features "racial hatred [that] makes a KKK rally look tame. The blacks talk about their own racial superiority, how the whites have a conspiracy to wipe them out, and how they are going to take over the country and wipe them out. They only differ over whether they should use King's non-violent approach (i.e. state violence) or use private violence." An undated newsletter entry discusses "the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family—carjacking," blaming it on blacks who follow "the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos." The entry advises potential carjacking victims to shoot carjackers, then "leave the scene immediately [and] dispos[e] of the wiped-off gun as soon as possible." The entry concludes: "I frankly don't know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming." [Houston Chronicle, 5/21/1996; New Republic, 1/8/2008; NewsOne, 5/6/2011] According to author and militia/white supremacist expert David Neiwert, much of Paul's information about black crime comes from Jared Taylor, the leader of the American Renaissance movement (see January 23, 2005). Taylor, Neiwert will write, cloaks his racism in "pseudo-academic" terminology that is published both in a magazine, American Renaissance, and later in a book, The Color of Crime, both of which make what Neiwert calls "unsupportable claims about blacks." [David Neiwert, 6/8/2007] Conspiracies, Right-Wing Militias, and Bigotry - The newsletters often contain speculations and assertions regarding a number of what reporter James Kirchick will call "shopworn conspiracies." Paul, as reflected in his newsletter, distrusts the "industrial-banking-political elite" and does not recognize the federally regulated monetary system and its use of paper currency. The newsletters often refer to to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1978, a newsletter blames David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and "fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests" for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it calls "one of the saddest events in the history of the United States." A 1988 newsletter cites a doctor who believes that AIDS was created in a World Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In addition, Ron Paul & Associates sells a video about the Branch Davidian tragedy outside Waco (see April 19, 1993) produced by "patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson" (see April 3, 1993 and September 19, 1994), as a newsletter calls her, who insists that Waco was a conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for President Clinton as bodyguards. Kirchick will note that outside of the newsletters, Paul is a frequent guest on radio shows hosted by Alex Jones, whom Kirchick will call "perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America." Connections to Neo-Confederate Institute - Kirchick goes on to note Paul's deep ties with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Alabama founded by Paul's former chief of staff, Lew Rockwell; Paul has taught seminars at the institute, serves as a "distinguished counselor," and has published books through the institute. The von Mises Institute has a long history of support for white-supremacist neo-Confederate groups, including the League of the South, led by Confederate apologist Thomas Woods (see October 14, 2010). Paul will endorse books by Woods and other neo-Confederates. Paul seems to agree with members of the von Mises institute in their view that the Civil War was the beginning of a horrific federal tyranny that ran roughshod over states' rights. Paul, in his newsletters and speeches, has frequently espoused the idea of states' secession as protest against the federal government. Lamenting the South African Revolution - In March 1994, a newsletter warns of a "South African Holocaust," presumably against white South Africans, once President Nelson Mandela takes office. Previous newsletters call the transition from a whites-only government to a majority-African government a "destruction of civilization" that is "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least below the Sahara." Praise for Ku Klux Klan Leader's Political Aspirations - In 1990, a newsletter item praises Louisiana's David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, for coming in a strong second in that state's Republican Senate primary. "Duke lost the election," the newsletter says, "but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asks, "Is David Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion is that "our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom." Duke will in return give support to Paul's 2008 presidential candidacy. Attacking Gays, AIDS Research - Paul's newsletters often praise Paul's "old colleague," Representative William Dannemeyer (R-CA), a noted anti-gay activist who often advocates forcibly quarantining people suffering from AIDS. Paul's newsletters praise Dannemeyer for "speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby." In 1990, one newsletter mentions a reporter from a gay magazine "who certainly had an axe to grind, and that's not easy with a limp wrist." In an item titled, "The Pink House?" the newsletter complains about President George H.W. Bush's decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite "the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony," adding, "I miss the closet." The same article states, "Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities." If homosexuals are ever allowed to openly serve in the military, another newsletter item concludes, they, "if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals." One newsletter calls AIDS "a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby," and alternates between praising anti-gay rhetoric and accusing gays of using the disease to further their own political agenda. One item tells readers not to get blood transfusions because gays are trying to "poison the blood supply." Another cites a far-right Christian publication that advocates not allowing "the AIDS patient" to eat in restaurants, and echoes the false claim that "AIDS can be transmitted by saliva." The newsletters often advertise a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague, which makes a number of false claims about casual transmission and defends "parents who worry about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims." Blasting Israel - Kirchick will note that the newsletters are relentless in their attacks on Israel. A 1987 issue of the Investment Letter calls Israel "an aggressive, national socialist state." A 1990 newsletter cites the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise." Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (see February 26, 1993), a newsletter said, "Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little." Another newsletter column criticizing lobbyists says, "By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government" and that the goal of the "Zionist movement" is to stifle criticism. Violent Anti-Government Rhetoric - In January 1995, three months before the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995), a newsletter lists "Ten Militia Commandments," describing "the 1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty" as "one of the most encouraging developments in America." It warns militia members that they are "possibly under BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] or other totalitarian federal surveillance" and prints bits of advice from the Sons of Liberty, an anti-government militia based in Alabama—among them, "You can't kill a Hydra by cutting off its head," "Keep the group size down," "Keep quiet and you're harder to find," "Leave no clues," "Avoid the phone as much as possible," and "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Slandering Clinton - Newsletters printed during President Clinton's terms in office claim that Clinton uses cocaine and has fathered illegitimate children. Repeating the rumor that Clinton is a longtime cocaine user, in 1994 Paul writes that the speculation "would explain certain mysteries" about the president's scratchy voice and insomnia. "None of this is conclusive, of course, but it sure is interesting," he states. Distance from Newsletter - In 2008, Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton will attempt to distance Paul from the newsletters, saying that while Paul wrote some of their content, he often did not, and in many instances never saw the content. Benton will say that the frequent insults and vitriol directed at King are particularly surprising, because, Benton will say, "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero." In 1996, Paul claims ownership of the content, but says that Morris took the newsletter quotes "out of context" (see May 22 - October 11, 1996). In 2001, Paul will claim that he did not write any of the passages, and will claim having no knowledge of them whatsoever (see October 1, 2001). Most of the newsletters' articles and columns contain no byline, and the Internet archives of the newsletters begin in 1999. In 2008, Kirchick will find many of the older newsletters on file at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Kirchick will note the lack of bylines, and the general use of the first person in the material, "implying that Paul was the author." Kirchick will conclude: "[W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him—and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays." Paul, Kirchick writes, is "a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics." Kirchick will conclude: "Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naive, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically—or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point—over the course of decades—he would have done something about it." [New Republic, 1/8/2008; NewsOne, 5/6/2011] In 2008, Paul will deny writing virtually any of his newsletters' various content (see January 8-15, 2008 and January 16, 2008).
Entity Tags: David Rockefeller, Sr., William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, David Duke, US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Trilateral Commission, Thomas Woods, World Health Organization, David Neiwert, David Dinkins, Council on Foreign Relations, Alex Jones, Barbara Jordan, Bilderberg Group, Casey Gane-McCalla, Charles ("Lefty") Morris, The New Republic, Sons of Liberty, William Dannemeyer, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Linda Thompson, Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, Jesse Benton, Lew Rockwell, Samuel Jared Taylor, League of the South, Eleanor Holmes Norton, James Kirchick, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Donna Shalala, Ron Paul and Associates, Ron Paul, Roberta Achtenberg, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald H. Brown
Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda
Ron Paul. [Source: Think Progress]Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) takes full credit for the racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic content featured in his newsletters (see 1978-1996), and says that he writes the material. Paul, on his own and through his campaign staffers, denies that the content is actually racist, saying that the material as quoted in the press is taken "out of context." Paul's opponent for his House seat, Charles "Lefty" Morris (D-TX), has released some of the newsletter material to the Texas press, prompting Paul to accuse him of "name-calling," "race-baiting," "political demagoguery," and "gutter-level politics." Morris says of Paul's statements: "Many of his views are out on the fringe.… His statements speak for themselves." The NAACP has also questioned Paul's stance on race; a Texas NAACP spokesman says of Paul, "Someone who holds those views signals or indicates an inability to represent all constituents without regard to race, creed, or color." Paul repeatedly denies being a racist, and says to "selectively quote" from his newsletters is "misrepresentation." He says that articles in his newsletters that claim "95 percent of the black males" in Washington, DC, "are semi-criminal or entirely criminal," that "it is hardly irrational… to be afraid of black men.… Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers," that blacks only commit "crimes that terrify Americans," and other such claims are not his beliefs, but "assumption[s] you can gather" from reports on crime; he also claims that civil rights leaders such as Jesse Jackson have made similar claims. A 1992 claim that "[o]pinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions" is Paul's work, says campaign spokesman Michael Sullivan, but the issue is political philosophy, not race: Sullivan says Paul does not believe that people who disagree with him are sensible. Sullivan goes on to say: "You have to understand what he is writing. Democrats in Texas are trying to stir things up by using half-quotes to impugn his character. His writings are intellectual. He assumes people will do their own research, get their own statistics, think for themselves, and make informed judgments." His newsletter's name-calling of Representative Barbara Jordan (D-TX) as "Barbara Morondon" and its claim that she is the "archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism," a "fraud," and an "empress without clothes" is merely an attempt to portray Paul's "clear philosophical difference" with her. He does not deny a 1993 accusation that Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) "made a pass at a female reporter young enough to be his daughter." Nor does he deny a number of newsletter items offering to help readers avoid paying taxes to the IRS and supporting violent attacks on IRS offices, though Sullivan says such claims were written in an "abstract" sense. Paul also says he has no idea why he is listed in a directory by the Heritage Front, a Canadian-based neo-Nazi group, which lists his newsletter under the heading "Racialists and Freedom Fighters." [Dallas Morning News, 5/22/1996; Houston Chronicle, 5/23/1996; Reason, 1/11/2008]
Entity Tags: Michael Quinn Sullivan, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Barbara Jordan, Charles ("Lefty") Morris, Heritage Front, Ron Paul, Jack Kemp
Fox News logo. [Source: Fox News]Fox News begins broadcasting on US cable television. Fox News provides 24-hour news programming alongside the nation's only other such cable news provider, CNN. Fox executive Roger Ailes, a former campaign adviser for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (see 1968, January 25, 1988, and September 21 - October 4, 1988), envisions Fox News as a conservative "antidote" to what he calls the "liberal bias" of the rest of American news broadcasting. Ailes uses many of the methodologies and characteristics of conservative talk radio, and brings several radio hosts on his channel, including Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, to host television shows. [Jamieson and Cappella, 2008, pp. 47; New York Magazine, 5/22/2011] Referring to Ailes's campaign experience, veteran Republican consultant Ed Rollins later says: "Because of his political work, he understood there was an audience. He knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them." [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011] Ailes Planned for Fox News as Far Back as 1970 - Ailes began envisioning a conservative news provider to counter what he considers the mainstream media's "liberal bias" as early as 1970, when he became heavily involved with a Nixon administration plan to plant conservative propaganda in news outlets across the nation (see Summer 1970). In 1971, he headed a short-lived private conservative television news network, Television News Incorporated (TVN—see 1971-1975), which foundered in 1975 in part because of its reporters and staffers balking at reporting Ailes-crafted propaganda instead of "straight" news. Ailes told a New York Times reporter in 1991 that he was leaving politics, saying: "I've been in politics for 25 years. It's always been a detour. Now my business has taken a turn back to my entertainment and corporate clients." But Ailes misinformed the reporter. He continued to work behind the scenes on the 1992 Bush re-election campaign, providing the campaign with attack points against Democratic contender Bill Clinton (D-AR) and earning the nickname "Deep Throat" from Bush aides. Though Ailes did do work in entertainment, helping develop tabloid television programs such as The Maury Povich Show and heading the cable business news network CNBC for three years, Ailes has continued to stay heavily involved in Republican politics ever since. Ailes became involved in the creation of Fox News in early 1996 after he left NBC, which had canceled his show America's Talking and launched a new cable news network, MSNBC, without asking for Ailes's involvement. Fox News is owned by News Corporation (sometimes abbreviated NewsCorp), an international media conglomerate owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. When NBC allowed Ailes to leave, Jack Welch, the chairman of NBC's parent company General Electric, said, "We'll rue the day we let Roger and Rupert team up." Murdoch has already tried and failed to buy CNN, and has already begun work on crafting news programs with hard-right slants, such as a 60 Minutes-like show that, reporter Tim Dickinson will write, "would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program." Dan Cooper, the managing editor of the pre-launch Fox News, later says, "The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving." Eric Burns, who will work for ten years as a Fox News media critic before leaving the network, will say in 2011: "There's your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda. That's its original sin." To get Fox News onto millions of cable boxes at once, Murdoch paid hundreds of millions of dollars to cable providers to air his new network. Murdoch biographer Neil Chenoweth will later write: "Murdoch's offer shocked the industry. He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice." Dickinson will write, "Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for." Ailes praised Murdoch's "nerve," saying, "This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great." [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011; Rolling Stone, 5/25/2011] Using Conservative Talk Radio as Template - In 2003, NBC's Bob Wright will note that Fox News uses conservative talk radio as a template, saying: "[W]hat Fox did was say, 'Gee, this is a way for us to distinguish ourselves. We're going to grab this pent-up anger—shouting—that we're seeing on talk radio and put it onto television.'" CBS News anchor Dan Rather will be more critical, saying that Fox is a reflection of Murdoch's own conservative political views. "Mr. Murdoch has a business, a huge worldwide conglomerate business," Rather says. "He finds it to his benefit to have media outlets, press outlets, that serve his business interests. There's nothing wrong with this. It's a free country. It's not an indictable offense. But by any clear analysis the bias is towards his own personal, political, partisan agenda… primarily because it fits his commercial interests." [New Yorker, 5/26/2003] Putting Ideology Over Journalistic Ethics, Practices - Ailes, determined not to let journalists with ethical qualms disrupt Fox News as they had his previous attempt at creating a conservative news network (see 1971-1975), brought a hand-picked selection of reporters and staffers with demonstrable conservative ideologies from NBC, including business anchor Neil Cavuto and Steve Doocy, who hosts the morning talk show "Fox and Friends." Both Cavuto and Doocy are Ailes loyalists who, Dickinson will say, owe their careers to Ailes. Ailes then tapped Brit Hume, a veteran ABC correspondent and outspoken conservative, to host the main evening news show, and former Bush speechwriter Tony Snow as a commentator and host. John Moody, a forcefully conservative ABC News veteran, heads the newsroom. Ailes then went on a purge of Fox News staffers. Joe Peyronnin, who headed the network before Ailes displaced him, later recalls: "There was a litmus test. He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals." Ailes confronted reporters with suspected "liberal bias" with "gotcha" questions such as "Why are you a liberal?" Staffers with mainstream media experience were forced to defend their employment at such venues as CBS News, which he calls the "Communist Broadcast System." He fired scores of staffers for perceived liberal leanings and replaced them with fiery young ideologues whose inexperience helps Ailes shape the network to his vision. Before the network aired its first production, Ailes had a seminal meeting with Moody. "One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals," he told Moody. "And we've got to fight that." Reporters and staffers knew from the outset that Fox, despite its insistence on being "fair and balanced" (see 1995), was going to present news with a conservative slant, and if that did not suit them, they would not be at Fox long. A former Fox News anchor later says: "All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom. But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color—and that your color was red." The anchor refers to "red" as associated with "red state," commonly used on news broadcasts to define states with Republican majorities. Ailes will always insist that while his network's talk-show hosts, such as O'Reilly, Hannity, and others, are frankly conservative, Fox's hard-news shows maintain what he calls a "bright, clear line" that separates conservative cant from reported fact. In practice, this is not the case. Before Fox aired its first broadcast, Ailes tasked Moody to keep the newsroom in line. Early each morning, Ailes has a meeting with Moody, often with Hume on speakerphone from the Washington office, where the day's agenda is crafted. Moody then sends a memo to the staff telling them how to slant the day's news coverage according to the agenda of those on "the Second Floor," as Ailes and his vice presidents are known. A former Fox anchor will later say: "There's a chain of command, and it's followed. Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down." After the 2004 presidential election, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan will admit, "We at the White House were getting them talking points." Targeting a Niche Demographic - Fox New's primary viewership defies most demographic wisdom. According to information taken in 2011, it averages 65 years of age (the common "target demographic" for age is the 18-24 bracket), and only 1.38% of its viewers are African-American. Perhaps the most telling statistics are for the Hannity show: 86% describe themselves as pro-business, 84% believe government "does too much," 78% are "Christian conservatives," 78% do not support gay rights, 75% are "tea party backers," 73% support the National Rifle Association, 66% lack college degrees, and 65% are over age 50. A former NewsCorp colleague will say: "He's got a niche audience and he's programmed to it beautifully. He feeds them exactly what they want to hear." Other polls from the same time period consistently show that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers, and one study shows that Fox News viewers become more misinformed the more they watch the network's programming. Ailes's Security Concerns Affect Operations, Broadcasting - Ailes is uncomfortable in his office, a second-floor corner suite in the Fox News building at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. His office is too close to the street for his tastes; he believes that gay activists intend to try to harm him, either by attacks from outside the building or through assaults carried out from inside. He also believes that he is a top target for al-Qaeda assassins. Ailes barricades himself behind an enormous mahogany desk, insists on having "bombproof" glass installed in the windows, surrounds himself with heavily-armed bodyguards, and carries a firearm (he has a concealed-carry permit). A monitor on his desk shows him what is transpiring outside his office door; once, when he sees a dark-skinned man wearing what he thought was Muslim garb on the monitor, he will order an immediate lockdown of the entire building, shouting, "This man could be bombing me!" The man will turn out to be a janitor. A source close to Ailes will say, "He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim—which is consistent with the ideology of his network." A large security detail escorts him daily to and from his Garrison, New Jersey home to his Manhattan offices; in Garrison, his house is surrounded by empty homes Ailes has bought to enhance his personal security. According to sources close to Ailes, Fox News's slant on gay rights and Islamist extremism is colored by Ailes's fear and hatred of the groups. 'We Work for Fox' - Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and Reagan biographer, will say: "Fox News is totalized: It's an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it's broadcast as 'the news.' That's why Ailes is a genius. He's combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way—one that blurs the distinction between the two." Dickinson will write: "Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America's most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypassing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as 'matadors' who want to 'tear down the social order' with their 'elitist, horse-dung, socialist thinking.' Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line." Former Bush speechwriter David Frum will observe: "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we're discovering that we work for Fox." [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011; Rolling Stone, 5/25/2011]
Entity Tags: Eric Burns, Tim Dickinson, Neil Cavuto, Dan Cooper, Steve Doocy, Joe Peyronnin, John Moody, David Frum, Sean Wilentz, News Corporation, Scott McClellan, Jack Welch, Tony Snow, MSNBC, Brit Hume, Television News Incorporated, Ronald Reagan, Roger Ailes, CNN, Fox News, CNBC, George Herbert Walker Bush, Sean Hannity, Neil Chenoweth, Ed Rollins, William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, Bill O'Reilly, Nixon administration, Dan Rather, Bob Wright, Rupert Murdoch
David Bossie. [Source: C-SPAN]David Bossie, an investigator for Representative Dan Burton (R-IN), is fired from his position. Bossie recently leaked transcripts of prison conversations featuring former Clinton administration official Webster Hubbell, who will be convicted of defrauding clients and sentenced to prison in 2004. Bossie fraudulently edited the transcripts to have Hubbell imply that First Lady Hillary Clinton broke the law while the two worked together in an Arkansas law firm. Bossie cut out portions of Hubbell's conversations exonerating her from any wrongdoing, and sometimes rewrote Hubbell's words entirely. In response to the controversy, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) says of Burton and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "I'm embarrassed for you, I'm embarrassed for myself, and I'm embarrassed for the [House Republican] conference at the circus that went on at your committee." (In late April, Burton had called President Clinton a "scumbag," further embarrassing Gingrich and the Republican leadership.) Bossie came to Burton's staff from Citizens United (CU), which he joined in 1994 and soon rose to become director of government relations and communications. In 1988, as a member of Floyd Brown's Presidential Victory Committee (PVC), Bossie helped produce the infamous Willie Horton ad (see September 21 - October 4, 1988). In 1992, as executive director of the PVC, Bossie oversaw the release of a fundraising letter accusing then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton of having an affair with an Arkansas woman, for use in an ad that falsely suggested it was the product of President Bush's re-election campaign. Then-President Bush accused the PVC of engaging in "filthy campaign tactics," and his son and campaign aide George W. Bush sent a letter asking donors not to give to the organization. Bossie has encouraged Burton to open an investigation into the suicide of Clinton administration aide Vince Foster (alleging that Foster was murdered as part of some unspecified White House plot, or perhaps an Israeli intelligence "black op"). While an aide to Senator Lauch Faircloth (R-NC), Bossie was found to have tried to intimidate a federal judge during a Whitewater-related investigation. Bossie has earned a reputation as a "Whitewater stalker," combing Arkansas for "evidence" of crimes by the Clintons, and repeatedly making false and lurid allegations against the president and/or his wife. For a year, Bossie has promised that Burton's committee would soon produce evidence of Chinese espionage and White House collusion, but any evidence of such a scandal has never been produced. A former lawyer for the Oversight Committee, John Rowley, has called Bossie's actions "unrelenting self-promoti[on]" and challenged Bossie's competence. Bossie says his transcripts were accurate (though the tapes of Hubbell's conversations prove he is wrong), and blames committee Democrats for the controversy. [WorldNetDaily, 5/7/1998; Salon, 5/7/1998; Media Matters, 5/11/2004] WorldNetDaily reporter David Bresnahan writes that according to his sources, Bossie "was either extremely incompetent or was intentionally trying to sabotage" Burton's investigations into the Clinton administration. Bresnahan also says that Burton allowed Bossie to resign instead of firing him, as other media sources report. [WorldNetDaily, 5/7/1998]
Entity Tags: Floyd Brown, David Bresnahan, Dan Burton, Clinton administration, Citizens United, William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, Webster Hubbell, Presidential Victory Committee, David Bossie, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, John Rowley, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Vince Foster
Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) says that newsletters printed for decades under his name that racially disparaged black lawmakers such as Representative Barbara Jordan (D-TX) were not actually written by him. He tells reporter S.C. Gwynne: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me. It wasn't my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around. I think the one on Barbara Jordan was the saddest thing, because Barbara and I served together and actually she was a delightful lady." (Paul's newsletter called Jordan "Barbara Morondon" and the "archetypical half-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism.") The item slighting Jordan was published, Paul says, because "we wanted to do something on affirmative action, and it ended up in the newsletter and became personalized. I never personalize anything." He attempts to explain why he never publicized his claimed lack of involvement with his own newsletter, saying: "They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them.… I actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn't come from me directly, but they [campaign aides] said that's too confusing. 'It appeared in your letter and your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.'" Gwynne writes: "It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time." [Texas Monthly, 10/1/2001; Reason, 1/11/2008] In 1996, Paul admitted to writing the newsletters (see May 22 - October 11, 1996). In 2008, a New Republic article (see January 8-15, 2008) will document a raft of crudely racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and far-right conspiratorial content from years' worth of Paul's newsletters (see 1978-1996).
Entity Tags: Ron Paul, S.C. Gwynne, Barbara Jordan
Roger Ailes, the founder and chairman of Fox News (see October 7, 1996), makes a joke to an audience of news executives: "It is true that Barack Obama is on the move," he says. "I don't know if it's true that President Bush called [Pakistani President Pervez] Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" The joke is a deliberate conflation between the names of presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) and Osama bin Laden. Ailes has Steve Doocy and the other hosts of his network's morning news show Fox and Friends begin making similar jokes. Fox insiders will later note that while the banter between Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Gretchen Carlson appears to be mostly ad-libbed, it is actually highly structured; Ailes uses the show as one of the primary vehicles to get his daily message into what reporter Tim Dickinson will call "the media bloodstream." Ailes meets with Doocy, Kilmeade, and Carlson every day before the 6:00 a.m. start; a former Fox News deputy will later say: "Prior to broadcast, Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson—that gang—they meet with Roger. And Roger gives them the spin." Doocy is the first Fox News figure to publicly state that Obama attended a radical Islamist madrassa as a child, a falsification that begins circulating on the Internet around this same time (see October 1, 2007). [New York Magazine, 5/22/2011]
Entity Tags: Roger Ailes, Barack Obama, Brian Kilmeade, Gretchen Carlson, Fox News, Steve Doocy, Osama bin Laden, Tim Dickinson
Representative Ron Paul, profiled in a New York Times article, answers a question about his connections to the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961, 1978-1996, August 4, 2008 and December 2011). "Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!" Paul replies in what the reporter calls "mock horror." "Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They're generally well educated and they understand the Constitution. I don't know how many positions they would have that I don't agree with. Because they're real strict constitutionalists, they don't like the war, they're hard-money people." [New York Times, 7/22/2007] The JBS is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent right-wing extremist group that has accused a number of lawmakers, including former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, of being "closet Communists," and promotes "wild conspiracy theories" such as the "international Jewish" conspiracy to control the global economy and the idea that the World War II Holocaust never happened. The JBS has been a pioneer in what an analysis by Political Research Associates (PRA) will call "the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric white racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the white supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII." PRA will note, "Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism." [Political Research Associates, 2010; Southern Poverty Law Center, 8/17/2010]
Entity Tags: Ron Paul, John Birch Society, Dwight Eisenhower, Political Research Associates, Southern Poverty Law Center
An anonymous chain email circulating through the Internet falsely claims that presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) "was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world." PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, calls the accusation intended to promote a "Manchurian Candidate-style conspiracy theory" about Obama's birth, his religion, and his citizenship. The email accurately notes that Obama's father was African and born a Muslim (see January 11, 2008). Obama's stepfather was Indonesian and raised as a Muslim. However, PolitiFact notes, both men were not religiously observant (Obama has described his father as a practicing atheist). Obama's American mother was agnostic at best. Obama has said that he grew up with virtually no religious traditions. He has been a practicing Christian for decades (see January 6-11, 2008). "Madrassa" is an Arabic word for "school," but Americans generally understand the word to mean a school where anti-Western Islamic ideology is taught. The email falsely claims that Obama attended a "madrassa" that engaged in a "RADICAL teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad against the western world." PolitiFact notes: "Westerners typically understand Wahabism to be an austere form of Islam based on a literal reading of the Koran. So is that the type of school Obama attended?" Obama attended a secular public school in Indonesia; a press investigation found the school to be "so progressive that teachers wore miniskirts and all students were encouraged to celebrate Christmas." The school has never taught Wahabism or any other form of "fringe" Islam. News reports accurately indicate that Obama's school registration form lists Obama's religion as "Muslim," but the form has several other errors, and, PolitiFact notes, "it seems reasonable to assume that he was registered as Muslim simply because his stepfather was Muslim." Obama also attended a Catholic school in Indonesia for several years. PolitiFact concludes that the email is "a wholesale invention designed to frighten voters." [St. Petersburg Times, 10/1/2007]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, PolitiFact (.org )
Presidential candidates Barack Obama (left), Tom Harkin, and Hillary Clinton stand for the singing of the National Anthem. [Source: Time]A chain email circulating around the Internet falsely claims Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), campaigning for president, "refused" to say the Pledge of Allegiance during an event and failed to put his hand over his heart. A photograph with the email shows Obama standing in front of an American flag with his hands clasped just below his waist. Fellow presidential contenders Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Bill Richardson (D-NM) stand beside him with their hands over their hearts. The email, noting Obama's middle name is Hussein, claims Obama "REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE… how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief????" The photograph was not taken during the saying of the pledge, but during the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner." It was taken on September 16, 2007 in Indianola, Iowa, at the Harkin Steak Fry, an annual political event hosted by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA). The photo was printed in Time magazine; the caption said Obama and the others "stand during the national anthem." Matt Paul, who helped organize the event, confirms that the photo was taken as someone sang the national anthem. Additionally, an ABC News video of the event confirms the photo was taken during the anthem. The email claims that "the article said" Obama refused to say the pledge and would not put his hand on his heart, but the article said nothing of the sort. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, attempts to find another article making the same claim, but only finds blog postings repeating the email's original assertion. Obama has said the email is false, and that he was singing during the anthem, a claim verified by the ABC video. "My grandfather taught me how to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was two," Obama recently said on another campaign stop in Iowa. "During the Pledge of Allegiance you put your hand over your heart. During the national anthem you sing." He called the email "irritating" and likened it to others that have falsely said he is a Muslim (see October 1, 2007, December 19, 2007, and January 11, 2008). The Obama campaign has received strong support from a number of retired military leaders. "Senator Obama's attackers are peddling lies and smears because they disagree with his strong opposition to the war in Iraq and the rush to war in Iran," writes former Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig, in a letter cosigned by retired General Merrill "Tony" McPeak and General J. Scott Gration. "We have served this nation for decades and we know a true patriot when we see one. Barack Obama is a patriot." Some conservative bloggers have noted their belief that federal law for "patriotic and national observances" says that during the Star-Spangled Banner, "all present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart; men not in uniform should remove their headdress with their right hand and hold the headdress at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart." The citation is not a formal law, and experts say it is somewhat obsolete, though it is still cited in some military manuals. Modern custom does not require a hand over the heart, says Anne Garside, director of communication for the Maryland Historical Society, home of the original manuscript of the Star-Spangled Banner. "I think the bottom line is that you show respect with your demeanor," she says. "Whether you put your hand over your heart, hold your hat at shoulder level or waist level, is really in this day and age irrelevant." [Time, 9/16/2007; ABC News, 11/7/2007; St. Petersburg Times, 11/8/2007]
Entity Tags: Tom Harkin, Tony McPeak, Richard Danzig, Matt Paul, ABC News, PolitiFact (.org ), Anne Garside, Bill Richardson, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, J. Scott Gration
An anonymous chain email circulates throughout the Internet claiming that newly elected President Barack Obama took the oath of office for his former position as a US senator on a Koran, the holy book of Islam, and not a Christian Bible. Obama is a Christian (see January 6-11, 2008), though many of his opponents have insisted that he is a "covert Muslim" or Islamist radical (see April 18, 2008). The email misspells the name as "Kuran," though it is either spelled Koran or Qu'ran. Two press reports from January 2005 confirm that when Obama was sworn into office as the junior senator from Illinois, he took the oath on his family Bible. The Obama presidential campaign has confirmed that Obama used his family Bible. Vice President Dick Cheney, in his role as president of the Senate, administered the oath. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, concludes: "We suspect this false claim was inspired by the 2007 swearing-in of Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), an American convert to Islam and the first Muslim elected to Congress. Ellison used a Koran that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, borrowing the rare book from the Library of Congress. It goes without saying that Ellison is not Obama. And with its intent to inflame, we find the email's allegation not only false, but pants-on-fire wrong." [St. Petersburg Times, 12/19/2007]
Entity Tags: Keith Ellison, Barack Obama, PolitiFact (.org )
The sanctuary of Trinity United Churco of Christ. [Source: Chocolate City (.cc)]PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, investigates claims that Democratic senator Barack Obama (D-IL), a presidential candidate, belongs to "a racist, anti-American church." The investigation concludes that Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, "teaches black empowerment, not racism, and that it claims Africa as its ethnic heritage." Anonymous emails "ricocheting around the Internet" claim that Obama should not be president because his church is "anti-American" and "scary," and, somewhat contradictorily, that Obama is not a Christian, but a "covert Muslim" (see December 19, 2007 and January 11, 2008). The emails began within hours of Obama's Democratic primary win in the Iowa caucuses. One email declares: "If you look at the first page of their Web site, you will learn that this congregation has a nonnegotiable commitment to Africa. No where [sic] is AMERICA even mention [sic]. Notice too, what color you need to be if you should want to join Obama's church… B-L-A-C-K!!!" PolitiFact writes: "It's the latest salvo in the email wars—anonymous missives launched into cyberspace seeking to frighten voters away from presidential candidates in the guise of friendly warnings. Typically they use kernels of truth, then launch into falsehood." Chicago historian Martin Marty, a white religious expert who has attended Trinity United services in the past, says: "There's no question this is a distortion.… Whites are highly accepted. They don't make a fuss over you, but you're very much welcomed." PolitiFact finds that Trinity United is one of the larger black "megachurches" in the US, preaches a message of black self-reliance, and has as its motto, "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." The church does have a "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa." However, it has no racial standards for its members, and does have white and other non-black members. Obama is a member who has attended regularly for years, though with the travails of recent presidential campaigning, his attendance has fallen off in recent weeks. The main focus of the email vitriol, aside from Obama, is Trinity's senior pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who preaches passionately and focuses on what he calls "black liberation theology." Obama has written in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, that it was Wright's preaching that inspired him to convert from a secular agnosticism to Christianity during the 1980s. He titled his memoir after one of Wright's sermons. PolitiFact finds, "Trinity's commitment to Africa appears to be more a statement of philosophical orientation than of political support for any particular African country," and notes that the church's Web site states, "Just as those of Jewish heritage advocate on behalf of the state of Israel, and those of Irish heritage advocate on behalf of Ireland, and those of Polish descent for Poland, so must we of African descent care about the land of our heritage—the continent of Africa." Divinity professor Dwight Hopkins, an African-American member of Trinity, describes the church as "highly evangelical and Bible-based." The preaching, he says, tends to be "common-sense folk wisdom laced with theological sophistication.… There's singing and shouting and people get happy. It's an old-fashioned, mainstream down-home church that somehow is captured in this 8,000-person congregation." John C. Green, a political science professor, says scholars do not view black liberation theology as racist, but some outsiders may hold that opinion. "A black empowerment theology could be seen as having a racist element because it isn't neutral in regards to race," he says. "The person who wrote this email obviously has very strong feelings about this." In February 2007, Obama said of his church and his faith: "Commitment to God, black community, commitment to the black family, the black work ethic, self-discipline, and self-respect. Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement. So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help." In recent weeks, Obama has distanced himself somewhat from Wright and Trinity, because, his campaign says, he wishes to avoid bringing an overwhelming influx of media attention onto the church. The campaign said in a statement, "[B]ecause of the type of attention it was receiving on blogs and conservative talk shows, he decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself." Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity has called Trinity's teachings "divisive," and engaged in what PolitiFact calls "a spirited debate" with Wright on one of his broadcasts. Conservative ethicist Michael Cromartie agrees with Hannity, saying: "It's too strong to call it racist but at the same time, it is a form of identity politics or identity theology, which insists you white people can come to this church, but you won't get it." Trinity has stated: "There is no anti-American sentiment in the theology or the practice of Trinity United Church of Christ. To be sure, there is prophetic preaching against oppression, racism, and other evils that would deny the American ideal." Green is reminded of the 1960 presidential election, when many opponents of candidate John F. Kennedy attacked Kennedy for being Catholic. "But we didn't have the Internet back then," he says. "This kind of communication has always gone on, but it moves much faster now." [St. Petersburg Times, 1/6/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 1/6/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 1/11/2008]
Entity Tags: Trinity United Church of Christ, Michael Cromartie, PolitiFact (.org ), Barack Obama, Sean Hannity, Dwight Hopkins, John C. Green, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Martin Marty
The New Republic writes a January 8, 2008 article detailing years of racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and far-right conspiratorial content in the newsletters of libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-TX—see 1978-1996). [New Republic, 1/8/2008] Hours after the article is published, Paul issues a statement, which reads in part: "The quotations in the New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts. In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin." After citing his admiration for another civil-rights era icon, Rosa Parks, Paul continues: "This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary [where Paul is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination]. When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name." [Reason, 1/8/2008] Most reactions are strongly negative. Nick Gillespie of the libertarian magazine Reason calls the newsletters' content "stunning," "odious," and "jaw-dropping." Gillespie adds: "I don't think that Ron Paul wrote this stuff but that really doesn't matter—the newsletters carried his name after all.… It is hugely disappointing that he produced a cache of such garbage." He calls Paul's response "unsatisfying on about a thousand different levels." [Reason, 1/8/2008] Radley Balko, also of Reason, writes that he "find[s] the prospect that Paul never read the newsletter implausible." Reason senior editor Brian Doherty, who wrote a recent cover story enthusing over Paul's candidacy, now writes that Paul's "campaign's reaction to this has been politically disastrous and given the third-rail nature of accusations of racism, Ron Paul's campaign was likely fatally wounded." [New Republic, 1/15/2008] David Boaz, a senior official of the libertarian Cato Institute, notes that Paul's response indicates he is essentially unfit to be president, seeing as Paul's defense has been, "I didn't know what my closest associates were doing over my signature, so give me responsibility for the federal government." Boaz writes that few at the Cato Institute were supportive of Paul even before the newsletters' content became widely known: "We had never seen the newsletters that have recently come to light, and I for one was surprised at just how vile they turned out to be. But we knew the company Ron Paul had been keeping, and we feared that they would have tied him to some reprehensible ideas far from the principles we hold." Paul may well have not written the newsletters, Boaz notes, "[b]ut he selected the people who did write those things, and he put his name on the otherwise unsigned newsletters, and he raised campaign funds from the mailing list that those newsletters created. And he would have us believe that things that 'do not represent what I believe or have ever believed' appeared in his newsletter for years and years without his knowledge. Assuming Ron Paul in fact did not write those letters, people close to him did. His associates conceived, wrote, edited, and mailed those words. His closest associates over many years know who created those publications. If they truly admire Ron Paul, if they think he is being unfairly tarnished with words he did not write, they should come forward, take responsibility for their words, and explain how they kept Ron Paul in the dark for years about the words that appeared every month in newsletters with 'Ron Paul' in the title." Boaz notes that while many Paul supporters are angrily speculating about "conspiracies" leading to the expose of the newsletters (see January 12-15, 2008), they are not denying that Paul's newsletters actually contained that content. Because of the content of these newsletters, Boaz writes, Paul "and his associates have slimed the noble cause of liberty and limited government." [Cato at Liberty, 1/11/2008]
Entity Tags: The New Republic, Nick Gillespie, David Boaz, Cato Institute, Brian Doherty, Radley Balko, Ron Paul
A poster promoting 'Hillary: The Movie.' [Source: New York Times]The conservative lobbying group Citizens United (CU—see May 1998 and (May 11, 2004)) releases a film entitled Hillary: The Movie. The film is a lengthy diatribe attacking the character and career of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Large portions of the film are comprised of conservative critics launching attacks against the personalities and character of Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton. CU president David Bossie (see May 1998) says he based his film on a documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, released in 2004 by liberal filmmaker Michael Moore (see August 6, 2004), and calls it "a rigorously researched critical biography" comparable to the material presented on political talk shows such as Meet the Press. [Washington Post, 3/15/2009; Moneyocracy, 2/2012] Bossie intended for the film to be released in late 2007 and impact the 2008 race in the same way that he believes Fahrenheit 9/11 impacted the 2004 race. A cable company made the film, at a cost of $1.2 million, available for free to viewers on "video on demand." Bossie also scheduled a small theater run for the film, but his primary focus was always cable television and the accompanying television advertisements. Knowing the film will probably run afoul of campaign law, he hired lawyers, first James Bopp Jr. (a former member of the far-right Young Americans for Freedom—YAF—and the former general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee—see November 1980 and After) [New Yorker, 5/21/2012] and later Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under the Bush administration. Olson will later say the film is "a critical biographical assessment" that provides "historical information about the candidate and, perhaps, some measure of entertainment as well." The New York Times calls it "a scathingly hostile look at Mrs. Clinton" replete with "ripe voice-overs, shadowy re-enactments, and spooky mood music." The film also contains interviews and material from mainstream media reporters, and interviews with figures such as former CIA agent Gary Aldrich, who wrote a "tell-all" book about the Clinton administration, and with Kathleen Willey, who has claimed that Bill Clinton once made an unwelcome sexual advance towards her. Reviewer Megan Carpentier of Radar Online will trounce the movie, saying that it "scrolls through more than a decade of press clippings and a treasure trove of unflattering pictures in its one-sided romp" and will advise potential viewers to watch it "while inebriated in the manner of your choosing, and only if you don't pay $10 for the privilege." [New York Times, 3/5/2009] Bossie claims the movie has nothing to do with the impending primary elections. CU intends to show the movie in a small number of theaters but primarily on "video on demand" cable broadcasts, with accompanying television advertisements. In return for a $1.2 million fee, a cable television consortium has agreed to make the movie freely available to its customers as part of what CU calls its "Election '08" series. (CU has another negative documentary on Clinton's Democratic challenger Barack Obama in the works—see October 28-30, 2008—but apparently has no plans to air any documentaries on Republican candidate John McCain or any other Republican presidential candidates.) However, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) refuses to allow the film to be aired on cable channels, or advertised for theater release, because the FEC considers the film "electioneering" and thus subject to campaign finance law (see March 27, 2002) restrictions. Moreover, the film and its planned distribution are funded by corporate donations. [United States District Court for the District Of Columbia, 1/15/2008; Richard Hasen, 1/15/2008; New Yorker, 5/21/2012] Bossie claims the film takes no position on Clinton's candidacy, and says that if he had to vote between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he would vote for Clinton. [New York Times, 3/5/2009] Court Fight - Bopp, CU's original lawyer, decides to pursue the same general aggressive course that he took in a recent successful Supreme Court campaign finance case, the Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL) decision (see Mid-2004 and After). The Hillary film was envisioned from the outset to serve multiple purposes: to advance conservative ideology, damage Clinton's presidential chances (despite Bossie's claims), and generate profits. Bopp knows that the FEC would likely classify the film as a political advertisement and not a work of journalism or entertainment (see August 6, 2004), and therefore would fall under campaign law restrictions. Before the film is officially released, Bopp takes the film to the FEC for a ruling, and when the FEC, as expected, rules the film to be "electioneering communication" that comes under campaign law restrictions, Bopp files a lawsuit with the Washington, DC, federal district court. The court rules in favor of the FEC judgment, denying CU its request for a preliminary injunction against the FEC's ruling. The court specifically finds that the WRTL decision does not apply in this case. "[I]f the speech cannot be interpreted as anything other than an appeal to vote for or against a candidate, it will not be considered genuine issue speech even if it does not expressly advocate the candidate's election or defeat," the court states. The court also questions CU's statement that the film "does not focus on legislative issues.… The movie references the election and Senator Clinton's candidacy, and it takes a position on her character, qualifications, and fitness for office." Film commentator Dick Morris has said of the film that it will "give people the flavor and an understanding of why she should not be president." The court rules, "The movie is susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her." (During arguments, Bopp says that the film is much like what a viewer would see on CBS's evening news show 60 Minutes, and Judge Royce Lamberth laughs aloud, saying: "You can't compare this to 60 Minutes. Did you read this transcript?" Other judges find it problematic that one of the film's central "issues" is its assertion that Clinton is, in Bopp's words, "a European socialist," but still claims not to be overtly partisan.) [Mother Jones, 1/13/2008; United States District Court for the District Of Columbia, 1/15/2008; Richard Hasen, 1/15/2008; New Yorker, 5/21/2012] Supreme Court Appeal - CU appeals the court's decision directly to the Supreme Court. Bossie soon decides to replace Bopp with Olson, a far more prominent figure in conservative legal circles. Toobin will write: "Ted Olson had argued and won Bush v. Gore (see 9:54 p.m. December 12, 2000), and was rewarded by President Bush with an appointment as solicitor general. Olson had argued before the Supreme Court dozens of times, and he had a great deal of credibility with the justices. He knew how to win." [Richard Hasen, 1/15/2008; New Yorker, 5/21/2012] Previous Attempt - In September 2004, Bossie and CU attempted, without success, to release a similar "documentary" supporting President Bush and attacking Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (D-MA) on television, just weeks before the presidential election. The FEC turned down the group's request. The FEC did allow the film to be shown in theaters (see September 8, 2004 and September 27-30, 2004). 'Ten-Year Plan' - Bopp will later reveal that the lawsuit is part of what he will call a "10-year plan" to push the boundaries of campaign finance law, and that he urged Bossie and other CU officials to use the documentary as a "test case" for overturning the body of law (see January 25, 2010).
Entity Tags: William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, Kathleen Willey, Megan Carpentier, Theodore ("Ted") Olson, New York Times, Michael Moore, John McCain, Royce Lamberth, James Bopp, Jr, Dick Morris, Gary Aldrich, Barack Obama, Bush administration (43), Hillary Clinton, Citizens United, David Bossie, Federal Election Commission, Clinton administration
Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties, 2008 Elections
PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, debunks Internet claims that Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), a presidential candidate, is a covert Muslim whose middle name is Mohammed. The claims appear to be sourced from anonymous emails circulating throughout right-wing blogs and organizations. PolitiFact writes: "First off, Barack Obama's middle name is not Mohammed; it's Hussein. He was named after his father, a Kenyan who came to the United States from Africa as a student." PolitiFact also verifies that Obama is not a Muslim, "covert" or otherwise. Obama is a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago (see January 6-11, 2008). PolitiFact notes that the emails contradict themselves, on the one hand making the claim that Obama is a Muslim and on the other attacking his membership in Trinity United. Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs has said, "To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago." [St. Petersburg Times, 1/11/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 1/11/2008] PolitiFact does further investigation and again debunks the claims months later (see April 18, 2008). PolitiFact has already debunked earlier claims that in 2005, Obama took his Senate oath of office on a Koran, when in reality he used his family Bible (see December 19, 2007).
Entity Tags: Robert Gibbs, PolitiFact (.org ), Barack Obama, Trinity United Church of Christ
At least one supporter of far-right libertarian Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) argues that a recently published article in the New Republic that exposed the overtly racist and conspiratorial content in Paul's newsletters (see 1978-1996) was the result of a conspiracy by "beltway libertarians" from the Cato Institute to discredit Paul. According to Thomas DiLorenzo, the Koch family (see 1979-1980), who provide much of the funding for the Cato Institute (see 1977-Present and 1981-2010), is behind the conspiracy. "Proof" of this conspiracy, according to DiLorenzo, is that James Kirchick, the author of the article, has said he found many of the newsletters in the University of Kansas library; Charles Koch "is a major patron" of that university. DiLorenzo asks, "How on earth would a kid just out of college know to go to a library in Kansas, of all places, to dig up such stuff?" DiLorenzo goes on to say that he "recognized a paragraph [in Kirchick's article] that was identical to one written on several occassions by one of the especially hate-filled Beltway losers who works at a DC 'think tank' on his spleen-venting personal blog. Either he wrote it or coached the author." Author David Bernstein, who notes that the Cato Institute is preparing to publish a book of his, speculates that Kirchick may have used an Internet database called Wordcat to find the Paul newsletters, and writes, "Even 'kids just out of college' often know how to use the Internet, I believe." And Kirchick calls DiLorenzo's conspiracy theorizing "comically credulous." [New Republic, 1/8/2008; Thomas DiLorenzo, 1/12/2008; David Bernstein, 1/12/2008; New Republic, 1/15/2008] DiLorenzo publishes his theory on the blog of former Paul chief of staff Lew Rockwell, who runs the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank in Alabama closely allied with Paul. [Thomas DiLorenzo, 1/12/2008] A week after the publication of the first New Republic article, Paul will deny having virtually any involvement with his newsletters (see January 16, 2008).
Entity Tags: Ron Paul, James Kirchick, David Bernstein, Charles Koch, Cato Institute, Lew Rockwell, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Thomas DiLorenzo, The New Republic
Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda, 2008 Elections
An editorial in the conservative Investors Business Daily (IBD) claims that presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) is an "African nativist" driven by anti-American and anti-Christian views. According to the IBD editorial, "disturbing information has come to light" showing that "[a]t the core of the Democratic front-runner's faith—whether lapsed Muslim, new Christian, or some mixture of the two—is African nativism, which raises political issues of its own." The IBD editorial speculates that Obama is driven by "black nationalism" and fears that he and other African-Americans will continue to be held "captive" to "white culture" unless they take action. The editorial points to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, one of the pastors of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ where Obama and his family are members, as an "Afro-centric militant" who serves as Obama's "personal spiritual adviser." IBD then sounds the alarm about Obama's "close family ties to Kenya," particularly the "Muslim militants" of the Kenyan Luo tribe; Obama's father was a Luo, as is his older half-brother Abongo "Roy" Obama, whom IBD describes as "a Luo activist… a militant Muslim," and "a Marxist" who has "urge[d] his younger brother to embrace his African heritage." IBD warns: "Beyond family politics, these ties have potential foreign policy, even national security, implications.… Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of US interests? It's a valid question, and one voters deserve to have debated regardless of the racial and religious sensitivities. Thanks to a media blackout of these issues, the electorate has yet to benefit from a thorough vetting of Obama." IBD then informs its readers of Obama's "Muslim past," questioning his Christianity and worrying that if he is indeed a Christian, he would have repudiated his "childhood Muslim faith" and be viewed by Muslims as "an apostate," thereby making him a possible target of "a fatwah" by radical Islamists. It concludes by avowing that Obama's "Afrocentric doctrine" will be an overt threat to the US if he is elected president, stating, "If a President Obama's foreign and domestic policies are anything like the Afrocentric doctrine he's pledged to uphold, Americans will pay a hefty price, including those among the growing black middle class." [Investor's Business Daily, 1/16/2008] The editorial comes three weeks after a similar claim by conservative scholar Daniel Pipes (see December 26, 2007), and days after conservative radio host Michael Savage claimed Obama was educated in an Islamic madrassa (see January 10, 2008). The assertions will be debunked (see January 22-24, 2008). [Media Matters, 11/29/2007]
Entity Tags: Michael Savage, Investors Business Daily, Barack Obama, Abongo ("Roy") Obama, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Daniel Pipes
Reporters show that Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), a leading Democratic presidential candidate, was never educated in a "madrassa," or Islamic school, as some of his political enemies claim. Insight Magazine, a subsidiary of the conservative Washington Times, recently reported that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) had unearthed information showing that Obama was educated in an Indonesian madrassa during his childhood. The Clinton campaign disputes that it is the source of the story, and calls it "an obvious right-wing hit job." Obama indeed lived in Indonesia from 1967 through 1971, with his mother and stepfather, but was not educated in a madrassa. Instead, Obama, who was six when his family moved to Indonesia, attended the Basuki School from 1969 through 1971. According to a school official: "This is a public school. We don't focus on religion." CNN correspondent John Vause, who visited the school, reports: "I came here to Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa… like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan.… I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan… this school is nothing like that." A former classmate of Obama's says the school was not radical in 1969: "It's not [an] Islamic school. It's general.… There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian.… So that's a mixed school." Associated Press reporters also visit two other schools attended by Obama, the SDN Menteng 1 and Fransiskus Assisi. SDN Menteng 1 is a secular public school, according to its vice principal, while Fransiskus Assisi is, according to the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs, "clearly a Catholic school." After the Insight story is repeated on Fox News, the Obama campaign calls those broadcasts "appallingly irresponsible." [CNN, 1/22/2008; Associated Press, 1/24/2008] Despite the debunking, some conservative radio hosts continue to assert that Obama is a Muslim (see January 10, 2008, February 21, 2008, April 3, 2008, July 10, 2008, August 1, 2008 and After, August 21, 2008, and September 10, 2008).
Entity Tags: Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs, Barack Obama, Basuki School, Hillary Clinton, John Vause, Fransiskus Assisi, Insight Magazine, SDN Menteng 1
Fred Hollander, a New Hampshire resident, files a lawsuit challenging presidential contender John McCain (R-AZ)'s ability to serve as president. Hollander names the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a co-defendant. [Hollander v. McCain et al, 3/14/2008] Hollander's challenge hinges on a February 2008 report from conservative news blog News Busters that said since McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 (his parents, both US citizens were stationed on a Navy base in Panama at the time), he may not be eligible under Article II of the Constitution to be president. News Busters went on to report that McCain's claim to have been born in the Coco Solo Naval Hospital in the Canal Zone was false, since that hospital was not built until 1941, and the nearest hospital at the time of his birth was not on a US military base, but in the Panamanian city of Colon. Therefore, the report concluded, "we were lied to" about McCain's birthplace, and News Busters speculated that McCain's citizenship was in question. However, News Busters was in error. According to subsequent investigations by the press, the Panama Canal Zone did contain a small hospital at the Coco Solo submarine base in 1936, and McCain was born in that hospital. Archival records also show the name of the Naval doctor who signed McCain's birth certificate, Captain W. L. Irvine, the director of the facility at the time. News Busters, and Hollander, are in error in their reading of the law. Both of McCain's parents were US citizens, and McCain was born on a US military base, which qualifies under the Constitution as "US soil." The McCain presidential campaign has refused to release a copy of McCain's birth certificate, but a senior campaign official shows Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs a copy of the McCain birth certificate issued by the Coco Solo Naval hospital. [News Busters (.org), 2/21/2008; Washington Post, 5/20/2008] Additionally, the Panama American newspaper for August 31, 1936 carried an announcement of McCain's birth. [Washington Post, 4/17/2008 ] Two lawyers interviewed by CBS News concur that under the law, McCain is a "natural born citizen" and eligible to serve as president. Theodore Olson, the solicitor general for the Bush administration, and Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor generally considered to be a liberal, agree that challenges to McCain's citizenship are specious. [CBS News, 3/28/2008] Hollander files what is later determined to be a fake birth certificate with the court that purports to prove McCain has Panamanian citizenship. The court throws Hollander's lawsuit out on the grounds that Hollander has no standing to challenge McCain's citizenship. [US District Court, District of New Hampshire, 7/24/2008 ; Obama Conspiracy (.org), 2/27/2009; Obama Conspiracy (.org), 4/24/2010] The lawsuit is similar in nature to numerous court challenges to McCain's Democratic opponent, Senator Barack Obama (see August 21-24, 2008, October 9-28, 2008, October 17-22, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 31 - November 3, 2008, October 24, 2008, October 31, 2008 and After, November 12, 2008 and After, November 13, 2008, and Around November 26, 2008).
Entity Tags: Laurence Tribe, Theodore ("Ted") Olson, Michael Dobbs, Republican National Committee, John McCain, Fred Hollander, News Busters (.org), W. L. Irvine, Coco Solo Naval Air Station
A recent spate of chain email attacks on presidential contender Barack Obama (D-IL) include claims that Obama may be the Antichrist of Biblical prediction. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, notes that the email entirely distorts the words of the Book of Revelation to make its claim. The email reads: "According to The Book of Revelations the anti-christ is: The anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal.… the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destroy everything is it OBAMA??… I STRONGLY URGE each one of you to repost this as many times as you can! Each opportunity that you have to send it to a friend or media outlet… do it! If you think I am crazy… Im sorry but I refuse to take a chance on the 'unknown' candidate." PolitiFact notes that there are at least 635,000 hits on Google for the search term "Obama + Antichrist," indicating that the subject has a certain interest to many. There are also literally thousands of blog posts about "Barack Obama the Antichrist" and such. PolitiFact states flatly, "Nothing about this detailed allegation is true." According to PolitiFact's research, which includes interviews with two religious scholars, the email makes a number of egregious errors. The email misstates the name of the "Book of Revelation" as "Revelations." The email falsely says that the Book of Revelation uses the term "anti-christ" or any such term. Religious studies professor Dr. James D. Tabor tells PolitiFact: "The word Antichrist is not used in the Book of Revelation so this is important to point out. Everybody thinks the word is used." Dr. L. Michael White, a professor of classics and religious studies, adds, "First and foremost, the word Antichrist and a figure called the Antichrist never occurs in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament." There are characters in Revelation that some interpret as being the Antichrist, particularly one beastly figure in Chapter 13 "having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy" that some consider to be an allusion to the Antichrist. "It's only in Chapter 13 and you could almost miss it," Tabor says. White notes that most Biblical scholars do not consider that figure to represent the Antichrist. "It wasn't there in the Bible," he says. "It emerges in the Middle Ages. It's something historians deal with." The term does appear a few times in other books of the Bible, specifically First John and Second John. The Bible does not identify the Antichrist as a man of any particular age. Nowhere does it describe "a man, in his 40s," as the e-mail alleges. "As you notice, there's nothing about being age 40," Tabor says. "This is completely wrong. The Book of Revelation doesn't say that. It says it's a male, so I guess they got that right. It says 'he,' 'he,' 'he.'" The Bible does not identify the Antichrist as being Muslim; Islam was not founded as a religion until 400 years after the completion of the various books of the Bible. "A Muslim would be a monotheist and the last thing a Muslim would do is have anyone worship anyone other than God," says Tabor. And Obama is a Christian, not a Muslim (see October 1, 2007, December 19, 2007, and January 11, 2008). According to White, the email lifts much of its information from the Left Behind series, a group of post-apocalyptic novels written by Christian-right preacher Tim LaHaye and his co-author, Jerry Jenkins. The email is, White says, "a jigsaw puzzle of bits and pieces all filtered through the kind of end-of-world scenarios we get in the theology that is the underpinning of the Left Behind novels." He says this kind of "patchwork interpretation of the Bible" is used by groups who wish to justify certain beliefs. "Of course, they never bothered to read the Scriptures carefully," he says, "so it's kind of a system of interpretation. That if you start with that presupposition… it's all there you can just find it.… That description [in the chain email] never occurs anywhere in one place nor are the component parts really about the same situation. It's a cherry-picking through Scripture to get it all to fit together." PolitiFact calls the email's claim "egregiously inaccurate." [St. Petersburg Times, 3/19/2008]
Entity Tags: James D. Tabor, Barack Obama, L. Michael White, Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, PolitiFact (.org )
The Supreme Court dismisses an appeal by the political advocacy group Citizens United (CU) that argued the group's First Amendment rights had been violated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The Court had agreed to hear CU's case that it should be allowed to broadcast a partisan political documentary about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Hillary: The Movie, on cable television networks in the days before critical primary elections (see January 10-16, 2008). The Court did not rule on the merits of the case, but instead ruled that CU should have filed its case first with the federal appeals court in Washington. The ruling does not dismiss the case entirely, but makes it unlikely that the Court will rule on the campaign law issues surrounding the case (see March 27, 2002) before the November 2008 elections. Lawyer James Bopp, representing CU, says, "It is our intention to get the case expeditiously resolved on the merits in the district court, and then if we are unsuccessful there, to appeal" again to the Court. Bopp accuses Justice Department lawyers of trying to slow down the case to prevent it being resolved before the election. CU also wants to release a similar documentary about the other leading Democratic presidential contender, Barack Obama (D-IL—see October 28-30, 2008), in a similar fashion to its planned widespread release of the Clinton film. Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the Court's more liberal members, says in the order dismissing the appeal that had the case been taken up, he would have affirmed the previous decision in favor of the FEC. None of the other justices made any public statement about the case. The case will be heard by the Washington, DC, federal appeals court. [Christian Science Monitor, 3/24/2008] The appeals court will find against CU, and the organization will reapply to the Court for a hearing, an application which will be granted (see March 15, 2009).
Entity Tags: James Bopp, Jr, Barack Obama, Citizens United, Federal Election Commission, Hillary Clinton, US Department of Justice, US Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer
A portion of Barack Obama's marriage certificate. The full-size original can be viewed online. [Source: St. Petersburg Times]PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, debunks a recent spate of claims that Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), a presidential candidate, has ties to Islamist radicals in Kenya. The claims appear to be sourced from a letter sent by American missionaries in Kenya, saying that Obama has ties to a Kenyan opposition party and warning its readers "not to be taken in by those that are promoting him." The email also claims: "By the way. His true name is Barak Hussein Muhammed Obama. Won't that sound sweet to our enemies as they swear him in on the Koran! God bless you." PolitiFact writes: "The e-mail reads like a bad game of 'telephone,' its claims drawn from assorted people and sources that have been stitched together. And yet, because it is signed by real people, who have a life in Africa, it somehow carries more credence than your average blog posting—and it's spreading rapidly." PolitiFact has debunked this claim before (see January 11, 2008), but notes that the claim continues to spread. PolitiFact posts a copy of Obama's 1992 marriage certificate, which states "Barack H. Obama" married "Michelle L. Robinson" on October 3, 1992, in a ceremony officiated by Trinity United Church of Christ pastor Jeremiah A. Wright (see January 6-11, 2008). Obama's driver's license record in Illinois identifies him as "Barack H. Obama." His property listings name him as either "Barack Hussein Obama" or "Barack H. Obama." His registration and disciplinary record with the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois notes that Obama was admitted to the Illinois bar on December 17, 1991, and has no public record of discipline. PolitiFact was unable to secure a copy of Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate (see June 13, 2008). PolitiFact has located the originator of the email, Celeste Davis. Her husband Loren Davis confirms that he cannot substantiate the claims in the email. "That was what we heard there [in Kenya]," Davis tells a PolitiFact interviewer. Davis says he and his wife have lived and worked in Kenya for the past 12 years, and says his wife's message was from a personal letter "never intended to be forwarded or sent out to the Web." [St. Petersburg Times, 4/18/2008]
Entity Tags: Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Barack Obama, Celeste Davis, Michelle Obama, PolitiFact (.org ), Loren Davis
Obama's birth certificate, obtained from the Hawaii Department of Health. [Source: FightTheSmears (.com)]Senator Barack Obama (D-IL), running for the Democratic nomination for president, releases a digitally scanned copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate. His campaign is responding to persistent rumors that he is not a legitimate American citizen. In the process of releasing the certificate, Obama's campaign also launches a Web site called Fight The Smears, devoted to debunking the allegations that, among other things, Obama is not a citizen, he is a closet Muslim, he took his oaths for political office on a copy of the Koran, he refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and other falsehoods. As Obama was born in Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu at 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961, his birth certificate comes under Hawaiian state law, and those laws state birth certificates are not public records. Only the individuals, or immediate family members, may request copies. The copy of the birth certificate released by the Obama campaign confirms that his name is legitimately "Barack Hussein Obama," not "Barack Muhammed Obama," "Barry Soetoro," or other claimed variants, and states that Obama's mother is Stanley Ann Dunham, an American, and his father is Barack Hussein Obama, an "African." The birth certificate release only inflames the "birther" claims that Obama is hiding his true citizenship, religion, political alliances, and other such personal facts (see June 27, 2008). [St. Petersburg Times, 6/27/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009; Honolulu Advertiser, 7/28/2009]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Ann Dunham, Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital, Barack Obama, Sr
Right-wing blogs begin reprinting and recirculating an email that claims presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) is somehow responsible for at least 19 mysterious deaths. Right-wing terrorism expert David Neiwert will compare the "Obama death list" to the equally spurious "Clinton death lists" that circulated throughout the two terms of the Clinton administration and still survive in some places today. The email falsely claims that the fact-checking Web site Snopes.com has validated the list. The email reads in part: "Please send this to as many people as you can, especially those who might be thinking of voting for B. Hussen Obama. We cannot have a man like this in office.… The following is a partial list of deaths of persons connected to Barack HUSSEIN Obama during his time inside the United States. Read the list and judge for yourself." The list includes a number of known and supposed Obama associates, all of whom "died mysteriously" from a variety of causes, from "suspiciously timed" heart attacks and car crashes to drug overdoses. According to the list: an author died in 2003 after supposedly "exposing" Obama as a secret "radical Muslim" (see October 1, 2007, December 19, 2007, Before October 27, 2008, January 11, 2008, Around March 19, 2008, and April 18, 2008), as did a supposed FBI informant. Another died before he could share "sensitive information about meetings Barack Obama had with arms smugglers," and that person's father died "four hours after" his son made an appearance on right-wing talk show host Michael Savage's broadcast. One woman died after filing and then dropping rape charges against Obama. A former Obama office secretary was murdered after meeting with a reporter to discuss Obama's secret connections to black militants. A "childhood classmate" of Obama's was beheaded before he could present evidence that Obama had attended a radical Islamist madrassa in Indonesia. One person, a former reverend of Trinity Baptist Church (see January 6-11, 2008), was allegedly murdered so the Reverend Jeremiah Wright could take over as head of the church; the pastor's son was also murdered before he could expose Wright as a murderer. Another person died before he could expose his homosexual love affair with Obama. Another was shot to death before she could expose Obama as a frequent client of prostitutes. Another went missing after telling friends that she was carrying Obama's "love child." Bloggers for the progressive Sadly No site say they have tried and failed to authenticate most of the "deaths" of the people on the list, including author Sarah Berkley, whose alleged book The Jihad at the Ballot Box does not seem to exist. [My Right Wing Dad, 7/15/2008; Sadly No, 7/26/2008; David Neiwert, 7/28/2008] One blogger later finds that one person on the list, who supposedly died because of sinister Obama machinations in 2003, also supposedly died in 1994 from equally sinister Clinton machinations. [Civilization Fanatics, 7/26/2008]
Entity Tags: Michael Savage, William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, Barack Obama, David Neiwert, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr
Logo for the Hawaii Department of Health. [Source: Baby Guard Fence (.com)]PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, publishes a scathing denunciation of so-called "birther" claims that presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is not a legitimate American citizen. The story has gained traction mostly through Internet blogs and emails circulating among far-right and "tea party" organizations and figures, making wildly varying claims—Obama is a Kenyan, he is a Muslim, his middle name is Mohammed, his birth name is "Barry Soetoro," and so forth. PolitiFact's Amy Hollyfield writes: "At full throttle, the accusations are explosive and unrelenting, the writers emboldened by the anonymity and reach of the Internet. And you can't help but ask: How do you prove something to people who come to the facts believing, out of fear or hatred or maybe just partisanship, that they're being tricked?" Hollyfield notes that PolitiFact has sought a valid copy of Obama's birth certificate since the claims began circulating months ago. PolitiFact has already secured a copy of Obama's 1992 marriage certificate from the Cook County, Illinois, Bureau of Vital Statistics, his driver's license record from the Illinois secretary of state's office, his registration and disciplinary record with the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois, and all of his property records. The records are consistent, all naming him as either "Barack H. Obama" or "Barack Hussein Obama," his legitimate, given name. PolitiFact ran into trouble with the birth certificate. Obama was born in a hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, and according to Hawaiian law, that state's birth certificates are not public record. Only family members can request copies. The Obama presidential campaign originally declined to provide PolitiFact with a copy, until the campaign released a true copy of the certificate (see June 13, 2008). When PolitiFact received the document, researchers emailed it to the Hawaii Department of Health, which maintains such records, to ask if it was real. Spokesman Janice Okubo responded, "It's a valid Hawaii state birth certificate." Instead of settling the controversy, the certificate inflamed the so-called "birthers," who asked a number of questions concerning the certificate, including queries about and challenges to: the certificate's seal and registrar's signature; the color of the document as compared to other Hawaiian birth certificates; the date stamp of June 2007, which some say is "bleeding through the back of the document," supposedly calling into question the validity of the stamp and, thusly, the entire certificate; the lack of creases from being folded and mailed; the authenticity of the document, which some claim is "clearly Photoshopped and a wholesale fraud." Further investigation by PolitiFact researchers supports the validity of the certificate and disproves the allegations as cited. Hollyfield writes: "And soon enough, after going to every length possible to confirm the birth certificate's authenticity, you start asking, what is reasonable here? Because if this document is forged, then they all are. If this document is forged, a US senator and his presidential campaign have perpetrated a vast, long-term fraud. They have done it with conspiring officials at the Hawaii Department of Health, the Cook County (Ill.) Bureau of Vital Statistics, the Illinois secretary of state's office, the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois, and many other government agencies." Hollyfield notes that the Hawaii Department of Health receives about a dozen email inquiries a day about Obama's birth certificate, according to Okubo. She tells Hollyfield: "I guess the big issue that's being raised is the lack of an embossed seal and a signature." On a Hawaiian birth certificate, she says, the seal and signatures are on the back of the document. "Because they scanned the front… you wouldn't see those things." Hollyfield concludes that it is conceivable "that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world's biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything's possible." But she goes on to ask doubters "to look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what's reasonable has to take over. There is not one shred of evidence to disprove PolitiFact's conclusion that the candidate's name is Barack Hussein Obama, or to support allegations that the birth certificate he released isn't authentic. And that's true no matter how many people cling to some hint of doubt and use the Internet to fuel their innate sense of distrust." [St. Petersburg Times, 6/27/2008]
Entity Tags: Janice Okubo, Amy Hollyfield, Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois, Barack Obama, Cook County, Illinois Bureau of Vital Statistics, Hawaii Department of Health, PolitiFact (.org )
A birth announcement from the August 13, 1961 Honululu Advertiser announcing the birth of a baby boy to the parents of Barack Obama. [Source: FactCheck (.org)]A blogger who supports Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for president over Democratic primary challenger Barack Obama (D-IL) finds a birth announcement from a copy of the August 13, 1961 Honolulu Advertiser announcing Obama's birth. The blogger publishes a scanned graphic of the announcement on his blog, and concludes that Obama was "likely" born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu as the campaign, and the senator, have always claimed (see June 13, 2008). Reprinting the annoucement, FactCheck (.org) notes: "Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his US citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the USA." [FactCheck (.org), 8/21/2008] Reporter Will Hoover for the Honolulu Advertiser notes that both the Advertiser and the Honolulu Star Bulletin published birth announcements for Obama. One of the announcements, the blogger notes, contains the actual address of Obama's parents at the time they lived in Honolulu, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway. Newspaper officials tell Hoover that the announcements came, not from the parents, but from Hawaii's Department of Health. "That's not the kind of stuff a family member calls in and says, 'Hey, can you put this in?'" Hoover explains. [What Really Happened (.com), 2008; St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009]
Entity Tags: Will Hoover, PolitiFact (.org ), Honolulu Advertiser, Hawaii Department of Health, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, FactCheck (.org), Honolulu Star Bulletin
One of the digital artifacts scanned from Barack Obama's birth certificate and digitally manipulated by 'Techdude.' [Source: Dr. Neal Krawetz]A blogger calling himself "Techdude" writes a "final report" for the conservative blog Atlas Shrugs that, he claims, proves Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)'s digitally scanned copy of his birth certificate (see June 13, 2008) is a fraud, regardless of the recent validation of the copy by PolitiFact (see June 27, 2008) and the discovery of a printed birth announcement from a Honolulu newspaper (see July 2008). The proprietor of Atlas Shrugs, Pamela Geller, refuses to name "Techdude," but claims "he is an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, American College of Forensic Examiners, the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, International Information Systems Forensics Association," and other unnamed organizations. He is, Geller claims, a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. "Techdude"'s report begins with complaints that unnamed Obama supporters have recently vandalized his car and hung a dead rabbit on his front door "in a lame attempt to intimidate me from proceeding with releasing any details of my analysis." The attempt at "intimidation" did not work, "Techdude" proclaims, and he then releases his detailed analysis of the certificate. Although he refuses to release any information about the supposed actual Hawaiian birth certificates he used for his comparisons, "because of the amazing number of violent psychopaths who seem to be drawn to this issue," he says comparison between the digital scan of Obama's certificate and the "actual" certificates he claims to have in his possession show critical differences between them. "Techdude" says, among other things: The borders of the real certificates differ from those on the Obama certificate; The measurements of the real certificates differ from those of the Obama certificate; The digital scan shows evidence that the information was "overlain" onto a piece of security paper; The digital scan shows artifacts that could only come from Photoshop manipulation; The typography shows differences in "kerning," or the spacing between characters, between the scan and the authentic documents. "Techdude" concludes that the digital scan was produced by someone obtaining a real Hawaii birth certificate, soaking it in solvent, and then reprinting it with the desired information. [Atlas Shrugs, 7/20/2008] Computer forensics expert Dr. Neal Krawetz later examines "Techdude"'s analysis and determines it to be completely specious. The analysis, Krawetz will determine, has been deliberately manipulated to produce false results. "TechDude did not make amateur mistakes," Krawetz will conclude. "Instead, he intentionally manipulated the data so that it would support his theory." [Neal Krawetz, 8/4/2008; Hacker Factor, 2011]
Entity Tags: PolitiFact (.org ), Barack Obama, Atlas Shrugs (.com), Neal Krawetz, "Techdude", Pamela Geller
Cover of 'The Obama Nation' [Source: Threshold / FactCheck (.org)]Dr. Jerome Corsi, a conservative author and blogger who was deeply involved in the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign to besmirch presidential candidate John Kerry (D-MA), publishes a book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. The title is a play on the word 'abomination.' In his book, Corsi, who writes for the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily and blogs at the extremist Free Republic, attacks Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in a fashion similar to that used against Kerry—combining fact, hyperbole, speculation, and outright falsehoods in an attempt to demean and disparage Obama's character and professional career. The publisher, Threshold (a division of Simon and Schuster devoted to publishing conservative political works), calls the book "[s]crupolously sourced" and "[m]eticulously researched and documented…" Among other allegations, Corsi accuses Obama of growing up under the influence of Communist, socialist, and radical Islamic mentors; of deep and secretive affiliations with '60s radicals William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn; of espousing what he calls "black liberation theology" through his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright; connections to socialists and radical Islamists in Kenya, his father's home country; deep and criminal ties to Chicago real-estate mogul Tony Rezko; and an intent to, if elected president, implement what Corsi calls "far-left" domestic and foreign policies. [Simon and Schuster, 8/1/2008; New York Times, 8/12/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/20/2008] The book debuts as number one on the New York Times bestseller list, propelled by large bulk sales (large buys by particular organizations designed to artificially elevate sales figures) and an intensive marketing campaign carried out on conservative talk radio shows. "The goal is to defeat Obama," Corsi says. "I don't want Obama to be in office." [New York Times, 8/12/2008] Allegations Roundly Debunked - Unfortunately for Corsi, his allegations do not stand up to scrutiny. FactCheck.org, a non-partisan "'consumer advocate' for voters" site run by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center, finds that Corsi's book "is a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods." It "is not a reliable source of facts about Obama." FactCheck notes: "Corsi cites opinion columns and unsourced, anonymous blogs as if they were evidence of factual claims. Where he does cite legitimate news sources, he frequently distorts the facts. In some cases, Corsi simply ignores readily accessible information when it conflicts with his arguments." The organization notes that Threshold's chief editor, Republican operative Mary Matalin, said the book was not political, but rather "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." FactCheck responds: "The prominent display of Corsi's academic title (he holds a Ph.D. in political science) seems clearly calculated to convey academic rigor. But as a scholarly work, The Obama Nation does not measure up. We judge it to be what a hack journalist might call a 'paste-up job,' gluing together snippets from here and there without much regard for their truthfulness or accuracy." [FactCheck (.org), 2008; FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] The St. Petersburg Times's PolitiFact finds, "Taken as a whole, the book's primary argument is that Obama is a likely communist sympathizer with ties to Islam who has skillfully hidden his true agenda as he ruthlessly pursues elected office," an argument that the organization concludes is wholly unsupported by Corsi's arguments and sources. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/1/2008] And an Associated Press article finds the book a "collect[ion of] false rumors and distortions [designed] to portray Obama as a sort of secret radical who can't be trusted." [Associated Press, 8/16/2008] Unreliable Sources - As reported by progressive media watchdog site Media Matters, Corsi's sources are often unreliable: for example, his allegation that Obama's father divorced his mother according to "Islamic sharia law" is based on a single and unverifiable post made by an anonymous blogger. [Media Matters, 8/4/2008] FactCheck notes that although Corsi points to his over 600 endnotes as proof of his "rigorous" sourcing, many of those endnotes refer to obscure, unverifiable Internet postings, blog posts, and opinion columns. Four of Corsi's sources refer to his own work. "Where Corsi does cite news sources," the site says, "he sometimes presents only those that are consistent with his case while ignoring evidence that doesn't fit the picture he paints." [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] Demonstrably False Claims - Some of Corsi's claims are completely false: his statement that Obama did not dedicate his 2004 memoir, Dreams from My Father, to his parents or grandparents is easily debunked merely by reading the book's introduction, in which Obama wrote, "It is to my family, though—my mother, my grandparents, my siblings, stretched across oceans and continents—that I owe the deepest gratitude and to whom I dedicated this book." [Media Matters, 8/4/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/20/2008] Corsi also claims, falsely, that Obama holds dual citizenship in the US and Kenya, though the Kenyan Constitution specifically prohibits dual citizenship. [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] Corsi goes on to claim that Obama has long rejected his white family members from his mother's side, including his grandparents in Hawaii who raised him for much of his childhood. This is part of Corsi's argument about Obama's secret embrace of the so-called "radical black rage" teachings of American activist Malcolm X. According to Corsi's reading of Obama's memoir: "His race, he self-determines, is African-American. In making that determination, he rejects everyone white, including his mother and his grandparents. We do not have to speculate about this. Obama tells this to us outright; his words are direct, defying us to miss his meaning." But PolitiFact calls this "a significant misreading of Obama's memoir," and notes that Corsi ignores a large amount of evidence that points to Obama's continued close relationship with his white family members throughout his life. PolitiFact concludes, "To conclude that Obama rejects everyone white, including his mother and his grandparents, Corsi has to significantly read against the memoir's stated meaning. We find factual evidence also contradicts this statement, indicating that Obama maintained lifelong relations with his white relatives." [St. Petersburg Times, 8/1/2008] Insinuations and Leading Questions - Many of Corsi's allegations are based on little more than questions and insinuations: for example, Corsi insinuates that Obama may not have stopped using marijuana and cocaine, as he admitted to doing during his high school years. Corsi writes: "Still, Obama has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended into his law school days or beyond. Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? How about in the US Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why…?" According to Media Matters, Obama wrote in his book Dreams from My Father that he stopped using drugs shortly after beginning college. [Media Matters, 8/4/2008] FactCheck notes: "Corsi… slyly insinuates—without offering any evidence—that Obama might have 'dealt drugs' in addition to using them. And he falsely claims that Obama has 'yet to answer' whether he continued using drugs during his law school days or afterward.… In fact, Obama has answered that question twice, including once in the autobiography that Corsi reviews in his book." Guilt by Association - Corsi alleges that Obama has links to Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga, and claims that Obama is somehow linked to the violence surrounding the 2007 Kenyan presidential election. He bases his claim on a single visit by Obama and his wife, Michelle, to Kenya, where they publicly took AIDS tests to demonstrate the tests' safety. In the testing process, Obama spoke briefly to the crowd. Odinga was on stage while Obama spoke. Corsi construes the speech as an Obama endorsement of Odinga, and, as FactCheck writes, "[h]e goes on to attribute all the violence in Kenya to an elaborate Odinga plot." Corsi ignores the fact that during that trip, Obama also met with the other Kenyan presidential candidate, Mwai Kibaki, and with opposition leader Uhuru Kenyatta. Human Rights Watch blamed the violence following the election on both Odinga and Kibaki and their followers. FactCheck notes that Corsi uses the logical fallacy of "guilt by association" to fill Chapters 3 through 7. [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] Misquoting Other Sources - Media Matters finds that Corsi sometimes misquotes and rewrites source material, as when he attributed a claim concerning Obama's supposedly untoward business relationship with Rezko to articles in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Boston Globe, and Salon (.com) that made none of the claims Corsi attributes to them. Corsi also misquoted the conservative Web site NewsMax when he used one of its articles to falsely claim that Obama had been present at Chicago's Trinity United Church during Reverend Wright's denunciation of America's "white arrogance." (Obama was actually in Miami during Wright's sermon.) [Media Matters, 8/4/2008] Corsi uses a man he calls one of Obama's "closest" childhood friends, Indonesian Zulfan Adi, to back his assertion that Obama was once a practicing Muslim. However, Corsi does not report that Adi later retracted his claims about Obama's religious practices, and admitted to knowing Obama for only a few months. Corsi also ignores a Chicago Tribune story that contains interviews with "dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends [who] show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia," and other media reports that have conclusively proven Obama was never a Muslim (see January 22-24, 2008). Ignoring the Obvious - Corsi repeatedly claims that Obama is a master speaker who bedazzles crowds with soaring flights of rhetoric, but never actually gives any specifics of what he intends to do as president. He writes: "At the end of every rhetorically uplifting speech Obama gives about the future of hope, millions of listeners are still left pondering, 'Now what exactly did he say?' If the politician is the message, as [campaign manager David] Axelrod and Obama have proclaimed, they can't forever avoid telling us what precisely that message is." But FactCheck notes that "Obama's Web site is packed with details of what he proposes to do if elected. He lays out descriptions of his policy proposals, including tax cuts for most families and increases for those making more than $250,000 per year; a $150 billion, 10-year program to develop alternative energy sources and more efficient vehicles; a proposal to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and another to create a public health insurance plan for those whose employers don't offer health coverage. Whether or not one agrees with them, Obama has indeed presented detailed plans for dozens of policies. It's hard to see how anyone writing a book on Obama could fail to acknowledge their existence." Conspiracy Theorist, 'Bigot,' and Veteran Liar - FactCheck notes: "Corsi is a renowned conspiracy theorist who says that [President] George Bush is attempting to create a North American Union… and that there is evidence that the World Trade Center may have collapsed [after the 9/11 attacks] because it was seeded with explosives. More recently, Corsi claimed that Obama released a fake birth certificate. We've debunked that twice now. [M]any of the themes in The Obama Nation are reworked versions of bogus chain e-mail smears." [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] In August 2004, Media Matters found that Corsi routinely embraced both extremist opinions and personal invective. Corsi called Islam "a worthless, dangerous Satanic religion." Of Catholicism, he wrote, "Boy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press." Of Muslims themselves, he wrote, "RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters—it all goes together." And of Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), he wrote: "Anybody ask why HELLary couldn't keep BJ Bill [former President Clinton] satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?" [Media Matters, 8/6/2004] (Corsi posted these comments on the Free Republic under the moniker "jrlc," and identified himself as "jrlc" on March 19, 2004.) [Free Republic, 3/18/2004; Jerome Corsi, 8/7/2004] An Obama campaign spokesman calls Corsi "a discredited, fringe bigot." [Associated Press, 8/16/2008] FactCheck concludes, "In Corsi's case, we judge that both his reputation and his latest book fall short when measured by the standards of good scholarship, or even of mediocre journalism." [FactCheck (.org), 9/15/2008] PolitiFact concludes: "A reader might think that because the book is printed by a mainstream publishing house it is well-researched and credible. On the contrary—we find The Obama Nation to be an unreliable document for factual information about Barack Obama." [St. Petersburg Times, 8/20/2008]
Entity Tags: Mwai Kibaki, NewsMax, Salon (.com), Raila Odinga, Simon and Schuster, Trinity United Church of Christ, Tony Rezko, Michelle Obama, St. Petersburg Times, Zulfan Adi, Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ayers, Media Matters, Hillary Clinton, Malcolm X, Boston Globe, Bernadette Dohrn, Barack Obama, Associated Press, Annenberg Public Policy Center, Chicago Sun-Times, Mary Matalin, Chicago Tribune, FactCheck (.org), John Kerry, Jerome Corsi, David Axelrod, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Free Republic, WorldNetDaily, George W. Bush
Ron Paul (R-TX), a US representative and candidate for the Republican nomination for president, gives the keynote address to the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011)'s 50th Anniversary Celebration. [New American, 10/8/2008] The JBS is, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent right-wing extremist group that has accused a number of lawmakers, including former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, of being "closet Communists," and promotes "wild conspiracy theories" such as the "international Jewish" conspiracy to control the global economy and the idea that the World War II Holocaust never happened. The JBS has been a pioneer in what an analysis by Political Research Associates (PRA) will call "the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric white racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the white supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII." PRA will note, "Throughout its existence, however, the society has promoted open homophobia and sexism." [Political Research Associates, 2010; Southern Poverty Law Center, 8/17/2010] The New American, the online magazine of the JBS (though the publication's Web site downplays its connection to the JBS), will cover Paul's speech. Paul speaks on the topic, "Restoring the Republic: Lessons From a Presidential Campaign," where he discusses how America can be "restored" with groups such as the JBS and his own Campaign for Liberty "leading the way." Paul is introduced by John McManus, the president of the JBS. According to the New American report: "Dr. Paul made evident his affection for the JBS by stating at the outset, 'I am delighted to help celebrate this birthday.' And when he moved on to talk about his first successful campaign for Congress in 1976, he said, 'I'm sure there are people in this room who probably helped me in that campaign, because I know that so many of you have over the years.' He then described his first press conference at the Capitol Hill Club, during which an antagonist from Houston asked him: 'Mr. Paul, are you a member of the John Birch Society? Have you ever been a member of the John Birch Society?' Dr. Paul recalled his response: 'No, I am not a member of the John Birch Society but many members of the John Birch Society are friends of mine and they have been very helpful in my campaign.'" Paul credits the JBS "for keeping alive the freedom fight through its programs to educate and motivate the American people. He went on to point out that the JBS had planted a lot of seeds over the years and that his presidential campaign was able to tap into the sentiment that sprouted from those efforts." Paul repeatedly cites what he calls "the remnant," which he defines as those who remember and respect the values upon which the United States was founded: self-reliance, personal responsibility, limited government, sound money, the gold standard, etc. Paul lauds the JBS for nurturing that "remnant," adding, "The remnant holds the truth together, both the religious truth and the political truth." He concludes with an exhortation for the audience to "continue what you have been doing," and says, "I come with a positive message and congratulations to you for all you have done." [New American, 10/8/2008] Paul's newsletters contain a raft of bigoted material (see 1978-1996), though Paul denies writing almost all of his newsletters' content (see January 16, 2008). In 2007, he readily admitted his support for the John Birch Society (see July 22, 2007).
Entity Tags: Southern Poverty Law Center, Political Research Associates, Ron Paul, John Birch Society, John F. McManus, The New American
Author Jerome Corsi, who has published a scathing, and well-debunked, challenge to presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)'s American citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After), calls Obama's birth certificate a "fake" in an interview on Fox News. Corsi tells interviewer Steve Doocy: "Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their Web site. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?" Corsi is referring to a scanned digital copy of Obama's birth certificate (see June 13, 2008), which has been confirmed as true and valid by Hawaiian state officials (see June 27, 2008). Corsi claims, "The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released and the campaign refuses to release it." Doocy asks if the copy isn't "just… a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?" and Corsi responds: "No, it's a—there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce." [FactCheck (.org), 8/21/2008]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Jerome Corsi, Steve Doocy, Fox News
As reported by progressive media watchdog site Media Matters, Jerome Corsi, author of a widely discredited book that smears presidential candidate Barack Obama (see August 1, 2008 and After), tells a C-SPAN interviewer that if Obama becomes president and people like Corsi dare to criticize him in print, "Obama might just have to create a department of hate crimes and put them in jail." [Media Matters, 8/16/2008]
Entity Tags: Media Matters, Barack Obama, Jerome Corsi
A photograph of the actual Hawaiian birth certificate of Barack Obama, being held by FactCheck (.org) writer Joe Miller. [Source: FactCheck (.org)]FactCheck (.org), a non-partisan arm of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, certifies that its experts have verified that the birth certificate released by Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is valid (see June 13, 2008). Since the release of the digitally scanned image, a firestorm of controversy (see July 20, 2008) has erupted over the authenticity of the certificate, even after Hawaiian officials verified its validity (see June 27, 2008) and the discovery of a printed birth announcement from a Honolulu newspaper (see July 2008). FactCheck notes that much of the controversy has been sparked by author Jerome Corsi, whose recent book Obamanation makes a host of negative claims against Obama (see August 1, 2008 and After), and who has told a Fox News interviewer that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake" (see August 15, 2008). FactCheck releases the following statement: "We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined, and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving US citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as 'supporting documents' to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the USA just as he has always said." The actual certificate is in the hands of Obama campaign officials in Chicago, FactCheck reports, and has the proper seals and signature from Hawaiian registrar Alvin Onaka. Certificate Meets Requirements for State Department Passport Issuance - FactCheck reports: "The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a US passport: 'your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.' The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above" in a photograph reproduced on FactCheck's Web site. 'Short Form' Certificate - The copy possessed by the Obama campaign is called a "short form birth certificate." The so-called "long form" is created by the hospital in which a child is born, and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is what is provided by Hawaiian officials upon receiving a valid request for a birth certificate: It "is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department." Scan Artifacts - The digitally scanned version released by the Obama campaign does indeed show "halos" around the black-text lettering, prompting some to claim that the text may have been copied onto an image of security paper. However, FactCheck writes, "the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process." Date Stamp, Blacked-Out Certificate Number - The digital scan also contains an unusual date stamp and a blacked-out certificate number. Campaign spokesperson Shauna Daly explains that the certificate is stamped July 2007 because that is when Hawaiian officials produced it for the presidential campaign. The campaign did not release a copy until mid-2008, leading some to speculate that the date stamp proved the digital scan was a forgery. Of the certificate number, Daly says that the campaign "couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world." FactCheck writes, "The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641." 'African' Father - Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., is listed on the certificate as "African," sparking claims that Obama is actually of Kenyan citizenship. Kurt Tsue of the Hawaii Department of Health tells FactCheck that the father and mother's race are told to officials by the parents, and thusly "we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be." FactCheck writes: "We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama Sr. would have thought of and reported himself as 'African.' It's certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be." Differences in Borders - The "security borders" on the digital scan do indeed look slightly different from other examples of Hawaii birth certificates. Tsue explains: "The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised." He also confirms that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for "all reasonable purposes." [FactCheck (.org), 8/21/2008]
Entity Tags: Kurt Tsue, Barack Obama, Barack Obama, Sr, Annenberg Public Policy Center, Alvin Onaka, Hawaii Department of Health, Shauna Daly, Jerome Corsi, FactCheck (.org)
Jerome Corsi, author of a widely debunked smear against Democratic candidate Barack Obama (see August 1, 2008 and After), says in a WorldNetDaily article that since the Obama campaign has responded to his book with a Web page called "Unfit for Publication," it is conceivable that an Obama presidency will create "a censorship department in which a book critical of a President Obama might be banned from publication." [WorldNetDaily, 9/7/2008] Corsi has previously suggested that Obama is likely to create a "department of hate crimes" and put critics such as himself in jail (see August 16, 2008).
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Jerome Corsi
Amy Kremer, a former flight attendant who wil go on to found the Atlanta Tea Party and become the chair of the Tea Party Express, writes of Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain (R-AZ), "he needs to tell Nobama [referring to presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL)] to bring his authentic birth certificate to the debate. I am so tired of the spin from his spinmeisters! Johnny Mac… just go straight to the source!" Kremer is referring to questions some have raised about Obama's supposed lack of a valid birth certificate (see June 13, 2008) and accusations that he is not an American citizen. Authors Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind later write of Kremer's "birther" beliefs, "Much of this sentiment predates the actual formation of tea parties." [Politico, 2010; Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 10/19/2010]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Amy Kremer, Atlanta Tea Party, Devin Burghart, John McCain, Leonard Zeskind, Tea Party Express
A Web graphic accusing presidential candidate Barack Obama of beginning his political career in the home of college professor William Ayers. [Source: Kickin and Screamin (.com)]Republican vice-presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) accuses Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) of "palling around with terrorists" who intend to attack American targets. Palin, telling audiences in Colorado and California that it is "time to take the gloves off," says Obama has ties to the 1960s-era radical group Weather Underground through an acquaintance, University of Illinois at Chicago professor William Ayers. Obama, Palin says, "is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." The Weather Underground was once labeled a domestic terrorist group by the FBI. Ayers served on a board with Obama and held a fundraiser for Obama's Senate run in 1995. Obama has condemned Ayers's connections with the Weather Underground, and most media organizations have discounted any ties between the two men. The Weather Underground has been defunct for decades. Palin says she is not attempting to "pick a fight" with Obama, but is telling campaign audiences about Obama and Ayers because "it was there in the New York Times… and they are hardly ever wrong." Ayers, she says, "was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and US Capitol.' Wow. These are the same guys who think patriotism is paying higher taxes.… This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America. We see America as the greatest force for good in this world. If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for for all of us." Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan condemns Palin's remarks, and cites a list of media outlets that have debunked the so-called Obama-Ayers connection. "Governor Palin's comments, while offensive, are not surprising, given the McCain campaign's statement this morning that they would be launching Swiftboat-like attacks in hopes of deflecting attention from the nation's economic ills," Sevugan writes. He also notes that the New York Times is one of the media outlets that debunked the connection, stating, "In fact, the very newspaper story Governor Palin cited in hurling her shameless attack made clear that Senator Obama is not close to Bill Ayers, much less 'pals,' and that he has strongly condemned the despicable acts Ayers committed 40 years ago, when Obama was eight." The Obama campaign calls the attempt by the McCain-Palin campaign to link Obama to Ayers part of a campaign of "dishonest, dishonorable assaults against Barack Obama." [Christian Science Monitor, 10/5/2008]
Entity Tags: William Ayers, Barack Obama, Hari Sevugan, Sarah Palin, Weather Underground
Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda, 2008 Elections, US Domestic Terrorism
As reported by progressive media watchdog Web site Media Matters, conservative radio hosts echo the claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has never produced a legitimate birth certificate proving his American citizenship, a claim long since debunked (Obama long ago posted a copy on his Web site—see June 13, 2008—and document experts and the Hawaii Department of Health will confirm its validity—see June 27, 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, and July 28, 2009). Rick Roberts tells his audience that Obama's birth certificate "hasn't… been produced" and that no one in the Obama campaign has ever provided one for public scrutiny. Chris Baker says there "has never been a real birth certificate presented" by Obama. Michael Savage, taking the story one step further, says that the birth certificate "that was produced is a forgery." Savage also claims that no one in Hawaii, Obama's birth state, can find the original certificate: It "does not exist, they can't find it in the Hawaii government. It's never been produced. The one that was produced is a forgery.… I will never work for a man who has a birth certificate nobody can find. In other words, if you vote for Obama, you're insane." Savage goes on to claim that Obama is actually a Kenyan citizen, like his father, another claim long since disproven (see August 1, 2008 and After), and makes an equally illegitimate claim that Obama was educated in an Indonesian madrassa, or radical Islamist school (see January 22-24, 2008), under the name "Barry Soetoro"; Savage even claims that Obama legally changed his name to "Barry Mohammed Soetoro" in Indonesia. No such name change has ever been documented. [Media Matters, 10/14/2008] Weeks later, Savage will assert, without proof, that Obama will visit Hawaii to address the issue of the birth certificate and cloak the trip by ostensibly visiting his gravely ill grandmother (see November 10, 2008).
Entity Tags: Michael Savage, Media Matters, Barack Obama, Rick Roberts, Chris Baker
Washington State resident Steven Marquis files a petition in Washington's Superior Court demanding that Secretary of State Sam Reed either prove that Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is a "natural born" citizen or remove him from the presidential ballot. Marquis says that granting his petition would "prevent the wholesale disenfranchisement of voters" who might otherwise choose a candidate who is a valid citizen. "At this point, Mr. Obama has not allowed independent or official access to his birth records nor supporting hospital records," Marquis writes in his petition, and accuses the Hawaii Health Department of "violat[ing] federal law by ignoring formal Freedom of Information requests for the same." Obama has long since posted an authentic copy of his birth certificate on the Internet (see June 13, 2008), and this has repeatedly been verified as valid (see June 27, 2008, July 2008, and August 21, 2008). Marquis references another lawsuit challenging Obama's citizenship, filed by lawyer Philip Berg and awaiting a hearing in a federal district court (see August 21-24, 2008). Marquis explains the timing of his petition—just before the presidential elections—as caused by Obama's "delay and subsequent non-response to reasonable request for valid certificates." He also cites the Washington secretary of state's office's refusal to certify Obama's birth certificate as he has previously requested, writing, "To date, in this regard, Secretary of State Sam Reed has not carried out that fundamental duty." Washington Superior Court Judge John Erlick will throw out Marquis's petition, saying Reed has no such authority to force Obama to prove his citizenship, and cites Marquis's failure to name Obama as a party to his complaint. [WorldNetDaily, 10/16/2008; Mid-Columbia Tri-City Herald, 10/28/2008; WorldNetDaily, 11/13/2008]
Entity Tags: Philip J. Berg, Barack Obama, Hawaii Department of Health, Sam Reed, John Erlick, Steven Marquis
Presidential candidate John McCain takes the microphone from a woman who says opponent Barack Obama is 'an Arab.' [Source: Associated Press / Truthdig (.com)]Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the Republican candidate for president, draws boos and catcalls from his own supporters when he defends opponent Barack Obama (D-IL) from charges that he is an Arab. Obama has been accused of being Arabic, Muslim, and not a US citizen by opponents (see October 1, 2007, April 18, 2008, July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, and October 8-10, 2008). At a town hall in Minnesota, McCain takes questions from selected members of the audience; in recent days, spurred by accusations from McCain and his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK), that Obama is a close ally of "terrorist" William Ayers (see October 4-5, 2008), McCain rallies have been marked by screams and cries of "Terrorist!" and "Traitor!" hurled against Obama. According to McClatchy reporters, at a rally in New Mexico earlier in the week, McCain "visibly winced" when he heard one supporter call Obama a "terrorist," but said nothing in response. In today's town hall, supporters pressure McCain to attack Obama even more fiercely. Instead, when one supporter tells McCain he fears the prospect of raising his young son in a nation led by Obama, McCain replies, "I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States." The comment draws boos and groans from the crowd. McCain continues: "If you want a fight, we will fight. But we will be respectful. I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments.… I don't mean that has to reduce your ferocity, I just mean to say you have to be respectful." Later in the town hall, an elderly woman tells McCain: "I don't trust Obama.… He's an Arab." McCain shakes his head during her comment, then takes the microphone from her and says: "No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with." Obama and his supporters have acknowledged that the rhetoric in the final weeks of the campaign is likely to get even more heated. He tells crowds in Ohio, "We know what's coming, we know what they're going to do." In recent rallies, McCain has stepped back from the more heated rhetoric, refusing to talk about Ayers and instead calling Obama a "Chicago politician." Palin, however, has continued the attacks on Obama via the Ayers association. Recent McCain-Palin television ads asking, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" have been taken by some as insinuating that Obama may be a Muslim. Obama has been a practicing Christian for decades (see January 6-11, 2008). Former Governor William Milliken (R-MI) has said, "I'm disappointed in the tenor and the personal attacks on the part of the McCain campaign." [McClatchy, 10/10/2008; Los Angeles Times, 10/11/2008] The next day, Obama thanks McCain. "I want to acknowledge that Senator McCain tried to tone down the rhetoric yesterday, and I appreciated his reminder that we can disagree while still being respectful of each other," he tells a crowd in Philadelphia. Referencing McCain's military service, he says McCain "has served this country with honor and he deserves our thanks for that." He then returns to his standard campaign broadsides against McCain's economic proposals. [Wall Street Journal, 10/11/2008]
Entity Tags: William Ayers, Sarah Palin, William Milliken, Barack Obama, John McCain
Sarah Obama, standing with her step-grandson Barack Obama in a 2009 photograph. [Source: Shooting from the Lip (.com)]Bishop Ron McRae of the Anabaptist Church of North America calls Sarah Onyango Obama, presidential candidate Barack Obama's elderly step-grandmother. McRae, in Pennsylvania, speaks to Mrs. Obama in Kenya over a garbled and troubled telephone connection; Mrs. Obama uses at least one translator, Vitalis Akech Ogombe (a cousin of Obama's and the grandson of Sarah Obama), because she speaks Luo and Swahili. (Apparently some, if not all, of the conversation is translated between English, Swahili, Luo, then back to Swahili, and then into English.) Additionally, the conversation takes place during a riotous celebration, and on the Kenyan side is being heard through a speakerphone. McRae set the conversation up through a contact, Kweli Shuhubia, a Kenyan Christian evangelist McRae knows as "Brother Tom," and who, in an exchange of emails, apparently demanded money and goods for setting up the "operation," as he and McRae call it. The telephone conversation lasts 14 minutes, and McRae apparently does not inform the Kenyans that they are being recorded. The resulting audiotape creates a firestorm of controversy over President Obama's supposed birth in Kenya, because it appears that Mrs. Obama says she saw him born in Kenya. McRae quickly makes an edited portion of the audiotape available on the Internet. It says in part: McRae: - "Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to visit Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?" Ogombe: - "She says yes she was. She was present when Obama was born." The edited version does not contain the next portion: McRae: - "Okay, when I come in December, I would like to go by the place, the hospital where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?" Ogombe: - "No. Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America." McRae: - "Whereabouts was he born? I thought he was born in Kenya." Ogombe: - "He was born in America, not in Mombasa." McRae: - "Do you know where he was born? I thought he was born in Kenya. I was gonna go by and see where he was born." Ogombe: - "Hawaii. She says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father, his father was also learning there. The state of Hawaii." McRae: - "I thought she said she was present. Was she able to see him being born in Hawaii?" Translator: - "No, no.… She was not… she was here in Kenya. Obama was born in America.… Because the grandmother was back in Kenya and Obama was born in America, where he is from, where his father was learning, learning in America, the United States." Instead of posting the entire audiotape, McRae will continue to insist that Sarah Obama confirmed Obama's Kenyan birth. McRae submits an affidavit that states in part: "Though some few younger relatives, including Mr. Ogombe (one of the translators), have obviously been versed to counter such facts with the common purported information from the American news media that Obama was born in Hawaii, Ms. Sarah Hussein Obama was very adamant that her grandson, Senator Barack Hussein Obama, was born in Kenya, and that she was present and witnessed his birth in Kenya, not the United States. When Mr. Ogombe attempted to counter Sarah Obama's clear responses to the question, verifying the birth of Senator Obama in Kenya, I asked Mr. Ogombe how she could be present at Barack Obama's birth if the senator was born in Hawaii, but Ogombe would not answer the question, instead he repeatedly tried to insert that, 'No, no, no. He was born in the United States!'" PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, notes that a March 2007 story in the Chicago Tribune featured a quote from reporter Tim Jones, who spoke with Sarah Obama and quoted her as saying that she received a letter announcing Obama's birth and she "was so happy to have a grandchild in the US." PolitiFact concludes that the audiotape as presented was "tightly… edited" to give a false impression that Mrs. Obama had seen Barack Obama being born in a Kenyan hospital. [Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ; Obama Conspiracy (.org), 3/6/2009; St. Petersburg Times, 4/7/2011] McRae will release his edited audiotape in the last week of October 2008, in an apparent attempt to influence the upcoming presidential election. [Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ] Explanation of Hoax - Investigative blogger Greg Doudna, who later obtains a copy of the unedited audiotape and makes it, and a transcript, available on the Internet, explains McRae's reasoning behind the hoax. "In this conversation McRae sought to obtain evidence on tape in support of a conspiracy theory circulating in certain right-wing circles in America, namely, that Barack Obama Jr. was not born in Hawaii in 1961 as represented, but actually was secretly born in Kenya. According to this theory, Obama's mother, then-18-year-old Ann Dunham, waited until about seven or eight months into her pregnancy to take a grueling transcontinental flight halfway across the world to Kenya, there to discover that because of her pregnancy she was not allowed by an airline to get on the plane back to the US, and so was forced to have her baby—the future president of the United States—in a hospital in Kenya. Motivated by a desire to ensure that her child would be regarded as a US citizen with all rights thereof, she or fellow-conspirator family members plotted to have [Obama's] birth recorded in Hawaii as if it happened in Hawaii, including placing a notice in a Hololulu newspaper of the birth, which was published a few days later (see July 2008). The plot succeeded (so the story goes), and the secret of the true circumstances of Barack Obama Jr.'s birth in Kenya was closely held by the family, so much so that neither Ann Dunham nor any other family member ever spoke of a trip of Ann Dunham to Kenya in all the years since." The "conspiracy" would have worked, Doudna writes, had Obama not decided to run for president. "No witness, document, evidence, or testimony has been produced which locates Ann Dunham anywhere outside the United States at any time in her life prior to 1967, when she and young Barack Jr. went to live for several years in Indonesia. Neither the outgoing Bush administration, the Republican Party, the McCain campaign, nor any of Obama's earlier rivals for the Democratic nomination disclosed any awareness of evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, or in any other way ineligible to be president. Yet the notion is fervently believed, like an urban legend that will not die." [Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ] Audiotape Used in Lawsuit - The edited audiotape will be presented as "evidence" of Obama's supposed Kenyan citizenship in a lawsuit (see August 21-24, 2008).
Entity Tags: PolitiFact (.org ), Ann Dunham, Kweli Shuhubia, Barack Obama, Tim Jones, Vitalis Akech Ogombe, Greg Doudna, Sarah Obama, Ron McRae
Andy Martin. [Source: Andy Martin]Hawaiian resident Andy Martin files a writ of mandamus in Hawaii's Supreme Court to compel Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI) to release a certified copy of presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)'s "vital statistics record," apparently asking that Hawaii ignore federal privacy laws and release the "long form" birth certificate on file for Obama (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, and August 21, 2008). His request is denied. [WorldNetDaily, 11/13/2008] When his lawsuit is dismissed, Martin responds on a blog for defeated Democratic primary opponent Hillary Clinton (D-NY), in a posting reprinted on the Free Republic and a number of other conservative blogs. Martin expresses his doubt that Obama has just flown to Hawaii to visit his dying grandmother, apparently referencing conspiracy theories on right-wing radio that Obama went to Hawaii to "scrub" his birth records (see November 10, 2008). He suggests that it is his lawsuit that caused the Obama campaign "to panic and suspend his presidential campaign to head off Andy's stories." (Martin has been posting a number of blog entries about Obama being a "covert Islamist"—see October 1, 2007 and April 18, 2008). He is, he boasts, "on the verge of taking down the Obama campaign," calling himself "the good sheriff stand[ing] alone against the Obama Gang. Eliot Ness and the Untouchables? The Long Ranger? Pick your own hero. Martin vs. Obama explodes into a Hollywood classic." Martin writes: "I will do my best to defeat Obama even though I essentially stand alone. I stand tall. All of the protagonists are from Chicago. Despite ridicule and envy from Chicago's corrupt mainstream media, I have spent over forty years successfully fighting crooked politicians like Barack Obama and his Daley Machine cronies." He cites "support" from Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity, and his own participation as a blog commenter on FoxNews.com and YouTube. He says he "became the target of a massive liberal assault at the [New York] Times" after one Hannity broadcast: "On direct orders from the Emperor Obama, the New York Times then unleashed its smear machine on me." He says his "investigative team" defeated the Times's attempt to "destroy me," writing: "I am still standing and the Times' credibility is going into the toilet.… High Noon.… Barack Obama vs. Andy Martin. The drama builds as we move closer and closer to disclosing the dramatic truth about Barack Obama.… Barack Obama is an enemy of the Constitution. He is using tens of millions of dollars in clandestine campaign cash from unknown sources to stage an electoral coup d'etat in our nation. That is why I keep fighting for the truth. Barack Obama has been lying to the American people. And his Big Lie is about to be exposed." [Andy Martin, 10/21/2008] Shortly after the lawsuit's dismissal, Martin will abruptly abandon his accusations that Obama is a Muslim, and will begin asserting that Obama is a secret Communist taught by his "father," a black activist named Frank Marshall Davis (see Before October 27, 2008). In a wide-ranging article about the "birther" controversy, Salon columnist Alex Koppelman will later note that Martin was denied an Illinois law license on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to practice law. [Salon, 12/5/2008]
Entity Tags: New York Times, Barack Obama, Anthony Robert Martin-Trigona, Alex Koppelman, Frank Marshall Davis, Linda Lingle, Sean Hannity, Free Republic
Philip J. Berg. [Source: Qui Non Negat, Fatetur (.com)]Attorney Philip J. Berg, whose lawsuit challenging Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)'s citizenship was thrown out of a Pennsylvania court (see August 21-24, 2008), claims that because Obama never personally responded to his lawsuit, Obama is thusly "admitt[ing]" to the lawsuit's allegations. Berg charged that Obama was not born in the United States (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, and August 21, 2008), but in Mombasa, Kenya. Berg cites Rule 36 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which states that unless the accused party provides a written answer or objection to charges within 30 days, the accused legally admits the matter. Obama, through his campaign lawyers, filed motions to dismiss the lawsuit and did not directly answer the charges in it. Therefore, Berg says Obama has legally admitted he is not a natural-born citizen. Berg is asking the court to formally declare Obama's admission and for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to name someone else as its presidential candidate. To a reporter with the conservative news blog WorldNetDaily, Berg says: "Obama and the DNC 'admitted,' by way of failure to timely respond to requests for admissions, all of the numerous specific requests in the federal lawsuit. Obama is 'not qualified' to be president and therefore Obama must immediately withdraw his candidacy for president and the DNC shall substitute a qualified candidate." Obama's campaign has said that lawsuits such as Berg's (see March 14 - July 24, 2008, August 21-24, 2008, October 9-28, 2008, October 17-22, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 31 - November 3, 2008, October 24, 2008, October 31, 2008 and After, November 12, 2008 and After, November 13, 2008, and Around November 26, 2008), are not actually about Obama's birth certificate, but instead are "about manipulating people into thinking Barack is not an American citizen." Obama's campaign has issued a number of documents and assertions that prove Obama's citizenship, as have several non-partisan fact-checking organizations. Berg has offered to drop his lawsuit if Obama will prove his citizenship to Berg's satisfaction. Berg tells a conservative blogger: "It all comes down to the fact that there's nothing from the other side. The admissions are there. By not filing the answers or objections, the defense has admitted everything. He admits he was born in Kenya. He admits he was adopted in Indonesia. He admits that the documentation posted online is a phony. And he admits that he is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president of the United States." [WorldNetDaily, 10/21/2008] Joseph Sandler, a lawyer who filed one of the motions to dismiss on behalf of Obama, says Berg's contention is erroneous. He goes on to explain why claims like these are never challenged or explained by defending lawyers: "When you file a motion to dismiss, to try to get the case thrown out before any factual inquiry is made, the facts that the plaintiffs put into their complaint are assumed to be true. You have to show that even if the facts were true, they don't have a case." [Washington Independent, 7/24/2009]
Entity Tags: WorldNetDaily, Democratic National Committee, Barack Obama, Joseph Sandler, Philip J. Berg
A Georgia court throws out a petition by the Reverend Tom Terry of Atlanta to force Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel to either prove presidential candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) is an American citizen or remove him from the election ballot. "I bear no personal ill will against Barack Obama," Terry says in a statement. "In fact, his election solely on the basis as the first African-American president-elect is a very positive thing for our nation. However, as an American, I have very grave concerns about Mr. Obama's possible divided loyalties since he has strenuously and vigorously fought every request and every legal effort to force him to release his original birth certificate for public review and scrutiny (see June 13, 2008). I think that is significant." Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter refuses to hear the suit, ruling: "I don't think you have standing to bring this suit. I think that the attorney general has argued the law. I think he is correct. I think you are not a lawyer." Terry will appeal the suit, telling a reporter: "Hopefully, this action will be noticed by other states and they will also take a serious look at the meaning of Georgia's Supreme Court's actions. It is apropos that the Latin motto in the Georgia Supreme Court is interpreted: 'Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.' I think if the Court rules in my favor, that motto will come alive with meaning and impact." [WorldNetDaily, 11/13/2008]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Tom Terry, Karen Handel, Jerry W. Baxter
Chicago resident Andy Martin, who has been accusing Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) of being a secret Muslim since 2004, abruptly shifts his story. Now, Martin claims, Obama is not the child of a Muslim father, Barack Obama Sr., as documents have clearly and repeatedly shown (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, and August 21, 2008), but the child of Frank Marshall Davis, an African-American activist who was suspected in the 1950s of having ties to Communist organizations. Martin's accusations, though never supported by fact, have garnered a great deal of coverage in some corners of the Internet. Martin now tells a CNN reporter that Obama's "father was Frank Marshall Davis." He gives no proof, and implies he has nothing more than a gut feeling. Davis was a black poet and political activist who moved to Hawaii in 1948. He wrote for a newspaper which the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) accused of being a Communist front. Right-wing Web sites have been claiming since 2007 that Davis was not only a Communist Party member but also the mentor to Obama in his teen years who he refers to in his autobiography as "Frank." Martin's most recent burst of prominence was an appearance on Sean Hannity's Fox News broadcast, where he said that "Obama's role as a community organizer [in Chicago] was a political staging ground perpetuated by the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers." Martin also told Hannity that Obama "probably had met William Ayers in New York, and was coming here to lay the foundations for what he thought would be some sort of political movement." An Obama presidency, Martin predicted, would lead to "a socialist revolution, which attempts to essentially freeze out anybody who's not part of this radical ideology." Martin readily admits that his current assertion about Obama's parentage refutes his four-year-old claims that Obama is a Muslim. He calls himself "an honest writer and an honest researcher.… I'm known as a person who strives for the truth." The fault is Obama's, he says, because he "hasn't told the truth to the American people." [Raw Story, 10/27/2008] In a wide-ranging article about the "birther" controversy, Salon columnist Alex Koppelman will later note that Martin was denied an Illinois law license on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to practice law. [Salon, 12/5/2008]
Entity Tags: William Ayers, Anthony Robert Martin-Trigona, Alex Koppelman, Barack Obama, House Un-American Activities Committee, Barack Obama, Sr, Sean Hannity, Frank Marshall Davis
Cover illustration of the 'Hype' DVD. [Source: Amazon (.com)]The conservative lobbying group Citizens United (CU) distributes hundreds of thousands of DVDs in newspapers throughout Ohio, Florida, and Nevada, all considered "swing states" in the upcoming presidential election. The DVDs contain a "documentary" entitled Hype: The Obama Effect and are characterized by CU as "truthful attack[s]" on Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). Previous advertisements for the film said the film portrays Obama as an "overhyped media darling," and quoted conservative pundit Tucker Carlson as saying: "The press loves Obama. I mean not just love, but sort of like an early teenage crush." The DVD distribution takes place just days before the November 4 election. CU says it is spending over a million dollars to distribute around 1.25 million DVDs, which are included with delivery and store-bought copies of five newspapers: the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Palm Beach (Florida) Post, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The film attacks Obama's record on abortion rights, foreign policy, and what the Associated Press calls his "past relationships" with, among others, his former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright (see January 6-11, 2008). The DVD also attempts to tie Obama to political corruption in Illinois, and lambasts the news media for what CU calls its preferential treatment of Obama. CU president David Bossie says: "We think it's a truthful attack. People can take it any way they want." Bossie was fired from his position on a Republican House member's staff in 1998 for releasing fraudulently edited transcripts of a former Clinton administration official to falsely imply that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton had committed crimes (see May 1998). Among those interviewed about Obama for the film are conservative columnist Robert Novak, conservative pundit Dick Morris, former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), and author and pundit Jerome Corsi, whom the AP terms a "discredited critic" of Obama. Obama campaign spokesman Isaac Baker calls the DVD "slash and burn politics," and says the DVD is another tactic of the presidential campaign of John McCain (R-AZ) to "smear" Obama with "dishonest, debunked attacks from the fringes of the far right." [New York Times, 7/22/2008; Associated Press, 10/28/2008; Media Matters, 10/29/2008] Newspaper Official Defends Decision to Include DVD - Palm Beach Post general manager Charles Gerardi says of his paper's decision to include the DVD in its Friday distribution: "Citizens United has every right to place this message as a paid advertisement, and our readers have every right to see it, even if they don't agree with it. That we accepted it as a paid advertisement in no way implies that this newspaper agrees or disagrees with its message." [Palm Beach Post, 10/31/2008] Falsehoods, Misrepresentations, and Lies - Within days, the liberal media watchdog organization Media Matters finds that the DVD is riddled with errors, misrepresentations, and lies. Claim that Obama 'Threw' Illinois State Senate Election - On the DVD, author David Freddoso claims that in 1998, Obama managed to "thr[o]w all of his opponents off the ballot" to win an election to the Illinois State Senate, a claim that has been disproved. Claim that Obama Refuses to Work with Republicans - Freddoso also asserts that there are no instances of Obama's stints in the Illinois State Senate nor the US Senate where he was willing to work with Republicans on legislation, an assertion that Freddoso himself inadvertently disproves by citing several instances of legislation Obama joined with Republicans to pass. Claim that Obama Wants to Raise Taxes on Middle Class and Small Business - The DVD's narrator misrepresents Obama's campaign statements to falsely claim that Obama has promised to "irrevocabl[y]" raise taxes on citizens making over $100,000 to fund Social Security; the reality is that Obama's proposed tax increase would affect citizens making $250,000 or more. The DVD narrator makes similarly false claims about Obama's stance on raising the capital gains tax, and on raising taxes on small business owners. Conservative radio host Armstrong Williams tells viewers that Obama will raise taxes on small businesses that employ only a few workers, when in fact Obama has repeatedly proposed cutting taxes on most small businesses. Huckabee makes similar claims later in the DVD. Claim that Obama Supports Immigration 'Amnesty' - The narrator misrepresents Obama's stance on immigration reform as "amnesty for the 12 to 20 million people who violated US immigration law," a position that Obama's "Plan for Immigration" rejects. Claim that Obama Wants 'Centralized Government' Health Care - Blackwell, now a contributing editor for the conservative publication TownHall, falsely claims that Obama wants to implement what he calls "a centralized government program that hasn't worked in Canada, hasn't worked in England, that has actually taken the freedom from the consumer and limited the choices." Organizations such as PolitiFact and the New York Times have called claims that Obama supports government-run "single payer" health care false. Claim that Obama Refused to Protect Lives of Infants - Conservative columnist and anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek claims that Obama opposed legislation that would have protected the lives of babies "born alive" during botched abortion efforts, when in fact no such legislation was ever proposed—the law already protects babies in such circumstances—and the Illinois Department of Public Health has said no such case exists in its records. (Stanek has claimed that she has witnessed such incidents during her time as an Illinois hospital worker.) Stanek has said that she believes domestic violence against women who have had abortions is acceptable, claimed that Chinese people eat aborted fetuses as "much sought after delicacies," and claimed that Obama "supports infanticide." Claim that Obama Supported Attack on Petraeus - The DVD narrator claims that as a US senator, Obama refused to vote for a bill that condemned an attack by liberal grassroots activist organization MoveOn.org on General David Petraeus. In reality, Obama did vote to support an amendment that condemned the MoveOn advertisement. Claim that Obama Supported Award for Farrakhan - The DVD narrator claims that Obama has aligned himself with the controversial head of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and cites the 2007 decision by Obama's then-church, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, to award a lifetime achievement award to Farrakhan. In reality, Obama denounced Farrakhan's anti-Semitism, and stated that he did not agree with the Trinity decision to give Farrakhan the award. Claim of Suspiciously Preferential Loan Rate - The DVD narrator claims that Obama received a suspiciously "preferential rate on his super-jumbo loan for the purchase" of a "mansion" in Hyde Park, Illinois, from Northern Trust, an Illinois bank. A Washington Post reporter did make such a claim in a report, but subsequent investigation by Politico and the Columbia Journalism Review showed that the rate Obama received on the loan was consistent with other loans Northern Trust made at the time and not significantly below the average loan rate. 'Citizen of the World' - Corsi claims that Obama does not consider himself an American, but a "citizen of the world." Media Matters has found numerous instances where Obama proclaims himself a proud American as well as "a fellow citizen of the world." In 1982, Media Matters notes, then-President Reagan addressed the United Nations General Assembly by saying, "I speak today as both a citizen of the United States and of the world." Media Matters notes that Corsi's anti-Obama book Obama Nation was widely and thoroughly debunked (see August 1, 2008 and After), and since its publication, Corsi has made a number of inflammatory and false accusations about Obama and his family (see August 15, 2008, August 16, 2008, September 7, 2008, October 8, 2008, October 9, 2008, July 21, 2009, and September 21, 2010). [Media Matters, 10/30/2008]
Entity Tags: Citizens United, PolitiFact (.org ), Palm Beach Post, Charles Gerardi, MoveOn (.org), Mike Huckabee, Politico, Rick Santorum, Cincinnati Enquirer, Trinity United Church of Christ, Armstrong Williams, Associated Press, Barack Obama, Washington Post, Tucker Carlson, Media Matters, Louis Farrakhan, Robert Novak, John McCain, David Bossie, Las Vegas Review-Journal, David Freddoso, Columbus Dispatch, Clinton administration, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbia Journalism Review, David Petraeus, New York Times, Hillary Clinton, Isaac Baker, J. Kenneth Blackwell, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr, Dick Morris, Jill Stanek, Jerome Corsi, Illinois Department of Public Health
Timeline Tags: Civil Liberties, Domestic Propaganda, 2008 Elections
Hawaii's Director of Health Dr. Chiyome Fukino says she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the Hawaii Department of Health holds Senator Barack Obama (D-IL)'s original birth certificate (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, and August 21, 2008). Fukino says that she has "personally seen and verified that the Department of Health has Senator Obama's original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures." Fukino and Onaka thereby verify that Obama is, indeed, an American citizen. Fukino releases the statement in an attempt to stem the tide of conspiracy theories that assert Obama is not a US citizen—"birtherism"—and therefore cannot be eligible to be president. Fukino adds that no state official, including Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI), ever issued instructions that Obama's certificate be handled differently. Hawaii state law prohibits the release of the so-called "long form" birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest; state law says that the "short form" the state releases to its citizens, and that Obama has long ago made public (see June 13, 2008), is legal and valid in and of itself. State courts in Ohio, Pennsylvania (see August 21-24, 2008), and Washington State have recently dismissed court challenges to Obama's citizenship. [FactCheck (.org), 8/21/2008; Associated Press, 10/31/2008] Fukino tells a Honolulu reporter: "This has gotten ridiculous (see July 20, 2008). There are plenty of other, important things to focus on, like the economy, taxes, energy." Asked if this "[w]ill be enough to quiet the doubters," Fukino responds: "I hope so. We need to get some work done." [FactCheck (.org), 8/21/2008]
Entity Tags: Chiyome Fukino, Linda Lingle, Alvin Onaka, Hawaii Department of Health, Barack Obama
Leo C. Donofrio. [Source: Obama Conspiracy (.org)]Retired New Jersey attorney, professional gambler, and conservative blogger Leo C. Donofrio files a lawsuit asking the State Supreme Court to prohibit three candidates from appearing on New Jersey's presidential ballot: Barack Obama (D-IL), John McCain (R-AZ), and Socialist Worker's Party candidate Roger Calero. Donofrio claims that none of the three have proven to his satisfaction that they are "natural born citizens," as the Constitution requires to serve as president (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008). The lawsuit asks Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells to intervene in the elections process. In his filing, Donofrio writes that Obama is not eligible for the presidency "even if it were proved he was born in Hawaii, since… Senator Obama's father was born in Kenya and therefore, having been born with split and competing loyalties, candidate Obama is not a 'natural born citizen.'" Obama has long ago posted his authentic birth certificate stating he was born in Hawaii and therefore is a US citizen (see June 13, 2008). McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone (see March 14 - July 24, 2008) and Calero's birth in Nicaragua, Donofrio continues, invalidate their ability to be president as well, even though the Constitution states otherwise. With three ineligible presidential candidates on ballots, Donofrio warns, New Jersey voters will "witness firsthand the fraud their electoral process has become." After being rejected by the New Jersey Court, US Supreme Court Justice David Souter rejects the lawsuit's appearance on the Court docket. Justice Clarence Thomas allows the case to be submitted for consideration, but the Court rejects it. [Leo C. Donofrio v. Nina Mitchell Wells, Secretary of State of the State of New Jersey, 10/31/2008; WorldNetDaily, 11/13/2008; Obama Conspiracy (.org), 12/21/2008; St. Petersburg Times, 6/28/2010] After his case is thrown out, Donofrio will write on his blog that "you have no Constitution and you have no 'Supreme' court. You have a filthy corrupted snake pit which tried to protect itself from responsibility for this issue by using clerks like brutal praetorian guards." [Obama Conspiracy (.org), 12/21/2008] An Internet rumor that Justice Antonin Scalia will "quietly" place the case on the Court docket is later proven entirely false (see June 28, 2010).
Entity Tags: Roger Calero, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Barack Obama, Antonin Scalia, Leo C. Donofrio, John McCain, Nina Mitchell Wells
As reported by progressive media watchdog site Media Matters, conservative radio host Michael Savage tells his audience that President-elect Barack Obama's grandmother "suspiciously died virtually the night before the election," in an apparent attempt to question Obama's pre-election trip to Hawaii. Obama visited his grandmother in late October, shortly before her death on November 3. Savage ties in his questions about Obama's grandmother and her "suspicious death" to discredited claims that Obama has been unable to verify his US citizenship. Savage tells his listeners: "Well, we don't even know where Obama was born. His grandmother died the night before the election. There's a lot of questions around this character that the media won't answer. Let's start with what country he's from. Why was the birth certificate never produced? Why in the world did he take time off from the campaign to visit the grandmother who then suddenly and suspiciously died virtually the night before the election? Tell me about that." Savage and other conservative commentators have suggested that Obama went to Hawaii, not to visit his gravely ill grandmother, but to address charges that his birth certificate is not valid. [Media Matters, 11/14/2008] Savage is one of a number of conservative radio hosts to spread false rumors about Obama's birth certificate (see October 8-10, 2008). Obama produced a copy of his birth certificate months before (see June 13, 2008). A number of organizations have verified that Obama's birth certificate is valid and authentic (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008), as have Hawaii Health Department officials (see October 30, 2008). [St. Petersburg Times, 6/27/2008; WorldNetDaily, 8/23/2008; FactCheck (.org), 11/1/2008] According to Talkers Magazine, Savage is third in talk-radio listenership across the US, behind fellow conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. [Media Matters, 11/14/2008]
Entity Tags: WorldNetDaily, Talkers Magazine, Media Matters, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Barack Obama, FactCheck (.org), Sean Hannity
Alan Keyes. [Source: WorldNetDaily (.com)]Alan Keyes (R-IL), the unsuccessful presidential candidate who ran under the American Independent Party banner, files a petition, Keyes v. Bowen, with the Superior Court of California in Sacramento. The action is filed by Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation on behalf of Keyes, along with well-known "birther" lawyer Orly Taitz. Two California electors, Wiley S. Drake and Markham Robinson, are also named with Keyes in the action. Keyes's "Petition for Writ of Mandate" claims that President-elect Barack Obama (D-IL)'s US citizenship is unproven (see (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008) and therefore he must be stopped from taking office until it is proven one way or the other. "Should Senator Obama be discovered, after he takes office, to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void," the petition states, "Petitioners, as well as other Americans, will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal." The petition requests that Secretary of State Debra Bowen be prevented "from both certifying to the governor the names of the California Electors, and from transmitting to each presidential Elector a Certificate of Election, until such documentary proof is produced and verified showing that Senator Obama is a 'natural born' citizen of the United States and does not hold citizenship of Indonesia, Kenya, or Great Britain." It continues with a request for a writ barring California's electors from signing the Certificate of Vote until documentary proof is produced. The defendants include Bowen, Obama, Vice President-elect Joseph Biden (D-DE), and the 55 California electors. The petition uses a fraudulently edited audiotape (see October 16, 2008 and After) as primary evidence that Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to be president. Referring to the tape's transcript, and a previously dismissed lawsuit by Philip Berg (see August 21-24, 2008) currently using the same audiotape to justify an appellate reversal, Keyes writes, "Mr. Berg provided documents [to the Supreme Court] to the effect that Senator Obama was born in what is now Kenya… and that his paternal grandmother was present at his birth." The petition states as a "fact" that Obama's paternal grandmother stated that "she was present during [his] birth… [she] affirmed that she 'was in the delivery room in Kenya when he was born Aug. 4, 1961.'" The suit asks that the court issue an immediate injunction prohibiting California's 55 electors from voting for Obama in the upcoming Electoral College vote on December 15, 2008, which would prevent Obama from being officially declared president. Keyes's writ asks that documentary proof be received and verified by the California secretary of state that the allegations are false and that Obama is affirmatively proven to be a "natural born citizen" by a series of tests not required of any previous president-elect. Investigative blogger Greg Doudna will speculate that Keyes's extraordinary actions have been sparked in part because he has now been twice defeated by Obama in elections; Obama defeated him in an Illinois election for US Senate in 2004. [Keyes et al v. Bowie et al, 11/13/2008 ; WorldNetDaily, 11/14/2008; Sacramento Union, 11/15/2008; Greg Doudna, 12/9/2008 ] After filing the lawsuit, Keyes tells a reporter: "I and others are concerned that this issue be properly investigated and decided before Senator Obama takes office. Otherwise there will be a serious doubt as to the legitimacy of his tenure. This doubt would also affect the respect people have for the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. I hope the issue can be quickly clarified so that the new president can take office under no shadow of doubt. This will be good for him and for the nation." [Sacramento Union, 11/15/2008] 'Pure Garbage' - An Obama spokesperson tells WorldNetDaily: "All I can tell you is that it [the petition] is just pure garbage. There have been several lawsuits, but they have been dismissed." [WorldNetDaily, 11/13/2008] Affidavit from Phony 'Computer Graphics Expert' - Self-described "computer graphics expert" "Dr. Ron Polarik," a conservative blogger, records a video (that blurs his face and disguises his voice) explaining how the actual Obama birth certificate was forged using Photoshop. Polarik submits an affidavit in support of the filing, but because he signs it "XXXXXXXXXXX," the affidavit is inadmissible. Kreep later tells a reporter, "If it ever comes down to it, we'll use his real name." [Washington Independent, 7/24/2009] The Berg lawsuit also used material supplied by Polarik. Computer forensics expert Dr. Neal Krawetz later determines that Polarik's analysis is a clumsy fraud perpetuated by an amateur with no real expertise. [Neal Krawetz, 11/25/2008; Washington Independent, 7/24/2009; Hacker Factor, 2011] Libertarian lawyer Loren Collins later traces a timeline of what he will call Polarik's "ever-changing resume," and questions Polarik's claims to his several doctorates and areas of expertise. [Loren Collins, 7/7/2009] Collins later discovers that "Polarik" is actually a man named Ronald Jay Polland, who holds a doctorate in instructional systems, has experience conducting surveys and statistical reports, operates a one-man consulting firm in Florida, and describes himself on his MySpace page as an "[e]xpert advisor on relationships, romance, and… dating." Polland's resume, unlike "Polarik's," claims no expertise in document forensics, computing systems, or graphics. [Loren Collins, 7/29/2009] Krawetz will learn that Polland claimed to use a pseudonym on the Internet because "he fears threats from Obama supporters." [Neal Krawetz, 11/25/2008]
Entity Tags: Debra Bowen, Loren Collins, Gary Kreep, Greg Doudna, Joseph Biden, Markham Robinson, Neal Krawetz, Barack Obama, Wiley S. Drake, Alan Keyes, Philip J. Berg, Orly Taitz, US Electoral College, United States Justice Foundation, Ronald Jay Polland
Warren County, Ohio, magistrate Andrew Hasselbach throws out a challenge by Ohio resident David M. Neal to President Obama's qualifications to serve as president. Before the election, Neal filed a complaint that demanded Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner either prove Obama is a US citizen (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008) or throw him off the ballot. Hasselbach writes that Neal gave too much credence to Internet rumors surrounding Obama's citizenship, and writes: "The onus is upon one who challenges such public officer to demonstrate an abuse of discretion by admissible evidence—not hearsay, conclusory allegations, or pure speculation. It is abundantly clear that the allegations in Plaintiff's complaint concerning 'questions' about Senator Obama's status as a 'natural born citizen' are derived from Internet sources, the accuracy of which has not been demonstrated to either Defendant Brunner or this magistrate." Neal had asked that Brunner obtain documents from the Federal Elections Commission, the Democratic National Committee, the Ohio Democratic Party, and possibly Obama himself to verify that Obama was born in Hawaii and not elsewhere. Neal asserted that the authentic certificate provided by the Obama campaign (see June 13, 2008) is not an original, and therefore not valid proof of birth. Neal, who maintains a politically oriented Web site, says he is part of what he calls a nationwide grassroots movement questioning Obama's citizenship. When he filed the complaint, he said, referring to a local school: "When I enrolled my son in Knothole, I had to show his birth certificate.… This guy is running for president of the United States." In arguing against Neal's motion, Assistant Attorney General Mike Schuler told the court: "One can conservatively estimate that more than 3 million Ohioans intend to vote for Senator Obama. Mr. Neal asks this court to disenfranchise those 3 million voters based solely on rumor and innuendo." [Cincinnati Enquirer, 10/31/2008]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Andrew Hasselbach, Mike Schuler, David M. Neal, Jennifer Brunner
President-elect Barack Obama faces another challenge to his presidency—an Internet-based effort to block the US Electoral College from certifying him as president, according to a report from the Christian Science Monitor. The challenge centers on long-debunked accusations that Obama is not a US citizen (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008). The Electoral College meets on December 15 to cast its votes, as garnered through the November 4 election results. The Constitution requires that the president be a US citizen; the people behind this effort insist that Obama was born in Kenya, and not in Hawaii as his birth certificate attests. North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall says: "Most of the world thinks this is settled except for a few conspiracy theorists. In the 2000 election… Republican electors felt under siege, and I expect the Democrat electors may end up feeling the same way [this time]." North Carolina elector Wayne Abraham (D-NC) says he has received three letters and a phone call asking him not to vote for Obama. "I was surprised, but I'm not worried about it," he says. "As I said to the lady on the phone, I figured that the Bush administration had ample opportunity to investigate Senator Obama, and if they had discovered he was not truly a citizen they… would have let us know." Immigration law expert Peter Spiro of Temple University says the entire issue is a "nonstarter, because Obama was born in Hawaii." The biggest effort of the attempt to stop the Electoral College from certifying Obama's presidency is a lawsuit in California brought by failed presidential candidate Alan Keyes (see November 12, 2008 and After). Lawyer Philip Berg, who has lost a lawsuit challenging Obama's citizenship (see August 21-24, 2008), says: "People are going after electors now because they can only vote for a qualified candidate, and [Obama] hasn't shown he's qualified. I think we have enough trouble—we don't need a fake president." Melanie Siewert of Kenansville, North Carolina, says the questions surrounding Obama's citizenship have moved her to get involved in politics for the first time in her life. "I'm not asking electors to overturn their vote, but really to, before we vote, to make absolutely sure," she says. She says she has contacted most of North Carolina's 15 electors. "This is not being a sore loser or racist. This is just about ensuring that our leader is being truthful about who he is." Presidential historian Perry Leavell says: "Human beings will always go for myth because it's compelling, dramatic, and, if it were true, it would be able to change history. You can go back into the history of the American presidency and find over and over again people… who are prepared to believe the exact opposite of what all the data would say." Constitutional law binds state electors to cast their votes for the candidate who won their state. [Christian Science Monitor, 11/26/2008] The Electoral College will vote for Obama as president. [WRAL-TV, 12/15/2008]
Entity Tags: Wayne Abraham, Christian Science Monitor, Barack Obama, Alan Keyes, Elaine Marshall, Philip J. Berg, Melanie Siewert, Peter Spiro, Perry Leavell, US Electoral College
A portion of the advertisement that runs in the Chicago Tribune. [Source: We the People (.org)]Robert L. Schulz, a wealthy anti-tax activist from upstate New York and the chairman of the We the People Foundation, takes out the second of two ads in the Chicago Tribune questioning whether President Barack Obama is a "natural born citizen" and thusly eligible to be president. Schulz confirms that his non-profit foundation spent "tens of thousands of dollars" on the ads. The ads echo long-debunked claims that Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate (see June 13, 2008) is fraudulent (see July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, and November 10, 2008). Cases challenging Obama's citizenship have been thrown out of numerous state courts (see March 14 - July 24, 2008, August 21-24, 2008, October 9-28, 2008, October 17-22, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 31 - November 3, 2008, October 24, 2008, October 31, 2008 and After, November 12, 2008 and After, November 13, 2008, and Around November 26, 2008), and the State of Hawaii has vouched for the authenticity of the Obama birth certificate, which by state law is locked in a state government vault with all other such "long form birth certificates" issued by Hawaiian officials (see July 1, 2009). Schulz's ad raises the following claims: The birth form released by Obama was "an unsigned, forged, and thoroughly discredited" live birth form, Schulz says. Digital and real copies of Obama's birth certificate have been examined by experts, including members of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and pronounced real (see August 21, 2008). According to Schulz, "Hawaiian officials will not confirm" that Obama was born in their state. Hawaiian officials initially did resist releasing a copy of the certificate, citing state privacy laws. However, Hawaii's health director and head of vital statistics reviewed Obama's birth certificate in the department's vault and vouched for its authenticity (see October 30, 2008). Schulz says that legal affidavits state Obama was born in Kenya. Those affidavits were filed by challengers to Obama's citizenship, and those challenges have been dismissed by a variety of courts (see August 21-24, 2008, October 9-28, 2008, October 17-22, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 31 - November 3, 2008, October 24, 2008, October 31, 2008 and After, November 12, 2008 and After, November 13, 2008, and Around November 26, 2008). Obama's paternal grandmother is recorded on tape saying she attended Obama's birth in Kenya, Schulz says. Schulz is referring to claims by street preacher Ron McRae who interviewed the second wife of Obama's grandfather, Sarah Obama, via long-distance telephone (see October 16, 2008 and After). The audiotape clearly shows that the assembled Obama relatives, and the translator who spoke to McRae, repeatedly stated that Obama was born in Hawaii. Schulz says that "US law in effect in 1961 [the year of Obama's birth] denied citizenship to any child born in Kenya if the father was Kenyan and the mother was not yet 19 years of age." Schulz is incorrect. US law states that any child born in the US is a legitimate citizen regardless of his parents' nationalities and/or citizenships. Obama's father had dual Kenyan/British citizenship, and his mother was a US citizen. Had Obama been born outside of US territory and his mother Ann Dunham been under 19 years of age, which she was, Obama would indeed not have been a citizen at the time of his birth, though the provisions of this law were subsequently loosened and made retroactive for government employees serving abroad and their families. The point is moot, because Obama was born in a hospital in Honolulu. Schulz says that in 1965, Obama's mother relinquished whatever Kenyan or US citizenship she and Obama had by marrying an Indonesian and becoming a naturalized Indonesian citizen. Schulz has produced no evidence to back this claim; Dunham did not file any of the documentation required to renounce one's US citizenship, and even so, would not have jeopardized Obama's citizenship in doing so. Obama and his mother moved to Indonesia in 1968, and returned to Hawaii while Obama was still in grade school. Schulz provides a reproduced Indonesian school document that states Obama's citizenship at the time as "Indonesian," but the same document lists Obama's birthplace as "Honolulu, Hawaii." [Chicago Tribune, 12/3/2008] Schulz claims his challenges to Obama are not motivated by political partisanship. "We never get involved in politics," he says of We The People. "We avoid it like the plague." However, Schulz has done battle with local and state authorities for years; in 2007, a federal judge ordered him to shutter his Web site because he and his organization were, in the words of the Justice Department's tax division, using the site to promote "a nationwide tax-fraud scheme." Schulz now says he is being targeted by government operatives who are attempting to silence him. He says his group attempted to buy a similar ad in USA Today, but could not afford the cost. [Chicago Tribune, 12/3/2008; Salon, 12/5/2008]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Robert L. Schulz, FactCheck (.org), Chicago Tribune, We the People Foundation, Ann Dunham, Sarah Obama, Ron McRae
Salon columnist Alex Koppelman explores the widening sets of claims that purport to prove President Barack Obama is not a US citizen—the heart of the so-called "birther" conspiracy theory. The Obama campaign long ago produced a valid birth certificate that allowed Obama to run legitimately as a presidential candidate (see June 13, 2008), Obama's mother Ann Dunham has also affirmed her son's citizenship, and Hawaiian officials have confirmed that Obama was indeed born in a hospital in Honolulu (see October 30, 2008). However, some on the right continue to promulgate the tale of Obama's supposed Kenyan citizenship, or Indonesian citizenship, or British citizenship. The Chigago Tribune recently ran a paid advertisement questioning Obama's citizenship (see December 3, 2008). Conservative news and opinion blogs such as WorldNetDaily run stories on a near-daily basis challenging Obama's citizenship, or producing hoax "birth certificates" that "prove" Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya, or other locales (see July 20, 2008). Plaintiffs have filed lawsuits challenging Obama's citizenship in a number of state courts, all of which have been rejected (see March 14 - July 24, 2008, August 21-24, 2008, October 9-28, 2008, October 17-22, 2008, October 21, 2008, October 31 - November 3, 2008, October 24, 2008, October 31, 2008 and After, November 12, 2008 and After, November 13, 2008, and Around November 26, 2008), and a similar case goes up for review in the Supreme Court (that case also challenges Republican presidential contender John McCain's citizenship, as McCain was born in the former Panama Canal Zone to parents serving in the US military, another legitimate way of securing citizenship—see March 14 - July 24, 2008 and August 21-24, 2008). Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic Magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, notes that some people will never let go of the idea that Obama is not a citizen, no matter what level of proof is provided. "There's no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody's mind," he says. "The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it.… Once you're committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind." Any inconvenient facts are irrelevant, he says. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates, agrees. People who believe in a conspiracy theory "develop a selective perception, their mind refuses to accept contrary evidence," Berlet says. "As soon as you criticize a conspiracy theory, you become part of the conspiracy." Social psychologist Evan Harrington adds: "One of the tendencies of the conspiracy notion, the whole appeal, is that a lot of the information the believer has is secret or special. The real evidence is out there, [and] you can give them all this evidence, but they'll have convenient ways to discredit [it]." Koppelman notes that during the presidential election, so-called "birthers" said that they would drop their claims if only Obama would release the "long form" of his birth certificate, even though to do so would be to violate Hawaii's privacy laws, which keep all such documents under lock and key. During the campaign, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the director of Hawaii's Department of Health, released a statement saying she had verified that the state has the original birth certificate on record (see October 30, 2008), and that Obama's Hawaiian birth is a matter of state record. Experts with the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, part of the FactCheck (.org) organization, have examined the certificate and verified its authenticity (see August 21, 2008), as has PolitiFact (see June 27, 2008). Koppelmann notes that the conspiracy theory has grown to the point where talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage have suggested that Obama used the occasion of his grandmother's death to go to Hawaii to alter the record (see November 10, 2008). Koppelman notes that many who align themselves with the "birther" movement are well-known conspiratorists. Author Jerome Corsi, who attacked Obama's citizenship in a pre-election book (see August 1, 2008 and After), has spoken of "secret government plans" to form a "North American Union" with Canada and Mexico. Philip Berg, who filed the lawsuit that had until now drawn the most public attention, asserts that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the US government (so-called "trutherism"). Another critic, Andy Martin, who seems to be the source of the rumor that Obama is a Muslim and is a strong "birther" proponent, was denied an Illinois law license on the grounds that he was mentally unfit to practice law (see October 17-22, 2008). Robert Schulz, who ran the Tribune ads, is a well-known tax protester and anti-government rhetorician. [Salon, 12/5/2008]
Entity Tags: Rush Limbaugh, Robert L. Schulz, WorldNetDaily, Philip J. Berg, PolitiFact (.org ), Michael Savage, Barack Obama, Chicago Tribune, Anthony Robert Martin-Trigona, Alex Koppelman, Ann Dunham, Chip Berlet, Chiyome Fukino, Evan Harrington, John McCain, Jerome Corsi, FactCheck (.org), Michael Shermer
Conservative columnist Thomas P. Kilgannon, the president of Freedom Alliance, writes in a piece for the online news magazine Human Events: "Globalists were dismayed because [President] Bush's rejection of the ICC [International Criminal Court] was a vote for American sovereignty—a refusal to cede authority to international government and a court that is not bound to the principles of the US Constitution, far less our laws. That could change under the Obama administration. Two weeks ago, hope returned to the House of Hammarskjold [referring to the United Nations] when US Ambassador Susan Rice, in a closed [UN] Security Council meeting, voiced support for the ICC." [Human Events, 2/10/2009; Media Matters, 4/10/2009]
Entity Tags: International Criminal Court, Freedom Alliance, George W. Bush, Obama administration, Susan Rice, Thomas P. Kilgannon, United Nations
Self-described "martial arts master, actor, and political activist" Chuck Norris adds his voice to the call by some right-wing leaders for armed insurrection against the Obama administration. Norris and others are calling for open rebellion, and for the military to refuse orders from their commander in chief. Norris claims that thousands of right-wing "cell groups" have organized and are ready to launch what he calls a "second American Revolution." Days before, he jokingly told radio host Glenn Beck that he was ready to "run for president of Texas" after Texas secedes from the US (see March 3, 2009). In an article for the conservative Web publication WorldNetDaily, Norris makes the same claim in a far more serious tone: according to Norris, Texas was never formally a part of the US, and Texas will be the first of many states to secede from the union. The need for him to run for president of Texas "may be a reality sooner than we think," he writes. "If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state." He justifies his call for another revolution—essentially overthrowing the federal government and replacing it with one more to his liking—by writing, "[W]e've bastardized the First Amendment, reinterpreted America's religious history, and secularized our society until we ooze skepticism and circumvent religion on every level of public and private life." He asks: "How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution? We the people have the authority according to America's Declaration of Independence, which states: That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government." Norris has joined Beck's nascent anti-government movement, "We Surround Them," and writes, "Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation" when the group meets during a live telecast and series of "meetups" on March 13. Norris closes with the words of former Texas president Sam Houston, "We view ourselves on the eve of battle," and finishes with a plug for his latest martial arts event in Houston, "Showdown in H-Town." [Charlotte Examiner, 3/9/2009; WorldNetDaily, 3/9/2009] According to the website of "We Surround Them," as of March 10, less than 30 sites have agreed to host meetings, a figure somewhat lower than the "thousands" Norris claims. The national unveiling of "We Surround Them" will take place on Fox News. [Charlotte Examiner, 3/10/2009]
Entity Tags: Glenn Beck, WorldNetDaily, Chuck Norris
Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda, US Domestic Terrorism
The US Supreme Court hears the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Federal Election Commission (FEC) refused to let the conservative lobbying organization Citizens United (CU) air a film entitled Hillary: The Movie during the 2008 presidential primary season (see January 10-16, 2008). The FEC ruled that H:TM, as some have shortened the name, was not a film, but a 90-minute campaign ad with no other purpose than to smear and attack Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) as being unfit to hold office. A panel of appeals judges agreed with the FEC's ruling, which found the film was "susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her." As a campaign ad, the film's airing on national network television came under campaign finance laws, particularly since the film was financed by corporate political donations. CU was allowed to air the film in theaters and sell it in DVD and other formats, but CU wanted to pay $1.2 million to have the movie aired on broadcast cable channels and video-on-demand (pay per view) services, and to advertise its broadcast. CU president David Bossie (see May 1998) hired former Bush Solicitor General Theodore Olson after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Bossie denies that he chose Olson because of their shared loathing of the Clintons—they worked together to foment the "Arkansas Project," a Clinton smear effort that resulted in Congress unsuccessfully impeaching President Clinton—but because Olson gave "us the best chance to win." Bossie dedicated the Clinton film to Barbara Olson, Olson's late wife, who died in the 9/11 attacks (see (Between 9:15 a.m. and 9:25 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [Washington Post, 3/15/2009; Christian Science Monitor, 3/23/2009] "I just don't see how the Federal Election Commission has the authority to use campaign-finance rules to regulate advertising that is not related to campaigns," Bossie told reporters last year. [Christian Science Monitor, 2/1/2008] Uphold or Cut Back McCain-Feingold? - Observers, unaware of the behind-the-scenes machinations, believe the case gives the Court the opportunity to either uphold or cut back the body of law stemming from the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, or McCain-Feingold) campaign finance law (see March 27, 2002), which limits the ability of corporations and labor unions to spend unlimited amounts of money on political advertising before elections. CU is arguing that the BCRA is unconstitutional, having argued before a previous court that the the BCRA law was unconstitutional in the way it was being enforced by the FEC against its film. In its brief to the Court, CU denies the film is any sort of "electioneering," claiming: "Citizens United's documentary engages in precisely the political debate the First Amendment was written to protect… The government's position is so far-reaching that it would logically extend to corporate or union use of a microphone, printing press, or the Internet to express opinions—or articulate facts—pertinent to a presidential candidate's fitness for office." The Justice Department, siding with the FEC, calls the film an "unmistakable" political appeal, stating, "Every element of the film, including the narration, the visual images and audio track, and the selection of clips, advances the clear message that Senator Clinton lacked both the integrity and the qualifications to be president of the United States." The film is closer to a political "infomercial" than a legitimate documentary, the Justice Department argues. The film's "unmistakable message is that Senator Clinton's character, beliefs, qualifications, and personal history make her unsuited to the office of the President of the United States," according to a Justice Department lawyer, Edwin Kneedler, who filed a brief on behalf of the FEC. The Justice Department wants the Court to uphold FEC disclosure requirements triggered by promotional ads, while Olson and CU want the Court to strike down the requirements. Olson says financial backers of films such as H:TM may be reluctant to back a film if their support becomes publicly known. Kneedler, however, writes that such disclosure is in the public interest. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) is joining CU in its court fight, stating in a brief, "By criminalizing the distribution of a long-form documentary film as if it were nothing more than a very long advertisement, the district court has created uncertainty about where the line between traditional news commentary and felonious advocacy lies." Scott Nelson of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which supports the BCRA, disagrees with RCFP's stance, saying, "The idea that [the law] threatens legitimate journalism and people who are out creating documentaries, I think, is a stretch." [Washington Post, 3/15/2009; Christian Science Monitor, 3/23/2009] The RCFP has said that the movie "does not differ, in any relevant respect, from the critiques of presidential candidates produced throughout the entirety of American history." And a lawyer with the RCFP, Gregg P. Leslie, asked, "Who is the FEC to decide what is news and what kind of format news is properly presented in?" [New York Times, 3/5/2009] Filled with False Information - The movie was relentlessly panned by critics, who found much of its "information" either misrepresentative of Clinton or outright false. CU made several other films along with the Clinton documentary, which included attacks on filmmaker Michael Moore, the American Civil Liberties Union, illegal immigrants, and Clinton's fellow presidential contender Barack Obama (D-IL—see October 28-30, 2008). [Washington Post, 3/15/2009; Christian Science Monitor, 3/23/2009] Arguments Presented - Olson and his opponent, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart, present arguments in the case to the assembled Court. Traditionally, lawyers with the Solicitor General (SG)'s office are far more straightforward with the Court than is usual in advocacy-driven cases. New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin later writes: "The solicitor general's lawyers press their arguments in a way that hews strictly to existing precedent. They don't hide unfavorable facts from the justices. They are straight shooters." Stewart, who clerked for former Justice Harry Blackmun and is a veteran of the SG office since 1993, is well aware of the requirements of Court arguments. Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative justice with a penchant for asking tough questions that often hide their true intentions behind carefully neutral wording, is interested in seeing how far he can push Stewart's argument. Does the BCRA apply only to television commercials, he asks, or might it regulate other means of communication during a federal campaign? "Do you think the Constitution required Congress to draw the line where it did, limiting this to broadcast and cable and so forth?" Could the law limit a corporation from "providing the same thing in a book? Would the Constitution permit the restriction of all those as well?" Stewart says that the BCRA indeed imposes such restrictions, stating, "Those could have been applied to additional media as well." Could the government regulate the content of a book? Alito asks. "That's pretty incredible. You think that if a book was published, a campaign biography that was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be banned?" Stewart, who tardily realizes where Alito was going, attempts to recover. "I'm not saying it could be banned," he responds. "I'm saying that Congress could prohibit the use of corporate treasury funds and could require a corporation to publish it using its—" Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered a "swing" justice in some areas but a reliable conservative vote in campaign-spending cases, interrupts Stewart. "Well, suppose it were an advocacy organization that had a book," Kennedy says. "Your position is that, under the Constitution, the advertising for this book or the sale for the book itself could be prohibited within the 60- and 30-day periods?" Stewart gives what Toobin later calls "a reluctant, qualified yes." At this point, Roberts speaks up. According to Toobin, Roberts intends to paint Stewart into something of a corner. "If it has one name, one use of the candidate's name, it would be covered, correct?" Roberts asks. Stewart responds, "That's correct." Roberts then asks, "If it's a 500-page book, and at the end it says, 'And so vote for X,' the government could ban that?" Stewart responds, "Well, if it says 'vote for X,' it would be express advocacy and it would be covered by the preexisting Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA—see February 7, 1972, 1974, May 11, 1976, and January 8, 1980) provisions." Toobin later writes that with their "artful questioning, Alito, Kennedy, and Roberts ha[ve] turned a fairly obscure case about campaign-finance reform into a battle over government censorship." Unwittingly, Stewart has argued that the government has the right to censor books because of a single line. Toobin later writes that Stewart is incorrect, that the government could not ban or censor books because of McCain-Feingold. The law applies to television advertisements, and stems from, as Toobin will write, "the pervasive influence of television advertising on electoral politics, the idea that commercials are somehow unavoidable in contemporary American life. The influence of books operates in a completely different way. Individuals have to make an affirmative choice to acquire and read a book. Congress would have no reason, and no justification, to ban a book under the First Amendment." Legal scholars and pundits will later argue about Stewart's answers to the three justices' questions, but, as Toobin will later write, "the damage to the government's case had been profound." [New Yorker, 5/21/2012] Behind the Scenes - Unbeknownst to the lawyers and the media, the Court initially renders a 5-4 verdict in favor of CU, and strikes down decades of campaign finance law, before withdrawing its verdict and agreeing to hear rearguments in the fall (see June 29, 2009). Toobin will write that the entire case is orchestrated behind the scenes, by Roberts and his fellow majority conservatives. Toobin will write of "a lengthy and bitter behind-the-scenes struggle among the justices that produced both secret unpublished opinions and a rare reargument of a case" that "reflects the aggressive conservative judicial activism of the Roberts Court." Toobin will write that although the five conservatives are involved in broadening the scope of the case, and Kennedy actually writes the majority decision, "the result represented a triumph for Chief Justice Roberts. Even without writing the opinion, Roberts, more than anyone, shaped what the Court did. As American politics assumes its new form in the post-Citizens United era, the credit or the blame goes mostly to him." The initial vote on the case is 5-4, with the five conservative justices—Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Clarence Thomas—taking the majority. Expansive Concurrence Becomes the Majority Opinion - At the outset, the case is decided on the basis of Olson's narrow arguments, regarding the issue of a documentary being made available on demand by a nonprofit organization (CU). Roberts takes the majority opinion onto himself. The four liberals in the minority are confident Roberts's opinion would be as narrow as Olson's arguments. Roberts's draft opinion is indeed that narrow. Kennedy writes a concurrence opining that the Court should go further and overturn McCain-Feingold, the 1990 Austin decision (see March 27, 1990), and end the ban on corporate donations to campaigns (see 1907). When the draft opinions circulates, the other three conservatives begin rallying towards Kennedy's more expansive concurrence. Roberts then withdraws his draft and lets Kennedy write the majority opinion in line with his concurrence. Toobin later writes: "The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues. Roberts's approach to Citizens United conflicted with the position he had taken earlier in the term." During arguments in a different case, Roberts had "berated at length" a lawyer "for his temerity in raising an issue that had not been addressed in the petition. Now Roberts was doing nearly the same thing to upset decades of settled expectations." Dissent - The senior Justice in the minority, John Paul Stevens, initially assigns the main dissent to Justice David Souter. Souter, who is in the process of retiring from the Court, writes a stinging dissent that documents some of the behind-the-scenes machinations in the case, including an accusation that Roberts violated the Court's procedures to get the outcome he wanted. Toobin will call Souter's planned dissent "an extraordinary, bridge-burning farewell to the Court" that Roberts feels "could damage the Court's credibility." Roberts offers a compromise: Souter will withdraw his dissent if the Court schedules a reargument of the case in the fall of 2009 (see June 29, 2009). The second argument would feature different "Questions Presented," and the stakes of the case would be far clearer. The four minority justices find themselves in something of a conundrum. They feel that to offer the Kennedy opinion as it stands would be to "sandbag" them and the entire case, while a reargument would at least present the issues that the opinion was written to reflect. And there is already a 5-4 majority in favor of Kennedy's expansive opinion. The liberals, with little hope of actually winning the case, agree to the reargument. The June 29, 2009 announcement will inform the parties that the Court is considering overturning two key decisions regarding campaign finance restrictions, including a decision rendered by the Roberts court (see March 27, 1990 and December 10, 2003) and allow essentially unlimited corporate spending in federal elections. Court observers will understand that the Court is not in the habit of publicly asking whether a previous Court decision should be overruled unless a majority is already prepared to do just that. Toobin will call Roberts and his four colleagues "impatient" to make the decision, in part because an early decision would allow the ruling to impact the 2010 midterm elections. [New Yorker, 5/21/2012] Created to Give Courts Shot at McCain-Feingold - Critics, as yet unaware of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering, will later say that CU created the movie in order for it to fall afoul of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, and give the conservatives on the Court the opportunity to reverse or narrow the law. Nick Nyhart of Public Campaign will say: "The movie was created with the idea of establishing a vehicle to chip away at the decision. It was part of a very clear strategy to undo McCain-Feingold." Bossie himself will later confirm that contention, saying: "We have been trying to defend our First Amendment rights for many, many years. We brought the case hoping that this would happen… to defeat McCain-Feingold." [Washington Post, 1/22/2010] CU's original lawyer on the case, James Bopp, will later verify that the case was brought specifically to give the Court a chance to cut back or overturn campaign finance law (see January 25, 2010). The Court will indeed overturn McCain-Feingold in the CU decision (see January 21, 2010).
Entity Tags: Clarence Thomas, US Department of Justice, Theodore ("Ted") Olson, Scott Nelson, US Supreme Court, Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, Citizens United, Barbara Olson, American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Kennedy, Barack Obama, Samuel Alito, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton, Michael Moore, Hillary Clinton, Gregg P. Leslie, Nick Nyhart, Edwin Kneedler, David Souter, Federal Election Commission, James Bopp, Jr, John Paul Stevens, David Bossie, John G. Roberts, Jr, Jeffrey Toobin, Malcolm Stewart
Fox News senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano hosts radio host Alex Jones on the online program Freedom Watch. Jones says that he has long pointed out "how hundreds of mainstream news articles a week are saying there is a new world order, a global government. It will be run by the very banks that are collapsing society by design, and we will pay carbon taxes to them.… [T]he good news is, I've never seen an awakening this big. And I'm seeing, you know, people like Glenn Beck talk about the new world order on Fox. I'm seeing you talk about it for years before him. We're seeing [CNN host] Lou Dobbs talk about it. We're seeing, you know, mainline talk show hosts—[radio host Rush] Limbaugh is even talking about global government now. [Radio host] Michael Savage is talking about how he thinks, you know, Obama may stage crises to bring in martial law." [Media Matters, 4/10/2009] Jones is echoing claims made in the '90s and later by extremist militia groups, which warned that the US government intended to implement a "new world order" (see September 11, 1990) of a one-world government that would result in the confiscation of Americans' guns, and a general replacement of democracy for tyranny (see 1994, January 1994, February 1995, July 4-11, 1997, October 20, 1999, April 14-15, 2009, January 21, 2010, and October 11, 2010), and that are echoed by Fox News pundits such as Glenn Beck (see March 17, 2009), Bill O'Reilly (see April 1-2, 2009), and others (see April 6, 2009).
Entity Tags: Andrew Napolitano, Alex Jones, Barack Obama, Fox News
Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Minority Whip, while appearing on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," agrees with a caller that the Obama administration is moving the US towards one-party fascist rule. The caller says: "But what really is scaring the rest of us, the other half of us, is the fascism. I mean the true fascism that is happening in this country today.… The belligerent takeover of a one-party system." Without repeating the terminology, Cantor agrees: "Now as far as a one-party government in here, I think what the public is doing, they're finally waking up and everybody is realizing that checks and balances are a part of the system and divided government is something that is beneficial to a balanced debate, and something that can produce a better outcome. Which is exactly why Republicans in the House have said, 'Look, we want to work with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We want to try to bring this president back into the mainstream.'" [Think Progress, 3/25/2009]
Entity Tags: Obama administration, Eric Cantor
Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda, 2010 Elections
Fox News host Glenn Beck, on his daily radio show, hosts US Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to discuss her proposed constitutional amendment "to prohibit the president from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States." Beck says to Bachmann: "I don't want to believe that there are people in our country that would trash our dollar like this. And what's going to happen is if you start to talk about a global currency, which I'm telling you, there's no way out of what we're doing now besides devaluing the dollar to pay off our debt and then have a new currency. There's just no other way.… [W]hat happens is when you stand up, and when you say those things, then you're deemed a kook. Then you're deemed a militia member." Bachmann says later in the interview: "The president is committing us so much now, and Congress is committing us to so much spending, that the only way out will be for him to continue to print money and have wild inflation. And once that collapses, then it's a global currency. Well, then we are no more as a nation. We cease at that point." Beck responds: "I believe it. But convincing everybody else may be a different story." [Glenn Beck, 3/29/2009; Media Matters, 4/10/2009]
Entity Tags: Fox News, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck
The New York Post publishes an article headlined "Scary! Obama nominee wants one world order." The article, by Post reporter Meghan Clyne, attacks President Obama's nomination of Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as legal adviser to the State Department. Clyne says Koh is a "fan of 'transnational legal process,' arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish." She says that according to Koh's views, judges should put aside the Constitution in favor of "legal 'norms'" from other nations' laws. "Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts," she writes. "The United States constitutes an 'axis of disobedience' along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq." The newly launched Fox Nation, the blog for Fox News, links to the article, which disappears from the Post's Web archive shortly thereafter. [Fox Nation, 3/31/2009; Media Matters, 4/10/2009] An extraordinarily racist conservative blog, Chimpout, hosts a forum discussion of the article under the heading "Osambo picks another douche bag for his cabinet." The forum's thread is part of a larger discussion section entitled "N_gger College" and a subsection entitled "F_cked Up Facts about First Monkey," an apparent reference to Obama. Commenters immediately begin launching "birther"-styled accusations of Obama being an illegal president because of his "Kenyan birth" (see October 8, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, August 1-4, 2009, and August 4, 2009), and say Obama should be relegated to "picking cotton." [Chimpout, 3/31/2009] Days later, Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck, conservative editor Cliff Kincaid, and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum will join in attacking Koh (see April 1, 2009, April 6, 2009, and April 9, 2009).
Entity Tags: Glenn Beck, Chimpout (.com), Barack Obama, Fox Nation, US Department of State, Obama administration, Harold Koh, Rick Santorum, New York Post, Meghan Clyne, Cliff Kincaid
Dick Morris discussing the economy on Fox News. [Source: Fox News]Conservative political pundit Dick Morris tells a Fox News audience that the recent G20 economic summit advocated a "global approach" to the current economic crisis, and discussed putting both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Reserve under the control of the International Monetary Fund—a position not advocated or discussed by anyone in the Obama administration. He worries that there will soon be what he calls "a supernational authority run by bureaucrats, not by elected officials, that will be telling the elected governments, including the United States, what its [economic] regulations should be." President Obama is far more amenable to the idea of allowing a multinational authority to control the US economy, Morris insists, and adds that Obama intends to preside over what he calls "a global redistribution of income, downward," using environmental policy as "an excuse." "We're about to meet Barack Obama the internationalist," Morris continues, "not fighting for American interests, but looking for global coordination." He concludes, "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over'—well, they're beginning to have a case." [Media Matters, 3/31/2009]
Entity Tags: Fox News, Dick Morris
Timeline Tags: Global Economic Crises, Domestic Propaganda
Fox News host Glenn Beck, speaking on his daily radio show, lambasts President Obama's nomination of Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as legal adviser to the State Department. Beck says Koh "believes in internationalism. He believes that we should not have a Constitution, that the Constitution is trumped by international law." Beck later says: "[T]he idea is, have our courts answer to international law. Forget about the Constitution. Forget about your sovereignty." [Media Matters, 4/10/2009] Days later, conservative editor Cliff Kincaid and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum will join Beck in attacking Koh (see April 6, 2009 and April 9, 2009).
Entity Tags: Rick Santorum, Cliff Kincaid, Fox News, Harold Koh, US Department of State, Glenn Beck
Conservative pundits on Fox News and other media outlets falsely claim that President Obama ceded the government's authority over its economy to an international consortium during the G-20 summit, which concluded on April 2, 2009 in London. On April 3, pundit Dick Morris appears on Fox News's America's Newsroom to claim that Obama "effectively ceded massive areas of American sovereignty to Europe and to the global economic mavens.… [T]his literally is a massive surrender of sovereignty to an essentially European body." On April 3, US Representative Don Manzullo (R-IL) tells CNN's Kitty Pilgrim that Treasury Secretary Timothy "Geithner's proposing, with the help of the administration, a worldwide international control over all financial interests—in fact, over any corporation, to the extent of even controlling the compensation of the employees. That's not only radical, Kitty, that's frightening." Pilgrim responds, "Yeah, it certainly is." On April 5, Fox News host Monica Crowley, appearing on the syndicated McLaughlin Group, says the G-20 agreement is "the first step to abrogating American sovereignty here, because… it is going to allow European bureaucrats to step in, not just on the hedge fund regulation and the other explicit things that they agreed to, but buried deep down in this communiqué was the ability for European bureaucrats sitting in Brussels to decide what kind of executive compensation American executives should—" Financial Times US managing editor Chrystia Freeland interjects, "No, there was no authority like that there, Monica." Crowley responds, "I read it in the communique this morning." [Media Matters, 4/7/2009] In an April 6 column titled "The Declaration of Independence Has Been Repealed," Morris writes: "On April 2, 2009, the work of July 4, 1776 was nullified at the meeting of the G-20 in London. The joint communique essentially announces a global economic union with uniform regulations and bylaws for all nations, including the United States. Henceforth, our SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission], Commodities Trading Commission, Federal Reserve Board, and other regulators will have to march to the beat of drums pounded by the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a body of central bankers from each of the G-20 states and the European Union.… Obama, perhaps feeling guilty for the US role in triggering the international [economic] crisis, has, indeed, given away the store. Now we may no longer look to presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, to make policy for our economy. These decisions will be made internationally." Noting that the FSB is numerically dominated by European members, Morris writes: "The Europeans have been trying to get their hands on our financial system for decades. It is essential to them that they rein in American free enterprise so that their socialist heaven will not be polluted by vices such as the profit motive. Now, with President Obama's approval, they have done it." [Dick Morris, 4/6/2009] On the evening of April 6, Morris makes the same claims on Fox News's Hannity, telling viewers: "Basically, from an economic standpoint, [Obama's] repealed [the Declaration of Independence]. We no longer have economic sovereignty." [New York Times, 4/3/2009] None of these claims are true, as Freeland tried to assert. The FSB has no cross-border authority and therefore no authority over American economic decisions. On April 3, the New York Times reports, "While the [G-20] leaders agreed to create a new Financial Stability Board to monitor the financial system for signs of risks, they stopped well short of giving regulators cross-border authority, something France has long advocated." [New York Times, 4/3/2009; Media Matters, 4/7/2009]
Entity Tags: Fox News, Chrystia Freeland, Barack Obama, Dick Morris, Financial Stability Board, Timothy Geithner, Don Manzullo, New York Times, Kitty Pilgrim, Monica Crowley
Cliff Kincaid, the editor of the conservative Accuracy in Media, accuses President Obama of seeking to appoint an advocate of the "new world order" to the State Department. Kincaid is referring to Obama's nomination of Yale Law School dean Harold Koh as legal adviser to the State Department. Kincaid says Koh's nomination "is beyond worrisome. This is terrifying that—the thought of this kind of guy with these views becoming the top lawyer at the State Department. But seen in the light of the some of the other appointments Obama has made, it's consistent with his push, which is now out in the open, for the US to become really subsumed into this, quote, 'new world order' that everybody keeps talking about, in which our sovereignty has been sacrificed for the, quote, 'greater good.'" Kincaid is harking back to claims made in the '90s and later by extremist militia groups, which warned that the US government intended to implement a "new world order" (see September 11, 1990) of a one-world government that would result in the confiscation of Americans' guns, and a general replacement of democracy for tyranny (see 1994, January 1994, February 1995, July 4-11, 1997, October 20, 1999, April 14-15, 2009, January 21, 2010, and October 11, 2010). [Media Matters, 4/10/2009] Three days later, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) will say that Obama's nomination of the "internationalist" Koh shows that Obama is "contemptuous of American values" (see April 9, 2009).
Entity Tags: US Department of State, Barack Obama, Harold Koh, Cliff Kincaid, Rick Santorum
Former Republican senator Rick Santorum writes in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer that President Obama is "contemptuous of American values." Santorum, now a columnist for the Inquirer, ties his comments to the pending nomination of Harold Koh to become the State Department's lead counsel. Santorum and other far-right conservatives oppose Koh, a former Yale Law School dean, because of his "internationalist" views. Obama's nomination of Koh for the State Department, and Obama's recent supposed "apology for American arrogance" to European audiences, "helped convince me that [Obama] has a deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions," Santorum writes. Santorum opposes Koh's view that the US must become part of the international legal community, and instead insists that the US hold itself apart from international law, a position Santorum shares with the former Bush administration. "Koh's 'transnationalism' stands in contrast to good, old-fashioned notions of national sovereignty, in which our Constitution is the highest law of the land," Santorum writes. "In the traditional view, controversial matters, whatever they may be, are subject to democratic debate here. They should be resolved by the American people and their representatives, not 'internationalized.' What Holland or Belgium or Kenya or any other nation or coalition of nations thinks has no bearing on our exercise of executive, legislative, or judicial power. Koh disagrees. He would decide such matters based on the views of other countries or transnational organizations—or, rather, those entities' elites." Koh supports the International Criminal Court, which Santorum views as an objectionable intrusion upon American sovereignty. [Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/9/2009] Santorum is echoing recent arguments by Fox News host Glenn Beck (see April 1, 2009) and Accuracy in Media editor Cliff Kincaid (see April 6, 2009).
Entity Tags: Glenn Beck, Harold Koh, Rick Santorum, US Department of State, Cliff Kincaid
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Domestic Propaganda
Conservative columnist and political activist Jonathan Moseley writes an article for his blog US News and Views that asserts President Obama is, and always has been, a "closet Muslim." This assertion has been made numerous times by conservative opponents of Obama, and has been thoroughly debunked (see October 1, 2007, December 19, 2007, Before October 27, 2008, January 11, 2008, Around March 19, 2008, and April 18, 2008). Moseley accuses the national news media of "acting as the palace guard for 'Dear Leader' Barack Obama" and refusing to report what he calls "the truth" of Obama's "secret Muslim" beliefs. Apparently, Moseley's primary evidence is a February 2007 interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, where Obama recited the Muslim call to prayer and called it "one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset." Moseley calls the Muslim call to prayer "screeching," and says no one who listened to it would believe it to be beautiful "without enormous indoctrination into Islam." Obama says he learned the call to prayer as a child, when he attended school in Indonesia. According to Moseley, the recitation of the call to prayer "makes one a Muslim. The words express a Muslim's complete acceptance of, and total commitment to, the message of Islam.… Having attended Islamic religion classes, Obama knows this." Moseley also cites as "evidence" a false claim that in April 2009, Obama demanded that "Georgetown University cover up the name of Jesus in a campus hall before" he would give a speech there. And, he says, at a recent economic summit, Obama "bowed reverently to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah," but did not bow to Queen Elizabeth of England; Mosely writes that "a Muslim would instinctively give reverence to" the king of Saudi Arabia, but would not bow to the Queen of England, who, he writes, "is technically the head of the Church of England. Obama did not bow to the royal queen who is guardian of the world's first and oldest Protestant Christian Church." Moseley incorrectly calls Queen Elizabeth a "head of state" equal to the king of Saudi Arabia; in reality, Elizabeth is queen in title only, with the real head of the British government being the prime minister. Moseley states falsely that Obama "was raised as a Muslim," citing the fact that his biological father was Muslim as well as his stepfather Lolo Soetoro (see October 28, 2008), and falsely states that Obama's stepfather enrolled him in school under the name "Barry Soetoro" (see June 27, 2008, August 21-24, 2008, and Shortly Before June 28, 2010). Moseley even claims: "Since Obama changed his name back from Barry Sotero [an alternate spelling of 'Soetoro'], he could have legally removed [his middle name] 'Hussein' in the process had he wished to. He did not." This, Moseley claims, is further proof of Obama's Muslim status. Moseley says that Obama has been masquerading as a Christian for over 20 years, ever since his "profess[ed]" conversion to Christianity at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago (see January 6-11, 2008), but dismisses Trinity United as "little more than a left-wing political club" and not a real church. And, Moseley says, Obama incorrectly claimed he had been to "57 states" on the presidential campaign trail, and cites this as evidence of Obama's "closet Muslim" status, noting that there are 57 "states" in the Organization of Islamic Conference. "So the number of Islamic OIC states appears to have sprung more readily to Obama's mind than the 50 states of the USA," he writes. [Jonathan Moseley, 4/29/2009; The British Monarchy, 2011] Obama said after that statement that he had misstated both the number of states and the number of victims of a cyclone in Myanmar in that speech, and blamed fatigue for his misstatement; there are also less than 57 members in the OIC. [Snopes (.com), 7/1/2009] Moseley will later become a senior campaign aide to Christine O'Donnell (R-DE) in her unsuccessful bid for the Senate (see September 13, 2010); O'Donnell's campaign will assert that Obama is a Muslim, and both O'Donnell and Moseley will assert that Obama, like other Democrats, is a secret Communist. [Mother Jones, 9/20/2010]
Entity Tags: Trinity United Church of Christ, Barack Obama, Christine O'Donnell, Jonathan Moseley
One of the billboards erected by WorldNetDaily. [Source: WorldNetDaily]The conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND), which has been at the forefront of the "birther" movement challenging President Obama's citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After, October 21, 2008, October 24, 2008, November 12, 2008 and After, and December 5, 2008), begins erecting billboards asking "Where's the Birth Certificate?" Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND, calls the billboard initiative "the truth and transparency campaign." The first, a digital electronic billboard, is displayed along Highway 165 in Ball, Louisiana, and two more standard billboards are being prepared for display in Los Angeles and Pennsylvania. Farah says the "national [billboard] campaign is going to be big and long-lasting," and uses WND to solicit donations for more billboards. Farah says he and the WND staff deliberately chose not to name Obama in the billboards: "There are several reasons we chose the message, 'Where's the birth certificate?' There is only one birth certificate controversy in this country today—despite the near-total absence of this issue from coverage in the non-WND media. This is a grass-roots issue that resonates around the country, as our own online petition with nearly 400,000 signers suggests. In addition, I like the simplicity of the message. I like the fact that the message will cause some people to ask themselves or others about the meaning of the message. It will stir curiosity. It will create a buzz. I'm assuming when these billboards are springing up all over the country, it might even make some in the news media curious. And there's one more factor that persuaded me this was the way to go. Come 2012, campaign laws will pose restrictions on political advertising mentioning the names of presidential candidates. This one clearly doesn't. I would like to see the federal government make the case that this is somehow a political ad." Farah blames "timid elected officials in Washington, corrupt judges around the country, and a news media that show a stunning lack of curiosity about the most basic facts of Obama's background—especially how it relates to constitutional eligibility for the highest office in the land" for failing to investigate the "birther" controversy. Obama released his birth certificate in 2008 (see June 13, 2008), and since then it has been validated by multiple governmental and independent sources (see June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, and October 30, 2008). Farah, however, is not convinced, and believes the birth certificate "controversy" is part of a larger, sinister scheme by the Obama administration: "As Obama transforms this country from self-governing constitutional republic to one governed by a central ruling elite, the simple fact remains that no controlling legal authority has established that he is indeed a 'natural born citizen' as the Constitution requires," he says. "Obama's promises of transparency have become a bad joke as he continues to hide simple, innocuous documents like his birth certificate and his student records." Farah says WND is operating as an "independent watchdog on government" by launching the billboard campaign, and not acting as a partisan organization. "I wish such a campaign were not absolutely necessary," he says. "I wish there were checks and balances in our political and electoral systems to ensure that constitutional eligibility of presidential candidates was established before politicians could assume the highest office in the land. I wish my colleagues in the news media believed the Constitution really means what it says and pressed this issue as hard as we have pressed it at WND. I wish radio talk show hosts were bold enough to ask this question. But wishing is not enough. It's time to raise the visibility of this issue vital to the rule of law in America. I ask everyone to pitch in and help WND make a simple yet profound statement: The Constitution still matters." [WorldNetDaily, 5/20/2009] In November 2010, WND will erect a "birth certificate" billboard along Highway 93 near Kingman, Arizona, the small town in which Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh planned the destruction of the Murrah Federal Building (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995). Other billboards will be erected in Pennsylvania, Texas, Alabama, and Delaware. [WorldNetDaily, 11/8/2010]
Entity Tags: Joseph Farah, Barack Obama, Timothy James McVeigh, WorldNetDaily
Lester Kinsolving, in a photo taken during a 2007 Christmas celebration at the White House. [Source: Houston Chronicle]Journalist Lester Kinsolving, representing the conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND), asks White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about President Obama's birth certificate. Obama has been hounded for well over a year with questions concerning his heritage and his citizenship. Kinsolving begins by asking: "One question concerning what the president said in his speech on Thursday, and I quote: 'I ran for president promising transparency, and I meant what I said. This is why, whenever possible, we will make information available to the American people so they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable.' End of quote. Do you remember that statement?" Gibbs responds, "I can confirm he said that." Kinsolving says: "Good. In consideration of this very good promise of transparency, why can't the president respond to the petitioned requests of 400,000 American citizens by releasing a certified copy of his long form birth certificate listing hospital and physician?" Kinsolving is referring to an online petition hosted by WND that, the site claims, has over 400,000 signatures asking for Obama's "true" birth certificate. Gibbs tells Kinsolving that the certificate "is on the Internet, Lester" (see June 13, 2008). Kinsolving responds, "No, no, no—the long form listing his hospital and physician" (see July 1, 2009). Kinsolving is referring to the "long form" birth certificate that is by Hawaiian law kept in state vaults; only "short form" certificates are given to individuals and/or family members. Gibbs replies: "Lester.… This question in many ways continues to astound me. The state of Hawaii provided a copy, with a seal, of the president's birth (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008). I know there are apparently at least 400,000 people that continue to doubt the existence of and the certification by the state of Hawaii of the president's birth there, but it's on the Internet because we put it on the Internet for each of those 400,000 to download. I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we'll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy." WND will respond to Gibbs's statement by taking out an ad in the conservative publication Human Events calling Gibbs "arrogant… factually incorrect," and a liar, and accuses other journalists in the White House press corp, "members of the liberal elitist media," of "openly laugh[ing]" at Kinsolving's line of inquiry. PolitiFact researcher Robert Fairley will confirm that journalists could indeed be heard "chuckling" at Kinsolving's questions. [St. Petersburg Times, 6/17/2009; St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Lester Kinsolving, PolitiFact (.org ), Robert Gibbs, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, Robert Fairley
US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy review French troops during Obama's 2009 visit to Strasburg. [Source: Shawn Thew / EPA]Jon Scott and Jane Skinner, hosts of Fox News's "straight news" program Happening Now (see October 13, 2009), air selectively edited clips of President Obama to give the false impression that he has singled out the US for criticism during a trip to France. The segment hinges on an upcoming trip by Obama to Europe and the Middle East. Scott asks if "the president's upcoming trip [will] be what conservatives might call another apology tour"; in teasing Scott's segment, Skinner raises the same point. Both Scott and Skinner then air cropped clips from Obama's April 2009 visit to France. During his April speech, Obama both praised and criticized actions taken by the US, and criticized anti-American sentiment in Europe. However, Scott and Skinner air carefully selected portions of the speech to give impetus to their contention that Obama only criticized the US during his time in France. Fellow Fox News host Sean Hannity has suggested that Obama embarked on a "blame America first" visit and "apology tour." On-air text and graphics illustrate the "apology tour" contention. Neither Scott nor Skinner inform their audience that in the same speech, Obama criticized Europe and praised the US. Guest Elliott Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra conspirator (see October 7, 1991), advises Obama "to stop apologizing for our country," and adds that Obama is making a mistake in spending time talking to Muslims during the trip. [Media Matters, 6/2/2009]
Entity Tags: Elliott Abrams, Barack Obama, Sean Hannity, Jon Scott, Jane Skinner, Fox News
Pam Farnsworth, the marketing director for Tea Party Nation, asks on Twitter, "Where's the birth certificate?" referring to President Obama's supposed lack of a valid birth certificate (see June 13, 2008) and accusations that he is ineligible to be president because of his lack of American citizenship. Farnsworth also writes: "New bill would make Obama a US natural-born citizen. Doesn't the Constitution mandate he already be one to hold office?" [Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, 10/19/2010]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Pam Farnsworth, Tea Party Nation
Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda, 2012 Elections
Wesley Pruden, the editor emeritus of the conservative Washington Times, accuses President Obama of being "our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture… whence America sprang." Pruden accuses Obama of going to Germany to apologize for America's role in defeating that nation during World War II, says that Obama portrays himself as a Muslim while overseas, implies that Obama supports Islamic "sharia" law, claims that Obama routinely "grovels" to foreign leaders, and concludes: "Mr. Obama's revelation of his 'inner Muslim' in Cairo reveals much about who he is. He is our first president without an instinctive appreciation of the culture, history, tradition, common law, and literature whence America sprang. The genetic imprint writ large in his 43 predecessors is missing from the Obama DNA. He no doubt meant no offense in returning that bust of Churchill ('Who he?') (see June 29, 2009).… The great Cairo grovel accomplished nothing beyond the humiliation of the president and the embarrassment of his constituents, few of whom share his need to put America on its knees before its enemies. No president before him has ever shamed us so. We must never forget it." [Washington Times, 6/5/2009]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Wesley Pruden, Washington Times
Timeline Tags: US International Relations, Domestic Propaganda, 2010 Elections
L.E. Ikenga, a Nigerian-American woman who has published numerous essays and articles in conservative publications, writes in the conservative blog American Thinker that President Obama holds the African-centric views of his Kenyan father, and has "adopt[ed]… a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa." Ikenga writes: "[D]espite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself—those of us who know our history—have seen this movie before." She accuses Obama of conducting a "masquerade" as an American who believes in democracy, when he really identifies with his Kenyan heritage and is "intrinsically undemocratic." His true intentions are those of any "African colonial politician," she writes: "a complete power grab whereby the 'will of the people' becomes completely irrelevant." Ikenga writes that Obama is using the United States to play out his African colonial dreams of power. She bases her assertion on material drawn from his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, which she calls "an eloquent piece of political propaganda." In Ikenga's reading of the book, Obama "clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American," which she says he proved by actually going to Kenya to visit the homeland of his father. This visit, she says, "provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama." She concludes by warning that "the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot." [Fresh Conservative, 2009; L.E. Ikenga, 6/25/2009] The next day, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh will read extensively from Ikenga's article, which he calls "a special piece." He concludes that Obama is "more African in his roots than he is American," and declares: "[Obama] wants to turn this into a third world country.… The only way to try to do this is to just attack the private sector and deplete it of its resources, of its money, of its capital, which is exactly what he is doing.… We've elected somebody who is more African in his roots than he is American, loves his father who is a Marxist, and is behaving like an African colonial despot." [Media Matters, 6/26/2009]
Entity Tags: L.E. Ikenga, Barack Obama, Rush Limbaugh
The bust of Winston Churchill, loaned to the White House by the British government. [Source: WorldMeets (.us)]Conservative radio host Glenn Beck tells his listeners that President Obama recently returned a bust of Winston Churchill to Great Britain because of his secret hatred of the British. Britain gave President Bush a bust of Churchill to display in the Oval Office during his term of office. In February 2009, Obama returned the bust and replaced it with a bust of President Abraham Lincoln; he added a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the display. At the time, London's Daily Telegraph reported that the bust had only been lent to the White House: according to the British Embassy, it had been "uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W. Bush," not given in perpetuity to the US government. A British Embassy spokesman told the Telegraph: "The bust of Sir Winston Churchill by Sir Jacob Epstein was uniquely lent to a foreign head of state, President George W. Bush, from the Government Art Collection in the wake of 9/11 as a signal of the strong transatlantic relationship. It was lent for the first term of office of President Bush. When the president was elected for his second and final term, the loan was extended until January 2009. The new president has decided not to continue this loan and the bust has now been returned. It is on display at the ambassador's residence." The White House curator, William Allman, said at the time, "It was already scheduled to go back." However, Beck explains that Obama returned the bust because he harbors a secret hatred for the British. Beck tells his listeners that Obama's paternal grandfather, a Kenyan, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau Uprising in the 1950s, and that is the source of Obama's supposed hatred. Beck presents no other evidence that Obama holds any sort of grudge or negative feelings towards the British, and ignores the fact that the Churchill bust had been slated to be returned to Britain at the end of Bush's second term. Beck also fails to inform his listeners that Obama keeps a British treasure on his desk: a wooden penholder made from wood taken from a British sailing ship and given to him by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Instead, Beck tells his listeners: "Why does Obama harbor animosity towards the British?… A listener called me this morning. Said he had found information about Barack Obama's grandfather in an old Irish newspaper but couldn't verify it. I said okay, what is it? We looked into it. The information, took us about 20 minutes to find. It was out there, but until today I never heard about this information, and I'm kind of in the Barack Obama business, you know what I mean? I don't think you have. Maybe you have. What puts you in a position to act unexplainably in weird ways toward the ally? Something must have happened in your life and maybe this is a part of it." The news report apparently carried an account from Obama's Kenyan step-grandmother, who told of her husband being tortured by British soldiers during the 1950s. In light of this information, Beck says it "sure makes sense" that Obama would hate the British, and adds that if it had been his grandfather who was mistreated, "I certainly wouldn't want someone like me dealing with longtime allies." [Daily Telegraph, 2/14/2009; Associated Press, 1/5/2010; Media Matters, 6/29/2010] Beck is echoing themes advanced by a Nigerian-American conservative in a recent Internet publication, who claimed that Obama is secretly an "African colonial" (see June 25, 2009).
Entity Tags: Glenn Beck, George W. Bush, William Allman, Barack Obama
The non-partisan PolitiFact, an organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, again delves into the ever-widening controversy surrounding President Obama's supposed lack of US citizenship. A year ago, the organization attempted to debunk the wildly varying claims that Obama is not a US citizen (see June 27, 2008). Since then, the number and nature of the various claims against Obama's heritage and citizenship have continued to swell. PolitiFact examines one aspect of the controversy, the question about "long form" vs. "short form" birth certificates. According to PolitiFact researcher Robert Fairley, so-called "birthers" claim that Obama has never produced a valid "long form" birth certificate, only an easily faked "short form" certificate that is generated via a computer database in Honolulu, the city of Obama's birth. In August 2008, researchers from FactCheck stated that they had verified the authenticity of a physical and true copy of the birth certificate, though the verification did little to stem the tide of claims and conspiracy theories. The "long form"—kept in state vaults by Hawaiian law—is the actual "birth certificate," birthers claim; the "short form" is merely a "certification of live birth," and, they say, useless for proving anyone's actual status as a citizen. Many "birthers" believe that the "hidden" long form would prove Obama's foreign birth, and claim that Hawaii's refusal to release it (a violation of state law) is proof of Obama's hidden heritage. Some claim that Hawaii does not accept a "certification of live birth" as proof that an individual was physically born in Hawaii, and point to a statement on the Web site of the Hawaii Department of Home Lands, which reads in part: "In order to process your application, DHHL utilizes information that is found only on the original certificate of live birth, which is either black or green. This is a more complete record of your birth than the certification of live birth (a computer-generated printout). Submitting the original certificate of live birth will save you time and money since the computer-generated certification requires additional verification by DHHL." DHHL spokesman Lloyd Yonenaka says the statement is somewhat misleading. In order to be eligible for Hawaii's Home Lands program, an applicant must be able to prove that his ancestry is 50 percent native Hawaiian or indigeneous. Obama has never asserted that his ancestry is native Hawaiian. The DHHL Web site now states: "The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands accepts both certificates of live birth (original birth certificate) and certifications of live birth because they are official government records documenting an individual's birth. The certificate of live birth generally has more information which is useful for genealogical purposes as compared to the certification of live birth which is a computer-generated printout that provides specific details of a person's birth. Although original birth certificates (certificates of live birth) are preferred for their greater detail, the State Department of Health (DOH) no longer issues certificates of live birth. When a request is made for a copy of a birth certificate, the DOH issues a certification of live birth." Janice Okubo of the Hawaii Department of Health says there is no real difference between the "long form" and "short form" for any useful purposes. The terms are "just words," she says. Obama's birth certificate as posted on the Internet (see June 13, 2008) "is considered a birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. There's only one form of birth certificate." Hawaii has followed the same practice of keeping the "long form" on file and issuing copies of the "short form" since the 1960s, she says. The forms have changed somewhat in appearance over the ensuring decades, she notes, and says there are no doubt differences between certificates issued in, say 1961 and those issued now. "When you request a birth certificate, the one you get looks exactly like the one posted on his site," she says. "That's the birth certificate." The so-called "short form" "certification of live birth" would show if Obama had been born in a foreign land, she says. The certificate states that he was born in Honolulu. [St. Petersburg Times, 7/1/2009]
Entity Tags: PolitiFact (.org ), Robert Fairley, Barack Obama, Hawaii Department of Health, Hawaii Department of Home Lands, Lloyd Yonenaka, Janice Okubo
Lawyer Orly Taitz (left) and Army Reserve Major Stefan Cook, during an interview for a television news crew. [Source: Anna Raccoon (.com)]US Army Reserve Major Stefan Frederick Cook says he should not be deployed to Afghanistan because President Obama is not a US citizen and therefore lacks the constitutional authority to order troops to do anything. Cook's counsel, "birther" lawyer Orly Taitz (see November 12, 2008 and After and March 13, 2009), files a request in the US District Court for the Middle District of Georgia asking that the court bar Cook from deploying, and seeking conscientious objector status for her client. Taitz says in the filing that Cook believes Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States (see June 13, 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, and July 28, 2009) and therefore has no obligation to obey orders from his superior officers that generate from Obama. Moreover, the filing says, Cook "would be acting in violation of international law by engaging in military actions outside the United States under this president's command.… simultaneously subjecting himself to possible prosecution as a war criminal by the faithful execution of these duties." Cook is ordered to mobilize for active duty tomorrow. He is to report to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and then report to Fort Benning, Georgia, for overseas deployment. A week later, the Army revokes Cook's deployment orders, instead ordering Cook to await an upcoming hearing on his court filing. Army Public Affairs Officer Lieutenant Colonel Maria Quan says that reservists such as Cook have the right to ask for revocation of their orders up to the day they are scheduled to report for active duty, but adds that Cook has not asked for such revocation. The Army has learned that Cook volunteered for deployment in May 2009, while simultaneously conferring with Taitz to file the complaint. [Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/14/2009; Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/14/2009] Cook has posted on the Free Republic, a far-right Web site and forum, for six years under the moniker "roaddog727." As early as March 2010, Cook had exchanged emails with Taitz, suggested that he was one of a number of plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit challenging Obama's citizenship, and had posted a long discourse on Obama's lack of citizenship on the Free Republic. Taitz has repeatedly solicited soldiers to take part in her anti-Obama lawsuits. [Washington Independent, 7/14/2009; Mudville Gazette, 7/15/2009] On July 16, the day of the hearing, Cook is joined in the complaint by retired Army Major General Carol Dean Childers and active reserve Air Force Lieutenant Colonel David Earl Graeff. The government says that because Cook's orders have been revoked, the complaint filed by Taitz is "moot": "The commanding general of SOCCENT (US Special Operations Central Command) has determined that he does not want the services of Major Cook, and has revoked his deployment orders." Taitz revises the complaint to add Childers and Graeff to the suit, "because it is a matter of unparalleled public interest and importance and because it is clearly a matter arising from issues of a recurring nature that will escape review unless the Court exercises its discretionary jurisdiction." The lawsuit now says the injunction is necessary to encompass the possibility of Cook receiving future orders for deployment as well as to address and prevent "negative collateral consequences such as retaliation against" Cook. The filing notes that Cook lost his job at defense contractor corporation Simtech because of the lawsuit, and complains that Cook is the target of "gossip" from people who believe he was "manipulating his deployment orders to create a platform for political purposes." [Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/16/2009] Federal judge Clay Land dismisses the suit, siding with the defense which calls the lawsuit "moot." Land rules: "Federal court only has authority of actual cases and controversies. The entire action is dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction." Cook says after the ruling: "I love the Army and I want to continue to serve in the Army. If we can establish that [Obama] is in fact president of the United States legally, I'm on the airplane the next day over to Afghanistan… if they cut my deployment orders, so I can do the job that I want to do.… If one cannot establish the validity and legality of the order… we would be following illegal orders and subject to prosecution. I could be prosecuted by the Uniform Code of Military Justice and if captured I would not be privy to protections under the Geneva Convention." [Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, 7/16/2009] Taitz claims victory. The military has shown its cards "and they have nothing to play with," she says. "By revoking the orders, it's clear to anybody. Think reasonably: Why would the military undermine itself by revoking its orders?" She says the Army revoked Cook's orders because the government could not prove in court that Obama was born in the United States and is therefore the legitimate commander in chief. CENTCOM spokesman Lieutenant Commander Bill Speaks calls Taitz's claim "ridiculous" and Cook's position "a bizarre conspiracy theory. Suffice to say [that revoking the orders] is certainly not an acknowledgement or validation in any way of his claims." [Stars and Stripes, 7/30/2009]
Entity Tags: Orly Taitz, Maria Quan, Clay Land, Carol Dean Childers, Free Republic, Bill Speaks, US Department of the Army, Stefan Frederick Cook, David Earl Graeff, Barack Obama
Timeline Tags: US Military, Domestic Propaganda
Author Jerome Corsi, who has made a number of disproven and debunked claims concerning President Obama's citizenship (see August 1, 2008 and After, August 15, 2008, October 8, 2008, and October 9, 2008), now claims that he has "proof" Obama's attendance and exemplary performance at Harvard Law School were engineered by a Saudi prince through the auspices of an African-American Muslim radical. He points to Obama's decision not to release his college transcripts as circumstantial evidence (see September 11, 2008), saying that decision "prevents resolution of a continuing controversy over whether radical Islamic influences promoted his admission and financed his legal education there." The "continuing controversy" centers on a lawyer named Percy Sutton, who claims that Islamic radical Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour, "one of the world's wealthiest men," asked him to write a letter of recommendation to Harvard Law School for then relatively unknown Barack Obama. Sutton says al-Mansour, a Saudi citizen, introduced him to Obama, and says al-Mansour was raising money for Obama to attend Harvard. Sutton says al-Mansour was a "principal adviser" to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who, Sutton says, actually engineered Obama's acceptance to Harvard. According to Sutton, he was told in a letter from al-Mansour: "There's a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends left there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?" Sutton says he did write the letter, and told friends at Harvard, "I thought there was going to be a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly." The Obama campaign denied the story during the 2008 presidential campaign. Sutton, who is in his 80s and apparently suffers from some sort of senile dementia or memory loss that precludes him being contacted by Corsi or other members of the press, has made his allegations in a YouTube video that Corsi cites as his "proof." In 2008, Politico reporter Ben Smith contacted al-Mansour, who confirmed Sutton was "a dear friend, his health is not good" and said he's sure Sutton wrote a letter for someone else, "and he got it confused." Corsi has requested that the White House release all of Obama's law school records to "resolve the issue." Al-Mansour, Corsi claims, was originally Don Warden, a member of the 1960s Black Panthers. [WorldNetDaily, 7/21/2009]
Entity Tags: Percy Sutton, Alwaleed bin Talal, Barack Obama, Jerome Corsi, Ben Smith, Harvard University Law School, Don Warden, Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour
Reporter and columnist Philip Klein, writing for the conservative American Spectator, lambasts conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh for giving the "birther" conspiracy theory his support. Klein says he has refrained from writing about it up until now, "because I don't want to give those who claim [President Obama] is not a US citizen the attention they so desperately seek. I don't even want to describe the matter as a 'controversy,' because to do so suggests that there is a serious dispute over Obama's place of birth. To any sane human being, there is no controversy. Obama has produced an authentic certificate of live birth from the state of Hawaii that clearly shows he was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, at 7:24 p.m. (see June 13, 2008). State officials have confirmed the document as legitimate (see October 30, 2008) and have stated that such facts would have to be verified by the state before they appear on the document. And if that isn't enough, the fact is corroborated by a contemporaneous newspaper birth announcement" (see July 2008). Klein writes that instead of questioning Obama's citizenship and demanding that he produce a "real" birth certificate, "Limbaugh should be using his perch to explain why this story is complete nonsense. Doing so would help to keep these citizenship conspiracy theorists in the fringe, where they belong. Instead, he's just encouraging them. I've lost a ton of respect for Limbaugh this week." Klein goes on to denounce Representative Bill Posey (R-FL), who with nine other Republican House members has sponsored a bill requiring presidential candidates to produce "official" birth certificates. All 10 "should be embarrassed," he writes. It would be pointless for Obama to try to settle the issue by releasing a different version of the certificate, Klein writes, because "it would obviously not put the issue to rest… the conspiracy theorists have demonstrated that they do not care about facts." Secondly, "there's absolutely no reason for Obama to cave into these people. Doing so would set a standard in the future so that people can start whatever insane rumors they want about an elected official, and then the burden is on the official to dispute them. It's no different than those calling for an investigation of whether 9/11 was an inside job." [American Spectator, 7/22/2009]
Entity Tags: William ("Bill") Posey, American Spectator, Barack Obama, Rush Limbaugh, Philip Klein
Right-wing talk show host and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy (see March 23, 1974) claims to have evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya and not in the US. MSNBC host Chris Matthews interviews Liddy about the claim, which rests on long-discredited statements purporting to be from Obama's "grandmother" Sarah Obama. Liddy says that Sarah Obama, who is not Obama's biological grandmother but the second wife of Obama's grandfather and a woman the president calls "Granny Sarah," filed "a deposition, which is a sworn statement, from the step-grandmother, who says, 'I was present and saw him born in Mombasa, Kenya.'" The "deposition" claim comes from street preacher Ron McRae, who interviewed Sarah Obama in her Kenyan home via telephone. Through a translator, Vitalis Akech Ogombe, Sarah Obama apparently misspoke and told McRae that she saw Barack Obama born in Mombasa; when McRae pressed for details, Ogombe and other family members present quickly corrected Sarah Obama's error and repeatedly affirmed Obama's birth in Hawaii. McRae, however, continued to press for what he considered a blurted-out truth the family was trying to hide (see October 16, 2008 and After). Salon columnist Alex Koppelman writes: "No matter, though, because people who believe in a conspiracy theory simply hear what they want to hear. So some birther sites have posted transcripts and YouTube clips that end abruptly with the mistranslation and don't include the corrections. McRae, for his part, included the full translation in his affidavit—he thinks it's all just part of the conspiracy." McRae then filed a deposition claiming that Ogombe and the other family members he interviewed "have obviously been versed to counter such facts with the common purported information from the American news media that Obama was born in Hawaii." Though Matthews attempts to elicit this material during his interview with Liddy, the radio host will continue to promulgate the claim that "Obama's grandmother" watched his birth in a Mombasa hospital. [Chicago Tribune, 12/3/2008; Salon, 7/23/2009] Obama's presidential campaign released a verified copy of Obama's birth certificate (see June 13, 2008), and a number of non-partisan organizations have subsequently verified its validity (see June 27, 2008 and August 21, 2008).
Entity Tags: Ron McRae, Alex Koppelman, Barack Obama, Chris Matthews, G. Gordon Liddy, Vitalis Akech Ogombe, Sarah Obama
US Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) attempts to delay a Congressional resolution introduced by Representative Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's statehood. Bachmann, who has publicly expressed support for so-called "birther" claims that President Obama is not a real US citizen (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, and August 21, 2008), apparently opposes a line in Abercrombie's resolution that states, "Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961" (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). According to Abercrombie spokesperson Dave Helfert, "birthers" have claimed that the line is an attempt to get Congress to affirm Obama's citizenship. Bachmann objects to the resolution coming to a vote, saying a quorum is not present. The House later votes 378-0 to approve the resolution; Bachmann votes in favor. [Honolulu Advertiser, 7/28/2009]
Entity Tags: Neil Abercrombie, Barack Obama, Michele Bachmann, Dave Helfert
Hawaii's health director, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, releases a second statement that verifies President Obama was indeed born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, and therefore is a valid US citizen. Fukino is responding to persistent rumors that Obama is not a valid US citizen and therefore is ineligible to serve as president. The statement reads: "I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago." Fukino released a similar statement before the 2008 presidential election (see October 30, 2008), which was derided by "birthers" who are convinced Obama is not a true American citizen. CNN's Lou Dobbs has demanded to see Obama's "long form" birth certificate, even though Hawaiian law states that all such documents remain under lock and key and are not publicly released; Dobbs continues to push the "birther" story on his nightly talk show, even though CNN's US president Jon Klein has told Dobbs's staffers that the issue is a "dead" story. Birthers dispute the fact that Obama was born in Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, despite the release of a verified copy of the certificate (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, and August 21, 2008), court rulings, and statements by Fukino and Hawaiian Governor Linda Lingle (R-HI). [Honolulu Advertiser, 7/28/2009]
Entity Tags: Chiyome Fukino, Barack Obama, Lou Dobbs, Linda Lingle, Kapiolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital, Jon Klein
The press learns that in the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign investigated claims that then-Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) may not be a legitimate US citizen. The campaign investigation was spurred by reports of a court filing in Pennsylvania (see August 21-24, 2008). A lawyer contacted by the McCain-Palin campaign called the court filing "idiotic," but the filing prompted the campaign to do some investigating of its own. Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 McCain campaign, recalls: "We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign. The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing." Potter and other McCain legal experts quickly ruled out any chance of those lawsuits holding up in court. They also investigated the claims underlying the lawsuits. "To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations," Potter recalls. "We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state's Department of Health (see June 13, 2008), and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate (see October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance" (see July 2008). [Washington Independent, 7/24/2009] McCain's own citizenship has also been unsuccessfully challenged in court (see March 14 - July 24, 2008).
Entity Tags: Trevor Potter, John McCain, Barack Obama
Stars and Stripes, the official news outlet for the US military, publishes an analysis of a lawsuit filed by Army reservist Major Stefan Cook, who asked a court to stop his deployment to Afghanistan because of his doubt that President Obama is a US citizen and therefore lacks the authority of commander in chief. The lawsuit was dismissed after the Army rescinded its deployment orders for Cook (see July 8-16, 2009). Stars and Stripes reporter Megan McCloskey writes: "[T]he Army reservist's intention appeared not so much to fight for America as to fight against President Barack Obama, in furtherance of a bizarre conspiracy theory.… Cook is one of the so-called 'birthers,' a small group of activists who subscribe to a fringe conspiracy theory alleging that Obama was not born in the United States and therefore cannot legally serve as president. The conspiracy theory, proven false by numerous media investigations as well as officials in the state of Hawaii where Obama was born (see June 13, 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, and July 28, 2009), first surfaced early in the presidential campaign, but in recent months it has continued to fester on the Internet." McCloskey theorizes that the lawsuit was engendered by Cook's attorney, "birther" lawyer Orly Taitz (see November 12, 2008 and After and March 13, 2009), in order to "gain [her] a few more minutes of screen time on the cable news networks. Taitz, a Russian-born dentist who got her law degree online, is the public face of the birthers. She has been trying to get the conspiracy theory heard in court since before the election. So far, all of the lawsuits brought by the birthers have been summarily dismissed." The Army, McCloskey writes, "refused to be baited" by this lawsuit. Lieutenant Colonel Holly Silkman, a spokesperson for SOCCENT (US Special Operations Central Command), says Cook's critical engineer billet could not be "hijacked by further legal wrangling." Cook was scheduled to deploy on July 15, and his position cannot sit empty. The officer Cook was supposed to replace "is going to have to remain in Afghanistan a while longer," Silkman says, and adds that the Army is working to find a replacement: "No one has been identified yet, but it is a priority fill, so we're working on it and expect to fill it soon. Engineers are in high demand." Taitz, interviewed by McCloskey, tells the reporter: "I have one question: Why would any member of the US military risk his life or take any orders… from someone who is refusing to prove he is the legitimate president? We can't stand for the arrogant, obnoxious behavior of Obama. He wants to defraud the whole nation." Taitz refuses to allow McCloskey to interview Cook. Brandon Friedman of VoteVets (.org), a political action committee seeking to elect veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to public office, says of Cook: "That's not leadership. That's not the way Major Cook was trained and brought up in the Army. You don't leave a unit like that, and you certainly don't do it because you're trying to make a political statement." [Stars and Stripes, 7/30/2009]
Entity Tags: Holly Silkman, Barack Obama, Brandon Friedman, Stefan Frederick Cook, US Department of the Army, Orly Taitz, Stars and Stripes, Megan McCloskey
The fraudulent birth certificate presented by California lawyer Orly Taitz 'proving' that Barack Obama was born in a Kenyan hospital. [Source: Snopes (.com)]California attorney Orly Taitz posts an image of what she says is President Obama's "true" birth certificate, this one issued in Kenya (see June 13, 2008). Taitz then files a motion in federal court to prove its authenticity. The conservative news blog WorldNetDaily (WND) quickly publishes an article repeating Taitz's claim. WND notes that the Kenyan document lists Obama's parents as "Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham." The birth date is August 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth is Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. The document lists no attending doctor. It does list the signature of the deputy registrar of Coast Province, Joshua Simon Oduya. According to the document, it was issued as a certified copy of the original in February 1964. WND claims that it has compared the Taitz document to other Kenyan birth certificates, and, it concludes, "the form of the documents appear to be identical." WND admits that other fraudulent Kenyan birth certificates have recently been posted on the Internet, but, it says, "[t]he new document released by Taitz bears none of the obvious traits of a hoax." Critics note that the Taitz document was certified as being issued by the Republic of Kenya on February 17, 1964, though the Republic of Kenya did not come into existence until December 1964. However, WND says, "Kenya's official independence was in 1963, and any number of labels could have been applied to government documents during that time period." According to WND, Taitz says she received the document "from an anonymous source who doesn't want his name known because 'he's afraid for his life.'" Taitz's court filing, in the US District Court for the Central District of California, requests the purported evidence of Obama's birth—both the alleged birth certificate and foreign records not yet obtained—be preserved from destruction, asks for permission to legally request documents from Kenya, and seeks a subpoena for deposition from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Taitz tells WND: "I filed the motion with the court asking for expedited discovery, which would allow me to start subpoenas and depositions even before Obama and the government responds. I am asking the judge to give me the power to subpoena the documents from the Kenyan embassy and to require a deposition from Hillary Clinton so they will be forced to authenticate [the birth certificate]. I'm forcing the issue, where Obama will have to respond.… Before, they said, 'You don't have anything backing your claims.' Now I have something. In fact, I have posted on the Internet more than Obama has (see June 13, 2008). My birth certificate actually has signatures." Taitz says she plans to file more documents with the court in the following days. [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009; WorldNetDaily, 8/2/2009] Forgery - PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, asks for clarification from Salim Lone, the spokesman for Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Lone says via email: "It's a forgery. Kenya only became a republic in December, 1964. Other arguments could also be marshaled, but they are not needed." Blogger Steve Eddy then finds a nearly-identical document on the Internet using Google Search, posted on a genealogy Web site by an Australian, David Jeffrey Bomford. Eddy compares the two and, according to PolitiFact: "Same format. Same book and page number in the birth registry. Some of the officials' last names were even the same." Eddy tells PolitiFact, "At that point, it was pretty obvious the Kenyan one was a fake, that someone had used this real one from Australia to make their version." An ABC affiliate in Australia asks Bomford, a public service clerk in Adelaide, about the controversy, and Bomford replies: "That is ridiculous. Little old person in Adelaide, the president of the United States. I don't know whether to laugh about it or not, be worried about it." Bomford says he had nothing to do with the hoax. "It's little old me and my mum and everything else up there," he says. The birth certificate he posted online is his own, he says. "Oh, I definitely confirm that the birth certificate was mine. That was quite easy to see—my address, even the style of the birth certificate was an old South Australian one. So it's quite easy to identify that it's mine.… It's definitely a copy of my certificate. It's so laughable it's ridiculous." [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009] The Washington Independent's David Weigel notes , "The image is part of the extremely ill-informed conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Mombasa—conveniently, one of the more Muslim parts of the country." The Obama family lives in an entirely different part of Kenya, over a thousand miles from Mombasa. Moreover, at the time of Obama's birth, Mombasa was not a part of Kenya, but part of Zanzibar. [Washington Independent, 8/3/2009] Rebuttal - Taitz posts on her Web site that Bomford's certificate, not her own, is the fake, and says Bomford or someone else altered that certificate from the "original" Obama certificate to discredit her. Eddy says of Taitz's claim, "There's no reasoning with some of these people." A blogger from "Obama Not Qualified" writes a long screed detailing his or her belief that the Taitz document is real, though noting his or her belief that the photo Taitz originally posted may not be real, and giving a step-by-step walkthrough of how to create a falsified document. PolitiFact receives a response from Val Edyvean, registrar of births, deaths and marriages for South Australia, saying: "It appears that a South Australian loaded an image of his own birth certificate onto a family history Web site and that the format was used by others to 'create' a document which purported to be a Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama. As the South Australian man has now removed this image, and the date of his birth is in the period of certificates which are restricted from public access, I do not intend to add to speculation by commenting on details of either that certificate or any aspects of it." [Obama Not Qualified, 2008; St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009] Conclusion - WND publisher Joseph Farah publishes a column expressing his feeling that the Taitz certificate is "probably" a forgery, and claims that WND never made any assertion of its validity. (Farah also says that the State of Hawaii has "steadfastly refused" to state that the birth certificate posted by the Obama campaign in 2008 is valid, a false statement—see October 30, 2008 and July 28, 2009). "The Kenyan document could be real. I haven't seen a single disqualifying error pointed out in the last 24 hours. But I still strongly suspect it is not," he writes. Instead, he says, WND posted the certificate and the accompanying article so that it could be fact-checked. He then claims that Obama has "hidden" his real birth certificate and "virtually every other meaningful document in his life" from public scrutiny. [WorldNetDaily, 8/4/2009] PolitiFact concludes that the Taitz certificate "is a fake." However, "we have no delusions this changes anyone's mind in the birther movement." [St. Petersburg Times, 8/2/2009]
Entity Tags: Steve Eddy, US District Court for the Central District of California, WorldNetDaily, Salim Lone, Val Edyvean, Orly Taitz, David Jeffrey Bomford, David Weigel, Barack Obama, PolitiFact (.org ), Joseph Farah, Joshua Simon Oduya, Hillary Clinton
Glenn Beck, who hosts a daily radio show along with his Fox News talk show, attacks "birthers" who believe President Obama is not a citizen (see see July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, December 3, 2008, and August 1-4, 2009). He says: "Everybody says, everybody says, 'why is Barack Obama not just producing the birth certificate?' Okay, first of all, he did (see June 13, 2008). And you're never going to get, you're never going to get a conspiracy theory to stop. You're never.… One of the reasons why he doesn't just come out is because it is so great for him because it immediately marginalizes anybody who says that kind of stuff. It makes them immediately look like they're flat earthers." [Media Matters, 3/24/2011]
Entity Tags: Glenn Beck, Barack Obama
The logo used for the Obama administration's health care proposal on the White House Web site. The logo combines the Obama presidential campaign's 'sunrise' emblem with a stylized version of the medical caduceus. [Source: White House]After denouncing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for claiming that anti-health care protesters had used Nazi symbols and rhetoric in their protests (see August 6, 2009), conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh also makes a comparison between the Obama administration and Nazis. "Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate," he says. Like Obama, Limbaugh asserts, Hitler "was called the Messiah" and did not need the advice of a cabinet or other advisers to make decisions. "The people spoke through" Hitler, as Limbaugh says Obama believes is the case for himself. Hitler's decisions "sound like the things liberals are doing all over this country." To Pelosi, he says, "You look much more like [a swastika] than any of us [conservatives] ever will." [Media Matters, 8/6/2009; Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Limbaugh also says that the Obama administration's health care logo looks very much like the "Nazi swastika logo." He adds: "It reminded me of Germany. Something about it reminded me of Germany, 1942. The shape of the logo, the people.… The Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo.… Ms. Pelosi has some major apologizing to do." He says perhaps Pelosi's supposed "repeated botox injections" have caused her to have "blurry vision" that may have prevented her from seeing the similarities he noticed. [Media Matters, 8/6/2009; Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Limbaugh apparently gets much of his information, including the Botox joke, from a right-wing blog, "Sweetness and Light," which he credits in his statement. [Sweetness and Light, 8/6/2009] The next day, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says, "It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the president's health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler." [New York Times, 8/7/2009] Jennifer Crider of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) responds to Limbaugh's assertions: "Rush Limbaugh's comparison of the Democratic Party to the Nazi Party in World War II is as disgusting as it is shocking. Limbaugh's use of the Nazi swastika in attempting to make a tasteless political comparison has no place in the public discourse. At a time when families need real solutions to rebuild the economy and make health care more affordable, Rush Limbaugh is attempting to sidetrack the important debate through his use of symbols that are synonymous with murder and intolerance. Americans deserve better." [Boston Globe, 8/6/2009] Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times calls Limbaugh's rhetoric "insane." [Media Matters, 8/10/2009]
Entity Tags: Obama administration, Jennifer Crider, Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Marvin Hier, David Brooks, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rush Limbaugh
Timeline Tags: US Health Care, Domestic Propaganda
Mark Williams, speaking on Anderson Cooper's CNN broadcast. [Source: TPM Muckraker]Mark Williams, a conservative talk radio host in Sacramento and a prominent spokesman for the nationally based Tea Party Express (TPE), appears on a CNN panel during that network's Anderson Cooper 360° and, while defending his organization against charges of racism, himself uses racist allegations against President Obama. Williams denounces those who carry openly racist signs against Obama during tea party events (see June 30, 2009, July 28, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 11, 2009, August 11, 2009, September 11, 2010), and September 12, 2010), calling them "no more part of the mainstream of America than the hippies who wear nipple clips and feather boas in San Francisco streets during so-called peace demonstrations." Cooper informs Williams, "What you're saying makes sense to me here when I'm hearing what you say but then I read on your blog, you say, you call the president an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief." Williams shrugs and answers, "Yeah, that's the way he's behaving." Cooper asks Williams if he really believes Obama is an Indonesian Muslim and a welfare thug, to which Williams responds: "He's certainly acting like it. Until he embraces the whole country what else can I conclude." [Huffington Post, 9/15/2009] TPE is one of the most "establishment" of the various tea party organizations. It was founded and run by Republican operatives and lobbyists, in a similar fashion to the Washington conservative lobbying firm FreedomWorks (see April 14, 2009). Williams is a key element in making TPE a large and influential organization, and has publicly associated the organization with conservative Republican 2010 candidates such as Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle and Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller. [TPM Muckraker, 7/19/2010]
Entity Tags: Sharron Angle, Mark Williams (radio host), Anderson Cooper, Barack Obama, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express, Joseph Wayne ("Joe") Miller
Former Bush administration official Ellen Sauerbrey (see October 11, 2005) tells a group of Maryland Republicans that President Obama is advancing socialist and fascist policies. Sauerbrey addresses a group of local Republicans in Callaway, Maryland. According to Sauerbrey, Obama has surrounded himself with cult-like, fanatical followers much as Adolf Hitler or Argentina's Juan Peron did when they ruled their countries. While she says she is not comparing Obama to either of those leaders, she says that conditions in America make the time ripe for Obama to usurp dictator-like powers. Obama is advancing "fascist, socialist ideals," she says, and adds: "I'm really afraid for the future of our country. Our Constitution is indeed being dismantled." In an interview shortly after her address, Sauerbrey says she had issues with some of the Bush administration's economic policies as well: "[W]hen you start down this road of these kinds of policies, you are on the road to destroying what has made this a great country." As for the comparisons to Hitler and Peron, she later tells an interviewer: "I never mentioned Hitler's name other than when the reporter came up to me afterwards. And I said, look, I am not making a direct comparison Obama and Hitler. I'm making a comparison between policies in countries, and that history has a way of repeating itself." To the interviewer, Sauerbrey denies accusing Obama of being a fascist, though in her address she did accuse him of advancing "fascist, socialist ideals." Instead, she says: "I'm saying, if you said ideals—yes I do believe, when you look at the definition of fascism. Fascism is not government ownership of business, it is government control of business.… I think that the definition of what the Obama administration is doing, from an economic definition standpoint, is much more closely described as fascism than socialism, because the government is not owning, it is directing and controlling the elements of the economy. Would you disagree with it?" [TPMDC, 9/17/2009; Think Progress, 9/18/2009]
Entity Tags: Ellen Sauerbrey, Adolf Hitler, Bush administration (43), Juan Peron, Barack Obama
Conservative lobbyists cheer the IOC's decision not to give the 2016 Olympics to Chicago. [Source: MSNBC / Towleroad (.com)]While many Americans are shocked and upset by the decision of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) not to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago (see October 2, 2009), some conservatives cheer the decision as a personal defeat for President Obama, who spoke to the IOC on Chicago's behalf. The conservative Web site Drudge Report blasts a large headline: "THE EGO HAS LANDED; WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND." [Huffington Post, 10/2/2009] A gathering of conservative lobbyists and officials at Americans for Prosperity erupts in cheering and applause when the news of Chicago's loss is announced; the video of the reaction quickly makes the rounds of cable news and Internet outlets. [National Journal, 10/2/2009] Conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com, one of the right's most influential Internet commentators, celebrates the loss: "Hahahahaha," he posts. "I thought the world would love us more now that Bush was gone. I thought if we whored ourselves out to our enemies, great things would happen. Apparently not. So Obama's pimped us to every two-bit thug and dictator in the world, made promises to half the Olympic committee, and they did not even kiss him." [Erick Erickson, 10/2/2009] Fellow conservative blogger Michelle Malkin writes that the IOC decision effectively ends the Obama campaign motto of "Yes We Can" by introducing a new slogan: "No, You Can't." Malkin continues: "Like Icarus, President Obama's giddy ego flight has ended with melted wax and fallen wings. This is a big win and a massive relief for taxpayers. But Chicago cronies are not going to take this well. Gird your loins. Who will be first to cry RAAAAAACIST?" [Michelle Malkin, 10/2/2009] The National Review calls the decision an "embarrassment for Obama," and adds, "If he can't work his personal magic with the Olympians, why does he expect it to work with the Iranians?" [National Review, 10/2/2009] Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh gleefully echoes Drudge's "the ego has landed" headline, and says the decision makes this "the worst day of [Obama's] presidency." He claims that Obama "has failed.… We've got a two-year-old manchild with a Mars-sized ego, which today crashed and burned." The loss of the Olympics is a direct reflection of Obama's foreign policy, Limbaugh claims: "Our president, Barack Hussein Obama, has been running around the world for nine months telling everybody how much our country sucks.… Why would anybody award the Olympics to such a crappy place?… This is a moment of weakness, and weakness invites trouble. You think I'm laughing? What do you think's happening in Tehran?" And he says, in apparent jest, "Who knew the Olympic Committee was a bunch of racists?" [ABC News, 10/2/2009] The Huffington Post counters that "if Democrats had attacked [former President] George W. Bush for pushing Dallas as an Olympics host, they would immediately have been branded as unpatriotic." [Huffington Post, 10/2/2009]
Entity Tags: Americans for Prosperity, Erick Erickson, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Drudge Report, National Review, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, International Olympic Committee, Huffington Post
Victims of Stalin's gulags. [Source: Answering Christianity (.com)]Representative John Shadegg (R-AZ) tells his House colleagues that health care reform will result in "Soviet-style gulag(s)" for Americans. Shadegg says: "You know, it occurs to me, and I'll go through these other scandals very quickly, but what we're really getting here is we're not just getting single-payer care. We're getting full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care.… It appeared in last Friday's Wall Street Journal. You can Google it. You can pick up the phone and call Kim Strassel [a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote about the "hidden costs" of the Senate Finance Committee's reform legislation on October 9]. You can ask her about Soviet-style gulag health care in America, where powerful politicians protect their constituents." Progressive news and advocacy Web site Think Progress calls Shadegg's statement a "new low" in anti-reform rhetoric, and tells its readers: "The Soviet gulags were a network of prisons and forced labor camps that held as many as 20 million people during Stalin's reign of terror. It is estimated 1.5 million died in the camps." [Think Progress, 10/14/2009]
Entity Tags: Think Progress (.org), Wall Street Journal, John Shadegg, Kim Strassel, Senate Finance Committee
Judge David Carter. [Source: HubPages (.com)]US District Court Judge David Carter dismisses a lawsuit brought by a group claiming that President Obama was born in Kenya and, therefore, is not qualified to be president (see August 1-4, 2009). Carter lambasts lead lawyer Orly Taitz, ruling that he is "deeply concerned" that Taitz "may have suborned perjury through witnesses she intended to bring before this court." Carter notes in his ruling that he has received "several sworn affidavits" showing that Taitz "asked potential witnesses" to lie under oath. Additionally, he rules, Taitz engaged in "improper and unethical" conduct by encouraging her supporters to phone and write him in an "attempt to influence this Court's decision." Carter rules that Taitz and her co-plaintiffs have not presented any usable evidence to bolster their claim of Obama's supposed Kenyan citizenship. Instead, Taitz "favored rhetoric seeking to arouse the emotions and prejudices of her followers rather than the language of a lawyer seeking to present arguments through cogent legal reasoning." Taitz's inflammatory rhetoric, Carter finds, "often hampered the efforts of her co-counsel, Gary Kreep… to bring serious issues before the Court." Carter rules that he exhibited "extreme patience" with Taitz and Kreep's filings, noting that while Taitz and Kreep filed their lawsuit on January 20, 2009, they failed to serve the defendants in the case until August 25, 2009, and only then after repeated court orders to do so. "Taitz also continually refused to comply with court rules and procedures," he notes, and even tried to get Magistrate Judge Arthur Nakasato removed from the original case because Nakasato required her to follow the court rules. And, he writes, Taitz attempted to dismiss two of her clients from the suit because she did not wish to work with their co-counsel. "Plaintiffs have encouraged the Court to ignore [the] Constitution; to disregard the limits on its power put in place by the Constitution; and to effectively overthrow a sitting president who was popularly elected by 'We the People'—over sixty-nine million of the people," Carter writes. "Plaintiffs have attacked the judiciary, including every prior court that has dismissed their claim, as unpatriotic and even treasonous for refusing to grant their requests and for adhering to the terms of the Constitution which set forth its jurisdiction. Respecting the constitutional role and jurisdiction of this Court is not unpatriotic. Quite the contrary, this Court considers commitment to that constitutional role to be the ultimate reflection of patriotism." [The Smoking Gun, 10/29/2009; United States District Court for the Central District of California, 10/29/2009] Taitz and Kreep have filed a similar lawsuit with failed presidential candidate Alan Keyes, which has also been dismissed (see November 12, 2008 and After and March 13, 2009). Taitz was recently fined $20,000 for judicial misconduct (see October 13-16, 2009).
Entity Tags: Gary Kreep, Alan Keyes, Arthur Nakasato, Orly Taitz, Barack Obama, David O. Carter
Wesley Pruden, the editor emeritus of the conservative Washington Times, says that President Obama's current trip abroad proves that he is not a "real American" in his heart, but instead lacks a "blood impulse" for what America "is about" due to his "Kenyan father" and a "mother attracted to men of the Third World." Pruden mocks Obama for bowing respectfully to foreign heads of state such as Emperor Akhito of Japan and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and notes: "Not bowing to foreign potentates was what 1776 was all about. His predecessors learned with no difficulty that the essence of America is that all men stand equal and are entitled to look even a king, maybe particularly a king, straight in the eye. Can anyone imagine George Washington, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson making a similar gesture of servile submission? Or Harry Truman? Or FDR, who famously served the lowly hot dog, with ballpark mustard, to the king and queen of England? John F. Kennedy, on the eve of a trip to London, sharply warned Jackie not to curtsy to the queen.… But Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, likely knows no better, and many of those around him, true children of the grungy '60s, are contemptuous of custom. Cutting America down to size is what attracts them to 'hope' for 'change.' It's no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what [America] is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World, and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream." [Washington Times, 11/17/2009] Pruden made similar assertions several months ago (see June 5, 2009).
Entity Tags: Wesley Pruden, Barack Obama
Michael Savage, a conservative radio host, calls President Obama "Chairman Mao Tse-Obama" in a tirade about what Savage calls Obama's desire to become a Communist dictator. Savage makes the reference while speaking against the "Communists" who "infest" the Obama administration. [Media Matters, 12/4/2009] Savage has called the landmark civil rights decision Brown v. Board "sickening" (see May 18, 2004), accused Obama of being educated in a radical Islamic madrassa (see January 10, 2008 and April 3, 2008) and being a potential "radical Muslim" (see February 21, 2008), called Obama's presidential victory "the first affirmative-action election in American history" (see February 1, 2008), accused Obama of being sympathetic towards the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese of World War II (see March 13, 2008), said that homeless Americans should be put in "work camps" (see June 6, 2008), called Obama an "Afro-Leninist" (see June 6, 2008), said that welfare recipients should lose the right to vote (see October 22, 2008), accused Obama of using his grandmother's death to conceal his "efforts" to falsify his Hawaiian birth certificate (see November 10, 2008), accused Obama of planning to fire all the "competent white men" in government once he became president (see November 18, 2008), and accused Obama of desiring his own "Hitler Youth" program (see September 2, 2009).
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Michael Savage
A photo of a 'mountain of skulls' from one of the Khmer Rouge's 'killing fields.' Michael Savage argues that this could be a scene from Obama's America. [Source: Mormon Soprano (.com)]Michael Savage, a conservative radio host, tells his listeners that President Obama is a "baby dictator" comparable to Cambodian dictator and mass murderer Pol Pot. Savage reminisces about "Communists" in San Francisco giving out copies of "the little red book," presumably a reference to Chinese dictator Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book," that, Savage says, exhorted readers to kill anyone "with eyeglasses… members of the bourgeiosie… the entire middle class." Savage tells his listeners that Pot used teenagers to carry out his orders, specifically targeting "teachers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, businessmen, businesswomen, you name it," and others to either work in labor camps or for outright murder. "What does that have to do with Obama?" Savage asks rhetorically, and goes on to explain "why you should be very worried indeed." Pot, a "mild-mannered college professor," he says, "became radicalized" during his university studies in Paris, and brought an extremist Marxist ideology to Cambodia, which resulted, he says, in "a mountain of skulls." Ideas, he says, "can be very, very powerful… ideas can also create horrors that are unimaginable to the average American. We can't even imagine such a thing happening here, and we would say it can't happen here. I would argue that it can happen here. And I would argue that only vigilance, only vigilance and resistance to this baby dictator and his band of terrorists can prevent this from occurring here. [Media Matters, 12/18/2009] According to a Yale University study, between 1975 and 1979, around 1.7 million Cambodians—a fifth of the nation's population—died in what the study called "one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.… [T]he Khmer Rouge regime headed by Pol Pot combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and a diabolical disregard for human life to produce repression, misery, and murder on a massive scale." In 2007, Pot, who died in 1998, was found to have committed "crimes against humanity, genocide, grave breaches of the Geneva Convention, homicide, torture, and religious persecution." [Yale University, 2010] Savage has called the landmark civil rights decision Brown v. Board "sickening" (see May 18, 2004), accused Obama of being educated in a radical Islamic madrassa (see January 10, 2008 and April 3, 2008) and being a potential "radical Muslim" (see February 21, 2008), called Obama's presidential victory "the first affirmative-action election in American history" (see February 1, 2008), accused Obama of being sympathetic towards the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese of World War II (see March 13, 2008), said that homeless Americans should be put in "work camps" (see June 6, 2008), called Obama an "Afro-Leninist" (see June 6, 2008), said that welfare recipients should lose the right to vote (see October 22, 2008), accused Obama of using his grandmother's death to conceal his "efforts" to falsify his Hawaiian birth certificate (see November 10, 2008), accused Obama of planning to fire all the "competent white men" in government once he became president (see November 18, 2008), accused Obama of desiring his own "Hitler Youth" program (see September 2, 2009), and compared Obama to Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong (see December 3, 2009).
Entity Tags: Michael Savage, Barack Obama
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck suggests to his listeners that President Obama chooses to use his given name of "Barack" to identify with his "Kenyan… heritage" and anti-American "radicals." Beck, talking with his co-host Pat Gray, says that Obama deliberately switched from his childhood nickname of "Barry" in order to "make a statement" and "fit in" with his "anti-American," "radical" friends in college. "You know what?" Beck says. "This sounds ridiculous. But I don't believe it is. Maybe it is.… He chose to use his name Barack for a reason—to identify, not with America—you don't take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Is—really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion." [Media Matters, 2/4/2010]
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Pat Gray, Glenn Beck
Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck lambasts so-called "birthers," who argue that President Obama is not a citizen (see see July 20, 2008, August 15, 2008, October 8-10, 2008, October 16, 2008 and After, November 10, 2008, December 3, 2008, and August 1-4, 2009), calling them "idiot[s]" and members of "the fringe elements." Beck says "birthers" are on "the fringe" along with "9/11 truthers" and "progressives." He calls all of them "the crazy people that don't really like America." He includes Philip Berg and Alan Keyes, who brought lawsuits claiming Obama was not a citizen (see August 21-24, 2008 and November 12, 2008 and After), as "birthers." [Media Matters, 3/24/2011]
Entity Tags: Alan Keyes, Philip J. Berg, Glenn Beck, Barack Obama
Lawyer and "birther" activist Orly Taitz (see November 12, 2008 and After, March 13, 2009, July 8-16, 2009, August 1-4, 2009, September 16-21, 2009, October 13-16, 2009, October 29, 2009, April 16, 2010, July 7 - August 16, 2010, April 27, 2011, April 27, 2011, and April 27, 2011) is "disinvited" to an upcoming Tax Day Tea Party rally in Pleasanton, California. Several Republican political candidates, including Senate candidate Carly Fiorina, are scheduled to speak at the rally, but after they complain about Taitz's inclusion, she is removed from the slate of speakers. Bridget Melson, founder and president of the Pleasanton Tea Party, says the organization had been "getting calls from candidates like crazy." She explains: "It's not worth it. She's too controversial. This is not what the tea party is about at this point." Taitz herself is running for California secretary of state, a position that would presumably give her the power to block President Obama from being on the ballot in 2012 if she were to win the post. Fiorina, along with a representative of Senate candidate Chuck DeVore, and several congressional and state legislative candidates are scheduled to speak at the Pleasanton rally. Josh Trevino, a DeVore spokesperson, says, "I can say emphatically that the Chuck DeVore campaign and Chuck DeVore himself strongly disapproves of Orly Taitz and the crazy theories she continues to advance." Fiorina spokeswoman Julie Soderlund says, "President Obama is absolutely eligible for the presidency and is a natural-born United States citizen." She notes that Fiorina staunchly opposes most of Obama's policies. At least one scheduled speaker, House candidate John Dennis, told organizers that if Taitz were retained on the slate, he would withdraw entirely. "The presence of a discredited publicity seeker on the same platform with patriotic Americans distorts the focus of our movement, distracts from our common message, and gives ammunition to those who continue to question our legitimacy," Dennis told organizers. At least one rally attendee, Tom Del Beccaro of the California Republican Party, says Taitz's questions about Obama's citizenship may be valid: "I certainly don't have enough information to decide that (see June 13, 2008). I've never seen yay or nay either way, so how could I know?" Taitz has caused controversy in her current race for secretary of state, questioning the legitimacy of her Republican primary opponent, real estate entrepreneur Damon Dunn, and accusing Republicans of supporting Dunn over her solely because he is African-American. [Los Angeles Times, 4/13/2010]
Entity Tags: Josh Trevino, Bridget Melson, Barack Obama, Carly Fiorina, Chuck DeVore, Julie Soderlund, Orly Taitz, John Dennis, Pleasanton Tea Party, Tom Del Beccaro, Damon Dunn
A New York Times/CBS News poll shows that the 18 percent of Americans identifying themselves as tea party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public. They tend to be Republican, white, male, married, and older than 45. They tend to be more conservative than "mainstream" Republicans, and describe themselves as "very conservative" and President Obama as "very liberal." Most Republicans term themselves as "dissatisfied" with Washington, but tea party supporters tend to classify themselves as "angry." Most tea partiers tend to describe their individual or household tax burden as "fair," though they tend to dislike taxation in general. Most send their children to public schools. Most support Medicare and Social Security, though they support the idea of smaller government. Where they tend to diverge from the general public is in their deep pessimism about the direction of the country, and their conviction that the Obama administration is bent on helping the poor at the expense of the middle class and the wealthy. The vast majority of tea party supporters say Obama does not share American values and knows little about the problems of people like themselves. A quarter of the responding supporters say that Obama favors blacks over whites, as opposed to 11 percent of the general public, and they are more likely than the general public to believe that "too much has been made of the problems facing black people." Three things primarily fuel their anger at Washington: health care reform, government spending, and their feeling that Washington lawmakers ignore their concerns. Retired Florida lawyer Elwin Thrasher says in an interview: "The only way they will stop the spending is to have a revolt on their hands. I'm sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government." Over 90 percent of tea party supporters believe the country is heading down the wrong path, as contrasted with some 60 percent of the general population, and almost 90 percent say Obama is doing a poor job heading the country. That same percentage say he has mishandled health care, the economy, and the federal deficit. Ninety-two percent say Obama wants to make the US a socialist state. Retired medical transcriber Kathy Mayhugh says: "I just feel he's getting away from what America is. He's a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he's a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don't care what he says" (see October 1, 2007, December 19, 2007, January 11, 2008, January 22-24, 2008, April 18, 2008, June 27, 2008, October 10-11, 2008, September 24, 2010, and April 27, 2011). While most Americans blame the Bush administration or Wall Street for the current economic status, a majority of tea party supporters blame Congress, focusing much of that blame on Congressional Democrats. They vote almost unanimously Republican. Fifty-seven percent of tea party supporters say they hold a favorable opinion of former President George W. Bush, while almost the same percentage of the general public see Bush unfavorably. Most tea party supporters say they want to focus on economic issues ahead of social issues such as gay rights and abortion restrictions, and say the movement should focus first on shrinking the federal government, ahead of reducing the deficit or lowering taxes. Almost 75 percent of tea party supporters say domestic program spending should be reduced, though most do not want Medicare or Social Security cut. California tea party supporter Jodine White, 62, says of her view on federal spending: "That's a conundrum, isn't it? I don't know what to say. Maybe I don't want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.… I didn't look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I've changed my mind." [New York Times, 4/14/2010]
Entity Tags: New York Times, Barack Obama, Bush administration (43), CBS News, Elwin Thrasher, George W. Bush, Obama administration, Jodine White, Kathy Mayhugh
Author Amity Shlaes is one of 13 people interviewed by the New York Times about their perceptions of the tea party movement. [Source: National Review]The New York Times, in light of a recent poll showing American tea party supporters to be whiter, wealthier, and more conservative than average Americans (see April 14, 2010), interviews a number of prominent historians, journalists, and political analysts about their views on the tea party. Tea Party Very Similar to Anti-Liberal Organizations of Generations Past - Rick Perlstein, the biographer of former president Richard Nixon and former Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), writes of his "frustration" at "watching the rise of the tea party movement," calling it "ugly" and in opposition to "so many of the values I hold dear." He notes the "overwhelming historical myopia" of the news media's coverage of the tea party, saying that the current movement is comprised of "the same angry, ill-informed, overwhelmingly white, crypto-corporate paranoiacs that accompany every ascendancy of liberalism within US government" (see February 4-8, 2010, February 15, 2010, September 2010, and August 17, 2011). Perlstein quotes conservative activist Brent Bozell asking, "When was the last time you saw such a spontaneous eruption of conservative grass-roots anger, coast to coast?" and responds: "The answer, of course, is: in 1993. And 1977. And 1961. And so on. And so yet much of the commentariat takes Bozell at his word, reading what is happening as striking and new." Perlstein writes that the parallels between the current tea party movement and the previous movements opposing the Roosevelt, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations "are uncanny.… The only thing that changes is the name of the enemy within." In 1963, accusations flew that President Kennedy was "in bed" with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to bring socialism to America; today, the accusations are that the "Muslim terrorist" President Obama wants to bring socialism to America, perhaps with the aid of Islamist terror groups. Perlstein says that in years past, the media was far more unflinching at labeling the reactionaries as "fringe" elements. "[B]ack then, they covered the story with much more moral courage and civic wisdom." Now, Perlstein writes, the media fawns over tea party leaders and the right-wing commentators who promote them (see August 11, 2009). 'Sullen, Defensive Mobilization' of Wealthier Americans who Fear the Poor - Author Michael Lind, the policy director of the centrist New America Foundation, advises Republicans and Democrats both to "ignore this faux populist base of the GOP and focus instead on the genuine swing voters." Tea partiers, Lind writes, are not "[p]itchfork-wielding populists," but are closer to "the affluent members of the Liberty League who vilified President Roosevelt in the 1930s (see August 23, 1934 and After)—a sullen, defensive mobilization of the Have-Somes who dread the Have-Nots. The tea partiers put the 'petty' in petty bourgeoisie. They are disgruntled conservative Fox Republicans." Tea Parties Focusing on Constitutional Issues - Author Steven F. Hayward, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, lauds the tea parties as primarily focused on economic and constitutional issues (see May 2010), and more supportive of gay rights, abortion rights, and limited gun restrictions than the media may admit. Hayward writes that he is surprised that most tea partiers are "more economically secure than the general population" and better-educated than the average American: "[T]he narrative that the tea partiers are a bunch of pitchfork populist rubes becomes harder to maintain." Racism does not permeate the tea parties, Hayward argues (see February 27, 2009, April 2009, July 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 11, 2009, September 2009, September 14, 2009, October 15, 2009 and After, January 14, 2010, February 2010, March 20, 2010, March 25, 2010, March 26, 2010, May 14, 2010, July 13, 2010, July 14, 2010, July 15, 2010, July 17-18, 2010, August 6, 2010, August 24, 2010, August 24, 2010, September 11, 2010, September 12, 2010, October 10, 2010, October 19, 2010, April 15, 2011, April 16, 2011, May 5, 2011, July 29, 2011 and After, August 22-30, 2011, and December 10, 2011), "though there is some evidence of polarization that is a problem for the tea party as a movement." Hayward opines that such racism that can be documented in tea party members "is likely an aspect of party politics today." He also states that tea party supporters do not believe the "birther" conspiracy theory that Obama is not an American citizen any more than the average American, a statement at odds with many other analyses of tea party ideologies (see October 2008, January 8, 2009, June 4, 2009, February 4-8, 2010, February 15, 2010, September 2010, April 13-15, 2011, and July 1-2, 2011), even though the poll shows that only 41 percent of the tea party supporters believe that Obama is a "natural-born citizen." The driving factor behind so many Americans with no previous history of political involvement is, he writes, the fact that most tea party members "are moderates who are simply shocked by Obama's great leap forward in the size of government," and he compares the tea parties to the third-party backers of presidential candidate H. Ross Perot in 1992. He concludes, "The real promise of the tea party movement is that it may lead to a reinvigoration of the idea of constitutional limits on government—an idea liberals may find quaint if not hopelessly obsolete." Long-Discredited 'Radical Right' Views Propelling Tea Parties - Author and university professor Alan Wolfe, a self-described liberal, derides the tea parties as little more than a repackaged version of the "radical right" which has long been a part of America's body politic. The tea party movement, Wolfe writes, has given "American intellectuals whose views have been out of fashion for some time" a new platform with which to express their ideas. The same ideas that drove the McCarthyite "Red scare" of the 1950s are driving the tea parties today, Wolfe writes, and points to the increasing involvement of organizations such as the John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961) in the tea party movement (see July 22, 2007, August 4, 2008, October 10, 2008, April 13, 2009, April 19, 2010, and August 24, 2010). Like the people who support the JBS both now and in the 1950s, tea partiers are driven "not so much to their economic circumstances as to their status anxieties." They fear the changing, increasingly diverse and cosmopolitan society around them, and dislike, or sometimes even hate, the seeming "encroachment" of minorities and lower-class Americans on their lives. Wolfe says that the idea that tea party members do not embrace racist values any more than other Americans is specious; their poll responses can be explained, he writes, by noting that "people who respond to them have learned to hide their true feelings." He concludes: "At the risk of sounding condescending, these people have lost all perspective. They know how to kvetch. They know nothing about what makes their country great. Instead of watching Glenn Beck, I would urge them to learn more about their country's history—or to go and see a shrink." Using Coded Appeals to Race - Law professor Paul Butler writes that while most tea partiers are "more uber-Republicans than Klansmen," the organizations are very good at using racist "code words" to appeal to racist whites while maintaining plausible deniability about their inherent appeal to racist politics. "The tea party is smart enough not to frame its agenda around white supremacy, but the code words are there," he writes "[T]he most virulent anti-Obama force in the country is smart enough not to frame its agenda around white supremacy—at least not explicitly." While most tea partiers were clever enough not to indicate that they were bluntly racist in the poll results, the fact that a strong majority of them "believe that too much has been made of the problems that African-Americans face, and that the administration favors blacks over whites," is quite telling, Butler writes. "Overwhelmingly they believe that Barack Obama doesn't share the needs and problems of people like them, or the values of 'most Americans.' These code words have been around long enough, everybody gets them." Poll Does Not Support Idea that Tea Partiers Embrace Bigotry - Author and columnist Amity Shlaes writes that the poll numbers do not support the "media stereotype" that tea party supporters "are racist or intolerant. The media depicts tea partiers as bigots who look down on minorities, but that doesn't seem to be the case." Similarly, she argues, the poll results do not support the idea that tea party supporters believe Obama is a Muslim any more than average Americans do. As the tea party organizers claim, the movement is largely about economics, Shales writes. Fear of Loss of Control - History professor and author Alan Brinkley calls the tea party "the party of me," and compares its members demographically to the Americans who supported the McCarthyite "Red scare" inquisitions and the Clinton-era Whitewater investigations—predominantly white males, significantly wealthier than the average American, far more conservative than the mainstream, and fearful of the prospect that conservative white males might not continue to exert control over American society. "[W]hat seems to motivate them the most is a fear of a reduction in their own status—economically and socially," Brinkley writes. As for their economic worries, he writes, "[T]heir concern is not the state of the economy as a whole, but their own economic conditions." Brinkley concludes: "The real issue, I believe, is a sense among white males that they are somehow being displaced, that the country is no longer 'theirs,' that minorities and immigrants are becoming more and more powerful within society. And, of course, they are right about that. They just fear it more than many other Americans." Unrealistic Belief that Government Can Exist without Taxation - Author and former political science professor Lorenzo Morris writes that the tea party's position on taxes is extremist: "The tea party supporters seem to think that government can exist without taxes." The American experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which provided no real tax income at all, proves that idea to be wrong, Morris writes, but "[w]ith enough time and historical romanticism, however, bad ideas come back around." He writes that the current appearance of the tea parties has become less "vitriolic and menacing" than their image from the summer of 2009, when their vociferous and sometimes-violent protesting of health care reform painted them as frightening and bigoted (see July 23, 2009, July 24, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 27, 2009, July 28, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 1, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 2, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 3, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 4, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 5, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6, 2009, August 6-7, 2009, August 6-8, 2009, August 7, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 8, 2009, August 10, 2009, August 10, 2009, and August 11, 2009). The tea parties have begun to win the approval of right-wing Republican figures, including many of those who intend a presidential run in 2012. But, he concludes, their rigid disapproval of taxes as a concept, and taxation as a reality, means that they will inevitably "repeat the folly of those early Americans who thought there could be government with no taxes." Anger without Willingness to Make Real Change - Law professor Susan Estrich notes that the poll indicates a large reservoir of approval for former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK), the 2008 vice-presidential nominee for the Republican Party, but a strong doubt that she is competent to lead the nation. "Tea party types may be mad," Estrich writes, "but they aren't buying President Palin. And if they aren't, who would?" Estrich goes on to note that tea party supporters, "like most of us… want to have it both ways: they want their Social Security and smaller government, want major cuts but not in Medicare, which is a little like having your cake and eating it, too. If you want to really reduce the size of government, that means cutting defense and entitlements. If you're not willing to do that, what you get is big talk and no action, which is ultimately a recipe for anger." She concludes by calling the racial element "lurking in the polls" "troubling." Motivated by Racial Concerns - Author and Democratic activist Bob Moser writes of his familiarity with tea parties in Texas, "where the movement has flared up hotter than just about anywhere else," and his lack of surprise at the demographics: white, conservative, male, and relatively affluent. The concern about the nation's economic tribulations, and the anger directed at Obama, is understandable, he writes. However, "[w]hat strikes me is how often America's great and terrible obsession, race, slithers around the poll numbers." The poll numbers may not directly bear out the racism and bigotry that exists in the ranks of the tea partiers, Moser writes, "[b]ut it's impossible to shrug off the collective impressions left by the data. Why, exactly, do 73 percent of tea partiers say that the president does not understand 'the needs and problems of people like yourself'?" The movement works hard to marginalize Americans who disagree with them, particularly Obama, as un-American, not a member of "we the people." Moser notes that almost three-quarters of the tea party supporters "say that black and white people have an 'equal' chance of 'getting ahead in today's society.' If that's not colorblindness, it's certainly some kind of blindness." Moser concludes by writing that the tea party movement is achieving both goals set by "its corporate Republican conjurers," both "becoming the political expression of a white-resistance movement being spurred by anxieties over the economy, the black 'socialist' president, and the coming end of majority-white America… [and] leaning, at least in 2010, strongly Republican in attitude." Healthy Expression of Populism - Political analyst David Gergen writes that the perception of the tea parties as angry, bitter, and divisive is untrue. He describes the latest rally he attended as "festive and friendly." While many protest higher taxes and bigger government, Gergen writes, their claims that opposing Obama does not entail a racist viewpoint are true. "[M]any feel stung by what they see as misrepresentations in the press," he writes. Gergen compares the 2010 tea partiers to the Ross Perot voters of 1992: "Those who supported Mr. Perot were mostly white, a little better educated than the general population and much more concerned about government deficits than government peeking into bedrooms. They were also more from the West and South but had pockets of support scattered around the country." He notes that 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as tea party supporters; in 1992, 19 percent of voters cast their votes for Perot. He calls them a healthy expression of American populism and concludes: "Many of these tea partiers are fearful of how the country is changing. Some circles look down upon them; it would be far wiser to listen, understand and find ways to heal." Heralding GOP Success for 2010, Problems Farther On - Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center and a political polls expert, says the poll numbers "augur well for the Republicans in November's midterm elections: the politically energized supra conservatives—the 1 in 5 who are universally disaffected with national conditions, and with Barack Obama and with his policies—are likely to be a strong advantage in the midterms, where typically fewer than 4 of 10 eligible citizens vote." The Republicans' biggest challenge is to keep the tea party supporters' votes while simultaneously attracting independents and moderates. And a move by the GOP to the right, to further embrace the tea partiers, "may not bode well for the party in the longer run, given the new primacy of independent voters, a power that was on full display in 2008." Moreover, the tea parties may well co-opt the GOP, going from "the tail that wags the dog" to becoming "the dog itself." Kohut writes: "Looking ahead, our polling suggests that the Republican party needs unifying themes and leadership. A tea party-led GOP may not be the prescription for that." Economic Concerns Drive Tea Party Success - Political consultant Douglas Schoen says the fact that almost 1 in 5 Americans support the tea party "extraordinary, given that the movement is not active in half of America and that its name recognition is not universal." Schoen gives no credence to "what appear to be the class-based or race-based attitudes of the tea party movement," and writes that the movement is instead propelled by economic concerns. Schoen says that statistics aside, he believes the tea party movement to be far more diverse than the polls indicate (see September 2010). Almost half its supporters identify themselves as non-Republicans, and a quarter of them claim to have voted for Obama in 2008, he says. [New York Times, 4/15/2010]
Entity Tags: Bob Moser, Barack Obama, Amity Shlaes, Alan Wolfe, Alan Brinkley, Susan Estrich, Andrew Kohut, Steven F. Hayward, Paul Butler, Michael Lind, Douglas Schoen, Lorenzo Morris, Brent Bozell, David Gergen, Rick Perlstein, New York Times
The cover of Klein and Elliott's 'The Manchurian President.' [Source: Borders (.com)]The progressive media watchdog organization Media Matters finds a number of dubious or outright false claims in a recent book by Aaron Klein entitled The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists, and Other Anti-American Extremists. Klein is a reporter for the conservative news blog WorldNetDaily, which has taken a lead role in accusing President Obama of not being an American citizen (see December 5, 2008, May 28, 2009, and August 1-4, 2009). Among other disproven claims, Klein writes that "terrorist" William Ayers (see October 4-5, 2008) was the "ghostwriter" of Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father; Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga is Obama's cousin (using the false relationship to try to link Obama with Odinga, whom Klein calls a "traitor" to Kenya); Obama supports "involuntary birth-control measures," which Klein describes as "compulsory, government-mandated 'green abortions' [to] control population growth and prevent ecological disasters"; and Obama sought and received support from the socialist New Party in the early stages of his political career. Klein also attempts to portray the church that Obama attended as a child, the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu, as a "staging ground" for his supposed "antiwar activism" and "socialism"; claims a number of ties between Obama and Communist "black activists"; and makes other claims. Klein also attempts to argue that "Obama may not be eligible to serve as president." After admitting that there is "no convincing evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, nor that his birthplace was any place other than Hawaii, his declared state of birth," Klein claims that because Obama's father was not a US citizen, there should have been "Congressional debate about whether Obama is eligible under the United States Constitution to serve as president," focusing on the legal definition of the constitutional requirement that the president be a "natural born citizen." Klein ignores most accepted legal opinions on the subject, instead focusing on a 1758 treatise called The Law of Nations and an obscure Supreme Court decision, Minor v. Happersett. Both the treatise and the Court decision have been routinely cited by "birther" lawyers attempting to challenge Obama's citizenship, Media Matters notes. [Media Matters, 5/7/2010] Reviews of the book are mixed. David Horowitz's far-right publication Front Page Magazine calls the book a "meticulously documented piece of outstanding investigative research" that "blow[s] the lid off the dome of silence surrounding the Obama administration." Klein and co-author Brenda J. Elliot "reveal surreptitious ties to radical leftists of all stripes," the review states. [Front Page Magazine, 6/16/2010] Terry Krepel, the progressive founder of ConWebWatch, calls Klein's entire book an exercise in "guilt by association," using as one of several examples Obama's attendance at the Honolulu church: Obama was a young boy at the time; the group that Ayers was a part of, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), had splintered two years before Obama began attending church services; and Klein never shows any proof that what he calls "Ayers's ideology" made it into the Sunday school curriculum. The book is entirely "dishonest," Krepel concludes. [Huffington Post, 5/9/2010]
Entity Tags: WorldNetDaily, William Ayers, Terry Krepel, Students for a Democratic Society, Raila Odinga, Barack Obama, Aaron Klein, Front Page Magazine, Media Matters, New Party, First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
Conservative radio host Jim Quinn, of the syndicated Quinn and Rose broadcast, tells his listeners that President Obama "is an African colonial" who "hates" Britain. Discussing the Obama administration's response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Quinn says that BP (formerly British Petroleum), the company responsible for the spill, "stands for the two things that Obama hates the most in his life… the Brits and petroleum." Quinn continues, "Let us not forget, he is… an African colonial," and adds that "this guy's got a hard on for the Brits in particular, and Western civilization in general." [Media Matters, 6/11/2010] Quinn is echoing previous claims of Obama's "African colonial" and "Afrocentric" sympathies (see December 26, 2007, January 16, 2008, June 25, 2009, June 29, 2009, November 17, 2009, and February 2, 2010). Quinn and his partner, Rose Tennent, have previously made racist allegations against Obama and his African-American supporters (see October 20, 2008), and Quinn has said that only American landowners should be allowed to vote (see October 21, 2008).
Entity Tags: Barack Obama, Rose Tennent, Jim Quinn
A chain email makes the rounds of the Internet containing a purported Associated Press (AP) article that claims to hold evidence that President Obama is not an American citizen (see June 13, 2008, June 27, 2008, July 2008, August 21, 2008, October 30, 2008, July 1, 2009, July 28, 2009, July 28, 2009, and July 29, 2009). The story claims that transcripts from Obama's first university, Occidental College, show that Obama attended the school under the name "Barry Soetoro" and received financial aid as a native of Indonesia. The alleged AP story reads in part: "The group 'Americans for Freedom of Information' has released copies of President Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College. Released today, the transcript school [sic] indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate. The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California. The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program. To qualify, for the scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship." PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, investigates the claim. AP spokesman Jack Stokes tells PolitiFact the story is not valid: "It is not an AP story," he says. PolitiFact then performs Google and Lexis-Nexis searches, and finds no information on any such group named "Americans for Freedom of Information." The story, PolitiFact notes, is dated April 1, 2009, April Fool's Day. Occidental College official Jim Tranquada confirms that the school has not released Obama's transcripts, because it has never received a request from Obama to do so, and unless it receives such a request, it cannot, under federal law, release the transcripts to anyone. Obama called himself "Barry" when he entered Occidental, but according to the recollections of friends and acquaintances, began calling himself "Barack" by the time he left. "Soetoro" is the name of Obama's stepfather, with whom he lived in Indonesia while a small child. Tranquada confirms that Obama registered under the name "Obama" and not "Soetoro." The email's claim that Obama applied for a Fulbright scholarship cannot be verified by any records. [St. Petersburg Times, 6/28/2010]
Entity Tags: Jim Tranquada, Occidental College, Americans for Freedom of Information, Associated Press, PolitiFact (.org ), Barack Obama, Jack Stokes
A chain email circulating on the Internet claims that because Barack Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, he cannot be a US citizen. The argument, according to the email, is: "Pakistan was on the US State Department's 'no travel' list in 1981. [Therefore,] when Obama went to Pakistan in 1981 he was traveling either with a British passport or an Indonesian passport." Had Pakistan actually been on the "no travel" list in 1981, Obama would have had to either travel there illegally, or use the passport of a foreign national. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan, political fact-checking organization sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times, investigates the claim. It is true that Obama went to Pakistan in 1981, during a summer vacation; he went to Indonesia to visit his mother and then to Pakistan with a college friend. But in 1981, according to the State Department, Pakistan was perfectly accessible to US citizens. State Department public affairs officer Ivna Giauque says, "According to our Pakistan experts, there was no travel ban to Pakistan in 1981." PolitiFact notes that in August 1981, the State Department issued a "travel advisory" for Pakistan, but that would not have precluded any American from visiting Pakistan had he or she chosen to do so. In August 1981, the US consul general in Lahore wrote a letter to the New York Times encouraging Americans to visit the country. And a March 1981 New York Times featured an advertisement listing Karachi and Lahore as two destinations in their travel package. PolitiFact concludes that in the case of the email, "[s]omebody was just looking for an excuse to promote the birther conspiracy." [St. Petersburg Times, 6/28/2010] The "travel ban" was advanced as an argument against Obama's citizenship in a 2008 lawsuit which was summarily thrown out of court (see August 21-24, 2008).
Entity Tags: PolitiFact (.org ), Barack Obama, US Department of State, Ivna Giauque
Receive weekly email updates summarizing what contributors have added to the History Commons database
Developing and maintaining this site is very labor intensive. If you find it useful, please give us a hand and donate what you can.Donate Now
If you would like to help us with this effort, please contact us. We need help with programming (Java, JDO, mysql, and xml), design, networking, and publicity. If you want to contribute information to this site, click the register link at the top of the page, and start contributing.Contact Us
Except where otherwise noted,
the textual content of each timeline is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike