Month: August 2009

Not That Anyone Cares

by digby

The gasbags spent the entire day talking about the new polls which have Obama at anywhere between a 50 and 58 percent approval rating. They all seem to think he’s toast, although David Gergen did mention that such a characterization means that people have been misreading polls since the beginning of time.

But in all the discussion of polls and how much people loathe and despise the idea that sick people should be able to get health care, nobody mentioned this:

Forty-one percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday say they favor the war in Afghanistan — down 9 points from May, when CNN polling suggested that half of the public supported the war.

Fifty-four percent say they oppose the war in Afghanistan, up 6 points from May.

“Afghanistan is almost certainly the Obama policy that Republicans like the most,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “Nearly two-thirds of Republicans support the war in Afghanistan. Three-quarters of Democrats oppose the war.”

I realize that it’s not the central issue at the moment, but it still seems like something worth mentioning.

On the other hand, CNN isn’t all bad. Rick Sanchez took the Bernie Madoff of health care downtown.

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Mission Accomplished

by digby

Now we’re talking:

Tampa, Florida – Angry protesters and strong supporters are clashing inside and all around a health care reform town hall meeting in Downtown Tampa. The meeting which was scheduled to begin at 6:00 at the Children’s Board of Hillsborough County drew hundreds of people who quickly began to overwhelm staff and event organizers at the front entrance.

As the building filled to capacity, angry protesters stuck outside began to scream, yell, and chant. At one point, those trying to get inside began banging on windows as Tampa Police officers quickly spread out guarding all entrances.

10 Connects photojournalist Kevin Carlson, currently inside the meeting reports at least one fist fight breaking out inside. Some other journalists remain outside.

Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor and State Representative Betty Reed were hosting the event.

UPDATE 7:13pm

Police on bullhorns are trying to break-up the crowd outside the building on 1002 E. Palm Ave.

Many in the crowd are refusing to go.

UPDATE 7:32pm

The forum has ended early.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but this is the real purpose of these protests. They want Democrats to be scared and cancel their events. They did it in 1994. They did it in 2000. It works.

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Scaring Grandma

by digby

I’m a little bit surprised that everyone’s so gobsmacked about the right wing’s ability to spread the alarm about Obama’s alleged intention to turn all the old people into Soylent Green. How it became such an article of faith on the right is no mystery: it’s a fundamental part of the Right To Life agenda and it’s been going on for a long time.

Here’s the NRLC in 2007:

How Medicare Was Saved from Rationing — And Why It’s Now in Danger
By Burke J. Balch

Editor’s note: Since its inception, the National Right to Life Committee has been equally concerned with protecting older people and people with disabilities from euthanasia as with protecting the unborn from abortion. We have recognized that involuntary denial of lifesaving medical treatment is a form of involuntary euthanasia, and therefore have opposed government rationing of health care. In 1997 and 2003, NRLC successfully fought to amend Medicare by allowing older people the right to use their own money to obtain unrationed care; shockingly, under the new leadership of Congress that right is now at risk. Here’s the background:

Most people are aware that Medicare—the government program that provides health insurance to older people in the United States—faces grave fiscal problems as the baby boom generation ages.

Medicare is financed by payroll taxes, which means that those now working are paying for the health care of those now retired. As the baby boom generation moves from middle into old age, the proportion of the retired population will increase, while the proportion of the working population will decrease. The consequence is that the amount of money available for each Medicare beneficiary, when adjusted for health care inflation, will shrink.

Three alternatives exist. In theory, taxes could be increased dramatically to make up the shortfall. Few knowledgeable observers consider this likely, regardless of which party is in power in Washington.

The second alternative—to put it bluntly but accurately—is rationing. Less money available per senior citizen would mean less treatment, including less of the treatments necessary to prevent death. For want of treatment, many people whose lives could have been saved by medical treatment will perish against their will.

The third alternative is that, as the government contribution decreases, the shortfall is made up by payments from older people themselves, so that their Medicare health insurance premium is financed partly by the government and partly from their own income and savings.

It goes on to promote that last as the best way to insure that the elderly will not be euthanized. Here’s their earlier argument when Bush was pushing his prescription drug plan in 2003:

The news has been full of the Republican proposal to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. What Americans might not realize is that the bill as currently drafted could lead to involuntary euthanasia through the rationing of
health care.

Everyone knows pharmaceutical prices continue to skyrocket. Exciting new medicines can treat illnesses that used to have anautomatic death sentence, but these medicines come with such a high price tag that the government can’ t possibly make them available to everyone in the Baby Boom generation without a mammoth tax raise. If drugs are rationed, what chance is there that they will be available to senior citizens?

National Right to Life has consistently sounded the alarm about the dangers of rationing and managed care. In 1997, heeding these concerns, Congress gave older Americans the opportunity to use their own money to join private “fee-for-service” insurance plans. Just as most people set aside money to supplement Social Security when they retire, such insurance plans assure that senior citizens can choose their own doctors and make their own decisions about whether a given treatment is “futile.”

However, the prescription drug benefit in the current draft of Medicare legislation has no such “escape clause” permitting Americans to buy additional drug coverage at their own expense. Although private plans could offer such an unmanaged benefit, they would be at an unfair advantage trying to compete with the 70% subsidy involved in the government’s managed care plan. Individuals purchasing such plans would still be charged for Medicare, effectively a double taxation…

“Older Americans must remain free to spend their own money to save their own lives,” says Jenny Nolan of the medical ethics department of National Right to Life.

I’ll bet many of you didn’t know until now that unless we “allow” the elderly to buy their own health insurance, they will all be euthanized, did you? (And it’s always interesting to see how the concerns of social conservatives always seem to converge with the money folks around the issue of taxes, isn’t it?)

This stuff is as fundamental to the social conservative worldview as abortion is. And everyone should have known that after having watched that Schiavo circus just a few short years ago. Here’s a fairly typical example of what was written at the time:

While many people might accept the idea of planning their own death, in the sense that a “living will” avoids prolonged suffering, the embrace of the Netherlands model by AARP seems to suggest it wants us to move toward embracing government intervention into our lives for the purpose of facilitating of causing our deaths.

The WHO is reformulating a “new ethics” which emphasizes the importance of “economic” resources and the likelihood of success in treating people. Analyst Marguerite Peeters says, “The system of priorities in the new WHO paradigm will necessarily lead to the marginalization of certain people. There will be no available resources for certain ‘categories’ of patients, those deemed less important to public health: the elderly, the handicapped, and perhaps even the members of minority groups.”

It is noteworthy that, 50 years ago, the Nazis were prosecuted for war crimes for their government-sponsored euthanasia program. Now, the Nazi program is being accepted under the cover of “sustainable development.” How can they “sustain” the earth when there are so many people on the planet? The obvious answer is to get rid of some of them, especially those who are sick and elderly or handicapped.

The WHO, under the leadership of AARP favorite Brundtland, the former leader of Norway, implicitly supports this practice.

It is significant that AARP also supported Hillary Clinton’s socialized medicine scheme. Once the health care system has been completely nationalized, it can be easily linked to a global network under the supervision of the U.N.’s WHO, in which the “new ethics” can be used to guide the Social Security and health care systems, including Medicare. In this context, it must be recalled that the WHO played a role in developing Hillary’s original plan.

On the Social Security front, the most likely political outcome is stalemate, with the liberals using the ongoing crisis as a pretext to seize even more government control over the health care system, ration treatments to the elderly, and then eventually implement a government-sponsored euthanasia program to target and eliminate some of the most “nonproductive” and “useless” people. This will “solve” the Social Security “problem” and the government will remain in charge of the system. Taxes will continue to rise and we will live in a full-fledged socialist state. That is, if we live.

That was 2005. Here’s Rush today:

They accuse of us being Nazis, and Obama’s got a health care logo that’s right out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook. Now, what are the similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in Germany? Well, the Nazis were against big business — they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn. They were against cruelty and vivisection of animals, but in the radical sense of devaluing human life, they banned smoking. They were totally against that. They were for abortion and euthanasia of the undesirables, as we all know, and they were for cradle-to-grave nationalized healthcare.

There’s so much inaccurate historical information in that insane rant, it would take a separate post to rebut it. But you know that — and somehow I doubt that his listeners are sticklers for historical accuracy. (If you’d like even more Nazi analogies, read Pat Buchanan’s column from yesterday with the pithy headline, “Say Goodbye Grandma.”)

Betsy McCaughey may have brought the euthanasia subject to the attention of the elite villagers, but the right has been steeped in this stuff for decades. Of course for decades the mainstream media has been telling us that Rush and his ilk are fine fellows, simply entertaining the fringe — there’s nothing to see here and nothing to worry about. Except it isn’t really confined to the fringe, is it? Since the election, we’ve seen the entire Republican caucus genuflect to Rush as if he’s Caligula. Just yesterday the chief Senate Republican negotiator on the health care reform spread this vile euthanasia canard as if were casually discussing the weather:

GRASSLEY: In countries that have government-run health care, just to give you an example, I’ve been told that the brain tumor that Sen. Kennedy has — because he’s 77 years old — would not be treated the way it’s treated in the United States. In other words, he would not get the care he gets here because of his age. In other words, they’d say ‘well he doesn’t have long to live even if he lived another four to five years.’ They’d say ‘well, we gotta spend money on people who can contribute more to economy.’ It’s a little like people saying when somebody gets to be 85 their life is worth less than when they were 35 and you pull the tubes on them.

Again, this is the supposedly good faith negotiator for whom Baucus and Obama are selling health reform down the river in their quixotic attempt to claim bipartisanship. No, Grassley isn’t saying right out that Obama is a Nazi who wants to euthanize all the old people, but he’s validating the dishonest talking points of those who do.

There is an age split on mistrust of this health care plan and there’s a good reason for it. Older folks are probably more mistrustful of Obama, for the sad obvious reasons, but they are also uniquely victimized by misinformation and scare tactics. If any of you out there are dealing with geriatric parents, you know about stuff like this:

I recently became involved in helping my 88 year old Great Aunt , with her estate and personal matters. Last week she asked that I help her balance her check book, in which i noticed she was writing monthly checks to anything and everything that had to do with social security.It seems that she has been receiving petitions and contribution requests from our good friends in Washington DC and not just one or two. I had her save her ‘junk mail’ for one week, equaling a total of 117 envelopes ALL WANTING TO SAVE SOCIAL SECURITY and ALL WANTING A DONATION. When i asked her about this,her explanation was that our government is going to take her social security away and she wont be able to live. Hence the big debate: shes afraid the government will stop her social security check-but giving it back to them in donations.

The elderly are easy prey for all kinds of scare stories and scams from unscrupulous people. And nobody is more unscrupulous than a right winger desperate to obstruct a program or politician they know will be popular and empowering of liberals. Here’s one example from a few years ago, and as far as I know they are still active today. The groups they fronted for certainly are.

I know it’s seems surprising to many that the right is able to mobilize senior citizens against health care reform, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. They’ve been laying the groundwork for this, from dozens of different directions, for decades. The “right to life” people’s ongoing efforts to put euthanasia on the table is just well tilled little piece they are using for this particular moment.

The fundamental architecture of the conservative movement is built on a simple premise: liberals want to take all your money and then kill you or they want to kill you and then take all your money. It’s not really any more complicated than that.

If someone had asked me how to respond to the euthanasia scare I probably would have tried to pre-empt it with something like this: “the Republicans want to interfere in your most private, personal decisions and force terminal patients to be hooked up to machines for years against their will, just like Terry Schiavo.” With their crusading against living wills, it’s has the benefit of being true.

If you don’t put them on the defensive first, they get you every time. They’ve been working it for years —it’s reflex by now.

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Yeah, Sure

by digby

From the pull my finger file:

Re: Hands Off Medicare [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Earlier today I expressed puzzlement at a post by Dylan Matthews over at The New Republic, not seeing its point. Thanks to Timothy Noah, I think I get it now. Both of them are reacting to Arthur Laffer, the supply-side economist, who in a recent CNN interview said, “If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid, and health care done by the government.” Matthews and Noah take Laffer to be suggesting that Medicare and Medicaid are not currently “done by the government.” Noah writes, “If there is a hell for libertarian poseurs, Laffer has secured himself a berth in it.” I think this is a simple misunderstanding. Laffer seems to me to be saying that Medicare and Medicaid are not run well, and neither will health care in general when the government expands its role in it. “Done by the government,” that is, modifies only “health care,” not “Medicare, Medicaid, and health care.” Laffer could have spoken more precisely, but that doesn’t seem like an offense worth casting someone into Hell for.

Sure, he could mean something that he’s clearly not saying, but it’s usually a better policy to assume that he means what he clearly says.
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Major Spying Scandal

by digby

No, not that boring old crap about warrantless wiretapping. All you people ever want to do is play the blame game and look in the rearview mirror.

This is something much worse:

ABC News’ Rick Klein was first to report, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, was quite taken aback by White House Director of New Media Macon Phillips’s request that if citizens “get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy,” they “send it toflag@whitehouse.gov.”

In a White House blog, Phillips said he was trying to stem the flow of “disinformation,” and Linda Douglass, communications director for the White Houses Health Reform Office, appeared in a web video saying, “there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this one, take a look at this one. This one says,‘Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate Private Insurance.’

Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. You know, the people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.”

In response,Cornyn wrote to President Obama that he’s concerned “about a new White House program to monitor American citizens’ speech opposing your health care policies, and to seek your assurances that this program is being carried out in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and America’s tradition of free speech and public discourse.”

The Texas Republican said it seemed “inevitable that the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House. You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program.”

And he suggested that if President Bush had “asked Americans to forward emails critical of his policies to the White House,” President Obama “would have been leading the charge in condemning such a program-and I would have been at your side denouncing such heavy-handed government action. “

Asked about Cornyn’s letter on Thursday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “nobody is collecting names.”

The blog and tips email was because, Gibbs said, “we have seen, and as I’ve discussed from this podium, a lot of misinformation around health care reform. Some of it I think spread purposely. We have used on many occasions the Web site to debunk things that are simply not true. We ask people if they have questions about health care reform and about what they’re hearing about its affects on them, to let us know and we’d provide them information to show that that wasn’t true.”

Continued Gibbs: “but nobody is collecting names.”

Awesome!

Having a hissy fit over this is the kind of political tactic in which the right specializes. They take a liberal meme — the government spying on citizens —- and they apply it to something trivial and transparently political. People may be conflicted and uninformed about whether or not the government can do these things for national security purposes, but the idea of the White House collecting emails of specific tea baggers is something that instantly fuels their nutball base’s paranoid fantasies and makes eveyone else think there might also be something “off” about this since it’s so trivial. If the Republicans had the majority, you can bet they would be launching investigations immediately. As it is, the teabaggers will make a lot of money and launch any numbers of conspiracy theories based upon this.

The truth is that this really wan’t necessary for the White house to do. Tracking the disinformation is something the old country bloggers are actually pretty good at.

Update: Rush is already on it:

“Barack Obama has a snitch website. Barack Obama has a website in which he’s asking for his supporters to rat out people who are spreading disinformation about health care, when in fact the only disinformation’s coming from him and members of his party. Now what this essentially is, ladies and gentlemen, is Barack Obama’s very own personal domestic spying program. … I wanna know, where are all you leftist civil libertarians who were up in arms when George W. Bush was trying to catch terrorists in the act before they committed the act? The warrantless wiretap program that you said was a violation of civil liberties that, by the way, Barack Obama has expanded? Where are you today?”

Is it irresponsible to speculate that Barack Obama is using the full power of the federal government to secretly spy on tea baggers? It’s irresponsible not to…

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Taser Nation

by digby

This one’s especially interesting. A baseball fan is drunk and apparently belligerent (clearly the first time in history such a thing has happened. )The police are called to remove him. He argues with the cops for a little over 30 seconds and then it happens:

Since tasers were supposed to be a replacement for deadly force, I can only assume that in the past drunken baseball fans were shot dead for arguing with police. There must be quite a body count.

You can hear the the electrical sparking of the taser and it’s familiar enough to me that I got sick to my stomach at the mere sound — there are audible gasps on the track. It’s an interesting Pavlovian response which I woud imagine will be fully absorbed into the collective American psyche before too long.

The muy macho dudes at the Sporting News reported it like this:

This gentleman, we’ll call him Belligerent Santa, was clearly not happy about something going on at the A’s game last night. (A YouTube commenter who claims to have been sitting near where the incident took place said it was a loud Texas fan who was yelling inappropriately and got angry when he was asked to quiet down. Judging from how few people were around him, that doesn’t really sound like much of a stretch.) After what seemed like a decent amount of time trying to reason with Belligerent Santa, the jig was up, and like that scene from The Hangover, they had to unleash the full power of the Taser.

The officer pulled out his taser after talking to the man for 41 seconds and hit him at a little after the one minute mark — at which point he fell head first out of his seat on to the cement and rolled down several steps. I didn’t hear anybody laughing on the soundtrack to this movie. Maybe that’s because the sight of a drunk being shot with enough electricity to make him fall out of his chair onto cement stairs just isn’t so funny in real life.

But we are all getting the message, aren’t we?

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The Underbelly

by digby

From the Washington Independent:

A new poll from the Pew Research Center finds that 28 percent of Americans believe that there’s been “too little” coverage of “allegations that President Obama was not born in the United States” — including a plurality, 39 percent, of self-identified Republicans. Only 14 percent of Democrats and 30 percent of independents share that view.

“If anything surprised me, it’s how many people have heard about this,” said Michael Dimock, an associate director at the Pew Research Center. “When we put the question in, we said to ourselves, well, Lou Dobbs has covered it, and it’s been discussed on the Internet. For 80 percent of people to have heard something about this is pretty high.”

I hate to get myself in trouble here, but why would anyone think this is unusual in a country where only 39% of people believe in evolution?

[A] Gallup poll tied to Darwin’s birthday finds that just 39% of Americans believe in evolution. As expected, Gallup notes, education plays a big role here: 74% of those with post-graduate degrees believe in evolution. That’s compared with only 21% of high school grads (or those with less education) who believe in the theory. Ditto religion: 55% who don’t attend church believe in evolution, versus 24% of weekly churchgoers who believe in it.

This isn’t the smartest country in the world.
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Amateur Hour

by tristero

The most shocking thing, and the worst thing, about the fake healthcare riots and the very real thuggishness of the paid Republican operatives involved in them is not that they’re happening. That’s what Republicans do, after all. No, the really terrible thing is that by all appearances, the Democratic party was caught completely by surprise.

It’s as if the eight years of Bush/Cheney, with its lockstep Republican Congressional goons, its relentless intimidation and marginalization of anyone to the left of the John Birch Society, its proactive (and successful) effort to target Democrats for prosecution by hand-picked Attorneys-General – it’s as if all of that – and so much more – never happened.

Democratic leadership once again failed to perceive political reality as it is in 21st century America: The Republican Party is dominated by fascists who will do anything, anything at all, to undermine what’s left of this country’s democracy after the successful Bush/Cheney assault on it. After all, this is a party that used the Department of Homeland Security to hunt down Democrats when they bolted from Texas in order to avoid committing political suicide. After all, this is a party that aggressively opposes the regulation of computerized voting machines, voting machines manufactured by none other than prominent members of their own party.

Shutting down town hall meetings is precisely the kind of tactic these characters love, they spend night and day meticulously planning them, and get well-paid to boot. Shame on Democrats for not seeing these latest Republican riots coming.

Kerning

by digby

I get lots of interesting emails, but one of the most interesting recurring ones is a list that sends articles from this web-site:

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Sounds awesome. All those millionaires must be lining up for the kind of financial insights only Jerome Corsi can provide. Insights like this:

More cracks have appeared in the official story of Barack Obama’s
family life, with the revelation in school documentation from the
University of Washington that Ann Dunham most likely left her
husband, Barack Sr., within weeks of the baby’s birth.

The official story as presented in his autobiography, “Dreams from My
Father,” and in various accounts in newspapers and websites
supporting Obama conflicts with the results of a careful analysis of
the documentary evidence available.

For example, the official story claims Dunham relocated to Seattle
late in 1962, but documentary evidence establishes she left Hawaii
when she moved to Seattle in August or September 1961, only a few
weeks after the birth of Barack Obama Jr.

Likewise, the official story describes how Dunham and Obama Sr. lived
as man-and-wife in Hawaii until he left for Harvard to begin the fall
term in September 1962. But the documents establish Dunham abandoned
Obama Sr. when she left to begin school at the University of
Washington in Seattle for the fall term of 1961, which began in
September of that year.

The repositioning of the timeline revealed by the school documents
may mask a yet undisclosed secret that lies at the heart of the Obama
birth certificate controversy.

The Obama long-form original birth certificate continues to be hidden
from the public by Obama despite a multitude of requests to make the
document public.

But here are a number of critical dates documenting the birth of
Barack Obama Jr. from available public records.

•Ann Dunham was born Nov. 29, 1942, according to her original Social
Security Card. This would have made her 18 years old at the time
Barack Obama Jr. was born.

•Barack Obama Jr. was born Aug. 4, 1961; this would put his date of
conception at the earliest on or around Nov. 4, 1960, assuming there
was a full nine months of pregnancy.

•Records provided to WND by Stuart Lau, university registrar in the
Office of Admissions and Records at the University of Hawaii at
Manoa, document that Ann Dunham’s first day of instruction at the
university was Sept. 26, 1960, less than six weeks before the
earliest date Barack Obama, Jr. could have been conceived.

•Ann Dunham and Barack H. Obama, Sr.’s divorce decree states they
were married Feb. 2, 1961, in Wailuku, Maui, Hawaii. This would mean
Obama’s parents were married approximately three months after Barack
Obama, Jr. was conceived, if the baby went full-term.

•Instead of staying in Hawaii with her husband and new baby, Ann
Dunham began classes at the University of Washington in Seattle in
September 1961 for the autumn semester, less than two months after
Obama was born. WND confirmed this date with Madolyne Lawson of the
Office of Public Records at the University of Washington.

•Ann Dunham took up residence in Seattle at 516 13th Ave. E.,
according to the 1961 Seattle Polk directory. This residence was torn
down in 1985 and is now replaced by twin Capital Park residential
towers; the Seattle Polk Directory listing is for a “Mrs. Anna
Obama,” a variant of her name that most researchers have considered
to be Ann Dunham.

Ann Dunham’s residence in Seattle, 1961 (Washington State Archives,
Puget Sound Branch, King County Assessor Property Record Card
collection)

•At most, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham lived together for
approximately eight months, from Feb. 2, 1961, the date of their
marriage, until September 1961 when Ann Dunham began her studies at
the University of Washington. But there is nothing on the public
record to suggest Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. ever lived together
again as man and wife.

•There is nothing on the public record to suggest that Ann Dunham’s
mother, Madelyn Dunham, accompanied her daughter to Seattle in
September 1961, even though she was 18 years old and responsible for
a baby who was less than two months old.

•There is no evidence on the public record that Obama Sr. ever joined
his wife in Seattle. Instead, the public evidence is that Obama Sr.
remained in Hawaii, while his wife and infant son established their
residence in Seattle.

•Obama Sr. began studies at Harvard University in September 1962,
which means Dunham did not return to live in Hawaii until after Obama
Sr. had left the islands, never to return to Hawaii again as a
resident.

•The same records show Dunham did not resume her studies at the
University of Hawaii until April 1963 for the spring semester, when
Barack Obama was approximately one year and five months old.

•Dunham and Obama Sr. were divorced Jan. 20, 1964.
The dates appear reliable, especially given the limited documentary
evidence available about Barack Obama’s birth circumstances.

Timeline of President Obama’s birth

The timeline raises several questions:

1.Were Dunham and Obama Sr. ever very much in love, even at the
beginning of their relationship, or was the marriage always one of
convenience arranged to mask an inconvenient pregnancy?

2.Did Dunham and Obama Sr. ever live together as man and wife, and if
so, what testimony is there from neighbors at the time that would
establish their residence address?

3.Was Obama Jr. born in Hawaii, or was he born in Kenya? Could he
have been born in Seattle or possibly even in British Columbia?

4.What hospital was Obama Jr. born in, and who was the attending
physician? What official records establish these facts?

5.Who are Obama Jr.’s true birthright parents?

6.Why has President Obama prevented the release to the American
public of his long-form original birth certificate listing the
hospital of his birth, the attending physician and the identity of
his parents, as recorded at the time of his birth? What information
is on the original, long-form birth certificate that President Obama
does not want the American people to see?
Many of these questions should be able to be answered if the American
public could authenticate Barack Obama’s original long-form birth
certificate listing the hospital where he was born, the date and time
of the birth, the attending physician and the names of the parents.

This leads to what is perhaps the key question: What is it the White
House is determined to hide by refusing to release the president’s
original long-form birth certificate?

Moreover, while President Obama and his supporters have made many
photographs available from his childhood, important gaps remain:

•No photographs have yet surfaced showing Ann Dunham pregnant in 1961.

•No photographs have yet surfaced with Barack Obama Sr. and Ann
Dunham with Barack Obama Jr. as an infant in the hospital where he
was born.

•No photographs have yet surfaced of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr.
with Barack Obama Jr. after the newly born infant was taken home from
the hospital.

When and why did Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham separate?

In his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama Jr. tells
the story that his mother and father first separated when Barack
Obama Sr. left Hawaii to attend Harvard.

On page 10, Obama presents this version of the story, writing: “He
[Barack Obama Sr.] won another scholarship – this time to pursue his
Ph.D. at Harvard – but not the money to take his new family with him.
A separation occurred, and he returned to Africa to fulfill his
promise to the continent. The mother and child stayed behind, but the
bond of love survived the distances …” (ellipsis in original)

The Seattle Times, reporting on the Obama family history in April
2008 when Obama was emerging as a frontrunner for the Democratic
Party presidential nomination, disclosed that the family separated
when Ann Dunham left Hawaii to enter the University of Washington in
Seattle. But the paper incorrectly pushed Ann Dunham’s relocation to
Seattle to 1962.

In the published article, Seattle Times staff reporter Jonathan
Martin wrote: “By 1962, Dunham had returned to Seattle as a single
mother, enrolling in the UW for spring quarter and living in an
apartment on Capital Hill.”

This version allows a few more months for the young mother to care
for her infant son while living yet with her husband in Hawaii.

On Oct. 21, 2008, the Seattle Weekly published yet a different
version of the story: “But [Ann Dunham] returned to live in Seattle
around 1962, after Barack was born in August 1961, leaving her
husband, Kenya-born Barack Sr., and his newborn namesake in Hawaii.”

The assumption in the Seattle Weekly story is that Ann Dunham left
the baby with her parents, Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham,
who ultimately raised the future president.

Nicole Brodeur, a Seattle Times staff columnist, interviewed Ann
Dunham’s high school “best friend” Maxine Box in February 2008.

According to this version, Box last saw Ann Dunham in 1961, “when
[Ann Dunham] visited Seattle on her way from Honolulu to
Massachusetts, where her then-husband was attending Harvard.”

Box also told the Seattle Times that Ann Dunham showed no interest in
baby-sitting when they were in college, suggesting she was surprised
when Dunham ended up pregnant only a year after graduating from
Mercer Island High School.

“[Dunham] felt she didn’t need to date or marry or have children,”
Box recalled for the Seattle Times interview published in March 2007.

Then, commenting on the birth of Barack Obama Jr., Box said, “I just
couldn’t imagine [Ann Dunham’s] life changing so quickly.”.

Unfortunately for Box, Barack Obama Sr. still was in Hawaii; he did
not leave for Harvard until the following year.

In an unusual video now removed from the Internet, Ann Dunham’s high
school friend Susan Blake also claimed Dunham visited Seattle in
August 1961 with her infant son. Blake said she changed the baby’s
diapers. The video is still noted and transcribed as footnote No. 21
in Ann Dunham’s Wikipedia entry.

What Ann Dunham was doing in Seattle immediately after her baby was
born is unclear, unless she was there to find an apartment so she
could start school in September 1961 at the University of Washington.

Others have speculated that perhaps Barack Obama Jr. was born in
Seattle, or possibly in Canada, allowing Dunham to be in Seattle
immediately after the future president’s birth without having to fly
from Hawaii to the mainland sometime between Aug. 4, 1961, when the
baby was born, and September 1961 when the fall term began at the
University of Washington.

Barack Obama Jr.’s babysitter in Seattle

Mary Toutonghi, according to an interview published in the Seattle
Chat Club blog, claimed to have baby-sat for the future president at
Dunham’s Seattle apartment in January and February 1962. The Toutongi
interview provides no information about Dunham arriving in Seattle to
begin classes in September 1961.

When asked why Dunham left her husband in Hawaii to come to Seattle
with her infant son, Toutongi explained Dunham told her that she and
the baby would be going to Kenya when she finished her education, as
she had promised her parents when she was married.

Toutongi also added Dunham’s explanation that her husband had an
obligation to his tribe to take another wife that was a full-blooded
Kenyan. Toutongi further commented, “I don’t think I could have been
that brave.”

In an interview with WND, Toutongi said she baby-sat for infant Obama
“for two or there months, when he was seven months old,” adding “it
was in the spring.”

Given Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, this would put the dates
Toutongi baby-sat infant Obama in February and March 1962.

“My daughter was 18 months old and she just had her 50th birthday
this year,” Toutongi recalled. “So, that would make the time around
February and March 1962.”

“Ann Dunham and the baby moved in while we were there,” she
remembered. “We managed the house and they had the rooms on the first
floor to the right, immediately above the garage. Each of the rooms
on that floor comprised a one-bedroom apartment. I can’t remember
when she moved in, but the baby was seven months old.”

“It was kind of weird, but she never told me why she abandoned her
husband,” she commented. “I don’t know if the courses she wanted were
here. I couldn’t figure out why she was here in Seattle while her
husband was in Hawaii.”

Did Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham ever live as man and wife?

WND has previously reported the birth notices for Barack Obama Jr.
that were published in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin
in 1961 do not provide solid proof of a birth in Hawaii because of
uncertainties over the policies and procedures used by the newspapers
at that time.

WND hired a private investigator in Hawaii to seek out neighbors who
lived in 1961 adjacent to 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, the address
listed in the newspaper published birth notices.

According to an affidavit filed with WND by the private investigator,
Beatrice Arakaki was a neighbor who has lived at her current
residence of 6075 Kalanianaole Highway from before 1961 to the
present.

Arakaki did not recall the Obama family living in the neighborhood,
and she was unaware of any young couple living at 6085 Kalanianaole
Highway that met the Obama family description.

If Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham lived at this address when Barack
Obama Jr. was born, the original long-form birth certificate should
confirm this address as the residence of the baby at birth.

The Hawaii short-form Certification of Live Birth lists no residence
address information.

Obama’s birth certificate is not the only document at issue. WND has
reported that among the documentation not yet available for Obama
includes his kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental
College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis,
Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly
articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records,
files from his years as an Illinois state senator, Illinois State Bar
Association records, any baptism records and his adoption records.

Case closed. Not only isn’t Barack Obama a citizen of the United States of America, he isn’t a citizen of planet earth. In fact, he doesn’t actually exist.

And to think that for only a hundred bucks a year you too can be privy to this kind of “deep analysis.” A bargain at any price.

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Spitting Out The Mouthpiece

by dday

Where oh where will I get my weekly dose of horrendously bad comedy now?

The Washington Post has brought down the curtain on “Mouthpiece Theater.”

Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli killed the satirical video series Wednesday after harsh criticism of a joke about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, which had prompted him to pull the latest episode from the paper’s Web site Friday night. The Post staffers who appeared in the videos, Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, agreed with the decision and apologized in separate interviews.

“I don’t think the series worked as they intended,” Brauchli said. “It was meant to be funny and insightful and translate the superb journalism Chris and Dana do in print and online into a new format.”

“Mouthpiece Theater” was designed as a sendup of pompous punditry, with Milbank, the paper’s Washington Sketch columnist, and Cillizza, a White House correspondent who writes The Fix blog, appearing with oversized pipes and smoking jackets.

Um, it wasn’t a sendup of anything. It was exactly what it looked like – bitchy, self-regarding gossip from two inside-the-Beltway Villagers who accurately translated their feelings of entitlement into video form. They weren’t sending up pompous punditry, they were EXHIBITING it.

By the way, you’ll be excited to know that Brauchli praised Milbank and Cillizza effusively and welcomed them back to work on their regular assignments of spouting conventional wisdom and producing Mean Girl low-rent Maureen Dowd ripoffs (which is quite a feat).

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