Conservative Heritage Times

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I suppose pigs are flying loop-the-loops on this St. Patrick’s Day. They have to be. For Leonard Pitts, a hard-left columnist who’s never seen a federal power grab he didn’t like, now agrees Obama’s claimed power to execute Americans without a trial is wrong and should be opposed:

[I]t is inconceivable that the White House would claim the right to kill without at least presenting its evidence before a federal judge in a secret hearing. To eschew even that safeguard — there is precedent, in urgent cases, for a ruling to be handed down in hours or even minutes — is to set Obama up as potential judge, jury and executioner of every accused terrorist.

So where is the outrage? Had Bush claimed the right to kill American citizens without judicial oversight, the resulting cries of protest would have been audible on the moon.

Of course, Pitts is right – there would have been massive protests had Bush claimed such power. But, just as only Nixon could go to China, only Obama could nullify the Bill of Rights.

That’s how the central government works. Republicans provide “conservative” cover for big-government programs conservatives would object to, and Democrats provide “liberal” cover for programs liberals would oppose if a Republican sponsored them.

Richard Nixon implemented Affirmative Action. Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to illegal aliens. And George W. Bush pushed through No Child Left Behind, which nationalized the state-controlled schools.

Both parties assure us they must control us for our own good. Obama’s just doing what Democrats do best, and that is to expand DC’s power over us in the name of “social justice” and “democracy.”

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Oopsies! Looks like we’ve been fooled again – this time, by the new boss:

President Obama’s national health care law will cost $1.76 trillion over a decade, according to a new projection released today by the Congressional Budget Office, rather than the $940 billion forecast when it was signed into law.

Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.”

We’ve seen how Obama has been continuing the Bush regime’s policies of perpetual war and undermining the Bill of Rights. So it appears Obama is also continuing W’s policy of lying to the American people about the cost of war and socialized medicine.

Look for a Southern Poverty Law Center exposé about the Congressional Budget Office being staffed by kluxers. (They’re everywhere, you know.)

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Does the phrase “natural born citizen” require a President to have two citizen parents? This came up in a thread below, and since I think it is an issue of utmost importance to anyone who says they care about original intent, I have decided to post my rather long thoughts on the matter below. (I post it as is so look back to understand the context and what and who I am addressing.) I don’t really answer the question here, because I haven’t seen it decisively answered, but I offer a way to approach the question and what I think the most cautious consensus opinion should be. I would prefer people take up the issue under this stand alone threads so as not to clutter up this very important question with more stuff about the Trump debate.

Kirt and C Bowen, I don’t think a definitive case can be made about what the Founders intended, but I think a compelling case can be made. If a definitive case could be made then someone would have already made it. I’ve only looked into it superficially and asked people I trust. There was actually surprisingly little said about what they meant and intended. That is why so many people end up referring to a foreigner, Vattel. What I believe is that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that the person was supposed to have two citizen parents. As Kirt rightly points out, the issue is complicated by matters of history. They didn’t have all the apparatuses of state for recording citizenship back then that we have today nor hospital births nor easy mass travel etc. So people were generally assumed to be subjects of the place they resided unless they otherwise weren’t, meaning they still claimed allegiance to a foreign government/King, they were obvious temporary residents, etc. IMO, at a minimum, the person should be born of two parents neither of whom still legally technically owed allegiance to a foreign government. This IMO represents the most cautious default opinion. This should be the opinion that conservatives defend with a unified voice. I think the issue should be clarified with a Constitutional amendment, although I don’t think I would like the way that would likely go. I think requiring that the President be born of two citizen parents is a good and cautious policy. There is no right to be President and if the President were the minimalist position it ought to be, no reason to believe that we so desperately need to broaden the talent pool to include those otherwise born.

The problem is that very few conservatives initially even bothered to look at the issue from an original intent standpoint. Many just made arguments off the top of their head based on what felt right to them. Worse, many made definitive foot stomping arguments based on what felt right to them. This is true of both the birthers who foot stomped that being born on foreign soil, if true, was exclusionary, and anti-birthers who foot stomped that it wasn’t. I was guilty of this at first, because initially I argued that what was meant by natural born was “not naturalized” or “born a citizen,” essentially what Kirt says it means. In fact, I’m still of the opinion that a better case can be made for a child of two citizens born on foreign soil than can be made for someone born on US soil with one or two foreign parents. The birthers in general, there are exceptions I’m sure, generally didn’t latch on to the Obama is inedible regardless of where he was born argument until definitive proof he wasn’t born in HI seemed less and less likely to be forthcoming, which raised skepticism and decreased the credibility of the claim in the minds of many.

This is an issue of extreme current and future importance. If “natural born” means simply born a citizen, then Obama (assuming he was born in HI which I do), Jindal and Rubio are eligible. If natural born means something other than just born a citizen then Obama, Jindal and Rubio are not eligible. Since Rubio and Jindal are both talked up as potential VP nominees and future candidates and Obama is the current President who is seeking reelection, then I can’t understand how this could be viewed as an issue of little significance.

I don’t think there is a conspiracy of silence on the part of organized conservatism to not address the issue because they want to maintain the viability of Rubio (I believe this is what C Bowen is implying), although I think many do. That would imply more logic and forethought and organization than I have witnesses in this debate which I have been following closely from the start. As I said, I haven’t seen any kind of organization or a script or talking points. I’ve just seen a bunch of knuckleheads foot stomping and making definitive statements based on what felt right to them. I do think fear of birther taint has contributed significantly to this lack of a consensus. I also think that modern “conservatives” are just squeamish about making the argument because it seems anachronistic and harsh to them and might bring the dreaded r word charge. Birthers are partially at fault for their own taint associated with them because they weren’t cautious with their claims or their sources and brought discredit on themselves in many ways. But “reasonable” conservatives are guilty of letting their fear turn off their brains and silence them. Reasonable conservatives ought to be able to sift through the junk and figure out what is important. From the very beginning organized conservatism should have made the case in a unified voice that Obama is most likely ineligible because his alleged father was a transient foreign national. (The transient issue is potentially important because Obama’s alleged father wasn’t even here with the intent of becoming a citizen in the case that allegiance is the issue.) I’m as guilty here as anyone, because I didn’t make that case from the start, but at least I always had sense enough never to foot stomp and never to believe that his eligibility was determined by anything other than the original intent of the Constitution. By implication, organized conservatism should rule out Rubio and Jindal as potential VPs or Presidential candidates.

While I agree with Kirt that we are unlikely to overturn a popular election based on a preponderance of the evidence interpretation of the Constitution that contradicts the “current interpretation” so blatantly, to me this is also about what our unified voice should be. At a minimum, no one who calls himself a conservative or a Constitutionalist or anyone else for that matter should be able to simply assert the eligibility of Obama or Jindal or Rubio without being asked to back up that opinion with evidence regarding original intent.

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Dave Weigel addresses the Ralph Nader effort here.

Nader’s group won’t make the deadline.

“[Secretary of State] Bill Gardner switched the days on us,” Nader says. “He threatened to change the primary date after Nevada moved up its caucuses, and in the process, he moved up the filing deadline. So he’s pulled the rug out from under us — you think it’s late November, and all of a sudden it’s October 28.”

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People have long wondered how dependent Barack Obama has been on affirmative action.  Both in college and as president Obama’s writings and comments give the impression that he is in over his head.  There not only are the obvious gaffes (such as Obama stating the US has 57 states) but Obama seems to lack a basic understanding of English grammar.  Jack Cashill recently pointed out a letter Obama wrote to Harvard Law Review defending affirmative action:

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged.  In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

“Since the merits of the Law Review’s selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues,” wrote Obama, “I’d like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works.”

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that “merits … have.”  Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone.  He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times.  In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: “Approximately half of this first batch is chosen … the other half are selected … ”

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space.  Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:

“No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind.”  Huh?

The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama’s political philosophy.

“I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen’s extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.”

Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later.  Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.

Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose.  The phrase “our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer” would more profitably read, “we should focus on the employer.” “Concern” is simply the wrong word.

Scarier than Obama’s style, however, is his thinking.  A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would “even insinuate” that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.

And now the Washington Times reports on a new book, Obama Grammar: Using the President’s Bloopers to Improve Your English, by William Proctor:

Here comes “Obama Grammar: Using the President’s Bloopers to Improve Your English,” a new book that parses Mr. Obama’s command of the language, or lack thereof.

“The first wordsmith is, in fact, an occasional stem-winder who is grammatically challenged,” says author and Harvard-educated historian William Proctor, who pored over 3,000 pages of the president’s official speeches and remarks. He’s convinced that Americans — particularly students — can learn a little something from Mr. Obama.

“His speeches reveal that at this point, he is simply not in the same rhetorical-grammatical league as a Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan,” Mr. Proctor says. “Even as we explore Mr. Obama’s errors, we should not lapse into smug, finger-pointing complacency. His mistakes should serve as a reminder to the rest of us that we, too, may need to clean up our technical language skills.”

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The article I promised below is now up at EtherZone.

On Friday, American Spectator ran this feature article on the Obama/Ayers relationship. At the time of this writing it was up to 601 comments so clearly this relationship is of interest to many. First of all, I don’t really like these sorts of guilt by association articles. Yes, Ayers has done some bad things in his life. Yes, he associated with some bad people. And yes, he probably got off with less punishment than he otherwise would have because his family is politically connected. But I don’t like this guilt by association stuff because it comes off like a right-wing version of a SPLC smear. According to SPLC style reasoning, Conservative Candidate X somehow associated with some know wrongthinker, therefore he is evil. The sleaziness of this “logic” is obvious, so we shouldn’t copy it. The fact that Obama was closer to Ayers than he let on does not mean he supports bombing the Pentagon. 

If an outside the mainstream conservative is active in outside the mainstream conservative circles, he will almost invariably come in contact with people whose views he does not share and would not want associated with him. Likewise, anyone running in certain leftist circles in Chicago was bound to run into Ayers, not to mention the fact that he lived in the same neighborhood as Obama. It seems to me that one effect of this sort of guilt by association is to drive potential future candidates into the mainstream where they aren’t as likely to run into “unsavory” wrongthinkers that some wag is later going to throw up in their face. Is this something serious conservatives want to encourage? Does it serve our interests to copy and hence validate SPLC style reasoning?

What is important about the closer than reported Ayers/Obama relationship is not to imply that Obama condones violent activism. (He might have at one time, but that isn’t established simply by the fact that he knew Ayers better than he let on.) What is important is that his association with Ayers places him in circles that are likely farther left by degree than if he was hanging out with Mayor Daley for example. It also illustrates that he lied about the extent of that relationship.

It also strikes me that this sort of guilt by association (left and right) encourages people to be uncivil for the sake of protecting themselves. Is it not possible to have relationships and friendships with people with whom you disagree? Had Obama met Ayers at a Chicago cocktail party was he supposed to run the other way in order to protect his future political viability? What should matter is what Obama or Conservative Candidate X say they believe and what their records suggest they believe, not that they scrupulously avoided any association that might later be held against them.

All that said, the most striking thing about this article is what it does not mention about the Ayers/Obama relationship. It is a long, well documented article, but it fails to mention even in passing the explosive allegation that Ayers might have ghost-written Obama’s memoir. Surely Regnery was aware of this allegation. It would be impossible to research a long article like this and not be. So that suggests that the ghost-writing allegation was intentionally not mentioned. Why? Was the evidence examined and found wanting? (If that is the case, why not say that since the allegation is already out there and well known?) Or was it not mentioned so as to avoid any association with anything that might be considered conspiratorial? (For whatever reason, while the ghost-writing allegation is a separate issue and only ancillary related to the whole “birther” thing, it has nevertheless been largely subsumed under the “birther” umbrella.) I strongly suspect the later.

American Spectator gained prominence in the Clinton era as the primary outlet for the explosive Troopergate story, so AmSpec may retain a residual reputation as a magazine willing to broach the conspiratorial (It seems to based on a few of the comments.), but as far as I know since the Troopergate backlash AmSpec seems to have actually been reluctant to tackle the conspiratorial.

While I realize that individual blog posts and articles don’t necessarily reflect the editorial beliefs of the magazine, I can’t recall any posts or articles that were sympathetic to those who have doubts about, in one way or another, the Obama narrative, and I do recall some that were not sympathetic. Did AmSpec commision a forensic evaluation of the long form birth certificate upon its released? Has AmSpec addressed the Connecticut Social Security number issue? Have they addressed the fishy draft registration card? Have they addressed the authorship issues? I will be happy to stand corrected if I am wrong, but as far as I know they haven’t. And all these issues could be addressed without embracing “born in Kenya” orthodox birtherism. All these issue could be addressed as simple curiosity about a narrative that is clouded in mystery and secrecy, hardly something that would allow any fair-minded person to brand them as a conspiratorial rag.

Far from being a magazine that conspiracy mongers, I sense in the post-Troopergate AmSpec a magazine that actually scrupulously attempts to avoid the taint of conspiracy.  How else do you explain a four page article on the Obama/Ayers relationship that doesn’t even mention the 800 pound gorilla in the room, the ghost-writing allegation?

We already have a deliberately incurious mainstream media that looks the other way and actively covers for Obama. A primary role for “respectable” right-wing journalism ought to be to examine objectively those things the mainstream media is intentionally overlooking, not serve as fellow guardians of acceptable opinion.

One problem with the whole birther debate from the beginning is that it has been almost entirely hashed out by partisans on either side, a protective deliberately incurious look the other way mainstream media along with left-wing Obama hacks vs. convinced birthers in the “outside the mainstream” right-wing blogosphere. This is not a dynamic that favors getting to the truth. If AmSpec could get over their apparent conspiracy squeamishness then maybe they could play the role of objective seekers of truth that should normally be played by the “regular” press if we had a functioning one which we don’t. A good place to start would be examining the Dreams from My Father authorship controversy. Maybe that could be part two of the Regnery Ayers/Obama relationship expose.

Originally published at EtherZone.

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Newsmax has the story.

Consumer advocate and progressive liberal Ralph Nader said Thursday he will send a letter to a targeted group of 40 former university presidents, retired congressmen, progressive business leaders and civic activists and ask them to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.

“The pitch is this: Look, take six months off from your routine, form a slate, challenge Obama in the primaries,” Nader said on Fox News.

The letter will go out in “a few days,” he said.

“If he’s not challenged from the progressive liberal wing of his party that elected him, there’ll be a very dull campaign,” Nader said.

Read more…

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I wrote a post on this AmSpec article on the Obama/Ayers relationship, but it was long enough and substantial enough that I decided to turn it into a full-fledged article and submit it to EtherZone. I’ll post it in full here a day after it goes up at EtherZone.

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Jack Cashill has come across another example of Obama’s early writing that demonstrates further, as if any additional evidence is needed, that Obama did not write Dreams From My Father.

I really wish that PJ Foggy and Dr. Conspiracy and all the other prominent debunkers would come on here and state categorically that they think Obama wrote Dreams. I don’t think they’ll do it because I think they KNOW good and well he didn’t. They may be apologists, but they are not stupid.

Update: Lew Rockwell is running this story on his frong page today (1 Sep). This should bring it to the attention of a different set of readers.

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Is Mike Gravel the challenger Ralph Nader was alluding to? Gravel says he will challenge Obama if he can raise 1 million dollars.

Despite speculation that President Barack Obama will face a primary challenge from disaffected liberals in 2012, no candidate has emerged. That may be about to change.

“Somebody should challenge Obama, there’s no question about it. He is what he is, and it’s not what we want,” former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel said in an interview with The Daily Caller. “I’d be happy to do it, but it takes money. Without enough money to be heard, you come off as somewhat foolish.”

Gravel said he will challenge Obama if there is sufficient financial backing.

“If [supporters] would put up $1 million, I probably would run. And that would at least fund enough activity to get a message out,” Gravel said.

Read more…

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Ralph Nader says Obama is almost certainly going to have a primary challenger. See below. 

So let’s play guess the primary challenger.

My off the top of my head guess is Van Jones. I’ll explore and see if I can find a real rumor.

The winner, if there is one, gets an article posted on the main site, assuming it is reasonably within our editorial framework and not profane.

Start guessing.

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Ulsterman reports:

Nader made it clear that the president’s repeated failure of leadership is reason enough he should be challenged for the Democratic Party nomination…

Nader indicated ”another chapter” in the move to get a viable primary challenger to Barack Obama will unfold within the next week and a half.  Who that candidate might be is uncertain – but that President Obama will have to fight off at least one opponent for the Democratic Party nomination appears increasingly certain.

Read more…

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It seems a few people are still not convinced by my overpowering logic. Let’s try a thought experiment.

Let’s imagine, for the sake of the argument, that Patrick Henry is the ideal candidate to represent our philosophy and where we would like to see our country. Now imagine that our country has electorate A where Mitt Romney is the nominee of the perceived liberal party and Michelle Bachman is the nominee of the perceived conservative party. Further imagine that our country alternatively has electorate B where Ralph Nader is the nominee of the perceived conservative party and Mao is the nominee of the perceived liberal party. Now which electorate is more likely at some future time, all other things being equal, to elect Patrick Henry, the electorate that thinks Nader is a conservative or the electorate that thinks Romney is a liberal? Does it not then follow that the electorate who votes for Romney over Obama is more likely at some later date to vote for Patrick Henry than is the electorate that votes for Obama over Romney?

Admittedly I am using extremes to illustrate my point, and there is no controlling for unforseen circumstances like a catastrophic economic collapse, but it seems to me intuitive that an electorate that elects Obama does not bode as well for future progress as an electorate that elects Romney. An electorate that elects Obama (especially a second time after a disasterous first term) would make me not very optimistic about the future (not that I’m optimistic anyway).

If Obama wins a second term then that argues that there is already a structural advantage (largely demographic) built into the system that favors the Democrats. If Obama wins a second term I’m not sure a Republican (at least as we know them) ever wins another Presidential election. The Democrats’ demographic advantage is only getting worse.

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You can read my response to Walter’s post below in the comments. But I also want to direct our readers to a couple of articles to further illustrate why I think hoping for an Obama win, much less voting for him, is a bad idea. First see this article by Alex Kurtagic at AltRight. It addresses this issue specifically, and it is almost like Kurtagic and I are reading each other’s mind, but I didn’t plagiarize his article, I swear.

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World Net Daily has scheduled a press conference for tomorrow where they will announce their intent to sue Esquire Magazine over a satire Esquire published.

I am not a lawyer so I do not know the legal merits of the suit, but I do know that the article was bad satire. Good satire is subtle but obvious. The Esquire article was neither subtle nor obvious as evidenced by the fact that so many people mistook it for the truth, and also by the fact that Esquire had to issue an update to clarify that it was satire. The article does not read like satire. It reads like a mean-spirited vindictive liberal taking pleasure in the travails of his enemy, and that scenario should strike no one as unique. Ever watch Olbermann or Maddow?

Hopefully this press conference will give WND a chance to lay out some of the evidence that the long-form birth certificate the White House released is a forgery*, since the obvious question is “Didn’t a book entitled Where’s the Birth Certificate become a moot point after Obama released his long-form birth certificate?” Of course, the MSM should have had the birth certificate forensically analyzed immediately after it was released, but they didn’t, so this will hopefully nudge them to address the concerns.

*I do not dogmatically claim the long form is a forgery, but I have read some analysis that should make any fair-minded person wonder. What is needed is expert forensic examination, the type you would have in a high profile trial, of the scan the White House released and of the alleged original.

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As I mentioned in the post below, Jerome Corsi’s new book Where’s the Birth Certificate was released today. Corsi has a lot of radio interviews lined up. This is from his Facebook page:

Book in the stores tomorrow. If it becomes a bestseller, the Obama eligibility issue will not go away. I start radio with Sean Hannity tomorrow. We have two weeks of back-to-back radio already scheduled. Obama lied. He was not born in Hawaii. Starting tomorrow, I plan to tell the whole story.

This is from the linked article:

“With the unprecedented success of this book several weeks ago, reaching No. 1 at Amazon, I fully expected Obama, in desperation, to release a fraudulent document – and that’s exactly what he did,” said Corsi. “I was warned by excellent sources it was coming. And it’s not even a good forgery. I am prepared to tell all beginning today – not only about the birth certificate, but also to explain why even a birth on U.S. soil could not possibly qualify Obama for the presidency as a natural born citizen.”…

… Corsi’s first nationwide interview takes place on the Sean Hannity radio show this afternoon. He follows that up with appearances on hundreds of other radio and television shows.

“Obama tried to preempt this book with the release of a document he had been hiding with good reason for two-and-a-half years,” said Corsi. “However, he has done himself in by counting on a compliant media to simply accept it at face value as authentic. It is not. Now he will have to face the music for attempting to deceive the American public and defraud the Constitution he took an oath to uphold.”

On April 27, with great fanfare, Obama finally released his “birth certificate” after years of stonewalling, after spending a fortune on attorneys to block its release and defend against dozens of lawsuits brought by citizens wanting to see it, after claiming he had already released it and after ridiculing everybody who said he had not released it.

Yet a stunning Gallup Poll taken more than a week later (May 5-8) shows more than half of all Americans remain unconvinced Obama was born in the U.S.

Reportedly, the book also covers the original intent of the phrase “natural born citizen” and the Connecticut Social Security number issue.

Corsi makes the bold claim above that Obama was not born in Hawaii. Personally, I would not make that claim because even if his long form birth certificate is fraudulent, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t born in Hawaii. But on an issue where a lot of people make a lot of claims that are speculative or not accurate, Corsi has always been well informed and careful about what he says so maybe he has sufficient grounds to make that claim. Anyway, I wish Dr. Corsi great success with the sale of his book and hope he represents those of us with doubts about the Obama narrative well.

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From the end of the video, former chief of CIA Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer: “Both parties [Democrats and Republicans] love to intervene in other peoples’ business where there are no US interests at stake and where we spend enormous amounts of money at a time when we’re nearly bankrupt. That doesn’t seem to me to be a wise practice of American statesmanship.” Then the woman from CNN rudely cuts him off, hallucinating that the US isn’t bankrupt and US foreign policy is hunky-dory.

HT: RS

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From the AP:

Obama spoke shortly after the White House released a copy of the long form of his birth certificate, which contains more extensive data than a version released earlier.

The certificate says Obama was born to an American mother and Kenyan father, in Hawaii, which makes him eligible to hold the office of president. Obama released a standard short form before he was elected in 2008 but requested copies of his original birth certificate from Hawaii officials this week in hopes of quieting the controversy.

Until Wednesday, the White House had insisted that the short form certificate was the appropriate legal document confirming Obama’s birth and no further proof was needed.

The newly released certificate is signed by the delivery doctor, Obama’s mother and the local registrar. His mother, then 18, signed her name (Stanley) Ann Dunham Obama.

The form says Barack Hussein Obama II was born at 7:24 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, within the city limits of Honolulu.

There’s no mention of religion. It says his father, Barack Hussein Obama, age 25, was African and born in Kenya and his mother was Caucasian and born in Wichita, Kan. Obama’s mother and the doctor signed the certificate on Aug. 7 and 8.

Hawaii’s registrar certified the new photocopy of the document provided to the White House on April 25, 2011.

Hopefully the matter is at last closed, though Obama should have released this long form years ago…

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In order not to clutter up the site with multiple links only posts, I will combine some Ron Paul and Donald Trump related links of interest in a single post. My minimal commentary will follow some of the links.

Ron Paul gets a little love from The Hill. In the same blog post The Donald gets dissed.

Bussiness Insider also give Paul a little love and respect.

Public Policy Polling says we should take Paul seriously.

Politico has the story on Paul’s announcement. This story irked me a bit. It begins:

“Ron Paul will move one step closer to a long-shot presidential bid Tuesday, when he announces the formation of an exploratory committee in Iowa.”

Ron Paul’s campaign honestly is a “long-shot,” but it is poor form for the allegedly neutral Politico to inject that editorial description of the campaign into its story, especially in the first sentence.

Trump questions how Obama got into Harvard Law School. The reigning assumption of a lot of people including Trump (and Wayne Allyn Root who has harped on this issue a lot) seems to be that Obama is not disclosing his school records because his grades were poor, and this seems likely true, but I also think he may not want his school records revealed because they might reveal he attended school as a foreign student or have some other embarrassing information. So the focus shouldn’t just be on grades. That said, it is good that this issue is being brought up because it also focuses the attention of a lot of people on the unfairness of Affirmative Action. We do know that Obama graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law because that information is public, so he is no dummy, but he likely didn’t earn his way in.

Trump claims Obama’s birth certificate is missing. This is a bold and reckless, if not true, claim. Does Trump know something? The problem is Trump tends to shot from the hip. He says he has been “told.” Anyone else I would think they might know something. Trump I’m not so sure.

De Niro criticizes Trump. Trump fires back. As much as I appreciate Trump for having the balls to raise and pursue the birth certificate issue, he really is too thinned skinned for politics. Trump has a tendency to respond by going for the neck. For example his famous exchange with Rosie O’Donnell. Here he calls De Niro dumb. Trump’s handlers, if there can be such a thing, need to help him reign in this type of reaction.

HT: IPR, Lew Rockwell

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