The Birthers are at it again! You know. Those Rushista racists, crackpots, and sore losers convinced that Barack Obama was born in Mombassa, not Honolulu. You know. Those troglodytes who disbelieve the State of Hawai’i’s statement explaining its birth records access law and assuring inquiring minds that yes, indeedy, Mr. President was born there. Not satisfied, in March Florida Republican Rep Bill Posey introduced HR 1503, requiring all future presidential candidates to divvy up their bc to prove they are good ol’ amurkans. Unlike Obama.
Bill summary:
To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate, together with such other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility to the Office of President under the Constitution.
Now comes well-known crackpot Joe Farah, who runs the well-known crackpot World-Net Daily to up the ante. He’s offering $10,000 “to anyone who can provide persuasive evidence of involvement or presence at that birth – whether it took place in Hawaii or elsewhere.”
To collect the bounty, the “subject” must
1. Agree to an interview with WND journalists;
2. Provide persuasive evidence, such as pictures, documents or verifiable details;
3. Agree to a polygraph test
Individual Worldnet readers are also encouraged to donate to the reward fund to fatten up the kitty.
“Where’s the birth certificate” billboards are going up, too, and for $5.00 you can get your own “where’s the birth certificate” yard sign. Hmm, that’s an idea. No, on second thought….We want OUR birth certificates, not somebody else’s.
Unfortunately, Worldnet does not allow comments or it would have a big fat comment from Bastardette.
The Examiner.com posted its own article on the subject, $10,000 bounty for any witness to Obama’s birth, much of it taken from Worldnet, featuring a cute pic of Obama as an 8 something and more crackpottery from Farah. There’s also a bonus video of crackpot Alan Keyes yattering that Obama is a “radical communist, ” which is news to Bastardette. Every Marxist we know considers Obama a Bush-lite and whingy DINO.
This evening Bastardette sent the following comment off to The Examiner:
6,000,000 adopted persons in the US today are denied access to their own original birth certificates. Adoptees are routinely denied passports, pensions, government entitlements, driver’s licenses, professional certifications, security clearances, and other normal documents and government favors due to their lack of an original birth certificate. The “amended birth certificate–the state-forged document issued at the time of their adoption finalization that changes the name,parents’ names, and sometimes date and place of birth are rejected for the fake documents they are. I have yet to see birthers complain about this. But then, none of those adoptees is a president or candidate they loathe. If the birthers keep up their insane campaign and win, some of those 6,000,000 adoptees could be denied the opportunity to be president or any other elected position birthers decide is worthy of a birth certificate because the states of their births have sealed the birth records.
Ironically, birthers and their ilk are in the forefront of keeping birth certificates sealed. It really is amusing to hear the great birther whine about not being allowed to see someone else’s birth certificate, when adopted people aren’t allowed, under law, to see their own. Cry me a river, birthers. If Hawaiian adoptees can’t get their own birth certificates, why should you be allowed to get a perfect stranger’s?
That comment, with a small change, is identical to a comment I posted on Politico a few days ago earlier under Glenn Thrush’s Birther Republican running risks?. In fact, I’ve sent off boiler plate responses to birther rants in numerous newspapers and blogs and (surprise!) received the sounds of silence (and not my old friend) for my trouble.
With one exception: “Dr. Cathy,” who we assume is not a reading comprehension specialist, on Politico, (I’m only posting the relevant part. Go to Politco for the full bizarre remark):
Dr Cathy:
If as you adoptees claim above that you cannot get your hands on your adopted birth certificate, not your original, through your own admission, does this not point to the fact that 0bama is unable to produce his original birth certificate because it was sealed? Like yours are. And if his is sealed then would that not demonstrate that we was indeed legally adopted by his second father, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian citizen? If 0bama was adopted, as many believe he was, at the age of 4, he would have automatically acquired Indonesian citizenship according to the laws that govern Indonesia. If he was adopted after the age of five, Lolo would have had to outright adopt him, through Indonesian Court of Law, in order for him to receive any state benefit such as an education. His parents paid for his private elementary school education but he attended state run school before returning to the US. So, we know for a fact that he is a dual national – USA and British, and now, as evidenced by your own comments, he was adopted and his original birth certificate was sealed, then he also became an Indonesian citizen, right? So now he has three loyalties – British, Indonesian and USA. Hello?????? The constitution says “natural born” NOT tri national or even dual national or native citizen, but natural born. Why is this so difficult for many of you to comprehend? And why is it so damned difficult to get you, the press,
Unfortunately, comments are disabled after 3 days and I didn’t get around to replying. I’m sure the subject will come up again, though.
Who, however, really wants to get into a tiresome discussion on short and long form birth certificates, sealed records, raised seals, and who knows what other bureaucratic abominations, especially with crackpots who aren’t concerned that the birth certificates of 6.000,000 US citizens are confiscated by the government and replaced with forgeries. That 6,000,000 US citizens can be denied services that the non-adopted receive for the asking. That 6,000,000 US citizens with their degraded legal status are a ticking time bomb under the national security state that the birthers and their ilk have created over the last 60 years.
You’d think the idea that 6,000,000 US citizens being denied their own birth certificates would trigger some kind of “patriot” response as well…unAmerican. Oh, that’s right! None of us is a president they hate. Yet. What would happen if a bastard with sealed records ran for president? What would they say then? I guess it would depend on the bastard’s politics.
Since I first blogged about all this, I’ve got your *REAL* fake birth certificate right here, wingnut! Alan Keyes has come to the fore in this smear campaign.
He does so without the least bit of ironic understanding that the compulsory pregnancy movement he himself is such a part of has time and again argued in state legislature after state legislature that ‘records must be kept sealed to protect privacy.’
Apparently our State falsified birth certificates are just fine by Keyes and his anti-abortion buddies, but when it comes to Obama’s Birth certificate, Keyes and his ilk are perfectly willing to set aside their objection of political convience (that being the so called “mother’s privacy”) when it suits their political purposes.
For those of us who daily live these “issues,” the hyper-hypocrisy is plenty clear:
The Anti-abortion movement has been a key player in creating aspects of and maintaining the system of State falsified documentation that we as adopted people are forced to live under, yet when it suits their purposes, they gladly throw all their ‘justifications’ to the wind and demand ‘genuine’ documentation.
Maybe we should get signs that read, “Where’s MY birth certificate?”
Given all this talk about presidents, birth certificates, and adoption, I’m curious about Clinton. I know he was born with a different surname several months after his father’s death in a car accident, and only took his stepfather’s surname (Clinton) as a teenager. Does anyone know if Clinton was formally adopted by his stepfather? I don’t expect the normal secrecy provisions would apply to stepparent adoptions and he wasn’t a bastard (at least in that sense), but it would be interesting if adoption was actually involved.
If I didn’t know that the whole Obama birth certificate thing was an excuse to keep blathering about how his father was a scary and dangerous furr-inner, I would wonder why it was Obama’s origins that were questioned when Clinton was born under a different name and McCain was born in Panama.
Love the blog, btw. I’m from Ontario, and have greatly enjoyed your bits on our various lame disclosure laws, letters from crazy people, and our delusional privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian especially.
Unless the government is behind schedule and lying about it (pretty likely) those of us who sent in the applications right away on June 1 and are lucky enough not to be regarded as hyper-curious home-wreckers by our progenitors will get our original birth info either this week or next. Here’s hopin’.
James M– If I told you everything that I have heard about Clinton’s birth father, you would not only not believe me, but this website’s server would probably be impounded by the Feds.
OK, that’s a ludicrous overstatement… but to say the least there is controversy over who Clinton’s real father is. William Jefferson Blythe Jr conveniently died 3 months before Bill was born, thus escaping the question of where exactly he was in December 1945 when he was supposed to be impregnating Bill’s mom. The US Army says Blythe was in Italy at that time.
To make a long story short, some people think that Bill is either the son or grandson (through his mom, although that doesn’t quite make sense) of Winthrop Rockefeller, the former governor of Arkansas and eccentric heir to the Rockefeller dynasty.
But those kinds of things are old wives tales, and what do old wives know?
The allegation against Barack Obama is that his mother could not return to the US because airlines at the time would not carry a late term pregnant women to avoid births in flight. She is claimed to have given birth in Kenya and returned with the baby to Hawaii the next day. To anyone with common sense, this should not be a problem with citizenship. But curiously, this common sense does not apply to lesser persons than the president.
In 1989 a pregnant American woman visited Tijuana Mexico and gave birth. She returned with the baby to the US the next day and the baby was eventually adopted. At the age of 16, the girl, Stephanie Zizzo, applied for a US passport and was informed that she was not a citizen. She can’t travel without a passport, she cannot apply for immigration documents from within the United States, and dares not travel out of the country for fear that she will not be allowed back in. Being an illegal immigrant for 17 years counts as a point against her in any citizenship application. If she stays, she is in the category of persons facing deportation for the most trivial infraction of the law. A newspaper article is online at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20081020-9999-1n20adopt.html
Robert T McQuaid
Mattawa Ontario Canada
There have been several birth controversies involving presidents.
Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, to name two.
Then there was the late 19th century president who fathered an illegitimate child. Grover Cleveland.
As for Obama, well, being the son of US citizens makes him a US citizen — no matter where he was born.
Meanwhile, despite the minor questions about Obama’s origins, he knows the identities of his mother, his biological father, his step-father and a lot of other relatives scattered around the country and world.
Apparently there is no danger to the republic when the president has a chaotic family structure and knows many of the people in his family tree.
Based on the experiences of Clinton, Ford and Obama, we can have confidence that permitting people to know their full biological histories is unlikely to harm the nation or any of its citizens.
Posting bounties is the the surest sign that what you’re looking for doesn’t exist in the form you’re hoping to find. There is no surer bet, for instance, than OJ Simpson putting up a million dollars to find Nicole’s “real killer”. Or, during the campaign last year, the rumors that a huge bounty existed for a tape of Michele Obama calling white people “whitey”. Needless to say no tape ever showed up, nor has OJ had to part with his million.
If there exists a person with access to a document or other credible proof of the birther claims they could sell it to the Enquirer for a lot more money than world net is offering. Since a vigorous market exists that will pay handsomely, the bounty itself is nothing but a stunt. And, since the market exists and no one has stepped forth, the existence of such proof seems unlikely, and more so every day no one steps forth to claim the reward.
Anon Guy,
Why do people believe in stories like the one claiming Bill Clinton is a son of Winthrop Rockefeller?
It’s right up there with the nuttiness of claiming Bush, Cheney and the rest of the previous administration orchestrated 9/11.
These stories are amusing when they are not vile.
Loathing Barack Obama’s policies isn’t racism, it’s common sense.
To suggest racism is goofy. He’s bi-racial you know. To call him a Black man is to deny biology.
He actually is an African-American, when most cannot claim that designation!
I don’t know if BO was born in Hawaii or not. That’s why it is a fair request to see his original long form birth certificate.
Hawaii officials state such a birth certificate exists in their ‘vault’.
Obama also got a U.S. passport a few years ago, so presumably he came up with a real birth certificate for that.
Why can’t he release the one in his possession?
If you say it’s because he doesn’t have to, well then that answers why HR 1503 is being offered.
A presidential candidate should have to prove his eligibility.
All this red-herring argument about the unfairness of birth record access to the adopted is smokescreen.
But isn’t that sort of rhetorical technique mostly used when you are losing an argument?
Bastardette does not support Obama. Obama He could take a flying fuck off Mt. McKinley for all I care. New boss same as the old boss. Bush, Obama, McCain, Baldwin, Paul. They’re all the same.
Obama has nothing to do with adoptee rights. Anybody who thinks he might be on “our” side is deluding themselves. Even if he were, birth certs are a state issue. Obama screwed over queers. I hardly think bastards would fare any better.
How can the restoration of the right of adoptees to their own birth certs be a red herring? It has nothing do with Obama, but a lot to with the hypocracy of state-loving birthers who as a class promote sealed adoption records and secret adoptions. They want the right to a perfect stranger’s bc. We want the right to our own.No comment on that?
6 million adopted persons are denied access to their birth certificates and I don’t see any birthers complaining about that. As I wrote, adopted persons are routinely denied passports, security clearances, pensions, and drivers licenses due to their hinky state-forged bcs. International adoptees are being investigated, thrown in ICE camps, and even deported due to their hinky state-forged bcs. No complaints from birthers there. Of course not.
And where in the hell did race come into this? Bastard rights have no race, religion or creed We are bastards. We are all bastardized by the state you birthers love so much.
You asked, “And where in the hell did race come into this?”
I think it came in when you smeared those asking about Obama’s birth certificate as racists.
And you also called us, “troglodytes who disbelieve the State of Hawai’i’s statement explaining its birth records access law and assuring inquiring minds that yes, indeedy, Mr. President was born there.”
Actually they released a statement that an original birth certificate was on file, without further comment. By law they can’t. That is of course not the same as affirming a Hawaiian birth.
I can tell that you emotional about the denial of access to birth records for adopted children.
I empathize with that plight. Yet
I don’t see those problems as being insurmountable. Surely legislation can be created that preserves the privacy of a biological parent and still satisfies the procedural requirements of various government agencies.
Be that as it may, it is only tangentially related to the constitutional issue of the eligibility of presidents.
Good luck to you. Justice can be had…in finding the truth.