^Okay, the picture of a birth certificate is a piece of evidence. Let me just preface that I could care less where he was born or if he is a technically a citizen. I care a lot more about the other issues. Still, I haven't found any conclusive evidence either way. If the contrary evidence below didn't exist, I agree the birth certificate would be enough. However, I have seen contradictory evidence so at this point I cannot be confident in the truth. That doesn't mean I am politically biased, it means I make decisions based on the evidence I have, not faith.

How do you respond to this:

"According to Obama's Kenyan (paternal) grandmother, as well as his half-brother and half-sister, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya, not in Hawaii as the Democratic candidate for president claims. His grandmother bragged that her grandson is about to be President of the United States and is so proud because she was present DURING HIS BIRTH IN KENYA, in the delivery room.

A few months back, a birth certificate WAS posted on the internet which shows that Obama was born in Hawaii. Yet some say this birth certificate is a forgery and again, his grandmother states that she was present at the birth, in Kenya. So what is the truth?

One explanation is that Obama's mother Ann Dunham, flew to Kenya in 1961 with Obama's father to meet his family. According to some news reports, Ann Dunham, was not accepted well by her husband's family because she was white:

"Obama's family did not take to Stanley Ann Dunham Obama very well, because she was white, according to Sarah Obama. Shortly after she arrived in Kenya Stanley Ann decided to return to Hawaii because she later said, she did not like how Muslim men treated their wives in Kenya. However, because she was near term the airline would not let her fly until after the birth of her baby. Obama's grandmother said the baby—Barack Hussein Obama, Jr.—was born in Kenya and that shortly after he was born, Stanley Ann returned to Hawaii."

However, by the time she wanted to leave Kenya, it was during the late stages of her pregnancy. She was not able to board a plane because the airlines wouldn't allow women so close to birth to fly. It is instead believed, that Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya as his grandmother apparently stated. Then, after he was born, his mother returned with him to Hawaii where his birth was REGISTERED on or about August 8th, 1961, in the public records office in Hawaii.

There is also a discrepancy in what hospital Barack Hussein Obama was born in, even if he was born in Hawaii. Reports by his own sister in two separate interviews state that he was born at two different hospitals-- Kapiolani Hospital and Queens Hospital--in Honolulu."

The testimony of his grandmother or sisters could be falsified, but so could the birth certificate. Given the information presented here, how can one make an honest conclusion either way?

"Funny how many of the “proof” comes out forged or plain false? If it is so clear and logigal… why the need to forge things? Funny how these known forgeries are still used in school text books today?!"

Hoaxes are not made for the betterment of the theory, they are made for personal gain. The people who make them are intellectually dishonest and should never be scientists.

And as usual Ray Comfort has no idea what evolution is - his interviewees don't really understand it either.

>> ^Arg:
I'd be amazed if this man is capable of tying his own shoelaces.


I meet him and he is an intelligent, funny and likable guy. Of course you can mock and spout something about a person that you don't know instead of dealing with what he says.
Ben Stein was considered one of the smart guys before he decided to make his movie about Evolution. Now (even though he is not a Christian) he is mocked in similar fashion.
I was under the impression that this is a country where people can speak their mind and challenge thought?! Isn't that, an open discusion and reasoning, what makes sience worthwhile and lead to something?
Funny how nobody wants to talk about the things that Darwin said would have to fall into place to prove his theory. Funny how many of the “proof” comes out forged or plain false? If it is so clear and logigal… why the need to forge things? Funny how these known forgeries are still used in school text books today?!

Just to name a few:

Piltdown man: Found in a gravel pit in Sussex England in 1912, this fossil was considered by some sources to be the second most important fossil proving the evolution of man—until it was found to be a complete forgery 41 years later. The skull was found to be of modern age. The fragments had been chemically stained to give the appearance of age, and the teeth had been filed down!


Nebraska Man from the Illustrated London NewsNebraska man: A single tooth, discovered in Nebraska in 1922 grew an entire evolutionary link between man and monkey, until another identical tooth was found which was protruding from the jawbone of a wild pig.


Java man: Initially discovered by Dutchman Eugene Dubois in 1891, all that was found of this claimed originator of humans was a skullcap, three teeth and a femur. The femur was found 50 feet away from the original skullcap a full year later. For almost 30 years Dubois downplayed the Wadjak skulls (two undoubtedly human skulls found very close to his "missing link"). (source: Hank Hanegraaff, The Face That Demonstrates The Farce Of Evolution, [Word Publishing, Nashville, 1998], pp.50-52)


Orce man: Found in the southern Spanish town of Orce in 1982, and hailed as the oldest fossilized human remains ever found in Europe. One year later officials admitted the skull fragment was not human but probably came from a 4 month old donkey. Scientists had said the skull belonged to a 17 year old man who lived 900,000 to 1.6 million years ago, and even had very detail drawings done to represent what he would have looked like. (source: "Skull fragment may not be human", Knoxville News-Sentinel, 1983)


Neanderthal: Still synonymous with brutishness, the first Neanderthal remains were found in France in 1908. Considered to be ignorant, ape-like, stooped and knuckle-dragging, much of the evidence now suggests that Neanderthal was just as human as us, and his stooped appearance was because of arthritis and rickets. Neanderthals are now recognized as skilled hunters, believers in an after-life, and even skilled surgeons, as seen in one skeleton whose withered right arm had been amputated above the elbow. (source: "Upgrading Neanderthal Man", Time Magazine, May 17, 1971, Vol. 97, No. 20)

The theory of embryonic recapitulation asserts that the human fetus goes through various stages of its evolutionary history as it develops. Ernst Haeckel proposed this theory in the late 1860’s, promoting Darwin’s theory of evolution in Germany. He made detailed drawings of the embryonic development of eight different embryos in three stages of development, to bolster his claim. His work was hailed as a great development in the understanding of human evolution. A few years later his drawings were shown to have been fabricated, and the data manufactured. He blamed the artist for the discrepancies, without admitting that he was the artist. (source: Russell Grigg, "Fraud Rediscovered", Creation, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp.49-51)

Racism... sigh.

If you don't know how much the Chinese love to steal things it's probably that you haven't investigated the matter yet.

Ask any national security agency and they'll have volumes to say about Chinese military and industrial espionage. Not to mention the huge market in China that relies on nothing less than forgery to exist.

Yo, yo,yo I weave a tapestry strike rapidly and
magically
Alter battle rap habitats automatically
You back down, I change your background like
Photoshop
My oratory inventory's overstocked
I'm ripping the track, djs are enjoying it
'Cutting it up, and completely destroying it'
Ambidextrous, yo you must be on a deathwish
Stepping to this, I'm venemous I'll leave you
breathless
I spat words, waxed and taxed herbs
Your raps absurd, backs get fractured,
My crack a shell, bag your mademoiselle
Take the cake then I break like a bat out of hell
You fuck with Esoteric catch a capital L
Lock horns with 7L, son there's none parallel
You need a beat to flow to?
You're lucky if your said Hello to
Bitch-ass crab I thought I told you

'Known to be the master in the M.C. field'
'Make way, 'cause here I come'
'Known to be the master in the M.C. field'
'Cover every angle on the mic, I'm killin''

It's Esoteric kid, yeah that's whose spitting
Ask Lew dipping in the back, brew sipping
I spit hot shit when wack crew ripping
It even leaves the ink on your tattoo dripping
Crab cat talk about how your seeing gats
The only metal you hold is the one for being wack
The only battle you've been in is the one you
reinact
Talking trash from the back like a sneak attack
I'm strictly biz cause I'm going where Parrish
went
You ain't wack, you's a fucking embarrassment

I'm making sense like your last record's total
sales
I spoke in brail, you felt it so much
That you left with broken nails
When packing a jam, harrassing the fans for not
clapping their hands
Cuz you ain't dope you just a flash in the pan
Like coke to a crack dealer bagging a gram
I rock a fitted cap, can't deal with little
straps
Strictly big guns when it comes to ripping tracks
I ain't sweating sales, dub this for your crew
Cuz once they hear the rhymes they're gonna want
the cover too

Yo I take command crushing all my enemies,
breaking their hands
A giant avalanche quaking your fam
The mic killer, I bring doom ripping buffons
Rhymes expand like the womb in delivering rooms
Too gory, these kids split Whigs like a Tory
More importantly I bring the 4th degree of
sorcery
Orally, forgery authorities report to me
Quarterly, the way I corner borders be like
Normandy
I'm ornery, words turn, as your verse squirms
like an earthworm
First learn, churches burn as worlds turn
Predicaments, make your ligaments of no
significance
I'm speaking real words kid your speaking
ignorance
I must insist, it's tough to feel dissed
By a rap group I don't even know exists
What you maggots hope to say, could never serve
Shay
The only wax you put out was candles on your
birthday

I'll submit the lyrics below. Who is this song referring to? Bill O'Reilly? Dobbs? Rivera? Murdoch? Murdoch's sons? Maybe it is Stephen Colbert. I think this song and video are great. I guess I see more into it since I worked as a reporter for so long.

Dancing Choose-TV on the Radio

he's a WHAT? he's a WHAT?
he's a newspaper man
and he gets his best ideas
from a newspaper stand;
from his boots to his pants
to his comments and his rants
he knows that any little article will do!

though he expresses some confusion
bout his part in the plan,
and he can't understand
that he's not in command;
the decisions underwritten
by the cash in his hand
bought a sweater for
his weimariner too

now i'm no mad man,
but that's insanity
feast before famine,
and more before family
goes and shows up with
more bowls and more
cups and the riot for the
last hot meal erupts
corrupts his hard drive
through the leanest months
shells out the hard cash
for the sickest stunts;
on aftershave, on gasoline
he flips the page and turns
the scene

in my mind i'm drowning butterflies
broken dreams and alibis;
that's fine.
i've seen my palette blown
to monochrome-
hollow heart
clicks hollowtone,
it's time.

eye on authority,
thumb prints a forgery
boy, ain't it crazy what the
lights can do
for counterfeit community;
every opportunity
wasted as the space
between the flash tattoo

and the half-hearted hologram,
posed for the party
now he gloss full bleed
on a deaf dumb tree
cod liver dollar signs,
credit card autograph
down for the record
but not for freedom

angry young mannequin
american, apparently
still to the rhythm
better get to the back of me
can't stand the vision,
better tongue the anatomy
gold plated overhead,
blank transparency
in the days of old,
you were a nut
now you need three bumps
before you cut
not that i should care about,
nothing i ain't scared of, but
i guess you had
to
be
there.

in my mind i'm breeding butterflies,
broken dreams, and alibis
that's fine.
i've seen my palette
blown to monochrome
hollow heart
clicks hollowtone
in time.

i see you figured in your action pose
foam-injected axl rose,
life size
should something shake you
and you drop the news,
lord, just keep your dancing shoes
off mine

I'm not sure if that woman was one of them, but there's a section of the McCain base that believes the birth certificate provided by Obama is a forgery because a printed version was never presented - or something along those lines.

There's even a lawsuit in the works from Phillip Berg. He's the guy behind the Obamacrimes.com website. When the case is immediately thrown out of court and he's calling for appeal after appeal, it really shows how delusional people can be..

I'm sure this woman just hear hannity or limbaugh mention this though and now thinks it's seriously an issue.

good howto on forgery.

does seem like a fair amount of effort, in this case.
box of bolts, maybe 20-25 bucks, US?

lotsa' nice equipment he's got, though.
might as well put it to use!

>> ^Raverman:
If they can try to impeach clinton for a blowjob, How many Lies from the administration are needed before someone does something?


The thing is, they weren't under oath when they lied, because everybody in the Bush Administration refuses to testify under oath, even if it means ignoring a congressional subpoena. And only a few democratic congressmen have the balls to support handing out the proper punishment for refusing to testify, which is a contempt of congress citation. There are plenty of other grounds for impeachment, though.

I would NOT put MG in that category.

>> ^Throbbin:
Good point Rougy - where's MarineGunrock and QuantumMushroom when the tough questions are being asked?
You know they're reading this too...tails between their legs and all.

Oh man, Cheney went to the stupidest guy on Earth to commit forgery? Can't they just get an office in the white house to take care of that stuff?

^ Actually liberal blogs just laugh it off, this is purely the domain of the right-wing of the blogosphere. Obama's campaign hasn't even put the "forgery" portion of the myth up on fightthesmears.com.

I haven't seen this meme repeated by Fox News, even, which goes to show how crazy it is.

"a very few statistics..." LOL... GRAPHS that were pulled from a comprehensive paper that's linked in the main article. Take anything Constipational_Tootriate posts with a grain of salt. Not only is he apparently shilling for Milton Friedman (NAIRU, Chile, 1973?) but he also believes the deeply anti-semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion is legitimate, rather than the acknowledged forgery that it is.

Anyone who isn't of the Lizard-People/Jewish Conspiracy stripe should find the link in my previous post to be instructional.

I come from an upper-middle-class liberal suburban place pronounced Missour-EE within a red state called Missour-UH in the United States of Jesus. My high school had a very high percentage of children of professors at Washington University, and if you added up all the jews, blacks, asians, and mixed people, that was probably over 50%. My mother hails from UCC, which is probably the second most welcoming and nondogmatic of sect of Christianity behind Unitarian Universalism (Barack Obama is in UCC). My father was a woowoo evangelical. Some of my recollections on the subject of religion during childhood are:

1. In third grade, some kid started going around asking everybody, with a dichotomous intonation, "Are you Catholic, or Christian"? I suspect he was an evangelical. I don't recall giving any reply, but even at the time I had doubts due to the lack of any fulfillment of prayer. I had grown to distrust all adults and authority figures as a reasonable extension of my discovery, as a five or six year old, of Santa Claus, the first thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and many other lies. I had also grown to suspect something was terribly rotten in our society due to the cruelty of many homophobic bullies who called me names that weren't even true and the teachers who didn't care. Because of my alienation, I was not inclined to presuppose that the majority opinion was more likely to be correct.

2. Around this time, my (divorced remarried noncustodial) father also took me to see a faith-healer. I don't recall what he was trying to cure me of. He attended some crackpot semirural megachurch, and his business was "no money down" real-estate, another religion.

3. Within two years afterward my father was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for schizophrenia because he believed he could communicate directly with the spirits of Joan of Arc, Jesus, and other saints, and they told him to fight demons by committing arson. He later said the charges were trumped-up and unsuccessfully tried to get out with a religious freedom argument.

4. Teachers from sixth through twelfth grade stressed the importance of critical thinking and incorporated it into the curriculum.

5. In seventh grade, I recall being asked of my religious affiliation, and replying that I was sitting on the fence between agnosticism and atheism. There was no retribution or suprise or stigma. I was already an outcast and had nothing socially to lose, anyway. About a year prior I first acquired persistent unsupervised access to the internet, which I have had ever since. In the following two years I did quite a lot of research online and debating in online bulletin boards. This drew me closer to atheism by gaining a greater understanding of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology, etc. In other words, a greater understanding of how the world came to be the way it is. However, I would still call myself a teapot-agnostic.

6. In high school, I found a clique of atheists and agnostics. Shortly after 9/11, when the Missouri legislature enacted a bill that compelled schools to recite the pledge of allegiance at least once a week, some of my classmates and I openly expressed our disapproval on the grounds of separation of church and state. No gasps were heard. This was long before the Newdow case. When the Bible As/In Literature was taught in English class, several of my classmates and I expressed our disapproval again on the same grounds. In classroom discussions on that book, I recall many viewpoints being expressed with no great gasps of shock. I, the nerd, said openly that I thought the bible was a collection of fairy tales, poems, and forgeries, while the big football jock next to me expressed a predilection for biblical literalism in not so many words. I recall a very hot semi-orthodox Jewish girl who told me she would only date Jews.

I agreed with, or even said openly online, much of what is contained in the God Delusion, before the book was published. I suspect some others have had similar experiences. Not every consensus is a flock.


The ID movement, and the fact that every single suicide hijacker/bomber is faith-based, and the loosening of taboos by (e.g.) the Daily Show, have probably been three of the most important factors that led to the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. In Dawkins' case, the ID movement alone may have been the most important factor because of his biological profession. Hitchens tends to write books extremely quickly (averaging a book a year for the past 24 years), and it's very plausible that he began writing his after, and because of, the success of The God Delusion.

Most nonatheist people's comments on the Sift about Dawkins accuse him of being too shrill. Accusing one's opponent of too much enthusiasm (stridency, shrillness) is irrelevant to the subject matter of the debate. I personally find nothing unpleasant about Dawkins' manner of speech except his affinity for hooptedoodle. His grotesque description of the god of the old testament is spot-on. A book only appears strident in relation to one's perception of orthodoxy, and neither the orthodoxy nor one's perception of orthodoxy are necessarily correct. Rather, debate the substance of the issue. Neither Dawkins nor any of his followers is advocating curtailing the religious freedom of believers, so his opponents have nothing to fear but the holes in their theories.

MG: No no, fake is for youtube. Videosift is the real deal. It must be a REAL forgery.