The Vetting of Barak Hussein Obama

[Ogopogo]

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/10/2 ... ended.html


Posted on Tuesday, 04.10.12
Posted on Tuesday, 04.10.12
About time a GOP politician defended Muslim faith
By Leonard Pitts Jr. The Miami Herald

By Leonard Pitts Jr.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com

Barack Obama himself has never had the guts to say it.

Indeed, while it is famously difficult to prove a negative, it seems apparent that few people in all of politics and media have had the guts to say it. Did John McCain ever say it? Did Rick Santorum or Bill O’Reilly?

So let us plant a little flag for, mark with a yellow highlighter, the thing Rep. Raul Labrador said Sunday on Meet The Press: that “it wouldn’t matter” if President Obama were a Muslim. And if it seems rather much to be handing out medals for such a modest statement of principle, well . . . the principle has been under fire for so long that even a modest statement feels momentous.

In recent years, public figures have made news for refuting (like McCain) or failing to refute (like Santorum) the canard that Obama is a follower of Islam. But outside of Colin Powell, who did so a few years back on Meet The Press, it is difficult to think of many — or any — who have dared to confront the notion implicit in the lie. Namely, that being a Muslim is incompatible with being an American.

This is taken by some as self-evident truth even as Muslim soldiers risk their lives on our battlefields, Muslim cops risk their lives on our streets, Muslim teachers teach our children, Muslim reporters report our news, Muslim politicians help to make our laws and Muslim Americans struggle against those who believe our sacred ideals cover other people, but not them.

Thus, a fleeting statement that should have been obvious to the point of mundanity feels instead like a water station in the Mojave.

Labrador is no fan of the president’s. His comment about Islam was made en route to a contention that Obama’s policies have “weakened” the nation. Labrador is a Republican and a conservative from a very Republican and conservative state, Idaho. It is his political and ideological kin who are most responsible for pushing — and believing — the Obama-as-Muslim narrative. All of which imbues his remark with a welcome patina of political courage and moral clarity.

Perhaps he would agree that what has historically weakened this nation at least as much as any policy the president has ever pursued is the tiresome notion that some of us are more American than the rest of us, that the “all” in “all men are created equal” refers only to those of the right gender, genus, sexual or political orientation or faith. It is an idea abhorrent to the aforementioned sacred ideals, yet one embraced eagerly in recent years by those who apparently feel bereft without someone to fear.

It is a shameful truth of American history that there has never been a shortage of someones to fear, nor of those who were willing to maximize and exploit that fear.

It is an equally shameful truth that Americans, in thrall to that fear, have committed grievous sins against both human rights and those sacred ideals.

And always, it begins with some false, implicit truth, some lie that gains such a foothold in the popular imagination, that becomes so pervasive and persuasive, no one even questions it anymore. Some, because they don’t think to; others, because they don’t dare to.

So someone says the German Americans are traitors, and let’s string that one up — and no one says a thing.

Someone says the Japanese Americans are spies, and let’s imprison them all behind barbed wire — and no one raises a cry.

And someone says all the Muslims are terrorists, and we must rid our nation of them by any means necessary — and one hears only the arias of the crickets.

It is in those complicit silences that we lose ourselves, that we betray our ideals and that mobs are born. So there is nothing modest about even a modest statement of principle. And one cannot help but be glad Labrador, being what he is, said what he said.

It’s about time someone did.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/10/2 ... rylink=cpy

[Julian]

Also penned by the sage journalist from the Miami Herald "Leonard Pitts Jr"!

GOP has embraced extremism as a virtue

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/07/2 ... sm-as.html


Leonard is the pitts alright.

[smallLliberal]

Also penned by the sage journalist from the Miami Herald "Leonard Pitts Jr"!

GOP has embraced extremism as a virtue

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/07/2 ... sm-as.html


Leonard is the pitts alright.

He is bang on!

This is completely true. Reagan would not be welcome in the GOP in 2012. He would be called a "centrist" and
appeaser" and his patriotism would be questioned.

It is sobering to realize that Ronald Reagan, patron saint of modern conservatism, would be unelectable by the standards thereof: He raised taxes and was known to compromise with political opponents — not “enemies” — to get things done.

I believe Reagan also condemned the NRA after he left office because of the Brady bill. Too bad he did not have the guts to do it while in office.

[Julian]

The Vetting - Exclusive: Obama Letter to Bell to Blurb 'Dreams from My Father'

Barack Obama’s association with radical Critical Race Theory professor Derrick Bell did not end after Harvard Law School--and certainly not at the April 24, 1990 rally at which Obama embraced Bell, literally and figuratively. Breitbart News has discovered a letter sent by Obama to Bell in February 1995 in which Obama asks Bell to review--and to blurb--an early version of Obama’s autobiography, then entitled Dreams of My Father.

The letter is preserved in the archives of New York University, to which Bell donated his papers. The archives--which are open to the public--include Bell’s papers from decades of research, writing, teaching, and speaking. The website for the archives lists some of Bell’s notable correspondents, but omits Obama. Though the archives do not permit full publication without permission of the copyright holder, some excerpts can be provided.

The letter, dated February 3, 1995, is on a letterhead from Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland, the civil rights law firm that hired Obama. Over two pages, Obama brings Bell up to date on his career in Chicago, mentions that he is using Bell’s textbook with his own students, and asks him for help in reviewing, and promoting, Dreams:

As for me, I’m keeping busy in Chicago. I’m currently working at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland here in Chicago, a small firm specializing in employment discrimination and voting rights/civil rights cases. I’m also teaching a seminar on race and the law at the University of Chicago law school -- your casebook has been an invaluable reference guide for that.

The main reason I’m writing to you, though, has to do with a book that I’ve been writing, on again, off again, for the past two years. Originally, the book (called Dreams of My Father) was going to be a series of essays on issues of race and class, but as it has evolved it’s become a memoir of my family and my experiences as an organizer in Chicago...

Your name came to mind as somebody whose insight I’ve always appreciated, so I’ve enclosed an advanced reader’s edition of the book. If you have time to read it and think it’s worth of a plug, I’d be thrilled...

If you own a copy of Dreams from My Father, you will not find a blurb from Bell on the back cover. That is because when Obama ascended to the national stage in 2004, and the book was reprinted, the publishers chose not to include it. But Bell did provide a blurb for the book’s first edition, which is a rare collectible today. The blurb reads:

Dreams from My Father is a beautifully written chronicle of a gifted young man marked and molded by a family whose love for him was as deep as its diversity was daunting. We hear in Barack Obama’s soaring book that survival demands resilience in the face of frustrated expectations, and that one’s committed opposition to the destructive tides of America’s obsession with color cultivates a vision of life that is nourished by struggle.

- Derrick Bell, author of Faces at the Bottom of the Well

By the time Obama reached out to him, Bell’s radicalism was well and widely known. He had just blurbed Louis Farrakhan’s book on black self-reliance, A Torchlight for America, and praised the Nation of Islam’s community education programs.

Clearly, Obama’s link to Bell was more than just a “hug,” but part of a sustained effort to align himself with the radical left--and to be seen by others as a legitimate radical--in the early stages of his public life.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government ... -My-Father

[Ogopogo]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/pos ... _blog.html

Posted at 05:06 PM ET, 05/03/2012
Department of Wrong Answers (Media Hype Division)
By Jonathan Bernstein

As far as I can tell, David Weigel isn’t being sarcastic when he answers his own question about the political press’s reaction to David Maraniss’s new book about Barack Obama:

So instead of being welcomed for what it is, Maraniss's book is going to be minded for "potentially game-changing" anecdotes. Yesterday's blow-up gave us an idea of what the conservative media will do with the book. Expect 10,000 or so versions of this story: "Why didn't liberal media vet Obama and find out about his ex-girlfriend's diary?" It's actually a fair question (one answer: David Maraniss is better than most reporters), because the media took a lot for granted about Obama's life.

Wrong answer! The correct answer to “Why didn’t liberal media vet Obama and find out about his ex-girlfriend’s diary” is: his ex-girlfriend’s diary tells us nothing about what Obama would be like as president, and was therefore was only of minor relevance to the human interest portions.

Similarly, Politico’s Glenn Thrush and Dylan Byers are wrong when they claim that the Maraniss book is “a dangerous book for Obama,” although they certainly could be correct that the White House is (foolishly) worried about it.

There’s a Republican-driven idea out there, one Sarah Palin is big on repeating, that Barack Obama wasn’t fully vetted by the press in 2008. It’s preposterous. The truth is that Obama has been the mainstream Democrat he ran as, and I’d guess that it’s very difficult to tie whatever idiosyncrasies he’s had within that to anything in particular about his personal history, and certainly not anything we didn’t know about in November 2008.

And as far as the 2012 election, it’s highly unlikely that anything new unearthed about Obama’s life before January 2009 will change anyone’s vote. People are going to vote on how he’s behaved in office, or at least the results they’ll attribute to him; they’re not voting on his life story. As political scientist Richard Skinner tweeted, “3 yrs into presidency, hard 2 see any revelation about his youth changing BO's image much.”

The bottom line, however, is that there’s plenty of stuff about Barack Obama’s presidency and his plans for a second term that the press could usefully report on. Anything that we’re going to learn about his life before then might be interesting, but doesn’t really have anything to do with the choice voters will be making this fall.

By Jonathan Bernstein | 05:06 PM ET, 05/03/2012

[Julian]

FORGERY-GATE

Feds destroyed evidence on Obama's draft registration?

Rules changed 4 days after Sheriff Joe announced probe

(WASHINGTON TIMES) WASHINGTON, May 7, 2012 — Changes in the wording of Selective Service System record-keeping requirements, made days after the opening of an investigation into the alleged forgery of President Barack Obama’s selective service registration form, raise serious questions about U.S. Government intentions.

The new rules allow existing copies of documents that may be sought by investigators to be destroyed.

The Selective Service System’s new privacy rules were published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, September 20, 2011, four days after the September 16 announcement by World Net Daily that the Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff’s Office “Cold Case Posse” was opening an inquiry with full subpoena power into alleged forgery of several documents concerning Obama’s birth and draft registration.

More: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/ ... raft-card/

[Julian]

FORGERY-GATE
1991 Obama was stamped 'Born in Kenya'

Literary agent’s bio describes him as African, ‘raised in Indonesia and Hawaii'



A literary agent’s promotional brochure from two decades ago declares Barack Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii,” according to Breitbart News.

The brochure was created by Acton & Dystel, which was promoting Obama as the author of the never-produced “Journeys in Black and White.”

The report says the biography was dispatched to “business colleagues” in the publishing industry.

The text of the biography states:

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.”

Breitbart News published a disclaimer at the beginning of its report stating its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, was never a “Birther” and Breitbart News “has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism.’” Breitbart himself once characterized Obama’s eligibility as “not a winning issue.”

Nevertheless, the biography is one of numerous published reports as well as personal claims that Obama was born abroad, including the recent testimony of a Chicago-area postal worker who reported he was told by the parents of Bill Ayers that Obama was a foreigner.

The Breitbart report says Acton no longer represents Obama, who later published “Dreams from My Father.” Breitbart News describes the entire Acton booklet as being 36 pages long, printed in blue ink using offset lithography.

“It purports to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Acton & Dystel, which was founded in 1976,” the report said.

Breitbart said Dystel still lists Obama as a client, and Miriam Goderich, now Dystel’s partner, was listed as the editor of the brochure. Breitbart says it tried to reach Goderich, without success.

“The parade of authors alongside Obama in the booklet includes politicians, such as former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill; sports legends, such as Joe Montana and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; and numerous Hollywood celebrities. The reverse side of the page that features Barack Obama includes former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and early-1990s ‘boy band’ pop sensation New Kids On the Block,” the report says.

Acton told Breitbart that almost none of the biographies was written by the person promoted.

“Regardless of the reason for Obama’s odd biography, the Acton & Dystel booklet raises new questions as part of ongoing efforts to understand Barack Obama – who, despite four years in office remains a mystery to many Americans, thanks to the mainstream media,” the report says.

Meanwhile, Allen Hulton, a retired Chicago-area mailman, has come forward with his first-person recollection of a clean-cut young man he identified as Obama who approached him and told him he was going to be president.

Allen Hulton (WND photo)

Hulton delivered mail to Tom and Mary Ayers in a Chicago suburb in the late 1980s and early 1990s and claims to have met Obama in front of the Ayers home.

He has given a sworn affidavit to investigators commissioned by Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio to determine whether Obama is eligible for Arizona’s 2012 election ballot. Hulton has recorded about three hours of video interviews with WND.

Hulton says that in conversations with Mary Ayers while on his route he learned of the couple’s enthusiasm and support for a black foreign student. One bright, warm Chicagoland day, he recounts, he met the student who fit Mary Ayers’ description in front of the Ayers home in Glen Ellyn, Ill. That young man, Hulton is convinced, was Barack Obama.

Hulton delivered mail to the Ayers, who are both deceased, when he was stationed at the post office in Glen Ellyn, an upper-middle class suburb 25 miles west of downtown Chicago, from late 1986 to 1997. He was a Postal Service employee from March 28, 1962, through March 30, 2001.

As WND reported, Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers – whom he dismissed in a 2008 debate as “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood” – plagued him in the 2008 presidential campaign and could resurface in this year’s election, as many questions remain.

Young Obama

Over a period of years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hulton estimates he spoke with Mary Ayers about 18 to 20 times and once to Tom Ayers, who died in 2007. Mary Ayers died in 2000.

“Sometimes Mary would be out when I delivered the mail, and we would exchange a few words on occasion,” he says, recalling that she liked to talk about her family.

“One day, Mary came to the door when I came up to the house with the mail,” he remembers. “After a greeting, she started enthusiastically talking to me about this young black student they were helping out, and she referred to him as a foreign student.”

Hulton assumed that by “helping” the student, Mary Ayers meant she and her husband were financially supporting the black foreign-exchange student with his education.

See excerpts of Jerome Corsi’s interviews with Allen Hulton:

He says that Mary Ayers told him the student’s name, but that it was a “strange name” that he could not remember, even though at the time it sounded African to him.

“I was taken aback by how enthusiastic she was about him,” Hulton says. “And I believe she said he was from either Kenya or Indonesia, and I favor Indonesia in my recollection.”

WND has reported that when Obama was in Indonesia with his Indonesian stepfather and his mother from ages 6 to 10, he was registered in school as an Indonesian citizen and a Muslim. He went by the name Barry Soetoro, adopting the surname of his Indonesian stepfather. His mother’s passport listed him with the surname Soebarkah.

‘I’m going to be president of the United States’

About a year after discussing with Mary Ayers the foreign student she and her husband were supporting, Hulton recalls meeting a young black male on the sidewalk in front of the Ayers home.

Hulton describes the man as being in his early 20s, noting that he was tall, thin, had a light complexion and that his ears stuck out.

“He greeted me,” Hulton says. “He was very polite, dressed nicely, but informally – slacks and a dress shirt – and he spoke with no accent. Immediately this young black man entered into conversation with me. He told me he had taken the train out from Chicago and had come to thank the Ayers family personally for having helped him with his education.”

Hulton remembers asking the young man what his plans were for the future.

“He looked right at me and told me he was going to be president of the United States,” Hulton says.

“There was a little bit of a grin on his face when he said it – he sounded sure of himself, but not arrogant. I know how people will say things because they have an ambition, but it did not come across that way,” Hulton says. “It came across as if this young black male was telling me he was going to be president, almost as if it were the statement of a scientific fact that had already been determined, as if his being president had been already pre-arranged.”

There also was an internal bulletin from the Kenyan National Security Intelligence Service, or NSIS, that states that the Kenyan government in 2009 commissioned a cultural museum in the Obama home village of Kogelo to honor the “birthplace of President Barack Obama” and rededicate the tomb of his father, Barack Obama Sr.

The 2009 NSIS bulletin report said:

The ministry of national heritage this month hosted a cultural festival in Kogelo and commissioned a cultural museum on a plot donated by a member of the Kogelo community. The cultural festival was attended by the minister for national heritage, William ole Ntimama and U.S. ambassador, Michael Ranneberger.

This was to honour the birthplace of President Obama and re-dedicate the tomb of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., the president’s late father. But the project had been delayed because of ownership wrangles surrounding the plot.

According to an article in the Kenyan Daily Nation newspaper July 5, 2010, the Kenyan government’s plans to build a 112 million Kenyan Schilling ($1.3 million) cultural center at Kogelo was locked in a dispute over who should donate land to the government for the project.

The Daily Nation, which published an artist’s sketch of the proposed Kogelo cultural center, referred to it as Obama’s “ancestral home.”

The NSIS memo suggests the Kenyan intelligence agency kept a close watch on the Obama family in Africa.

It noted the Kenyan government provided assistance to Obama’s step-grandmother, Sarah Hussein Obama, in the form of additional security and a government stipend of 50,000 Kenyan Schillings ($575) per month.

A Kenyan blog, “Jaluo,” reported that Grandmother Sarah caused family conflict when she visited Moammar Gadhafi in Libya “to the surprise and chagrins of the White House in Washington, D.C.,” and “without a proper delegation and approval of the entire family.”

The NSIS bulletin echoed the concern that Sarah Obama was visiting Muslim countries on her own initiative, commenting, “Mama Sarah had requested government assistance to travel to Mecca, Saudi Arabia for Hajj pilgrimage,” but “the Saudi Arabia government through its Nairobi embassy has come to her aid” by announcing “she will be a state guest in Saudi Arabia during her time there.”

WND also reported Kenyan MP James Orengo at one point asked the nation’s parliament, “How could a young man born here in Kenya, who is not even a native American, become the president of America?”

On the day after Obama’s election, MP Boni Khalwale asked fellow members, “Could we allow … a Motion for Adjournment so that we could also continue the celebrations of having a Kenyan ruling the USA?”

In addition, a number of media sources – including National Public Radio – reported Obama’s birthplace as Kenya prior to his election as president.

Another reference was made in 2008 in the Nigerian Observer.

Under a Washington dateline, Solomon Asowata wrote, “Americans will today go to the polls to elect their next president with Democratic Party candidate, Senator Barack Obama largely favoured to win. The Kenyan-born Senator will, however, face a stiff competition from his Republican counterpart.”



An African Travel Magazine once reported, “As Kenyan born U.S. Senator Barack Obama jets into Kenya today as part of his African tour, concerns have once again been raised on the security preparations for other visitors and residents.”

An article in the Sunday Standard in Kenya begins, “Kenyan-born US Senate hopeful, Barrack (sic) Obama, appeared set to take over the Illinois Senate seat after his main rival, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race on Friday night amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations.”

The article is credited to the wire service Associated Press. However, it could not be found either in the AP archives online or the African newspaper’s website.

Also, an African news site and an MSNBC broadcaster referred to President Obama’s birthplace as being outside of the United States.

A report by Modern Ghana posted in advance of the president’s visit stated his birthplace was on the continent of Africa.

“For Ghana, Obama’s visit will be a celebration of another milestone in African history as it hosts the first-ever African-American President on this presidential visit to the continent of his birth,” the report said.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/revealed-bio ... irthplace/

[Julian]

Wright says Obama considered himself Muslim

Fox News host Sean Hannity: Here is author Ed Klein. We will do what the mainstream media will not do, we will play the tapes of his recent interview with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

KLEIN: Do you think he ever thought of himself as Muslim?

WRIGHT: Yes. …

HANNITY: What do you think of that?

KLEIN: Well, I was very interested in another part of that, as well, which is, when I asked the Reverend Wright about this whole question of Islam and Christianity, he said, “Well, you know, Barack Obama was steeped in Islam. He knew a lot about Islam from his childhood. But he knew very little about Christianity. And I made it easy for him to feel not guilty about learning about Christianity without turning his back on his Islamic friends.”

http://www.worldnewstribune.com/2012/05 ... lf-muslim/

[Julian]

Obama Caught Lying Again: He Was Member of Socialist 'New Party,' Says Kurtz

Barack Obama was, in fact, a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s and sought its endorsement for the Illinois senate--contrary to the misrepresentations of Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, and in spite of the efforts of Politico's Ben Smith to quash the story. Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (2010), has released new "smoking gun" evidence at National Review Online. It is evidence that the mainstream media can no longer ignore--and Obama can no longer deny.

more: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government ... Says-Kurtz

[Julian]

Investigator: Foreigners bought Hawaii birth certificates

'A Mafia operation was run in the early infancy of the state'



The lead investigator for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse – which already has found probable cause that Barack Obama’s publicly released birth certificate is a forgery – says any Hawaii documentation for Obama’s birth that exists would probably be of little value.

Mike Zullo, a retired New Jersey detective now heading Arpaio’s volunteer investigative team, explained in an interview that at the time of Obama’s birth during the state’s early years, Hawaii birth documentation routinely was purchased by foreigners for children not born in the state.

Arpaio’s investigation was launched last September after constituents came to the sheriff with their concern that Obama was ineligible for the presidency and would perpetrate a fraud by placing his name on the state’s ballot.

Zullo’s comments came in an interview with Tea Party Power Hour host Mark Gillar.

Gillar described the process in the 1960s: Foreign nationals, primarily from Japan, would fly to Hawaii and buy a birth registration for their son or daughter, not with the goal of one day having them become president, but to obtain the benefits of being a U.S. citizen.

Zullo said that when he was in Hawaii last month following up on leads, he talked to older locals who “informed us about a syndicate operation, a Mafia operation if you will, being run in the early infancy of the state of Hawaii where birth certificates were being sold to Japanese refugees on a black market basis.”

Does anyone really know where Obama is from? Find out the startling truth from New York Times best-selling author Jerome Corsi.

At that time, Japan was still undergoing post-war reconstruction while America was an established superpower.

Zullo said there was a business in Hawaii in “birth certificates … for profit.”

Obama released an image of a Hawaiian birth certificate last year as “proof positive” of his birth in the U.S. and “natural born” citizenship, a constitutional requirement for the presidency.

There have been numerous challenges to Obama’s eligibility. Some say that regardless of where he was born, he isn’t qualified because the Founding Fathers understood a natural-born citizen to be the offspring of two U.S. citizens. Obama’s father was a foreign national who only attended school in the U.S.

Zullo also debunked again the contention that 1961 newspaper birth announcements prove anything. He argued the listings were generated automatically by the state and delivered for publication based on the registration of any child with the state.

“Anybody that is hanging their hat on a newspaper entry to prove … Barack Obama [was] born in the state of Hawaii doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” he said.

The births of Japanese children whose parents purchased Hawaii birth certificates also would be listed in the papers, he explained.

During that time period, Japanese parents would fly to Hawaii so their children, born in Japan, could have the benefits of American citizenship, he said.

For that reason, he said, Obama can’t claim that a Hawaii birth certificate is proof he was born in the state.

The interview: (video at the link)

The interview also addressed unanswered questions about the “discovery” of the Obama birth documentation. Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie, when elected, promised to track down the documentation to put to rest the arguments over Obama’s birth location and eligibility.

The governor eventually concluded, in January 2011, that there was something “written” in state records, but he was unable to produce any documents to the public.

Then, when Obama requested a certified copy of the original documentation three months later, state officials reportedly produced the documentation.

Abercrombie is no longer eager to address the issue.

Earlier this week, WND tried to find out what happened to the governor’s self-initiated research into Obama’s birth documentation.

Initially, Abercrombie spokeswoman Donalyn Delacruz told WND she was happy to help with questions – until she found out the subject.

When WND asked in an email for an explanation of why Abercrombie’s investigation could not turn up the documentation, she refused to answer.

“What news organization are you with?” she demanded. “We get frequent ‘birther’ questions and this would fall in that category.”

Subsequently, she refused to respond to email questions.

When WND called, a receptionist in the office responded to the same inquiry with “That’s been done” – apparently meaning president had released the birth certification image. But she promised to take a message and have someone call back.

No one did.

WND had questions about the anomalous results: The governor’s stated inability to find the documentation and the state agency’s later simple recovery and alleged duplication of the same record.

It was shortly after his election that Abercrombie vowed to end the questions from those who doubted Obama’s status as a “natural born citizen.”

Stated Abercrombie then: “We’ll do what we can as quickly as we can to make it inevitable that only those who wish the president ill, only the ones with a political agenda, will be the ones doing this kind of thing.

“The president is entitled to the respect of his office and he’s entitled to have his mother and father respected,” he said.

He said he was instructing his attorney general and the chief of the state’s health agency to look at what legal avenues could be used to release information.

“This is a transparent state in terms of our communication with one another,” Abercrombie said. “This is the Aloha state. We care for each other, we look out for each other, we’re family.”

He told CNN in that interview that he would pursue the information regardless of the feelings of the White House.

“It’s a matter of principle with me. I knew his mom and dad. I was here when he was born. Anybody who wants to ask a question honestly could have had their answer already,” he announced.

Obama’s narrative states that he was born Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu.

However, after a flurry of high-profile media interviews in which he blasted “birthers,” Abercrombie suddenly went silent even though polls reveal nearly six on 10 doubt Obama’s own eligibility story.

He told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about Obama’s documentation: “It actually exists in the archives, written down.” The London Daily Mail, however, noted Abercrombie “suggested that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate for Barack Obama may not exist within the vital records maintained by the Hawaii Department of Health.”

Yet, when Obama wanted the records, the state instantly waived a ban on reproducing long-form birth certificates and copies were produced to be delivered to Judith Corley, a private attorney.

WND continues to report on multiple legal challenges to Obama over his status as a “natural born citizen.” The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

Some of the lawsuits question whether Obama actually was born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama’s American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.

Other challenges have focused on Obama’s citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Further, others contend it’s impossible for him to be considered a “natural born citizen” as his father was a foreign national.

Among the various campaigns raising questions about Obama’s past:

There’s a campaign to raise funds to pay the expenses of the Cold Case Posse assigned by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to look into the validity of Obama’s records. This is the team that already said there is probable cause that the birth document is a forgery.

There’s the complete findings documented by the Cold Case Posse.

There’s the “Your Papers, Please?” edition of the Whistleblower, the explanation for why there have been dozens of lawsuits over the issue, and why millions of Americans want Obama to prove he’s constitutionally qualified to be president.

There’s a campaign to post billboards, reminding Americans just what they don’t know about Obama.

There’s a petition to Congress seeks help from that body of leaders in resolving the question over Obama’s eligibility to be president.

There’s a “Birther on Board!” bumper sticker to raise awareness.

There’s the “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” book by Jerome Corsi, detailing the evidence that exists – and explaining what’s still missing.

There’s a light look at the issue, from Molotov Mitchell, in his DVD “For the Record: I’m Not Crazy.”

There are yard and rally signs to let people know what hasn’t been documented by Obama.

A stylish T-shirt allows you even to wear the question.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/06/investigator ... tificates/

[Julian]

Obama's Social Security Number challenged

If Barack Obama has an immediate eligibility problem, it is more likely to derive from the Social Security Number he has been using for the last 25 years than from his birth certificate.

Ohio private investigator Susan Daniels has seen to that. On Monday, July 2, she filed suit in Geauga County (Ohio) Common Pleas Court demanding that Jon Husted, Ohio secretary of state, remove Obama’s name from the ballot until Obama can prove the validity of his Social Security Number.

Daniels, who has vetted thousands of Social Security Numbers for numerous other clients, has done her homework. In her filing, she thoroughly documents her contention “that Barack Obama has repeatedly, consistently, and with intent misrepresented himself by using a fraudulently obtained Social Security Number.”

To acquire appropriate standing in court, Daniels has gone to the trouble of establishing herself as a valid write-in candidate for president. Before she is through, this 70-something mother of seven, who has been a licensed Ohio PI since 1995, may cause Obama more trouble than the Romney campaign.

Daniels started her investigation in August 2009. Given her profession, she has been able to access a variety of proprietary databases. What she learned without much trouble is that Obama has been using a Social Security Number with the prefix “042″ since 1986.

As she discovered, the “042″ number is reserved for the exclusive use of individuals who register in Connecticut. When she ran 10 sequential numbers before and after Obama’s, all returned with the documentation “issued 1977-1979 in CT.”

When Daniels ran the numbers immediately flanking Obama’s, she came to the firm conviction that Obama’s number was issued in March 1977 in Connecticut.

By all accounts, as Daniels thoroughly documents, Obama was then a 15-year-old living in Hawaii. There is no record of him even visiting Connecticut in or near this time frame.

To have gotten a Social Security card at this time Obama would have had to show up for a “mandatory in-person interview.” This could not have taken place in Connecticut. Obama’s sister, Maya, by contrast, uses a number appropriate for a Hawaiian resident.

Daniels checked other databases as well to validate her findings, including the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles and the IRS. Yes, Obama used the 042 number to get a driver’s license when at Harvard and as recently as on his 2009 income tax return.

In her research, Daniels kept coming across what she calls a “marked anomaly,” one she had never seen before – multiple birthdates listed for the same person. The 08/04/1961 and 04/08/1961 variation made sense, but the frequent appearance of the year “1890″ did not.

The ample evidence Daniels gathered led her to believe that the 042 number Obama has been using “had previously been issued to another person,” one who lived in Connecticut between 1977 and 1979 and who was born in 1890.

This assertion can be verified. By law, the Social Security Administration will have kept on microfilm a copy of the original SS-5 application attached to a particular Social Security Number. Daniels, however, does not have access to that microfilm.

For this reason, Daniels has filed suit. “Defendant Husted, through this filing,” she argues, “has been made aware that the Democratic Candidate has been using a fraudulent Social Security Number, which would render Barack Obama ineligible under both the Ohio and U.S. Constitutions.”

Daniels asks the court, among other things, to issue an injunction against Obama’s name appearing on ballot until it is determined that he is using a proper Social Security Number.

Given the response of courts elsewhere, it is unlikely that Daniels will find satisfaction in Geauga County or from the Republican secretary of state.

What Daniels has done, however, is establish a paper trail so indisputably legitimate that even the most squeamish of conservative media will have a hard time finding fault.

The major media, of course, will not bother to look. It is up to our Beltway brethren to step up and ask some very basic questions of the president that they, through their timidity in 2008, helped elect. The Romney campaign cannot talk about this issue without their support.

Video at the link: http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/obamas-socia ... hallenged/

[Julian]

Immigration officers doubted Obama birth story

INS was prepared to investigate marriage, paternity in 1961

NEW YORK – Immigration documents filed in 1961 cast doubt on whether Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was the president’s biological father and indicate federal officers were prepared to investigate whether the Kenyan was married to the president’s mother, Ann Dunham.

Aside from the image of a long-form birth certificate released by the White House April 27, 2011 – a document Sheriff Arpaio’s law enforcement investigation has found probable cause to believe is a forgery – what documentary evidence is there that Barack Obama was the biological father?

Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s next news conference on his probe of Obama’s eligibility is set for Tuesday, July 17. Sign up to watch it live-streamed for free on WND.

The recent biography of the president by Washington Post editor and author David Maraniss, “Barack Obama: The Story,” quotes concerns about Obama Sr.’s sexual promiscuity expressed by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers, but he dimisses them as racially motivated.

Maraniss, on pages 162-163, examines a 1961 INS memo that indicates Obama Sr. continued to have multiple girlfriends at the University of Hawaii after his supposed marriage, Feb. 2, 1961, in Maui to Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham.

In the memo, written by a Lyle H. Dahlin, Obama Sr.’s student adviser, a Mrs. McCabe, indicated Obama Sr. was “very intelligent” but had been a “playboy,” “running around with several girls” since he arrived. The adviser also noted he was married to an American, though he already had a wife in Kenya.

Maraniss writes regarding the memo: “There was a fine line between how Obama acted and the racial attitudes and expectations of those who were working with him, the unanswerable but valid question being whether the official concern was heightened because he was a black man interacting with white women.”

However, a close analysis of the INS documents in Obama Sr.’s immigration file makes clear Maraniss either misunderstood the true concerns of the INS or misrepresented them.

The primary concern of the INS, according to the memos, was not that Obama Sr. was sexually involved with white women, but that he might have engaged in a sham marriage to Dunham so he could remain in the U.S. or gain U.S. citizenship.

See the evidence about Barack Obama’s heritage, in “Dreams from My Real Father.”

The INS documents indicate authorized government immigration agents suspected the evidence for an Obama-Dunham marriage was thin, and doubts that the Kenyan was the biological father were substantial.

The Dahlin memo

In the first paragraph of the Dahlin memo, shown below as Exhibit 1 (click on photo to enlarge), the officer poses the question of whether Obama broke any laws if he married Dunham while he was still married to a Kenyan.

Exhibit 1: INS file by Lyle H. Dahlin. Click to enlarge.



Paragraph three articulates the next problem: If Obama was “running around with several girls” at the university, did Obama’s continued promiscuity suggest he was not married to Dunham or that it was a sham marriage?

Evidently, the best McCabe could get out of Obama was a less-than-credible promise that he would “try” to stay away from the girls.

The last two sentences of the third paragraph appear to be Obama’s rebuttal to an accusation of bigamy: He apparently explained to McCabe that he was divorced from his wife in Kenya because Kenya did not require anything more than a husband expressing to his wife a desire to terminate the marriage.

The fourth paragraph dismisses the bigamy concern, explaining Obama was in the United States not as an immigrant seeking U.S. citizenship but on a temporary student visa under which suspicion of polygamy was insufficient to support a deportation charge.

Is Obama constitutionally eligible to serve? Here’s WND’s complete archive of news reports on the issue

The last paragraph indicates that if Dunham, as a “U.S. citizen wife,” were to petition for Obama Sr. to receive permanent residence status as an immigrant on track to citizenship, the INS should conduct an investigation to make sure the alleged marriage was legitimate.

Contrary to Maraniss’ assertion, the INS officers didn’t appear to be concerned about the interracial nature of the Kenyan’s sexual activities at the university.

What was of concern was that Obama Sr. and Dunham were not living together as husband and wife, and their marriage might have been arranged for immigration purposes.

Under 8 U.S.C. Section 1325(c), current immigration law specifies that any individual who knowingly enters into a marriage for the purpose of evading any provision of the immigration laws is subject to up to five years imprisonment and a maximum fine of $250,000, or both.

In 1961, the INS, in investigating suspected marriages of convenience, would interview the two individuals separately and ask questions about the personal, often intimate, habits of the alleged mate.

Give the baby to the Salvation Army?

WND previously reported Boston Globe reporter Sally H. Jacobs had access to an INS file in which the memo seen in Exhibit 1 was displayed without redaction.

As seen in Exhibit 2, this version of the letter permits reading of part of the third paragraph.

Exhibit 2: Lyle H. Dahlin memo without redaction. Click to enlarge.



In the third sentence of the third paragraph, the Dahlin memo adds the detail that McCabe reported the Kenyan had gotten Dunham pregnant, a fact that would have been consistent with the marriage being legitimate.

Except, Dahlin adds, McCabe reported that the Kenyan and Dunham did not live together and Obama Sr. and Dunham were contemplating giving the baby away to the Salvation Army.

The facts suggest a sham marriage arranged for immigration purposes only: a supposedly married couple who do not live together, a “husband” with multiple girl friends on the side and a baby neither parent seems determined to raise.

INS suspicion of the marriage is further reinforced by the handwritten note at the end of the memo. Dahlin makes clear an apparent superior officer within the INS section agreed that the facts did not merit deportation for the Kenyan, a non-immigrant student in the USA on a temporary visa. But an investigation would be warranted if he sought to further extend his visa.

Dating the Dahlin memo

The only date on the Dahlin memo is the handwritten April 12, 1961, preceding the handwritten note at the bottom of the document. That date indicates the memo was written while Dunham was pregnant, less than four months before the baby’s birth.

The decision to give away the baby to the Salvation Army after Obama Sr. “got” Dunham pregnant must have caused the INS to wonder precisely what kind of relationship existed between the two.

The memo indicates Obama Sr. might have been testing the waters to see what impact claiming a U.S. citizen wife and a U.S. citizen child would have on the INS. Officials would question whether he was the natural father or if he was merely the “stand-in” father, covering up an embarrassing situation.

If the Kenyan were actually the father and the marriage to Dunham legitimate, why not press the claim that the U.S. citizen wife and the U.S. citizen child established a basis for changing the Kenyan’s status with the INS from a non-immigrant student seeking only a temporary stay to an immigrant seeking permanent residence on the path to becoming a U.S. citizen?

But then, why would Obama Sr., as the biological father, want to give the baby to the Salvation Army if the marriage with Dunham were legitimate?

The Dahlin memo, written while Dunham was pregnant, raises the question of whether or not Obama married Dunham at all.

If the Kenyan merely wanted a sexual relationship with Dunham, why marry her?

There is no evidence he proposed marriage to any of his allegedly many girlfriends at the university, so what made Dunham different?

If he was not committed to living with Dunham and raising the baby, why bother getting married?

Pieced together, the available evidence supports the theory the Obama-Dunham marriage was a cover-up from the start, designed to designate Obama as the father, without any expectation the two would ever live as husband and wife or that he would help raise the baby.

The factual record is that Obama Sr. never used marriage to a U.S. citizen or the fathering of a child in the U.S. to bolster his immigration status, even though it could have enabled him to remain in the U.S. without having to apply for yearly extensions.

Dahlin may well have been instructed by superiors to communicate to Obama Sr. and to Dunham that an attempt to use the marriage and child as a reason to change the Kenyan’s immigration status would have led to a full-scale INS investigation.

Obama’s 1961 application to extend stay in U.S.

Further evidence that the marriage to Dunham was a sham is provided by a close examination of the next document to occur chronologically in Obama Sr.’s INS file – an alien student application to extend the time of a temporary stay in the U.S. and to request permission to accept employment. It was filed with the INS Aug. 31, 1961, as seen below in Exhibits 3 and 4.

Exhibit 3: Barack Obama Sr.'s INS application to extend stay and permit employment, Aug. 31, 1961, page 1. Click to enlarge.



Exhibit 3: Barack Obama Sr.'s INS application to extend stay and permit employment, Aug. 31, 1961, page 2. Click to enlarge.



The document notably was filled out in Honolulu some 28 days after the baby was born.

There is a six-and-a-half-month time period in which there is no record of Dunham’s whereabouts – from Jan. 31, 1961, when she concluded her first semester at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, until Sept. 25, 1961, when the University of Washington at Seattle documents she was enrolled for extension classes on campus.

Nothing in the Dahlin memo documents where Dunham was in April 1961, when it was written.

Interestingly, Obama Sr.’s temporary stay visa expired Aug. 9, 1961, some five days after the baby was born, as indicated by his answer to Box 13.

Clearly, Obama Sr. had to be concerned about the extension of his student visa in April 1961. It would have been convenient to have a U.S. citizen wife and a U.S. citizen child being newly born just as his student visa was expiring.

Yet, the application to extend the temporary stay provides more evidence the story of a U.S. citizen wife and child was not credible. In Box 2, Obama Sr. indicated he was living at 1482 Alencastre Street in Honolulu. However, Dunham was living at her parents home at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, the address listed in the birth announcements published in the Honolulu newspapers.

The INS would have regarded the fact the supposed parents did not live together as additional evidence the alleged marriage was a marriage of convenience arranged to commit immigration fraud.

Even more interesting, in the extension of Box 7, the Kenyan blacked out the first name he wrote for his wife, then penciled in “Ann S. Dunham, Honolulu, Hawaii.” Her named, however, was Stanley Ann Dunham, or S. Ann Dunham.

Then, in the space below Box 7, Obama Sr. did not list Barack Hussein Obama II as his son – an omission that is hard to understand if the child supposedly was born earlier that month.

The Woods memo

An additional document from Obama Sr.’s INS file is relevant: a handwritten memo dated Aug. 31, 1961, by William Wood, as seen in Exhibit 5.

Exhibit 5: Barack Obama Sr. INS File, Woods Memo, Aug. 31, 1961. Click to enlarge.



The memo’s use of the term “claims” suggests the information came from Obama Sr., possibly at an in-person meeting with an officer at the INS office when he filled out and filed his visa extension form.

The memo confirms Dunham was leaving Hawaii to attend school in Seattle, an additional factor the INS would have examined had an investigation been undertaken into the legitimacy of the marriage and the fatherhood of the child.

In the last paragraph, the memo notes the child was living with the mother at the home of the grandparents, while the Kenyan was living at the Alencastre Street address – facts that did not need to be seriously considered if the only relevant question in extending Obama Sr.’s visa was whether or not he was then a student in good standing.

Interesting, the note appended to the memo suggests the information the Kenyan provided raised serious questions about the wife and child that would need to be answered if he were applying for more than a temporary stay.

Given that the INS was not going to conduct an investigation, the Woods memo appears to document only what the Kenyan said and did not determine whether or not the claims were true.

While Obama Sr.’s INS files do not prove he was not the father of the future president, they provide ample documentation the officer was skeptical the Kenyan was legitimately married to Dunham and/or was the biological father of Barack Obama II.

By deciding to stay with the temporary student visa status, the Kenyan obviated the need for an INS investigation that might have uncovered in 1961 that the marriage was fraudulent and the biological father of the child was someone else.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/immigration- ... rth-story/

[Ogopogo]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glaz ... n-america/

Young Obama’s Dreams of a Communist Revolution in America

Posted by Jamie Glazov Bio ↓ on Aug 8th, 2012 Comments ↓
170
Print This Post Print This Post

A A A

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. John C. Drew, a political scientist who tried, without success, to alert the media and the John McCain campaign back in 2008 that young Occidental sophomore Obama had been a Marxist socialist looking forward to an inevitable Communist revolution. Since then, Drew’s take on young Obama’s ideological extremism has been featured in books including Michael Savage’s Trickle Up Poverty, Paul Kengor’s Dupes, Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief, Jack Cashill’s Deconstructing Obama and most recently in Paul Kengor’s newest book, The Communist – Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. Dr. Drew has contributed at least four articles regarding young Obama’s ideological extremism to American Thinker and has posted articles at Breitbart.com and PJMedia. Key elements of Dr. Drew’s story have been verified by liberal authors including David Remnick in The Bridge and most recently David Maraniss in Barack Obama: The Story.

FP: Dr. John C. Drew, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin with you sharing how you met the young Barack Obama.

Drew: Thanks Jamie.

I met him through my girlfriend, Caroline Boss. She had taken two political science classes with young Obama at Occidental College – one in the spring of 1980 and one in the fall of 1980. She was the co-president of the Democrat Socialist Alliance at Occidental College and wanted to introduce young Obama to me over Christmas break 1980 as “one of us.” By that time, I was in my second year of graduate school at Cornell University where I was working on my Ph.D. in political science.

FP: What was the young Obama like ideologically?

Drew: The young Obama was a garden variety Marxist-Leninist. He and Boss and his sophomore year roommate, Hasan Chandoo, believed that social forces where creating an inevitable Communist revolution in the U.S. and that it was important to have a highly trained elite of educated leaders guide this revolutionary process and oversee it once the revolution took place. Remember, this was at the height of the Cold War in 1980. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president and the USSR was still our mortal enemy. In a lot of ways, the young Obama was more radical than me because by that Christmas break I had stopped believing in the possibility of a Communist revolution and no longer believed a pure Communist economic and social system – one without private property or profits – was possible anymore.

FP: What did Obama say that made you think he was a Marxist?

Drew: I only remember bits and fragments of the actual conversation. I remember that Obama reacted negatively to my suggestion that it was wrong to ever expect a Communist revolution in the U.S. given the experience of Western Europe. I definitely remember him taking about the need to prepare ourselves and the people for the coming Communist revolution. I remember that he was particularly good at arguing the perspective of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial revolutionary thought. I had read Fanon, but his writing was not authoritative to me the way it seemed to be for Boss and Obama.

FP: Tell us why this is significant today.

Drew: I think it is significant, in part, because it helps demonstrate the impact that Frank Marshall Davis had on young Obama. It was very unusual for such a young student at Occidental College to be such an intense believer in Marxist ideology. It turns out Obama last met with Davis only about four months prior to Obama first meeting with me.

The really crucial issue, however, is that Obama does not seem to have a conversion story which explains how he quit being a Marxist. In the experience of me and others, being a Marxist is sort of like being in a religious cult. It ends up controlling what you do with your life, the friends you choose, the mentors you pick and the careers that make sense to you. I have a fairly detailed conversion story. I remember the exact moment when I first realized I was no longer a Marxist. Obama, however, does not seem to have a conversion story in his autobiography.

FP: What do you expect to accomplish by sharing this story?

Drew: I think that if I had gotten my story out earlier in 2008 that it might have been enough to keep Obama from becoming president. The McCain campaign and the mainstream media, however, did nothing to pick up my story. I want to leverage the communication channels available to me now to make sure that the Romney campaign understands the strength of the case regarding young Obama’s ideological extremism. There are a lot of Ph.D.s now – Savage, Kurtz, Cashill, Kengor and me – who are making a very convincing argument that Obama has been lying to the American people about the strength and intensity of his Marxist ideology. If the folks running the Romney campaign have not been reading these books, they really need to.

FP: Have you received any hate mail or violent threats?

Drew: My father was worried about that when I first went public with my story in February 2010. He even offered to hide my wife and me at a special safe house. It doesn’t look like I’m that attractive as a target. Besides, harming me would only call more attention to my story.

FP: If you had a question for Obama, what would it be?

Drew: I’d really like to hear whether or not he has a conversion story. David Horowitz has a conversion story. Whittaker Chambers had a conversion story. I have a conversion story. I’d really like Obama to share the moment when he turned to Bill Ayers or Rev. Wright or Alice Palmer and said, “Hey – you guys are wrong.” I want to know what it was like when Obama shared with these folks that he no longer believed in their revolutionary ideology.

FP: Do you have any tips for the Romney presidential campaign?

Drew: Yes. Rush Limbaugh just mentioned my take on young Obama last month. It was obvious to me that Rush – even with all his resources – wasn’t up to speed on the Obama literature. My take was a complete surprise to him. I suspect that there are a lot of folks in the Romney campaign who haven’t been reading what Kurtz, Kengor, Cashill or me have been writing about the young Obama and his ties to extremist ideology.

I think if they read this literature they will see that it is completely solid and they should feel comfortable confronting Obama’s ideological extremism. The voters suspect Obama has secrets up his sleeve regarding what he wants to do to us if he wins reelection. The Romney campaign can leverage all the intellectual work done by these fine scholars to remind swing voters that Obama does have a history of keeping secrets. In the long-run, I think a lot of Obama voters are going to feel that he fooled them in 2008.

FP: Dr. John C. Drew, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

To watch a video of Dr. Drew telling his story about knowing Obama in college, and about his own personal break with Marxism, click here or watch below:

About Jamie Glazov
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. His new book is Showdown With Evil. He can be reached at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.

[Ogopogo]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/john-peraz ... socialist/

Barack Obama, the Socialist

Posted by John Perazzo Bio ↓ on Sep 6th, 2012 Comments ↓
124
Print This Post Print This Post

A A A

Is Barack Obama a socialist? Many observers, from points all along the ideological spectrum, have been exceedingly reticent to describe him as such, as though there were insufficient evidence to make the case for a charge so impolite. In February, for instance, a Business Week headline stated bluntly that “it’s dumb to call Obama a socialist.” Four months later, the Associated Press published an article depicting the president merely as “a pragmatist within the Democratic Party mainstream,” and suggesting that “the persistent claim that Obama is a socialist lacks credence.” In July, a New York Times op-ed piece by film director Milos Forman said that Obama is “not even close” to being a socialist. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post casts Obama as no more radical than “a moderate Republican of the early 1990s.” Republican strategist Karl Rove cautions, “If you say he’s a socialist, [his supporters] go to defend him.” Leftist commentator Alan Colmes impugns those who “mischaracterize what Obama is doing as socialism, when there’s no government takeover” of the private sector. And Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly—noting that he has seen “no evidence that the president wants to seize private property, which is what communists do”—concludes that Obama “is not a socialist, he’s not a communist, he’s a social-justice anti-capitalist.”

But a careful look at Barack Obama’s life story, his actions, his closest alliances, his long-term objectives, and his words, shows that he has long been, quite demonstrably, a genuine socialist. The early groundwork for Obama’s socialist worldview was laid during his teen years, when he was mentored by the writer/poet Frank Marshall Davis, a longtime member of the Communist Party and the subject of a 601-page FBI file. The co-founder of a Communist-controlled newspaper that consistently echoed the Soviet party line, Davis had previously been involved with the American Peace Mobilization, described by Congress as not only “one of the most notorious and blatantly communist fronts ever organized in this country,” but also “one of the most seditious organizations which ever operated in the United States.” When Obama in 1979 headed off to Occidental College in California, Davis cautioned him not to “start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh–.”

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama recounts that he chose his friends “carefully” at Occidental, so as “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout.” Among those friends were all manner of radicals, including “the more politically active black students,” “the Chicanos,” “the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists.” Further, Obama writes that he and his similarly “alienated” college friends regularly discussed such topics as “neocolonialism, Franz Fanon [the socialist revolutionary], Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” David Remnick’s highly sympathetic biography of Obama—The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama—confirms that the future president and many of his closest friends at Occidental were unquestionably socialists.

John C. Drew, an Occidental College graduate who knew Obama personally in the early 1980s, reports that the young Obama of that period was “already an ardent socialist Marxist revolutionary”; was highly “passionate” about “Marxist theory”; embraced an “uncompromising, Marxist socialist ideology”; harbored a “sincere commitment to Marxist revolutionary thought”; and was, in the final analysis, a “pure Marxist socialist” who “sincerely believed a Marxist socialist revolution was coming to turn everything around and to create a new, fairer and more just world.”

It was at that point, in the early Eighties, that something profoundly important happened to Barack Obama. He was drawn into the powerful orbit of a strand of socialism that had resolved, as the revolutionary communist Van Jones would later put it, “to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.” American socialists of that period, pained by the recent ascendancy of a conservative and popular presidential administration (Reagan), understood that no anti-capitalist revolution was going to take place in the United States anytime soon, and that, for the foreseeable future, no one was going to impose socialism on the populace “from above.” Consequently, many socialists in the U.S. put on a new face and pursued a new approach. As Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief, explains, the aim now was “to get a kind of de facto public control over the economy from below”—through the work of community organizers dedicated to gradually infiltrating every conceivable American institution: schools and universities, churches, labor unions, the banking industry, the media, and a major political party. Toward that end, the renowned socialist Michael Harrington established the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to serve as a force that would work within the existing American political system—specifically, within the Democratic Party. Figuring that a move too far or too quick to the left would alienate moderate Democrats, the DSA sought to push the party leftward in a slow and gradual manner, on the theory that, over time, ever-increasing numbers of Democrats would become comfortable with socialism and would espouse it as their preferred ideology.

In Radical-in-Chief, Kurtz points out that this incrementalism became the modus operandi of the “democratic socialists” who embraced the ideals of Karl Marx but were convinced that a “peaceful” and gradual path represented “the only route to socialism that makes sense in America’s thoroughly democratic context.” They believed that “government ownership of the means of production”—the standard definition of socialism—could best be achieved by way of protracted evolution, not sudden revolution. Kurtz explains that socialists, far from agreeing unanimously on tactics and strategies, have always engaged in “never-ending factional disputes” about whether they ought to “eschew capitalist-tainted politics and foment revolution,” or instead “dive into America’s electoral system and try to turn its political currents” toward “a piecemeal transition to a socialist world.” At this point in his life, the twenty-something Obama made a calculated decision to embrace the DSA’s gradualist approach—under the deceptive banners of “liberalism,” “progressivism,” and “social justice.” By no means, however, did this approach represent a rejection of Marx and his socialist doctrines. Kurtz notes that Marx himself, who “expected to see capitalism overthrown by a violent socialist revolution,” was nonetheless “willing to compromise his long-term goals in pursuit of short-term gains, particularly when he thought this democratic maneuvering would position the communist movement for more radical breakthroughs in the future”; that Marx himself “recognized that not only his enemies, but even potential followers could be put off by his most radical plans”; and that, “depending on context, Marx [himself] withheld the full truth of who he was and what he hoped to achieve.”

This strategy of settling for incrementalism rather than sudden, sweeping revolution was displayed with vivid clarity during the healthcare debates of 2009-10. Obama was already on record as having stated emphatically, in a 2003 speech at an AFL-CIO event: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan”—i.e., a government-run system. But by 2007, with the White House clearly within his reach, Obama began to make allowances for the increasingly evident fact that a single-payer plan was not politically palatable to a large enough number of American voters. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” he said in May 2007. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out.” He made similar references to a “transition step” and “a transitional system” on other occasions during the campaign. In the summer of 2008, Obama declared that “if I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system,” but acknowledged that from a practical standpoint, such a result could only come about “over time.” Obamacare, then, was deliberately designed to be a stepping stone toward total government control of healthcare—a mere way station along the road toward the “radical ends” that the president ultimately sought to achieve.

In the early Eighties, Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in New York. During his time in the Big Apple, he attended at least two Socialist Scholars Conferences, DSA-sponsored events that quickly grew into the largest annual gatherings of socialists in all of North America. It is particularly noteworthy that Obama attended the 1983 Socialist Scholars Conference, which was promoted as a celebration to “honor” the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death.

In June 1985, a 24-year-old Obama moved to Chicago and took a community-organizing job with the Developing Communities Project, funded by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD). Viewing capitalism as a system steeped in injustice, CCHD states that “the causes of poverty are understood to be an aspect of ‘social sin’ rooted in our social and economic structures and institutions.” To address the problems allegedly spawned by capitalism, CCHD promotes transformative institutional change in the form of “alternative economic structures” that will “broaden the sharing of economic power.” The Catholic magazine Crisis observes that “the way the CCHD educates others about transformative change and empowerment” is very much “in line with the socialist and Marxist ideals so prevalent in community organizing.”

And what, exactly, is “community organizing”? Dr. Thomas Sowell, the eminent Hoover Institution Fellow, offers this concise explanation:

“For ‘community organizers’ … racial resentments are a stock in trade…. What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.”

To be sure, the 2012 Obama campaign’s incessant emphasis on identity politics—seeking to divide the American people along lines of race, ethnicity, class, and gender—bears all the corrosive hallmarks of precisely the mindset that Dr. Sowell describes. Stanley Kurtz provides additional vital insights into the striking parallels that exist between the world of community organizing and the DSA’s gradualist approach toward socialism:

“Community organizing is a largely socialist profession. Particularly at the highest levels, America’s community organizers have adopted a deliberately stealthy posture—hiding their socialism behind a ‘populist’ front. These organizers strive to push America toward socialism in unobtrusive, incremental steps, calling themselves ‘pragmatic problem-solvers’ all the while.”

It is highly significant that three of Obama’s mentors in Chicago were trained at the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by the famed godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky, who advocated mankind’s “advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization … [to] a future where the means of production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful.” In the Alinsky model, “organizing” is a euphemism for “revolution”—where the ultimate objective is the systematic acquisition of power by a purportedly oppressed segment of the population, and the radical transformation of America’s social and economic structure. The goal is to foment enough public discontent and moral confusion to spark the social upheaval that Marx and Engels predicted.
But Alinsky’s brand of revolution was not characterized by dramatic, sweeping, overnight transformations of social institutions. As author Richard Poe explains, “Alinsky viewed revolution as a slow, patient process. The trick was to penetrate existing institutions such as churches, unions and political parties.” Promoting a strategy that was wholly consistent with the DSA approach discussed above, Alinsky advised radical organizers and their disciples to quietly, unobtrusively gain influence within the decision-making ranks of these institutions, and to then introduce changes from those platforms.

Obama himself went on to teach workshops on the Alinsky method for several years. In 1990, eighteen years after Alinsky’s death, an essay penned by Obama was reprinted as a chapter in a book titled After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. And in 1998, Obama attended a performance of the play The Love Song of Saul Alinsky at the Terrapin Theater in Chicago. Following that performance, Obama took the stage and participated in a panel discussion about the show, along with several other socialists and communists such as Quentin Young and Heather Booth.

As a young community organizer, Obama had close connections to the Midwest Academy, a radical training ground for activists of his political ilk. Probably the most influential community-organizing-related entity in America at that time, the Midwest Academy worked closely with the DSA and synthesized Saul Alinsky’s organizing techniques with the practical considerations of electoral politics. Emphasizing “class consciousness” and “movement history,” the Academy’s training programs exposed students to the efforts and achievements of veteran activists from earlier decades. Recurring “socialism sessions,” taught by Heather Booth, encompassed everything from Marx and Engels through Michael Harrington’s democratic socialism and the factional struggles of the Students for a Democratic Society, a radical organization that aspired to remake America’s government in a Marxist image. Knowing that many Americans would be unreceptive to straightforward, hard-left advocacy, the Midwest Academy in its formative years was careful not to explicitly articulate its socialist ideals in its organizing and training activities. The group’s inner circle was wholly committed to building a socialist mass movement, but stealthily rather than overtly. As Midwest Academy trainer Steve Max and the prominent socialist Harry Boyte agreed in a private correspondence: “Every social proposal that we make must be [deceptively] couched in terms of how it will strengthen capitalism.” This strategy of hiding its own socialist agendas below the proverbial radar, earned the Academy the designation “crypto-socialist organization” from Stanley Kurtz.

“Nearly every thread of Obama’s career runs directly or indirectly through the Midwest Academy,” says Kurtz, and, as such, it represents “the hidden key to Barack Obama’s political career.” The author elaborates:

“Obama’s organizing mentors had ties to [the Midwest Academy]; Obama’s early funding was indirectly controlled by it; evidence strongly suggests that Obama himself received training there; both Barack and Michelle Obama ran a project called ‘Public Allies’ that was effectively an extension of the Midwest Academy; Obama’s first run for public office was sponsored by Academy veteran Alice Palmer; and Obama worked closely at two foundations for years with yet another veteran organizer from the Midwest Academy, Ken Rolling. Perhaps more important, Barack Obama’s approach to politics is clearly inspired by that of the Midwest Academy.”

Obama’s next major encounter with socialism took place within the sanctuary of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, pastored by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Best known for his undiluted contempt for the United States and its traditions, Wright has long been a proud prophet of black liberation theology, a movement that seeks to foment Marxist revolutionary fervor founded on racial solidarity, as opposed to the traditional Marxist emphasis on class solidarity.

According to black liberation theology, the New Testament gospels can be properly understood only as calls for racial activism and revolution aimed at overturning the existing, white-dominated, capitalist order, and installing, in its stead, a socialist utopia wherein blacks will unseat their white “oppressors” and become liberated from their deprivations—material and spiritual alike.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Obama spent fully 20 years attending Wright’s church, which openly promoted a “10-point vision” calling for “economic parity” and warning that “God … is not pleased with America’s economic mal-distribution!” Impugning capitalism as a system whose inequities force “Third World people” to “live in grinding poverty,” Wright derides the United States as the “land of the greed and home of the slave.” For good measure, he has praised the socialist magazine Monthly Review for its “no-nonsense Marxism,” congratulating that publication for “dispel[ling] all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word ‘socialism’ or ‘Marxism.’”

This same Jeremiah Wright served as a mentor to Barack Obama for two decades. So great was Obama’s regard for Wright, that Obama selected him not only to perform his wedding to Michelle Robinson in 1992, but also to baptize his two daughters later on. Perhaps Obama’s most significant show of support for Wright’s ministry was his donation of some $27,500 to Trinity Church during 2005-06. Another report indicates that from 2005-07, Obama gave a total of $53,770 to Trinity. People simply do not give such large sums of money to causes in which they do not thoroughly believe. Thus there is no reason in the world to suspect that Obama rejected any part of Wright’s message at any time between 1988 and early 2008. He disavowed Wright only when the latter’s bilious radicalism threatened to become a political liability to Obama’s ambition for the White House.

In the early to mid-1990s, Obama, now in his early thirties, worked with the (now defunct) community organization ACORN and its voter-mobilization arm, Project Vote. Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern explains that ACORN, professing a dedication to “the poor and powerless,” in fact promoted “a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor.” ACORN, Stern elaborates, organized people “to push for ever more government control of the economy” and to pursue “the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism.” In 2010, former ACORN insider Anita MonCrief confirmed the organization’s unmistakably socialist orientation:

“As an ACORN insider my indoctrination as a socialist was a slow but steady progression from radical liberalism to embracing the stealth socialist methods that had made ACORN a powerful force in American electoral politics…. Inside ACORN offices across the country, young, idealistic liberals were being ingrained with the Saul Alinsky style of Organizing. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals was never mentioned by name, but Alinsky’s tactics were used on employees and ACORN members. ACORN’s strategy of stealth socialism was aimed at gaining power through duplicity and somewhat assimilating into society…. I once asked Marcel Reid, former ACORN national board member and President of DC ACORN, how it was possible for ACORN to push its agenda and she replied, ‘We never use the word Socialism.’ ACORN’s appeal was to simply implement a Socialist agenda without ever saying the word.”

Smitten with Obama’s political and ideological makeup, ACORN in the early 1990s invited him to help train its staff in the tactics of community organizing. In 1995, Obama was one of a team of attorneys who sued, on ACORN’s behalf, for the implementation of a “Motor Voter” law in Illinois. Jim Edgar, the state’s Republican governor, opposed the law because he believed, quite correctly, that it could potentially breed widespread voter fraud. In a 2007 interview with ACORN representatives, then-presidential candidate Obama said enthusiastically: “You know you’ve got a friend in me. And I definitely welcome ACORN’s input…. Since I have been in the United States Senate I’ve been always a partner with ACORN as well…. I’ve been fighting with ACORN, alongside ACORN, on issues you care about my entire career.” Also during Obama’s presidential run, his campaign gave more than $800,000 to the ACORN front group Citizens’ Services, Inc., to fund voter-registration efforts. Obama’s relationship with ACORN remained rock-solid right up until the organization’s dissolution amid immense scandal (involving voter fraud, among other matters) in 2010.

It was in the mid-1990s that Obama first decided to try his hand at electoral politics, setting his sights initially on a state senate seat in Illinois. Remarkably, Obama launched his political career in the home of two well-connected Chicagoans, longtime activists who would help the fledgling politician make important contacts and enlarge his public profile. These two allies were the infamous Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, lifelong Marxists who in the 1960s and ’70s had been revolutionary leaders of the Weather Underground Organization, a domestic terror group (described by Ayers as “an American Red Army”) that aspired to transform the U.S., by means of violence and even mass murder, into a Communist country. In 1974 Ayers and Dohrn co-authored a book that openly advocated “revolutionary war” as “the only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism”; called for “a revolutionary communist party … to lead the struggle [to] seize power and build the new society”; and lauded socialism as the key to “the eradication of the social system based on profit.” Now, they were the key figures ushering Barack Obama into a political career.

Obama’s ties to Ayers and Dohrn were extensive and long-lasting. In 1995, Ayers appointed Obama as the first chairman of his newly created “school reform organization,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, whose stated educational objective was to “teach against oppression” as embodied in “America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.” From 1999-2002, Obama served alongside Ayers on the board of the Joyce Foundation, which funded a host of left-wing groups and causes. The enduring nature of Obama’s friendly relationship with Ayers and Dohrn was evidenced by the fact that he attended a July Fourth barbecue at the couple’s home in 2005, even as the former terrorists continued to hold America—and capitalism—in utmost contempt.

Another key supporter of Obama’s 1996 entry into politics was Democratic state senator Alice Palmer of Illinois, who, as she prepared to run for Congress, hand-picked Obama as the person she hoped would fill her newly vacated state-senate seat. Toward that end, Palmer introduced Obama to party elders and donors as her preferred successor, and helped him gather the signatures required for getting his name placed on the ballot. Palmer’s background is highly noteworthy: A veteran of the Midwest Academy, she consistently supported the Soviet Union and spoke out against the United States during the Cold War. In the 1980s she served as an official of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a Communist front group. In 1986 she attended the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and expressed a high regard for the USSR’s system of “central planning.” And she applauded the Soviets for “carrying out a policy to resolve the inequalities between nationalities, inequalities that they say were inherited from capitalist and czarist rule.”

During his state senate campaign in 1996, the 35-year-old Obama actively sought the endorsement of the so-called New Party, a socialist political coalition whose objective was to promote the election of left-wing public officials—most often Democrats. The New Party’s short-term goal was to gradually, incrementally move the Democratic Party leftward, thereby setting the stage for the eventual rise of a new socialist third party. As Stanley Kurtz puts it, the New Party “is best understood as an attempt to build a mass-based political front for a largely socialist party leadership.” New Party co-founder Joel Rogers once penned a piece in the Marxist journal New Left Review, wherein he made it clear that the organization was a socialist enterprise at its core. Not only was Obama successful in obtaining the New Party’s endorsement, but he also used a number of New Party volunteers as campaign workers, and by 1996 Obama himself had become a New Party member.

Yet another important Obama ally in 1996 was Carl Davidson, a major player in the Chicago branch of the New Party.
Davidson is a lifelong Marxist who in the 1960s served as a national secretary of the Students for a Democratic Society. In 1969 Davidson helped launch the Venceremos Brigades, which covertly transported hundreds of young Americans to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane and learn guerrilla warfare techniques from the communist government of Fidel Castro.
In 1988 Davidson founded Networking for Democracy, a program that encouraged American high-school students to engage in “mass action” aimed at “tearing down the old structures of race and class privilege” in the United States “and around the world.” And in 1992 Davidson became a leader of the newly formed Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an outgrowth of the Communist Party USA.

Obama’s commitment to the redistribution of wealth—an unmistakable hallmark of socialism—is deep, longstanding, and well-documented. He articulated that commitment with particular clarity during a guest appearance on Chicago’s WBEZ public radio in 2001, when he was a 40-year-old Illinois state senator. In that radio interview, Obama lauded the ability of community organizations “to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.” He lamented, however, that the Supreme Court had “never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society”; that the Court had not been able to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution,” a document that unfortunately “doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf”; and that he himself was “not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts,” even though he found it easy to “come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts.”

When Obama ran for president in 2008, he formed a Black Advisory Council that included Professor Cornel West—a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a former supporter of the now-defunct New Party, and an avid admirer of Jeremiah Wright.
Identifying himself as a “progressive socialist,” West contends that “Marxist thought is an indispensable tradition for freedom fighters.” Viewing capitalism as the root cause of America’s “unbridled grasp at power, wealth and status,” West warns: “Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit—often at the cost of the common good.” When Obama appeared with Professor West at a Harlem, New York campaign fundraiser, West introduced him as “my brother and my companion and comrade.” Obama, in response, called West “a genius, a public intellectual, a preacher, [and] an oracle.”

Obama’s socialist orientation is further manifest in a number of his political appointments as President. For example:

Obama named Van Jones, a longtime revolutionary communist who famously declared that “we [are] gonna change the whole [economic] system,” as his “green jobs czar” in 2009;
he appointed Carol Browner, a former “commissioner” of the Socialist International, as his “environment czar”;
he appointed John Holdren, who not only views capitalism as a system that is inherently destructive of the environment, but strongly favors the redistribution of wealth, both within the U.S. and across international borders, as his “science czar”;
he named Hilda Solis, a former officer of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (the socialist wing of the House of Representatives), as his labor secretary;
and he chose Anita Dunn, a woman who has cited Mao Zedong as one of her “favorite political philosophers,” to serve as White House communications director.

Also worth mentioning are Obama’s two closest political advisors. Valerie Jarrett, the daughter-in-law of a journalist with ties to the Communist Party, was largely responsible for persuading the communist Van Jones, whom she admired tremendously, to join the Obama Administration in 2009. And David Axelrod, the chief architect of Obama’s political campaigns, was mentored, as a young man, by the lifelong communist David Canter. Axelrod’s other mentor, Don Rose, was a member of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an organization replete with communists and Sixties radicals. Rose also belonged to the Alliance to End Repression—a suspected Communist Party front—and he did some press work for the Students for a Democratic Society.

In May 2012, Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor a civilian can receive, to the iconic union activist Dolores Huerta. A longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Huerta had previously won a Eugene Debs Award, named after the man who founded the Socialist Party of America. On at least one occasion, she was a guest speaker at a gathering of the Socialist Scholars Conference. And she is an open admirer of Venezuela’s communist president, Hugo Chavez.

Last January, a Forbes magazine piece by Paul Roderick Gregory documented the striking similarities that exist between President Obama’s political agendas and those of the Party of European Socialists—particularly as regards the expansion of the welfare state; government-funded universal access to education and health care; a progressive taxation system designed to redistribute income and wealth on a massive scale; a belief that state control is necessary to rein in the “greed” that underlies market forces which benefit only “the privileged few”; a reliance on “international institutions” and “international consensus” as the basis of foreign-policy decisions; and environmental policies that favor “carbon taxes, higher energy prices, restricted drilling and refining, and subsidies of green technology … even at the expenses of higher conventional growth and jobs.” Concluded Gregory: “If the Party of European Socialists were to rate Obama, he would get a near-perfect score. The political views and programs that Obama is prepared to reveal to the public are consistent with those of European socialists. He is clearly a socialist in the European sense of the term.”

Stanley Kurtz, for his part, points out that Obama, from his teenage years to the present, “has lived in a thoroughly socialist world”; that Obama “never abandoned his early socialist convictions but instead discreetly retained them, on the model of his colleagues and mentors in the world of community organizing.” The final sentence of Kurtz’s book is its most powerful: “The president of the United States is a socialist.”

Though Obama—in the tradition of the Democratic Socialists of America, ACORN, and the Midwest Academy—has carefully avoided openly referring to himself as a socialist, he gives us a glimpse of his mindset every now and then, particularly when he is busy fomenting class envy, demonizing financial prosperity, and advocating wholesale wealth redistribution. Recall, for instance, when Obama famously told Joe Wurzelbacher (“Joe the Plumber”) that a tax increase on small businesses would be justified because “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody”; when he told an Illinois audience in April 2010, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”; when he made any one of his innumerable disparaging references to “the top 1 percent,” the “millionaires and billionaires,” the “fat-cat bankers,” and the “corporate jet owners” who are “sitting pretty” as they live lavishly at the expense of “the bottom 90 percent”; when he flatly rejected “this brand of ‘you’re-on-your-own’ economics” in January 2012; when he condemned the “ever-widening chasm between the ultra-rich and everybody else”; when he advocated “a new vision of an America in which prosperity is shared”; when he congratulated the anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street radicals for “inspir[ing]” him, reminding him “what we are still fighting for,” and being “the reason why I ran for this office in the first place”; and most recently, when he claimed: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen”—a reference to the government-funded “roads and bridges” that presumably made it possible for the business to thrive. These quotes are both illuminating and instructive, but they represent merely the tip of Obama’s socialist iceberg.

Five days before the 2008 presidential election, Obama candidly articulated his intent to “fundamentally transform” the United States, echoing his previous pledges to “remake the world as it should be,” and to “change this country, brick by brick, block by block.”
These ominous proclamations sit at the very heart of the socialist mindset, the grandiose quest to tear down the status quo and erect a new, utopian world upon the scattered rubble of its despised ruins.

In the final analysis, Americans are, and indeed should be, free to vote for a socialist president if that is what they want. But if they choose that road, they ought to at least be aware that that is in fact what they are doing—rather than be bamboozled into thinking they are merely supporting a “liberal,” a “progressive,” or a big-hearted advocate of “social justice.” Therefore let it be understood: A ballot cast for Barack Obama is a ballot cast for a man who is, beyond any shadow of a doubt, a lifelong, committed socialist.

[Julian]

Israeli science website: Obama birth certificate forged
Award-winning, former Netanyahu adviser behind assessment


Israel Science and Technology, the national database and directory of science and technology-related websites in Israel, has published an article asserting the long-form birth certificate released by the White House is a forged document.

The website was created by a former science adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.

Hanukoglu, an award-winning researcher, is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University Center of Samaria in Ariel, Israel.

The professor established the first version of his website during his tenure as Netanyahu’s science adviser. The site has evolved into “the premier science and technology portal for Israel.”

The website says that the White House’s release of the Obama document in April 2011, after years of controversy, “raised in our minds the possibility that there could be something suspicious about the information available on this document.”

The website conducted an independent analysis and cites others who came to the same conclusion.

The website says the publication “of such a blatantly fake document about something so basic as the birthplace of Mr. Obama, should raise great concern about the suitability of the person who is holding the reigns on the most powerful country of the World.”

Israel Science and Technology explains why, as a site of science and technology, it dedicated “a page to expose forgery about a document related to Mr. Barack Hussein Obama.”

“Mr. Obama is the president of the USA that is currently the leader of the Free World, and the most powerful country in the Western hemisphere,” the site says. “In his position as the President, the policies pursued by Mr. Obama affects the whole world and not just the USA.”

Moreover, inaction by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as U.S. courts, despite many appeals, also was seen to “raise a concern about how the governmental institutions of the reputedly best, and certainly the most important democracy in the Free World have avoided the issue.”

The missing ’1′

Utilizing the software program Foxit Reader version 4.3.1, the Israel Science and Technology website examined the PDF file posted by the White House April 27, 2011, and found that the last digit of the birth certificate’s number, 61 10841, disappears under 800-percent magnification.

Also, the font of the last digit is different from the other digits.

“This is only one example,” the Israelis concluded after examining the birth certificate number. “Many more examples can be discovered by examining magnified document with full page view of the document.”

Conclusion: “In brief, this simple analysis using just a viewing software reveals that the PDF document has been altered by a graphics software.”

The ‘ungrouped’ image

Next, the Israeli Science and Technology site examined the PDF birth certificate file in the freely available Inkscape graphics software, version 0.48.1.

“In vector graphics software, an image is composed of elements,” the website notes. “If the ‘Long-Form Birth Certificate’ of Obama was a photocopied document then it should not be composed of separate parts.”

The website says the status line “at the bottom of the software reports that the image is composed of ’2 objects’ that have been grouped.”

The Israelis found the Obama birth certificate PDF could be ungrouped, revealing individual layers. The most important of nine different ungrouped layers also shows the final digit, 1, is missing in the birth certificate number 61 10641.

(image at the link)

Israeli Science and Technology cited as additional evidence of forgery the following analyses, many of which were first published by WND:

An expert analysis of the typography and layout of elements in the long-form birth certificate by Mara Zebest, here and here
The conclusion of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse” that the birth certificate is fake.
“From A to Z: What’s Wrong with Obama’s Birth Certificate,” published by WND May 13, 2011.
“Irrefutable’ Proof of Obama Forgery,” published by WND July 17, 2011.
“A Tale of Two Birth Certificates,” published by WND April 28, 2011.
“Layered Colors ‘Simple Proof of Obama Document Forgery,” published by WND July 26, 2011.

http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/israeli-scie ... te-forged/