colmado_naranja Revealed

As previously reported, WorldNetDaily has been feverishly covering the eBay seller colmado_naranja, and his auctions for the alleged Obama Kenyan Birth Certificate that he claims to have in his possession. There have been plenty of twists in this story, almost entirely on the part of colmado_naranja's own representations, but there's one 'twist' that I'm compelled to cover, and cover immediately.

Here is the latest auction, now reduced to simply auctioning off signed photographs. In it, colmado_naranja ndicates that he intends to upload a video to his YouTube account, InspectorSmith, and posts several photos of himself:

   

One enterprising Free Republic poster put that name and photo together with the seller's apparent home of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and stumbled across this photo:



That's a CBS Photo of the Day, from a year ago. The caption reads "Lucas Smith rides his bike through the water after checking up on his flooded house in the southwestern area of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Friday June 13, 2008." It looks an awful lot like colmado_naranja, doesn't it? And it's not an understatement that he has an interesting Wikipedia page. References to "Colmado Scarlette" and a Smith-penned book about the Bush Administration?

So "colmado_naranja" is apparently Lucas Smith, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Another quick round of Googling promptly turns up thisstory from the Syracuse Post Standard:

Jim Jr. was born with one kidney. It kept him going for the first 18 years of his life. He rarely missed school, and even felt fine the day a school nurse took his blood pressure and realized something was wrong. Go see a doctor, she told him. Right away...

Jim Jr. was put on the national kidney transplant list in November 2001, five months after doctors diagnosed him with end stage renal disease...

In late 2002, a man from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sent an e-mail to the family. The man, who called himself Lucas Smith, said he was 23 years old and had emigrated from Russia five years earlier. He had seen the Web site and, Smith said, he wanted to help.

The Wilsons stopped searching for a donor. Smith passed all of the medical, physical and psychological tests. They thought he was going to save their son's life.

Then, on May 3, 2003, Smith sent Jim Wilson Sr. an e-mail saying he wanted to be compensated for donating his kidney.

Wilson said they would pay his airfare, but because it was illegal to receive money for an organ donation, they wouldn't give him any other cash.

Five months after holding out a lifeline, Lucas Smith disappeared.

Jim Wilson Sr. called the Cedar Rapids police.

Yes, at least one Lucas Smith of Cedar Rapids, Iowa has previously attempted to extort money for a valuable commodity in his possession, only to never deliver on it. Maybe it's the same Lucas Smith of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Maybe not.

Bravo, Joseph Farah, for putting this story and this attempt at con-artistry in the limelight. Bravo.

Update (7/3): Another FreeRepublic poster ran Mr. Smith's name through the archives of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, and unsurprisingly, Lucas Smith has a criminal history. Most notably, in 2000 he pled guilty to passing several bad checks after opening a bank account with false information, and in 1998 he received a deferred judgment on a charge of forgery.

WorldNetDaily's Bogus Obama Petition

If you're on this blog, there's a decent chance you've heard about WorldNetDaily's Petition for Public Release of Barack Obama's Birth Certificate. WND is quite proud of this thing, currently bragging on their front page that 210,000 people have signed their petition. Birthers cite it all the time as evidence that there's actually a groundswell of support for their cause.

The standard rebuttal (as I'm not the first to point this out) is that the petition is horribly flawed, even by internet petition standards. Signing the petition requires only first and last name, and e-mail address. Zip code is optional. There's not even a clause where the signer affirms that the information given is true and accurate. That alone opens the petition to abuse, but what keeps this from being mere incompetency on WND's part, and instead elevates it into the realm of intentional con-artistry, is WND's decision to keep the actual list of signers secret. Are the same people signing the petition over and over? We can't see the list of signatories, so we don't know. Is the list full of fake names and bad aliases? We can't see the list of signatories, so we don't know.

So tonight, I engaged in a little experiment. Here's a screenshot of the petition, taken at 4:36 pm EST tonight:



You can see that at the time, the petition reflected 214,295 signatures. Granted, the page states that the total is updated periodically, so I took another screenshot at 4:57 pm EST, when the total was given as 214,705:



And another screenshot almost an hour later, at 5:54 pm EST, when the total was 214,737:



In the interim I surfed around a bit, created an Amazon listing, watched some Battlestar Galactica webisodes, and created 43 tabs over four Firefox windows that looked like this:



43 ready-to-go tabs for WND's petition, every one with the signatory name of "Barack Obama" himself, and every one with Phil Berg's e-mail address. I unchecked the little "YES!" box on each one, too.

And why 43? Not only is it the Hitchhiker's Guide answer +1, but it's also a sufficiently large number to prove my point, but also small enough that I don't need to set up 100+ tabs. Entering that info 43 times was kinda repetitive, even with Firefox's help.

Anyhow, right after 6:00 pm EST, it was time to give it a go. Here's the final screenshot, taken moments before I began submitting petition entries. For extra authentication, I put a shrunken window of the US time.gov clock on the screen. At a few seconds past 6:01 pm EST, the total was 214,738. 43 signatures in about 1 hour, 25 minutes, an average of about 1 signature every 2 minutes:



I started clicking petition submission buttons, and a couple of minutes later, I refreshed that original control window (which I didn't use to sign the petition), and it said this:



214,782. 44 signatures in 2 minutes, 8 seconds. A rather statistically improbable yet coincidental increase, wouldn't you say? An increase that reflected every one of the 43 applications I submitted, plus one additional one that reflects the average submission rate I noted above. An increase of the total during the 2 minutes of my experiment that matched the increase of the previous hour-and-a-half combined. So not only can you sign WND's petition multiple times, and not only you can sign it with the same name dozens of times within a couple of minutes, but you can sign it dozens of times within a couple of minutes even if you use the name of the President-Elect himself.

Here's one last screenshot, taken at 6:37 pm EST, after I've taken the time to upload images and type this post:



It's been over half an hour since my little experiment, and the total has only increased another 14 signatures.

So if you put any stock in the validity of this petition, take a moment to reconsider. And after that moment, take another one to reconsider exactly how much faith you should put in WND and Joseph Farah for attempting to snooker their readers like this.

Joseph Farah Is a Very Confused Man

Joseph Farah, head honcho over at WorldNetDaily, posted an editorial of sorts a couple of weeks back about other reporters' attribution to a WND finding that Obama's Certification of Live Birth is authentic. Farah takes serious issue with this, and writes:

[A]s any regular visitor would know, I don't believe that document displayed on Obama's website proves anything about his eligibility for office – other than the fact that he seems intent on hiding something...

Here's an example. It's a constituent letter from Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash. He writes: "As you know, President-Elect Obama has indeed provided his actual paper Certification of Live Birth to several media organizations, as well as the Annenberg Foundation's non-partisan 'Factcheck.org' website and the conservative news website WorldNetDaily, which reported that a WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic.' In fact, all of these groups have recognized that the president elect's actual birth certificate document is real and genuine."

That statement is totally and obviously false...At no time did Obama ever make his actual birth certificate available to WND – or any other news organization.

WND did offer up to forgery experts the facsimile of a partial birth certificate posted on his website. None of them could report conclusively that the electronic image was authentic or that it was a forgery.

Written by Joseph Farah, posted on WND, December 20, 2008

So where, you ask, did Rep. Inslee get the idea that WND had authenticated the Certification? Why, he got it from WND:

A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.

Written by Drew Zahn, posted on WND, August 23, 2008

Both of these are WorldNetDaily articles, published within four months of each other. Look again at how they conflict:

Zahn, August 23: "A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic."

Farah, December 20: "WND did offer up to forgery experts the facsimile of a partial birth certificate posted on his website. None of them could report conclusively that the electronic image was authentic or that it was a forgery."

What was a conclusive finding of authenticity in August is, by December, an inconclusive finding, with Farah berating other news agencies for reporting that WND had ever made a conclusive finding.

This should serve as an object lesson to anyone who considers WorldNetDaily to be a reliable news source. Because, apparently, even Joseph Farah doesn't consider WND's reporting to be reliable.