Saturday, December 31, 2011

WND's Aaron Klein cribs from CNN?

So WND now says that the seeming plagiarism in Jerome Corsi's article was the fault of anonymous "Kenyan researchers," and that the "unattributed references" were "unknown to WND."

Whether you trust WND's explanation may come down to whether you believe WND's writers would knowingly include unattributed references in their articles. Perhaps you would consider whether they had done so recently.

Take, for instance, Aaron Klein's December 9, 2011 article, "Naturalizer Newt: Gingrich's shifting views on immigration".

Now take this November 29th CNN editorial by William J. Bennett.

Now let's compare them:

CNN, Nov. 29:
Gingrich's call for a "humane" immigration policy in last Tuesday's CNN debate sounded too much like amnesty to many conservatives.
Aaron Klein, Dec. 9:
During a CNN debate two weeks ago, Gingrich called for a "humane" immigration policy that would grant legality for an untold number of illegal immigrants, something that sounds a lot like amnesty to conservative critics.
CNN, Nov. 29:
...only grant legality, not full citizenship, to anyone who has entered the country illegally should they meet stringent requirements.
Aaron Klein, Dec. 9:
Although legality, not full citizenship, would be given to those who meet stringent requirements,
CNN, Nov. 29:
Only those who can sustain themselves without government assistance (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) and pay for their own private health insurance would be eligible to stay.
Aaron Klein, Dec. 9:
only those who can sustain themselves without government assistance and pay for their own private health insurance would be eligible to stay in the country with legal status.
CNN, Nov. 29:
An independent, local "citizen's review" board would grant legal status based on the requirements above as well as the immigrant's standing in his or her community. Should they be permitted to stay, they will still be subject to a $5,000 penalty.
Aaron Klein, Dec. 9:
...an independent, local "citizen's review" board that would grant legal status based on the financial independence requirements and the immigrant's standing in his or her community. Each individual permitted to stay would be subject to a $5,000 penalty.
And finally, the real kicker, the word-for-word swipe:

CNN, Nov. 29:
...full control of the border by January 1, 2014. All government resources necessary would be made available for this, including "round-the-clock drone flights" and "multi-layer, strategic fencing in urban areas."
Aaron Klein, Dec. 9:
...full control of the border by Jan. 1, 2014. All government resources necessary would be made available for this, including "round-the-clock drone flights" and "multi-layer, strategic fencing in urban areas," Gingrich says.
Now admittedly, this is hardly the worst case of unattributed borrowing out there. But Klein clearly cribbed from Bennett's editorial, borrowing word choices and sentence structure and even whole phrases, and there is no link or attribution to either Bennett or CNN.

More importantly, this was published on WND on December 9, just ten days before Corsi's article that similarly (but more blatantly) swiped from the London Evening Standard and the AFP. So how much benefit of the doubt do you want to give WND in believing their story about "Kenyan researchers" being to blame for Corsi's conduct? Are "Kenyan researchers" also to blame for Bennett's words showing up in Klein's article?

Thursday, December 22, 2011

WND's Corsi Plagiarizes the London Evening Standard and the AFP?

Several months back I illustrated how Brad O'Leary, in his WND-published book The Audacity of Deceit, heavily copied an article by another WorldNetDaily writer. Another blog noted last month where a column by WND head Joseph Farah bore a suspicious resemblance to a Wikipedia article.

But neither of those hold a candle to a December 19 WND article by Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation and Where's the Birth Certificate? The article is "Obama's legacy of broken promises – in Kenya". Not only is roughly half of Corsi's article lifted from a 2008 British news story, but Corsi goes further, and repeatedly claims that the copied information and quotations were instead obtained by unnamed "WND researchers" in Kenya.

The British article in question is "Barack Obama's broken promise to African village", written by David Cohen and published in the London Evening Standard on July 25, 2008. Corsi even links to Cohen's story in his article (proving that he personally read the article he copied, and the content was not just provided to him by an unscrupulous "source"), but credits it as the source of only three sentences of information.

Meanwhile, he claims the rest of the article is the result of "a report in Kenya commissioned by WND." Corsi writes:
"A former Kenyan Parliament member with whom WND has worked confidentially since 2008 compiled the report. The research was assigned to trusted Kenyan professionals who conducted the field work and reported their findings in writing."
This is not the only specific reference in Corsi's article to WND researchers. On several occasions, he provides quotes and statements that he claims were provided to WND researchers. But a review of the Evening Standard shows that Corsi simply lifted them, verbatim, from the 2008 story:

Evening Standard, 2008:
However, the school's senior teacher Dalmas Raloo, 41, who is often used as a translator for Obama's grandmother who only speaks Luo, and is a friend of the family, says the family are mystified by what they are calling "Obama's lapse". "If you ask whether Obama's family think he should give something to the village and to the school, the answer is 'yes, definitely'. But they feel it should come from him spontaneously. They don't want to ask him for it."
Jerome Corsi, 2011:
Raloo said Obama's family in Kenya is mystified by what they are calling "Obama's lapse."

"If you ask whether the family think Obama should give something to the village and to the school, the answer is 'Yes, definitely,'" Raloo told WND researchers in Kenya. "But support should come from Obama spontaneously. We shouldn't have to ask him to keep his promises."
Evening Standard, 2008:
Villagers say that despite her age, Sarah Obama still comes to market where she sells her homegrown fruit and vegetables.
Jerome Corsi, 2011:
Villagers told WND researchers that Sarah, 88 years old, still goes to market where she sells her homegrown fruit and vegetables.
Evening Standard, 2008:
The market is where we head next to speak to villagers about their hopes for an Obama victory in November and what it might do for their village. Mary Manasse, 40, who runs the Mama Siste Mini Shop selling staples such as bread and cow's milk (packaged in old Coke bottles) says she has a photograph of Obama shaking hands with her on his 2006 visit.

"Back then I was looking after 40 orphans at the orphan centre," she recalls. "We faced a desperate shortage of money and Obama told us that he especially liked special, dedicated projects like ours and wanted to help. We thought he would give funds to help our project but we got nothing. A few months later we were forced to shut down the orphan centre because of lack of funds. Just a million Kenyan shillings [£6,000] would have kept us going another year. I feel disappointed that he did not come through."

Jerome Corsi, 2011:

The market is where WND researchers heard villagers express disappointment over hopes they once held that Obama would transform their lives in Kogelo.

Mary Manasse, who runs the Mama Siste Mini Shop selling staples such as bread and cow's milk packaged in old soda bottles, told researchers she has a photograph of Obama shaking hands with her on his 2006 visit.

"Back then I was looking after 40 orphans at the orphan center," she recalled. "We faced a desperate shortage of money, and Obama told us that he especially liked special, dedicated projects like ours and wanted to help.

"A few months later we were forced to shut down the orphan center because of lack of funds. Just a million Kenyan shillings (about $12,000) would have kept us going another year. I feel disappointed that he did not come through."

Those are just the instances of Corsi attributing the work and research of the London Evening Standard to his anonymous "WND researchers."

The singular other specific reference to the work of his "researchers" is also nothing more than a paraphrase of a May 2011 AFP article. While not copied word-for-word like much of the content from the Evening Standard, the information and 'quotes' provided to "WND researchers" by "Francis Muti" appear suspiciously similar to quotes appearing in the AFP article. (I'd also note that discovering the true source of this particular material was considerably more difficult than the content copied from the Evening Standard, given Corsi's paraphrasing and misspelling of Muti's last name.) To wit:

AFP, May 2011:
“In the wake of security challenges including terror threats, I can confirm that we decided to enhance security at the home of Mama Sarah … ,” said regional administrator Francis Mutie"

There have been no direct threats against the family but Kenya is on alert following warnings from Al-Qaeda followers after bin Laden was killed by US special forces in Pakistan on May 2.
Jerome Corsi, December 2011
"'As a result of the security challenges, including the threat of terror, I can confirm that we decided to improve security at home,' she told WND researchers in Kenya."

Francis Muti, the regional administrator said there was no immediate threat to the family, but Kenya was on high alert after a warning from adherents of al-Qaida after U.S. Special Forces in Pakistan killed bin Laden.

In short, every single quote or finding specifically attributed to Corsi's unnamed "researchers" was lifted from an earlier publication by another news agency.

While these falsifications may be the worst journalistic offenses in the article, they're still not the only ones. Several pictures accompany the article. It's not explicitly stated where these photographs originated from, but it's implied that they also came from "WND researchers." Corsi captions one picture of Sarah Obama by writing "As seen in Exhibit 5, Sarah continues to have roving chickens around her home, as well as goats and cows not seen in this photograph."

But this picture is, in fact, a copyrighted photo belonging to Evelyn Hockstein. No attribution to Ms. Hockstein is provided, and WND does not even indicate that the image is copyrighted. Even the 'roving chickens, goats, and cows' language is borrowed from the Evening Standard.

So much of Corsi's article is paraphrased or copied, word-for-word, that it can only be illustrated visually. Below is that illustration, with the yellow portions of Corsi's column representing the content that was lifted from other sources.

Color-Coded Legend:
Yellow = word-for-word copying from the Evening Standard;
Orange = content taken from the AFP;
Pink = specific references to the work of 'WND researchers';
Blue = credited citations to the Evening Standard

Obama's legacy of broken promises – in Kenya

I emailed Corsi for comment, including to ask for the names of his 'researchers' or a copy of their 'report.' I received no response. (Update: I received a reply from Corsi claiming that the report is "proprietary," but he'd be willing to give comments. However, he did not respond to follow-up emails with specific questions, including when the supposed investigation was conducted, and what other stories the 'source' has supposedly contributed to since 2008).

In the event that the online version of Corsi's article should disappear or be altered, I have preserved a PDF printout of the article at Scribd.

Finally, while the straight lifting of text from the Evening Standard is egregious, and the rewording of quotations from the AFP is suspicious, Corsi's attribution of all this material to his unnamed 'WND researchers in Kenya' is most troublesome. Corsi regularly relies on unnamed phantom "sources" from Kenya and Hawaii. Corsi's actions here, claiming that copied material was actually spoken directly to his anonymous "sources," should not just call into question the credibility of his "sources"; it should seriously call into doubt whether they even EXIST.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Presidential Succession and Designated Survivors

The Presidential line of succession tells us who ascends to the Presidency in the event of a vacancy in the Oval Office. And in this, we once again find Birther claims refuted.

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was the daughter of an Italian immigrant mother. Current Senate President Pro Tempore Daniel Inouye is the son of a Japanese immigrant father. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is the son of Italian immigrants. Attorney General Eric Holder's father is from Barbados. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was abandoned at birth in Pennsylvania; his biological parents' identities are unknown. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis is the daughter of Nicaraguan and Mexican immigrants. And Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki was born in the Territory of Hawaii in 1942.

That's just Obama's Cabinet. All of them appear as legitimate successors under the law, unlike the Taiwan-born Elaine Chao or the Czech-born Madeline Albright. Their parents' citizenship is irrelevant, and indeed is often not publicly stated, because it is irrelevant.

There is also the tradition of the Designated Survivor, a Cabinet member who remains at a distance during public meetings of the nation's top leaders, such as at the State of the Union address. Only Cabinet members who are eligible for the Presidency can be named as designated survivors.

And yet, Eric Holder was the designated survivor in 2009. More significantly, in 1996, the designated survivor was HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants.

But most significantly, the person selected in 2000 to sit out the State of the Union address, the person who the White House specifically selected to take over the Presidency if Congress was nuked, was Energy Secretary and future Presidential contender Bill Richardson. Bill Richardson, whose mother María Luisa López-Collada Márquez was a Mexican citizen when he was born in 1947 and remains a Mexican citizen today. But Richardson was born in California, and that makes him a natural born citizen, like it or not.

And that's not all. In 2003, President Bush had two designated survivors. One of those two was Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, the son of Japenese immigrants. Not only were Mineta's parents not U.S. citizens when he was born in 1931, but under the Asian Exclusion Act, they were not even allowed to become U.S. citizens. But Mineta, like Richardson, was himself born in California. And that was sufficient for the Bush Administration to choose him as a Constitutionally eligible designated survivor.

Yes, even the custom and practice of the Executive Branch itself, in the specific context of preserving and protecting the Office of the Presidency, contradicts the Birthers' claims.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Where are the Herman Cain Birthers?

Since November 2008, Joseph Farah has wanted Barack Obama to quell Farah's doubts about Obama's eligibility. Among his reasons for being skeptical from the very beginning: the lack of a produced long-form birth certificate, the identity of the birth hospital, and conflicting reports on the specific location of his birth.

Now in 2011, a new election is around the corner, and Farah has a new "favorite" candidate: Herman Cain.

Curiously, however, Mr. Farah is failing to exact the same level of scrutiny upon Cain as he did upon Obama. We have no proof of where Cain was born at all. We haven't seen Cain's long form birth certificate, or even his short form. We don't know what hospital he was born in. We have no proof of who his parents were. We haven't seen any birth announcements, hospital records, school records, college records, passport records, medical records, or baptism records.

"But," as the objection is liable to be, "there is no doubt or question as to where Herman Cain was born." Really? There isn't?

According to various news stories, Herman Cain was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Similarly, according to Wikipedia, Herman Cain was born in Memphis, although no authority is provided for this assertion. Indeed, for years, Wikipedia flatly stated that Mr. Cain was born in Georgia.

And it was not just Wikipedia that claimed Herman Cain's birthplace was in Georgia, rather than its neighbor to the north. To wit:

Nation's Restaurant News - 1988
But the unfamiliar has seldom proved to be a hurdle for the Atlanta-born 42-year-old, who broke into food service only six years ago as a "Whopper flopper," manning the grill at a Burger King unit.
Yahoo News
But the crowd was waiting for the official announcement from Atlanta-born Cain himself.
BET
Born in Atlanta, Cain cooked up a career that landed him in the position of CEO of the National Restaurant Association.
The Fiscal Times
The Georgia-born Cain, the only African-American GOP candidate, has had broad experience as a businessman, media celebrity and fiscal expert.
Cartersville Patch
Is Georgia-born Herman Cain ready for the grueling spotlight of a presidential campaign?
Los Angeles Times
Not to be outdone in the canine arena, Georgia-born businessman Cain criticized...
New York Sun
Mr. Cain is a Southern man, born in Georgia, who probably has a better understanding of the Bull Connors of the world than the Harlem native Mr. Rangel.
Conservapedia
Cain was born in Georgia and grew up there.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Back in May, when Georgia native Herman Cain announced his campaign for the presidency...
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Georgia native and tea party favorite Herman Cain
WSB Radio
While Herman Cain's popularity is increasing outside Georgia, the Atlanta native is the runaway leader in his home state.
Peach Pundit
The other Georgian in the race claims to have been born in Georgia, though birthers haven’t yet started asking for his birth certificate. Herman Cain most recently has been a talk show host for WSB radio in Atlanta, but also has served as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and executive positions with Pillsbury and Coca Cola.
Indeed, this alone represents far more American news sources that disagree about Cain's birthplace than have ever disagreed about Obama's. WorldNetDaily regularly argues that there were inconsistent reports as to what hospital Obama was born in; but news sources, major news sources, cannot even agree on what state Mr. Cain was born in.

When, then, can we expect Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily, and the rest of the Birther community to hold Herman Cain to the same standard they have applied to President Obama for the last three years? When are they going to demand that Herman Cain prove his eligibility for the Presidency? When are they going to start asking "Where's Herman Cain's Birth Certificate?"

Friday, August 12, 2011

Polarik's "Breaking" News is Broken

Well, Polarik's back. And rather than just claiming that Obama is the love child of Malcolm X and a Lebanese woman, or pretending that every childhood photo of Obama was faked in Photoshop, now he's spinning a tale that puts himself directly in the story.

The last time I posted about Polarik here (outside of a passing mention in a footnote in "Secret Origin, Part 2") was over a year ago, when he claimed PolitiFact invented a rumor about Obama's middle name. Now he's again trying to shift responsibility for something Birther-related, with a YouTube video and a WorldNetDaily article that claim the White House website linked to a fake Certification of Live Birth that Polarik created on his computer.

This is his claim, as expressed at YouTube:
On April 27, 2011. Obama and his White House held a press conference in which they gave reporters a copy of his "long-form" birth certificate and a copy of his "short-form" birth certificate." That copy, now posted on WHITEHOUSE.GOV, came from the image I created and stored in my Photobucket account - they did not make a copy of his short-form because there is no short-form (the COLB).
Ron's 'evidence' for this is essentially two-fold:

1) The White House blog linked to a black-and-white PDF scan of Obama's COLB that indicates that it was printed off the Snopes website, as it has a Snopes URL at the bottom.

2) An article on the Snopes website used to link to a COLB image in Polarik's Photobucket account.

He goes on at length (as he is wont to do), but that's the core of his claim. The only problem is that even given that both of the above are true, that still doesn't support his conclusion that the White House published and/or circulated an imitation document he'd created.

The White House printed off an image that was ON the Snopes server. The Snopes article linked to a Polarik image that was NOT on the Snopes server, but was rather on Photobucket's. The only way the White House published Polarik's image was if Snopes uploaded Polarik's image to its own server and published it at this address.

And Polarik provides absolutely zero evidence to support that conclusion. Rather, much of his argument contradicts it. He shares some charts showing pageviews of his Photobucket account that came from Snopes. But if web surfers are arriving at his account, then they're not looking at an image uploaded to Snopes' server.

After Polarik went public with this claim, several holes were pointed out in his story. The Snopes image has file info that says it was last modified "Saturday, November 15, 2008 3:19:50 PM." Polarik's fake COLB has file info that says it was last modified "Saturday, March 12, 2011 7:48:46 AM." Furthermore, the White House's image is clearly not Polarik's fake; there's a telltale uneven line of text at the bottom that clearly distinguishes the two. All too quickly, Ron's story was falling apart.

Now if I may interrupt my own narrative for a moment, let's go back a year, to June 2010. Polarik posts his own thread at FreeRepublic entitled "**Obama Bombshell** Blue Hawaii: Health Department falsified Obama's birth records!" In it, he wrote:
Sometime between October 31, 2008, and July 27, 2009, the dates of Health Director Chiyome Fukino's two press releases, Hawaii amended Obama's birth record. A brand-new Certificate of Live Birth (not Certification of Live Birth) was issued to him...

Not only did Obama get a new birth certificate, the certificate itself was designed with him in mind as Rev. 10/08 - coincidentally, the date of Fukino's first press release (10/31/08). Hawaii ditched the old Certification of Live Birth and switched to a hybrid form called a “Certificate of Live Birth” - formerly the name of the long-form birth certificate.

Say, "Aloha" to Obama's new COLB (Certificate of Live Birth):

[here Polarik put a Photobucket-hosted image of "Obama's new COLB"]

Click on the thumbnail for a full-size copy
When Freepers realized that Polarik wasn't being quite honest with them, he did an about-turn and posted a disclaimer, where he said that he'd posted his fake image to test people to see if they could spot it.

Okay, that aside was to provide some context for how Polarik answered his current detractors. He updated his YouTube description so that it now says:
[ **UPDATE** Last year, I made a 2nd forgery with an obvious flaw in it (a tilted line) to see if people would notice it. They didn't. People are only seeing it now because the White House posted a black & white outline of my prior image (which does not have the flaw).

That outline was made from my image shown in the video, but I left the link alone so that viewers can see the flawed forgery that so many have called a genuine copy of Obama's birth certificate.
You see? Sure, it looks like he was lying, but really he was just using a fake image to test people. Again.

He also added a single word to his original video description, to suit his new and improved story (addition emphasized):
That copy, now posted on WHITEHOUSE.GOV, came from the prior image I created and stored in my Photobucket account
New story, new details.

Not that the new narrative makes a lick of sense. In attempting to incorporate various inconvenient facts, Polarik has ended up making the following claim:

That Polarik created a fake COLB and posted it to his Photobucket account. That Snopes downloaded it and uploaded it to their server. That as a 'test', Polarik replaced his original fake with a crappier fake that had a tilted line. And that the White House printed out the original fake from Snopes and gave it to the press.


So now we have TWO Polarik-created fakes, one which has a tilted line and one which he says exists but hasn't shown. Plus an inexplicable scheme to switch out a really good fake for a not-so-good fake to see if people noticed. And a claim that the White House published a fake he created, but not the same fake he originally claimed they published a few days ago.

Still, even as silly as that sounds, is it believable? No. In trying to salvage his story, he simply made it worse.

For starters, one can view Polarik's Photobucket RSS feed to see when images were uploaded. "BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg" was indeed uploaded on March 12, 2011. Rather curiously, images called "Barack Obama's birth certificate (Factcheck copy)" and "Barack Obama's birth certificate (Fight The Smears copy)" were also uploaded the day before on March 11...and they're the same fakes with the tilted line. 'Test' or not, he was certainly out to lie to people about what his uploads represented.

This upload date demonstrates one of the problems with Polarik's new timeline. He uploaded the tilted line fake on March 12, but the White House printout was made on April 25, 2011. Yet the White House image is clearly not the March 12 fake. In fact, Polarik's version 2.0 story is maddeningly irrational; if Snopes had already linked to a fake he created, then why replace it with a more obvious fake? And why, when you go public, do you only brag about Snopes linking to the obvious fake, and not mention the 'prior image' at all until you revise your story?

The feed doesn't show when the original "BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg" was uploaded to Polarik's Photobucket account, but there was indeed a prior image at that URL. However, it wasn't a fake; it was the real thing. Israel Insider linked to it way back on June 24, 2008. Polarik certainly hadn't created a polished fake within two weeks of the original release of the COLB. He simply uploaded the real image, using the same filename that the DailyKos had used. Then in March 2011, for some reason, he replaced it with an imitation.

In browsing my computer files, I found something of note:


See there? "BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg," which I saved July 20, 2009. Followed by several other Polarik-created COLB files which I saved contemporaneously while I was writing about Polarik. And what does BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg look like?


Yep. It's just the plain ol' real COLB. If you open it in a separate window from the tilted line fake, you can see the differences for yourself. This isn't merely a shifting of a line; the entire rattan background changes, as does the border.

So, long story short, what do we have here? Snopes may have linked to a once-legitimate image URL on Polarik's Photobucket account, which Polarik originally uploaded in June 2008 but surreptitiously swapped out for an imitation image in March 2011. (This is a reminder of the risks of hotlinking to outside sites.) The White House printed out a legitimate image that was saved to the Snopes server, said image having nothing at all to do with Polarik's March 2011 fake. There's no evidence whatsoever of Polarik's 'prior' fake that was first mentioned in his revised story. Polarik's first attempt at his story may have gotten published at WND, but its faults caused him to revise it, but the narrative still crumbles under basic scrutiny.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Jim "RaceBannon" Bancroft: Birtherism's Forrest Gump

One of the great legends of Birtherdom, particularly over at FreeRepublic, is a story spun by Jim "RaceBannon" Bancroft. Bancroft was calling Obama's birth certificate a forgery within ten minutes after it went online, so it's no surprise that he went on to be a vocal Birther. What sets him apart is that he's a Birther with a tall tale.

Although he was preaching the 'Born in Kenya' gospel in the summer of 2008, it wasn't until November 2009, over a year after the Presidential election, that Bancroft made a stunning announcement: he had met teenage Obama in a Hawaii shop in 1980, and teenage Obama had personally told him that he was born in Kenya.

Indeed, according to Bancroft, teenage Obama told him that he was born specifically in Mombasa. And that he was from mixed-race parentage. And that he grew up in Indonesia. And that he wanted to be President when he grew up.

In subsequent tellings, teenage Obama's confessional to Bancroft grew even more thorough, with the young man also saying that he was living in Hawaii with people who weren't his parents and stating that the old black cook in the shop was his father.

Oh, and when he finally decided to share his story with the world on November 16, 2009, where did Bancroft first publish it? At Alan Peters' Anti-Mullah. Yes, at the blog of the same man who began the 'Born in Kenya' rumor the year before. Indeed, Bancroft and Peters have been affiliated with each other since at least 2005. They've even appeared on the radio together.

Still, it wasn't the details of Bancroft's Obama story that impelled this post. Nor was it his friendship with Alan Peters. Nor was it his fanciful claim of having named the Tamil Tigers.

No, what drove this post was Bancroft's story of meeting another politically-connected person in 1980. In the same story that appeared on Anti-Mullah, Bancroft wrote:
I met the son of G. Gordon Liddy on board the USS Okinawa in 1980 when we were heading to Iran.

My ship was part of the 31st Marine Amphibious Unit, deployed in January 1980 from Pearl Harbor as normal, and once in Subic Bay , Philippines , President Jimmy Carter announced what is now called, “The Carter Doctrine”. As I remember it, some group of men were standing near the port side of the hanger deck, just milling around near some open hatchway, and I noticed they were inspecting some military equipment, don’t remember what, but I saw this person’s name written on his trousers, “LIDDY”...

So, I find myself standing next to a 6’2” man about 28 or so with the name LIDDY on his trousers, and I asked him, “Hey, are you related to Gordon Liddy?” His answer surprised me totally, “Yes, that's my father”. The likeness was now apparent and unmistakable and since then, I have read how one of his sons was a Navy SEAL at that time, so, that is who I met. What was embarrassing for me, was I was struck, he was among the famous persons I met while in the Corps, I commented how his dad never ratted anyone out, and he said, “No, He didn’t”. I was filled with wonder at meeting him and I told him that it felt like I was talking to a celebrity. That didn’t go over too well, his face changed it’s stoic expression to one of , “You’re annoying me” and a blonde man next to me spoke up, “Uh, You’re talking to my Lieutenant here…”
Sounds plausible enough, right? Certainly more plausible than a random encounter with a teenage Obama who spilled his entire life story and personal secrets to a random stranger. I'd always written the Liddy story off as a perfunctory detail in the story, an attempt to disguise the piece's Birther motivations.

Except the Liddy story is undeniably false, it is provably so. James G. Liddy is a former Navy SEAL and the son of G. Gordon Liddy. How do we know that James Bancroft absolutely did not meet him in the summer of 1980?

1) Jim Liddy was 20 in 1980, not 28.
2) Jim Liddy was not on the USS Okinawa in 1980.
3) Jim Liddy was not a Lieutenant in 1980.
4) Jim Liddy was not a Navy SEAL in 1980.
5) In fact, Jim Liddy did not even join the U.S. Navy until 1985.

Yet Bancroft quotes the young man as confirming a familial relationship and says that "the likeness was now apparent and unmistakable." Basically, the entire story is utter crap from top to bottom.

The first of these discrepancies was brought to Bancroft's attention within a matter of days. His reaction was to stand by his supposed memories, but claim the officer lied to him about being the son of a convicted felon.

And so when Bancroft published a "revised" version of his story a few days later on another website (which had posted his original version the day after Alan Peters did), he made some changes to the Liddy part of his tale:
While on ship, I met the son of a famous political figure connected to the Watergate scandal on board the USS Okinawa in 1980 when we were heading to Iran....I saw this person’s name written on his trousers, the same name as that political figure.

This political figure was the chief of certain operations in the Nixon White House....So, I find myself standing next to a 6’2″ man about 28 or so with the name on his trousers, and I asked him, “Hey, are you related to that man” His answer surprised me totally, “Uh, Yes, he’s my father”. The likeness was now apparent and unmistakable and since then, I have read how one of his sons was in the military at that time, so, that is who I met.
He simply removed all the references to the name "Liddy." The entire description of the event remains the same. His claim that he met the son of a convicted Nixon conspirator remains the same. Even the "apparent and unmistakable" family resemblance is still there.

Bancroft had already learned that his story of meeting Liddy's son could not possibly be true, but his response wasn't to cut the anecdote or even to rewrite it to propose he had been the target of a joke. No, he left the anecdote in, continued to treat it as factual, and simply scrubbed it of all the specific references that could be used to show it was an impossible event. He continued to tell the story, even as he knew it was completely false.

In short, Bancroft's story spotlighted two supposed celebrity encounters in 1980. One (Obama) with absolutely zero confirmable details, and another (Liddy) that was capable of independent confirmation. And the one that was capable of independent confirmation was independently, and conclusively, debunked. Moreover, Bancroft's response to the debunking was not to drop the anecdote; it was to scrub the anecdote of the specific details that made such a debunking possible.

And amazingly, other FreeRepublic Birthers continue to promote Bancroft's personal myth on the grounds that he is a "credible" source.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Secret Origin, Part 2

Cross-posted at Birth of a Notion

The Secret Origin of the Birthers explained how the 'Obama was born in Kenya' rumor began. But how did it get from a passing comment on FreeRepublic to a widespread rumor that drove the release of Obama's Certification of Live Birth? How do we know that it was those March 2008 posts that drove the later rumors?

Although he took a decisive lead in the delegate count in late February, Barack Obama did not clinch the Democratic nomination until June 3. He then became the first African American to be nominated for the Presidency by a major American party. It took less than a week for his detractors, both extremist right-wingers and disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, to latch onto a theory that attempted to delegitimize that nomination. Within a matter of days, hundreds of bloggers and commenters were newly promoting or repeating the previously nonexistent debate over Obama’s birth and Presidential eligibility.

The source of this sudden shift in interest was the single post of a political blogger at the National Review Online. And the tipping was not only unintentional, it was precisely the opposite effect of the writer had hoped for. Jim Geraghty is a conservative activist who blogs at NRO. Starting in May 2008, he began blogging about his skepticism over rumors of a supposed tape of Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, where she was “railing against whitey,” said rumors being spread by avid Hillary Clinton-supporter Larry Johnson. It was a nasty rumor that was among the very first items on the Obama campaign’s FightTheSmears.com website (the birth certificate being another).

Still, while all the Obama camp could do was deny the rumor, it was Geraghty who truly killed it. On June 6, Geraghty observed that the story “sounds like something out of a clichéd political thriller novel. Actually, it sounds exactly like something out of a clichéd political thriller novel.” And Geraghty then pointed readers to a 2006 novel, The Power Broker, about a Democratic Senator on his way to becoming the first African-American President, whose opponents locate a tape of him ‘railing against whitey,’ and choose to hold onto it as an October Surprise.

Geraghty also observed that story-propounder Larry Johnson had been wildly inconsistent in his details of the alleged tape, and that Johnson had been vulgar in response to inquiries from Reason Magazine regarding those inconsistencies, and he declared the rumor dead. And so, one early ugly rumor about the Democratic Presidential candidate was quelled by a Republican.

Three days later, on June 9, 2008 Geraghty tried taking on another round of unfounded rumors. But these were rumors that he, on his own, couldn’t defeat, and so he called on the Obama campaign to release the one document that could do the job.

Geraghty noted three specific rumors, all of which he deemed “unlikely.” First, that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Such a cover-up, Geraghty noted, would require Obama and every family member to have lied consistently for decades. Second, that Obama’s middle name was “Muhammed,” and not “Hussein," a rumor that had continued to circulate even after PolitiFact collected and published Obama’s various public records. Third, that Obama’s legal first name at birth was “Barry,” not Barack.

So Geraghty asked the Obama campaign to debunk all this nonsense in one fell swoop, by releasing his birth certificate. Some people have accused Geraghty of merely stoking rumors, but the “whitey” incident suggests otherwise. As he stated, he didn’t want conservatives clinging to unfounded stories as their last-ditch hope for the election, and so cutting down those rumors early served his interests as much as Obama’s. And in a very significant sense, it worked; the Obama campaign published Barack’s birth certificate on the web on June 12, and Obama’s birth certificate and related rumors failed to become issues in the campaign, for either the parties or the candidates or the overwhelming majority of the electorate.

But despite Geraghty’s explicit skepticism about the rumors, and about the Kenyan birth one in particular, they still managed to find an audience with whom they resonated. Moreover, by appearing on the website of National Review Online (along with an able assist by Michelle Malkin, who reposted the rumor on her popular site), the Kenyan birth rumor managed to reach a much wider audience it they had before. A rumor that had been repeated fewer than twenty times in its three months of existence, with most of the repeating coming from an even smaller handful of individuals, suddenly was published on dozens and even hundreds of different websites within a matter of days. Malkin’s post alone drew 168 comments in under two days, and received 46 trackbacks from other websites.

FreeRepublic started its first thread devoted to the rumor on June 10. WorldNetDaily published its first article about Obama’s eligibility on the same day. Websites like Atlas Shrugs, TexasDarlin, and Larry Johnson’s NoQuarter, which all served as leaders of the early Birther movement (long before they were even dubbed “Birthers”), all ran their first Birther-related stories after June 9. Literally overnight, rumors about Obama’s birth and eligibility went from being impossibly obscure to practically commonplace, and a document that only a handful of people had ever suggested be released was suddenly the subject of urgent demands of transparency all over the web.

In fact, one thing that stands out in retrospect is how insignificant the issue of Obama’s birth certificate had been before June 9, 2008. Those with selective memories (and possessing a selective memory is among the chief qualifications for being a Birther) claim that there were months of demands to see Obama’s birth certificate before he finally ceded and posted an image online. Oftentimes, these are the same people whose memories tell them that the rumors about Obama’s birth began back in 2007 or earlier.

To the contrary, demands for Obama’s birth certificate were few and far between before Jim Geraghty suggested that one be produced. The post at NRO not only served to tip the Kenyan birth rumor, it also tipped the demand for Barack’s birth certificate.

There was only one formal, publicly announced request for the President’s birth certificate prior to Geraghty’s, and it is the same one Geraghty himself notes. PolitiFact.com, the online fact-checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times, stated on May 2, 2008 that they had requested a copy of Obama’s birth certificate in the course of their debunking of the rumors about Obama’s middle name. But PolitiFact said that the campaign would not release that particular document, and that Hawaii did not make such records public.

The reaction to PolitiFact’s statement was thundering silence. The blogosphere did not explode with demands for a birth certificate, and message boards were not filled with threads calling for disclosure. In the weeks between PolitiFact stating “We tried to obtain a copy of Obama's birth certificate, but his campaign would not release it,” and Geraghty’s post suggesting the birth certificate be released, only a handful of individuals so much as noted Obama’s absentee birth certificate, much less demanded it. None came from a journalist or even a prominent pundit or blogger.

Instead, the only requests for Barack’s birth certificate prior to June 2008 came from unremarkable bloggers and message board posters. The earliest such requests were in February 2008,* as the question of McCain’s eligibility got its initial press. And it was not allegations of a foreign birth that drove those earliest requests; it was unfounded speculation over Obama’s first name and middle name.

On March 5, 2008, conservative blogger “velvethammer,” posting on his site Ironic Surrealism, made a post entitled “Wanted: Barack Hussein Obama’s Birth Certificate.” The author claims the post was made “(mostly) tongue in cheek,” and he didn’t raise any particular conspiracy theories about what allegedly harmful information the document might contain. Instead, he glossed over the question rather quickly and moved onto other Obama questions, such as the spectre of dual citizenship and split loyalties.

The value in velvethammer’s post is in the post’s comments, as they offer some insight into what the national conversation over Obama’s birth certificate actually looked like in the first half of 2008. A handful of commenters in March admitted they would be interested in seeing a birth certificate, a handful more accuse him of not being a true Christian, and one person demanded to see his baptism records.

A couple of people raise the legal name accusation, suggesting that the birth certificate might list his first name as “Barry” or his last name as “Dunham.” A few throw around some gossip about his parents, particularly the allegation that they weren’t married when he was born.

But one thing is noticeably absent from the early comments at this site: none of them accuse Barack of having been born in Kenya. Not a single one. The first comment to make such an allegation came on June 9, the same day as Jim Geraghty’s post at NROnline.

The comments section also supports viewing Geraghty’s June 9 post as the tipping point of Birtherism. Velvethammer’s post attracted 21 posts during the three months between March 5 and June 8, with a third of those coming from the author himself. Then, suddenly, there were 19 comments on June 10 ALONE. By the end of June 12 there were another 36 comments. And whereas only a single blog had linked back to the post in the ten weeks after it was made, June 10 saw seven trackbacks in a single day.

Still, if there was any talk at all about Obama’s birth or eligibility or his birth certificate that had mustered any attention prior to June 2008, there’s one place it would be absolutely guaranteed to appear: Jerome Corsi’s “The Obama Nation.”

“The Obama Nation,” published in mid-2008, is practically a reference book for anti-Obama rumors, smears and accusations. Corsi spends two pages ruminating on which part of Jakarta young Obama might have grown up in, under the premise that it would say something negative about his step-father’s financial status. A whole chapter is devoted to wild speculation about Obama’s ties to Kenyan politicians, which is full of enough half-truths and unsupported allegations that it sets the high-water mark of wrong for the entire book. And the entire middle third of the book is about the misdeeds and misbehavior of people Obama knew in Chicago. It would seem reasonable to assume, then, that if questions about Obama’s birth and his Constitutional eligibility had been circulating before and during the primaries, they would be front and center in “The Obama Nation.” Corsi claims in the Preface that he “finalized the decision to write this book in March 2008,” and the book mentions dozens of specific events that took place up through May 2008, so a controversy raging since the year before shouldn’t have escaped his not-so-discriminating eye.

And in fact, Corsi does talk about Obama’s birth. On page 17, he writes:

“Obama Junior was born on August 4, 1961.”

But that’s pretty much it. Every time Corsi references Obama's birth in "The Obama Nation," he treats it as straight, uncontroverted fact. In over 300 pages, Corsi never questions when, where, or to whom Barack Hussein Obama II was born. He never so much as hints at a dispute over Obama’s eligibility or status as a natural-born citizen.** Corsi devoted an entire sub-chapter to accusing Obama of using movie quotes in his speeches, but Obama’s birth and citizenship was a complete non-issue even to him. That’s because he finished putting his book together at the very beginning of June 2008, missing the tipping of Birtherism by only a matter of days.

This universal non-interest in Obama’s birth prior to June 9 presents its own question: how did a completely unfounded rumor make its way from a random comment on FreeRepublic to a blog post at the National Review? If Jim Geraghty wasn’t introduced to rumors about Obama’s Kenyan birth through a noteworthy rumormonger or rampant demands for a birth certificate, where did he hear it, and how did it appear worth refuting? Thankfully, he provided a source for the rumor in his June 9 post.

That source was a thread on the message boards of Snopes.com. As web-savvy readers know, Snopes is one of the internet’s premier resources on urban legends and internet myths. Popular rumors are verified or debunked in full articles with details and citations to sources; less serious submissions that don’t merit a full debunking often receive just a reposting of the submission onto the Snopes message board, for reader amusement. One such rumor posted on April 21, 2008 read as follows:

Today, we have a new matter before us. There is an article out today on the internet that says that Barack Obama's mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy.

She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so she Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth.

Obama is not eligible to be the President of the United States of America. This may not be proven in the next few days, but I am sure it will be proven before the General Election.

The DNC and the elite of the Democratic party should respect Hillary and not force her off the ballot. If they do, we may not even have a viable candidate.

I'm sure all this can be proven, by hospital documents and witnesses. It will take time, but Obama is not a legitimate U. S. citizen. He has citizenship established in Kenya, where he is recorded as Arab-African.

Most of the early conspiracy allegations are present in this post. Obama’s mother was specifically in Kenya late in her pregnancy. Her flight home was prohibited. She gave birth in Kenya, but then took her son home to Hawaii and registered his birth there. And it specifically asserts that he is not eligible to be President.

Curiously, the comment appears to have been written from a Democrat’s perspective, expressing concern over the viability of the likely Democratic Presidential candidate, and advocating for Hillary’s candidacy. So it was likely not a right-winger who forwarded this rumor to Snopes, but a proto-PUMA.

So what was this “article out today on the internet” that the reader saw and believed? There was no news article that presented this allegation, nor did any high-profile blog or website report it. In April 2008, speculation that Obama was born anywhere but Hawaii was still spectacularly rare, so a likely candidate readily presents itself.

The article itself was most probably a piece entitled “Obama Laundry List of Lies.” Originating at the blog "The Audacity of Hypocrisy", the list was an assemblage of poorly-sourced “lies” that Mr. Obama had allegedly made during the campaign. Audacity of Hypocrisy regularly updated its list with new items, and these different lists circulated the web, eventually attracting the interest of Snopes.

One variation of the Laundry List that was reposted around the internet was notably different than the others. This variation of the list proper ended with #68, and then continued with a seemingly unrelated two-item list:

“Obama claims special birth”

Much more so than we might believe.

1. Reports emanating from Africa allege his mother was in Kenya with his ARAB Kenyan (NOT Black Kenyan) father - this is clearly shown in Kenyan Govt. Registry documents which list the father as an Arab Kenyan - at a very late term of her pregnancy and was not allowed on a flight to return to HAWAII.

She gave birth to him in Kenya, immediately got on a plane and then registered him as being born in Hawaii.

2. He is NOT an African American at all but an Arab American and cannot claim African minority status, which by US Federal regulations require a person to have 1/8 (one eighth) of the minority blood (12%).

From his mother he has 50% white blood, from his father he has 43.25% Arab BLOOD and from his MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER he manages to hold onto 6.75% African or Black heritage blood.

He has had to duck and weave all his life and use whatever lies he could use to even “pass for Black” and the benefits that this minority status provided. So even this, while understandable - IS A documented LIE.

Here we see all of the elements present in the rumor as presented on the Snopes message board on April 21. Obama’s mother in Kenya with his father. Her pregnancy preventing her from flying. A Kenyan birth, followed by a prompt trip back to Hawaii to register the birth. The Snopes account also provides no new notable details that the Laundry List lacks; even something as basic as Ann Dunham’s name is missing from both accounts.

If there can be any doubt that this is the article the Snopes submitter saw, that is settled by the “Laundry List”s claim that Obama and his father are both “Arab,” rather than black. This singularly unusual claim is reflected in the Snopes post, where both Obama and his father are described as being “Arab-African.” Both even make reference to supposed Kenyan government records regarding this ethnic classification. This is the same rumor Alan Peters referenced in his March 5, 2008 "Ruthless Roundup" post that helped kick off the 'Born in Kenya' rumor.

Given this close symmetry of information, the Snopes submitter was almost certainly referring to a posting of this version of the “Obama Laundry List of Lies.” And indeed, the Laundry List was responsible for the biggest spread of the Kenyan Birth rumor prior to its appearance at National Review Online.

The author of this formulation of the Laundry List, with its appended birthplace and genealogical rumors, was none other than Alan Peters. He posted it on his blog “News Views” on April 3, 2008, and the same day linked to the article from another of his blogs, Anti-Mullah.

Peters obviously cribbed the core of the Laundry List from “The Audacity of Hypocrisy,” but starting with “Obama claims special birth,” everything that followed, including the Kenyan birth rumor, is Peters’ addition. So was it original to Peters, or did he cut and paste it as well?

As the seemingly irrelevant comment “Obama claims special birth” might suggest, it was in fact a cut-and-paste job. Peters copied it directly from an April 4, 2008 post by FARS at the conservative forum FreeRepublic, where it was posted in a thread that began with the 68-item version of Audacity of Hypocrisy’s Laundry List. The non-sequitur introductory comment is a remnant of the post that FARS was responding to, a satirical anecdote about Obama’s father being shot at in the Honolulu airport.

Aside from a couple of short comments, Peters’ list attracted no recorded attention at first. Then, a little over a week after it was posted online, it started to spread.

“No2liberals,” a regular poster at the site NukeGingrich.com, is an Alan Peters commenter and fan. On April 11, 2008, No2liberals posted a link to Peters’ Laundry List post in the comments section of a NukeGingrich post. Included alongside it was a link to someone claiming that Obama was “only 1/16 black.” He would link to it again the next day in a comments thread at the blog "A Future In Freedom", and a third time in a comment left at the blog "Gates of Vienna" on April 16.

Another commenter in the Gates of Vienna thread was VinceP1974, a then 33-year-old Chicagoan who maintains a website entitled the “Islamo-American War Site.”*** The Laundry List must have appealed to Vince, because he promptly turned around and posted it in the comments of other blogs in the wee hours of April 17, including “neo-neocon” and “The Strata-Sphere.” But not before he left some charming comments like “B Hussein Obama is not black. He's Arab and white.”

Meanwhile, Peters’ work had taken other routes of republication. It was posted to the Facebook group “Stop Barack Obama (One Million Strong & Growing)” on the evening of April 16. Then on April 17, Peters’ piece appeared simultaneously on the blogs “Not Under the Bus” and “Just a Typical White Person”, which shared a common author.

On April 20, 2008, Alan Peters’ “Obama Laundry List of Lies” was republished at “Miss Beth’s Victory Dance” and “Wake Up America”, as well as several other blogs maintained by “Miss Beth,” a/k/a Kateri Jordan of Tucson, Arizona. In all, Jordan posted the Laundry List to at least a half dozen websites, as well as posting it at Digg. The posts began by stating “This came to me in my email and I was given permission to post and spread this anywhere and everywhere I can.” This is followed with an enjoinder to “Read, memorize, swipe and publish!”

Two particular details set these versions of the List apart from earlier versions. One is the addition of a wholly unrelated item at the bottom of the List, entitled “BREAKING NEWS - ISLAMIC SUPPORT FOR Obama HUSSEIN COMING INTO THE OPEN IN CA,” and spotlighting a photograph of a Muslim woman holding a pro-Obama sign outside an Anaheim mosque. The source of this non-sequitur item? Alan Peters. From a April 2, 2008 post that Peters made to his blog “Anti-Mullah.” The other added detail was an acknowledgment, specifically crediting Alan Peters as the author of the piece.

Most of these posts were met with little response. None drew particular attention to the rumor that he was born in Kenya. But one, at the blog “Wake Up America”, received several dozen comments, including substantial discussion of the alleged Kenyan birth and the consequential eligibility matters. Most of this discussion was between Jordan and Katie Norcross of Palatine, Illinois.

Norcross quickly became perhaps the first proactive Birther, fiercely stressing Obama’s ineligibility, claiming that she had already “searched birth records and no hospital or county office has any records” (how she was doing this in Illinois is unclear ), announcing that she was starting to check Kenyan records (again, how she was doing this in Illinois is unclear), and declaring that she was running a Freedom of Information Act search for a State Department birth certificate from Kenya, all within a day or so of first hearing the rumor. She exhibits not only the Birther tendency to immediately accept a rumor as fact, but also the pseudo-intellectual bombast that allowed her to reach seemingly impossible conclusions without any cognitive dissonance. When
she stated that she had searched Hawaiian hospital records and come up empty, was she simply lying, or did she honestly believe she could peruse 1960s-era Hawaiian hospital records from her
home computer?

Given Norcross’s enthusiastic conspiracism, the active comment thread, the April 20th posting date, and the fact that a handful of other websites linked back to the “Wake Up America” post, it seems probable that the “article out today on the internet” referenced in the April 21 Snopes message board post was the April 20 post Kateri Jordan made to “Wake Up America.” Although the same rumor was repeated on other sites, including other ones that Jordan posted it to, it was just item #69 in a list; what sets the post at “Wake Up America” apart is the spotlighting and discussion of the ‘Born in Kenya’ rumor in the comments. I have been unable to locate any other sites that featured such extensive discussion or debate about that singular rumor.

Regardless of the specific URL that the Snopes emailer had visited and which inspired his query, the probability is still overwhelming that the submitter was referencing someone’s republication of Alan Peters’ Laundry List post. Thus not only can it be established that Alan Peters and FARS were responsible for creating the original Kenyan birth rumor, but Peters was also responsible for spreading it across the web, where it eventually caught the attention of Jim Geraghty. And as noted previously, Peters was also responsible for first telling the lie that Obama's half-siblings had vouched for a Kenyan birth.

This was just the starting point for Birtherism, however. Other rumors developed to validate this initial rumor, or to flesh it out with additional details. Efforts were made to cast doubt on accepted facts. Opportunists hitched their wagons to the rumors, and the misinformation continued to spread.

- Copyright Loren Collins
June 23, 2011
_______________________________

* Interestingly one person posting alongside these early birth certificate demands is “DrRJP,” who later adopted the pseudonym “Dr. Ron Polarik.”

** Corsi specifically notes on p. 103 that Obama was born to an American mother and that "his father, who was born in Kenya and was a Kenyan citizen when Obama was born." Corsi makes no insinuations whatsoever that this genealogical fact disqualifies Obama from the Presidency. Three years later, however, Corsi has now written a book which claims that this exact same fact disqualifies Obama from the Presidency.

*** Vince also appeared in the comments of Kenneth Lamb’s February blog post debuting the 'Obama is an Arab' lie, where Vince immediately accepted that Obama is Arab and blamed the media for the cover-up.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

The Secret Origin of the Birthers

Cross-posted at Birth of a Notion

Birthers like to claim that the public was questioning Obama's birth and eligibility long before such claims ever actually arose. By backdating their theories to 2007 or 2004 or even earlier, they mentally lend their beliefs greater credibility. Even some skeptics have proposed that proto-Birther rumors began prior to the 2008 primaries. A 2007 posting at Yahoo Answers asked “If Obama bin HUSSEIN al Barack was born in Kenya, how can he run for president in the US?” In a July 2009 editorial, the National Review said that the allegations of a Kenyan birth for Obama began with a commenter at a Democratic blog, The Blue State, who wrote on July 23, 2007, “Obama isn't technically a northerner either since he was born in Kenya... I like a more international view of the world so I like the fact he was born somewhere else.” There was even a Kenyan newspaper from 2004 that casually referenced “Kenyan-born Obama.”*

I believe that it is a mistake to peg comments like these as starting rumors about Obama’s birth. Apart from the lack of any evidence that others repeated their errors, they all are lacking essential elements of the popularized rumor: the acknowledgment that Obama’s public biography places his birth in Hawaii, and the allegation of a cover-up to hide his true birth in Kenya. The earlier comments don’t allege that the Hawaiian birth story is false; rather, they seem blissfully ignorant of Obama’s biography, and appear honestly mistaken in their assumptions. They give no indication that they’re questioning or disputing the official story, and their casual statements that Obama was born in Kenya appear to be nothing more than simple mistakes of fact, like someone who erroneously believes that George W. Bush was born in Texas, or Sarah Palin in Alaska, or Al Gore in Tennessee. Would you have guessed that of the two 2004 Presidential candidates, former Texas Governor George W. Bush was born in east-coast Connecticut, while Massachusetts Senator John Kerry was born in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado?

Extensive searching for the first online appearance of challenges to Obama’s birthplace, or challenges to his Constitutional eligibility, or demands for his birth certificate turn up nothing prior to the start of the 2008 primary elections. Rather, all three made their initial appearances in March 2008, right around the time that Obama took a decisive lead in the delegate count for the Democratic nomination. Most websites that one would expect to be early adopters of Obama birth and eligibility rumors (e.g., conservative sites like FreeRepublic, conspiracy sites like Prison Planet, white supremacist sites like Stormfront) didn’t engage the rumor until June 2008.

Virtually all of Birtherism owes its existence to the rumor that Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, did not give birth to him in Hawaii. As the rumor goes, she instead had traveled to Kenya for unspecified reasons, and had given birth to her son there, before returning to Honolulu and falsely claiming that she gave birth in Hawaii. This is the rumor that eventually caused the Birther conspiracy theory to tip as an epidemic, that drove the resultant demands for the release of Obama’s birth certificate, that inspired the immediate skepticism of the birth certificate following its release, and ultimately led to the neverending supply of alternative legal theories as to why Obama ought to be deemed Constitutionally ineligible for the Presidency. Perhaps one or more of these events would have transpired anyway in the absence of the Kenyan birth rumor, but as it happened, the rumor was the root cause of them all.

And that rumor first appeared in the early hours of Saturday, March 1, 2008, on the conservative web forum, FreeRepublic.com. In a thread entitled “FR CONTEST: Pin the Middle Name on the Obama,” where posters were offering various 'funny' middle names for Barack Obama in lieu of “Hussein,” a poster named “FARS” posted this non-sequitur:

I was told today that Obama swore in on a Koran for his Senate seat. I do not believe he did. Can someone clarify this for me? I am under the impression only a Congressman has so far sworn in on a Koran.

Also that Obama’s mother gave birth to him overseas and then immediately flew into Hawaii and registered his birth as having taken place in Hawaii.

Again, any clarifications on this? Defintely disqualifies him for Prez. There must be some trace of an airticket. While small babies are not charged air fare they do have a ticket issued for them.

Long time ago but there may be some residual information somewhere. Good ammo (if available and true) BEST USED AFTER he becomes PREZ (if that occurs) and it’s too late for Dems - except accept the VP.

Most of the essential elements of the rumor are here, from the immediate flight to Hawaii for registration to the eligibility concerns. All that is lacking is a specific reference to Kenya, which we’ll see was remedied shortly thereafter. He acknowledges that Obama’s public biography states that he was born in Honolulu, and he alleges that the public biography is false. He actively endorses the idea of Obama’s family covering up a birth in Kenya, and as such, is proposing a conspiracy theory.

Importantly, despite being the first person, anywhere, to report this rumor, he cites no source for it. No news report, or broadcast program, or website. Only “I was told today.” The fact that it appears alongside the oft-repeated and equally oft-debunked false rumor that Obama took his oath of office on a Koran illustrates the level of FARS’ willingness to factcheck rumors before repeating them.

FARS’ rumor drew as much negative response as it did support; the very next poster wrote in reaction “Has the Conservative Philosophy and Message become so diluted and fuzzy that we must resort to trash like this[?]” No one appeared to pick up the rumor and spread it themselves. Rather, it took a blogger outside FreeRepublic to repeat it as a legitimate rumor.

Four days later, on March 4, 2008, FARS’ rumor was cited by pseudonymous blogger “Alan Peters” on his blog “Ruthless Roundup.” The post began with a link to FreedomsEnemies.com**, and followed that link with this addendum:

Add to the family history shown in this article that Obama's mother was allegedly visiting Kenya with Obama's father in the final months of her pregnancy and was not allowed to board a flight in her late term to return home.She allegedly had Obama in Kenya and quickly boarded a flight to Hawaii. Airlines do not accept late term pregancies but do not refuse passage to a newborn, usually issuing a 10% or free fare ticket for the trip.Once in Hawaii, his mother registered him as being born in Hawaii.

Apart from his bloodline making him an Arab American NOT an African American, (his African blood only reaches less than 7% and insufficient to qualify for Federal standards of a minimum 12.5% as a given minority) he may not even be born in the USA, and unlike McCain without being on an American military base and with BOTH parents being Americans.

Like FARS, Peters provided no source for the rumor, choosing only to frame the rumor with “allegedly,” giving it marginally more credence than FARS’s “I was told today.” Also, just as FARS had paired the birth rumor with another popular false rumor about Obama, Peters does precisely the same, with the claim that Obama is “an Arab American NOT an African American”*** (a rumor that FARS had mentioned in subsequent posts in the ‘Middle Name’ thread). Peters also adds the remaining core elements of the rumor, pinpointing Kenya as the supposed location of birth, and offering rationales for why Ann Dunham would have been in Kenya and why she would not have returned to the U.S. prior to giving birth.

Peters does not cite FARS as his source for this rumor, but there can be little doubt as to that. FARS regularly posts links to Peters’ blogs on FreeRepublic, and Peters occasionally incorporates comments from FARS into his blog posts. FARS actually tends to talk more about Peters than himself, and in my communications with FARS, he responded for the both of them. At the very minimum they are long-time friends who are in regular communication; on the other hand, it is entirely possible that they are actually the same person, and “FARS” is just a secondary internet identity for Peters.

“Alan Peters” is itself a pseudonym, and the 70-year-old Santa Ana resident who uses it is a prolific anti-Muslim blogger who maintains several websites, most notably Anti-Mullah. He describes himself as having been “For many years involved with intelligence and security matters in Iran with significant access at top levels during the rule of the Shah, until early 1979. Currently an Iran SME (subject matter expert), analyst/commentator, and multi-linguist.” A writer in Forbes Magazine cited Iranian sources who said Peters has become “a sensationalist and even fantasist in his later years.”

That description is, if anything, an understatement. Peters’ disdain for the Muslim religion is exceeded only by his outright hatred of Barack Obama. During the two years since the Kenyan birth rumor debuted on Peters’ blog, he has been one of the most steadfast purveyors of anti-Obama rhetoric and Birther conspiracy theories, ably assisted by FARS’s posts at FreeRepublic. Peters is also personally responsible for starting one of the most widespread secondary rumors about the supposed Kenyan birth, the completely false claim that Obama's half-siblings had said he was born in Kenya. If Birtherism has a founding father, it is Alan Peters.

So how can it be certain that the Kenyan birth rumor began with FARS and Peters? FARS’s source could have been a liar or a practical joker or a nut. Perhaps it all started with a random e-mail, or perhaps there never was a source, and it was created out of whole cloth.

Amazingly, I found the answer on a website I had frequented for years. And it was not on an extremist or racist or conspiracist website, but rather on a highly respected law blog. On February 28, 2008, UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh posted to The Volokh Conspiracy a short item where he stated that he was certain that John McCain was a natural-born citizen. In the comments thread to this post, one commenter posited this legal scenario:

Let's change the hypothetical (just for grins and giggles).

Barack Obama's father was a citizen of Kenya. What would Senator Obama's citizenship status (and Presidential eligibility) be if:

1) He had been born in Kenya, but taken by his mother to the United States immediately after birth and then spent the rest of his life as he has subsequently lived it?

2) He was born in a third country, and like my first hypothetical, immediately taken to the United States? Does that change the analysis?

3) Would these results change if Senator Obama had been raised in a foreign country for any length of time before his mother returned with him to the United States?

That was posted at The Volokh Conspiracy at 2:02 a.m. on February 29, 2008. Just over 24 hours later, FARS was sharing at FreeRepublic what he had “been told today” about Obama having been born overseas, but taken by his mother to the United States immediately after birth. All the details subsequently expressed in the rumor are there, a rumor that shows no signs of having existed prior to February 29.

Thus, before it was a rumor that gave birth to a fringe movement and dozens of attempted lawsuits, Birtherism was borne out of nothing more than a legal hypothetical. No family confessions, no stories out of Africa, no investigative reporting. Just a mere thought exercise about citizenship law.

That is how Birtherism was conceived. After gestating for three months, during which time it elicited comment on perhaps a dozen or two websites in all, mostly just in passing, it was eventually born on June 9, 2008, when it finally ‘tipped’ into being a full-fledged conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory that even three years later continues to inspire lawsuits, books, and even White House press conferences.

- Copyright Loren Collins
June 22, 2011

Continue reading The Secret Origin of the Birthers, Part 2
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*The Kenyan newspaper is easily one of the top 3 favorite pieces of Birther evidence. It is often presented as proof that Obama's 'secret' African birth is a widely-known and published fact in Kenya despite simultaneously being the subject of an elaborate fifty-year cover-up in the United States. Birthers see such wild internal inconsistency as the preferable interpretation to "The foreign newspaper made a mistake."

**FreedomsEnemies.com was operated by Parker "Beckwith" Shannon, and was originally dedicated to commentary on Muslims. Shannon later shifted his focus to Obama (whom he was calling "the Muslim stealth candidate" as early as 2006), and rebranded his site TheObamaFile.com, which continues to be the internet's one-stop-shop for smears and unverified rumors about Barack Obama.

***The false claim that Obama is Arab and not African-American was invented by blogger and radio host Kenneth Lamb in a February 14, 2008 post entitled "Is Obama Really African-American?" Lamb has since declined to produce any evidence whatsoever to support his claim.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

The Provenance of the "Blaine" Birth Certificate

With this week's release of the long-form, the time seems right to look back at one of the fake birth certificates that has floated around the web. Specifically, this one:



Commonly dubbed the "Blaine document," it appears that Orly was responsible for the spread of this starting on October 19, 2009, though she apparently received it from one "William Blaine". Subsequent e-mails from "Blaine" make him appear rather anti-Orly. (Link to Google cache of Orly blog post with emails.)

There are several telling signs of fakery in the document. To cite just one, typed text throughout the document does not maintain horizontal consistency. See Barack/II/Hussein/Obama and Honolulu/1. Text produced on a typewriter would typically not feature such drops, as the typewriter would move in a straight line across the document.

Now compare the above document with this blanked-out certificate:



This redacted image was online at least as early as July 2009, when it appeared in the Western Journalism Center's "Clearing the Smoke" "report." I don't know if it was created for that purpose, but it's definitely the underlying document used to make the "Blaine" certificate.

There are several telling indicators of this. For instance, the "Blaine" document is missing portions of lines around certain boxes, that sync with the lines erased by the redactions in the WJC image. There's the same distinguishing hash mark in Box 7g. And most of all, in Box 21 the words "Signature of Local Registrar," which were partially erased by the white redaction box in the WJC image, are not only identically cut off in the Blaine certificate, but if you look closely, you can see how the words are identically obscured by the top edge of the handwritten signature that has been removed.

And where, in turn, did the WJC image come from? From a blogger who, in June 2008, posted his own Hawaiian birth certificate online:



The distinguishing hash mark in Box 7g? It's there. And so is the overly large signature in Box 21. Additional marks in Boxes 2, 3, 11, 12a, and others further establish that this is the document whose information was redacted to create the WJC image.

So in case the obvious fakery of the Blaine document wasn't enough, now you can also see precisely what legitimate document it was forged from. Additionally, you can see why it's in low-res black-and-white, because recreating and faking the color crosshatch patterns would have been considerably more difficult.

So is the "Blaine document" the creation of an overzealous Birther, or a hoax a la the Bomford certificate?

The latter, as it turns out. I tracked down the individual behind it, the eponymous Mr. "Blaine," who informed me that the document was thrown together one evening to punk Birthers. And although it never gained the widespread attention of the Bomford or Lucas Smith certificates, and although many Birthers dismissed it as fake from the start, it still continues to display occasional signs of life around the web. As we've seen with so many other rumors, it's hard for any bit of wrong information to ever truly die and disappear for good.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

One More WND Quote

Joseph Farah, April 23, 2011
"WND never reported that Obama had spent $2 million hiding his birth certificate."

Joseph Farah, December 9, 2010
"Obama has spent at least $2 million fighting efforts to release his birth certificate."

Has WND reported that Obama spent millions to hide his birth certificate?

"WND never reported that Obama had spent $2 million hiding his birth certificate."
- Joseph Farah, April 23, 2011
Joseph Farah wrote the above in his column today at WorldNetDaily, as part of a follow-up rebuttal to a Salon article about Donald Trump repeating a Birther allegation.

Is Farah correct? Has WND only reported the amount that Obama paid his legal counsel, without suggesting that all of those funds were spent on eligibility issues? Has WND never reported that Obama spent millions to hide his birth certificate?

Consider the following 48 quotes from WND articles. This is not a comprehensive list; I simply gave up when I reached the four dozen mark. Also included for timeline purposes are the three Chelsea Schilling articles mentioned by Farah and Salon.

---

("Is Obama campaign cash quashing eligibility suits?" - Chelsea Schilling, April 22, 2009)

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Bob Unruh, May 9, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Bob Unruh, May 13, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Bob Unruh, May 16, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Jerome Corsi, July 12, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate and other documentation."
- Jerome Corsi, August 2, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Jerome Corsi, August 6, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Jerome Corsi, August 7, 2009

("Obama law tab up to $1.4 million" - Chelsea Schilling, August 10, 2009)

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend an estimated sum approaching $1.4 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- uncredited, August 13, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- Jerome Corsi, August 25, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- Drew Zahn, September 6, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated at more than $1 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest some questions."
- Bob Unruh, September 7, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated at more than $1 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- Chelsea Schilling, September 16, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated at more than $1 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- uncredited, September 17, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated at more than $1 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- uncredited, September 17, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated at more than $1 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- Bob Unruh, September 19, 2009

("Obama law tab up to $1.7 million" - Chelsea Schilling, October 27, 2009)

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- uncredited, October 27, 2009

"The ruling came this morning from Judge David Carter who as WND reported last night apparently recently hired a law clerk out of the law firm that has been paid nearly $1.7 million to defend Obama from eligibility challenges."
- Bob Unruh, October 29, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, October 29, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums exceeding $1.7 million to avoid releasing an original long-form state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- uncredited, November 12, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums exceeding $1.7 million to avoid releasing an original long-form state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- Bob Unruh, November 13, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, November 18, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, November 29, 2009

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in excess of $1.7 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Bob Unruh, December 2, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, December 8, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, December 22, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, December 28, 2009

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, January 8, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- uncredited, January 9, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Drew Zahn, January 12, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- uncredited, January 15, 2010

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in excess of $1.7 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Bob Unruh, January 18, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, January 20, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, February 3, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation, such as his original birth certificate."
- uncredited, February 4, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – and payments to one of his eligibility lawyers at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of numerous lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation. That's in addition to the work done by U.S. attorneys defending Obama's eligibility, as in this case."
- Chelsea Schilling, February 4, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, February 23, 2010

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in excess of $1.7 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Joe Kovacs, February 24, 2010

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in excess of $1.7 million to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- uncredited, February 24, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, March 8, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, March 17, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, March 25, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, March 25, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, April 8, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Chelsea Schilling, April 8, 2010

"Adding fuel to the fire is Obama's persistent refusal to release documents that could provide answers and the appointment – at a cost confirmed to be at least $1.7 million – of myriad lawyers to defend against all requests for his documentation."
- Bob Unruh, June 29, 2010

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest all of the questions."
- Bob Unruh, August 12, 2010

"If one court had guts enough to deal with this and allow discovery, Obama would be out of office," Berg told WND. "We would ask for a lift of Obama's ban on all of his documents. The last official report said Obama has spent $1.6 million in legal fees [keeping his papers secret], and the total is probably over $2 million now."
- Brian Fitzpatrick, November 23, 2010

"Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate that would put to rest the questions."
- Bob Unruh, March 31, 2011