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John Avlon Reveals Birtherism’s LEFT-Wing Origins. I beat up on the folks at the Daily Beast a lot for their left-of-center commentary, so it’s only fair to give ‘em some credit when credit’s due. Today, Wingnuts author John Avlon offers a surprising history of Birtherism’s conservative liberal origins:
But there’s an inconvenient truth liberals are going to have to confront: The Birthers began not on the right, but on the left.
Investigations for my new book, Wingnuts, revealed that the Birther conspiracy theory was first concocted by renegade members of the original Obama haters, Party Unity My Ass, known more commonly by their acronym, the PUMAs. They were a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost after the bitter 50-state Bataan Death March to the 2008 Democratic nomination.
The Third World is well known for voting against Israel in the United Nations General Assembly, and it is time to discuss the previously unmentioned elephant in the living room. These countries resent people of Euro-American background, and Jews in particular, because they remind them of the cultural inferiority that relegates their people to short lives of disease, poverty, violence, and abject squalor. Although no civilized person would say, as Pat Robertson did, that Haitians did “something” to deserve a catastrophic earthquake, Lawrence Harrison’s “Haiti and the Voodoo Curse” shows what Haitian culture has done to make the country among the poorest on earth while neighbors like the Dominican Republic and Barbados enjoy rising standards of living.
Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign aid over the last 50 years, and yet it remains the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere. Its indicators of progress are closer to Africa’s than to those of Latin America. It has defied all development prescriptions.
Why? Because Haiti’s culture is powerfully influenced by its religion, voodoo. Voodoo is one of numerous spirit-based religions common to Africa. It is without ethical content. Its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies. It is a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.
Harrison concludes that “Culture matters. Race doesn’t,” and the exact same argument applies to Palestinians who live in squalor while their primarily Jewish neighbors enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the region.
Scientists use the phrase “inference to the best explanation” to illuminate an unproven phenomenon. Given the available evidence, including the fact that some evidence has been strategically withheld, one can infer that Obama likely was born in Hawaii but that Ann Dunham did not give birth to Barack Obama Sr.’s child on August 4, 1961. So much depends on Obama’s fabled “story,” however, that the mainstream media have chosen not investigate. When Christopher Andersen tried, he found himself immersed in a swamp of conflicting and concocted stories that tested the savvy of even a veteran biographer. And so Obama’s birth remains a mystery a year after his inauguration. The mainstream media meanwhile have paid more attention to the origins of Trig Palin than to those of the president, and have spent their excess energy mocking those who do the reporting they once did.
If my humble efforts to clarify matters make me a “birther,” so be it.
Climate makes money move in mysterious ways. The British Government has been pouring millions of pounds into ‘climate-related’ projects all over the world, says Christopher Booker.To begin with a small example. Everyone has now heard of “Glaciergate”, the inclusion in the IPCC’s 2007 report of a wild claim it was recently forced to disown, that by 2035 all Himalayan glaciers will have melted. In 2001 the Department for International Development (DfID) spent £315,277 commissioning a team of British scientists to investigate this prediction. After co-opting its Indian originator, Dr Syed Hasnain, they reported in 2004 that his claim was just a scare story. Some glaciers were retreating, others were not. There was no way they could disappear in a time-span shorter than many centuries.
Three years later, however, when the IPCC produced its 2007 report, it endorsed Dr Hasnain’s claim without any mention of the careful UK-funded study which had shown it to be false. What made this particularly shocking was that in 2008 another British ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) announced that it had paid £1,436,000 to fund all the support needed to run the same IPCC working group which, as we now know from a senior IPCC author, had included the bogus claim in its report.
But the story did not stop there. In a report to Parliament the same year, Defra stated that its funding of the IPCC working group had been not £1.4 million but only £543,816. It was also in 2008 that Dr Hasnain was recruited by Dr Pachauri to work in his Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri), where his spurious claim was used to win Teri a share in two lucrative studies of the effects of the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Defiant Iran set to begin higher enrichment of uranium.– Iran will begin enriching uranium to 20 percent from Tuesday, the Islamic republic’s atomic chief announced on Sunday just hours after being told to do so by hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The decision raises the stakes in a dispute with the West less than a week after Iran had appeared to accept a UN-drafted nuclear deal on the supply of fuel for a research nuclear reactor in Tehran.
Michael Moore Seeks Million-Dollar Refundable Tax Credit (from Program He Trashed) to Cover Costs of His Anti-Capitalist Movie.Filmmaker Michael Moore has been approved to receive a refundable tax credit of up to $1 million from the State of Michigan Film Office for his 2009 documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” and a Republican state senator in Michigan wants her state’s money back. Two years ago, Moore attacked the movie-subsidizing program for giving “free money” to corporations.
“That’s a refundable tax credit, so that’s just a handout,” Michigan Sen. Nancy Cassis told CNSNews.com Friday from her office in Lansing. “I am just aghast at his asking for the taxpayers of Michigan to donate $1 million out of our already impoverished general fund to support his film–that trashes our economic system.”
Sarah Palin will not take back her Obama ‘Pals around with terrorists’ comment .Wallace asked if she would take back the comment she made during the 2008 campaign which she said Obama “pals around with terrorists.”
“No. I don’t because his associations with Bill Ayers and others, he never really has – I think – adequately addressed why in the world he would have a relationship with a type of person like that who had such disdain for America that he would want to bomb, harm, hurt, kill Americans,” Palin said.
In correspondence with The Post & Email, Jill T. Nagamine, Deputy Attorney General for the State of Hawaii, has made it clear that her office will not corroborate or back in any way the July 27, 2009 Statement of Dr. Chiyome Fukino, Director of the Hawaii Department of Health, which declared Obama Hawaiian-born and a “natural-born American citizen.”
The stunning admission was made in an email sent to the Editor of this paper yesterday evening.
The implications of this denial are catastrophic for the Democratic strategy.
Amnesty International is ‘damaged’ by Taliban link. An official at the human rights charity deplores its work with a ‘jihadist’.A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims. Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.
Vanishing Viewers: Feb. 4 CNN, MSNBC Down Over 50% in 25-54 Demo From a Year Ago.
.Such is the case with the steep ratings declines at CNN and MSNBC. A year ago, they already trailed Fox News badly — so badly that Fox’s audience in a given hour of prime time was sometimes greater than CNN, MSNBC, and Headline News (HLN) combined.
Revise “sometimes” to “virtually always.” A comparison of Media Bistro’s scoreboard for Thursday, February 4, 2010 to the same report for Thursday, February 5, 2009 shows stunning leakage from CNN and MSNBC. The jug is less than half full:
CNN and MSNBC both declined over 50% in the 25-54 demographic, while both networks also suffered seriously in total audience.
WorldNetDaily.Com
Like most “emergency” programs set up by government, the benefits of gaining “Temporary Protected Status,” or TPS, as a refugee do not expire when the emergency has passed. In government jargon, “temporary” can be 20 years – or forever.
The federal government has no system for tracking
people previously awarded TPS since its inception in 1990. Thus, there is no way of knowing the total number of individuals now residing in the United States who first arrived under the TPS program, nor is there any reliable data on what percentage of TPS refugees eventually return home. But the nation’s experience with the first decade of the program led the Center for Immigration Studies to conclude, “In the real world, there is nothing as permanent as a temporary refugee.”
Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri’s own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.
“Surely you can question my policies without questioning my faith,” the president said, pausing for a few seconds before adding, “or, for that matter, my citizenship.”
“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Alexis de Tocqueville
Condolences. If your faith in politicians as stewards of tax dollars isn’t yet dead, it should be. Washington’s conduct ridicules anyone who trusted that the stimulus bills and other “temporary” spending increases were designed for economic recovery. Washington’s record breaking outlays have had far more to do with rewarding interest groups that contributed to victory in the prior election.
FOXNews.Com
Justice Department Inspector General Stripped of Investigative Power. In response to a Republican lawmaker who requested a probe into dismissed complaints against the New Black Panther Party, the Justice Department’s Inspector General said he has been unable to do so because he lacks the authority.
