hawaii considering FU to birthers

[Butthead]

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100317/D9EG7MBO0.html

i would love to know what is on his birth certificate that keeps this in the dark.

[Phatmax]

I am not a major "birther", and at this point, I don't think that even if it was proved he was born on Mars, that he would leave office.

That being said...this stinks of a cover-up of EPIC proportions. Two people have "seen" it, therefore it is good?

and he won't release his college records?

gimme a ****ing break, I know companies that won't hire you if an applicant would refuse these things. This guy needs to prove the birthers wrong to shut them up, yet a couple minutes of his life is too hard to just show them?

[Hammerhead]

It's painfully obvious to all but the most deranged KoolAid drinkers that something is "amiss".

[winmutt]

Butthead wears a tinhat. What is on that document is not of the concern of anyone else for all practical purposes. The thing has been validated by people who were appointed by Republicans. Ironically if he was born a decade+ later none of this crap would matter.

[Hammerhead]

What is on that document is not of the concern of anyone else for all practical purposes.
Right, and when you apply for a passport, tell them that what's on your birth certificate is none of their business. One of the requirements to become POTUS is that the candidate must be a native born U.S. citizen & since Barry works for us, I think it is our business.


The thing has been validated by people who were appointed by Republicans.

So?

[BUD]

If it is no big deal then why all the secrecy and cover up? I haven't put much stock in it but the more they try to keep it in the dark, the more I wonder what they are hiding.

[wallypiper]

So what should they do? Put it in a glass case so everybody can look at it? What would that prove? Send it to every birther that submits a request and hope that it comes back in one piece? My original birth certificate is a crumbling slip of paper that probably wouldn't survive being handled by three people in a row. Nothing other than the original paper written on by the physician that certified it can prove anything and state officials have said that piece of paper exists and they have seen it. Who would you believe? Rush? Hannity? Maybe they should let those guys hold it in their hands. If THEY said they saw it and it was real would that be convincing enough?

[Mongo]

I am far from an Obama fan but good lord some of you are in serious need of a life. The cert that has been released is a legal copy of a birth certificate - legal per the passport office and anyone else that requires a birth certificate. There is no coverup except in the heads of some nutjobs - and yes, if you think there is some huge conspiracy because Hawaii won't release his (oh yeah, or anyone else's) paperwork to random people off the street then you are indeed a nutjob.

[winmutt]

Butthead wears a tin hat.

[Butthead]

i do not believe in a conspiracy, so no tin hat required. i believe he was born here. but there is obviously something on his original
certificate that he does not want others to see. maybe a different father listed, maybe no father listed. i don't know.

[winmutt]

i do not believe in a conspiracy, so no tin hat required. i believe he was born here. but there is obviously something on his original
certificate that he does not want others to see. maybe a different father listed, maybe no father listed. i don't know.

And none of our concern.

I mean really if you want to nitpick, the Cheney Bush election was illegal as both came from the same state.

[Butthead]

i agree, but still curious.


And none of our concern.

I mean really if you want to nitpick, the Cheney Bush election was illegal as both came from the same state.

[Phatmax]

Plus the college records.... What is on those? I think they have more pertinent information as to the ability to govern, etc.

Is there record of cheating? Bad grades? Negative comments?

Again, more of a curiosity thing, but remember how the media had a field day with Bush's college records, and he released them KNOWING that would happen.

If Obama is such a genius and all around smart-guy....His records should be great for showing how MUCH smarter he is then Bush.

[winmutt]

That is laughable. We have video evidence that Obama, if nothing else, has a better grasp of the English language.

There were specific questions raised about W's education and he opted to release them. Good for him. Obama didn't. Good for him as well.

[impalanar]

That is laughable. We have video evidence that Obama, if nothing else, has a better grasp of the English language.

With a teleprompter.

[Phatmax]

That is laughable. We have video evidence that Obama, if nothing else, has a better grasp of the English language.

There were specific questions raised about W's education and he opted to release them. Good for him. Obama didn't. Good for him as well.

That is laughable. We have video evidence that without a telepromter, he stutters, um, ahs, hems, haws and says things like 57 states.

[winmutt]

Only furthering proof that he could actually read, where as one has to question if W could....

Then there was the debate with W where he was wearing something very special under his jacket........

[Phatmax]

Only furthering proof that he could actually read, where as one has to question if W could....

Then there was the debate with W where he was wearing something very special under his jacket........

You know what is funny, if W was a Dem and had dyslexia (which it seems he may have), he would have been held up by the media as a shining example of exceeding expectations and conquering a "disability".

Since he had an R after his name, he was called a retard.

ETA: Keep in mind that I think W was a poor excuse of a Republican and a terrible conservative. I just think that the praise heaped upon Obama is not earned and totally contrived. Hell, his books were ghost written, but he is called a "great writer"

[Phatmax]

Obama book ghostwritten by terrorist Bill Ayers?
November 27, 2:34 PMLaw Enforcement ExaminerJim

While Obama contends he is not a friend of terrorist Bill Ayers, a new book reveals he is.
Photo credit: LA ChronicleThe founder of Times Books -- publisher of President Barack Obama's autobiography Dreams From My Father -- Thomas Lipscomb recently dropped a huge bomb on the Obama White House. Now a senior fellow at the well-regarded Annenberg Center, Lipscomb contends that Obama's story was actually ghostwritten by former terrorist and cop-killer William Ayers.

During the presidential campaign if asked how close he was with the former bomb-maker for Weathermen, Obama would claim that Bill Ayers was merely "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis."

But according to Lipscomb's Accuracy in Media report: "Obama had to give up on a $150,000 Simon & Schuster contract because he couldn't complete the manuscript, his sources were telling him Obama finally had to bring in a ghostwriter to put together his highly praised Dreams From My Father for Times Books. He had a million pieces of tape, pictures, memos, notes, and no manuscript."

Unfortunately for Obama, he was caught at a July 10, 2008, meeting in Fairfax, Virginia proudly saying the following: "I've written two books. I actually wrote them myself."

While bloggers have posted stories alleging Obama's book is a ghostwritten product, a noted journalist and best selling author of 33 books Christopher Andersen published a fascinating new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, a fawning diatribe about America's First Family, that alleges matter-of-factly that not only is Obama's book ghostwritten, but it was ghostwritten by the former terrorist Bill Ayers.

Andersen states in his book: "Everyone knew [Obama and Ayers] were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both."

"In the end, Ayers' contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant -- so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers' own writing," according to Andersen's book.

The Accuracy in Media report and Anderson contend that these oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.

"Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an "approximation" of reality, resembles Ayers' defense of the inaccuracies in his own memoir Fugitive Days," wrote Lipscomb.

"In the foreword to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and "impressions." ... Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books," claims the AIM report.

"At the very least, Ayers should have been identified as a co-author. But that would have brought too much attention to their relationship. The truth must be made known," said Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media.

[Phatmax]

Longer and much more complex article:

Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
By Jack Cashill
Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called -- with a straight face -- "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."


The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.


And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.


Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.


The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.


In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams. I have also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the point of complicity, Edward Said's and Rigoberta Menchu's prominent among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers. Obama's ascent seems to follow a century-old pattern.


Tracing Obama's literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com calls a "scant paper trail." That trail begins at Occidental College whose literary magazine published two of Obama's poems -- "Pop" and "Underground" -- in 1981. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":


Under water grottos, caverns


Filled with apes


That eat figs.


Stepping on the figs


That the apes


Eat, they crunch.


The apes howl, bare


Their fangs, dance . . .



It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."


Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that "the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later."


Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review --more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."


A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as Harvard's first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.


With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.


According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the "ruthlessness" of Obama's literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.


Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.


To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire ghostwriters -- John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his memoir, Faith of My Fathers -- but it is highly unusual for unknown young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.


I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success. It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly did not. If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama's sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.


I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.


Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.


In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.


For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." Without question, he contributed much of the book's raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.


Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since. Just as Obama resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at least tried to.


"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son "Malik" after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son "Zayd" after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.


Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described "community organizer," Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams' author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."


Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.


In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava." Indeed, the Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in 1969 Chicago.


As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar, "audacity!" Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior rising up inside of me -- audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.


The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.


As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship, at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing. In the book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened. I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe the same conventions. Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls, in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, "our constructed reality."


"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."


"That whole first year seemed like one long lie," Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in "Dreams," a figure nearly matched in "Fugitive Days."


The reader knows that Ayers -- with some justification -- has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why. This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.


"I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War," writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.


Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.


One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence. In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the nation's seemingly ineradicable racism.


In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."


In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment. "There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."


Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.


In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with "Bud," the driver of a "brand-new Peterbilt truck." The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes -- at least two of them retold word for word -- before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his "N****r neutralizer."


"White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy," Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as though he were not a member of this benighted race.


These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:


"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."


The second from Dreams:


"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."


These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.


The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.


A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."


"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.


Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.


The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how this came to be. According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama's much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years after its modest release. After winning the election, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.


Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."

Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully reliable authorship analysis. As expert in the field Patrick Juola of Duquesne University observed, “The accuracy simply isn't there.” He cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).”

That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”

Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along. Gold saw the complementary value, however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me “to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.”

Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers's stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.


"I'd thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, "but I didn't have it in me."


The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."


Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.


"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.


"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."


Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."


Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea." More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."


Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."


Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."


In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.


On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."


In Obama's defense, he did grow up in Hawaii. Still, the short Hawaii stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island's natural appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.


If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:


"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."


As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.


One more item of interest. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.


None of this, of course, proves Ayers' authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.


The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.


Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.

[Hammerhead]

^^^^sonofabitch that's a long post. I heard someone speculate the other day that Obama won't release his school records because he got to where he was through affirmative action.

[wallypiper]

Max, I don't know if Ayers co-wrote Obama's book or not, but I am thoroughly unimpressed with the evidence in that article.

This sentence, "As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did. ", is incredible. I certainly knew exactly what ballast was long before the days of google and I've never been on any boat bigger than about 35' long. All the author of this article does in that sentence is expose his own ignorance.

He may be right about Obama and Ayers, but he would have a hard time convincing me with evidence like that.

[Phatmax]

That is the thing, there is an overwhelming amount of zero evidence that Obama can write anything, except those two books, and especially the first one.

That is like an unknown artist producing the Mona Lisa and painting the Sistine Chapel and nothing else. No drawings, sketches, etc.

That is why I think that the hiding of college records is suspicicous. All the writers that are good authors and have bestselling works always have other, lesser known works published or at least on a Curriculum Vitae.

[Phatmax]

^^^^sonofabitch that's a long post. I heard someone speculate the other day that Obama won't release his school records because he got to where he was through affirmative action.

Yeah, trying for a length record.

[willr1]

so who's down on emailing Hawaii ?

[Perry73779]

Plus the college records.... What is on those? I think they have more pertinent information as to the ability to govern, etc.

Is there record of cheating? Bad grades? Negative comments?

Again, more of a curiosity thing, but remember how the media had a field day with Bush's college records, and he released them KNOWING that would happen.

If Obama is such a genius and all around smart-guy....His records should be great for showing how MUCH smarter he is then Bush.

There are rumors that he stated he was not from the US in order to get financial aid through college. I have no proof of this, no sources, just word of mouth. I really dont care at this point.

[KTM Rider]

his home country is Kenya. Michelle says so right here.....his appointment as president by the MSM is a farce and a slap in the face to our country and everything it stands for.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLDHDfPNBME&feature=youtube_gdata

[Mongo]

Please tell me you're joking.

[KTM Rider]

that his home country is Kenya? his wife said it right there......i doubt my wife would say my home country was Scotland because my ancestors were from there but maybe that is what she meant and its just that michelle is a stupid bitch.

[Butthead]

:D


that his home country is Kenya? his wife said it right there......i doubt my wife would say my home country was Scotland because my ancestors were from there but maybe that is what she meant and its just that she is a stupid bitch.

[Mongo]

that his home country is Kenya? his wife said it right there......i doubt my wife would say my home country was Scotland because my ancestors were from there but maybe that is what she meant and its just that michelle is a stupid bitch.


My wife could easily answer three different states if asked where I'm from depending on what she thought the questioner meant. So would that make her a stupid bitch too?

[Butthead]

common mongo, that is not really the same thing. ;)


My wife could easily answer three different states if asked where I'm from depending on what she thought the questioner meant. So would that make her a stupid bitch too?

[KTM Rider]

if you'll notice from the video i linked, nobody asked michelle where barack was from. she offered the information casually as if it were 2nd nature...because since he probably is really from there....it is. the truth is easy to tell....its lies that come out unnaturally.

but to directly answer your question.....if someone asked your wife which COUNTRY you were from and she answered with any of the 50 (or 56 if you are BO) states well then.....you can probably answer your own question:lol:

[Hammerhead]

My wife could easily answer three different states if asked where I'm from depending on what she thought the questioner meant. So would that make her a stupid bitch too?

Could she answer with another country?

Besides, Michelle didn't answer anything, she made a statement.

[Mongo]

Wow, you guys really are messed up. Of all the shit Obama is actually doing you still freak out about something that is blatantly ridiculous. You remind of the morons bitching about Bush's misuse of words when there was so much good stuff to bitch about.

[MrBlah]

obama's mom was american, it's just that simple, he is, the constitution protects this right, even if he's born in another country, he's still got an american mother and he's american


No Person except a natural born Citizen

you have to be a natural born citizen. nowhere does it say you have to be physically born on US soil.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicity states:


"the children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond Sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born Citizens".

[KTM Rider]

obama's mom was american, it's just that simple, he is, the constitution protects this right, even if he's born in another country, he's still got an american mother and he's american



you have to be a natural born citizen. nowhere does it say you have to be physically born on US soil.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicity states:

then why does it matter what a birth certificate from Hawaii or any other place may say?....and why wouldnt he be 100% forthcoming with showing it to anyone and everyone who asked?

if i was elected president and i was being asked for this info and if i had nothing to hide due to either being born here or to being born to an american mother, why wouldnt i show it and put it to bed?

you cant answer that question and nobody else can either except BO himself and yet he chooses not to.

[Hammerhead]

obama's mom was american, it's just that simple, he is, the constitution protects this right, even if he's born in another country, he's still got an american mother and he's american



you have to be a natural born citizen. nowhere does it say you have to be physically born on US soil.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicity states:
Was Obama Sr. a U.S. national(serious question, I don't know)? If not, & Barry was born outside the U.S., then no, he's not a citizen.

http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_citi.html
•Any one born outside the United States, both of whose parents are citizens of the U.S., as long as one parent has lived in the U.S.
•Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year and the other parent is a U.S. national
•A final, historical condition: a person born before 5/24/1934 of an alien father and a U.S. citizen mother who has lived in the U.S

[Mongo]

then why does it matter what a birth certificate from Hawaii or any other place may say?....and why wouldnt he be 100% forthcoming with showing it to anyone and everyone who asked?

if i was elected president and i was being asked for this info and if i had nothing to hide due to either being born here or to being born to an american mother, why wouldnt i show it and put it to bed?



you cant answer that question and nobody else can either except BO himself and yet he chooses not to.

It's been answered - repeatedly. Yet there are some truly delusional weirdos out there who refuse to accept the answer as being ttrue. Not sure why since they would for any other person born in Hawaii, the answer was good enough for everyone who wanted a birth certificate as he grew up, yet still it's not good enough for you guys.

The reason he won't answer is because he has and unlike you the majority of the US population has accepted the answer.

[MrBlah]

Was Obama Sr. a U.S. national(serious question, I don't know)? If not, & Barry was born outside the U.S., then no, he's not a citizen.

http://www.usconstitution.net/consttop_citi.html
•Any one born outside the United States, both of whose parents are citizens of the U.S., as long as one parent has lived in the U.S.
•Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year and the other parent is a U.S. national
•A final, historical condition: a person born before 5/24/1934 of an alien father and a U.S. citizen mother who has lived in the U.S

his mother is a us citizen that's all that matters

[Hammerhead]

his mother is a us citizen that's all that matters

Um.... ok.

I backed up my argument, back up yours.

[MrBlah]

Um.... ok.

I backed up my argument, back up yours.

? one parent is all it takes, our laws are all biased towards getting more american citizens, with the exception of immigration

[Hammerhead]

? one parent is all it takes, our laws are all biased towards getting more american citizens, with the exception of immigration

Did you notice the link I provided? One parent is all it took pre 1934. Again, back up your argument.

[MrBlah]

Did you notice the link I provided? One parent is all it took pre 1934. Again, back up your argument.

cant help stupid

it says right in your link, if one parent is a citizen that's all you need



Section 1401 defines the following as people who are "citizens of the United States at birth:"
Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is an alien and as long as the other parent is a citizen of the U.S. who lived in the U.S. for at least five years

[Hammerhead]

cant help stupid

it says right in your link, if one parent is a citizen that's all you need

The subsection quoted went into effect in 1986. The INA of 1952 would apply to Obama & it says that the citizen parent must be physically present in the U.S. or "outlying possesions" no less than 10 yrs. & at least 5 yrs. "after attaing the age of 14". Barry's mom was 18 when he was born so if he was born abroad he wouldn't be a citizen.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8693236/1952-Immigration-and-Nationality-Act-Title3-Chapter1

[Mongo]

It's all a moot point, dude was born in Hawaii and has a birth cert to prove it.

[Hammerhead]

It's all a moot point, dude was born in Hawaii and has a birth cert to prove it.

Not according to Michelle.

[MrBlah]

The subsection quoted went into effect in 1986. The INA of 1952 would apply to Obama & it says that the citizen parent must be physically present in the U.S. or "outlying possesions" no less than 10 yrs. & at least 5 yrs. "after attaing the age of 14". Barry's mom was 18 when he was born so if he was born abroad he wouldn't be a citizen.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8693236/1952-Immigration-and-Nationality-Act-Title3-Chapter1

that's not what your link says, it says 1 parent is all that's needed, as long as they had been in the US in the past year

I'm not gonna bother replying to your links anymore, you don't fact check them yourself

[Mongo]

Not according to Michelle.

Doesn't really matter what she said, the state of Hawaii is the final authority on the issue.

[Dan43]

Was Obama Sr. a U.S. national(serious question, I don't know)? If not, & Barry was born outside the U.S., then no, he's not a citizen.

•Any one born outside the United States, both of whose parents are citizens of the U.S., as long as one parent has lived in the U.S.
•Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is a citizen and lived in the U.S. for at least one year and the other parent is a U.S. national
•A final, historical condition: a person born before 5/24/1934 of an alien father and a U.S. citizen mother who has lived in the U.SI notice you choose not to post the entire list. Specifically, you left this part out.


Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is an alien and as long as the other parent is a citizen of the U.S. who lived in the U.S. for at least five years (with military and diplomatic service included in this time)

[Hammerhead]

I notice you choose not to post the entire list. Specifically, you left this part out.

Again, that only applies after 1986.

[Dan43]

Again, that only applies after 1986.Please point out where you find something that says that what I posted only applies after 1986. The link you posted (which is the same one I used) does not support your assertion.

[winmutt]

Please point out where you find something that says that what I posted only applies after 1986. The link you posted (which is the same one I used) does not support your assertion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_nationality_law

Prior to 1986 either or:



1. Both parents were U.S. citizens at the time of the child's birth
2. At least one parent lived in the United States prior to the child's birth.


Its a moot point, the only ppl still following it are the tin hatters.

[Back Marker]

my daughter asked me if a black man was born in china, would he be considered chinese?
i told her, no... he would be considered a black man who was born in china...

i thought Hawaii already showed a certified Birth Certificate already. if they haven't, they can legally reproduce a copy of one and put the seal of authenticity on it. It doesn't need to be the original document, certified copies are legitimate. i am going to assume this because when i lost one of my kid's birth cert, i had to contact the state for a certified copy.

-a|ex

[Butthead]

here is a better question?

if two, white native south africans move to the usa and have a child, is that child an african-american?

[Hammerhead]

Please point out where you find something that says that what I posted only applies after 1986. The link you posted (which is the same one I used) does not support your assertion.

From the Wiki link Mutt posted....

For persons born between December 24, 1952 and November 14, 1986, a person is a U.S. citizen if all of the following are true :

One of the person's parents was a U.S. citizen when the person in question was born
The citizen parent lived at least ten years in the United States before the child's birth;
A minimum of 5 of these 10 years in the United States were after the citizen parent's 14th birthday.

[KTM Rider]

here is a better question?

if two, white native south africans move to the usa and have a child, is that child an african-american?

my friend wasnt. he even tried to tell his high school guidance counselor his explanation for checking "african american" on his college apps and the guy wouldnt let him do it. pretty ****ed up.

[impalanar]

Pie > Cake

[winmutt]

From the Wiki link Mutt posted....

For persons born between December 24, 1952 and November 14, 1986, a person is a U.S. citizen if all of the following are true :

One of the person's parents was a U.S. citizen when the person in question was born
The citizen parent lived at least ten years in the United States before the child's birth;
A minimum of 5 of these 10 years in the United States were after the citizen parent's 14th birthday.


Doesn't matter because he was born in Hawaii.

[Hammerhead]

Doesn't matter because he was born in Hawaii.

I've never said he wasn't but the lack of the original b.c. & now with Michelle saying that his home country is Kenya I can see why people may be a little suspicious.

[winmutt]

Michelle saying that his home country is Kenya

Thanks for the laugh. When I go to Germany I say I am going to the father land and you know what it does feel like going home. Even though I am born and bred in Atlanta. Anyone who is first or second or more generation that I know of feels the same. Going to where your mom, grandmother or great grandmother told stories about as the "old country", that is going home. And when you come back and the plane touches and you land, what do you say? Feels great to be home again. Home is where you make it.

[Hammerhead]

Thanks for the laugh. When I go to Germany I say I am going to the father land and you know what it does feel like going home. Even though I am born and bred in Atlanta. Anyone who is first or second or more generation that I know of feels the same. Going to where your mom, grandmother or great grandmother told stories about as the "old country", that is going home. And when you come back and the plane touches and you land, what do you say? Feels great to be home again. Home is where you make it.

And if Michelle said that Barry enjoys getting his knob polished by Portuguese midgets you'd interpret to mean that he likes getting the doorknob to the oval office shined by dark complected little people, right?

[Dan43]

From the Wiki link Mutt posted....

For persons born between December 24, 1952 and November 14, 1986, a person is a U.S. citizen if all of the following are true :

One of the person's parents was a U.S. citizen when the person in question was born
The citizen parent lived at least ten years in the United States before the child's birth;
A minimum of 5 of these 10 years in the United States were after the citizen parent's 14th birthday.By the conditions posted in the wiki link, Obama would be a Natural Born US Citizen by either the pre 1986 requirements OR the post 1986 requirements.

[Hammerhead]

By the conditions posted in the wiki link, Obama would be a Natural Born US Citizen by either the pre 1986 requirements OR the post 1986 requirements.

"A minimum of 5 of these 10 years in the United States were after the citizen parent's 14th birthday."

Barry's mom was 18 when he was born. Do the math.

[winmutt]

And if Michelle said that Barry enjoys getting his knob polished by Portuguese midgets you'd interpret to mean that he likes getting the doorknob to the oval office shined by dark complected little people, right?

No. I would have to go look up the work complected first.

[wallypiper]

It is a word but Miriam Webster labels it "an Americanism". That is, while it's roots are not American, the word itself originated here and is generally only used here.

[winmutt]

I'd still have to look it up.

[Dan43]

"A minimum of 5 of these 10 years in the United States were after the citizen parent's 14th birthday."

Barry's mom was 18 when he was born. Do the math.Don't know how old his mother was. Don't recall having seen her age when he was born in anything I have read.

[Mongo]

She was 18.

[BUD]

I just want to know why the big deal if everything is legit? Why spend so much time to hide it?

[Mongo]

What time to hide it? The only time that has been spent is responding to nutcases who refuse to drop it. Hell, if I were a citizen of HI I'd be absolutely pissed off that my tax money is being spent dealing with idiots who refuse to believe things right in front of them.

[BUD]

http://newsmax.com/Farber/Obama-birth-certificate/2009/04/06/id/329299

[wallypiper]

Jesus, Bud. Wanna trade links:
http://factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

[Mongo]

http://newsmax.com/Farber/Obama-birth-certificate/2009/04/06/id/329299

Year old article with some blatant lies, cute (I for one have heard of a certificate of live birth).

[Mongo]

Jesus, Bud. Wanna trade links:
http://factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

Freaky shit - you mean there are no Obama employees who have seen it, held it, photographed it? Say it ain't so!

[BUD]

My only point in this whole birthing thing is why did he spend so much money defending it or hiding it? If anyone asked for mine, I could produce it instantly, especially if I was running for office and needed it.

[wallypiper]

He DID produce it. You want him to go hang it on the fence in front of the white house so every conspiracy nut in the country can touch it and feel the actual embossed seal on it. What does it take to convince people?

[Mongo]

My only point in this whole birthing thing is why did he spend so much money defending it or hiding it? If anyone asked for mine, I could produce it instantly, especially if I was running for office and needed it.

He has never hid anything. Period. End of story. And I'm one who doesn't trust the chicago scumball politician in the least bit. It's been produced, it's been shown to people, it exists. What the hell more do YOU want from him? Seriously, what would make YOU happy and accept it exists?