Releasing Birth Certificate Sets Up Wedge Issue Between Establishment GOP and Its Wingnut Base
Jon Ponder | Apr. 27, 2011
n reporting that Pres. Obama released his so-called long form birth certificate, Ben Smith at right-leaning Politico.com gives voice to the inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom that the president and his team bowed to pressure from birthers like Donald Trump:
Seeking to put an end to the “birther” conversation — and, incidentally, elevating Donald Trump on the day [...]
You know, the troubling thing in the interview tonight was he said as time has gone on here, over the last couple of weeks, he has become more interested and more believing in the issue. You know, when he first brought it up, he said ‘of course I accept that he’s a citizen. He ought to just release the, release his birth certificate.’ Different tone tonight. This is a mistake. It will marginalize him and he’s falling into Barack Obama’s trap. Barack Obama wants Republicans to fall into this trap because he knows it discredits us with the vast majority of the American people when they do.
– Karl Rove, speaking to Bill O’Reilly on Fox about Donald Trump’s newfound belief in birtherism
Journo Demands 'Real' Certificate, Two Newspaper Birth Announcements, Witnesses to U.S. Childhood - And What about Trump's Foreign-Born Parent?
Jon Ponder | Mar. 29, 2011
After bragging he could produce his own birth certificate in one hour, Donald Trump sent a digital image of a document to Newsmax, a clearing-house for the crypto-racist birther conspiracy cabal.
Upon inspection, however, New York City officials told right-leaning Poltico.com, that the document was not the Donald’s actual birth certificate:
One observation about the birther conspiracy that seldom gets made is that Pres. Obama’s handling of this entirely fictional, made-up controversy is proof positive that he can play hardball when he wants to.
Even if Jeebus himself descended from heaven and unfurled Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate from the top of Mt. Sinai, the birthers [...]
Plans by a tiny Gainesville, Fla. church to burn Qurans on Sept. 11 were condemned by a guy who knows how to act toward Islam. Gen. David Petraeus is pleading with the Christian extremists to tone it down or put American troops at risk.
“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. [...]
– CBS News estimates of crowd size at Mormon Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington on Aug. 28, based on work commissioned by CBS from AirPhotosLive. The company uses photos taken from tethered balloons shot at the peak of the crowd, which are then broken into 2-D and 3-D grids, and the individuals counted.
Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands
– Figure quoted by NBC Nightly News
More than 100,000
– ABCNews.com
Crowd Attending Beck Rally Estimated at Over 500,000
– FOX News headline
As low as 300,000 and as big as 650,000
– Glenn Beck on FOX News Sunday
“We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today – because we were witnesses.”
It was not my intention to select 8-28 because of the Martin Luther King tie. It is the day he made that speech. I had no idea until I announced it.
– Talk radio and FOX News personality Glenn Beck, stating the obvious. No one doubts that the date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was outside Beck’s frame of reference when he planned his “Restoring Honor” tea bagger rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, site of King’s world-changing speech.
Disgraced HCA Columbia Healthcare CEO Rick Scott (who was forced to resign rather than face criminal charges in the nation’s largest Medicaid fraud case, resulting in a $1.7 billion fine) sums up all the Republican lies about the Islamic Center in New York in one TV spot, going FOX News one better by tying construction of the facility to health care reform. Why Scott, who is running for governor of Florida — a state which will have little if any say in the issue — would chose this as a campaign platform is unclear.
–The number of Americans (18 percent) who mistakenly think Pres. Obama is a Muslim, according to a Pew Research poll conducted before his comments on the Islamic community center in downtown Manhattan. A Time Magazine poll taken after his comments showed 25 percent of Americans now think Obama is a Muslim.
Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg [...]
