The NoBull Newsletter: Is Obama really in charge?
from The Betrayal by David-Crockett

American Grand Jury
The No Bull Newsletter is written by a group of attorneys in Australia. You may learn more about them by googling “No Bull Newsletter.” This article does give you a great deal to think about! Ponder these thoughts.

I have been having a nagging intuition lately that something is not quite right about Barack Obama. I am not suggesting there is something wrong with the man, per se. Nor am I talking about the crazy, even dangerous, policies coming out of the White House.

No, lately, I have been wondering if Barack Obama is, in fact, the person who is actually functioning as President of the United States [POTUS].

I mean, there’s no doubt that he fills the position of POTUS but is he really the one in command? The man actually seems lost at times. He seems to be reacting to ideas about which he does not really have a clue. He has left the writing of this health care bill to Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives and she, in turn, has farmed the writing out to several fairly radical community action groups.

When questioned about health care, he seems not to know or understand the details and even with his silver-tongue seems unable to demonstrate any leadership on the issue.

With respect to Afghanistan and the rest of our foreign policy, he seems equally lost. Especially when it comes to dealing with other world leaders. He makes beautiful speeches, but seems to be unable to cut deals which benefit our nation. He seems to be acting as a pawn of much more clever world leaders.

The more I watch the man, the more I see a person who appears to be the “face” of some other entity or group. He seems like a “front man.” And it is becoming clear that his strings are being pulled by someone else. He does not appear to be the man in command of the ship of state. At least, he is not in the driver’s seat.

You might recall that people said about Bush that he was a front man for the neo-cons and that it was really Dick Cheney that was running the show. It turns out that Dick Cheney was not as influential in Bush’s second term as many thought, but perhaps it is true that the neo-cons, whoever they may be, were pulling some of Bush’s strings.

On the other hand, with Obama, it does not appear that there is anyone who is visible to we the people, or the media, who is pulling the strings. If they are there, they are not in elected positions as Cheney was. They are better hidden than that.

We know that Obama has been, and remains, surrounded by life-long radicals, professed communists and anti-capitalists, some of whom he has even appointed as czars in his administration. Thirty six czars, to date.

But is it Obama who is picking the czars, or is it the czars who are running the show and propping up Obama as their front man?

I know all this may sound crazy but, really, when you look at the man without the idolatry and media worship, does he really look like he knows what he is doing? Does he seem to have a direction? Firm convictions? Something he deeply believes in? The more he talks now, the more his words seem empty of content. Platitudes about America and the American people which, when he says them, simply do not ring true. They are words being mouthed but not believed by him.

Okay, so maybe he is really clever, is firmly moving the ship to the left while mouthing the words of a centrist. But I don’t think so.

What I used to think was that he was a really slick conman who was making us watch his left hand while he was manipulating us with his right. But, now I don’t think that so much. I think the man is more plastic than real. Now I begin to see him as the “Great and Powerful Oz”: a fearsome presence who is being manipulated by men behind the curtain. And, while Obama does not have strong convictions, the men behind the curtain do. And they are moving this country down a dangerous path. All the while, we are being distracted by Obama and what he says and does.

Okay, maybe I am simply a mildly paranoid conspiracy theorist. Why, you might ask, have Obama up there? Why not have one of the actual people behind the curtain run for President. Well, being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I can come up with an answer to that question.

Those other people behind the curtain have backgrounds that are so radical that they would never have made it past the first few days of a campaign. Additionally, they are life-long community organizers and they know what kind of face can be effective if you wish to radically change the nation.

First, you need a black man to gain the support of the vast black minority.

Second, you need a pale skinned black man so as not to be too much of a threat to white Americans. For the same reasons, you need a mixed race man who allies himself with the poor and down-trodden.

And you need someone who speaks well enough to co-opt the language of the right and appear to be a uniter, not a divider. Someone who sees, or at least can articulate, both sides of an issue. This is the kind of man you would pick to be your front man so that while you move things drastically and dramatically left, the vast majority of Americans will not believe that was the intention of the moderate appearing front man.

Yes, Obama was a community organizer. Yes, he could be clever enough to have all this be his idea. But, he really wasn’t a community organizer for that long. And when he was, he didn’t do anything truly radical.

It was more a time during which he was being trained than a time when he was driven by a personal sense of commitment to anything in particular.

There are people who are now in his government who have been community organizers and radical left wing activists for 20-30 years. These people have deeply ingrained commitments to changing the system and have been actively trying to do so for all that time. Obama is not one of them.

In my view, Obama has been trained and used as a puppet by others for a long time. His successes seem to have come too easily, as if they have been orchestrated. His life appears to have been pre-planned.

I mean, Harvard Law Review without publishing a single paper of note. That is unusual.

A community organizer for a short time..

A State legislator for a short time.

A freshman US Senator (143 days).

A convention key-note speaker.

And then POTUS. How does that happen? A person with zero governmental administrative experience is running the entire government of the United States …

How do 1100-page documents get developed and put out in such short order?

Who is writing all these proposals?

Does it not seem that something is just not quite right here?

Forget about the specifics of the policies for the moment. Have you ever seen this level of activity in the first few months of any other administration in your lifetime?

Does Obama seem like the kind of person that could manage this level of activity in so short a time?

Too much does not make sense here.

So, slowly but surely, I am becoming convinced that it is not Barack Obama who is running the show. The White House has been captured by a group of people who are using Barack Obama as their front man. He is nothing but an articulate and empty suit. We have to start looking behind the curtains to find out who is really controlling the “great and powerful Obama.”

Something to think about…………..

the OTHER SIDE of the BIRTHER'S STORY

Editors note: I, personally, dispute information highlighted by myself in "orange".

Birthers

Wednesday, Aug 5, 2009 03:32 PDT

Salon's handy-dandy guide to refuting the Birthers

Now you, too, can silence the annoying Birther in your life -- and in just eight easy steps!

By Alex Koppelman

AP Photo/Obama Presidential Campaign

This photo provided by the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shows Obama with his mother Ann Dunham in an undated photo from the 1960's. Dunham met Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. from Kenya, when both were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; they married in 1960.

There are, sadly, a lot of Birthers out there. A recent poll showed that 11 percent of Americans -- including 28 percent of Republicans -- don't believe President Obama was born in the U.S. Another 12 percent aren't sure.

So, at some point, you're likely to find out that a friend or relative is a Birther. Your Uncle Floyd will forward you a chain e-mail that says Obama was actually born in Kenya and there's a Kenyan birth certificate that proves it and hundreds of government officials and reporters are in on a conspiracy to hide the truth of his ineligibility for the presidency from the public. And you will wonder: How can I possibly deal with all the falsehoods in this e-mail without disappearing down a rabbit hole?

Well, wonder no more. In the spirit of public service, Salon has compiled this list of the most popular Birther myths, along with all the debunking you could ever ask for. Now you can just e-mail this list to Uncle Floyd and get on with your life.

Unfortunately, there is some small print involved in this offer. We can't promise this article will convince Uncle Floyd that Obama was born in the U.S. and is the legitimate president. In fact, we can just about guarantee that it won't have much effect at all. That's just the way conspiracy theories work: Believers are unlikely to change their minds, no matter how much evidence you present.

Still, it's worth a try.

Myth 1: Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

This is the big one. It may also be the most easily refuted. First of all, during the presidential campaign, Obama released a certification of live birth, which is the official document you get if you ask Hawaii for a copy of your birth certificate. There are allegations that what Obama released is a forgery, but state officials have repeatedly affirmed its authenticity and said they've checked it against the original record and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.

If that wasn't enough, two Hawaiian newspapers carried announcements of Obama's birth in August 1961. (Read the Honolulu Advertiser's item from Aug. 13, 1961, nine days after Obama's birth, here.) The traditional joke that Birther debunkers make is that his grandparents must have placed those announcements because they knew that he'd want to run for president nearly five decades later. The truth, though, is that the notices are even stronger pieces of evidence than that. Obama's family didn't place them -- Hawaii did, as it does for all births. The announcements were based on official records sent to the papers by the state's Department of Health.

Myth 2: Obama can't be president because his father was a British citizen

Some of the Birthers -- like de facto leader Orly Taitz -- believe that Obama wouldn't be eligible for the presidency even if he were born in the U.S. That's because, in their infinite wisdom, the Founding Fathers included in the Constitution a fair amount of phrases they never really bothered to define. One of those is this explanation of who can be president: "No person except a natural born citizen."

The Supreme Court has never ruled directly on the question of what "natural born citizen" means. So the Birthers have simply settled on their own definition -- someone born to two citizen parents -- and found a source,"The Law of Nations," a 1758 book by the Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel, to back them up.

There are a couple of problems with this. Most important, Obama isn't the first president with a non-citizen parent: Chester A. Arthur, the 21st president, was. His father was from Ireland and apparently did not become a U.S. citizen until more than 10 years after the future president's birth.

Plus, even if the Founding Fathers did rely on Vattel as much as the Birthers say -- always a dubious proposition -- Swiss philosophy books aren't legal precedent in the United States. British common law is. And in 1898, in the case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court looked into the meaning of "natural born" in the common law and concluded that a non-citizen's mere presence in the U.S. is enough to make their child, if born here, a natural-born citizen.

Myth 3: A Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, showing he was born in Mombasa, has been discovered

It's a hoax. Once Taitz released the document, purportedly a certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate, it took less than two days for Internet sleuths to prove that it had been forged.

The first signs were a couple of small but revealing errors: The certification is dated Feb. 17, 1964, when newly independent Kenya was known as the Dominion of Kenya. It wouldn't start calling itself the Republic of Kenya until December of that year -- but the document refers to the republic. Additionally, the document's header refers to "Coast Province," but as two British professors who are experts in Kenyan history pointed out to Salon, at the time the certificate was supposedly produced, the country's provinces were referred to as regions.

For the final nail in this myth's coffin, one particularly enterprising man, Steve Eddy, located the original Australian document on which the Kenyan certificate was apparently based. The two documents share several identical numbers, including the page and the book of records in which they can be found, and minor changes were made to the names of the registrars responsible for the Australian copy. Taitz claims the Australian certificate "was created to try to discredit my efforts" but it was in fact available on the Internet as far back as 2007.

Myth 4: Obama's grandmother said he was born in Kenya

There's a kernel of truth to this one. In an interview with a street preacher named Ron McRae, Sarah Obama, the second wife of the president's grandfather, did say she was there, in Kenya, for her grandson's birth.

Unfortunately for the Birthers, it was the result of a miscommunication -- or perhaps a mistranslation -- and as soon as McRae started pressing the issue, Obama's family realized what had happened and corrected him. Most Birthers simply ignore the corrections, excising them from audio and transcripts of the conversation posted online. McRae just believes it's part of the conspiracy and that Obama's younger relatives were coached to hide the truth.

The full audio can be downloaded here. What follows is a transcript of the relevant portion of the interview:

MCRAE: Could I ask her about his actual birthplace? I would like to see his birthplace when I come to Kenya in December. Was she present when he was born in Kenya?

TRANSLATOR: Yes. She says, yes, she was, she was present when Obama was born.

MCRAE: When I come in December. I would like to come by the place, the hospital, where he was born. Could you tell me where he was born? Was he born in Mombasa?

TRANSLATOR: No, Obama was not born in Mombasa. He was born in America.

MCRAE: Whereabouts was he born? I thought he was born in Kenya.

TRANSLATOR: No, he was born in America, not in Mombasa.

MCRAE: Do you know where he was born? I thought he was born in Kenya. I was going to go by and see where he was born.

TRANSLATOR: Hawaii. Hawaii. Sir, she says he was born in Hawaii. In the state of Hawaii, where his father was also learning, there. The state of Hawaii.

Myth 5: Hawaii allows parents to get birth certificates for their foreign-born children

This one is actually true -- just not in the way the Birthers think. Here's their position, as outlined by World Net Daily, a conservative news site that's become the unofficial Birther Web headquarters: "The 'Certification of Live Birth' posted online and widely touted as 'Obama's birth certificate' does not in any way prove he was born in Hawaii, since the same 'short-form' document is easily obtainable for children not born in Hawaii."

Children not born in Hawaii can get a birth document from the state. But it won't say they were born in Hawaii, as Obama's does.

"If you were born in Bali, for example, you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali," Janice Okubo, the director of communications for the state Department of Health, told the Washington Independent's David Weigel recently. "You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate."

Myth 6: Obama traveled to Pakistan using an Indonesian passport

When the Birthers tire of arguing that Obama wasn't born in the U.S., they take another tack. At some point during the time he spent in Indonesia growing up, they say, Obama must have taken Indonesian citizenship or renounced his American citizenship or both. As proof, they cite the trip he took to Pakistan in 1981 with a friend from college, and say the U.S. government had issued a ban on travel by its citizens to the country.

Thing is, there was no travel ban. "We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since," a State Department spokesman told Weigel. And FactCheck.org's Brooks Jackson notes that the New York Times printed an article about travel to Pakistan on June 14, 1981, which said Americans just needed a visa to travel there. Two months later, the U.S. consul general in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote to the Times to say he'd "welcome an influx of Americans."

Myth 7: Obama hasn't released his birth certificate

Here, we'll admit, Uncle Floyd has a point -- at least a limited one. Strictly speaking, what Obama's campaign released wasn't called a birth certificate; it's a certification of live birth. But there's no functional difference between the two: Ask Hawaii for your birth certificate, and you'll get the certification of live birth back.

"Our Certificate of Live Birth is the standard form, which was modeled after national standards that are acceptable by federal agencies and organizations," Okubo told the Honolulu Advertiser. "With that form, you can get your passport or your soccer registration or your driver's license."

There's been some confusion about whether the original even still exists, but that's now been cleared up. Okubo told the Advertiser that in 2001 the state's paper documents were put into an electronic form, but "any paper data prior to that still exists ... we have backups for all of our backups."

Myth 8: If Obama would just release his birth certificate, he could end all this

So why hasn't the state of Hawaii released the original paper document? By law, the state can't release Obama's birth records without his OK. State law says that the document can only be released to or "inspect[ed]" by someone with a "direct and tangible" interest. (Though, again, except for "permit[ting] inspection," the law refers to the release of copies and certified copies, not the original record.)

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama could get the original paper document out of its undisclosed Hawaiian location and show it to reporters. Shouldn't he? Maybe not. He's already released a completely legal form of proof of his birthplace; to cave in to the Birthers' demands now would legitimize them. It would also likely lead to a wave of stories asking why the change in stance had happened, and what had taken so long.

The truth is that it was the original release of the certification of live birth that kicked off the Birther movement to begin with. And some of its leaders wouldn't cease their quest even if they were given the original birth certificate -- along with a video showing Obama being born, lei already around his neck.

Conspiracy theorists cling to their theories in the face of all evidence, and in this case the groundwork for disputing an original birth certificate has already been laid. In October of 2008, Rush Limbaugh suggested that Obama's trip to Hawaii to see his dying grandmother might really have been made in order to do some quick forgery. Limbaugh's fellow talk radio host Michael Savage jumped on that bandwagon, too.

Plus, the Birthers have a long list of other demands. Here's one sent out by Gary Kreep, who's representing Alan Keyes in his lawsuit challenging Obama's eligibility. Read it, and abandon all hope:

• Actual long-form birth certificate (NOT an easily-forged electronic copy of a short-form document that is not even officially accepted in Hawaii)
• Passport files
• University of Chicago Law School scholarly articles
• Harvard Law Review articles
• Harvard Law School records
• Columbia University records
• Columbia University senior thesis, "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament"
• Occidental College records, including financial aid that he may have received
• Punahou School records, where Mr. Obama attended from the fifth grade until he finished high school
• Noelani Elementary School records, where Barack Obama attended kindergarten (according to the Hawaii Department of Education, students must submit a birth certificate to register -- but parents may bring a passport or student visa if the child is from a foreign country)
• Complete files and schedules of his years as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004
• Obama's client list from during his time in private practice with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard
• Illinois State Bar Association records
• Baptism records
• Obama/Dunham marriage license
• Obama/Dunham divorce documents
• Soetoro/Dunham marriage license
• Soetero/Dunham adoption records
  

The former British police officer who wants to bring down Barack Obama

from The Betrayal by David-Crockett

Conspiracist prominent in movement claiming president is an imposter

Neil Sankey has spent his life investigating organised crimes. As a former British police officer with almost 20 years experience, he was seconded to elite units of Scotland Yard through most of the 1970s and now runs his own private detective agency in California.

Over the years he has been involved in some big investigations. As part of the Special Branch and Bomb Squad he monitored British leftwing groups and the IRA, and in America his clients have included several big car companies.

But never has he handled anything quite as monumental as the investigation that is absorbing his energies today.

Sankey is pursuing what he believes to be fraud on a gigantic scale — a conspiracy, no less, to infiltrate and destroy the free world by putting a foreign imposter into the White House.

Sankey is a member of the fringe alliance known widely as the Birthers (he dislikes the expression, considering it pejorative). Together with other activists, he seeks to prove that Barack Obama is not a true American and is therefore ineligible to be president.

Over the past year Sankey has been at the centre of some of the most aggressive efforts by the Birthers to unseat the president. At the end of last year he tried to block Obama’s inauguration by contacting all 538 electoral college representatives who formally elect the president. More recently, he has carried out his own probe into Obama’s personal identification history which has revealed, he believes, a suspicious multiplicity of social security numbers.

Sankey says his fascination began with the realisation “that this man wasn’t what he said he was. He wasn’t an ordinary Democrat — he was far more extreme than that.” So about a year ago he began reading blogs and websites that claimed to expose Obama’s foreign roots, his spurious Hawaiian birth certificate and the $2m White House cover-up that has prevented the public finding out about the plot.

His travels put him in touch with Orly Taitz, one of the most energetic and flamboyant of the Birther leaders. Of Moldovan extraction, she emigrated via Israel to California where she works as a dentist and lawyer. She has filed numerous legal suits around the country on behalf of serving US military personnel attempting to prevent their deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan on the grounds that they should not be taking orders from an illegally serving commander-in-chief.

Sankey’s journey from having worked in some of the most elite police units in Britain to taking part in a movement dedicated to the pursuit of a paranoid conspiracy theory may seem bizarre. But he insists it has been a natural progression. He joined the Hampshire force in 1961, and was seconded as a detective sergeant to Scotland Yard where he developed a specialism tracking leftwing political groups and the IRA.

“We created an operation into what we called revolutionary criminality — monitoring leftwing bookshops and extremist literature, following the leftist fringe and the Marxist links of the IRA.”

In 1980 he moved to California, set up his agency, and became a naturalised American in 1985.

Sankey contends that his police experience in England now informs his fight against Obama. “It’s quite obvious to me — America is heading towards a socialised state just as has happened in Europe. Socialised medicine, everyone on the dole, and when everything collapses you tip the scales into Marxism.”

He also believes his training in Scotland Yard is now reaping benefits for the Birthers. The same techniques he used to analyse the IRA’s associations he is now applying to Obama. Most recently, he carried out an exhaustive search of databases that he claims threw up 140 different identification numbers and addresses for “Barack Obama”. He admits the findings prove nothing — there is nothing to link the entries to the president — but he believes it raises further doubts that need investigating.

Taitz says Sankey’s UK police expertise has been invaluable. “He has had superb training. I have the greatest respect for Scotland Yard.”

The Birther movement is not a unique phenomenon within US politics. Bill Clinton was accused by conspiracy theorists of having murdered his friend and White House legal adviser Vince Foster; George Bush had to contend with the Truthers who believe he was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

But the Birthers are unlike previous movements in that they are focused on who Obama is rather than what he does.

“There is no other president who has had his citizenship questioned in this way,” says Patricia Turner, an expert in folklore at the University of California, Davis. Turner says that the popular Birther theories that Obama has used fake Hawaiian documents to disguise the fact he was born in Kenya or Indonesia are retellings of an old story. “This is just a proxy for old-fashioned racism. They are driven by hostility towards anything they see as foreign or exotic.”

Although the Birthers are on the fringe of American politics, they are part of a wider surge of rightwing anger towards Obama’s perceived socialist policies that is sweeping the country.

As such they can command considerable support. An internet petition demanding an official inquiry into Obama’s origins has been signed by almost 500,000; critics say the number is inflated by multiple clicks.

Like any virulent conspiracy theory, that of Obama’s birth has proved immune to the intervention of fact. When Obama’s birth certificate in Hawaii was digitally scanned for all to see, it was denounced as a forgery. The birth notices printed by two Hawaii newspapers announcing his birth in August 1961 were similarly dismissed.

Dozens of legal actions have been brought before the courts by Taitz and other Birther leaders, and so far every one has been thrown out. Last month a federal judge dismissed Taitz’s lawsuit seeking to challenge the chain of military command up to Obama as commander-in-chief. In a devastating ruling, the judge accused Taitz of trying to “emasculate the military” in a way that would “leave this country defenceless”.

None of these setbacks have dissuaded Sankey. He says accusations of racism are smears that he has come to expect. “The objection is not Obama’s colour but his politics. I like him as a person, I just wish he was genuine.”