On Radio Sandy Springs
Here is the interview:
Sandy Springs Radio is a low-power unlicensed AM station near Atlanta. It primarily broadcasts on the Internet through America’s Web Radio. Kuck is a nationally prominent immigration attorney.
Birther burnout
There are ups and downs in the birther reporting business and you may have noticed that there haven’t been many articles of late. I suppose that’s a good thing, that the birthers haven’t done anything to get excited about. There is also a bit of burnout after four and a half years of writing about birthers. As the next major milestone of 3,000 articles looms, one wonders what there is left to say. Is it time for Doc’s Greatest Hits?
I’m taking this week to recharge. In the meantime, there are several hundred really nice articles some of you haven’t read.
The occasional open thread: Misspent youth edition
Place your Obama conspiracy comments not related to the current articles here. This thread will close in two weeks.
Judd v. Obama Appellant brief filed
Something actually happened to break the birther doldrums. Orly Taitz has filed the Appellant’s Opening Brief in the case of Judd et al. v. Obama et al. Lots of familiar names in the et al. part, including Alvin Onaka, and Debra Bowen1. Orly Taitz is not only the attorney but also an appellant.
This is the crazy case that Orly Taitz tried to remove from state to federal court, even though plaintiffs can’t do that. It was a real mess and judge David Carter threw it out. The Appellants want the case reinstated and they want a different judge.
Taitz sums up her objections by saying:
The status of the U.S. Judiciary today is reminiscent of the judiciary in the Communist Soviet Union or NAZI Germany. Germany in 1932-1945 had a Constitution, parliament, codes, thousands of highly educated judges, however not one single judge in Germany found actions of Adolf Hitler to be in any way illegal or unconstitutional. In years of Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union and Communist China not one single judge found actions of Stalin or Mao to be illegal or unconstitutional. Actions of the U.S. Judiciary during the Obama regime are very similar: judges have in front of them all the evidence of the usurpation of the U.S. Presidency by a criminal who does not have one single valid ID, using crude forgeries and the judges are simply using one bogus excuse after another to cover up flagrant elections fraud and forgery. Actions by judges are so egregious that they amount to criminal complicity and possibly treason.
Treason? 
Taitz, always trendy, threw in the NSA surveillance/Prism story. Taitz speculates that judges won’t touch Obama because he’s blackmailing them with information gained in the NSA data gathering.
In days gone by, I would have spent more time on this filing, but I really don’t care any more. Read it if you want; it’s crap.
1For a complete list of the defendants in the original case, see the note at the end of my article: “Orly’s California case moving.”
Reed Hayes: expert enigma
The latest darling of the birthers is named Reed Hayes, a handwriting expert in Hawaii, tasked by the Maricopa County volunteer Cold Case Posse to look at the electronic PDF image of Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate. (According to the birther press, the Obots are all in a tizzy1.) So what do we know about this guy, and what do we not know?
The biggest thing we don’t know is what his report says because it hasn’t been released. Putting the mountain aside, let’s examine the mole hills.
Let’s start with a birther claim: Hayes is a registered Democrat. You can see it on the birther web sites:
- CDR Kerchner (Ret)’s Blog: Mr. Reed Hayes… is a Registered Democrat.
- Freedom Outpost (quoting PPSimmons): …the fact that Mr. Hayes is a registered Democrat
- PPSimmons (quoting Mike Zullo): …the fact that Mr. Hayes is a registered Democrat
- Patriots Tea Party News: They also stated that Hayes is a registered Democrat in HI
In fact “Reed Hayes” “registered Democrat” returns 505 hits on Google. The problem: Hawaii doesn’t have political party registration. The birthers seem to think that being a Democrat somehow makes him immune from criticism (not publishing his report is what actually makes him immune from criticism). Birthers are opportunists, believing whoever seems to support them, but they think that their opposition works the same way, and that Obots only trust Obots. Here’s a quote attributed to Mike Zullo:
This ought to serve as a warning shot across the bow to the naysayers of our criminal investigation in the Obama fraud case. The impressive credentials of Mr. Hayes, and the fact that he has testified in court cases for Perkins-Coie coupled with the fact that Mr. Hayes is a registered Democrat, demonstrates the integrity of our investigation and our conviction that we possess incontrovertible evidence to back our case.
But since when is an association with Obama or his law firm a badge of honor and qualifications for the birthers? It is when it suits them. We normals have to be more objective. It seems a dubious claim that Mike Zullo gains confidence because he has a report from an Obama supporter. Ability, integrity and political leaning are not correlated.
The quote above does introduce another topic, and that is the alleged use of Mr. Hayes by a large national law firm who happens to represent Barack Obama. Generally in the English language, the plural is not appropriate for a single instance. Zullo alleges multiple cases where Hayes and Perkins-Coie are tied. Hayes’ CV lists only one attorney from Perkins-Coie in Seattle who may or may not have been associated with that firm when Mr. Hayes was used.
Now as to credentials, Hayes has an impressive list (see CV link). He has certifications in document analysis and has testified in court a listed 22 times. What is interesting is that as far as I can see, he has never testified in federal court. That’s significant for me because I cannot readily gain access to any of the cases, nor can I determine what they were about, or what he testified. One of the cases he lists is State of Hawaii v. Lisa-Katharine Otsuka and I found at least that his CV had been submitted in that case.
His particular expertise, however, appears to be in handwriting analysis and that has no relevance to whether a PDF is a scan of a document or something constructed in Adobe Illustrator. Whether he is an astrologer or not is hardly relevant either.
See also Squeeky Fromm’s take on this story.
1I’m a tizzy because I’m installing Windows 8 on my laptop, not because of Mr. Hayes.
Silly story of Hillary, the birther
I don’t know why, but one of the very frequent tweets tagged #birther says in various forms that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement.
One Twitter message had this picture attached:
Obama Conspiracy Theories, after extensive research, has gotten to the root of the phenomenon, and here are the graphic results:
I think these tweets are indeed the result of the principle, “monkey see, monkey do.” One of the promoters of this “monkey business” threw some Monkey Chow™ to the birthers last April. Jerome Corsi at WND wrote an article titled “Sheriff Joe Expands Obama Probe to Hillary Supporters,” by which he means that (according to Corsi) Sheriff Arpaio is going to find out what Clinton supporters in 2008 knew about Obama’s eligibility. Corsi gets in the monkey swing of things by saying that there are “dozens” of unnamed Clinton supporters ready to come up with evidence and affidavits. Corsi makes his story more attractive by putting lipstick (Arpaio) on it.
“Oh, any day now! Any day now! Oh please, I want it to be true! Zullo and Arpaio will save is from shame. We will be vindicated and all the Obots will go to jail. We birthers will rise from the nut heap of history, and become the patriotic saviors of America.” Not.
This is a story that I have generally ignored. I ignored it because there’s no evidence to sift, no logic to analyze. The claim originally came allegedly from a Hollywood film producer Bettina Viviano1 who said (and that is all there is) that she heard Bill Clinton say Obama is not eligible. To explain why Clinton never raised the issue in the campaign, they say Obama threatened to kill Chelsea Clinton. That’s silly. Rather than allow his daughter to be threatened, Bill Clinton (as every good “Clinton Body Count” conspiracy theorist knows) would just have had Obama killed.
The Clinton’s were never birthers, because neither of them is stupid enough to believe that garbage. If you really want to know where the birthers started, read Loren’s article, “The Secret Origins of the Birthers.”
1The Internet Movie Database credits Viviano with 9 films.
Time’s up
It should be obvious to everybody that birthers never accomplish anything. Their lawsuits get dismissed, their events have tiny attendance, their books don’t sell, and Barack Obama is sitting in the White House. Nevertheless, they continue to attempt to keep the enthusiasm going and to create the sense of movement when there is no movement.
There’s no better example of this than Mike Zullo and the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse who pretend to be a law enforcement investigation, but in fact just write misleading reports and promise that some day their “investigation” will produce results and that something will come of it. The real evidence, they say, can’t be released yet. Well, Mike Zullo may write another least-seller book and perhaps that is what he is waiting for.
In this short article, I wanted to highlight two instances where birthers “any day now” approach to inactivity has actually been specific, and has fizzled. The first is a remark here by commenter Hermitian, who said on May 21:
The wheels will come off your Obot wagon in two weeks.
All my wheels seem to be in place and functioning normally. I haven’t even lost any marbles.
The second is a May 26 title from Orly Taitz:
There are 7 days left for Sheriff Arpaio and CCP Director Zullo to file a criminal complaint against Barack Obama based on Zullo’s recent statements that they proved that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a 100% forgery. If they do not file the criminal complaint, the donors will start demanding a refund of all the donations solicited and received by Arpaio, Zullo and CCP for over 2 years under false pretenses, when they stated that they need donations for the criminal investigation of Barack Obama for his use of forged IDs as a basis of his eligibility when he ran for the U.S. President in Maricopa county Arizona and elsewhere.
In fact Taitz has been publishing these titles daily, counting down to the arbitrary deadline. She claims that people are actually asking for refunds now. It just shows the impotence of the birthers that their threat resulted in nothing.
The closest thing I can come up with for such irrational optimism is gambling, only in the case of the lottery, somebody wins. The birthers will never win.
