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Archive | July, 2010

Dunham Passport — let the spin begin

By on July 31, 2010 in Charles Kerchner, Featured Articles, FOIA, Passports, Stanley Ann Dunham

Charles Kerchner really spins off the road and into a tree in his latest missive posted on Mario Apuzzo’s blog [the preceding hyperlink points to a saved copy of the article, since it has since been revised since the publication of this article] upon the theme of the Stanley Ann Dunham passport FOIA Documents. I daresay he will rewrite it after he reads this.

Before I get to what Kerchner says, let me briefly identify the documents under discussion:

  • “P1” is a passport renewal application for Obama’s mother dated August 13, 1968, extending her passport until July of 1970.
  • “P3” is an application for an amended passport to “change to read in married name.”

Look at what Kerchner says:

The record starts with a “RENEWAL” application filed in 1965 due [to] her name change after marrying Lolo Soetoro at Molokai Hawaii on March 15, 1965 per page marked “P3” of the released documents.

This is wrong in 3 ways:

  1. While the cover letter mentions an application from 1965 that could not be found, the renewal application is dated in 1968, 3 years after her marrying Lolo Soetoro. The document “P3” is not a renewal, but an amendment (look at the title of the form).
  2. The amendment (which is the “P3”) document appears to have been made in 1967 according to the hand-written notation on the right side, not 1965. 1965 is the date of the original passport application.
  3. The “P3” could not have been a renewal because according to the law at that time, a passport was good for three years and could be renewed only once for two additional years. Since the 1968 application (document labeled “P1”)  was a renewal (it is so marked) the 1965 application three years earlier had to be an original application. The “P2” document states clearly that her passport (which apparently had expired the year before) was issued in 1965. Continue Reading →

Strunk FOIA results for Obama’s mother

By on July 31, 2010 in Citizenship, Evidence, FOIA, Obama Family, Passports, Stanley Ann Dunham

Stanley Ann Dunham

The FOIA results of Christopher Strunk’s Freedom of Information Act request for passport applications of Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama’s mother, were released July 29. A copy of the results appear at the end of this article.

Strunk asked for the “passport applications” of Dunham along with other information specifically about Barack Obama. That latter information is not available under FOIA according to regulation. Strunk sued the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security. (See my article: “What does Strunk know and when did he know it?”)

Now we have a series of documents that are not as helpful as one might hope. The earliest application in the file is a passport renewal from 1968 that references a passport issued in 1965 (prior to Obama’s trip to Indonesia to live with her new husband). However, the Department of State does not have the 1965 document (presumably destroyed in the 1970s when old records were cleared out). So from this material we cannot definitively say that Stanley Ann Dunham’s first passport was in 1965.

There are two things of interest in the 1970 application. First, there is a signed statement by Dunham that she had not naturalized in any other country (addressing the myth that she became an Indonesian citizen) and second she listed her child named “Barack Hussein Obama”, not “Soetoro”.

A curiosity is that after Barack’s name is the word “(Soebarkah)”. No satisfactory theory has been presented to explain this word.

Readers here may know that I submitted my own passport FOIA for Dunham in January of 2009, two months after Strunk. My request differs from that of Strunk in that he asked for “passport applications” and I asked for “passports issued.” While the application records from 1965 (and earlier) were presumably destroyed, the Department of State says that they have passport records since 1925. I still hope, therefore, that my FOIA will conclusively show that Stanley Ann Dunham either had or did not have a passport before 1965. [Update: My FOIA did not find any earlier record of a passport issued to Stanley Ann Dunham, nor did it find a record of the 1965 passport.]

The Strunk FOIA documents were first reported to be on the Orly Taitz web site, and subsequently  found on Scribd uploaded by Mario Apuzzo. Read the documents following: Continue Reading →

Immigration cartoons

By on July 31, 2010 in Birther Politics, Cartoons, Media

While peripheral to the topic of this web site, immigration issues are hot buttons for many of the same folks who take the view that President Obama himself is an illegal immigrant. I was sent this collection of cartoons and wanted to share them with you. Click on the image below to see the full-sized original. (The links are to a commercial web site that sells the images.)

Licensed for ObamaConspiracy.org

Spam, spam, spam, spam

By on July 31, 2010 in Lounge

Folks trying to sell all manner of things on the Internet post their messages on blogs like this along with URL’s to boost their search engine page rankings. I’ve had over 32,000 of these spam comments since the blog started. If it were not for a third-party spam filter, this blog would be unmanageable.

While the filter is 99.7% accurate, it sometimes makes mistakes and puts your legitimate comments in the spam bucket. This has happened 24 times in the past month.

Spam filtering has nothing to do with moderation, and it’s not something I can configure or tweak. I don’t know anything you can do to reduce the chance you end up in the spam bucket either. I review all the spams and eventually your message will appear.

Constitutional amendment to remove Obama

By on July 30, 2010 in Birther Politics, Wild & Wacky

I wrote in a previous article about Constitutional Fundamentalism, featuring a mock up of the Constitution packaged to look like the Holy Bible, totally unaware that I could have saved the effort and used the real thing:

Pocket Constitution

That edition probably doesn’t have the original Thirteenth Amendment, not ratified by the requisite number of states, at least according to everyone except a group of conspiracy theorists called “Thirteenthers” who believe it was. This group succeeded into inserting a plank into the Iowa Republican Platform calling for the “reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th amendment” of the Constitution, according to an article in the Huffington Post yesterday (July 29, 2010).

How does this affect President Obama? The amendment, according to some views, would make Obama not only ineligible to be president but also no longer a citizen because he accepted a Nobel Prize, contrary to the words of the amendment:

If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.

Two for WikiLeaks

By on July 28, 2010 in Lounge

I guess everyone here has heard of the tens of thousands of classified military documents obtained by WikiLeaks.org. Nothing, it seems is immune from the Obama denialist discussion, as the ABC News Blog talking about the President’s reaction to the leaks included this added comment:

Quo Warranto: If WikiLeaks were half the force they think they are… they would have a long-form copy of the Birth Certificate on their web site…

The second thing is the following interview with Julian Assange,  the founder of WikiLeaks.org. This is not an endorsement of  WikiLeaks. Continue Reading →