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Hawaii Legislator says the birther issue will “go away”

by Dr. Conspiracy on 08. Aug, 2010 in Birthers, Hawaii Dept. of Health

The State of Hawaii was pestered by birthers to the point that the Legislature passed a law allowing state agencies to ignore repeated requests for the same information from the same people. The Department reports that although the law has never been invoked, requests have fallen off sharply to just  2-3 per week, according an article from the Associated Press yesterday.

Rep. Gene Ward

Although the new Hawaii law allowing duplicative requests to be ignored may have discouraged people from asking, the drop-off in inquiries may be a natural outcome nearly two years after Obama was elected, said Republican state Rep. Gene Ward, who believes Obama was born in Hawaii.”These kind of birther issues aren’t what they were fresh after the election,” said Ward, who voted against this year’s legislation on open government grounds. “There are so many things that were residuals of the election, and this is just one that’s carried on longer than usual. Eventually, it will go away.”

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Spinning Dr. Fukino

by Dr. Conspiracy on 08. Jul, 2010 in Birthers, Featured Articles, Hawaii Dept. of Health

Dr. Chiyome Fukino

Until a couple of years ago I daresay none of you, nor I, had ever heard of Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawai’i Department of Health, serving in that position since 2002, appointed by newly elected Republican Governor Linda Lingle. While Dr. Fukino has been honored by her colleagues, she had not made a national name for herself until this Obama conspiracy business came along.

You see, the Department of Health in Hawaii is also the custodian of the State’s vital records and Dr. Fukino had the audacity to cross the birthers. Early on in the birther crusade to discredit Obama’s birth certificate (in October of 2008), Dr. Fukino, along with the head of vital statistics, Dr. Alvin Onaka, made a little expedition to look at the original documents of President Obama’s birth, after which she said:

“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate. State law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record. (more…)

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Birther defects

by Dr. Conspiracy on 07. Jul, 2010 in Birthers

It is not the purpose of this article to demonize or stereotype those who believe that President Obama is not eligible to be president. If I have learned anything, it is that such people (and I’m going to call them “birthers” going forward) are very diverse. I know some personally that are well-educated, intelligent and who function rationally and at a high level in their demanding jobs.

There are failure modes hard-wired in the human brain; critical thinking does not come naturally to us. For a discussion of these general characteristics of human error, I recommend this video presentation from Michael Shermer, Executive Director of the Skeptic Society, titled “The pattern behind self deception.” It may be that birthers have some extra dose of the characteristics that Dr. Shermer talks about.

This article, however, looks at birtherism with a different hypothesis, what I will call “the birther blind spot.” There is ample discussion in the literature that shows humans have a “confirmation bias“; they tend to accept evidence that agrees with their beliefs and reject evidence that disagrees. I think that confirmation bias reaches the extreme with birthers. (more…)

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Birther math (part 8) Complex Numbers

by Dr. Conspiracy on 05. Jul, 2010 in Birthers

The numbers we deal with most often are the natural numbers: 1, 2, 3…. When it comes to money, we need fractions, what we call “rational numbers”. There are special numbers like pi, too. What all of these numbers have in common is that they are “real numbers.” You can order them in a row by size and you can do math with them. Some can be really large (like the US deficit) and some can be really small (like the percentage of Obama eligibility cases won by plaintiffs), but they are all real numbers.

In math there are some questions that cannot be answered by real numbers, like what number squared equals minus 1. For that, mathematicians created a special “imaginary number” and represented it with the symbol i. You can multiply real numbers by imaginary numbers, and you can add them too. When you add a real number and an imaginary number, the result is a complex number and it is written like “6 + 7i” where 6 is the real part and 7 is the imaginary part.

Here’s where birther math comes in. (more…)

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Slumming

by Dr. Conspiracy on 29. Jun, 2010 in Birthers, The Blogs

Been slumming? Something catch your eye on a birther web site? Drop us a note here.

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Birther math (part 6)

by Dr. Conspiracy on 26. Jun, 2010 in Birthers, Mario Apuzzo

Here we continue the analysis of a A Catalog of Evidence – Concerned Americans Have Good Reason to Doubt that Putative President Obama Was Born in Hawaii by attorney Mario Apuzzo. We’re adding up the value of the items in his catalog picking up from Birther math Part 5.

This is the next to last (HOORAY!) installment of “Birther math.” So far in parts 1-5, we have seen an attorney do what attorneys are trained to do: create doubt. Unfortunately the doubt is build on unsupported claims, outright false statements, and clever tricks of rhetoric that my High School English teacher taught us were wrong to use. So far, it’s nothing that hasn’t been hashed and rehashed on the Internet and been debunked on this web site, the mainstream press and fact checking and debunking web sites. The score entering part 6 remains a goose egg.

Let’s move on to item 26.

(26) Nancy Pelosi, in her capacity as the Chair of the Democratic National Convention, signed an affidavit to 50 states certifying that Obama was nominated for the Office of President. In many of the 50 states, Pelosi did not address the issue of Obama’s Article II “natural born citizenship” qualifications…. (more…)

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Orly Taitz featured in new MSNBC Documentary

by Dr. Conspiracy on 17. Jun, 2010 in Birther Politics, Birthers, Media, Tea Party, Videos

Chris Matthews, of the MSNBC Hardball show hosted a documentary titled, “The rise of the new right,” featuring Taitz to Tea Party. The program aired June 16.

“Their common cause, a raging hostility towards the American government“

View the video: (more…)

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