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Obama’s ring

By on October 10, 2012 in Jerome Corsi, Misc. Conspiracies, WorldNetDaily

President Obama wears a gold band on his left hand. From his Harvard school days comes a humorous statement from a satirical Harvard student publication written by Obama about the ring:

Latest Accomplishments: … Deflecting Persistent Questioning about Ring On Left Hand.

The ring appeared in photos as early as 1987 [1981 - see update at the end of this article] when young Obama traveled to Kenya to meet relatives and visit the grave of his father.

WorldNetDaily’s Jerome Corsi has come up with a tale that there is an Arabic inscription about Allah or something on the ring (thoroughly debunked on the Urban Legends site). That suggestion is absurd on the face of it; if Obama were a closet Muslim, he’d never wear a ring that could be blown up to the size of a watermelon by any photographer with a foot-long telephoto lens. Corsi makes lots of stuff up, although I think this is originally the product of fellow smear author Joel Gilbert.

Conspiracy theory thinking

I think this is a very informative story about the mental defects in conspiracy thinking. There are excellent close-up photos of Obama’s ring out there, but Jerome Corsi at WND relies on photos blown up beyond their original resolution to add noise to them. In reality there’s nothing whatever written on the ring — just a regular flat wavy line pattern. Here’s the Corsi imagination photo:

image

Here’s what a clear photo (Free Republic, 2009) looks like:

imageWhat’s informative is that conspiracy thinkers are very good at imposing patterns where there are none, or in this case imagining information where there is just a regular wave pattern, with a little noise due to blur and glare in the photos. Conspiracy thinkers fill in the blanks with imagination. There’s nothing wrong with imagination so long as the mental facilities exist to filter out nonsense — conspiracy thinkers like Corsi lack that.

The same imagination gone awry in this article is found all through Corsi’s writing, from finding imaginary smiley faces in Onaka’s signature on the long-form birth certificate, to finding significance in people Obama has known over the years.

This silliness about the ring is emblematic for the birther movement as a whole.

Speculation, all speculation

Because it is pretty much all speculation where the ring came from, and the Arabic writing business has been completely debunked at the Urban Legends site, I might have just ignored the story completely except for the fact that I took some photos of Obama’s ring myself, and thought I would share them, for what it’s worth.

 

Ring1

Ring2 Continue Reading →

Birther hot spot

By on September 22, 2012 in Jerome Corsi, Mailbag, Mike Zullo

I keep getting these bizarre messages through this site’s contact form from conservative groups asking me to help them get in touch with potential speakers for their meetings. One wanted Orly Taitz to talk to a Republican women’s group in California. This one wants Mike Zullo to speak in Florida. I thought it was interesting since recent comments here questioned whether a legitimate investigator would talk about an ongoing investigation at Tea Party gatherings. Here’s the email:

I see from an email a tea party friend sent me, they are having Mike Zullo speak next week on his investigator research he has done.

I wanted to find a contact so that i can extend an invitation to Mike to speak at the Tea Party Manatee weekly meeting.  You can go to www.teapartymanatee.org and see our large group and you can also email me to set this up. 

Tea Party Manatee is one of the largest tea parties in FL.  We have an email list of 2,800 and a facebook of 800 members.  And, we are growing.  Last week we had the honor to have as our key note speaker Trevor Loudon from New Zealand.

A quick Google search turned up a good bit of birther activity at the Tea Party Manatee web site, and a strong Jerome Corsi connection. This very public organization may give us a window on what happened with the Surprise Tea Party in Arizona that started the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse witch hunt there.

I never know exactly how to reply to these things. In the case of Orly Taitz, I just sent them her phone number. In this case, I said enigmatically:

Are you really sure you want to have Mike Zullo speak after he was caught fabricating evidence? I wouldn’t touch the guy with a ten-foot pole.

Swift boats is a-comin’

By on August 8, 2012 in Jerome Corsi, Smears

Up until now, if you wanted pro-birther media you had to read a supermarket or Internet tabloid, visit a birther blog, or read an ad in the Washington Times newspaper. Today, birthers have joined the many attack ads and robocalls, vying to become a “mainstream” smear campaign.

The original song from 1961 was “Shrimp boats is a-comin’” but I am reminded today of the attacks on John Kerry when he ran for President in 2004, attacks that appeared in the Jerome Corsi book, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, which added the term “swiftboating” to the lexicon as:

Swiftboating is American political jargon that is used as a strong pejorative description of some kind of attack that the speaker considers unfair or untrue—for example, an ad hominem attack or a smear campaign.

The Conservative Majority Fund has spent over half a million dollars in just three weeks buying airtime for a birther-style attack ad against Obama titled “Shady Past,” raising issues of Obama’s birthplace and social-security number and making robocalls. Like Corsi’s 2004 book, the Conservative Majority Fund ad is to put it bluntly, a pack of lies.

Corsi &^%$@#

By on August 7, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Jerome Corsi, Joe Arpaio, Mike Zullo, Videos

As you may know, there are certain words you can’t say on this blog without getting your comment thrown into moderation. I’m not going to engage in a double standard, no matter how sorely tempted I am by this [pause for a breath] video by Jerome Corsi. (For some reason, this video is protected against embedding, but that’s fine by me. I don’t want it here anyhow.)

In a burst of irony, Corsi utters one true thing:

Document… that amateurs have been able to determine is a computer-generated document1.

Unfortunately for him, professionals know better.

Did Corsi admit that the Posse “created evidence.” Listen for yourself:

Has anyone seen one word on an “obot blog” asking about what Arpaio is doing?

1Of course all PDF’s are computer-generated, but we know what Corsi means.

Sheriff Joe presents

By on July 27, 2012 in Jerome Corsi, Joe Arpaio, Mike Zullo, WorldNetDaily

SheriffJoePresents

When you look at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Posse “investigation,” you really don’t see much investigation. What you see is theater.

The context of the investigation is law enforcement, with stern-faced Sheriff Joe Arpaio throwing around law enforcement dialog, like “lead investigator,” “person of interest,” and “probable cause.” But those are just stage props. The “lead investigator” was a volunteer local Tea Party leader who’s been selling cars for the last 20 years, the “person of interest” was never named, and “probable cause” led to no indictments or charges.

The large portion of the CCP story had to do with doing things with Barack Obama’s birth certificate PDF file. That crank analysis initially came from Mara Zebest, a WorldNetDaily contributor of similar material. Zebest is a long-time Obama hater, as we saw from her 2008 blog posts. The most recent splash was an attempt to show internal inconsistency in the birth certificate in a video that actually contained an image taken from a birther blog, The Daily Pen, long-noted for faking or misrepresenting government documents.

A good example of the CCP non-investigation was their phone interview with Verna Lee, former local registrar in Honolulu, who Corsi talked to. Lee basically provided no evidence for the investigation except to assert that the State of Hawaii coded forms accurately. Still this provided the theater necessary to present the March 2012 blog material afresh and with some thinly applied respectability.

Another is their much-touted investigative mission to Hawaii which, as far as I can see, netted nothing. Corsi may have found that one letter in the library and Zullo presented that, but the letter rather than supporting the Posse actually refuted it.

All the CCP has really done is to take old birther material and to package it as an investigation and make Mike Zullo and Joe Arpaio mouthpieces for it. But really when you look at the CCP, all you are really seeing is a slick production of old material from WorldNetDaily and the  birther blogs.

Cold Case Posse: The Sword of Damocles

By on July 22, 2012 in Jerome Corsi, Joe Arpaio, Mike Zullo

imageIf you’re not familiar with the legend of the Sword of Damocles, I suggest you take a moment to read the synopsis at the Wikipedia.

Jerome Corsi and the Cold Case Posse are in a very precarious position and what little credibility they have left is hanging by a thread, which may break at any moment.

The Maricopa Sheriff’s Department Cold Case Posse and Mike Zullo made as the centerpiece of their recent press conference a claim of internal inconsistency on Barack Obama’s birth certificate, a contradiction between the text race response for Obama’s father and the data entry code next to it. To make the case, Zullo presented what he claimed was a “1961 vital statistics instruction manual.” It has since been shown that the image from this “manual” that appeared in their video presentation was faked; they used an image from 1968. They misrepresented what they showed.

Zullo may well believe that since the 1968 codes make the birth certificate wrong, that they are the real codes. He’s entitled to sloppy research for his personal beliefs, but when he claims to represent law enforcement, personal belief and sloppy research is not an acceptable standard and lying about what he had is beyond the pale.

Zullo, Corsi and the lot of them should realize that they don’t have much time left. All it takes is one more long form Hawaiian birth certificate from 1961 that doesn’t match Zullo’s codes and he is done for.

No one knows this better than Jerome Corsi.

You see, Jerome Corsi published an article at WorldNetDaily back in September of 2011 titled, How does Obama’s document stack up against genuine BC? In that article, he showed an August, 1961 birth certificate for an unnamed female person (the name is known, but I won’t repeat it for privacy reasons). The parent race items are redacted, but not the codes:

image

It appears that both father and mother are coded “3.” If the Cold Case Posse showed the true 1961 Hawaiian codes, that means that both these persons are (American) Indians. Corsi has the original unredacted form, and he can look at it to see how much hot water he’s in. It could be “Indian” on the form: .22% of 1961 Hawaiian births were coded “Indian.” But you know, looking at the smudges above the redacted text, there seems to be something longer than “Indian” there. I think I know what it is.

I want to thank several individuals who contributed information used in this article.

Media reacts to Arpaio press conference

By on July 17, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Jerome Corsi, Joe Arpaio, Media, Mike Zullo, WorldNetDaily

The bizarre claims from Arizona that Hawaii is a “national security threat” may be sensational enough to warrant some national press attention, despite any real evidence. Here’s a sampling, and commenters can add others they find in comments. John Woodman gave an interview to ABC 15 in Phoenix this evening and I’ll be looking for that.

According to ABC 15 in Phoenix, Hawaii issued the following statement in response to today’s press conference:

The State of Hawaii has repeatedly confirmed the indisputable evidence of President Obama’s birth in Hawaii. An exhaustive accounting of this is provided on the State Department of Health (DOH) website.

My own article is going to take a while — the title is “Cross examining Mike Zullo.”

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