Free Republic

Ben Smith has a great catch – the North Dakota Republican Party fronting its website with a joke about the White House party crashers demanding President Obama’s birth certificate. The news here is the steady mainstream Republican acceptance of a deeply nutty and quasi-treasonous conspiracy theory about whether the president of the United States is really an American citizen. Yes, it’s just a joke here. But when’s the last time a Democratic Party web site fronted a joke about, say, whether Sarah Palin is the real mother of Trig Palin? (She is, by the way.)

Introductory Remarks: On December 7, 1941, U.S. military installations at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii were attacked by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Could this tragic event that resulted in over 3,000 Americans killed and injured in a single two-hour attack have been averted? After 16 years of uncovering documents through the Freedom of Information Act, journalist and historian Robert Stinnett charges in his book, Day of Deceit, that U.S. government leaders at the highest level not only knew that a Japanese attack was imminent, but that they had deliberately engaged in policies intended to provoke the attack, in order to draw...

Operation Enduring Freedom, on Oct. 7 will begin its ninth year. At $4 billion per month, a National Priorities Project has determined that the total cost of military operations in Afghanistan by the end of the year will be almost $200 billion. Thoughtful American taxpayers may ask why the Obama administration has not only embraced the Central Asian ground war that it inherited from Bush, but is seeking to expand not only the U.S. military footprint, but subject its NATO allies to contribute more troops and funding as well. Shorn of post 9/11 patriotic and fervor against the perpetrators of...

"As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities." --Voltaire "Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." --Demosthenes A long, long, long time ago, many people believed the Earth was flat, but for more than the last 2,000 years few educated people have subscribed to this delusion. The story (included in some textbooks used in American schools) that Christopher Columbus' 1492 voyage was the first proof that the Earth is round and not flat is deceitful historical revisionism, nothing more. For (literally) thousands of years, people...

To its credit, National Review once attacked those who refused to accept the prima facie evidence of Barack Obama's birth certificate as proof of his eligibility to be president of the United States. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn't.) Now examine...

UN officials have likened the theft of e-mails from university climate researchers to the Watergate scandal, after claiming computer hackers were probably paid by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the theft from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics, but was a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a sceptic website from a...

Conspiracy theorists awaiting Wednesday night's premiere of "Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura" might take interest in a curious comment Ventura made in the Los Angeles Times this weekend. Ventura, who has been doing the media rounds promoting his new venture on TruTV, told the paper that MSNBC cancelled his show "Jesse Ventura's America" in 2003 because he did not support the Iraq War. He said the network "in essence" paid him to be silent, which allowed him to purchase a house in Mexico. This is not your first venture into TV hosting since leaving the governorship. What happened to "Jesse...

Here's another reason "liberal elites" look down on Sarah Palin: "Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?" she was asked (around 9 minutes into the video above). "I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think that members of the electorate still want answers," she replied. "Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?" Humphries persisted. "I think it's a fair question, just like I think past...

At 7:45, your quote of the day. Something for (almost) everyone here: For the left, smoking-gun proof that she’s a fringe character, and for Birthers, smoking-gun proof that their concerns are mainstream. As for righties like me and Ed (and Glenn Beck) who think this particular science is well settled, tomorrow should be a fun media day. I wonder if she realized when she said this that it’ll follow her around from now on.

The Birther movement is convinced that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen and hence is constitutionally prohibited from being President. Most Birthers claim that Obama was born in Kenya, while others think his birth occurred in Indonesia. Even though Obama has released a copy of his birth certificate showing that he was born on Oahu, these conspiracy theories continue to animate the fanatical right. What is most surprising about these conspiracy theories is the number of relatively mainstream people willing to associate themselves with the Birthers or at least recognize the issue as a legitimate controversy. One of CNN’s...

Never fear conspiracy theorists of the world! The Birthers are alive and well and advertising in the pages of the Washington Times. And what an advertisement it is. It's unclear what is more offensive here: the accusation that President Obama is not an American citizen, or the ape imagery. The former, of course, is utterly ridiculous. The latter is not. Also, now Obama is British. Ape imagery has well-documented racist undertones, making it fairly difficult to miss the subtle message here. Earlier this year the New York Post got in some very hot water for publishing a cartoon depicting policemen...

It's perhaps indicative of the culture, but there has been a media obsession with the scandalous aspects of Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashing a White House State Dinner on Nov. 24. However, the incident also demonstrated how vulnerable President Barack Obama could be to outside intruders, and that isn't getting the lion's share of the attention. Instead, coverage like that from NBC's "Today" show has been about reality TV and exclusive interviews. This soft focus, argued Fox News host Glenn Beck on his Dec. 1 broadcast, could have repercussions. "Let me ask you, what's more reasonable: people walking by the...

No no, just kidding: There’s no “maybe” here. On the contrary, he blithely asserts that “there’s no question about it,” which precipitates the first and likely last defense of George W. Bush ever mounted by David Shuster. But then, this is the same guy who once claimed that Karl Rove planted the phony memos that destroyed Dan Rather’s career, who called for nationalizing America’s oil industry, and who thought it’d be super-keen to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. Chock full o’ good ideas, he is; it was only a matter of time before he stumbled across this one.

Here is video of Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey accusing the Bush administration of intentionally letting Osama Bin Laden "get away." Rep. Hinchey said "we apparently intentionally let Bin Laden get away." Hinchey said the Bush admin. let Bin Laden get away because "they knew very well if they captured Al-Qaeda there would be no justification for an invasion in Iraq." (Video)

Originally I just saw a "thread pulled" message, but now it has: "Site has links to trutherism, don’t post it here again" So now content is banned because the site *links* to objectionable content? I'd suggest that's true of most major news outlets for one thing. "Free"republic should support "free speech", it's one of the cornerstones and strengths of our system. Censorship is the antithesis of the American system.

Rumors about gun confiscations. Angry protests about the government's tax policies, replete with Nazi comparisons. A resurgent militia movement. Rage at the election of a president deemed to be illegitimate and threatening. Distrust and anger toward the government fueled by paranoia and conspiracy theories. They are among the crosscurrents of anger and hostility that have swept certain sectors of the country since President Barack Obama took office nearly a year ago. And they are contributing to "a toxic atmosphere of rage in America," according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which today issued a report looking at the various sources that...

After various responses from the DoH giving unclear answers to UIPA requests which exclusively pertained to birth documents for Obama dating back to August 1961 – specifically documents which caused his birth to have been “Filed by Registrar August 8, 1961″ – I requested assistance from the OIP. Their interpretation of the DoH response was that of a denial of access. But the OIP also issued guidance as to how I could properly refine my request. I took the OIP advice and issued a 6th UIPA request asking for the same documents and limiting any possible wiggle room. And to...

Orly Taitz, Birther Queen, has been rejected again. US District Judge David O. Carter threw out a lawsuit questioning Barack Obama's eligibility to hold the office based on his "natural born" citizenship status Thursday, saying the courtroom is not the proper arena to "challenge a president’s election." Judge Carter dismissed Barnett et al v. Obama et al. This had been Taitz's most successful lawsuit to date, which is not saying much. However, it is the one that got the furthest through the legal system....

Fidel Castro has found something to sneeze at in Washington's decision to ease visits by Cuban-Americans to his island: He says more Americans mean more swine flu. The 83-year-old ex-president wrote in state-controlled newspapers on Saturday that many of Cuba's early cases of the virus were visitors from the United States and he used the occasion to take a jab at the U.S. embargo. "We had the strange case where the United States on one hand authorized more trips for a large number of people carrying the virus, and on the other prohibited us from obtaining equipment and medicine to...

Love Can Mess You Up: Before Arthur David Horn met his future bride Lynette (a "metaphysical healer") in 1988, he was a tenured professor at Colorado State, with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale, teaching a mainstream course in human evolution. With Lynette's guidance (after a revelatory week with her in California's Trinity Mountains, searching for Bigfoot), Horn evolved, himself, resigning from Colorado State and seeking to remedy his inadequate Ivy League education. At a conference in Denver in September, Horn said he now realizes that humans come from an alien race of shape-shifting reptilians that continue to control civilization...

...after the terror attacks of 9/11/01, there were indeed a few Americans who honestly believed that the federal government was so corrupt that it was behind and responsible for the events of September 11th. Even though we all watched in shock, as hijacked planes flew into the twin towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, these folks imagined that someone in Washington DC might have blown up those buildings instead. These believers were labeled “truthers”—snip Most Americans passed these folks off as crackpots—mentally unstable individualssnip So when very normal people starting asking who this grand nobody from Chicago was, who...

Next month will mark the 45th anniversary of the publication by Harper's Magazine of Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a work that seems to grow more relevant by the day. I was not always a fan. When I first read it two decades ago, I thought Hofstadter was being needlessly insulting by equating political views with mental illness—despite his insistence that he wasn't using the word that way. Besides, I thought, who really cared about the strange notions that occurred to members of marginal groups like the John Birch Society? Joe McCarthy's day was long...

By Michael Peabody The other day someone sent me a link to an “Antichrist Decoder” that has been posted online by an otherwise reputable Christian ministry. You can type in anybody’s name and the program will calculate the value of the name in Roman numerals. After checking my name to make sure that I was not the Antichrist I looked at the other names that people had plugged into the decoder and learned that Barack Obama is not the antichrist, neither is Barack Hussein Obama. Ronald Wilson Reagan’s name doesn’t add up to 666 even if you type in two...

MEMPHIS, Oct. 19 (UPI) -- Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan told an audience in Memphis he believes the H1N1 flu vaccine was developed to kill people, a witness said. Farrakhan, 76, spoke for nearly three hours Sunday at a gathering to observe the religious group's Holy Day of Atonement, which also marked the 14th anniversary of the Million Man March in Washington, the (Memphis) Commercial Appeal reported, citing a source who attended the speech. "The Earth can't take 6.5 billion people. We just can't feed that many. So what are you going to do? Kill as many as...

Late last week, Democratic-leaning pollster Stan Greenberg released a focus group study showing that conservative GOP base voters live in an alternative universe of their own political paranoia. In this world, President Obama is ruthlessly advancing a secret agenda to ruin -- yes, ruin -- the economy so he can impose socialism upon the United States and destroy the core civil liberties of American democracy. And in this covert crusade, Obama is no more than a frontman for unseen interests aiming to annihilate the United States. This dark view was propounded by die-hard right-wingers -- older, white Republican-base voters --...

By AP - newtimesonline.com Tue, 04 Nov 2008 | Print | E-Mail | PDF | Graphics Version Americas Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 After almost two years of campaigning, Democrat candidate Barrack Obama, Republican, John McCain yesterday brought their train to a halt in their respective home states to await the verdict of Americans. So far, the odds favour the once underdog in American politics, Obama, the African-American Senator from Illinois State . A Congressional Quarterly (CQ) politics monitored on BBC put the Kenyan born American ahead of his rival, Senator McCain. Even though Senator Obama leads in all polls, unlike in...

This is my own work, I own any associated copyrights to it. ... What is a Natural Born Citizen? ... Ҥ 212. Citizens and natives. The citizens are the members of the civil society; bound to this society by certain duties, and subject to its authority, they equally participate in its advantages. The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens. As the society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The...

Okay okay, one final birther story. Unfortunately for the true believers your leader, Orly Taitz, was fined $20,000 for mis-use of the legal system. Justice Clay Land wrote a 43 page order railing against Ms. Taitz and warned her against misusing the court system to push purely political agendas. You can read the order here (it's pretty scathing). For any who are not familiar with Orly Taitz, she is one of the leaders of the so-called birther movement who has sought to have the legitimacy of President Obama's election over-turned through the claim that he never provided a true birth...

Orly Taitz gets Joy Behar very nervous about the Obama Eligibility case.

Columbus attorney William Mason has seen "birther" lawyer Orly Taitz on television and read about her in the newspaper. He's quick with a description of the California lawyer: "She's nuts," Mason said. “Based on what I saw and read, she's nuts." Mason said her court filings don't appear written by someone familiar with the court system. Also, members of the Georgia bar, to which Taitz doesn't belong, aren't allowed to advance an untrue cause. And, he said, she's never been able to support speculation made in federal court that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. For attorney...

Is there anything left to be said—or seen—when it comes to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? Just you wait. JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America, a two-part, four-hour special airing on History [Sunday, October 11, 9/8c and Monday, October 12, 9/8c] takes viewers back to November 22, 1963 and tells the story via a timeline using only archival news footage, much of which will be new even to assassination buffs. There is no narration (sorry, Peter Coyote). There are no talking heads. The project’s exec producers Nicole Rittenmeyer and Seth Skundrick used a similar technique in last year’s...

Today, the Washington Post published a long profile of Orly Taitz. This is the nut job that's leading the birther movement. Taitz helms a very leaky swift boat. We should be forgetting her right about now. Taitz was news or newsy this past summer. But why do we need a big story on her in October? Her power is only derived from free media attention. Did I mention that she's a nutjob? A quick Nexis check reveals that Taitz has been mentioned, chronicled, and/or written about more than 400 times before WaPo decided to profile her. Other newspapers wrote about...

The dental office of Orly Taitz, DDS, Esq., is in a low-slung complex in a quiet planned community in Orange County, alongside an assortment of small businesses and solo practitioners. The practice, Appealing Dentistry, is busy this morning. In the waiting room are a woman with no dental insurance and a boy with three cavities, and the phone is ringing off the hook with dentists eager to fill a job opening. "Crowns, bridges, veneers, root canals -- you need to be able to do root canals and molars," the receptionist is telling one caller. And now here is Taitz herself,...

Apologies for the tease (can you post pics here? I'm a FR noob...) but follow the jump for perhaps one of the rarest photographs in existence. Of the beloved Bella Pelosi. Prepare yourselves...

PETER Wright, the British agent whose publication in Australia of Spycatcher was a victory for free speech, has been slammed in a new history of MI5 as a dangerous conspiracy theorist, whose work in the intelligence service was as damaging and distracting as that of some traitors. Christopher Andrew, the leading historian who has had unprecedented access to MI5 files to write the first official history of the secret service, concluded that while he was an active officer Wright's "conspiracy theories arguably did as much damage to the service as the treachery" of traitor Anthony Blunt. The Cambridge University historian...

We cannot confront the fallacies of conspiracy thinking in our political culture if we do not understand it. In recent weeks Van Jones, the President's Green Jobs Czar, lost his job because of his embrace of conspiracy thinking. More recently popular talker Glenn Beck has been smeared by his opponents as a conspiracy nut. We can only decipher these issues and win these intellectual fights if we know just what kind of thinking needs to be isolated from political life. Click here for Part IWhen we last left off our 9/11 Truther Crackpot was suggesting that surely his conspiracy theory...

Are New Vaccines Laced with Birth-Control Drugs? During the early 1990s, the World Health Organization (WHO) had been overseeing massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in a number of countries, among them Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Philippines. In October 1994, HLI received a communication from its Mexican affiliate, the Comite' Pro Vida de Mexico, regarding that country's anti-tetanus campaign. Suspicious of the campaign protocols, the Comite' obtained several vials of the vaccine and had them analyzed by chemists. Some of the vials were found to contain human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), a naturally occurring hormone essential for maintaining a pregnancy. hCG and...

The suspicion that President Obama was born outside of the United States has been written off as a conspiracy theory, but that hasn't stopped the so-called "birther" movement from keeping their theories alive. A fundamentalist Christian Web site LivePrayer.com has produced a 28-minute infomercial dedicated to questioning where the president was born. It has run at least once on a CBS affiliate in Lubbock, Texas. LivePrayer.com was founded by Christian minister Bill Keller, who committed his life to God after spending time in prison for insider trading, according to his site. The infomercial is also the work of attorney Gary...

.......Last night I stumbled upon a post at Media Matters — or, as I like to call it, the George Soros Steno Pool. Media Matters is a leftwing “media watchdog” that monitors conservative talk radio and FOX News, then refutes their daily “lies.” So Media Matters is supposed to be all about facts and truth and “telling the whole story.” Got it. Apparently, though, telling the whole story about, say, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 means leaving out one itty bitty detail that doesn’t fit the doctrinaire Media Matters narrative: the name and political affiliation...

How on earth did this crackpot get a national TV show? Watch this amazing eight-minute monologue in which Glenn Beck interprets public art, and ties together the Rockefellers, communism, fascism, corporatism, the United Nations and the Obama White House together in a grand conspiracy. If this were in a movie, you wouldn't believe it. But this is on national TV, on Fox News, every weeknight: < video > Where's Beck getting this garbage? Listen to this 1976 speech by Beck guru W. Cleon Skousen, in which he cites Mormon prophecy to bolster his rant against the Rockefellers, the communists, and...

The leftwing blogosphere has been trying to convince themselves and others that the attendance at the 9/12 Washington, D.C. Tea Party was fairly small. However, there is one really big problem for them. How to explain away a highly inconvenient time lapse video from a camera showing massive numbers of Tea Party folks parading down Pennsylvania Avenue (video below the fold). The way they get around to explaining away what our lyin' eyes tell us on that video is to devise the most hilarious set of conspiracy theories you can imagine.Why is flag in the video at half staff? How...

Lemme cut to the chase, Kanye West is phony as was his contrived outburst when he rushed the stage to disrupt an acceptance speech from country singer Taylor Swift, during last night’s MTV Video Music Awards. It was a perfectly executed stunt which was designed to make national headlines (which it did). It was designed to become among the top trending topics in twitter and one of the hot key words in google (which it is). It was obviously designed to take away attention from issues at hand as Kanye’s outburst overshadowed many of the performances and presenters including the...

Many prominent young bloggers say its time conservatives altered their fortunes and cast off those intellectual dead weights who stir up irrational fear. Time to throw off those whose intellectual bankruptcy has left the conservative movement with no credibility in the eyes of the American people. No, they’re not calling for the removal of those writers and political leaders who told us that if we didn’t give the Treasury $700 billion to distribute to corporate America, the world as we know it would end, thus undermining free-market economics. Rather, the talk from young political guns Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke...

Aware of the fact that Barack Hussein Obama does NOT meet Article II – Section I constitutional requirements for the office of President, what well-seasoned professional politician would be stupid enough to sign their name and stake their personal career upon certifying Obama as eligible?

"Truthers" are the people who believe the 9/11 terror attacks were an inside job. That the Bush administration had advance knowledge of them and let them occur. In the more extreme version of an already extremist theory, truthers believe the U.S. government itself carried out the attacks as an excuse to take the nation to war. At the very least the truthers question the official version of events and want the government to reopen the investigation. In a way, they have a lot in common with those who to this day refuse to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald fired the...

To be a bonafide conspiracy, two or more individuals must knowingly conspire, plot or plan an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious act. In politics or law, an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act, is a “conspiracy.” Not in theory, but in reality. Such is the case today!

Van Jones: On the 9/11 Attacks, Not Just a 'Truther,' a 'Deserver' By Tom Blumer September 7, 2009 - 23:49 ET The "resignation" shortly after midnight on Sunday morning of President Obama's "green jobs czar" Van Jones has generally been seen as a convenient holiday weekend move. By Friday, after White House Secretary Robert Gibbs would only say that he still was a part of the administration, it was obvious that Jones's resignation was only a matter of time. The 9/11 truther and other evidence accumulated by Glenn Beck, Gateway Pundit, WorldNetDaily, and others was simply overwhelming. But it seems...

Let's call it a "blast from the past." Yesterday, David Horowitz noted with perceptible disgust that former Sean Hannity sidecar occupant Alan Colmes had waved away criticism of disgraced "Green Jobs Czar" and admitted Communist Van Jones by describing Jones as simply "a mainstream liberal." (Insert your own joke here.) What struck me about Horowitz's post was his opening line: "If you didn't believe it when I said it..." Back in 2006, I saw and heard Alan Colmes say something on his old FOX News show that I tried to convince myself I'd misheard.

The average American citizen has a very hard time believing that a world organization - in this case the WHO – could be so evil as to plan a “pandemic” of some kind in order to further some diabolical agenda. It is no surprise that an official document indicating that the pandemic has been planned YEARS ago would turn up from within the dark sewers of IBM. IBM is no stranger to getting involve in the blackest of evils.

When the White House press corps finally grilled White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones last Friday, a reporter asked how the administration could reject "conspiracy theories" about his birth certificate while employing someone who previously charged the U.S. government with masterminding Sept. 11. I found that to be an interesting juxtaposition. Could the answer be as simple as the White House has no respect for truth? Will reporters and even some clamoring to position themselves as respectable "conservatives" and critics of Barack Obama figure out that deception and deceit are at the very core...