Banned: Sleeper Troll

Posted on December 26, 2008 by Kevin

Yes, friends, I am a “sleeper troll” according to FreeRepublic.com who has banned me from replying to articles there.

A troll is some posts a message for the purpose of starting an argument that is irrelevant, but long and persistent. In my case, I tried to refute some of their silliness, by pretending to be one of them while asking probing questions or presenting refuting evidence.

I am guilty of being a “sleeper” but I will not agree to the “troll” part. My motivation was not to start an argument, it was to correct misinformation.

Whatever their reasons, I am banned  (not that bans are ever really effective, but I will respect their wishes and not post there). If they want to have misinformation on their site, with many like-minded people sharing a false sense of reality, that is their right.

Looks like folks just aren’t welcome sometimes. See here for another experience.

Posted in General | 5 Comments

Am I a Citizen?

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Kevin

Reading some of the discussion of the fourteenth amendment and juristiction on the Internet, it makes me wonder.

I was born in the United States, as was my father and his father before him, but my great grandfather was not.

Heinrich and Helena emigrated to the United States around 1900, citizens of Germany. I do not know if they were ever naturalized or not. Let’s assume not. Then my grandfather who was born in Wisconsin would be the child of aliens, and hence not a citizen (according to some). I’m reasonably confident that my grandfather never went through any naturalization process. His daughter, my mother, was born in Alabama (I guess the child of an alien too) and I’m confident that she was never naturalized. I also was born in Alabama and I know that I have never been naturalized.

So, according to some, this third-generation, American born writer is not a citizen.

Bah!

Posted in Obama Citizenship Denial | 9 Comments

Natural born Citizen

Posted on December 15, 2008 by Kevin

With this odd fellow we elected President has come discussion about the Constitutional requirements for being President, and in particular that pesky little phrase “natural born citizen.” There are some very long (and some long-winded) discussions about that this means. I personally think the thing is being over analyzed.

I hit the Concise Oxford English Dictionary for the “old meaning” of the term, and it provided a very simple definition: “having a position by birth”, so “natural born citizen” means being a citizen at birth. There’s nothing new here, and indeed this is what is usually understood by the term. If you look at all the uses of “natural born”, it means “born with” some characteristic, e.g. natural-born storyteller, natural-born swimmer, natural-born athlete, natural-born mathematician, natural-born musician, and on and one. A natural born citizen is just someone born with the quality of being a citizen.

Continue reading →
Posted in Educational Reports, Obama Citizenship Denial | 50 Comments

*****-gate

Posted on December 13, 2008 by Kevin

Yesterday’s article at Media Matters said:

Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago

To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation’s leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar…

By portraying Arkansas as thoroughly, and uniquely, corrupt, the media (and Clinton’s political opponents) tied him to a long line of misbehavior that had nothing to do with him — and created the impression that Clinton must be corrupt merely for being from such an ethical cesspool…

No surprise here. As I have watched the silly stuff on right-leaning web sites about Obama’s constitutional qualifications for president, I felt a premonition that we would be reliving the “permanent campaign” mode of government again. Let’s hope that the lack of substance in these stories will eventually make everyone sick of it. At least solid Democratic majorities in the Congress will keep them focused on governing rather than trashing the president.

Posted in Politics | 14 Comments

Berg’s Ingenuous Offer

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Kevin

According to WorldNetDaily, “[Attorney Philip J.] Berg has since challenged Obama publicly that if the candidate will simply produce authorized proof of citizenship, he’ll drop the suit.”

Having no success in the courts, and getting no publicity in the mainstream media, Berg is asking for a change of venue. He want’s to move his case to the “court of public opinion”. Whether he would gain any sympathy there I can’t say, but he would certainly get some publicity.

Berg makes so many allegations in his lawsuit and demands so many documents (some of which probably never existed), that one wonders exactly what (according to Berg) “authorized proof of citizenship” is? Given that Obama published sufficient proof of the facts of his birth for any court in the USA back in June, it would be naive to think that all Berg is asking for is a photocopy instead of a computer printout of the facts of Obama’s birth. “Authorized proof of citizenship” for me would be a US Passport

This offer is just a publicity stunt to goad Obama into making the mistake of taking his case to the Internet where there are no standards of evidence and no referee.

Posted in Obama Citizenship Denial | 9 Comments

The Assassination of Chester A. Arthur

Posted on December 10, 2008 by Kevin

Obama Citizenship Denial folks say Barack Obama can’t be president because his father was a British citizen, not an American citizen. That particular presidential requirement was a new one on me! I speculated that surely there could be among all of the Presidents of the United States ONE who didn’t have both parents as US citizens.

It turns out that there is one, Chester A. Arthur. Who knew?

So given this historical precedent, will the anti-Obama crowd drop their demand for citizen-only parentage (which was just a fringe view anyway)? No. In a perverse consistency, they are claiming that Chester A. Arthur wasn’t a legitimate president either. This appears on Leo C. Donofrio’s Natural Born Citizen site.

Donofrio says: Because Chester Arthur covered up his British citizenship, any precedent he might have set that the country has had a President born of an alien father is nullified completely as Chester Arthur was a usurper to the Presidency. He wouldn’t have been on the ticket if it was public knowledge. Nobody knew Arthur was a British subject because nobody looked in the right place for the truth.

Arthur did not cover up the fact that his father was Irish, and he never claimed that his father was naturalized before Arthur was born. To say that “he wouldn’t have been on the ticket” had his father’s citizenship status been known is pure speculation. The fact that there was a furor over WHERE Arthur was born argues that his father’s status WAS known. If investigators at the time believed that Arthur was the son of two US Citizens, then why would his being born in Canada matter? Rather than say the investigators failed to discover the father’s citizenship status, it makes more sense that they didn’t think it mattered. After all, most people believe (and I think rightly) that natural-born just means “born a citizen”. And however you spin Wong Arthur was born a citizen.

The New York Times carried a biography of candidate Arthur on June 9, 1880 which began:

Gen. Chester A. Arthur was born in Franklin county Vt., Oct. 5, 1830. He is the oldest son of a family of two sons and five daughters. His father was the Rev. Dr. William Arthur,  a baptist clergyman, who emigrated to this country from County Antrim, Ireland in his eighteenth year and died Oct. 27, 1875, in Newtonville, near Albany.

There was no secret where Arthur’s father came from, and no assertion in this biography that he ever became a citizen. Nonetheless, while there were accusations that Arthur was born in Canada, no one seemed interested in his father’s citizenship status.

Posted in Educational Reports, Obama Citizenship Denial, Politics | 9 Comments

United States v. Blog

Posted on December 9, 2008 by Kevin

I have been fascinated for a long time with the fact that there are groups of people who firmly believe one thing and other groups that firmly believe the opposite thing. I’m not talking about religion or philosophy, but rather disagreements about things that reasonable people should be able to come to consensus on.

For example: Barack Obama’s published birth document is/is not a certification that he was born in Hawaii.

Put aside the questions of forgery or fraud and focus only on the question, “does the document assert that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii?” Reasonable people, given an opportunity for exchange of ideas, with not-too-much research, should be able to find out what, on the face of it, true or not, the document says.

Now here is where the title of the article “United States v. Blog” comes in. If you were to take a poll by doing a web search for “Obama Birth Certificate”, selecting only blogs, you would find a massive majority of “No” votes to my question (and high-confidence in the answer). If you took a poll of people in the United States, you would find a massive majority of people who had never heard of a published birth certificate, but nonetheless are convinced that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

Why do rational people differ? The answer is that bloggers get information from bloggers and most people get their news from radio, television and newspapers.

One person can set up a blog and using relatively simple free software can with some effort set up a very impressive-looking web site. A billion-dollar news organization can also set a very impressive-looking web site. The old addage, “you can’t tell a book by its cover” applies equally to the web. The web sites can look similar but the typical independent blogger has limited resources to verify what appears, while the news organization has access to people and services that the average person does not.

What you may see in a blog is nothing more than a collection of rumors inside a fancy cover. Blogs are still in their infancy and some blog readers haven’t yet learned to separate the quality of the layout from the quality of the content. There are certainly some high-quality blogs out there, but it’s hard to separate them from the garbage just by looking at the cover.

It’s OK to read blogs and get information from them, but it is not OK to believe everything you read without a little critical thinking and a little fact checking. If you see a link on this blog, more than likely it will be to a newspaper, a university or a government agency because I wouldn’t expect anyone to accept somebody’s blog as an authority.

Posted in General, Politics | 29 Comments