Tracking Teh Crazie - WND

More data to consider when we're considering the source - World Net Daily's Joseph Farah.

At birther-central, head birther Farah published this on biblical creation day:

Was the world created 6,028 years ago today?

That’s a question that will drive fans of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking up the wall.

I don’t know that it was. I don’t think anyone but God knows the actual day of creation.

Yea, but still it probably wasn't.

Here's Farah's evidence for a Young Earth:

But one of the greatest biblical and historical scholars of the 17th century, Archbishop James Ussher, meticulously calculated all the data he could find about the day of creation, and that’s what he came up with in his famous “Annals of the World,” a great companion to your reading of the Bible.

That's it.  That's Farah's evidence.  And the evidence for a very Old Earth?

All of physics - in this instance, radiometric dating:

Spontaneous breakdown or decay of atomic nuclei, termed radioactive decay, is the basis for all radiometric dating methods. Radioactivity was discovered in 1896 by French physicist Henri Becquerel. By 1907 study of the decay products of uranium (lead and intermediate radioactive elements that decay to lead) demonstrated to B. B. Boltwood that the lead/uranium ratio in uranium minerals increased with geologic age and might provide a geological dating tool.

As radioactive Parent atoms decay to stable daughter atoms (as uranium decays to lead) each disintegration results in one more atom of the daughter than was initially present and one less atom of the parent. The probability of a parent atom decaying in a fixed period of time is always the same for all atoms of that type regardless of temperature, pressure, or chemical conditions. This probability of decay is the decay constant. The time required for one-half of any original number of parent atoms to decay is the half-life, which is related to the decay constant by a simple mathematical formula.

If it's wrong, where is it wrong?  The rate of radioactive decay?  Where's Farah's evidence that it's wrong?  To that question, Farah has the Bible and that's all he needs:

I take the Bible literally – and seriously. And the Bible strongly affirms a date in the neighborhood of 6,000 years, at least for the age of man, who was created on the sixth day, according to Genesis. If that’s not true, it calls into question the rest of the Bible’s accuracy.

Well, yea.

It also calls into question the rationality of someone who takes it so seriously and literally that he's willing to abandon all of science.  Look, if you want to believe the literal Bible, that's fine.  We live in a free society and you're free to believe what you want to believe,  But simply believing it doesn't make it science.  Nor does it make anything you believe to be true, to be, in fact, true.

Birther Central is now just a little more infected with teh crazie.

Tracking Teh Crazie - The "Unconstitutional" Minimum Wage

Every now and then it's good to take a peek at teh crazie - and we've done it more than a few times here at 2PJ.

Today, I'd like to look at this paragraph found at World Net Daily (actually it's from Mr Crazie himself, Joseph Farah):

My thought is that nobody in Washington – not Obama, not the Congress and not the Supreme Court – has any constitutional authority to insert itself between employers or potential employers and employees. If two consenting adults, as Obama believes, can do whatever they want to each other sexually, surely two consenting adults have the right to agree or not to agree to perform services for whatever wages they deem appropriate – without any interference from the federal government.

This is your more or less classic tenther argument about the minimum wage.  If it's not specifically spelled out on the Constitution, the Congress doesn't have the authority to implement it.

Too bad the Supreme Court already decided (in 1937!) that Congress does have the authority to set a minimum wage.  From West Coast Hotel v. Parrish:

In each case the violation alleged by those attacking minimum wage regulation for women is deprivation of freedom of contract. What is this freedom? The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract. It speaks of liberty and prohibits the deprivation of liberty without due process of law. In prohibiting that deprivation, the Constitution does not recognize an absolute and uncontrollable liberty. Liberty in each of its phases has its history and connotation. But the liberty safeguarded is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the people. Liberty under the Constitution is thus necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and regulation which is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the interests of the community is due process. This essential limitation of liberty in general governs freedom of contract in particular. More than twenty-five years ago we set forth the applicable principle in these words, after referring to the cases where the liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment had been broadly described.

'But it was recognized in the cases cited, as in many others, that freedom of contract is a qualified, and not an absolute, right. There is no absolute freedom to do as one wills or to contract as one chooses. The guaranty of liberty does not withdraw from legislative supervision that wide department of activity which consists of the making of contracts, or deny to government the power to provide restrictive safeguards. Liberty implies the absence of arbitrary restraint, not immunity from reasonable regulations and prohibitions imposed in the interests of the community.

This power under the Constitution to restrict freedom of contract has had many illustrations.  That it may be exercised in the public interest with respect to contracts between employer and employee is undeniable. [Emphases added.]

The United States Supreme Court, 75 years or so ago.

When given the opportunity 4 years later, the US Supreme Court said in US v. Darby:

Since our decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, it is no longer open to question that the fixing of a minimum wage is within the legislative power and that the bare fact of its exercise is not a denial of due process under the Fifth more than under the Fourteenth Amendment.

And yet, Joseph Farah and his merry band of truth-telling tenthers missed this decades old decision.

The GOP Debacle 2012 - Two Views

We all know how the election ended. President Obama was reelected with 332 Electoral and 62,085,892 Popular votes (51%), beating Challenger Mitt Romney who won 206 Electoral and 58,777,012 Popular votes (48%).

The big story, as told by CBS, is how the Romney Campaign got it so wrong.  They really did think they were going to win:

Romney and his campaign had gone into the evening confident they had a good path to victory, for emotional and intellectual reasons. The huge and enthusiastic crowds in swing state after swing state in recent weeks - not only for Romney but also for Paul Ryan - bolstered what they believed intellectually: that Obama would not get the kind of turnout he had in 2008.

They thought intensity and enthusiasm were on their side this time - poll after poll showed Republicans were more motivated to vote than Democrats - and that would translate into votes for Romney.

Didn't happen, of course. But why not?

Politico has some answers:

Across the [GOP]’s campaigns, committees and super PACs, internal polling gave an overly optimistic read on the electorate. The Romney campaign entered the last week of the election convinced that Colorado, Florida and Virginia were all but won, that the race in Ohio was neck and neck and that the Republican nominee had a legitimate shot in Pennsylvania.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee consistently had a more upbeat assessment of races in North Dakota and Montana, among others, than their Democratic counterparts. One GOP poll even showed Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock holding even with his opponent, even as public polls showed the embattled Republican hemorrhaging support. A Republican poll taken by Susquehanna Polling and Research showed Pennsylvania Senate candidate Tom Smith leading Democratic Sen. Bob Casey by 2 points a few weeks before the election; Casey won by 9 points.

Back to CBS. The piece lists the miscalculations the GOP made regarding their poll data:

1. They misread turnout. They expected it to be between 2004 and 2008 levels, with a plus-2 or plus-3 Democratic electorate, instead of plus-7 as it was in 2008. Their assumptions were wrong on both sides: The president's base turned out and Romney's did not. More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008. And fewer Republicans did: Romney got just over 2 million fewer votes than John McCain.

2. Independents. State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren't oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans - there just weren't as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

3. Undecided voters. The perception is they always break for the challenger, since people know the incumbent and would have decided already if they were backing him. Romney was counting on that trend to continue. Instead, exit polls show Mr. Obama won among people who made up their minds on Election Day and in the few days before the election. So maybe Romney, after running for six years, was in the same position as the incumbent.

That's one view - reasonable, logical and supported by, you know evidence.

But never mind all that, Joseph Farah over at World Net Daily has the real reason why Romney ended up 116 Electoral and 3,309,000 Actual votes down.  It was VOTER FRAUD:

I also know that the reigning ethos of this movement represented so ably today by Obama is this: “By any means necessary …” It was first articulated by Jean Paul Sartre in his play, “Dirty Hands.” But it became popularized as a slogan of the revolutionary left by Malcolm X.

What it means, in short, is that the ends justify the means. It means violence is fine in achieving a worthwhile objective. It means lying, stealing, cheating and all those other bourgeoisie “sins” are appropriate means of furthering the cause.

Is there any doubt in your mind today that this is now the reigning ethos of the Democratic Party and its various tentacles and allies?

There is no doubt in my mind.

And that’s why stealing the vote is not only an acceptable practice by these people, it is a moral imperative in their twisted worldview.

Am I suggesting that the recent presidential election was stolen through voter fraud and manipulation?

Without a doubt.

While he writes that he has "plenty of anecdotal evidence" to support his view that 5% of the Democrat's support is attributed to fraud, he only offers us 4 examples.

None of which actually make much sense as evidence.  Let's take them one by one:

1) In Ohio, the voter rolls are "bloated" meaning that in some counties there are more people registered to vote than there are actual voters.  This, to Farah, is evidence of voter fraud.  What he leaves out of his quotation from his source material is these paragraphs:

The research found: more than 1.8 million dead people listed as voters; about 2.75 million with voter registrations in more than one state; and about 12 million voter records with incorrect addresses, meaning either the voters moved or errors in the information make it unlikely any mailings can reach them.

The latter category is where you’ll find most of Ohio’s 1.6 million inactive voters.

“For the most part, these are individuals who have already had mail returned to the board of elections or have filed a change of address with the U.S. post office,” said Husted spokeswoman Maggie Ostrowski.

Yet they are still officially registered to vote in Ohio and can cast a ballot if they provide a valid form of identification and their signature matches the one on file.

Bloated voter rolls in Ohio? Doesn't matter.

2) Michigan.  Farah wonders who Obama won so handily when the polls showed the two candidates in a virtual tie." Because they didn't. Take a look at Nate Silver's listing of the Michigan Poll data. Or Real Clear Politics. Nowhere in there is there any indication of a "virtual tie."

3) James O'Keefe and Project Veritas.  This doesn't even require a response.

4) WND's investigation that "demonstrated conclusively" that the Obama Campaign was taking illegal contributions via its website.  While I have no idea how this proves Voter Fraud, it did show that WND itself committed fraud by donating to a political campaign in someone else's name.

No limit of teh crazie over at World Net Daily.

Tracking Teh Crazie - WND

From the head birther at birther-central (World Net Daily) we read this stunning display of religious tolerance.

It a piece called "Why atheists can't be real Americans."

Farah begins by taking a step further than Pastor John Hagee (how on Earth can anyone take something a step further than a nut case like Hagee?)  By the way, that's not my characterization.  It's Joey's.

Take a look:

Pastor John Hagee, senior pastor of San Antonio’s Cornerstone Church, is making People for the America Way very angry with some comments about atheists.

Here’s what he said in a talk captured on YouTube by the group: “This nation was not built for atheists or by atheists. It was built by Christian people who believed in the Word of God. To the atheists watching this telecast, if our belief in God offends you, move. There are planes leaving every hour on the hour, going every place on planet earth. Get on one, we don’t want you and we won’t miss you, I promise you.”

That may sound harsh, coming from a Christian minister of a mega-church with 20,000 members.

But let me take what Hagee said a step further.

See?

And what's the extra step from the birther-king?

Atheists can’t be real Americans in the truest sense of the word – and People for the American Way should be renamed People for the un-American Way.

So from Hagee, we learn that atheists should leave Amurika and from Farah, that we're not "real Americans" anyway.

Huh.  Upon what does Farah place this puffery?

America was founded on a creedal statement. It can be found in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;...

And so on.

Too bad The Declaration, amazing document that it is, is not the law of the land.

The Constitution is.  And the Constitution has nothing to say about this being a "Christian Nation."  In fact Article VI, has this in it:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. [emphasis added.]

And do I really need to quote the 1st Amendment at yinz?

I'll give the final word to the Supreme Court, circa 1943 (when the World was at war):

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

So who's being un-American?  The folks who believe that all citizens are equal citizens or the religious zealots who want everyone that disagrees with them to just leave?

The Zombie Lies That NEVER Die (World Net Daily and the Obama Birth Certificate)

When times get boring, just head on over to World Net Daily to see what teh crazies' up to.

Did you know they're still flogging the Birth Certificate? They're still putting it in irony quotation marks so it shows up like this: Obama's "birth certificate".

As of this date and time (7:14 am on May 25) we see these articles in this order:

Above the date there's this non-Birth Certificate story:

U.K. celebrates Obamas, but Michael Savage is another story

The rest is red meat for the birthers:

A QUESTION OF ELIGIBILITY
WND Exclusive
Trump pumps Corsi
for latest on Obama
Requests information from author
of 'Where's the Birth Certificate?'

WND POLL
Combing over the facts
What is Donald Trump up to now with his questioning of Jerome Corsi?

A Poll asking WND readers what they think of the previous story.

WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Store clerk: Best-selling book probing Obama 'withdrawn'
Borders representative bases answer on fake Esquire article

A story on Corsi's book being out of stock in one Borders in California.

WND Exclusive
Obama camp pushes to sell birth-certificate images
'Don't miss out on this chance to get yours'

A story on how the "push" to sell "birth-certificate images" has actually driven up the sales of Corsi's book.

WND Exclusive
'Criminal' Obama secret gets no media attention
'Hawaiian' president has mysterious Connecticut Social Security Number

A story on the back-up birther story: Obama's Connecticut Social Security number

WND POLL
Coverage you can't count on
Why are news media paying no attention to Obama's Connecticut Social Security Number?

A reader poll on the previous story.

WND Exclusive
Now popular Republicans 'not natural-born citizens'
Rising stars of GOP in doubt because parents from overseas

A tangental birther story. How Governors Rubio and Jindal might not be natural born citizens (even though they were born in the US) because, like Obama, both men's parents were not American citizens.

WND
Corsi interview on Clear Channel Radio
Listen now to what Obama and crew are trying to hide

An interview with Jerome Corsi on Obama's birth certificate.

WND.COMMENTARY
What it'll take to resolve natural-born-citizen issue
Exclusive: Monte Kuligowski offers process for assuring justice in 2012 election

As of this writing, this is a broken link. But by the title we see it's still about Obama's "natural-born-citizen issue."B

ETWEEN THE LINES
Obama's 'Made in the USA' campaign
Exclusive: Joseph Farah applies apt definitions to word re-election effort is touting

From Farah himself. A story on how the phrase "Made in the USA" and how it actually hints at Obama not being a real American

WND Exclusive
'The Obama code': Hidden messages in birth document?
Computer experts find anomalies embedded in White House release

Story on some computer manipulation of the Long Form Birth Certificate that proves it's a forgery - or something like that

WND Exclusive
It's out! The book that proves Obama's ineligible
Today's the day Corsi is unleashed to tell all about that 'birth certificate'

Ad for Jerome Corsi's book on the Obama's Birth Certificate

WND Exclusive
From A to Z: What's wrong with Obama's birth certificate?
Examine for yourself mounting evidence that president's document isn't genuine

A primer on the birth certificate story.

THE FULL STORY
WND Exclusive
Is Obama constitutionally eligible to serve?
WND's complete archive of news reports on the issue

Birth Certificate again - WND's complete "reporting"

WND Exclusive
Obama's day of reckoning could end his presidency
Free, landmark summary explains eligibility issue clearly, suggests what you should do

Another primer on the Birth Certificate

DEALS OF THE DAY
Corsi No. 1 bestseller 'Obama Nation' $4.95 today only!
Fantastic $23 discount on other book most hated by Team Obama

Another ad for Jerome Corsi's book on Obama's birth certificate.

Most politically incorrect film of the decade
Documentary explores forbidden issue of president's legal qualifications

Ad for an anti-Obama documentary.

And so on
WND - Birther Central

Still.

WND: Teh Crazie (Still!)

Joseph Farah is still at it.

He's STILL droning on about the Birth Certificate.

Really.

And in supporting his case, the stuff he leaves out is simply breathtaking.

Really.

Here's Joey:

The State Department is maintaining a "counter-misinformation" page on an America.gov blog that attempts to "debunk a conspiracy theory" that President Obama was not born in the United States, as if the topic were equivalent to believing space aliens visit Earth in flying saucers.

Well, it is. As one has to be rational to recognize this, I can't expect anyone from WND to understand.

Really.

The "counter-misinformation" page, written by Todd Leventhal and dated August 21, 2009 (good thing they got right on it at WND, huh?) can be found here.

But as you read Joey's prose, take note the verb tenses when describing the president's "dual citizenship." It's always in the present tense. Even when what he's quoting always puts it in the past. For example, Joey writes:

In a number of court cases challenging Obama's eligibility, dual citizenship has been raised as a factor that could compromise his "natural born" status under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution. The cases argue dual citizenship would make Obama ineligible...[emphasis added.]

But way way way way down the bottom of the piece, he writes:

Finally, Leventhal cites FactCheck.org to state, "Obama was originally both a U.S. citizen and a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies from 1961 to 1963 (because his father was from Kenya, which gained its independence from the British Empire in 1963), then both a U.S. and Kenyan citizen from 1963 to 1982, and solely a U.S. citizen after that." [emphasis added.]

So even if Obama once held a dual citizenship, he no longer does. But as part of Joey's argument, he's ranting about how Obama's dual citizenship would make him ineligible.

See? That's teh crazie right there.

By the way factcheck.org goes a bit farther:

In other words, at the time of his birth, Barack Obama Jr. was both a U.S. citizen (by virtue of being born in Hawaii) and a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies (or the UKC) by virtue of being born to a father who was a citizen of the UKC.

Obama's British citizenship was short-lived. On Dec. 12, 1963, Kenya formally gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

When he held also held a Kenyan citizenship. However :

[T]he Kenyan Constitution prohibits dual citizenship for adults. Kenya recognizes dual citizenship for children, but Kenya's Constitution specifies that at age 23, Kenyan citizens who possesses citizenship in more than one country automatically lose their Kenyan citizenship unless they formally renounce any non-Kenyan citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance to Kenya.

Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1984.

So he hasn't been a "dual citizen" since he convinced Weather Underground member Bill Ayers to ghostwrite a book for him - eleven years later.

That's teh crazie.

Really.

Teh Crazie GOP Fringe

This is getting funner and funner.

Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of the wingnut World Net Daily has declared CPAC (the "Conservative Political Action Conference") dead.

The reason?

They're not crazie enough to take him seriously.

I touched on this last September linking to this article at the LATimes:

Amid a rebirth of conservative activism that could help Republicans win elections next year, some party insiders now fear that extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories coming from the angry reaches of the conservative base are undermining the GOP's broader credibility and casting it as the party of the paranoid.

Such insiders point to theories running rampant on the Internet, such as the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and is thus ineligible to be president, or that he is a communist, or that his allies want to set up Nazi-like detention camps for political opponents. Those theories, the insiders say, have stoked the GOP base and have created a "purist" climate in which a figure such as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) is lionized for his "You lie!" outburst last week when Obama addressed Congress.

And so on. The point to remember is that GOP insiders fear the "purist" climate.

Well today, Farah fights back. He tells his side of this story and hangs his victimization onto the actions of two people:

Fresh from sponsoring CPAC in 2009 and addressing the group on multiple occasions dating back to the 1980s, I thought I would plant a seed in the minds of the organizers for the 2010 affair.

So I sent a brief e-mail to event director Lisa De Pasquale suggesting that if CPAC 2010 were planning to do anything on the constitutional eligibility issue, I would like to be the speaker on that subject – what are the facts, why it's important.

I never heard back from her and didn't really give it another thought, until September – eight months later – when suddenly that innocent, private e-mail between a sponsor of CPAC and the director suddenly became "news."

It began when Republican blogger Jon Henke declared an ill-fated boycott of WND. I say ill-fated because WND had a banner year for revenues and traffic. That should tell you something about his level of influence in the world of politics and news. Henke did his best to get the Republican Party to withhold advertising from WND, never thinking, of course, to suggest the same to the Democrats, who outspent Republicans nationally and in WND in the election year 2008.

Hissy fit begun, Farah complains about what was allowed at CPAC 2010:

Apparently, De Pasquale and the CPAC leadership are more concerned about pleasing the media than their long-time sponsors and speakers – even people like me who are under siege from the left, the soft-right and the media establishment.

It didn't surprise me later, therefore, when this same leadership made the conscious decision to include in its sponsors for 2010 a group promoting same-sex marriage.

This was also the year CPAC accepted back into its ranks the formerly too-crazie for us John Birch Society. But Farah thinks they've gone soft on their conservative purity. So his solution:

That's why today I pronounce CPAC dead.

It's one of the reasons I am organizing a conference this September called "Taking America Back." This one is about the ultimate issues of God, the Constitution, the tea-party uprising, freedom and justice.

There will be no two-headed monkeys.

There will be no same-sex marriage sponsors.

But there will be free and open discussion of issues like the constitutional eligibility of the man occupying the White House.

Screw you guys, Farah Cartman sez, I'm going home.

More Wingnut Crazie

No, not JOSEPH FARAH's wingnut crazie. This time the wingnut crazie's coming from Newsmax.com.

Rest assured, we'll still post JOSEPH FARAH's wingnut crazie as often as we chose to, but that doesn't preclude posting crazie from other wingnut sources.

Newsmax, or at least John L. Perry, has posted a column there titled:

Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention’

Though Perry is verry careful:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it. [emphasis added]

BUT they go on (of course they do):

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

As John Aravosis at Americablog writes:

This is beyond the pale. If the Democrats don't step up and shut this kind of talk down right now, I fear we are going to see violence in this country. And yes, it will be the Republicans' fault. But it will also be the fault of the Democratic party for watching the crazy talk grow, and not doing a thing to stand up to it. At some point, silence abets.

Wingnut Crazie. It's everywhere.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall posts this:

The author, John L. Perry, claims not to be 'advocating', only describing what he says is already being considered and is the best option available. But give it a read and you be the judge.

And just so we're totally clear, no, I'm not expecting any military coups. This is just one more nugget to add to the backdrop list of incitement now coming from the right.

Can we add treason?

UPDATE, ANOTHER: The Perry column has been taken down.

UPDATE, AND ANOTHER From Talking Points Memo:

As noted earlier, Newsmax appears to have taken down its article endorsing a potential military coup as the only way to solve the "Obama problem". But here's the full text of the article as it originally appeared.

As noted previously, the article not only endorsed the idea but seemed to suggest that top military brass were also planning or actively considering such an option.
Late Update: Newsmax is now distancing itself from Perry's column and they've sent us a statement to that effect.

Later Update: Let me just add a little more on this. As you can see, the angle Newsmax is taking on this is to suggest that Perry doesn't really have anything to do with them, that he's just an "unpaid blogger." Now I think we all understand that there are many sites -- Kos, Redstate, even TPM -- where readers are allowed to set up their own blogs or diaries and write their own stuff. These are essentially discussion areas. And it's a cheap shot when someone finds some nutty diary on Kos and says DailyKos published such and such. Newsmax is claiming that that's what's happening here. But we've taken a close look. And I think it's clear that that is not true. Perry has written a weekly column for the site going back to at least 1999. And he's prominently listed on the bio page of all Newsmax columnists, along with Dick Morris, Dr. Laura, Grover Norquist, Lanny Davis, Michael Reagan, Rep. Ernest Istook, etc. (You can see the page we're referring to here; scroll down and look for the red arrow on the left.) We'll have more for you on this shortly.

Stay tuned.

Taking Credit For Teh Crazie

Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of the most profoundly wingnutty World Net Daily, has taken credit for the recent resurgence in the profoundly wingnutty "Birth Certificate" conspiracy theory.

In his latest column, Farah is looking for money to continue a national billboard campaign - one where he asks the question "Where's the birth certificate?":

Ask yourself this question: What else, besides this campaign, could possibly have been responsible for the outburst of talk, discussion, debate, controversy, snide comments and media coverage of Barack Obama's eligibility issue in the last five weeks? I think it's clear that this very low-budget media campaign, stifled, as it were, by three of the largest communications companies controlling billboards, has made an enormous and surprising impact on the national debate.

Am I right or wrong about that?

There have been newspaper stories about the campaign. There have been cable TV newscasts about the campaign. There have been talk-radio shows discussing the eligibility issue that have never before broached the topic. The Internet is abuzz with debate.

This was pretty much a dead issue before I launched this billboard campaign. Now it's alive again.

And he's using the issue to, surprise surprise surprise, raise money:

And before I get back to the subject of Barack Obama's birthday, I want to try to set the record straight on a misunderstanding that, I believe, has severely hampered the campaign in recent days.

While it's true that CBS, Clear Channel and Lamar Advertising have all banned this campaign nationwide, that does not spell the end of this effort – far from it. There is no shortage of billboards to acquire for this campaign. There are literally hundreds of thousands available to us through other major providers and through independent companies eager to work with us.

But this misunderstanding that we've somehow been shut out of advertising has resulted in a precipitous drop in contributions toward the billboard campaign. While we have a few more billboards on their way, we've had to stop our aggressive pursuit of more because the money has all but dried up.

Aw, geez.

I know I haven't mentioned this in a while, but World Net Daily actually published this last August:

However, FactChecker.org says it obtained Obama's actual birth certificate and that the document was indeed real. The site discredited some of the claims of Internet bloggers, such as that the certificate as viewed in a scanned copy released by Obama's campaign lacked a raised seal. FactChecker.org also established that many of the alleged flaws in the document noted by bloggers were caused by the scanning of the document.

A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.

I forget if Farah has denounced his own website. Does anyone know?

Teh Crazie continues...