This will have to be one for Great Birther Moments in 2012.
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See also:
My Oh My, It’s Rudy
Birthers, Right Wing Nutzoids, Treasonous Bastards, Video
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Mar 072012
Mar 072012
President Obama, as a law student at Harvard, speaking at a protest in 19910:
It was perhaps Barack Obama’s most intense immersion in the charged campus racial politics of the late 1980s and early 1990s: As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1991, he aligned himself with Professor Derrick Bell’s dramatic protest for diversity on the faculty of Harvard Law School.
Bell was the first black tenured professor at the school, and a pioneer of “critical race theory,” which insisted, controversially, on reading issues of race and power into legal scholarship. His protest that spring was occasioned by Harvard’s denial of tenure to a black woman professor, Regina Austin, at a time when only three of the law school’s professors were black and only five women. He told Harvard he would take a leave of absence — a kind of academic strike — “until a woman of color is offered and accepted a tenured position on this faculty,” and he launched a hunger strike to dramatize his point.
Obama was a major figure on campus, the first black president of the Law Review. Some friends, in a prescient joke, just referred to him as “the first black president.” He had a reputation as a conciliatory figure, not a confrontational one like Bell.
“How Obama would react to Derrick Bell’s protest was a matter of some interest,” New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote in his exploration of Obama and race, The Bridge.
In the BuzzFeed comments section, someone who was present:
James Minister O’Keefe · Director at Immigration Law Group LLC
Small error — Obama graduated in 1991. “As President of the Harvard Law Review in the spring of his final year there, 1990″ — which puts this video in the Spring of 1991. As fate would have it, I happened to have been there, standing pretty close to the person holding the camera.
As an anti-birther, you have to always collect these moments of witness, because some Birther liar may claim Barack Obama was in Timbuktu that day.
Adding this video from PBS FRONTLINE: Dreams of Obama in 2008:
‘You Will Be Dumber For Having Read This Book’
Birthers, Books, Republicans, Right Wing Nutzoids
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Mar 072012
Doc Conspiracy reviews, A Question of Eligibility: A Law Enforcement Investigation into Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate and His Eligibility to be President by Jerome Corsi and Michael Zullo.
My first question as I started reading A Question of Eligibility: A Law Enforcement Investigation into Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate and His Eligibility to be President by Jerome Corsi and Mark Zullo was whether or not any member of law enforcement was involved in the investigation. The book describes the lead investigator, Mike Zullo, as “Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Chief Investigator, MSCO Cold Case Posse” which might lead someone to think that Mr. Zullo holds a law enforcement position with Maricopa County, but that would be wrong. The Cold Case Posse is a group of volunteers, not County employees. Published sources describe Mr. Zullo as a “retired detective from New Jersey” but nowhere in the book does it say whether he was a police detective or private detective or that he is a detective at all. One would expect a book about an investigation to talk about the people who participated in the investigation, their background and their credentials, but that’s completely missing in this book. All we have are the two names of this book’s authors. In an interview Sheriff Joe Arpaio states that virtually no money from the County was spent on the investigation, which means that none of his paid law enforcement staff worked on it.
My second question was whether there was any investigation.
Read the full review.
Sen. Murkowski Regrets Contraception Vote
Congress, GOP Says NO, Health Care
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Mar 072012
Over the weekend, Sen. Lisa Murkowski learned the hard way not to get between women and birth control.
Back from Washington, D.C., for the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race, the senator kept running into female voters who wrote in her name in the last election — moderate women who did not always vote Democrat or Republican. These women were coming unglued.
The reason: Murkowski’s support for a measure that would have allowed not just religious employers, but any employer, to opt out of providing birth control or other health insurance coverage required by the 2010 health-care law for moral reasons. …
We talked for 45 minutes. What Lisa Murkowski told me I already suspected. She’s a moderate. She supports abortion rights and contraception coverage. She also doesn’t line up completely with the Catholic Church when it comes to birth control. She regretted her recent vote.
“I have never had a vote I’ve taken where I have felt that I let down more people that believed in me,” she said.
It Takes A Gawker
Media, Right Wing Nutzoids
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Mar 072012
Provocateur, website founder and collector of America’s largest wads of spittle Andrew Breitbart died last Thursday morning, when some sentient shred of his cardiac organ kamikazed out of an exhausted sense of justice.
The invertebrate response from journalists was exactly to be expected. Breitbart said, like, bad stuff in his lifetime, but he also married someone and fathered people; once he even objected to anti-gay GOP rhetoric. A malicious career and two milquetoast mitigating facts: It all balanced out, really, at least for the purposes of forced, quailing objectivity. To borrow a gross analogy lustily employed on Breitbart’s own websites, if today’s mainstream media was penning obits on May 1, 1945, they would have summed up with, “Despite initiating the Second World War, the German leader was fond of public architecture and is survived by his beloved dachshunds.” …
Breitbart trained the media like dogs, and he was still doing so, on Thursday morning, from beyond the grave. People joked that they didn’t know if his death was a hoax, and it’s a certainty that some asked because they were afraid of telling the truth about someone by then literally incapable of hurting them. It was like watching a sick rerun of a Stalinist apparatchik sitcom, where one functionary was unwilling to believe another that The Leader is really dead, each presuming the announcement might be a trap. …
The anemic response wasn’t all wariness. Numerous journalists, even ones on the other side of the ideological fence, were quick to note that Breitbart was generous and warm in private. But Breitbart also destroyed a woman’s career in public. He destroyed an institution that helps poor minorities in public. He called Occupiers rapists in public. He screamed at strangers and loved to talk about kicking their asses in public. Outside of books written by the Aqua Net-shellacked c-minus Sturmabteilung of FOX News, his stamp on history in 20 years will be a Coughlin-esque paragraph about race-baiting and fraud. …
But this cynical gadfly behavior presents no aberrancy. What his biggest fans have never confronted, and what the obits omitted, perhaps out of embarrassment, is that Andrew Breitbart was always a creature of the left, accepted by the establishment, nurtured by the American elite. They made him from cradle to grave. He was banal troll indistinguishable from any gin-blossomed paunch of resentment occupying a neighboring barstool and nursing his own sense of denied grandeur—save for the glorious intervention of two cultures he so loudly claimed to hate: The Hollywood madding crowd and, later, the Beltway water cooler.
Read the whole, big, beautiful thing.
Ba-rock on, Obama!
Presidency, True Goodness, Video
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Mar 072012
Billboard puts the President on top of the heap:
With the ease of social media, Obama may go down as the most recognized musical leader of them all. Our 44th President’s brief rendition (just a line) of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” back at a January fundraiser has racked up over 5.2+ million views on YouTube. The viral sensation led to blues legend Buddy Guy calling him up on stage to perform hometown anthem “Sweet Home Chicago” alongside Guy, B.B. King, Mick Jagger and more. Again, Mr. President only showed off a line of singing, but it’s an effective campaign tool nonetheless. Bonus: Obama’s a Grammy winner, scooping up the Best Spoken Word Album Award in 2006 for his “Dreams From My Father.”
Heh. He’s getting an awful lot of mileage on those little bits of song.