President Faces His Toughest Dilemma Yet That Has Echoes of What LBJ Faced Over the Vietnam War; No Matter What Decision He Reaches, Obama Is Likely Stuck in a ‘Damned-If-You-Do, Damned-If-You-Don’t’ Position — Alienating One Side or the Other in Debate Over the U.S. Role in Afghanistan

It’s lonely at the top: There are times when being the president of the United States can be the toughest and loneliest job in the world. And at no time is that feeling greater than when a president is confronted with his most fateful decision in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces: To commit U.S. troops into armed combat, especially in a war that’s unpopular with the American people. President Lyndon Johnson (left) learned that the ward way when he made his fateful decision in 1965 to escalate the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. Now President Obama (right) faces a similarly fateful decision on whether to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan or to pull back. Whichever way he decides could determine the fate of his presidency. (Photos: UPI Archives and the White House)

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, October 5, 2009)

By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT

During the last several weeks, Americans have found themselves back in the middle of a fierce debate over our continuing military effort in Afghanistan. What was Bush’s forgotten war had, until recently, seemed quite safely transformed in public opinion into Obama’s “war of necessity.”

Now, because of General Stanley McChrystal’s request for significantly more troops, coming on the heels of his public declaration that the Taliban are essentially “winning,” the ruling Democrats have suddenly been thrust back into “quagmire” mode.

Predictably, we are once again awash in feverish Baby Boomer analogies to Vietnam, despite the pronounced absence in Afghanistan of any great-power antagonism. Indeed, America enjoys the exact opposite there.

Nonetheless, defections from the “good war” are occurring across the ideological spectrum. On the right, Washington Post columnist George Will has declared it’s “time to get out of Afghanistan,” while on the left, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warns that congressional support for more troops is fast dwindling.

Most tellingly, that avatar of the American middle, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, now confesses that he fears our “babysitting” job in Afghanistan has morphed into a full-fledged “adoption.”

In sum, our nation’s elite are finally grasping just how far into the future a counterinsurgency/nation-building effort in rugged, backward Afghanistan may extend — i.e., way beyond the 2010 midterm elections.

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DEBATE IGNORES REALITY THAT AFGHANISTAN WAR IS INTERNATIONAL EFFORT

But what’s especially odd about this debate is its stunningly self-centered tone: What are America’s national interests? How long can America last? How much will America be forced to spend in blood and treasure? What will happen to America’s standing if we withdraw? The whole conversation feels like a neurotic superpower talking to its therapist.

We continue to debate our involvement as though this is “America’s war” alone, when it is nothing of the sort and never has been, even if its triggering tragedy — the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks — is.

Like every other U.S. military intervention going back to Operation Desert Shield in 1990, the United States is conducting a police action on behalf of an international community that remains deeply interested in the targeted nation’s stability. That’s why 50 nations other than the United States have been involved in Operation Enduring Freedom at one time or another.

And yet, despite this obvious widespread interest in the outcome, especially among Afghanistan’s many regional neighbors, we conduct our conversation as if the only interests that matter are those of United States and, by ideological extension, its traditional Cold War allies in NATO (which has at times also found itself on the therapist’s couch).

WEST MAKING HUGE MISTAKE IGNORING OTHER COUNTRIES’ INTEREST IN AFGHAN CONFLICT

Even taking into account the still-charged memory of 9/11, the West’s strategic arrogance here is a bit much. Imagine Russia, India, Iran and China all declaring themselves empowered to settle some raging insurgency in Central America, or Mexico’s “drug war,” on the basis of its global security implications. Now consider that Afghanistan, and that part of it that bleeds into Pakistan, is the proverbial “front yard” of these great powers.

And yet, what signs do we receive from these next-door neighbors amidst our internal debates on Afghanistan?

Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, recently declared Moscow’s interest in seeking a direct role in future alliance strategizing on Afghanistan. “We want to be inside,” he stated. Does that suggest Russian boots on the ground? Not any time soon. But it means Russia wants to be more involved than simply serving as logistical through-point.

India has increased its pledged developmental assistance to Afghanistan to $1.2 billion, leapfrogging to fifth place among advanced-economy donors — behind only the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan and Canada. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Indian government is also paying to bring scores of bureaucrats to India, as it cultivates a new generation of Afghan officialdom.”

Iran’s latest response to the West’s demands regarding its nuclear program sought to tie that dispute to a wider regional security dialogue, encompassing, among other things, instability in Afghanistan-Pakistan. As in Iraq, Tehran continues to offer help in rebuilding Afghanistan even as its munitions regularly show up there. As usual, Iran will be intimately involved, one way or another.

Then there’s China, whose $3 billion deal on an Afghan copper mine earlier this year constituted the greatest single foreign direct investment in that nation’s entire history. Already building infrastructure throughout the country, often while being protected by U.S. military forces, China has recently stepped up its training of Afghan police along their common border. With Beijing’s excellent record of training overseas civilian police, says the European Council on Foreign Relations, China “should be asked to train and provide mentors for the Afghan police,” in addition to training their civilians by the thousands in the fields of medicine and engineering.

FEAR OF A WORLD IN WHICH AMERICA IS NO LONGER TOP DOG

Given all that, why don’t we hear any American politicians or experts arguing about how we need to spread ownership of this problem regionally, instead of further burning out our own forces and those of NATO? Because for them, that would be handing “victory” over to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or the “axis of diesel” — signaling, no doubt, the onset of a “post-American world.”

And yet, who amongst us believes that any realistic outcome for Afghanistan-Pakistan could somehow not intimately involve these states, and will not ultimately constitute their “success” far more than ours?

My continuing fear with the Obama administration is that it remains nowhere near ready to bargain realistically with such states. Why? Because under the “soft on defense” Democrats, a “strong” America — as opposed to a strong America — must simultaneously stand up to Iran, boss India around, hedge on China’s rise and counteract resurgent Russia. It must do everything, to everyone, while somehow still pulling a rabbit out of its hat in Afghanistan.

Despite all the nice talk about cooperating where Bush-Cheney once confronted, Team Obama still seems far too timid in its diplomacy. It hasn’t made a single daring or imaginative call on a “war” it has declared its own.

With his most respected principal, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, publicly stating that we’ve got maybe a year to show clear progress, it may already be too late for President Barack Obama to escape this historical trajectory.

And so long as Democrats continue the tragic Bush-Cheney habit of wedding themselves to internal political timetables — remember the sudden bursts of official honesty after the ’04 and ’06 elections? — it’s hard to see how any interested great power would trust our strategically myopic leadership.

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(Thomas P.M. Barnett is senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC and a contributing editor/online columnist for Esquire magazine. This commentary first appeared on the World Politics Review Web site.)

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Guest Commentary Copyright 2009, World Politics Review LLC. Re-posted by permission.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Secret Service Wants to Know Who Posted Poll on Facebook Asking ‘Should Obama Be Killed?’ Amid Continuing High Spike in Death Threats Against the President; Meanwhile, Columnist at Right-Wing Magazine Predicts a ‘Seven Days in May’-Style Coup d’Etat to Overthrow Obama and Establish a Military Junta

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, October 1, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

The Internet has long been the “Wild Wild West” when it comes to political discourse. But what transpired online this week has triggered a firestorm of outrage — and an investigation by the Secret Service.

The social networking site Facebook on Monday pulled a third-party application that allows users to create polls after a site member built a poll asking if President Obama should be killed.

Disclosure of the poll has prompted the Secret Service, the agency assigned to protect the president, to launch an investigation.

Meanwhile, the right-wing online magazine Newsmax posted an incendiary column on Tuesday that predicts a military coup against the president — a real-life version of a scenario chillingly dramatized more than 40 years ago in the motion picture “Seven Days in May,” which hit the theaters when Lyndon Johnson was president.

Newsmax quickly pulled the column from its Web site — but not before the media watchdog site MediaMatters.org captured a copy of the column and posted it on its own Web site.

Taken together, these developments are the strongest signs yet that there are people on the Far Right who have become completely unglued by the reality of America having a black man as president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces and they are plunging headlong into outright paranoia by launching an increasingly hysterical campaign of hatred against Obama.

Such hysteria would easily be dismissed as the rantings of crackpots — except that it has reached such a fever pitch among a significant portion of the American populace, it is rapidly creating a dangerous climate that can lead to an outbreak of the kind of devastating political violence this country has not seen in almost half a century.

BLOGGER BLOWS WHISTLE ON POLL, ALERTS SECRET SERVICE

The online Facebook poll asked readers “Should Obama be Killed?” — accompanied by a mock book cover featuring a photograph of the president with his name printed in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and other Slavic languages, an apparent play on a widespread belief among many of Obama’s right-wing opponents that he is a Soviet-style communist.

Facebook readers were asked to answer “yes,” “no” “maybe” or “if he cuts my health care.” The poll, which was posted on Saturday, was flagged on Sunday by a blogger at The Political Carnival Web site who uses the online pseudonym GottaLaff. GottaLaff snapped a “screen grab” — an online copy of the poll — and posted it on the Carnival site.

“Okay, that’s it, I’ve had it,” wrote the blogger, whose real identity is a closely-guarded secret but is a California woman, according to her profile.  “The hate speech, the threats have gotten completely out of hand. And those who have incited viewers and listeners — and you know who you are, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. — are responsible for a good part of this horrific activity.

“No, it is not ‘grassroots,’ not even close,” GottaLaff continued. “It is a sick, terrifying, dangerous movement toward violence and the worst kind of civil unrest.”

GottaLaff contacted the Secret Service and urged her readers to do the same. On Monday, she reported that the Secret Service had called her back “to thank me for my screen grab of the poll, and said without it, they wouldn’t have been able to address the matter.”

FACEBOOK PULLS POLL OFFLINE AT SECRET SERVICE’S REQUEST

In an interview Wednesday with CNN, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the Secret Service informed the social-networking site of the poll on Monday and asked to have it taken down.

Facebook allows third-party developers to create applications — such as polls and quizzes — which are then made available to Facebook users, who use the applications to create specific content. Users may choose to make their content available to the general population of Facebook or limit it only to their friends.

In the case of the “Kill Obama” poll, case, according to Schnitt, the user made the poll asking whether Obama should be killed available to the general public. The application “was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content,”Schnitt said.

The Facebook spokesman credited GottaLaff and other users of the social network with alerting the site about the poll. “As is usually the case, our vigilant users reported it to us first,” he said. By the time the Secret Service contacted Facebook, “it had already been removed, and we let them know,” Schnitt continued.

DEATH POLL AMID HUGE SPIKE IN ANTI-OBAMA THREATS

Disclosure of the “Kill Obama” poll is only the latest development in an unprecedented spike in death threats against the president that has stretched the Secret Service to the limit of its ability to protect Obama and his family in the more than nine months since he took office.

As reported in August, the rate of threats against the president has soared by 400 percent from the 3,000 reported threats a year or so under former President George W. Bush, according to author Ronald Kessler.

In his book, In the President’s Secret Service, Kessler reports that some threats to Obama already have been publicized, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.

Most threats, however, are kept under wraps because the Secret Service fears that revealing details of them would only increase the number of copycat attempts. Although most threats are not credible, each one has to be investigated meticulously.

NEWSMAX COLUMNIST PREDICTS MILITARY COUP AGAINST OBAMA

In a column that touched off an Internet firestorm, Newsmax columnist John Perry wrote that “There is a remote, although gaining, possibility [that] America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem.’ Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.”

What did Perry mean by the “Obama Problem?” He calls it “Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for ‘fundamental change’ toward a Marxist state.” In other words, Obama is a communist and setting the country on a path toward Soviet-style communism — a path that Perry predicts many in the military will not tolerate.

“Officers swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Perry writes. “Unlike enlisted personnel, they do not swear to ‘obey the orders of the president of the United States.’

Perry continues: “Top military officers can see the Constitution they are sworn to defend being trampled as American institutions and enterprises are nationalized. They can see that Americans are increasingly alarmed that this nation, under President Barack Obama, may not even be recognizable as America by the 2012 election, in which he will surely seek continuation in office.

“They can see that the economy – ravaged by deficits, taxes, unemployment, and impending inflation – is financially reliant on foreign lender governments,” Perry writes. “They can see this president waging undeclared war on the intelligence community, without whose rigorous and independent functions the armed services are rendered blind in an ever-more hostile world overseas and at home.”

“They can see the dismantling of defenses against missiles targeted at this nation by avowed enemies, even as America’s troop strength is allowed to sag,” Perry goes on. “They can see the horror of major warfare erupting simultaneously in two, and possibly three, far-flung theaters before America can react in time. They can see the nation’s safety and their own military establishments and honor placed in jeopardy as never before.”

Perry cautions that “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 won’t.”

NEWSMAX YANKS COLUMN WITHIN 24 HOURS AFTER COMPLAINTS

Twenty-four hours after it posted Perry’s column, Newsmax pulled it. The direct link to Perry’s column instead defaults to the right-wing outlet’s home page. But not before MediaMatters grabbed a screenshot of Perry’s column and posted it on its own Web site as a PDF document.

Newsmax makes no reference to the controversial column on its home page — neither an explanation of why it was pulled nor an apology for its content. But in a statement sent to MediaMatters, a Newsmax spokesperson said that in writing about a possible military coup, Perry “clearly stated that he was not advocating such a scenario but simply describing one.”

The spokesperson said that Newsmax pulled the Perry column “after several reader complaints.” The spokesman said the site “wanted to insure that this article was not misinterpreted.”

The spokesman went on to say that Newsmax “strongly believes in the principles of Constitutional government and would never advocate or insinuate any suggestion of an activity that would undermine our democracy or democratic institutions.”

The spokesman insisted that Perry, who served as a political appointee in the Carter administration,  “has no official relationship with Newsmax other than as an unpaid blogger.”

A SCARY SCENARIO REMINISCENT OF 1964 COLD WAR MELODRAMA

The coup that Perry outlined in his column is eerily reminiscent of one of Hollywood’s most gripping political thrillers, “Seven Days in May,” a 1964 Cold War melodrama that starred Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster about a U.S. Army colonel (Douglas) who discovers that a four-star Air Force general (Lancaster), was plotting a coup to overthrow the president and establish a military junta after the president reached a nuclear-disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union.

After warning the president of the plot, the colonel — in spite of his own opposition to the treaty — had just seven days to head off the complex and elaborately planned coup.

The upshot: The president in the film was named Jordan Lyman (played by Frederic March) — an anagram of the real-life President Lyndon Johnson, who made nuclear disarmament with the Soviets a major plank in his successful campaign to win a full four-year term in 1964 after succeeding the assassinated President John F. Kennedy the year before.

The general in the movie was portrayed as a right-wing “superpatriot,” who, in a direct face-to-face confrontation with the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office, accused the president of leading the country to a disastrous surrender to the Soviets through the treaty he reached with Moscow.

For some of those old enough to have lived through the Cold War, “Seven Days in May” was a far more serious melodrama than the two other major Cold War films that also came out in 1964, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail-Safe,” both of which dealt directly with the nightmare scenario of a direct military confrontation between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.

The Cold War’s been over for 20 years. But the possibility of a military takeover of the U.S. remains a scary thought.

# # #

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

The Two Most Visible Right-Wing Figures in the Media Have Crossed the Line With Beck Calling the President a ‘Racist’ Without a Shred of Proof and Limbaugh Falsely Claiming Obama Is an Arab and Calling for Racial Segregation of School Buses

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday,September 28, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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Can you believe their chutzpah?

Just who are Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck trying to impress with their wild, unprovable claims that President Obama is a big, badass black boogeyman who’s out to make life miserable for white people in this country?

Has Limbaugh’s admitted past addiction to OxyContin and other prescription drugs driven him totally paranoid? Has Beck’s own admitted past addiction to cocaine and alcohol similarly pushed him over the edge?

Or have America’s two most visible and controversial right-wing pundits come totally unglued by the changes in America’s  political and social landscape that they both know they cannot stop?

It’s indeed a blessing that Obama is as cool as a cucumber. Rather than take Limbaugh and Beck’s racially-charged bait, the nation’s first African-American president has ignored them, instead moving on with the same calm demeanor of optimism that won him the presidency at a time when America is facing its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Indeed, it would be very un-presidential of him to do otherwise.

But it would be the height of irresponsibility at best — and outright enabling at worst — for anyone else to either ignore or dismiss as “boys will be boys” the racially-charged venom that Limbaugh and Beck are injecting into the public discourse.

We absolutely don’t buy Limbaugh’s lame excuse that he’s merely an “entertainer” and his rants are merely sarcastic parodies. As we said in an editorial last week, that’s a crock of pure, unadulterated B.S. What Limbaugh has done — and continues to do — is ugly and poisonous.

Indeed, it is beyond ugly. It is beyond poisonous. Limbaugh and Beck have crossed the line into deliberate race-baiting that, in the opinion of The ‘Skeeter Bites Report and many others — including a growing chorus of conservatives — a flat-out abuse of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. The time is long overdue that they be held accountable.

LIMBAUGH AND BECK SHOULD BE SUED FOR SLANDER, DEFAMATION

Limbaugh and Beck also crossed a line into outright slander and defamation of character, for which both clearly deserve to be sued in a court of law. Limbaugh’s claim that the president is an Arab was a thinly-disguised attempt to demonize the president as a Muslim, when in fact, he is a Christian.

In making that comment, Limbaugh gave tacit –if not overt — support for the “birther” movement, which insists — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that Obama is not a native-born U.S. citizen but a native of Kenya, his father’s homeland.

He also, whether consciously or unconsciously, stoked the rabid Islamophobia of so-called “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz, whose ties to a radical Jewish extremist group that considers Obama a threat to Israel were exposed by The ‘Skeeter Bites Report  on September 7 and whose latest lawsuit against the president was thrown out as “frivolous” by a federal judge — ironically, an appointee of Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush..

Beck’s accusation that Obama “is a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” was a clear attempt to stoke the passions of rabid white-supremacists. It was also so patently false and defamatory toward the president that the only reason Beck hasn’t been sued is that the president, being the nation’s chief executive as well as a public figure, cannot take legal action against Beck — or anyone else — until after he leaves office and becomes a private citizen.

LIMBAUGH: SEGREGATE BUSES — ROSA PARKS AND FEDERAL LAW BE DAMNED!

Limbaugh went over the line when he called for the re-segregation by race of school buses. “We need segregated buses,” he said, commentating on an incident aboard a school bus on September 15 in which a white teenager was attacked by two black teens.

Seizing upon the incident to fire yet another slam at President Obama, Limbaugh said, “I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson that we’re being taught here today. [The] kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and so forth. This is Obama’s America.”

One big problem with that, Rush: Segregation by race on buses and other public accommodations is illegal. It’s been illegal for more than half a century. But apparently, Limbaugh doesn’t care about that.

Nor, apparently, does Limbaugh care about the long struggle by African-Americans to end the practice that began in 1955 when Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress, refused to obey the bus driver’s order that she give up her seat at the front of the bus to a white passenger and move to the back of the bus where blacks were required to sit.

Parks’ act of defiance became an important catalyst to the modern civil rights movement with the subsequent launch of the Montgomery bus boycott, led by a young African-American minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott launched King into national prominence in the civil rights movement and made Parks an international icon of resistance to racial segregation.

The Federal Communications Commission takes a dim view of broadcasters using the radio and TV airwaves to openly advocate breaking the law, but is generally powerless under the First Amendment to do anything to stop them — unless they openly incite violence or the violent overthrow of the government, the latter of which is illegal under the federal Smith Act of 1940.

While neither Limbaugh nor Beck have gone so far as to advocate the violent overthrow of the government — yet — one has to wonder how much longer will it be before they cross that red line.

BECK INFLUENCED BY ‘CRACKPOT’ CONSPIRACY THEORIST?

This isn’t the first time that Beck has gotten himself in trouble over racially-charged remarks. In fact, Beck has been playing the “race card” on the radio for years.

According to columnist Joe Conason, long before he went national with his syndicated radio show, Beck, while a “shock jock” morning-show host on a Kentucky radio station, “regularly mimicked African-American speech patterns for fun.” Conason, citing a  lengthy profile of Beck written by Alexander Zaitchik for Salon.com, quotes a former colleague of Beck’s as saying that Beck “used to do a funny ‘black guy’ character, really over the top.”

Conason also writes that Beck is a devotee of author and conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen. “Among Skousen’s pet theories was that Southern slave owners were actually the victims of the plantation system, which according to him, favored the lazy and pampered slaves, whose children he called ‘pickaninnies.'”

Does that mean Beck is a bigot? “If Obama had ever endorsed the writings of Louis Farrakhan,”Conason wrote, “replete with vile slurs against whites and especially Jews, that would certainly be enough for Beck — who says he believes that the president has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture.’ That must be why the Obama White House has so many whites of all ethnic and religious backgrounds advising the president, from the Cabinet down.”

CONSERVATIVES’ GROWING ALARM OVER BECK

Beck’s increasingly bizarre comments are drawing ire from a growing number of conservative commentators. Lat Tuesday, MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough, a conservative former Republican congressman, lashed out at Beck, telling viewers, “When you preach this kind of hatred, and say that an African American president hates all white people —  hates all white people, you are playing with fire. And bad things can happen. And if they do happen, not only is Glenn Beck responsible, but conservatives who don’t call him out are responsible.”

Scarborough went on to say that he was starting an “honor roll” of conservatives willing to come out against Beck. He made multiple references to Beck’s “race-baiting,” and “wallow[ing] in conspiracy theories.”

Other conservatives, however, are going after Beck’s assertion made during an interview with “CBS Evening News” Anchor Katie Couric on her new Web-only program that John McCain would have made a worse president than Obama — apparently coming to the realization that Beck is a totally unpredictable “loose cannon” whose growing popularity with the radical right-wing fringe is posing a direct threat to the mainstream conservative movement.

A “loose cannon” who apparently doesn’t care for an African-American being president of the United States. Make that two “loose cannons.”

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved./

Let’s Not Kid Ourselves: What ACORN Staffers Did When Two Conservative Activists Showed Up At Their Offices Posing As a Prostitute and a Pimp Was Incredibly Stupid — and the Agency is Long Overdue for a Major Housecleaning — But Make No Mistake: The Activists’ Video Expose is Part of a Years-Long Right-Wing Campaign to Destroy ACORN — and Was Likely Conducted Illegally

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, September 24, 2009)

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GUEST COMMENTARY

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By JOHN WELLINGTON ENNIS

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an umbrella organization of community groups that serves poor people in major cities across the country through housing, legal advocacy, family services and higher wages, has lost all federal funding, after decades of working for low-income, disadvantaged Americans.

That the House of Representatives has moved swiftly on anything is stunning in and of itself. More stunning, this is in response to a single independent report by conservative activists, with no follow-up investigation, no hearings — not even being provided a copy of the full, unedited videotapes shot by conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles at ACORN offices in New York, Baltimore and Washington.

This is serious stuff here. This is not a game of gotcha, of cheap political points, of practical jokes – not when this is money that helps in many real ways in impoverished communities around our country.

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ACTIVIST BEHIND EXPOSE ADMITS POLITICAL MOTIVE

It is vital to assess how this backlash was accepted so quickly in light of videos that were from someone whose films are funded by conservative backers, videos that misrepresented ACORN through editing and not disclosing other failed attempts at their desired response, and may well have been dubbed over, if O’Keefe would dare to release the unedited tapes in their real context to prove otherwise.

A significant reason that this ACORN backlash has moved through Congress like Montezuma’s Revenge is that this particular hidden camera stunt had the ring of “child prostitution” in it, which most politicians of either party would run from rather than dispute its irrelevance. “Anyone defending ACORN is for child prostitution” is an immediate fallacious meme. It’s not like we’re talking about the Catholic Church here, which still gets federal funding.

Noteworthy is that there have not been any previous allegations between child prostitution and ACORN. In this weekend’s Los Angeles Times, O’Keefe himself asserts that this ruse had  nothing to do with prostitution, importing underage sex workers, or tax help for starting up a business:

“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”

That’s what this is really about: the elections, and the threat that has been hyped tirelessly that ACORN is in some way stealing your vote.

Before I digress into the long campaign to smear ACORN because of its successful voter registration, I don’t want to be accused to changing the subject to the elections. O’Keefe clearly stated that is what these stunts were about from the beginning.

There is much to dispute in O’Keefe’s quote. There is no evidence whatsoever that politicians are getting elected single-handedly by ACORN, and it is a wild exaggeration. Many claims of voter fraud are made, few instances ever occur.

What has been distorted is that these allegations surround voter registrations, not actual votes, and that ACORN has regularly flagged forms that were incomplete, duplicate, or unverifiable. By law, anyone collecting voter registration forms has to turn in all that are used, even if they know the forms will not be processed.

Far-fetched is the idea that no one in the media has been putting pressure on ACORN. That O’Keefe would even think ACORN could elect politicians single-handedly is because of Fox News’ rampant coverage and conflation of ACORN conspiracies and allegations, to the extent that John McCain worked it into his stump speech by the end of the 2008 presidential election.

RIGHT-WING ANTI-ACORN CAMPAIGN TIED TO U.S. ATTORNEY FIRINGS

The red herring of voter fraud as an excuse to deny others the right to vote is a well-worn claim. Voter suppression, specifically using the fear of “voter fraud” to advance voter suppression, is a topic I have explored and documented in-depth in my documentary “Free For All!” which you can see online for free right now.  I also produced a video about ACORN with Video the Vote focusing on the fraud of voter fraud.

David Iglesias, a Republican U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, investigated allegations of voter fraud throughout the state at the urging of Republican leaders, and when he found no evidence and would not prosecute falsely, he was fired, as asserted by Iglesias in his testimony before Congress and e-mails recently declassified from former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

But again, I don’t want to be accused of dodging the issue — I am just looking to rebut the persistent falsehood which directly affected this kid’s motivation to punk a community organization into losing millions of dollars to help the poor.

O’Keefe is comparable to the FBI informant who brought down the Bronx terrorist plot — only that there would not have been any actual plot were it not for this FBI informant actively recruiting mentally challenged Muslims from mosques for this plot, which apparently involved entrapping people who were dumb enough to listen to him.

O’Keefe could well have actually attempted to show something about ACORN’s voting registration controversies — like speaking to registrants who admitted falsifying voter registration forms, or followed up on who registered and who voted, or even interview ACORN directly. But none of those would have involved a minister’s daughter dressing slutty, so you can’t really blame him.

O’KEEFE A MASTER MANIPULATOR

So it came to pass that in this effort to dispute voter registration that Giles and O’Keefe conceived of the worst sounding scandal they could invoke, and traveled the country to ACORN offices across the country to find someone to take their time to humor them in the improv game of “Yes, And.”

And they eventually found some clueless ACORN employees, people far too eager to offer good customer service than employ any common sense. A couple of workers comply with O’Keefe’s outlandish inquiry for underage brothels in dispensing tax advice.

The well-publicized clips are shocking enough, and have been exploited as much as any couple of minutes of video can be. Glenn Beck taunted other networks for not covering it. Even Jon Stewart bunted on it, as if his guest interview were Sistah Souljah.  As a potent testament to Stewart’s “Most Trusted Newsman” gatekeeper status, the House the next day voted to cut all federal funding for ACORN.

It is worth noting here that what transpired on O’Keefe’s videotape were conversations about hypothetical situations-not actual prostitution, no actual crime, and not proof of an agency-wide policy or program involving prostitution or illegal immigrants. In fact, O’Keefe’s experiment proves this — that several other ACORN offices would not be ensnared by their absurd scenario, and turned away these provocateurs. One office in Philadelphia filed a police report because they were alarmed by the pair.

O’KEEFE APPARENTLY VIOLATED MARYLAND STATE LAW ON SURREPTITIOUS RECORDING . . .

Ironically, the only thing illegal in some of these tapes is that O’Keefe was filming illegally at ACORN’s Baltimore office. States like California and Maryland have strict consent laws about surreptitious recording, which is why the news and entertainment industries have long figured out workarounds for hidden cameras. (Hint: Las Vegas.)

As the right-wing crankosphere raves over how the media didn’t uncover this, it is worth pointing out that not only are the tactics against the standard of journalism, the lack of disclosure and misrepresentation pushes this expose well out of the range of journalism and in to the realm of entrapment.

As it was, O’Keefe had to misrepresent a conversation where a woman stated up front that their inquiry was illegal, but played along because she figured it was a gag. Another misrepresentation by Fox News was the breathless uproar about a woman who joked that she had killed her husband — Well, after it was established that her husband was alive, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and others kept repeating the ridiculous claim for another day, demanding an investigation, since they obviously didn’t have the resources as a major “news” network to confirm that this guy was alive.

. . . AND PULLED A RACIALLY-MOTIVATED SCAM ON PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Nor is this O’Keefe’s first foray into being the Tucker Max of conservative hacks. He pulled a stunt on Planned Parenthood entrapping receptionists and donation representatives into conversations where he said he wanted to kill off black people, while his compatriot Lila Rose called and claimed to be underage to see if the clinics would report statutory rape.

(Lila Rose just recently called for abortions to be held in public squares to create the mass gross-out that would therefore make them all illegal).

In a detailed response from ACORN’s chief executive, Bertha Lewis, and its executive director, Steven Kest :

“O’Keefe has a sordid history of preying on receptionists and other front-line service workers for respected organizations. In 2008, he pulled a similar stunt on Planned Parenthood when he and another female colleague secretly recorded phone conversations with staff who handle fundraising calls at a few of the organization’s affiliates.

“During the calls, O’Keefe pretended to be interested in setting up funds for low-income women in need of health care. Once the conversation hit a comfortable stride, O’Keefe would change his tune and explain, in explicit language, that his real intent was to target women of color in an effort to control minority populations. The audio recordings were edited in an attempt to make it appear that Planned Parenthood was complicit in accepting donations for racist purposes.

“O’Keefe’s intent then, as it is now, was to entrap an organization whose mission he is ideologically opposed to, and masquerade his efforts as investigative journalism rather than the propaganda videos they are.”

OTHER RACIALLY-CHARGED AND SEXIST STUNTS BY O’KEEFE

And in college, O’Keefe showed women their place with his video wit, as reported by Media Matters:

As a Rutgers University undergraduate, O’Keefe videotaped a classmate distributing to a Women in Culture and Society lecture a handout that emphasized that a “good wife always knows her place.”

And most tastefully of all, O’Keefe drove around posing as a Publisher’s Clearinghouse van offering big checks to people — nearly all of them black — only to taunt them that the money is what was going to bank bailouts.

Do not-so-subtly racist or sexist stunts count in courts of law? Shouldn’t there be a requirement that they at least be funny, besides mean for the sake of mean?

Is this same adolescent accountability accepted by defense contractors, when Blackwater and its owner Eric Prince are implicated in murder?  He just keeps getting contracts.

Representative Darrel Issa (R-California) sent out a letter bragging of cutting ACORN’s money for all of us, then asked us to give him money. Issa’s hometown of San Diego has had political scandals that have led to actual convictions, not simply recordings of speculative conversations. Isn’t it time to slash San Diego’s federal funding? All of this is not to get off subject, though. Whatever angry conservatives want to insist the subject is.

It is natural for many to shirk away from defending ACORN in light of this footage. But this particular exchange is not just cherry-picked — it was planted, nurtured, and harvested, the latest attempt to take down an organization that empowers the numbers that vote Republicans out of office.

(John Wellington Ennis is a filmmaker whose most recent documentary, “Free For All!” was hailed by critic Roger Ebert as “engrossing, even enraging.” His production company, Shoot First Inc., in Beverly Hills, specializes in unscripted entertainment, such as documentaries, reality TV, comedy, and live music. He blogs at johnennis.tv. This commentary first appeared at ThePublicRecord.org.)

# # #

Guest Commentary Copyright 2009, The Public Record. Re-posted by permission.

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

When Right-Wing Radio Talkmeister Said ‘We Need Segregated Buses’ After Incident on an Illinois School Bus, He Not Only Told His ‘Dittohead’ Listeners a Bald-Faced Lie About What Happened, He Also Crossed a Red Line By Openly Advocating the Direct Flouting of More Than 50 Years of Federal Laws and Court Rulings That Ban Racial Segregation

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, September 21, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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Rush Limbaugh has gone too far.

The right-wing radio talk-show host has been sounding increasingly belligerent in the past year toward liberals, Democrats, women and racial and ethnic minorities. But last week, he crossed a legal “red line” he should not have crossed when he called for publicly-owned school buses to be racially segregated.

“We need segregated buses,” he said, commentating on an incident aboard a school bus in which a white teenager was attacked by two black teens.

Seizing upon the incident to fire yet another slam at President Obama, Limbaugh said, “I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson that we’re being taught here today. [The] kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and so forth. This is Obama’s America.”

Limbaugh — never once referring to the president by his official title, or even by his first name — continued, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on!'”

But Limbaugh told his “Dittohead” listeners a bald-faced lie  — and the proof that he lied is on videotape.

ATTACK ON TEEN CAPTURED ON SECURITY VIDEO

In the incident, which was captured by an on-board security camera, two black high school students pummeled a white student while on their way to school last Monday morning in the St. Louis suburb of Belleville, Illinois.

The attack was initially labeled as racially motivated, but local police later backed away from that assessment.

According to a Fox News report fed to local Fox network affiliates, Belleville police said kids on the bus repeatedly told the 17-year-old victim he could not sit beside them, so he finally pushed aside a backpack and sat anyway.

The network quoted Belleville Police Captain Don Sax as saying that the incident was “an extreme case of kids behaving poorly.”

After the white student sat down, “Pretty soon the kid who he sat next to is pushing him, trying to push him out of the seat and the next thing you know he starts punching him and choking him and punching him some more,” Sax said. “It’s ridiculous.”

Four minutes after the first attack, the victim was pummeled again by a second student.

Neither the 17-year-old victim nor his alleged attackers, aged 14 and 15, were identified, but his assailants were expected to be charged in Juvenile Court with assault.

Sax told Fox News that because the victim was white and his attackers black, “It’s a strong suggestion that it was race-related.” But after examining the videotape, police ruled out a racial motive for the assault.

VIDEO CLEARLY SHOWS OTHER WHITE KIDS CHEERING ON ATTACKERS

In his Tuesday broadcast, Limbaugh claimed that the black students aboard the bus chanted “‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on!'” while the white student was being pummeled.

But a close examination of the audio portion of the video — which is available for viewing on YouTube and other Web sites, including Limbaugh’s — shows that Limbaugh lied. There was no “Right on!” chant — although it did pick up one student yelling “Kick his ass!” just prior to the initial attack and shouts of “Get off the bus!” during it.

More importantly, the video clearly shows other white kids cheering on the victim’s attackers, as the driver shouted frantically at the teenagers to return to their seats. Other students seated at the front of the bus — black and white alike — can be seen reacting with shock at what was going on.

LIMBAUGH: ‘THIS IS OBAMA’S AMERICA — WHITE KIDS GETTING BEAT UP ON SCHOOL BUSES’

Limbaugh point-blank used the Belleville incident to engage in deliberate race-baiting. According to a transcript of his Tuesday broadcast posted on his own Web site, the right-wing commentator said:

“Hey, look, folks, the white kid on that bus in Belleville, Illinois, he deserved to be beat up.  You don’t know about this story?  Oh, there’s video of this.  The school bus filled with mostly black students beat up a white student a couple of times with all the black students cheering.

“Of course the white student on the bus deserved the beating,” Limbaugh continued.  “He was born a racist.  That’s what Newsweek magazine told us in its most recent cover.

Limbaugh’s rant continues: “It’s Obama’s America, is it not?  Obama’s America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now.  You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he’s white.”

When a caller reminded Limbaugh that Sax “did not comment on anything other than he said more investigations shows that [the incident] was not racially motivated,” the right-wing talkmeister replied, ” I think the guy [Sax] is wrong. I think not only was it racism, it’s justifiable racism.”

Then came Limbaugh’s stunner: “I mean, that’s the lesson that we’re being taught here today. [The] kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses. It was invading of space and so forth. This is Obama’s America.”

DEAN COMPARES LIMBAUGH TO 1930S RADIO DEMAGOGUE FATHER COUGHLIN

Reaction to Limbaugh’s rant was swift and furious. Appearing Thursday night on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former Democratic national chairman Howard Dean compared Limbaugh to another notorious right-wing radio demagogue: Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who in the 1930s used his radio program to issue blatantly anti-Semitic commentary and to rationalize the policies of Hitler and Mussolini.

“There’s a lot of money to be made in passing out hate of the kind that Rush Limbaugh is just doing,” Dean said.  “He’s always an entertainer, but he’s way over the line.  And this is a long — there’s a long, unfortunate American tradition of this, going back to Father Coughlin and people before that. They appeal to the very worst in people.”

On the same program, Mark Potok, a spokesman for the anti-racism Southern Poverty Law Center, said by arguing that school buses be segregated, as far as Limbaugh was concerned, “this is the only way, I suppose, that white people can be protected from black people.

“I think when we have characters like Limbaugh saying that on the air to millions of Americans — many of whom actually revere the man — it’s not surprising that people feel that ‘the race wars around the corner’ and that we’re allowed to say these kinds of things,” Potok said.

LIMBAUGH CLAIMS HIS ‘BUSES’ REMARK IS A ‘JOKE’ — BUT THAT’S A CROCK OF BULL—-!

Not surprisingly, Limbaugh fired back on Friday. “This whole race tumult is being orchestrated and run out of the White House straight out of [chief of staff] Rahm Emanuel and [senior advisor David] Axelrod’s office.  They are promoting it; they are encouraging it.  Isn’t it amazing? You have black kids who beat up a white kid on a school bus. That’s not racism. You have half the country criticizing a socialist health care plan, and that is racism.”

Limbaugh took dead aim at Potok: “So I’m doing a total parodic rant. I mean, the sarcasm is dripping — and this bottom-feeder at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Potok, is putting it out there that I made a call for segregated buses.  You know what this is like?”

“Parody,” my ass. Pardon me for using blunt language, but Limbaugh’s claim that his call for “segregated buses” was a sarcastic “parody” is a crock of pure, unadulterated bull—-. He knew what he was doing when he said it.

I’ve never bought Limbaugh’s namby-pamby excuse that he’s “just an entertainer.” Bull—-! He’s a demagogue. He meant what he said.

RIGHT-WING TALKMEISTER CALLED FOR OPENLY FLOUTING HALF-CENTURY OF COURT RULINGS, LAWS

By calling for “segregated buses,” Limbaugh has used his radio platform to openly advocate the re-imposition of racial segregation in a public accommodation — which has been illegal under a host of court rulings and a passel of federal and state laws for more than half a century.

Rosa Parks — whose refusal to yield a front seat to a white man in 1955 led to the Montgomery bus boycott that kicked off the civil rights movement — must be turning over in her grave. Ditto Dr. Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Ralph David Abernathy, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin and scores of others who devoted — and in many cases, sacrificed — their lives to bring an end to the evil of America’s apartheid based on race.

Limbaugh has the unmitigated gall to employ reverse psychology again and again and again to not only deflect longstanding complaints against him as a demagogue, but to accuse his critics of being demagogues themselves.

But this time, Limbaugh has gone too far. He has called for the open flouting of the law.

The First Amendment bars the Federal Communications Commission from taking punitive action against Limbaugh for violating its rules that strongly condemn the use of the airwaves to promote illegal activity. But that does not mean that Limbaugh cannot be held accountable.

ADVERTISER BOYCOTT AGAINST GLENN BECK SHOULD EXPAND TO INCLUDE LIMBAUGH

Not by the FCC, but by the advertisers who buy time on his show to air their spots — a fact that Fox News host Glenn Beck has learned the hard way after his blatantly slanderous and defamatory attack on President Obama as a “racist who hates white people” without providing a scintilla of evidence to prove it.

Now he’s costing Fox News hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue — despite a big spike in Beck’s ratings — thanks to a advertiser boycott of his show.

Money talks and bull—- walks. It took an advertiser boycott to bring down Don Imus after he made a highly inflammatory remark about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. The multimillionaire Limbaugh can be hit where it really hurts — in his massive bank account.

Limbaugh’s show is syndicated by Premiere Radio Networks, which is owned by Clear Channel Communications. Premiere also syndicates Glenn Beck’s radio show, as well as that of Sean Hannity.

I see no reason why the advertiser boycott of Beck’s TV show should not spread to his radio show as well. Nor do I see any reason why there shouldn’t be an advertiser boycott of Limbaugh. He’s a demagogue who’s called for the deliberate flouting of laws banning race segregation.

If I were an advertising executive, I’d think twice before having my client’s product associated with race-baiting demagogues like Limbaugh and Beck.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. all rights reserved.

CBS and Bloomberg Polls Show Obama’s Health-Care Speech Halted Weeks-Long Slide in His Job-Approval Ratings, With Most Americans Praising President’s Handling of Issue, But Remaining Sharply Divided on Whether His Plans Will Succeed; Gallup Poll Finds Sharp Disapproval of Wilson’s ‘You Lie!’ Outburst — Even Among Republicans — But the Race Issue Won’t Go Away

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, September 17, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

President Obama’s attempt to explain his plans for health care reform to the American public in an address before a joint session of Congress last week appears to have paid off – with some unexpected help by the conservative Republican congressman who heckled him during his speech.

Two new polls released this week — one by CBS News and the other by the business-oriented Bloomberg News — show that Americans now give the president the “thumbs-up” for his handling of the health care issue, halting a weeks-long slide in Obama’s overall job-approval ratings. But the public remains sharply divided over whether the president clearly explained his plan and whether it would succeed.

Meanwhile, a third poll released by the Gallup Organization showed strong disapproval of Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” outburst during the president’s address, with a solid two-thirds majority opposing the South Carolina Republican’s actions.

The Gallup Poll results came on the eve of the House vote Tuesday to rebuke Wilson for his heckling of the president, an incident unprecedented by a sitting member of Congress. The House voted 240-179 in favor of a “resolution of disapproval” — the least severe form of disciplinary action against one of its members.

OBAMA’S POLL NUMBERS STOP FALLING, BUT DOUBTS ABOUT PLAN’S COST REMAIN

Before his address, the president’s handling of the health-care reform issue was more negative than positive, with a CBS News poll taken from August 27 to August 31 showing 47 percent disapproved while only 40 percent approved. In a Gallup survey taken August 6 to August 9, 49 percent disapproved of Obama’s handling of the health-care issue, while only 43 percent approved.

Obama’s speech appears to have stopped his slide particularly with independent voters in the CBS poll, with his approval rating among this important voting bloc having risen as a result. But they remain sharply divided. Among Democrats, the president’s support solidified at 85 percent. Even among Republicans, Obama’s approval ratings rose slightly after his speech, but only 17 percent of Republicans back his health-care proposals.

Respondents in the Bloomberg survey, conducted Thursday through Monday, were slightly more approving of the president’s efforts after the speech as well, with 48 percent of respondents in  favor and 42 percent opposed.

Nonetheless, at least half of respondents expressed doubts that Obama can fulfill his promises to veto legislation that adds to the federal budget deficit; to preserve the Medicare trust fund,  particularly as the eldest of the 76 million Baby Boomers — those born in 1946 — approach their 65th birthdays in 2011; and to produce savings to help pay for prescriptions for Medicare patients.

“The debate seems to be about money, not about the need for reform,” Bloomberg News quoted Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Company, as saying. “When you look at specific planks, respondents like all of them.”

Selzer & Company, based in Des Moines, Iowa, conducted the poll for Bloomberg.

“I do think everyone should have health care, somehow,” said Judy Shaffer, a Bloomberg poll respondent in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, “[But] the deficit is going to go up so much higher. I think it’s really bad where it’s at right now.”

The 63-year-old Shaffer said the president’s address failed to allay her concerns about the impact that his plan will have on the deficit, and thus she remains opposed to it.

NO DOUBTS ABOUT WILSON’S OUTBURST: SOLID MAJORITY SAYS IT WAS WRONG

But while Americans remain divided over the success or failure of the president’s health-care reform plan, there is one thing they do agree on: That Wilson’s outburst against Obama during the president’s address was out of line, according to Gallup.

A greater-than-two-thirds majority of 68 percent disapproved of Wilson’s actions — with 23 percent expressing outrage at the South Carolina Republican calling Obama a liar after the president himself denounced as “false” accusations that his health-care plan would cover illegal immigrants.

Even a majority of Republicans — 52 percent — opposed Wilson’s outburst, while 39 percent of Republicans supported him, the Gallup survey found.  Not surprisingly, an overwhelming 86 percent of Democrats disapproved of what Wilson did, while only three percent supported his actions. Among independents, a near-two-thirds majority of 64 percent disapproved, while 17 percent approved.

There was no demographic breakdown in the Gallup survey on Wilson’s conduct, but it did note that 45 percent of Democrats expressed deep outrage at Wilson, perhaps reflecting the views of many Democrats who see a racial element not only in Wilson’s actions, but in the venomous sentiment expressed by many of the president’s opponents — particularly the so-called “birthers” who steadfastly claim that Obama is a foreigner constitutionally ineligible to be president, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

WILSON REPRIMAND POURS MORE FUEL ON PARTISAN DIVIDE

The House resolution rebuking Wilson only added more fuel to the already bitter partisan divide in Congress.

Democrats insisted that “This is not about partisan politics or inappropriate comments,” in the words of House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-South Carolina), who introduced it. “To the contrary, this is about the rules of this House and reprehensible conduct.” While some Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), would have preferred that the matter be laid to rest, Clyburn, declaring that “Silence gives consent,” insisted, “We cannot be silent because we cannot consent to this conduct.”

Republicans, while shying away from defending Wilson’s outburst, nonetheless insisted that the vote to rebuke him was a distraction. “Our economy is struggling, our families are hurting, and Congress is poised to demand an apology from a man who has already apologized,” said Representative Mike Pence (R-Indiana), chairman of the Republican Conference. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the resolution a “partisan stunt.”

Wilson did apologize to the president for calling him a liar, but he’s refused to bow to majority Democrats’ demands that he issue a public apology on the House floor to his colleagues for breaching the chamber’s decorum.

On Tuesday, Wilson again refused to apologize to his colleagues in the debate leading to the vote on the resolution. “I think it is clear there are far more important issues than what we are doing right now,” he said. “It is time we move on.”

MUCH TO OBAMA’S CHAGRIN, RACE ISSUE COMES FRONT AND CENTER

House Democrats, particularly members of the Congressional Black Caucus, felt compelled to act as the issue of racial bias against the president suddenly surged front and center in the past week, partly due to revelations that Wilson is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans — a 113-year-old “Southern heritage” group that, according to an anti-racism watchdog, has been taken over in the past decade by avowed white supremacists — and partly due to remarks made by former President Jimmy Carter.

The SCV, according to a 2006 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had undergone a purge of its longtime moderate members — including several present and former U.S. senators — who were replaced by “racial extremists.” That, in turn, led to a bitter severing of relations between the SCV and other Southern heritage groups, including the Military Order of Stars & Bars and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The report noted that some 300 moderate SCV members were expelled, accused by the radical racialists of disloyalty for criticizing racism in the organization.

And in a 2008 expose, The St. Petersburg Times revealed that since the 1990s, clusters of SCV members “have aligned themselves with ‘heritage groups’ like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens” — both considered racist hate groups by the SPLC, with the CCC essentially a revival of the white citizens’ councils that sprung up in the 1950s and 1960s to resist the civil rights movement.

Carter, in an interview Tuesday with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams and in remarks Wednesday during a town hall meeting in Atlanta, said that Wilson’s outburst was an act “based on racism” and rooted in fears of a black president.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he is African-American,” the former president said.

But one of Wilson’s sons disputed that.

“There is not a racist bone in my dad’s body,” said Alan Wilson, an Iraq War veteran who is seeking the GOP nomination for state attorney general in South Carolina. “He doesn’t even laugh at distasteful jokes. I won’t comment on former President Carter, because I don’t know President Carter. But I know my dad, and it’s just not in him.”

Republican National Chairman Michael Steele also denied race being a factor in the opposition to Obama’s domestic agenda, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday that Carter was “dead wrong” and “out of line.”

But when confronted by TV images during the president’s address showing Republican members of Congress almost exclusively white males and Democratic members of Congress a very diverse group in terms of race and gender, Steele admitted that the Republican Party needed to take a new line to connect with nonwhite voters. “Our party has for over a generation employed a strategy that right now many of us wish we never had,” he said.

EVEN OBAMA DENIES RACE A FACTOR — BUT ISSUE WON’T GO AWAY

Even the White House disagreed with Carter’s assessment on Wednesday, with press secretary Robert Gibbs telling reporters that Obama “does not believe” that criticism of his policies is “based on the color of his skin.”

Gibbs said the president understands that “people have disagreements with some of the decisions that we’ve made and some of the extraordinary actions that had to be undertaken by this administration and previous administration to stabilize our financial system, to ensure viability of our domestic auto industry.

“[But] the president does not believe that it’s based on the color of his skin,” he continued.

Asked why this is not a “teachable moment” on race similar to the one that the president seized upon after the racially-charged arrest of Dr. Louis Gates, a prominent African-American scholar by police at his Cambridge, Massachusetts home, Gibbs replied, “Obviously, the president has, and has always had, great concerns about race relations in this country.

“He’s talked about them in speeches. He’s talked about them throughout his career in politics; he believes we’ve made great strides, and obviously we’ve got work to do. But I’m not sure I see this — this large national conversation going on right now.”

The president has gone to great lengths to avoid making race an issue. But given the  involvement of white supremacists in the “birther” movement to remove Obama from office; warnings of neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists girding for a campaign of domestic terrorism and the unprecedented spike in death threats against him — all of it exposed by The ‘Skeeter Bites Report and elsewhere over the past eight months — it is an issue that will not likely go away any time soon.

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Representative Joe Wilson Is Reportedly a Member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a ‘Southern Heritage’ Group Taken Over in the Last Decade By Radical White Supremacists Who Defend Slavery As ‘A Benign Institution;’ He Also Denounced as a ‘Smear’ the True Claim of Biracial Daughter of Late Senator and Ex-Segregationist Strom Thurmond

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, September 14, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Until last week, Joe Wilson was virtually unknown outside of his South Carolina congressional district. Now, the entire country is learning who he is.

The conservative Republican stunned and outraged many of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle and was loudly booed when he shouted “You lie!” at President Obama as he was delivering an address to a joint session of Congress on health-care reform.

Wilson accused the president of lying about a promise he made that his health-care reform proposals would not provide coverage for the nation’s estimated 13 million illegal immigrants. The congressman apologized to the president within an hour after his speech and Obama accepted Wilson’s apology.

Two days after his apology, however, Wilson recorded a YouTube video defending his opposition to Obama’s health care plan – as well as requesting donations to the congressman’s re-election campaign. As of late Sunday, Wilson raised $1 million.

Wilson’s outburst against the president may have been motivated by more than annoyance over illegal immigrants.

It turns out that Wilson is, according to a candidate biography on the nonpartisan Web site OurCampaigns.com, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a longtime Southern-heritage organization that, according to the  Southern Poverty Law Center, has been taken over in the past decade by radical white supremacists, who advocate secession from the Union and defend slavery as a “benign institution.”

Nor is the nation’s first African-American president the first person Wilson has publicly called a liar. The congressman did the same thing to the biracial daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond, to whom Wilson was a former congressional page.

Wilson called Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired teacher, a liar when she came forward in 2003 that she is the eldest daughter of Thurmond and a black woman who worked for Thurmond’s family as a maid in the 1920s — despite the fact that the Thurmond family acknowledged her as a long-hidden relative.

DEFIANT WILSON WON’T APOLOGIZE TO CONGRESS, FACES REPRIMAND

Meanwhile, Wilson, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said emphatically Sunday that he won’t apologize to his colleagues in Congress for his outburst — increasing the likelihood that the House will reprimand him as early as today (Monday).

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Wilson made it clear that he would not bow to House Democrats’ demands that he stand on the floor and issue an apology to his fellow lawmakers. “I’m not going to apologize again,” a defiant Wilson Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “I believe the American people know I’m a civil person. I respect the institution of the House. I have apologized to the president. I believe that should be enough.”

Wilson took an even harder line after his TV appearance, issuing a statement declaring, “The American people are fed up with the political games in Washington. I refuse to participate in an effort to divert our attention away from the task at hand of reforming health insurance and creating new jobs.

“Having apologized on Wednesday to the White House, we agreed that we must move forward in a civil manner to do the work the American people have sent us here to do,” the Wilson statement continued.

Wilson denied a suggestion by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that his outburst against the president was racially motivated. In a column published Sunday, Dowd wrote that what she heard Wilson shout in the House chamber was, “You lie, boy!” — a highly racially-charged epithet that is deeply offensive to African-Americans.

“Surrounded by middle-aged white guys – a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club – Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t,” Dowd wrote. “But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

“Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber,” Dowd wrote.

Asked by Wallace whether race underlay his outburst, Wilson responded, “No, no, I respect the president.” the 62-year-old Wilson added that his ancestors lived near those of first lady Michelle Obama in Georgetown County, South Carolina.

WILSON’S REPUTED MEMBERSHIP IN RACIST-CONTROLLED GROUP RAISES QUESTIONS

But revelations of Wilson’s reputed membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans are likely to raise more questions about the motive for his outburst against the president.

The 113-year-old SCV, according to a 2006 SPLC report, had undergone a purge of its longtime moderate members — including several present and former U.S. senators — who were replaced by “racial extremists.” That, in turn, led to a bitter severing of relations between the SCV and other Southern heritage groups, including the Military Order of Stars & Bars and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The report noted that some 300 moderate SCV members were expelled, accused by the radical racialists of disloyalty for criticizing racism in the organization.

And in a 2008 expose, The St. Petersburg Times revealed that since the 1990s, clusters of SCV members “have aligned themselves with ‘heritage groups’ like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens” — both considered racist hate groups by the SPLC, with the CCC essentially a revival of the white citizens’ councils that sprung up in the 1950s and 1960s to resist the civil rights movement.

The question arises: If it turns out that Wilson is indeed a member of the SCV, how credible then, in the face of its takeover by white supremacists, are his denials of Obama’s race being a factor in motivating his outburst against the president?

WILSON ATTACKED OUT-OF-WEDLOCK BIRACIAL DAUGHTER OF STROM THURMOND

In 2003, Wilson called Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired teacher, a liar when she came forward in 2003 that she is the the out-of-wedlock, biracial daughter of the late Senator Strom Thurmond and a black woman who worked for Thurmond’s family as a maid in the 1920s — only to apologize after the Thurmond family acknowledged her as their long-hidden relative.

Thurmond, a former arch-segregationist who became notorious for his fierce opposition to civil rights legislation — leading the longest filibuster in Senate history against the civil rights bill of 1957 — had a sexual liaison with the then-16-year-old Carrie Butler in 1925. Thurmond was 22 at the time.

Within days after Washington-Williams’ revelation, Wilson told The State newspaper of Charleston, South Carolina that he didn’t believe Williams. He deemed the revelation “unseemly” and “a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina.”

But after the Thurmond family acknowledged that Washington-Williams was indeed the late senator’s eldest daughter born out of wedlock, Wilson apologized but insisted that Washington-Williams should have kept the fact that Thurmond was her father private.

Washington-Williams, who now lives in Los Angeles and will turn 85 on October 12, did not learn of Thurmond being her father until she turned 16 and met the senator in person for the first time in 1941.

WILSON A RECIPIENT OF ‘GOVERNMENT-RUN’ HEALTH CARE HE OPPOSES FOR OTHERS

Wilson’s strident opposition to what he sees as “government-run heath care” in the president’s reform package is inconsistent with his being a recipient of government-run health care. Wilson is a retired colonel of the Army National Guard. As such, he receives full health-care coverage under the military’s TRICARE program and will retain such coverage for the rest of his life, according to Newsweek magazine.

In fact, Wilson’s family — he has four sons now serving in the military — has been a beneficiary of such “government-run health care” for several generations, according to the magazine.

Yet Wilson voted 11 times against expanding health-care coverage for veterans, according to the liberal-leaning South Carolina political site IndigoJournal.com, citing a blistering campaign ad by Rob Miller, Wilson’s Democratic opponent in last year’s election.

Miller, an Iraq War veteran and former Marine Corps captain who lost to Wilson by eight percentage points last year, is running against Wilson again in 2010 — and has raised more than $1 million in the days since Wilson’s outburst.

# # #

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

Republicans’ Unprecedented Show of Contempt During President’s Address on Heath-Care Reform is Captured by TV Cameras; GOP Congressman is Booed Loudly After Calling Obama a Liar While Another Republican Challenges President on ‘Death Panels’

(Posted 8:00 a.m. EDT Thursday September 10, 2009)

NOTE TO READERS: Due to a computer crash, today’s edition of The ‘Skeeter Bites Report is being posted three hours later than normal. We apologize for any inconvenience this delay might have caused.

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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The television images were startling: As President Obama addressed Congress and the nation on health-care reform Wednesday night, the cameras showed many Republican members of Congress displaying their contempt for the president’s reform push, with some holding up signs reading “What Bill?” and “What Plan?” and copies of GOP-sponsored bills rejected by majority Democrats, while others were scanning their BlackBerrys while Obama spoke.

Then the House chamber’s microphones picked up the voice of a previously little-known Republican from South Carolina openly heckling Obama — the first time in memory that a sitting member of Congress showed such blatant disrespect for a president while he addressed the lawmakers — calling Obama a liar after the president said his reform plan would not cover illegal immigrants.

But that’s not all. According to a report on HuffingtonPost.com, another Republican congressman challenged Obama when the president told the lawmakers that claims by his right-wing opponents that his proposal would establish so-called “death panels” on end-of-life matters was “a lie” by demanding that he “Read the bill!” — a common chant used by opponents at lat month’s explosive town hall meetings.

And a third Republican congressman loudly dismissed with a sarcastic “Ha!” the president’s assertion that he had “no interest in putting insurance companies out of business,” the Web site reported.

WILSON BOOED LOUDLY; HE QUICKLY APOLOGIZES

Apparently emboldened by the fierce condemnation of the president’s health-care reform proposals displayed by opponents at town-hall meetings across the country on the matter, House Republicans, in particular, were in no mood to back down from their own united — and apparently implacable — opposition.

But Wilson’s outburst clearly crossed the line, according to HuffPost. He was booed loudly by Democrats and Republicans alike. “Shame on you!” shouted one spectator. “Throw him out!” shouted another. First Lady Michelle Obama, who was seated above and behind Wilson in the visitors’ gallery, was overheard shouting “Damn!” as she shook her head in disgust.

Within an hour after the president’s address. Wilson issued an apology. “This evening I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the health care bill,” he said. “While I disagree with the president’s statement, my comments were inappropriate and regrettable. I extend sincere apologies to the President for this lack of civility.”

Wilson also called the White House to apologize.

BIPARTISAN CONDEMNATION OF WILSON

Wilson’s outburst was roundly condemned by Republicans and Democrats alike. Appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” minutes after the president’s address, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) said he found Wilson’s remarks “totally disrespectful — [there’s] no place for it in that setting or any other and he should apologize immediately.”

On the same program, Representative Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) said, “I thought that was unfortunate. [Obama’s] the president. He deserves more respect than that.”

Democrats were furious. “Nineteen years [in the House and] never, never have I seen anything like this,” said an angry Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut).

“I thought it was very inappropriate behavior, to hold up signs. None of us ever would have done that,” said Representative Henry Waxman (D-California). “I don’t think in the Congress of the United States there ought to be catcalls, or people standing up and yelling comments or holding up signs.”

Representative John Dingell (D-Michigan), the House’s longest-serving member — whose father, John Sr., introduced a health-care reform bill as far back as 1943 — said he was not impressed by the GOP’s antics. “Well, you’ve got to understand: They’re Republicans. They’re just doing what comes natural,” he told HuffPost.

But by far the most barbed reaction came from MSNBC morning host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman. “Whoever shouted out that the president was lying is a dumbass who should show the president some respect!” Scarborough wrote in a posting on Twitter.

GOP’S DISRESPECT OF OBAMA UNPRECEDENTED — IS IT RACIALLY TINGED?

It’s pretty clear by now that Republicans — especially those in the House — are in no mood to back down from their fierce and increasingly implacable opposition to health-care reform.

But their boorish behavior during the president’s speech strongly suggests to The ‘Skeeter Bites Report that the Republicans also might be emboldened by something far uglier: A refusal to accept the decision last November by a 54 percent majority of the American electorate to entrust, for the first time in the nation’s history, the the most powerful job in the world to a black man.

Are we the only ones who noticed from viewing the TV images that the Republicans who displayed such open contempt for the president were all white male Southerners? Is it merely a coincidence that Wilson, the GOP congressman who made the “You Lie!” outburst, is a conservative white male Southerner from South Carolina?

Can anyone recall any of Obama’s predecessors — including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon — ever receiving this kind of treatment by members of the opposition party while addressing a joint session of Congress? We can’t.

We are, therefore, forced to ask this question; Partisan loyalties aside, would the Republicans have displayed this much contempt for the president of the United States if Obama were white?

We seriously doubt it.

As much as the Republicans despised Clinton, they never subjected him to that kind of open display of disrespect even as they impeached him in 1999 — and remember, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress back then.

Likewise, the Democrats, for all of their dislike of Nixon, never resorted to such open displays of contempt — not even when Congress began impeachment proceedings against him over the Watergate scandal in 1974.

HOW ELSE TO EXPLAIN GOP MOVING FARTHER AND FARTHER TO THE RIGHT?

It is becoming more and more difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that there is more than partisan motivation behind the Republicans’ hardening opposition to Obama’s health-care proposals.

This is, in fact, a hardening of the GOP’s opposition to Obama’s entire presidency, based on their nearly unanimous opposition to his emergency economic stimulus package and the solid opposition to his plans for dealing with climate change and energy independence.

The reason for the hardening opposition should be as plain as day: The Republicans have for months now been sucking up to the rabid demagogues of right-wing talk radio, led by Rush Limbaugh, and of a certain right-leaning cable news channel that’s having to deal with a growing advertiser boycott against one of its rising stars, Glenn Beck.

Of course, there’s more to it than that: The Republican Party’s voting base has shrunk to where it’s now where the Democratic Party’s voting base was for much of its history prior to the end of World War II: almost lily-white, mostly Southern, overwhelmingly male and fiercely conservative — and moving ever farther rightward, away from the American political mainstream.

Indeed, the GOP is moving so far to the right that it is at the point where the party is in danger of becoming a xenophobic, neo-fascist fringe party similar to the British National Party, France’s National Front, Austria’s Radical Party, Germany’s National Democratic Party and the Netherlands’ Freedom Party.

The GOP cannot remain viable with the majority of the American people if it continues on its rightward trajectory.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.

It’s Time to ‘Take Off the Gloves’ and Reveal Orly Taitz’s True Motivation For Her Stubborn Effort to Force Obama Out of Office: She’s a Rabid Islamophobe With Backing From a Radical Jewish Extremist Group That Adamantly Insists Obama Is a Muslim and Poses a ‘Dangerous Threat’ to the Survival of Israel

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, September 7, 2009)

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A ‘SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL

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Enough is enough!

The time has come to “take off the gloves” and reveal the true motivations of Orly Taitz, the so-called “Queen of the Birther Movement” that bullheadedly insists President Obama is not a U.S. citizen and is holding the presidency illegally — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Taitz’s stubborn campaign to remove Obama from office resumed anew Friday with her filing of yet another lawsuit in a California federal court, accompanied with yet another certificate allegedly documenting the president’s birth in Kenya.

But, just as in her previous lawsuit, the alleged Kenyan birth certificate of the president that Taitz filed with the court was immediately exposed as a forgery.

Her absolutely hell-bent determination to remove Obama from office despite her “evidence” against him getting shot down as fraudulent again and again and again would be laughable, were it not for her extreme prejudice in pursuing it.

That, unfortunately, has made it necessary to once and for all expose Taitz for what she is: A rabid Islamophobe who tenaciously clings to the false belief that the president is a Muslim and considers him a “dangerous threat” to the security of Israel.

That Taitz is motivated by extreme anti-Muslim hatred can no longer be ignored. In early April, Taitz — an immigrant from the former Soviet republic of Moldova who holds dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship — made an appearance at a gun show in Knob Creek, Kentucky, according to Esquire magazine, and unleashed a fusillade of anti-Muslim invectives against the president:

“I am extremely concerned about Obama specifically because I was born in [the] Soviet Union, so I can tell that he is extremely dangerous,” the magazine quoted Taitz telling the crowd. “I believe he is the most dangerous thing one can imagine, in that he represents radical communism and radical Islam. He was born and raised in radical Islam, all of his associations are with radical Islam, and he was groomed in the environment of the dirty Chicago Mafia! Can there be anything scarier than that?”

TAITZ BACKED BY RADICAL JEWISH EXTREMIST FOLLOWERS OF KAHANE

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has subsequently learned that Taitz has support from the Jewish Task Force, a radical extremist group whose members, according to its Web site, follow the teachings of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the militant Jewish Defense League (JDL), who later emigrated to Israel and founded the far-right extremist Kach Party.

The JTF, like Taitz, adamantly insists that President Obama is a Muslim — despite overwhelming evidence that he is, in fact, a Christian — and considers him a traitor to the U.S. and a direct threat to Israel.  “We are opposed to Israel surrendering land for ‘peace,'” the JTF declared on its Web site. “We are also opposed to Islamic terrorism, which we believe is an integral part of Islam.”

The JTF regards critics of Israel in both the U.S. and Israel itself as “domestic fifth columnists who attempt to undermine America’s and Israel’s will to defend themselves and to properly fight their wars [against Islamic terrorism],” and included Obama as a “fifth columnist.”

The group formed another organization, Jews Against Obama, “to expose him as being just that” and it strongly supports Taitz’s efforts to oust the president from office. It has posted a highly inflammatory video online that claims Obama “wants to destroy Israel.”

KAHANE MOVEMENT BANNED IN ISRAEL AS ‘RACISTS,’ ‘TERRORISTS’

In 1988, Kahane’s Kach Party was branded racist by the Israeli government for its rabid anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred and banned from the Israeli Parliament.

In 1994, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Kach Party member Baruch Goldstein, an American-born immigrant, opened fire on a group of Muslim worshippers at the al-Haram al-Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron, killing 29. Following the massacre, the Israeli government outlawed Kach as a terrorist organization.

The Anti-Defamation League, in a report on Jewish extremists, noted that while followers of Kahane — who was assassinated in New York in 1990 — “advocate militant Jewish nationalism as a means to protect the Jewish people, the Kahane Movement, in its 35-year history, “has demonstrated a pattern of xenophobia, anti-Arab bigotry and violence in the U.S. and Israel.”

The ADL report notes that in 2001 — exactly two months after the September 11 attacks — JDL leader Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel, the group’s former West Coast coordinator, were arrested in California just days before they planned to launch apparently retaliatory attacks. They were charged with plotting to blow up the San Clemente offices of Darrell Issa, a Lebanese-American Republican congressman; the Los Angeles offices of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, south of Beverly Hills.

Rubin committed suicide while awaiting trial in November 2002. In September 2005, Krugel was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the plot.

DESPITE SETBACKS, TAITZ PRESSES AHEAD WITH NEW CLAIMS AGAINST OBAMA

Taitz cannot practice law anywhere outside California because she never passed the bar exam and received her law degree from an online university that is not accredited. And her previous lawsuit against the president was undermined when an alleged birth certificate showing Obama’s birth in Kenya was almost immediately exposed as a forgery.

Undaunted, however, Taitz went ahead with yet another lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California claiming yet again that the president was not born in the United States, but in Kenya.

Taitz filed as part of her new lawsuit yet another alleged birth certificate showing Obama having been born at “Coast Province General Hospital, Mombasa, British Protectorate of Kenya” on August 4, 1961.

And this time, Taitz claims to have a witness: Lucas Daniel Smith, a 29-year-old Iowan, who, according to Taitz’s lawsuit, “went to Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya in February and paid ‘a cash consideration’ to a Kenyan military officer on duty to look the other way, while I obtained the copy of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama.”

A POINT-BY-POINT DISMANTLING OF NEW KENYA ‘BIRTH CERTIFICATE’

But, as was the case in her previous lawsuit, no sooner than the alleged “Kenyan” birth certificate Taitz filed in her new suit was made public, it was immediately exposed as a forgery. Even the Orange County Register, the largest newspaper in California’s most staunchly conservative Republican county, cast doubt on the authenticity of the document.

In the first place, the city of Mombasa was not Kenyan territory in 1961; it was part of Zanzibar. Although the city was administered by the British under its Kenya Protectorate, Mombasa remained Zanzibari territory until it was formally ceded to Kenya in 1963 — after Kenya won its independence from Britain.

Second, as we pointed out in a previous editorial on this matter last month, British law requires a birth certificate to bear the signatures of a newborn infant’s parents in order for the certificate to be legally valid. This new alleged certificate — as well as the previous one filed by Taitz — do not bear the signatures of either the president’s father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. or of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.

Third, this new alleged “Kenyan birth certificate” lists the time of the future president’s birth as 7:24 p.m. local time  — which happens to be the precise time he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, according to a widely-distributed copy of Obama’s birth certificate issued by the State of Hawaii.

Any serious student of geography can tell you that there is a 13-hour time difference between Honolulu and Mombasa. When it was 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, it was 8:24 a.m. the following day in Mombasa.

Hawaii state law forbids the release of birth or marriage certificates to anyone but the persons named in the documents or their immediate relatives. A copy of the president’s birth certificate released by his campaign in June of last year to the nonpartisan Web site FactCheck.org carries a date stamp of June 6, 2007 — which the Web site noted “has bled through from the reverse side.”

“It’s therefore probably a copy obtained by Obama himself at that time,” said FactCheck.org’s Brooks Jackson, a former correspondent for CNN. “This document should put to rest [all this] groundless speculation.”

Fourth, Dunham, who, contrary to what both alleged “Kenyan birth certificates” say, kept her maiden name throughout her three-year marriage to the senior Obama — and, in fact, did not adopt the surname of her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, until after their divorce in 1980, altering the spelling to “Sutoro.”

OBAMA’S MOTHER WAS NEVER IN KENYA . . .

Fifth — and most important — Dunham was never in Africa at the time of her son’s birth. It would have been extremely dangerous for Dunham to be in Kenya in 1961. Tribal warfare between the Kikuyus and the Luos was raging in Kenya at the time of her pregnancy.

The ethnic warfare erupted in the immediate aftermath of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonialists. There’s no way that Barack Obama Sr., a Luo, would have dared to bring his pregnant, white American wife to Kenya at the time, knowing full well that her safety — and that of their unborn son — would have been in grave jeopardy.

There was another reason the senior Obama, a Muslim who later became an atheist, dared not bring Dunham to Kenya: He was married to three other women there — a fact he kept secret from Dunham.  It is not unusual under Muslim tradition for a man to have as many as four wives, but the senior Obama knew that would have been deeply offensive to his Christian-raised American wife. In addition, the senior Obama’s marriage to Dunham was fiercely opposed by several of his Kenyan relatives at the time.

Ultimately, Dunham did learn of her husband’s other marriages and filed for divorce in 1964.

There is no evidence whatsoever that Dunham ever set foot outside of the United States before 1967, when she moved to Indonesia to live with her second husband, Lolo Seotoro.

. . . AND HIS FATHER LIVED IN THE U.S. FOR SIX YEARS

And then there is the not-so-small matter that the government of Kenya flatly denies that the U.S. president was born on its soil.

In Washington, Jon Chessoni, administration secretary of the Kenyan Embassy, told the online journal The Washington Independent last month that his office has received many questions about the president’s alleged birth in Kenya, which he called “baseless.”

“It’s madness,” said Chessoni, pointing out that the president’s father, had been out of the country when his son, the future U.S. president, was born in 1961. “When this matter first came up, the Kenyan government did its research and confirmed that these are all baseless claims,” he said.

In fact, the senior Obama left Kenya in 1959 after he was awarded a scholarship from an American program offering educational opportunities to Kenyan students and did not return to his homeland until 1965. During those six years in the United States, the senior Obama was a student at University of Hawaii, where he first met Dunham in the fall of 1960.

They married in February 1961, only to separate a little over a year later. After graduating from the University of Hawaii in 1962, Obama Sr. left Hawaii for Boston — leaving behind his wife and son — and took graduate study courses at Harvard University before returning to Kenya three years later.

TAITZ’S ‘WITNESS’ FALSELY CLAIMS KENYAN P.M. IS OBAMA’S COUSIN — AND ADMITS BRIBERY

In a written declaration filed with the court as part of Taitz’s lawsuit, Smith claimed that he “traveled to Kenya and Mombasa in particular with the intent to obtain the original birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama, as I was told previously that it was on file in the hospital and under seal, due to the fact that the prime minister of Kenya Raela [SIC] Odinga is Barack Hussein Obama’s cousin.”

Smith’s claim that Raila Odinga is the president’s cousin is false. In a January 2008 BBC interview, Odinga did assert that he was the Obama’s first cousin.  But Obama’s paternal uncle, Saiid Obama, denied any direct relation to Odinga.

In an interview with the Reuters news agency in January from the president’s ancestral village of Kogelo, Saiid Obama acknowledged that “Odinga’s mother came from this area” and is of the same Luo community as the Obamas, “so it is normal for us to talk about cousins,” he said. But “he is not a blood relative,” Saiid Obama told Reuters. Even if Odinga’s claim were true and he was the president’s first cousin — the son of his uncle Saiid — then why does the prime minister of Kenya not bear the Obama family name?

Smith continued in his declaration that “I had to pay a cash ‘consideration’ to a Kenyan military officer on duty to look the other way, while I obtained the copy of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama.”

While it’s well known that corruption is widespread in Kenya, Smith incriminated himself by admitting in court that he paid a government official to “look the other way.” In any country, that’s a criminal offense — bribery of a government official. That Smith admitted it in court renders this new so-called “Kenyan birth certificate” inadmissible as evidence, even if it was authentic, because it was obtained illegally.

No court in its right mind can accept evidence that was obtained by illegal means. Are Smith and Taitz really that stupid?

TAITZ NOW FACES POSSIBLE BAN FROM PRACTICING LAW IN CALIFORNIA

Now Taitz will have to defend herself against an attempt to ban her from practicing law in California — and she’s already lost a lawsuit from an erstwhile ally in the “Birther” movement.

A formal complaint has been filed with the California Bar Association against Taitz, on the grounds that she has “indiscriminately hurled charges of treason and called for an armed revolt against the federal government” — the latter of which is a federal crime under the Smith Act of 1940, under which Taitz can be prosecuted.

Taitz is also accused of “actively recruited clients in a state where she is not licensed to practice law;” of “repeatedly disrespected judges and officers of the court;” of making  “false and misleading claims in court filings” and of “not properly” accounting “for money she has raised to further her crusade.”

Taitz was also sued by Philip Berg, a Pennsylvania lawyer who sought unsuccessfully to declare Obama ineligible to be president on the grounds that he is not a native-born U.S. citizen, as the Constitution requires.

Berg accused Taitz of “harassing” him and fellow plaintiffs in Berg’s unsuccessful lawsuit against then-candidate Obama, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. He won a default judgement against Taitz in June after Taitz failed to respond to his lawsuit by a court-imposed deadline.

Yet despite all this, Taitz stubbornly continues her campaign to oust the president, even as others in the “Birther” movement have begun to give up, frustrated by their inability to come up with any concrete evidence to prove their claims against him. Only an extremist would continue to carry on despite having no chance whatsoever of winning.

And make no mistake, Orly Taitz is an extremist. She deserves absolutely no credibility whatsoever and we have every confidence that the courts will toss her latest lawsuit into the wastebasket, where it clearly belongs.

Sincerely,

Skeeter Sanders

Editor & Publisher

The ‘Skeeter Bites Report

Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All Rights Reserved.

Former Attorney General Breaks From Cheney, Says Holder is Doing the Right Thing By Asserting His Independence From White House in Getting to the Bottom of CIA ‘Torturegate’ Scandal ‘Based on the Facts’ — But Less Than a Month Ago, He Opposed the Investigation as ‘Having a Chilling Effect’ on Anti-Terrorism Efforts

(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Thursday, September 3, 2009)

By SKEETER SANDERS

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales caused a sensation both inside and outside the Washington Beltway on Tuesday when he came out in defense of his successor’s decision to reopen an investigation into whether CIA officers tortured terrorist suspects.

In a sharp break from former Vice President Dick Cheney and other conservatives, Gonzales said in a radio interview that Holder was correct to move forward with the investigation, despite President Obama’s often-stated desire to put the “Torturegate” controversy to rest and move on.

“As chief prosecutor of the United States, he [Holder] should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House,” Gonzales said during an appearance Tuesday on “America’s Morning News,” a nationally syndicated radio program produced by The Washington Times, which published an exclusive  story based on the interview on Wednesday.

Gonzales’ comments marked a dramatic reversal from remarks he made in an earlier interview less than a month ago, in which he opposed any such investigation.  The former attorney general told the Associated Press on August 11 that any criminal investigation into whether CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects crossed the line into torture could have a chilling effect on future anti-terror efforts.

Gonzales told the AP that if the Justice Department launched an investigation, it “could discourage” CIA operatives from “engaging in conduct that even comes close” to department guidelines. “So where do you draw the line?” he said. “What is allowed, what’s not allowed?”

GONZALES: HOLDER ACTED PROPERLY IN NAMING SPECIAL PROSECUTOR

In his radio interview, Gonzales said that as attorney general, Holder has a “great deal of discretion” in such matters, but denied having any inside information on whether Holder acted alone in deciding to name a special prosecutor, John Durham, to head the “Torturegate” investigation, then informing the president of his decision.

In sharp contrast to Cheney, who has been highly critical of Holder, Gonzales said he was confident that Holder is concerned only about the “one percent of actors” who went beyond the guidelines of Justice Department lawyers, and not conducting a “witch hunt.”

The other 99 percent “are heroes and and should be treated like heroes for the most part, not criminals,” he said.  Gonzales said Bush administration lawyers clearly defined what interrogation techniques were legal and the few who went beyond the rules should be investigated, despite the so-called “chilling effect” it might have on future intelligence-gathering.

“We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists,” the Times quoted Gonzales as saying. “And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror.”

REMARKS A DRAMATIC CONTRAST FROM EARLIER CRITICISM OF PROBE

Gonzales’ comments marked a dramatic reversal from remarks the former attorney general made in his earlier interview in Lubbock, Texas with the AP, in which he said that any such investigation “could discourage” CIA operatives from “engaging in conduct that even comes close” to department guidelines.

Gonzales said at the time that he had talked to CIA attorneys who had heard from the spy agency’s operatives. “They’re very, very concerned about the legal liability and legal exposure,” he told the AP. “And that’s the danger with launching some kind of investigation. But, again, this is a decision that’s got to be made by the current attorney general.”

The former attorney general’s radio interview also puts him at odds with Cheney, who bluntly accused Obama on Sunday of setting a “terrible precedent” by launching an “intensely partisan, politicized look back at the prior administration” — remarks that strongly suggested that the former vice president was calling into question Obama’s fitness as commander-in-chief.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,”  Cheney minced no words in attacking Holder’s decision to reopen the “Torturegate” probe. “It offends the hell out of me,” he said. “I think it’s a direct slap at the CIA. I don’t think it will work.”

In unusually blunt language, Cheney blasted the president for not overruling Holder. “We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn’t be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration,” Cheney said. “Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they’re reversing course on that.”

GONZALES’ TURNABOUT DRAWS MIXED REACTIONS

Gonzales’ latest comments stunned both human-rights activists and Beltway Republicans — and, not surprisingly, drew mixed reactions.

Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, was quoted by  The Washington Times as saying that “there’s a kind of dumb honesty to Gonzales.”

Malinowski told the newspaper that “There is no reason why he [Gonzales] shouldn’t support this investigation because, at least on the face of it, it appears to validate the Bush-era legal memos concerning interrogations” and added that CIA officials who authorized controversial interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, “have nothing to fear.”

On the other hand, at least one congressional Republican took issue with Gonzales. Representative Peter King (R-New York), the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he was mystified with the former attorney general’s motives.

“I don’t know the reason for it,” he told the newspaper. “I just think Gonzales is missing the larger point here: This is either a political decision or a liberal philosophical decision by Holder. [This] has all the indicators of a political investigation, a political decision [because] these cases have already been investigated by the Justice Department, have already been examined, to reopen them has to have a chilling effect and violates the spirit of double jeopardy.”

The Justice Department declined to comment on Gonzales’ remarks.

GONZALES’ OWN TENURE AS ATTORNEY GENERAL HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL

Gonzales, appointed by President George W. Bush  in 2005 as the first Latino to serve as attorney general, is no stranger to controversy. Under his two-year tenure, the Justice Department and the FBI were accused of improperly, and perhaps illegally, using the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act to uncover personal information about U.S. citizens.

His inability to explain his role and influence in the highly controversial dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys — particularly the firing of U.S. Attorney David Iglesias — and his interpretations of the Constitution led several members of Congress from both major parties to call for his resignation. The dismissals are now the subject of a separate criminal investigation ordered by Holder.

When The New York Times revealed in December 2005 that the National Security Agency (NSA) was eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without proper warrants, Gonzales threatened to prosecute journalists for leaking classified government documents, raising the specter of a First Amendment confrontation between the Bush administration and the media reminiscent of the court battle in the 1970s between the Nixon White House and the media over publication of the Pentagon Papers.

But it is the treatment of terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks that has generated the most controversy. Gonzales, who previously served as Bush’s White House counsel, drew fire for approving legal opinions written by John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel that became known as the “torture memos.” One such memo suggested that Geneva Conventions protections for prisoners of war did not apply to Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan or al-Qaida suspects held worldwide.

Those memos have led to calls for Gonzales’ disbarment from practicing law and even for the, prosecution of the former attorney general and other Bush administration lawyers.

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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.