LOL: Kamala Harris took money from birther conspiracy theorist in 2011, gave it away 4 years later

Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic refuses to acknowledge the facts of illegal immigrant crime

The crimes of illegal immigrants, apart from being here illegally, continue as we speak, and continuously are noted in the Twitter feeds and websites of conservatives. Of course all of that is illegitimate to the Anne Applebaums of the world. Nothing is legitimate unless it is sanctioned by coverage in the press which her side owns, and this story is not covered by her press, for political reasons. That story forms the heart of the Trump political campaign, and to give it expression is to do the work of her political enemy, which is what the essay is really all about, her political enemies, in Poland, Hungary and the United States. At one point she even solemnly informs us that "(A ruling party that has politicized its courts and suppressed the media is a party that finds it much easier to steal.)", as if that isn't a perfect description of liberal democratic rule in the United States since FDR. It's now a country where the words "illegal alien" are banned on Twitter. That's how important cheap landscapers are to The Establishment.

From the story here:

Much as Trump used birtherism and the fabricated threat of immigrant crime to motivate his core supporters, Kaczyński has used the Smolensk tragedy to galvanize his followers, and convince them not to trust the government or the media. Sometimes he has implied that the Russian government downed the plane. At other times, he has blamed the former ruling party, now the largest opposition party, for his brother’s death: “You destroyed him, you murdered him, you are scum!” he once shouted in parliament.

Liberal blogger admits Hillary campaign in 2008 pushed birther issue through Sidney Blumenthal who fed over 60 stories on various subjects

I guess Martha Raddatz is right. The birther issue isn't over . . . for Hillary.

Here.

Once again it's Obama who is the original birther: As late as April 2007 his literary agent portrayed him as born in Kenya

Mark Levin opens show discussing birther issue telling us it's not important, opens second half hour discussing it the same way

Like Ted Cruz isn't Mark Levin's preferred candidate, especially as in the middle of the first hour Levin tried to destroy Donald Trump using Trump's own previous statements about the differences between New Yorkers' values and those of the rest of the country.

Levin can't stand it that Trump turned this into a discussion about 911.

Levin finishes the hour claiming birthers have said to Levin that both parents must be born in the US.

I call bullshit on that.

I say prove it, Levin. Show us the evidence, and send it to Ann Coulter, whose arguments and column he hasn't dared touch.

Mark Levin is avoiding Ann Coulter.

Marco Rubio's official biography misrepresents his parents as exiles from Castro's Cuba

Castro took over Cuba in 1959 after a guerrilla insurgency begun in December 1956. Marco Rubio's parents left Cuba in 1956, according to this story in the Tampa Bay Times:

'To press their case, birthers dug up Rubio’s parents' immigration papers. While the eligibility question is unresolved, in some eyes, the file (which the Times independently obtained) confirmed his parents were given citizenship in 1975. Rubio at the time said he did not know why his parents waited, though experts told the Times that it wasn’t uncommon for some immigrants to wait.

'The immigration dossier broke some news: It showed Rubio’s parents came to the United States in 1956, not after Fidel Castro took over, as Rubio’s ... official biography noted and he repeatedly implied when talking about his “exile” parents.'

In yesterday's Republican debate in South Carolina, Rubio similarly misrepresented himself on a number of issues.

Cornered like a rat, Ted Cruz last night resorted to a straw man argument to defend his presidential eligibility

From the transcript here:

"At the end of the day, the legal issue is quite straightforward, but I would note that the birther theories that Donald has been relying on -- some of the more extreme ones insist that you must not only be born on U.S. soil, but have two parents born on U.S. soil. Under that theory, not only would I be disqualified, Marco Rubio would be disqualified, Bobby Jindal would be disqualified and, interestingly enough, Donald J. Trump would be disqualified."

No one is arguing that to be eligible both parents must have been born on US soil, only that both parents must be citizens at the time of the candidate's birth in a US jurisdiction.

The extreme non-existent standard propounded by Cruz isn't necessary to exclude him, Rubio and Jindal (and Obama), only the constitutional one which defines natural born citizenship as beyond the reach of statute. Cruz' citizenship is statutory, not constitutional, and that is why he is excluded from eligibility. He acquired citizenship through the law, not through the Constitution: 

'Because Cruz's citizenship comes from the law, not the Constitution, as late as 1934, he would not have had "any conceivable claim to United States citizenship. For more than a century and a half, no statute was of assistance. Maternal citizenship afforded no benefit" -- as the Supreme Court put it in Rogers v. Bellei (1971). 

'That would make no sense if Cruz were a "natural born citizen" under the Constitution. But as the Bellei Court said: "Persons not born in the United States acquire citizenship by birth only as provided by Acts of Congress." (There's an exception for the children of ambassadors, but Cruz wasn't that.)' 

  

Is Hillary worried we'll find the birther e-mail on her server?

Hillary's vigorous denial of the birther story only lends more credence to the charge that she started the birther movement. If it's so ludicrous, why give it this credibility?

Hillary throwing up the smokescreen here, never mentioning that Politico reported, not the right wing, that the anonymous birther e-mail (!) circulated in the Clinton campaign in early 2008:

HILLARY CLINTON: That is – no. That is so ludicrous, Don. You know, honestly, I just believe that, first of all, it’s totally untrue, and secondly, you know, the President and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that. You know, this is such a bad example of what’s wrong with, you know, instantaneous reactions and Americans getting all worked up and people feeding prejudice and paranoia like Donald Trump. And obviously all of us have to stand against it. And, you know, I have been blamed for nearly everything, that was a new one to me, but you know, I’ll just keep going and talking about what I want to do to get income risings and making college affordable and making all of the positive changes that we have to be worried about.

Hillary Clinton's greatest achievement: Creating the birther movement

Flashback to 2011 and Politico, here:

Obama’s controversial but emphatically Christian pastor emerged as a campaign issue and the belief that he was a Muslim seemed to lose traction.

Then, as Obama marched toward the presidency, a new suggestion emerged: That he was not eligible to serve.

That theory first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,” asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.

The Original Birther

Obama's Real Lie: Hiding His Own Bogus Claim Of Kenyan Birth

Erick Erickson at Red State, here:

The point is not that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. The point is that Barack Obama has repeatedly been perfectly okay embellishing and having others embellish his qualifications and biography to make himself someone unique instead of just another Chicago politician. The pattern goes back to his job as a “financial reporter”. A former colleague of his and Obama fan, way back in 2005, claims Barack Obama really embellished his resume describing his financial related reporting. ...

Barack Obama embellishing his biography to make himself look unique? Hardly worthy of press attention. In fact, nothing Barack Obama has done suggesting serious character flaws — and that’s what this is about — is ever worth the media’s collective attention. Why? Because some people think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but much of the press corps is pretty damn sure he was born in Bethlehem.

One last point — a friend raised this on email. Could this be why the campaign screams bloody murder about racists and birthers every time someone asks about Barack Obama’s college transcripts? This would explain why Obama is so squirrely about the issue and waited until Donald Trump caused him measurable damage in the polls on this issue before responding. He’s not embarrassed that people will find out he lied about being born in Hawaii; he’s embarrassed they’ll find out he lied about being born in Kenya.

Now Add "Shorters" to "Truthers" and "Birthers" in Conspiracy Theory Pantheon

I kid you not:

Another economic warfare tool that was linked in the report to the 2008 crash is what is called “naked short-selling” of stock, defined as short-selling financial shares without borrowing them.

The report said that 30 percent to 70 percent of the decline in stock share values for two companies that were attacked, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, were results of failed trades from naked short-selling.

The collapse in September 2008 of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, was the most significant event in the crash, causing an immediate credit freeze and stock market crash, the report says.

In a section of who was behind the collapse, the report says determining the actors is difficult because of banking and financial trading secrecy.

“The reality of the situation today is that foreign-based hedge funds perpetrating bear raid strategies could do so virtually unmonitored and unregulated on behalf of enemies of the United States,” the report says.

For the complete story at The Washington Times, go here.

The paranoid style in America lives to die another day!

NY Times Paints Loughner and Hard Money Libertarianism as Right Wing Extreme

The leftist ridicule offensive continues, designed to preoccupy the opposition and get the right fighting amongst themselves over who belongs and who doesn't, while the left presses on for new gun control measures and suppression of free speech.

Notice the elision going on in the first passage here:

He became an echo chamber for stray ideas, amplifying, for example, certain grandiose tenets of a number of extremist right-wing groups — including the need for a new money system and the government’s mind-manipulation of the masses through language.

Libertarians generally hold to hard money ideas, but that hardly makes them right wing, witness the long war of traditionalists like Russell Kirk against what he called "the chirping sectaries." The hard money idea is subtly paired with mind-manipulation conspiracy theory by the Times, whatever that means, without support and simply by assertion. Having been a fairly well-informed conservative since the late 70s, one is hard-pressed to know what the Times is even talking about. There you go again, one of our own might say now. We've had our Truthers and our Birthers. Now we've got our Minders, I guess.

One suspects the Times knows full well its only plausible case is in the Libertarian hard money ideology, as here:

A few days later, during a meeting with a school administrator, Mr. Loughner said that he had paid for his courses illegally because, “I did not pay with gold and silver” — a standard position among right-wing extremist groups. With Mr. Loughner’s consent, that same administrator then arranged to meet with the student and his mother to discuss the creation of a “behavioral contract” for him, after which the official noted: “Throughout the meeting, Jared held himself very rigidly and smiled overtly at inappropriate times.”

Notice the effort to paint gold and silver backed money as "a standard position" on the right. It isn't, and it hasn't been as long as conservatism has been resurgent since the 60s and Milton Friedman style monetarism and devotion to a strong dollar captured people's imaginations.

Clear-headed thinkers on the right, like George Will, have well noted the Federal Reserve's failure to maintain a sound currency partly because its mandate was divided in 1978 to include maintaining full employment. Instead, hard money ideology has been an enthusiasm prevalent on the fringe, among Libertarians, in the post-war era in view of the fact that the monetarist consensus has been breaking down due to its failures, and because the gold standard used to be, well, the law of the land, all the way up until . . . FDR.

The dishonesty of the presentation coheres with the view of the Times that, for most of its history, America has been a veritable right-wing nuthouse. They ought to know.

The Original Birthers: ModernGhana.Com

The Original Birthers: The Nigerian Observer

The Original Birthers: The Botswana Sunday Standard

The Original Birthers: NPR.ORG Refers To Obama As "Kenyan-Born"

Up Yours, America

The Wall Street Journal offers a penetrating critique of ObamaCare, as the Senate prepares to vote.

Or as the Democrat Senator from Rhode Island would put it: Just another bunch of white male supremacist Aryan skinhead birther pistol fanatics going off the deep end:

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.

To read the whole sorry tale, go here.