Jerome R. Corsi's Blog, page 320

Obama changes his story: 'Born to a single mom'

Barack Obama’s path to the White House began when he famously introduced himself to the world at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 as the product of an “improbable love” between a Kansas girl and a Kenyan goat herder.

Elsewhere, Obama has insisted that the love endured even when his father had to leave a wife and a 2-year-old child behind to pursue dreams at Harvard. In his autobiography, Obama indicated that if only Harvard would have offered enough money to support all three of them, as another school did, they could have stayed together.

Now, it appears, Obama is aligning his story with evidence WND has reported for many years that his mother, Ann Dunham, never lived with Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and left Hawaii with her son only weeks after he was born.

Obama’s campaign website posted a photograph and a quotation from a rally yesterday in Golden, Colo., in which Obama declared his mother was not married at the time of his birth.

Learn more about the real story of Obama’s origins in “A Question of Eligibility,” “Where’s the REAL Birth Certificate?” and “Your Papers, Please?”

“Let’s face it, a mixed kid from Hawaii born to a single mom is not likely to become president of the United States,” Obama told the campaign rally. “But in America it can happen because of education, because somebody gave me opportunity.”

Obama campaign website: 'Born to a single mom'

The Obama campaign also posted the comment on Twitter, apparently seeing no conflict with the official Obama nativity story.

Obama campaign Twitter posting: 'Born to a single mom'

In September 2009, WND reported Obama repeated in an address televised to the nation’s schoolchildren the story he first told in his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” indicating the family was together until his father left for Harvard in June 1962.

“I get it. I know what it’s like,” Obama said in the televised speech. “My father left my family when I was 2 years old, and I was raised by a single mom who had to work and who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us the things that other kids had.”

In the autobiography, Obama related a story his mother allegedly told him: “When your father graduated from UH (University of Hawaii), he received two scholarship offers. One was to the New School, here in New York. The other one was to Harvard. The New School agreed to pay for everything – room and board, a job on campus, enough to support all three of us. Harvard just agreed to pay tuition. But Barack was such a stubborn bastard, he had to go to Harvard. How could I refuse the best education? He told me. That’s all he could think about, proving that he was the best.”

But as WND reported in August 2009, Ann Dunham never shared a common address with Barack Obama Sr., either before or after the baby was born. The address published in the birth announcements for Barack Obama Jr. in two local Honolulu newspapers, as WND also reported, was the address of the grandparents.

See video of Obama’s statement yesterday about his birth:

In June 2011, WND reported Immigration and Naturalization documents indicated the agency has doubts that Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham were ever married. The INS, records show, was prepared to contest any attempt by Obama to extend his visa on the basis of his claim that he was married to a U.S. citizen and had fathered a U.S. citizen child.

In September 2009, WND reported no marriage certificate has ever been found for Obama Sr. and Dunham. Also, as WND reported, there appear to be no records documenting the whereabouts of Dunham in the six months between her purported marriage in February 1961 and the baby’s birth in August.

WND was first to report Dunham left Hawaii only weeks after the future president was born to enroll at the University of Washington in Seattle. Later, a university course bulletin showed the classes on Dunham’s transcript were held on the Seattle campus, beginning in late September 1961. Barack Obama Sr., meanwhile, continued his studies at the University of Hawaii in the fall of 1961.

 

Papers run porn king's ad, reject anti-Obama filmmaker

USA Today and the Washington Post turned down full-page ads for Joel Gilbert’s documentary exposing Barack Obama’s past, but they have published pornographer Larry Flynt’s full-page offer of $1 million to dig up dirt on Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

Flint, the publisher of Hustler magazine, is offering up to $1 million for verifiable information about Romney’s unreleased tax returns or details of his offshore assets, bank accounts and business partnerships.

Gilbert’s documentary, “Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception,” presents evidence Obama’s biological father is his teen mentor, the Communist Party activist Frank Marshall Davis, not Barack Hussein Obama, the student from Kenya.

Joel Gilbert’s DVD “Dreams from My Real Father” is available at WND’s Superstore

As WND reported, the New York Post was the only paper to accept the ad.

Larry Flynt's Hustler ad in USA Today and Washington Post

In an interview with WND, Gilbert charged USA Today and the Washington Post with hypocrisy in what he sees as editorial decisions motivated by political ideology.

“When a known pornographer offers cash to anyone to commit a possible crime, accessing private tax and bank records, USA Today and the Washington Post deem that acceptable advertising,” Gilbert said. “But USA Today and Washington Post censor my commercial product from their newspaper advertising. What is unbelievable is now believable!”

Mark Faris, a legal assistant for Gannett, the publisher of USA Today, told WND that Gilbert’s advertisement was rejected because USA Today did not consider Gilbert’s claims sufficiently documented. Faris said the newspaper was worried about the possibility of a defamation lawsuit.

Faris argued that the small print of the Flynt advertisement specified the offer was conditioned on someone obtaining the information legally, so the newspaper incurred no liability publishing the anti-Romney piece.

He told WND that the decision was not politically motivated.

Gilbert was not convinced.

“The fine print won’t help USA Today in a lawsuit, because the advertisement solicits information that can only be obtained illegally – the tax and bank records of a private citizen.”

Joel Gilbert's ad in the New York Post

He stressed the research that went into developing his documentary was sufficient to defend against defamation charges.

“My film is based on a two years investigation into Barack Obama’s official life story of ‘improbable love’ between his Kansas mother and a Kenyan goat herder, as Obama said of his early family life,” Gilbert said.

“My film reveals Obama’s story is a lie; in fact Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist Party USA propagandist who raised Obama, was the real biological father, who became the ideological father of Barack Obama.”

The Washington Post media office insisted to WND that the two ads aren’t comparable: “One makes factual assertions without substantiation. The other solicits information.”

But Gilbert insisted Flynt’s ad is “soliciting the commission of a crime against a presidential candidate, not seeking information.”

He asserted the information in his ad is substantiated in his film.

“No newspaper in the country requires verification of advertisers’ claims,” Gilbert argued, “they just write ‘advertisement’ on it, just like the New York Post did.”

See the “Dreams from My Real Father” trailer:

Video: Obama called Kenya his 'home'

A Reuters television news clip that captures Barack Obama calling Kenya his “home” has added to the mystery surrounding the president’s place of birth.

The clip – archived by the British-based news and content provider ITN – shows Obama with then-Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga at an Aug. 26, 2006, rally against AIDS.

“I’m so proud to come back home and see all you people are here,” Obama says.

WND reported last month Obama’s step-grandmother in Kenya, Sarah Obama, has a 2005 poster calendar on the wall of her home that proclaims “The Kenyan Wonder-Boy in the U.S.: Senator Barack Obama.”

The staged public event was held at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Kisumu, Kenya, about 37 miles from Sarah Obama’s home and his father’s gravesite in the village of Kogelo.

Find out all about the facts behind the Obama birth certificate issue, with “A Question of Eligibility,” “Where’s the REAL Birth Certificate?” and “Your Papers, Please?” as well as a number of items designed to raise awareness of the controversy.

The event was also filmed and recorded in a documentary, “Senator Obama Goes to Africa,” which shows the enthusiastic reception Obama received on his 2006 tour of Africa, his third visit to Kenya.

The pro-Obama documentary, designed to support his political career, appears to begin coverage of the event after Obama said, “I’m so proud to come back home.”

At the event, Obama and his wife Michelle took an AIDs test to demonstrate to the local people that the test was safe.

As Obama spoke, Odinga, a Luo tribesman like Obama’s father, stood prominently with him. Odinga was contesting President Mwai Kibaki for leadership of the African nation.

Kibaki criticized Odinga, a member of the Orange Democratic Movement, for appearing with Obama in a place where he was seeking votes.

In introducing the AIDS testing event, the documentary noted that in Kenya 1.3 million people, or 6.7 percent of the population, are living with HIV/AIDS. Another 1 million children are orphaned due to AIDS.

“One of the reasons we are here today is because HIV/AIDS have ravaged the community,” Obama told the assembled crowd. “Too many people, too many children have gotten sick. So one of the things we’re going to do here in front of this van today is that my wife and I are going to get tested for HIV/AIDS, because if you know your status, you can prevent illness.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control suggested to Obama that as many as 500,000 Kenyans would take the HIV/AIDS test after they saw him and his wife safely take the test themselves.

Barack Obama with Raila Odinga at 2006 rally

More importantly, however, Kenyans viewed the event as Obama injecting himself into the presidential contest on the side of Islamic Luo tribesman Odinga.

Skillfully, Obama and Odinga had transformed a health message delivered by a foreign politician into a low-key stump speech in which Obama was effectively endorsing Odinga’s candidacy, simply by how Odinga was positioned and filmed at the event.

The event was discussed in the 2008 New York Times bestselling book, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” on pages 94-96.

Claim: Obama hid 'gay life' to become president

A prominent member of Chicago’s homosexual community claims Barack Obama’s participation in the “gay” bar and bathhouse scene was so well known that many who were aware of his lifestyle were shocked when he ran for president and finally won the White House.

“It was preposterous to the people I knew then to think Obama was going to keep his gay life secret,” said Kevin DuJan, who was a gossip columnist in Chicago for various blogs when Obama was living in the city as a community organizer and later a state senator.

“Nobody who knew Obama in the gay bar scene thought he could possibly be president,” said DuJan.

DuJan, founder and editor of the Hillary Clinton-supporting website HillBuzz.org, told WND he has first-hand information from two different sources that “Obama was personally involved in the gay bar scene.”

“If you just hang out at these bars, the older guys who have been frequenting these gay bars for 25 years will tell you these stories,” DuJan said. “Obama used to go to the gay bars during the week, most often on Wednesday, and they said he was very much into older white guys.”

Obama, DuJan said, is “not heterosexual and he’s not bisexual. He’s homosexual.”

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen, who worked with the National Security Agency from 1984 to 1988 as a Navy intelligence analyst, confirmed DuJan’s claims.

“It is common knowledge in the Chicago gay community that Obama actively visited the gay bars and bathhouses in Chicago while he was an Illinois state senator,” Madsen told WND.

WND also spoke with a member of the East Bank Club in Chicago, who confirmed Obama was a member there and was known to be a homosexual. The upscale fitness club, which has some 10,000 members, is not a “gay” facility.  But it’s one of a number of places identified by the Chicago homosexual community as a “gay gym,”  where homosexuals meet and engage in sexual activity.

In April, WND reported a federal judge dismissed a libel case against Larry Sinclair, a homosexual who claimed Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign had paid to rig a polygraph test regarding Sinclair’s sensational charge that he had sex and used cocaine twice with Obama while Obama was an Illinois state senator. Sinclair tells his story in “Barack Obama & Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies & Murder.”

WND also reported former radical activist John Drew has said that when he met Obama when Obama was a student at Occidental College, he thought Obama and his then-Pakistani roommate were “gay” lovers.

In addition, rumors have swirled around Obama’s relationship with his personal aide and former “body man,” Reggie Love, who resurfaced on the eve of the Republican National Convention to support his old boss. Love resigned from the White House in November 2011 after compromising photographs of him as a college student received wide circulation.

WND also has documented in two separate articles, here and here, that Obama wore a gold band on his wedding ring finger from the time he attended Occidental College through his student days at Harvard Law School.

DuJan said that during Obama’s first presidential campaign, “there was fear in the gay community” about talking openly about Obama being homosexual, particularly after the murder in December 2007 of Donald Young, the openly gay choir director at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, who was known to be a close friend of Obama.

“People did not want to talk openly about Obama being gay,” he said.

“Then, when we saw how Larry Sinclair was demonized, anybody who would expose Obama worried they would be silenced if they dared to speak the truth about Obama’s gay life,” DuJan said.

‘Obama’s secrets’

DuJan said he has been told “Obama’s secrets would have to come out just like John Edwards’ secrets came out.”

He said Obama stopped going to gay bars and bathhouses in Chicago when he began running for the U.S. Senate in 2004.

“Back then, Obama could walk around Chicago and people generally wouldn’t recognize him, even though he was a state senator in the Illinois assembly at the time,” DuJan said.

DuJan insisted that while he’s a supporter of Hillary Clinton, he holds no personal animus toward Obama. He said he campaigned for Clinton in 2008 “because I had waited for years for her to be able to run.”

“I opposed Obama not because I’m a racist, or that I hate Obama, I just knew the type of person Obama associated with in Chicago,” he said.

He pointed to Obama’s association with convicted Chicago real estate magnate Tony Rezko, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Rev. Wright.

“Obama was a dirty politician that the media never wanted to vet – that’s what concerned me about Obama,” Du Jan said.

DuJan spoke further of his claims about Obama in an interview Monday night on Andrea Shea King’s show on BlogTalkRadio.com, which included questions from WND during the last half of the show.

Man’s Country

Madsen published an article in his Wayne Madsen Report in May 2010 claiming Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel were members of the same bathhouse in Chicago.

“President Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are lifetime members of the same gay bathhouse in uptown Chicago, according to informed sources in Chicago’s gay community, as well as veteran political sources in the city,” Madsen wrote.

He said the bathhouse, “Man’s Country,” catered “to older men,” noting “it has been in business for some 30 years and is known as one of uptown Chicago’s ‘grand old bathhouses.’”

Madsen wrote his 2010 report after traveling to Chicago to interview bartenders and customers at several “gay” bars.

DuJan gave WND a list of “gay” bars in Chicago where older customers hang out and tell stories about how Obama, prior to 2004, frequented visited to pick up men for sex, including several on Halstead Street, widely known as an “uber-gay Chicago street.

Writing in HillBuzz.org Tuesday, DuJan said rooms at Man’s Country bathhouse are still referred to as the “presidential suite,” or the “Oral Office,” because “the current President used to haunt the place when he was a just another Illinois state senator that no one had ever heard of or cared about.”

DuJan said he believes that, someday, “all of this is going to be as public knowledge as JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe and the other women he cavorted with while married to Jackie.”

“Someday,” he said, “in the next 10-20 years, everyone will know all about Man’s Country, and the place will no doubt get a plaque of sometime commemorating that place as a gay hangout for the future leader of the free world.”

New York Post ad exposes Obama's 'real father'

Joel Gilbert's ad in the New York Post

The New York Post has accepted a full-page ad declaring Barack Obama’s real biological father is the late Communist Party activist Frank Marshall Davis, not the Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama.

Filmmaker Joel Gilbert makes the case in his full-length documentary “Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception.”

The ad will run in the Post’s New York City, national and international editions Tuesday and Sunday.

Convincing the newspaper to accept the full-page ad required Gilbert to go personally to the Post’s main editorial office in Manhattan.

“It took a lot of discussion,” Gilbert told WND, “but we were given a very favorable position at the front of the newspaper in the news section.”

Joel Gilbert’s DVD “Dreams from My Real Father” is available at WND’s Superstore

Gilbert told WND the placement of the ad is “part of our national publicity campaign, designed to circumvent the mainstream media that is either too afraid or too corrupt to cover the evidence presented in this film.”

In an effort to reach the voting public directly, Gilbert is planning to mail out millions of DVDs in bulk across the United States.

Advertising anti-Obama DVD a ‘tough sale’

In July, Gilbert tried to place a similar version of his full-page advertisement in three of the nation’s most prominent newspapers – USA Today, the Washington Post and the New York Times – offering first to pay USA Today $90,000.

All three newspapers rejected the advertisement, with the New York Times specifically telling Gilbert, “The ad isn’t for us.”

“You would think the print media could use the money,” Gilbert told WND. “But apparently, an ideological bias toward supporting Barack Obama is more important to the newspapers than the money.”

Gilbert’s problems getting his DVD advertised have not been limited to establishment newspapers.

Newsmax.com also rejected the “Dreams from My Real Father” banner advertising campaign in early May, even after Gilbert had reached an agreement and paid for the campaign in advance.

“Newsmax pulled the banner advertising campaign at the highest level of the organization,” Gilbert said. “Newsmax told me the organization was trying to appeal to the political center and the concern was that publicizing Gilbert’s DVD might make the news organization appear too conservative.

Newsmax’s Tom Mulcrone told WND that Newsmax never accepted Gilbert’s banner ad.

“We are a news organization, and we need to be careful with what we send out,” Mulcrone told WND.

The cell phone call to Mulcrone ended abruptly and Mulcrone did not return voice messages WND left requesting to complete the interview.

A Communist Party mentor

“Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multi-cultural ideal, a man who stood above politics,” Gilbert explained. “His father was a goat-herder from Kenya, so Barack Obama would bring people together, so the story went.

“However, as I show in the documentary, the truth is Barack Obama has a deeply disturbing family background, including a father who was a propagandist for the Communist Party USA – a fact Obama has intentionally hidden in order to obscure his Marxist political foundations.”

Gilbert acknowledges voters are willing to overlook many faults a politician may have.

“However, providing a false family background to hide a Marxist political agenda is irreconcilable with American values and a totally unacceptable manipulation of the electorate,” Gilbert stressed.

Gerald Horne, a contributing editor to Public Affairs, an openly Marxist political review, made the first positive identification of “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis.

In March 2007, Horne gave a speech at New York University on the occasion of the Communist Party USA archive being placed at a NYU library.

In the speech, Horne discussed Davis, noting Davis, who was born in Kansas and lived much of his adult life in Chicago, had moved to Honolulu in 1948 at the suggestion of his good friend, actor Paul Robeson. In the 1940s, Robeson was an outspoken critic of segregation and racial discrimination in the United States, who was also a strong advocate of the Soviet Union and a member of the Communist Party USA.

Horne also documented Davis’s friendship with the Dunham family in Hawaii.

“Eventually, [Davis] befriended another family – a Euro-American family – that had migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”

Lorne further documented Davis was “a decisive influence in helping [Obama] to find his present identity as an African-American, a people who have been the least anti-communist and the most left-leaning of any constituency in this nation.”

After Horne’s speech, the identity of “Frank” was never in doubt, nor his importance in the development of the young Barack Obama.

On Dec. 5, 1956, Davis appeared in executive session before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee investigating “the scope of Soviet activity in the United States,” one of the McCarthy-era committees seeking to expose communists considered to be a security threat.

Invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, Davis refused to answer a direct question asking if he was then a communist.

A year earlier, in 1955, a Commission on Subversive Activities organized by the government of the Territory of Hawaii identified Davis as a member of the Communist Party USA; the committee singled out for criticism several articles Frank Marshall Davis published in the “Communist Honolulu Record” that were critical of the commission.

See the “Dreams from My Real Father” trailer:

 

Israeli science website: Obama birth certificate forged

Israel Hanukoglu

Israel Science and Technology, the national database and directory of science and technology-related websites in Israel, has published an article asserting the long-form birth certificate released by the White House is a forged document.

The website was created by a former science adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.

Hanukoglu, an award-winning researcher, is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in the Department of Molecular Biology at Ariel University Center of Samaria in Ariel, Israel.

The professor established the first version of his website during his tenure as Netanyahu’s science adviser. The site has evolved into “the premier science and technology portal for Israel.”

The website says that the White House’s release of the Obama document in April 2011, after years of controversy, “raised in our minds the possibility that there could be something suspicious about the information available on this document.”

The website conducted an independent analysis and cites others who came to the same conclusion.

The website says the publication “of such a blatantly fake document about something so basic as the birthplace of Mr. Obama, should raise great concern about the suitability of the person who is holding the reigns on the most powerful country of the World.”

Israel Science and Technology explains why, as a site of science and technology, it dedicated “a page to expose forgery about a document related to Mr. Barack Hussein Obama.”

“Mr. Obama is the president of the USA that is currently the leader of the Free World, and the most powerful country in the Western hemisphere,” the site says. “In his position as the President, the policies pursued by Mr. Obama affects the whole world and not just the USA.”

Moreover, inaction by members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as U.S. courts, despite many appeals, also was seen to “raise a concern about how the governmental institutions of the reputedly best, and certainly the most important democracy in the Free World have avoided the issue.”

The missing ’1′

Utilizing the software program Foxit Reader version 4.3.1, the Israel Science and Technology website examined the PDF file posted by the White House April 27, 2011, and found that the last digit of the birth certificate’s number, 61 10841, disappears under 800-percent magnification.

Also, the font of the last digit is different from the other digits.

“This is only one example,” the Israelis concluded after examining the birth certificate number. “Many more examples can be discovered by examining magnified document with full page view of the document.”

Conclusion: “In brief, this simple analysis using just a viewing software reveals that the PDF document has been altered by a graphics software.”

The ‘ungrouped’ image

Next, the Israeli Science and Technology site examined the PDF birth certificate file in the freely available Inkscape graphics software, version 0.48.1.

“In vector graphics software, an image is composed of elements,” the website notes. “If the ‘Long-Form Birth Certificate’ of Obama was a photocopied document then it should not be composed of separate parts.”

The website says the status line “at the bottom of the software reports that the image is composed of ’2 objects’ that have been grouped.”

The Israelis found the Obama birth certificate PDF could be ungrouped, revealing individual layers. The most important of nine different ungrouped layers also shows the final digit, 1, is missing in the birth certificate number 61 10641.

Israeli Science and Technology “ungrouped” image of Obama long-form birth certificate

Israeli Science and Technology cited as additional evidence of forgery the following analyses, many of which were first published by WND:

An expert analysis of the typography and layout of elements in the long-form birth certificate by Mara Zebest, here and here
The conclusion of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse” that the birth certificate is fake.
“From A to Z: What’s Wrong with Obama’s Birth Certificate,” published by WND May 13, 2011.
“Irrefutable’ Proof of Obama Forgery,” published by WND July 17, 2011.
“A Tale of Two Birth Certificates,” published by WND April 28, 2011.
“Layered Colors ‘Simple Proof of Obama Document Forgery,” published by WND July 26, 2011.

Look what's happened to Eastwood's empty chair

Exhibit 1: Karl Marx

Following actor Clint Eastwood’s provocative presentation at the Republican National Convention last week, the “empty chair” metaphor has taken on a life of its own, symbolizing the Obama administration’s failure to fulfill the “hope and change” expectations of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Eastwood’s prime-time act featured a mock conversation with Obama, who was represented by an empty chair.

Perhaps one of the more humorous examples of the empty-chair meme  circulating on the Internet is a photograph of Karl Marx  that serves as “proof” Obama met the author of “The Communist Manifesto.”

Get your copy of “Running On Empty,” the latest issue of WorldNetWeekly digital magazine.

As seen in Exhibit 1, the proof turns out to be a studio photograph of Marx with his left hand resting on the back of an empty chair.

The Hill’s “Twitter Room” noted that Obama opponents on Twitter had dubbed Sept. 3 as “National Empty Chair Day,” supported with a “National Empty Chair Day” site on Facebook, as seen in Exhibit 2.

Exhibit 2: Facebook “National Empty Chair Day” page

A.F. Branco at LegalInsurrection.com created a logo for “National Empty Chair Day,” posted with the encouragement “free to use,” as seen below in Exhibit 3.

Exhibit 3: National Empty Chair Day logo

The National Empty Chair Day was subtitled “Eastwooding Obama” in a page created on Facebook that currently has over 75,000 “invites,” as seen in Exhibit 4.

Exhibit 4: “Eastwooding Obama” Facebook page

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has doubled down, posting on Twitter the image of an empty child booster seat mounted on a wooden adult chair, as seen in Exhibit 5.

Exhibit 5: Sarah Palin’s spoof

Under #EmptyChairDay, a host of photos were posted on Twitter, including a Photoshopped image of U.S. troops in a helicopter ferrying an empty chair, as seen in Exhibit 6.

Exhibit 6: U.S. troops ferry an empty chair

Another Twitter empty chair post, as seen in Exhibit 7, targeted Solyndra, the bankrupt “green” energy company that received federal loan guarantees that, the Romney campaign charged, amounted to “crony capitalism.”

Exhibit 7: Solyndra empty chair post on Twitter

TheConservativeTreeHouse.com has a series of humorous empty chair images, as seen in the following exhibits:

Exhibit 8: “Smithsonian exhibition updated,” posted at TheConservativeTree.com

Exhibit 9: “Obama Accepts the Nomination,” posted at TheConservativeTree.com

Exhibit 10: “The Nobel is awarded,” posted at TheConservativeTree.com

HillBuzz.com got into the act, with Kevin DuJan posting as the “Winner, Hands Down, Best of Meme” an image of “Obama’s Empty Chair on Mount Rushmore,” as seen in Exhibit 11.

Exhibit 10: “Obama’s empty chair on Mount Rushmore,” posted on HillBuzz.com

The empty chair image inspired a YouTube video musically mocking Obama for his reputation for golfing in preference to focusing on unemployment and economic recovery.

Now, with the decision of the Democratic Party to move Obama’s DNC acceptance speech from the 74,000-seat Bank of America stadium in Charlotte to the much smaller convention site, “Empty Chair Day” has morphed into “Empty Stadium Day” on Twitter, given momentum by the Weather Channel predicting a zero chance of rain at the scheduled time of Obama’s speech.

 

Top Dem: Christians want Jews 'slaughtered'

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., a Jewish Democratic county chairman lashed out at evangelical Christians, claiming they aren’t true friends of Jews and that Christians want Jews “slaughtered” to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ.

“I’m Jewish,” Palm Beach County Democratic chairman Mark Alan Siegel told Scottie Neil Hughes, a reporter attending the DNC who represents Patriot TV and the Tea Party News Network. “I’m not a fan of any religion of any religion other than Judaism.”

Hughes asked, “So, you’re not a fan of Christianity?”

“No, I’m not,” Seigel answered. “The Christians just want us to be there so we can all be slaughtered and converted and bring on the second coming of Jesus Christ. They (Christians) are not our friends. They want Israel to pursue policies that are antithetical with its security and existence.”

Seigel deflected a question from Hughes, determined to continue his diatribe.

“The worst possible allies for the Jewish state are evangelical Christians, who want Jews to die and convert so they can bring on the second coming of their Lord,” he declared. “It is a false friendship. They are seeking their ends and not ours.”

The Jewish Week, published in New York, reported that Seigel had been angered over the omission of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in the Democratic Party platform.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported just last week that South Florida, “the state’s Democratic stronghold,” sent a bus organized by Seigel that brought 40 Democrats to the DNC in North Carolina. The bus left from Deerfield Beach on Sunday, with stops in West Palm Beach, Port St. Lucie, Daytona Beach, St. Augustine and Jacksonville.

Travel expenses reportedly ranged from $150 to $175 per person, compared to a cost of approximately $400 for airfare.

NFL star urges blacks not to vote for Obama

Retired National Football League star Burgess Owens, a Super Bowl champion with the Oakland Raiders, has urged African-Americans not to vote for Barack Obama simply on the basis of race.

In his newly published e-book, “It’s All About Team: Exposing the Black Talented Tenth,” Owens recounts how he grew up as a liberal Democrat and supported Jimmy Carter.

A bankruptcy in the 1980s forced him to move his wife and four young children, the oldest 10, into the basement of his mother-in-law’s Brooklyn home.

At one point during that time, Owens worked as a chimney sweep during the day, built a networking business at night and then began a midnight shift as a security guard.

Still, through the economic difficulties, he retained confidence that he would be able to provide for his family and that his future would be brighter.

“I believe that my worth is not measured by what I do, by the honors that are bestowed upon me or by material wealth that I might obtain,” he writes. “Instead I am measured by the courage I show while standing for my beliefs, by the dedication I exhibit to ensure my word is good and the resolve I undertake to establish my actions and deeds as honorable.”

Owens told WND in an exclusive interview last week in Tampa, during the Republican National Convention, that his faith in God has inspired his life.

“We are going to have to have black ministers stand up once again,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have been a little disappointed that we have issues out there like traditional marriage, abortion, school education, and we have so much silence from the black community, from black preachers, because they understand first hand the impact of all that. We can no longer support those who are against the faith.”

Owens said social welfare programs promoted by the Democratic Party have created a government dependency within black communities to the detriment of the family and economic progress.

The progressive policies of the Democratic Party, he said, have created a culture of “defeat, breakdown, failure and collapse” in the African-American community, where abortion has taken the lives of 13 million black babies since 1973, an average of 325,000 deaths each year.

Owens has rejected “War on Poverty” government dependency in favor of the principles of our Founding Fathers.

“It is no accident that this country has been blessed with its abundance and its history as the freest and most productive in the world,” he writes in his book. “As its citizens humbly recommit to an acceptance of guidance from the God of our fathers, our nation will once again see the miraculous resurrection of the proud, responsible, visionary black father. And with him, his family and community will be lifted.”

Owens identifies with the themes of private enterprise and individual initiative.

“It’s heartwarming to hear from just normal Americans the same thing over and over again, ‘I went out there and I worked it, and I built it,’” he told WND. “That ‘I built it’ is the American way, and it comes back down to how are we’re going to change the black community.”

Burgess Owens talks to WND

For Owens, that formula begins with belief in God, the restoration of the black family and the encouragement of black children to get an education to prepare them to compete economically.

“It’s not going to be white Americans who are going to do it,” Owens said. “It’s going to be black Americans who have turned within themselves, and they go out and build great businesses, and they build communities.”

Owens sees Obama building a central government structure typical of socialist governments that espouses advancement for minorities, while in reality enslaving them.

“There is still a desire, by most within the black community, to recapture for their children the ideals of a traditional family where moms and dads commit to each other and to their children through the lifelong bonds of marriage,” Owens concludes. “We can be the kind of example as the black middle class was for decades to give encouragement to others who follow.”

Obama suffers amnesia blaming Bush for economy

In the current narrative presented by Democratic Party operatives, the banking industry collapse of September 2008 was caused by tax cuts under George W. Bush and supply-side economics tracing back to the era of Ronald Reagan.

The narrative, however, ignores the personal responsibility Barack Obama and Democratic Party operatives played in creating the subprime mortgage market, beginning with the passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

The 2008 banking collapse was triggered by a series of failures in the mortgage-backed securities market resulting from massive defaults in the subprime mortgage market and derivatives supporting the mortgage market that caused Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns to go bankrupt. Financial giants such as Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Merrill Lynch and AIG threatened to follow suit, as detailed by the Guardian of London.

As WND reported in May 2009, Obama himself played a role as an activist lawyer in Chicago, representing ACORN in the 1994 case Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank. In the case, ACORN pressed Citibank to make more loans to marginally qualified African-American applicants “in a race neutral way.”

ACORN Housing, then a nationwide organization with offices in more than 30 cities, used the Citibank litigation to push the group’s radical agenda to get subprime homebuyers mortgages under the most favorable terms available.

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977

The Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA, was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977 with the goal of forcing banks to provide credit to businesses and homeowners with poor credit.

The CRA’s purpose was to stop banks from “red-lining,” or refusing to lend to people in low-income areas because the risk of the loan not being repaid was too high.

Even though lending to people with poor credit is inherently risky, the Carter administration was intent on forcing banks to accept a social responsibility to provide credit to homeowners and businesses in low-income neighborhoods.

The CRA was super-charged during the Clinton administration with a set of new rules that allowed subprime mortgages to be securitized.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in a speech to the Community Affairs Research Conference in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 2007, noted a 1992 law passed during the Clinton administration expanded the CRA market by requiring the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to securitize “affordable housing loans,” a euphemism widely understood to mean low-income housing loans.

Clinton expands subprime mortgage market

Securitization of mortgages into bonds, a process that became a multi-trillion-dollar business in the 1990s, increased dramatically the liquidity, or amount of money available, to make new home loans.

Because mortgage originators could sell their mortgages to investment bankers, creating mortgage-backed securities, mortgage originators did not have to hold the mortgage in their portfolio. As a result, mortgage lenders could more easily engage in riskier lending, including lending to less qualified buyers in the subprime market.

By allowing CRA-generated and other subprime mortgages to be included in mortgage-backed securities, the Clinton administration advanced a social agenda to extend homeownership into inner-city poverty, where prospective homeowners were typically not qualified to obtain a mortgage.

By definition, subprime lenders are not credit-worthy under normal lending standards. They typically cannot meet normal lending requirements to verify income and have a history of credit problems.

Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, in their 2011 book “Reckless Endangerment,” detailed how the subprime mortgage crisis resulted in the collapse of financial institutions in September 2008. The authors demonstrated, as noted on page 3 of the book, how Clinton’s “calamitous” homeownership strategy developed and “came to blow up the economy.” The authors calls it a “story of greed, good intentions, corporate corruption and government support.”

In the aftermath of the U.S. government takeover of Fannie and Freddie, attention focused on three prominent Democrats who served as Fannie Mae executives: Franklin D. Raines, former Clinton administration budget director; James Johnson, former aide to Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale; and Jamie Gorelick, former Clinton administration deputy attorney general.

All three prominent Democrats earned millions in questionable compensation while serving as top Fannie Mae executives.

Raines earned $90 million in his five years as Fannie Mae CEO, from 1999 to 2004; Johnson earned $21 million in just his last year serving as Fannie Mae CEO, serving from 1991 to 1998; and Gorelick earned an estimated $26 million serving as vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2003.

All three were subsequently involved in mortgage-related financial scandals concerning their stewardship at Fannie Mae.

Franklin Raines

Franklin Raines’ problems began in 2004, when Fannie Mae’s regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, or OFHEO, and the Security and Exchange Commission’s top accountant issued reports charging that under Raines’ stewardship Fannie Mae had misstated earnings for three and a half years.

The $9 billion restatement of earnings required by the OFHEO and SEC ended up wiping out 40 percent of Fannie Mae’s originally stated profits from 2001 to mid-2004.

Raines resigned from Fannie Mae in December 2004, with a $19 million severance package.

Raines continued playing the victim until April 2008, when he and two other Fannie Mae top executives were ordered in a civil lawsuit to pay nearly $31.4 million for their roles in what amounted to an Enron-like accounting scandal.

Raines and the other Fannie Mae executives were accused in the civil suit of manipulating Fannie Mae books to manufacture earnings over a six-year period that stretched from 1998 through 2004 to trigger for themselves millions of dollars in otherwise unearned bonuses.

In the final settlement, Raines was also forced to give up Fannie Mae stock options then valued at $15.6 million.

A controversy broke out when the Washington Post noted in July 2008 Raines had taken calls from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain ran a television advertisement using the Post article as a source to claim Raines was an Obama adviser. But Raines issued a denial that he was an adviser to Obama or that he had provided the Obama campaign with advice on housing or economic matters.

In September 2008, as the controversy developed, the Washington Post stood behind its original report, noting Raines statement that month that he never provided Obama’s campaign with advice on housing or economic matters contradicted what he told the newspaper in July 2008.

James Johnson

James Johnson was appointed to head Obama’s vice presidential selection committee until a controversy concerning an alleged $7 millions in questionable real estate loans he received on favorable terms from failed sub-prime mortgage lender Countrywide Financial surfaced and forced him to resign.

The controversy over Johnson began when the Wall Street Journal reported June 7, 2008, that Countrywide had extended to Johnson and Raines millions of dollars in favorable home loans because they were “Friends of Angelo,” or “FoA,” as such preferential borrowers were known in the inner circles of Countrywide.

The Wall Street Journal carefully noted there is nothing illegal about a mortgage firm treating some borrowers better than others.

Yet, when two top Fannie Mae executives received the preferential mortgage treatment, it spelled political trouble for the government-sponsored, shareholder-owned company, as well as for the Democratic Party and the Obama presidential campaign with which Raines and Johnson were connected.

A lawyer for Johnson insisted to the Wall Street Journal that Johnson’s Countrywide home mortgage loans were within industry practice; Raines did not respond to the newspaper’s requests to comment.

Jamie Gorelick

In 1998, Fannie Mae Vice Chairman Jamie S. Gorelick received a bonus of $779,625, despite her alleged involvement in a scandal in which Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions to manipulate books to meet 1998 earning targets. The targets, in turn, triggered multi-million-dollar bonuses for top executives, including Gorelick.

The 1998 bonus reported for then-Fannie Mae Chairman and CEO James Johnson was $1.932 million. Then-Chairman-designate Raines received $1.11 million.

After leaving Fannie Mae, Gorelick encountered controversy a second time, over an alleged conflict of interest when a 1995 memo she authored as deputy attorney general at the Justice Department during the Clinton administration surfaced while she was a member of the 9/11 commission.

The memo, which outlined a policy that became known as the “Gorelick Wall,” appeared to put in place barriers that barred federal anti-terrorist criminal investigators from accessing various federal records and databases that may have assisted them in their criminal investigations.