I just received the following press release from Andy Martin. Although it is out of date, it makes some interesting claims. Andy Martin accuses Barack Obama of repeated lying. What do you know? :
NEW YORK News Conference:
Obama Panics: Andy Martin's book forces Obama to admit he is illegitimate
ANDY MARTIN
Executive Editor
ContrarianCommentary.com
“Factually Correct, Not Politically Correct”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ATTENTION DAYBOOK/ASSIGNMENT EDITORS
ANNOUNCEMENT OF NEW YORK NEWS CONFERENCE JULY 14, 2008
OBAMA AUTHOR ANDY MARTIN FORCES OBAMA TO ADMIT HE'S ILLEGITIMATE
MARTIN SAYS RELEASE OF HIS BEST-SELLING BOOK PROMPTS OBAMA TO PANIC, MAKE ADMISSION OF ILLEGITIMACY
MARTIN ACCUSES OBAMA OF KNOWINGLY AND PERSISTENTLY LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE FOR DECADES OVER HIS PARENTS' "NON-MARRIAGE"
MARTIN'S CONTROVERSIAL BEST SELLER STARTS TO IMPACT THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
MARTIN CALLS OBAMA A "GIRLY MAN" FOR USING HIS WIFE TO ADMIT HE'S ILLEGITIMATE; OBAMA'S NO COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF ANDY SAYS
(NEW YORK)(July 14, 2008) Legendary Chicago Internet columnist and Obama author Andy Martin will hold a New York news conference Monday, July 14th to drop the first of several bombs on the Obama campaign: Obama is illegitimate and his parents were never married.
For the past four years one man has made Obama miserable: Chicago writer Andy Martin. Martin's accurate original article is cited as the source of later rumors concerning Obama's Islamic family roots. Martin has relentlessly and accurately investigated Barack Obama's lies.
"Obama knew we were working the 'illegitimate' story, and we were preparing a series of news conferences in conjunction with my book Obama: The Man Behind The Mask," Martin will state. "The Obama campaign also knew we were planning a lawsuit over his illegitimate birth. So they tried to use Obama's wife to do damage control. It was one of the most cowardly gestures in American political history.
"Jesse Jackson does not have to perform surgery. Obama is a 'girly man' who used his wife to ooze out the truth about his lies and his parents' lies. What kind of a commander-in-chief would the cowardly Obama be? Who would follow a leader into battle that was afraid to admit his parents were not married?
"Barack Obama, Senior, and Anne Dunham never married. Obama knows this fact. This is also why he keeps his white grandmother a virtual prisoner; she knows too, and she won't lie.
"Through the past several decades Obama has pretended he 'didn't know' the facts about his illegitimate birth. He thought he could get away with the big lie. And he almost did get away with it. But we kept digging. And we are still digging. We have more to come.
"We plan two weeks of news conferences and other Obama-related disclosures, all timed to coincide with release of my book. The book was mailed to some Washington media last Friday, and Monday afternoon it will be delivered in Midtown to Fox News, MSNBC and others. Demand for review copies has been so heavy we have already had to reorder. We expect the first truckload of Obama books to reach the warehouse early next week, depending on production schedules at the printer.
"The release of my book and attendant publicity has prompted Obama to panic. My book is the literary equivalent of a bone-jarring tackle in football, causing the ball carrier to fumble. Obama has been forced to drop the pretense his parents were married. It is time he told us the truth. His parents were never married, he knew his parents were never married; he repeatedly lied about his lack of knowledge concerning his parents' non-marriage. He should admit that is why he keeps his white grandmother virtually imprisoned and away from any media contact. He should beg the American people for forgiveness. Otherwise, his campaign is bakacht.
"If Obama had simply told the truth, the matter would probably be forgiven. But he repeatedly lies and pretends he 'doesn't know.' The cover-up is always worse than the crime. Jesse knows the truth. That is why Jackson has contempt for Obama.
"I criticized Obama for running a bogus campaign ad saying he grew up with a 'strong family and strong values.' The whole commercial was a lie. His father was a rake who never married his mother, and his mother showed abysmally poor judgment in being impregnated by a married man. Hardly a 'strong family' and certainly not 'strong values.' Quite the contrary. Shameful values is more like it.
"His mother was promiscuous and had a child out of wedlock, in 1961, when that was still scandalous behavior. Is this Obama's idea of 'family values?' Obviously, he has been deceiving the American people and hoping his advertising lies could overcome the truth. He has failed. My book is only the first step in our organized effort to deconstruct the mirage Obama created for the Democratic Party, and is now trying to re-create for the American people. Ironically, we're running a better and more focused campaign against Obama than John McCain is.
"We will have more to say about Obama later in the week," Martin will state.
TO PURCHASE BOOK: http://www.OrangeStatePress.com
ANDY E-MAIL: AndyMart20@aol.com
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Social Democracy and the Achievement Motive
There may be a deepening rift between American culture and its political structure. The cause is the shift from what Louis Hartz calls the Horatio Alger psychology of late nineteenth century America to the credentialism and "rationalization" that Progressivism initiated in the early twentieth century. I put rationalization in quotes because although the Progressives and their predecessors, the Mugwumps, along with early management theorists like Frederick Winslow Taylor and Fayol believed that bureaucracy, tight structure, merit-based systems and the like fostered efficiency, this was only a partial truth. Merit and structure foster efficiency where change is limited but may not be so important where change is rapid. Also, the measurement of ability is riddled with error, even when it is done properly, which it rarely is. The best measures of ability explain 25-30 percent of the variance in performance for a specific job. There has never been any serious effort to predict long-term, say life-long achievement. There are measures that may predict future success, but the book "Millionaire Next Door" suggests that the key variables, ethics, time preference, thrift, interpersonal skills, type B personality, and a stable family are not generally discussed in the personnel psychology literature or tangentially so. But most firms do not utilize valid criteria in hiring. So even the modicum of rationality that the Progressives advocate have not been implemented in most firms.
More importantly, American society has chosen to replace achievement and market success with college and graduate school diplomas in making selection decisions. This removes achievement from the equation, and stratifies society. Part of selection into college is family background, and part is IQ as tested by the various scholastic aptitude tests. Neither of these is identical with achievement. The correlation between IQ and job performance is about .55, which means that about 30 percent of the variance in job performance is due to IQ, 70% is not. The correlation becomes much weaker when one looks at life success over the long term. Success and short-term job performance are two different things. Ethics and the Aristotelian virtues (courage, prudence justice and sophrosunae, self-control, balance or moderation) play a significant role over the long term. The point isn't to diminish the importance of IQ or raise the importance of ethics. Rather, the point is that structure rather than market have increasingly predetermined outcomes, and rough measures of potential rather than human excellence have been rewarded. In the nineteenth century Whig philosophers could argue that wealth reflected religious or moral virtue. In the twentieth century, one can argue that wealth reflects gaming some corporate HR department's slapdash interview process or the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is only a hair better.
Thus, rather than achievement creating economic success, Progressivism decreed that success would be administered. The attack on achievement that began with the Progressive movement's emphasis on rationalized human resource management criteria and the related emphasis on professional degrees was carried forward by the social democracy of the New Deal, which reflected the ultimate fulfillment of the Progressives' agenda. The New Deal established the paradigm that experts can rationally determine the equitable distribution of wealth; that the very wealthy can retain their wealth intergenerationally through family trusts but that up-and-coming entrepreneurs would be heavily taxed upon death; that the use of coercion in the redistribution of wealth is acceptable; that the monetary system can and should be used to redistribute wealth as well as various compulsory welfare systems, such as social security and unemployment insurance.
The "conservative" attack on the New Deal focused on the unemployment insurance. In effect, the Democrats forced the Republicans into the same corner that Jefferson forced Hamilton, and the Republicans took the bait. The Republicans did not frame their complaints about the New Deal in terms of its bias toward the wealthy, in part because the Democrats were able to sufficiently cloak the bias by throwing up red flags that likely they anticipated the Republicans would charge. Social insurance is a small matter, and it could have been done voluntarily as many firms such as General Electric had been demonstrating by the 1920s through welfare capitalism. The public works of the Hoover and Roosevelt administration were nothing new. They had characterized American government since the pre-revolutionary days, and if anything were more voluntaristic than the approach that was often used in colonial America: forced labor.
What changed during the Progressive era was increasing subsidization of big business (which had always been subsidized) through the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, which increasingly became a conduit for subsidization of big business at the expense of small and at the expense of taxpayers. This can be coupled with regulation such as securities regulation, pension regulation, and health and safety regulation which purported to help small investors and employees but served the purpose of excluding entrepreneurial initiative and further consolidating power in the hands of large corporations and banks, which have through the twentieth century proved decreasingly efficient.
Thus, Progressivism attacked the achievement motive in two ways. First, by rationalizing selection for elite jobs, first through civil service and then through inept but rigid personnel requirements involving college diplomas that reflect IQ and class but not achievement. Second, Progressivism instituted a progressive process of regulation whereby elites could secure their position in the name of helping underprivileged groups whose lot became increasingly worse the more the social democrats helped them.
As a result, and because the debate between the advocates of achievement and social democracy devolved into a debate between two parties that advocate social democracy, the Democrats and the Republicans, the political and economic elite, through Progressivism, slowly wrenched America's heart out of its casing, and ate it, blood dripping from its Progressive chin. In effect, in the twentieth century Progressivism reversed the democratic and laissez-faire achievements of the nineteenth.
Louis Hartz wrote the following about those nineteenth century achievements:
"Freedom from state control went hand in hand with the religion of opportunity, which in the broadest sense democratized economic power and made it acceptable to the egalitarian ethos of a liberal society. Technically, of course, this correlation was not essential. One could have the Horatio Alger dream functioning in the context of the old Whig paternalism: Ragged Dick could dream of making his million in a business fostered by the government itself, and we cannot excuse Hamilton from his failure to grasp the Alger secret by referring to the state of the American economy. There was sheer blindness, sheer failure to understand America in the Hamiltonian attitude. At the same time the capacity of Whiggery to dispense with the state, or at least a portion of the state, did make certain things possible. One was a full appropriation, or perhaps one should continue to say "confusion" of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian symbolism. That symbolism had assailed the state for granting the corporate charter and thus interfering with individual enterprise. Now, with the reliance on the state diminished, the capture of this symbolism was facilitated. The granting of the corporate charter could be confused with corporate regulation, the corporation could be confused with the individual, and Jackson could be turned inside out. The antagonism of state and individual, originally created to disadvantage the corporation, could be twisted to its defense. Down to the present day it is the genius of this achievement to convert the ideological Jefferson into his own worst enemy."*
Hartz's point is brilliant although his history is inaccurate in several ways. The point is that the corporation became a vehicle for individual achievement. But through a process of increasing government support as well as economies of scale and foreign trade advantages, the corporation became ever-increasing in size. Rather than demand that corporations prove themselves in the market, the Progressive era established exponentially greater supports for big business. This enhanced support had a range of economic and social effects. One of these was an attack on the achievement motive through credentialism, regulatory obstacles to new enterprise ideas, and the inheritance tax, which excludes the economic elite through the institute of family trusts, restricting the inter-generational evolution of family firms.
*Louis Hartz, "Government-Business Relations" in Economic Change in the Civil War Era: Proceedings of a Conference on American Institutional Change, 1850-1873, and the Impact of the Civil War Held March 12-14 1964. David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, editors. Greenville, Delaware: Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation.
More importantly, American society has chosen to replace achievement and market success with college and graduate school diplomas in making selection decisions. This removes achievement from the equation, and stratifies society. Part of selection into college is family background, and part is IQ as tested by the various scholastic aptitude tests. Neither of these is identical with achievement. The correlation between IQ and job performance is about .55, which means that about 30 percent of the variance in job performance is due to IQ, 70% is not. The correlation becomes much weaker when one looks at life success over the long term. Success and short-term job performance are two different things. Ethics and the Aristotelian virtues (courage, prudence justice and sophrosunae, self-control, balance or moderation) play a significant role over the long term. The point isn't to diminish the importance of IQ or raise the importance of ethics. Rather, the point is that structure rather than market have increasingly predetermined outcomes, and rough measures of potential rather than human excellence have been rewarded. In the nineteenth century Whig philosophers could argue that wealth reflected religious or moral virtue. In the twentieth century, one can argue that wealth reflects gaming some corporate HR department's slapdash interview process or the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is only a hair better.
Thus, rather than achievement creating economic success, Progressivism decreed that success would be administered. The attack on achievement that began with the Progressive movement's emphasis on rationalized human resource management criteria and the related emphasis on professional degrees was carried forward by the social democracy of the New Deal, which reflected the ultimate fulfillment of the Progressives' agenda. The New Deal established the paradigm that experts can rationally determine the equitable distribution of wealth; that the very wealthy can retain their wealth intergenerationally through family trusts but that up-and-coming entrepreneurs would be heavily taxed upon death; that the use of coercion in the redistribution of wealth is acceptable; that the monetary system can and should be used to redistribute wealth as well as various compulsory welfare systems, such as social security and unemployment insurance.
The "conservative" attack on the New Deal focused on the unemployment insurance. In effect, the Democrats forced the Republicans into the same corner that Jefferson forced Hamilton, and the Republicans took the bait. The Republicans did not frame their complaints about the New Deal in terms of its bias toward the wealthy, in part because the Democrats were able to sufficiently cloak the bias by throwing up red flags that likely they anticipated the Republicans would charge. Social insurance is a small matter, and it could have been done voluntarily as many firms such as General Electric had been demonstrating by the 1920s through welfare capitalism. The public works of the Hoover and Roosevelt administration were nothing new. They had characterized American government since the pre-revolutionary days, and if anything were more voluntaristic than the approach that was often used in colonial America: forced labor.
What changed during the Progressive era was increasing subsidization of big business (which had always been subsidized) through the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, which increasingly became a conduit for subsidization of big business at the expense of small and at the expense of taxpayers. This can be coupled with regulation such as securities regulation, pension regulation, and health and safety regulation which purported to help small investors and employees but served the purpose of excluding entrepreneurial initiative and further consolidating power in the hands of large corporations and banks, which have through the twentieth century proved decreasingly efficient.
Thus, Progressivism attacked the achievement motive in two ways. First, by rationalizing selection for elite jobs, first through civil service and then through inept but rigid personnel requirements involving college diplomas that reflect IQ and class but not achievement. Second, Progressivism instituted a progressive process of regulation whereby elites could secure their position in the name of helping underprivileged groups whose lot became increasingly worse the more the social democrats helped them.
As a result, and because the debate between the advocates of achievement and social democracy devolved into a debate between two parties that advocate social democracy, the Democrats and the Republicans, the political and economic elite, through Progressivism, slowly wrenched America's heart out of its casing, and ate it, blood dripping from its Progressive chin. In effect, in the twentieth century Progressivism reversed the democratic and laissez-faire achievements of the nineteenth.
Louis Hartz wrote the following about those nineteenth century achievements:
"Freedom from state control went hand in hand with the religion of opportunity, which in the broadest sense democratized economic power and made it acceptable to the egalitarian ethos of a liberal society. Technically, of course, this correlation was not essential. One could have the Horatio Alger dream functioning in the context of the old Whig paternalism: Ragged Dick could dream of making his million in a business fostered by the government itself, and we cannot excuse Hamilton from his failure to grasp the Alger secret by referring to the state of the American economy. There was sheer blindness, sheer failure to understand America in the Hamiltonian attitude. At the same time the capacity of Whiggery to dispense with the state, or at least a portion of the state, did make certain things possible. One was a full appropriation, or perhaps one should continue to say "confusion" of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian symbolism. That symbolism had assailed the state for granting the corporate charter and thus interfering with individual enterprise. Now, with the reliance on the state diminished, the capture of this symbolism was facilitated. The granting of the corporate charter could be confused with corporate regulation, the corporation could be confused with the individual, and Jackson could be turned inside out. The antagonism of state and individual, originally created to disadvantage the corporation, could be twisted to its defense. Down to the present day it is the genius of this achievement to convert the ideological Jefferson into his own worst enemy."*
Hartz's point is brilliant although his history is inaccurate in several ways. The point is that the corporation became a vehicle for individual achievement. But through a process of increasing government support as well as economies of scale and foreign trade advantages, the corporation became ever-increasing in size. Rather than demand that corporations prove themselves in the market, the Progressive era established exponentially greater supports for big business. This enhanced support had a range of economic and social effects. One of these was an attack on the achievement motive through credentialism, regulatory obstacles to new enterprise ideas, and the inheritance tax, which excludes the economic elite through the institute of family trusts, restricting the inter-generational evolution of family firms.
*Louis Hartz, "Government-Business Relations" in Economic Change in the Civil War Era: Proceedings of a Conference on American Institutional Change, 1850-1873, and the Impact of the Civil War Held March 12-14 1964. David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, editors. Greenville, Delaware: Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation.
Janice Okubo on Obama Birth Certificate
Janice Okubo had stated that she believed the Obama birth certificate was accurate on June 13 and June 27 according to Politifact, a website of the St. Petersburg Times. On June 13, Janice Okubo stated that the Certificate of Live Birth that Politifact sent her was real:
"'It's a valid Hawaii state birth certificate,' spokesman Janice Okubo said June 13, 2008, after we e-mailed her our copy."
Then, on June 27 Politifact repeated this narrative.
It is not clear that Ms. Okubo's statements conflict with Pamela Geller's claim that the certificate is a forgery. There is a big question and three small questions. The big question is why is there no administrative body handling this instead of a St. Petersburg journalist?
One small question is whether the copy that the Obama campaign sent to Poltifact has the same problems that the copy on the Obama website has. Ms. Okubo does not state that she sent the birth certificate to Mr. Obama, which was the impression I had initially from her statement to the Hawaii newspaper.
Hence, the second small question is whether Dan Nakaso of the Hawaii newspaper exaggerated the extent of her verification.
The third small question is that I wonder if the St. Petersburg newspaper would be willing to permit a forensics expert to review their copy.
I have written the following to Amy Hollyfield of Politifact:
I appreciate your work on the Obama birth certificate. After your article's publication, questions about it's being a forgery were raised at http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html. The key problem for me with respect to this issue is why the United States administrates an elections system without requiring identification and background information as part of the public record, to include not only birth certificates but also fingerprinting, criminal record, marriage certificate, etc. We live in an age of identity theft, yet there is no administration of verification of candidates' credentials. I have inquired with the Federal Elections Commission, my state's (and other states') board of elections, my state's secretary of state, the IRS (which administrates campaign funding) and my Congressman. We have a sorely mismanaged election system that could use professionalization of its administration, as in requiring birth certificates and the like from all candidates. Is anyone sure that of all the state legislatures, Congressmen, Senators and local elected officials that there is not one or even a few who have relied on stolen identities?
To this end, I have developed a petition to the FEC at
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Federal-Elections-Commssion/
http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/2008/08/petition-to-request-federal-elections.html
Several of the 5,200 people who have signed it have wondered why candidates run without ID verification while someone like you is the one to attempt to verify Mr. Obama's birth certificate.
I would like to make an inquiry. Since you have a hard copy of the purported certificate, would you make it available to a forensics expert to verify? Ms. Okubo did not confirm that she actually sent you the certificate. Rather, she confirmed that it looked like a real certificate. Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs states that a forensics expert determined that the certificate posted on the website is a forgery. Would your newspaper be willing to allow or commission an independent forensics expert to further document your story?
Best wishes,
Mitchell Langbert
"'It's a valid Hawaii state birth certificate,' spokesman Janice Okubo said June 13, 2008, after we e-mailed her our copy."
Then, on June 27 Politifact repeated this narrative.
It is not clear that Ms. Okubo's statements conflict with Pamela Geller's claim that the certificate is a forgery. There is a big question and three small questions. The big question is why is there no administrative body handling this instead of a St. Petersburg journalist?
One small question is whether the copy that the Obama campaign sent to Poltifact has the same problems that the copy on the Obama website has. Ms. Okubo does not state that she sent the birth certificate to Mr. Obama, which was the impression I had initially from her statement to the Hawaii newspaper.
Hence, the second small question is whether Dan Nakaso of the Hawaii newspaper exaggerated the extent of her verification.
The third small question is that I wonder if the St. Petersburg newspaper would be willing to permit a forensics expert to review their copy.
I have written the following to Amy Hollyfield of Politifact:
I appreciate your work on the Obama birth certificate. After your article's publication, questions about it's being a forgery were raised at http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html. The key problem for me with respect to this issue is why the United States administrates an elections system without requiring identification and background information as part of the public record, to include not only birth certificates but also fingerprinting, criminal record, marriage certificate, etc. We live in an age of identity theft, yet there is no administration of verification of candidates' credentials. I have inquired with the Federal Elections Commission, my state's (and other states') board of elections, my state's secretary of state, the IRS (which administrates campaign funding) and my Congressman. We have a sorely mismanaged election system that could use professionalization of its administration, as in requiring birth certificates and the like from all candidates. Is anyone sure that of all the state legislatures, Congressmen, Senators and local elected officials that there is not one or even a few who have relied on stolen identities?
To this end, I have developed a petition to the FEC at
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/Federal-Elections-Commssion/
http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/2008/08/petition-to-request-federal-elections.html
Several of the 5,200 people who have signed it have wondered why candidates run without ID verification while someone like you is the one to attempt to verify Mr. Obama's birth certificate.
I would like to make an inquiry. Since you have a hard copy of the purported certificate, would you make it available to a forensics expert to verify? Ms. Okubo did not confirm that she actually sent you the certificate. Rather, she confirmed that it looked like a real certificate. Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs states that a forensics expert determined that the certificate posted on the website is a forgery. Would your newspaper be willing to allow or commission an independent forensics expert to further document your story?
Best wishes,
Mitchell Langbert
Comments on Janice Okubo's Story Switch
Phil writes:
>"Any shots of Obama wining and dining Janice Okubo on his vacation in Hawaii?"
I respond:
You can't help but wonder. She certainly did NOT write to me that she had given the campaign a certificate and that the one posted was accurate. Instead, she wrote to me that the freedom of information act does not apply to Hawaii. She saved this other information for later. I do not know the reason for the difference.
Mairi writes:
>"SHEESH! Do you believe these guys? They have no respect for us at all. Just label everyone out there a "crackpot" and have done with it. NOT!
I have written to Dan, but don't expect to hear from him any more than I expect to hear from Dan White......Maybe it goes with the name? LOL!
Janice is a REAL disappointment. Typical, "say one thing one day, and something different the next". I must applaud your efforts. Dealing with this as much as you have must be very aggravating.
Sincerely,
Mairi
I respond:
Not so aggravating, just tiring as I should be working on other things. I got the traffic up on my blog so I'm happy about that. I do not expect that I will single handedly reform the system, so I expect little. The one who irritates me is that reporter Dan Nakaso from the Hawaii newspaper. He ran a story without speaking to the other side. That's sleazy.
>"Any shots of Obama wining and dining Janice Okubo on his vacation in Hawaii?"
I respond:
You can't help but wonder. She certainly did NOT write to me that she had given the campaign a certificate and that the one posted was accurate. Instead, she wrote to me that the freedom of information act does not apply to Hawaii. She saved this other information for later. I do not know the reason for the difference.
Mairi writes:
>"SHEESH! Do you believe these guys? They have no respect for us at all. Just label everyone out there a "crackpot" and have done with it. NOT!
I have written to Dan, but don't expect to hear from him any more than I expect to hear from Dan White......Maybe it goes with the name? LOL!
Janice is a REAL disappointment. Typical, "say one thing one day, and something different the next". I must applaud your efforts. Dealing with this as much as you have must be very aggravating.
Sincerely,
Mairi
I respond:
Not so aggravating, just tiring as I should be working on other things. I got the traffic up on my blog so I'm happy about that. I do not expect that I will single handedly reform the system, so I expect little. The one who irritates me is that reporter Dan Nakaso from the Hawaii newspaper. He ran a story without speaking to the other side. That's sleazy.
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