Thoughts on The Certificate

I had previously written about David Horowitz's important Frontpagemag editorial concerning the birth certificate. Unlike most conservatives, I admire Saul Alinsky, and one of Alinsky's "rules for radicals" is that tactics that drag on too long become a drag. At the same time, variations on the birth certificate theme might be useful, but not everyone agrees. I solicited comments from some brilliant and insightful friends, and here they are:

Raquel Okyay writes:

The facts so far are "foggy", but what if the fog was lifted, and indeed Obama is shown not to be a natural born citizen, does he receive immunity from the constitution's requirement simply because he is a black man, and his election is historic? What you are proposing is to ignore facts and possibly permit a person to lie to the American people, and violate what is clearly enumerated in the U.S. Constitution (whether outdated or minor).

If you have an argument to change the Constitution to remove this requirement going forward, fine. But, for me changing the rules after the game is unfair and undemocratic. I do not think it is wrong for the electorate to question Obama's eligibility after the fact. Obama can simply produce the proper documentation and this controversy is over.

The very fact that the pissant media are completely ignoring this story is the most disturbing aspect and I think that in itself is a major point. And this is the essence of the argument -- liberty has to do with freedom from oppressive governments. When the government and their pissant media friends are hiding or confusing the truth, it is in fact, our liberty that is being ignored. True democracy only exists in truth of liberty!

Notwithstanding, David, you are still one of my favorite authors!

Cortes de Russy writes:

As Mitchell and I have discussed, I fall down on David's side of this argument for the primary reason that he states.

Where there are wrinkles to be ironed out in process, these can be readily managed through the tools at hand. Oklahoma's legislature, for example, has already proposed legislation that would require adequate proof of a candidate's legal and constitutional eligibility prior to a candidate being included on the ballot in that state. If only one state passes such a requirement, I believe, this issue will be put to bed forever.

Regarding the development of a political system and electorate that is more respectful of the original intent of the Framers regarding devolution of powers among the states, etc., the solution is not any "quick fixes" but rather a serious education effort that will convince and reinforce the principles which uphold individual liberty. For example, there was no discussion in the recent campaign regarding the appropriate role of government in the lives of its citizens. McCain had a perfect opening to ask the question when Joe the Plumber inadvertently prompted Obama's "spread the wealth" comment but he either missed it or he doesn't contemplate the question at any level.

Keeping this issue alive will only harden positions and make it all the more difficult to convince the majority of citizens that conservatives are not "kooks" but rather thoughtful and concerned actors on the American political stage.

David Horowtiz replies to Raquel:

What I am proposing is not to make further inquiries into the facts in this case. It's too late and the consequences of this debate are destructive to our nation and our constitution when we are fighting two wars and in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in our history. You say I am proposing to "possibly permit a person to lie to the American people." What president, legislator, political leader etc has not lied to the American people? This is a question that the 64 million Americans who voted for Obama will be asking if 5 unelected political appointees on the Supreme Court decide to disqualify him.

Second, when you say that "changing the rules after the game is unfair" you need to think about the fact that more than half the nation which still believes in Obama will be asking the same question.

Third, concerning your distress at the bias of the media. What else is new and why should its support for Obama on this minor issue be the point of your distress?

I apologize for speaking so bluntly -- and I do appreciate your graciousness in allowing me the latitude to be wrong -- but I really think this whole issue is an emotional one that boils down to conceding that we lost the election and now have to live with Obama as president. But I think the beginning of a conservative political revival lies precisely in accepting this fact.

Raquel adds:

Ok, David, I have tried to persuade you to the far side of the moon, and I have failed. :(

You are proposing that concerned citizens do not make further inquiries and I am proposing we inquire, inquire, and keep inquiring!

I concede to the fact that we lost the election, and whatever the outcome of this controversy, I agree that a new conservative revolution is in the workings. I have little doubt that Democrats will ultimately hang themselves, they don't need me and my silly questions.

A quick observation: both the mayor of Honolulu and the Chief Clerk (or whatever her title is) have stated that they have seen Obama's birth certificate and that it is valid. Unless they are criminals, that should suffice to settle the matter.

I, frankly, understand why the Obama people ignored this issue for, had they rushed to respond his interlocutors would have been encouraged to come up with other issues forcing him to respond further, etc. It would never have ended and would have done just what was desired: create an aura of doubt surrounding his candidacy.

I, too, am distressed at his victory but do not want to win by such means.

Phil Orenstein writes:

My comments are two words: cognitive dissonance. I've been avoiding this for the past week or so, but now I have to cough it up. When I first read David's 3 blogs arguing that the birth certificate issue was nonsense and conservatives should move on, and the hundreds of emotional responses that followed, I decided to put it on the back burner and not deal with it. To me and to those who had done their homework regarding the facts of the issue, we found it a straightforward issue of Obama's obfuscation and lying to the American people about his birth certificate as well as numerous other documents (college records, medical records, etc.) and by implication everything that he stands for including change, hope and transparency. Due to the legal hieroglyphics and intellectual gymnastics one had to go through to sort out the wheat from the chaff, even many conservatives just avoided it and admonished us to move on to the real issues. Mitch has done a yeoman's job in simplifying the issues. To put it simply, no document the Obama camp has so far revealed to the public is proof of his legitimate "natural born" status as required by the Constitution, including his COLB (Certification of Live Birth) which is not proof he was born in Hawaii. It is a stunning admission of guilt that Barack Obama would not, simply out of respect for the people he was elected to preside over, disclose the sealed "vault copy" of his birth certificate, which would have ended the debate for me, Mitch and others.

FrontPage is my computer's homepage, and I read David's blog every day. I respect him as my major intellectual hero, for having advanced the Academic Bill of Rights, taken the fight for our country's values and self defense directly into the schools with the IslamoFascism Awareness projects, wrote "the Party of Defeat", the only author I am aware of who unmasked the treasonous actions of the Democratic Party to sabotage our now victorious war in Iraq, and many more. To me David, having been on both sides of the political divide is a true visionary and great conservative voice for Americas future.

But when I read David's arguments for dropping the whole ball of wax, I was stunned...Or on the other hand am I missing something? Am I just obsessing over a silly issue that has no relevance to reality. If a terrorist struck on our soil tomorrow, would we still carry on over the vault copy? So I thought about David's main point that Obama had already won and that the continued frenzy of a fringe of us trying to point out the obvious truth to a majority of American's who don't do their homework and are seduced by ephemeral images, via the pissant media and academic indoctrination, is tantamount to banging our heads against the wall. So David's point, truth be dammed, is that we'll only be hurting ourselves by continuing along this road.

Now I am busy planning and promoting a great conservative event event in NY for Feb 2009 to rebrand the GOP as the true "Party of Lincoln." The key is to re-establish the image of our greatest leader, Lincoln in the American memory which has declined in the past few decades, since the guiding premise of teacher education is that members of minority communities are marginalized when national heroes are recognized. So Lincoln and our great heritage has been stripped from the curriculum. This is the travesty that is poisoning the Obama generation to be disconnected with our great past heritage and only find relevance is the messianic images Obama projects. Also, postmodernism has already made a mockery of everything sacred in the world including religion, our American heroes and the Constitution. So truth, history and facts to these majority of our fellow Americans schooled in progressive indoctrination, has little or no relevance. So in the end, while I agree with Mitch that Statism and lies have taken over both political parties, the addiction is so complete, that cold-turkey prescriptions for truth will be rejected by the body politic. Basically what I am saying is to move on. Obama will be haunted by the entire foul Chicago political machinery of Emanuel, Rezko and now Blagojevich following him into the White House to claim a piece of the filthy pie that Obama was groomed in. Let's put our heads together now and save our country!

David, I wrote this to get a load off my chest. However, I cannot in good conscience tell others to "move on" although I myself am too tied up to pursue the case further. I have to agree with my friends Raquel and Mitchell, that as long as their conscience compels them to pursue the truth, they should do so. Whether it gets to the justices or not, either the sealed vault copy shows he is natural born or not and the American people have a right to know. Take the Duke Lacrosse rape case. Now it's Blagojevich's and his connections to Emanuel and possibly both their resignations rather than staining Obama's record. So I applaud those who are still fighting since the same process of lies and cover-ups will continue for the next 4 years. Sorry, I can't honestly concede on this.

David Horowitz replies:

That last line is exactly right, and we need to be positioning ourselves to take maximum advantage of their mistakes...Well, the search for information is one thing, and I certainly am all for finding out the truth in these matters. The political act of seeking to void an election is quite another on a matter as de minimus as this, and that's what I object to...My point is not truth be damned, but with the election over there's no feasible way to establish the truth in a way that will persuade a majority of Americans, let alone a majority of the Obama voters that this is indeed the truth and Joe Biden should be president. Joe Biden???!!!! Are you sure you would want to go through with this even if you could which (I am convinced) you can't?

Vasos Panagiotopoulos writes:

David, I agree. As president of Columbia GOP 1982-83, Obama and I often debated at Ferris Booth Cafe, and I found him to be fair, decent and intelligent, even if he was persistently wrong and unable to stop talking. This issue makes conservatives look nasty and small. I think Dole, Giuliani and McCain are nasty and small and the big reason we were so badly defeated. Bush Jr, for all his failings, would have been an even match for Obama. Romney would have defeated him. Don't forget Bush was elected twice. McCain made the same mistake as Faso '06, Gore'08 and Nixon'60 and precisely the mistake Bush'88 avoided. Americans voted for Obama the decent chap, not the black, not the liberal. As a son of immigrants (and a grandson of illegals) and a Columbia alum (and a fellow student of Brzezinski) I am darned proud of Obama. I don't think it is a coincidence that those here in Queens who hate CPAC board member and national conservative icon Serf Maltese with a passion also hate Obama. They only betray their own nastiness and help Obama.

In 1996 my assemblyman, Jim Buckley's former driver, Doug Prescott, was defeated by a pretty young attorney who happened to be the niece of a powerful judge. No one took her seriously because she was a "little girl." So our older volunteers didn't work much. A week before elections, the campaign office was closed for lack of staff. (In fact when our state senator correctly sued the feds for the local cost of illegals, our district's influx of Italians saw this, in combination with Andy Beveridge's study of Italians being NYC's top illegals, as an assault on them and voted for the Italian-surname "little girl" as the senator was running unopposed.)

I kept arguing all along, if you make Obama to be Jimmy Carter (thanks to Brzezinski) you can defeat him. If you play the race card, we will be totally defeated. I know pleny of conseratives from Columbia wo helped Obama because they genuinely liked him as a person. I can tell you I have reason to believe some prominent former Reagan youth members also helped him because they found McCain and his Nixonian coterie to be a nasty, noxious piece of garbage. Because of these small minded people, we have given Richard Dailey and Zbigniew Brzezinski control of the White House and the world for at least then next two years, if not for two decades.

Mitchell Langbert replies:

Dear Cortes, Phil, Raquel, Vasos and of course David--Thanks so much for your thoughtful correspondence about David's blog. I hope you don't mind that I posted everyone's comments on my blog. David is likely right, although the law suits may be creating a useful tactical or psychological imbalance. The recent Blagojevich news seems to confirm my early conclusion that Obama is not a nice guy. I don't think the people he's associated himself with (Vasos, you're obviously the exception) have been nice people. Not just Wright and Pfleger but the likes of Blagojevich, Daley and the entire Chicago sludge machine. Since the media wasn't interested in asking questions, it's easy for him to look great. Also, the Republicans are in worse trouble than Vasos and Phil are saying. I don't think that today they have the necessary ideological grounding to win, and in order to gain it they would need to reject a large portion of their likely financial support. I think the country is in trouble and more than just tactical and strategic planning is necessary. The Republican Party has lost its vision. Phil's idea about the party of Lincoln sounds great, but where are Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises now that we really need them?

Stock Market Volatility

Recently Warren Buffett said that if you wait until you hear the birds sing, it will already be spring. In other words, if the S&P 500 is forming a V formation, there will be a quick move back to the last ten years' usual price range. If the S&P falls back to 720 as it did a few weeks ago (actually 750), there's a good buy. Many people are saying that the Dow might fall to 5,000 which would correspond to an S&P of 500 (the Dow is currently 8924 and the S&P about 900 and at their heights the Dow was slightly over 14,000 and the S&P about 1480.) A number of my students are bearish. In contrast, in 2000 they were all buying Internet stocks. This is true at both Stern School of Business and Brooklyn College. Both student bodies were buying Internet stocks in 2000 and are many are talking bearish now. When I said that I bought some GE shares a number of my Stern students scoffed, saying the financial risk was too great. However, a Forbes writer, Ken Fisher, is bullish. Nevertheless, the majority of media hype has been very pessimistic. My mother, who does not invest in stocks, is extremely pessimistic. She believes that unemployment is at an all time high, forgetting that for most of my early professional life (from the time I graduated college in 1975 until the time entered the doctoral program in 1986) the current 6-7%unemployment rate was viewed as low. Howard S. Katz believes that this has been a rare, media-driven bear market. The vast monetary expansion of the past four months would seem to be a fundamentally bullish short-to-medium term phenomenon.

There is a certain illogic to the media's coverage of credit swaps. According to the media, the banks could not value the derivatives properly but invested in them anyway and now are losing their shirts. Now, they are experiencing unanticipated defaults and risk. But if they could not value the derivatives intelligently three years ago, why can they value them intelligently now?

I recently obtained a car loan for 6%. For much of my life car loans were above 10%. In 1991 I paid 11% to buy a Ford Probe. Now, I pay 6%. Does that suggest a massive catastrophe in the circulation of money?

It is difficult to grasp the current market downturn--is it purely a psychological panic, or is there something to the derivatives devaluing? Bears believe there is something, bulls (and they seem to be few right now) are skeptical. If the market decline is psychological as Howard S. Katz suggests, then spring may come in late winter.

I hold a fair amount of mining and gold stocks that have been hurt in this downturn but they went up very strongly today, about 10%. Overall, my portfolio is down about 11%, almost all of it due to the gold stocks and some commodities etfs. I have been buying stock during this downturn, though. It is possible that the Dow will fall to 5,000. In case, I am keeping some powder dry.

Orly Tatz Action Plan Re BO BC

Dear Mr. Langbert,
my name is Dr. Orly Taitz, ESQ. I represent 7 plaintiffs, seeking staying certification of elections, due to the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is ineligible. The case is in front of the Supreme Court of the US, Judge Anthony Kennedy. I would greatly appreciate support of all your readers. they caN GET MORE INFO ON DRORLY.BLOGSPOT.COM

Orly Taitz DDS Esq

According to the D Orly Tatz website :

>Urgent! What needs to be done now

There are a number of things you can do:

1. write to all 9 US Supreme Court justices in support of Lightfoot v Bowen, docket number 08A524

2. become a correspondent on my blog drorly.blogspot.com After you write an article call Bob Stevens (641--715-3900, ext 50926) or e-mail him at hound9_9@yahoo.com He can put your articles on the blog.

3. Very important!!! write an open letter to US att in Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, cc US att in DC Mike McCuskey, cc General Director of FBI, cc FBI in all the states and demand immediate indictments of Obama on massive fraud for following reasons:

a. he is not a natural born citizen (his father was a foreign subject, he doesn't qualify as a natural born, since both parents have to be citizens at the time of the child's birth in order to qualify as a natural born citizen, see Law of Nations ), he became a candidate on the ballot by fraud

b. fraud committed in collecting $650 million under false pretenses

c. lying under oath while being sworn as an attorney in Illinois (stated that he had no other names, concealed his identities, since he went by Barry Obama and Barry Soetoro)

d. Contact the FBI and US attorney's office, and assert that they need to investigate immediately expert reports showing that his selective service certificate is forged

e. Instruct the FBI and US Attorney's office that they need to subpoena his original birth certificate and investigate reports that the short form "certification of live birth" that Obama presented to the public appears to have been altered, fake or "forged".

f. The FBI and the US Attorney's office needs to subpoena medical records, coroners reports and death certificates for his grandmother Madelyn Dunham and has mother Stanley Ann Dunham (aka Obama, aka Soetoro, aka Sutoro aka Anna Toot) and investigate why the mother's deceased social security number 535-40-8522 shows as active as late as 2006, when she allegedly died in 1995. It shows 2 addresses in HI and 2 addresses in NY.

Please call FBI and US attorney's office and demand daily updates, as to when the indictments will be forthcoming. Those have to be issued ASAP, before Jan 20, 2009. You should also contact your state attorney general's office.

4. you can forward my pleadings in Lightfoot v Bowen and footage of 12.08.08. press conference at the National Press club to all the congressmen, senators, media and your friends and family. Thank you for willingness to help.


Contact Information

United States Attorney's Office
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division
219 S. Dearborn St., 5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60604
Phone: (312) 353-5300

United States Attorney's Office
Northern District of Illinois, Western Division
308 W. State St., Ste 300
Rockford, IL 61101
Phone: (815) 987-4444

Correspondence to the Department of Justice, including the Attorney General, may be sent to:

U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001
BY E-MAIL:

E-mails to the Department of Justice, including the Attorney General, may be sent to AskDOJ@usdoj.gov.

For the Illinois Attorney General, addresses and phone numbers are here. You can email the Illinois Attorney General's office by using this contact form.

Contact the FBI.

Dr. Orly Taitz, DDS Esq

Arson You Can Believe In

The following appeared in Newsmax:

>Gov. Sarah Palin's home church was badly damaged by arson, leading the governor to apologize if the fire was connected to "undeserved negative attention" from her failed campaign as the Republican vice presidential nominee.

Damage to the Wasilla Bible Church was estimated at $1 million, authorities said Saturday. No one was injured in the fire, which was set Friday night while a handful of people, including two children, were inside, according to Central Mat-Su Fire Chief James Steele.