La presse ne s'interroge pas sur Obama

L'autre Obama que la presse comme il faut s'évertue à ignorer.

Notre blog est un des rares espaces francophones à se faire l'écho des doutes persistants nés de la candidature de Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) à la présidence des Etats-Unis. Les interrogations de quelques esprits chagrins ont été ignorées ou ridiculisées ou marginalisées par les grands médias et le candidat Obama a finalement été élu et il occupe désormais la Maison blanche.

Que les questions soient pertinentes ou pas, l'absence de réponse de la part de l'équipe de BHO peut se comprendre.

En revanche, ce qu'il est difficile d'admettre est le refus pathologique des grands médias américains à enquêter sur BHO.

Dans son blog, Diane West fait une remarquable synthèse des questions qui mériteraient d'être posées sur le passé de BHO et le refus des journalistes de s'en faire l'écho.

A mes yeux, les engagements de jeunesse de BHO ne le disqualifient pas plus que le président Mitterrand n'était disqualifié pour avoir reçu la Francisque des mains du maréchal Pétain.

Toutefois, la logique du système américain implique une totale transparence pour les personnalités publiques.

Or BHO ne se plie pas à cette exigence de transparence et de vérité.

Pour des motifs qui restent obscurs.

A titre d'exemple. Tout porte à croire qu'il est bien né à Hawaï. Alors, pour quelle raison se refuse-t-il à publier l'original de son extrait de naissance ?

De même, les liens de BHO avec les milieux de la gauche radicale sont soigneusement occultés par les médias.

On a du mal à imaginer une mansuétude semblable pour un candidat républicain qui dans sa jeunesse aurait des relations avec un groupe mal vu des médias comme American Renaissance.

C'est un parfait exemple d'une politique de « deux poids, deux mesures». Et après on s'étonne que les Américains se tournent massivement vers FOX News et sur internet au détriment des grands médias traditionnels.

The Pathology of Media Denial

This week's column (way below) examines the continuing, increasingly dangerous failures of the media to cover Barack Hussein Obama as a subject worthy of analysis and curiosity beyond the scope of White House handouts and Obama-memoir "Dreams." Taboo is the topic of the radical Left -- Marxist -- milieu in which Obama was steeped and mentored, and which, as the authors of the book depicted above make clear, influences Obama administration policy to this day.

But this same republic-threatening radicalism is an item that triggers self (media)-induced censorship -- as it always has. During the presidential campaign, for example, it was only the accidental celebrity of Joe the Plumber in mid-October, 2008 that made Obama's brand of socialism into any kind of a headline; although, if you recall, the media then proceeded to turn their investigative energies not into whether Obama was indeed a socialist but into whether Joe was indeed a (licensed) plumber. Even the appearance online of evidence of Obama's participation in a socialist party, the New Party, failed to match media standards of what was fit -- i.e., safe for their candidate -- to investigate, let alone print.

Recently, thinking back on this period, I went back to a stash of old email correspondence with producers at CNN, where over several years I had appeared as a commentator on the Lou Dobbs shows, becoming an official "contributor" specifically keyed in to the presidential campaign cycle in July 2007. I discovered something I had never realized before: that the regularity of my gig, usually weekly or sometimes more often, particularly as the 2008 campaign barrelled to the finish, came to an abrupt end after October 17, the day I emailed one of the senior producers with links to a pair of online blog posts headlined: "Web Archive Confirms Barack Obama Was Member of Socialist `New Party' in 1996;" and "Second Source Confirms Obama Socialist Party Membership Plus How They Infiltrated Democratic Party."

"I've included the links to the documents below, in case you would like to check the story out," I wrote.

I think it's safe to say crack CNN investigative units failed to materialize. But quite suddenly, while I appeared a second time that same week to tape a previously scheduled "Lou Dobbs" round table, that was it for my regular gig.

Coincidence? I honestly don't know. I have no more than the dateline of events as evidence one way or the other. I was indeed invited on (more than one time after I specifically asked what was up) for a few more sporadic appearances (mainly holidays) but that turned out to be it -- almost a year before Dobbs himself left the cable network.

I did claw my way back for one more pre-Election appearance which just might have sealed my CNN fate as a non-person -- but it was well worth it. After opening with a fairly anodyne statement to the effect that voters had reason to wonder whether Obama as president would take the country "in a socialist direction," one of my roundtable conferes, Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf, accused me of "red-baiting" -- a slur that is supposed to indicate a slanderous lack of evidence and thereby shut down discussion -- which I had a wonderful time rebutting.

So much for memory lane. The Manchurian President tells us this debate is about our future.

The syndicated column:

The first response to publicist Maria Sliwa's e-mail queries to news organizations about whether they would like to receive a review copy of "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists" came back from a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor.

The answer was "no." But it wasn't just "no." The reporter called the book by journalist-author-WABC radio host Aaron Klein and researcher Brenda J. Elliott -- at the time embargoed and thus unread -- a name for toilet paper I'd rather not print. Reflexively, Sliwa hit the delete button (thus losing the reporter's name for posterity). But when other e-mails started coming back with similarly visceral (and even similarly scatological) responses, she started saving them, realizing the reactions themselves were a story.

And so they are. Again, these e-mails, some of which appear below, are responding to the prospect of a new book by a journalist known for groundbreaking work as the Jerusalem-based correspondent for the popular conservative news site Worldnetdaily.com. Klein was also the journalist who first put the Bill Ayers-Barack Obama story together in February 2008 -- 5,000 miles from the United States.

"Ridiculous crap," wrote John Oswald, news editor of the New York Daily News.

"Never, ever contact me again," wrote Time Magazine senior writer Jeffrey Kluger.

"Absolute crap," wrote Evelyn Leopold, former U.N. bureau chief for Reuters.

"Seriously, get a life," wrote David Knowles, AOL's political writer.

"This is sensational rubbish that is of no interest to any legitimate publication," wrote Newsweek deputy editor Rana Foroohar.

Such attitudes help explain why Newsweek is on the block, and why mainstream media (MSM) in general are hurting. But the mindset itself remains mysterious. These ladies and gents of the Fourth Estate didn't just want to ignore the Klein-Elliott book about Barack Obama's radical ties, they wanted to denigrate it, and some quite angrily, which is an out-of-sync reaction to a book that last week debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at No. 10. Somehow, the book was personally or even existentially offensive to these MSMers' most cherished convictions. Whether such convictions balance on a halo affixed to Barack Obama (threatened by the book's revelations), or rest on their own sorry credentials as news professionals (ditto), or something else, I don't know. But this rejectionist reflex, which characterized the abysmal 2008 Obama campaign coverage, is why we now have a president who poses a danger to the future of the republic.

Unfortunately, conservative media, too, are relatively AWOL on this book. Even Fox News, which has indeed hosted Klein, hasn't built on the book's newsiest chunks, the ones that make it stunningly clear that Obama's radical-filled past was, as they say, merely prologue. From Obama's participation in the socialist New Party in the mid-1990s, to his connections to communist-terrorist Bill Ayers, it's all relevant today. How? For example, some of the same anti-American, anti-capitalist revolutionaries from those bad old days now help craft republic-changing legislation.

Take Obama's 2009 stimulus package that launched the outraged Tea Party Movement. As the authors report, a radical group with a Marx-inspired agenda called the Apollo Alliance strongly influenced the legislation -- as the group repeatedly brags at its website (apolloalliance.org), charting similarities between the stimulus bill and Apollo's recommendations, and citing Senate House Majority Leader Harry Reid's tribute to Apollo as an "important factor." Among Apollo's Leftist founders is Joel Rogers, who co-founded the socialist New Party. Jeff Jones, who co-founded the Weather Underground with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, is the director of Apollo's New York office. The authors further explain why it is that, as a project of the secretive Tides Center - on whose board sits Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN and former member of Weather Underground's parent group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- the Apollo Alliance's financial sources are effectively impossible to trace.

All of this isn't "guilt by association." It's association, a key to understanding how the radicalism of Obama's past today shapes the policy dictating our future. And it cries out for further journalistic digging. Consumers of New Media - blogs, talk radio -- already know some of the story, while The Manchurian President's brisk sales guarantee a wide audience. But the MSM? Clueless. Which wouldn't much matter if it still weren't the case that only the MSM cover the president. Or do they cover-up the president?

Un héros de la liberté oublié : Whittaker Chambers

Whittaker Chambers est un de ces héros du XXe siècle dont le nom n'est jamais cité. Normal, il a largement contribué à mettre hors d'état de nuire la cinquième colonne soviétique aux Etats-Unis et mis en lumière les responsabilités de leurs compagnons de route dans la gauche comme il faut, celle qui porte costume et cravatte en fréquentant les soirées mondaines.

Non sans raison, le commentateur Alan Snyder met en lumière les parallèles entre la situation à l'époque du New deal et la présidence Obama. A cette époque comme à la nôtre, les adversaires de la politique du président sont démonisés. Par exemple, toute la gauche bien pensante dénonce le mouvement des Tea Parties comme étant le fruit d'une droite réactionaire et raciste tout comme leurs prédécesseurs ont tenté de dénigrer les adversaires de l'Union soviétique en les accusant de mener une « chasse aux sorcières ».

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Whittaker Chambers: The New Deal as Revolution


Whittaker Chambers had a secret. He had worked in the American Communist underground for most of the 1930s. His break from that underground had been hazardous; he hid his family for quite some time before surfacing. When he did, his unique writing talent earned him a place at Time magazine, where he eventually rose to be one of its senior editors.

Whittaker Chambers at His Desk at Time Magazine

In 1939, with the outbreak of WWII, Chambers decided he needed to inform the FDR administration of what he knew about those currently working in the underground. Through an intermediary, he obtained an interview with Adolf Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security. During his evening with Berle, Chambers disclosed a long list of individuals who could be threats to the country during a war that he sensed the U.S. would eventually have to enter.
Berle seemed alarmed by the revelations. Chambers was relieved that now the truth would come out. Yet when Berle took this information to FDR, he was rudely dismissed—FDR didn’t care.
When Chambers finally realized the administration was apathetic to the traitors in its midst, he had to reassess what he knew of FDR and his policies. In his classic autobiography, Witness, he describes how this rebuff affected him:
And with astonishment I took my first hard look at the New Deal. . . . All the New Dealers I had known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends. I myself thought of the New Deal as a reform movement that, in social and labor legislation, was belatedly bringing the United States abreast of Britain or Scandinavia.
What shocked Chambers was that he recognized for the first time that the New Deal was far more than a reform movement. It was ”a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation.”
This “revolution” was not taking the same form as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, but its effect was just as sinister:
It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution.
Chambers was quite prescient in this analysis. American historians have long noted that in the last half of the nineteenth century, presidents played second fiddle to business leaders. This never sat well with progressives. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made strides in the shift to power politics, but they suffered a setback in the 1920s under Harding and Coolidge, who were ingrained with the principles of self-government and sanctity of private property.
Then came the Depression and all the wonders that government could perform to ease the plight of the American people. Chambers saw that even though the New Deal was not an overt socialist/communist ploy, it worked in tandem with that philosophy. New Dealers, most of whom would have never considered themselves either socialists or communists, were, due to their progressive policies, fellow-travelers. As Chambers explains,
Thus men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism, in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves, except that it was just the Communists who were likely to be most forthright and most dedicated in the common cause.
Critics of Witness often howled at Chambers’s association of liberals with socialists and communists. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, they cried. Yet Chambers put his own reputation on the line giving his witness before Congress in 1948, as he testified in the landmark Alger Hiss case. He knew, from personal experience, that the difference between liberalism and communism was in degree only: both put their faith in man and rejected faith in God; therefore, they shared a common worldview.

Chambers Testifying before the House Committee on Un-American Activities

Chambers summarized the symbiotic relationship quite nicely:
Every move against the Communists was felt by the liberals as a move against themselves. . . . The Communists were fully aware of their superior tactical position, and knew that they had only to shout their innocence and cry: “Witch hunt!” for the liberals to rally in all innocence to their defense.
Some things don’t change: we are still undergoing a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking, and we continue to hear the snarls of “witch hunt” whenever this revolution is challenged. What we need now is the same tenacity shown by Chambers. He completed his “witness.” What will we do?

Trente secondes qui valent de l'or

Harold Wilson disait qu'une semaine c'est long en politique. Arlen Specter dirait la même chose de… trente secondes.

Vétéran sénateur républicain, Arlen Specter n'avait rien trouvé de mieux que de changer de parti après la victoire écrasante de Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) afin de profiter de cette vague bleue (couleur du parti démocrate) pour se maintenir au pouvoir.

Or, il a fait face à de dures primaires au sein du parti qui l'a accueilli. Son opposant, un amiral à la retraite a bénéficié du soutien actif, intelligent et diligent d'une équipe de publicitaires qui a concocté un petit bijou de propagande électorale qui a fini de déconsidérer Arlen Specter auprès des militants démocrates.

Trentes secondes qui valent de l'or.

Obama menace la liberté d'expression

Selon ses écrits, Elena Kagan pourrait dire « Je n'aime pas ce que vous dites et je ne veux pas que vous ayez le droit de le dire. Je suis pour une liberté d'expression à la française : restreinte »

Elena Kagan, la juriste proposée par le président Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) pour devenir le prochain juge de la Cour suprême a fait l'impossible pour ne laisser aucune trace de ses opinions et avis sur des sujets qui tiennent à cœur l'opinion américaine.

Son entregent et son sens des relations publiques lui ont permis d'occuper les plus hautes fonctions tant à l'université que dans l'administration publique sans pour autant avoir donné les preuves écrites de sa compétence.

Ses adversaires tout comme ses soutiens sont bien en peine de trouver dans ses écrits de quoi affûter leurs argumentaires.

Peu d'articles savants et pas de jugements… Un vide sidéral qui tranche avec les bibliographies et archives bien fournies des autres candidats potentiels. Un fait stupéfiant quand ont connaît la réalité de ce dicton universitaire américain : Publish or perish (« publie ou péris »). Sans articles ou sans ouvrages publiés un chercheur ne peut progresser dans la hiérarchie académique. Pourtant Elena Kagan l'a fait.

Un article d'Aaron Klein dans un site farouchement anti-BHO vient de jeter un pavé dans la mare. Dans un article publié en 1993, Helena Kagan plaide en faveur d'une restriction de la liberté d'expression si celle-ci met en péril l'idéal d'harmonie raciale et d'égalité.

Si on suit ses recommandation, les Etats-Unis peuvent tomber bien bas, peut-être même aussi bien que la France, pays où la liberté d'expression est restreinte par la loi et où les dissidents sont condamnés à la prison ferme ou à de lourdes amendes.

Je fais des vœux pour que la candidature de cette liberticide soit rejetée par le Congrès.

Kagan: Some speech can be 'disappeared' Wanted 'societal costs' counted against 1st Amendment rights NEW YORK – President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, argued certain forms of speech that promote "racial or gender inequality" could be "disappeared."

In her few academic papers, Kagan evidences strong beliefs for court intervention in speech, going so far as to posit First Amendment speech should be weighed against "societal costs.”

In her 1993 article "Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V," for the University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan writes:

"I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation."

The hottest book in America is the one that exposes the real Obama! Get your autographed copy only from WND!

In a 1996 paper, "Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine," Kagan argued it may be proper to suppress speech because it is offensive to society or to the government.

That paper asserted First Amendment doctrine is comprised of "motives and … actions infested with them" and she goes so far as to claim that "First Amendment law is best understood and most readily explained as a kind of motive-hunting."

Kagan's name was also on a brief, United States V. Stevens, dug up by the Washington Examiner, stating: "Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs."

Kagan's academic writings are sparse – just nine articles, two of which are book reviews.

Her stand on free speech could become a hot button issue as the Senate convenes to confirm her. If approved, Kagan would give the high court three women justices for the first time. She would be the youngest member on the current court and the first justice in nearly four decades without any prior judicial experience.

WND has reported that in her undergraduate thesis at Princeton, Kagan lamented the decline of socialism in the country as "sad" for those who still hope to "change America."

WND also reported Kagan has advocated for an increased presidential role in regulation, which, she conceded, would make such affairs more and more an extension of the president's own policy and political agenda.

Kagan was nominated as U.S. solicitor general by Obama in January and confirmed by the Senate in March. She was a dean of Harvard Law School and previously served alongside Obama as a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

A former clerk to Abner Mikva at the D.C. federal appeals court, Kagan was heavily involved in promoting the health-care policy of the Clinton administration.

Obama praised her because while he said a "judge's job is to interpret the law, not make the law," she has evidenced a "keen understanding of the impact of the law on people's lives."

The president said she has a "firm grasp on the nexus and boundaries between our three branches of government."

But more importantly, she understands, "behind the law there are stories, stories of people's lives," Obama said.

Kagan said the law is "endlessly interesting" and also "protects the most fundamental rights and freedoms."

With research by Brenda J. Elliott.

Un point de vue favorable à Elena Kagan, ici.

Un point de vue de gauche hostile à Elena Kagan, ici.

Elena Kagan pourrait mettre en péril un des grands privilèges de l'Amérique : la liberté d'expression des opinions les plus indéfendables, du racisme à la pédophilie, en passant par le pire et l'indicible. Voici un exemple extrême, impensable en France, qui démontre la solidité de la société américaine.

Obama, toujours des questions sans réponse

THE BRIDGE: THE LIFE AND RISE OF BARACK OBAMA

David Remnick

Picador, 621pp, £20


Il est difficile à la presse américaine de se défaire de son « obamania». Pour le moment elle n'aborde toujours pas les questions difficiles soulevées par le refus persistant du président de dévoiler l'original de son extrait de naissance ou celui de rendre publiques ses archives privées comme tous ses prédécesseurs.

Pourtant il est des zones d'ombres liées à sa carrière politique qui mériteraient que les journalistes fassent preuve d'un peu plus de curiosité. Quand voici peu l'hagiographe du président David Remnick a publié son long conte de fées consacré à la vie édifiante de Barack Hussein Obama (BHO), il s'est bien gardé de poser des questions clef relatives à son entrée en politique.

Aucune des recensions publiées dans les grands médias américains n'a relevé ces lacunes. Le journaliste politique américain John R. MacArthur, spécialisé dans le coupe-gorge de Chicago, a écrit un compte-rendu qui n'a pas trouvé preneur aux Etats-Unis.

C'est l'hebdomadaire britannique Spectator qui l'a publié. On comprend pourquoi.

Under false colours


‘With time,’ writes David Remnick, ‘political campaigns tend to be viewed through the triumphalist prism of the winner.’ Never more so, perhaps, than in Remnick’s idolatrous new biography of Barack Obama, which presents the First Black President’s ascension to the White House as nothing less than a glorious saga.

Deeply read — if not rooted — in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Obama is said to have derived his spectacular political success from the great and martyred prophet Martin Luther King, Jr and King’s closest disciples, especially John Lewis. In this account, by the editor of the New Yorker, Obama’s life journey began, metaphorically, on 7 March 1965, in the middle of the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, when hundreds of black marchers, led by Lewis and Hosea Williams, were halted by state troopers, reinforced by a deputised white mob, who bludgeoned and tear-gassed the demonstrators as they knelt and prayed. The conscience of the nation was shocked, the Voting Rights Act was swiftly passed, and the path was opened, for the first time since Reconstruction, to full participation by African-Americans in their country’s electoral politics.

To Obama, who was only four at the time and living in relative safety with his white mother and white grandparents in multi-cultural Hawaii, the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ are the stuff of inspirational legend that stimulate his political ambitions when he learns about them later in life. For Remnick, however, ‘Bloody Sunday’ is central to the biblical arc of Obama’s rise, as well as to the narrative structure of the biography. The ‘bridge’ is finally crossed and the saga completed when we learn, at the book’s end, that Obama owns a framed cover of Life Magazine, signed by Lewis, depicting the 1965 confrontation in Selma. At a luncheon following Obama’s 2009 inauguration Lewis, now a veteran Democratic congressman, received a souvenir signature from the new president with the dedication, ‘Because of you, John.’

As satisfying and reassuring as all this sounds, there are reasons to distrust Remnick’s version of ‘the Life and Rise of Barack Obama’. For one thing, the book has all the tell-tale signs of an authorised biography, crammed as it is with knowing inferences based on insider sources, both named and anonymous. Clearly, Obama and his advisers granted to Remnick access to friends and personal letters that were previously unavailable to journalists. Sitting presidents and their media counsellors take care who they talk to, and there’s every indication that Obama’s inner circle trusted Remnick to relay their version of the story, which he does dutifully, often at excruciating length.

To Remnick’s credit, he critiques Obama’s bestselling memoir Dreams of My Father, although he doesn’t challenge the essential facts as we’ve been told them. We do learn more than we previously knew about the intelligent, frustrated and rebelliously self-destructive Kenyan father, Barack, Sr, who probably served as an anti-role model in young Barack’s imagination. Obama’s abandonment by a black father, albeit a highly educated African one, places him within hailing distance of the experience of many black Americans. However, the divide between Obama and his less fortunate ‘brothers’ is huge: raised by his cosmopolitan mother and liberal, middle-class grandparents, Obama is able to attend the most elite private school in Honolulu, a privilege that guarantees him access to ever higher and more prestigious levels of education. At first a casual student, Obama seems to have found his academic drive at some point during his sophomore year at Occidental College, but Remnick, bogged down by a ponderous, race-centered narrative, doesn’t really explain either Obama’s new-found interest or his career choices. We know he wants to be liked, has a talent for pleasing all different kinds of people, is easily bored, generally wants to help the disadvantaged and develops ‘rock star charisma’. But we never get near his core.
Why, for example, does the up-and- coming Obama leave community organising in New York for the same sort of work in Chicago — a critically important decision, as things turned out. ‘Obama knew that he had had enough of New York,’ writes Remnick, who pads this non-insight with a quote from Obama’s then boss: ‘I asked him if it would help if I got on my knees and begged — and so I did. But it didn’t help. It was time for him to go.’ Maybe he didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere at Columbia, where, a friend tells Remnick, the newly studious Obama found Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian-American literary and political critic, to be a ‘flake’.
In Chicago, Remnick’s mythmaking turns from the merely annoying to the decidedly implausible. Again and again Obama is smart, bold and lucky — always at the right place at the right time. Even when he supposedly overreaches (as in his unsuccessful challenge to incumbent congressman Bobby Rush in 2000), Obama simply learns from his alleged mistakes. Remnick’s Obama is largely self-made and mostly independent from the family-ruled Democratic machine that has run the city and its surrounding county for most of the last six decades.

But nobody gets ahead in Chicago’s brutal, one-party political oligarchy without a sponsor — known in pre-PC days as a ‘Chinaman’ — and all the evidence suggests that Obama was spotted as talent by two important members of the Chicago establishment, a white lawyer named Newton Minow, and a key black aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley, Valerie Jarrett. Minow, a bien pensant liberal of the most hypocritical sort (he helped Rupert Murdoch buy the once enlightened Chicago Sun-Times), provides the white lakefront money and corporate connections, and Jarrett introduces Obama (as well as his future wife, Michelle, whom Jarrett hired) to her important friends at City Hall and around town.

To understand Obama’s cautious, essentially non-reformist conduct thus far as president, it is crucial to know how he got ahead in politically corrupt Chicago, but Remnick is either not interested in finding out or not up to the journalistic task. For him, Valerie Jarrett’s explanation is pretty much all you need to hear:

I always felt that I was doing someone a favour by introducing that person to [Obama]. It wasn’t like I was doing this just to help his political career.

A dubious notion, but the question of how Obama became a made man within the Chicago Democratic organisation is left hanging. Remnick’s former Washington Post colleague David Ignatius has reported — and my own inquiries support this — that the Daley machine privately ‘prodded’ the young state senator (by then under the tutelage of the machine’s leader in the Illinois Senate, Emil Jones) to run against Bobby Rush, in my opinion to punish Rush (a former Black Panther) for having dared to challenge Daley in the mayoral primary of 1999. This is standard procedure in Chicago politics: disturb the boss and suddenly you find yourself confronted by a well-funded, motivated, and even (in the case of Obama) articulate opponent from within your own party. The message is clear, whether or not you survive the challenge: don’t get out of line if you want your safe seat to remain safe. In this scenario, Obama wins even though he loses to Rush — he earns the confidence of the Daley machine.
With the mayor’s blessing, all sorts of good things come your way, including the expert tactical advice of David Axelrod and fund-raising prowess of Daley’s former chief of staff, John Schmidt. As described by Remnick, Obama on the make is a sunny idealist with a pragmatic understanding of politics, and Daley is something of a New Democrat, not in the same category as his thuggish father, Mayor Richard J. Daley. According to Remnick,
part of Richard [M.] Daley’s Machiavellian skill had been to modernise the Chicago political structure, removing its mailed fist but retaining its toleration of occasional corruption in the name of making things work.

Today, Chicago is so ‘modernised’ that Democrats hold 49 of 50 seats on a city council where there is even less independent Democratic opposition than in the days of the old boss Daley. And the mailed fist is still very much in evidence, as in Daley’s unilateral and illegal midnight bulldozing of Chicago’s lakefront airport, and his crushing (Remnick doesn’t mention it) of a rare city-council rebellion in favour of a special minimum wage for employees of large retail stores like Walmart.

Remnick sees mostly good in Obama’s accommodations to the party machine: after all, ‘to remain pristine in Chicago politics — to follow the path of someone like the independent alderman Leon Despres — was to put a cap on ambition.’ Remnick writes that Obama’s goal after five years in the state senate was to ‘re-establish himself as a Democrat independent of the Daley circle and organisation, but also as someone who would not wage an overtly anti-Daley race.’ Thus, Obama remained silent during the 2004 battle over the minimum wage, a law that would have helped Chicago’s working poor, including those in his own state senate district, to make ends meet.

Pristine we can certainly do without, but what about principle? There is nothing in Remnick’s biography about Obama’s eager courting, once he gets to the US Senate, of the sleazy Democrat-turned-‘independent’ Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, who continues to champion the invasion of Iraq that Obama once said he opposed. We hear almost nothing about his dogged pursuit of Wall Street and K Street lobbyist money (including the law firm of convicted felon Jack Abramoff) for his own and his party’s campaigns; nothing about his unfailing respect for the prerogatives of congressional committee chairman, or the spoils system that rules Washington, DC, through the awarding of pork-barrel projects and patronage appointments.
Given Obama’s Windy City heritage, it is no surprise that his health care ‘reform’ was written by Liz Fowler, a former executive for a private health insurer, who now works for Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a beneficiary of millions of dollars in contributions from insurance and health care companies. As ‘pragmatists,’ Obama, and Remnick, can easily rationalise such behaviour, despite the candidate Obama’s incessant rhetoric about ‘change you can believe in’. How else could he have wrested control of the party from its previously dominant faction, the ethically compromised fundraising machine called Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Nowadays, according to the Washington Post, even the Congressional Black Caucus is unhappy with Obama for doing too little (beyond recruiting poor kids to fight in Afghanistan) to combat black unemployment, now at 16.5 per cent. These disappointed heirs to Martin Luther King, Jr might want to refer to a more obscure book by Rickey Hendon, Obama’s former state senate colleague, cited by Remnick. In Black Enough/White Enough, Hendon relates a blatant case of Obama’s hypocrisy over Republican-sponsored budget cuts affecting the poor in their respective Chicago districts and to Obama’s ugly reaction when Hendon called him out in public. From this run-in, Hendon concluded that Obama was ‘bipartisan enough and white enough to be President of the United States’. I’m not sure that’s what Dr King had in mind for the Selma marchers when they reached the other end of the bridge.

John R. MacArthur’s latest book is You Can’t Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America.

Du Champaign pour Obama

Dans ce court extrait de quelque secondes qui a suscité un joli buzz sur You Tube, le maire de la ville de Champaign (dans l'Etat dont Obama avait été élu sénateur), interrogé par ce qui semble être un étudiant, n'hésite pas à affirmer qu'à ses yeux le président Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) n'est pas un citoyen américain.

L'argumentaire du maire, même s'il contient une erreur flagrante, BHO est bien un citoyen américain, contient un argument irréfutable : « s'il ne veut pas rendre public l'original de son certificat c'est qu'il a quelque chose à cacher ».

Le journaliste David Mercer, de l'AP, qui rend compte de cet événement, se garde bien de poser la question clef de ce débat : « pourquoi donc BHO n'a-t-il pas rendu public une copie de l'original de son acte de naissance » ?

Champaign mayor doubts Obama is an American

Video of comments about citizenship posted on YouTube

— When a man with a video camera at a tea party protest asked Champaign Mayor Jerry Schweighart what he thought of President Barack Obama, the three-term Republican didn’t hesitate.

“I don’t think he’s American, personally,” the mayor said Thursday in a video that’s been posted on YouTube. “You know, if you’re not willing to produce an original certificate like a birth certificate, then you’ve got something to hide.”

The 71-year-old Schweighart told The Associated Press on Friday that he stands by the statement.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “My stand, and I don’t understand why everybody is so upset, is he’s never shown the original birth certificate.”
Schweighart was echoing complaints made by some tea party activists and so-called birthers who doubt Obama is qualified to hold his office. Though state officials in Hawaii say records confirm Obama was born there, birthers say the president has never proven his citizenship.

A spokesman for the Illinois Democratic Party said he was surprised to still be responding to questions about Obama’s legitimacy as president.

“Most rational people have discarded that question years ago,” Steve Brown said.

The mayor’s statement led to discussion on local talk radio Friday. A half-dozen or more callers sounded off on WDWS radio’s “Penny for Your Thoughts” program, some backing the mayor, some saying he embarrassed the city.

Schweighart said the man who videotaped him appeared to be part of a student group from the University of Illinois who attended the rally in opposition to the tea party. The YouTube video was posted by someone whose online ID is illinoisgrads, but the person didn’t respond to a request for comment that The Associated Press sent through the Web site.

The mayor said he doesn’t know Obama, though years ago he shared a table with him at a Champaign event where Obama spoke. Schweighart said he had no particular awareness of Obama as a politician — much less concern about him — before the former senator from Illinois became president.

But Schweighart, who was a Champaign police officer for 32 years, said he shares many tea party concerns about the president’s health care plan and other issues.

“It’s just worrisome that the government is going to be running everything,” he said.

Barack Obama, le doute qui demeure

Un président qui n'ouvre pas ses archives privées.

Un an après mes premiers post sur ce sujet, les doutes d'une minorité active d'Américains sur les origines précises du président Barack Husein Obama (BHO) sont toujours présentes dans le débat politique aux marges de la société américaine.

En témoigne une nouvelle pétition qui circule sur la toile ces jours-ci et qui a le mérite de résumer les questions demeurées sans réponse à ce jour.

Validation of Barack Obama's Constitutional Eligibility

To: Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, Governors, Legislatures, Election Officials and all other controlling legal authorities of elections in the 50 states:

Whereas, by requirement of the United States Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, no one can be sworn into office as president of the United States without being a natural born citizen;

Whereas, there is sufficient controversy within the citizenry of the United
States as to whether presidential election winner Barack Obama was actually
born in Hawaii as he claims;

Whereas, Barack Obama has claimed to be the son of a Kenyan national and a subject of the United Kingdom at birth;

Whereas, Barack Obama was apparently adopted by an Indonesian national stepfather as a child, potentially abrogating his "natural born citizen" status;

Whereas, Barack Obama has refused repeated requests for the release of documents, such as his school records, college records, travel records, passport records, Selective Service records and health records, that might shed light on his citizenship status;

Whereas, Barack Obama has even refused repeated calls to release publicly his entire Hawaiian birth certificate, which would include the actual hospital that performed the delivery;

Whereas, lawsuits filed in several states seeking only proof of the basic minimal standard of eligibility have been rebuffed;

Whereas, this constitutional cloud over the commander-in-chief creates an exceedingly heavy burden on the nation's armed forces, some members of which, at great personal risk to themselves and their careers, are publicly calling for Barack Obama to prove his eligibility;

Whereas, Hawaii at the time of Obama's birth allowed births that took place in foreign countries to be registered in Hawaii;

Whereas, growing concerns that our governments and election officials are not taking this constitutional question seriously will result in diminished confidence in our system of free and fair elections:

Thriller Obama

Voici un exemple des documentaires qui cherchent à semer le doute quant aux origines du président Obama. Regardez-le car il résume bien une affaire dont les grands médias ne veulent pas parler.

Birther de vive voix

Pour ceux qui aiment les feuilletons télévisés américains en VO, voici le dernier épisode de Birthers.




Pour ceux qui préfèrent lire, voici un excellent article de Jonathan Valania publié à Philadelphie par le Philadelphia weekly.

The Birther Theory Local lawyer Phil Berg is convinced the president is an illegal alien.

In the soft twilight of the first Saturday of August, a gray-bearded man in a dark suit stood on the grassy knoll in front of Independence Hall and declared for the benefit of a film crew on hand that we are, as a nation, through the looking glass, people. Black is white, up is down, cats are dogs and the President of the United States is a fraud and a liar, a “usurper,” a foreign-born alien unqualified to hold office and the fact that he currently resides in the White House represents a constitutional crisis on a scale not seen since the darkest hours of Watergate.
The man who said these things was one Philip Berg, Esq., a private practice lawyer based in the Philadelphia suburb of Lafayette Hill, a lifelong Democrat and a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania. The film crew was shooting a sky-is-falling exposé with the working title Fall Of The Republic: The Presidency Of Barack Obama , produced by Austin, Texas-based talk-radio host Alex Jones, whose previous work includes The Obama Deception, which alleges darkly that the president is a puppet of a multinational cabal of corporate oligarchs, and Loose Change, which claims that 9/11 was an inside job.
“Our nation is in jeopardy,” Berg gravely intoned, as clusters of tourists filed past, some doing a double-take when they noticed the cameras, briefly studying Berg’s face for the earmarks of someone recognizably famous and then moving on when he failed to register.
“There are three constitutional requirements to be president: first, you must be 35 years old. Second, you must reside in the U.S. for 14 straight years and lastly you must be a natural-born citizen. And on this last point, Obama fails ... ” As Berg spoke, a warm breeze gusted behind him, wreaking havoc on his back-to-front combover. Long strands of hair flapped wildly in the breeze, peaking out behind his ears only to disappear and then reappear on the crown of his skull, creating the disturbing impression on camera that white tentacles were sprouting out of the back of his head.
This simply would not do.
The cameras stopped rolling and the film crew asked Berg to fix his hair. He gamely tamped down the stray hairs, but this would prove to be a fight with the summer wind that Berg wouldn’t win.
“I wish I would have brought some hairspray,” he said, wetting his fingers and plastering down the stray hairs before turning and asking a passing woman if she happened to have some hairspray he could borrow. She didn’t.
“I am doing this for the 1.5 million Americans that have died defending the Constitution,” he said righteously when the cameras started rolling again, only to stop yet again when the tentacles reappeared.
This time the camera crew asked Berg to turn slightly, hoping to angle the tentacles out of the shot.
“I believe Obama is setting himself up to be blackmailed by other countries, and that may explain the reason he has relaxed travel restrictions on Cuba—because they are blackmailing him,” said Berg before the hair-raising breeze returned and the tentacles were back.
Welcome to the bizarro nation, where everything we hold true is in fact a lie, magical thinking trumps scientific analysis, hysterical partisan operatics drown out the low hum of objective connect-the-facts narrative, and a recent survey indicates that nearly 60 percent of registered Republicans openly question whether or not the President of the United States is a natural born citizen. The one prominent Republican naysayer is, shockingly enough, Anne Coulter who publicly called people who question the president’s citizenship “cranks.” Truly, when Ann Coulter is the voice of reason, we are through the looking glass, people.
Almost exactly one year ago, just days before Barack Obama received his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Berg made headlines when he filed a lawsuit alleging that the candidate was not a natural born citizen of the United States and therefore not qualified to hold the office of president. In the time since Berg first filed suit, people who openly question President Obama’s place of birth have been dubbed “Birthers” by the media—a play on the nickname the media afforded believers in the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, aka Truthers. Because Berg has the dubious distinction of filing the first legal salvo in The Battle For Obama’s Birth Certificate, he is in essence the Alpha Birther, a status he both relishes and cultivates.
When the right wing fringes of the Internet began buzzing with questions of Obama’s eligibility early last summer, the Obama campaign posted a lo-res JPEG of his Certification Of Live Birth (COLB), the short form proof of birth currently used by the state of Hawaii. The poor quality of the JPEG provided an opening for self-styled forensic experts—emboldened by their triumphant debunking of the documents used for Dan Rather’s 2004 ill-fated 60 Minutes broadcast questioning George W. Bush’s National Guard service—to question the authenticity of Obama’s COLB. FactCheck.org, a respected non-partisan online outfit that truth squads various political claims, was able to examine Obama’s COLB and vouched for its authenticity (and posted a hi-res version of it online), as have Hawaiian state officials.
Still, the Birthers insist, the COLB is short on details such as the presiding physician and the name of the hospital where Obama was born. Those records are sealed, as per the federal Health Information Privacy Act of 1999 and Hawaiian state law, and will remain that way unless Obama greenlights their release, which to date he has not.
The Birthers take this as proof Obama is hiding something, while most others just assume he has more pressing concerns: two wars, a cratering economy and a health care reform effort that has triggered a right wing jihad.
most others just assume he has more pressing concerns: two wars, a cratering economy and a health care reform effort that has triggered a right wing jihad.
Although Berg’s lawsuit was quickly dismissed, he doubled down and took it directly to the Supreme Court, demanding an injunction to stop the November 4 election, then to stop the counting of the votes, then to stop the swearing in of Obama. In the end, the Supreme Court refused to take the case and turned down all his requests for injunctions. Not to be dissuaded, Berg filed the case again with the Federal Court of Appeals. And just to hedge his bets, Berg has filed two more suits in federal court using separate legal arguments: the first is a Qui Tam or false claims suit, usually used for recovering payments for bogus Medicare claims, alleging that because Barack Obama is in fact an illegal alien, he could not legally serve as a U.S. Senator and therefore his salary and benefits—totaling nearly $1 million—should be returned to the U.S. Treasury. This case was dismissed in June, but, as ever, Berg was not to be discouraged and filed a motion for reconsideration.

The third lawsuit was filed on behalf of Gregory Hollister, a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel. Because Hollister is on lifetime recall, he could, theoretically, be pressed back into active duty and sent to Iraq or Afghanistan. Therefore, he has a right to know incontrovertibly whether or not Barack Obama is the legitimate commander in chief.

In March, the presiding judge threw the Hollister suit out, calling it “frivolous,” and threatened to financially sanction Berg’s co-counsel John Hemingway. No matter, says Berg, he has already filed an appeal. By his own estimation, all three cases will be tied up in the courts for years. The ultimate goal of all these lawsuits is to get just one judge to let the case proceed to the discovery stage which would grant Berg the power to subpoena Obama’s complete birth records, which, he is fairly certain, would prove his theory that the 44th president of the United States was born in Kenya, not Hawaii.

“I would like to see him removed from office, thrown in jail and then deported,” says Berg when asked what would happen if he were able to prove in a court of law that Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States.

Berg may have been the first Birther to file a lawsuit against the president, but he’s no longer the only one.

If Berg is the Alpha Birther, Orly Taitz—an Orange County dentist-
turned-lawyer who you may have seen melting down on a cable news outlet near you, decked out in her trademark platinum blond hair, thick black eyeliner and lowcut blouses—is the Acid Queen of the Birthers. But given Taitz’s demonstrable propensity to sue, intimidate and threaten anyone that gets in her way—she has a habit of calling those who question her “brownshirts” and routinely calls for Obama and all other enemies to be “purged”—perhaps She Wolf of the Birthers is more accurate.

Berg certainly thinks so. For the last six months Berg and Taitz have been trading insults on their respective websites. Berg thinks the combination of Taitz’s stalker-like aggressiveness (she has been known to show up at public appearances of various Supreme Court Justices and loudly demand that they hear her case), and combative incoherence during TV interviews, along with her dubious credentials (she got her law degree online) and self-sabotaging recklessness (two weeks ago Taitz caused quite a stir when she released what she claimed was Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate, but was in fact a deliberately doctored document created by an Obama supporter to punk the Birthers) only serves to hurt the cause. Although Berg is hardly blameless in this regard. His initial lawsuit included a Canadian Obama birth certificate that Berg was forced to withdraw and disavow after the anti-birthers pointed out that it was signed by DUDLEY DORIGHT.

Lisa Liberi, Berg’s paralegal, personally incurred the wrath of Taitz over perceived snubs. Taitz publicly accused Liberi of having a long criminal record (which Liberi says is ludicrous) and called for her to be “purged” and went as far as publishing Liberi’s social security number and home address online, presumably for the benefit of any of her rabid followers who might make good on her threat. Berg was in court last week asking a judge for a restraining order against Taitz.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she was put up to this by the Obama people to make us all look foolish,” says Berg. Liberi wonders aloud if she is working for German or Russian intelligence, noting that Taitz’s blog gets flagged by most web browsers as an “attack site.”

“I’ve been told that it installs malware on your computer and sends all your files to Russia,” says Liberi.

What makes Berg notable, beyond the Alpha Birther status, is that he doesn’t fit the profile of the typical Obama hater. At 65, he’s a lifelong Democrat, having spent 31 years as a Democratic Committeeman in Philadelphia and Montgomery County, as well as serving as chairman of the Montgomery County Democratic Party back in the late ’80s. He’s a lifetime member of the NAACP. He served as a deputy attorney general during both of Milton Shapp’s two terms as governor back in the ’70s. He ran as the pro-choice candidate for governor against Bob Casey Sr. during the Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1990, and although he lost the nomination Berg did net a respectable 23 percent of the vote against a sitting governor.

During the 2000 Presidential election’s contentious Florida recount, Berg flew down to the panhandle to serve as one of Al Gore’s watchdogs, eventually filing a petition demanding the disbarment of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Sandra
Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas for not recusing themselves from Bush v. Gore.

But some time after 9/11 Phil Berg went off the reservation. “I just felt that we were lied to and I still feel that way,” says Berg. “There is no way that 9/11 could’ve happened without government help.”

In October 2004, Berg filed Rodriguez v. Bush, a civil lawsuit in federal court that named 156
defendants—including the United States Of America, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, George Herbert Walker Bush, George Walker Bush, Richard Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld. The 237-page suit was an epic medley of jaw-dropping allegations, including: The Twin Towers were brought down via “controlled demolitions;” FEMA is creating an “American Gulag,” a network of concentration camps which it will run after martial law is declared; some or all of the 156 defendants named in the suit engaged in treason, murder, conspiracy, kidnapping, arson, trafficking in narcotics, blackmail, embezzlement, insider trading, securities fraud, identity and credit card theft, trafficking in humans, and the abduction and sale of women and children for sex.

In the end, the case went nowhere but it did get Berg a lot of media attention. Speaking engagement offers poured in from around the country. A wealthy sympathetic benefactor even bankrolled a press junket across Europe that lasted more than three weeks. All of which was great cloak-and-
dagger fun for Berg, who loved the attention and the VIP status the case conferred on him in the more paranoid sectors of the public.

“I remember we had a police escort the whole time we were in Kansas,” he says with pride. But Berg spent so much time on the 9/11 suit that he neglected his once-thriving multi-lawyer practice, which shriveled and eventually died, forcing Berg to declare bankruptcy in 2005. Berg pretty much lost everything, including ownership of the spacious, 9,000 square foot, 200-year-old farmhouse that once housed his lucrative practice. Today he works out of a cramped, one-room office on the ground floor of a Lafayette Hill apartment complex. The space is crammed with boxes full of files and lawbooks stacked floor to ceiling, leaving just a narrow pathway around the perimeter of his cluttered desk. And though he was once, by his friends’ estimates, a millionaire several times over, Berg remains unrepentant. “Even my family has questioned what I have done,” he says, adding that the bankruptcy proceedings are still ongoing some four years later. “But I feel I was put on this earth to fight the good fight.”

Besides, he’s too excited about his impending guest appearance on
paleo-conservative talk show host Michael Savage’s radio show. “He’s got 10 million weekly listeners!” Berg enthuses, certain this appearance will trigger a healthy uptick of contributions on his website ObamaCrimes.com. Turns out filing multiple lawsuits questioning the eligibility of the president of the United States is expensive—it cost $6,000 just to make the requisite copies of his lawsuit for the Supreme Court’s consideration—and the pay stinks. He refuses to disclose exactly how much he has collected in web donations, but you get the distinct impression that they barely keep up with his costs, and that’s not even factoring in a year’s worth of 24/7 billable hours he and others have put into the case, pro bono.
Hello to everyone in the Savage Nation,” says Berg when the show’s producer calls and puts him on the air. Despite his long track record with the Democratic party, he is, not surprisingly, persona non-grata in blue state circles these days. The person who answered the phone at the Montgomery County Democratic Party headquarters—where Berg served as chairman back in the late ’80s—declined to comment for this story and refused even to give his name. “They pretty much all hate me,” says Berg with a shrug.
Fortunately, Berg has a whole new bunch of friends in the talk radio/Internet echo chamber of the far-right, which, again not surprisingly, applauds the courage it takes for a lifelong Dem to file eligibility lawsuits against a sitting Democratic president, and takes great pleasure in parading Berg around like some special prize in a partisan hostage swap.
“I think that by pushing on, terrible things are going to happen,” Savage warns gravely. “We are dealing with the most dangerous people on earth. Wait until the Smear Machine fires up after we get off the air. Look out, because the loony left is coming after you.”
Berg shrugs off the warning. “People ask me if I fear for my safety, but if anything happened to me it would be front page news,” he responds. “I believe we can get him to resign by the end of the year, even if the legal process takes longer.”
Although all three of Berg’s cases have been thrown out of court, and the Birther controversy has been dismissed as a groundless partisan witchhunt by every major media outlet and debunked by every credible non-partisan truth squad—Factcheck.org, Politifact, Snopes and McClatchy News have all looked into the Birther controversy and determined it to be nothing more than a far-right fantasia—don’t expect Berg or the Birther movement to go away any time soon. Not even if Obama were to release his complete birth records, as the Birthers and, as of late, even some on the left, including The Atlantic ’s Andrew Sullivan, have demanded.

“Paranoia is the most political of mental illnesses in that it requires enemies,” says Dr. Jerrold Post, Director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University and the author of 11 books, including Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred .
The paranoid’s position is that it is better to be the center of a plot against you than to be totally ignored and insignificant. A sense of powerlessness leads to compensatory delusions of grandiosity which sends people into a blind pursuit of confirming data. It is very hard to get people out of paranoid belief system because it is very comforting to them,” says Post.
n other words, the long national nightmare that keeps Birthers up at night—Googling furiously through the shadow of a doubt, fingers crossed, literally hoping against hope—has only just begun. And the rest of us should probably get some sleep. ■

Jonathan Valania is the editor-in-chief of phawker.com.

Les lacunes d'Obama

Une copie d'un acte de naissance établi en 1961.

Non seulement le débat sur la couverture sociale des Américains tourne au vinaigre, mais les questions soulevées par les origines de Barack Hussein Omaba (BHO) ne disparaissent pas, bien au contraire.

On se souvient que le certificat de naissance complet de BHO n'a jamais été rendu public. l'explication officielle est qu'il a été détruit lors de l'informatisation du système. Cette explication ne tient pas parce qu'il est inimaginable qu'un service d'état civil détruise des originaux sans au moins conserver l'information qu'ils contiennent.

Or, non seulement un haut fonctionnaire de l'Etat de Hawaï a affirmé le 31 octobre 2008 avoir vu les originaux de l'acte de naissance de BHO, mais l'administration a démenti avoir détruit ces originaux.

En outre, une mère de famille de Hawaï a montré les reproduction de deux actes de naissances de ses filles jumelles nées elles aussi comme BHO en 1961.

Donc l'absence d'acte de naissance pour BHO ne peut pour le moment pas s'expliquer autrement que par un refus de BHO de le rendre public.

La chose se complique quand on fait la liste des autres archives concernant BHO qui sont manquantes.

Chelsea Schilling, sur le site World Net Exclusive en a dressé une liste non exhaustive :

Obama: Where have all his records gone?
Footprints of president's own history either vanish or remain covered up

While nearly 400,000 concerned citizens demand President Obama present his elusive "long-form" birth certificate, more than a dozen other documents remain unreleased or otherwise blocked from the public eye.
Numerous documents which have yet to be surrendered include the following.
Obama kindergarten records
The Maui News reported that Obama attended kindergarten at Noelani Elementary School on Oahu during the school year 1966-67. It released a photo of two teachers, Katherine Nakamoto and Aimee Yatsushiro, with five students. The teachers claim one of the children is Barack Obama.
According to the Hawaii Department of Education, students must submit a birth certificate to register. Parents may bring a passport or student visa if the child is from a foreign country.
So far, no records have been released by the school. Noelani Elementary School officials have not responded to WND's request for comment.




Though from a modest background, Obama began attending the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu, one of Hawaii's top private institutions. He reportedly received a scholarship and attended the school from the fifth grade until he finished high school, though no financial records have been released.
The Boston Globe reported, "In 1979, the year Obama graduated, tuition for high school students at Punahou was $1,990, a sizable expense compared with Hawaii's median family income of $22,750 that year.
Obama, reportedly a "B" student, studied among the island's richest and most accomplished students. According to the school's website, he also played forward on Punahou's 1979 state championship basketball team.
Occidental College records
Obama arrived at Occidental College, a small liberal arts school in Los Angeles, Calif., in the fall of 1979. He only briefly mentions the school in his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father."
Obama attended the school on a scholarship. Some question whether the financial aid he received was reserved for foreign students. Financial records have not been released.
In a legal action, handled largely by Gary Kreep of the U.S. Justice Foundation, officials at Occidental College were served with a demand to produce records concerning Barack Obama's attendance there during the 1980s because they could document whether he was attending as a foreign national.
Kreep petitioned the college with a demand for its records concerning Obama.

"The gravamen of the petition is the question as to whether United States Senator Barack Hussein Obama, of Illinois, is eligible to serve as president of the United States pursuant to the requirements for that office in the United States Constitution," he wrote. "The records sought may provide documentary evidence, and/or admissions by said defendant, as to said eligibility or lack thereof."
College officials then contacted Obama's lawyers, who argued to the court that the election was over and that future concerns should be addressed to Congress.
The motion stated that the records, which could reveal on what name Obama attended classes at Occidental and whether he attended on scholarship money intended for foreign students, "are of no relevance to this moot litigation."
The motion also claimed the petitioners failed to serve the subpoena properly.
Get your "Where's the birth certificate?" bumper sticker here.
"The subpoena directed to Occidental College should therefore be quashed. Alternatively, this court should issue an order directing that the deposition of the custodian of records of Occidental College not take place," the firm working on Obama's behalf stated.
"The central issue in this lawsuit … is whether any Respondent had a legal duty to demand proof of natural born citizenship from Democratic Party's nominee," the motion said. "None of the documents sought by petitioners could possibly assist in answering this question."
A judge granted a motion to quash the subpoena.
"Obama's attorneys bent over backward to block us," Kreep told WND. "Obama doesn't want anyone to see those records. He's trying to hide them."


His efforts resulted in a threat from Obama's attorneys to seek financial sanctions against the plaintiff's lawyers.
Kreep said a notice of appeal will be filed next week.
A notice posted on the Occidental College website states, "Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) regulations protect the privacy of student education records. We, therefore, cannot disclose students' classes, grade point averages, majors or other such information."
Columbia University records
Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in 1981, at the age of 20.
According to the New York Times, Obama "suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and 'stopped getting high,' which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years."
Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told the newspaper in October 2007, "He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life."
In a 2005 profile in a Columbia alumni magazine, Obama called his time at the school "an intense period of study."
"I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk," he said.



Obama claimed to be a part of the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities. But according to the New York Times, several well-known student leaders did not recall his involvement.
Fox News made contact with 400 of Obama's classmates. No one remembered him.
The Columbia University chapter in Obama's life remains blank, according to the New York Sun.
"The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript, despite an academic career that led him to Harvard Law School and, later, to a lecturing position at the University of Chicago," the Sun reported in September 2008. "The shroud surrounding his experience at Columbia contrasts with that of other major party nominees since 2000, all whom have eventually released information about their college performance or seen it leaked to the public."
When the newspaper inquired, the Obama campaign did not offer an explanation for why the transcript had not been released.
According to the New York Sun, a program from Columbia's 1983 commencement ceremony lists Obama as a graduate. University spokesman Brian Connolly confirmed that Obama graduated with a major in political science but without honors. Nonetheless, he was later admitted to Harvard Law School.
Columbia thesis "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament"
Before applying to Harvard, Obama is said to have written a major thesis in his senior year. It has not been released.


An Oct 30, 2007, a New York Times article stated, "[Obama] barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament."
Former Columbia professor, Michael Baron, told NBC News Obama excelled in his year-long honors seminar called American Foreign Policy.
He also said Obama spent a whole year writing a "thesis" or "senior thesis" on the topic of nuclear negotiations with the former Soviet Union.
"My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States," Baron told reporters in an e-mail. "At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other … For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A."
Baron said he saved Obama's paper and recently searched through boxes hoping to find it, but he told reporters he may have thrown it away during a move several years ago.
Baron wrote a letter of recommendation when Obama applied to Harvard Law School. According to Federal Election Commission records, he also donated at least $1,250 to Obama's presidential campaign.
On July 24, 2008, the Obama administration told NBC News Obama was unable to release copies of his thesis paper.
"We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said.
According to MSNBC, Columbia University officials claim they do not have a copy available in the college's archives.
Harvard Law School records

With less than steller marks upon his graduation from Columbia, Obama was accepted into Harvard Law School.
WND columnist Jack Cashill wrote, "If Obama's LSAT scores merited admission (to Harvard), we would know about them. We don't. The Obama camp guards those scores, like his SAT scores, more tightly that Iran does its nuclear secrets."
He continued, "We know enough about Obama's Columbia grades to know how far they fall below the Harvard norm, likely even below the affirmative action-adjusted black norm at Harvard."
Cashill wrote, Khalid al-Mansour, principle adviser to Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, lobbied friends like Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton to intervene at Harvard on Obama's behalf. Al-Mansour reportedly mentored founders of the Black Panther party in the early 1960s.
Cashill suggests Obama's "shyness" about his Harvard experience may stem from his reluctance to broadcast his connections.
According to Politico, Obama's name does not appear on any legal scholarships during his time at Harvard. His campaign reportedly said his Harvard education was a product of hard work and student loans. Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991.
Harvard Law Review articles
In 1990, Obama beat out 18 other contenders to become the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, where he spent at least 50 hours a week editing submissions from judges, scholars and authors.
According to Politico, there were "eight dense volumes produced during his time in charge there – 2,083 pages in all."
Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told Politico Obama didn't write any articles for the Review, but he did leave behind numerous case analyses and unsigned "notes" from Harvard students.
As Matthew Franck noted in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."
Susan Estrich, the first female president of the Review who served 14 years earlier, said Obama must have had something published that year, even if his campaign denied it.
"They probably don't want [to] have you [reporters] going back" to examine the Review, she said.

However, Politico later reported it had unearthed a 1990 article that "offers a glimpse at Obama's views on abortion policy and the law during his student days."
His six-page summary answers a legal question about whether fetuses should be allowed to file lawsuits against their mothers.
"Obama's answer, like most courts': No," Politico reported. "He wrote approvingly of an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that the unborn cannot sue their mothers for negligence, and he suggested that allowing fetuses to sue would violate the mother's rights and could, perversely, cause her to take more risks with her pregnancy."
The report continued, "His article acknowledged a public interest in the health of the fetus, but also seemed to demonstrate his continuing commitment to abortion rights, and suggested that the government may have more important concerns than 'ensuring that any particular fetus is born.'"
Despite its earlier statement, the Obama campaign later confirmed Obama's authorship of the article and claimed it was the only piece he had written for the Review.



Obama lectured at the University of Chicago Law School, a top school where the faculty is known for voluminous scholarly publishing, from 1992 until 2004.
The university offered Obama a full-time tenure-track position, an honor typically reserved for published instructors. However, reporters have been unable to find scholarly articles authored by him. The university reports that Obama declined the tenure offer.
Sarah Galer, news editor at the Law School and Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, told WND, "President Obama wrote 'Dreams from My Father' while at the law school but did not produce any scholarly articles as far as I know."
Passport
According to March 2008 reports, State Department employees conducted an unauthorized search of Obama's passport files during the recent presidential campaign. CNN reported that three different contract workers accessed his information on separate occasions – Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14 – without authorization. Two workers were fired and another faced discipline.
Obama's files reportedly contained copies of passport applications, birth date, basic biographical information, records of passport renewal and possibly citizenship information.
The Obama campaign demanded a thorough investigation to determine which employees looked at the file and why.
"This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight years," Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton told CNN in a statement. "Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the American people, not use it for political purposes."
Meanwhile, a key witness who had been cooperating with federal investigators was later found fatally shot in front of a Washington, D.C., church. A police officer found the body of Lt. Quarles Harris Jr., 24, slumped dead inside his car.
At the time, investigators said they didn't have any information connecting the murder to the passport case. After one year of investigation of the homicide, there have been no arrests.
The passport has not been released.
Medical records
During his first presidential campaign in 1999, Sen. John McCain released 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records collected by the Navy. In 2008, McCain allowed reporters to spend three hours sifting through 1,200 pages of health records.


In 1999, former Vice President Al Gore released medical records revealing "mildly elevated" cholesterol levels and removal of a common form of skin cancer from his forehead in 1997. The documents disclosed his weight, resting heart rate, resting blood pressure, cardiovascular fitness and a variety of other health details. Gore's records were compiled after a complete physical examination by several military physicians.
Likewise, President George W. Bush allowed the media to view about 400 pages of personal medical information in 2000 and 2004.
After initial reluctance, Sen. John Kerry allowed the Navy to release his full medical records in 2004.
While not all have done so, it has been common practice for presidential candidates to release medical records.
However, Barack Obama, a relatively young candidate who was said to have been in "excellent health," refused to release medical records. Instead, he simply provided a six-paragraph note from his physician briefly summarizing 21 years of doctor visits and health information.
The letter contained no supporting documentation.
Other documents

According to additional records listed at the The Obama File, other documents that remain unreleased include:
• Complete files and schedules of his years as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004
• Obama's client list from during his time in private practice with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard
• Illinois State Bar Association records
• Baptism records
• Obama/Dunham marriage license
• Obama/Dunham divorce documents
• Soetoro/Dunham marriage license
• Adoption records
Birth certificate

WND has been reporting since before the election on questions – and lawsuits – raised over Obama's birth and eligibility. He reported in his book he was born in Hawaii and his half-sister agrees. But the woman the president says is his paternal grandmother, Sarah Obama, claimed to have been present at her grandson's birth in Mombasa, Kenya.
The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."
Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 380,000 others and sign up now!


Complicating the issue are Obama's move to Indonesia as a child, where he reportedly attended that nation's public schools, and his later travels to Pakistan, raising questions about on what nation's passport was that travel accomplished. Then there are the multiple law firms hired to make certain Obama's long-form birth certificate information, and other documentation such as college records, remain sealed from public view.
Obama's presidential campaign released to select news organizations only what is known as a "certification of live birth," a document obtainable in Hawaii in 1961 by Americans actually born outside the country. However, Joseph Farah, WND editor and chief executive officer, has been calling for the release of Obama's long-form birth certificate showing the hospital of his birth, attending physician and other details to confirm his citizenship status.
Farah launched a national billboard campaign last month in an effort to keep the issue before the American people. The billboards, being leased around the country, ask the simple question, "Where's the birth certificate?" Farah is asking the public to support his campaign with donations. So far, more than $75,000 has been collected.
The billboard campaign followed one launched months earlier to collect the names on an electronic petition demanding accountability and transparency on the issue. So far, that petition has gathered nearly 400,000 names.
The campaign got a boost recently when WND White House correspondent Les Kinsolving asked Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, why the president wouldn't release his birth certificate. Gibbs' response was covered live on C-SPAN and by Fox News Channel and others – excluding CBS.

It was the first time any member of the press corps has publicly asked a member of the administration a question directly related to Obama's constitutional eligibility for office as a "natural born citizen."
Congressional hearings were held to determine whether Sen. John McCain was constitutionally eligible to be president as a "natural born citizen," but no controlling legal authority ever sought to verify Obama's claim to a Hawaiian birth.
Both the petition and the billboard campaign are part of what Farah calls an independent "truth and transparency campaign."
The first sign to be posted under the campaign, a digital, electronic one, is up and online on Highway 165 in Ball, La.. In addition, based on the heavy volume of financial donations in the first days of the campaign, WND was able to commit to leasing three more standard billboards – one in Los Angeles, another in Orange County, Calif. and a third in Pennsylvania.

Farah said the campaign was born of frustration with timid elected officials in Washington, corrupt judges around the country and a news media that show a stunning lack of curiosity about the most basic facts of Obama's background – especially how it relates to constitutional eligibility for the highest office in the land.
"As Obama transforms this country from self-governing constitutional republic to one governed by a central ruling elite, the simple fact remains that no controlling legal authority has established that he is indeed a 'natural born citizen' as the Constitution requires," Farah said. "Obama's promises of transparency have become a bad joke as he continues to hide simple, innocuous documents like his birth certificate and his student records."

Les morts qu'Obama ne veut pas voir

A Chicago, un travailleur social a fait une étonnante découverte. La majorité des 41 morts d'enfants et d'adolescents a eu lieu à proximité de la maison du président Obama (BHO).

Cette courte vidéo du Guardian est très révélatrice.

Mais, tout aussi révélateur,n à aucun moment le journaliste n'insiste sur le fait que les victimes comme leurs assassins sont noirs. Le carcan idéologique n'est brisé qu'une seule fois quand le travailleur social insiste sur le fait que les zones de Chicago où on n'enregistre pas de meurtres sont habitées par des Blancs.

On est attristés par les propos d'une mère de famille qui déclare « Il suffirait que BHO dise : Je ne veux pas que cela ait lieu à Chicago pour les choses s'arrêtent. »

Hélas, les chercheurs savent bien que les causes de la violence meurtrière qui fait tant de victimes au sein de la communauté noire, et qui explique également qu'un jeune noir américain sur cinq soit en prison ou sous contrôle judiciaire, sont à la fois génétiques et sociales.

Il est urgent que l'on cesse de penser que les garçons noirs peuvent être éduqués par un système scolaire qui a été conçu pour de jeunes Blancs au XIXe siècle.

Ils ont besoin d'initiatives radicalement nouvelles tout comme la communauté noire a besoin de retrouver une structure sociale et familiale en mesure de construire des vies à tous ces enfants.

Mais pour cela il est indispensable d'arrêter de voir la société avec des prismes idéologiques.

Le Figaro, toujours pas au mieux de sa forme

BHO avec son grand-père à Hawaï.

Voici l'article que consacre aujourd'hui Nathalie Mattheiem dans le Figaro à l'affaire des origines de BHO.

Comme vous pouvez le constater en comparant cet article avec les nôtres, et même celui du Guardian, Nathalie Mattheiem en a fait le minimum. Soit qu'elle n'a pas réellement compris la question soit qu'elle avait peu de temps à consacrer à ce papier, soit enfin qu'elle ne lit que la « bonne presse » comme souvent les correspondants à l'étranger du Figaro (par exemple celle de Madrid).




La nationalité américaine d'Obama contestée


On les appelle les «birthers», dérivé du «birth certificate», le certificat de naissance par lequel les Américains prouvent leur nationalité et se distinguent de leurs compatriotes qui ont acquis la citoyenneté par naturalisation. La différence est importante en droit constitutionnel : être «né Américain» est une condition d'éligibilité à la présidence. La théorie des «birthers» est que Barack Obama est de nationalité kényane comme son père et que, de ce fait, son élection n'est pas légale.

Pas du tout. le débat ne porte pas sur la nationalité américaine de BHO. Mais sur sa qualité de « natural born citizen » nécessaire pour devenir président. Au piquet Nathalie !

Celui qui allait devenir le 44e président des États-Unis a tenté de mettre fin à de telles assertions dès l'automne dernier durant la campagne électorale en publiant le certificat qui confirme sa naissance, le 4 août 1961 à Honolulu. Peine perdue : les adeptes de la théorie du complot récusent l'authenticité du document, pourtant confirmée par le gouverneur (républicain) d'Hawaï, devenu le 50e et dernier État de l'Union en 1959. Mardi encore, le Dr Chiyome Fukino, directeur de la santé à Hawaï, est à nouveau intervenu pour confirmer la naissance du jeune Barack Obama en territoire américain.

Nathalie n'explique pas la différence essentielle entre le certificat résumé produit par BHO et le certificat original réclamé par les birthers. Peux mieux faire Nathalie.

«Pour ce que j'en sais…»
Rien n'y fait, des animateurs de radio et de télévision refusent de l'admettre, d'autres, tels Michael Reagan, le fils de l'ancien président, ou Lou Dobbs, sur CNN, font état d'une «incertitude» qu'ils contribuent à entretenir.

Une dizaine d'élus conservateurs ont choisi ce moment pour proposer une loi qui exigerait des candidats à la présidence qu'ils produisent leur certificat de naissance. À les entendre, il ne faudrait voir aucun lien entre leur initiative et la polémique savamment entretenue. Il a pourtant fallu attendre 233 ans et l'élection d'un président afro-américain pour qu'une telle proposition soit formulée.

Nathalie ne souffle mot sur la polémique entretenue au sujet du candidat McCain né à Panama. Pas très au courant du sujet, Nathalie ?

Interrogé sur la nationalité du président, l'un des signataires de cette loi, John Campbell, répond : «Pour ce que j'en sais, il est américain.» Il reprend ainsi la formulation qui avait suscité un tollé lorsque Hillary Clinton l'avait utilisée pendant les primaires en réponse à une question sur la religion de Barack Obama : «Pour ce que j'en sais, il n'est pas musulman.» Liz Cheney, la fille du vice-président, va plus loin en insinuant que les Américains se sentiraient «mal à l'aise face à ce président»qui serait «réticent à défendre le pays à l'étranger».

Objecteur de conscience
Sur ce terrain de la défense du pays, il est piquant de noter que la dernière des nombreuses plaintes (toutes rejetées) des «birthers» concernant la citoyenneté du président a été déposée par un réserviste. Stefan Frederick Cook s'était porté volontaire pour l'Afghanistan avant de se déclarer objecteur de conscience : il ne saurait servir sous les ordres d'un commandant en chef qu'il croit illégitime.

Les «birthers» surgissent aussi là où on ne les attend pas : lors d'une rencontre organisée dans son district, Mike Castle, un élu républicain du Delaware, a été hué quand il a rétorqué à une militante qui disait vouloir «reprendre son pays» : «Barack Obama est américain.»

Ce n'est certes pas la première fois qu'un homme politique américain est dépeint comme «autre» ou «différent» à cause de ses origines. Les candidats Michael Dukakis ou Mario Cuomo en ont fait les frais avant Barack Obama. Le vide politique créé par la déroute du Parti républicain a donné à cet extrémisme une place qu'il n'aurait sans doute pas dans d'autres circonstances.