I think we need to see that they are not. They have one issue. One question. They have suspicion about one thing, and that suspicion notably hasn't led them into other theories. There's one factual issue — the immensely important matter of the President's qualification — that hasn't been nailed down to their satisfaction.
It's perfectly rational to take as your working theory that evidence that isn't produced would run counter to the interest of the party who could produce it and does not. In legal cases, if a party fails to produce a document requested in discovery, the judge can deem that the fact is established to be what the party seeking discovery is trying to prove. (See Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(b)2)(A)(i)).
All I'm saying is that it's not paranoid to answer the question the way the majority did in that poll. I haven't followed the so-called "birthers" that much. Presumably, some of them branch out into other theories and cross over into conspiracy thinking and paranoia. But it's absurd to read the poll results as a sign that the GOP is full of folks like that. If you really wanted to gauge the nuttiness of Republicans, you could do a much more fine-grained poll about what Republicans believe and how strongly the birther issue correlates to other beliefs.
Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water? Well, do you know what it is?... Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?... Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridated water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream?... You know when fluoridation first began?... Nineteen hundred and forty six. Nineteen fortysix, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice.
Yes, it's also the 10-year anniversary of the big Florida recount. I wish I'd been blogging then! It would have been so much fun to write about that every step of the way. I'd have liked to show you in real time that I really wanted my guy, Al Gore, to win, and I also accepted nearly everything the Supreme Court did in the complicated litigation over the recount. But there are so many missed blogging opportunities in the past. I'd have loved to have blogged the Clinton scandals too. And the Clarence Thomas hearings. The Bork hearings.
As if things couldn't get any weirder, did you notice the name of the lawyer who made the Republicans' unsuccessful arguments before that federal judge today? That would be Ted Olson, a man Washingtonians often refer to as a 'Washington super-lawyer.' Who is Ted Olson? Well, that would be the same one knee-deep in the Arkansas Project, which in league with the American Spectator spent a ton of money digging dirt on Bill Clinton in Arkansas....
Well, now, isn't that weird? I just blogged this morning about that Think Progress blogger who confronted Justice Alito and he was going on about the Arkansas Project:
Last night, the American Spectator — a right-wing magazine known for its role in the “Arkansas Project,” a well-funded effort to invent stories with the goal of eventually impeaching President Clinton — held its annual gala fundraising event....
That first TPM post wove Justice Scalia into its conspiracy-ish riff:
Of course, Olson... is also the Olson from Morrison v. Olson, the supreme court case which upheld the constitutinality of the Independent Counsel statute. Olson was against it. Come to think of it, we Dems now think he and Scalia were right. So maybe chalk one up in his favor.
So that's how TPM first talked about law. Yikes. Spelled "constitutionality" wrong too.
I'm going to start reading the lefty blogs more and writing about them, I think. I'm interested in the way they string ideas together, and I think they need some more push back.
Asks Pelosi, going all conspiracy theory. It just can't be that people — and it's the vast majority of Americans! — actually read/hear news reports and commentary and arrive at opinions.
Asks David Frum. I got there via Hot Air. Hey! I wrote a post 3 days ago titled "Is the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero more political performance than reality?" I was bouncing off the same New York Post story that inspired Frum. Damn! I could have had a Hot Air link. But I decided not to publish my post, because, reading to the end of the story, I saw that although the would-be mosque-builders only owned one of the buildings needed for the project, they did have a lease and an option to purchase the second building at its assessed value. That is, the path to acquiring the second building looked clear, assuming they could raise the money for the project. So raising the money for the project is the only real difficulty, which is the same thing we thought when it seemed that they already owned both buildings.
So is Frum seeing more than I saw or less?
The mosque developers are three Arab-American businessmen: Sharif and Sammy el-Gamal and Nour Moussa. They have a partner in Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Muslim writer and publicist who does most of the talking. But the money and credit pledged to the project belong to the company owned by Moussa and the el-Gamals, Soho Properties.
Soho Properties has paid some $5 million in cash to buy the Burlington Coat Factory building, a building that yields no income. They are paying rent to hold rights to the Con Ed building, which also yields no income. All of this in the midst of the worst commercial property slump in memory, in an area of New York with a very uncertain economic future....
You can see why the Gamal-Moussa team would be dazzled by the notion that philanthropists in the Persian Gulf might donate $100 million to raise a grand gleaming Islamic center in lower Manhattan. You can tuck a lot of development fees into a $100 million project. And if not a mosque … what else do you do with their two loser properties on Park Place?
Frum thinks the Gamal-Moussa businessmen really did originally intend to build condos, but that wasn't going to work, and they hooked up with Feisal Rauf believing he was the kind of guy who could connect them to guys in the Middle East who'd give them $100 million if they were buttered up in a suitably Islamic way. Is "publicity stunt" the right word for Frum's theory? It sounds more like he thinks it was a hare-brained real estate scheme.
$100 million is not so easily raised, not even in Abu Dhabi, not in the middle of a global commercial property slump, not with the Manhattan real estate market in a shambles. Believe it or not, rich people in the Persian Gulf are not yearning to plunge into a U.S. political controversy.
And, of course, the mosque will never be built. The idea that I tossed aside was different. I entertained the notion that the idea was to propose it in order to stir up the reaction that was, in fact, stirred up. Some Americans would be outraged, including a subgroup that would say anti-Muslism things, and some Americans would get passionate about freedom of religion and celebrating diversity. In this theory, the point was always and only to undermine American society by dividing us in two and touching off a terrible, endless fight between the two halves. In this theory too, then, the mosque is never built. It's not that the business scheme fails, but that the proposal was itself the project, and the project succeeds.
This was recorded just a few hours a go. They got it up quick, so it must be good:
Here's a list of the highlighted topics:
The Times Square bomber, immigration, and assimilation Does fighting terrorism require policing minds? Jim defends Arizona’s new immigration law Has Obama bungled the gulf oil spill? On purpose? Ann reveals her devious Supreme Court plot Intellectual diversity and a Harvard student’s controversial email
Note that they've got me on the left side of the split screen for this one. With good reason!
On Wednesday's show, Rush Limbaugh was talking to a former Google employee — "John Doe" — about the way sponsored links on Google work. Rush was unusually thick trying to understand, and I found that pretty annoying considering that he'd been riffing this week about how a sponsored link to BarackObama.com — Obama's campaign site — comes up on a Google search for: goldman sachs sec. (It still does. Try it. You get "Help Change Wall Street/www.BarackObama.com/It's Time for Financial Reform that Protects Main Street. Act Now!")
So this is pure Alinsky on steroids. This guy is incompetent to run the private sector but, boy, does he know how to agitate and community organize. They had no advance knowledge this was happening, but they happened to get hold of Google and they said, "Look, we want to buy the search terms 'Goldman Sachs SEC,' we want you to direct the first hit to our website where we are going to raise campaign funds and awareness of the effort to demonize Wall Street." Meanwhile, the White House continues to deny that there's any link between the timing of the SEC suit and its push for regulatory reform.
Okay. Interesting conspiracy theory — collusion between the White House and the SEC. That's something to consider. It was pretty convenient that the SEC moved against Goldman Sachs just as Obama was presenting his finance reform bill. But what kind of evidence is the Google ad?
Back to the colloquy with John Doe:
CALLER: The way it works is that, for instance, with the Goldman Sachs SEC key word, a company or a political campaign can put in a bid on that key word or that phrase so that when someone does a Google search for that phrase an online auction is conducted instantaneously, and the highest bidding organization has its advertisement displayed there. So if you were the Obama campaign, you would bid enough so that the very top result would be the one that you want people to see, namely the anti-Goldman Sachs advertising campaign.... [I]t can cost anywhere from five to ten cents a click or it can cost upwards of two to five or ten dollars a click depending on how popular and how much in demand those key words are. And so, for instance, every time you click on that ad, the campaign is charged anywhere from 25 to 50 cents....
I'm editing out the parts where Rush struggles to understand this description. You can read the whole dialogue at the first link in this post. It's possible that Rush pretends to have trouble understanding to help radio listeners keep up with something that might be a little challenging.
Now, the funny thing is that John Doe didn't call in to help us weigh the evidence of collusion. (What would motivate the Obama campaign to bid for the "goldman sachs sec" search term? How likely is that bid to a result of advance knowledge that the SEC was going to charge Goldman Sachs with fraud?) Instead, John Doe has an idea that will waste the Obama campaign's money:
CALLER: [W]hat your audience might be interested to know, sir, is that each time somebody clicks on that link, the campaign is charged anywhere from 25 to 50 cents or greater. And so I don't want to tell anybody what to do, but again, your audience of millions of people might be interested to know that each time they click on that link, the campaign is charged a small fractional amount, but with millions of listeners, sir, that can end up having --
RUSH: Snerdley, do you know what he's talking about? I have no idea what he's talking about here?
Ha. Is Rush pretending not to understand?
CALLER: Sir --
RUSH: John Doe from somewhere in the country, uhhh, sometimes I'm pretty thick.... So if the 20 million people in this audience all entered "Goldman Sachs SEC" and then clicked on the first result that came up at the top of the list, the person responsible behind that link -- in this case the campaign -- would be charged 25 to 50 cents.
CALLER: That's correct, sir.
RUSH: That can add up to a lot of money if I'm hearing you right.
CALLER: It can, sir, and in many cases the organization will establish a daily budget of maybe $50 or $100 or $10,000 or $100,000 dollars. But in any case, each time there is a click, there is a charge against that organization, and when they reach their maximum budget for the day, their ad disappears.
RUSH: Oh, is that right?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: Oh! Oh! So the White House -- I'm sorry -- the campaign here has agreed to a maximum daily financial exposure, and whenever that limit is reached per day, that link then disappears from any further searches?
Oh, too bad! Because 20 million clicks at 50¢ each... talk about pure Alinsky on steroids! But it's still pretty good Alinsky stuff to get people who don't like Obama to go max out the clicks, use up the campaign's allotted money for that sponsored link, and make it go away so it can't reach anyone the campaign was hoping to reach.
After the break, Rush goes into a related riff that is horribly ignorant about Google. Rush either doesn't know or pretends he doesn't know the difference between a sponsored link and a "Google bomb":
RUSH: You remember late in the second term of George W. Bush, if you entered the search term "miserable failure" in the Google search field you would come up with stories on George W. Bush. And Google said, "There's nothing we can do about that, that's just the way it happens." But then when it began to hurt Obama -- 'cause after Obama was elected you put in "miserable failure" or whatever the algorithm was, it defaulted to whoever the president was. That was a way of hiding it being a direct default to George W. Bush. There was a time you could enter "miserable failure" in a Google search field and you would end up with Obama. They found a way to fix it then.
But it's incredibly easy to find out that Google fixed the Google bomb problem by January 29, 2007 — before Obama had even announced his candidacy for President. I Googled "Google bomb" and got the Wikipedia article on the subject. It has a section on the "miserable failure" incident, and that got me to the NYT article, dated January 29, 2007, which makes it obvious that Google responded to the problem Bush had:
It has been a bad month for anti-Bush snarkiness....
[A] favored online tactic to mock the president — altering the Google search engine so the words “miserable failure” lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House — has been neutralized.
Google announced on Thursday on its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself.
Indeed, a search on Saturday of “miserable failure” on Google leads to a now-outdated BBC News article from 2003 about the “miserable failure” search, rather than the previous first result, President Bush’s portal at whitehouse.gov/president.
Such gamesmanship has been termed “Google bombing,” and is not unique to President Bush, or even politics. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, was linked to the search “waffles,” while other Google bombs have been elaborate jokes or personal vendettas.
So, note: Google didn't respond to the problem when it affected Kerry. So Rush's they're-all-against-us pose is ridiculous. Yet it's unlikely his millions of listeners will notice. It happened to jump out at me. I think Rush Limbaugh reads my blog, by the way — I have my evidence — so Rush, I'm talking to you.
Back to Rush's Wednesday show:
"Miserable failure" at Google was linked to the White House page, the official WhiteHouse.gov page. And so when Bush was president, "miserable failure," took you there. But when Obama assumed office it still took you there, and then Google found a way to change it. They said they didn't know how it was happening. So when Obama was elected, it went to him, and Google said, "Oh, no, no, we can't have that," so they changed it. So now "miserable failure" does not take you to the White House website ever since Obama has been immaculated.
That's just plain not true. And even if it were true, it wouldn't have anything to do with the suspicions about the sponsored link and the question whether there was collusion between the White House and the SEC.
On Thursday, in Madison, the Tea Party had broken up, and we were walking away when we saw one man, in another part of the Capitol Square, standing alone, holding up a sign. I would have walked on by, but Meade, wielding a small camera, approached him.
No one else was anywhere near him, but he staunchly held up his sign, which read: "911 Underground Demolition!" The "11" part of "911" was shaped like the World Trade Center Towers.
Meade said "hi" and read the sign out loud as he walked up. "So you believe it was..."
"I'm the only one," the man said. "911 Truth doesn't even know this stuff."
He handed Meade a paper that explained that the WTC was built with explosive nuclear devices underground. The man said he was thrown out of the Tea Party: "They literally told me to go away. They don't want me here."
I asked, "Were you trying to start a counter-demonstration over on this side?"
He said, "No, not at all. They just didn't want me over there. There were all these spies, like, pointing at me."
I said, "Who are the 'they'? Who didn't want you over there?"
He paused, giggled, then laughed and said, "The Illuminati."
He was John Tesh. She was Oprah Winfrey. According to the new Kitty Kelley book about Oprah, this happened in the mid-1970s in Tennessee. The quote is (obviously) hearsay. Some other woman who dated Tesh served that up to Kelley. Really untrustworthy, because who is she, and what does she have against Tesh, who didn't stay with her? And even if she was utterly accurate about what Tesh said to her, Tesh could have been lying to her, perhaps bullshitting about how her body was better than Oprah's or some such lover's nonsense.
A few weeks ago Joseph Stack crashed a plane into an IRS building in Austin. Yesterday, John Patrick Bedell started shooting people at the Pentagon. What sort of person attacks a government building by himself? And let's distinguish Stack and Bedell from Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a government building years ago. Not only did McVeigh act in a different era — pre-9/11 — but McVeigh used a method that was designed to cause vast damage and to allow him to watch from a distance, unscathed. Stack and Bedell undertook ineffectual attacks that led — predictably — to their deaths.
So, should we make this easy and just consign Stack and Bedell to the dead psycho dustbin? But they attacked government buildings, so it was political. Yes, but a lot of crazy people rave incoherently about the government. That in itself doesn't make them part of a movement. Do they belong to the left or to the right? Is that a question that interests you? If it does, do you lean in the direction other than the one you feel like saying they lean? No one answers "no" to that last question, do they? And therefore... what?
[Q]uite a number of people ... seem to believe that Obama intends to induct their children into -- well, it's not quite clear what they're afraid of. The Web and talk radio are abuzz with various attempts to organize a boycott of Tuesday's speech....
[There is a] process at work in the healthcare hysteria and, increasingly, elsewhere where the GOP thinks it can shove the Obama administration into a ditch. Republican officials ... are playing a dangerous game with an unhinged segment of public opinion that regards Obama not as an elected official with whom they disagree, but as an illegitimate usurper of the presidency.
That paranoid fantasy is what's really behind the 'birther' movement and the allegations that the president is -- take your pick -- a secret Marxist or a secret Muslim.
Come on! This is absurd. You're stringing one thing after another and claiming it's all part of a big scheme. That itself is paranoid ideation.
It's the kind of fanciful anxiety that produces comments like this, posted on a conservative website this week: "Barack Obama and his left-wing Chicago machine regime are putting into place laws and institutions which will insure that there will never again be free elections in America."
And this is the kind of fanciful anxiety that produces columns like this....
Good lord, somebody posted a comment on a website somewhere and in Rutten's fevered brain it's all: yes, yes, this is exactly the way it is.... this, this is the problem!!!11!!!11!!!
Get a grip, man.
These are the people who are stockpiling ammunition and keeping their children at home next Tuesday.
What people?! The people! The people! You know: THE PEOPLE!!!! The PEOPLE WITH GUNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSS.........
Caldera submitted his resignation yesterday and to no surprise, it was promptly accepted. The White House wants the memory of this fiasco to fade — and fast....
The White House review of the incident shows that Caldera was informed of the mission but missed numerous chances to stop it from happening, failed to alert senior White House officials about it, nor did he even recognize that the public might have a reaction to seeing a jumbo jet tailed by military aircraft swooping down on the city.
But look at the picture. Why would people going to all this trouble and expense to get a photograph that looked so awful?
Thanks to my commenters on last night's post for forcing me to think about this. First was rhhardin said:
It's not easy to take pictures when you're steering a fighter with your knees.
Presumably, the picture was taken from the cockpit of one of the F16s that flew alongside Air Force 1. Here's what the cockpit looks like. There's no passenger seat. There's no room for a professional photographer. How does it make any sense to do a big photo shoot without a professional photographer?
Peter V. Bella said:
It took this long? Guy should have been fired the next day.
Maybe it took so long because the story is more complicated.
JAL said:
Yeah. If they truly wanted to "update" the photos for PR purposes (??) why not do it *right*. Shooting out of a fighter plane window (while piloting said plane at only 1000' over a densely populated area) and including either a shadow or a portion of the fighter plane (lower right corner) in the picture is $328,000+ worth of amateur photography.
They didn't get our money's worth.
So - who all was IN the big plane?
Maybe the pilot took a photograph, but that can't have been the purpose of the flight. So JAL has the right question: Who was in Air Force 1?
Palladian said:
That's a poorly composed photograph. Positioning Liberty Island below the plane in that manner makes it look like the plane is a shitting bird and that the island is the pile of shit. Also the color is murky and excepting the Statue of Liberty, the scenery is a depressingly industrial swath of New Jersey. And the garbage barges or whatever they are in the harbor don't add any majesty to the photograph. The supergenius Obama kidz couldn't remove those with their mad Photoshop skillz? And what is the white streak in the upper right of the photograph, near the nose of the plane? It looks like reflection from shooting through a window.
This is what we got for $357,012? Classic.
That's a great description of what a crappy photograph it is, but instead of exclaiming over how stupid they were to take such a bad photograph, I think we need to advance to the assumption that the flight cannot have been for photography purposes.
rhhardin said:
In defense of the incompetents, they're not allowed to photoshop anything.
Some military rule?
Charles said:
rhhardin: That photo was photoshopped. It has the distinctive tags "JFIF", "Ducky", and "Adobe" in the header.
They apparently used Photoshop to remove the EXIF information from the file, lest we see that the photo was taken as a souvenir by the pilot with his $150 point-and-shoot.
I don't understand all that tech talk, but I think I want to say: Aha!
Yes, I know. I've moved into conspiracy theory territory. It's not my thing, normally. But this is just staring me in the face, and I feel required to say what I see. The pieces don't fit. I want to know more. The Caldera resignation does not turn the page. Who was in Air Force 1?
(By the way, what are the 9/11 Truthers doing with this story?)
ADDED: An emailer with some experience writes:
A few facts that may be useful:
(1) The F-16 family of aircraft does in fact have two seater trainer versions (however, I haven't a seen a photograph of the F-16s accompanying the 747 that has sufficient clarity to determine if either is a trainer version.
(2) No F-16 pilot can "steer with his knees" as the aircraft is controlled by a sidestick controller that operates via a fly-by-wire system.
(3) The F-16 can be flown on autopilot.
(4) Pilots of large, expensive to operate and maintain military aircraft gain necessary flying hours by piloting smaller, cheaper aircraft such as T-38 trainers.
(5) No military aircraft leaves the ground, anywhere, without those high up on the chain of command knowing about it and authorizing it. This would be so for Air Force One unless the Obama administration allows the aircraft to be treated like a privately owned light aircraft hangered in Uncle Fred's barn.
That being understood, here are reasons why the F-16 is a particularly awful photography platform:
(1) The cockpit in even the trainer version is very tight, with both pilots tightly strapped into seats that recline sharply to assist in dealing with high G forces. This makes manipulating cameras of sufficient quality (required for good photos) and size difficult at best.
(2) The canopy of the F-16 is essentially a one piece, continually curved plexiglas bubble, introducing distortion, light flares, and all manner of other problems into the photography equation. No competent photographer would try to shoot through this kind of medium under these conditions unless they had no choice.
(3) Fighter aircraft, at the low speeds apparent in this situation, are barely above stall speed and subject to significant buffeting. They are not stable photographic platforms. This is true of any light aircraft, particularly when compared with much larger aircraft.
(4) The released photograph is indeed poor in quality in every facet of photography, particularly when one considers framing, background and composition. It looks like the kind of thing a fighter jock might shoot, one handed, with a little digital camera that would fit in a flight suit pocket.
I'm surprised that no one had demanded a list of the crews of all involved aircraft, and the opportunity to interview them absent White House minders. It would also be interesting to learn who the official "photographer" for this mission was and to find out why they were apparently flying in a very poor platform and what kind of training they had (was this person actually a military photographer? Was there, in fact, a qualified photographer on hand?) and equipment they used. One suspects that the story of this mission would be quite different if we could speak with those involved.
AND: Here's what official Air Force photographs actually look like.
