Showing posts with label hoax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hoax. Show all posts

Monday, August 25, 2008

Obama birth certificate not fake; someone sues anyway

Ed Brayton and the WorldNutDaily have noted that Philip J. Berg:
has sued Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic National Committee and the Federal Election Commission, claiming that Obama is not a natural-born citizen and, therefore, is not eligible to be president of the United States.

For his efforts, Ed has given him the not-so-coveted Robert O'Brien Trophy that he awards regularly for special displays of stupidity (he apparently manages to have a blog, see PZ's dungeon for more details about Robert O'Brien.

A summary of Berg's claims are:


Obama was not born an American citizen; lost any hypothetical American citizenship he had as a child (Editor's note: This point is not supported by U.S. citizenship law); may not now be an American citizen and even if he is, may hold dual citizenships with other countries. If any, much less all, of these allegations are true, the suit claims, Obama cannot constitutionally serve as president.

Note that even a WorldNutDaily editor knows more about the law than this crazy fellow.

Obama was born an American citizen, as confirmed by FactCheck.org:

The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records." The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal

To quell even the most diehard of conspiracy theorists about this:

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:

Obama's birth announcement

The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama "likely" was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.
Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

And Philip Berg sues with no basis for his lawsuit because 1) Obama was born a US citizen, 2) even a wnd editor knows that 2) one cannot lose citizenship as a child, 3) is still an American citizen even if 4) he holds dual citizenship (which is not a crime is most cases; embarrassing perhaps, but not a crime; in any case, the US does not prohibit dual citizenship). If Obama were not a citizen or were not born one, then, yes, Berg would be right. Since he was born in Hawaii he is a citizen and unless he specifically renounced (even then, it's not necessarily final) he still is -- and was admitted to the bar, the senate... Maybe Berg will get reprimanded for filing a frivolous lawsuit.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Bigfoot revealed -- to be a hoax

No surprise. This site has the story, as does this one (with bad spelling).

A passage from the first site says:

After the Searching For Bigfoot team and "The Real Bigfoot Hunter" Tom Biscardi began to thaw out the creature in a 1,500 lb. cooler of ice, they discovered it was a rubber suit.


What was the motive of the two men who claimed to have found a cadaver?



What else?

Biscardi contacted Whitton and Dyer and they agreed to admit the truth to the public. When Biscardi arrived at their hotel, the pair had vanished.

Searching For Bigfoot believes that their motive was financial.


They needed to quote a website to suggest that the motive was financial?

I wonder if the wounded police officer of the two men will get his job back. I'm glad I don't live anywhere near where he's patrolling.

The easiest way to determine if it's a hoax about bigfoot: it's about bigfoot.
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Sunday, August 17, 2008

No surprise: bigfoot story a(nother) hoax

You weren't expecting anything else, were you? Before the press conference, I saw a larger picture of the head over at the WorldNutDaily (who else who pay this much attention to such a ridiculous story?) and it looked like a gorilla mask. I read somewhere that someone had said that he had or had seen a similar mask.

But then there's the news conference.


As this news story notes, the DNA test was of two different well known creatures: a human and an oppossum (well, 96% of an oppossum's DNA):
One of the two samples of DNA said to prove the existence of the Bigfoot came from a human and the other was 96 percent from an opossum, according to Curt Nelson, a scientist at the University of Minnesota who performed the DNA analysis.


Missing from the press conference -- and par for the course for hoaxes -- evidence.

They didn't show the body. They didn't even say they could (or would) show the body. They said they would perform an autopsy.

I'm not sure whey the mainstream media even covered the story; they must have been short on "off beat" news.
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