Debunking Debunkers: Global Disinformation Index (GDI)

A useful exercise is to debunk the debunkers. I've done it before with the UK's fact-checker Full Fact .

It's particularly important in this coronavirus climate of frantic "fact-checking" and "information-correcting".

An article recently published on the website of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) is about a physicist, Danny Rogers, who has co-founded and is Chief Technical Officer of the Global Disinformation Index, with the noble purpose of saving the internet from lies, errors, fake news and what have you.

The first disinformation service he should perform is against some of his own claims during the interview, for example: "QAnon has led to people’s deaths."

This is a wide and sweeping generalisation with no basis in reality. If it refers, as the only tenuous link, to the murder of alleged mob boss Frank Cali by Anthony Comello in March 2019, it is highly flimsy.

Apparently on the advice of his lawyer Robert Gottlieb, Comello pleaded not guilty, since Gottlieb is trying to defend his client as not guilty due to mental defect.

According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Comello wanted to perform a citizen’s arrest on Cali to help Trump, as he believed the Gambino crime family's presumed boss was part of the deep state and that he "was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself" to place Cali under citizen's arrest. When Cali didn’t comply, the documents say, Comello killed him out of fear that Cali would kill him.

What is unclear, among many things, is why Comello thought Cali belonged to the deep state.

The connection of this murder with QAnon, what Leftists call a "conspiracy theory" that Trump and his presidency have been under attack by the deep state, is at the very least dubious.

On the same grounds we could blame any political movement, in most cases with better reason, of "leading to people’s deaths". Many examples come to mind, for instance the 14 June 2017 shooting At Alexandria, Virginia, Congressional Republican Baseball Practice which only for the presence of a security detail by a miracle didn't kill anyone but could have been a massacre,

James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on GOP lawmakers and staffers with a rifle as they prepared for the annual summer baseball game between Republicans and Democrats, wounding several people.

Hodgkinson’s social media profile revealed he was a Left-wing Bernie Sanders supporter who believed President Trump was a “traitor.” In one Facebook post of 3 months before Hodgkinson wrote: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

The AAAS article goes on to say:

GDI’s [the above-mentioned Global Disinformation Index] system analyzes content and context flags which can help assess any domain’s risk of disinformation. It rates the disinformation risk for websites based upon variables that include overall credibility, whether they push sensationalism, whether they contain hate speech, and whether the company embraces sound policies regarding content.

Now, since the article is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the "debunking" website with a high-sounding name it analyses is co-founded and headed by a physicist, we would expect some more precision in its chosen criteria than this. What objective characteristics does "overall credibility" entail?

And, even more importantly, how do you define "hate speech"? What does this concept mean? What role can it have in a science-led effort of exposing disinformation?

It's an impossible task to give "hate speech" a role in refuting falsehoods, for many reasons. First of all, hate is a sentiment, an emotion, a passion. As such, it's in the realm of the subjective, not the objective. What you consider hate another may consider simply justice, or telling the truth. There's no objective yardstick for definition, let alone measurement.

Furthermore, "hate" has been overused ad nauseam by the political and cultural Left to stigmatise, place beyond the pale and therefore silence (or at least the Left hopes) its adversaries.

So, this other "fact-checking" enterprise on the face of it seems to be, like so many of the same kind, Leftist propaganda masquerading as a quest for the truth.



PHOTO CREDIT
Pixabay

Why Communism Dominates in the West

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that).

It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself.

The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were fundamentally right and both were vilified. But Farage wouldn't say that - especially about the latter - in a million years.

The only misconceived thing of the article is when it quotes Diana West's favourable view of "Enlightenment logic".

The Enlightenment has brought to Europe the first sparkles of totalitarian thought. Marx was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we ourselves have been indoctrinated by intentional "disinformation" - possibly of Soviet origin -, and it takes us time to get through the fog.

Here's part of the very long article:

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.


To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

Massacres, Gun Control Studies and Social Change

I have closely followed the gun control debate in the US from the outside and, as a European, I am trying to make sense of it because I know that at stake is not just the gun legislation but also the American Constitution, with what it represents as the most historically important declaration of human rights and liberties to be safeguarded against the power of the state; the thorny issues of broken families and of how to treat the mentally ill; and even the always controversal question of race and gang violence.

I have never seen a gun in my life except on TV and in movies. I grew up in a very gun-averse environment in Northern Italy. Almost everyone, including people on the political centre-right like my family, believed that ordinary citizens should not have guns and that America needed to have tighter gun control laws.

This is more or less what I thought too until I began realizing how anti-freedom and despotic our Western governments actually are, something I had not realized before. That, for a start, made me take a better look at the meaning of the Second Amendment.

Here is a classic emotion versus reason conflict. Many of us have an instinctive repulsion against weapons, so we think the less the better, but on closer inspection things may be different.

When something traumatic like the Newtown massacre happens, the normal human reaction is to find means of control so that we feel reassured that it won't happen again. In some ways this need for control is not dissimilar to the rituals and compulsions performed by an OCD sufferer, which don't have to be based on reality and reason as long as they have the power to assuage the anxiety.

I think that something like this on a collective scale is happening in America now.

The idea that less control on guns leads to more guns and more guns lead to more murders, multiple or not, is not so much simple as simplistic. Simple is what addresses the problem, simplistic is what avoids it.

The reason why I am saying this is that, despite the immediate intuitive nature (along with wishful thinking) of the thesis that more gun control reduces violent crime, there is absolutely no evidence to support it.

And not for lack of trying to find it.

One of the 23 “executive actions” initiated by President Obama is a Presidential Memorandum directing the Department of Health through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other scientific agencies to "conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it".

Something similar had already been done by one of Obama's predecessors at the White House, Jimmy Carter. Wanting to build the case for new comprehensive federal gun-control legislation, in 1978 the Carter administration commissioned a large-scale scientific study which, they presumed, would conclude that gun-control laws reduce crime.

Carter gave a substantial research grant to University of Massachusetts professor of sociology James D. Wright and his colleagues Peter Rossi and Kathleen Daly, all highly regarded sociologists. Professor Wright was on record as strongly in favour of much stricter gun controls. This was the most comprehensive study of gun control that had ever been undertaken, which resulted in a massive three-volume work, Under the Gun.

David Kopel, Research Director of the Independence Institute and co-author of the law school textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment, explains:

Wright and his colleagues were asked to survey the state of research regarding the efficacy of gun control, presumably to show that gun control worked and that America needed more of it. But when the researchers produced their report for the National Institute of Justice in 1982, they delivered a document quite different from the one they had expected to write. Carefully reviewing all existing research, the three scholars found no persuasive scholarly evidence that America's 20,000 gun-control laws had reduced criminal violence. For example, the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned most interstate gun sales, had no discernible impact on the criminal acquisition of guns from other states. Washington, D.C.'s ban on the ownership of handguns that had not already been registered in the District was not linked to any reduction in gun crime. Even Detroit's law providing mandatory sentences for felonies committed with a gun was found to have no effect on gun-crime patterns, in part because judges would often reduce the sentence for the underlying offense in order to balance out the mandatory two-year extra sentence for use of a gun.

Professor Wright summarized the research's conclusions thus: “Gun control laws do not reduce crime.” Kopel said: “As the scholars frankly admitted, they had started out their research as gun-control advocates, and had been forced to change their minds by a careful review of the evidence.”

Another milestone of research on the subject was a 2003 study evaluating the effect of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, a federal 10-year ban law enacted in 1994 and expiring in 2004 on so-called "assault" weapons - the same ones for which a ban is called for now by gun-control advocates -, carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It found "insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence".

The National Research Council's 2004 Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review reviewed over 200 journal articles, 99 books and 43 government publications assessing the impact of 80 gun-control measures. It was unable to find empirical evidence that restrictive firearm laws and regulations decreased violent crime, suicide, or accidents. It observed that academic studies of the assault weapon ban "did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence" and remarked: "due to the fact that the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban ... the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small....".

A further study assessing the 1994-2004 ban's impact on gun markets and gun violence, conducted by scholars of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, and funded by the US Department of Justice, found:

Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs ["assault weapons"] were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. LCMs [large capacity magazines] are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current [at the time of the ban] magazine capacity limit) without reloading.

Not coincidentally, lacking any evidence of its presumed and desired effectiveness, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was not renewed after its expiry in September 2004.

In the late ’80s, in Orlando, Florida, 33 women were raped in only 9 months. The Orlando Sun-Sentinel newspaper and the police offered a very well publicized firearms safety course.

Everybody knew that in Orlando there were 6,000 women who had handguns and knew how to use them. The result was that in the following nine-month period, there were only three rapes. In addition, crime in general declined. The fact is, Orlando, Fla., was the only U.S. city with a population of over 100,000 that had a reduction in crime that year.

In fact, it is not only Orlando that experienced a dramatic decrease in crime. After the 1987 Florida right-to-carry legislation, homicide, firearm homicide and handgun homicide rates all decreased. Eight of Florida’s 10 largest cities experienced drastic decreases in homicide rates from 1987 through 1995... Miami Beach down an incredible 93 percent.

Opponents of Florida’s right-to-carry legislation claimed their state would become known as the “Gunshine State.” But the last quarter century’s actual experience (as of mid-2011, Florida has issued a total of 2,031,106 concealed-carry permits under the 1987 law) proves Florida’s trailblazing program to fight crime has been a tremendous success. As U.S. Sen. Orin Hatch, R- Utah, put it: “The effect of that legislation on state crime rates has been astonishing. The predictions of the gun-control advocates were wrong, flat wrong.”

Research by Dr John Lott, author of the book More Guns, Less Crime (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , published in three editions by the University of Chicago Press, was the first research on the effects not just of the federal ban but also of state legislation. Generally, his research found no impact of gun bans on violent crime rates, but the third edition of the book in 2010 offered evidence that Assault Weapon Bans even increased murder rates a little.

Leftist, uninformed media outlets sometimes may say that John Lott's research has been "debunked", but that is simply not true. In fact the National Research Council's 2004 Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, mentioned above, in Chapter 6 "Right-to-Carry Laws", reviewed both Lott's research and its critics Ayres & Donohue who were trying to refute its thesis, and concluded that neither offered definite proof, leaving the matter undecided.

But the criminologist on the panel, James Q. Wilson, wrote a dissent from this conclusion, saying that all the panel's estimates on murder rates supported Lott's conclusion on the effect of Right-to-Carry Laws on murder. He wrote:

In sum, I find that the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate, though their effect on other crimes is ambiguous.

Several attempts have been made to discredit Dr Lott's research, but they all failed and backfired on the would-be discreditors' reputation.

We must also remember that the burden of proof is on those who want to change the law, not on those who wish to maintain it, especially in view of gun laws' potential to infringe Second Amendment rights.

In an interview, Lott says: "States with the largest increases in gun ownership also have the largest drops in violent crimes. Thirty-one states now have such laws—called “shall-issue” laws. These laws allow adults the right to carry concealed handguns if they do not have a criminal record or a history of significant mental illness."

Since the time of the interview, more and more states have adopted those laws. The above video shows that the states passing laws permitting concealed weapons have steadily increased over the years (at this moment they are all the states with the exception of Illinois, which will be required to draft a concealed carry law by May 2013), and at the same time crime declined in those states after the passing of the laws.

John Lott explains that of course guns can create violence, but they can also deter it before it starts and stop it after it started:

Criminals are deterred by higher penalties. Just as higher arrest and conviction rates deter crime, so does the risk that someone committing a crime will confront someone able to defend him or herself. There is a strong negative relationship between the number of law-abiding citizens with permits and the crime rate—as more people obtain permits there is a greater decline in violent crime rates. For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.

Concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime for two reasons. First, they reduce the number of attempted crimes because criminals are uncertain which potential victims can defend themselves. Second, victims who have guns are in a much better position to defend themselves.

Virtually nothing is without drawbacks. The question is always of balance, of net effect. And here we need to look at the evidence.

Lott has extensively researched the subject not just in the USA but all over the world and in the above video he says: "I can't find a place in the world where you've had a ban on guns and you haven't seen an increase in murders afterwards".

He concludes:

Much of Eastern Europe; most of Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa; all but one South American nation; and all of Central America and Mexico suffer even higher murder rates than we do. For example, despite very strict gun control, Russia's and Brazil's homicide rates over the last decade averaged about four to five times higher than ours.

Indeed, if you are going to look across all nations and not just a select few, what you find is that the nations with the strictest gun control tend to have higher murder rates.

A Foreign Policy magazine's survey of gun laws and gun crime in 9 countries in different parts of the world, "Armed, but Not Necessarily Dangerous", although clearly biased in favour of gun restrictions, did not find any correlation between firearm control and ownership on one hand and violent crime on the other.

Many of the countries surveyed, like Yemen, Iraq, Cyprus or Serbia, have a past or present history of conflict and instability, so the parallel with the US is difficult to draw, but the case of Switzerland is particularly interesting because the law there is more permissive for motives that are close to the United States' reasons and history.

Switzerland has a unique system of national defence, developed over the centuries. "Instead of a standing, full-time army, the country requires every man to undergo some form of military training for a few days or weeks a year throughout most of their lives."

Switzerland also requires all men aged 20-42 to own automatic rifles (i.e. military rifles, the kind that is illegal for civilians in the US to possess without a stringent permit, not the semi-automatic weapons that in the States represent virtually all guns produced for civilians), but has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.

Guns are deeply rooted within Swiss culture - but the gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept.

In 2001, with a population of 6 million, at least 2 million firearms, including about 600,000 automatic rifles and 500,000 pistols, were estimated to be kept in Swiss homes.

The estimated total number of guns held by civilians in Switzerland today is 3,400,000. The rate of private gun ownership is 45.7 firearms per 100 people. "In a comparison of the number of privately owned guns in 178 countries, Switzerland ranked at No. 22."

Once discharged, men serve in the Swiss equivalent of the US National Guard, but still have to train occasionally and are given bolt rifles. Women do not have to own firearms, but are encouraged to.

Few restrictions

In addition to the government-provided arms, there are few restrictions on buying weapons...

But despite the wide ownership and availability of guns, violent crime is extremely rare. There are only minimal controls at public buildings and politicians rarely have police protection.

Switzerland is indeed a unique country, and its history has very much been moulded by its geography. Its Alpine nature has meant isolation, creating a deep sense of need for self-reliance and self-defence in its population, which has made it prouder, less dependent on the state, and more attached to its liberties. Rather, the state relies on the citizens for defence, fact which increases their freedom.

In the 19th and early 20th-centuries, for example, Switzerland was a haven for anarchists fleeing from neighbouring Italy. Switzerland has a strong tradition of direct democracy, in the form of its many referendums, and of decentralization: it is unusual for such a small country to be a federation of states, known as "cantons".

For all these reasons, the rationale behind Switzerland's exceptional gun laws have something in common with the motivations at the root of the American Constitution's Second Amendment.

So, more guns do not appear to breed more criminality and there is no empirical evidence to support this thesis. If, on the other hand, you look at successful results in the war on crime, such as New York City's dramatic reduction in crime achieved by Mayor Guliani, you see that it was not through new gun control laws but due to enforcement of existing laws and zealous prosecution of criminals.

But, as observers have remarked, addressing guns is infinitely easier than addressing people and the problems created by them, especially when there is a fear of being called "racist".

The calls for a ban have focused on rifles and not handguns. Not only rifles of any type cause a very low number of murders per year (323 in 2011) compared to hammers and clubs (496); hands, fists and feet (728); and knives (1,694). But also, according to the same official statistics by the FBI, by far the weapons most used to commit homicides are handguns (6,220).

The tragic mass shootings that hit the headlines are fortunately exceptional; what is common is inner city gang crime, committed with illegal firearms, mostly handguns, easily available. As the Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice makes it clear, although gun violence in the country is generally on a steady decline, "The profile of the typical murderer with a gun is a black male in a city under the age of 25".

In our urban areas — and gun violence happens much more in urban areas than anywhere else — young black men, often in broken families, are joining gangs and committing acts of violence against each other. There have been 24 people murdered with guns in Chicago since the Newtown tragedy... Just look at the most violent neighborhood in Chicago with 202 murders since 2007.

Daniel Greenfield tells a tale of two countries, America and Obamerica:

67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.

Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.

Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory...

Chicago, the capital of Obamerica, is a city run by gangs and politicians. It has 68,000 gang members, four times the number of police officers. Chicago politicians solicit the support of gang members in their campaigns, accepting laundered contributions from them, hiring their members and tipping them off about upcoming police raids. And their biggest favor to the gang bosses is doing nothing about the epidemic of gang violence...

America does not have a gun violence problem. Obamerica does. And Obamerica has a gun violence problem for the same reason that it has a drug problem and a broken family problem...

But Obama, like every Chicago politician before him, don’t want to end the violence. The death toll is profitable, not just for rappers writing bad poetry about dealing drugs and shooting rivals, but for the politicians atop that heap who score money and gain power by using the problems of Obamerica as some sort of call to conscience for the rest of the country.

Picking a fight with law-abiding rural America, Republican voters who, to quote Romney in the opposite sense, would never vote for them, does not cost the Democrats anything.

But similarly, as some have done, blaming the mentally ill and the current psychiatric system that does not detain them involuntarily is analogous to asking for gun control: both positions try to control what cannot be controlled with such simple measures.

Violent crime commited by psychotics is also, like mass killings, a very rare event. The proportion of psychotic people who commit violent crimes is extremely low. And rare events are difficult to handle statistically.

It is not so simple to predict psychotic behaviour. It is many, many times likelier to make a mistake than not, and we should not deprive people of their rights, be they gun rights protected by the Second Amendment or the right to freedom that applies to the mentally ill as much as to anyone else, without a justifiable cause.

In some ways, this request is a knee-jerk reaction without foundation like the one of the anti-gunners.

You cannot derive general principles or laws affecting large populations - like gun control - or groups - like the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill - from the occurrence of events that are rare, however tragic they may be.

To address the complex, multi-faceted problem of all crime, including violence and murder, requires the same kind of change that would also deal with many other societal problems, including substance abuse which also has an effect on the current rate of mental illness. An obvious and central necessary measure is to re-establish the importance of the family.

If Hollywood stars, who are so keen to decrease violence by gun restriction laws, decided to refuse roles in films that are filled with mindless violence, they would certainly do something good. I don't know whether the reduction of violence that serves no purpose and seems to be an end in itself (in perfect analogy with massacres like the one committed in Newtown) in movies, video games and on TV would go some way to prevent those massacres - there is no evidence for that either -, but at the very least it would help reverse the prevailing dumbing down, raise the artistic value of films and inject more content into them by forcing movie-makers to think of something that is not violence, sex or vulgar language.

What Happens in the USA? Houston Resident: "I felt in a War Zone"

Residents of Miami, Florida, and Houston, Texas, were terrified by the sight of military helicopters in their skies and the sound of military gun fire. A Houston resident said: "I felt I was in a war zone". It turns out it was just a multi-agency training a drill.

Similar urban military exercises took place in Los Angeles and, since April 2012, in St. Louis, MO; Minneapolis, MN.; Long Branch, NJ; Laredo, TX; Boston, MA; and Chicago, IL, and Atlas Shrugs says in Harrisburg, Pennslyvania.

Atlas Shrugs also says:

What kind of military exercise requires black hawk helicopters and machine gun fire in a city? What is Obama expecting to happen?

Why such drills in civilian areas? These usually take place out of public view. Why weren't local police and fire/rescue alerted prior? There is certainly an intimidation factor at work here.

And The Examiner (h/t Augusto Pozuelos):

Of course, a little over a week ago, renowned author and humanitarian Dr. Jim Garrow made the shocking claim that President Obama will only keep military leaders who "will fire on U.S. citizens."

Read this columnist's report on the shocking claim...

It should be noted that the Obama administration has yet to deny the allegation.

On January 20, the Washington Free Beacon reported the head of Central Command, Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis is being dismissed by Obama and will leave his post in March.

Since 2010, Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (USA), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. David Petraeus (USA) and Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright (USMC) have all been forced into retirement.

In light of the Obama administration's push for gun-grabbing legislation (being sponsored by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA)), a flurry of "multi-agency training drills" and the dismissal of several well-respected military leaders...one need not be a conspiracy theorist to be genuinely concerned about the imminent threat to our freedoms.

As the ancient Chinese curse portends...these are truly "interesting times."

Best and Worst US States for Small Business

The US magazine Entrepreneur has published a map (see below) grading American states from A to F according to how small-business friendly they are.

The map is based on a survey of over 6,000 small-business owners all over the country.

It is interesting - although hardly surprising - to note that the best states for small businesses are the Republican-majority ones (Texas, Utah, Oklahoma) and the worst are Democrat-majority (California, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts).

The only states that have Ds and Fs are Democrat ones.

This is, for whoever still needs it, the umpteenth confirmation that socialism makes countries and people poor.

It's not surprising that rich Texas, that "maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th largest economy in the world", and other over 30 states have submitted a petition to withdraw from the union, to protect their citizens' standards of living and not force them to pay for the squandering socialist states.

And remember, we're talking small businesses here, often sole traders or family-run, managed by people who instead of sitting on their butts waiting for the government to solve all their problems go out, start a business and create jobs for the local community, and not the "demonic, greedy" big (God forbid!) corporations (which in fact create even more jobs).

Good News: Half of Voters Got Their Campaign News from the Web

A little piece of good news after the US election disappointment: half of voters got their campaign news from the Internet.

A pew survey released yesterday shows a steep increase in voters who got their campaign news from the Internet. The number went up from 36 percent in the 2008 election to 47 percent in this year’s election.

Television continued to serve as the primary source with 67 percent of voters saying they turned to the TV for campaign news coverage. Another interesting bit of info: Cable news was by far preferred to the networks:

Among TV news outlets, 42% cite cable news as a main source. Network television is named by 19% of voters, while 11% cite local TV news. These percentages are little changed from 2008.

Among cable networks, 23% of voters name the Fox News Channel as a main source; 18% cite CNN and 9% MSNBC. There also is little change in the percentage naming any of these cable networks from 2008.

If this trend continues and the number of voters consulting the internet for their news keeps increasing, there is a better likelihood that people will be able to go beyond the myths constructed by the mainstream media.

Romney Lost the Election. Now What?

Romney lost the election and, unlike Al Gore against George W. Bush in 2000, he lost the national popular vote, although not by a large margin. This is close to what some opinion polls just before the election had predicted.

At first there was uncertainty about the result of the popular vote and I was doubting whether he would accept this result or, as Al Gore did, he would contest it, but he accepted the result and conceded defeat. Maybe litigiosity is not his style anyway, although in this case I wish it were.

The Republicans' victory in the House of Representatives will make life difficult for Obama.

Obama's political friends may not like this and call it obstructionism, but that's what the Congress, elected by and representing the people, is there to do: to balance the power of the administration and prevent it from becoming a tyranny.

And with this President and his Marxist, Islamophile, statist ideas there is certainly a lot that needs counterbalancing and outright opposition.

We can try and make all sorts of hypotheses about why Romney lost the election, although I don't know how useful it can be now.

It's been a real rollercoaster, with the polls a few months ago giving a certain victory for Obama, then the first televised presidential debate changed that scenario dramatically and saw the number of people saying they would vote for Romney skyrocketing.

We can say that the undoing of Romney was due to two factors, two events that occurred very shortly before the election, both fortuitous and accidental, showing how thin the basis of Obama's victory is.

These two events are the unemployment figures marginally improving, and the tragic Superstorm Sandy.

There are those who believe that without even one of those developments things would have gone the other way and Romney would have been elected President, and that Obama has been this time again, as always, an extraordinarily lucky man.

But maybe these assumptions derive from the misconception, common among conservatives, that pre-election polls were generally wrong or biased in Obama's favor, whereas they proved in fact to be rather accurate.

What Now?

Now that the election is over -  there may be a renewed effort to hold Obama and his administration responsible for the support they gave, at the time of the 'Arab Spring-Turned-Winter', to the Libyan terrorists who took governance of Libya and carried out the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, killing four Americans.

The general media silence on this matter has certainly much helped Obama's re-election.

But the many voices who called for his impeachment for treason may now find more vigor and urgency.

Either way, I have the feeling that, especially now that he doesn't even have to worry about re-election for another term and can be even bolder in his approach and extreme in his policies, Obama might just go too far and provoke his own downfall before his second term is over.

Should Obama Be Impeached for Treason?

Many American voices are rising to say that Obama, far from being re-elected, should resign or be impeached for high treason.

"He should resign!" Giuliani told a revved up crowd of Mitt Romney supporters in Ohio. "He told us he would resign if he did this poorly! Do you remember that?"

"'He lied!' Giuliani continued. "He has been a disaster. The worst president for our economy in our lifetime. He doesn't want a second term. He wants a second chance, because he screwed it up the first time."

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, affectionately called "America's mayor" for the way he handled the terrible aftermath of Sept. 11 when he was Mayor of the city, knows a thing or two about both Islamic terrorism and disaster crises.

Bravely he called for Obama's resignation, doing what many other people in politics and the media should have done.

Obama did make that promise. As with many others of his promises, he broke this one. Actually, he broke two: that of mending the economy in his first term, and that of resigning if he din't. He lied on both accounts.

The video above shows a February 2009 interview in which Obama promised to turn the economy around in three years. At 4.15 minute of the video, in answer to a question whether he should change course, he says that he is at the beginning of his office, but if he hasn't fixed the economy in 3 years his will be a "one-term propoposition", and that he will be held "accountable".

Giuliani is right in holding Obama - in the President's own words - "accountable", although unfortunately not many have dared do the same.

Giuliani attacked Obama for his "incompetence" over his management of the economy, his handling of the assault on the U.S consulate in Benghazi, and for putting his own campaign ahead of managing the fallout from Superstorm Sandy.

Obama's treatment of the Benghazi crisis, about which Obama supporters turned out to know knothing (which may go some way to explain why they are his supporters), has been so serious to warrant calls for impeachment for high treason.

Former five-term congressman Tom Tancredo says: "Benghazi amounts to giving 'aid and comfort' to enemy".

Radio, TV and press veteran Barbara Simpson, in her piece Liar or Traitor? writes: "In a just world, he would be impeached and tried for treason; he would not be re-elected. I hope you know that."

As we've known for many days now, CIA sources said they had reported to Obama "within 24 hours" that the fatal Benghazi assault was carried out by Islamist militants, and had nothing to do with the Muhammad video which for weeks he spinned was the caue of the attack.

More recently, documents obtained by former Muslim Brotherhood member Walid Shoebat have emerged.

These documents reportedly show that the Obama administration is responsible for the deaths of four Americans in the Benghazi consulate assault because it empowered the Islamic terror group al-Qaeda to take control and rule over Libya.

Barack Obama’s claim to election fame – that Al-Qaeda has been destroyed – needs a reality check, according to a group of anti-Al Qaeda Libyans in exile. “We beg to differ,” they exclaimed. “Obama gift-wrapped Libya, handed it over to Al-Qaeda, and we can prove it.”

...These documents include evidence of highly sophisticated weaponry provided to jihadists which leads them [anti-Al Qaeda Libyans in exile] to doubt that any solutions will take place under what they called “The Obama regime”.

We have come into the possession of an array of records obtained from top-level sources inside the Libyan government. They include passports of Al-Qaeda operatives and identifications of terrorists from many nations—Chad, Egypt and Pakistan to name a few—which are now all camped in Libya as they enter by crossing borders guarded and managed officially by what they called “government appointed Al-Qaeda leaders.”

This explains why the drafts of two letters on September 11th expressing worry that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was under ‘troubling’ surveillance and that the Libyan government failed to fulfill requests for additional security. “It wasn’t failure,” these pro-U.S. agents said, “but the Libyan government’s mafia-like system, subordinate to Al-Qaeda and installed with the blessings of the Obama administration that is responsible for the deaths of Americans in Benghazi,” they said.

And this also explains why Obama preferred to blame the Youtube video rather than the terrorists for the fatal Benghazi attack.

Ex-Federal Elections Commission Member: "Democrats Commit Most Voter Fraud"

This PJTV video "Voter Fraud: Will The Democrats Vote Early, and Often?" makes a comparison between the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s who made famous the phrase "Vote early and vote often" and the current crop of Chicago gangsters.

It is introduced thus: "Can we expect the Democrats to engage in gangland style voter fraud in the presidential election? Democrats are encouraging their base to vote early through absentee ballots." The idea, the video suggests, is to get Democratic electorate to vote twice: with an early vote and on Election Day, maybe in a different state.

Of course the liberal media try to deny the existence of voter fraud, since it is mainly left-wing parties that commit it, in the USA as in other parts of the world.

This is probably why the Dems don't like so much the idea of ID presentation at the ballot box while Republicans have righly backed genuinely tough and enforceable voter ID laws nationwide.

But Obama and Democratic Party election frauds at the highest level have already been demonstrated on video and resulted in investigations and resignations. There have been criminal cases involving Democratic-supporting ACORN in several states.

The organization Project Veritas has been conducting an ongoing series of investigations in more than a dozen states “demonstrating the ease with which election fraud can be committed and legitimate voters can be disenfranchised.”

Former Federal Elections Commission (FEC) member and Justice Department official Hans von Spakovsky praises Project Veritas' work, and has said that its videos are reflective of cases he has researched, including one few weeks ago in Vernon, California, in which a judge threw out an election result after determining that voters included people who didn’t live in the jurisdiction where they were registered.

Spakovsky added that vote fraud is a bipartisan endeavor, carried out by both Democrats and Republicans, but Democrats are the perpetrators in most of the cases.

He highlighted the particular vulnerability of Virginia’s voter ID law, which unlike Georgia’s or Indiana’s does not require a government-issued photo ID, because the many other documents that can be used in Virginia, like utility bills, can be faked, as is shown in a high-profile Project Veritas videos.

And new suspicions and evidence of more voter fraud are constantly emerging.

There are the voting machines that, when you try to vote for Romney, record a vote for Obama in the crucial swing state of Ohio, in Colorado and in other states. What is suspicious is that it never happens the other way round, whereas faulty machines should produce random wrong choices. This is why it is recommended that you check your ballots when finished. The story:

The DNC’s 2004 Colorado Election Manual is a helpful reminder of what Democrats can be expected to do to try win President Obama’s reelection. Page 54 of the manual instructs:

“If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a pre-emptive strike…“

With the presidential contest too close to call, Obama’s Justice Department dispatching hundreds of lawyers to 23 states and Democrats having 2,500 lawyers stationed across Ohio, 600 in Cuyahoga County alone, to “monitor” elections there are bound to be more shenanigans than we can imagine. Don’t forget Obama’s Attorney General decided not to go after the New Black Panther Party members who were intimidating voters in 2008.

So it is troubling that we are hearing numerous reports of voting machines recording votes intended for Romney as votes for Obama.

Members of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) were denounced by poll watcher Eve Rockford, trained by True the Vote, a nonpartisan election integrity association that is "equipping citizens to take a stand for free and fair elections".

The NAACP members descended on a polling station in Houston, Texas, to “encourage” people to vote for President Barack Obama, wearing NAACP clothing and caps and behaving in many ways as if they owned the place, including "picking people out line and moving them to the front, cutting off everyone else". Rockford says: "The NAACP basically ran this poll location and the judges did nothing about it".

In addition:

the “ringleader” of the group was also accused of touching an electronic voting machine that a voter was using.

Eve Rockford said the woman in the NAACP attire first screamed at the poll supervisor and demanded that a clerk be removed during the Friday incident.

“She starts screaming at [poll supervisor Rose Cochran] and she says ‘get this clerk out of here, get him out of here I’ve had enough of him,” Rockford, 51, told TheBlaze. “He starts calmly, using his voice, ‘she’s touching the machines, she’s touching the machines, she’s not acting appropriately, she’s touching the machines.’”

WND online news magazine tested the Obama campaign and found it wanting on the crucial issue of donations:

The controversial Media Matters For America progressive group today posted a false article claiming President Obama’s campaign did not accept a donation from someone impersonating Osama bin Laden using a foreign proxy server.

...The Media Matters piece took issue with a WND article, linked at the popular DrudgeReport.com, reporting “bin Laden” successfully donated twice to Obama’s presidential re-election campaign using a Pakistani Internet Protocol address and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address.

The “Bin Laden” donations, actually made by WND staff, included a listed occupation of “deceased terror chief” and a stated employer of “al-Qaida.”

The apparently foreign-based contributions were conducted as a test after media reports described the ability of foreigners to donate to the Obama campaign but not to Mitt Romney’s site, which has placed safeguards against such efforts.

The acceptance of foreign contributions is strictly illegal under U.S. campaign finance law.

...Indeed, the two donations, for $15 and $5 respectively, were accepted by the campaign and were deducted from the disposable credit card that was used.

Media Matters further wrongly claimed, “The Obama campaign also requests ‘proof of a current and valid U.S. passport’ if a contribution originates from outside the United States and raises questions about the contributor’s citizenship.”

When the “bin Laden” donations were made using a foreign proxy server, no such requests of citizenship were made. At no point was the user prompted to enter any passport information. No questions were asked at any time by the Obama campaign website to verify proof of citizenship or even whether the donor was a U.S. citizen at all.

“Bin Laden” is currently set up on the official campaign website to contribute more to Obama’s campaign. The name is also registered as a volunteer.

Since the “foreign” contribution was sent, “Bin Laden’s” email address has received several solicitations from Obama’s campaign for more donations.

This doesn't require a comment.

Obama's Socialism is Making America Poor

The above video has been viewed almost half a million times (488,318) in less than two weeks, since October 23, on YouTube.

It is the most visually compelling indictment of President Obama and his administration’s policies, showing the outcome of the “hope” and “change” Obama promised in 2008.

It shows, inter alia, that Obama dedicated more time to golf than work “during the worst economy since the Depression.”

A report by the Government Accountability Institute in July revealed that "President Barack Obama averages just eight minutes more a week on economic meetings than the average dog owner spends walking their dog".

US radio host, writer and commentator Michael Savage said: “What’s relevant is that Obama is our first socialist president,” and added: “That’s what this election is about”.

Why is that important? Because, among other things, it fundamentally explains the horrific statistics of the current American economy:

Falling wages. 47 million on food stamps. In 2009 the economy was generating $13.2 trillion in wealth annually. After borrowing $6 trillion, the economy is generating $13.6 trillion. Good investment? His promise to cut the deficit in half. His agreement that if the economy was not better after four years, he would be a one-term president.

Since he is running again for president, that was another of his many lies.

“Green energy” scam. Climate-change fairy tales.

Only half of America paying taxes. Yet, even considering that fact, the average American must work 107 days just to make enough money to pay local, state and federal taxes.

When Obama took office in 2009, the average price for a gallon of gas was $1.85. The average American household spent $4,155 on gasoline during 2011. At the same time, the real median household income has declined by $4,300 since Obama entered the White House.

The poverty rate in the U.S. is 22 percent.

An average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day during 2010.

30 percent of unemployed Americans have been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty. 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives benefits from the government. And this is Obama’s constituency! This is his base.

Last year, 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed. Student loan debt is at $1 trillion.

He [Obama] claims to feel our pain, but Americans buy 80 percent of the pain pills sold on the entire globe each year.

95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle-class jobs. America is losing 500,000 jobs to China every single year. The national debt is rising by more than $2 million every single minute. 88 million working-age Americans are not employed and are not looking for employment – an all-time record high.

The U.S. national debt has risen $6 trillion since Obama took office. In his first three years in office, Obama added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.

And the biggest reason of all to defeat Obama next Tuesday is this: You ain’t seen nothing yet. If Obama created this disaster in his first four years, what will he do in his second four years when he is unaccountable for re-election?

As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Or, put it this way:

If Mr. Obama wins re-election, and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. If GDP grows at an annual rate of 3%, it will take $120 of debt to create $100 dollars of GDP. (similar to Italy). More simply put, a household that earns $100,000 will need loans of $120,000 to support that income. Bottom line, the US is heading into bankruptcy and the American dream is becoming a nightmare.

And who is it that supports this president, besides the super elitist left media and the occupy stoners? His largest support base are the public sector unions. Let's take the average municipal worker in Wisconsin. These folks can retire after 25 years of service and continue to receive full salary and healthcare for the rest of their lives. Millions of parasites swarming all over the US economy and sucking the life out of hard working families and their children. Almost 50% of US citizens don't pay federal income taxes while Obama campaigns for the other 50% to pay their fair share. The Greek socialists would be proud of these figures.

In conclusion, its clear to anyone with an inkling of common sense that all this man cares about is re-election. If he is elected for four more years, extinguish the lights. The nightmare will quickly metamorphose into reality.

Socialist ideas are always deleterious for a country's economy (as well as for many other things). Just look around the globe and you'll see the poverty spread by communist and socialist regimes. China itself developed when it abandoned many of them.

And there is plenty of evidence for Obama's past and present communist affiliations:

Barack Hussein Obama was during his college years a committed Marxist, advocating the revolutionary overthrow of America’s capitalist system. His father was a communist. His main mentor as a young teenager, Frank Marshall Davis, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA.

Obama admits in “Dreams From My Father” that, during college, he was attracted to the “Marxist professors.” Indeed, the Marxist student leader at Occidental College at the time, John Drew, says Obama was far more radical than even Drew was, actually believing that Marx’s prophesied proletariat revolution to overthrow capitalism was imminent in the United States. Today Drew, who has long since repudiated his former radicalism, says that even in his Marxist days he attempted to rein in Obama by trying to persuade him to work within America’s political system to bring about the Marxist transformation they all desired.

After college, Obama followed in the footsteps of Chicago Marxist Saul Alinsky and went on to practice and teach Alinsky’s revolutionary street-organizing methods. Obama launched his political career in the living room of Bill Ayers, a self-described “small-c communist” and unrepentant Pentagon-bombing terrorist. Moreover, the evidence is indisputable that Ayers played a major role in writing Obama’s highly acclaimed autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”

Obama’s pastor for two decades, whom he described as his “spiritual mentor,” was Jeremiah Wright, a perennially enraged, America-hating purveyor of “Black Liberation Theology” (Marxism disguised as Christianity). As president, Obama appointed as White House communications director Anita Dunn, who in a speech to students claimed mass-murdering Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was one of her “favorite political philosophers,” and “green jobs czar” Van Jones, who in his earlier years admitted to being a communist and, in fact, founded the communist group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM.

Regarding the interesting point of Marxism disguised as Christianity, it's worth noting that Obama has learned and applied that lesson from Jeremiah Wright very well.

He uses Christianity and the Scriptures as justifications for the government doing the good, charitable work for its citizens through high taxes, wealth redistribution and welfare state.

The reality is that the New Testament does not contain and can never be construed as providing such justifications.

The Holy Scriptures speak to individuals, not governments. The individual is the one who makes the choice of what and who to give to, and should not be coerced by the state who deprives him of this choice.

Man's free will is at the centre of Christianity.

Going back to the article on Obama's past and present communist affiliations:

I could go on and on. These oft-cited facts merely scratch the surface of Obama’s long-term radicalism.

... But now, sitting in the White House is a man who has spent most of his entire life immersed in Marxist ideology, influences, mentors and benefactors. He has proven, as president, that he is still fully committed to dragging America – kicking and screaming if necessary (recall the outrageous and illegal way Obamacare was passed) – into a new era of unprecedented, government-coerced redistribution of wealth and power. To be precise: Marxism.

It would be folly, of course, to imagine that Obama just magically appeared out of thin air to lead a nation of liberty-loving, responsible, moral, right-thinking grownups leftward. America has been moving in this sad direction for decades. No, not under the “Marxist” label, or any of those other nasty words of yesteryear, like “socialism” or “communism” or “collectivism.” They’ve all been carefully replaced by warm-and-cuddly terms like “fairness,” “economic justice,” “redistribution,” “progressivism” and – as an off-script Obama famously told Joe the Plumber – “spread[ing] the wealth around.”

The spirit of socialism has taken root and flowered spectacularly in America, especially in all of our elite, idea-generating institutions like education, the news and entertainment media, and, of course, government. The original American spirit – stout, risk-taking, God-fearing, responsible, adult – has progressively been displaced by the spirit of dependency and helplessness, of perpetual grievance and victimization, and most of all, of envy and resentment. All of which cries out for ever bigger government.
So the question is: Will we Americans re-embrace the values that made ours the greatest nation in history, or will we continue on our current path toward the godless mirage of “redistributive change” – and the poverty and loss of liberty that always follow?

In any event, for the present I can at least derive some solace from remembering that I was raised by parents and grandparents who appreciated their adopted country and all the blessings the Creator freely bestowed upon it – and weren’t angrily obsessed with “transforming” it into a socialist paradise. For that I am truly grateful.

Still in 2007, a year before his election, he was marching with hard-left members of the New Black Panther Party:

New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

It's worth remembering what Norman Thomas, 6-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, said in 1944:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."

Obama Endorses "Gay" Anti-Christian Bigot

The video shows Dan Savage, a homosexual activist who created It Gets Better Project to help homosexual teens survive bullying during their teenage years.

It sounds good and nice, until you realize that Savage is himself full of the hatred he accuses others of nurturing.

He utters anti-Christian bigotry every time he opens his mouth. He praises violence against people who disagree with him.

He tells kids to f..k their teachers, preachers, parents.

All this is vile but maybe, with all the important events going on, not worth getting out of our way to draw attention to, since he will be one of the many homosexualist militants who do similar things.

But this bigoted, hateful, inciting to violence individual is endorsed by Barack Hussein Obama, Vice President Biden, and White House staff on the White House's own website, with links to Savage's website.

The anti-bully is a bully himself. Yet another, the umpteenth reason to vote for Romney against the bully-in-chief Obama on November 6th election day.

We Know Very Little about Obama the Man

I don't know how the American people can trust as President a man who has been so, shall we say, economical with the truth even about himself as a person.

I'm not referring here to life details which concern someone's privacy. No, this is about things and events that the public has the necessity to know about a man's deep-seated beliefs, ideas and past and present behavior in order to form an opinion on his suitability as their President.

Barack Hussein Obama, about whom the overwhelming evidence is that he was born and raised a Muslim and remained a Muslim until until his late 20s, has repeatedly denied having ever been a Muslim.

A man's religious beliefs are important to understand the person in any case. In the current international political climate, with Islamism on the rise globally, Al-Qaeda much stronger than ever, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation urging the United Nations and the European Council to adopt their particular take on "human rights" through their Sharia-based Cairo Declaration while not signing the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights because in conflict with Islamic values, and the Muslim world asking for Sharia's blasphemy laws to be imposed everywhere, it is imperative for a US President at least to declare his Muslim background and sympathies, not to cover them up.

Obama lied about many facts of his life just because it suited him at the time.

Obama lied when he said that he had never been a member and candidate of the Chicago socialist New Party. Here again we don't have a little white lie, but a deception aimed at keeping the American people in the dark about his real beliefs and affiliations.

Obama lied on his country of birth, when in 1991, in order to sell his autobiography, he falsely claimed that he "was born in Kenya." Is this important? Yes, for a future President.

What all the dispute about his country of birth shows is that Obama, unlike all other US Presidents, was not vetted and scrutinized prior to or after his election.

During the 2008 Presidential election cycle, we as a nation witnessed the collapse of the American mainstream media, and the deterioration of journalism right before our very eyes. We watched the media become completely unhinged losing all journalistic integrity & moral objectivity as they jumped head first into the tank for Barack Obama openly cheer-leading for him, and essentially functioning as a political arm of the Democratic Party. The liberal media practically campaigned for him in a grotesque display of partisanship rendering themselves negligent to their own profession. The fawning media anointed Barack Obama as their “Savior” insulating him from criticism, and ignoring the extremely important Presidential vetting process which has always been a necessary step toward helping the American people select a candidate. The traditional rules & protocols that the media had applied to every other Presidential predecessor of history apparently did not apply to Barack Obama.

If Barack Obama was properly vetted and scrutinized in 2008 the way every Republican candidate is currently being looked at under the microscope, he would never have been elected by the American people. Obama’s extraordinary lack of applicable job experience required to run for the highest office in the land was glaring, but the media did its best to minimize, diminish, and flat out suppress vital information about candidate Obama from the misinformed public which would have disqualified him from contention. He had absolutely no executive/business experience, no leadership/governing experience, served less than 1 full term as a functioning U.S. Senator, had a murky past that is shrouded in secrecy, and also a history of associating himself with the most radical fringe elements of society. This included a friendship with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers along with spending 20 years in a church of hate with his bigoted mentor & father figure Jeremiah Wright preaching fiery racist rhetoric, anti-Semitic slurs, and spewing vicious anti-American rants from the pews. The fact that Obama spent 2 decades in this hostile environment listening to Wright’s hate filled sermons, and embracing this man so closely speaks volumes about his judgement, character, and world view. While campaigning in 2008, candidate Barack Obama told America, “Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself with.” This revealing statement should have been closely examined given Obama’s numerous relationships with highly questionable, and unsavory individuals yet it gained absolutely no traction within the elite media as they were far too busy drooling over Obama’s grand speeches, and trying to get his autograph.

...Liberals were so enamored by Barack Obama that they were practically ready to carve his face into Mount Rushmore, and inscribe his image onto U.S. currency before he was even sworn into the Oval Office.

If the upcoming election becomes a referendum on Obama’s disastrous economic policies, his failed stimulus packages, recklessly adding over 5 trillion dollars to our nation’s unsustainable debt, Obama-Care which continues stifling businesses from hiring, and sky rocketing gas prices, he will lose the election in a landslide. His far left divisive ideologies, and radical associations alone should be more than enough ammunition for the American people to come out to the polls in droves to ensure he is a 1 term President. Heading into the 2012 election cycle, we are about to embark on the most negative & outright vicious attack/smear campaign against the Republican nominee at the hands of Obama’s Marxist minions within the powerful liberal mainstream media establishment. If Barack Obama, and his billionaire overlord George Soros have it their way, the media conversation will be driven by an unprecedented all-out assault against the Republican opponent in a deliberately deceitful attempt to divert the attention away from Obama’s indefensible failures & abysmal Presidential record.

We are talking about a man who was given the Nobel Peace Prize just for having been elected. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, contains such an enormous amount of lies to legitimately raise the question "Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?". In the book he fabricated an account of his Kenyan grandfather being racially persecuted.

The Obama Record: The most frightening aspect of this president may not be his radical ideology but his rank dishonesty in selling that ideology. Now he's been caught lying about family racism.

In "Dreams from My Father," his 1995 memoir, Obama used the story of his paternal grandfather's imprisonment and torture at the hands of British colonists in Kenya as an example of white cruelty. He claimed Hussein Onyango Obama was unjustly detained for six months before being released a crippled, lice-ridden "old man."

In fact, none of it is true, according to Washington Post editor and biographer David Maraniss, who traveled to Kenya to investigate the tale. His grandfather was not detained or beaten by his "white rulers," as Obama, writing as a 34-year-old lawyer, claimed.

This is only the latest example of a growing body of fabrications, embellishments and outright lies told by this president, who has a real and possibly pathological problem with the truth.

...Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.

Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn "white folks" and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.

Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a "big fight" with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked "why black people were so angry all the time," when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.

In both his autobiographies, Obama paints a false portrait of a still-racist America and West, where he, his friends and relatives are victimized by that racism. Conveniently, his remedy is redistributive justice through bigger government.

In Dreams from My Father he lied, among other things, about paternal grandfather, "his maternal grandfather, his father, his mother, his parents' wedding, his stepfather's father, his high school friend, his girlfriend, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright".

Victor Davis Hanson has the final word on this: "If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother's terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything."

Donald Trump may have followed an unorthodox procedure in trying to get to the truth, but he had a point when he said that Obama is the mystery candidate:

“I thought it would be a very easy way to get transparency from the president,” he answered, going on to accuse Obama of being the “least transparent of any president — ever.”

Trump maintains that Obama’s past remains a relative mystery. And since, in his view, not many people know about the president’s personal history, gaining access to his passport and college records would be telling.

“Passport applications tell you a lot,” Trump told TheBlaze. “I would hope to find nothing – but I have a feeling that might not be the answer.”

Given how little we all know about Obama and his life, authors have made plausible and valid explanations. Joel Gilbert produced a video on DVD, Dreams From My Real Father, in which he gives good reasons to believe that Barack Obama's real father, biologically as well as ideologically, was the late Communist Party USA activist Frank Marshall Davis:

At age 18, Barack Obama admittedly arrived at Occidental College a committed revolutionary Marxist. What was the source of Obama’s foundation in Marxism?

...The film begins by presenting the case that Barack Obama's real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama’s worldview during his formative years. Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multicultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. Was the goat-herding Kenyan father only a fairy tale to obscure a Marxist agenda, irreconcilable with American values?

This fascinating narrative is based in part on two years of research, interviews, newly unearthed footage and photos and the writings of Davis and Obama himself. "Dreams From My Real Father" weaves together the proven facts with reasoned logic in an attempt to fill in the obvious gaps in Obama’s history.

Since there is a physical resemblance of Obama to communist Frank Marshall Davis, it is thought that Obama had cosmetic surgery in order to disguise that. Two nationally known cosmetic surgery experts independently reached this conclusion:

“It appears Obama had some aesthetic refinement,” said plastic surgeon J. David Holcolm.

...“Obama has gone to great lengths to obscure his past,” Gilbert said. “Now, in addition to the alleged document forgery and photographic forgery by Obama to hide his true identity, we now have evidence of facial forgery.”

Holcolm described in detail his reasons for concluding Obama has had cosmetic surgery.

“The upper and middle nasal vault are both narrowed. The tip and infra-tip are softer and the tip has been rotated up,” he said. “Alar height appears to have been reduced so the lower part of the nose that makes up the nostrils appears softer.

“These changes are not characteristic of the natural aging process,” Holcolm said, “where the tip tends to settle and rotate downward causing the appearance of a longer nose and where the tip also often widens noticeably.”

Wendy Lewis, a cosmetic surgery consultant and author of 11 consumer health and beauty books, including “America’s Cosmetic Doctors & Dentists” and “Plastic Makes Perfect,” agrees.

“In the three younger photographs, Obama appears to have a bulbous nasal tip with wide alar bases, not uncommon with males and with skin of color,” Lewis said. “The more current photos show a thinner nasal tip which suggests some finessing of his nose over the years, but it is a very natural-looking effect.”

...Gilbert suspects Obama had the surgery because he was “concerned he was looking too much like Frank Marshall Davis as he got older.”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence that Obama chose to undergo a rhinoplasty before running for U.S. Senate and facing the national spotlight,” Gilbert said. “If Obama was identified as Davis’ son, it would connect the Marxist dots of Obama’s entire life journey.”

Gilbert said Obama “needed the Kenyan father fairy tale to misdirect the public away from the fact that he is a red diaper baby, the child of a Communist Party USA propagandist and Soviet agent.”

Gilbert told WND he’s received hundreds of emails people who have received a copy of his documentary in the mail, and the main message is “good folks don’t like it when they’ve been lied to.”

Look at the pictures yourself.

The latest revelation comes from an in-depth research by Jerome Corsi of WND, author of many No. 1 N.Y. Times best-seller books on Obama:

Largely ignored [by establishment media] in 2008 was research by the Hillary Clinton campaign based on contacts developed with members of the church Obama attended for two decades, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. This is the first of a series of articles WND has developed from months of in-person interviews with church members who have known Barack and Michelle Obama over many years.

According to these sources Obama was one of the members of the Trinity United Church of Christ who benefited from a “matchmaking service” run by the Trinity Church and known as the Down Low Club. The latter is a well-known program to "help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife" as well as to help them find homosexual lovers.

Ten years ago, the New York Times reported on a growing underground subculture in the black community known as Down Low, comprised largely of men who secretly engage in homosexual activity while living “straight” lives in public.

It’s within that subtext that opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign began investigating rumors that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was running a “matchmaking service” for members of his Trinity United Church of Christ known as the Down Low Club, which included Barack Obama.

Over the past several months, WND investigators have interviewed a number of members of the church who claim the president benefited from Wright’s efforts to help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife.

The 2003 New York Times story, “Double Lives on the Down Low,” said that though many black men reject “a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate,” they “have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low.”

This is the kind of investigatigative journalism that the mainstream media should engage in to uncover the truth about the President of the United States, if they weren't too afraid of what they may find.

Why Communists Like Comrade Obama

Norman Thomas, 6-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, said in a 1944 speech:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.

"...I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform."

Thomas was very prescient of things to come.

And more recently the Marxist-Leninist, formerly generally disliked, Communist Party USA has strongly supported the incumbent President of the United States, Muslim-born Barack Hussein Obama.

During Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Political Action Commission, fully endorsed the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House in a column entitled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway”. In it she said that Senator Obama is “ready to listen” to the “left and progressive voters” and appealed to all working people of the United States to back him, in order to cause “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.” "Fishman makes it clear that the CPUSA is part of this coalition."

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc official ever to have defected to the West, says in the article The Socialist Mask of Marxism:

That [2008] new alliance between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party was a first in the history of the United States, the world’s headquarters of democracy and free enterprise. In November 2008, over 65 million Americans who were unable to identify the stealth virus of Marxism that was infecting the Democratic Party voted to give this party the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure to what extent the Communist endorsement of the Democratic Party influenced the results of the 2008 election. But if there had been any doubt in my mind that the Democratic and the Communist parties had secretly joined forces, that doubt was erased in 2009, when Van Jones, part of a left fringe of declared communists, became the White House’s green jobs czar. Soon after that, the White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress began dutifuly following in Marx’s footsteps by redistributing our country’s wealth and putting under government control a part of its health care, banking system, and automobile industry.

... In his Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx urged his followers to replace capitalism with communism via a “socialist redistribution of wealth,” which “should displace capitalism and precede communism.” Marx advocated ten “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” and he called them the ten planks of communism. The most important are:

• A progressive or graduated income tax;
• Abolition of rights of inheritance;
• Centralization of credit in the hands of the state;
• Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state;
• Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

If you know the Manifesto, you will think Marx himself wrote the Democratic Party’s 2012 electoral campaign, which contains all of the above planks of Marxism. If you don’t know the Manifesto, click here and you’ll get it from the horse’s mouth.

In 2011, the Communist Party USA again supported Obama and the Democrats for re-election in 2012.

Endorsing the Obama campaign, the chairman of the Communist Party USA, Sam Webb, who had called Obama a friend back in 2008, wrote in an article in the People’s Weekly World, his party's official newspaper:

Despite the many frustrations of the past two years, the election of Barack Obama was historic and gave space to struggle for a people’s agenda.

If, on the other hand, the Republicans had been victorious in 2008, the character of class and democratic struggles would have unfolded very differently. Our movement would have been on the defensive from Day One, the Democrats would be running for cover, and the Republicans would have an unfettered hand in their efforts to liquidate the welfare state, roll back the rights revolution of the 1930s and 1960s, and crush the people’s movement – labor in the first place.

As if all this were not enough, the Communist Party USA has a history of infiltrating the Democratic Party and moving it to the left.

Remember all this on Tuesday, November 6.