Why Kenyan Birth Claim Was No ‘Fact Checking Error’

 by: Jack Cashill

No sooner did the literary agency brochure in which Barack Obama was said to be Kenyan-born surface than the media went to work to deep-six it.
“This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me – an agency assistant at the time,” Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC News.  “There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”

This confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any number of reasons.  Let us start with the obvious.  At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant.  How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 “error” to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions until changed in 2007?  To make this claim credible, there would have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth.  I am confident that there is no such submission.

Former publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich's explanation for a New York minute.  "As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE," writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power Line.  "It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like Kenya for an author?"
The Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a Jane Dystel client in the mid-1990s, who noted,  "All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner."  This is standard.  In the eight books I have written under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical information sent out about me either by agent or publisher.  Like most authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.

The most interesting "tell" in the 1991 Acton & Dystel brochure relates to what was said about Obama's career in the business world.  Obama, the reader learns, "worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation."
In Dreams from My Father, Obama inflated his stint at Business International even more and transformed it into a faux moment of racial awareness, one of at least a half-dozen concocted racial melodramas in the book.  As Obama tells the story, a "consulting house to multinational corporations" hired him and promptly promoted him to the position of "financial writer."
Here, he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines," and a guilty one at that.  "As far as I could tell," he adds, "I was the only black man in the company."  He does not boast of his racial uniqueness.  Rather, in full grievance mode, he considers it "a source of shame."  Indeed, the whole experience troubled him:

I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.

As early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and Obama fan Dan Armstrong revealed Obama's whole account to be a "serious exaggeration."  Obama worked at not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published newsletters."  He was not the only black person who worked there.  He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles.  He mostly just copy-edited business items and slipped them into a three-ring binder for the company's customers.
Are we supposed to believe that Goderich not only changed Obama's birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya, but also transformed him from a grunt filling three-ring binders into a "financial journalist and editor"?
When this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either camp were confused as to why Obama would lie about such seemingly irrelevant details.  There are two good, non-exclusive possibilities.  For one, the exaggeration enables the reader to see Obama as he would like to see himself -- "a spy behind enemy lines."  For another, Obama's co-author, Bill Ayers, once again took the framework of Obama's life and roughed in the details. 

In Fugitive Days, Ayers' 2001 memoir, he uses the phrase "behind enemy lines" almost literally to describe his and his comrades' quiet infiltration of the opponent's position.  Wife Bernardine Dohrn has said the same in public.  When the Weather Underground declared its state of war with the United States in May 1970, Dohrn warned that people fighting "Amerikan imperialism" all over the world "look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire."
The bottom line is this: Obama has been creating and shifting identities his entire adult life.  If the agency brochure was a snapshot of the 1991 Obama, Dreams captured him in his 1995 pose: hip, black, progressive, wounded by racial slights but able to overcome them, just the man to lead Chicago into the 21^st century, then the extent of his and Ayers's ambition for him.
"I met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s[,]"  Bill Ayers would tell Salon, likely pushing the actual date back several years.  "And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago." 
Friend Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to Harvard.  "He wanted to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he ever talked about as far as holding office," she would tell early Obama biographer David Mendell.
No one would have challenged Obama's biography had he not gone beyond Chicago, but he did.  And so where he was born matters, and whether he even wrote his own biography matters, too.  As much as I know about Obama, I don't know or pretend to know the answer -- at least to the first of those two questions.

Democrats Push for Tax Confiscation Law That Has Some Nasty History Behind It

by: Gary DeMar
For centuries, millions of Europeans came to the United States to escape the oppression of tyrannical regimes. Others came for expanded economic opportunities. With the rise of Nazism in Germany, many Jews saw the handwriting on the wall and got out with their possessions before it became illegal to do so. Most didn’t. Gary North’s comments put a fine edge on the point:

The hypothetical Jewish family in question should have done a lot more than sew gold coins into their clothes in 1939. The head of the household should have sold his house and his business. He should have transferred all of the family’s assets to Switzerland, England, or the United States. Then he should have directed the family to pack their bags and follow their money. After August 31, 1939, this became illegal. World War II broke out. 

Sen. Chuck Schumer and some of his fellow Democrats want a new law placed on the books. It’s called “Ex-PATRIOT”: “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy.” The proposed law is in reaction to Eduardo Saverin’s decision to renounce his American citizenship which Democrats like Schumer believe is a “scheme” to “help him duck up to $67 million in taxes.”
Saverin is one of the founders of Facebook. He is originally from Brazil. Fearing that their son might be a kidnap victim, the Saverin family moved to Miami in the early 1990s to find a safe place to live. Saverin’s father was a wealthy industrialist.

Eduardo Saverin has lived in Singapore since 2009 and renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2011.
Saverin has not done one illegal thing. He’s taking advantage of the tax laws as they are written. He should be applauded for his foresight.

What should be condemned is the idea that any one person should have to pay $67 million in taxes. Here is Saverin’s response to Schumer’s new wealth confiscation bill:

“My decision to expatriate was based solely on my interest in working and living in Singapore, where I have been since 2009. I am obligated to and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to the United States government. I have paid and will continue to pay any taxes due on everything I earned while a U.S. citizen. It is unfortunate that my personal choice has led to a public debate, based not on the facts, but entirely on speculation and misinformation.”

It’s obvious that Saverin did not become an ex-patriot because of taxes. He did it for sound business reasons.
But can you blame anyone from legally trying to avoid paying taxes to a government that throws our confiscated tax dollars away to companies like Solyndra? At least Saverin is investing his own money in his new business ventures. The more money he has to invest, the more jobs he will create. He takes the risks — he should reap the benefits.
Finally, the problem is our tax code that makes it expensive to do business in the United States. A change in our tax code might have kept Saverin and his billions in the United States.

Army letting diversity trump winning wars

by: Bob Unruh
It seems that the old military song “The Army Goes Rolling Along” may need some revisions. Especially where it says, “We’ll fight with all our might, as the Army keeps rolling along.”
That’s because of the military’s new move to open up previously closed job assignments, such as infantry, to women, according to the nonpartisan Center for Military Readiness.
The move was launched in February when Defense Department officials Vee Penrod and Army Maj. Gen. Gary Patton eliminated some rules regarding women soldiers. They promised at the time that assignments for women in or near direct ground combat would be “only the beginning,” the organization noted.

The move was affirmed yesterday when Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Raymond Odierno spoke with reporters.

“This is a progressive way forward,” he said. ” … We’re opening up the occupational specialties that currently women serve in, down to infantry and armor battalions. And we will run this for several months. And my guess is, based on my experience in Iraq and what I’ve seen in Afghanistan, we’ll then move forward with a more permanent solution inside of the Army probably sometime this fall.”
The CRM statement released by its director, Elaine Donnelly, explained the situation this way: “The National Football League does not pursue ‘diversity’ by training female players for non-lethal combat on the gridiron. Even the best female athletes would not survive the grueling training and punishing clashes against aggressive male opponents. Social experiments that override recognition of individual merit are not acceptable in pro football. Every team wants to win the Super Bowl.”
But in the case of the U.S. military, women now are being invited “to train for infantry battalions that engage in lethal ground combat – violent conflicts in which lives and missions are at risk. The stated motive is not to improve combat readiness, it is ‘diversity’ and ‘equal opportunities for women to excel.’”
Odierno said just this week “more than 200 women began reporting to the maneuver battalions in nine of our brigade combat teams, selected to participate in the exception to the direct ground combat assignment rule.”

He said other rules were rescinded to open up “six military occupational specialties and 80 units, more than 13,000 positions to women, opening up new opportunities to our female soldiers.”
But a report posted by the National Health Institute cites studies showing that women are “approximately 52 percent and 66 percent as strong as the men in the upper and lower body respectively. The men were also stronger relative to lean body mass.”
So where are the military benefits to having someone physically less strong being put in a position of carrying an injured soldier, hefting a 70-plus pound pack and fighting a pitched firefight at the end of a days-long trek?
CMR has said the Pentagon’s policy “is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.”
“Instead of putting the needs of the military first, the Defense Department is taking incremental steps to implement the deeply flawed recommendations of the Military Diversity Leadership Commission,” CMR said.
Its report, “From Representation to Inclusion: Diversity Leadership for the 21st Century,” comes not from battle-scarred veterans but from “civilian military ‘equal opportunity’ professionals who assign priority to ‘diversity,’ not military effectiveness,” CMR said.
The recommendations concede “diversity” is not about “treating everyone the same,” but instead its focus is on “inclusion.”

 read more: http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/army-letting-diversity-trump-winning-wars/