I must say that the McInnish v. Chapman lawsuit is a magnet for nutty birther theories. We had the Larry Klayman complaint, followed with the amicus brief from Lucas Daniel Smith (who brought the subject of this article to my attention – and no, I have never tried to access your computer), then the USJF brief, and now someone named Albert W. L. Moore, Jr. has submitted his own amicus brief.
If one sang the Sesame Street song: “one of these briefs is not like the other,” this one might be the odd one (but then again maybe they all are). It is like the others in that it seems to ignore what the question before the Alabama Supreme Court is. They’re not deciding whether Obama is eligible to be President or not; they’re deciding whether the lower court correctly dismissed the case, a dismissal not based on Obama’s eligibility. Still the Moore brief is a bit out there, even by birther standards.
It has the usual old birther stuff: Fukino said “records” instead of “record,” Indonesian adoption and Barack Obama Sr. is not really the President’s father. But it also has a narrative structure that I have come to associate with a former commenter here, Sven Magnussen (and his host of sock puppets). Here’s a bit:
Obama was a naturalized citizen of Indonesia around 1968, when American Secretary of State Dean Rusk issued a certificate of loss of nationality to facilitate the Indonesian naturalization. In 1971, Obama was returned to the United States unaccompanied on his Indonesian passport. The Department of State referred him to Catholic Charities of Connecticut, under a contractual arrangement. Catholic Charities had Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham appointed guardian. In 1977 Obama started using the Social Security number of a deceased American citizen to avoid applying for one on the basis of his American citizenship….
Then it lapses into the April Fool story of Obama attending Columbia University under the name of Barry Soetoro with a foreign student scholarship. Oh, and he wants a DNA sample.
Of course this is pure fantasy. Its logic (if you can call it that) says that Obama had to use someone else’s social-security number because he wasn’t a citizen—only you don’t have to be a citizen to get a social-security number, only a legal resident. And of course Columbia University lists Barack Obama, not Barry Soetoro as a graduate.
I don’t know. Maybe this brief was submitted to make the birthers look crazy. Either way, the McInnish appeal is pretty much a publicity stunt all around.
Read more:
Update:
This is more than just reminiscent of Sven Magnussen, it is the same. I found substantially the same text on Sven’s blog.
If I understand the law correctly from Dr. Taitz (who is, after all, a lawyer), on an appeal, especially in Alabama, you cannot introduce new evidence, but must refer to evidence that was before the trial court.
So, Doc, did Mr. Moore find all of that stuff in the record on appeal?
An Amicus brief is not constrained by legal reality and neither the reply briefs by the appellants, or so it seems 🙂
A lot of imagination this Moore guy has, but a little light on evidence and facts. Seems to be par for the course for most birther cases.
I think Moore is really Sven, and is again testing the limits of birther lunacy. I guarantee you there will soon be a Free Republic thread on this filing. Butternut will, or course, demur in favor of her own loony pronouncements.
It’s so predictable. Moore is another bitter old white guy, 75 years old, admitted to the Missouri Bar in 1964. He and our pal Hermie should hook up.
It’s either the work of a former competent attorney, now seriously demented, or a trolling of magnificent proportions. I’d like to think the latter as the former is quite sad.
Someone is trying to make the appellants look foolish… Not that they need much help
Well, whoever it is, he/she has done a glorious job of it! That was quite a read. Best birther BS evah!
I sort of imagine Sven holding the signposts of Lunacyland tightly against his (her?) chest and running as fast as possible to increase the size of his (her?) domain.
The only evidence I saw in the brief was the quote from Dr. Fukino saying that Pres. Obama was a natural born citizen. The rest has no reference to anything, and nothing appears attached.
I like the reference to DNA testing. It would seem that the worst fears of Justice Scalia from the other day are coming true.
Now that is an excellent speculation. After reading the darn thing through I couldn’t imagine anyone actually believing that drivel. So, perhaps it is satire…one would hope. 🙂
Update:
This is more than just reminiscent of Sven Magnussen, it is the same. I found substantially the same text on Sven’s blog.
http://svenmagnussen.blogspot.com/2013/03/obama-naturalized-as-us-citizen-in-1983.html
It all makes sense now! This elaborate hoax was concocted and put in place because ❝pretending to be the son of the alien black man who adopted him❞ was the best narrative for winning a national election.
It seems like each of the 6 amicus briefs (not counting the ADP’s) has tried to be crazier than the one before it. I fully expect the next brief to suggest that the President is not really a human. Of course, the Supreme Court has not granted permission to any of the various proposed amici (other than the ADP) to file anything, so none of those filings are currently before the court.
A birther gets mad at someone for assuming a false ID and in order to further his gripes… assumes a false ID?
I’ve gotten into it with Mr. Moore before. He’s pretty confused about a lot of things, like whether or not a child’s U.S. citizenship can be renounced; you’d think a lawyer should know better. But it’s his theory about President Obama’s parents that’s really…interesting. He says Stanley Dunham was indeed one of the President’s parents– but not Stanley ANN Dunham. According to Mr. Moore, Stanley ARMOUR Dunham was the President’s father. And the mother was some “obliging Polynesian wahine.”
http://www.examiner.net/opinion/letters/x1381057761/Is-the-president-lying-about-his-ethnicity#axzz2VMIkBjiv
Here’s a “draft application and suggestions of amicus curiae” he dreamed up for our friend David Farrar’s Georgia case:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/foxnews-finally-covers-obama-birth-controversy/#comment-72962
Alas, I’m not sure it ever made it into the judge’s hands.
And he’s shown up here before:
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2008/12/cia-dna-test-reveals-barack-obama-was-adopted/#comment-36080
Well it won’t win anyone the Nobel Prize for literature…………
What a load of nonsense, and without any motive! Why did the boy want Indonesian citizenship? What is with the Connecticut child welfare issue?
The President’s story is odd enough and has ample supporting evidence; this
nonsense has NONE. Face it,Mr Moore, the President is half black. You’ll survive.
Mr. Moore is, representing the typical, slight variation in inane complexity from the Birther “norm”, just another Birther.
The Birther phenomenon is only visible because of the Internet’s ability to let widely scattered deranged and/or racist persons who have the same hobbies and/or hatreds, connect and feel as though they have a supporting and admiring community. The Internet further provides a means to disseminate false information to fellow unquestioning fruit-cakes, and the low-information citizen looking for a way to substitute one damning catch-phrase for a life-time of responsible information gathering to support fact-based participatory citizenship.
These crazy and/or hateful people have always existed as an irreducible percentage of the population, in the form of “the neighborhood nut-case” espousing any number of bizarre beliefs, but usually harmlessly below the radar of the mental-health community.
I fear the Birthers will prove to be only one of the first such insane movements that will become a never-ending aspect of the communication saturation that we have immersed our society in. I especially dread how it is likely to be used in more sophisticated ways to further exploit superstitious citizens to their own detriment.
Odd . . . there actually is an attorney named Albert W. L. Moore, Jr. He’s from Missouri. I wonder if he’s pals with Sven?
I made the mistake of going over to Sven’s blog entry….geez…The Stupid It Hurts, especially the comments section.
He’s real, all right. I looked him up last night:
http://members.mobar.org/members/lawyersearch/GSResults.aspx?fname=albert%25&lname=moore%25&city=independence%25&zip=%25&county=
Speaking of congress, the congress person who was present at the Zullo ‘presentation’, Stockman, has remained quiet on the topic…
Too bad… It would have been such a great show…
Good find. How does someone as goofy-minded as Moore manage to continue to practice law? Oh wait; Rickey said he was 75, so he’s probably retired, or at least semi-retired. And apparently already in his dotage.
You really have to bend the crazy needle to be embarassing to Steve Stockman.
As I mentioned in another thread, I strongly suspect that Boehner and Cantor have strongly warned their colleagues in the House to stay away from birtherism, at least overtly. Representatives such as Stockman, Gohmert and Bachmann have eagerly embraced many other crackpot theories, so there has to be a reason why none of them will go full birther.
I normally don’t read legal stuff, since I don’t understand 90% of it. But after the comments, I had to read this one. It’s chock full of nuts, that’s for sure!
I looked up a few of Mr. Moore’s cases a while back. I seem to remember an appeal in a slip-and-fall suit against McDonald’s– he also keeps running, unsuccessfully, for county committeeman in Jackson County.
LOL! Yeah, I noticed that too… Crazy, delusional extremism is a one-way direction towards further and further madness…
Excellent post with great points! Well said!!!
One little note about Mr. Moore’s brief (putting aside for a moment his mangled understanding of renunciation)–
From the brief:
“In 1979, he (President Obama) confirmed as an adult his relinquishment of American citizenship in favor of his underlying Indonesian naturalization by refraining from registration with the Selective Service System.”
Mr. Moore neglected to read this:
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=44697
“1-103. Persons born in calendar year 1961 shall present themselves for registration on any of the six days beginning Monday, July 28, 1980.”
NOBODY was obligated to register for the draft in 1979. I certainly wasn’t; and President Obama registered on the second day he was ALLOWED to do so.
Either Obama is the “perfect storm” or a harbinger of things to come.
Perhaps excepting Zeigler’s brief.
Mr. Moore has said elsewhere that President Obama “intended to relinquish U.S. citizenship in 1981, all right, partly to evade an obligation of male U.S. citizens, to register with Selective Service.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Albert_Moore/mitt-romney-mexican_n_1192694_153179668.html
President Obama wouldn’t have been able to permanently “evade an obligation” to register with the Selective Service merely by renouncing his U.S. citizenship; he MIGHT have had no such obligation while in the United States on Mr. Moore’s imaginary student visa, but upon Mr. Moore’s imaginary naturalization, he certainly would have. In fact, proof of registration with the Selective Service System would’ve been a prerequisite for the imaginary naturalization. I sure have a hard time squaring this imaginary visa and naturalization with that imaginary alienage to evade registering with the Selective Service System.
All for a draft that I don’t recall anybody being the least bit concerned about in 1980.
As diverse as his background is, compared to past presidents, he’s certainly the first to cross the threshold beyond what bigots can wrap their heads around, sure. I’m sure they see him as the “perfect storm”…although then again, they certainly need to come up with a lot of delusional fantasies about his sexuality, religion, communism, etc. to have to add on top of that, just to maintain their hate….
So, I’m sure that someday there will be a bigger “perfect storm” to addle the crazies and build new BS myths around. But yeah, it might be awhile.
In terms of “harbinger of things to come”, I’m just concerned that the mere toleration the level of absurdity, crazy and fact-less demagoguery we’ve seen since his original election will “set the bar”, regardless of who is in office next. It simply may also be awhile before sanity in media is restored…and who knows if the “wild west” of the internet will ever see a general trend towards establishing some level of expected cultural civility or even search tools that help people weed out non-credible kook sites…
Not holding my breath there either. But hey, at least the dark insanity of birtherism is on the wane, regardless of the hopeless dead-enders in its midst.
You devious dog faces will pay the price some day because the idiot will be jailed along with his entourage of devious criminals; criminals who are wanted for “MURDER”.
Good luck PUTZ BRAINS you lose now that the heat is really on all of you for the very near future.
Sheriffs ar ah coming la da de da da.
Moore also is a racist, as evidenced by this comment:
One also needs two U.S. citizen parents at the time of birth, but in fact both Obama and Romney had two U.S. citizen parents. Obama won’t disclose his, because neither is Negro. Probably his father was a honkeychalk and his mother a native Hawai’ian wahine. Not people who would draw blacks from the ‘hoods of Chicago. Now, a black African father who made it with an American white chick would be a draw.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Albert_Moore/mitt-romney-mexican_n_1192694_153229863.html
Stop insulting my favorite coffee. Best price at Costco, too.
Never heard that word before, and a Google search yields about 5 results all tied to birthers talking about Obama or his mother.
Is this like saying “whitey white”? Are they making up words now, too?
If Hillary runs and wins in 2016, I expect a whole lot more of the Pauly Guthrie “wimmin can’t be Prez” types to come out of the woodworks. They might even be more vocal than birthers now because misogyny is much less taboo than racism.
Conservatives make up everything.
War is Peace = Iraq
I have a small concern with this article in that it associates the name of an anonymous commenter on the Internet with a real person. We don’t generally “out” people here. To be clear, I am not saying that the two are the same, only that text written under one name was used by the other.
Which is why Michelle Obama should run.
I think you are onto something there. Obama brought out the latent racism that is hiding underneath the surface. The misogyny will start to really slip out against HRC…
I don’t know if Sven Magnussen is actually Albert Moore, either. It could simply be that Moore has cribbed Sven’s theories.
However, it’s pretty clear that the birther Albert Moore who posts at HuffPo and elsewhere is the same Albert Moore who filed the amicus brief. Here is another of his posts which looks like it came straight out of Sven’s fevered mind:
Obama’s constitutional eligibility problem lies not in his birth, but in his voluntary naturalization as a citizen of Indonesia, with intent to relinquish U.S. citizenship and thereby evade the obligation to register with the Selective Service. In 2008 a counterfeit registration was slipped into the files with a clumsily forged date of receipt stamp to back-date it (“2008” to “80”; odds are that ALL those actually filed in 1980 read “1980”). Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission and House of Representatives might launch investigations of the conspiracy between Obama and Indonesian President SBY to purge or sequester Obama’s Indonesian naturalization records and who received what for this tampering with Indonesia’s official records to obstruct American justice.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/Albert_Moore/mitt-romney-mexican_n_1192694_153224107.html
I think they are the same. A Swede is a fanatical Denialist. Really?