Orly Taitz
As we all know, Orly Taitz, erstwhile attorney and queen of the birthers makes a big deal about her contention that Barack Obama has committed fraud by using multiple fake social-security numbers. I’ve commented here that Taitz has been sloppy in her court filings meeting court rules requiring redaction of valid SSNs.
Her latest lawsuit, a Freedom of Information Act complaint against the Social Security Administration, also contains social-security numbers in plain view. The Social Security Administration is not amused and petitioned the court to have these rule-violating documents removed or re-filed under seal, and the court so ordered.
Taitz, not to be outdone, questions the court as to what a “valid social-security number” is. She argues [link to Taitz web site] that she is free to file documents with Obama’s SSN on them because it is not valid.
Now here’s where she is asking for it: in her request for clarification, she uses Obama’s unredacted SSN! This on top of issuing a bogus subpoena.
After the motion for clarification, she filed a motion for summary judgement and again did not redact the SSN.
She must be angling for martyr status, since that worked so well for Lakin.
I think she needs more PayPal-clicky, so she’s fishing for another sanction.
Or she’s just plain stubborn like a 3-year-old and thinks “if I have to redact the numbers, fine, but I’ll file two unredacted motions before, that’ll teach ’em not to give orders to Orly”.
I just find it funny this raving egomaniac is soft and quiet like a mouse when she’s actually in front of a court.
I’m with you on this – on both of your points.
what would be appropiate at this time is that the judge should order her to undergo pshyciatric evaluation, that would be the right thing to do.
Agreed!
ORLY
´ʘʘ˘
☀☁☀
TAITZ
It is hard to believe that after submitting the original unredacted complaint, being ordered to redact, and immediately again submitting unredacted numbers, she isn’t going to be sanctioned. It’s actually pretty amazing how much she’s gotten away with through her many cases. I’ve seen attorneys get in trouble with a court for a lot less than she continually does case-in-case-out.
I completely agree. It astounds me that they’ve given her so many “passes” on her bad behavior. I can’t believe that CA has allowed her to retain her law license this long.
I keep wondering if judges are reluctant to sanction crazies, because they just want them to go away quietly…
If you ask me, that’s a short-sighted policy to take, as the dedicated crazy WON’T go away, and certainly won’t go quietly. Going light on them just encourages them to file more and more frivolous actions, wasting many court rooms’ time. I say better to throw the book at them, sanction them strongly and get them disbarred and away from being a public nuisance as quickly as possible…
One would think that the California bar will be compelled to take action if she is sanctioned again, but then I thought that she would be disciplined after she accused various Federal judges of committing treason.
I can’t help but think the Cal Bar might just think she’s not worth the trouble.
It’s not like she’s a serious attorney liable to make a grievous error in a precedent setting case, and it’s entirely possible that litigious as she is she’d try to sue them for years afterwards, becoming more of an annoyance than she’s worth.
We have a guy in the warehouse at work who is abysmally bad at his job, but he doesn’t cost the company any money, because he doesn’t do anything. He never gets disciplined because nobody thinks it would be worth it, and he’s enough of a crackpot that he’d sue forever and ever if he was fired, justified or not.
The lawyers got together and decided it was cheaper to just pay him until he retires than to waste time in court.
I don’t necessarily mean the Bar has to take action – but it’s surprising the latitude she’s given by the courts themselves. Usually this latitude is given only to non-attorneys representing themselves, not to an otherwise licensed practitioner. And most certainly someone with a law license would know basic thing like if the court asks you nicely to redact numbers from now on, to actually do so and no submit new unredacted documents almost out of spite.
I think she’s looking for a fight. Perhaps she is dumb enough to think that if she gets sanctioned for not redacting Obama’s SSN, she will be able to get DISCOVERY as part of her fight to overturn her sanctions. She’s a moron.
I think she tried that before, claiming that her sanctions from Rhodes v. Obama should give her discovery. I does not appear that it worked well for her.
I think we have a winner here– Just imagine Orly’s logic;
The Court says: We told you to redact SS numbers. We sanction you $$$$$.
Orly: I won’t pay unless you prove it is Obama’s actual SS Number- I demand every scrap of his papers, applications, etc.
She probably thinks she wins either way- She will either drive the Usurper from office (and into jail) or she will be sanctioned, become an even greater martyr and birther bigshot, and rake in donations.
I think I’ll take a page out of the birther’s playbook and hope that somehow she is violating an obscure but important immigration law, and she will be rounded up and deported.
I’ll even rock back and forth mumbling “any day now… any day now…) 😉
Actually, she is more likely to be deported than Obama…
Where would they even deport Obama TO?
Hawaii?
Funny, no one here cares that the president has a bogus SSN that was previously issued to a person from connecticut, but is really concerned about some redaction issue. By now that SSN is so much in the public domain that the need to redact is laughable.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Obama’s social security number was ever issued to anyone else.
Why do you even think it was?
Wouldn’t that just be transported?
Chris: First, there is not the slightest evidence that the current President ever committed a fraudulent act regarding his SSN. Not a molecule.
But let’s suppose he had, Would I be concerned about a crime committed in the distant past by someone who later became President? Yes, that would be of some concern. Should a President be impeached for something done outside of his official duties? We’ve already been there in recent history and the answer was “No”. And that was for an act done while in office.
Now let’s do the hypocracy test. Around the same time that your wild speculations lead you to believe that Barack Obama may have committed a crime, another recent President (incidentally from Connecticut) committed the crime of drunk driving. Not wild speculation but fact, admitted to in court. His Vice President committed the same offense twice. And this is a crime that results in thousands of deaths in the US every year-several 9/11s every single year. Having an unauthorized SSN, while serious, has never, to my knowledge, resulted in anyone’s death.
So let me ask you, did George Bush and Dick Cheney’s actual (as opposed to wild speculation) record of drunk driving concern you?
I’ll agree that redacting Obama’s SSN is closing the barn door after the horse has left; however, rules are rules, and in this case, the rule violation is the only story there is.
You said that Obama’s SSN was previously issued to a person in Connecticut. Who might that person be? Is he deceased? No, that’s not possible because the SSN doesn’t show up in the SSA death index. It is true that the Obama SSN comes from series of numbers usually assigned to Connecticut residents, but not always. The idea that Barack Obama is using a fake SSN is wildly implausible for all sorts of reasons we’ve discussed before.
So the only real news here is Orly Tatiz and her inability to color between the lines.
“Funny, no one here cares that the president has a bogus SSN”
.
Cris, as the SSA and IRS consider this a joke, maybe you ought to report it to the Canadian Mounties. Tell them a young teen forged a SSN and has been using it all these years with out any problem from the IRS. Also tell the Mounties that SSA and IRS have refused to act on Orly’s accusation. He did this to hide his identity which is why his identity as Obama is not hidden. Please also relay to them that the number, though for 1890, seems to fit in sequence with 1960’s number, that means the conspiracy a young teenager commited was amazing, the FBI must be in on it. I can give you Canadian Embassy phone number if you wish.
Hi Chris,
Here is President Eisenhower’s application for a social security number (ss-5). Notice he mailed it from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania but the SSN is for a California resident.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/54563729/President-Eisenhower-s-SS-5
Is this a case of Social Security fraud?
What Chris fails to understand is that the 1890 DOB showed up in reference to Obama at an address linked to Obama. In other words, there was no other person to whom the SSN has been granted.
In fact, there are various DOB’s: 1890, 1990, 08/04/1961 and 04/08/1961
Again, there is NO evidence that the number has ever been assigned to someone other than President Obama. And yet, Orly claims ‘fraud’ based on ignorance and lack of evidence.
Which is why she will fail again and again, much to the amusement of those interested in logic, reason and facts based on evidence, all of which indicate not only that President Obama is natural born but also that there is NO evidence of any SSN fraud.
What now?
No one cares that you cling to that delusion…. is that good enough for you?
Susan Daniels makes a good case that the President was assigned the SSN in 1977 (IIRC) as she found the person who has the SSN immediately after the President. This would mean the person born in 1890 didn’t apply for their SSN until they were 87 years old.
Obama referenced this ssn on his Selective Services Application in 1980. We also know that President Obama worked at Baskin Robins earlier in his life and likely needed a SSN…
Again, these arguments have no legal merits, and are meant solely to undermine our President and destroy the Office of The President of the United States. These people claim to have respect for the Constitution but their actions show otherwise.
If Obama has been using a bogus SSN for the past 34 years, one would expect that by now the IRS and SSA would have caught on. You realize, I hope, that when the IRS receives a tax return, they cross-reference the filer’s SSN against the SSA records and they will reject the return if the SSN does not match the name on the return. Yet Obama seems to have experienced no problems with getting the IRS to accept his returns.
What Orly fails to recognize is that if Obama’s SSN had been issued to someone else, the name of that “someone else” would show up in the same database searches which she has been relying upon. Yet no name other than Obama’s has ever been associated with his “bogus” SSN.
Oh Rickey….tut tut
It’s all a CONZPIRUCY going back to before the beginning of time (1961) and EVRYONE is a TRAITOR AN USURPER and COMMIE/NAZI/BILDERBERG/MOOSLUM.
Or something…. 😎
I’d point out that the whole claim of a fraudulent SSN is based wholly on the idea that Obama’s SS;number is associated with the state of Connecticut. Many others have pointed out that a simple one-digit typographical error in entering a zip code could account for the difference.
But I also am always left to wonder what evidence anyone has that Obama did NOT spend time in the state of Connecticut as a teenager? The fact that he does not mention a summer vacation in Conn. in his autobiography is not evidence that it didn’t happen — if I were to write my life story, I probably wouldn’t bother to list all of the different places I traveled with my kid. I’m several years older than Obama and I spent the summer I was 15 working as a camp counselor in a faraway state; the other teenage camp counselors came from all over the country. Another year I applied for a summer internship at a research lab in Maine (didn’t get it, but I’m sure some other teenager did). Teenagers travel. They traveled in the 70’s and they very certainly do now. Plus, I think that kids with single parents are particularly likely to be sent off to stay with other folks, simply because their parents have to work and don’t have the ability to supervise them closely during periods when school is not in session. Teenagers also go through a phase of being totally annoying and obnoxious, which means that at around age 15-17, their grandparents aren’t always that fond of them either.
So not only is it possible that the first 9 digit in Obama’s Hawaii zip code was mistakenly entered as a 0 for a Conn. equivalent — it is equally plausible that Obama spent a chunk of time during the summer he turned 16 in some state other than Hawaii. See for example: http://www.teensummercamps.com/Connecticut-Summer-Camps.htm
If that time was spent doing something that is typically done by rich white kids — and was done in the company of rich white kids — then it wouldn’t have fit at all within the Dreams from My Father narrative, which was all about Obama’s search for his identity as the son of a black African. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
I would like confirmation on whether Barack Hussein Obama, the father of the president ever lived in Connecticut.
I would like confirmation on whether Barack Hussein Obama, the father of the president ever lived in Connecticut.
SSA & IRS don’t care, why should you?
Why would a Harvard student live in CT? Think, man, think!!!
I know of nothing that suggests that he did; however, the time when this might have been possible was long before Jr. applied for a social-security card.
It doesn’t matter where the father lived, because at the time that Obama obtained his Social Security number, his father was in Kenya. Obama would have applied for the SS on his own.
There are two main possibilities to account for the CT-associated number:
1) Obama’s return address zip code in Hawaii was one digit off from a CT equivalent, and a mistake was made in assigning his SS # as a direct result of a data entry error in entering social security data.
2) Obama was temporarily staying in CT at the time he applied for his SS (extended visit with friends, participation in summer program for teens, etc.) — and he either used his temporary CT mailing address in the application or applied in person at an office in CT.
To me, either explanation is equally plausible. As far as I know, Social Security number assignments have never been tied to residency or domicile — only the mailing address or the office from which an application was made would ever have any bearing on geographic assignment of numbers.
34 years. A 34 year old mistake becomes at some point becomes at 34 year fact. So, when the owner accepted it, it became a fact.
So Taintz is a nearly 51 year old mistake.
She is just wrong, and it isn’t even funny.
Agreed.
Fortunately, one thing all these birther lawsuits prove is that our systm of jurisprudence works and has checks to prevent crazies from doing damage. Judges and clerks do need to do a lot of work, however, to make this all happen. It shows we have had some very intelligent people in our past.
Well, the Birther lawsuits are just one tiny sliver of insight into the amount of completely crazy and frivolous lawsuits submitted that tie up too much of our courts time and cause delays in addressing other, serious lawsuits. From the government’s side, the sixth Amendment is supposed to provide the right to a speedy trial (at least for criminal cases). A waste of time is a waste of money for all involved, especially those that have to waste time defending themselves from frivolous and bunk lawsuits. Not to mention the judges time, etc. spent dealing with these instead of acual serious matters.
If anything, watching these Birther cases and seeing how excessively LENIENT the courts are in handling them, I’m even more in favor of tighter and stricter reforms in the system to weed out and sanction such nonsense.
and it wouldn’t have mattered, since the Obamas, never applied for SS for Obama II. His father was long gone from the US by the time 1977 rolled around.
As a non-American I am constantly amazed at the way in which citizens can use such inflamatory words when describing their elected president. I know that you have a Freedom of Speech Amendment but that also brings with it a responsibility not to abuse that right. Orly Taitz has been describing Mr Obama at various times of being a Usurper, a Criminal, a forger, a dictator, and a treasonable person. And these are only the words that come to mind. When the President refers to his critics in this matter as “carnival barkers” she comes over all offended and complains to the courts. What a terrible thing to say about her and her cohorts!
Could these things happen in any other country in the world? I don’t think so which only goes to show that at the very least Mr Obama is not a dictater but is a tolerant person who patently would never abuse his office to silence these people who , if they were honest, really only care about his skin colour.
I believe that it is up to ordinary Americans to do whatever iit takes, legally, to stop this behaviour.
Since this appears to be an Obama site let’s do it this way. If you think Obama’s SSN is legit then why not prove it. In order to make fun of Orly you need to prove her wrong. So far on this site I have not seen any of you prove her wrong. The 042 says a CT SSN. You all say well the Social Security Administration makes mistakes. Again if it is a mistake you prove it. Computer experts say that Obama’s LFBC has been doctored. You say it has not and that it is good to go. Personally I have seen a lot more evidence that says it has than I have seen that says it has not. All I hear from the left is rant with never any proof. If any one in their right mind thinks that this man is squeaky clean then they are living in a dream world. When your first order of business is to seal all of your records then something is bad wrong. You do not spend millions to keep those records concealed unless you have something that you do not want the world to see. Their is just no way around that one.
So defend this guy if you like but sooner or later you will be boiling your dog on the kitchen stove just to have something to eat. I am giving ten to one odds that he is dirty, any takers.
And how about the senate resolution on McCain where it said since his father and mother were both U.S citizens then he McCain was considered a NBC, remember Obama signed that one. Well if it does not matter about both of your parents being U.S citizens or not then why enter that into the resolution. According to that resolution which Obama signed, Obama does not make the cut. You left wing libs just kill me. You rant and rave but you never prove anything wrong. The right chunks something out and all the left does is come back with, YA YA YA and Obama spends a few more hundred thousand to keep it hid. If you have nothing to hide and are so right then show the people that you are right but stop with the mouth only and a truck load of attorneys. If Obama had come clean we would not be having this discussion period. Personally I think the guy is dirty right down to the bone and one day we will find this out and all of you left wing eat your dogs Democrats will have pie all over you face. But not to worry because I am sure you will have another excuse by then.
personally, you’ve seen nothing of the kind. you’re just repeating birfer rumor.
This is to Jim Finan. Obama is not a dictator because we will not allow it. Personally I think he would like to be but he knows better. Yes Jim we can tell Obama to kiss off and he can tell us to kiss off, that is why we are Americans. We do not bow down to any President weather he be a Republican or a Democrat. We will treat you with respect as long as you treat us with respect. We do not like people who hide things, in other words who will not be transparent. We do not like Presidents who seal their records. We do not like Senators, Congressmen and judges who will not uphold their oath of office, which is to defend our constitution. Our men and women are buried all over the world because we were defending freedom. Where would we be if Hitler had hit a home run?
No Jim I did not serve in Vietnam nor did my only brother serve in Vietnam nor did five of my uncles serve in WWII to see some president hide his records and spend a couple of million to keep them hid. I served because it gives me the right to tell this so called president to kiss off. This president who has not a clue as to what he is doing. This so called president who is spending our country into bankruptcy. Now Jim pay close attention to this one. OBAMA KISS OFF. See how easy that was?
Fortuitously for the Americans in the room, in THIS country, they law says presumption of innocence so it’s up to Birtfoon idiots like “Bill Prat” to prove tuff, bot the President.
I count 18 outright lies in one, disjointed word salad, not even a record, back to the rear or the little yellow bus for Prat alas.
So, we can count on your vote and support then?
Obama / Biden 2012
So what is your proof that he is dirty? This one statement shows that you would not believe any proof the President gives. Your entire word salad is only accusations with no proof.
This is the whole birthers problems. Since they believe the President is “dirty” and a “crook,” they only evidence, facts and proof they will accept is that which incriminates him (so much for the 5th amendment). Being that there is no evidence of wrong doing in either Obama’s BC or SSN, yet the birthers will only accept evidence of wrong doing, they are demanding the President produce evidence that does not exist. When he fails to produce, then our poster here will claim the President is hiding something.
I am just waiting for their next theory where they accuse the President of spending billions to hide nothing as a distraction to keep the birthers from finding the real proof of fraud elsewhere.
Indeed, Bill, why don’t you prove it?
Where are Bill Plat’s records? Why are they sealed? He has shown absolutely nothing.
Can you prove that statement?
You do realize that “liberal” is right wing, don’t you? if you don’t know that, i suggest you go back and read some history and philosophy.
That’s just an opinion of course.
Because Porn ‘stache Joey Farah and his kept, well-paid boyfriends at WND said so?
Bill you don’t like Presidents who seal their records? So you must hate every President before Obama since they didn’t release “their documents” while they ran or were in office.
And of course “Bill” you are aware the EO “sealing records” is an EO which LOOSENS restrictions placed on Presidential Records implemented by Bush-Cheney?
I further assume you of course know that the records so “sealed” are PRESIDENTIAL records created during the term of the PRESIDENCY and not PERSONAL records or records created or linked to or by an individual BEFORE they become President.
No, this is just a reality based site. Unfortunately for you birthers, all the facts reside on our side.
Not the way it works in the US. The burden is on you to prove it’s not legit.
Oh…there are many reasons to make fun of Orly, and we’ve shown her to be wrong on sooooo many occasions. Like her claim Obama will be out of office in 60 days, that she is going to trial, that anyone will remotely pay attention to her subpoenas. Oh…and the fact that she is an incompetent attorney is a pretty easy target for making fun of her.
The SSA says flat out that the numbers don’t always match up. Check out their website. The very fact that President Obama has been using the same number for some 30 years is pretty strong evidence whatever social security number he is using is legit. I mistyped my wife’s ssn on our taxes this year, and they were immediately reject. You think that a person could go 30 years using a fraudulent ssn, and no one would notice?
Actually, no. There has not been a real computer expert to say it was doctored. Not a one. Not a single person that has ever been held forward as an expert in a court of law. You have a bunch of crackpots, including a guy who believes in pyrimad power, and that he found Moses’ altar…but real experts, not quite. Reality is that you have not seen any evidence or any expert that would make it into a courtroom say anything of the sort. The problem is that you think any crackpot that says something you like on the internets is evidence.
Actually, all the evidence is on our side. And it is even evidence that could be admitted into a court of law. What do you have? Nothing but your delusions.
Irrelevant, and a strawman argument. No one is claim the President is pure and innocent.
Too bad for you it never happened….care to produce some “evidence” of that?
Actually, what there is no way around is the fact that this is another birther lie. For someone who wants evidence, how about you actually provide some of your own?
Perhaps you should actually read the resolution before spouting off like a complete idiot? The resolution was not providing a full definition of natural born citizens, only the reason why McCain, a person not born on US soil, would be a natural born citizen….uless you believe that the only people who are natural born citizens are people “born to American citizens on an American military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936.”
The rest of your rant doesn’t even merit discussion. I’m sorry, you are one ill-informed crank. Rather than demanding evidence from everyone else, how about you actually do some of your own research than simply repeating long debunked birther lies and garbage.
You know there is a recent president that said more than once that he would like to be a dictator…and it wasn’t President Obama.
Again with the lies. President Obama has not sealed anything. In fact the first think he did was loosen the retrictions the President Bush had put in place, and returned them to what the were under Clinton. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good angry rant.
Neither do I. And while I do think many Congressmen aren’t upholding their oath, it had nothing to do with the President (but I think the judges for the most part do a pretty stand up job)>
And I severed in Gulf, so I can tell you to KISS OFF. You’re right. It is pretty simple.
I can also tell you that repeating the same birther lie about millions spent doesn’t make it any less a lie.
So I’ll go back to other comment and tell you to KISS OFF again.
Every other day a new birther spewing the same long discredited lies. When confronted they either run away or shift to some new lies without addressing the lies they were confronted on. It pisses me off so much.
So why is it that I gloss over the intelligent discussion and keep zeroing in on these fools and liars who piss me off? Their lies and their reality impaired world view have no impact on the political landscape. Barack Obama is still president until at least January 2013, quite possibly until 2017. In other words, birthers spewing lies about Barack Obama has about as much impact on his status as president as my spewing hatred at True Blood has an impact on that show being cancelled.
My question is why do I willingly expose myself to things that piss me off?
A worthy question which I have asked myself.
There’s intelligent discussion on the topic? Hmmm….seemed all there was was dealing with stupid birther lies, and a rather mundane discussion about the boring reality. Although I do recall a long time ago, there was an interesting discussion about whether a person like McCain can actually qualify as an NBC…but that was rather short lived.
Thrifty,
One of the reasons we ALL keep returning to the the things and people who piss us off is simple and wholly moral.
Without refutation, the lies will rapidly become the “new truth” and we have all seen where that leads many times in the last 100 years.
Birthers as a group lie, real simple, one of the classics being how they ALL were taught in school that you need two, staunch, upstanding American citizen parents to run for and be seated as President.
It’s a lie, pure and simple and not one of them has every been able to lay their hands on a text book, from the era they would have been taught in, to show that.
Has it changed them, hell no, do they still push it, hell yes, do you want this to become the “new truth”, not while I have breath in my body.
Well said.
No, this is not an “Obama site,” but I and most of the commenters here have come to the conclusion that the birthers are wrong about their their claims.
I don’t know about how anyone would go about “proving” that Barack Obama’s social-security number is legit. What we can prove is that he used it on his selective service registration. The problem is that social security numbers are not public information for living persons. I can prove that the 042 SSN does not belong to Mr. Ludwig, since Ludwig is deceased and his number is available through the social security death index.
The Social Security Administration, in a letter to Taitz, disputed her claim that Obama’s SSN indicated that it had been issued to a Connecticut address.
What we can argue is that the IRS validates social-security numbers, and has done so since before Obama was an elected official. I don’t see any plausible scenario where the Taitz contention could work.
I don’t know what I can add to that.
That’s not how the legal system works. Innocent until proven guilty. I can’t drag you into court with no evidence, and say “prove that you didn’t murder this guy”. I have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you murdered the guy. The duty of proving is that of the accuser.
As for the rest of your standard birther garbage, I have plenty of proof that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. He released a Certificate of Live Birth three years ago which states that it is prima facie evidence of the fact of birth. That’s it. It needs no further proof. The document itself is the end of the verification road.
But fine, we’ll play it your way. Prove to me that the Nordyke certificate isn’t fake. Provide your social security number and prove it isn’t fake.
But the liars are not swayed by out refutation. So what good are they? And how is it our job? I should think that preserving the President’s reputation is the President’s job.
Thrifty,
This is not, or rather only incidentally about the President and nothing at all to do with his reputation or his job performance.
This is about lies, liars, bigots and those who would attempt to warp or destroy the laws and principles upon which this Republic is founded.
Birthers are simply the latest meme that needs to be beaten back and hounded from society and as a functional member of society it is ever persons responsibility to say “Thus far and no further”.
Without taking that stance we all tacitly accede to the hate and we will end up far the worse for it.
Because most people just said “birfers, damn kooks, what’s to worry about” and poo-poo’d any concerns, we ended up with a plethora of profoundly racist and un-Constitutional Birther Bills being pushed in a range of state legislatures. All bar one have been killed THIS time, what about the next legislative sessions?
Don’t fight the hate and the haters and you deserve all we will end up with.
One of the reasons I don’t comment a lot is that it does get so repetitive. Someone like Bill Plat comes along and makes some claims, and they’re generally exactly the same claims that that last 10 or 15 of them made. it’s pretty rare for someone to come up with something different. And then by the time I get around to it, several people here have already refuted it, and there doesn’t seem to be much point in piling on.
I also sometimes just take a total break from it. Just don’t read it at all (I keep it in my RSS and take a look every once in a while to see if anything’s new–Donald Trump and then the long-form release brought me back this time, but before that it’d been a while.) I wonder if it would help you to do that. After all, you know the birthers will still be here whenever you want to come back.
I do think there’s a value in this, though. As someone else said, a claim that goes unchallenged becomes the “truth.”
I think that anyone who’s really made up their mind that Obama’s ineligible at this point, is not reachable. But there are always people who haven’t really made up their minds, they just heard something about it. I think those people are much less likely to actually post. I have no proof of that, but it stands to reason: the more strongly someone feels about something, the more likely they are to speak out about it, in general.
So you only get the comments from the hard-core. But you don’t know who else is out there not posting. When I do make a comment, I usually think of it like this: I’m not really addressing the hard-core birther who made the comment I’m responding to. I’m addressing the undecided lurker. Who may or may not actually be there ……. but if they are, maybe they’ll be convinced. So, yeah.
Excellent comment and I fully agree about possibly reaching the undecided or just misinformed.
Over the past 30 days, there have been 12,286 unique visitors on the site. Around 4,000 of those are new folks, and the average visitor looks at 5 pages. This month, far and away the most visited page was my Reply to Douglas Vogt. That is a long article packed with information that someone interested in Vogt’s claims would want to read. The 5th most popular article this month was from 2010, the article on Obama’s Social Security Number. That also appears in the search keywords that sends people here.
So for whatever reason, there are folks interested in what gets said.
Great post LM, and I think you’re right. When it comes to debating, I like to remember a scene from the movie Thank You for Smoking, a scene where Aaron Eckhart is trying to explain his job (lobbyist for Big Tobacco) to his son. They stage an debate over which is the better flavor of ice cream, chocolate or vanilla. At the end of the debate, the son says “But you didn’t convince me that chocolate is better than vanilla!” to which Eckhart replies “I’m not trying to convince you. I’m trying to convince THEM (meaning spectators).”
That’s something I tend to forget a lot. Even among reasonable people, it’s normal to get entrenched in your position and for debates to be ultimately fruitless if the goal is to convince the other person you’re debating. The other person you’re debating cares enough about his position to argue, and is going to have a lot invested emotionally. Spectators only care enough to watch, and often are much less invested.
I recently got into a debate over abortion with my mom and my sister on Facebook. I said at the outset that this topic was off-limits in face-to-face conversation when we met in real life. I said this partially because I don’t want a family gathering ruined by a contentious political debate. I also said it because online gives me more time to think things through. Finally, I said it because online gives me an audience of less invested third parties. I got a couple of my posts “liked” by some of my aunts (who weren’t participating in the debate), and my brother gave me a very flattering compliment (saying I was “well written”).
Regarding that debate, mom and sister are very strongly pro-life. I’m mostly lukewarm on abortion (I think that it’s an unsolvable debate because the whole thing is based on an entirely subjective premise), but was taking issue with their tendency to oversimplify and their intractability on the topic.
Well said! I agree, completely.
Excellent points. Well said.
I do the same.
Doc once said that it can be fun tossing a ball against the wall and catching it on the rebound, but you are going to get tired of the game before the wall does.
You never know though, the practice may come in handy some day.
Don Bradman
That reference to “Don Bradman” is a link to an article, not a signature line. I didn’t do that very well.