I started a big technical project here at the beginning of 2015, the ultimate goal of which is to identify whether or not my congressman Trey Gowdy posts at Gerbil Report™ just for the heck of it. Gowdy is, all of the sudden, not too big on the Tea Party circuit since he decided to support Boehner for Speaker. I don’t have any conclusive results yet, but I have learned a great deal about the birther community as participants on web sites. One thing I found was a lot of sock puppets among birthers, so many in fact that I stopped looking. One birther had around 30 I know of. I also found a tiny number of Obot multiple-identities, so here’s a shout out to DARPAmontor_52 from your old pal, Dr. Conspiracy.
One concern I have is that information is being lost as birther web sites shut down, and the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived all of the pages. I have the technology to test pages for copies in the Web Archive and add them. It’s a possible project for 2015.
The whole Arpaio/Zullo universe-shattering announcement is technically still pending, but the close proximity between the newspaper revelations that Sheriff Joe had paid $100,000 to a con artist and the sudden stop in hints about Sheriff Joe’s second criminal investigation, suggests that the two were the same source, and that this particular conspiracy theory will never see the light of day.
I think debunking birther claims about Obama’s long form being a forgery is pretty much wrapped up with the excellent work done by NBC and others with the Xerox MRC results. I don’t anticipate much there.
I left a comment at the Above the Law blog:
I learned long ago that on a slow news day, you can always go to Orly Taitz’ web site, find something inane she said, and write an article making fun out of it. After a while, I also learned that there are better things to do.
So that’s unfinished business, but probably not business worth doing. There is the one big Taitz case in Mississippi that I sincerely hope gets some action in 2015, and when it gets dismissed, I can cover the “penalty phase.”
Doc, your mention of NBC reminded me to visit his blog which I had not done in awhile. It doesn’t look like there has been any activity there since early last December. Is he OK? Hope so, as this was one of the earliest anti-birther blogs.
Just a minor correction Doc
A sockie. is where an individual uses multiple identities on the same site to bolster their viewpoint, act trollishly etc
An individual using different singular identities on different sites isn`t really using sock puppets
What about Taitz’s big case in Texas? The 100% birther-free one? That’s still pending, or I missed something.
Taitz’s big case in Texas was discovered by the judge not to be enough of a case to allow him to bloviate against the Obama administration…he’s put it aside to see if the states’ case will allow him to complain more. 😀
Speaking of inane statements on Taitz’s blog, here’s a current post title:
“Why is media silent about the fact that Barbara Boxer’s grandson, Zach Rodham, is Hillary Clinton’s nephew?”
Right, and the 30 instances were one person all on the same site. That’s why I used “multiple identities” rather than “sock puppets” for DARPAmonitor_52 who only appeared under that identity when they looked at Falcon’s Intense Debate Profile so far as I know.
I would presume he has better things to do. Nobody that I know of knows who NBC is.
NBC has been involved in a long discussion of the Ferguson Grand Jury decision at the Fogbow. NBC thinks they were correct not to indict the officer based on the evidence as presented. It is a a lengthy discussion that I may read when I have a spare week or two.
DARPAmonitor_52’s raison d’etre apart from obviously being an agent of DARPA appears to be only to screw with the ego’s of birfers as well as serve to build a handy little list of friends of the Birther Report and associates thereof who use Intense Debate accounts.
They might be desperate enough to one day release the Reed Hayes report just to generate an uptick in “OMG this is it”, knowing that most birfers will not bother reading, or trying to comprehend, the debunking anyway.
If he ever does, I may well hire an expert to review his findings.
I’m sure your analysis is correct.
The new commenter at Gerbil Report that I find far more interesting is GerbilFalcon. GerbilFalcon is visiting lots of GR Intense Debate user profiles (as am I, looking to see who’s looking at who’s looking at …) as well as commenting. And GF is not me.
I’m sure there would be no end of tea leaf readers and carney graphologists who would be qualified as peer review for anything he generated.
How dare you look at Intense Debate profiles! Why, it’s as bad as a newspaper printing a politician’s name without his permission. Apparently, there are a lot of people who haven’t read the Constitution!!
Got one for you…fits right in with the birthers’ mentality.
http://www.real-voodoo.com/voodoo-priestess.html
I don’t think that would even be necessary. My theory has always been that the report does not look at original sources but is a “meta analysis” of the findings of others, as in “Zullo said Corsi said Verna Lee said X, and X means Obama is ineligible, so Obama in ineligible”, or “Since Zullo says BC’s are numbered like this and Obama’s BC is numbered like that, it’s a forgery”.
As much as I would love to see the Reed Hayes report, I doubt that it will ever see the light of day. I’m sure that it is replete with caveats which would show that Zullo has misrepresented it.
I’ve noticed that on Hayes’ website there is no testimonial from Zullo!
I suspected the “Reed Hayes Report” contains a single sheet of paper, and on that sheet of paper, a picture of “Troll Face”.