A Mitt of the people

With Mitt Romney stepping in it with $10,000 bets, giddy proclamations that he enjoys firing people, announcements that he doesn't really care about the very poor, and revelations of Swiss and Cayman Island bank accounts, there are concerns that not only does Mittens fail to connect with the average Joe and Jane, but that Joe and Jane may not want to connect to him come November. And thus we can imagine this kind of discussion at the Vote Mitt 2012 headquarters:

AIDE: 
Sir, you are having trouble convincing average Americans who have been dealt a body blow by the economy and the housing crisis that you actually understand the problems they're facing and how to solve them. What you need to do is get out there and spend time with someone like them. You know, some aging, fat bald guy who knows the pain of bankruptcy.

MITT:
I know just the guy!

...

We would like very much to ask you to shut the front door

When Donald Trump started bashing China, OPEC, and then South Korea on his Trump Stump tour, a bunch of people pointed out how, well, less-than-factual Mr Trump was being.

But these pleas for accurate statements from a would-be policy have fallen on deaf ears. In fact, what he says about China and South Korea seems to have become part of his routine, repeated over and over again until it's finally true, I'spose. (No, no, I did not just compare Trump to Nazis... but these people did).



The part about South Korea runs from 13:45 to 16:58 (twice as long as Rain's Hollywood career). You get to hear all about how South Korea "paid us nothing" for the US military presence (a bald-faced lie he keeps repeating). He also goes on about how a scared South Korea signed the FTA after the Yŏnpyŏng-do shelling, when in fact the FTA was signed in 2007 and the recent renegotiation was at the behest of the Obama administration, not Seoul.

As an added bonus, at 15:27 you can hear him briefly try on a faux Asian accent. I think even he realized that probably wasn't very wise (even if it is a favorite pastime of on-air Republican personalities), since he sort of stops himself halfway through:

“We would like very much to sign contract. You are a wonderful, wonderful trading partner,” Mr. Trump recounted in an unctuous, chop suey accent. “We love you very much. Oh and would you mind sending over the great aircraft carrier the George Washington and about 17 destroyers because North Korea’s shooting at us.” [source]

Yeah, not terribly smart to run with that. And he's all about being smart. Because our current leaders are stupid, especially that African-American fellow who flunked out of Occidental but mysteriously made it into the Ivy League... or did he?!

Oh, and if you want to listen, right before the South Korean part, he rails against the Chinese. I will say, however, that I do agree with him on the currency devaluation issue. I don't agree with him about all the jobs having moved to China as being the fault of the Chinese, but I guess Trump wouldn't want to embarrass all his billionaire buddies who have been offshoring American jobs for years and years.

Trump get TKO'ed by BHO

Who knew Obama was also Comedian-in-Chief?

At the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, he tossed some jibs and jabs at other political figures, His remarks included some rather pointed hits at Donald "Duckweed" Trump, who was in the audience (see video).



Of course, this was all going on as gas prices creep toward the dreaded $25/gallon mark, everyone in the Middle East from Morocco to Karachi is rising up, and the NFL players are still being locked out. While I would say it's good for political discourse for opponents to sit down and just be normal people with each other, I suppose critics would say Emperor Neo shouldn't be fiddling with punchlines while the homeland burns.

I'll tell you one thing: The Donald doesn't seem to have the capacity to laugh at himself. He looked like he was downright stewing.

No, Trump, he really did go to Harvard...

Now I'm not so sure I should be a birther. Donald Trump is now seems to be suggesting that President Obama didn't go to Harvard, or at least was grossly unqualified:

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”

Uh-huh. It took me all of three minutes to go into the Harvard Law Review archives (on PDF) and look at some random edition during his tenure there (in this case, December 1990) and see his name listed in several places as the editor and president of the Harvard Law Review, a highly coveted and prestigious position one would scarcely imagine going to some dunderhead.

Below are images I snapshot from page iii.

This is the upper part of the page (it's too big to snapshot at once).
See if you can find Barack Obama's name. Click to enlarge.

His name appears a second time. Can you see it?
Click to enlarge.

This is now just getting ridiculous. Maybe since Trump has more money than all his own lawyers he assumes he's also smarter than they are (and not just incredibly lucky, starting with massive seed money from his dad), so he doesn't really grasp that Obama might actually be his intellectual superior.

Of course, if Obama were Trump's intellectual superior, that would make some folks like Trump all the more, since there is a disturbingly high number of folks out there who decidedly distrust and dislike "intellectuals." They're like the Khmer Rouge that way.

By the way, I have the entire PDF to send to anyone who'd like to see it. It lists dozens of people also on the HLR who could probably attest to having known him there.

And finally, we have this (the whole thing is good, but the exchange in question starts just after 2:00)...

Letterman versus Dr Phil: Is Trump a racist or just an idiot?

Echoing what I wrote here, I'm guessing just idiot.

By the way, this is interesting:

A government file on Barack Obama Sr. said that Harvard University, where he was studying, told immigration officials it would “cook something up” to force him to return to Kenya in 1964.

The immigration file, which was released under freedom of information laws, contains records of Mr Obama Sr.’s time as a student at the universities of Hawaii and Harvard between 1959 and 1964.

It may solve the long-running mystery, described in the President’s memoir, of why his father really left the US, only returning to see his son once before he died.

An April 1961 memo said that a University of Hawaii employee called to report that Mr Obama Sr. had married Ann Dunham, the future president’s mother.

She warned that he was already married to a woman in Kenya and had been “running around with several girls” since arriving and that he had been warned to curb his “playboy ways”.

I guess that was too wordy even for the long form.

Newly released Obama birth certificate is fake! (UPDATED)

Click to be fooled

The big news this morning — announced in bold Helvetica by a Huffington Post alert on my iPhone — is that President Barack Hussein Obama has finally released his full, long-form, tits-to-the-wall birth certificate that is legally required for anything you do in America, from getting a driver license, to obtaining a passport, to seeing a copy of the smaller and less Constitutionally acceptable Certificate of Live Birth, like the White House foisted on us all these months and years.

So they released it and I immediately saw that something was wrong: This purported long-form "Certificate of Live Birth" doesn't list what religion Barack Hussein Obama is. Not that we don't already know, but that's how I instantly knew it was fake. The whole reason he'd spent $5 million of taxpayer money (it was thought to be $2 million, but that number was not shocking enough, so it was doubled... then tripled... but that didn't sound "round number"ish enough, so it was 2.5led) was to hide the fact that he was born a Muslim.

And while I'd hoped to have an Internet scoop (I haven't had one since I successfully scuttled Brangelina's plans to adopt an entire African country in 2009), it turns out that people who wake up earlier than we in the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone beat me to it:

After much of the excitement for everyone regarding Barry's birth certificate that he spent over 5 million dollars in lawyer fees to hide from the prying eye of the public. I stumbled upon someones investigation into how the newly released birth cert is in fact fake, and you can even do this yourself if you have the software to see for yourself. You see they left things in PDF format which can be imported into Adobe Illustrator. This is where things got interesting, see for yourself. This in itself shows that the birth Certificate given to the public wasn't scanned, it was pieced together digitally. Sorry, but you've been had! If you don't understand how Clipping Masks work I suggest you Google it to find out.

Damn straight, because Google knows fu¢kin' everything!

And as much as I hate to admit it, this development has firmly thrown me into the birther camp. I have looked into this issue before, and while I wanted to believe local Hawaiian officials Chiyome Fukino and Linda Lingle that they really saw this thing, they are Republicans, and ever since Iran-Contra, I don't trust Republicans.

Besides, if these state officials are incapable of fixing all the frickin' potholes in Honolulu that make this city's streets look like a lunar landscape, then how do I know they didn't muck up this task too? They probably found some guy named O'Barry's birth certificate and declared "Mission Accomplished!" (because that's something Republicans like to say).

And then I got to thinking, "Hey, self, you've lived in Hawaii for five years, have you ever encountered the Obama long-form birth certificate?"

"No!" I said back to myself. "I haven't."

And that is odd. Not even once in five years. I mean, this is a small island... I run into classmates and professors in the most obscure places. There was that Marxist student from my Stratification Theory class who was at Walmart, and my Microbiology Pathology professor at the Korean mega-spa. Sure, they were both running away and/or hiding their face in some guy's lap because they obviously didn't want me to see them (they both owe me money), but the point is that you run into people all over the place here because it's a small island (sorry for repeating myself but it's a really small island).

But yet, in all these five years, half a decade, I've never encountered Obama's birth certificate.

Come to think of it, I've never met anyone who knew Obama when he was a newborn. Sure, I run into Punahou graduates who say they were in class with him or had their ice cream scooped by him back in the day (that's not a euphemism; he actually worked at Baskin Robbins), but nobody knew him as a newborn, which is Constitutionally required for eligibility for our nation's highest office. What gives?

So yeah, with this second fake and/or inadequate "certificate of live birth," I'm firmly in the birther camp now, Mr Born-in-Kenya-as-a-Muslim Barack Hussein Obama. A few weeks ago I mocked some of my future fellow-birthers by saying that if the long-form birth certificate were released, the birther industry would quickly declare that as subterfuge as well...

What will be the call when/if that were to be released? Guaranteed, it will be called fake, and then some other supporting evidence will be demanded because the long form could be faked, etc., etc., ad nauseum .

... but now I realize ipso facto ex redacto that those pioneering birthers were just guarding our interests. They knew it would be fake because it is fake.

Holy wow! [epiphany hitting, please bear with me] The world is so much clearer when you accept birther logic. The air is fresher, the blues are bluer... the birds... I can really hear the birds.

So don't be fooled, America. Already O-bomb-America has not released his college transcripts, his passports, his senior thesis outlining an Islamo-Marxist takeover of southeastern Michigan, his ticket stub from that flight to Karachi when he was a teen, the second-grade drawing of King Kamehameha surfing that supposedly won an Honorable Mention, and other stuff he's hiding that I haven't thought of yet.

Ours is not a commander-in-chief but a counterfeit-in-chief. Not a POTUS but a pot-au-feu. I'm not sure what that means, but it's French, and ergo is bad. Very bad.

UPDATE:
All across America, people are discovering for themselves what fakery this is:

• Patriot Update (from whom I bought bumper stickers) notes that Obama is listed as African instead of Negro, which was a no-no in those pre-PC days. The PC backers of Obama are foiled by their own politically correct hubris. Winning!

• Trump says he's very proud of himself and that now we should force Obama to reveal what a terrible student Trump heard Obama was.

• Godlikeproductions notes that the supposed birth certificate is missing a seal. And if you have no seal, well, then what you have is Seal Beach (Orange County inside joke, sorry).

• Market Ticker sees that there are problems with aliased pixels. And that sounds like alien pickles. Si¢k fu¢ks. 

• Is Hawaii even a state? I mean, no place should be considered a state unless you can travel there from another state in a conestoga. I mean, that's just Being American 101. Also, Hawaii used to be a kingdom, and we don't roll that way. Statehood attempt FAIL!

• Even if this fake birth certificate were accepted as genuine, Obama is still not a natural born citizen because he doesn't have two parents who were born in the United States. The new fake certificate proves it, because it proves Obama's father was Barack Obama Sr, who was a British subject, and that makes Obama Jr not eligible. This, apparently, was the whole point of the birther movement all along... if the birth certificate is real, which it is not. Yeah, I'm confused, too. 

• I'd also like to add that this supposed birth certificate is green, and everything I've seen pictures of from 1961 was black and white. I'm pretty sure color wasn't invented until the late 1960s, unless you were a Nazi. Need I say more?

Is that a javelin in your hand or are you just happy to be a Nazi?

UPDATE 2:
Dangit! it looks like the PDF layers and stuff are easily explained, according to the National Review Online.

But (and this is me channeling the Tea Party), you can't spell RINO without N, R, and O.

Trump shoots his mouth off on Korea

Possible presidential candidate Donald Trump, fresh from cluelessly releasing the wrong document that would officially certify his birth while chiding President Obama for not being forthcoming about his own origins, the real estate developer turned media whore decided that birther b.s. was not enough to wrap up the Republican nomination and he went after some more red meat for some Tea Party conservatives: foreign "occupation" and free-trade pacts, specifically with South Korea.

From Reuters:

He singled out the recent trade pact with South Korea, signed after a military showdown with communist-ruled North Korea, saying it was a "joke" with insufficient benefits for the United States.

"We go over there, we protect them, we protect them with our ships ... Did anyone pay us for this? No! So, what is happening is mind-boggling."

As with so many things spewing from his mouth, the mercurial and diarrheal Trump doesn't let facts get in the way of a good rant, but one would hope voters are more grounded in reality. And for those voters, let's take a look at the facts, courtesy of PolitiFact:

First, we should note that the number of U.S. service members is dwarfed by the more than 500,000 South Korean service members on active duty, plus many more South Korean reserve troops.

"The South Koreans defend themselves," said Allan R. Millett, a historian and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. "We do the high-tech things so they can have more shooters."

But do they pay for the U.S. help?

Indeed, they do. South Korea has regularly signed agreements spelling out its "burden sharing" responsibility for U.S. troops. The current agreement, which was signed by representatives of the two governments in January 2009, covers the five-year period between 2009 and 2013.

The financial burden South Korea must shoulder, converted into dollars, is about $694 million. That amount will rise for each of the succeeding four years at an amount pegged to inflation. The prior agreement covered 2007 and 2008, with payments totaling $664 million and $678 million in 2007 and 2008, respectively.

The payments by South Korea fall into several sub-categories. Labor cost sharing, paid in cash, accounts for about 41 percent of the total. Logistics cost sharing, which is paid in kind, accounts for about 18 percent. And construction programs, which are a combination of cash and in-kind payments, account for the remaining 41 percent of the costs.

Trump’s statement that South Korea doesn’t "pay us" is a sweeping statement that suggests they get U.S. protection for free. But in fact, they are paying the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

The idea of South Korea getting a free ride, when in fact almost all ROK males have to perform military service or a suitable substitute and Seoul spends a higher percentage of GDP than almost all the US's allies, is ludicrous. That Trump would uncritically regurgitate such claims for political points shows that he just simply doesn't have the intellect or the ethical standards to run the country. We need someone who actually understands how things work if we want to fix what's wrong. Throwing your feces, simian-like, at whatever bothers you at the moment, is not an effective plan.

Oh, and the Free Trade Agreement was not signed after the North Korean attacks but renegotiated. In fact, it was signed in 2007, when George W. Bush was president.

Let's also take note (as suggested elsewhere in the PolitiFact article) that the US military presence in South Korea (and Japan) is not just about preventing war on the Korean Peninsula but in Northeast Asia in general, which is clearly in the US's interests.

The Marmot (who is no fan of the US military presence in South Korea) also addressed this issue, even quoting one of his favorite America Firster pundits, John Derbyshire:

Once you start to have subversive thoughts like that, others come thick and fast. If we don’t need those thirty thousand troops in South Korea, then, hey, maybe we don’t need the 36,000 we’ve got stationed in Japan, either. It may even be — you might want to sit down for this one, it’s way out radical — it may even be we don’t need to keep 52,000 troops stationed in Germany, or the ten thousand in Italy, or the nine thousand in Britain. It’s real nice for those countries to have us protecting them, but how is it good for us?

Methinks simpletons like Derbyshire don't understand how deterrence works or why it's important. The highly successful Pax Americana, the greatest source of stability Northeast Asia has known in centuries, is still needed. And it would seem that Europe is uncharacteristically peaceful as well, thanks to the US-anchored NATO which calls for the US military presence.

Let me make it simple: The US military presence in Northeast Asia and Europe costs pennies on the dollar compared to how much it would cost the US in lives and treasure were a war to inevitably break out in our absence. A war there would likely suck us right back in (see: World War I, World War II, Korean War, etc.), but even if it miraculously didn't, we would still lose more treasure than it costs to station our troops there. Isolationism as a way to cut costs or save lives is a fantasy, and that's why you don't understand how it is good for us to have troops in places where we have lost tens or hundreds of thousands to put down an enemy that hasn't returned on our watch.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think South Korea (and Japan) can do more. I've long been an advocate of Seoul joining Washington on military ventures that mutually benefit both, particularly anti-piracy efforts off Africa and Southeast Asia (and Seoul is stepping up more and more in that regard). That is the solution if you think one side is benefiting more than it should, not grabbing up your marbles and walking off in a huff.

Back to Trump. I have never liked Donald Duckweed, not even when he was a Democrat. Setting aside his creepiness (he said he'd date Ivanka if she weren't his daughter... his hot daughter), I loathe people who make fortunes off of political connections and feeding other people's vices (e.g., Atlantic City) and I am old enough to remember the man's failed real estate ventures — and that alone makes me shudder at the possibility of this know-nothing trying to run the economy or foreign policy. It's clear from his TV shows that he is all flash and no substance, and that is no way to run the frickin' country.

Geez, if we want a "reality" TV show host to run the nation, let's go with Jeff Probst. I admit, I came up with the idea as a one-off, but on paper the guy would make a far better candidate, and I think the Democrats should drop Joe Boring and pick up Jeff as his running mate.

How Jeff Probst stacks up against The Donald:

• More experience (in terms of seasons on television)
• Fewer failed marriages
• Does not make creepy comments about romantic/sexual relations with his hot daughter (who "has a very nice figure")
• Obvious from reward challenges and immunity challenges that the guy understands the value of competition
• From his interactions with contestants on Survivor™ it is clear that he is in touch with the average American (and, lately, former NFL stars, pin-up models, would-be actors, sports franchise cheerleaders, etc.)
• More foreign experience (China, Africa, Panama, Nicaragua, Australian Outback, Marquesas Islands, Vanuatu, Gabon, Palau, Fiji, Brazil, Cook Islands, Samoa, etc.).
• Calm temperament, even when faced with idiots
• Better hair
• Not a duckweed

So there's nothing left to say: Probst in '12!

UPDATE (April 27, 2011 HST): 
Trump wins! Obama forced to release long-form birth certificate, which is fake!!!