GOP Spin Stops Here! This is where the flood of misinformation from the right-wing spin machine is stopped in its tracks!
Monday, December 8, 2008
The Truth = 1, Conspiracy Theorists = 0
In what must be unbelievable news to the right-wing conspiracy theorists who have been pushing this Obama birth certificate nonsense, the Supreme Court delivers a punch to the gut by rejecting Leo Donofrio's appeal today:
"Without any comment whatsoever, the Supreme Court today declined to take up an appeal by a New Jersey man who questioned President-elect Barack Obama’s eligibility for the presidency.."
Not that this will convince any of these conspiracy nuts who need NO credible evidence to buy in to a conspiracy theory because they read it on a right-wing blog or heard it on pushed on the air by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Jerome Corsi, etc.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
More On The "Obama Birth Certificate" Conspiracy Nuts

1. The fact that the case has gone to conference doesn't mean anything about its merits -- the court will also be deciding whether to take up a number of other cases, and the chances that the suit will actually be heard is exceedingly small. Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, has calculated that over the past eight years the court has considered in conference 842 cases that sought a stay. Only 60 of them were actually heard.
2. Any inconvenient facts are irrelevant. People who believe in a conspiracy theory "develop a selective perception, their mind refuses to accept contrary evidence," Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates who studies such theories, says. "As soon as you criticize a conspiracy theory, you become part of the conspiracy."
3. Evan Harrington, a social psychologist who is an associate professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, agrees. "One of the tendencies of the conspiracy notion, the whole appeal, is that a lot of the information the believer has is secret or special," Harrington says. "The real evidence is out there, and you can give them all this evidence, but they'll have convenient ways to discredit it."
4. Rush Limbaugh already suggested that Obama's trip to Hawaii to see his ailing grandmother, who died not long after, was somehow connected to the controversy. Others, like Michael Savage, followed Limbaugh's lead, saying Obama was going to Hawaii to alter the record.
5. Not surprisingly, almost all of the people who've been most prominent in pushing this story have a history of conspiracist thought. There's Jerome Corsi, who's best known as the co-author of the book that launched the Swift boat vets; he's a chief proponent of the claim that the government is secretly planning to form a "North American Union" with Canada and Mexico. Philip Berg, who filed the lawsuit that had until now drawn the most public attention, is a 9/11 Truther. Andy Martin, who's credited with starting the myth that Obama is a Muslim and has been intimately involved in the birth certificate mess as well, was denied admission to the Illinois bar because of a psychiatric evaluation that showed he had "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character." He also has a long history of anti-Semitism. Robert Schulz, who's responsible for the ads in the Chicago Tribune, is a fairly notorious tax protester.
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