Berg v. Obama Update -- Friday, August 22
9:35pm
I just got off the phone with Philip Berg, asked some easy questions and some tough ones. I'm no Chris Matthews--for starters, the sight of Barack Obama does not send a chill up my leg--but I think I did a fair job. Keep checking America's Right for the Q&A once I've had a chance to put everything together.
5:15pm
I've obtained copies of the hearing proceedings and the order denying the TRO. The order actually says that the hearing was conducted in open court--not behind closed doors as I had been informed--and I am kicking myself for not sitting in.
Expect more here at America's Right on where the proceedings go from here and what it all means -- just as soon as I go home and eat a nice dinner with my lovely wife and beautiful daughter.
I should bring flowers, as I expect to spend this evening as I did yesterday, sitting in my home office in front of the computer. Flowers work, right?
3:00pm
I just spoke with Philip Berg. The temporary restraining order was denied by the Hon. R. Barclay Surrick, but the exhibits have been taken into evidence and Judge Surrick has decided to leave the case open, allowing subject to once again be brought forth once all parties are served.
He mentioned that all related pleadings and documents can be found at ObamaCrimes.com, including the original complaint, the memorandum in support of the temporary restraining order, the press release, and more.
Furthermore, upon being pressed, he acknowledged that some issues in his background could serve to hinder his credibility, and promised to address those issues with me soon. He also acknowledged that Judge Surrick asked why, after months of eligibility-related information swirling around the Web, he waited until the week before the convention to file suit.
"I told him that somebody had to," he said.
When I asked, Berg also mentioned that he has had "no contact" with anyone in Hillary Clinton's camp, and if fact does not even know the political affiliations of those who worked with him on preparing materials for the case.
Developing as we speak ...
1:40pm
Listen, folks. I have no idea as to the veracity of the allegations found within Philip Berg's civil action. All I have is the civil action filed by Philip Berg yesterday afternoon. Here's some of what I've learned since then:
- Philip Berg has an employment and service history which, on its face, insinuates credibility. He did serve as Deputy Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, held various positions in local Democratic party leadership, and ran for office on several occasions.
- Philip Berg, despite his history as a public servant, has credibility problems. First, he apparently adheres to the idea that the United States government was behind the attacks on September 11, 2001. Personally, these 9/11 conspiracy theories make me queasy, as I feel we face a threat in fundamentalist Islam which has been documented since the very first days of our nation's history, and threatens Western civilization now more than ever. America, my friends, is not infallible, and bringing forth controversy about 9/11 where there is none only serves to distract us from the task at hand. Second, his ethics have previously been brought into question. Should this lawsuit go forward, those looking to protect Barack Obama will have no problem bringing forth these issues, all the while ignoring Obama's own questionable actions, associations and practices. All that being said, Mr. Berg and I have similar interests -- ensuring that the presidency goes to someone who, ideology aside, has a right to be there in the first place.
- Back on July 20, 2008, AtlasShrugs.com posted details as to why Barack Obama's birth certificate is believed by many to be a forgery. Outwardly, this appears to be the basis of many of Berg's claims.
- Factcheck.org posted a counter-argument yesterday to many of Berg's claims and claims of those who feel the same way that he does. I am not a forensic scientist, and I did not stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I have no means of knowing whether to lend credence to Factcheck's version of the birth certificate controversy, or to Berg's. What I do know is that Barack Obama's failure to be forthright with regard to this issue is sketchy at best, and that Factcheck.org is owned by The Annenberg Foundation, which has been accused of sweeping potentially damaging information about Obama under the proverbial rug.
- As of two hours ago, Barack Obama's "Fight the Smears" Web site removed his birth certificate from its pages, only to put it back up a little while later. Again, regardless of the outcome of this legal action, Obama's failure to address this issue should draw a fair amount of skepticism but has not. Perhaps we can thank the mainstream media's overprotective nature for that.
To me, This lawsuit is an indictment of the mainstream media for protecting their Chosen One by not bringing this issue up in the first place. Remember, of course, that in late February the New York Times had no problem playing turncoat and bringing up questions of John McCain's eligibility shortly after it appears that he had secured the GOP nomination.
(Now, this was nothing new for the Times, which in May also overtly disparaged McCain's military service in Vietnam, stating that he had spent five years "sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world" and therefore "did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like [John] Kerry, [Jim] Webb and [Chuck] Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle" and never "underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol.")
Over and beyond citizenship, naturalization and Article II, Section 1, this issue is, to me, first and foremost a reminder that the person leading our great nation should be someone who understands what it means to be an American. Barack Obama, regardless of where he was born, has decided time and time again to surround himself with people who not only blame America for the world's ills but also seek to undermine Her security, government and mission. That, combined with his socialist roots, should be enough to make him constructively ineligible for the office of president of the United States of America.
11:45pm
I just learned that a hearing has been scheduled on the matter for 2:00pm today. I have no further details at this time, though I know that the hearing is not open to the public.
It should be noted, though, that the judge assigned to the case--the Hon. R. Barclay Surrick--was appointed to the federal bench by President William Jefferson Clinton.
RELATED ITEMS:
The America's Right story which started it all: Obama Sued in Philadelphia Federal Court on Grounds he is Constitutionally Ineligible for the Presidency
America's Right commentary: Eligibility Goes Beyond Citizenship
America's Right interview: A Conversation with Philip Berg, Esq.
See periodic updates at America's Right.com (Click HERE)
Posts
24 comments:
Can you put up a link to a news paper or something that is covering this....need some facts, I don't like to spread things around without facts.
So, you're saying, like the newspapers which sat on the John Edwards story for more than eight months?
Or maybe the magazines which sat on the Lewinsky story before Drudge broke it wide open?
Listen, I cannot be sure about the allegations in Berg's lawsuit. All I know is that it was filed. I have the "facts" as charged by Berg.
I too am interested to see how this factcheck thing pans out. While the hearing is not open to the public, perhaps I can catch Mr. Berg here in the courthouse.
"While the hearing is not open to the public, perhaps I can catch Mr. Berg here in the courthouse."
Just call out for the 9/11 conspiracy theorist - Berg should pipe right up.
Well I don't trust the media at all, some people just want links. I have googled it every way I can and I did find this at Free Republic.
PHILIP J. BERG v. BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA - Complaint
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2066207/posts
I am sure there will be no coverage on this by the MSM but sometimes a small paper will try to get the truth out. Thank you for keeping us up dated.
Full pleadings here...
http://www.obamacrimes.com/
Here is a link for you:
http:factcheck.org
They blow this lawsuit out of the water. They have the original Birth Certificate and it is fully legitimate. Nice try, fools.
I have read that Fact Check is owned by none other than The Annenberg Foundation. If you are familiar with that story by Steve Diamond and Stanley Kurtz at NRO....one has to doubt Fact Check.
I will keep checking for further updates if you are able to get more information on how the court case goes.
Thank you.
Thanks for the latest update,
As for the hearing, the temporary restraining order was denied by the Hon. R. Barclay Surrick, but the subject can once again be breached once everyone is served
not a lawyer here...whats next? they are served and then we wait?
Jeff,
can you or Mr. Berg get the court citation into the public domain via a more credible-sounding website than obamacrimes. A direct link to the court webpage would be best. Some folks are denying that this is happening at all..
It's worth noting that "Techdude," who was the "star witness" with regard to claiming the birth certificate a forgery (and that it was forged from Maya Soetoro's certificate), was found out to be a fraud who used the bona fides of someone else to pass himself off as an "expert" and that most of his "analysis" was pure fabrication.
Then there's Polarik, whose "analysis" doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
As for the third person Berg makes reference to, I'm not sure who that could be. Perhaps he's referring to a poster on TexasDarlin called "KG" who claimed to have duplicated Techdude's results in response to an offer by Techdude that he would pay for a trip to Las Vegas to the first person who did.
It's particularly interesting that Techdude reviewed and confirmed KG's results even though KG's results had the name of Obama's sister in a completely different location than where Techdude's claims would have placed it.
By confirming KG's results, Techdude effectively contradicted his own. And I suspect that was intentional.
Personally I believe that Techdude's intent was ultimately to get blogs like TexasDarlin, NoQuarter, and Atlas Shrugs to buy into his claims, publish them, but leave a trail of breadcrumbs in his analysis which would lead anyone who wasn't unquestioningly swallowing it to show that it was largely a fabrication.
Atlas Shrugs still stands by Techdude's claims, but TexasDarlin and NoQuarter have removed all the guest articles written by him.
k
I read the complaint -- that's some sloppy pleading. Among other pleading errors, Berg, Esq. writes in the second person on at least one occasion, demands that BHO "withdrawal" from the race, cites non-controlling authority, makes liberal and bizarre use of capitalization, and generally disregards the rules of grammar. Judges and their clerks care about these things, and unfortunately, Berg, Esq.'s pleadings look like the work of a crackpot or prisoner.
Furthermore, no credible member of the bar refers to himself as "Esquire." He'd better back this up with facts or brilliant courtroom skills, because so far he just looks like a pro se crank.
Birth certificate
Born in the U.S.A.
August 21, 2008
The truth about Obama's birth certificate.
Summary
In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake."
We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.
Analysis
Since we first wrote about Obama's birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.
Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?
Doocy: What do you mean they have a "false birth certificate" on their Web site?
Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.
Doocy: Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?
Corsi: No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.
Corsi isn't the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:
The birth certificate doesn't have a raised seal.
It isn't signed.
No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
In the zoomed-in view, there's a strange halo around the letters.
The certificate number is blacked out.
The date bleeding through from the back seems to say "2007," but the document wasn't released until 2008.
The document is a "certification of birth," not a "certificate of birth."
Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it's stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.
The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller
Alvin T. Onaka's signature stamp
The raised seal
Blowup of text
You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven't been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.
The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records." The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.
The document is a "certification of birth," also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.
The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.
We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that's when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and "all the records we could get our hands on" according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn't release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama's citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: "[We] couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world." The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641.
Blowup of certificate number
Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama's information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn't have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible "scenario" without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.
We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn't meet the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural-born citizen."
We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: "It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over."
In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:
Obama's birth announcement
The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama "likely" was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.
Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.
–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller
Sources
United States Department of State. "Application for a U.S. Passport." Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.
State of Hawaii Department of Health. "Request for Certified Copy of Birth Record." Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.
Hollyfield, Amy. "Obama's Birth Certificate: Final Chapter." Politifact.com. 27 Jun. 2008.
Come on! It's been three hours! How long to does it take to gulp down some chow and toss the wife some flowers? ;)
k
Anonymous
We all know who owns Fact check so forget that...
Get some rest...we will be here tomorrow.
You are such a loser.. it just eats you up inside to see a someone who isn't a pale face and who doesn't conform to your expectation of what a president should look like is doing so well. What has Bush, who is a natural born American done for this country except utterly ruin it.. i bet you didn't know an entire country could be ruined in 7 years.. surprise.. How do you even feed yourself? i hope this isn't a full time effort for you because you are pretty terrible at this. All these retarded accusations will be dismissed for what they are, the retarded ramblings of a redneck racist..
HANG BUSH!!!!
Sean Hannity's blog has it up.
So, what you're telling me is that TechDude, AtlasShrugs, TexasDarlin, JimJ, NoQuarter, SusanUnPC, et al got their wish granted: someone filed suit against Obama alleging their fantasies are true.
...and in the process gave the Obama the tools he needs to name them and drag each and every one of them into court to testify under penalty of perjury. It's call "discovery" and it gives Obama's people subpoena rights against Wordpress, Hotmail, Google, speakeasy, ComCast and any other ISP or service provider they used.
...makes me wonder if the suit isn't being brought by a pro-Obama patron.
The state of Georgia and the state of Florida also only give abbreviated versions of birth certificates when a duplicate is requested. That is not unusual. Some people are just desperate and decide to flaunt their ignorance. Sad. So sad.
"America, my friends, is not infallible, and bringing forth controversy about 9/11 where there is none only serves to distract us from the task at hand."
What is this task at hand? To fight terrorism? Ha! No, the task at hand is to bankrupt this country in the name of fighting cave-dwelling boogymen.
Bringing forth controversy where there is none? You have some nerve to even make such an absurd statement. Talk about intellectually bankrupt. I would expect better logic from a lawyer...
Why dont you just admit the truth.... that the only way to be safe from "terrorism" is to go live in a cardboard box in an alley after you've given all your money to a blatantly corrupt textbook fascist system.
The corruption has reached such epic proportions that any number of false flag 9/11's should be a shock to no one. You really should study history. I guess that would interrupt your time on the golf course?
"A Certificate of Live Birth", printed with a computer, was not available when Barry Obama was born....it is a forgery. Everyone knows what a birth certificate looks like!!! Where is Barry Obama's birth certificate? The newspaper ad could have been placed by the grandparents!!! What hospital was her born in? Who delivered him?
Is it true the the US Marshalls Service served Barack Obama and the DNC with the lawsuit? That is what I am hearing. Now what happens next?
Also, per the US Attorneys Office in PA, the FEC (Federal Election Commission) is looking into the allegations of the lawsuit RIGHT NOW-today!
Stay tuned for more updates!
This is going to be fun!
Where is the PROOF that Obama was born in Hawaii? Everyone knows what a real birth certificate looks like!!! This computer copy called "certificate of live birth", which is a forgery, doesn't even have the hospital listed on it!! It's a fake!! Barry, where is your birth certificate? Has anyone even looked in Kenya for it?
"Has anyone even looked in Kenya for it?"
What a ridiculous point. Wouldn't you assume that would be one of the first things they would do? And when they don't find a Kenyan birth certificate, what's the next step?
'Oh, well, they don't keep good records in Kenya' for the half-insane.
'Oh, well, the Obama Campaign went back and eliminated all the evidence' for the totally insane.
First you all ask Obama to prove a positive - that he was born in Hawaii - and when he does that, instead of accepting it, you ask him to prove a negative - that he wasn't born Kenya. Give me a break.
Look, nobody likes to lose. But nobody likes a sore loser.
From what I see, his problems come because he lacks standing. If he were a candidate, wouldn't he then have standing?
Isn't the solution around that technicality to become a candidate? Would righting his name in on a ballot make him a candidate? At that point he would have standing to refile the case?
Just curious.
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