WorldNetDaily

In yesterday’s round-up we mentioned that American Life League President Judie Brown had declared that, due to Sen. Sam Brownback's support of Kathleen Sebelius' nomination to become Secretary of Health and Human Services, he had lost the right to ever be called “pro-life” again.

And Brown is not alone in calling out Brownback from apparently squandering his pro-life credentials by backing Sebelius – Jill Stanek piles on as well, blasting him for being apparently unconcerned about what sort of “damage this abortion lover” will do to the country:  

That some pro-lifers don't understand the harm done is also disturbing … Brownback thinks he needs to move to the middle if he's going to get the keys to the governor's mansion in 2010.

But here is where Brownback in particular made a common pro-life politician's mistake, which too many pro-lifers accept: Casting dreams for what he could do for us tomorrow, Brownback didn't do the right thing today.

I don't care what pro-life politicians promise they will do for me tomorrow. Tomorrow never comes. I only care what they do for me today. In fact, they're only where they are today because they cast dreams in a previous campaign to do something for me today.

Now to the damage this abortion lover could do as HHS secretary.

Operation Rescue is likewise livid:

"It is unimaginable that a Catholic pro-lifer such as Sen. Brownback would support Sebelius' nomination to a post where she can advance her extremist abortion agenda on the national level. There is so much documentation of her ardent support of indicted late-term abortionist George Tiller that is hard to believe that the Senator from Kansas is simply ignorant of her record. We pray that Mr. Martin's information is in error," said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman.

"We at Operation Rescue are urging our supporters to contact Sen. Brownback's office and ask for confirmation on this story," said Newman. "Our own calls to his office have been met with equivocation. We believe that the people have a right to know the truth on where the Senator stands."

[An interesting side-note: Human Life International rips into Catholic United for backing Sebelius, asking if “the word 'integrity' means to these self-proclaimed 'faithful Catholics’” but says not a word about Brownback, who is also Catholic.]

But the Family Research Council is not so much concerned with Brownback’s failure to oppose her as it is with the entire Republican Party’s failure to stand up for the pro-life agenda by sinking her nomination:

The biggest example of this divide between conservatives and the GOP may be found in President Obama's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). With the exception so far of Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), the nomination of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kans.)--arguably the most pro-abortion governor in the nation -- has been met by the Republican leadership with a collective yawn. Here is a woman who aligns herself against 80% of the country in suggesting that the government knows better than parents in children's health decisions, and yet the GOP can't muster the will to fight her nomination. As governor, she hosted a private reception for a notorious partial-birth abortionist, vetoed bills that would have made abortion clinics cleaner for women, and blocked court reforms that would have helped to prevent third-term abortions. Like President Obama, she even opposed protection for infants who are born alive during an abortion.

If Republicans won't take a stand now, when will they? Once Sebelius is confirmed, she will control the largest government agency in America with more power and resources to advance a radical social agenda that will drive a deeper wedge between parents and their children. Grassroots conservatives understand what's at stake here. Why doesn't the Republican leadership?

"Birthers" is the term Politico uses for those right-wing conspiracy theorists who continue to insist that President Obama is not a native-born citizen and therefore ineligible to hold the office of president in this new article examining their claims and conspiracy theories.

The article covers key figures like Alan Keyes, Orly Taitz, and Phil Berg and doesn't break any new ground, but does contain several interesting tidbits, such as Taitz's assertion that the media's refusal to take their claims seriously is "totalitarian" and the fact that the Keyes camps doesn't like to be associated with the Berg camp due to the latter's claims that 9/11 was an inside job - apparently that type of conspiracy theorizing only serves to undermine the Keyes camp's own conspiracy theorizing.

And then, of course, there are the conservatives who think this whole movement is making them all look bad:

"Untold numbers of people have asked us to look into it," said Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, which recently sued to block Hillary Clinton, on technical grounds connected to her Senate seat, from taking the position of secretary of state.

"When we sued over Hillary ineligibility there were a lot of folks saying, 'Why weren't you suing over Obama's ineligibility?'" he said..

Fitton said he hadn't "seen any credible evidence Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen eligible for the presidency."

"If people understood better what the law is, I don't think they'd be as concerned as they are," he said.

...

"I'm not a conspiracist, but this could be a very big conspiracy to make conservatives disgrace themselves," [Michael] Medved said.

Frankly, considering Judicial Watch's own history, when they say that these people are a bunch of crackpots, it is probably safe to assume that they are indeed a bunch of crackpots.

Of course, the crackpots don't see it that way, and now WorldNetDaily is blasting the article for mocking them: 

[This Politico article] cites WorldNetDaily as the source for news on the United States Justice Foundation's most recent attempt to demand Obama give legal evidence of his constitutional eligibility to serve as president.

Politico's coverage of the questions that still linger over Obama's birth, however, is far from kind.

...

As WND has reported on several occasions, however, none of the so-called "evidence" of Obama's constitutional eligibility produced thus far is beyond reasonable doubt nor as iron-clad as simply producing an authentic birth certificate, something everyday Americans are required to do regularly, but the president still refuses to do.

• Always wanted to spend several minutes listening to Focus on the Family's Tom Minnery ramble on and spread misinformation about hate crimes legislation?  Well, you are in luck.
• Ed Whelan is not happy that the Obama administration is consulting with the American Bar Association about the role that the ABA will play in evaluating judicial nominations.
• Utah Sen. Chris Buttars may be refusing to apologize, but the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is doing its best to distance itself from him and his views.
• Finally, via this post on TPM Cafe, I learned an interesting and telling fact that I had not known; namely, that Rebecca Hagelin, a Senior Communications Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, was formerly vice president of communications for WorldNetDaily.

I honestly don't even know how to go about describing Janet Porter's latest column in which she exposes the current economic recovery efforts as part of a Communist conspiracy to take over the United States ... a conspiracy that has apparently been in the works for nearly twenty years and directly involves Barack Obama.

You see, Sam Webb, chairman of the Communist Party USA is apparently pleased with President Obama's handling of the economic crisis and, Porter reports, he might not be the only Communist rejoicing.  Because, as it turns out, a few months ago Porter received an email from her friend, Wiley Drake (you know, the guy who ran as Alan Keyes' vice president and once called for imprecatory prayers against Americans United) but she didn't write about it at the time because "it just seemed too extreme." But now, in light of recent developments, it seems downright prophetic.

As it turns out, the email from Drake was actually written by a guy named Tom Fife who claims to have regularly traveled to Russia in the early 1990's, where he reportedly met a woman who was active in the Communist movement ... and it was from her that he first heard the name "Barack."

As Porter admits, she "can't prove whether it's true or not, but in light of all that is happening, it just doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore" and then proceeds to re-print Fife's email in which he describes how he came to be informed by this unnamed Russian woman that America "will have a black president very soon and he will be a Communist."

We'll let Fife take it from here:

"Yes, it is true. This is not some idle talk. He is already born, and he is educated and being groomed to be president right now. You will be impressed to know that he has gone to the best schools of presidents. He is what you call 'Ivy League.' You don't believe me, but he is real and I even know his name. His name is Barack. His mother is white and American and his father is black from Africa. That's right, a chocolate baby! And he's going to be your president."

She became more and more smug as she presented her stream of detailed knowledge and predictions so matter-of-factly – as though all were foregone conclusions. "It's all been thought out. His father is not an American black, so he won't have that social slave stigma. He is intelligent and he is half white and has been raised from the cradle to be an atheist and a Communist. He's gone to the finest schools. He is being guided every step of the way and he will be irresistible to America."

...

She was full of little details about him that she was eager to relate. I thought that maybe she was trying to show off that this truly was a real person and not just hot air.

She rattled off a complete litany. He was from Hawaii. He went to school in California. He lived in Chicago. He was soon to be elected to the Legislature. "Have no doubt: he is one of us, a Soviet."

...

She continued with something to the effect that America was at the same time the great hope and the great obstacle for Communism. America would have to be converted to Communism, and Barack was going to pave the way.

So there you go, all the way back in 1992 some unnamed woman in Moscow knew all about Barack Obama and the intricate Communist plot to take over America ... and all it took was fifteen years and a group of borderline lunatics like Folger, Drake, and Fife to unravel it in the pages of WorldNetDaily.

I know that I should probably just start ignoring Porter, as I do all the other insanity that appears on WND, but I can't because I am still terrified by the fact that this woman was a close adviser to Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign and Huckabee himself praises her in his book, citing her as among the "new wave of leaders" who will remake the Republican Party.

• In yesterday's installment of Right Wing Leftovers we mentioned that Utah Eagle Forum President Gayle Ruzicka was opposing Equality Utah's Common Ground Initiative which would extend some legal protections to same-sex couples, saying it was a slippery slope to undoing Utah's anti-marriage amendment. But even authors of the amendment say the right-wingers are over-reacting because the amendment was "drafted very carefully to allow the extension of certain benefits."
• Tony Perkins's latest video update is, not surprisingly, dedicated to bad-mouthing the stimulus bill.
• The Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver blasts the Ninth Circuit's DOMA ruling, calling it "an opinion of an activist judge based on nothing else than his personal bias is no law at all and [that it] commands no respect."
• The Eagle Forum is angry at Sen. Kay Hagen for voting against Sen. DeMint's stimulus amendment, saying she has already turned "into a yes-woman for the intolerant secular-progressive forces in Washington."
• Gary Bauer warns Barack Obama that if his "actions lead to the obliteration of a U.S. city, the words 'I screwed up' won’t be enough."
• Did "angelic beings" save Ronald Reagan on not one, but two occasions? A new book says "yes, they did."
• Finally, Rick Warren was asked if he was surprised when he was asked to deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration. He says it was entirely unexpected and that he "could name several dozen wonderful pastors who would have done a better job." Yeah, so could we.

Last week, while trolling around the intertubes for content for this venerable blog, I came across this article when I noticed it popping up in a few of the darker right-wing corners:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is extremely frustrated with orders that the White House is contemplating. According to sources at the Pentagon, including all branches of the armed forces, the Obama Administration may break with a centuries-old tradition.

A spokesman for General James Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, states that the Obama Administration wants to have soldiers and officers pledge a loyalty oath directly to the office of the President, and no longer to the Constitution.

While I dismissed it as an obvious hoax, those dedicated journalists at WorldNetDaily decided to contact the Joint Chiefs for comment, only to be told that “there was no substance because the issue wasn't under discussion and hadn't been under discussion.”  

And then, just for good measure, WND reported on some of the lunatics who were actually taken in by this obviously fraudulent story and who offered rather convoluted attempts to justify their own paranoia:

One of those who acknowledged the report was Orly Taitz, the California lawyer whose cases at various levels of the court system are challenging Obama's qualifications for the Oval Office under the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural born" citizen.

She later explained why the report didn't seem far-fetched.

"Why do we believe everything bad, illegal and unconstitutional when it comes to Obama?" she wrote in a followup.

"Will Obama really change the military oath? Will there be changes to the Constitution? We don't really know. The main reason is that Obama has zero credibility. When a man spends [a] reported $800,000 on attorneys to keep [his] original birth certificate sealed, you know that this birth certificate shows him as ineligible for presidency, otherwise he would've shown it to us," she wrote.

"I hope each and every member of the military or any other citizen for that matter should write to him and demand written assurance that he will not be making any changes to the Constitution and demand to see all of his records under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) in order to find out what is his legal name and what is his citizenship. Until BO steps up to the plate, the citizens will believe anything and everything about him, and rightfully so," she said.

Columbia Christians for Life, an organization that also had alerted its constituency about the report, apologized for what appeared to be "satire."

"On the other hand, I wonder if it may have been fabricated and the story floated on the Internet to see what kind of a response there would be (e.g., in the blogosphere) if such a thing were to be attempted," an organization spokesman said.

"It still makes me wonder … if someone did not learn of this issue actually being discussed by the WH and Pentagon and then building (fabricating) a believable news report around it?" the organization said. "If you are a Christian, pray such a thing never does come to pass in America, as it did in Hitler's Third Reich."

So these folks aren’t just gullible and paranoid – it’s that Obama really is engaged in a massive cover-up to conceal the fact that he’s ineligible to be President and is sending out fake news reports about something he intends to do in order to gauge the response and throw everybody off the trail.  

How do you argue with that sort of logic?  

Right-wing commentators, activists, and leaders just want to make clear that, while the country might appear to be united behind Barack Obama and optimistic that his administration will succeed, they most certainly are not. 

While Rush Limbaugh is saying he hopes Obama fails, and Joseph Farah is praying that he does, Gary Bauer is likewise proclaiming that “conservatives have not united around Obama, nor should they” … and he’s got a novel explanation of just why that is:

President Obama received the votes of 65 million Americans, which translates to only about 22 percent of the American population.  In 2004, George W. Bush received the votes of 62 million Americans, which translated into about 21 percent of the American population.  Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t remember the media talking about the nation having united around its president then. 

In 2008, 235 million Americans did not vote for Barack Obama (roughly equal to the combined populations of 47 states).  More than 60 million Americans cast their ballots for somebody other than Barack Obama for president, while another 100 million eligible voters found the idea of Obama as president so stirring that they couldn’t even drag themselves to the voting booth on Election Day.

It’s interesting that we are now judging a president’s support not by the percentage of votes received among those cast but by the number of votes not cast. 

By that metric, it looks like Ronald Reagan wasn’t quite the phenomenally popular president the Right has been telling us he was all these years because it turns out that he only received a mere 54 million votes during his landslide re-election in 1984, which means that a whopping 77% of the 235,000,000 citizens in this country at the time didn’t vote for him.  

Now that Barack Obama is officially the President of the United States, the right-wing columnists at WorldNetDaily are struggling to figure out the best way to cope with the new president and Democratic Congress.  So far, all they’ve been able to come up with is hoping that he fails. 

Phyllis Schlafly writes that Obama’s presidency will be just like Bill Clinton’s and that he and Congress will repeat the “mistakes” of 1993 and soon find themselves voted out of office.  Ben Shapiro predicts that it will soon “become obvious that Obama's election was Americans' superfluous attempt to move beyond race, not a broad mandate to remold the country” and that “Obama will learn the hard way that while Americans will never fail, presidents can.”

While most WND columnists seem content to let Obama to shoot himself in the foot and destroy his own presidency, WND founder Joseph Farah has decided on a more pro-active response by praying that Obama will fail miserably:

Many a coward has been bolstered in his conviction against challenging tyranny by not reading too deeply into the Scriptures. Yet, nowhere does the Bible ever suggest evil rulers are to be obeyed. When the rule of men conflicts with the commands of God, the Bible leaves no doubt about where we should stand.

That's why I do not hesitate today in calling on godly Americans to pray that Barack Hussein Obama fail in his efforts to change our country from one anchored on self-governance and constitutional republicanism to one based on the raw and unlimited power of the central state.

It would be folly to pray for his success in such an evil campaign.

I want Obama to fail because his agenda is 100 percent at odds with God's. Pretending it is not simply makes a mockery of God's straightforward Commandments.  

But just in case that doesn’t work, Burt Prelutsky has a back-up plan:

I know that armed insurrection is a notion that has occurred to quite a number of right-wingers, and while I admit that popping off a round or two in the general direction of Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell and any number of left-wing politicians is undeniably appealing, I really wouldn't want to promote a second war between the states. At least not so long as there was a viable option. And, fortunately, there is. There's Canada!

During the American Revolution, Americans who were loyal to England crossed the border. I suggest that we conservatives who are loyal to the America conceived by our forefathers pack up our principles, our values and our Constitution, and move north.

We may not have the numbers to win a presidential election here in the United States, but our 58 million votes in Canada (current population: 33,500,000) would be more than enough to ensure a conservative plurality for the foreseeable future.

Furthermore, having learned from experience, I propose that our first order of business should be to erect a large wall along our southern border in order to keep out the riff-raff.

You know, of all the suggestions posted on WND, this is the one we support most whole-heartedly.

In her latest WorldNetDaily column, Janet Porter continues her crusade to expose what she says is Barack Obama's ineligibility to be president he is "an impostor from another country" and that the media has "blocked any news of his birthplace and citizenship" and even censored "paid advertising that tried to expose it."

Today WND reports that Porter was indeed shut down by various networks when she tried to buy advertising for a 60-second expose ahead of Congress's certification of the Electoral College results:  

WND columnist Janet Porter told WND she found that out when her organization, Faith2Action.org, tried to purchase airtime to publicize information about the eligibility concerns.

She told WND that national networks that refused to sell her time for a 60-second commercial included CNBC, MSNBC, Headline News, CNN and Fox. Washington, D.C., outlets for the same organizations did the same.

While we may not be able to see her commercial on television, we can at least see it via YouTube:

Apparently, the veracity and importance of this ad depends primarily on what you consider the meaning of the word "fact" to be.