Free Republic

Thanks as always for the pings, Mr. Thecarp. I've been lurking here periodically but haven't been keeping up with the Obama skeletons as much lately. However, seeing the name Sheila jogged a memory of that name on an old handwritten postcard. A person whose identity some of us speculated about on this thread. (There is a link on my post #23 there to a fairly high res image of the postcard that, as of minutes ago, is still online).

Apologies in advance for the fact that I didn't make an effort to check the timeline for a plausible connection to the Sheila mentioned on this thread and that I also failed to read enough of today's relevant threads here to determine whether anyone else had already raised the possibility that these two Sheilas were one in the same.

And finally, I'm not sure that it would even matter to anyone. Just kinda interesting to try connecting some of these dots.

YES! This point cannot be overstressed. This LIST WAS NAMED NOT BY TRUMP BUT BY FEDERAL ACTIONS THAT OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA years. Only Syria was specifically named. The countries were indicated because they were the ones enumerated in prior actions from 2015 and 2016. Their names weren't mentioned in the text of Trump's order. His order merely contained a reference to the relevant sections of the prior action.

Decent blog post I found here when Googling for the truth about Trump and his Middle Eastern business interests.
https://sethfrantzman.com/2017/01/28/obamas-administration-made-the-muslim-ban-possible-and-the-media-wont-tell-you/

Thanks for the thread.

Levin Urges Student to Flee Liberal Denison University

Late in tonight's (Tues. 1/24) broadcast, a college student named Ryan called in from the Colombus, OH region with news of the ridiculous reverse prejudice and other routine liberal absurdities he encountered on his college campus yesterday during the school's belated MLK Jr. observances yesterday.

Levin's recent show audio. 1/24/17, segment starts at 1:43:30

Rather than indulging the student in his complaints, Mark swiftly responded with a fervent, decisive charge that the student get away from that campus at the end of the current semester or as soon as possible.

I didn't think the name of the school was mentioned during the call, so I couldn't resist hitting the ol' search engine once I got home from my evening commute. It didn't take much effort at all to deduce all indicators were pointing squarely at Denison University, a pathetic bastion of liberalism in based in Granville, OH.

It occurs to me that if someone who might happen by this board has a knack for social media (and perhaps a penchant for stirring up a bit of innocent trouble), some strategic tweeting and facebooking and maybe an email or two might spark up some much needed negative attention for Denison "University" and her cadre of despicable liberal denizens masquerading as scholars.

Mark Levin is widely known to have befriended and endorsed Hillsdale, and now we know the anti-Hillsdale, the Ohio school Mark explicitly urges students to avoid at all costs.

Of course, Denison, would doubtless receive Mark's disparaging remarks as a badge of honor. "Come to Denison, the University More Despised by Mark Levin than Any Other®"

I say, let them knock themselves out. The easier it is for conservatives to see these liberal laughing stocks a mile away, the more likely they will remember to direct their money and their children elsewhere.

Oh come now, it’s not that simple. You completely forgot to mention the crucial role that anthropogenic global climate change plays in motivating these sorts of episodes. When are people ever going to learn to start recycling so the world can be spared all this senseless violence?

Also a photo all by itself here (as of this moment):

http://mashable.com/people/4eb578835198402b59000149/

I see. Thanks again.

Thanks Siezethecarp. Given the delay ad infinitum of meaningful new developments from MCSO on the birth certificate, I’ve gotten a bit out of the loop on the day to day analysis and speculation.

Are people beginning to guess that the earth shattering evidence touted by Zullo was in fact MCSO’s apparent discovery that the court appointed monitor had been directed to broaden the scope of his investigation in order to scrutinize MCSO’s work on the birth certificate? Is that even a possibility, given the timelines? Sorry I don’t remember when the monitor had begun his/her work.

I wonder if when MCSO saw the broadened monitor powers, if that became the tipping point to spin off the secondary taxpayer funded investigation indirectly related to the CCP birth certificate probe. When Gallups or Zullo referred to a dark twist that had developed, might the unsaid explanation have been, “because we now know that the monitor appointed by the court supposedly for anti-discrimination matters has been quietly asked to look into what we’ve discovered related to Obama’s birth certificate”?

If the earth shattering development is no more and no less than the fact that MCSO noticed the feds/DOJ wanted to see what MCSO had overturned about the Birth Certificate (the Hayes report as you mention in post 25, etc.), that would be interesting, surely. To be honest though, in my opinion, it would seem less meaningful than if the earth shattering development referred to the emergence of some new, virtually indisputable item of evidence directly related to Obama’s birth narrative such as a yet unseen tell-tale document or a damning bit of testimony from a key eye-wintess.

In any case, I’m glad that Arpaio and his MCSO/CCP tried valiantly to get to the bottom of this, and I desperately hope that one day we’ll know what they did and didn’t discover and what the secret developments were that prompted the various enshrouded Zullo/Gallups teaser statements.

Starting with a side point:

"It is clear to anyone with an IQ above 60 that Mr. Obama was not born in Hawaii..."

So maybe I don't have an IQ above 60, but for what it's worth I think there are a lot of birth certificate doubters and eligibility doubters who, like me, are guessing something is definitely significantly awry with with Obama's identifying documents and/or birth narrative but who, again like me, don't feel convinced he was born in Kenya.

On to the bigger issue:

"Again moot point."

This I think is a fair position, and I think you have justified it decently (not that my conclusion matters given my astonishingly low IQ). I had gathered that your interest in the debate was about how best to interpret the meaning of the constitution from a strict constructionist perspective. It was on that point that I was attempting debate, but on this point of mootness I must admit, to me it seems you are quite right.

Regardless of what historical evidence does or doesn't tell us about the Framers' intentions, it would appear the sitting supreme court has weighed in with its conclusion implicitly through inaction and silence regarding Obama's disposition. The idealist in me is hesitant to see Republicans as pushing still further the definition of natural born citizen that is in my view less attested, so I have been reluctant to join the Ted Cruz club, but at some point I may.

My kids think me hypocritical for suggesting I could support Cruz when for so long I have argued that even if Obama is telling the truth about his birth circumstances he is still probably not what the founders meant by natural born citizen. I explain myself by asking them to consider an umpire behind the plate who calls "ball high" for pitches thrown between the waistline and the letters. If the rulebook says the strike zone goes from the knees all the way up to the letters I might argue with him the first time he grants a walk to an opposing batter on a "ball high" that was well below the letters. Nevertheless if he should remain stonefaced and consistent, I would certainly instruct my batters to not swing at tough pitches that are above their waists so that the opposing pitchers are burdened to stay within the same small strike zone imposed upon my pitchers.

The point of course is that the Nine Black Riders seated in our highest court are analogous to the umpire in that they are for all practical purposes the duly vested authorities whether I like it or not. So if the Dems are going to leverage a wider definition of natural born and bear no negative consequences, it only seems reasonable the the Republicans should be afforded the same latitude. When do two wrongs make a right? When the Supreme Court says (explicitly or tacitly) that neither of the wrongs were wrong at all.

If I could have my wish it would be instead that SCOTUS finally show some courageous responsibility and take a case regarding Obama's eligibility in which they would articulate once and for all how it is those 3 words in Article II must be interpreted, but it looks like that's just not going to happen.

So yes, I'll concede. My argument about the Framers' intentions is apparently moot, thanks to the silent Supremes. All the best to Ted Cruz and his supporters. For now I'm content to stick with the outsider who grew up in the Detroit ghetto, but in Senator Cruz there is definitely much to be admired.

I can admit that I have no credentials and nothing new to add to this discussion; however, I think I am at least enough familiar with the principle issues contested in the argument to provide a basic summary.

The framers used the phrase “natural born citizen” not “person born a citizen” although the latter was certainly an option that might have occurred to them.

The choice of those specific three words could imply that they had a specific meaning in mind for the phrase—that it was for them a term of art that held a particular application not contingent upon however congress may varyingly legislate the conditions of citizenship throughout the Republic’s future that then lay still ahead.

If they did indeed choose the words they did because they had a specific meaning in mind, it is at least plausible (I think most likely) that they meant to
invoke the definition of Vattel’s “naturels” which he defines in his Law of Nations as those born in that country of which their parents were citizens. We know that the founders depended heavily upon the ideas of Vattel as they broke new ground in establishing this Constitutional Republic. Also in the very early English translations of Vattel’s work, the word naturels was rendered “Natural born citizen”.

On this point many will counter that the framers had perhaps instead meant to invoke the idea behind British legal scholar Blackstone’s “Natural Born Subject” which was broader. However, the founders saw a crucial distinction between the meaning of “subject” and that of “citizen.” The former is deemed such in service to and under the dominion of the monarch, while the latter implies privilege and to some extent responsibility are owned by the individual. Thus “subject” denotes all people upon whom the king may make some claim as beholding unto the throne and as such would naturally seek to apply to a broader class of people than the idea of citizenship. The framers intentionally preferred “citizenship” for founding documents since it conveyed the idea that the individual is the privileged stake-holder in his country, not a being living and serving unto the pleasure of his king.

One of the key factors in support of reading Vattel’s meaning in Article II is the fact that in Minor v. Happersett, the supreme court’s decision specifically connected the term “natural born citizen” with the meaning found in Vattel. The decision went on then to add that whether lesser conditions were sufficient to designate one to be a “citizen” (not natural born citizen) was less certain. The implication of their language in determining whether the plaintiff was a citizen was that the term “citizen” was uncertain or in doubt because it could be variously construed, but that the subclass of citizen, “natural born citizen” had a specific definition which they stated was “never in doubt”. Thus it seems very reasonable to interpret the earliest and perhaps most prominent time when natural born citizenship was contemplated by the Supreme Court as declaring the exact meaning Vattel had in mind. If so, it would seem Obama and Cruz are excluded. And that would be the case despite whatever statutory legislation is in effect to regard them citizens at the times of their births. Again, as Mr. Apuzzo said, why would this phrase of the Constitution be subject to being redefined at the whim of congress without the need to meet the burden required for amending its meaning in any other significant way.

For what it’s worth the quotation from the LA Times attributed to an immigration judge you mentioned near the beginning of this thread doesn’t seem to state an opinion specifically with regard to whether or not Cruz is a “natural born citizen.” Yes, I know it’s implied, but I mean to make the point that there is only one office in America impacted by the the natural born citizen clause. Immigration judges may be interested all day long in who is a citizen and and by what virtue a person is a citizen, and even on occasion perhaps whether a person is born a citizen, but an immigration judge never has any practical cause to contemplate much less make a ruling upon whether a person satisfies the framers specific “natural born” criterion.

Sorry if you were already familiar with all of that. I just got the impression that some here, including perhaps the original poster, were not up to speed on some of the complexities that come into play regarding the “natural born citizen” debate. Though I am not as confident as Mr. Apuzzo and lack the legal training from which he draws, I personally am inclined to interpret historical, linguistic and literary evidence as indicating that the framers never intended that their idea of natural born citizen would apply to people born under the circumstances Obama or Cruz—or even Chester Arthur—were born under.

I think Carson is intelligent enough and principled enough and persuasive enough to lead. Political experience is of little value to a country in need of someone who isn’t covered and dripping in the blood of a lifetime of negotiations and alliances with lobbyists and campaign donors and crony colleagues.

With respect to how mean he is, I too have been a bit concerned about whether he will show a strong and clear tact. This quote from him about ISIS further encouraged me that he is perhaps up to the challenge:

“When you’re dealing with an organization like ISIS whose stated goal is to destroy you, you can’t play with them, you can’t just drive them back to their little hole and let them regroup and come back out. You have to have a philosophy that you’re going to get rid of them and you have to use the means that are necessary in order to do that. You can’t play games.”

The CBS reporter and producer will be audited.

Ha! Quite so, and the emails ordering the audit will be lost forever to a super selective, multiple-disc-drive-and-tape-spanning data crash.

On the other hand, maybe CBS will be okay if they were the on-call desensitization platoon designated to make sure the scandal had a soft landing. Given how gentle they were with the story, I suppose that's possible.

T. Cochran (i) 50.3% 63,813

C. McDaniel 48.0% 60,839

T. Cochran (i) 50.6% 59,736

C. McDaniel 47.8% 56,486

I was able to find these from 2002 that might be relevant, however if you wrote using the name Gen.Blather back then I’m having a hard time finding anything from the same time frame.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/732107/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/732594/posts

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/675940/posts

That thought occurred to me also, but when I tried it I found that I was still getting the redirector fairly often. When I append /focus to the site designation it never seems to give me redirector links. My most recent experiment was with the search term “Declares”

Declares +site:freerepublic.com/focus
(no redirector links on first page of results)

Declares +site:freerepublic.com -redirected
(plenty of redirector results)

I encountered the same problem minutes ago, when I was logged out of my gmail user account and googled key terms including the site:freerepublic.com qualifier. I use that site restriction method occasionally as well for freerepublic, but today I saw that a high percentage of results were links to the redirectors, like you said.

Thankfully, I found that using site:freerepublic.com/focus instead seemed to clean the results from all the redirector links. Unfortunately, that might exclude some results that you'd rather keep. I think you might get a fuller picure if you also do separate search using site:freerepublic.com/tag

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a way to combine two "site:. . . ." restrictions in the same search.

I completely agree. In my opinion, we would be wise now to launch a national effort urging conservatives from his district to withhold votes from him in the general election—assuming he makes it past the primaries.

There’s a place for pragmatism and accepting the lesser of two evils, but there’s also a place for drawing a line and demonstrating real consequences for this kind of betrayal.

It's bad enough he wants to see us do the unthinkable, but the traitor won't even frame the discussion properly.

If the only problem these people are having is a lack of documents, why on earth would we be talking about making them them legal? Just document them and be done with it, right?

No?

Well, if pelosi-ugly Eric Cantor is desperate to make them legal, then wouldn't that imply that currently they're not? Let's see now, Eric, what do we call the state of not being legal? Hmm, I guess I'm just at a loss for for words.

Have we changed the english language so much that "legal" is the remedy of all problems.

---

Dear Congressman,
My nephew has a broken collar bone, and since that is a considerable burden to bear, I am writing on his behalf to petition you to grant him legal status. I know there's nothing unlawful about having a broken collar bone, but I admire your efforts to help all those immigrants by given them legal status--even though in your opinion they haven't done anything illegal either.

Also, my wife and I have a meager income. Now there's no crime in that, but it would still help us feel so much better if you guys would pass a bill that conveys legal status upon us, too. Oh and then there's my neighbor who turned his homework in late . . .

---

Well what did I expect? Cantor's just using typical Washington politispeech to deftly have it both ways. He gets to be the old softy who doesn't see anything wrong these people committing innocent "acts of love," while at the same time he basks in his glorious triumph of having delivered them from the misery of their illeg-er..I..mean..undocumented lives into the shining hope of now being legal.

But I digress. I really think we need to show "Republicans" we're serious. I think it would be a measured, reasonable and timely response for us to start mounting a national campaign to persuade their constituents to railroad Cantor and McConnell in November. One pelosi-ugly candidate from each chamber should be turned into a brutal example of how SICK we are of this! I yes, I realize the short term impact of that could prove somewhat costly, but in order to finally get this through their thick skulls we must turn to extremes.

The only reason Cantor wants to make a de facto abdication of his seat by supporting open-border amnesty is that some fat cats in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have arranged a glamorous retirement waiting for him and his family in Monaco. But, he only taps that gold after he passes his law to convert the criminals into cheap berry pickers and meat processors. If his constituents don't cast their votes for him in November, then Eric will be forced into early retirement--before his ship can ever come in. Then he'll be stuck in the work-a-day world of beltway lobbying, hoping to earn his one-way trip to an overseas paradise quick, before our once-mighty republic drowns in the crushing throngs of entitlement seekers flooding over her wide open borders.

I only caught the tail end of Levin’s conversation with Ben Carson, but for those moments there seemed to be only mutual admiration expressed. I wondered if I might have missed Levin drilling into some of Carson’s views, particularly his stance on 2nd Amendment issues.

I keep hoping that Ben Carson tightens up some of his rhetoric and positions so can capture broader favor I among skeptical constitutionalists. I think he’s quite close already, but I recognize that I am strongly biased toward favoring him in the first place for several reasons related to my personal tastes.

If anyone can share a comment or two of their impression from Levin’s entire interview with Carson I’d be grateful to hear it.

Well said.

I stumbled upon a commenter on the McConnell victory article at Breitbart tonight who was claiming that the Tea Party conservatives are making a big deal out of nothing. He said, "I am 65+ years old and am just as free now as the day I was born." and he added, "I just don't see your gripe."

After he was unpersuaded by my initial brief attempt at expressing why this matters, I decided to throw together a more thorough response. I think we need to be ready to explain that we keep hurting ourselves so long as we coddle these frauds who will not hold their ground in the times of our republic's most desperate challenges. Here is the long response offered in tho hope that it can kindle some ideas for how to express these ideas in conversations with people who seem to have no concept of what's at stake.

---

To the guy who doesn't really care much about whom we send to Washington

You are comfortable enough to be lulled into a complacency about real changes that are happening all around you.

Just because you're not as impacted as many business owners, you can't see any downside in the hundreds and thousands of new regulations dictated year after year.

Just because you like to pay for abortions, you don't mind that I have to.

Just because you think the concept of marriage is nothing but an antiquated irrational idea, you feel fine about some federal judge wiping out with a stroke of her pen a state's constitutional amendment passed by their electorate to maintain a status quo that has held strong for hundreds if not thousands of years in most western cultures.

You blithely look on from your cozy recliner as our national debt racks up at an astronomical rate, and why should you care? The next generation will have to bear that burden.

If you have grandkids who are in public schools your mind wanders off to some happy diversion to muffle their voices when they start talking about the climate they face in school wherein administrators go to considerable lengths to reduce their exposure to and expression of ideas that don't fit today's box. If those grandkids are looking forward to getting their first jobs, you couldn't care less about the fact their hireability is constantly eroding given that illegal immigrants are warmly welcomed by McConnell and his ilk. Furthermore, why should you be bothered when the government insists on telling unskilled laborers and employers how much they are worth to each other, imposing circumstances in which over a million jobs have to be eliminated?

You're happy to see my earnings commandeered for the sake of welfare services and education costs and incarceration costs for thousands of criminals who pour over our borders every month. Was a close relative of yours robbed or raped or murdered by one them? Of course not so why would that matter to you?

You don't invest your money in any of the many firearms manufacturers who are facing financial institutions that are bullied by Eric Holder's hush-hush program into severing ties with that un-favored industry.

Since you like your health insurance, why would you care that America has now begun deteriorating into a rationed care system that punishes those who, left to their own devices could have done much better. I know, there's nothing exceptional about individual responsibility and salf reliance.

You're already signed up for your health plan so why should you care that the government spent over $500 million of *someone's* money to buy a website that really still doesn't work from the First Lady's High School crush, and then wouldn't even be so accountable as to hand over the real numbers detailing its actual performance. You're not a doctor so why should you worry about what treatments a bureaucrat decides are and are not warranted for your patients?

You're not a teacher so why should you care about curriculum based on Washington's official party line about what is true, what is important and what is the best methodology to impose those views?

You're not tasked with law enforcement in a southwestern border state, so it's of no consequence that the federal government has decided that ICE agents no longer need to work with state police, sheriffs and municipalities to keep illegal immigrants in check. Obviously you weren't one of the American agents killed while staring down the barrel of a Fast and Furious distributed rifle, so how could you find it irritating when Obama suddenly claimed executive privilege to keep that program's documents under lockdown even though he insisted he had never seen them?

You not the parent of a soldier who lost his life when he courageously decided to enter the battle fray in Benghazi, so I realize you chuckle at those parents who are engaged in a struggle for answers about what happened that day. So what if Obama's state department suppressed thousands of pages and hid dozens of relevant witnesses all to help strengthen the president's relection political campaign by maintaining the illusion that terrorism had been nipped in the bud all over the world by that Chicago Kid of ours?

You, yourself, are the kind of feller who could never be mistaken for one who's plotting anything against the government, so it's no trouble to you that the government reads all your emails and tracks all your phone conversations. They can be trusted to be good stewards of that information and never use it in a way that would be untoward, right?

You're not earning a living by sweating it out in a conventional power plant every week day, so you can feel warm and fuzzy on the inside knowing that Solyndra was awarded many millions of dollars in grant money despite its doomed business model, merely because the company was well connected with democrat donors.

You have no interest in sentimental gestures toward the the men who were ready and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to keep America free during WWII, so you're surely a bit tickled by the irony that the National Parks Service was ordered to INCREASE its non-essential man-hour and maintenance costs to make sure those veterans and their fellow citizens would "feel the pain" of barricades when my representatives in congress shutdown the government, attempting on behalf of citizens like me to rein in one of the most costly and ill conceived power grabs ever launched by our government.

Yep everything's going fine. Nothing much has changed. Who cares who gets sent to Washington to run the show?