Free Republic

One would think an entire think-tank university staff is behind Snopes. Not so. It's a couple — husband and wife. Their opinions are considered bible by countless who check out "the facts" by going to Snopes.com. These countless include college profs, Congresspersons, the National Review writers, and masses climbing all over the grassroots.

A rumor that won’t die is the myth that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is fake. There are different theories on where Obama was born, if he was not born in Hawaii as he claims. A prevailing belief is that he was born in Kenya, and as a native Kenyan, is not eligible to be President of the United States. Some have also claimed that his full name includes the name “Mohammed,” adding to speculation that Obama is a secret Muslim. At this point, mountains of evidence are in and they all point to the fact that Barack Obama is a...

Stop it. You are being duped on many occasion by two political and theological liberals. That's right. Liberals.

The crew of a naval vessel was vaccinated with H1N1 vaccine in order to “see what happens”. Well, what happened was that the Captain and the Chief Petty Officer died. Worse than that, it has become clear (yet again) that the vaccine actually CAUSES swine flu. If you choose to give either yourself or your kids a swine flu vaccine, you need your head examined. Here is the testimony from Navy wives of the affected crew via the internet radio show A Marines Disquisition, with Drew Raines. http://www.clipser.com/watch_video/1362067 : Ignore at your own peril. After the testimony is the actual...

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA Dear President Obama You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truely scare me. You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you. You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support. You scare me because you did not spend your formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American. You scare me because you...

Read content at source only

On the morning drive Quinn & Rose radio show, I heard about the famous high school graduation exam from Salina, Kansas which Snopes had debunked as a hoax. I remember when they did this as I checked their site which categorically stated that such an exam did not exist. Well, it turned out that such an exam does exist and is preserved by a historical society in, of all places (drum roll, please) . . .

Lou Pritchet is a former vice president of Procter & Gamble whose career at that company spanned 36 years before his retirement in 1989, and he is the author of the 1995 business book, Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat. Mr. Pritchett confirmed that he was indeed the author of the much-circulated "open letter." “I did write the 'you scare me' letter. I sent it to the NY Times but they never acknowledged or published it. However, it hit the internet and according to the ‘experts’ has had over 500,000 hits. AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA

Millions of Americans, including national leaders, who rely on the popular online hoax-buster Snopes.com as the ultimate authority in separating truth from fiction, may be surprised to learn that behind the Wizard's curtain, is just a husband and wife doing research on their own. In fact, Snopes, routinely cited by many as the final word on both frivolous and important stories, is not the well-staffed think tank of researchers, journalists and computer hacks one might expect – but rather, the work of David and Barbara Mikkelson, living in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dear President Obama: You are the thirteenth President under whom I have lived and unlike any of the others, you truly scare me. You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you. You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support. You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American. You scare me because you have never run a company or...

If you happened to read online news sites such as United Press International or the popular hoax-busting Snopes.com anytime up until Tuesday night, you would have seen definitive statements that President Obama was born at the Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. But checking back now, both sites are suddenly providing an entirely different location, the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children, also in the capital of the Aloha State. Within hours of a WND report revealing Obama's birth being reported at two different Hawaiian hospitals, both sites changed their information to suddenly fall in line with the president's...

Below is a letter Obama sent to Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii at a Centennial Dinner on 01/24/2009 which was read by Rep. Neil Abercrombie. Obama clearly references this hospital as his hospital of birth.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/graphics/mugshot1.jpg

> If the immigrant is over 65, they can apply for SSI and > Medicaid and get more than a woman on Social Security, > who worked from 1944 until 2004. > > She is only getting $791 per month because she was born in > 1924 and there's a 'catch 22'. > > It is interesting that the federal government provides a > single refugee with a monthly allowance of $1,890. Each > can also obtain an additional $580 in social assistance, > for a total of $2,470 a month. > > This compares to a single pensioner, who...

Irena Sendler, a candidate for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, is credited with saving 2.500 Polish Jews from the Holocaust.

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has referred constituents raising concerns over President Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office to an online "fact" organization that relies for its answer partly on information from the Obama campaign. The response from Kyl to an Arizona constituent was revealed just one day after a Florida WND reader alerted WND to the fact Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., had told him that Obama's eligibility was affirmed by voters who supported him in the Democratic primary and general elections in 2008. The response from Kyl to a voter who asked about Obama's ability to meet the constitutional...

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has referred constituents raising concerns over President Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office to an online "fact" organization that relies for its answer partly on information from the Obama campaign. "Thank you for your recent e-mail. Senator Obama meets the constitutional requirements for presidential office. Rumors pertaining to his citizenship status have been circulating on the Internet, and this information has been debunked by Snopes.com, which investigates the truth behind Internet rumors."

From ripoffreport.com: Perhaps you want to discover the origin of an urban legend or verify that the photo of a 45-pound cat someone emailed you isn't a doctored photo. Maybe you want to know if Proctor & Gamble's logo is really satanic. Snopes.com (hereafter “snopes") is good for verifying unimportant stuff like that, but don't count on them being “fair and balanced" when it comes to anything political or religious. Although Snopes hasn't any political philosophy explicitly stated on the website, snopes' selectivity and analysis of political emails oozes with partisanship. Religious emails don't fare much better and typically get...

Bangkok: A hippopotamus swallowed a circus dwarf in a "freak accident" in northern Thailand according to a columnist in the Pattaya Mail. The Grapevine column reported" A circus dwarf nicknamed Od,died recently when he bounced sideways from a trampoline and was swallowed by a yawning hippopotamus waiting to appear in the next act" "Vets said Hilda the Hippo had a gag reflex which caused her to swallow. More than 1000 spectators continued to applaud wildly until they realized there had been a tragic mistake"

Ford, Chrysler and GM's contributions after 9/11 An interesting commentary...You might find this of interest: 'CNN Headline News did a short news listing regarding Ford and GM's contributions to the relief and recovery efforts in New York and Washington.

Selma Got Me Born - LIAR, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 - Selma had no effect on your birth, as Selma was in 1965. that's just 1 of 50

I have seen an email circulation about three Obama insiders being past Fannie Mae looters (my term).

You have to click on the link because Snopes won't let me copy and paste. There is a rumor circulating apparently via email that Biden will drop out in early October (some say the 5th) citing health reasons, and Hillary will replace him. Snopes says the rumor is "undetermined" at this point, but they question whether Obama would switch because doing socould hurt him. They point out that switching hurt McGovern in 1972. An article written yesterday at the liberal Huffington Post thinks it would benefit Obama greatly and urges for it to happen. Do you think there is any...

Snopes referring to the Michelle Obama thesis.

CALL TO ARMS

Well, maybe not, but I like his style. Check out the Motor City Madman's answer to the unbelievably idiotic question posed to him by a French reporter. In the green box.

Most have now heard about the emails from soldiers in the field who were less than impressed by the fact that the Obamessiah failed to grace them with his holy presence. We posted on it yesterday.Well, one of the first emails to travel around the net has now been "recanted" by the sender. The email itself was genuine, but now he is asking that people stop sending it around and posting it. He said it was meant only for his family. The odds are good that what happened was that it got around, and since his name was attached, he...

LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO HOUSES AND SEE IF YOU CAN TELL WHICH BELONGS TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST. HOUSE # 1: A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than...

A tourist who relieved himself over a live railway line at a south London station was electrocuted.

I have been looking at Snopes to "confirm" certain things out there about Obama. For instance, quotes from his books, and Snopes comes across as very liberal, defending Obama and making excuses for what he's said. Most of the quotes, he did in fact say but Snopes likes to say it was taken out of context, etc. Anyone else have an opinion on this?

Mr. McCain, now the presumptive Republican nominee, has staked out his candidacy on the promise that American troops can bring stability to Iraq. What he almost never says is that one of them is his own son, who spent seven months patrolling Anbar Province and learned of his father's New Hampshire victory in January while he was digging a stuck military vehicle out of the mud.

A Home Depot store in Utah plans to celebrate Gay pride in the Store with decorations of Rainbows and employee Tee shirts announcing gay pride. Inside sources say that this is something that will be devastating to business as most of the customer base tends to be on the Right side of the issue as they are mostly religious people. I am actively involved in this business and i dont want to be a part of it bacuae this is contrary to my belief and would like advice from more experienced FReepers on how best to disrupt these outrageous plans...

MONTGOMERY The state Senate may have been locked down for most of the year, but it did find time to endorse a widely discredited urban legend spread by the John Birch Society. The upper chamber passed a joint resolution April 10 sponsored by state Sen. Rusty Glover, R-Semmes, claiming that Canada, Mexico and the United States are moving toward a "North American Union" and working on construction of a "NAFTA Superhighway" to link the countries and report edly destroy their sovereignty. "It's about retaining independence," said John McManus, the president of the John Birch Society, in a phone interview Mon...

http://www.fdrs.org/quotes_of_gun_control.html "The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." - Adolf Hitler . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Weapons_Law German Weapons Law On November 11, 1938, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, passed Regulations Against Jews' Possession of Weapons. This regulation effectively deprived all Jews of the right to possess firearms or other weapons. Source: http://www.stephenhalbrook.com/article-nazilaw.pdf

January 29, 2008 (Computerworld) A popular urban legend debunking site has stopped serving up adware downloads after the practice was criticized by security experts and users, according to one researcher. Snopes.com, a site that exposes urban legends, had until yesterday been funding its operation in part with revenues from a pop-up ad that posed the question "Do you want to block Junk emails?" That pop-up, said Alex Eckelberry, CEO of Sunbelt Software, in turn shilled ad-serving software from Zango Inc., a well-known adware distributor that settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in late 2006 over charges it used unfair...

Caribou Coffee Claim: An Islamic bank is the majority owner of the Caribou Coffee chain. Status: True Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2002] As you will see from the links below, Caribou Coffee is owned 87.8% by the First Islamic Investment Bank which, among other things has the following philosophy: "Above all, ensuring that all activities conform to Islamic Shari'ah" The chairman of their Shari'ah supervisory board is: Dr. Yusuf Abdullah Al-Qaradawi Chairman, Seerah & Sunnah Center, Qatar University; Professor, Faculty of Shari'ah, Qatar University. As you will see from the links below he is also on the supervisory board...

I heard recently on the Rush Limbaugh show this quote. "What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it. But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender....

Converning Bill's ad for Hillary: By Dick Morris, former political advisor to President Bill Clinton If you happen to see the Bill Clinton five minute TV ad for Hillary in which he introduces the commercial by saying that he wants to share some things we may not know about Hillary's background . . beware . . As I was there for most of their presidency and know them better than just about anyone, I offer a few corrections; Bill says: "In law school Hillary worked on legal services for the poor." The facts are: Hillary's main extra-curricular activity in law...

We've just obtained a copy of the Obama Muslim smear email -- smear-mail? -- that the Iowa county chair volunteering for Hillary sent out. Key quotes: "Obama's parents met at the University of Hawaii . When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Kenya . His mother then married Lolo Soetoro, a RADICAL Muslim from Indonesia . When Obama was 6 years old, the family relocated to Indonesia . Obama attended a MUSLIM school in Jakarta." And: "Since it is politically expedient to be a CHRISTIAN when seeking major public office in the United...

We all get "those" emails from time to time-the ones making claims that are meant to be passed on. We've learned to check things on sites like snopes.com to make sure what we pass is true. When it comes to the movie The Golden Compass, whats going around is...true

A letter from a Canadian: Please take the time to read it so you can do whatever you wish....research, verify, etc., but please read it. I saw on the news up here in Canada where Hillary Clinton introduced her new health care plan. Something similar to what we have in Canada. I also heard that Michael Moore was raving about the health care up here in Canada in his latest movie. As your friend and someone who lives with the Canada health care plan, I thought I would give you some facts about this great medical plan that we have...

A year or two, and a PC, ago I read in Free Republic about this website where I could check if a story in an e-mail was fact or urband legend. Unfortunately, after changing PCs, I lost the link to that site. I have wished over and over I had saved that info when I changed PCs. Finally, I've decided to ask the same people who gave me the information at least a year ago. Freepers, do y'all know the website I'm talking about? How about its address? Thanks.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/budweiser.asp They apparently don't like to have their stuff copied, since they won't let me select the text. Therefore, link only.

Mexican flag flown OVER Old Glory, and the Stars n' Stripes are displayed upside down at Montebello High School in California, March 27, 2006. Full story here: http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/mexicoflag.asp More pics here: http://michellemalkin.com/2006/03/29/the-american-flag-comes-second/

Claim:   Crocodile hunter Steve Irwin became a born-again Christian a few weeks before he died. Status:   False. Example:   [Collected via e-mail, 2006] Yes, we now have confirmation of Steve Irwin's decision for Christ. I want to inform Creation Ministries International, that Steve Irwin became a born again Christian two and a half weeks ago at the Kings Church AOG Buderim, Queensland Australia, going forward publicly before the congregation to ask Christ to become his Lord and Saviour. Many of us will now spend eternity with him. I am sure Terri is comforted as a Christian in the...

Hoax as it appears on the internet: Many will recall that on July 8, 1947, witnesses claim that an unidentified object with five aliens aboard crashed onto a sheep and cattle ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico. This is a well-known incident that many say has long been covered up by the U.S. Air Force and the federal government. However, you may NOT know that in the month of March 1948, exactly nine months after that historic day, Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., Hillary Rodham, John F. Kerry, William Jefferson Clinton, Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Charles E. Schumer, and...

.... The flags are France,Germany,and Russia.

I'm Your Worst Nightmare. I am a BAD Republican. I like big cars, big cigars and naturally big racks. I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some mid-level governmental functionary with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts squirting out babies. I don't care about appearing compassionate. I think playing with guns doesn't make you a killer. I believe its called the Boy Scouts for a reason. I think I'm better than the homeless. I am not the real Slim Shady, so I think that I’m gonna stay seated...

The following from a director with SW BELL in Mexico City. ( Bob Blaydon) I spent five years working in Mexico. I worked under a tourist visa for three months and could legally renew it for three more months. After that you were working illegally. I was technically illegal for three weeks waiting on the FM3 approval. During that six months our Mexican and US Attorneys were working to secure a permanent work visa called a FM3. It was in addition to my US passport that I had to show each time I entered and left the country. Barbara's was...

..."The credibility that they've established is based on the laziness of reporters who have used them as a source." That last quote is quite chilling: A Los Angeles-based husband and wife---just two people with goodness knows what agenda or leanings---have somehow managed to establish themselves as a pretty big boulder in the information stream. Most people accord the Mikkelsons a fair amount of credibility as the best source for confirmation or refutation of widely distributed Internet memes. Given how much reliance is being placed on their determinations, it seems like we do very well to know where they're coming from....