Wednesday Briefing

Friday, I'll give you my take on where we are 8 years after 9/11 and why so many experts think we need another 9/11 to get the attention of the American people.

Coming up next Tuesday and Wednesday...Live on WRVA/Richmond from 3-6pm ET. You can watch/listen live here by clicking on the Blog TV box at the right of the screen. Station web site is wwww.WRVA.com

Another Ft. Benning solidier is questioning President Obama's legitimacy under the U.S. Constitution requirement that he be "natural born" citizen. Despite the left's adamant statements that Obama was born in Hawaii, no indisputable documents are public to prove that assertion. The solidier says they will not be deployed.

Matt Burke wrote this for our web site on the Ft. Benning solidier issue:

Some advice for the birther movement
By: Matt Burke

September 9, 2009

The internet world buzzed this past weekend with the news that a Kenyan birth certificate showing that President Obama was born in Kenya was revealed. Then yesterday, Judge David Carter, a US District Court Judge in California, set a court date in late January for one of the cases challenging President Obama’s nationality.

Lets take each of these individually. First, the Kenyan birth certificate.

There are many potential problems that I see with this evidence. First, the affidavit that was attached to the birth certificate offered testimony that the person who retrieved the document, a Lucas Daniel Smith, had to pay a “cash consideration” to a military officer to look the other way while the birth certificate was being retrieved. A good attorney, rigorously defending the President, could drive a truck through Mr. Smith’s credibility (if he paid a guard to look the other way, could more money paid to this person have produced a fraudulent copy?). That same attorney would have a good case to have the present copy of the Kenyan birth certificate thrown out as not being a properly validated public record, and as such, would be inadmissible hearsay.

There may also be other problems with the certificate, ones that would easily expose it to be possibly accurate, or a fraud. First, there is a certificate number in the top left corner. Is that number consistent with a birth in August, 1961? Also, there is a footprint at the bottom. Did Kenya even process new births this way in 1961, and of course, does that print even match the President? The certificate is also signed by a John Odomo; was he employed by the hospital in August, 1961? There is also a signature of the attending doctor that can be similarly challenged.

A wrong answer to any of these would be fatal.

Now, on to the case. Before the case is to be heard in January, 2010, the court has scheduled two motions to be addressed by the Court. The first is a Motion to Dismiss, filed by the US Attorneys Office, claiming that this case should be immediately dismissed for a number of reasons, including that the plaintiffs do not have standing, and that the Court does not have the authority to hear the case. I would put the government’s odds of winning this motion at 70%.

If the plaintiffs survive that Motion, then the Court is going to consider the discovery requests filed by the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs requested discovery includes the President’s kindergarten records, Punahou school records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, passport, medical records, files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records, and his adoption records. The Government has objected to all of these.

The standards for producing discovery are low, the requests just have to be reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence, the evidence itself, however, does not have to be admissible. However, objections can be made for timeliness of the records (most of these are over 20 years old) and they must relate to the current claims made by the plaintiffs. Based on the fact that the plaintiffs are only seeking to determine the President’s nationality, some of these requests go beyond the claims made by the plaintiffs and I would expect them to be denied by the Judge. These would include the Columbia thesis, Harvard Law review articles (which would be published anyway), scholarly articles from the University of Chicago (also published), medical records, and files from his years as an Illinois State Senator as being outside the bounds of the claims made by the plaintiffs.

Also present in the discovery requests is a request to have the judge order the Secretary of State to obtain a certified copy of the original birth certificate from Kenya. As Kenya is a sovereign country not subject to an order from an US Judge, Kenya would have to be pressured by the US State Department. How aggressively would former rival Hillary Clinton pursue this request, an analysis which is better presented in its own column- should this case proceed that far.

After discovery, the US Attorneys Office would certainly file a Motion for Summary Judgment, which essentially asks if there are any matters of fact in dispute that should be decided by a jury. If there are none, then the case would be decided by the judge. If discovery does not produce any evidence that shows President Obama is anything but a natural born American citizen, then this case will be dismissed—and it would most likely be dismissed with prejudice, meaning that this case can never be re-filed.

So, for the birthers out there, very little has happened. Odds are that this case will be dismissed before it ever gets to trial, as a case based only on supposition and hearsay testimony will not find its way into a courtroom. The system is designed to prevent that from happening.

As a word of advice, I would remind the conservatives out there that much damage has been done to the Democrats over the past two months simply by engaging them in the marketplace of ideas. We have fundamentally weakened the domestic policy of the administration to such a level that there is an outside chance that Republicans will take over the House of Representatives after the 2010 election. If we continue to focus our attention on the flawed policies of the Democratic Party, we can regain our power without having to resort to long shot court cases based on weak evidence.
Email today from terrorism expert Ken Timmerman. He has a great column today at www.Newsmax.com

A note from Ken Timmerman:


“Honor Killings” get underplayed in the U.S. Media, which kowtows to Muslim apologists and claims that when Muslim girls and young women are murdered by their male relatives, they are merely victims of domestic violence.

17-old Rifqa Bary – the Ohio teen who fled her family after they discovered they had converted to Christianity – is an honor killing victim in the making.

Media exposure at Newsmax and elsewhere is helping to prevent this tragedy from occurring.

As I reported on Thursday, a Florida court has temporarily thrwarted efforts by Rifqa’s family to get her back to Ohio.
http://newsmax.com/timmerman/rifqa_bary_scared_mosque/2009/09/04/256426.html

To learn more how honor killings are actually conceived of and planned, see
http://kentimmerman.com/honor-killing.html

Even if you don’t read the book, you should read the blurb – and take a look at the on-line resources, here:

http://kentimmerman.com/hk-web.html

Today, Pamela Geller provides an update on the Rifqa Bary story at Newsmax.
http://www.newsmax.com/pamela_geller/rifqa_bary_islam_convert/2009/09/08/257464.html

Finally, if you want a detailed, academic account of how extensive Muslim honor kiilling has become in America, read this chilling essay by Dr. Phyllis Chesler, whom I cite at the end of my Newsmax article, below.
http://www.meforum.org/2067/are-honor-killings-simply-domestic-violence



Best,
Ken Timmerman

Teen Christian Convert Bary Fears Mosque with Terror Ties

Friday, September 4, 2009 9:21 AM
Newsmax.com
By: Kenneth R. Timmerman Article Font Size

17-year old Rifqa Bary, who fled her Muslim family in Ohio this summer after they suspected she had converted to Christianity, will stay in Florida for the time being, an Orlando, Florida judge decided on Thursday.

Circuit Court Judge Daniel Dawson issued a gag order on all lawyers involved in the case after a lawyer for the girl’s mother started to quote from a sealed law enforcement document during Thursday’s hearing, to argue that the girl faced no danger if she was returned to her family.

The sealed document, an investigative report from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), included a videotaped interview with the 17-year old girl, where apparently she did not mention any fear of returning home.

However, the girl’s court-appointed guardian told the court that Rifqa had felt intimidated by the law enforcement officers who interviewed her and objected because the interview had been conducted without the presence of her lawyer.

In an affidavit presented to the court on Monday, Rifqa said she left home on July 17 after her father threatened to kill her because she had become a Christian.

“In a fit of anger that I had never seen before in my life, he picked up my lap top, waived it over my head as if to strike me with it and said 'If you have this Jesus in your heart, you are dead to me! You are no longer my daughter.' I continued to remain silent and then he said to me even more angry than before, 'I will kill you! Tell me the truth!'"

The case has attracted national attention, because Rifqa’s flight from her family in pursuit of religious freedom shatters one of the myths that Muslim advocacy groups are so keen to purvey.
[...]

Read the full story here:
http://newsmax.com/timmerman/rifqa_bary_scared_mosque/2009/09/04/256426.htmlT