Miranda Blue's blog

WorldNetDaily’s intrepid birther Jerome Corsi is out with a new report today, in which he uncovers that President Obama’s wedding band is actually inscribed with the Arabic for “There is no god except Allah.”

Corsi’s source for this revelation? None other than all-purpose anti-Obama conspiracy theorist Joel Gilbert. Gilbert has recently achieved some success with his film “Dreams From My Real Father,” in which he claims that the president’s real father was labor activist and communist organizer Frank Marshall Davis. The film is currently being sent to households around Ohio, with the help of an undisclosed source of funding, and recently received the enthusiastic endorsement of the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party. Gilbert, apparently, believes that Obama is not only a hard-core Marxist, but also a secret Muslim:

"Dreams from My Real Father” producer Joel Gilbert, an Arabic speaker and an expert on the Middle East, was the first to conclude that Obama’s ring, reportedly from Indonesia, bore an Islamic inscription

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Filmmaker Joel Gilbert, an expert on Islamic history, noted Obama wore the ring during his high-profile speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009, in the first months of his presidency.

“Now we have a new context for what Obama meant when he told the Islamic audience in Cairo that he has ‘known Islam on three continents,” Gilbert said. “He also told the Cairo audience that he considered it part of his responsibility as president of the United States ‘to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.’ All religious Muslims are by definition required to defend Islam.”

Before he turned his attention to the president’s supposed Communist genetics, Gilbert directed a number of Bob Dylan documentaries and “Atomic Jihad,” a film accusing President Obama of appeasing Iran.

Corsi has previously speculated that the same ring, which the president has been pictured wearing before his marriage to Michelle Obama, is proof that he was once married to his male Pakistani roommate.

We ordinarily wouldn’t really pay attention to Joel Gilbert, a Bob Dylan enthusiast who also dabbles in anti-Obama conspiracy theories, most recently making a film that alleges that the president’s real father is labor activist and communist party organizer Frank Marshall Davis.

But when Bill Armistead, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, started promoting Gilbert’s movie, “Dreams from My Real Father,” and when news surfaced that Gilbert was sending thousands of copies of his movie gratis to households in swing states and that conservative groups were holding showings, we thought we should start keeping track of him.

Gilbert has a spiel that he repeats pretty much word for word on media appearances, but once in a while he comes up with something new (for instance when he said that the Aurora movie theater shooting could very well have been an Obama administration inside job).

In an interview with Iowa radio host Steve Deace yesterday, Gilbert asserted that the president is “comfortable around anti-American extremists” – including Michelle Obama. He also elaborated on his theory that Obama is “attempting to turn the entire United States into this one-party system by doubling the food stamp rolls, putting everybody on government healthcare, making illegals legal.”

Obama is comfortable around anti-American extremists, people that are anti-American – Bill Ayers, Michelle Obama, dare I say. These are the people that he feels comfortable with and they’re comfortable with him. Obama’s policies mirror this classic Marxist indoctrination that he received and reinforced his entire life by joining the Midwest Academy, his relationship with Bill Ayers and his family for 25, 30 years, as well as Bernadine Dorn, and this entire rat’s nest of Marxist ideologues that came out of Chicago and transformed their, took their little one-party ideology from Chicago and are attempting to turn the entire United States into this one-party system by doubling the food stamp rolls, putting everybody on government healthcare, making illegals legal. Their intent, it’s all about keeping power and creating a one-party state that they can never have to give up power.

Joel Gilbert, the filmmaker behind the theory that President Obama inherited a Marxist worldview from his “real father” Frank Marshall Davis – a theory adopted this week by the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party -- spoke last month with right-wing radio host Michael Savage.

Gilbert told Savage that Obama’s 2008 “Change” slogan was actually “a code word for a revolution to end capitalism” and assured listeners that by the end of his second term, the president will “achieve what he wants, which is to make America irreversibly socialist.” Part of this transformation, Gilbert said, is that “the middle class’ health care is going to be given away to poor and illegals.”

Savage: How is Obama’s campaign different this time around?

Gilbert: Well, what’s different is he was being very general and vague about ‘hope and change’ and everybody just read into it what they wanted, nobody really knew what ‘change’ meant from the socialist point of view. ‘Change’ is a code word for a revolution to end capitalism. Now his Marxist ideology is just coming through loud and clear. His entire campaign is based on the top one percent, of the breathtaking greed of a few. He talks about how the rich don’t pay their fair share. Well, anybody can just Google it and see that the top income brackets do pay up to 40 percent of income and it kind of goes down from there. So his entire campaign is based on this lie, this absurd notion that we don’t have a fair tax system. But this is the classic Marxist rhetoric that Obama would have gotten during this indoctrination from his real father, Frank Marshall Davis.

Gilbert: National healthcare is simply a socialist tool to eliminate the middle and upper classes. So for Obama, poor quality, long waits and high taxes in this national health care doesn’t matter. It’s just a socialist tool. For Obama in the next term, the middle class’ health care is going to be given away to poor and illegals. Middle class’ employers are going to be taxed and regulated out of business. And the middle class’ retirement will evaporate into a bankrupt, socialist state, and Obama will achieve what he wants, which is to make America irreversibly socialist without anyone ever realizing how it happened.

Joel Gilbert, the filmmaker whose theory that President Obama is secretly the son of American labor activist Frank Marshall Davis was recently promoted by the chairman of the Alabama GOP, is apparently open to any number of Obama-related conspiracy theories.

In an interview with master conspiracy theorist Alex Jones back in July, Gilbert asserted that the mass shooting in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater could very well have been orchestrated by the Obama administration in an effort to promote gun control. "I hate to say it, but you can't put anything past them," he said:

Speaking to a Republican women’s group in Alabama yesterday, state GOP chairman Bill Armistead recommended to his audience a fringe birther movie that claims that President Obama’s real father is American labor activist Frank Marshall Davis, according Mobile Press-Register political editor George Talbot, who was reporting the event on Twitter:

 The movie Armistead reportedly recommended, “Dreams From My Real Father,” represents a breakout fringe of the birther movement. The film, according to its director Joel Gilbert, “presents the case that Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA organizer and propagandist, was Obama's real father, both biological and ideological, and indoctrinated Obama with a political foundation in Marxism and an anti-White world view.”

A trailer for the film cuts to various right-wing bogeymen including Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and ACORN in between misleadingly edited snippets of speeches by the president and Michelle Obama:

Gilbert’s film has divided the birther movement, since its assertion that Davis is Obama’s real father would seem to be incompatible with the theory that the president was born in Kenya. Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily, apparently untroubled by the contradiction, has embraced the film. Birther leader Orly Taitz, however, claims that by promoting the film, Corsi is “trying to kill the case by making up an American citizen father for Obama.”

Thanks to an aggressive campaign by Gilbert, “Dreams From My Real Father” has had a remarkably wide reach. In September, the New York Post ran a full-page ad for the movie. Yesterday, World Net Daily reported that Gilbert has sent 1 million copies of the film to households in Ohio and plans to send 1 million more out in swing states. Gilbert and Corsi both fault the mainstream media for ignoring their film, which Gilbert claims they’re doing “because they support national health care.”

In a National Press Club appearance this summer, Gilbert expanded on his theory, claiming that Obama and strategist David Axelrod were both “red diaper babies,” born of communist parents to carry on the cause; that Obama is pursuing Davis’s “dreams of a forced imposition of a classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad”; and that Obama worked with ACORN to cause the subprime mortgage crisis as part of a plan to “use minorities and the poor to collapse capitalism.”

This is the first we’ve heard of a political leader embracing Gilbert’s conspiracy theory. Armistead is a former state senator who a became the Alabama GOP Chairman last year.

UPDATE: Talbot has posted some more of the context of Armistead's remarks:

“We have to win this election. This is about our country. Our country will not be the same,” Armistead said. “I’m convinced, if Obama wins, our children and grandchildren will not live under the same conditions that we’ve lived in these wonderful years. Obama has a different ideology than we do.”

Armistead suggested that audience members see the movie '2016: Obama’s America,' a documentary by conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza that is critical of the president.

“If you haven’t seen it, you should,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you about another movie. The name of it is ‘Dreams From My Real Father.’ That is absolutely frightening. I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

The former Susan G. Komen for the Cure executive who orchestrated the organization’s controversial and short-lived break from Planned Parenthood earlier this year, is out with a new book claiming that the funding dispute was all Planned Parenthood’s fault. In “Planned Bullyhood,” Karen Handel claims that Planned Parenthood turned its back on a “gentlewomen’s agreement” to not discuss the fact that Komen was withdrawing $680,000 a year in grants for breast cancer screenings through the organization’s clinics and then turned on Komen in a PR blitz.

Handel, an anti-choice activist and former GOP candidate who reportedly pushed the move within Komen, resigned shortly after the news of the break caused a national firestorm.

In interviews with right-wing radio hosts Janet Mefferd and Janet Parshall last week, Handel portrays herself as the victim of bullying by the “vicious” Planned Parenthood. She tells Mefferd that Planned Parenthood launched “a mafia-style attack” and that “Komen was held hostage for a mere $680,000.” She sees a double standard in the fact that President Obama didn’t call her after she was criticized, “like he did Sandra Fluke”:

Handel: The left and Planned Parenthood, they were threatening Komen’s corporate sponsors: “See what we’re doing to Komen? If you don’t stop supporting them, we’re gonna do the same to you.” They were just filling up the Facebooks, Twitter, Komen’s website crashed, there were bomb threats, corporate sponsors were threatened. It really was almost a mafia-style attack, if you will, and Komen was held hostage for a mere $680,000. And Planned Parenthood and the left, they wanted this to be about politics. I believe they used Komen purposefully as a pawn, if you will, in this ridiculous so-called “War on Women” and these cries of “women’s health.” And Janet, my question for you, and I just find this all so insulting, how in the world did the issue of women’s health get reduced to being about abortion and contraception?

Meffered: Right. I’m with you.

Handel: I just reject that. I reject that notion, and I think that most women do too.

Mefferd: Oh, completely. And what I found very interesting, Karen, doing the show that I do, and being pro-life and knowning a lot of pro-lifers, when Susan G. Komen made that decision and all the pro-lifers were going “Yes, finally, great!,” the next thing people were saying was, “Now watch what Planned Parenthood will do to them.” You know, we knew. We knew exactly how Planned Parenthood would react, though admittedly it was more over the top than I think a lot of us believed it would be. It was shameful what they did.

Handel: You know, it really was. And you know, they had such an amicable partner in all of it, which was the liberal mainstream press, which really served almost as an extension of all of it and really targeted the politics, my personal politics, Ambassador Brinker’s personal politics. And I’d like to point out, you did not see Susan G. Komen for the Cure endorsing presidential candidates the way Planned Parenthood has, you don’t see Komen investing, what’s Planned Parenthood gonna spend, almost $10 million in campaign ads to support Barack Obama. Nobody, the president didn’t call me and let me know he was sorry about the attacks that I faced, like he did Sandra Fluke.

Handel told Parshall that Planned Parenthood’s “agenda” is “not about women’s health” or “they would not have wanted to try to destroy” Komen.

Parshall: Planned Parenthood’s assault, to use your word, and by the way you started using that word back in February of this year, way before it became the title of your book, if they’re bullying people because they might have a pro-life position, it really calls into account whether they are pro-women or whether they are politically aligned rather than rising to a higher cause.

Handel: I think that’s right, I think you’ve really hit on it, Janet. And for Komen, that’s exactly what Komen was trying to do. Komen wanted to be in a place where everyone, regardless of whether they were pro-life or on the other side of the issue, would be able to embrace the organization and embrace the mission. We wanted to be neutral and we wanted to be good stewards of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, it was both. Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, they were willing to sacrifice Komen for the sake of their agenda, which is not about women’s health. If it was about women’s health, they would not have wanted to try to destroy an organization that was doing such good work in the area of breast cancer.

On the Janet Mefferd Show yesterday, the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg shared his theory of how gay rights activists are winning the battle for public opinion: through “intimidation” and “emotional blackmail”:

Sprigg: There are people with big bucks who are trying to move the Republican Party in a more liberal direction on this issue. And while, you know, I think it will be a long time before – I don’t think it’ll ever happen that the Republican Party will endorse same-sex marriage – but what I fear more than that is some candidates in office and officeholders simply going silent on the issue.

Mefferd: Oh, that’s happening.

Sprigg: That is definitely happening and that’s where the big concern is, because if we are not willing to fight to defend marriage, then that increases the chances we will lose it.

Mefferd: Well, and that’s what’s so frustrating, especially for us as Christians, when we look at so many people who don’t have the spine to talk about it. ‘Well, let’s just work the issue back around to the economy, everybody wants to talk about the economy, I don’t want to talk about something controversial.’ Part of it, I think, is because they don’t want to be vilified, they don’t want to be called names, because that’s what the activist crowd does, they call you names, they insult you, they make your life pretty miserable. Look what they’re doing to Dan Cathy! Who does want to put up with that?

Sprigg: Right. That’s exactly right. It’s a form of intimidation that they’re using, a sort of emotional blackmail almost. And with some people it’s effective. They don’t want to pay that price.

New York Times reporter Erik Eckholm has a big front-page story in Sunday’s paper on a case that readers of RWW are familiar with: the disappearance of Lisa Miller. Eckholm traveled to Nicaragua to talk with the Mennonite communities that have helped harbor Miller and her daughter Isabella on their flight from United States law enforcement and from Isabella’s other legal parent, Miller’s former partner Janet Jenkins of Vermont. Miller, who kidnapped her daughter rather than allow her to have visitation rights with Jenkins, has become a cause celebre among the Religious Right, a supposed victim of anti-Christian persecution.

Eckholm supplies us with an illuminating and creepy anecdote about a family of hamsters left to die in Miller’s abandoned house, and casts some light on the thinking of those who helped harbor Miller in Nicaragua. But there’s one important piece of the puzzle that remains a mystery: did Miller’s attorneys at Liberty University have anything to do with Miller’s disappearance? LU Law School dean Mat Staver tells Eckholm that he was surprised as anyone when Miller disappeared, as he has since it first became known.

But Liberty University’s relationship with Miller has always been a little complicated. Rena Lindevaldsen, an LU Law School dean and Miller’s attorney before she disappeared, has now written a book arguing Miller’s case. And even before Miller kidnapped with Isabella, Lindevaldsen and Staver were teaching Miller’s case as an example of a situation where the demands of “God’s law” trump those of “man’s law.” Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner talked with several students who had taken a required class from the two deans and got her hands on a copy of an exam that quizzed students on what to do in Lisa Miller’s situation:

Students at Liberty Law School tell RD that in the required Foundations of Law class in the fall of 2008, taught by Miller’s attorneys Mat Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen, they were repeatedly instructed that when faced with a conflict between “God’s law” and “man’s law,” they should resolve that conflict through “civil disobedience.” One student said, “the idea was when you are confronted with a particular situation, for instance, if you have a court order against you that is in violation of what you see as God’s law, essentially... civil disobedience was the answer.

This student and two others, who all requested anonymity for fear of reprisal by Staver (who is also the law school’s dean), recounted the classroom discussion of civil disobedience, as well as efforts to draw comparisons between choosing “God’s law” over “man’s law” to the American revolution and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. According to one student, in the Foundations course both Staver and Lindevaldsen “espoused the opinion that in situations where God’s law is in direct contradiction to man’s law, we have an obligation to disobey it.”
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That semester’s mid-term exam, obtained by RD [see excerpts of the actual exam here], included a question based on Miller’s case asking students to describe what advice they would give her “as a friend who is a Christian lawyer.” After laying out a slanted history of the protracted legal battle, the exam asked, “Lisa needs your counsel on how to think through her legal situation and how to respond as a Christian to this difficult problem. Relying only on what we have learned thus far in class, how would you counsel Lisa?”

Students who wrote that Miller should comply with court orders received bad grades while those who wrote she should engage in civil disobedience received an A, the three students said. “People were appalled,” said one of the students, adding, “especially as lawyers to be, who are trained and licensed to practice the law—to disobey that law, that seemed completely counterintuitive to all of us.”

Still, some knew what they needed to “regurgitate,” in order to get a good grade. “It was obvious by the substance of the class during the semester the answer that they wanted,” said one of the students. “The majority of people that I am acquainted with who did get As wrote that because that was expected of them.”

One of the students who got an A said, “I told them she needed to engage in civil disobedience and seriously consider leaving the country,” adding, “I knew what I needed to write.”

Given what was expected of them on the exam, and the tenor of the class, there is “not a lot of shock among the students about the current developments,” said one of the students, referring to the revelation that Miller is in hiding in Nicaragua. “Everybody semi-suspected that Liberty Counsel had something to do with her disappearance.”

Of course, we have no way of knowing what Liberty Counsel knew and when they knew it. But Posner’s reporting shows that it’s certainly worth looking into.

Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s Peter LaBarbera continued his discussion with Liberty University Law School’s Rena Lindevaldsen on Friday. The two revisited the topic of openly gay judges, specifically the Virginia prosecutor who was rejected from a judgeship simply because he was gay. That discrimination was ok, Lindevaldsen said, because “if you’re engaged in a lifestyle of immorality, whether that be a homosexual lifestyle or an adulterous relationship or fornication, that’s not the type of moral character that I believe should be someone who’s being appointed to become a judge”:

Lindevaldsen: I think we can equate this not only with the judiciary, but the same debate is taking place, you know, who we want to serve as our schoolteachers, for example. We want moral, upstanding individuals to serve as judges, and this debate’s taking place with schoolteachers too. So if you’re engaged in a lifestyle of immorality, whether that be a homosexual lifestyle or an adulterous relationship or fornication, that’s not the type of moral character that I believe should be someone who’s being appointed to become a judge.
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I think it goes to fit moral character and I think that the necessary qualification of any judicial appointment. And therefore it is relevant, based on your conduct, to judge and decide whether you should be allowed to sit in the judiciary.

Immediately after Lindevaldsen and LaBarbera made the case that gay judicial nominees should be defined by and excluded for their sexual orientation, they changed the rules when it came to another prominent example of an openly gay person in public life. Lindevaldsen and LaBarbera heaped scorn on gay rights activists who have had the nerve to call the late Sally Ride, who lived for 27 years with her same-sex partner, a gay pioneer. Emphasizing Ride’s sexual orientation, LaBarbera said -- expanding on a tweet from shortly after her death --would be like defining her as an alcoholic if she had a drinking problem:

LaBarbera: They’re always using opportunities to promote what their version of reality on homosexuality. And really quickly, Sally Ride, another great example. Sally Ride was the first female astronaut, the first…and she had many amazing accomplishments. Unfortunately she also fell into lesbianism and left her husband, she was married, she ended up living in a lesbian lifestyle. She was not public about it. Now gay activists, like Michelangelo Signorile, are using her homosexual, you know, the fact that she practiced the homosexual lifestyle, to say, ‘Hey, this is another gay hero.”

Kirkwood: She was a female astronaut, now she’s the ‘lesbian astronaut.’

LaBarbera: Now she’s the lesbian astronaut, and you better believe in textbooks like in California where they’re teaching gay history now, there’s going to be Sally Ride. So people are going to learn Sally Ride as a, and we’re going a bit over here, they’re going to learn Sally Ride, Rena, as a gay hero, even though she wasn’t even public about it in her life.

Lindevaldsen: Yeah, because they need to contort our history to show that we’ve accepted this all along and that it’s perfectly normal, and see you too can do this and become great things. And you can, you can accomplish things, but that’s not who she was, that doesn’t define who she was and what she accomplished.

LaBarbera: And Rena, I tweeted, and I knew this was going to get me in trouble, but I tweeted, ‘Did she have a drinking problem too?’ In my tweet, I said that she made great accomplishments. But she should not be, and I didn’t, of course she doesn’t, I don’t know if she had a drinking problem or not, but my point was the fact that she practiced homosexuality would be about as relevant as saying, ‘Sally Ride, hey people who drink can be great.’ I mean it’s still immoral behavior, it’s very sad to me that she was involved in that lifestyle. The fact that she was in that lifestyle doesn’t take away from the great accomplishments that she had. But the point is gay identity politics now wants to seize her as a hero.

Grove City College professor Paul Kengor is out with a new book, The Communist, which examines President Obama’s relationship with his grandfather’s friend Frank Marshall Davis, who has become the nexus of several right-wing conspiracy theories.

In an interview with American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios this week, Kengor went into detail about the “amazing” similarities between Davis and Obama, including what he claims is their “hate” for Winston Churchill. Kengor and Rios went on to recount the favorite right-wing story that “one of the first things” Obama did as president was remove a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office and send it back to England.

Kengor imagines that when this imaginary diss of the British leader took place, “Churchill rolled over in his grave” and “Frank Marshall Davis leapt up in his grave and laughed and saluted.”

Kengor: Well, I dug into the Chicago Star writings, the Honolulu Record writings, and you see here in Frank Marshall Davis a man who constantly bashed Wall Street, excess profits, capitalism, the rich, GOP tax cuts, General Motors, was calling for taxpayer funding of public works projects and universal healthcare, was trashing Winston Churchill. I mean, here’s a thought for you: name two Americans who hate Winston Churchill. Well, I couldn’t have done that five years ago. Now I can give you two: Barack Obama and Frank Marshall Davis. The similarities are amazing.

Rios: Well, and evidenced by, you know, one of the first things Barack Obama did, you and I both know but others might not, that he removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the White House. Sent it back to Great Britain!

Kengor: Yeah

Rios: Unbelievable!

Kenger: Unbelievable. Unbelievable and so many Americans just yawned when that happened. I mean, Churchill rolled over in his grave when that happened. Frank Marshall Davis leapt up in his grave and laughed and saluted when that happened, because Davis despised Winston Churchill, called him, like Harry Truman, called him a ‘fascist,’ a ‘racist,’ an ‘imperialist,’ a ‘colonialist,’ every name in the book. And to imagine that today, Frank Marshall Davis must be looking at the results of November 2008 and seeing all these young people that voted for Obama and all these old, one-time Cold War anti-communist Democrats and all these moderates and independents and he must just be laughing so hard that he can hardly control himself at what’s happened.

For the record, here is a photo the White House posted today of Obama and British Prime Minister looking at the Churchill bust outside the Oval Office in 2010:

Update: White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer clarifies that there were at one point two busts of Winston Churchill in the Oval Office area. One, which was a gift to George W. Bush, was removed when President Obama took office to make room for a bust of Lincoln. The other, which has been in the White House since the 1960’s, remains. And the argument that President Obama’s change of Oval Office décor signals a “hatred” for Churchill remains absurd.