BREAKING: Obama releases LFBC (Also: Panetta to take over the Pentagon, Petraeus to become CIA chief)

This just in.

The WH has released Obama’s long form birth certificate. That link will take you directly to the WH blog.

From CNN’s political ticker:

(CNN) – The White House released President Obama’s original birth certificate Wednesday.

The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States.

Read it and weep, birthers/suckers:

Obama’s birth certificate [PDF]

Well timed, Obama. Very well, timed.

As I said yesterday in The War on Legitimate Dissent, this whole birther/secret Muslim explosion has been one huge distraction… and the President has just lobbed the ultimate pie in the face of the GOP.

Donald Trump, ever the blowhard, says he’s done his job… touche:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Trump said, “I have accomplished something nobody else has accomplished.”

“I want to look at it, but I hope it’s true,” he added. “He should have done it a long time ago. I am really honored to have played such a big role in hopefully getting rid of this issue.”

More from the CNN link:

Earlier Wednesday, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said the debate has been “really bad for the Republican Party.”

The so-called “birther” debate is “good politics” but “bad for the country,” said Pfeiffer.

White House spokesman Jay Carney is expected to speak more about the birth certificate Wednesday morning.

From the WH blog link at the beginning of this post:

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting. President Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate can be seen here (PDF):

Obama himself has spoken on the issue this morning. From the Guardian’s live blogging of Obama’s statement…

9.48am ET: Obama is now speaking at the White House.

“This isssue has been going on for two and a half years now, I think it started during the campaign,” says Obama, looking relaxed.

He says he’s been “amused and puzzled” by how long the rumours have persisted, despite many investigations and the release of the shorter version of his birth certificate. “And yet this thing just keeps on going.”

9.51am ET: “Normally, I would not comment on something like this,” says Obama. But he explains that, two weeks ago during the budget debate with Republicans in Congress, he found that the biggest news story was about his birth certificate.

(That was Trump’s fault: that was when he started raising the subject.)

9.52am ET: “We’re not going to solve our problems if we get distracted by carnival acts and sideshow barkers,” says Obama – an oblique reference to Trump, surely?

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness, we’ve got big stuff to do, I’ve got big stuff to do,” says Obama, before closing his statement, without taking questions from the White House press corps.

Oh that’s a great touch by Obama calling Trump a sideshow barker.

This morning is all bread and circuses, and the oligarchy scores again!

Also from the Guardian live blog… Donald Trump is a big fat liar, bringing the Clinton’s name into his birther shenanigans:

10.01am ET: More nonsense from Donald Trump earlier:

Why he didn’t do it when the Clintons asked for it, I don’t know.

That’s just a flat untruth. The Clintons never asked for Obama’s birth certificate to be published – although some suggest the origins of the birther argument came from the Clinton campaign during the 2008 primaries. Whether or not that is true, what is true is that the birthers set sail under their own wind long ago.

The only real political fight Obama has ever had was against Hillary. I’m sure the Clintons did their opposition research, but they’re both lawyers, they both endorsed him for president, and Hill became Obama’s secretary of state. The birthers took it upon themselves to demand Obama’s birth certificate past the point of any semblance of rationality. Trump just wants to bring the Clintons’ name into it because he doesn’t want to bear the egg on his face alone.

Incidentally, two other big announcements this morning, although unofficial — AP: Panetta to take over Pentagon, Petraeus picked for CIA chief.

From the link (USA Today):

CIA Director Leon Panetta will be named to succeed Robert Gates as secretary of Defense and Gen. David Petraeus will be nominated to replace him as CIA director, the Associated Press reports, quoting unidentified sources.

The AP also reports that Ryan Crocker, the seasoned diplomat who was ambassador to Iraq during the Bush administration, is the top candidate to become new ambassador to Afghanistan.

And, the wheels on the oligarchy bus go round and round, round and round.

Yesterday, from the Obama 2012 campaign, via Jim Messina (h/t Joyce Arnold):

The most important aspect is this: Our campaign will be grounded in President Obama’s experience as a community organizer. This notion of ordinary people taking responsibility for the organization at the neighborhood level is not only the way to win, it’s also the way politics ought to work. Our campaign will be an example of innovation and efficiency, but it will also be an example of civic engagement at its best and most rewarding.

Isn’t that rich? Recycling the “community organizer” pitch? But, really I’m not surprised. Obama’s an excellent organizer and he is running on that indeed–it’s just that most people miss WHO it is that he is organizing for: Himself.

Not ordinary people.

Obama has offered his ostensible base–the American people– nothing but crumbs, bones, and insults, while catering to his real base, the one that will help bankroll his billion dollar re-election campaign — Wall Street. Yet, as evidenced by today’s well-timed WH dumps, this WH is “fired up and ready to go” to get Obama re-elected and confident they’ve got 2012 in the bag. All this bread and circuses has served him and the oligarchy well to that end.

The War on Legitimate Dissent

April 25, 2011, WH Egg Roll. Clearly this president has always been at war with Easter. (Reuters)

I wasn’t even going to dignify this Fox News/Drudge-generated distraction, but then I read the following snippet from Salon’s Alex Pareene — White House war on Easter: Party, but no proclamation?

From the link:

Sure, the White House had its annual “egg roll” on the lawn, with tens of thousands of children and a giant rabbit and general Easterness, but without a White House proclamation how could anyone have known yesterday was Easter? As Fox Nation commenter “jfitz” writes: “He gives his flock a happy Ramadanadingdong, but shows little regard for Easter. Why give his slight a second thought. After all, he is not of our culture.”

Then there’s this, via CNN:

“Well I’ve been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Monday. “I’ve been told that it’s not there or it doesn’t exist. And if that’s the case it’s a big problem.”

And this, via Politico:

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump told the Associated Press in an interview, a claim he’s made in the past but one he doubled down on by suggesting he’s probing that area of the president’s life.

“How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records,” he said, without providing backup for his claim.

Trump added, “I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard.”

“We don’t know a thing about this guy,” Trump said. “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

The lengths these idiots will go to “discredit” Obama on such xenophobic, puerile, and irrelevant grounds is apparently endless. The assorted nitwits that make up the “secret Muslim”/birther contingent are not discrediting Obama.

They are fueling his re-election campaign and helping to bring disgruntled Dem voters back into the Dem column for 2012.

I cannot in good conscience vote for Obama after he’s normalized GOP/Bush policies and made them par for the course, but I can certainly understand why people feel tempted to vote for him out of spite or sympathy after watching these phony baloney attacks on his citizenship, religion, and culture.

On the other hand… inane though his birther rhetoric is, Trump hits on a kernel of truth when he says we don’t really know much about this president. Obama was never properly vetted in any meaningful or substantive way. Americans were sold change. No more Bush Clinton Bush Clinton. Obama was the antidote to the inevitability of a Clinton third term.

What Americans got instead of a return to the dreadful peace and prosperity of the nineties was the third Bush-Cheney term.

Given that Trump has a history of donating to Democrats (as the Center for Responsive Politics report at the link illustrates), the only conspiracy theory here that seems remotely worth considering is whether or not David Axelrod and Donald Trump are ultimately working for the same team.

The symbiotic relationship between the birthers and the corporate media keeps the irrelevant questions about Obama’s background front and center while legitimate scrutiny of the president goes largely unanswered and unaddressed. This works to the oligarchy’s advantage. Instead of asking the critical questions–for instance, why is President Obama, the much ballyhooed “expert” in constitutional law, presuming Bradley Manning to have “broken the law” before proven guilty–the WH press Corps gives us this:

Hands Ups are Welcome

Many of you may be aware that one of our frontpagers, Minkoff Minx, has been using a five year old computer that’s now completely unusable.  It’s lost the light that makes the screen work.  Minx is the mother of young children so she’s having difficulty writing as much as she usually does because she’s having to vie for the family computer. She’s also one of our Sky Dancing community that’s experiencing economic challenges so the cost of a new computer is something that would severely stress the family budget.

I know that many blogs frequently have fund drives for a variety of purposes. In our six months of existence, we’ve had some donations that have allowed us to expand things here that have been strictly used to improve the blog.  We’ve never directly asked for help but I’d like to make an appeal to those of you that are in a good position right now to help Minx get back to normal so we can enjoy her frequent contributions.

There’s a PayPal button (little orange button that says Make a Donation) over on the right column that goes to my PayPal account that I’ve recently been using for nothing but the blog and its expenses. It can be used to help us get some money to Minx.  I’d like to set a time frame of 10 days from today for every one that’s able and willing to do so to send whatever amount they could to help us buy Minx a replacement computer.  Again, there’s no pressure to do this and I don’t think she needs or is expecting a supercomputer so every little bit will help!  You can ask me to pass your name on or not pass your name on to Minx and you can ask me to specify the amount donated or just throw it in with a bundle coming from a bunch of Secret SkyDancers.

Minx has been doing two of our scheduled morning posts each week.  She’s an editor and chatroom monitor too which can be extremely time-consuming although it’s been a fairly pleasant job over here to date. Believe me, I’ve had the duty when it’s stressful and unpleasant elseblog.   Also, you’re most likely aware that Minx usually writes other posts regularly. Minx is also the CSS expert so a lot of the new Blog format is due to her patience, effort, and time.  She’s definitely worth our investment. So, please consider helping if you can.

Thanks so much!  We now return you to your regularly unscheduled blogging.

Dakinikat

Update:  As of 10 pm Sunday, cst time … we’ve got enough to get her a nice computer!!!

Thanks for to all of you that helped!!!