CNN's bad news for Obama: 6 of 10 doubt U.S. birth story

pineinthegrass wrote:

Science Chic wrote:

The Viking wrote: www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=187781

Even 36% of Democrats are not sure of where Obama's was born.

And this was a CNN poll. Not some right wing poll. So did we even celebrate his correct birthday the other day? 6 out of 10 are not sure.

Viking, do you even read these articles?

First off, the link you cited was to a blog, not CNN, and the CNN poll was conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation who partners with a lot of companies. Second, that guy can't do his math - next time check the poll results yourself before blindly accepting it to be true. Definitely + Probably Born in the U.S. is 42% + 29% = 71%. 100% - 71% = 29% which also corresponds with the numbers in the poll: Definitely born elsewhere + Probably born elsewhere = 27% + 2% No opinion = 29%. 71% + 29% = 100% so the numbers add up, but the last time I checked 27% does not equal 6 in 10 people unless we're in a universe where anti-matter is the dominant matter. 36% of Democrats aren't sure of where Obama was born? No, 7% + 8% = 15%. That there is a partisan difference is not a surprise at all; Democrats will latch on to anything negative about a Republican they dislike and run with it, and Republicans will latch onto anything negative about a Democrat they dislike, what matters is whether it has merit or not.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/image ... l10k1a.pdf
41. Do you think Barack Obama was definitely born in the United States, probably born in the United
States, probably born in another country, or definitely born in another country?
July 16-21, 2010

Actually, the blogger can do his math, but he's being very biased in his "analysis".

If you answer that Obama was probably born in the US, that should count with the group that thinks Obama was born in the US as you assume.

But this blogger plays the trick I've seen other biased people do. If you answer that Obama was probably born in the US, he interprets that to mean that you question if Obama was born in the US. So he groups them with the people who say Obama wasn't or probably wasn't born in the US. Very dishonest.

So if you play that trick, you do get about 60% (actually 100%-42%=58%) "question" that Obama was born here.

If I were part of the poll, I'd of probably voted that Obama was probably born in the US as well. But that in no way means I question he wasn't born here. I think there is plenty of evidence that he was. I do wonder why he hasn't bothered to dig up his original birth certificate to put this all to rest, but with all the other evidence I figure it's maybe just a 1 in 1000 chance he wasn't born here.

But even if he did produce the original, that wouldn't satisfy them. They already had a ton of other "proofs" that Obama wasn't born here. As each of those were debunked, they just kept coming up with new conspiracies. It's never ending...

pine - you are absolutely right, and it's a sloppy assumption on his part.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/ ... ertificate

But according to several experts in conspiracy theories, and in the psychology of people who believe in conspiracy theories, there's little chance those people who think Obama is barred from the presidency will ever be convinced otherwise. "There's no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody's mind," says Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, and who holds an undergraduate and a master's degree in psychology. "The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it ... Once you're committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind."

Perhaps the most common argument of those questioning Obama's eligibility is that he should just release his full, original birth certificate, rather than the shorter certification, which is a copy. His failure to do so only proves there is reason to be suspicious, they say, and if the document was released, the issue would go away. But that's unlikely. It was, after all, the Obama campaign's release of the certification this summer that stoked the fever of conspiracy mongers.

There's more good stuff in the article, but I'm at my quote limit - please read it all, especially the paragraph about the director of Hawaii's Health Dept reviewing Obama's original birth document herself and how the conspiracy theorists react to that information!

I find it telling that the first person to file a lawsuit and start this whole birth certificate business was a man who believes in the 9/11 conspiracy theories that the US government destroyed the World Trade Center.

If the McCain campaign investigated and found no credible evidence to suggest he was born elsewhere, and did believe the evidence that he was born in Hawaii, and McCain stood the most to gain from this rumor being true, then doesn't it stand to reason that they would have pushed the hardest to bring it to light rather than risk losing the election?
http://washingtonindependent.com/52474/ ... hip-rumors

“We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” said Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain presidential campaigns. While they ruled out any chance of the “birther” lawsuits holding up in court, lawyers for the McCain campaign did check into the rumors about Obama’s birth and the assertions made by Berg and others. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” said Potter. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

Viking, I know you really don't like this president and his policies, but this isn't constructive at all. He's a citizen, born of an American citizen, and he's going to remain president. If you don't like it, make your voice heard to your representatives on specific issues, wait out his term, and vote for someone else.