You have to understand, this was supposed to be WorldNetDaily’s moment. They’ve been pimping the birther issue all year, and today, on Barack Obama’s 48th birthday, they’re releasing a DVD that reveals everything.

Just as everyone is laughing at them.

And by everyone, we don’t mean the Usual Suspects like, um, us. We mean their fellow wingnuts, on Fox, at National Review, at Free Republic. The WND-promoted Orly Taitz certificate forgery was such a howler, everyone’s in on the gag.

Even Glenn Beck. “The birther thing, what are you going to do,” he told his radio audience Monday. “Even if it was true, what, are you going to take him out of office? You can’t do that.”

And just to twist the knife: “There’s so many things that are going on that are not on the fringes, not conspiratorial.”

Read more »

Left: The scanned birth certificate of David Jeffrey Bomford, born April 10, 1959, in Australia. If the server time is to be believed, this was posted on the Bomford family website on June 5, 2007.

Right: The Obama Kenyan certificate that’s provided everyone such amusement the past couple days. (We’ve heavily mangled it here to get a rough side-by-side comparison.)

The tell? Both certificates are said to be registered in “Book 44B, Page 5733” — the numbers typed, not printed. The Australian certificate is the original of the forgery.

Read more »

If you’re a long-time fan of Steve Reich, this is pure music. If not — we cannot accept responsibility for damage to your ears.

Well, this should get interesting — if it’s the kind of thing that interests you, as Keith Olbermann somewhat says on that Palin retrospective they’ve run on Countdown a half-dozen times.

If you watch Countdown (which we consider splendid West Coast dinner entertainment), you’ll recall that Keith declared a couple months back that he’ll no longer be lampooning Bill O’Reilly. The proximate cause was O’Reilly’s advocacy of physician executions. But by a curious coincidence, according to the New York Times, the ceasefire happened just after NBC’s Jeff Zucker and one of Rupert Murdoch’s henchmen negotiated a truce between their warring cable networks.

A truce brokered by — wait for it — Charlie Rose.

Read more »

They didn’t get much traction with their claim last week that Obama is really the Antichrist (isn’t everybody?), so WorldNetDaily is back from their magical mystery tour with what they purport is Barry’s real birth certificate from Kenya.

Er, excuse us — the real Kenyan “certified copy of the original”.

Not to be confused with Hawaii’s certified copy of the original, which WND dismisses as an obvious fraud. Apparently you can trust government bureaucrats, as long as they’re not American.

But let us not be critical, and instead celebrate the glory of the free market. WND has offered $10,000 to “anyone who can prove he or she was present at the birth of Barack Obama”, after all, so the sweepstakes is just getting started. Our own entry will be submitted as soon as we can find a fresh ribbon for our very dusty Underwood.

Is this really smoking gun of Obama’s Kenyan birth? [WND]

Title: “Persepolis”

Author: Marjane Satrapi

Rank: 1,472

Blurb: “A memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran, Persepolis provides a unique glimpse into a nearly unknown and unreachable way of life.” (Time)

Review: “We tried having the freshmen at our school read this book over the summer, thinking that they might have less resistance to a graphic novel than an onslaught of straight text. We forgot, of course, that they are freshmen and will resist all attempts to read/learn over the summer regardless.”

Customers Also Bought: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” (Still in the Top 100! Go Team Zombie!)

Footnote: Time for our monthly Book Chat! Are you smarter than a high-school freshman?

Persepolis [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]