Public Schools: Make Them Private

by Milton Friedman
 

Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured. Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system--i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools. The most feasible way to bring about such a transfer from government to private enterprise is to enact in each state a voucher system that enables parents to choose freely the schools their children attend. The voucher must be universal, available to all parents, and large enough to cover the costs of a high-quality education. No conditions should be attached to vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment, to explore, and to innovate. . . .

Read more . . .

A House of Cards: the Case Against the Birther Movement

by Michael David Rawlings

—Mombasa! Mombasa! Mombasa!

—The Grandma Chronicles

—Obama an Indonesian Citizen?

—The Obama-Pakistan Travelgate

—Did Obama Doctor His Selective Service Registration?

—Where's Obama's Birth Certificate?

—Two Disc Jockeys and His Excellency

—Obama's Kenyan Birth Certificate!

Appendix

[They] assert that the Certificate of Live Birth produced by Obama was altered or forged. They claim that the contemporaneous birth announcement in a newspaper of Obama's birth is insufficient evidence that he was born there. (Did a fortune-teller place it in the paper knowing he would run for president?). And they accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being part and parcel of the grand plan to install Emperor Obama and usurp the rule of law.  —Michelle Malkin, "Truthers to the left of me, truthers to the right"

Birtherism—from Mombasa to Kenyan birth certificates—is the stuff of tabloid sensationalism: the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, Elvis lives!, Batboy, "I was corn-holed by a Martian!" —Michael David Rawlings

Related Articles:
Who are the Real Conspirators?
The Obama Controversy and the Soiler Factor
Update:  Obama Releases the Long-Form Birth Certificate

Mombasa! Mombasa! Mombasa!

The Debunker's Guidebook to Birtherian Mythology defines the term Mombasa as follows:

—Main Entry: Mombasa

—Pronunciation: mäm-'bä-sə\

—Function: proper noun, geographical name

—Etymology: political Americana, Zanzibar; to misplace as in geographically or historically, to mistake as in badly: 1000 miles east + city of Mombasa/Mombasa Province + British colony of Zanzibar + prior to 1963 + Islamic stronghold

—Inflected form(s): plural mom-bos-sons \mäm-'bä-səns\

—Date: mid-2007?

1 : the name of Kenya's second most populous city, located on the coast of the Indian Ocean in the Mombasa District; prior to 1963, part of the British colonial state of Zanzibar which included the island of Zanzibar and the adjacent east African coastal region; located 1000 miles east of Nyanza Province, the ancestral home of President Obama's family

2 : a: often used pejoratively, i.e., inflected form, mombasanian, one who denies President Obama's natural-born status based on the belief that he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, which is 1000 miles east of the Nyanza Province, the ancestral home of President Obama's family b: a disciple of the Birthian sect of Mombasanism or an adherent of Mombasanism c: a person given to eccentric or ludicrous notions—synonym, crackpot, birther

Usage see city of Mombasa or Mombasa Province; also birther

—mombasanism \mäm-'bä-sə-niz-əm\ noun

—mombasanian \mäm-bä-'sā-nē-ən\ adjective/noun

—mombasanally \ mäm-'bä-sə-n(ə-)lē\ adverb

______________________________________

The Grandma Chronicles

Sarah Obama told a ''minister of the Gospel'' that her grandson was born in Kenya.

This is the urban legend that the author of this piece is talking about when he writes:

Birthers excel at perpetuating groundless rumors, launching them from blogs or attaching them to links copied and pasted to posts with titles like "Obama's COLB a Forgery!" or "Obama Born in Kenya!". And when a rumor like the one about Sarah Onyango Obama telling an American clergyman that her grandson was born in Kenya is shown to be false, the typical Birther asks, "Well, if she didn't say it, who did?" For the Birther, one answer always leads to the same question ("Who are the Real Conspirators?").

Obama an Indonesian Citizen?

 

Obama's Indonesian school registration card indicates that he was an Indonesian citizen; Indonesian law prohibited dual citizenship and prohibited foreign nationals from attending the nation's public schools at the time.

(Update, April 27, 2011:  As advised by others and confirmed by the author, there is no credible evidence to support the notion that the Indonesian government actually prohibited non-citizens legally residing in the country from attending its public schools.) 

This is just a bit of sensationalism.  Obama himself relates the most pertinent details about this period of his life in his books Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope.  It's never been a secret that he lived in Indonesia and attended school there.  It had never been an issue before.  But then, suddenly, this widely read chapter of Obama's life became something mysterious and sinister.

This is the bit of nonsense to which the author of this piece is referring when he writes in "Who are the Real Conspirators?":

But the Birthers favorite pastime is to mangle the law on citizenship and nationality, or to disregard it altogether. Hence, when all else failed, it was claimed that the citizenship requirements of a foreign country could trump the status of one's citizenship in the United States or that a fraud allegedly perpetrated in a foreign country by adults could nullify the U.S. citizenship of a minor in their charge. Choose.

Before Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas, for example, politely expressed their regret that this or that injunction would not be issued after all—not on that day or on any other—those of us who are learned in the law of citizenship and nationality can easily imagine these justices ripping pages from the petitions to wipe tears of ball-busting laughter streaming from their eyes and pocketing others for later use—the next time they wiped their asses.

The Obama-Pakistan Travelgate

 

Did Obama go to Pakistan/Afghanistan against U.S. travel bans without using a U.S. passport in 1981?

The idea here is that Obama must have used either a Kenyan or an Indonesian passport to get into to Pakistan/Afghanistan since the United States allegedly banned Americans from traveling to these countries in the early 1980's. Now, why would that matter? Well, because Obama must have retained dual citizenship.  He must have reaffirmed his Kenyan or Indonesian citizenship with an oath of allegiance after his 18th birthday in order to obtain a usable passport. Under U.S. law this would have constituted an act of expatriation, a formal renunciation of U.S. citizenship.

Did Obama Doctor His Selective Service Registration?

 

Some have claimed that Obama did not register with the Selective Service System in 1980 as was required of him by law. Those who fail to register may not be engaged by the federal government; they may not hold elected or appointed offices at the federal level. Some have alleged that Obama registered years later, that he doctored his registration.

Given the suspicions about the hue of his national loyalties and the barrage of doubts assailing his eligibility for office, had the author of this piece been in Obama's shoes, he would have ignored this rumor too.  While the Obama campaign felt compelled to release a copy of the candidate's COLB (certificate of live birth) verifying his homeboy credentials and to confront the rumors that his religious affiliation was ever seriously anything else but Christian, it wisely chose to ignore this comparatively obscure bit of gossip, just as it ignored the other marginal sensations.

Where's Obama's Birth Certificate?

 

Obama's original birth certificate ceased to be an issue for the author of this piece after an Hawaiian state official confirmed as far back as October of 2008 that all of the information on Obama's publicly released COLB (certificate of live birth) short-form was identical to the information contained on the electronically stored long-form derived from the original vital record.

Contrary to what CNN President Jon Klein told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail, the original vital record was not destroyed in 2001 after its data was transcribed to an electronic format.¹ Klein's report prompted Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, to confirm in July of 2009 that the original vital record still existed, that the information on the publicly released COLB short-form was identical to that on the original birth certificate.

Two Disc Jockeys and His Excellency

 

Obviously, the ambassador thought the first of the two disc jockeys was talking about the birthplace of Barack Obama Senior. At the beginning of the conversation, especially, it did not occur to him that an American was stating in the form of a question that the American-born president-elect was born in Kenya. The Ambassador simply did not process this conversion in the same way as the disc jockeys. And this is clearly true despite the fact that the ambassador states "it's widely known" in the same breath as he states "his paternal grandmother still lives there."

In other words, in the beginning of the exchange, the ambassador is thinking "Obama Senior" because of the way the original, leading question was asked. He attaches the notoriety of the father's birthplace to President-elect Obama in his mind at that point and then goes on to mention the residence of Obama Junior's grandmother. Clearly he wasn't the only one who processed the exchange this way.  Apparently, the woman behind the female voice on the recording heard/interpreted the exchange that way too.

Obama's Kenyan Birth Certificate?

 

The document is an obvious forgery and appears to be a joke played on Birthers to further discredit them.¹  The Kenyan government did not issue birth certificates to foreign nationals born abroad at the time of Obama's birth, and the presentation on this document purports that it was issued by the government of jurisdiction to a resident born within the boundaries of said jurisdiction. . . .  Mombasa was never a part of Kenya before 1963, and Obama Junior was born two years before in 1961. Mombasa belonged to the state of Zanzibar, the semi-autonomous region of present-day Tanzania. And some things just bear repeating: if Obama Junior were born anywhere in Kenya, it would have been in Nyanza.

This has always been a red flag for conspiracy theorists, so it deserves some explanation. Barack Obama Sr. was born and educated in Nyanza Province, in southwestern Kenya, on Lake Victoria. This is the area where Obama's family lived and continues to live; Sarah Obama, the step-grandmother of the president, lives in Nyang'oma Kogelo, a small town in the province. But Mombasa is a city on the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles to the east. . . .  And the city wasn't even part of Kenya when the future president was born. Mombasa was a part of Zanzibar until December 12, 1963, when it became part of the newly independent Kenya

(" 'Birthers' Latch onto Forged Kenyan Birth Certificate"; David Weigel; Washington Independent; August 3, 2009).

APPENDIX

Important Biographical Facts

Stanley Ann Dunham meets fellow student Barack Obama Senior at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1960.

Three months pregnant, Stanley Ann Dunham marries Barack Obama Senior on February 2, 1961 in Hawaii.

Barrack Obama Junior  is born on August 4, 1961 at the Kap'olani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii to Ann Dunham, a natural born citizen of the United States from Wichita, Kansas.

Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior divorce in 1964.

Ann Dunham resides, variously, in the states of Hawaii, Washington and Massachusetts from 1960 to 1967. She meets and marries an Indonesian student, Lolo Soetoro, in Hawaii. With little Barack in tow, she leaves the United States for Indonesia with her second husband where it appears Lolo Soetoro adopted Barack under Indonesian law.

No one has ever produced any credible evidence showing that Ann Dunham ever traveled abroad between the pertinent years of 1959 and 1967.

There exists no credible evidence that Barack Obama Senior resided anywhere else but in the United States between the years of 1958 and 1966.