Taitz, Swensson, etc. regularly thank their contributors, and the amounts received are relatively small.

And every other birther has the hat out; the money isn't just rolling in.

I'm with bob.

If ellie wyatt was here, she'd school you on how much these folks can take in via paypal.

I don't know who all but I'm sure they're stoopid and vile and worthy of banishment to the dark side of a distant decrepit stinking planet.

Are you sure that quoting from Soros' allowances is fair to the Birfing crowd

For what it's worth, based on the three years and eight months I've been writing about these twitmuffins, I would not at all be surprised to find out there is some birtherstani financial support out there.

I don't think there was at first, it was too disorganized and I don't think many of the usual suspects really expected Obama to defeat McCain.

However, I've been a lot more consistency and propagation of birther memes, particularly in the last several months. And the way that many in the GOP refuse to condemn the birthers and continue to play flirty games with them, tells me that there are some using it as a way to hopefully undermine the President.

I don't think those people actually BELIEVE the birther claptrap myself. For that matter, I don't think many of the big name birthers (like Joseph Farah and the like) actually believe it either. They're simply using it as a propaganda tool.

I expect it to be cranked up more and more the closer we get to November, with more "wink wink nudge nudge" moments from Republican office holders and candidates. I expect Corsi and Farah will try to "swift boat" Obama with more lies and smears. And, assuming Obama is re-elected, it wouldn't surprise me in the least to have at least one GOP representative try and do a birther challenge towards the electoral college results - and only mildly surprise me if a GOP senator joined in.

I don't think it was funded at the start - but I think there is some funding and some political manipulation involved now. Not because they actually believe it, but because it's a cheap and easy propaganda tool to keep the base riled up.

Yep.

Concur WRT to "political manipulation" (which is essentially free).

I never really got what the hell (other than a free jolly) Dean was doing in Hawai'i for over 2 weeks.

Hell, on one occassion I got rousted from my fetid sack of sleep on a Thursday night, told to assemble the team, fly out NY to Frankfurt Friday overnight, take control and shut down a 100,000 sq ft data center in a manner calculated to preserve sensitive data. All whilst ensuring that we used the local Disaster Recovery processes so that all overnight and weekend processes completed and the cold and warm standby servers were up and running with minimal business impact. Oh and hand over to a local team so we would be the hell outta Dodge first flight Monday AM before the local workers council woke up and started creating.

And Deano did what.......apart from cavort around with a comedy check and video himself gambolling around on a beach.....?

In the real world, that amount of piss poor ROI would get me canned faster than a fast thing with extra fast sauce on top.......

I'm fully invested in the notion they're funded. As a practical matter, nothing is as easy as getting disaffected asshats to write blog posts, make demands and stir up trouble. Every campaign uses them.

But I think most of the money comes through WND. That's through, not from. I believe there are still Mellon Scaife-like folks, if not actually Mellon Scaife, out there funding ratfuckers*. The Kochs are always a possibility.

WND was founded for exactly this sour purpose, discrediting popular Democrats. I would not be at all surprised to find a brand new name pulling Farah's strings.






* ratfucking is a term specifically referring to conservative dirty tricks. Wikipedia thinks it was first unleashed to describe the Watergte antics of the Nixon administration, but I've always heard it started with the Helen Gahagan Douglas v Tricky Dick
Nixon gubernatorial campaign in the 50's.


*. Wikipedia's entry on ratfucking says that the term was coined during Watergate, but I've always heard that it was from the
Helen Gahagan Douglas v Tricky Dick Nixon campaign in the 50's. Either way, the term was coined specifically bout conservative political operatives. It still pisses me off when the other side accuses us of it, too. Not true, it's simply an argument deflector.

Perhaps, but what else has happened in the last several months? Corsi had two books come out, essentially providing the Birthers with a central 'gospel' to work from. WND has further cemented itself as Birther-central, particularly in the area of promoting long-form 'experts.'

Meanwhile, the other Birther outlets have dried up a bit. The P&E is a shadow of its former self, and is now mostly hidden behind a pay wall. ORYR continues to function, but mostly just republishes others' material. And we're seeing fewer freelancers. There's no Polariks or TechDudes or Lucas Smiths or MissTicklys showing up and taking the Birther world by storm.

And even the consistency of their memes is questionable. As others have noted, Birthers have started recycling old debunked stuff even WND won't touch, like Lucas Smith's fake birth certificate or the Bomford certificate. Heck, we've seen the API get resurrected as a source.



And that's disappointing, but it's hard to imagine how surreptitious financing could be responsible for that. They may see it as potentially useful, but it doesn't really speak to the question of 'Who funds the birthers?'

Surreptitious funding is one thing. What about those non-birther lawyers who surreptitiously aid the birthers just to see the fun?

Tim Bueler, Corsi's publicist is listed as WND's publicist on their who's who page. He was the man arrested with Corsi in Kenya. He is also media relation's man and co-director of Minuteman Project and director of 1776 Tea Party. Strange figure to have as a publicist at WND, wouldn't you think so ?
You might want to look up his wiki profile.
I have discussed his sinister organizational role in Corsi's Kenya mission a few years ago on this forum.

Haskins and Miki were pestering the hospital employees and the DOH employees. They were getting Sunahara to do the same. They found him a lawyer and made it worth his while to lend his name to another frivolous lawsuit against the DOH. It had no other value that to provide fuel for the propaganda campaign and add to the suspicions about the 'forged BC' and the fraud and cover up by the DOH. After all, the Hawai'ian DOH is the legal authority backing up Obama's claims and they know that is the strongest single unassailable fact. So, yes, quite a good piece of change was spent on the 'discredit the DOH' campaign.

Not really. He's a 26-year-old conservative kid from California with no college education, who got the attention of Minuteman founder and fellow Californian Jim Gilchrist. Gilchrist wrote a book with Corsi in 2006, and Bueler subsequently started working for Corsi as well. And Corsi works for WND.

That's pretty straightforward networking.

I'm afraid I understood more of that than maybe I should oughta.

Should I put my affairs in order?

PD

Unless you were involved in using a financial sectors network infrastructure and server equipment to run a swathe of "naughty" sites hosting content even the Germans found too queasy you should be good to go....

Anyway, wasn't me can't prove it, no video evidence, it's all hearsay I tells ya.....

not really ?

Tim Bueler and Minuteman Project - Media Advisor (Director of Media Relations)

From the Minuteman groups infightings

WND's who's who page

About Bueler and Tea Party org

From the Minuteman Project to the Tea Party


Bueler's Manifesto - 15 Non-negotiable Core Beliefs

it was written by him also note the birther ad:




here is what he sends around, from hìs Tea Party

1776 Tea Party …Steve Eichler and Tim Bueler


an interesting mail to Tim Bueler

Oh, he had the money. He posted the deposit slip. But there was never *any* chance that he would actually PAY it. Remember, one of the conditions of that offer was that he, Dean Haskins, had to be CONVINCED that his evidence was wrong. There was no objective standard. The very terms of the offer allowed him to escape losing the money by simply saying "I don't believe you" at the end of the day.



Manning has publicly and vocally hated Obama since at least January 2008. I imagine he went Birther for the same reasons most PUMAs did.



There are obviously anonymous sources of Birther revenue. The mere fact that WND fund drives accumulate funds mean that people are giving money to them. Some Birthers satisfy their conspiratorial urges by doing the legwork, and others just click Paypal buttons out of laziness.

But the fact that unidentified Birthers are contributing monies to identified Birthers is hardly the same as suggesting that there are significant somebodies providing those funds. Or that there is anything resembling an organized funding source or organizational architect.

Remember, Polarik was the Birthers' big anonymous icon for a year, who produced hundreds of pages of 'reports'. Then he turned out to just be some nobody schmuck in Florida.

There was rampant speculation about who "John Charlton" actually was, and the guesses were consistently that he was a sockpuppet for somebody more famous. Then he turned out to just be some nobody schmuck in Massachusetts.

The guy behind Obama Release Your Records? Some nobody schmuck from the (IIRC) the Carolinas.

And of course, there was the time that the behind-the-scenes benefactor actually got outed. Lucas Smith naturally didn't have $1800 to blow on certified letters, but he got that money from...Bruce Steadman, a nobody schmuck from Georgia.

Plus, the one time that a rich potential benefactor actually went full-fledged Birther, in the form of Donald Trump, what did he do? He claimed that he commissioned investigators in Hawaii...and then it turned out that he never actually did. The one rich guy who *might* have actually funded Birthers didn't even spend the money he SAID he spent.

There's also a way to kinda-sorta test this question. The Birther SuperPAC is required to submit a donor report after the election, naming contributors. I'm predicting that we're not going to get any big surprises there, either in terms of names or amounts.

Yeah, not really.

I mean, you've certainly got a...list of things there. But what exactly is your hypothesis?

So Bueler is connected to three or four organizations, all of which involve people who are, themselves, connected. Gilchrist and Corsi have a preexisting relationship. So do Corsi and WND. So do the Minutemen and Steve Eichler. Bueler's ridden those connections to get himself a small handful of jobs. Is there supposed to be something odd about Bueler being tied to people who are quite publicly tied to each other, apart from Bueler?

I think I missed this memo....


Ditto for Taitz, as well as the "presidental candidate" birthers.

Bueler is not only riding connections, he is driving them. For the moment It's an hypothesis, I know.

I came across this birther email that was sent from 'Minuteman PAC' thru an email campaign from 'American Conservative PAC'.

The birfer email piece:
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=0c6 ... 07196dd3If you

The American Conservative PAC site:
xxhttp://amconpac.com/

If you look at the American Conservative PAC email campaign, it's 90% Birther. And the title of the TAB that your browser will display is MMPAC. So, I guess it's just an arm of the Minuteman PAC?

Email Campaign Archive
from American Conservative PAC
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/home/? ... eceea08d45

If you would have clicked on one of the pleas to donate to help, like this one:



or this one:



... you would have been transported to an online donate page where the money goes to the Minuteman PAC. Not to any kind of fund for the Posse or anything.

https://www.fundraisingbynet.net/fbn/Co ... n=595F5D56

It doesn't look like American Conservative PAC ever did anything. Just a mostly empty website.

```````````````````````````````````
```````````````````````````````````

When I looked up 'American Conservative PAC', I saw it's run by Brett Farley. He's this guy:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/brettfarley

xxxhttp://brettfarley.us/about/

xxxhttp://brettfarley.us/



I didn't see any money though. No money.
http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/dcdev/forms/

Brett was the Executive Director of the MinuteMan PAC until Feb, 2010.

I looked them up at FEC.

http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/expendi ... =C00417857

( or http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00417857 )


The biggest recipient of the MinuteMan PAC money is Veritas, which is Brett's company.

I go back and forth on this issue a lot, but I'm leaning toward "outside funding" coming in to at least some birthers.

I do not think Orly is getting any substantial money at all. She's capable of self-funding, obviously far too indiscrete to be trusted with anything that needs to be kept quiet, and obviously insane.

Haskins is a different story. Let's use as conservative a set of figures as we can.

He has made at least two trips to Honolulu that we know of - one in September, and one in November. We know that Miki Booth was with him in Hawaii during the first trip, and we know that Miki was in Honolulu shortly after the second trip - she attended the Taitz hearing in early December. Both Miki and Dean are married, I believe, and not to each other. They might have stayed with Miki's family, but even if nothing was going on between them they might not have wanted to risk that kind of gossip. I think a hotel is likely. A rental car is probable. Add in meals, and $200/day + airfare looks like a reasonable low-end estimate. He seems to have been in Hawaii for at least 15 total days, and maybe more. With bottom-end, bargain-basement airfare, it's still probably going to total at least 5K.

And, yes, some of those expenses would be incurred regardless of travel, but let's also remember that he didn't have the income he otherwise might have - to the best of our knowledge, he's self-employed. No paid vacation. We'll assume that his normal expenses (rent/mortgage, utilities, etc) were entirely covered by his wife, and disregard those.

Duncan Sunahara received some Iraqi dinars around that time. I believe that total was in the vicinity of $1200. We do not know if anything else went to Duncan, but I would not be surprised if something did. The lawyer did not work for free - even if he was only billing $50/hour (and I don't think he can bill anything less and still eat), there's still probably at least another $2K there once filing fees are included.

That gets us to a bit over $8K just for Hawaii. That doesn't take into account the rest of that trip, the total missing income, or anything else. Then there are the other excursions. We know he was in Georgia, we think he was in Arizona for the March 1 press conference, we think he has been in Arizona again more recently (the picture with Lord Fauntleroy). We know he was filming and livestreaming on some of those occasions.

If we assume that Dean did each of the other three weeks of his big trip for $1K, and only spent $1K on each of the other trips, we're looking at at least $14K in the last six months. We're also probably looking at Dean spending at least 8 weeks of the last 6 months not working at his normal business.

Dean seems to have some sort of arrangement with WND now, but I've got to wonder about WND's current financial state and how much they can reasonably spare. I find it hard to believe that they're bringing in more than $1.2 million/year in advertising (and suspect that the real figure is closer to 500K than 1 mil). With that, they've got to maintain their site, maintain their WH reporter, pay Pornstache, pay Corsi, pay their other employees. Even if their total staff is in the neighborhood of 10, they've got to be hurting financially. And I doubt that WND books is helping make up any ground there.

Admittedly, none of this proves anything regarding external funding. It's possible that all of this is taking place without any influx of outside cash. But there's enough going on that I think it's reasonable to speculate.