Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Esquire has a very amusing story where one of their reporters follows around Orly Taitz and her tattered band of dupes and whackos as they go from one agency to another causing much mirth and merriment as they tried to get someone to take their complaints seriously. Long excerpt below the fold.
The next morning, I met Taitz in a Cracker Barrel parking lot outside of Louisville. She was joined by a small group of Kentucky citizens, and they were the nicest people you could imagine -- warm and welcoming, quiet and modest, dressed as if they were going to church: a tweed jacket for the homeschooler teaching six children, a flowered shirt for the woman who was a delegate to the last Republican convention, a row of medals for the small white-haired man who once commanded a Navy submarine, a white cowboy hat for the pastor of a Children of God church."It gets worse and worse and worse," one said. "Did you see Obama bowing to the Saudi Prince yesterday?"
"They financed his Harvard education," said another.
"That's his sugar daddy right there," said a third.
We set off in a flotilla of cars. When we got to the state office complex an hour later, it took less than ten minutes for us to get badges and pass through security. A man named George Wilding, the manager of Kentucky's Public Corruption Unit, led us to a conference room. A few minutes later, we were joined by Bob Foster, Kentucky's Commissioner of Criminal Investigations.
Then Taitz began to talk, and she did not stop for 15 solid minutes: Obama forged this and his campaign forged that and these are his false addresses and here's something very strange that Justice Scalia told her at a book signing and here are the 500,000 signatures collected by WorldNetDaily magazine demanding an investigation...
Finally Wilding held up a hand. "Let me just stop you right there. What applies to Kentucky?"
One of the citizens starts showing him documents. "This is clearly his school record that shows that he was a citizen of Indonesia..."
"I don't understand what that has to do with the Kentucky attorney general's office," Wilding repeated.
"He was on the ballot here in Kentucky," Taitz said.
"That was a federal election. There are federal-election laws. The FBI investigates those. So I believe that your best venue and jurisdiction lies with the U.S. district court and the FBI."
That's when Taitz lost it. "I can see that you are hell-bent on doing absolutely nothing," she said, eyes flaring. "You want to pass the buck."
"No ma'am. I'm trying to follow the law."
"I'm going to the FBI and not only reporting Obama, I'm going to report you for refusing to investigate crimes. You have a duty to investigate those crimes! Why are people paying salary for this whole office of attorney general of Kentucky? To do nothing?"
"I think we're finished," Foster said.
But Taitz wasn't finished. She marched her troops straight over to the secretary of state's office and did the exact same presentation all over again. Then she headed to the FBI to do it a third time. And the whole time, she never stopped talking:
Goldman Sachs runs the treasury.
Obama is a puppet.
There's a cemetery somewhere in Arizona where they just dug 30,000 fresh graves, which wait now for the revolution.
Baxter International -- a major Obama contributor -- developed a vaccine for bird flu that actually kills people.
Google Congressman Alcee Hastings and House Bill 684 and you'll see that they're planning at least six civilian labor camps.
Google an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about train cars with shackles.
The communist dictator Hugo Chavez way back in 2004 purchased the Sequoia software that runs our voting machines and the mainstream media won't report any of it -- not even Fox because Saudi Arabia bought a percentage of Fox in 2007.
Funny stuff.
Politics
Comments
Squirrel. Bait.
Posted by: n | August 12, 2009 9:31 AM
I googled "San Francisco Train Cars Shackles" and it led me to some of the craziest conspiracy forums I have ever encountered. Thank you, Orly Taitz!
Posted by: Imrryr | August 12, 2009 9:35 AM
She is the gift that keeps on giving.
Posted by: MikeMa | August 12, 2009 9:46 AM
I just find it endlessly amusing that her name is ORLY. That's just one of the most poetic coinkydinks I've ever come across.
Posted by: Spidergrackle | August 12, 2009 9:58 AM
to view a partial list of crimes committed by FBI agents over 1500 pages long see
http://www.forums.signonsandiego.com/showthread.php?t=59139
to view a partial list of FBI agents arrested for pedophilia see
http://www.dallasnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3574
Posted by: mackie mccleod | August 12, 2009 10:07 AM
mackie mccleod
And the first and most powerfull head of the FBI whore a dress on the week-ends. You point is then???
Posted by: theroachman | August 12, 2009 10:12 AM
mackie mccleod:
I'll make you a deal, I'll look at yours if you'll buy a case of quarts of "Fleck-B-Gon!". It works wonders on spittle streaked computer screens.
Let's just remember, folks. We don't want to derail this thread because we attack Orly as a woman. So, try to keep it gender neutral, for example:
"This attorney is a complete fucking nutter."
"This dentist is a complete fucking nutter."
"This Russian Israeli dental attorney is a complete fucking nutter."
or other remarks of that sort. Mmmmmkay?
Posted by: democommie | August 12, 2009 10:20 AM
@Mccleod - Lol. I'm glad that you guys are keeping track of incidents like on page 7 where an FBI officer's gun accidentally went off after an arrest. No one was injured, but maybe the sidewalk can press charges? Where would be without your dedication to chronicling these horrible crimes?
I doubt you have one, but I'd love to see your list of all the crimes committed by Americans in the armed forces, or the police, or firefighters, or EMTs... etc.
Posted by: Imrryr | August 12, 2009 10:22 AM
@Imrryr - drat. "Where would WE be..." I always manage to accidentally skip a word. I blame Obamacare, and the FBI.
Posted by: Imrryr | August 12, 2009 10:25 AM
(set mode to tasteless)
Is it just me or did the conservative movement get a big boost when we decided to mainstream the insane?
(/tasteless)
I apologize to the mentally ill. The mentally ill are much more sensible than these people.
Posted by: justawriter | August 12, 2009 10:31 AM
I'm a long time lurker but I needed to post.
I read the Esquire 2 part article. I realize these folks are right wing extreme but they scare me. Don't they scare you guys? I worry about what they can do. Reassure me!
Posted by: oddbean | August 12, 2009 10:45 AM
AS FBI REGIONAL BUREAU CHIEF, YOU CAN BE ASSURED THAT I'LL GIVE THESE SERIOUS ALLEGATIONS THE CONSIDERATION THEY DESERVE!!! LET'S JUST SAY I'LL BE "ORLY FIXATED"!!!
OR PERHAPS I'LL JUST HAVE MY CHARGES INVESTIGATE WHAT SINISTER HALLUCINOGEN CAUSED ORLY TO GO BOI-OI-OING, AND WHO PROVIDED IT TO HER!!!
Posted by: FBI Regional Bureau Chief GORDON COLE!!! | August 12, 2009 10:56 AM
Wow. Just wow. Those last statements are just... wow. Ignorance may be bliss but delusional must be hell.
Posted by: Chris Caprette | August 12, 2009 11:07 AM
I'm another long-time lurker from the UK, but I have to concur with oddbean: this stuff fucking terrifies me! Are these nutters a serious threat?
Posted by: Silvermute | August 12, 2009 11:36 AM
Ignorance may be bliss, but delusions are paranoia.
Posted by: Bill Ware | August 12, 2009 11:48 AM
To piggy-back some of the other commenters, this is funny in a "ha-ha, she's so nutty, oh wait a minute other people agree with her, that's not so f'ing funny anymore" kind of way.
And it seems to be neither going away nor getting the full-scale mockery it deserves (outside of places like sciblogs).
Posted by: chris | August 12, 2009 11:48 AM
I think you mean HR 645: HR 684 was introduced by Marion Berry(D-AR-1) and deals with lower prescription drug prices.
HR 645 lets DHS establish at least 6 long-term emergency housing & disaster-preparedness centers on military bases. I agree that it's very creepy, but since it got sent to committee 6 months ago and hasn't been seen since, so for all intents & purposes, it's dead.
There's nothing in the SF Chronicle about train cars with shackles. That and the Goldman Sachs hysteria are both part of the NWO conspiracy, it's been around for ages.
Posted by: Matt | August 12, 2009 12:09 PM
Don't just read the excerpts, click through to the article -- and more importantly to the first part, which gives more background on this insanity and names some important names thst got it rolling -- with special emphasis on Glenn Beck.
I want to dismiss these people as just the latest version of the nuts that have infested the fringes of the political spectrum (metaphors merrily mixed here) since Rev. Jedediah Morse first 'revealed' the sinister plot hatched by the Bavarian Illuminati against the American government -- in 1798.
But there's something about them -- and the persistence of their insanity -- that makes me unable to dismiss them as the latest version of Bircher/black helicopter madness. Maybe it was the presence -- mentioned in the first article -- of "Mark from Michigan" (originally a suspect in the McVeigh bombings who served six years for resisting arrest -- I wish Richardson had given more details) at the rallies. Maybe it is the slow eroding of the 'Chinese Wall' between elected officials and crazies that has been in place for most of my lifetime -- Helen Chenoweth being a rare counter-example.
Maybe it is the simple persistence of this myth -- most of these bubbles of paranoia break pretty quickly, even the Rev. Jedediah 'retreated into silence' after his theory was shown to be fraudulent -- which hasn't stopped his successors from trotting it out repeatedly. Maybe it is that the Poplawski case was just the first demonstration of what Richardson says so well, that 'ideas have body counts.'
Or maybe it is the whole Weimar Republic feel to the current protests. But something tells me this will not go away without a very scary and messy ending. I hope I'm wrong, just responding to a (real) oncoming thunderstorm that is pushing my buttons, but this time I'm much less optimistic than usual.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | August 12, 2009 12:13 PM
Shorter #18:
"amusing"? Maybe too scary to be just 'amusing.' Read the whole piece.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | August 12, 2009 12:15 PM
After I wrote the above, I did my hourly refresh on my daily dose of Steve Benen. Two stories in succession caught my eye, the painting of a swastika on the offices of (Black and Blue Dog) Dem. Rep. David Scott's office -- and a reminder that there are other (Republican) Reps even crazier than Michelle the Mad, like Paul Broun.
and
Sometimes 'amusing' isn't the right word at all.
Posted by: Prup (aka Jim Benton) | August 12, 2009 12:26 PM
Who CARES about Wilding and Foster? They're not attorneys. Or are they?
That was 99% utter nonsense; but the bit about Saudi Arabia buying a share of Faux News does sound plausible. Faux and the Wahabbis have so many enemies in common...starting with everyone on this blog...
Posted by: Raging Bee | August 12, 2009 12:35 PM
For some strange reason the following came to mind:
I think soon it'll be Oily Titz who will be 'preaching to vacancy'* - DJ
_____
*(if she isn't already, in terms of mentality at least)
Posted by: DingoJack | August 12, 2009 12:35 PM
All of which goes to prove, once again, that some people just have too much time on their hands.
Personally, I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person, but they're much more fun if you have to think about them for a few minutes before concluding that they're a bunch of BS, rather than being able to tell that before they've even been fully explained. And even then, I don't believe them, as much fun as they can be.
Posted by: Elaine | August 12, 2009 12:37 PM
Last night I heard Glen Beck define both himself and Bill O'Reilly as "smart guys".
I'd love to do a Lloyd Bentsen all over his head for his tying his recently published book to Tom Paine's. ("I knew JFK, JFK was a friend of mine, you sir, are no JFK" - Bentsen to another "smart guy", Dan Qualye).
Posted by: Michael Heath | August 12, 2009 12:43 PM
Oops forgot to:
[Cue new Republican themesong "Pretty Vacant" by the S_xpistols]* - DJ
______
*Wouldn't want to cause any pearlclutching/vapours from the GOP fundraisers, would we?
Posted by: DingoJack | August 12, 2009 12:45 PM
Now, Gordon. What the hell is this about a Mexican Chihuahua?
Posted by: Special Agent Dale Cooper | August 12, 2009 1:00 PM
Elaine: I agree. The birfers are, without a doubt, the dumbest conspiracy-buffs ever to walk the Earth in blinders. The JFK and UFO crowds do HUGE amounts of research and information-gathering, and are each able to tell a gripping narrative that takes more than fifteen minutes, and more than a high-school diploma, to refute. Even the LaRouchies do enough research to keep their wacky stories up-to-date and mildly amusing (the Queen running the entire US drug-trade? CLASSIC!! Someone needs to make that into a movie with Helen Mirren!!). The Jewish-conspiracy buffs, at the very least, can cobble up an impressive-looking list of powerful Jews all over the world. And even the 9/11 troofers do enough research that they can gum up a blog-thread with impressive-sounding factoids, without repeating themselves too many times.
But the birfers? Forget it. They don't even have the most rudimentary understanding of any of the concepts relevant to their story. I mean, how hard is it to look up a few court cases and a handful of clauses in US law? Or look up some bureaucrat in Hawaii who can answer a few simple procedural questions? I've heard raving homeless loons show more erudition, and more command of facts, than these factophobic asshats.
Crazy with a good command of facts is amusing. Crazy and stupid is just not worth our time.
Posted by: Raging Bee | August 12, 2009 1:02 PM
Britain has them too -- some of the nuttiest -- and what they lack in quantity they make up for in craziness.
Are you old enough to remember when David Icke was a soft-spoken second-tier sports commentator for the BBC? Well, after a short time being the Messiah/God or something, he's been a fully-fledged member of the New World Order conspiracy movement, but with his own special brand of crazy---it's all the fault of shape-shifting reptilian aliens, whose members include the Royal Family no less. (That's why Pricess Di had to die.)
Posted by: tacitus | August 12, 2009 1:43 PM
oddbean @11 - "I read the Esquire 2 part article. I realize these folks are right wing extreme but they scare me. Don't they scare you guys? I worry about what they can do. Reassure me!"
Those folks are feeling weak, out of control and terrorized by their loss of power and position. Some of this feeling is justified. A lot of US citizens have slowly come to understand that the American way of life is not the vision that "Father Knows Best", "Leave it to Beaver", "Bonanza" presented, the whole package that told us that if you worked hard and got an education it would all work out, spoon fed us. It is dawning on them that there is a good chance they will not exceed the standard of living of their parents. That their children face even odds that they will not have a better life than they have. The social contract and assumptions that under gird the 'American way' has been shown to be a come-on routine by a carnival barker selling shots in a game that will not be won by anyone not well connected or extremely lucky.
This is scary stuff to find out. These people are out of their depth and are floundering. They feel the fear, doubt, depression, desperation, and borderline terror. Made all the more terrifying by their inability to change anything. The situation is bigger than they are and the terror is cause by the totality of the situation. The day to day abuse from bosses, bureaucrats, the loss of things that were comforting, the loss of implicit power of race and status, the increasing uncertainty and provisional nature of their lives, lives that felt so secure twenty years ago, combine to produce a daily concatenation of disappointments.
The usual answers don't hold. The dream is broken and they have nothing to take it's place but simplistic tales of apocalypse, brute force heroism, and a struggle to regain a former time. A time before 'it all went south'. A former day when the spoon fed lies still held sway. Overlooking the fact that the American dream was a Madison Avenue construct simulacrum made real on a sound stage by actors.
Desperation and fear often lead to the very worse of human behavior. The South American death squads used they fear of communism and the loss of their way of life to justify and excuse torture, murder, and rape. Germans were told that the international bankers, specifically the Jews, caused their defeat in WWI and that they were poised to enslave them. Fear of, and vilification of, the other was used to excuse and justify their brutality. Brutality and the willingness to act in concert and use violence when ordered became a defining characteristic of their ideology.
Fear, weakness and desperation becomes the justification for unspeakable actions. These people are nothing if not fearful, weak and desperate. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to fall. For it to be revealed how far they will go. Will most of them wake up, pick up the pieces, and try to work collectively with the 'others' toward some positive way of gaining traction in the situation they find themselves? Will they figure out that they have much more in common with poor Mexicans, and inner city blacks than the rich media figured who make a living currying their resentments and fear? Or will they kindle their fear and resentments into a violent rage and go down in a blaze of futile and meaningless glory.
The later possibility scares me. They can't win, numbers and money are decisive, but they can do a lot of damage on the way down. On their own they can't, IMO, make much different long term but if you combine their potential destructiveness with economic calamity and, perhaps, a pandemic the effect could be multiplied.
Posted by: Art | August 12, 2009 2:18 PM
Now, Gordon. What the hell is this about a Mexican Chihuahua?
COOP, I MAY NOT BE A "REAL ATTORNEY" LIKE ORLY TAITZ, BUT I KNOW THAT MEXICAN CHIMICHANGAS, WHILE TASTY, ARE IRRELEVANT AND BESIDE THE POINT!!! FOCUS!!!
I WANT YOU TO CONSTRUCT A HYPOTHETICAL IN WHICH JOHN SYDNEY MCCAIN IS ELECTED PRESIDENT, AND POSIT WHETHER, IN SUCH A SCENARIO, ORLY WOULD DIRECT EQUAL ENERGY TO PROVING THAT PRESIDENTIAL BIRTHS IN THE PANAMA CANAL ZONE ARE CONSTITUTIONALLY ILLEGITIMATE!!! COOP, FAR BE IT FROM ME TO IMPUGN MS. TAITZ'S IMPARTIALITY, BUT I SUSPECT SHE *MAY* NOT HAVE THE ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE OF THE BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT FACT-CHECKING STANDARDS OF 1930s CANAL ZONE NEWSPAPERS THAT SHE DOES OF EARLY-1960s HONOLULU NEWSPAPER STANDARDS!!! MY SUSPICIONS, AND THEY'RE RARELY WRONG, IS THAT ORLY AND HER ENTOURAGE MAY BE GETTING A BIT TOO MUCH OF THEIR OBAMA BIOGRAPHICAL INFO FROM THE "WHITE LODGE!!!"
Posted by: FBI Regional Bureau Chief GORDON COLE!!! | August 12, 2009 2:30 PM
If she offered real proof, would the AG have been "Orly satisfied"?
To those of you who are expressing real fear over these people - I got yelled at when I said this here a few weeks ago, but I'll give it another shot. We need to implement minimum standards of intelligence and sanity as a prerequisite for voting. Birthers, fundies, creationists - they aren't going to go away, and they will never, ever stop.
Posted by: Jeff Eyges | August 12, 2009 2:48 PM
Orly forgot the part about how after the healthcare bill is passed that seniors will be spirited away in the night by MIBs to Area 51 where Obama will personally extract their gray matter for the great brain feast we will hold in honor of our new Martian overlords when they invade Earth in 2012 (according to the Mayan calendar).
To quote Rachel Ray: "Yum-O!"
Posted by: CHV | August 12, 2009 4:46 PM
Forgive me, but the mental image of the lot of them meeting in a Cracker Barrel parking lot, is giving me a seizure from laughter.
Posted by: WilliamProc | August 12, 2009 5:06 PM
No, CHV, he's planning to use our brains to generate electricity, as part of his evil plan to get America off fossil fuels. Didn't you watch "The Matrix?"
Geez, I have to think of EVERYTHING around here...
Posted by: Raging Bee | August 12, 2009 5:32 PM
Geez, I have to think of EVERYTHING around here...
Posted by: Raging Bee
Do you think you are the architect or something?
Posted by: theroachman | August 12, 2009 6:46 PM
@tacitus
Oh yeah, I'm old enough to remember Icke. And I certainly didn't want to come across as suggesting that the UK is any different from anywhere else when it comes to nutters and extremists - we've got the utterly vile BNP to contend with, for starters. It just seems like that there are crazies springing up across the board at the moment, which I find genuinely frightening.
Posted by: Silvermute | August 13, 2009 5:46 AM
Jeff Eyges "We need to implement minimum standards of intelligence and sanity as a prerequisite for voting. Birthers, fundies, creationists - they aren't going to go away, and they will never, ever stop."
So...the only way to save liberal democracy is to destroy it?
Posted by: Modusoperandi | August 13, 2009 12:32 PM
So...the only way to save liberal democracy is to destroy it?
No - limiting voting privileges to those who have a grasp of reality could save it.
The lunatics have spent thirty years voting into office the people who've destroyed this country - and, while we're going down, taking the rest of the world with us, they continue to scream, "It's the libruls! It's the gaaaayyys! They did this!" You think holding onto an egalitarian ideal is going to save us?
The Western Europeans seem to be able to handle representative democracy. We don't do so well with it. Let's run this place like a republic for a while, except that instead of power being wielded by a landed aristocracy, let's restrict it to those who have a fucking brain.
Posted by: Jeff Eyges | August 14, 2009 7:36 PM
Thanks for your reply Art.
I agree with what you posted but your last sentence scares me! :) Thank for replying though.
Posted by: oddbean | August 14, 2009 10:43 PM
Posted by: Taz | August 14, 2009 11:40 PM
I'm worried that she's tainting the good name "Orley."
http://www.littleorley.com/disc.htm
Posted by: Ed Darrell | August 15, 2009 4:41 AM
Jeff Eyges "No - limiting voting privileges to those who have a grasp of reality could save it."
So...to save the Constitution we have to destroy it?
Posted by: Modusoperandi | August 15, 2009 6:52 PM
Modusoperandi,
It's called an amendment.
Posted by: Jeff Eyges | August 16, 2009 7:35 AM
The 28th Amendment, wherein the People decide to divest themselves of the Vote? Good luck getting that past Congress. Most of them would be out of a gig.
Posted by: Modusoperandi | August 16, 2009 11:47 PM
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Posted by: Patricia | August 18, 2009 9:59 AM