Results tagged “conspiracytheory”

We get a lot of tips on the Chicagoist tip-line [tips (at) chicagoist (dot) com], some pretty good, others for stories we don't quite know how to cover. But we received one last night from a reader named "SF Truther" that caught our attention, pointing us to this website warning of a nuclear strike on Chicago on September 22, 2009. The logic used in the determination of that date is...faulty, at best. For example:

Disasters of national or global magnitude bring out lots of emotions in people. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, all brought out expressions of anger, compassion, grief and outrage. While the gamut of human emotions that run through events like these, events that define moments in time, that feel larger than life and wholly out of our control, are often fueled by our sense of humanity, there's almost always a portion of the population that connects darker forces to these events. Roosevelt knew in advance of Pearl Harbor and let the U.S. get dragged into WWII. Katrina was an opportunity to clear out a poor, black largely Democratic-leaning population. 9/11 was a government conspiracy to instigate a war against the Islamic world.

Yesterday we explored what we thought was a benign attempt by a fringe political group to raise a ruckus over Barack Obama's birth certificate. Boy, were we wrong. While we're not putting on our tinfoil hats, it definitely has earned our attention. There have been several lawsuits filed regarding the release of Obama's birth certificate, including one by former Obama opponent Alan Keyes, and now one of the cases has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court will consider tomorrow whether or not to hear a lawsuit brought by Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells, a suit originally intended to delay the election.

The most famous case questioning Obama's citizenship was filed in Pennsylvania in August on behalf of Philip J. Berg and sought to enjoin the Democratic National Committee from nominating Obama. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to accept the case. Earlier, a federal judge rejected it for "lack of standing"—ruling that Berg had no legal right to sue. In cases like this, judges sometimes believe the matter is best left to political institutions, such as the Electoral College or Congress, said legal scholar Eugene Volokh of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Continue reading "Supreme Court To Consider Obama Birth Certificate Case"