Blog Heap of Links for the day 21 May 2012

…1995 …Dreams from My Father …pages 12 and 13 of the 2004 paperback edition …President unequivocally asserts his Cherokee ancestry... no concrete evidence…

Video author Tracy is an independent... researcher and eligibility challenger.... No, don’t tell me– the “birthers” are making all of this up– it’s a “conspiracy theory- woooooooooooooo...!" [Video]

“He is the most ill-prepared person to assume the presidency in my lifetime,” Christie told some 600 Kentucky Republicans at a Lexington hotel. “This is a guy who literally is walking around in a dark room trying to find the light switch of leadership.”

When it comes to conspiracies, I'm an Occam's Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he's spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.

Rush: I'm overwhelmed by the number of people -- we're three-and-a-half years into his regime, and I'm getting e-mails from people that the first time they'd heard he'd done cocaine was in the past two, three weeks. The first time they'd heard that he had bullied a young girl. They didn't know his college transcripts hadn't been released. They just assumed all that had happened and they missed it. They didn't know any of this.

Based on the record, the case can be made that Obama still has not resolved the fundamental identity issues that drove him to experiment with weird, obnoxious ideologies that are fundamentally hostile to America and what it has stood for. That’s scary. The case can also be made, and has been by Stanley Kurtz, that Obama has resolved these issues in favor of a radicalism that, though less virulent than that of Rev. Wright, Frank Davis (the Communist who mentored Obama in Hawaii), and Bill Ayers, is ambivalent at best about America and what it has stood for. That’s very scary.

Rubio: “The man who today occupies the White House and is running for president is a very different person. We have not seen such a divisive figure in modern American history as we have over the last three and a half years.” [Emphasis in the original.]

China's Dalian Wanda Group and AMC Entertainment announced Monday a $2.6 billion deal to take over the U.S. theater group, forming the world's largest cinema chain, according to a new release on the deal.

Robin Gibb, one-third of the Bee Gees, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer, his spokesperson has confirmed via a statement. Gibb was 62 years old. [At one time, this mindful webworker had all the Bee Gees' pre-Disco LPs. Perhaps I still do.]

[Rapid Eye Movement] enhancing device that is supposed to help steer the sleeper into lucid dreaming by making the brain aware that it is dreaming. …to allow people to have the dreams of their choice, from driving a race car to flying to having lunch with Abraham Lincoln. [To… ahem! what people would really dream about.]

[From the "Odessa" album, the Bee Gees' With All Nations (Internatonal Anthem) MP3 available for download.]

CHICAGO - What they aren't saying (and neither is Channel 7) is that these "peaceful protestors" were caught in the act filling bottles with gasoline and sitting with a bizarre assortment of weapons ranging from crossbows to throwing stars. For those who claim "bullshit" or attempt to defend these assholes, we don't have third hand knowledge or second hand knowledge of this event. We have direct knowledge and this mayor, this superintendent and mouthpieces like Healey can go fuck themselves for keeping this from the public, encouraging the public to bring families downtown into this crap, and for sending police officers into this type of atmosphere in "soft clothes" and under-trained. By the way, has anyone read anything about protestors throwing bags of excrement at the Board of Trade yesterday? That happened, too, and we can't find any report of it. And the additional bags of excrement at Daley Plaza today? Not a whisper in the media. Curious, isn't it?

all forms of central planning are a dead end and lead inexorably toward breakdown…. The real problem with centrally-planned Malthusian population reduction programs is that they greatly underestimate the value of human beings.

Remains of an enormous turtle… unearthed in a Colombian coal mine. The shell alone of the 60-million-year-old turtle, Carbonemys cofrinii, aka "coal turtle," is large enough to be a small swimming pool. Its skull is roughly the size of a regulation NFL football. "…first evidence of giant-ism in freshwater turtles…" "…smaller crocs would have been easy prey for this behemoth."

The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.