Caveat Emptor

Out on the far fringes of American politics are the "birthers," who insist that Barack Obama never presented a valid birth certificate, is not a natural-born citizen and is thus constitutionally ineligible to be president.

There is, however, one slight problem with this theory: Obama released his birth certificate, showing that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961, last year during the campaign. It was certified as genuine by the Hawaiian Department of Health, is the exact same sort of document issued by states all over the country, and is fully accepted at all levels of government as proof of both identity and citizenship. The certificate proves that Obama is indeed a natural-born citizen and is thus eligible to be president.

Of course, the birthers (particularly Joseph Farah of the WorldNetDaily website) argue the certificate is a fake and demand that Obama release his original "long form" certificate. The problem is that if Obama caves in to this shrieking and does so, they will immediately claim that certificate is a fake. There is simply no way to win with these people.

So why not cash in on it? I can't believe it really took this long for someone to get around to it, but someone calling himself "colmado_naranja" claims to have an Kenyan birth certificate for Barack Obama and is offering it for sale on eBay. (The seller has of course refused to post a photo of the alleged document, claiming it "would lead to a flood of facsimiles on the Internet [and] would inadvertently decrease the value of the certificate as well.") The bidding starts at $1000, but you can buy it outright for $1 million.

eBay has yanked the listing numerous times, pointing to their rules against the selling of real or fake government documents on the site. Naturally, this made WorldNetDaily add them to its ever-growing list of conspirators to install an ineligible fraud in the White House.

But what if some sucker patriot really does manage to plunk down gobs of cash for this thing? Personally, I think they'll wind up with something like this:

The guy who's trying to peddling this thing obviously hopes his victims never heard the phrase caveat emptor - let the buyer beware.

Back to Everyday Craziness

Now that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has been located safe and sound - it turns out he sneaked off to Argentina for a few days of romping with a woman not his wife - we now rejoin our normal political insanity, already in progress.

Let's see, to whom can we turn to bring a note of complete batshit craziness to our everyday life? Of course - Representative Michele Bachmann! You may recall Bachmann from her earlier close encounters with weird conspiracy theories, including:

• Claiming the White House is conspiring with other countries to introduce a one-world currency
• Accusing then-candidate Barack Obama and others in Congress of being "anti-American"
• Calling the SCHIP health-insurance program for children a "magnet" for illegal immigrants
• Saying that a law expanding AmeriCorps and increasing opportunities for volunteering creates "re-education camps for young people"
• Urging violence over the issue of global warming, saying, "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"

This list could go on forever, but you get the idea. She does not so much embrace every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike as rip its clothes off, throw it down on the bed and have her way with it. (No word yet on whether she believes President Obama to be a dictatorial Muslim usurper.) Indeed, her image as an inhabitant of Bizarro World reduced her to claiming, "This is not Michele Bachmann being a kook."

Anyway, she's back. In the middle of one of her usual rants about the community-organizing group ACORN last week, Bachmann loudly said she will refuse to fill out anything on her Census form. The rationale for this was that since the government is hiring outside organizations for the Census' door-to-door legwork, she's afraid that ACORN (boogity-boogity) will somehow get hold of and misuse the data.

Never mind that refusing to participate in the Census is illegal. Or that violating a Census participant's privacy can get you five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Or that socioeconomic questions asked either in the short Census form or the longer American Community Survey form are used to determine how federal tax dollars are distributed among states and localities. Or even that ACORN won't be involved at all in collecting Census responses.

Paranoia must be assuaged, you see, and so Bachmann stepped up to the plate again today, warning that Census data can be misused. And she did it by invoking the specter of the Japanese-American internment during World War II:

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I'm not saying that's what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up.

You can almost hear her screaming it from the rooftops: "Obama and ACORN will put you all in prison!"

Her tactics are typical: spew out fear and paranoia by warning of hideous things that no one is planning (indeed, that no one in their right minds would possibly consider) and then walk it back ever so slightly by saying "well, I don't think they're planning that."

But considering the killings which have taken place in the last few months - killings very likely inspired by the continuing torrent of hate and fear in the conservative media - is it paranoid to worry about the safety of Census workers? What if someone really believes that the local Census worker who comes to the door is actually on a secret mission to identify "undesirables?" What happens then?

Bachmann's wingnut craziness may be entertaining, but it masks a very disturbing trend in America. Can we stop it before more people get killed?

This Is Gonna Get Ugly

Meet Mark Sanford. He's the Republican governor of South Carolina and a staunch family-values conservative. He is anti-abortion, anti-gay, makes a big deal about the "sanctity of marriage," and generally likes to get on his moral high horse to tell everyone else how to run their lives.

Oh yes, and he just got back after a week in which he sneaked away to sunny Buenos Aires, Argentina. He didn't tell his family where he was going, even skipping out on them for Father's Day. He left his cell phone off and was completely incommunicado. He did, however, apparently get back in touch with the office a couple of days ago to say he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail.

But there's a slight problem - even the southernmost tip of the Trail near Atlanta is about five thousand miles from Buenos Aires. So either Sanford lied to his staff about his whereabouts or his staff lied to cover for their boss. Neither one is good.

So what was Sanford actually doing down there? Was he there to take advantage of Argentina's medical tourism? Or was it something a little less family-friendly?

I'm betting it's the latter. When you tell a lie that transparent and that easily debunked, it means you probably weren't there to feed the homeless.

For his part, the now-resurfaced Sanford is not helping his image. When he got off the plane, he was cornered by a reporter asking why he left the country and didn't bother to tell anyone about it. His response? "I wanted to do something exotic."

Oh, that sounds good.

This sure looks like it's going to get very ugly, very quickly.

Update: The American embassy in Argentina apparently had no idea he was in the country. Add in Buenos Aires' legendary kidnapping risk and a prominent American like Sanford would have to be certifiably insane to go there without any security or even informing the embassy.

Sanford will hold a press conference at 2PM EDT. Get the popcorn.

Tehran Spring

The streets of Tehran, and most cities in Iran, are filled with people protesting last week's blatantly stolen presidential election. The Iranian government's attempts at a media blackout have failed miserably as social channels like YouTube and Twitter are filled with back-channel information. The people get their message out any way they can. The eyes of the world are on Iran, and no one wants a Persian replay of China's 1989 Tienanmen Square crackdown.

Here at home, the Republicans are naturally playing politics with this whole thing, with often unintentionally hilarious results:

• Rep. John Culberson of Texas called his party "oppressed minorities" because the House leadership cut off debate on a bill.
• Rep Pete Hoekstra of Mississippi went even further, tweeting that the Iranian people's struggle for a free and fair election was just like "what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."
  

Sure, they're exactly alike.

After President Obama spoke out in favor of the protesters, the GOP jumped all over him demanding that he do more. Senator Lindsey Graham called the president "timid and passive," and the usual suspects muttered darkly that with Obama's "Muslim past," he is surrendering to Tehran.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about recent Iranian history knows full well that tough talk from Obama on the situation in Iran would backfire. Badly.

After Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister in 1951, he nationalized Iran's oil resources and thus ran afoul of the American and British oil companies. The United States responded by sending in the CIA to foment a coup, which overthrew Mossadegh in 1953.

Installed in his place was Shah Reza Pahlevi, who quickly did his backers' bidding by handing his country's oil back to the corporations and turning the country into a repressive autocracy. Clamping down on any dissent and political opposition, the Shah radicalized the Iranian people, making them easy pickings for the hardline Ayatollah Khomeini.

After Khomeini overthrew the Shah in 1979 and set up his own repressive government, he never failed to refer to the United States as the "Great Satan." And while the Iranian government no longer depicts the US as a satanic monster, the memory of the American intervention and the Shah's rule is very much alive and well in the country's political psyche.

Which explains why Obama is watching his words carefully when it comes to Iran. He knows very well that any overt American support for the protesters would rally Iranian public support around the government, stolen election or no stolen election.

But the Republicans don't care about that. There are points to be scored, no matter how cheap.

Barack Obama, Murderer

Well, no, not really.

Tuesday evening, President Obama was in the middle of a televised CNBC interview when a fly started buzzing him. So he did what anyone else would do - he swatted it. Fly forgotten, interview continues.

Enter PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. These are the same people who are behind some of the most ridiculous, ill-conceived and just plain offensive campaigns ever, including:

• Lobbying the town of Fishkill, New York to change its name to "Fishsave" (the "kill" part actually comes from the Dutch word for "creek" or "stream")
• Comparing factory farms to the Holocaust
• Asking college students (among whom binge drinking is already endemic) to drink beer instead of milk
• Showing up in Ku Klux Klan-like robes outside the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
• Trying to rename fish "sea kittens" on the grounds that people are less likely to hurt cute kittens than fish
  

And so on. So they naturally could not let this one go unchallenged. Attacking Obama for his part in keeping the pest population down, a PETA blogger archly reminded the president that "he isn't the Buddha, he's a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act."

Cue the inevitable media circus, topped off by Stephen Colbert's hilarious take on this whole brouhaha.

Once again looking like a bunch of self-righteous fools, PETA backtracked ever so slightly by claiming that Obama should have disposed of the insect without killing it. They even sent one of their $8 "humane bug catchers" to the president for free.

So PETA is not among those who call Obama a crazed murderer - for now.

He's only been in office a few months, after all.

Worst. Conspiracy Theory. Ever.

There have been a wide range of conspiracy theories thrown around about President Obama, ranging from the potentially dangerous (the president is a dictatorial Muslim usurper) to the just plain silly (the president has it in for Republican Chrysler dealers).

But this one really takes the, er, cake.

You may recall that this past spring, First Lady Michelle Obama set up an organic garden on the White House grounds and invited kids from all over to come help grow stuff. On Tuesday, she held a party at which kids harvested and ate the fruits (as it were) of their labor, including peas and lettuce.

Web gadfly Matt Drudge (a reliable conduit for wacko right-wing accusations making their way into the mainstream media) thought the timing - two months from planting to harvest - was a tad suspicious, and said so on his website:

Once you get past that he got the dates wrong (March 20 was when ground was broken, planting actually happened on April 9) his sneering comment on "Michelle's miracle grow" speaks volumes. He's actually saying, "She cheated! It can't be organic! Those veggies can't be real!"

Well, putting aside the simple fact that swapping store-bought vegetables for home-grown ones is like something out of a movie farce (in real life, Jim Jones did just that in Guyana to try and hook potential Peoples Temple members back in the 1970s) this nonsense was quickly shot down by people who have experience with actual, you know, gardening.

Apparently deluged with dark mutterings from readers, Susan Reimer put it succinctly on the Baltimore Sun's website:

The snap peas and the greens were ready to harvest - but that's no surprise for Washington, D.C., and a spring as rainy as ours has been. And the soil was amended with compost before it was planted. When I did that in a new bed I installed, the plants went crazy. The kale, chard and lettuces look exactly as they do at the Farmers' Market in Annapolis that I visit each Saturday. But there are no cukes yet, no peppers, mostly tomato flowers, and one tiny eggplant. The sweet potatoes and okra are just seedlings.

So we now have a winner for the Stupidest Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever!

Until the next one, that is.

Don't Blame Us

Two days after a deranged neo-Nazi (redundant, I know) attacked the Holocaust Museum in Washington and killed a security guard, the rightest of America's right-wing pundits are scrambling to claim that they bear no responsibility for the tragedy.

Their reasoning? James von Brunn was actually a leftist.

Therefore, President Obama and the liberals are to blame.

Really.

Harry Binswanger of the Ayn Rand Institute told an approving Glenn Beck that "von Brunn's culture is a tribe of racist anti-Jewish, anti-Negro, anti-immigrant, everything, and therefore he's the phenomenon of the left, because racism is a form of collectivism. The right wing is individualist, believes in individual rights, freedom, the dignity of each individual life. You know, Hitler was national socialism, right?" (Of course, Adolf Hitler was no more a socialist than was Gordon Gekko.)

Latching on to Binswanger's nonsense, Beck one-upped his guest by jumping through hoops to attack Obama: "We have a guy in the White House right now who, if you're gonna link people to this guy [von Brunn] who have nothing to do with this shooting, let's talk about the relationship with Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright."

The right-wing NewsMax website targeted Obama directly as well, claiming that "it is no coincidence that we are witnessing this level of hatred toward Jews as President Barack Obama positions America against the Jewish state."

Rush Limbaugh also got into the act, saying that von Brunn "has more in common with the marchers and protesters we see at left-wing rallies."

And in what may well be the most offensive and insane take on the tragedy, conservative blogger Erick Erickson writes that "the gunning down of guards outside the Holocaust Museum in Washington has [Daily Kos founder and über-blogger] Markos Moulitsas and his band of leftist brothers positively demanding a ticker tape parade for the deranged shooter."

All this frantic activity shows utter desperation on the part of the right-wing media. Limbaugh, Beck and their ilk know all too well that by shoveling out bizarre delusions 24/7 that Obama will take away everyone's guns or set up concentration camps or bring back the Hitler Youth, they stoke a climate of fear and paranoia.

And eventually, fear and paranoia boil over, resulting in what we saw on Wednesday.

They did it.

They know they did it.

They created and maintained the atmosphere which allowed von Brunn and who knows how many other like-minded nuts to believe that their insane ravings are right and good and well within the mainstream. And they do so while consistently opposing common-sense laws which would keep guns out of these people's hands.

So they have to blame someone else - anyone else - for the inevitable results of their own actions.

How many more killings will it take for them to wake up?

Again

It happened again.

James von Brunn, who has a long history of virulently hating Jews, blacks and everyone else who is not white and Protestant, walked into the Holocaust Museum in Washington yesterday and opened fire, killing a security guard before he was shot himself and arrested. There are so many angles one can take with this horrible story it's hard to know where to begin.

Soon after President Obama took office, a report requested by the outgoing Bush Administration on the dangers of violent right-wing extremist groups (the KKK, armed militias, violent racists and anti-Semites, etc) was leaked. Led by Fox News, the GOP screamed that the report was actually about mainstream conservatives, to the point where Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano knuckled under and retracted it. Will everyone who led this shrieking chorus now apologize?

As a convicted felon who in 1981 walked into the Federal Reserve's HQ in Washington armed with a shotgun and threatened to kill everyone inside, von Brunn should never have been allowed anywhere near a gun. How did he get it? Did he buy it at a gun show, at which background checks are still not required? Did he bribe the owner of a gun store to let him have one anyway? Did he get it from one of his neo-Nazi comrades?

Will the guns-for-everyone crowd finally remember the first part of the Second Amendment, the part about a "well regulated militia?" I'm pretty sure the Founding Fathers didn't intend the nation to be filled indiscriminately with mechanisms of death and mayhem.

And will all the pundits who pollute the airwaves with hatred and paranoia, who spin wild fantasies that a president with the middle name of "Hussein" is a traitorous tyrant who must be stopped at any cost, who regularly use the language of war and violence - will they finally realize that there are people out there who take their overblown rhetoric literally?

They will - for maybe a day. Then it will be back to business as usual.

Until the next time, that is.

But You Already Knew That

"What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality."

Neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, admitting that the world as seen on Fox News bears little or no resemblance to the actual world we live in

Praying for Death

Out on the lunatic fringe of Christian-right politics is a preacher named Wiley Drake, who last distinguished himself by being the 2008 vice-presidential running mate of Alan Keyes. (You may remember Keyes from the 2004 Senate campaign in Illinois; after the original GOP candidate imploded in a sex scandal, he was called in as a last-minute replacement and went on to get creamed by a guy named Barack Obama. Today, Keyes spends his time cozying up to the craziest of the crazies, insisting that Obama is a secret Muslim who was actually born in Kenya.)

Drake is fond of what he calls "imprecatory prayers," a ten-dollar phrase which means praying for someone to die. Now, as children we all had such moments, usually on the playground when you ask for God to send a bolt of lightning to zap a bully or something. But Drake really means it.

In 2007, he urged his followers to pray for the deaths of Joe Conn and Jeremy Leaming (which Drake misspelled as "Learing"), two staffers at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. You see, they apparently got on Drake's bad side by reporting that Drake's church was under investigation for specifically endorsing Mike Huckabee's presidential run and thus violating IRS tax-exemption rules.

Well, nothing happened. Conn and Leaming are still very much alive and well.

Last week, he openly celebrated the murder of Kansas doctor George Tiller: "I am glad George Tiller is dead. I said to the Lord, 'Lord I pray back to you the Psalms, where it says that they are to become widowers and their children are to become orphans and so forth.' And we began calling for those imprecatory prayers, because he had obviously turned his back on God again and again and again." Not surprisingly, this did not go over well with Christians and other people who see murder as, you know, bad.

Undeterred by the resulting criticism, Drake is now trying again. This time, he's setting his sights a tad higher than two staffers and a doctor - he's going for the big kahuna, the whole nine yards, all the marbles.

Yes, he's praying for the death of President Obama himself.

One day after cheering Tiller's murder, Drake went on Alan Colmes' radio show and specifically said that since Obama's policies somehow show that he follows the "wrong" form of Christianity, he has to go.

Colmes: When you say you are praying for the death of someone using imprecatory prayer, you then said - I asked, then, "for whom else are you praying in that fashion?" And you said "President Obama." Are you praying for his death?

Drake: Yes.

Colmes: So you're praying for the death of the president of the United States.

Drake: Yes.

Colmes: Do you, are you concerned that by saying that you might find yourself on some kind of a Secret Service call or FBI wanted list or, uh, do you think it's appropriate to say something like that, or even pray for something like that?

Drake: I think it's appropriate to pray the Word of God. I'm not saying anything. What I am doing is repeating what God is saying, and if that puts me on somebody's list, then I'll just have to be on their list.

Colmes: Uh, you would like for the president of the United States to die?

Drake: If he does not turn to God and does not turn his life around, I am asking God to enforce imprecatory prayers that are throughout the Scripture, uh, that would cause him, uh, death, that's correct. I think we'll see, in the days ahead, other imprecatory prayers answered. God says clearly in his word that we are to continue to pray, and he will answer our prayers.

Since Drake is supposedly a Southern Baptist, the group's president backed away from his comments as fast as he could. Johnny Hunt called it a "terrible statement, [a] very unbiblical statement."

Is Drake determined to prove that Christian demagogues can be just as insanely bloodthirsty as their Muslim counterparts? He's certainly doing a good job at it.

Deus Vult

After President Obama spoke in Cairo last week to the Muslim world, reaching out to the people whom President Bush had slapped away for years, you could hear neoconservative heads exploding all over the place. Ed Cline in particular accused Obama of making "obeisance" to his supposed Muslim masters, and pressed all the usual hot buttons in urging a continued holy war against Islam.

My reaction to all this was "deus vult."

In 1095, Pope Urban II declared a crusade to "liberate" the Middle East from Muslim control. In reply, crowds of fired-up Christians yelled out "deus vult" - God wills it - and went on to slaughter horrendous numbers of Jews, Muslims and others in the name of God.

One wonders if God was ashamed of what had been done in the holy name.

For more than seven years, the Bush Administration waged the Global War on Terror as a religious war - precisely what should not have happened. From Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin's derision of Allah as a satanic idol while preaching in uniform to official military evangelizing of the local population in Iraq and Afghanistan to the biblical quotes on the president's daily Pentagon briefings, everything was cast in a stark my-God-can-kick-your-God's-butt light.

The problem with a religious war is there can be no compromise and no middle ground. Anything less than total war is tantamount to surrender. Worse yet, it tells people of the opposing faith that they are the enemy, even if the vast majority of those people would never take up arms in such a war.

This is the dilemma in which we now find ourselves. President Bush and his crowd did indeed see Islam and all Muslims as the enemy, but how can you differentiate between "bad" Muslims and "good" Muslims? In a religious war, you ultimately cannot. Casting the battle against terrorist groups who follow a twisted view of Islam as a struggle against an entire faith guarantees that such a fight will go on forever, with new generations of recruits perpetually induced to sign up by whatever religious insult is offered at any one time.

Cline is most certainly wrong when he said that "Islam has been and is certainly now at war with the U.S. and with the West." How can a religious faith be at war with anything? If he had said that some people who follow a faction of Islam are at war with the US, he would be more correct.

Rather ironically, he also says that, "There is no reconciliation possible between...reason and faith... As with reason versus any other faith or religion, it is a matter of 'either-or.'" Considering that the previous Administration saw the world precisely in such black-and-white religious terms, it's an odd argument for him to make.

After 9/11, the entire world was with us in our battle with al Qaeda - especially the Muslim world, who rightly saw Osama bin Laden and his murderous ilk as a threat to them as well. But President Bush threw that all away, preferring to fight the War on Terror as a global crusade - with all the connotations that word implies. The Administration and the larger Republican Party did everything they could to cast Muslims of all stripes as a vague and threatening Other, and all American Muslims were seen as potential traitors and terrorists. Is it any wonder that the Muslim world now sees us with deep suspicion, and is it any wonder that President Obama now has a lot of work to do to correct that image?

Let's look at it this way: suppose 9/11 had been carried out not by nineteen followers of bin Laden's perverted brand of Islam, but by nineteen followers of an apocalyptic Jewish sect. (And don't say "Jews would never do that" - look at Baruch Goldstein.) The vast majority of Jews loudly denounce what was done in their name and promise to root out the killers in their midst. And then the White House reacts by declaring war on Judaism itself, claiming that the religion is inherently violent and terroristic, no matter what actual Jews may say or do. The military goes on to invade and destroy Israel, desecrate the tallitot and tefillin of Jewish prisoners, and distribute Christian Bibles in Hebrew to convert local Jews to the "right" faith.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

President Obama was absolutely right last week in Cairo. We can no longer afford to treat 1.5 billion people as "less than" because they follow the same basic faith as do a band of fanatical killers. Such an approach would be tantamount to treating all Jews like Baruch Goldstein, or all Christians like Torquemada. If we want the Muslim world to live with us in peace, we have to live with them in peace, and that starts with treating them like adult human beings instead of religious untermenschen.

The Freedom Concerts Scam

It's that time of year again. The days are growing longer, the air is getting warmer and the kids are looking forward to summer vacation. Which also means it's time for Sean Hannity to start plugging his "Freedom Concerts" series on his TV and radio shows.

"It's all to raise money for a great cause," Hannity says, "the Freedom Alliance Scholarship Fund, which gives scholarships to the children of slain heroes." Great idea - kids whose parents died while serving our country certainly deserve all the help we can give. Lord knows they've earned it.

But the Freedom Concerts aren't as advertised. Only a tiny fraction of the ticket money ever gets to the people who need it.

While the fine print has mysteriously disappeared from Hannity's website, a number of bloggers preserved it for posterity: "The following fees are included in the above ticket prices: $4.75 facility fee, $4.25 parking fee, and a $4.00 donation to the Freedom Alliance." (Note: This is from 2007, but since Hannity no longer tells anyone how much of the ticket price is actually donated, let's assume nothing has changed.)

Putting aside the fact that parking costs more than the actual donation, the amount given is the same no matter how much you spend on a ticket - four dollars. Ticket prices can go to $300 or more, but let's say you get one of the cheap seats at $75, which means 5.3% is donated.

Now that you have your ticket, take a moment to note the fine print - the $4 does not go directly to the scholarship fund, but rather to the Freedom Alliance as a whole. This tax-exempt group, founded by Iran-Contra scoundrel and Fox News talking head Oliver North, exists primarily to push all sorts of right-wing causes. According to their website, "the Mission of Freedom Alliance is to advance the American heritage of freedom by honoring and encouraging military service, defending the sovereignty of the United States and promoting a strong national defense."

Oh yes, and they also throw a few bucks to the troops here and there. The FA's most recent Form 990 (the IRS form filed by tax-exempt groups) says they took in $12,459,317 in 2007. But if you keep looking, you find some surprising information on what was spent where:

• Salaries: $1,063,018
• Postage and shipping: $1,424,627
• Printing and publications: $1,151,428
• Grants and allocations: $895,347

That works out to 7.2% of their revenue being spent on grants. (By comparison, the United Negro College Fund spends 56% of their revenue on grants.) And if that doesn't grab you, consider that they actually spend more just on stamps than on the people who are supposed to be getting help.

But wait, it gets worse. If you run down the list of scholarship grants as given in the Form 990 (none of which are more than $6000, a small fraction of actual college costs) and add everything up, you get the grand total of $597,500.

$597,500 out of $12,459,317 is 4.8%. Combine that with the 5.3% of the cheap-seats ticket price and you get a final percentage of 0.25% of your money actually going for scholarships.

And if you get one of those $300 tickets, just 0.064% goes to the supposed purpose.

So when Hannity and his ilk flog their Freedom Concerts as a fundraiser for the kids of dead soldiers, they are actually perpetrating an extraordinarily cruel and heartless scam. They are ripping off well-meaning concertgoers who think they're helping the children of America's fallen warriors. Raking in the dough, they keep most of it for themselves while giving a pittance to those who need it the most.

There should be a special place in hell reserved for people like this.