WND is just one of many right-wing online publications that seem to have spent a huge amount of time trying to shine the most negative and despicable light on President Obama through lies, innuendos and blatant slander….
WND, one of my personal favorite right-wing propaganda machine sites, has apparently and unwittingly committed a crime while erroneously reporting that Obama is accepting money from foreign nationals.
WND made the claim that, “Using a Pakistani Internet Protocol and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address, “Osama bin Laden” has successfully donated twice to Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign.”
First of all, that’s not true. As the Obama campaign has explained (and has, unsurprisingly, been ignored),
“If a billing address is verified via AVS, then the credit card contribution is processed without delay. Some transactions caught by AVS may initially appear to a donor to have been accepted even though this is not the case. Obama for America employs a manual process to review any transaction flagged by AVS, also taking into account other fraud risk factors, and using fraud detection services provided by our credit card processor.
“As an example, the contribution discussed here may have initially appeared to have gone through when the donor completed the transaction at 10:18 a.m. but it was rejected at 4:51 p.m. under our standard fraud detection procedures.
“So any claims that Obama for America has disabled AVS are inaccurate; any question about this would have been answered-if the question had been asked.”
Conveniently, this information is not noted in the WND article, but they don’t seem to care much about what is correct and what isn’t. They also state that, “The acceptance of foreign contributions is strictly illegal under U.S. campaign finance law,” which isn’t true, either. Foreign donations, provided they come from U.S. citizens, are perfectly legal. What isn’t legal are donations from foreign nationals. American citizens outside of the United States must prove citizenship for the donation to be accepted.
Another bit of easily verifiable information that they failed to properly investigate comes from the Daily Caller, a well known source for totally fair and balanced conservative propaganda news:
As the Daily Caller reported, a statement accompanied the GAI’s report from former U.S. Attorney Ken Sukhia noting that 68 percent of traffic to BarackObama.com comes from foreign users, all of whom are redirected to a fundraising page operated by the president’s re-election campaign.
First of all, the domain name that the Daily Caller reported on was not – repeat, not – BarackObama.com. It was, in fact, Obama.com, and those two domain names have different traffic results entirely. However, the 68% foreign traffic number is wrong for both, as easily seen and verified on Alexa (barackobama.com site stats found here and obama.com stats here).
Here are screenshots for the traffic percentages to each:
As you can see, foreign hits are actually only 17.6% of traffic on BarackObama.com — a far cry from 68%.
Here’s the picture for Obama.com:
For Obama.com, 29.3% are from foreign countries. Also, considering Obama’s good standing in the world, it is not surprising in the least that there are foreign visitors to his site.
On another note, somebody should probably let the good folks over at WND know that donations in another person’s name are not permitted before they take the following action: “WND is preparing an affidavit for the Federal Elections Commission and the FBI on the illegal donation accepted by the Obama campaign.”
Yeah, good luck with that. Aaron Klein, the writer that published this piece of easily disproved garbage, should probably get the “worst journalist ever” award for this one. However, the real goal was never accurate journalism anyway, but rather a piece of fiction that will be seized upon and repeated ad nauseam. As reported by Media Matters:
Right-wing media are ignoring anti-fraud protections the Obama campaign has in place to allege that the Obama campaign accepted donations from someone impersonating Osama bin Laden.
Matt Drudge is hyping an article by World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein who claimed that ”Using a Pakistani Internet Protocol and proxy server, a disposable credit card and a fake address, ‘Osama bin Laden’ has successfully donated twice to Barack Obama’s presidential re-election campaign.’ “
Have fun with that, conservatives. We’ll be looking forward to your breathless and credulous reporting on this non-story for the next week in between your hourly floggings of the made up Benghazi scandal.
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