Got a crazy forwarded political email from your family? Post them here.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Got a crazy forwarded political email from your family? Post them here.

merchant_x: Dec 29, 2000; Will choke to death for food.; Nap Ghost

Since Snopes was mentioned earlier up the thread I'll go ahead and post this one I got from my dad this week.

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And you believe that SNOPES is the final word on the authenticity of any circulating statements???? Then think again.
----- Original Message -----
From: Bill Wolf

I've always suspected Snopes had a political agenda.....too many times they have gone out of their way to protect Obama and other democrats. I have also heard that Wikipedia is ran by liberals also. We are being outgunned on the web.

Check this out.

For the past few years https://www.snopes.com has positioned itself, or others have labeled it as the 'tell-all, final word' on any comment, claim and e-mail.

But for several years people tried to find out who exactly was behind snopes.com. Only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it - kinda makes you wonder what they were hiding. Well, finally we know. It is run by a husband and wife team - that's right, no big office of investigators and researchers, no team of lawyers. It's just a mom-and-pop operation that began as a hobby.

David and Barbara Mikkelson in the San Fernando Valley of California started the website about 13 years ago - and they have no formal background or experience in investigative research. After a few years it gained popularity believ ing it to be unbiased and neutral, but over the past couple of years people started asking questions who was behind it and did they have a selfish motivation? The reason for the questions - or skepticisms - is a result of snopes.com claiming to have the bottom line facts to certain questions or issues, when in fact, they have been proven wrong. Also, there were criticisms the Mikkelsons were not really investigating and getting to the 'true' bottom of various issues.

When I saw that Snopes had falsely claimed that Obama's Birth Certificate had been properly validated, I realized something was wrong with either their research and/or their credibility. It seems something is seriously wrong with both.

Then a few months ago, when my State Farm agent Bud Gregg in Mandeville hoisted a political sign referencing Barack Obama and made a big splash across the Internet, supposedly the Mikkelson's claim to have researched this issue before posting their findings on snopes.com. In their statement they claimed the corporate office of State Farm pressured Gregg into taking down the sign, when in fact nothing of the sort ever took place.

I personally contacted David Mikkelson (and he replied back to me) thinking he would want to get to the bottom of this, and I gave him Bud Gregg's contact phone numbers. Bud was going to give him phone numbers to the big exec's at State Farm in Illinois who would have been willing to speak with him about it. He never called Bud. In fact, I learned from Bud Gregg no one from snopes.com ever contacted anyone with State Farm. Yet snopes.com issued a statement as the 'final factual word' on the issue as if they did all their homework and got to the bottom of things. Not!

Then it has been learned the Mikkelson's are very Democrat and extremely liberal. As we all now know from this presidential election, liberals have a purpose agenda to discredit anything that appears to be conservative. There has been much criticism lately over the Internet with people pointing out the Mikkelson's liberalism revealing itself in their website findings. Gee, what a shock!

So, I say this now to everyone who goes to https://www.snopes.com to get what they think to be the bottom line facts: Proceed with caution. Take what it says at face value and nothing more. Use it only to lead you to their references where you can link to and read the sources for yourself. Plus, you can always Google a subject and do the research yourself. It now seems apparent that's all the Mikkelson's do. After all, I can personally vouch from my own experience for their 'not' fully looking into things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snopes.com

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I don't know who Bill Wolf is but his added commentary before he forwarded was particularly amusing to me.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2009 05:33

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 19:27

merchant_x: Dec 29, 2000; Will choke to death for food.; Nap Ghost

Has this one been posted yet?

quote:

This is so sad; from a proud, strong country to a laughing stock of the world.

Canadians Version of David Letterman's Top 10. Just makes you want to shake your head in disbelief, and, just maybe choke someone in charge.

This is Canada's Top Ten List of America's Stupidity.

Of course we look like idiots - we are!

# 10 Only in America... could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 per plate Obama campaign fund-raising event.

# 09 Only in America... could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black while only 14% of the population is black, 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans - 3X the rate that go to whites, 5X the rate that go to Hispanics!
,
# 08 Only in America... could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

# 07 Only in America... can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

# 06 Only in America... would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become American citizens. (probably should be number one)

# 05 Only in America... could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be called EXTREMISTS.

# 04 Only in America... could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

# 03 Only in America... could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

# 02 Only in America... could you collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year - for total spending of $7 Million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

# 01 Only in America.... could the rich people - who pay 86% of all income taxes - be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.

PLEASE DON'T KEEP THIS - SEND IT OUT TO YOUR ENTIRE LIST.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2015 01:40

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Got a crazy forwarded political email from your family? Post them here.