Obama Overseas Fundraising Story is Fake

There is a fake story going around the internet, in email inboxes, and in the comments sections of these very pages, that says that a big chunk of Barack Obama's donations are coming from overseas, particularly the middle east.

The story even has a Maureen Dowd byline, dated June 29, and some feature a photo of the New York Times columnist.

The Obama campaign has been dogged by this type of smear during the entire campaign, and just when one lie is mostly stamped out, another pops up in its place.

While the appearance of a byline may seem like ironclad proof of authenticity, I would advise everyone to run their email news past any 5th grade teacher first. Here's a sample of the email:
Certainly the most interesting and potentially devastating phone call I have received during this election cycle came this week from one of the Obama's campaign Internet geeks. These are the staffers who devised Obama's Internet fund raising campaign which raised in the neighborhood of $200 million so far. That is more then twice the total funds raised by any candidate in history – and this was all from the Internet campaign.

What I learned from this insider was shocking but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that when it comes to fund raising there simply are no rules that can't be broken and no ethics that prevail.
If you don't have a 5th grade teacher handy, or a 5th grade education yourself, I'm pretty sure the New York Times has one of those inter-web thingys, where you type it in and you can see all of their stories.

Still, for me, if something sounds only slightly more high-fallutin' than the loudmouth at your local watering hole who's always saying, "Here's the thing..." it probably wasn't written by a professional journalist.

As recent events make clear, you can't always believe even what you see on the real news, but at least someone's keeping an eye on them. Use your email for videos of penguins being pushed over, and leave the news to the professionals.

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