Big_T
Posts: 3101
Joined: 6/7/2007
From: Milwakuee, WI
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Actually, I can dispute it. I searched public records on the FEC, which is required to post all contributions over 200.00, site as well as 2 other independent sites and didn't find ANY donations by either David or Barbara Mikkelson from California. There was one donation made by a Barbara Mikkelson from Texas in 1988 for the amount of $500.00, but the Barbara from snopes doesn't live in Texas. If you have other evidence that they did in fact donate, please let me know as I welcome any new information.
Here's the Federal Election Commision site as well as others where you can do your own search.
http://www.fec.gov/disclosure.shtml
http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/index.php
http://moneyline.cq.com/pml/home.do
http://fundrace.huffingtonpost.com/neighbors.php
http://www.campaignmoney.com/finance.asp?type=in
I actually did some research and this is the snopes.com response to the above email. I've attached the text, but the place I got it from (on snopes) is here:
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=37828
quote:
Allow me to provide a little background about who wrote this message and why.
While we were working on an article about some pictures of anti-Obama signs that had reportedly been posted outside a couple of businesses in different parts of the U.S. (including a State Farm insurance office), we were contacted by someone whom I'll call "Mr. X" (since he didn't have the integrity to put his real name out there). Mr X. stated, among other things, that: "The very photos you have posted I TOOK. I encouraged [the insurance agent] to do it - I should note we are close friends and he is my insurance agent." Note those words carefully: Mr. X said he encouraged his insurance agent to post anti-Obama signs outside his place of business and then took photographs of them which were promulgated all over the Internet. Someone had an acknowledged political bias from the outset, and it wasn't us.
Since the article was about verifying photographs, our objectives were to document that the photographs were real and that the accompanying text descriptions of them were accurate. The signs had already been removed by the time we finished our article; why they had been taken down was not relevant to our purpose and was therefore not a subject of interest -- save to Mr. X, who was anxious to impress upon us that the signs outside the State Farm office had supposedly been removed because the agent was fearful of threats from "liberal kooks." (Mr. X also said this information was "confidential," and therefore it was not something we could include in our article without permission from everyone involved.)
Even though we had already gathered enough information from various sources to document that the signs were indeed real, as a typical matter of thoroughness we made inquiries of both the agent and State Farm to see if they wanted to provide any additional information. The former didn't get back to us, while the latter did -- a State Farm representative told us they had asked that the signs be removed from outside the office as soon as they found out about them (information which we noted in our article). We also knew that the agent had been providing other inquirers with the contradictory information that he removed the signs when he had discovered that the supposed quote from Barack Obama displayed on one side was apocryphal.
Subsequently, because it suited his agenda, Mr. X began spreading false information about us around the Internet. Of course, all of this information could easily have been verified as false with a minimal amount of research (or even resorting to the simple expedient of asking us), but Mr. X made not the slightest attempt to do so because that wouldn't have suited his purpose. The notion that people have been trying "for years to out who exactly was behind snopes.com" and "only recently did Wikipedia get to the bottom of it" is absurd, a claim that could only be made by someone determined to utterly ignore any reality that didn't conform to his biases. In all the years we have been operating this site, we have been interviewed hundreds and hundreds of times by journalists, we have made countless radio and television appearances, and we have had reporters and film crews over to our house to document exactly how we work. It's hard to imagine how we could have been any *more* public about who we are and what we do, and simply reading one of the many major-publication articles that have been written about us by journalists who actually took the time to find out how we work (or undertaking such a basic step as reading our site's FAQ) would have revealed that information Mr. X suggests is "hidden" has in fact been publicly available for many years. But Mr. X didn't bother with any of this, because the facts wouldn't have supported his agenda.
There's a simple word to describe a person who clings to information that supports what he wants to believe while ignoring contradictory information: "biased."
For the record: We're not Jewish (not that it should matter to anyone save anti-semites), we don't live in the San Fernando Valley (and never have), and neither one of us is a Democrat ("liberal" or otherwise). Barbara's a Canadian citizen who couldn't possibly have an affiliation with a U.S. political party, and I'm officially an independent. (I have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, as well as candidates from other parties, in past elections.) Neither of us has ever made a donation to a political party or candidate, worked on behalf of a political campaign (either on a paid or volunteer basis), or publicly endorsed or supported any party, candidate, or political cause (not even to the extent of displaying a bumper sticker, putting up a yard sign, or wearing a campaign button). Someone didn't know how to do basic investigative research, and it wasn't us.
Of course, anyone who gave the issue a moment's thought would wonder why, if we were such "liberal Democrats," we'd even bother writing an article about photographs of anti-Obama signs (much less vet them as real), thereby publicizing a negative message about a Democratic candidate to thousands of readers who might otherwise not have encountered it. But not Mr. X, because such thinking wouldn't validate his bias.
Yes, we are just two people (we've never claimed to be otherwise), but so were Woodward and Bernstein, and they broke one of the biggest news stories of the last century. Although many journalists work for larger news organizations, most journalistic articles are actually written by one or two people, not "a big office of investigators and researchers" or "a team of lawyers." We've been researching and writing articles for nearly twenty years now, and our work is continually written about and cited by news organizations across the U.S., from national news outlets such as CNN and USA Today to major newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times to hundreds of other local newspapers around the country.
So, as always, be wary of unsourced, anonymous e-mails. They typically come from people who don't check facts and disdain any information that doesn't further their agendas. Fact-checking sites with long established histories of reliability are good places to start when you receive such e-mails:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/int...es_exposed.htm
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/s/snopes.htm
Forward this to everyone you know.
< Message edited by Big_T -- 11/22/2008 2:12:09 PM >
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RE: Snopes...This is intresting - 
