That is super-f'ed up. Let me see if I have this straight. 1) he's an anti-Obama birther 2) he specifically volunteered for duty in the area 3) as a reservist, he can rescind his voluntary request for deployment 4) legal case thrown out because he was within his legal rights to change his mind, the military wasn't forcing such duty upon him 5) basically, the guy is a **** who volunteered specifically for such duty just so that he could file the lawsuit, this disrupting military planning when he backed out. 6) the military is fully within their rights to make him clean latrines with a toothbrush until the day his enlistment is up, at which point they can give him a dishonorable discharge?
Lest your forget, there also were challenges to McCain's natural-born citizenship. I don't know why "it's not fair to even ask". There are questions & issues raised about every candidate. Not all relate to the accident of birth. Think back to gossip about Clinton's trip to Russia & Bush's National Guard service. It all depends on whose ox is being gored. If anything, people like Taitz make most of the rest of us feel reassured about our own sanity. I'm not a big fan of misuse of the courts, however, so I would appreciate it if there was some sort of committee on integrity in California which would look into her activities. The hesitancy of most courts to impose attorney's fees & costs for frivolous lawsuits bothers me.
With the amount of public record information subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, there certainly is going to be too much information out there. I don't know why someone wouldn't be entitled to view Hawaii's long-form birth certificates, in whatever format they have been preserved. I have seen some pretty impressive forged documents during my career, as well as some pretty lame ones. I once argued in court that IMO I could obtain my own Haitian birth certificate for about $200, establishing that I was 16 years old! (A defendant was alleging that he was a minor.) I also once had the occasion to subpoena a Custodian of Records for a hospital, who took such care of the millions of pages of documents produced during her career that she actually refused to surrender the original documents which she had brought with her to court! (The authenticity of some certified copies had been challenged.) She became so excited when opposing counsel asked for them, that we thought she was going to collapse! The judge eventually had an envelope marked for identification, had her put the originals in it, then remove them, then had us all handle the envelope as if it were the originals (a nice move, IMO!). So, who knows? There may be some actual records from Obama's birth somewhere in a hospital in Hawaii. If anything, they would make a nice exhibit in his future Presidential Library!
In retrospect, producing that Hawaii birth certificate created the opposite of the intended effect. To conspiracy theorists, no amount of evidence can debunk their wackiness - to them, any counter-evidence is more puzzles in their conspiracy puzzle.
I wonder with all these frivolous lawsuits that people are filing, and using all this taxpayer money, whether Obama should resign so he can work for America from outside the president's office. I mean at this point its time for him to be a good point guard and pass the ball so he won't have so many lawsuits wasting taxpayers time and money.
Now this is ugly ... [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V1nmn2zRMc&e"]YouTube - Mike Castle on PeeBo's Birthcertificate.[/ame]
God, I hate stupid people. EDIT: Actually, "stupid people" was downplaying the ugliness of that clip. That's grassroots fascism in action, that.
At least the people who are focused on the birth certificate aren't focusing on things where they can actually have an impact. That article on Orly Taitz was interesting. Before reading it, I was like, how can you combat this stuff when they don't believe any evidence that you provide them with? But now that I've read it, she's displaying signs of mental instability (e.g. someone comments on her blog that she's an idiot, she tracks the IP address back to Everett WA and comes to the conclusion that whoever posted that is working for Obama, because Obama's mom spent some time at the University of Washington, which is in Seattle, near Everett), so I can feel pity for her instead of wondering how to combat her. I wonder what would happen if someone made a dentist appointment with her, and then cancelled it, saying "Obama told me to cancel this"? No, that would be too mean. She needs help, not people messing with her.
No kidding. I can't believe we've gotten to the point where this kind of crazyness is so incredibly widespread. That's in Delaware, for chrissakes. I feel sorry for Rep. Castle. I mean, June 30! The election is long over! BTW, WTF is "PeeBo"? Is that some racist term I'm unfamiliar with? Oh, and I found a freeper thread on this very video, and the idiocy is ASTOUNDING. They are arguing for something that IMO is clearly not supported in the law (despite technically being an unsettled issue, the legal definition of "natural born"). Part of my favorite post: 1. Are their two types of citizenship (naturalized and natural born) or three (naturalized, natural born and some third type of citizenship at birth but not "natural born"). 2. Is there any way Obama could have lost his citizenship before his eighteenth birthday? I ask because I want to know if there is anything Lolo Soetoro could have done to take away Obama's (possible) US citizenship, or if it is immune to any parent's actions up to and including getting a (possible) Indonesian citizenship for Obama. 3. How did Obama get to Pakistan and under what country's passport did he travel? Is getting another country's passport equivalent to giving up one's US citizenship? Dude, the answer to question 1 is right there in the question, and the answers to two and three are trivial ("no"; you cannot lose your citizenship without explicitly wishing to lose it). Unbelievable.
When I click on the PC&E forum and someone's posted in this thread I see: Whack jobs and Birth..... I can't help but adding "Control" and thinking, yep, that's affective.
I'm telling you, all that chicken shit in rural Delaware is like nerve gas this time of year. They're all certifiably insane down there.
I was going to say, at least the whole birther movement is keeping the nutty people focused on a bright shiny objects. At least they're not filling U-Haul trucks with explosives or gunning down abortion doctors.
Well, these folks are a few clowns short of a circus. But here's Salon wondering about CNN, Fox, and the Birthers.... http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/?last_story=/politics/war_room/2009/07/20/birthers/ CNN had two of the leaders of the birther movement -- perennial candidate Alan Keyes, and his rather eccentric attorney, Orly Taitz -- on Lou Dobbs' show Friday night. That decision doesn't reflect well on CNN, but to its credit, (and almost certainly because Dobbs himself wasn't hosting) Kitty Pilgrim, who did the interview, was pretty tough on Keyes and Taitz. If Dobbs had been there, the situation might well have been different: He had the two on his radio show last week, and played the exceedingly credulous interviewer, almost never challenging them and accepting even some of their most ludicrous allegations. Fox News is, at least, still not bringing the birthers themselves on. But that's about all you can say for the network and for one of its stars, Sean Hannity. Last week, he did a short segment on one short-lived birther lawsuit, also involving Taitz, and fell hook, line and sinker for Taitz's spin of the case. Turns out she was, as always, completely wrong. Video of both segments {in the link}
Yeah, I meant to add "yet". Obama has the best security detail in the universe, so he should be alright, but you know how those crazies are. They do crazy things.
That is frightening. I'm still amazed at how these people can hate Obama that much. I know a LOT of people disliked Bush, but I don't recall this type of anger in this type of setting and certainly not this early in his presidency. And then, you have this guy on stage. Typical politician. He shoots down her idiocy and then joins in with her on the pledge of allegiance so that he doesn't look un-American. I wish he would have stood their with his arms crossed and then said, "I'll join you in saying the pledge of allegiance AFTER you accept the legitimacy of our government and our President."
Lou Dobbs is staying on top of this. Not in a good way. http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/feature/2009/07/22/dobbs/ From the beginning of his coverage, Dobbs has been repeating a familiar trope of the birthers and their supporters: If Obama would just release his real birth certificate, the long form rather than the certification of live birth he made public last year, then all of this would be over. "I believe Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States, folks, don't you? But I do have a couple of little questions, like you. Why not just provide a copy of the birth certificate? That's entirely within the president's power to do so. Then all of this nonsense goes away," Dobbs said on his radio show Tuesday. "One would think the president would want to get rid of this nonsense. But he doesn't. And so none of us knows what the reality is." But Dobbs knows that the crowd of conspiracy theorists he's now supporting won't be placated that easily. When he brought Keyes and Taitz on his show, he mentioned that he'd asked Taitz, off-air, whether the release of a long form birth certificate would satisfy her. "She said no," Dobbs told his audience, and then directed the question to her again. "Both parents have to be citizens in order to satisfy the requirements of natural-born citizen," Taitz responded. In other words, for the de facto leader of the movement, her questions can never go away, because Obama's father was a British citizen at the time of his son's birth. (For the record, Taitz is wrong about the law here, as she very often is; in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case, the Supreme Court said a child born in the U.S. is a natural-born citizen regardless of their parents' citizenship.) Besides, Dobbs is completely wrong about the legal status of the certificate of live birth that Obama released. He said Tuesday that "there is no actual birth certificate. There is a document that says there is a birth certificate." But what Obama has made public thus far is the same form that anyone requesting their birth certificate from Hawaii would receive, and state officials have made very clear that it's authentic and shows he was born there. Taitz and others say, wrongly, that there's a Hawaiian statute that applied to Obama that would have allowed his parents to register a foreign birth there, and somehow get state officials to say he was born in Honolulu. But as Janice Okubo, the director of communications for the Hawaii Department of Health, recently explained to the Washington Independent's David Weigel, "If you were born in Bali, for example, you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali. You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate. But it’s become very clear that it doesn’t matter what I say. The people who are questioning this bring up all these implausible scenarios." That gets to the heart of the problem here. While Dobbs' colleagues at CNN, like Rick Sanchez and even Kitty Pilgrim, his own guest host, have debunked the birthers' claims, Dobbs himself says he's learned a lot about birth certificates and the whole issue from Taitz and Keyes. And that raises a question: With other CNN hosts having offered the actual facts on the air -- Pilgrim even attributed the debunking to the network itself -- why is Dobbs allowed to go on and make these false claims, without any hint of opposition? For now, CNN's not saying.
Republicans are getting dragged down by this "issue". There was a video of a Republican congresscritter on Hardball where Chris Matthews was pushing him to admin that Obama was legit, and the guy was trying to weasel out of it. If he says Obama is legit, he loses the support of the birthers (and maybe gets challenged in the primary by someone crazier than he is), and if he joins the birthers, his Democratic opponent in the next election can use that against him.
Here's the video: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVndfV4--5g"]YouTube - Chris Matthews Smacks Down Birther Rep. Campbell; Makes Him Admit Obama is U.S. Citizen[/ame]
http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/07/22/liz_cheney_and_birthers/ Add Liz Cheney to the list of people not denouncing the yahoos. I wasn't planning to blog so I took notes in real-time, and I can't promise Cheney's quote is verbatim. But she said the same thing twice, so I'm confident I caught her drift. After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that's one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a "poor, pathetic" fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because "People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas." The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney -- which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable. Carville called her on it, accurately: "She refuses to say, 'This is ludicrous,' because she actually wants to encourage these people to believe this." Now, I've debated Cheney, so I know she'll do anything from rudely interrupting to lying to make her point, but even I expected her to take King's opportunity to distinguish her brand of Republicanism from the hooligans who run with the Birthers. But she didn't. Wow. The GOP keeps coughing up younger, supposedly more compelling, "new" leadership, from Sarah Palin to Mark Sanford to, now, Liz Cheney -- and they keep making clear they're not ready for prime time. It's remarkable.