In Arizona, more birther buffoonery

IF ONE-FIFTIETH of 1 percent of Arizonans demanded that Ken Bennett, the state’s Republican secretary of state, go to work in the nude, would he comply? Not likely. After all, Mr. Bennett, the former Republican president of the Arizona Senate, is planning to run for governor in two years. It wouldn’t pay to pander to crackpots — and humiliate himself in the bargain. Or would it?

The question arises because Mr. Bennett, allegedly in response to e-mailed requests from 1,200 Arizonans, has demanded that Hawaii provide him with verification of President Obama’s birth certificate. If he doesn’t get it, he says, he might strike the president’s name from the state’s ballot this fall.

Read the rest here.

It's not often I agree with Op-Eds in major newspapers and damned rare if that paper is the Washington Post or their equally left leaning northern cousin the New York Times. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day and they are right on this one.  So for the record (gag), I am in complete agreement with this editorial.

Brett Baier explains "Natural Born Citizen"

I can't believe someone from FOX News actually wrote this. Rupert must have been really shaken by all of his recent scandals. I foresee a lot of exploding heads among Birthers.

Here's the deal...

Many legal analysts and scholars agree with this take-- and until the Supreme Court weighs in.. this is how the law is interpreted:

The Constitution requires that the president be a "natural born citizen," but does not define the term. That job is left to federal law, in 8 U.S. Code, Section 1401. All the law requires is that the mother be an American citizen who has lived in the U.S. for five years or more, at least two of those years after the age of 14. If the mother fits those criteria, the child is a U.S. citizen at birth, regardless of the father's nationality.

The brouhaha over President Obama's birth certificate -- has revealed a widespread ignorance of some of the basics of American citizenship. The Constitution, of course, requires that a president be a "natural born citizen," but the Founding Fathers did not define the term, and it appears few people know what it means.

The law lists several categories of people who are considered American citizens at birth. There are the people born inside the United States; no question there. There are the people who are born outside the United States to parents who are both citizens, provided one of them has lived in the U.S. for any period of time. There are the people who are born outside the United States to one parent who is a U.S. citizen and the other who is a U.S. national (that is, from an outlying possession of the U.S.), provided the citizen parent has lived in the United States or its possessions for at least one year prior to the birth of the child. And then there are the people who are born outside the United States to one parent who is a U.S. citizen and the other who is an alien, provided the citizen parent lived in the United States or its possessions for at least five years, two of them after the age of 14.

They're all natural born U.S. citizens.* That also includes people who are born in Puerto Rico and people who were born in states before they became states. Born in Hawaii in 1950, a decade before statehood? You're a natural born U.S. citizen.

That is how legal experts interpret the "natural born" requirement.. and how you get that status is actually pretty open. Until the Supreme Court weighs in on this issue (and there are no plans that we know of that that will happen)... -- to your emails... Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Bobby Jindal are both eligible to run and become Vice President or President.

Read the Source.
* Emphasis mine (A/O)

Perry: Obama is an American citizen (Says he was just kidding in birther comments)

Seeking to end three days of distractions from his campaign, Texas Gov. Rick Perry says in an interview to air Sunday that he has no doubt that President Obama is an American citizen, saying he was only kidding around about the issue when he raised doubts about where Obama was born.

The St. Petersburg Times reported today that Perry told the newspaper, when asked if he thinks Obama is an American citizen, "I have no doubt about it." (See transcript at the end of this story.)

Though Perry has repeatedly called the so-called "birther" talk a "distraction," he has continued the sideshow by refusing to answer questions about whether he believes Obama was born in the United States. It has had a negative impact on his campaign, overshadowing at times the tax and entitlement reform proposals he unveiled on Monday and Tuesday. And it raised the question of potential pandering by the Perry campaign to extremists in the Republican Party who maintain that Obama's origins are suspect in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Read the rest here.

Stick a fork in him.  Perry is (well) done.

Rick Perry’s birther Parade

If at first you don’t secede, try the birther movement.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who more than once has dipped his cowboy boot into the secessionist swamp, has found a new outlet for his fringe instincts. The Republican presidential candidate has revived questions about President Obama’s birth certificate.

The controversy pretty much died in the spring when Obama, hounded by “carnival barker” Donald Trump, released his long-form birth certificate confirming his birth in the United States and, therefore, his eligibility for the presidency. But Perry, in an interview in Sunday’s Parade magazine, showed that he marches to a different drummer:

Read the rest here.

Obama Slams "Carnival Barkers" and Releases Long Form Birth Certificate

I don't blame him for doing it, but it was a political mistake.  The "birthers" were tearing apart the GOP and making conservatives look like escapees from the state asylum.  Of course a lot of them won't accept it.  I can already here the cries of "forgery" from the wingnuts.

Read the story here or pretty much on any news site.

Military Court sentences "birther"

More news from the lunatic fringe...

FORT MEADE, Maryland — An Army doctor who disobeyed orders to deploy to Afghanistan because he questioned President Barack Obama's eligibility to be commander in chief has been sentenced to six months in a military prison and will be dismissed from the Army.

A military jury sentenced Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin on Thursday after three days of court-martial proceedings.

Before sentencing, Lakin had been found guilty of missing a flight that would have gotten him to his eventual deployment.

He also pleaded guilty to disobeying orders to meet with a superior and to report to deploy to Afghanistan.

Besides his sentence, Lakin will pay a potentially heavy financial price.

At 18 years in the Army he was two years short of retirement, which over the course of a lifetime could have added up to an estimated $2 million in retirement pay and benefits, according to NBC News.

In videos posted on YouTube earlier this year, Lakin aligned himself with the so-called "birther" movement, which questions whether Obama is a natural-born citizen as the U.S. Constitution requires for presidents.

Source

It appears that the courts are becoming less tolerant of these moonbats.

The other conspiracy nuts (the lefties have theirs too)

I have occasionally, and with some justification, been accused of harping on the far right conspiracy wackos that infest the Tea Party movement and have a solid following in the Republican Party while ignoring the kooks who inhabit the far left. I can only plead as a defense that I am a bit more sensitive about those on the right, having been for most of my life a Republican (never to be confused with a small 'r' republican) who just took it for granted that a goodly number of those on the extreme left were several fries short of a Happy Meal. That said, I offer the following in reparation for my hitherto one sided focus on the reality challenged in the GOP.

A small gathering of 50 or 60 people; roughly 95 percent white, 90 percent male, a few blond-haired kids, average age 45, all nodding in assent as a series of speakers explains that our government is conspiring against us and fabricating massive lies in order to hide its own crimes and frighten us into giving up our constitutional rights and liberties.

The Tea Party? Minutemen? Birthers? No, “Truthers,” left-wing conspiracy theorists who believe (among other things) that 9/11 was an inside job, that no plane hit the Pentagon, that Ted Olson did not receive a call from his wife, Barbara, shortly before she perished in the crash of Flight 77, that the anthrax scare was also a government hoax (although the anthrax was real and deadly), and that hurricane Katrina was the result of weather manipulation by racists or profiteers or both.

Like many others, I was aware of these theories and aware too that a significant percentage of Americans (about the same percentage that believes President Obama is a Muslim who was born in Kenya) was at least partly persuaded by them. But on Aug. 15 I got an up-close look at the phenomenon when I attended a meeting of Truthers that just happened to be held in Livingston Manor, a small Catskill town about 20 miles from my house.

Read the rest here.

Ironically many of the leading exponents of the "9-11 Truther" movement were also early and leading figures in the "Birther" movement and have filed multiple court cases in an effort to prove their many bizarre beliefs. In every instance they have been laughed out of court. In at least a few instances they were fined for abusing the legal system with their frivolous suits. None of which has deterred them.

Hawaii to birther loons: Go away!

HONOLULU — The conspiracy theorists who cling to the false belief that President Obama was born outside the United States outrage many Democrats and embarrass many Republicans. But to a group of state workers who toil away in a long building across from the Capitol, they represent something else: a headache and a waste of time.

The theorists, known as “birthers,” have deluged the state Health Department here with so many demands for information about the president’s birth in Hawaii that Gov. Linda Lingle, a Republican, signed a law this week allowing state agencies to ignore repeated requests from people who have had a request answered in the last year.

It comes none too soon for Health Department workers, who have been inundated with so many requests for the president’s birth records that a printout of the e-mail messages they have received on the topic through March stands some 13 inches high. Each one required a response, and many required consultations with state lawyers.

“It became really, really a burden,” said Janice Okubo, a spokeswoman for the department, who said that handling the hundreds of requests took up huge amounts of the department’s time as it was trying to respond to an H1N1 flu outbreak. Many requests, she said, came from the same handful of people.

Read the rest here
My take on birthers.

More from the moonbat files...

Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, a decorated military man who has become a part of the fringe "birther" movement - which believes President Obama was not born in the United States - could face a dishonorable discharge for failing to obey orders, MSNBC reported on Tuesday.

The 18-year veteran came out in support of the largely discredited conspiracy theorists at the end of March, proclaiming he would "disobey" his "illegal" orders to deploy.

"I believe all servicemen and women, and the American people, deserve the truth about President Obama's constitutional eligibility to the office of the presidency and the commander in chief," he said in a video statement posted on YouTube on March 30.

Read the rest here.

At the risk of sounding unChristian, IMO this man needs to be dealt with severely. Private citizens have an absolute right to subscribe to any zany beliefs they wish provided they don't break the law. Members of the armed forces do NOT have that right. Nor do they have the right to spread seditious lies. The military should throw the book at him. His actions could have extremely prejudicial effects on the good order and discipline of the armed forces.

When I was in the Navy the way it was explained to me is if given an order from any superior you are obligated to obey it. If you believe it is unlawful you must still obey it and file your complaint later. The ONLY generally recognized exceptions were in cases where the "unlawful" order was as a matter of common sense one that would endanger lives and or the ship or violate the laws of war (war crimes). In those cases anyone refusing to obey said orders could be required to defend their actions in court. The burden of proof is on the defendant in such cases as there is a legal presumption that orders are lawful unless proven otherwise.

That policy exists for very good reasons. You can't have everyone making up their own mind about what orders they will and will not obey in the armed forces.

This nut job needs to be cashiered and sent to the brig.

More on the birther loons...

Apparently the recent fine of $20,000 for abusing the legal system with frivolous lawsuits has not deterred Orly Taitz, one of the leaders of the so called "birther" movement (previously addressed in this post), from attempts to advance the lunatic fringe's agenda through the courts.

Judge David O. Carter in dismissing Taitz's latest attempts at judicial knavery writes in part...

"Plaintiffs have attacked the judiciary, including every prior court that has dismissed their claim, as unpatriotic and even treasonous for refusing to grant their requests and for adhering to the terms of the Constitution which set forth its jurisdiction," he writes.

"Respecting the constitutional role and jurisdiction of this Court is not unpatriotic,"... "Quite the contrary, this Court considers commitment to that constitutional role to be the ultimate reflection of patriotism."

..."The Court has received several sworn affidavits that Taitz asked potential witnesses that she planned to call before this Court to perjure themselves,"... "This Court is deeply concerned that Taitz may have suborned perjury through witnesses she intended to bring before this Court."

..."Plaintiffs appear to assume that should the Court receive a document from Kenya, the Court would give credence to this document over the American birth records of the President and the case would be resolved."

Source.
Read the entire opinion here.