Lou Dobbs is a birther?! [vid]

[CaptainChewbacca]

How is even his birth an issue? His mother was born a US citizen. Even if she was 14 when he was born he's still a US citizen no matter where he was born!

Not true. As I've said previously in this thread, natural citizenship by birth would not have been conferred on Obama because his mother was only 18. As per the law in the US at the time of his birth, she would have had to have lived in the US for two years AFTER she turned 18. She was too young to pass citizenship to him by herself. That's why they're so keen on proving he wasn't born in the US. Its also what's different between Obama and McCain; Both of McCain's parents were citizens and of sufficient age to make him a citizen.

Edit: Actually, I think it was another thread, but I've said it on SDN several times.

[Darth Wong]

Of course, the people desperately trying to prove this in the face of all evidence to the contrary are the same people who said we should just sweep evidence of pro-Bush electoral shenanigans under the rug in 2000, in order to "heal the nation".

[Elfdart]

Of course, Elfdart ignores all the evidence that's come out since 1945 about the Roosevelt Administration -- especially about Henry A. Wallace; FDR's VP from 41-45; who was very likely a KGB Source, according to Vassily Mitrokhin.

And this proves Roosevelt was a communist Jew working for Moscow? Fail, as the kids say nowadays.

I have the The Sword and the Shield. The book only references Wallace as having been "naively pro-Soviet," not as a spy or informant. In fact, the book is pretty clear that Wallace himself didn't have a direct connection with the KGB.

What other evidence about the Roosevelt Administration are you referring to? I am only familiar with Laurence Duggan, who was with the Department of State (and had more or less been uncovered by the FBI after the war), and Harry Dexter White, in the Department of Treasury (and was ratted out in 1939 by a Soviet defecter, but not acted against until well after the war).

Yellow Rain Man is caught in yet another lie. Oh, and today is Thursday. And the sun rose in the east this morning...

[Fire Fly]

link

Less than half of Republicans believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America, a new public opinion poll finds.

Only 42 percent of Republican respondents in a Research 2000 survey, conducted for the liberal website Daily Kos, said they thought Obama was a natural born citizen; 28 percent said they did not believe Obama was born in the United States; 30 percent said they were not sure.

The responses, which were gathered after several prominent conservative media personalities fed suspicion that Obama was unconstitutionally holding office, show the extent to which the conspiracy has taken hold in the GOP.

That only a plurality of Republicans were willing to acknowledge the president was born in America is nothing short of astounding, considering the preponderance of evidence that confirms his Hawaiian birth.

The conspiracy has a regional flavor. Overall, even including Democrats and independents, only 47 percent of respondents in the South said they believed Obama was born in America, with 23 percent saying he was not and 30 percent saying they were unsure. In the Northeast and Midwest, the percentage of respondents who believe Obama was born in the U.S. was over 90 percent.

Ninety-three percent of Democrats say the president was born in the United States, as do 83 percent of independents.

An email to the survey's authors, asking for the number of individuals surveyed in the Research 2000 poll, was not immediately returned.

Jesus christ. These numbers are scandalous and this certainly smells like racism.

[General Zod]

Jesus christ. These numbers are scandalous and this certainly smells like racism.

Not really a surprise. 28% is about the same amount as Dubya's approval rating before he left office, right?

[KroLazuxy_87]

The evidence stacked against the birthers was aired on Lou Dobbs' show...

This is about a week old now from The Daily Show, go ahead and skip to about 3:30 in the video clip.

Link to video

[Ryan Thunder]

Alternatively, they're just undereducated, credulous morons...

[General Zod]

Alternatively, they're just undereducated, credulous morons...

Turns out most racists are under-educated morons?

[Azazal]

Alternatively, they're just undereducated, credulous morons...

Turns out most racists are under-educated morons?

Quoting Zod for the mother fucking truth:

Birthers strongest in the south

But I was especially surprised by the regional breakdowns. In the Northeast, West, and Midwest, the overwhelming majorities realize the president is a native-born American. But notice the South -- only 47% got it right and 30% are unsure.

** damn I see that Fire Fly got it already, ok well there is a pretty graph to go with the numbers **

[Darksider]

I really don't see why the regional breakdown surprised anyone.

It's fairly well known that the south is full of racist, idiotic, fucktards.

[Elfdart]

Chris Kelly points out that according to the birthers and other right-wing fucktards, many of our presidents held office illegally:

Barack Obama's birthday is tomorrow (or is it?) and in the spirit of gift giving, I've got something for the 28% of Republicans who don't believe Obama was born in America: An invitation to common ground.

Here's the first place we can agree: It would be nice if the president would ask Hawaii to release his original, long form birth certificate.

There are all kinds of perfectly good moral, legal and political reasons why he shouldn't, but, frankly, I'm still tuckered out from all the perfectly good moral, legal and political reasons Hillary Clinton wouldn't release the Rose Law Firm billing records.

I'm not going through that hell again.

Here's the second place we can agree: The rule of law is a good thing.

Lincoln said:

As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor; let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap - let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges - let it be written in primers, spelling books, and almanacs - let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

That goes double for me. Can't get enough of that Constitution and Laws. When it comes to the Constitution and Laws I'm right there, lisping and prattling like Glenn Beck.

My children may not have primers, spelling books or almanacs -- because they go to school in California -- but they understand that we can't pick and chose which laws we obey and which we don't. If we acted like that, we'd be no better than wild animals in the jungle or Dick Cheney.

Here's the third place we can agree: If the Constitution says Barack Obama is ineligible to be president, he's ineligible to be president.

The Constitution is always right because the Framers were infallible, even about slavery and not letting women and Indians vote. The Constitution means what it says and says what it means, not unlike Horton Hatches an Egg, if it had been written 230 years ago by 55 guys.

The Constitution says:

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

And that's what it means.

I'm sorry, but I don't think we can get Obama on the "natural born" part. I don't know what it means and neither do you, and neither did the Founding Fathers. I think it had something to do with not letting Louis XVI be president or black people vote, but your guess is as good as mine. And guesses don't count.

The only person I'm absolutely certain is a natural born man is Bo Diddley.

Luckily, we don't have to interpret what they were getting at. That's why God created Originalism and sent us Antonin Scalia.

Originalism forbids interpretation. (Which could lead to thinking.) It says the document is what it is. We'll never know what the Framers meant, so the safest thing to do is exactly what they say.

So we can agree: Every word in the Constitution, no matter how oblique or arcane, is there for a reason and any president who violates it is gone, or our system collapses, strangers steal our mail, and our sons start playing with dolls.

Good. Now let's talk about the phrase "a Citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution."

Six simple words that mean exactly what they say. No spin. According to the clear letter of the law of the United States Constitution, Barack Obama can't be president, even if he was born in Hawaii, because Hawaii wasn't a state when the Constitution was adopted.

In 1788.

For their own impenetrable but absolutely unambiguous reasons, the Framers made a rule that says you can only be president if you were born in one of the original 13 colonies.

Sorry Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant, William McKinley, James Garfield, William Howard Taft, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Harding, Harrison and Hayes. A rule's a rule. Get out.

What are you smiling at, Abe? Kentucky didn't join the Union until 1792. Take your almanac, your primer and your lisping baby and scram.

Wait a second. I just had a thought. What if Article 2, Section One of the Constitution couldn't possibly mean what it literally says?

"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President..."

Read it again. It's not just about where you were born. It says you can never be president unless you were alive in 1788.

That leaves out everyone but Robert Byrd.

I'm not saying we can't nullify the election. I'm just saying we can't do it without interpreting the Constitution. And we can't interpret the Constitution, because then we'd be no better than one of those horrible activist judges who legislates from the bench.

Next thing you know, we'd be feeling empathy.

[Vympel]

Birthers release embarassingly obvious forged 'Kenyan birth certificate' for Obama

Monday, Aug. 3, 2009 11:15 EDT
Birthers release forged Kenyan birth certificate for Obama

To hear the Birthers tell it, their Holy Grail has been found: Over the weekend, de facto movement leader Orly Taitz released a photo of what is supposedly a certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate for President Obama, which shows that he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, and not in Hawaii.

The movement is, naturally, all abuzz. But even people who might normally be inclined to support it, like the founder of conservative forum FreeRepublic.com and the Birthers' favorite self-proclaimed document expert, who declared Obama's Hawaiian certification of live birth a forgery, are calling foul. The document is just another in an increasingly long line of fakes intended to prove Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

How do we know?

First of all, Obama was born in Hawaii. He has released a copy of his actual birth certificate -- the same kind of copy anyone requesting their birth certificate from the state would get -- and it has repeatedly been authenticated by Hawaii officials. They've also said that they've checked the original record in their files, and that Obama was born in Hawaii. Those records are supported by two newspaper announcements from the time of the president's birth -- and those announcements weren't submitted by the family, but taken from hospital records.

The Birthers won't care about that, of course -- they haven't yet.

But there are major, glaring flaws in this latest forgery, which is supposedly a copy produced in February of 1964 by the government of the Republic of Kenya (Obama was born in 1961, but the Birthers believe this particular document was related to his parents' divorce).

The biggest? Kenya gained its independence from the United Kingdom in December of 1963, but was known as the Dominion of Kenya until December of 1964 -- 10 months after this copy was allegedly made -- when it became a republic and changed its name.

There are some other basic issues with the document, including the age it gives for Obama's father, who's listed as 26. But Barack Obama Sr. was born in 1936, making him 24 or 25 at the time of his son's birth and 27 or 28 at the time the copy is dated.

The Washington Independent's David Weigel makes another good point about the location of birth given, saying Mombasa just doesn't fit a basic Occam's Razor test and is instead part of the conspiracy theories about Obama's religion:

The image is part of the extremely ill-informed conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Mombasa -- conveniently, one of the more Muslim parts of the country.

This has always been a red flag for conspiracy theorists, so it deserves some explanation. Barack Obama Sr. was born and educated in Nyanza Province, in southwestern Kenya, on Lake Victoria. This is the area where Obama’s family lived and continues to live; Sarah Obama, the step-grandmother of the president, lives in Nyang’oma Kogelo, a small town in the province. But Mombasa is a city on the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles to the east. It didn’t even have an international airport until 1979. And the city wasn’t even part of Kenya when the future president was born. Mombasa was a part of Zanzibar until December 12, 1963, when it became part of the newly independent Kenya.

The new forgery? Why, it claims that the president was born in Coast General Hospital in Mombasa.

Taitz also filed the document in court as part of the case in which she's representing Alan Keyes. (Two plaintiffs, including Keyes' running mate, have just dropped off the case, citing "irreconcilable differences with counsel," not the first time Taitz's eccentric legal strategies have led to disillusionment.)

Even by Taitz's standards, the motion that accompanies the document is bizarre and incoherent. Among other things, she asks that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, write to Kenya and to the U.K. and ask for their files, and says that discovery in the case should be expedited because "hearsay evidence exists that an individual involved in the examination of passport files at the United States Department of State relating to and involving certain 2008 Presidential candidates may have been killed in relation to such inquiry."

As always, Taitz started with a small morsel of the truth there and then spun way off from reality. In the filing, she writes, "Lt. Querl Harris was one of the suspects in passport tampering scandal. Washington post [sic] has announced that he was cooperating with the FBI and shortly thereafter he was found dead, shot in the head, sitting in his parked car."

It was actually a man named Quarles Harris, not "Querl," and it was the Washington Times, not the Washington Post. And Harris was indeed under investigation relating to passports at the State Department -- but it had nothing to do with the people who looked at Obama's passport records, among others. According to the Times, Harris was cooperating after he was stopped and "found in possession of 21 credit cards and eight printouts of State Department passport applications." He allegedly told authorities that he was part of a fraud ring that applied for credit cards using information obtained from the applications. But he's shown up on at least one "Obama Body Count" (shades of the Clintons) so it's natural that a conspiracist like Taitz would know something about his case and see it as evidence for her own cause.

Update: Two British professors who specialize in African history have e-mailed Salon to point out another apparent error in the purportedly Kenyan document. The certificate's header reads Coast Province -- but according to the professors, at the time the document is dated, what are now known as provinces were called regions.

Writes Dan Branch, an assistant professor of African history at the University of Warwick:

It seems highly implausible and certainly a hoax. I have not seen any documents from this period in early 1964 that uses the heading of Republic of Kenya -- unsurprisingly given Kenya was not a Republic until December 1964. Moreover, the label of 'Region' was being used in early 1964 instead of 'Province.' While some of the old colonial forms may have still been in circulation, which would have used 'Coast Province,' these would have been headed as 'Colony & Protectorate of Kenya.'

As for his qualifications to judge the document and the header on it, Branch e-mails, "I''ve been working in the Kenyan archives on late-colonial and post-colonial history for the past eight years."

[Patrick Degan]

The object of the exercise, by this point, is to so muddy the waters with claims and counter-claims that there will always be a shadow of a doubt on Obama's legitimacy as president and even as a U.S. citizen. Expect it to get really nasty in 2012 and even nastier than that when Obama is reelected.

[Samuel]

That is a pathetically bad forgery. Are they to incompetant to find another birth certificate from the same time and just write in Obama?

[CaptainChewbacca]

I saw an interview with Orly Taitz. She seems like a crazy cat lady who officiates over her pets' weddings.

[General Zod]

How is this woman still an attorney? Frankly I'm amazed they haven't disbarred her yet.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Taitz melted down on msnbc today.

Its awesome.

[Vympel]

How is this woman still an attorney? Frankly I'm amazed they haven't disbarred her yet.

AFAIK, she might not really be one. At least, to practice outside of California, anyway.

[Vympel]

Taitz melted down on msnbc today.

Its awesome.

Edited your post to fix the link. Wow that's fantastic.

[Dominus Atheos]

Here's a great list of everything wrong with the birth certificate:

You see Barack Obama's totally real Kenyan birth certificate that is not photoshopped and completely believable unlike those phony Hawaiian documents? I mean, if there's one country that you know won't scam you, it's Kenya!

Yet some people persist in casting suspicious glances at the document. User CatM in the comments:

First, the hospital is Coast Provincial General Hospital (sometimes said to be Coast Province General Hospital), not Coast General Hospital.

Second, Kenya was a Dominion the date this certificate was allegedly issued and would not become a republic for 8 months.

Third, Mombasa belonged to Zanzibar when Obama was born, not Kenya.

Fourth, Obama's father's village would be nearer to Nairobi, not Mombasa.

Fifth, the number 47O44-- 47 is Obama's age when he became president, followed by the letter O (not a zero) followed by 44--he is the 44th president.

Sixth, EF Lavender is a laundry detergent.

Seventh, would a nation with a large number of Muslims actually say "Christian name" (as opposed to name) on the birth certificate?

Eigth, his father (born in 1961) would have been 24 or 25 when he was born and not 26.

Ninth, it was called the "Central Nyanza District," not Nyanza Province. The regions were changed to provinces in 1970.

Old Redneck in a recommended diary (omitting duplicates from above):

1. The document is dated 5 August 1964 -- a Saturday. From what I can find, Kenyan guvmint offices close early on Friday and are closed on Saturdays. Oooops [...]

1. This piece of paper certainly looks nice and new to be 45 years old -- unless the Kenyans were using acid-free paper back in 1964. Heh, heh.

1. Finally, Officials of Coast Province General Hospital reported: "We do not have computerized records going back to the 1960's and can only sort through our archives by hand," Dr. Christopher Mwanga, an administrator at the Mombasa hospital tells GLOBE. "We have searched for all the names of babies born on Aug. 4, 1961, and have not found the name of Barack Hussein Obama. That is all I can tell you."

Dr. Mwanga is clearly in on the scam.

In all seriousness, some of these bullet points may turn out to be misfires. But the totality of the evidence -- gathered lightning fast, I may add -- suggests that this is a forgery. And not just any forgery, but one good enough to take in the idiot birthers, while poor enough to let everyone else in on the joke.

In other words, the Birthers just got played, in a hilariously overt way.

My personal favorite is number 3, where it points out that the hospital the certificate says Obama was born at was actually part of Zanzibar at the time.

Also, some bloggers found the real Australian birth certificate that was photoshopped into the fake Obama one:

[Patrick Degan]

Taitz melted down on msnbc today.

Its awesome.

Jesus Cthulhu, I almost expected spittle to start flecking out the woman's mouth.

[ray245]

You know what all those journalist should do? Ask all the Birthers to prove to them that they are Amercians, using the same standard of requirement Birthers used against Obama.

[Colonel Olrik]

Video:

[Bounty]

Funny: everyone I've seen who tears up this supposed "birth certificate" for the fraud it is has pointed out that EF Lavender is detergent and obviously a fake name... except EF Lavender comes straight from the Australian original. Poor guy.

[Terralthra]

Funny: everyone I've seen who tears up this supposed "birth certificate" for the fraud it is has pointed out that EF Lavender is detergent and obviously a fake name... except EF Lavender comes straight from the Australian original. Poor guy.

It's GF on the original.