2012 Election

[KCMax]

I would agree.  But there are a few nuts and insane people on the left.

Anyone that has ever made a paper mache puppet in an anti-war rally fits this category.

[KCMax]

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson (R) is officially in. He's a pretty good libertarian candidate, and while I don't expect him to make much of a run it would be interesting to see if the GOP lets him in the debates as many of his views are critical of the GOP - particularly on drug policy.

[KCMax]

Trump said he'd release his tax returns if Obama produces a birth certificate. Well.....

http://www.slideshare.net/whitehouse/bi ... from=embed

Your move Donald.

[grovester]

It's a forgery! Typed up by Bill Ayers!  Notarized by Jeremiah Wright! 

[chrizow]

i don't understand why obama would even participate in this dialogue.  if you acknowledge that donald trump and the birthers exist, you lose.  

[KCMax]

i don't understand why obama would even participate in this dialogue.  if you acknowledge that donald trump and the birthers exist, you lose.  

I thought the controversy was actually helping him. The people that don't believe he was born here weren't going to vote for him anyway. And their claims make most moderates think Republicans are crazy/whiny and less legitimate.

[knucklehead]

I thought the controversy was actually helping him. The people that don't believe he was born here weren't going to vote for him anyway. And their claims make most moderates think Republicans are crazy/whiny and less legitimate.

I call people like the birthers "charlie manson" republicans. They would vote for Charlie Manson for president if he was the republican nominee while arguing vehemently that good ole Charlie was framed by the liberal media.

I am not a marketing person. I guess the marketing types who package and sell politicians think repeating absurd crap like the birther talk has some impact on how people subconsciously view Obama.


It is insulting but madison avenue has turned this stuff into a science. Think of the money spent in the last 50 years on the science of marketing. Presidential elections cost about 2 billion. It would be absurd to think that marketing technics are not being used extensively.

Marketers understand that many people are basically irrational and easy to manipulate.

[aknowledgeableperson]

But Trump still isn't convinced:

However, he said he would have to check out the certificate himself and wondered why the president didn't do this "a long time ago."

Now, what does he have to prove that he is not a Muslim?  Burn a Koran?

But grovester is right - you will still have those who believe it is a forgery.  Just like the moon landing. 

[FangKC]

Where were these birthers when John McCain was running for the Republican nomination?

John McCain (born 1936), who ran for the Republican party nomination in 2000 and was the Republican nominee in 2008, was born at Coco Solo Naval Air Station[37][51][52][53][54][55][56] in the Panama Canal Zone. McCain never released his birth certificate to the press or independent fact-checking organizations, but did show it to Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs, who wrote "a senior official of the McCain campaign showed me a copy of [McCain's] birth certificate issued by the 'family hospital' in the Coco Solo submarine base".[53]

A lawsuit filed by Fred Hollander in 2008 alleged that McCain was actually born in a civilian hospital in Colon City, Panama.[57][58] Dobbs wrote that in his autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote that he was born "in the Canal Zone" at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Coco Solo, which was under the command of his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr. "The senator's father, John S. McCain Jr., was an executive officer on a submarine, also based in Coco Solo. His mother, Roberta McCain, now 96, has vivid memories of lying in bed listening to raucous celebrations of her son's birth from the nearby officers' club. The birth was announced days later in the English-language Panamanian American newspaper."[59][60][61][62]

The former unincorporated territory of the Panama Canal Zone and its related military facilities were not regarded as United States territory at the time,[63] but 8 U.S.C. § 1403, which became law in 1937, retroactively conferred citizenship on individuals born within the Canal Zone on or after February 26, 1904, and on individuals born in the Republic of Panama on or after that date who had at least one U.S. citizen parent employed by the U.S. government or the Panama Railway Company; 8 U.S.C. § 1403 was cited in Judge Alsup's 2008 ruling, described below.

A March 2008 paper by former Solicitor General Ted Olson and Harvard Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe opined that McCain was eligible for the Presidency.[64] In April 2008, the U.S. Senate approved a non-binding resolution recognizing McCain's status as a natural-born citizen.[65]

In September 2008, U.S. District Judge William Alsup stated obiter in his ruling that it is "highly probable" that McCain is a natural-born citizen from birth by virtue of 8 U.S.C. § 1401, although he acknowledged the alternative possibility that McCain became a natural-born citizen retroactively, by way of 8 U.S.C. § 1403.[66]

These views have been criticized by Gabriel J. Chin, Professor of Law at the University of Arizona, who argues that McCain was at birth a citizen of Panama and was only retroactively declared a born citizen under 8 U.S.C. § 1403, because at the time of his birth and with regard to the Canal Zone the Supreme Court's Insular Cases overruled the Naturalization Act of 1795, which would otherwise have declared McCain a U.S. citizen immediately at birth.[67]

The U.S. Foreign Affairs Manual states that children born in the Panama Canal Zone at certain times became U.S. nationals without citizenship.[68] It also states in general that "it has never been determined definitively by a court whether a person who acquired U.S. citizenship by birth abroad to U.S. citizens is a natural-born citizen […]".[69]

In Rogers v. Bellei the Supreme Court only ruled that "children born abroad of Americans are not citizens within the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment", and didn't elaborate on the natural-born status.[70][71] Similarly, legal scholar Lawrence Solum concluded in an article on the natural born citizen clause that the question of McCain's eligibility could not be answered with certainty, and that it would depend on the particular approach of "constitutional construction".[72] The urban legend fact checking website Snopes.com has examined the matter and cites numerous experts. It considers the matter "undetermined".[73]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... t_citizens

[mean]

Where were these birthers when John McCain was running for the Republican nomination?

Dude. McCain's white and doesn't share a name with Saddam Hussein. They don't care.

[FangKC]

The truth will set you free.  BTW, Boxcar Willie was a reptile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke

[AllThingsKC]

Wow.  This is going to be far from over, I predict. 

[aknowledgeableperson]

Now Trump is raising some questions about Big O's college education.  Wants to see transcripts.  Of course this is an old issue but itis coming back to life.

[phuqueue]

Of course it's far from over, nothing is going to satisfy the conspiracy theory nuts.  For what it's worth, the document isn't even actually layered, but Adobe Illustrator is able to interpret the PDF data and present it as layers.  The one time I ever used the PDF plug-in for OpenOffice, it also (very clumsily) handled "layers" in a PDF that didn't actually have them.  But this information isn't going to stop the morons.  Then again, what would?  I've seen people demand the actual hard copy (are we just gonna pass it around to all 300 million Americans so everyone gets a look at it?), but would that actually satisfy anyone?  Wouldn't they just assume he used his ill-gotten presidential powers to have an "authentic" birth certificate forged?  This secret Islamosocialist conspiracy can get a foreigner elected President of the United States but can't print out a copy of the fake birth certificate it published on the internet?

This is never going to go away until Obama's term is over and people gradually stop caring.  It was kind of stupid of him to even jump back into the fray, having already produced his short form birth certificate a few years ago.  If that wasn't good enough, why should this be?  Even before LAYERGATE broke here you had random fucking morons on the internet trying to evaluate the handwriting and shit to prove that it couldn't be real.

And even if the birth certificate thing did finally die, like AKP mentions, there's plenty of other shit that these people are gonna go after.  I'm not even really sure what they're hoping to prove with his academic records, though -- it's not like a Harvard law degree is a constitutional requirement to be president.  Say their wildest dreams come true and they manage to prove that he only got into Columbia and Harvard through affirmative action (uhhhh, is this really any worse than Bush getting into Yale on family legacy?) and then they even prove that he cheated his way through school or whatever they're hoping to find.  None of that renders him constitutionally ineligible for the office the way the birth certificate thing would have if he really were born in Kenya.  Are they thinking they might be able to impeach him or something?  Just hoping for additional ammo to use in the 2012 campaign?  I mean what is the end game here?

[aknowledgeableperson]

Consider this.  Think about how big our federal government is (I am not going negative with this).  How it is involved somewhat in almost every function of our life, one way or another.  Now think about how big the government was after the Civil War.  The book I have been reading about the Civil War has gone into the politics tht happened after it.  Today's Democrats are yesterdays Republicans.  Today's Republicans are yesterdays Democrats.  Anyway, there was even some big discussions about how big the government was getting back in 1876.

Northern convervatives (Dems) viewed themselves as reformers embarked on a crusade to return government at all levels to its pristine simplicity of the pre-Civil war years.
...
They (corrupt politicians) catered to the lazy poor in the electorate by promising them expensive and unnecessary grovernment programs that drained wealth from hard-working taxpayers and taught the poor that they did not have to work at an honest job for a living.

You would think the book was written just last year but it was published in 1990.  Guess the Tea Party has its roots to way back then. 

[FangKC]

I don't know how people can hold this conspiracy belief when i read that two Hawaii newspapers printed Obama's birth announcement, and one of the newspapers has the announcement on microfiche?

Secondly, even if Obama had been born in Kenya, he would have acquired citizenship through his American mother through right of citizenship through parentage. This would have applied to Obama even if he had been born out of wedlock to his mother in Kenya. The text of the original Constitution, on the issue of eligibility for President, does not define what is meant by natural born: in particular it does not specify whether there is any distinction to be made between persons whose citizenship is based on jus sanguinis (parentage) and those whose citizenship is based on jus soli (birthplace).

Only legislation and court opinions defined it later.

Statute, by parentage

If one parent is a U.S. citizen and the other parent is not, the child is a citizen if
the U.S. citizen parent has been "physically present"[6] in the U.S. before the child's birth for a total period of at least five years, and at least two of those five years were after the U.S. citizen parent's fourteenth birthday.

Children born overseas out of wedlock

There is an asymmetry in the way citizenship status of children born overseas to unmarried parents, only one of whom is a U.S. citizen, is handled.

Title 8 U.S.C. § 1409 paragraph (c) provides that children born abroad after December 24, 1952 to unmarried American mothers are U.S. citizens, as long as the mother has lived in the U.S. for a continuous period of at least one year at any time prior to the birth.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 (expressly defining the term "natural born citizen" to include a person born abroad to parents who are United States citizens), as well as subsequent Supreme Court dicta, it appears that the most logical inferences would indicate that the phrase "natural born Citizen" would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship "at birth" or "by birth".

So it appears that even if Obama was born in Kenya, he would be considered a natural born citizen just as John McCain is--McCain being born in Panama.

Thirdly, Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee, was born in Arizona when it was a territory, and not a US State. George Romney, who ran for the Rep. nomination in 1968, was born in Mexico.

Where were the birthers when John McCain was campaigning for the Republican nomination? He never had to prove his citizenship or release his birth certificate for the media, despite the fact that he was born in Panama when the Canal Zone--one was not recognized as a US territory at the time, and only received citizenship retroactively a year after he was born.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Bo ... nch_policy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural-born_citizen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright ... _parentage

[mean]

Wow.  This is going to be far from over, I predict. 

It will never be over. Every piece of evidence that runs contrary to a conspiracy theorist's pet theory, is always and without fail turned into evidence in support of the theory. That's just how these things work.

[splash]

I had a brief, but maddening, conversation about this with a relative recently.  She absolutely believes that Obama was born in Kenya, is not a US citizen and doesn't understand how I could believe otherwise.  Our conversation confirmed to me that issue isn't a citizenship issue, but is solely an Obama issue.  I tossed out several examples of birthplace and parentage issues and with every one, it didn't seem to matter where the birth took place; that as long as one parent was a citizen, the child was a citizen. 

[shinatoo]

I had a brief, but maddening, conversation about this with a relative recently.  She absolutely believes that Obama was born in Kenya, is not a US citizen and doesn't understand how I could believe otherwise.  Our conversation confirmed to me that issue isn't a citizenship issue, but is solely an Obama issue.  I tossed out several examples of birthplace and parentage issues and with every one, it didn't seem to matter where the birth took place; that as long as one parent was a citizen, the child was a citizen. 

the constitution doesn't have a citizenship requirement for President, it has a domestic birth requirement.

I am NOT the type to cry racist. But this would not be an issue if Obama wasn't black. The fact that this is still an issue makes me embarrassed. 

[FangKC]

I recall when Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, and seen to be a rising political star, there was talk among Republicans of changing the constitution to allow foreign-born citizens to run for president.  Senator Orrin Hatch proposed the amendment, but it didn't go anywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Oppo ... _Amendment

Former Nixon staffer, John Dean, also argued for changing it.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20041008.html

Now it seems funny that it is those politicians in the Republican Party that are constantly questioning Obama's status.