Senate, Clunkers, Birthers, Missouri And Unintelligent Design

Will Missouri imbecile tweet up a bipartisan solution to birtherism?

This morning Politico named 7 of the 9 freshman and sophomore Democrats, all "centrists," who are doing the foot-dragging on health care reform: Kay Hagan (NC), Claire McCaskill (MO), Jim Webb (VA), Mark Begich (AK), Mark Warner (VA), Amy Klobuchar (MN), and Michael Bennet (CO). They don't seem to care what's in the bill, so long as it can be labeled "bipartisan." If that were the attitude of more worthy representatives of the electorate of yore, we would still be an English colony. Or we'd still be cursed with slavery. We certainly wouldn't have women or minorities or poor people voting. And there would be no Social Security, no minimum wage and certainly no Medicare.

Also this morning, the pathetic, anti-democratic, bribe-ridden and bedraggled Senate-- which should never have been created and certainly should be abolished-- grumpily reached an agreement regarding the House's extension of the Cash For Clunkers program, which is wildly popular among Americans and-- for that reason-- extremely disliked by Republicans and a handful of confused Democrats bipartisans (led by twittering idiot Claire McCaskill).

The Senate has cleared the way for a vote extending the "cash-for-clunkers" program, which offers car buyers rebates of up to $4,500 for trading in their gas-guzzlers for new, higher-mileage models, setting aside Republican opposition to the plan.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday he had several very good conversations with Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and there is "a significant majority" that wants to move forward with the legislation.

Reid said the Senate would have to stay in session on Friday if lawmakers wanted to make changes to the bill.

Reid had said on Tuesday that he had the votes to pass a $2 billion extension already approved by the House. The funding would triple the cost of $1 billion rebate program and give as many as a half-million more Americans the chance to grab the new car incentives through September.

Car companies have credited the clunkers program with driving up sales in late July. Most consumers are buying smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles under the program, according to a list of the top-10 selling cars released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

I have no idea how the dull-witted McCaskill plans to vote on this-- presumably with the Republicans. She probably won't get much attention back in Missouri one way or the other since the whole state seems obsessed with the birther scandal manufactured by right-wing opponents of Obama's agenda. Roy Blunt, of course, is leading the charge. What a team he and Claire would make in the Senate! Perhaps, instead of sticking to facts, they could come up with a bipartisan approach to birtherism-- since so many (crazy and delusional) people believe so, so, so strongly that Obama was born in either Kenya, Indonesia, or Mexico (why not North Korea?) The real facts are up on Salon today. But I bet Blunt and McCaskill could come up with a new set of factoids-- tweet-sized, like their brains-- that all the folks who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs will believe.

Myth 1: Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

This is the big one. It may also be the most easily refuted. First of all, during the presidential campaign, Obama released a certification of live birth, which is the official document you get if you ask Hawaii for a copy of your birth certificate. There are allegations that what Obama released is a forgery, but state officials have repeatedly affirmed its authenticity and said they've checked it against the original record and that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.

If that wasn't enough, two Hawaiian newspapers carried announcements of Obama's birth in August 1961. (Read the Honolulu Advertiser's item from Aug. 13, 1961, nine days after Obama's birth, here.) The traditional joke that Birther debunkers make is that his grandparents must have placed those announcements because they knew that he'd want to run for president nearly five decades later. The truth, though, is that the notices are even stronger pieces of evidence than that. Obama's family didn't place them-- Hawaii did, as it does for all births. The announcements were based on official records sent to the papers by the state's Department of Health.

Myth 2: Obama can't be president because his father was a British citizen

Some of the Birthers-- like de facto leader Orly Taitz-- believe that Obama wouldn't be eligible for the presidency even if he were born in the U.S. That's because, in their infinite wisdom, the Founding Fathers included in the Constitution a fair amount of phrases they never really bothered to define. One of those is this explanation of who can be president: "No person except a natural born citizen."

The Supreme Court has never ruled directly on the question of what "natural born citizen" means. So the Birthers have simply settled on their own definition-- someone born to two citizen parents-- and found a source,"The Law of Nations," a 1758 book by the Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel, to back them up.

There are a couple of problems with this. Most important, Obama isn't the first president with a non-citizen parent: Chester A. Arthur, the 21st president, was. His father was from Ireland and apparently did not become a U.S. citizen until more than 10 years after the future president's birth.

Plus, even if the Founding Fathers did rely on Vattel as much as the Birthers say-- always a dubious proposition-- Swiss philosophy books aren't legal precedent in the United States. British common law is. And in 1898, in the case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court looked into the meaning of "natural born" in the common law and concluded that a non-citizen's mere presence in the U.S. is enough to make their child, if born here, a natural-born citizen.

Myth 3: A Kenyan birth certificate for Obama, showing he was born in Mombasa, has been discovered

It's a hoax. Once Taitz released the document, purportedly a certified copy of a Kenyan birth certificate, it took less than two days for Internet sleuths to prove that it had been forged.

The first signs were a couple of small but revealing errors: The certification is dated Feb. 17, 1964, when newly independent Kenya was known as the Dominion of Kenya. It wouldn't start calling itself the Republic of Kenya until December of that year-- but the document refers to the republic. Additionally, the document's header refers to "Coast Province," but as two British professors who are experts in Kenyan history pointed out to Salon, at the time the certificate was supposedly produced, the country's provinces were referred to as regions.

For the final nail in this myth's coffin, one particularly enterprising man, Steve Eddy, located the original Australian document on which the Kenyan certificate was apparently based. The two documents share several identical numbers, including the page and the book of records in which they can be found, and minor changes were made to the names of the registrars responsible for the Australian copy. Taitz claims the Australian certificate "was created to try to discredit my efforts" but it was in fact available on the Internet as far back as 2007.

Myth 4: Obama's grandmother said he was born in Kenya

There's a kernel of truth to this one. In an interview with a street preacher named Ron McRae, Sarah Obama, the second wife of the president's grandfather, did say she was there, in Kenya, for her grandson's birth.

Unfortunately for the Birthers, it was the result of a miscommunication-- or perhaps a mistranslation-- and as soon as McRae started pressing the issue, Obama's family realized what had happened and corrected him. Most Birthers simply ignore the corrections, excising them from audio and transcripts of the conversation posted online. McRae just believes it's part of the conspiracy and that Obama's younger relatives were coached to hide the truth.
The full audio can be downloaded here.

Myth 5: Hawaii allows parents to get birth certificates for their foreign-born children

This one is actually true-- just not in the way the Birthers think. Here's their position, as outlined by World Net Daily, a conservative news site that's become the unofficial Birther Web headquarters: "The 'Certification of Live Birth' posted online and widely touted as 'Obama's birth certificate' does not in any way prove he was born in Hawaii, since the same 'short-form' document is easily obtainable for children not born in Hawaii."

Children not born in Hawaii can get a birth document from the state. But it won't say they were born in Hawaii, as Obama's does.

"If you were born in Bali, for example, you could get a certificate from the state of Hawaii saying you were born in Bali," Janice Okubo, the director of communications for the state Department of Health, told the Washington Independent's David Weigel recently. "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."

Myth 6: Obama traveled to Pakistan using an Indonesian passport

When the Birthers tire of arguing that Obama wasn't born in the U.S., they take another tack. At some point during the time he spent in Indonesia growing up, they say, Obama must have taken Indonesian citizenship or renounced his American citizenship or both. As proof, they cite the trip he took to Pakistan in 1981 with a friend from college, and say the U.S. government had issued a ban on travel by its citizens to the country.

Thing is, there was no travel ban. "We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since," a State Department spokesman told Weigel. And FactCheck.org's Brooks Jackson notes that the New York Times printed an article about travel to Pakistan on June 14, 1981, which said Americans just needed a visa to travel there. Two months later, the U.S. consul general in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote to the Times to say he'd "welcome an influx of Americans."

Myth 7: Obama hasn't released his birth certificate

Here, we'll admit, Uncle Floyd has a point-- at least a limited one. Strictly speaking, what Obama's campaign released wasn't called a birth certificate; it's a certification of live birth. But there's no functional difference between the two: Ask Hawaii for your birth certificate, and you'll get the certification of live birth back.

"Our Certificate of Live Birth is the standard form, which was modeled after national standards that are acceptable by federal agencies and organizations," Okubo told the Honolulu Advertiser. "With that form, you can get your passport or your soccer registration or your driver's license."

There's been some confusion about whether the original even still exists, but that's now been cleared up. Okubo told the Advertiser that in 2001 the state's paper documents were put into an electronic form, but "any paper data prior to that still exists ... we have backups for all of our backups."

Myth 8:  If Obama would just release his birth certificate, he could end all this

So why hasn't the state of Hawaii released the original paper document? By law, the state can't release Obama's birth records without his OK. State law says that the document can only be released to or "inspect[ed]" by someone with a "direct and tangible" interest. (Though, again, except for "permit[ting] inspection," the law refers to the release of copies and certified copies, not the original record.)

But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that Obama could get the original paper document out of its undisclosed Hawaiian location and show it to reporters. Shouldn't he? Maybe not. He's already released a completely legal form of proof of his birthplace; to cave in to the Birthers' demands now would legitimize them. It would also likely lead to a wave of stories asking why the change in stance had happened, and what had taken so long.

The truth is that it was the original release of the certification of live birth that kicked off the Birther movement to begin with. And some of its leaders wouldn't cease their quest even if they were given the original birth certificate-- along with a video showing Obama being born, lei already around his neck.
Conspiracy theorists cling to their theories in the face of all evidence, and in this case the groundwork for disputing an original birth certificate has already been laid. In October of 2008, Rush Limbaugh suggested that Obama's trip to Hawaii to see his dying grandmother might really have been made in order to do some quick forgery. Limbaugh's fellow talk radio host Michael Savage jumped on that bandwagon, too.

Plus, the Birthers have a long list of other demands. Here's one sent out by Gary Kreep, who's representing Alan Keyes in his lawsuit challenging Obama's eligibility. Read it, and abandon all hope:
• Actual long-form birth certificate (NOT an easily-forged electronic copy of a short-form document that is not even officially accepted in Hawaii)
• Passport files
• University of Chicago Law School scholarly articles
• Harvard Law Review articles
• Harvard Law School records
• Columbia University records
• Columbia University senior thesis, "Soviet Nuclear Disarmament"
• Occidental College records, including financial aid that he may have received
• Punahou School records, where Mr. Obama attended from the fifth grade until he finished high school
• Noelani Elementary School records, where Barack Obama attended kindergarten (according to the Hawaii Department of Education, students must submit a birth certificate to register -- but parents may bring a passport or student visa if the child is from a foreign country)
• Complete files and schedules of his years as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004
• Obama's client list from during his time in private practice with the Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard
• Illinois State Bar Association records
• Baptism records
• Obama/Dunham marriage license
• Obama/Dunham divorce documents
• Soetoro/Dunham marriage license
• Soetero/Dunham adoption records 

One of Charles Pierce's most salient points in Idiot America is that to far too many idiots it doesn't matter if something is objectively true or not; what matters is what people believe-- like in the case of fundamentalists being positive that men and dinosaurs co-existed because otherwise the Buy Bull might not be able to be taken literally. Result: jerks who think evolution and Intelligent Design should both be taught in science classes. In fact, if Claire McCaskill decides to tackle this one, she doesn't even have to cross the aisle. All she needs to do is ring up the Senate's stupidest Democrat, Mark Pryor of Arkansas. Watch: