On Wednesday evening, Marcia L. Fudge, Ohio's congresswoman for District 11, held a town hall meeting for her constituents. These events, once staid and even boring exercises in democracy, have recently become notorious for the groups of vociferous opponents of health care reform who have stormed them, armed with a strategy formulated by the health care industry and its Republican Party allies to shut down meaningful discussion on this important issue, intimidate elected representatives, and give the impression that those who oppose reform are more numerous and care more deeply about their point of view than those who support reform efforts such as single-payer. But at the Fudge event, they got their come-uppance, big time. Fudge not only represents a solidly Democratic district that spans the East side of Cleveland and some adjoining suburbs like Shaker Heights (where I live), it is also a very progressive one. Fudge is a strong single-payer supporter and one of the 86 co-sponsors of John Conyers' House Resolution 676 that seeks to expand Medicare coverage for all. Fudge claimed in her remarks that our district is the most diverse in the nation. I am not sure how such things are measured and if she has data to support it, but from first hand experience living there, I see no reason to doubt it. Since the event was held at the place I work (Case Western Reserve University) in an auditorium in the very building my own office is in, I got a ringside view of the events. My corner office overlooks the two main streets that intersect at my building and I could see the demonstrators with placards gathering on the sidewalks from about 4:00 pm for the 6:00pm meeting. It was clear that the pro-reform forces had mobilized because on the streets they clearly outnumbered the anti-reform forces. When I entered the auditorium shortly before 6:00 pm, it was full to its capacity of about 500. The chair of the session got loud applause when he asked that all people be given a respectful hearing. The first 45 minutes consisted of introductions and various people being recognized, especially ten young community leaders, each of whom spoke briefly. The shape of things to come became clear when one of the honorees spoke briefly. He was Zac Ponsky from the nonprofit group MedWish, a group that works to provide free health services to those who need it, both home and abroad. He said that we needed action on health reform now, and we needed to do it on a national level. He got generous applause but then there came some boos and this generated much louder applause to drown out the boos. It was clear that the anti-reform groups were in for a tough time with this crowd, who were prepared and ready to combat them. When Fudge spoke at 6:45 she covered some general ground before she got to health reform and she said that we are definitely going to get it this year. This was met with loud cheers, before some boos were heard which again were responded to with louder cheers for Fudge. From the relative loudness of the two sides, I estimated that the pro-reform forces outnumbered the anti-reformers by about 10 to 1. Soon after Fudge began her remarks, the anti-reform groups, which seemed to be in three different clusters in the auditorium, went into the mode that those of us who have been following these events are familiar with. They started yelling out their slogans ("Why the rush?" "This bill will kill old people", "What about the cost?" etc.) and refusing to let Fudge speak, even though the crowd started yelling for them to keep quiet and let her go on. It was clear, though, that university security had prepared for this. An officer went up to two men yelling the loudest and spoke to them, presumably to ask them to stop preventing the speaker from continuing. When they did not, they were both force-marched out of the room. This seemed to deflate the protest groups and they quieted down. Later on, during the Q and A, when another man started yelling from his seat and interrupting Fudge's answer to a question from a person in the line, the head of the campus police, a genial but firm man, went and spoke quietly to him and he subsided. At the end of Fudge's brief remarks, the anti-reform people knew the drill and quickly got in line for questions in greater percentage (about 50%) than their presence in the room (about 10%) warranted. This was actually a good thing since it enabled Fudge to challenge the misconceptions on which they work. Fudge was not at all rattled. She is sharp, articulate, personable, and quick-witted. She knew what to expect and was ready. The largely pro-reform audience listened quietly to the questions and comments of even those who opposed reform, except for a couple of questioners who refused to yield the microphone when they were done but started to harangue Fudge. At that point, officials took the microphone away from them and moved them aside to allow the next person up, to the cheers of the crowd. As to the question "Why the rush?", she said that we were actually too slow, that health reform has been talked about for 60 years, and that nothing had been done at all during the Bush years. As to the question as to whether the reform bill will euthanize old people, she said, to loud applause and laughter, that anyone who would even think such a thing has real problems. She said that all of us, including her, have elderly relatives whom we love. Why would we want to kill them? She then explained clearly what the bill says about end-of-life issues, a far cry from the 'death panels' that exist in the fantasy world of Sarah Palin and the nutters. ("Sarah and the Nutters" would make a good name for a music group, don't you think?). Fudge was also challenged as to whether she had read the entire 1,000-page bill. When she said she had not, they was a triumphant "Aha!" sound from the protest groups, implying that this meant that she did not know what was in the bill that she was supporting. She then explained what should be obvious. No congressperson is going to read every line of every bill that they vote on. It is not humanly possible. That is why they have staffs to do that work and flag those things that she should focus her attention on. The most moving moments during the Q and A came from two women who spoke about their personal situations. One was a middle-aged nurse who works three jobs but cannot get health insurance because of a family history of cancer, not for any reasons directly related to her. She has been turned down by 14 companies and had her coverage taken away by another two. Another woman spoke of her husband who fortunately gets free treatment from the (government run) VA that costs $43,000 per year, but she herself cannot afford to buy her own insurance and they are going to lose their home because of her health care costs. Both women pleaded for the adoption of an affordable public plan and they received warm and sympathetic applause. Twice Fudge was asked why the single-payer option was off the table and she replied both times that it was because Obama had taken it off, which is true. But perhaps not wanting to sound too critical of the president, she qualified it the second time round by saying that in order to pass reform legislation, they needed some conservative Democratic and/or Republican votes and they felt that single-payer would not be able to get that support. In summary, the crowd was overwhelmingly in favor of health care reform with a public option, with a sizeable chunk pushing for single payer. The anti-reform groups were completely routed. POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on boisterous town halls I showed this yesterday, but it seems to fit today's post better.

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Am I imagining it or does there seem to be a sudden upsurge in the number of people who seem to be disconnected with reality? To elaborate, is there an increasing number of vocal and visible people who are believe strongly in some crackpot idea despite the complete lack of plausible evidence in favor of their belief? Into this category I put those who believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that evolution did not occur. Also included are the so-called 'truthers' (those who think that the events of 9/11 were planned and executed by the US government or that they had advance knowledge of it and yet allowed it to happen), and the ' birthers', those who think that Obama is not a natural born citizen of the US and is thus ineligible to be president. And then we have the 'gunners', those who are convinced that Obama is going to take away their guns and enslave them. They have been forming militias and stocking up on weapons and ammunition ever since the election, presumably to prevent the military takeover of the country under the orders of Generalissimo Obama. It is not surprising that this kind of paranoid climate would encourage individual nutcases like the Baptist preacher who is asking god to put a hit on Obama. Some have even gone on murderous rampages as a result of their beliefs The health care reform debate has spawned yet another group of crackpots, called the 'deathers', who roam town hall meetings and yell about how the health care reform plans currently under consideration will result in government bureaucrats deciding who will live and who will die, and that they seek to kill off old people and anyone with any defects. This is quite an amazing level of delusion The fact that there exist a sizable number of people who believe in each of these things is not surprising. I have long felt that there is no proposition, however crazy, that you cannot persuade up to about 20% of Americans to take seriously, simply by using spurious arguments that seem to have a veneer of plausibility, along with 'evidence' consisting exclusively of vague references to 'they say' or 'I read somewhere', with the source never specified. For example, a survey finds that 23% say 'no' or 'not sure' to the question of whether they believe Obama was born in the US. (Among Republicans, the figure is an incredible 58%!) It is quite likely that there is strong overlap amongst all these groups, given their common basis in irrationality, so that the total number of believers may not be that much larger than the number that believes in just one of them. But given the rapid proliferation of such groups, it may be useful to adopt an umbrella label of some sort that covers everyone. How about the 'nutters'? Tom Tomorrow describes the weirdness of these people in a recent cartoon. These people are helped in their paranoia delusions by prominent politicians, who should know better, reinforcing their beliefs. A report says that Representative Paul Broun (R-GA) said "spoke of a “socialistic elite†– Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as an excuse to declare martial law." Then there is the ever-reliable serial exaggerator Sarah Palin. On her Facebook page she says the following about health care reform: "And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." Her statement has no connection to reality. Can she really be so stupid and ignorant as to believe this? Can she really not know that the proposed health reform legislation does not say anything of the sort? Or is she cynically deceiving and exploiting her followers? In addition, she once again shamelessly uses her baby as a political prop when it suits her purposes, while whining that her family should be off limits. (To make it worse, Palin uses for support Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachman, a person with an Alan Keyes level of craziness. Deciding which of Bachmann's statements and actions is the loopiest is not easy, but my favorite was when she warned that Obama was thinking of abandoning the dollar as the US currency.) Stephen Colbert gives his take on the death panels.

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As I said earlier, some greedy geezer seniors are prominent among the deathers who are trying to whip up anger against health care reform with their insanities, perhaps in order to preserve their own government-run Medicare health privileges. Christopher Beam writes: "To be sure, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for seniors to be concerned about reform. Seniors already have universal health care in the form of Medicare. There remains the possibility that a broader universal plan will drain resources from a program they like as it is, thank you very much." The Daily Show has some thoughts on the motivation that drives these people.

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So what is making these people so unhinged? Is it the thought that any Democratic president must necessarily be evil, and that a black one has to be the anti-Christ? Could they be that unhinged? It is strange because Obama is not even a liberal. He has kept and even increased the secrecy practices of the Bush regime, he is not planning a total pull out of Iraq any time soon (if ever, which I doubt), he is rapidly escalating the US war in Afghanistan, he has done little to advance gay rights, he has refused to close down the torture prisons that the US runs in other countries or to forbid the policy of extraordinary renditions, he is not prosecuting the lawbreaking torturers of the Bush regime, he has continued policies friendly to Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular, he has undermined support for a single-payer health care system, he continues the violation of human and constitutional rights such as habeas corpus, and so on. We should not be that surprised. As cartoonist Tom Tomorrow points out, Obama has made vague promises into an art form that enabled his starry-eyed followers to read into his speeches what they wanted to hear and thus believe he was far more liberal than he really is. As a reality check, this website keeps a scorecard on Obama's promises. Sam Smith also keeps tabs on Obama. So why are these people so angry about his presidency when he is really not opposed to their interests in any fundamental way, just making changes in the margins? I do not believe that their anger is completely artificial, although powerful interest groups are definitely bankrolling and urging these groups on. Is it as simple as racism, that these people cannot stand the prospect of white people not having exclusive control of the power structure, even if the minorities who replace them pursue pretty much the same policies? The Daily Show has some thoughts on the racial fears that seem to be driving at least some of these people batty.

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POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the level of current discourse

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By now everyone must have heard about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. flap, where the Harvard academic had a confrontation with a Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley, when he was seen by neighbors breaking into his own home when could not open his front door. What should have been a simple misunderstanding that was quickly settled ended up with Gates being arrested and even president Obama being dragged into it as well. As might have been expected, people have focused on the race aspect of the incident (Gates is black, Crowley is white) and the class aspect of the town-gown divide (Gates being perceived as a member of the privileged Harvard faculty and Crowley as working class). So were race and class factors? In America, any encounter between people of different races always carries with it a racial subtext. That is inevitable and unavoidable. Underlying this whole episode is the almost universal feeling among black people that police treat them far worse than they do white people. Black people are always conscious that actions that would be seen as innocent if done by white people are viewed with suspicion when done by blacks. This is because black people of whatever status in society have usually experienced an incident where they were personally treated negatively by the police and other security personnel, even though they were totally innocent. This feeling is so strong in the black community that it explains the rare verbal misstep that Obama made when, instead of keeping out of the fray because he did not have all the facts (and he should not feel obliged to comment on every incident anyway), he ventured the comment that the police acted 'stupidly' in this incident. It is a rare white person who has had that kind of negative experience at the hands of the police. At the risk of over-generalizing, white people, especially those in the middle and upper classes, tend to look on the police as their friends and protectors, while black people tend to look on them as a necessary evil. Class conflict is a trickier issue in the US, since it is less spoken of by the general public but, like race, is always present in any encounter between people of different classes. Police officers in general get infuriated when people try to intimidate them with the "Do you know who I am?" and the "I know important people and can make life hard for you" class-based rhetoric that some people try to use to intimidate officers who are merely doing their duty, in order to avoid being charged with some minor offense. So while race and class had to be factors in the Gates-Crowley incident, the real question is whether race and class played a greater role than usual here. That is hard to say, without knowing more about the people involved and the details of the incident. And since much of the contentious elements of the exchange occurred when only Crowley and Gates were present, we might never know. What I would guess is that over and above the race and class issues, what escalated the confrontation between Gates and Crowley is that for each person the encounter created a sense of lese majeste, which Merriam-Webster defines as originating as "an offense violating the dignity of a ruler as the representative of a sovereign power" but now is used more generally as "a detraction from or affront to dignity or importance." Gates is an academic superstar and people outside academia may not be aware of how deferentially such people are treated in the normal course of their work lives. Although in any administrative flow chart of a university, faculty members like Gates are at the bottom of the hierarchy, ranking below their department heads, deans, provosts, and university presidents, in reality they are more famous, more powerful, and more valued by their institutions than their nominal superiors. They carry a lot of clout and every one around them treads very gingerly for fear of giving offense because such people will be quickly snapped up by rival institutions if they are not accorded the proper respect. So Gates is used to being treated like royalty and it must have been galling for him to be treated and talked to like just an ordinary person, let alone an ordinary black person. Police officers are also used to people being very deferential to them. First of all, they are armed and can easily injure or even kill you. They also have the power to arrest, harass, taser, or otherwise make life very difficult for you. So most people, even if they are innocent and think that they have been wrongly stopped or questioned by the police, will talk to them politely, even obsequiously, so that they do not give the police an excuse to book them. When people do challenge police, the charge of 'disorderly conduct' can and is routinely invoked against them, as was done against Gates, since this is a very elastic term that gives a police officer wide latitude with which to arrest someone, even if the challenge consists of merely expressing annoyance or anger. The phrase 'disorderly conduct' is sometimes referred as being a euphemism for the crime of 'contempt of cop'. See this Colbert Report clip of police tasering people, including a 72-year old great-grandmother, who did not show sufficient 'respect' to the police officer.

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Can anyone doubt that the feisty great-grandmother was being punished with a tasering purely because the police officer was offended by her act of lese majeste? People who are routinely treated with excessive deference, such as Gates and Crowley, are the ones who are most likely to overreact to perceived affronts, unless they are highly self-controlled or have a well-developed self-deprecating sense of humor. It is very likely that what triggered Gates' outburst against Crowley was the thought that he, a famous academic, used to being kowtowed to, was being asked to show his identification in his own home by a lowly policeman, an act that, while not unreasonable under the circumstances under which the officer was summoned, he would have perceived as an act of lese majeste. It is very likely that what triggered Crowley's use of the disorderly conduct arrest charge was that Gates talked back at him and demanded his name and number, again an act that while not unreasonable, would have also been seen by him as an act of lese majeste. What is surprising is that Gates, whose field of study is race, seems to have been taken by surprise by being treated the way other blacks are routinely treated. This may be because, as Ishmael Reed suggests, Gates has benefited professionally from being a leading proponent of the view that America is now a post-racial society, which is why he reacted so angrily to the way that most black men are used to being treated all the time. Reed says that Gates actually got off easy. "If a black man in an inner city neighborhood had hesitated to identify himself, or given the police some lip, the police would have called SWAT. When Oscar Grant, an apprentice butcher, talked back to a BART policeman in Oakland, he was shot!" All in all, it is an unfortunate incident, symptomatic of what happens when two self-important people prick each others' ego balloons, resulting in an absurd situation in which the president ends up having to invite them both to the White House for a highly publicized beer, further feeding their already inflated sense of self-importance. POST SCRIPT: Larry Wilmore on the Gates incident

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Yesterday, I pointed out that even if one takes the birthers’ highly implausible claim that Obama was born in Kenya at face value, Title 8, section 1401, subsection (g) of the U.S. Code seems to grant him natural born status since his mother was a citizen who lived in the US for at least five years, at least two of which were after the age of fourteen. But the birthers have seized upon the fact that the requirement of years of residency in the US of the parent has changed with time. According to the U.S. State Department:

Birth Abroad to One Citizen and One Alien Parent in Wedlock: A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child's birth. (For birth on or after November 14, 1986, a period of five years physical presence, two after the age of fourteen is required. For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child. (my emphasis)

So here's what the birthers’ case boils down to: Obama was born in Kenya in 1961 but his mother was not yet 19 at the time (she was born November 29, 1942 and Obama was born August 4, 1961) so she could not have satisfied the 'five years after the age of fourteen' condition that was in force at the time of his birth. Hence Obama is not a natural born citizen. Hence he is not qualified to be president. In addition, if he is not a natural born citizen, and since there is no evidence that he ever went through the naturalization process for citizenship, that would mean that he is in the US illegally and would have to be deported. (Without getting too much into the legal weeds here, it is not clear that the courts would even apply this rule in Obama's mother's case because it would seem to eliminate people over something they had no control, purely because they are too young, and this might violate the 'equal protection' clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As is usual in such cases, the courts do not go merely by the language of the law but will likely look closely at the explicit legislative history and language to see if Congress meant to only exclude people who could have satisfied the five year residency requirement but chose not to.) Kitty Pilgrim of CNN lays out the evidence against the birthers. (If there is any doubt that the birthers are out to lunch, one needs to look no further than the fact that Alan Keyes ( Alan Keyes!) is one of them.) Furthermore, this article in the Honolulu Advertiser should put to rest the speculations that the newspaper announcements of his birth were planted by Obama's people in the US as part of the elaborate hoax. The article says that the newspapers' birth notices are not inserted at the request of the parents or family but taken by them from hospital records. It should also settle the issue of whether Obama's Hawaiian 'Certificate of Live Birth' that has been made publicly available is somehow less than complete and that he must produce the full document or else he is hiding something. And what about the allegation that Obama's step-grandmother (the second wife of Obama’s Kenyan grandfather) made a deposition that she was present when Obama was born in Kenya? That has also been debunked by Alex Koppelman. Like all such elaborate theories, the birthers' case first requires you to accept a highly implausible premise. In reality, all this is moot since no reasonable person could doubt that Obama was born in Hawaii. To think otherwise is to create a preposterous scenario in which Obama's mother secretly went to Kenya (without leaving any discernible trail) to deliver her baby there (why?) and yet was savvy and influential enough to create an elaborate scheme with the collusion of Hawaii government officials to have his birth recorded in Hawaii and provide him with faked birth certificates even now. They also must have colluded with two Hawaiian newspapers to run contemporary birth notices of Obama's birth. All this in order to make him eligible to run for president decades in the future. Remember that even if Obama had been born in Kenya and did not meet the criteria for being a 'natural born' citizen, it would have been easy for him to become a naturalized citizen because his mother was a citizen. The only reason for this elaborate charade on his mother's part is to make him eligible to run for president, the one and only job in the US that requires ‘natural born’ citizenship. If she was ambitious, smart, far-sighted, and knowledgeable enough to go to all this trouble to make her son appear eligible for the presidency, surely she would have simply had the baby in the US and been done with it? The birthers' would benefit from studying the logic of David Hume who explained how to judge the credibility of extraordinary claims: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." I suspect that Obama and the Democrats are thoroughly enjoying this. Far from being a serious challenge to the legitimacy of his presidency, this issue, coupled with the insulting treatment of the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court that focused so heavily on her Hispanic heritage in a negative way, is serving to further marginalize the Republican Party by making them look like a bunch of xenophobic and nativist loons. To exploit this issue, one Democratic congressman introduced a bill celebrating 2009 as the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's statehood. Included in the bill is a statement acknowledging that the state is also the birthplace of the current president. This put the Republicans in a quandary. Voting for this ceremonial bill might anger the birthers while voting against or being absent would make them look nutty. The bill passed 378-0, suggesting that Congressional Republicans are realizing that this is getting out of hand. Will that be the end of the story? Not at all. For birthers, like truthers and those who deny evolution, no evidence will convince them to change their minds. What they will do when they encounter setbacks or counterfacts is expand their theory into even more extreme territory. When the inevitable happens, with a judge throwing out their legal challenge to Obama's birth in Hawaii, they will start asking whether Stanley Dunham really was a citizen. Or if she really was Obama's mother or whether, as part of a secret advanced fertility research program, the egg that was used to conceive Obama was not really Dunham's but was taken from a non-citizen, fertilized in vitro, and then inserted in her. Or if all these arguments fail, suggest that there was a technical fault in the process whereby Hawaii became a state in 1959, invalidating its statehood. It will never end for the true believers. One can only ignore the birthers. Or better still, laugh at them. POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on the birthers And right on cue, here is Jon Stewart to laugh at them.

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I was vaguely aware during the election that some people were questioning Obama's eligibility for the presidency because of his Kenyan father, just as others were questioning McCain's because he was born in Panama. Neither candidate made an issue out of the other's birth and I assumed that this issue would die down after the election. To my amazement some people seem to have become totally convinced that Obama is not constitutionally qualified to be president because he is not a natural born citizen. These so-called 'birthers' are still going on, even gaining steam, aided by some in the media such as Fox News and Lou Dobbs on CNN. Emblematic is this town hall meeting to discuss health care where a woman angrily claims that Obama is not a citizen and that she 'wants her country back'. Congressman Mike Castle (R-Delaware) is then booed by the crowd when he responds that Obama is a US citizen. It has since emerged that the woman in the video is well-known locally as "Crazy Eileen", who has called Obama the anti-Christ and said she has spoken with angels and aliens. She has been banned even from local conservative call-in radio talk shows. The birthers are (along with Sarah Palin) becoming a nightmare for the Republican Party, because the Party cannot totally denounce them because the base takes this stuff seriously, while they cannot endorse them because it makes them look like wackos too. Watch how Congressman John Campbell (R-CA) tries to dance around the issue, wanting to pander to the birthers while also not wanting to be seen as a nutcase who believes that Obama is not constitutionally qualified to be president. Mike Stark of the Huffington Post and firedoglake tries to pin Republican congresspersons down on this question with no success except for one exception. Some of the people literally run away from him or hide to avoid having to answer. Like most bizarre theories, such as the one that suggests that the events of 9/11 were an elaborate Bush-Cheney-CIA plot, (supporters of which are called 'truthers'), there is a tiny kernel of relevance buried in mounds of rubbish. The issue is the constitutional qualifications for president which are laid out in Article 2, section 1: "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." The key phrase that the birthers have zeroed in on is 'natural born citizen'. So what is the issue here? Since Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, and Hawaii became a state in 1959, that should end the matter, no? Well, yes, except that the birthers allege that he was actually born in Kenya and that this whole Hawaiian birth thing was faked. They keep saying that his birth certificate is being hidden and the copies that are being shown are either faked or incomplete, and nothing anyone can say will dissuade them. The Annenberg Political Fact Check project has actually examined the birth certificate and pronounced it genuine, but they think that they are part of the elaborate cover up. But even if Obama was born abroad, since his mother was an American doesn't that make him a natural born citizen? This is where things get a little complicated. The intent of the drafters of the constitution was to exclude naturalized citizens from holding the office of the presidency. But they lived in simpler times when it was clear how to identify such people. But as time went on and children were being born all over the world to all manner of combinations of citizens and non-citizens, and as the US acquired territories that were not states of the union, things got more complicated and the conditions for being classified as 'natural born' needed to be more precisely codified and this was done in statutes. Title 8, Section 1401 of the U.S. Code lays out all the possible scenarios whereby natural born citizenship can be achieved. The relevant one that applies to Obama's case (taking at face value the birthers' claim that he was born in Kenya) is subsection (g) that grants it to:

a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years.

But surely he qualifies under this too, since he had one parent (his mother) who was a citizen (born in Kansas) who lived in the US for "not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years"? You would think so. But then you would be underestimating the paranoia and inventiveness of groups like the birthers. Next: The plot thickens! POST SCRIPT: Meet the birthers Stephen Colbert gives a leading birther enough rope and she duly hangs herself, revealing her nuttiness in all its glory.

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In their zeal to protect their members from politically hazardous votes on issues such as gay marriage and gun control, Democrats running the House of Representatives are taking extraordinary steps to muzzle Republicans in this summer's debates on spending bills. Link Even some Democrats are chaffing at the heavy-handed clampdown on debate. Abortion opponent Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., on Thursday lashed out at his party's leaders for denying him and others a chance to vote on restoring a long-standing directive by Congress blocking taxpayer-funded abortions in Washington, D.C. At issue are 12 bills totaling more than $1.2 trillion in annual appropriations bills for funding most government programs—usually low-profile legislation that typically dominates the work of the House in June and July. For decades, those bills have come to the floor under an open process that allows any member to try to amend them. Often those amendments are an effort to change government policy by adding or subtracting money for carrying it out. The tradition has often meant laborious debates. But it has allowed lawmakers with little seniority to have their say on doling out the one-third of the federal budget passed by Congress each year. It was a right the Democrats zealously defended when they were the minority party from 1995 through 2006.

Vice President Joe Biden told people attending an AARP town hall meeting that the health care plan must become law in order to avoid bankruptcy. Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’†Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.†* * * * * * * Keep spending, spending into oblivion.

From Frank Rich, NYT: In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base†of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era. USA Today has a similar story too. * * * * * * * * There are probably several Republicans who are much better than Palin. Looking to Palin to save the GOP in 2010 is a serious mistake.

My great weakness as a political analyst, and the reason I am often wrong in my predictions, is that I try to think strategically. I keep forgetting that many of the prominent people in politics are divas who think that the normal rules of politics don't apply to them and thus do things that you never anticipate. Just look at the recent list: David Vitter, Mark Sanford, John Ensign, John Edwards, Elliot Spitzer, and Larry Craig. And of course we have Sarah Palin, the biggest diva of them all. Like everyone else, I was dumbfounded by Sarah Palin's statement on Friday that she was resigning as governor of Alaska. You can read the text of her speech here but you have to view the full 18 minutes of it to fully appreciate what an extraordinary performance it was. It was a classic Palin production: rambling and incoherent, uplifting phrases strung together without much thought to continuity, putting her family in the spotlight and yet whining about the way she and her family have been treated, repeatedly praising her own doggone maverickiness, and pandering to Alaskans by the bucketful. What the speech notably lacked was a plausible reason for resigning. Basically she said that she had first decided to not run for re-election. She vaguely implied, in another bit of blatant pandering, that her visit to wounded soldiers in Kosovo and Landstuhl were factors in this decision. She then went on to castigate all lame-duck office holders as wasters of taxpayers' time and money by going on junkets and the like. But she was not going to do that, no sirree, because that would be 'politics as usual'. You would think then that what she would do to defy that stereotype is put her head down and do a boffo job as governor in the second half of her term and accumulate a list of strong accomplishments, by golly. But no, she seems to think that the only way to avoid being a typically profligate lame duck is to not be in office at all, a kind of "stop me before I hurt myself" attitude that is mystifying. She said, astoundingly, that it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars for her to continue as governor, the job they actually voted her to do. Then, after a long and confusing basketball metaphor about how good point guards deal with difficult situations, gosh darn it, she quit, which is not what champion athletes do. While most of her speech left me baffled, there was one thing that made me wince. She made an odd comment at the end about how much we can learn from children with Downs Syndrome and said that, "the world needs more "Trigs", not fewer". I have known children who have Downs. They are very affectionate and sweet and their families love them. But I don't know anyone who thinks that having Downs is a good thing, to be encouraged, simply because it teaches the rest of us important life lessons. Once again, it seemed like an attempt at using her family as props for her own self-aggrandizement, to show that she was better than anyone else. So what is going on? Why did she resign? The most charitable explanation that I can think of is that after the heady days of running for vice-president, with the private jets, the fancy hotels, a large staff to cater to her needs, shopping sprees paid for by others, permanently on national media, and so on, the daily grind of retail politics involved in running a small state was just too boring for her. Or maybe she was clearing her desk so that she could run full-time for president in 2012. Many commentators (even those who are among her strongest supporters) think that if she thought that this was a good strategy, then she has made a serious miscalculation because this will be taken as evidence that she cannot stick to anything for long. Any doubts that this was a terribly bad move were dismissed when Bill Kristol (Motto: "Unapologetically Wrong About Every Thing") thought that this could be good for her and that she might be "crazy like a fox". There were those who thought that she could be a credible candidate in 2012 if she worked on being a good governor and hunkered down and studied up on the issues that she seemed to be so ignorant of. Clearly she has not made any attempt to get up to speed on any of the big issues. Frankly I could never see that happening. As I said back in December, such habits and interests are formed early in one's life and has been noticeably absent in hers. I think she believes that a breezy confidence in her gut instincts, her strong convictions on some social issues, and her looks were enough to run on, and that winks and smiles and a down-home speaking style of platitudes and clichés and banalities would make voters overlook the lack of substance, you betcha. The timing of her sudden announcement was also weird. Palin clearly is narcissistic and loves media attention. I would have thought that she would have set up a big press event and had all the national media covering her resignation so that she went out in a blaze of publicity. But among political professionals, Friday evening is the time when it is believed to be best to dump any news that you don't want people to pay attention to. The Friday evening before the July 4th weekend would be an even bigger news black hole. But since she wasn't delivering news that needed to be buried, the timing was puzzling. Some have speculated that she had to get out quickly before some big scandal breaks but so far nothing has emerged. Either she acted purely on impulse or she decided to take advantage of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report going on vacation on July 3 and not returning until July 13, hoping that other events would intervene and thus she would avoid being skewered by them when they return. Furthermore, she made the announcement in her back yard before a single local TV camera crew and microphone and, if you watch the last few seconds, the camera pans over the crowd and you realize that there are only about ten people (including some children) there for the big show. It looked like she rounded up a few neighbors for her announcement. The whole thing was clearly rushed. Even her father-in-law was taken by surprise. As I watched her performance, it struck me once again that she might be suffering from some kind of slight mental instability that I am not competent to diagnose, perhaps some kind of attention deficit disorder or even a little bipolarity. There has always been a slightly manic quality to her behavior, a curious adolescent mixture of chipper, upbeat, self-aggrandizement mixed in with maudlin self-pity. The character of Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard comes to mind. Others suggest that she is smart enough to realize that she was never going to win higher office and decided to start right now to make money by exploiting her fame before it waned, by going the full-time celebrity route, writing books, giving speeches, and maybe having her own TV show. One thing that Palin was right about in her speech was in her repeated assertions she does not practice 'politics as usual'. I have never seen anything like her brand of political weirdness. I never believed that Palin had even the ghost of a chance of winning even the Republican nomination, let alone the presidency. However I was hoping that she would make a run for the White House. It would have provided endless entertainment to see how the other Republican primary candidates would handle her because she has got the politics of victimhood down pat. If criticized for her lack of awareness on the issues, she responds that this is sexist and that women are held to a higher standard. If people point out her lack of experience, she takes this as a slur on the people of Alaska and a denigration of small town values. She hauls her family out as political props when it suits her and then whines when anything is said about them. She loves being in the media spotlight and then complains about her treatment by them. The Democrats knew that the people who liked her would never vote for them anyway, so her tactics did not really matter to them and all they needed to do was ignore her. She actually helped them by alienating independents. But the other Republican candidates would have been competing with her for the same base of voters, and dealing with her prickliness would have been a minefield for them. You can bet that they are heaving a huge sigh of relief and hoping she really is out of politics for good. So come back Sarah! I miss you already. Elections won't be nearly as much fun without you. You betcha. POST SCRIPT: Al Franken I have been amused at how some political commentators are treating Al Franken, now declared as having been elected as Minnesota's senator, as an intellectual lightweight because he used to be a comedian. In reality, good comedians, especially those who have done stand-up, are pretty sharp. They have to be quick-witted and knowledgeable because they write much of their own material (at least early in their careers) and they have lots of experience putting down hecklers. They also know how to go for the jugular and have killer timing. Jon Stewart has writers for his show for the set pieces, but his background as a standup is what makes him a good interviewer where, if he wants, he can easily make the other person look foolish. Ask Jim Cramer. Although I think that Franken is going to your standard issue, middle-of-the-road liberal, there is also every indication that he is a policy wonk, so people are likely to be surprised. Here is a clip where Al Franken and Ann Coulter respond to the question of which character from the past they would have liked to have been. Note how Franken paces his response to Coulter, using pauses to think through his response to get maximum laughs.
Ann-coulter-al-franken - The best video clips are here You cross a stand-up comic at your peril.

Can President Obama explain last week's dismissal of federal Inspector General Gerald Walpin for the crime of trying to protect taxpayer dollars? Wall Street Journal Article This smells of political favoritism. I wonder how can we continue to trust Obama's promise of open transparency. In fact, President Obama, as senator, co-sponsored the Inspectors General Reform Act, which requires the President to give Congress 30 days notice, plus a reason, before firing an Inspector General. How can the White House cite that Mr. Walpin of misconduct and having improper charges on Kevin Johnson? How can they say it was "just pure coincidence" to dismiss Mr. Walpin during the St. HOPE controversy? Something is quite fishy here. * * * * * * * * * * Dailykos is siding with the reasoning that Walpin's investigation was politically motivated because he was a Bush appointee and he was out to get Obama support Kevin Johnson. They cited that acting U.S. Attorney Lawrence Brown (a fellow Bush appointee) questioned Walpin's conduct during the investigation and said he did not have the proper evidence to file charges against Johnson's involvement with St. HOPE. Plus since the relevant authorities determined that no crime had been committed, they allege that Walpin tried to undermine that by appealing to Congress. Yet they failed to note that Lawrence Brown decided to cut Walpin out of the loop, and arranged a settlement with Johnson that featured a watered down financial repayment and no charges against Mr. Johnson. That was why Walpin went to Congress because he felt that the settlement between Brown and Johnson and St. HOPE did not fit the crime that was committed. So St. HOPE had to pay back half of the $850,000 AmeriCorps grant (with a financial assist by Mr. Johnson). It also required Mr. Johnson to take an online course about bookkeeping. And the 30-day waiting period before firing Walpin. That was taken care of when they put Walpin on 30-days paid leave, then they will fire him at the end of that. Plus there's a Walpin allegation that there is a great deal of money that is not being properly allocated at AmeriCorps. Will this be investigated? From the Democrat/liberal viewpoint, they think Walpin was running a politically-motivated investigation, and drumming up weak charges against Johnson, one of their Obama supporters and now San Francisco mayor. From the Republican/conservative viewpoint, they think Walpin was fired because he was criticizing a favorite liberal program (AmeriCorps) and going after certain supporters that had the ear of the President. Can this be solved via independent counsel?

For anyone wishing to seek their "15 minutes of fame" with the Obamas and Bidens, think twice before doing so. It appears that anyone wishing to get some publicity with the President and Vice-President is risking the wrath and scorn of the opposite side. If you advocated national security, you get ridculed by the peace activists. If you are pro-choice, you get criticized by the lifers. So in this case, if you sold a pedigreed pup to Biden's family, you are likely to incur the wrath of animal advocates, activists, and those that prefer shelter versus pedigreed. Linda Brown sold a pedigreed pup to Biden in December. When the story got out, she faced backlash from pet lovers who thought the Bidens should have opted for a shelter over a breeder to find their new puppy. The crazies at PETA also took the opportunity to suggest that people who buy from breeders believe that the killing of shelter animals is warranted. It even went ahead and did a "Buy One, Get One Killed" pet commercial in Delaware. Her dog kennel got inspected repeatedly by dog wardens. She even got death threats from animal activists. What's the deal here? How do we know Linda Brown wants shelter animals to be killed? Why should we criticized people who want to buy a pedigreed? I could suggest that PETA is in favor of throwing all pedigreed animals into the grinder. The public should not be gullible by this. They have every right to purchase something they want. Sure, they may consider looking at a shelter animal, but they want to buy a pedigreed, that's their choice. News Link

Brought to you by the folks at Time Magazine Link 1) His bowling score - "The Special Olympics" 2) Giving PM Gordon Brown DVD's (of course the region was 1 as opposed to 2 in Europe) 3) Nancy Reagan's seances 4) Spread the wealth - Joe the Plumber 5) My Muslim faith 6) The presidential-looking seal 7) They get bitter 8) Borrowing words 9) Likeable 10) The 1984 Spoof Ad

Daniel Hannan, MEP for South East England, gives a speech during Gordon Brown's visit to the European Parliament on 24th March 2009

After 51 days in office, Barack Obama has appointed only 73 people to 1,200 jobs that require Senate confirmation. Every senior post in the US Treasury Department remains vacant, with the exception of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, who should have 17 deputies. In this economic crisis, this is not acceptable. Enough with the weekend parties, the poses for magazine covers, the honeymoon is over. It's time to get working. Our allies in the United Kingdom called the Obama team "unreachable." Sure, it was comments by Sir Gus O'Donnell, Britain's most senior civil servant, but he does point out the advantagse of a permanent civil service. Don Surber - There is Nobody There Independent - Cabinet Chief: Obama team 'unreachable'

NAACP To Protest News Corp Nationwide Over Cartoon IMHO, if the NY Post cartoon artist put the name "Pelosi, Reid, Rangel" on the monkey or monkeys, I would say the reaction would be much more muted. Of course they would be calls for insensitivity, but on a much lower scale. It would seem that Sharpton and the NAACP are milking their 15 minutes worth in order to prolong this outrage at the NY Post, Fox News, and basically any media publication that has been labeled as "insensitive" in their eyes. Still, what if Bush was President or McCain? No outrage. Or if Hillary Clinton was President? Nothing. It certainly looks like "monkeys" being used in political cartoons are non-grata for the next four years. Maybe the cartoonist should use hyenas next time.