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I wouldn’t blame Maddow for this, as fun as it might be to do so (and think it’s disingenuous for the article to do so): I’ve seen publicly released reports by my own company, completely apolitical stuff, become the subject of similar tweets, where dozens of accounts tweet the exact same thing containing a link to my content. I know I’m not doing it (and it’s a three person company and the other two people know absolutely nothing about Twitter.) I’ve seen the same thing happen with blog posts, too: sites just steal content and pretend it’s their own.

I’m pretty sure that’s untrue: which other state showed an uptick in millionaires to correspond to Maryland’s loss? Much more likely millionaires suddenly found themselves multi-hundred-thousandaires as the economy went to hell.

Take a look at this line in the twelfth amendment:

And if the House of Representatives shall not choose a President whenever the right of choice shall devolve upon them, before the fourth day of March next following, then the Vice-President shall act as President, as in the case of the death or other constitutional disability of the President.

I think the "qualify" bit in the 20th amendment (which changed the start of term from March 4 to January 20) is simply updating this scenario.

Imagine a situation where the Electoral College has run into a 269-269 tie, and where the House of Representatives is deadlocked and has not yet chosen a President -- but the Senate HAS selected a new Vice President. This section of the 20th amendment serves to make it clear that the Vice President serves as acting President "until a President shall have qualified."

Why else use the wording "until a President shall have qualified? If there's an argument to me made that some sort of documentation needs to be presented, why wouldn't it be worded to say so? Something like "until a President shall have proven to be eligible for the office." There's historical precedent for a Presidential election being decided after multiple ballots in the House; the 12th amendment's language regarding this situation is made obsolete by the 20th's change in the date; this makes sense to me.

What on earth are you talking about? There’s no requirement of proof; no previous president has been asked to prove anything about their birth, including the one who may have been born in Canada. There’s no support whatsoever for your claims, and by your logic, the office of President has ALWAYS been vacant because no one has ever “proven” their eligibility before.

If we can get one prominent dim to say he’s not an ape, then he loses the lib crowd. Worth the asking, IMHO.

Sorry, that doesn't make any sense at all. The theory of evolution says that men and apes have A COMMON ANCESTOR. It doesn't say that humans are DESCENDED from apes themselves.

My guess (and it's just a guess) is that the grouping of "official" balls is handled formally by committee and isn't very flexible.

This seems like a non-issue to me -- the transcript at Fox News shows he went to all ten of the official balls and zero of the unofficial ones, including the BET one that someone upthread is saying he went to. Considering it took them four hours to hit those ten balls, that they ended at 12:30 in the morning after so full of a day, and that the Commander-in-Chief ball, honoring the military, was among those he attended, I fail to see how this particular attack makes a lot of sense.

The Queen mother died a few years ago ... she was, I believe, a centurion.

The Queen Mum was a Roman soldier?

Or a Cylon.

Hendricks has a little bit of a cucumber flavor to it. I think it makes a really good Bloody Mary (yeah, I make mine with gin instead of vodka), but I don’t know if it’d be great in a martini.

Which prior candidate showed a birth certificate to "the State Department?" I can't seem to find any news articles about John Kerry, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan, or Jimmy Carter arriving at "the State Department" to present their papers.

Do I need to look back beyond that for the last time it happened?

Did every single State Department employee witness the presentation of documents? Was it just the Secretary of State who received the formal papers from each candidate? Perhaps a deputy? Is it a civil servant who looks over and approves the form, or a political appointee? If the candidate disagrees with the State Department's assessment of the validity of his papers, is there an appeals process?

Did the candidates need to show their parents birth certificates as well, you know, to ensure they were natural born citizens? Or is that a new requirement?

Please, do tell me more about this procedure. I'm fascinated by this untold story of American politics.

Which Presidential candidates have shown their birth certificates in previous elections? Who did they show them to? Who decided the birth certificates they supposedly showed weren't forgeries?

I'm not aware of any presidential candidate ever being asked to produce a birth certificate, and I'm certainly not aware of random anonymous internet "experts" then declaring said birth certificate a forgery.

I also remain unaware of any state that actually hands out original birth certificates, as opposed to official copies and the like, since doing so would ensure that the STATE no longer had record of your birth, but, hey, anonymous internet experts know everything.

Unless your parents were foreign diplomats, I believe you ARE a natural born citizen — but the court is never going to officially define it, so all we have to go on is what the term meant then. If you were born in a given country you were a “natural subject” of its king or other government.

The birth certificate that everyone is pretending is a forgery says he was born in Hawaii. There’s no issue here, never HAS been an issue here, and never will be an issue here. This is “Hillary killed Vince Foster and Web Hubbell is Chelsea’s real father” territory.

I agree that the only argument to be made is that his father's citizenship makes Obama himself NOT a natural-born-citizen, though I believe that argument fails, both for practical reasons and for reasons of the law.

From a practical standpoint, I think the court is loathe to define the term; they've avoided explicitly doing so at every previous occasion, and I don't see them wanting to do so now.

From a legal standpoint, based on Jay's letter to Washington, the lack of debate about the phrase being included in the constitution, and the common law usage of the word at the time, I believe the phrase's meaning was clearly understood at the time -- natural born citizen meant all those born in the United States other than children of diplomats or hostile occupying forces. If they'd wanted to refuse American-born children of foreigners, the constitution would have said natural-born citizens of OTHER COUNTRIES were ineligible. Instead, it said the opposite -- that natural born citizens of this country were.

How is "our side" helped by ignoring the doubts about The One's birthplace and/or nationality?

Because there are no serious doubts. There's no real evidence for any of this. There might -- MIGHT -- be some argument to be made that having a non-American father might make you a ... non-natural-born citizen -- but there's NOTHING that seriously suggests he was born anywhere but in Hawaii, and the continual claims of that non-issue have really made it impossible to intelligently discuss the first, POSSIBLE issue of his father's citizenship. (Which, separately, as best I can tell, wouldn't preclude an American-born person from being considered natural-born, based on case law.)

First, I doubt that his 18-year-old mother would have been aware that she was one year too young to qualify her son for citizenship under the current law; hasn't everyone always believed that a US citizen's baby, born anywhere in the world, is automatically a US citizen (and, of course, may or may not also be a citizen of the country in which he is born?)

Second, I don't think the timeline makes a lot of sense -- his parents married in February, and he was born in August. I can't imagine a young pregnant woman deciding to travel to Kenya -- pretty much on the exact opposite side of the world from Hawaii -- especially in 1961. (And I don't think I've ever heard of evidence she DID travel to Kenya then, though I also haven't heard stories of people standing up to say "oh, I was her hospital roommate when she had Barack in Honolulu, look, you can see her in the corner of this old family photo." (Haven't been looking for such, either.)

Finally, there's the inconvenience of the birth certificate that lists his place of birth as Honolulu, along with the maybe corroborating evidence of the birth announcement. I realize it's a 2007 printout, so aside from the unlikeliness of it actually being a forgery, we'd also need to account for the fact that he would also have had to forge his birth certificate on PREVIOUS occasions, such as to get a US passport. Since this CURRENT forgery, produced while running for President, is apparently so clumsy that random anonymous experts on the internet can determine so, how is it that the state department fell for his previous, likely even clumsier forgeries?

I'm sorry, it's just all too much, and requires way too much belief in bad faith by everyone from his 18 year old mom to the city clerk in Honolulu. I don't buy it.

This American, born in America. God, this must be how most Democrats feel when Al Sharpton shows up on TV: you're not helping our side.

What about Woodrow Wilson’s England-born mother?

Was he not a natural-born citizen?

Wouldn’t the court setting some extra-constitutional standard be an example of that judicial activism we’re always hearing about? There’s not a word in the constitution regarding how one proves eligibility, or what “natural born” might mean, and there’s certainly no serious evidence behind claims Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii.

I mean, except for the obvious step his mother took of putting a birth announcement in a Hawaii newspaper, just in case he ever wanted to run for President someday despite being, you know, born in Kenya.

Oh, OK, you’re absolutely right.

Enjoy your tin foil hat.

This is a great comment, except for the part where it’s utterly wrong and ignores the common law interpretation of “natural born citizen” as it existed in 1787.

One good explanation:
http://volokh.com/posts/1204265246.shtml