That's a very plausible story. In fact, I would say it is probably the most likely scenario, given the facts we know.
Yet you still find it odd she traveled to Seattle. Why?
A disingenuous, intellectually dishonest point. Name a major party candidate in any US presidential election in the modern era other than McCain and Obama where being a natural born citizen was raised as a campaign issue and prompted the filing of lawsuits.
A presidential candidate is not obligated to respond to every absurd allegation raised by fringe elements on the other side. Nor is any candidate obligated to take seriously frivolous lawsuits filed against him.
Except for the babysitting problem. The babysitter said she sat for him at night while Ann attended night classes. See the article I cited in my previous post.
And, of course, it's impossible that someone else sat for him while she worked during the day./sarcasm
Based on incomplete evidence. The key piece of evidence on which one could base a conclusion, the information set forth on the long-form birth certificate, has been withheld.
The Hawaiian COLB suffices to prove birth in Hawaii. It's good enough for the State Department to get a passport, provided it is filed within a year of birth and lists Hawaii as the birth place, which Obama's was. There is nothing additional in the long form necessary to prove his natural born status.
Perhaps we would be in a position to dismiss the other possibilities if we could see the information on the long-form birth certificate, such as in which hospital he was born and who was the doctor who delivered him.
And how exactly are the hospital and doctor relevant to establishing Hawaiian birth?
Except that all we have are purported images of a COLB on a friendly website.
Hard copies were also provided to a website funded by a foundation whose founders were life-long Republicans and McCain supporters.
And what was the basis for the place of birth? Did Barry's grandmother go in and claim that he was born at home?
Are you seriously alleging that the state of Hawaii would issue a birth certificate for a home birth based on such flimsy evidence? Gee, isn't it strange that the state department doesn't have the same concerns as you?
The possibility that at that time a Hawaii resident could register a child born outside Hawaii or purportedly born at home has already been discussed at length. Google it.
I've researched this in past months and found that it is nonsense.
The eyebrow-raising part is that someone would transport a newborn infant from Honolulu to Seattle.
Given that she had friends in Seattle, and it is very plausible that she was having problems in her marriage, I don't see why this should raise anyone's eyebrows.
Perhaps you find it strange that she would take an infant on a six hour flight. I don't. People take infants on commercial flights all the time. I've seen people with newborns on transatlantic flights, which are far more greuling than the relatively short Honolulu-Seattle route.
McCain's birth certificate was in fact submitted in evidence,
No it has not. McCain privately showed it to a single reporter. He never made either it or photographs of it publicly available.
and you can see it here at an anti-McCain website:
That image is a fake. It was not posted by McCain or made available to the website by him. It was never presented as evidence in any legal proceeding. It was fabricated by his opponents in an attempt to claim he is not eligible for the presidency. This has been exposed long ago. You are really behind the curve.
Your argument is a false choice. It's not either-or. Yes, we need the law clarified at the state levels to require reasonable evidence of eligibility prior to having a candidate's name placed on a ballot. But that has nothing to do with whether the American people should reasonably expect our highest public servant to demonstrate candor and openness on such a point.
Perhaps they should, but they haven't. The American people were obviously satisfied with the COLB images on Factcheck. They elected him anyway. That train has left the station, my friend.
Trying to pass off constitutional questions of presidential eligibility, and the related questions of standing to raise a particular constitutional issue, as some kind of "routine brief" is nonsense and again, intellectually dishonest.
Motions to dismiss based on lack of standing are pretty rountine.
Anyone who thinks that Obama and the DNC have not engaged leading constitutional lawyers to provide advice on this, and is not centrally managing all of these local counsel through lead counsel, and that lead counsel does not vet every single document that goes out in every one of these proceedings in every jurisdiction against Obama and the DNC, is fooling themselves.
Anyone who thinks that there are no high-power leftist lawyers willing to work for free for their Messiah is fooling himself.
Litigating constitutional issues with high quality counsel is expensive. The idea that this is all "pro bono" or covered by routine "retainers" is laughable.
Okay, so show me the evidence that either Obama or the DNC has spent a dime on any of these proceedings.
One would expect there to be a very strong reason for taking a newborn infant on such a trip. For example, one possibility raised by those questioning the concealment of the long-form birth certificate by Obama is that Obama Sr. and Ann had gone to Kenya that summer and the baby was premature, or they were somehow delayed in their departure, such that the baby was born in Kenya, and immediately after the birth they returned to Honolulu. In that case, being stuck in a third world country with a newborn, one could understand the desire to undergo the inconvenience and take the risks associated with immediate travel back to Honolulu in order to quickly be in the support system provided by her parents and available medical care. On the other hand, why someone with a newborn infant would leave the support provided by her mother and doctor in Hawaii to take the newborn alone to Seattle is not as understandable. But, maybe that happened.
You say President Obama is not “obligated” to respond to questions raised about where he was born, such as in which hospital. Well, he is obligated if a court requires him to respond.
And the idea that a president should exhibit openness and candor before the American people about the place where he was born apparently is risible to you.
You know, it is customary in this country for places of a president’s birth to be honored by a marker or a museum. Will Obama be the first president whose birthplace is a state secret? Perhaps there will be a secret museum in Area 51.
You say we should all be satisfied with the purported COLB images, that we have no reason to want to know in which hospital he was born or which doctor delivered him.
The point is that those details, if they exist and are genuine, would put to rest the set of concerns based on the possibility that he was born elsewhere than Hawaii, provided that his birth certificate was based on information provided by a Hawaiian doctor or other medical professional. On the other hand, if the long form birth certificate reveals that his Hawaiian birth was based solely on the claim of a family member, such as in the case of a claimed home birth without corroboration of a doctor, midwife or other medical professional, that would suggest there may in fact be reason to doubt his Hawaiian birth.
For example, in the scenario raised by those who think he was born in Kenya and then immediately returned to Hawaii as I described above, perhaps Ann and her mother, not being experts on citizenship law and wanting to be certain there would be no question as to whether the baby would have the benefits of U.S. citizenship, were the ones who submitted the information upon which the birth certificate was issued, claiming the baby was born at home with no medical professional present. The state employees would likely have no reason not to credit their information and would issue a birth certificate. If that turned out to in fact be the case from the information on the long-form birth certificate, those circumstances, in my mind, would reinforce the doubts about his place of birth rather than allay them.
You can certainly scoff at such possibilities, claiming them as implausible, and perhaps they are unlikely. But there is an easy way to resolve them, simply by not concealing the long-form birth certificate.
I know you are not a lawyer, because you are having trouble grasping that the constitutional standing issues raised in challenges to presidential eligibility are not resolved by some sort of standard “motion-to-dismiss-frivolous-lawsuit” pleading, and that the legal issues also differ based on the characteristics of the plaintiff. Also, you don’t understand the work involved in litigating issues of constitutional standing or in managing multijurisdictional litigation. But, one can get a reasonable idea of the magnitude of the legal costs incurred, at least to March, by the information cited in post #283 in this thread. Apart from the birther litigation, there appears to be very little else to account for the bulk of those expenses for the time period after the legal work done in the spring and summer of 2008 to be placed on the ballots for the November election. No doubt we will continue to see high legal expenses throughout the summer of 2009 due to the continued birther lawsuits.
But looking at your profile, I see that you are an economist, so you should at least be able to grasp the concept that Obama’s position is analagous to that of a least-cost avoider. He can authorize the release of the long-form birth certificate at minimal cost. Yes, the public and the media, as you suggest, can try to investigate matters ourselves, researching newspaper announcements, interviewing neighbors and acquaintances from that period, contacting hospitals and doctors, researching Hawaii law, etc, and trying to arrive at a preponderance of the evidence conclusion based on incomplete evidence, but we are at a position of much greater cost and difficulty.
Obama, on the other hand, as the most efficient provider of information through his ability to release his long-form certificate, and as someone who has claimed the office of our highest public servant, should reasonably be expected to bear the extremely minimal burden to him of providing the information.
And authorizing the state of Hawaii to directly submit into a court proceeding a certified copy of his long-form birth certificate does not require him to relinquish his legal position as to the standing of the plaintiffs; as a matter of civil procedure, he may still contest the standing issue.
Furthermore, that Obama of all people is contesting the ability of ordinary Americans to have standing in these types of cases appears hypocritical. Obama was a lecturer in consitutional law, and has purported to champion the rights of ordinary and powerless Americans against the powerful, claiming that the Constitution should be interpreted in a manner to show empathy towards such persons.
One would think Obama would be opposed to interpretations of standing that act to bar powerless ordinary Americans from challenging powerful government officials, unless of course he is simply a hypocrite.