Posted on 01/04/2010 1:40:16 PM PST by Spaulding
Since the teleprompter tells Obama what to say, I think debating the teleprompter would be a great site gag and you could have a George Soros puppeteer typing responses frantically behing the curtain (ala Wizard of Oz).
The "Birthers'" legal quest has turned into a massive wank. Intead of using the Freedom of Information laws in the State of Hawaii, a series of half-assed lawsuits in courts around the country has worked out very badly. No one is suggesting that the BC issue isn't worth discussing, but those who do so ad nauseam are foolish to believe that their failed and incompetent legal efforts have not cost them credibility. That is why Team Obama keeps bringing them up.
OK, so perhaps The Annointed One was born in Vancouver, or Kenya, or on the White House lawn on the 4th of July, the case to make is that he is not a Natural Born Citizen, because he said so and because his father was a foreigner.
Essentially, the "Birthers" are conspiracy theorists, the "Constitutionalists" are legal thinkers with documentary evidence and history to use in making their case.
like Obama being an illegitimate president???
after the things that actually you need to stop right now.
Like Obama's agenda by stopping Obama himself.
And if you want to argue, you want to argue, then let's argue based in fact, based on things that are provable and true.
like the natural born citizen clause of the U S Constitution and whether there are any facts out there that prove that Obama meets the qualifications thereof???
And what do you say? Do you want to argue the Constitution? Good. Let's show the number of people in congress and in the Senate that don't even read the Constitution.
Let's start with you, Glenn. Why don't you read the section having to do with the natural born citizen qualification and then tell us the facts and evidence you have in your possession that prove that Obama meets those???
Can't tell you right now if healthcare is even in the Constitution.
Can you tell us if a non-natural born citizen occupant of the Oval Office is in the Constitution????
Let's talk to the scholars.
Then why don't you??? start with talking to the Birthers, then Leo Donofrio, and others who have actually studied this issue???
Let's talk to the average Joe that understands this isn't in the Constitution.
The average Joe knows that you are being evasive on the natural born citizen issue. Are you clueless about that????
Let's argue the Constitution on the laws and the systems that they are building today.
Glenn, if they are not legally occupying the Oval Office, then they cannot build anything unconstitutional. Get it??? What's there to argue then???
Instead of arguing the Constitution and whether or not he was born in America, why don't we argue the constitutionality of a little known thing called czars.
Why argue czars at all when the head Czar is not qualified to be there at all???
And the power that these people have.
What kind of power do they have over you, Glenn, when you can pontificate the "Constitution" on your show and in your books, and yet when push comes to shove, run from it like a scared rabbit???
Back in a minute.
with answers??? or just more obfuscation???
Well Said, Marie2 —
What keeps you out of the A+ category is one teensy factoid. Every court in the land could declare Obama ineligible for office, which of course he is, simply because his father was a foreign citizen.
However, the only body that would then be constitutionally authorized to remove him, is still Congress! They would have to take the court ruling and the info, then use it to impeach and convict him. Since they, acting as the Electoral College, installed him and had him sworn in, I don't think that they would do that, especially as now constituted with a Democrat majority, especially in the Senate, which is the convicting authority.
Obama is the de facto, not the de jure POTUS. The eligibility court cases creep forward in, finally, the proper venue. However, IMHO it would be wise to assume that, in all likelihood, we are stuck with the SOB until 2012. We need to go to "Plan B," and do our best to control the marxist until then ... a Republican House majority in 2010 might help, if we can keep the RINO's down and not split up into another Perot thing.
What keeps you out of the A+ category is one teensy factoid. Every court in the land could declare Obama ineligible for office, which of course he is, simply because his father was a foreign citizen.
However, the only body that would then be constitutionally authorized to remove him, is still Congress! They would have to take the court ruling and the info, then use it to impeach and convict him. Since they, acting as the Electoral College, installed him and had him sworn in, I don't think that they would do that, especially as now constituted with a Democrat majority, especially in the Senate, which is the convicting authority.
Obama is the de facto, not the de jure POTUS. The eligibility court cases creep forward in, finally, the proper venue. However, IMHO it would be wise to assume that, in all likelihood, we are stuck with the SOB until 2012. We need to go to "Plan B," and do our best to control the marxist until then ... a Republican House majority in 2010 might help, if we can keep the RINO's down and not split up into another Perot thing.
Yep -- keep hammering Congress, especially the Senators, for Obama's SR511. Their hypocrisy on this issue is out there for all to see -- all who will look at it.
But I also believe that the absence of a valid U.S. birth certificate issue coupled with the fact of a foreign father keeps Obama and his legal team off balance. They are unable to destroy both arguments at the same time.
When they argue that Obama's BC has already been published on Factcheck, they are validating the evidence that his father was a Kenyan foreigner named Barack Obama, Sr. When they try to claim that his father may not have been that foreigner named Barack Obama Sr., then they must produce evidence of such a claim, like a birth certification that will then run counter to that certain Factcheck document that they all, including his campaign, claim to be valid.
It is the Obamanots [not the Birthers and the Foreign Fatherists] who are discombabulated by the dual track of this issue. We need to keep it that way and support each other. The success of one track serves the other, and vice versa. We all win in the long run.
As the scripture says: "In the mouth of two or more witnesses, shall every matter be established". Obama is not a natural born citizen by virtue of more than just one piece of evidence, and we still have to get to the bottom of his Indonesian citizenship and what that means. The more witnesses against his claim to office, the more factual the evidence against his usurpation.
The Obamanots have built a web that has them trapped. They might be able to wriggle out of one argument, but in doing so they entangle themselves in another. We need to keep all arguments alive because they are all valid in their own right.
Please use both of your abilities to write more concisely than I, who struggles to resist telling the whole story, to steer those who value freedom toward an understanding of this subtle provision, a provision to try to insure allegiance to our nation of laws and not a crown - natural born citizenship.
D’Onofrio is clearly a bright guy. He gets rattled. Apuzzo handles the pressure more gracefully. If I could choose someone to defend the truth in a swarm of Charlie Gibsons, I'd trust Apuzzo to handle the potshots gracefully and not storm off in a huff. I've spoken with a number of legal faculty here on the left coast. It is remarkable that most have never examined the legal history behind natural born citizenship. One who specializes in legal history confirmed the definition. So it is no surprise that few understand. It is apparently a concept seldom addressed in law school. The dean emeritus of this law school believes there are only two kinds of citizens, natural and naturalized - Hamilton, Madison, Marshall, Waite, Gray, ...be damned! Perhaps this debate, with suits being debated in the public, will engender some honest scholarship.
John Marshall remains the most concise in his statement in The Venus. Marshall is a fascinating man, a minuteman, neighbor of Washington, on the Virginia ratifying committee, an envoy to France with a penetrating intelligence not hindered by about three weeks of law school. The Grotian Society Papers of 1972 have a whole chapter on the importance of Vattel to the founders. Vattel was quoted more, by a factor of at least four, than any other legal source between 1790 and 1820. The Kent papers and Joseph Story are very readable. The Alexander Morse "Treatise on Citizenship, By Birth and Naturalization, with reference to The Law of Nations, Roman Civil Law, Law of the United States of America,and the Law of France... is, needless to say, exhaustive, and leaves no doubt about the intent of the founders, well understood when Morse wrote in 1881.
One of the great surprises to me, reading legal articles (my background is mathematics) is to discover the too obvious politicization of over a dozen papers which purport to examine the flaws in the natural born citizen provision. A test like one clearly not imposed on tree ring data in the global warming subterfuge, can be applied before reading papers by Solum, Lohman, Yinger and Herlihy. Look at their citations. Use the search utility in whatever pdf reader you use to look for “Vattel” or “Marshall.” Surprise! These legal scholars act like lawyers. They carefully select their evidence. Never mind that the founders, according to Hamilton, absolutely rejected English Common Law as the basis for national law, and replaced English definitions of citizenship because citizens must become citizens of the new nation; states had slightly different statutes for granting citizenship, and based upon Blackstone, because they were colonies. Most all recent academic authors depend upon the fuzzy reasoning in Wong Kim Ark, which finally determined that Wong Kim was a citizen, and avoid the clarity of Minor v. Happersett. Now, thanks to D’Onofrio, we know that the Wong decision was written by justice Gray, who was the only appointee of the ineligible Chester Arthur, whose father, like Obama’s was a British subject when Arthur was born. (This isn't to imply that Gray's confusing arguments were to cover for Arthur; his questions didn't help Arthur)
With bloodline requirements for leadership in England, the new United States needed an an independent mechanism to insure the allegiance of a commander in chief. Our founders depended upon Vattel. Jesse Reeves, “The Influence of the Law Of Nature upon International Law in the United States”, 1909, said “At the time of the American Revolution the work of Vattel was the latest and most popular, if not the most authoritative, of the continental writers.” As cited in The Venus, there is no doubt about the meaning and source of the terms “Natives or indigenes” which were translated to natural born citizen with the first English translation of Vattel’s Law of Nations.
The only doubt ever raised in Wong Kim Ark was whether we might want to add the foreign born children of U.S. citizens to the definition, but never were the U.S. born children of aliens included in a proposed extension. That doubt was never translated into an amendment, with good reason in my opinion. So Obama is not a constitutional president, and I hope we can find a way to inform those who have trusted our ill-informed pundits to interpret the meaning of our founders.
That's because they don't have any.
Of course that has not been alleged. The habit of posting birth announcements in the Hawaii paper did not require any presidential aspirations or conspiracy. No one ever said it did. As we all know, anyone can place a notice, for any reason, with no proof.
You need to read more than just birther websites. Have you actually looked at the pdf of the page in the newspaper that contains the birth announcement? If you had, you would know that it came directly from the department of health. It says so right at the top of the page. You would also know that a spokesman from the paper confirmed that all birth announcements came from the department of health.
In other words, what you think you know, that "anyone can place a notice," is simply wrong.
According to Hawaiian Law, the DOH is required to release Obama's information, because it is only they who have officially said that he is a "Natural Born Citizen." (Would you believe?) Thus, they are absolutely required by Hawaiian Law to provide the documents that led them to make that extraordinarily stupid statement.
Furthermore, once posting that Certification of Live Birth on his website and claiming it was a Birth Certificate, Obama legally waived all rights to privacy on the supporting documents. Bottom Line: after conducting this charade, Obama might still produce a valid Birth Certificate. So what? He still is not a "Natural Born Citizen," as required by Article II. He is, however illegitimate, the de facto POTUS, and will remain so until impeached and convicted by the House and Senate, which is the only way he can be removed from office.
Obama's legal dream team has managed to change this Birther Case into a wild goose chase, and by fighting the battle in courts where the foolishly (or worse) represented plaintiffs clearly had no standing, sort of judicially semi-established a back-door right of privacy for their client where none exists. It has put up a smoke screen obscuring the basic fact that he is ineligible because his father was not an American citizen.
I have a humble suggestion. Drop the name Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. and de-politicize this inquiry. Let's fight on to chisel in stone what a "Natural Born citizen" is, once and for all and get this impostor behind us.
I have never read a birther website.
Everything I know about the birth certificate controversy comes from coverage on FR.
LOL. Okay, so everything you know about the birther controversy comes from stuff posted on birther websites that was reposted on FR.
I have seen this claimed, but I have yet to see it substantiated.
Even if it were true, however, what possible motive mama Obama or granny Obama have to risk a felony purjury conviction and fraudulantly register Bambi's birth in Hawaii?
The great benefits of US citizenship, the lesser benefits of being native-born Hawaiian. Just ask Sun Yat Sen!
He was also falsely documented as a Hawaiian born, and was thus admitted went to Punahou Prep, just like Obama.
Your attitude is kind of ugly. I read all sorts of FReeper threads.
It wasn't necessary to fraudulantly register his birth in Hawaii to get him US citizenship if he were in fact born in Kenya. Under immigration law at the time, he was entitled to receive naturalized citizenship as the minor child of a US citizen, his mother. See my profile for the relevant sections of the law.
So no, there was no motive.
the lesser benefits of being native-born Hawaiian.
Such as?
Just ask Sun Yat Sen! He was also falsely documented as a Hawaiian born,
Yeah, over 50 years earlier, and long before Hawaii became a state. Why, exactly, birthers think this is relevant to Obama is beyond me.
"Just ask Sun Yat Sen! He was also falsely documented as a Hawaiian born,"Yeah, over 50 years earlier, and long before Hawaii became a state. Why, exactly, birthers think this is relevant to Obama is beyond me.
It shows that Hawaii has always played fast and loose with who it will give a Birth certificate to. Even today Hawaii will issue a Birth certificate to any one born any where, on their claim to a Hawaiian birth.
Obviously it is a legal concept that you cannot grasp.
I remember discussing the law in place at the time, and his mother, while a citizen, was not eligible to register a foreign birth as a citizen. The law was changed to provide a barrier to war-babies whose mother never came to the US, being born and raised abroad with no other connection to the US than a likely temporary marriage to or love affair with a US soldier abroad.
All of that discussion is on the Long Thread, and almost certainly you have been a participant on that thread. It’s been running as a thread since spring 2008.
Nor are you correct to mock or scoff at the very reasonable idea that the civil procedures and customs in Hawaii of 1961 were not overly dissimilar from those of the 1880’s — not 50 years, but 80 years earlier. The computer era in record keeping had not yet arrived, the only real differences were in typewriters. Filing, processes and forms would have been relatively unchanged. Civil bureaucracy changes with the pace of a snail in December.
The benefits of being a native born Hawaiian were well known to Grandma Toots Dunham from her work in the bank. A very insular and established culture was Hawaii, and being a native is a great leg up in all social and business endeavors. It also allows one entry to Punahou.
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