The ONE's citizenship questioned!?

[Tarheel]

I have read a LOT of stories about individuals and groups seeking a legal means to bring The ONE's citizenship into question in order to negate his win, stop the election, or stop the swearing-in ceremony.  Too little and too late in my opinion.  No one is going to legally stop the political juggernaut that is The ONE from taking the oath of office on 20 Jan 2009.

At any rate, this particular story did catch my attention due to the speculated reasoning of the writer as to why a particular Supreme Court Justice referred this case.  A reason that I think is amusing anyway.

This from The Politico, all emphasis is my own:

SCOTUS to debate Obama citizenship?
By: Nia-Malika Henderson
December 5, 2008
 
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide Friday whether to take up a case over president-elect Barack Obama’s citizenship — one of a few around the country seeking to nullify his election, but this one has an interesting lineage. It was referred to the high court by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only African-American justice.

Maybe Thomas is just returning the favor — putting through a case that questions whether Obama should be president, after Obama said he wouldn't have picked Thomas for the high court.

The suit filed against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells contests Obama’s claims to citizenship and therefore to the presidency and initially sought to stay the election. Alan Keyes, who was defeated by Obama in a race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, has filed a similar suit.

During the campaign, a copy of Obama’s birth certificate was posted on his website, showing that he was born in Hawaii. A petition to stop the Electoral College from confirming Obama as the next president has been rejected by Justice David Souter.

Legal experts say the case has little chance of going anywhere.

Here's the link:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16225.html

[Thrilla]

I have read a LOT of stories about individuals and groups seeking a legal means to bring The ONE's citizenship into question in order to negate his win, stop the election, or stop the swearing-in ceremony.  Too little and too late in my opinion.  No one is going to legally stop the political juggernaut that is The ONE from taking the oath of office on 20 Jan 2009.

At any rate, this particular story did catch my attention due to the speculated reasoning of the writer as to why a particular Supreme Court Justice referred this case.  A reason that I think is amusing anyway.

This from The Politico, all emphasis is my own:

Here's the link:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16225.html

Legal experts say the case has little chance of going anywhere.

Yep.  Pretty much.

Court: No review of Obama's eligibility to serve

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth. The court did not comment on its order Monday rejecting the call by Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J., to intervene in the presidential election.

Donofrio says that since Obama had dual nationality at birth — his mother was American and his Kenyan father at the time was a British subject — he cannot possibly be a "natural born citizen," one of the requirements the Constitution lists for eligibility to be president.

Donofrio also contends that two other candidates, Republican John McCain and Socialist Workers candidate Roger Calero, also are not natural-born citizens and thus ineligible to be president.

At least one other appeal over Obama's citizenship remains at the court. Philip J. Berg of Lafayette Hill, Pa., argues that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii as Obama says and Hawaii officials have confirmed.

Berg says Obama also may be a citizen of Indonesia, where he lived as a boy. Federal courts in Pennsylvania have dismissed Berg's lawsuit. Federal courts in Ohio and Washington state have rejected similar lawsuits.

Allegations raised on the Internet say the birth certificate, showing that Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, is a fake.

But Hawaii Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino and the state's registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, say they checked health department records and have determined there's no doubt Obama was born in Hawaii.

The nonpartisan Web site Factcheck.org examined the original document and said it does have a raised seal and the usual evidence of a genuine document.

In addition, Factcheck.org reproduced an announcement of Obama's birth, including his parents' address in Honolulu, that was published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961.

(This version CORRECTS that Hawaii officials, not secretary of state, confirmed Obama birth certificate.)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081209/ap_on_go_su_co/scotus_obama

[JohnDeere]

from conservative newsite Newsmax
http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/obama_birth/2008/12/08/159417.html

Obama Was Born in the United States

 
Monday, December 8, 2008 11:30 AM

By: Ronald Kessler  Article Font Size   
 



For months, I have been bombarded by e-mails claiming Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore does not meet the constitutional requirements to be president. I have also received hundreds of e-mails from readers asking why I do not expose the truth about his birth.

The truth is that Obama was born in Hawaii. Hawaii, by law, does not make original birth certificates public, and this has enabled conspiracy theorists to claim that there is something nefarious about the circumstances of Obama's birth.


Instead, it provides those born in Hawaii with a so-called certification of their birth — also known as a short-form birth certificate — that lists the name of the baby and the date and place of birth but not additional details like the birth weight and the parents' hometowns.


As claims of a cover-up mounted on the Internet prior to the election, Obama posted a digitally scanned image of his original short-form birth certificate. But that enabled conspiracy theorists to say the image had been created by Photoshop. Obama then let FactCheck.org, a nonprofit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, view, handle, and photograph the short-form birth certificate at Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago.


The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport," FactCheck.org, headed by respected former Wall Street Journal reporter Brooks Jackson, concluded.


According to the State Department, that includes "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records."


That led to claims by conspiracy theorists that the document shown to FactCheck.org was fake. However, on Oct. 31, the Hawaii Department of Health issued a press release saying that Chiyome Fukino, director of Hawaii's Department of Health, along with Alvin Onaka, the registrar of vital statistics, had "personally seen and verified that Hawaii's State Department of Public Health has Sen. Obama's original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures."


Fukino told the Honolulu Advertiser that her department issued the press release after being barraged by calls about the issue, including some received by state officials at home in the middle of the night.


This has gotten ridiculous," said Fukino, a medical doctor.


Aside from that official verification of Obama's birth in Hawaii, back on Aug. 31, 1961, the Honolulu Advertiser ran an announcement of his birth.


Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalaniaaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4," the announcement said.

What about claims that Obama’s paternal grandmother has said he was born in Kenya? At a dinner at the Ritz Carlton given by a conservative group, I happened to sit next to Philip Berg. Berg is the Philadelphia lawyer who is suing to have Obama disqualified as president because he is allegedly not a citizen of the United States.


A former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania, Berg has claimed that he has a tape recording of a phone conversation in which Obama’s paternal grandmother says she was in the delivery room in Kenya when he was born Aug. 4, 1961.

On Oct. 23, Berg told talk-radio host Michael Savage that he would release the tape “in a day or two.” To date, he has not done so.

At the dinner, I asked Berg how he knows that the voice on the tape is that of Obama’s grandmother. Berg was vague: He said he knows someone who vouches for the fact that the tape is authentic.

"Tape recordings" are never fool-proof evidence. For example, I remember a dinner my wife and I once had in Paris with a reporter for the National Enquirer while I was writing a book on arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Actor Richard Burton had just died, and the reporter said he was going to meet up later with other National Enquirer reporters at a bar so they could make up stories about Burton to run in the paper.

I knew a Williams & Connolly lawyer who reviewed the paper’s stories for libel before they were published. He had told me that he insisted on listening to any taped interviews that support sensitive stories.

“How do you get around that?” I asked the Enquirer reporter.

“Oh, that’s easy,” the reporter explained. “I get in a cab and pay the driver to say what I tell him to say into a tape recorder.”

On the radio show, Berg told Savage that he believes the birth certificate Obama showed FactCheck.org was forged.

“This has been a real sham he’s pulled off for the last 20 months," Berg told Savage.

Berg said he believes Obama's mother was near the end of her pregnancy and was unable to travel by plane, so Obama was born in Kenya. According to Berg, the family then traveled to Hawaii and registered the birth and submitted the birth announcement to the local newspaper.

Why would they do that? To any conspiracy theorist, the answer would be obvious: They knew that Obama would some day run for president. After all, Berg also believes that President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and other government officials had “adequate foreknowledge” of the 9/11 attack and “failed to warn the country or attempt to prevent it and have been covering up the truth of that day ever since,” according to another lawsuit he filed.

“I think that there is no question that President Bush knew about it [and] was very complicit in the events of 9/11,” Berg told Joe Scarborough on MSNBC on Jan. 28, 2004.

In response to Berg’s complaint about Obama’s citizenship, Obama and the Democratic National Committee asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit. They said that Berg’s claims were “ridiculous” and “patently false” and that Berg had “no standing” to challenge the qualifications of a candidate for president, because he had not shown the requisite harm to himself.

On Oct. 24, U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick in Philadelphia dismissed Berg’s lawsuit. In a 34-page memorandum and opinion, the judge said Berg’s allegations of harm were “too vague and too attenuated” to confer standing on him or on any other voters.

Berg has appealed to the Supreme Court. A virulent Internet rumor claims that the court has agreed to take the case. In fact, as it does with all cases, the court has merely agreed to decide whether to take the case. Berg's petition is on the justices’ private conference list for today, Dec. 8.

Meanwhile, Berg has been collecting money through his Web site to support his case. When I asked him how much he has collected, he would not say.

If there were any basis for Berg’s claims, one would think that the John McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee would have supported the lawsuit or at least blasted out e-mails touting the case. In fact, a McCain campaign aide told me that McCain campaign lawyers had looked into the allegations about Obama’s birth and found them to be bogus.

You would also think that Berg would be happy to be interviewed about the case by a journalist like me. But although he agreed to an interview at the conservative dinner, he has since failed to respond to my voicemails and e-mails asking for him to call.

Ever since President Bush toppled a man who killed 300,000 people, he has been the subject of vicious attacks and conspiracy theories from the left. Now is the time for the right to show that it will not tarnish itself by going down that road and that it will extend to the new president the fair play and respect Bush never received.


Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via
e-mail. Go here now.




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