2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign Discussion Thread-Part 10.

[JOFO]

Originally Posted by toscano

You ARE aware that a birth certificate would have been required to get a passport, right ? Is the right THIS desperate ? Really ?

Yeah, apparently they are.

[U2isthebest]

diamond, can you say "bullshit"?

[Utoo]

Originally Posted by diamond

john mccain has cooperated early on.

I guess we can assume that McCain's isn't photoshopped since he can't use a computer.

McCain's Birth Abroad Stirs Legal Debate
His Eligibility for Presidency Is Questioned

By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 2, 2008; Page A06

The Senate has unanimously declared John McCain a natural-born citizen, eligible to be president of the United States.

That is the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, then under U.S. jurisdiction. The bad news is that the nonbinding Senate resolution passed Wednesday night is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks.

Article II of the Constitution states that "no person except a natural born citizen . . . shall be eligible to the office of president." The problem is that the Founding Fathers never defined exactly what they meant by "natural born citizen," and the matter has never been fully tested in court. At least three pending cases are challenging McCain's right to be sworn in as president.

Jurists on both sides of the political divide, consulted by the McCain campaign, insist that the issue is clear-cut. They argue that McCain is a natural-born citizen because the United States held sovereignty over the Panama Canal Zone at the time of his birth, on Aug. 29, 1936; because he was born on a U.S. military base; and because his parents were U.S. citizens.

But Sarah H. Duggin, an associate law professor at Catholic University who has studied the "natural born" issue in detail, said the question is "not so simple." While she said McCain would probably prevail in a determined legal challenge to his eligibility to be president, she added that the matter can be fully resolved only by a constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court decision.
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"The Constitution is ambiguous," Duggin said. "The McCain side has some really good arguments, but ultimately there has never been any real resolution of this issue. Congress cannot legislatively change the meaning of the Constitution."

Senators sympathetic to McCain's position, including Democrats Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), dropped an earlier attempt to quell the eligibility controversy with legislation. McCaskill acknowledged in an interview that there is "no way" to completely resolve the question short of a constitutional amendment, a cumbersome process which could not be concluded before November.

She described the nonbinding resolution, which she sponsored, as "the quickest, clearest and most efficient" way for the Senate to send a message to the courts that McCain has the right to be president.

One person who disagrees with that premise is New Hampshire resident Fred Hollander, who has filed a suit in U.S. District Court claiming that the Republican candidate is "not a natural born citizen." In an attempt to prove his argument, the 49-year-old computer programmer filed a subpoena last month seeking McCain's birth certificate.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees citizenship services, declined to hand over copies of the document, saying the subpoena was improperly served.

In his autobiography, "Faith of My Fathers," McCain writes that he was born "in the Canal Zone" at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Coco Solo, which was under the command of his grandfather, John S. McCain Sr. The senator's father, John S. McCain Jr., was an executive officer on a submarine, also based in Coco Solo. His mother, Roberta McCain, now 96, has vivid memories of lying in bed listening to raucous celebrations of her son's birth from the nearby officers' club.

The birth was announced two days later in the English-language Panamanian American newspaper. A senior official of the McCain campaign showed a reporter a copy of the senator's birth certificate issued by Canal Zone health authorities, recording his birth in the Coco Solo "family hospital."

Curiously enough, there is no record of McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone Health Department's bound birth registers, which are publicly available at the National Archives in College Park. A search of the "Child Born Abroad" records of the U.S. consular service for August 1936 included many U.S. citizens born in the Canal Zone but did not turn up any mention of John McCain.

Possible discrepancies in the bureaucratic paperwork are of little concern to Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor who looked into the case at the McCain campaign's request. Tribe examined the issue along with Theodore B. Olson, his onetime nemesis in the 2000 Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore.

Tribe said it would be "astonishing if the recordkeeping practices of Canal Zone [officials] could have any bearing on eligibility for the U.S. presidency."

The key constitutional issue is whether the Canal Zone was part of the United States at the time of McCain's birth. In a memorandum, Tribe and Olson cite a 1986 Supreme Court ruling stating that the United States "exercised sovereignty" over the 10-mile-wide area between 1904 and 1979, when it was handed back to the Panamanians. Hollander and others challenging McCain's eligibility argue that the zone was never part of the United States.

Duggin, the constitutional law scholar, said the sovereignty question is "more complex" than Olson and Tribe concede. People born in some U.S. territories, such as American Samoa, are not recognized as citizens of the United States.

According to a State Department manual, U.S. military installations abroad cannot be considered "part of the United States" and "A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth." Tribe said the manual is an "opinion" with no legal status.

There are few precedents for someone born outside the 50 states running for president, let alone becoming president. The best example the McCain camp has been able to come up with is Vice President Charles Curtis, who served under President Herbert Hoover and was born in the territory of Kansas in 1860, a year before it became a state. The 12th Amendment requires that vice presidents possess the same qualifications as presidents.

Several prominent politicians have run for the presidency without having been born in the United States, including Barry Goldwater, who was born in the territory of Arizona in 1909, three years before it became a state. Mitt Romney's father, George Romney, ran in 1968, even though he was born in Mexico. Since neither Goldwater nor Romney won the presidency, the "natural born" clause was never tested.

Duggin believes that Hollander and the other plaintiffs are likely to have a hard time establishing their own eligibility, or legal standing, to challenge McCain. She said it will be difficult for them to demonstrate that they have been "disenfranchised" because of the mere presence on the ballot of a candidate with debatable constitutional qualifications.

But she said the matter should be sorted out before the election, rather than afterward: "Imagine what would happen if the courts were to overturn an election simply based on eligibility. It would be a disaster. After what happened in 2000, people would completely lose faith in the electoral process."

[Utoo]

From the August 1961 edition of the Honolulu Advertiser:





I'm still waiting to actually see John McCain's birth certificate.


And yours.

[Earnie Shavers]

Do you think Obama will bring that up tomorrow night so Johnny can clear his name?

do you?

<>

[diamond]

And yours.

I'm the Omega Man.

Seriously-that's looking more legit.

The next question:
How come the fat Democrat hasn't dimissed his suit then?

<>

[diamond]

Originally Posted by Utoo

From the August 1961 edition of the Honolulu Advertiser:





I'm still waiting to actually see John McCain's birth certificate.


And yours.

Utoo

Why is the date June 6th 2007, stamped on this document?

It's not the original, where's the original?



<>

[toscano]

Originally Posted by diamond

Utoo

Why is the date June 6th 2007, stamped on this document?

It's not the original, where's the original?



<>

It wouldn't be the first time someone got a copy of a birth certificate, did it myself for my middle child, as I lost it in a move, perfectly legal, proof enough of citizenship to get him his passport.

You're tilting at windmills son.....there's just no story here with any legs.

[Vincent Vega]

Originally Posted by Utoo

[IMG]

I'm still waiting to actually see John McCain's birth certificate.


And yours.

Well, McCain's birth already was an issue, why not make it even for the sake of it... however borderline it is.
McCain: Citizenship issue put to rest long ago - John McCain News - MSNBC.com

[diamond]

Isnt Factcheck.org owned by the Anneberg of Chicago that Obama sat on the board of disbursing 60 Million Dollars a year-conflict of interest here, where they are trying to legitamize this birth certificate.

[toscano]

Originally Posted by diamond

Isnt Factcheck.org owned by the Anneberg of Chicago that Obama sat on the board of disbursing 60 Million Dollars a year-conflict of interest here, where they are trying to legitamize this birth certificate.

Kind of a run on sentence there lil fella, but the simple answer is, there's no need to.

Why don't you run along, give the certificate # to the Hawaii Dept. of Health and ask them to verify it, be sure to report back to us.

Thank you so much for bringing the issue to our attention.

[toscano]

and in case it hasn't been mentioned already

COMMON SENSE


and also this

snopes.com: Barack Obama Birth Certificate

[toscano]

McCain a "natural born citizen" ???

hmmm, Iwonder

snopes.com: Is John McCain a natural-born citizen of the U.S.?

[diamond]

It's still incumbent upon Barrack to clear his good name.

He is for the common man right?

<>

[BVS]

Desperation is a tender trap...it gets you every time...

[toscano]

Originally Posted by diamond

It's still incumbent upon Barrack to clear his good name.

He is for the common man right?

<>

So he's guilty until proven innocent ?

Figures that would be the tack of a Bush devotee.....

[diamond]

Sarah was.

<>

[U2isthebest]

Originally Posted by BonoVoxSupastar

Desperation is a tender trap...it gets you every time...

"So Cruel" reference FTW

[cydewaze]

Originally Posted by toscano

It wouldn't be the first time someone got a copy of a birth certificate, did it myself for my middle child, as I lost it in a move, perfectly legal, proof enough of citizenship to get him his passport.

I had to send a letter to Albany to get a copy of my birth certificate since the original was lost some years ago during one of my family's moves. Of course it doesn't make the duplicate any less valid, since there had to be an original in order for the duplicate to even be granted.

This is the shit that people talk about when the issues aren't cutting it for them.

Anyway, here's something I found interesting. It's good to see that some conservatives are still interested in actual conservatism. The bolded part is my doing, because I think it outlines the disconnect between what this administration says and what it does.

Christopher Buckley, the son of conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Tuesday he's resigned from the conservative National Review days after endorsing Barack Obama's White House bid, among the most powerful symbols yet of the conservative discontent expressed this election cycle.

In an online column, Buckley said he had decided to offer his resignation from the magazine his father founded after hundreds of readers and some National Review colleagues expressed outrage he was backing the Illinois senator.

"While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for," Buckley wrote.

"Eight years of 'conservative' government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case," he also wrote.

The resignation comes four days after Buckley formally endorsed Obama on the Web site The Daily Beast, writing the presidential campaign had made John McCain "inauthentic," and Obama appeared to have a "first-class temperament and first-class intellect."

In a statement posted on the publication's Web site Tuesday, National Review editor Rich Lowry noted Buckley was writing for the magazine on a trial basis, and took his offer to resign with the "warmest regards and understanding" sincerely. Lowry also took issue with Buckley's contention the magazine had been flooded with angry mail over Buckley's endorsement, saying it had received a relatively small 100 e-mails expressing disapproval.

"It's an intense election season and emotions are running high," Lowry said.

Matt Lewis, a contributing writer to the conservative Web site Townhall.com, told CNN the National Review made the right decision in quickly accepting Buckley's resignation.

"While it is acceptable for a conservative to vote for a third party – or to abstain from voting for McCain – no real conservative could cast their vote for Obama," he said. "The conservative movement didn’t leave him, he left it."

But in his column Tuesday, Buckley expressed disappointment the magazine, and conservatives in general, were not more open to dissenting opinions that his own father once championed.

My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman," he said, adding later, "My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much."

Buckley is only the latest among several prominent conservative to express dissatisfaction with McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and George Will, all high-profile conservative thinkers, have each openly criticized the ticket over the last month.

"Sadly, I think Christopher Buckley is merely the latest example of the “conservative” avant-garde who has succumbed to a common temptation: Becoming more liberal is tantamount to becoming more open-minded. There is a palpable elitism among some of the conservative panjandrum," Lewis said.

[Diemen]

Give it up diamond. You said that there was only a photoshopped copy. Toscano rightly pointed out that a birth certificate is required to get a passport. Utoo showed you actual pictures of an actual, legitimate copy of Barack Obama's birth certificate (it is not unusual in the slightest to have a copy and not the original of a birth certificate), and your response is to claim that Factcheck.org, an organization recognized on both sides of the aisle for its impartial reporting of the facts, is somehow biased towards Obama?

For someone who just a little while ago said that you hope it's not true, you sure seem to be doing everything you can to ignore evidence that would confirm your supposed hopes.