h/t Right Wing Watch.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) is not exactly known as a towering intellect, although he's a panderer to wingnuts par excellence. Just days *after* he assured an FDL crew that he knew that Obama was born in Hawaii, he told a town hall audience that he wanted to file a lawsuit demanding that Obama produce his long-form birth certificate. It would appear Franks has calculated that there are votes in them thar wingnuts, because his statement at the Take Back America conference over the weekend is clearly tapping into that angry, violent undercurrent:

Obama's first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers' money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries...there's almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. We shouldn't be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can't do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity.

You stay classy there, Trent. Remember when the GOP lost their minds because one of the Dixie Chicks said only that she was ashamed of being from the same state as the president? How in the world can they justify such over-the-top nastiness now? If the majority party wasn't so gutless, I'd think a formal censure in the House would be considered.

John Amato:

Calling Obama an enemy of the people puts a big fat target on his back. These elected officials are acting like militia members who fly to DC in black helicopters and are helping to plan a violent act against him. It's dangerous and disrespectful and he should be called out publicly for his behavior.

TPM Muckraker has found the next late-night sensation - a birther infomercial entitled "Where Was President Obama Born." It's already received the usual 1:00-in-the-morning airing on at least one local TV station in Texas. The United States Justice Foundation, a Birther front group led by the aptly named Gary Kreep, paid $100 to the CBS affiliate in Lubbock for the privilege of gracing their airwaves. That seems like money well spent for the Birthers for reaching a few thousand eyeballs or so and filling them with wingnut ideology. But that's not the true purpose.

For a $30 contribution, viewers also get a fax sent in their name to the 50 state attorneys general and Attorney General Eric Holder demanding that President Obama produce his real birth certificate.

Getting 4 suckers to fork over $30 for nothing covers their whole expense, and looking at the production values, producing the episode didn't cost much more than $100 either. This is pure conservative hucksterism, where a few people make money off of whipping up fears for no real purpose.

And Bill Keller, the host of the birthermercial, is perfectly positioned to be that huckster - he's a fundamentalist preacher:

The program was produced by LivePrayer.com, a Web site affiliated with Bill Keller, a fundamentalist Christian minister who also hosts the infomercial.

Imprisoned in the late 1980s after an insider trading conviction, Keller later committed his life to God, attended Liberty University in Virginia, and founded Bill Keller Ministries, according to his bio. LivePrayer.com was "founded for the sole purpose of having a site on the internet where people can go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for prayer."

This has about as much of a chance at dislodging Barack Obama from office as the Sham-Wow, but both infomercials have the same goal - to get rich off of selling you garbage. Sadly, there are probably enough morons in America to make Gary Kreep and Bill Keller very wealthy men.

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(h/t CSAPNjunkie)
Tweety's love for Tom Delay is mythic as we all know so it's funny that he has to try and argue with him against the looney-birther movement. The fact that he loves them explains a lot. By the way, watching the Bugman talk about how he dealt with town halls is hysterical. He obviously treated town hallers better than members of his own party, but even Delay would probably have brought some pesticide with him at one today because many of the birthers are Ron Paul fans and they hate Republicans almost as much as they hate Obama.

Matthews: You're a man of the right and proudly so, I wonder whether you're even comfortable with the way it's headed. We've got people that we have people that question whether the president is legitimate or not. Whether he was born in the US or not and they mean it viscerally. It isn't something they just want to check his papers. They don't think he is. Where are you on that one?

We have people on the far right but they say they are birthers. How far do you go these days, Mr. Leader? Are you over with the birthers are you over with them?

Delay was trying not to answer the question and Chris kept coming back to it.

Delay: Well, I’d like the President to produce his birth certificate.

Tweety laughs...

Delay: Yeah, I can. Most illegal aliens here in America can. Why can’t the President of the United States produce their birth certificate?

Matthews: Are you actively seeking that paper?

Delay: Yeah.

Chris, will you do me a favor? Will you ask the President to show me his gift certificate — I mean, his — gift certificate — his birth certificate?

Matthews: No, I’m not going to ask him.

So he's looking for Obama's papers. The president better watch out. He also wants to get rid of Medicare and SCHIP and maybe the state of Texas too. Who knows....

As tax cut-receiving Tea Baggers and town hall hecklers continue their tirades over health care reform, their kin in the Obama birth certificate denial crowd perpetuate their mass delusion. But lost in the fury is what might be deemed the Iron Law of Birtherism. That is, the birther movement is strongest in precisely those states where Republicans poll best and health care is worst. And as it turns out, there is a Birther Corollary: education, working conditions and myriad other indicators of social failure are generally most dismal in the most red of states.

In the staggering DailyKos/Research 2000 poll released 10 days ago, a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. (Nationally, only 11% of Americans denied Obama's natural citizenship, with another 12% in doubt.) This is a uniquely Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. And to be sure, the old times there are not forgotten. As Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent concluded, "as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn't know where Obama was born."

That the birther movement would take hold in the states of the old Confederacy should come as little surprise. While Americans rejected George W. Bush's Republican Party on Election Day in November, in counties across much of the South voters actually increased their support for the GOP candidate John McCain over Bush four years earlier. The interactive New York Times map above tells the tale of November's losers still fighting their failed 2008 campaign by other means:

That helps explains why when it comes to the delusion over Obama's citizenship, as Steve Benen observed, one of these things is not like the other:

"Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it's practically mainstream."

But that brand of racial flat-earthism is not all that's practically mainstream in the South.

Consider, for example, abysmal health care.

Continue reading »

More right wing crazy if you can stand to watch the whole thing.
h/t Bob Cesca and Rumproast who has the lyrics posted:

A funny thing went down in the presidential race ‘08
The democratic nominee was thought to be so great
But our founders made a rule and what they wrote was really clear
Only natural-born citizens are eligible...my dear

Obama ,tell us where were you born?
‘Cause the media won’t do their job anymore
You’re grandmother in Kenya said you were born on foreign shores
So Barry tell us where oh where were you born?

You’d think that Ol’ Barrack would wanna try and nip this in the bud
To settle all these lawsuits and wipe away the rumor mud
But the one thing that could prove it he won’t let anybody see
A bona fide presidential birth certificate mystery

Obama ,tell us where were you born?
‘Cause the media won’t do their job anymore
You’re grandmother in Kenya said you were born on foreign shores
So Barry tell us where oh where were you born?

Can you confirm Barrack...where were you born?
‘Cause the jpeg on your website was proven forged
I gotta say pal to me this whole thing just smells rotten to the core
So Barry tell us where oh where were you born?

Barrack Hussein Obama tell us...where were you born?
You don’t like your middle name spoken aloud in your side a thorn
Obama tell us where oh where were you born
I said Barack Obama tell us where oh where were you born?

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Bill O'Reilly spent his Talking Points Memo segment last night lambasting Republicans for letting themselves get carried away by the "Birther" controversy. But then later, he continued his defense of the Birthers' chief mainstream promoter, Lou Dobbs -- mostly because the main entity attacking Dobbs is also a familiar enemy for O'Reilly:

O'Reilly: Check 6. The far-left group Media Matters is after Lou Dobbs. [Ad plays.] ... Now, check sees nothing racial in the birth-certificate controversy. It's all about far-right politics.

But Media Matters traffics in alleged racism. It's one of their favorite attack tactics.

Sorry, Bill, but if you really had any clue about the nature of far-right politics, you'd be aware that race is their primary motivator. If it's all about far-right politics, then more than likely it's all about race.

Moreover, it's obvious that race is the major subtext of the Birther conspiracy theory. The purpose of the entire meme is to underscore for Americans the idea that Obama is foreign, an outsider, not a "real American." Obama's mixed-race heritage is the central feature of this -- and reminding everyone that Obama's mother was a white woman who married a black African is all about touching on the more reptilian portion of the American psyche.

Conspiracy theories are all about creating scapegoats and delegitimizing enemies. There's a long history in this country of successful African Americans being attacked in this fashion by similar whisper campaigns that gradually migrate to the general public gossip. As Ana Marie Cox said yesterday on MSNBC, the Birther controversy is directly out of a history of "attempts to de-person black people and to treat them as something than full people, less than full humans".

Not that Bill O'Reilly -- himself a frequent practitioner of such enterprises -- would be likely to recognize this.

[Larger version of image here.]

Red state GOP Congressmen returning home for the August recess will find two epidemics sweeping their districts, crises they seem intent on ignoring. The first is the plague that is the "birther movement," the apparently contagious delusion primarily afflicting Southern Republicans that President Obama was not born in the United States. The second is dismal health care. As it turns out, health care performance is worst in precisely those reddest of states which voted for George W. Bush and John McCain.

While even Karl Rove ridiculed the latest bogus Kenyan birth certificate as "likely a forgery," his red state acolytes remain unconvinced. In a jaw-dropping DailyKos/Research 2000 poll released last week, a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. And to be sure, this is a uniquely Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and not coincidentally the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008.

But this disturbing denial of the indisputable truth of Obama's U.S. citizenship is far from the only sign of trouble in red state America. There, the health care systems are in critical condition.

A 2007 Commonwealth Fund report, "Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance," examined states' performance across 32 indicators of health care access, quality, outcomes and hospital use. Topping the list in the chart above were Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Bringing up the rear were the Bush bastions of Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The 10 worst performing states were all solidly Republican in 2004. (8 voted for McCain in 2008.)

The extremes in health care performance are startling.

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World Net Daily has done it! They've finally proven that President Obama was, in fact, born in Kenya:

The document lists Obama's parents as Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Obama, formerly Stanley Ann Dunham, the birth date as Aug. 4, 1961, and the hospital of birth as Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya. Read on...

There's just one teensy little problem here -- The Republic of Kenya didn't exist until 1964 -- three years after Obama's birth. Right wing blog Little Green Footballs is calling this a hoax, but leave it to the nutbags at Free Republic to take the debunked myth to a whole new level. See, the whole thing ties into the divorce of President Obama's parents!

Judge Samuel P. King who granted the divorce – last I heard was retired and alive (for now) in his 90s in Hawaii -- MAY or MAY NOT have asked to see the Marriage Certificate. BUT, I bet Judge King asked to see Obama JR's Birth Certificate to confirm Ann's claims that Obama SR was in fact the father. That is “standard” policy to have a Birth Certificate in case the mother asks for child support from the father (or Welfare) later after the divorce. Judge King probably told Ann to produce a birth certificate before or at trial, which would have been sometime in mid- to late-February 1964 HAD Obama SR answered his notice that was sent to Cambridge.

When Judge King wrote the order on Jan. 23, he had his clerk notify Obama SR via what's referred to as a "knock and nail". That is, the postman leaves the notification on the door for (generally) 10 days and retrieves it after that time passes -- signed or unsigned. That order was sent on Jan. 23 via airmail from Hawaii and was probably posted on Obama SR's door Jan. 27-28. Read on...

Nevermind the fact that Barack Obama's birth announcement appeared in two Hawaiian newspapers in 1961. Hell, even Karl Rove says it's likely a forgery. You can be sure the Fox News gang will be running with this story, but will CNN's Lou Dobbs continue to go down the Birther path that's killing his ratings and embarrassing the entire network?

Wait, isn't President Obama the Antichrist? My brain hurts. If I could speak directly to every Birther face to face, this is what I would say.

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Real Time's New Rules for July 31, 2009. Among other topics, Bill reiterates what he said in his LA Times op-ed.

Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything.

For the last couple of weeks, we've all been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers" -- the far-right goofballs who claim Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii and therefore the job of president goes to the runner-up, former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

Also, when Obama was sworn in as president, he forgot to give his answer in the form of a question.

And yet, every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in his house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID.

And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background ... and they still wouldn't believe it.

Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won't take anything on faith?

So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead.

But we live in America, and in America, if you don't immediately kill arrant nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive and eventually take over, like crab grass or reality shows about fat people.

This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up. A handful of Republican operatives, enraged at Bill Clinton's unprecedented economic growth and budget surpluses, found a woman named Paula Jones, which led to a woman named Monica Lewinsky, which gave me enough material to eventually be able to buy a big house in Bel-Air. Which I'm still conflicted about.

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Bernie Goldberg has a theory about why there's been a significant controversy over Lou Dobbs' promotion of the "Birther" conspiracy theory: It's all an evil plot by the Obama White House to string the story along indefinitely so as to make his right-wing opposition look like a nuttier bunch than a PayDay bar.

Goldberg: Well, let's get the easy part out of the way first. CNN should not, repeat, not fire Lou Dobbs for talking about this. Lou Dobbs didn't say Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, he said just the opposite! He said he was born in the United States. But then he said he should produce his birth certificate.

Now let's think about this for a second. Why wouldn't President Obama release his birth certificate? He was born in Hawaii, Hawaii last I checked is in the United States, and -- why in the world wouldn't he release his birth certificate?

O'Reilly: Can I answer that question?

Goldberg: Well, let me answer it first. OK? Let me just answer my own question first.

O'Reilly: OK, you answer it, and then I'll have the correct answer.

Goldberg: I have a theory. And the theory is this: That the Chicago Mafia inside the White House want to keep this crazy controversy going. Because the longer it goes, the better the chance that they will conflate the crazy right-wing fringe with regular conservatives and regular Republicans.

O'Reilly: That's not a bad theory. But from dealing with the Obama White House, now, for almost, more than a year, I will tell you they are, uh, as every White House I've ever experienced, they're arrogant, they're arrogant. And they're saying to themselves, 'We're not gonna let Lou Dobbs tell us what to do. We're not gonna let these cranks on talk radio tell us what to do. They want the birth certificate released? Tough. We're not going to do it, because we have the power, and we don't like that.' That's what it's all about -- it's a 'Ha ha, we're not gonna do what you say.'

Interesting theories, gentlemen. Unfortunately, they both tend to run aground on a simple fact: Obama actually released his birth certificate in June 2008. It reads, "Certification of Live Birth."

Now, as FactCheck.org's definitive piece on the certificate issue explains, this is in fact the "short form" of Obama's birth certificate, not its long form, which is filled out by the hospital and kept in its records. So why doesn't Obama release the long form? Because Hawaiian law doesn't give him that option:

The document is a "certification of birth," also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

Now, if Goldberg and O'Reilly are so concerned that the public might conclude that mainstream conservatives are prone to far-right conspiracy theories and various other forms of wingnuttery, they might look in the mirror. It's the virtual definition of wingnuttery to even be asking why Obama won't release his birth certificate when he has in fact done so.

There's no Obama conspiracy keeping this garbage alive and tying it around the necks of mainstream conservatives. They're doing a very fine job of that themselves.

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Judging from last night's performance, Lou Dobbs is pinning his hopes on salvaging the tattered shreds of his credibility on claiming that, gosh, he was just reporting objectively on the "birther" controversy:

Dobbs: A left wing group's liberal mainstream media have stepped up some attacks on me for reporting on the controversy over the president's birth certificate when in fact I've stated many times that President Obama is a citizen of this country in my opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, called on CNN to fire me for my even discussing the story. Coming to my defense last night, Bill O'Reilly. ...

... Undocumented persons -- well I want to say first of all to Bill O'Reilly thank you. I do want to point out Bill O'Reilly also kicked my rear end around a bit, disagreeing with me absolutely on the issue of whether or not, as I said, the president could solve all of this by just simply releasing his long form. He and I disagree on that, but I appreciate Bill O'Reilly being a standup guy. And apparently I was a topic on another show on FOX News, Geraldo Rivera attacking me for being wrong on illegal immigration as well as the birth certificate controversy. How I could be wrong about that I don't know because all I said is the president is a citizen, but it would simple to make all this noise go away with just simply producing the long form birth certificate. Ann Coulter came to my defense partially.

... Well I've repeatedly stated that President Obama is a citizen of the United States. My question is simply why not provide the long form birth certificate and end all of the discussion.

If Dobbs thinks this kind of lame excuse is going to pass muster, he needs to think again.

Dobbs wants to have it both ways: He wants to claim he believes Obama is a citizen, but just wants to know why there hasn't been a birth certificate produced. In other words, he believes Obama is a citizen, but believes he might not be.

As Robot regularly replied to Will Robinson: "Does not compute." Especially Dobbs' pretense that he merely intended to shed some light on the story.

First of all, merely covering a story on your network means you think the story has some credibility. Yet every working journalist who has acquainted himself with it has recognized it for what it is -- a groundless conspiracy theory concocted by extremist wingnuts looking for any kind of possible ax to grind with Obama and willing to fabricate stories out of whole cloth.

In other words, it's the kind of story that no responsible journalist will devote any more than a dismissive sentence to reporting. But then, Lou Dobbs is not what you would call a responsible journalist.

But really, one doesn't demonstrate the skepticism or objectivity that Dobbs pretends he was exercising here by claiming "no one" knows "the reality" regarding Obama's birth certificate and remorselessly demanding to know where Obama's birth certificate is -- when in fact everyone's been trying to explain to him that it's in Hawaii (as indeed he finally reported last night).

Verdict: Epic Fail.

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Lou Dobbs claims there are "new developments" in the Obama birth certificate "controversy" and goes on to defend the remarks he's made on his radio show and on CNN. And just what is this "new development" Dobbs felt he just had to "report" on? The state of Hawaii now says they did retain a hard copy of the original birth certificate. Wow Lou. Breaking news there, huh? Apparently Dobbs is determined to keep this up no matter how ridiculous it's making him look.

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I have to say this Birther movement is starting to get on my last nerve. Seriously, what more has to be done to get through their thick, dense skulls that Obama was born in the U.S.? And now, to add "credibility", they trot out G. (apparently for Geezer) Gordon Liddy--a convicted criminal, mind you--to express all the same ridiculous doubts ("That's not a birth certificate--it's a certificate of live birth!") and to assert that the "preponderance" of evidence (which is limited to his grandmother saying he was born in Kenya and the screaming mimis of some very unhinged people) suggests that he is, in fact, an illegal alien, and all the other evidence (the certificate of live birth, the birth announcement in the Honolulu papers, etc., the verification by state officials, the fact that courts have already thrown this ridiculous charge out, the fact that he was certified as a legitimate candidate for POTUS, etc.) entirely dismissable.

Chris Matthews ever-so-gently (perhaps in deference to the feeble appearance of Liddy?) smacks down the insane hate and logic spiraling out of control.

Media Matters looks at the nutwing conspiracists who should be relegated to the outer fringes of the national dialogue being instead mainstreamed by the likes of Lou Dobbs.

Life is hard enough and the mainstream media has a lot to answer for in making it so much harder –financial ‘experts’ like Jim Cramer spreading Wall Street rumours and urging viewers to buy Bear Stearns stock just before the investment bank collapsed, the Investor’s Business Daily’s scare-mongering with false claims the health care reform bill would make private medical insurance ‘illegal’, Lou Dobbs and his incessantly silly conspiracy theory over Obama’s birth certificate, Hardball’s collaboration with Karl Rove in the intentional misleading coverage of the Plame CIA leak, the non-stop maudlin eulogies for Michael Jackson drowning out any other more boring news like, oh say, more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, Glen Beck’s high-pitched hysterical assault on our (largely medically uninsured) eardrums, and now...

… Mom Jeans.

This is big news, according to Greg Gutfeld and the immaculately bleached and botoxed Laura Ingaham on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor as the first ‘dork’ President of the United States has appeared in public wearing Mom Jeans, bought with a gift certificate, apparently, from the now bankrupted Mervyn’s. Americans should be scared – scared, I tell ya – that the POTUS has lost his cool and dresses like a band teacher. Greg Gutfeld barely cracks a smile as he warns us ‘this isn’t going to intimidate Putin’ and ‘our adversaries in Iran will not take [him] seriously,’ especially since he also throws a baseball ‘like a little girl’… all symbols of something ‘deeper and more sinister’…

I kid you not. I wish I did. CNN’s Jeanne Moos has also had a good laugh at the President’s expense as well, linking Mr Obama’s fashion faux pas to that other political heavyweight, Jessica Simpson, who was even shown being hounded by the media for her stylistic stumble. Moos brings on celebrity fashionista Robert Verdi (wearing horizontal orange striped shirt, wrinkled khaki chinos and a pair of oversized white rimmed sunglasses down low on his forehead) for an in-depth queer eye for the straight guy study of the President’s pants. ‘Too short, frumpy, two big tree trunk legs, terrible – they’re Mom Jeans, for sure’.

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Lou Dobbs uses the example of some crazy birthers out there screaming at Congressman Mike Castle to claim that there are still some questions that have not been answered about the President's birth certificate.

This after his fill-in host, Kitty Pilgrim just debunked those claims on Dobbs' own show this past Friday. I asked whether Dobbs would follow suit and admit that there was no controversy. Well, I just got my answer.

Hey Lou, if you're going to spout crazy birther propaganda on your show, do you think you could get your story straight with your staff first?