Posted on 08/05/2009 12:52:28 PM PDT by lonewacko_dot_com
There are, sadly, a lot of Birthers out there. A recent poll showed that 11 percent of Americans -- including 28 percent of Republicans -- don't believe President Obama was born in the U.S. Another 12 percent aren't sure.
So, at some point, you're likely to find out that a friend or relative is a Birther. Your Uncle Floyd will forward you a chain e-mail that says Obama was actually born in Kenya and there's a Kenyan birth certificate that proves it and hundreds of government officials and reporters are in on a conspiracy to hide the truth of his ineligibility for the presidency from the public. And you will wonder: How can I possibly deal with all the falsehoods in this e-mail without disappearing down a rabbit hole?
Well, wonder no more. In the spirit of public service, Salon has compiled this list of the most popular Birther myths, along with all the debunking you could ever ask for. Now you can just e-mail this list to Uncle Floyd and get on with your life...
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Pure B.S.!
Name one "conservative" who has lost an election because of this "so-called" nonsense.
The only nonsense is anything out of the mouth of anyone who despised the former Constitution so much that simply asking someone for their "birth certificate" is "crank" exercise.
Nice try.....(It is with great discipline that I refrain from pressing the "Troll" button!)
We ARE the strict constructionists. The problem is that most of these people are not even aware of the fact the United States had a different set of citizenship laws for each one of the States until long after the phrase was written into the Constitution.
John Jay, Goerge Washington, and the other Founding Fathers knew exactly what the phrase meant, and they knew perfectly well that they were talking about allegiance and not about the place of birth. The misrepresentations being disseminated in the SCOTUS case law and discussions are difficult to follow and understand because they are based upon false assumptions that naturally lead to conflicting and nonsensical interpretations. When you disregard all this later revisionism and return to the plainly written words of the Founding Fathers and the works of the authors like Vattel whose Law of Nations they relied upon, the errors of the later revisionists become obvious.
The following is a response I just posted in another thread, and it explains how the phrase is referring to allegiance a person has at birth as determined by the varying laws existing at the time in each of the thirteen States of the Union.
You wrote:
“So far we have assumed that the conventional meaning of “natural born citizen” for those learned in the law in the eighteenth century was equivalent to the meaning of “natural born subject” in nineteenth century English law. But is this assumption correct?
No, the assumption is not correct. The British common-law was a relatively recent, 18th Century, abnormal departure from and in contradiction to the customary Law of Nations stretching back two millenia to the Roman Republic and earlier. The recent propensity to assume the 18th-19th Century English common-law practice of making the place of birth, jus soli, the method of determining status as a natural born subject equivalent to a natural born citizen is based upon widespread public ignorance and an erroneous confusion of the purpose and means of determining citizenship.
The place of birth, jus soli, is just one of many METHODS for determining ALLEGIANCE to a sovereign. There are many other METHODS which were used to determine ALLEGIANCE to a sovereiegn. Descent by blood, jus sanguinni, is another method used to determine allegiance to a sovereign. Descent from foreign parents, jus albinatus, was a method of denying allegiance to the sovereign in whose domains a person was born. In each circumstance, it is the allegiance which determines citizenship, and it is one or more of the methods which determines that allegiance.
A person natural born in the domain of a sovereign with parents of foreign citizenship and owing allegiance to another sovereign as a result of jus albinatus is the natural born citizen of the other sovereign, and is not the natural born citizen of the sovereign in whose domain the person was born. This was the actual law and practice in old France and many other nations at a time when England used jus soli as a method of claiming the allegiance of every person born in the dominions of the sovereign of England.
Upon the Revolution as of 4 July 1776, the United States of America abolished the British common-law and each state began to enact its own statutory citizenship laws in replacement of the former British common-law. The new statutory laws were modeled on a mixture of international law and custom as described by the works of Vattel and others of like background with respect to the Law of Nations. In every such law, the authors were concerned with allegiance to the sovereign State using a variety of methods including combinations of jus soli and jus sanguinni to determine the natural born allegiance of a person.
So when the phrase “natural born subject” or “natural born citizen” was used at the time of the origin of the Constitution, the true meaning of the phrase is “born in nature with allegiance to a sovereign” of this or another domain. As in old France, the sovereign owed the allegiance was not necessarily going to be the sovereign of the domain which was the place of birth, unless the place of birth was a domain of Britain.
The phrase, “natural born citizen,” as it was used in the Constitution was all about “natural born” allegiance and not about “natural born” place of birth. This is why the Founding Fathers understood exactly what they meant to say when they wrote the phrase into the Constitution for the purpose of excluding any person born with allegiance to a foreign sovereign from serving as Commander-in-Chief or being eligible to the Office of the President. As used by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, the phrase means “a person born in nature with allegiance only to the United States of America.” Each of the thirteen States of the Union had enacted its own laws to determine who could and could not be a Citizen of that State and thereby also a Citizen of the United States. Since dual nationality did not exist at that time, no person born with allegiance to another sovereign could possibly also be “a person born in nature with allegiance only to the United States of America.”
Not "is" but "could be." It wouldn't take the entire state government to pull something like this off, hypothetically.
When you factor in the collusion of the media and Dim partisans on this,the sequestering of other relevant documents--law school journal articles, scholarly articles and dissertations mainly==and moderates' fear of humiliation, at the very least it's a possibility.
I'll go away once they disprove my assumptions by releasing all relevant docs in just one of these categories.
Since we haven’t had any elections yet, nice try. But the perception that conservatives are loons because they focus on this rather than fixing a broken system is out there. The DNC is helping push it along with a commercial they released yesterday that got heavy play on all the news channels last night.
Real people believe that crap. It’s a war of public opinion and we need to do a better job then focus on this absolute nonsense of a birth certificate.
The Secretary of State AND the Governor of Hawaii have both made statements, on behalf of the state of Hawaii that he was born there.
By definition, in my mind, that’s word coming from the state of Hawaii. The job of the sec of state is to be responsible for these types of issues and her office has not once, but twice stated he was born in Hawaii.
Maybe you'd better assign each of us a point to address.
Um, Lingle’s comment was not a positive one. She said ‘he has claimed’ and then she offered something like ‘but no one seems to have heard of him here.’
Hello! Do you know when and where Lingle said that?
OK, I found it:
http://www.khnl.com/global/story.asp?S=8955821
According to that, she said: “...Hawaii is a small state, they are very proud of anyone from home that does well, but honestly Tom, not too many people in Hawaii had heard of Barack Obama until he ran for president. Because as you know, as he was born there, he spent a very few years in school but they are very partial to people who were born in our home state...”
That might let Zeleny off the hook; he said she said BHO was born there. However, it doesn’t let Pilgrim off the hook since Lingle’s parenthetical comment isn’t a verification.
Who is the "we" that are "focusing" on the birth certificate?
Certainly not the GOP politicians running for, or soon to run for, office.
Certainly not Freeperdom. It's my perception, from reading a substantial portion of the threads here for the past 11 years, that the principal focus by "we" here is on impending tyranny and efforts (political or otherwise) that will be required to prevent its success.
The birth certificate issue is simple to resolve. There have been two presidents since WWII who have not released their educational, health, and business-related documents (Clinton and BO). What is truly unique about BO is that something that is the simplest, most common, and least private (yet most required) of all personal information (a birth certificate) is something he absolutely refuses to produce.
The only "nonsense" about this situation is his absolute refusal to put the whole issue to rest.
However, I do not "focus" on this issue to the detriment of paying attention to the horrific losses of freedom & liberty we have already suffered....and the imminent loss of the few remaining.
As far as being portrayed in public media as "loons", I can remember this being the case when:
During the past six decades, any group that stands up to preserve the freedoms & liberties that were protected under the former Constitution have ended up being considered "loons" by the media and their Marxist/Fabian/Grammscian/socialist masters.
The only election I can think of that was lost because of the "loons" labeling was in 64. The media no longer has that kind of control on public opinion.
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