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<p>A San Francisco federal judge ruled Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate John McCain's claim of U.S. citizenship is strong enough that a lawsuit challenging his placement on the California ballot should be dismissed.</p> <p>Northern District of California Judge William Alsup ruled in the case of Robinson v. Bowen, filed by an elector pledged to third-party candidate Alan Keyes seeking an injunction to keep McCain off the November ballot. Two other challenges claiming that McCain's birthplace in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 disqualifies him under the Constitution have been dismissed on standing grounds. But Alsup evaluated the merits of the claim in a hearing last week and in an order issued Tuesday.</p>

This morning President Bush met with General David Petraeus in the Oval Office of the White House. After serving as the Commander of Multi-National Forces in Iraq for 19 months, General Petraeus was promoted to Commander of Central Command (CENTCOM). The President congratulated the General for his successful mission in Iraq. (Transcript) General David Petraeus was asked to do a very difficult job and he did it with distinction and honor. He was a part of the planning for the surge; he implemented the surge, along with a lot of other brave people; and the United States and the world...

CONCORD – A federal judge dismissed Thursday a Nashua man's legal challenge that Republican presidential nominee-to-be Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was ineligible because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone.

Natural Born Citizen Clause The clause of the U.S. Constitution barring persons not born in the United States from the Presidency. [Black’s Law Dictionary, Eighth Edition] [cf. Natural Born Citizen Clause] Greetings, The analysis below is indeed helpful, but it is erroneous and/or misleading on several important points which do deserve further clarification, as follows: (1) there are two (2) classes of citizens under American laws never repealed, not one (1) class: http://www.supremelaw.org/rsrc/twoclass.htm (see all links at the very end) Federal citizens aka "citizens of the United States" were not even contemplated with Article III -- and hence Article II...

Trade deals with Colombia, Korea, and Panama, all rife with political import, are stalled in Congress. In the meantime, some U.S. exports lag In its Decatur (Ill.) factory, Caterpillar (CAT) assembles a line of the heaviest-duty off-highway trucks, behemoths specialized for use in mining, quarry, and construction operations. One model, the $1.2 million, 163,089-lb. 777F truck, can hit a top speed of 40 mph even while carrying 100 tons of dirt, enough to fill 350 wheelbarrows. Caterpillar has seen a robust market in recent years for these monster trucks, but is worried that companies in other countries will start to...

Here they go again: Today the New York Times ran yet another flaky story questioning the presidential eligibility of John McCain, born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone, where his Navy father was stationed. Back on February 28, Congressional reporter Carl Hulse wrote a big story on the "controversy," even though Hulse himself admitted little was likely to come of it. The Senate later approved a resolution declaring McCain eligible for the presidency. Law reporter Adam Liptak's story today, which led the paper's National Section, ran under the hopeful headline, "A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth...

Disqualifying Obama from Presidency. Many here (and in Kook World) think we can disqualify Obama for the presidency with a claim that he not a natural born citizen of the U.S. Here’s how we can do it! First, Obama has no responsibility to “prove” he is a citizen. If we want to disqualify him, we would have to bring civil suit asking for a declaratory judgment that he does not meet the constitutional requirements and therefore must be disqualified. We have a few problems here. USC Title 8 provides many other ways than being born within the bounds of the...

Presumptive Republican nominee's birth location revives debate over the constitutional requirement that limits the presidency to 'natural born' citizens. By Eunice MoscosoWASHINGTON BUREAU Saturday, July 05, 2008 WASHINGTON — Is Sen. John McCain a natural born citizen? Or is he ineligible to be president? The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was born Aug. 29, 1936 — not within the 50 United States, but in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father, a Navy officer, was stationed. His birth location has revived a long-standing debate over the constitutional requirement that limits the presidency to "natural born" citizens. The problem is that the...

PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Panama has ruled out hosting a U.S. military base to replace one in Ecuador which is being reclaimed by the Quito government, a senior Panamanian official said on Friday. Panama -- along with Peru and Colombia -- had been tipped as a possible site to replace the Manta air base in western Ecuador, a key strategic asset in Washington's campaign to stop Latin American cocaine from reaching the United States.

ONCE you become accustomed to gas at $4 a gallon, brace yourself for the next shocking retail threshold: bananas reaching $1 a pound. At that price, Americans may stop thinking of bananas as a cheap staple, and then a strategy that has served the big banana companies for more than a century — enabling them to turn an exotic, tropical fruit into an everyday favorite — will begin to unravel. The immediate reasons for the price increase are the rising cost of oil and reduced supply caused by floods in Ecuador, the world’s biggest banana exporter. But something larger is...

Jim Geraghty takes a look at longstanding blog buzz over Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which the campaign refused to release to the St. Petersburg Times in April: We tried to obtain a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, but his campaign would not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public. Has anyone seen it? Why shouldn’t the record be in the public domain for presidential candidates? Geraghty walks through various rumors now circulating in the wake of the Obama campaign’s birth certificate blackout, including this one: Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name...

Today President Bush signed H.R. 4286, This is a bill passed by the leaders of the Senate and House to honor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi with the Congressional Gold Medal. She is Myanmar's detained opposition leader who has spent nearly 12 of the last 18 years in prison or under house arrest. He also expressed his heartfelt sympathy to the people of Burma in the wake of their natural disaster. LINKPresident Bush took part in an event commemorating Military Spouse Day on the South Lawn at the White House. LINK President Bush met with Panama's President Martin Torrijos in...

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.

Via S&L, a typically shrewd move by the Messiah on three counts — blunting any criticism of his own citizenship status; showing himself to be as magnanimous towards his opponent as Maverick was after l’affaire Cunningham; and avoiding any potential confrontation foisted on him by his dimmer supporters who’d dare challenge McCain’s right to American citizenship based on his military pedigree. Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign announced he would co-sponsor legislation introduced yesterday by his political ally Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) to ensure that John McCain can become president, even though he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. “Senator McCain...

FT. WORTH, Texas -- Sen. Barack Obama's campaign announced he would co-sponsor legislation introduced yesterday by his political ally Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill to ensure that John McCain can become president, even though he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. The issue of McCain's eligibility was raised in a New York Times article noting the constitutional requirement that a U.S. president be a "natural-born citizen" had never been fully defined.

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain said Thursday that he had no concerns about his meeting the constitutional qualifications for the presidency because of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone. A Democratic colleague said she wanted to remove even a trace of doubt. The Democrat, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, introduced legislation that would declare that any child born abroad to citizens serving in the United States military would meet the constitutional requirement that anyone serving as president be a “natural born” citizen. “In America, so many parents say to their young children, ‘If you work hard and you...

RICHARDSON, Texas (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said Thursday the question of whether he can run for president, despite being born in the Panama Canal Zone, was put to rest 44 years ago in Barry Goldwater's run for the White House.McCain added that he doesn't know why his campaign sought legal analysis of whether his birth outside the continental United States might disqualify him from the presidency.The Constitution says only a "natural-born citizen" may serve as president.McCain's campaign asked former Solicitor General Ted Olson for a legal interpretation of the issue.McCain himself insists the issue was put to...

The first statute on the citizenship of children born abroad, enacted in 1790, stated: "The children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States." Act of Mar. 26, 1790, ch. 3, 1 Stat. 104. Statutes passed in 1795 and 1802 similarly conditioned the citizenship of the child born abroad on the father's at least one-time residence in the United...

WASHINGTON: The question has nagged at the parents of Americans born outside the continental United States for generations: Dare their children aspire to grow up and become president? In the case of Senator John McCain of Arizona, the issue is becoming more than a matter of parental daydreaming. McCain's likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a "natural-born citizen" can hold the nation's highest office.

There have been some posts on this topic already, but they are incomplete and the Mccain campaign, Wikipedia, and other sources have weaseled around it with a reference to a 1790 act of Congress defining foreign-born children of US citizens as natural-born, thus meeting to requirements to run for President. I started digging into the Act of Congress that Mccain's campaign said got him around this (5th Congress, March 26th 1790), but found that this act was repealed by the same Congress, January 29th, 1795, RE-defining such children as just American citizens (not natural-born, as required for Pres. by the...