Also, birther Army doc Lakin’s conviction, sentence, dishonorable discharge and inability to collect a pension after 17 years in the military probably took some of the wind out of their sails. That kind of treatment from a jury of his military peers will at least quiet down the birthers in the armed forces.

The rest of the idiots will continue on their merry little ignorant way regardless of how much money they might have to pay to process their silly requests.

For those who can’t click the link, Beck—-while holding a bunny he probably then decapitated so he could drink its blood as soon as they quit filming—-claimed that Obama referenced the five pillars of Islam in coded terms in his State of the Union speech, by having five platform points, or something like that.

Of course.  Five is an evil number, it’s the number of Man’s hand, of arrogance.

I watched like four minutes of the Glenn Beck thing about the state of the union last night and when he said that leftists might destroy the capitalism like the terrorists destroyed the towers I just had to switch off. On kind of topic buying a copy of the president’s birth records is kind of weird, like stalker weird. If I was at someone’s house and they were like check out my copy of Obama’s birth cert I think the only rational option would be to jump through the window and escape screaming into the night because that’s got to be a prelude to nazi paraphenelia, plantation erotica or a long intense diatribe about the new world oreder while a loaded gun is waved a lot.

“Of course.  Five is an evil number, it’s the number of Man’s hand, of arrogance.”

It seems to me we’re just going to have to purge the number 5 from mathematics, science, and everywhere else it might sneak into to drop its evil payload of Mooslimocracy.  We just can’t afford to accept the risk of keeping it if we’re going to hold on to the American Way of Life.

Naturally, this means that all Real True Americans must amputate one toe from each foot, and one finger from each hand.  Unless you were born with six digits on your hand or foot, then that’s okay.  And instead of The Party telling us that 2+2=5, we’ll have to change that to 2+3=4.  We’ll make 4am and 4pm both two-hours long, so we can skip of that bad number in our time measurement.

Now, if we can purge the word “crescent” from the language and then figure out how to get the moon’s phases to skip over the “crescent moon”, then we can take another big step toward getting rid of the evil influence of Mooslimness in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

And let’s see if we can make some progress on making Mooslim temples (or whatever they call them places where they squat on little rugs and plot the destruction of America) illegal if they’re closer than 3,000 miles to New York…

Wow, Beck is completely unhinged.  I like how he immediately jumped to the conclusion that we would assume he was going to slaughter the bunny rabbit with the chainsaw!  Although knowing his audience, maybe that was the most logical assumption about his viewers thoughts.

That poor rabbit.  Those sensitive ears right up close to a miked Glenn Beck

I don’t think Obama is a Kenyan immigrant sleeper Islamic radical Manchurian candidate.  I’m just asking!

Almost word for word the lyrics of Roy Zimmerman’s great satirical song “Vote Republican”:

I’m not saying Barack Obama is a foreign-born Islamist puppy eater, I’m not saying that!
I’m saying: you decide.
There’s no evidence to suggest that Nancy Pelosi is a thousand year old Nazi vampire
That’s just what I heard, someone said it
(It was me)

I think the reason birthers are no longer asking for the birth certificate in bulk is for two reasons: they were recently limited to one ask by the state (and one aspect of birtherism is trying to be as annoying as possible, considering the annoyance factore alone a win on the liberals).

Also: I think Birtherism was a way racists thought they could get away with being racist, wink, wink, without being accused of out-right racism.

But they’ve probably moved on to new paranoias, and liberal-annoyance and hidden racism games, and I just can’t bring myself to keep up.

This Neil Abercrombie thing is great. It appears that he promised to deliver the original birth certificate but failed. I don’t know if thats actually true but for our purposes all that matters is perception.

Conspiracy theorists need these little discrepancies to survive. With the economy in recovery mode, I’ve been concerned that teaparty radicalism will decline. Thats bad for Obama because he wants to trick the republicans into nominating Palin. Then he’‘ll Goldwater her like there’s no tomorrow. Even with unemployment around 9% she’ll probably have an electoral map that will look like George Wallace’s…or Adlai Stevenson’s.

But it appears the republicans are wising up. Romney, who at least is an adult, won the most recent straw poll. Rove has long known this teaparty stuff is a disaster, as his attitude toward O’donnell demonstrates.  He was able to get a whopping 40% plus of the Hispanic vote for Bush and teabaggers squandered that. ‘10 was typical midterms plus a proverbial dead cat bounce for teh R’s, but it gave the teaparty courage. A brave fool is a the best enemy to have.

But its hard to maintain economic populism when the economy is in recovery, albeit a slow one. That’s why Obama needs to fan the flames of this birther stuff…and the good Gov of Hawaii is up to the task.

Indeed, the best case scenario is that Clintonistas, who actually started the Birther rumor as John Avalon reported not too long ago, give Obama a run for the nom, not with Hillary herself (thats unrealistic) but with some disgruntled progressive who also likes to exploit economic populism. This of course will endear Obama even further to moderates and he’ll secure a 2nd term where he’ll reap all the benefits from his careful and considerate policies that saved us from a 2nd great depression.

He’ll probably pivot to some neo-liberal Oprahesque program designed to help the poor help themselves. Since unemployment is a laggard, the 2nd term should be a real party.

@judybrowni: Yep. “I’m not questioning the validity of the presidency because the president isn’t white. Nosiree. I’m questioning it because he doesn’t have a birth certificate! He’s a furner! How dare you accuse me of racism!?”

Of course now that it’s apparently acceptable to just be flat out racist again they’ve stopped bothering. Why hide behind dog whistles and bullshit when the conservative, and by extension most of the media, definition of not racist is “Anyone that doesn’t use the N word.”. Srsly. As long as you don’t use racial slurs you’re not racist now. If you do use racial slurs, they’ll demand we look at the context like they did with Laura Schlessinger.  Even if the context actually makes it worse.

Accusing someone of racism, now that’s damn near a crime. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true.

I rather liked in today’s news Rep. Duncan Hunter of the Transportation committee said that highways and air travel were in the constitution, but bicycle paths were unconstitutional.

http://thinkprogress.org/2011/01/28/duncan-hunter-bike-lanes/

I hope Hawaii makes some bucks, honestly.

I live literally 10-15 minutes on foot from the hospital where Obama was supposedly born.  So if any birthers are interested, for the low, low fee of $1000 I will personally walk down there and thoroughly* investigate. 

Anyone interested?  Anyone?  ... *crickets*

*My definition of “thorough” may differ from your own.

@BonAppetit,

I’ll do better. I don’t live that close-I am perhaps 10-15 hours. But if enough concerned citizen councils would pony up a mere $250, I will spend a full day at the HA SOS building and ask for the BC repeatedly, using a variety of interpersonal communication styles, until I get an official response.

The 5 days prior? Um, praying, man. Praying.

Lately I’ve noticed and interesting development from some of the more rabid Obama-haters on my job.  Amanda and judybrowni, you’re spot on.  The thrill is gone for the rank and file wingnuts, at least the ones I see on a regular basis.  A couple of the guys made an oblique reference the other day to Obama being a Muslim, but it wasn’t a red-faced, fist-shaking performance like you’d see during and immediately after the election.  It’s more like a casual, snide remark, as though they’re not even trying to suggest that they really believe it.  It’s just an obvious and sophomoric insult, an easily deciphered code where ‘Muslim’ stands for ‘nigger’ or ‘illegitimate’ (or both).

judy: What’s funny about that formulation is it assumes that the people processing their requests aren’t members of their tribe.  Which, if they were before, I’m guessing the 500th time they had to mail out a single man’s birth certificate is when they quit being a wingnut.

I like how Beck doesn’t know the difference between investing and spending.  Kind of like how O’Donnell didn’t understand that most private business owners have an LLC or are incorporated.  Ooops!  Your dumb ass is showing!

I like how Beck doesn’t know the difference between investing and spending.

But does any conservative really know the difference?  I mean, most of their hatred of taxation and government spending is that they don’t realize that spending money on some things now can save or make us money in the future.  That’s sort of the entire problem with fiscal conservatism.

Limbaugh still hasn’t proven that he was born in Misssouri, let alone from a human female and not a horse’s ass.

Catgirl, you have a very strange conception of what constitutes fiscal conservatism.  Maybe it is because you have never seen actual fiscal conservatism in your life - you know, the kind that many “rock ribbed” republicans touted before Reagan.  The kind where you simply don’t spend what you don’t have, and you set priorties according to how not to spend more money in the future - such as funding anti-poverty programs that reap payback later.

That’s the “fiscal conservatism” that I grew up with - not this nonsense about “gimme gimme gimme mine gimme” that we’ve heard in your lifetime.

Ms Kate,

If you don’t have any money or a job, would it be fiscally conservative to get routine car maintenance done and put it on a credit card?  Or would it be fiscally conservative to not spend that money because you don’t have it, but then let your car break down and end up with no means of getting to job interviews, or ending up having to take on much, much more debt to buy a new car?  A fiscal conservative would not “spend money we don’t have” and let the car break down, or let our infrastructure crumble, or let us end up with a generation of grossly undereducated people because we don’t have the money right now to pay for bridge repair and teachers.  The funny thing is that in real life any sensible person, even a fiscal conservative would realize that going into debt for a few hundred dollars now is the better choice than going into debt for thousands years from now or having no means to make any money, but once it’s on a large scale they just can’t understand the same concept.

But does any conservative really know the difference?  I mean, most of their hatred of taxation and government spending is that they don’t realize that spending money on some things now can save or make us money in the future.  That’s sort of the entire problem with fiscal conservatism.

Honestly, they do.  They just don’t particularly care since they subscribe to the Austrian economists who are not really the antithesis of the Keynesian but certainly their skewed counterpart.  Rand and others have exploited the Austrian system to its current charade of mercantilism attitude.  Keynes is heavily fought against in the right-wing world because if Keynes is right “fiscal conservatism” as we understand it is fundamentally wrong. 

The multiplier effect though is real and most small children can be explained to why it is real.  The problem is people fail miserably at understanding how a dollar keeps existing in the economy after you spend it. 

On topic, Birtherism is losing steam because any conspiracy theory without new evidence eventually dies or just becomes accepted.  Since there is no real acceptance, just minor bigotry it’s dying.  If anything this is a steeling effect on the new younger voters.

catgirl:

fiscal conservatives of previous generations not only understood the idea of sometimes running countercyclical deficits, they understood the idea of planning your tax revenues to match your actual social needs. They were even—gasp—in favor of using taxes to discourage corporate behaviour they didn’t like. It wasn’t until Reagan’s people came in and torched the place that the current orthodoxy was born, and prior history erased/rewritten, like that mythical chinese emperor. (My father was a conservative republican economist, so this kind of stuff got burned into my brain.)

The real problem is, even the left thinks it an outrage to accuse someone of being a Keynesian.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBrHkxqNT7s

I just came back from 5 weeks in Honolulu, where it’s refreshingly non-white.

Hawaii is the only state in the union where Caucasians are in the minority, and I’m surprised that racist tourists’ heads don’t explode just walking down the street in Waikiki.

(But the tale of Sarah Palin fleeing the University of Hawaii because there were “too many brown people” makes a whole lotta sense.)

Long way short of saying, the odds are against anyone answering the government phone in the birth certificate department being a racist white person. I’m pretty sure they were fed up from day one of the repeated requests.

But, in general, the Hawaii’ans are fairly polite people and mellow as well as multicultural. I only wish they’d asked for the money, sooner.

After having spent some time there, it makes a whole lotta sense that the first black President of the United States was born and raised in Honolulu.

“The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_Obama

Which is also another reason why birthers and wingnuts try to pretend Hawaii isn’t part of the United States.

Ain’t white enuf for it to be the real Amurika.

The reason they didn’t ask for the money sooner was that the previous governor was an incompetent Repub.  The current governor is far, far better, and the lege is now capable of turning to clever rejoinders, now that it’s no longer fighting tooth and nail to keep the Executive from looting the state.

@Comment #12: Manju on 01/29 at 12:57 AM

I want to believe that Manju is a parody but my gut tells me Manju’s serious.

Ms Kate @21 FTW.

Judybrowni @ 29 - born, but not reared in HI past a very few years.
atheist @31 - After 3 or 4 comment threads, it’s hard to believe parody.  Unfortunately.

The birthers have already moved the goal posts. Instead of disputing that he was born in Hawaii, they’re now claiming that he was adopted by his Indonesian stepfather (Barry Sotero, anyone?) and traveled on an Indonesian passport to Pakistan at age 20, and therefore must have renounced his U.S. citizenship. Or something. Factcheck.org already has wiped their faces on the truth mat, not that they’ll believe the lamestream media.

At any rate, the evil black guy in the White House can’t possibly be a US citizen and they have to find ways to prove it.