Layers!!11!

Birtherism is the right-wing fever-dream that won’t die. For Democrats and independents, it’s long gone from being puzzling to hilarious – especially since the President released his “long-form” birth certificate in April 2011. The theory? Usually it comes down to Obama being a secret Muslim, Kenyan-born, Manchurian candidate, set up since birth in 1961 by a communist cabal intent on destroying the United States. Like the Romney campaign, this wing of birtherism still lives deep in the heart of the Cold War. 

Less insane birthers claim merely that Obama can’t be a “natural-born” citizen because under the law as it stood in the 18th century, one could not be “natural-born” if one’s father was not a citizen at the time of birth. Of course, that’s not the law in the United States. The 14th Amendment confirmed that any person born on American soil is automatically and by birthright a natural-born citizen. So, that theory’s out the window. 

The less inventive birthers insist that Obama’s certificate of live birth wasn’t proof of anything, despite the fact that writing on the document itself indicates that it is “prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding“.  So, to shut the thing up once and for all, the White House released the long form birth certificate, pictured above. 

Of course, these people immediately accused the White House and/or Hawaii of falsifying the birth certificate, analyzing the PDF version of it for “layers”, (as if the PDF wasn’t merely a scanned image in a particular format of a physical document). The “layers” theory was handily debunked here. 

There are still dummies all over the internet claiming that Obama is a foreign-born usurper and that everything is phony. In the most tea-party prone state in the Union, Arizona, a whopping (sarcasm – ed.) 1,200 emails were sent to Secretary of State Ken Bennett, (who – totally coincidentally – is also the Arizona co-chairman of the Romney campaign), to demand that Hawaii confirm Obama’s eligibility before the President is allowed to be listed as a candidate on the November ballot there. 

The emails between Arizona and Hawaii are utter comedy, but ultimately Hawaii did send a verification to Arizona, which you can see here. It seems pretty legitimate to me, even if it is a PDF and likely has LAYERS!

But for some reason, the Romney campaign has not yet answered claims that the likely Republican nominee is, in fact, a unicorn.  You see, Arizona was chasing down Obama’s eligibility, and claiming to Hawaii that it had a duty to do so. It would therefore follow that they had a duty to chase down Romney’s eligibility.  After all, Romney’s father may not have been born in Kenya, but he was born in Mexico. But Arizona hadn’t contacted Michigan, and had no plans to do so.

So, if a mere 1,200 angry, xenophobic, conspiratorial emails can get Arizona’s Ken Bennett to conduct a birther investigation, then certainly 15,000 emails will be more than persuasive for Mr. Bennett to conduct an investigation into the shocking, un-contradicted claims of Romney’s alleged unicornhood. 

The Republican rush to appropriate and placate the tea party is going to start coming back to haunt it – the tea party, which is at its core little more than a reactionary movement that facially opposes “spending” but never really coalesced for some reason until 2009. I wonder what that reason might be? 

After all, here’s a chart that shows a comparison of the growth in government spending between the Obama administration and other recent Presidents. (It starts with 2010, because the 2009 budget was passed in 2008 under President Bush). 

If conservatism is about smaller government, shrinking the federal budget, and lower spending, it would perhaps seem as if our political labels may be, quite frankly, reversed. The deficit? It wasn’t caused by spending – it was caused by a dramatic reduction in revenue during the 2008 downturn. 

But the longer we blama Obama for outrageous “spending” and for not being “natural-born”, the longer we’ll just keep going around and around, not really solving any big problems, but instead punting and making them worse for future generations. 

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If you thought Obama 2012 was going to be like the Democrats of yore, who would forever be on defense and let the Republicans control the message, you’d be wrong. 

For instance, this ad is now airing in Ohio.  It should be called “boom goes the dynamite”. 

And for those of you wondering whether Obama will run on his record, wonder no more. 

From a Romney campaign conference call a few weeks ago: 

The Lilly Ledbetter Act was the first bill President Obama signed into law in 2009. It legislatively reversed a Supreme Court decision, to make it easier for women to sue an employer when pay discrimination is suspected. While Romney eventually said he wouldn’t repeal it, he also won’t say whether he’d have signed the act.  

It sometimes seems as if the Romney campaign is unprepared to be distracted from its reactionary “tax breaks for millionaires”-heavy “platform”. 

By Flickr User DonkeyHotey

1. After sweeping the Tuesday once known as “super”, and effectively all-but-securing the Republican nomination for President, Mitt Romney took out his Etch-a-Sketch and made his first attempt to erase Mitt Romney as “Severe Conservative” and create Mitt Romney as “Paternal anti-Socialist Optimist.” His campaign theme, which until Tuesday had been, “I am just as insane a right-winger as Santorum, and just as unscrupulous a corrupt Washington insider as Gingrich” switched to “A Better America”. 

Aside from being a rip-off of the prospective hopefulness of the Obama 2008 campaign, imagine the right-wing response had Obama selected that phrase for his slogan. “Better?! N0bama thinks America is no good!” and other disingenuous cries echoing jingoistic American exceptionalism.

After all, no other post-industrial market economy with a pluralistic representative democracy exports jobs, votes against their own interests, coddles millionaires, and becomes bogged down in Asian quagmires like the United States of America. 

Romney has barely uttered a word about what he’d do as President – not publicly, anyway. Suffice it to say that a guy who’s never been in the middle class has absolutely no idea how to fix the problems ailing America’s middle class, nor does he likely care. The middle class don’t cut massive checks to friendly SuperPACs or max out to the Romney campaign.

So, now that it’s already been revealed that the Romney plan is going to be a rehash of the policies of George W. Bush, here’s the shorter version of the Romney campaign and how it intends to bring about a “better America”: 

a. A war in Asia with numerous anticipated but unplanned-for complications, and subsequent occupation; 

b. Tax cuts for millionaires; 

c. A renewed effort to voucherize or expressly privatize Social Security and Medicare; and

d. Revocation of Obamacare, which would return us to the days of lifetime maximums, denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, revocation of policies to cover kids up to age 26 on their parents’ plans, and continuation of the fiscal nightmare whereby the uninsured routinely go bankrupt in the face of medical bills, and government foots the bill for primary-care-by-emergency room. 

Romney’s support among the Republican faithful is a mile wide and 1/16th of an inch deep. The only motivator that will get true believers out will be a hatred of Obama. 

2. Apparently, Carl Paladino did for Newt Gingrich in New York in 2012 what Carl Paladino did for Carl Paladino in New York in 2010. 

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County Legislator and Canisius Political Science Professor Kevin Hardwick told the Buffalo News that being a Republican voter and waiting for primary day is like being in line for concert tickets, and the window closes just as you reach the front.

The Daily Show got a hold of that line and recruited Hardwick to help them do this great piece (the “next logical conclusion” line is fantastic):

President Barack Obama, Jimmy Fallon, and the Roots take on student loan interest rates.

Today is Primary Day here in New York! 

This post represents our wall-to-wall coverage of New York Republicans get to stay home in the bad weather or cast their protest votes for Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul. 

With 0% of precincts reporting, Artvoice is projecting that Willard Mitt Romney (R-Severe) will win the New York primary. 

If Romney receives over 50% of the vote statewide, it’s a winner-take-all proposition for him. If he receives less than a statewide majority, it’s a proportional system, and the delegates are split among the four candidates on the ballot (Gingrich, Romney, Santorum, Paul). The delegate breakdown for New York is 10 at-large delegates, 3 delegates for each of the 27 Congressional Districts (district-by-district, it’s winner-take-all), and one “bonus” delegate.  To earn a proportional share of delegates, a candidate must break through a 20% threshold of votes. 

Artvoice also predicts that the sole Democrat on the primary ballot – President Barack Obama – will win that party’s primary. 

Today, Carl Paladino will host a campaign rally for all-but-dropped-out Newt Gingrich. Gingrich is the preferred choice of the right wing of the Republican Party who can no longer vote for theocratic lunatic Rick Santorum. 

A recent poll shows this about Gingrich: 

That’s a close match with George W. Bush’s final favorability rating of 25%. In other words, about the same number of people who like Gingrich still liked Bush as the world financial meltdown of 2008 was underway. True believer right-wing Obama-hating people who probably forward loads of false “N0bama” chain emails that they didn’t first run through Snopes. 

This sounds less like a campaign stop – because really, there’s no campaign left – and much more like a paid personal appearance. And no one ever voted for Newt Gingrich ever again. The end.