Now Playing Tracks

7 Birthers Speaking At The Republican Convention | ThinkProgress

1. Donald Trump. The famed billionaire/birther king Donald Trump has been the most vociferous — and most closely connected to Romney — person alleging that the President wasn’t born in the United States.

2. Actress Janine Turner. The Northern Exposure star who has her own conservative radio show wrote a long screed titled “Reasoning ‘Kenyan Born.’” In it, she complains that anyone who questions the president’s citizenship is deemed a racist: “If this were a legal case in court, [Obama’s] book bio stating that Obama was ‘born in Kenya’ would be taken into consideration.”

3. Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens. During a town hall captured on video (at 3:5), Olens said, “You know the state of Hawaii says he’s produced a certified birth certificate… so on one hand I have to trust the state of Hawaii follows the laws. On the other hand it would be nice for the President to say, here it is, I have a copy.”

4. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. On one radio appearance during Huckabee’s bid for president, the former governor said, “I would love to know more [about where Obama was born]. What I know is troubling enough.” He later walked back the statement.

5. Florida Gov. Rick Scott. In 2010, the Orlando Sentinel reported than an audience member at one of Scott’s campaign events asked “what he would do about President Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ and whether he could legally appear on the 2012 ballot in Florida.” Scott responded, “I’ll have to look into it.”

6. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The Vice-Chairman of the House Republican Conference once told reporters “Oh, I’d like to see the documents.”

7. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. Jindal was willing to sign a “birther” bill into law. It would have required all presidential candidates to release their birth certificate in order to qualify for a spot on the state’s ballot.

Rep. King Goes Birther: Suggests Obama’s Parents Telegrammed Fake Hawaii Birth Announcement From Kenya

justinspoliticalcorner:

Try as they may, Republicans just can’t seem to kick their birther habit.

The latest GOPer to dabble in the ridiculous fantasy that President Obama wasn’t actually born in the United States: Rep. Steve King (R-IA).

During a tele-townhall meeting late last week, King was asked about his views on whether President Obama is a natural-born American citizen. The Iowa Congressman noted that his staff had investigated the matter and found birth announcements in the two Hawaii newspapers the week after Obama’s birth. However, King went on to float the absurd notion that his parents “might’ve announced that by telegram from Kenya.”

The fact that this “issue” even still needs to be addressed is beyond silly. If Obama’s birth certificate itself isn’t enough to convince the likes of Steve King and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio about where the president was born, no amount of evidence will.

h/t: Scott Keyes at Think Progress

The steadily shrinking white electorate, Voter ID laws, and the far-right’s “race wars” Because, as Jim Galloway at the AJC observes, white voter registration is steadily moving downward: “In May of 2008, African-Americans made up 28 percent of active registered voters in Georgia while whites made up 65 percent and “other” race… In May of 2012, African-Americans made up 29.4 percent of active registered voters, whites made up 60.2 percent, and “other” race made up 10.4 percent. So the downward trend in the white share of voters in Georgia has continued.” So while GOP lawmakers will try to disenfranchise the voters who they assume wouldn’t vote Republican anyway (i.e. non-whites), the rightwing media are working overtime to whip up enough FEAR and ANGER to get the whites who have voted Republican before into the voting booths again — despite how they feel about Mitt Romney. How? By victimizing whites, by insinuating there’s a race-war, by reminding their audience that everyone thinks they’re the “R” word (racist), and by evoking the usual tribal reaction from their base. McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed outlined some of the main players on the far-right last month in his article, “In Conservative Media, A “Race War” Rages“: Bill O’Reilly, Fox “News” — With the Norfolk, VA story, using the narrative: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up. Drudge Report –  ”Miami ‘war zone’ during urban weekend;” “Rib fest at Rochester beach turns rowdy;” and “Unruly urban crowd shuts down Nashville water park.” Tucker Carlson, Daily Caller – ”I was struck by the immediate, uncloaked assumption by the media that Trayvon Martin was innocent.” Rush Limbaugh – ”In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.” Dan Riehl, Riehl World News, Breitbart News – ”There are special interest groups on the left that exploit reports of white-on-black crime for political gain.” But as Coppins fairly reports: “Indeed, the irony of the race war narrative’s latest flare-up is that it comes at a time when national crime rates have reached historic lows — including reported hate crimes against whites… What’s more, hate crimes against blacks have continued to outstrip those against whites by about four-to-one: In 2010 alone, there were 2,201 reported. Violent crimes across the spectrum reached a four-decade low in 2010.” Jobs? Health care reform? Tax cuts for the one percent? Austerity for the rest of us? None of that really matters to low-information voters. Reality and facts, once again, are not part of the narrative that’s written and produced by the American conservative media and performed for the American conservative voter’s entertainment. What gets these people to the voting booth is fear and anger: do you want to be attacked by mobs of ‘rib-eating’ ‘urban’ youths? No? Then you’d better vote for Mitt Romney. image: Buzzfeed Related: Bill Maher: the problem with racism is Matt Drudge
Zoom

The steadily shrinking white electorate, Voter ID laws, and the far-right’s “race wars”

Because, as Jim Galloway at the AJC observes, white voter registration is steadily moving downward: “In May of 2008, African-Americans made up 28 percent of active registered voters in Georgia while whites made up 65 percent and “other” race… In May of 2012, African-Americans made up 29.4 percent of active registered voters, whites made up 60.2 percent, and “other” race made up 10.4 percent. So the downward trend in the white share of voters in Georgia has continued.”

So while GOP lawmakers will try to disenfranchise the voters who they assume wouldn’t vote Republican anyway (i.e. non-whites), the rightwing media are working overtime to whip up enough FEAR and ANGER to get the whites who have voted Republican before into the voting booths again — despite how they feel about Mitt Romney. How? By victimizing whites, by insinuating there’s a race-war, by reminding their audience that everyone thinks they’re the “R” word (racist), and by evoking the usual tribal reaction from their base. McKay Coppins at Buzzfeed outlined some of the main players on the far-right last month in his article, “In Conservative Media, A “Race War” Rages“:

  • Bill O’Reilly, Fox “News” — With the Norfolk, VA story, using the narrative: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.
  • Drudge Report –  ”Miami ‘war zone’ during urban weekend;” “Rib fest at Rochester beach turns rowdy;” and “Unruly urban crowd shuts down Nashville water park.”
  • Tucker Carlson, Daily Caller – ”I was struck by the immediate, uncloaked assumption by the media that Trayvon Martin was innocent.”
  • Rush Limbaugh – ”In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”
  • Dan Riehl, Riehl World News, Breitbart News – ”There are special interest groups on the left that exploit reports of white-on-black crime for political gain.”

But as Coppins fairly reports: “Indeed, the irony of the race war narrative’s latest flare-up is that it comes at a time when national crime rates have reached historic lows — including reported hate crimes against whites… What’s more, hate crimes against blacks have continued to outstrip those against whites by about four-to-one: In 2010 alone, there were 2,201 reported. Violent crimes across the spectrum reached a four-decade low in 2010.”

Jobs? Health care reform? Tax cuts for the one percent? Austerity for the rest of us? None of that really matters to low-information voters. Reality and facts, once again, are not part of the narrative that’s written and produced by the American conservative media and performed for the American conservative voter’s entertainment. What gets these people to the voting booth is fear and anger: do you want to be attacked by mobs of ‘rib-eating’ ‘urban’ youths? No? Then you’d better vote for Mitt Romney.

image: Buzzfeed

Related: Bill Maher: the problem with racism is Matt Drudge

Mitt’s Mormon army: religious beliefs are an issue only for black presidential candidates President Obama’s religious beliefs have been a major issue for teagelicals for over three years now. Raw Story reports that one in five Republicans believe the president is a Muslim: “18 percent of Republicans believed Obama was Muslim, even though the President is a church-going Christian. Both Obama’s religion and his birthplace have been points of controversy in his public career, Gallup noted. These data show that in terms of his religion, most Americans do not adhere to the belief that he is a Muslim. However, the fact that almost one in five Republicans do hold this belief suggests the potential for continuing controversy on this issue in the months ahead.” Related: Mitt’s Mormon army mobilizes Note: The Angel Moroni is a registered trademark of the LDS Church.
Zoom

Mitt’s Mormon army: religious beliefs are an issue only for black presidential candidates

President Obama’s religious beliefs have been a major issue for teagelicals for over three years now. Raw Story reports that one in five Republicans believe the president is a Muslim: “18 percent of Republicans believed Obama was Muslim, even though the President is a church-going Christian. Both Obama’s religion and his birthplace have been points of controversy in his public career, Gallup noted. These data show that in terms of his religion, most Americans do not adhere to the belief that he is a Muslim. However, the fact that almost one in five Republicans do hold this belief suggests the potential for continuing controversy on this issue in the months ahead.”

Related: Mitt’s Mormon army mobilizes

Note: The Angel Moroni is a registered trademark of the LDS Church.

How stupid are modern Republicans?

VERY! according to Dan Froomkin at the Huffington Post, who reports that a recent poll… found that fully 63 percent of Republican respondents still believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003. By contrast, 27 percent of independents and 15 percent of Democrats shared that view. […] this latest poll result seems to indicate a refusal — unique to the modern Republican Party — to acknowledge facts. According to this poll, an even larger proportion of Republican respondents who said Iraq had WMD — 64 percent — said they have either always believed (or have come to believe) that Barack Obama was born in another country, which he was not.

REMINDER: You’ll want to vote in November, because these people are definitely planning to. 

Classy bunch up there in Montana

At a GOP convention in Montana this weekend (where Newt Gingrich was the featured speaker), Raw Story reports on a proud display of something labeled “Obama’s presidential library” in the parking lot of the venue: a wheeled outhouse, riddled with fake bullet holes [which] contained a fake birth certificate for Barack Obama… stamped “bullshit.” Graffiti on the outhouse read “For a Good Time,” and listed fake numbers in reference to first lady Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Montana Republican Party Chairman Will Deschamps said, “It’s not something I’m going to agonize over.”

The outhouse was also a Republican float in the Memorial Day parade.

The Arizona Clown Show: Ken Bennett explains why he won’t verify Mitt Romney’s birth records

News out of Arizona that should surprise exactly zero people. You wonder how long it took Bennett to come up with this painfully lame excuse:

Secretary of State Ken Bennett will not verify the birth records of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, at least not now – and possibly not ever – despite an earlier public commitment to do so.

Bennett said Thursday that he has received requests from Arizona residents to perform the same kind of verification through Michigan about Romney’s birth certificate as he did through Hawaii for President Obama. And he acknowledged he had agreed to make such a check if he got a request.

But Bennett is now saying he needs something else: an allegation by an Arizona law enforcement agency that there is a question about the veracity of a candidate’s claimed birth certificate.

More…

The President of the United States was born in the United States. That’s just a fact. It’s not a disputed point. It’s just a fact. It’s like, we have one moon not two. It’s a fact.
David Frum (Former Special Assistant to George W Bush) on CNN answering the question: Where do you disagree with Donald Trump?

(Source: underthemountainbunker.com)

Hoekstra Says Feds Should Check Birth Certificates (but it’s not about Obama) – Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra (R) said he’d like to “create a federal office in Washington that would verify that presidential candidates meet the minimum requirements to hold the office,” the Detroit Free Press reports. Said Hoekstra: “This is not brain surgery. It should be an FBI person, maybe a CIA person. If you want to run for president, you’ve got to go with the proper documentation and get it certified that you meet the qualifications to be the President of the United States.”– Political Wire CNN Host Confronts Pete Hoekstra Over Birther Commission Proposal– Baldwin aired a clip of an infamous Hoekstra ad that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, since pulled from his website, in which an actress depicted a Chinese villager thanking Hoekstra’s opponent in broken English for running up the national debt. “Critics called you a racist for that ad,” Baldwin said. “Do you realize that critics might use this office, this proposal for this office, as further proof?” Hoekstra was not happy to see the old wound reopened. “I don’t know why they would take it in that direction,” Hoekstra said. – TPM Romney surrogate: CNN ‘should be embarrassed’ for covering birther story — Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who is now a surrogate for Mitt Romney, on Wednesday blasted CNN host Soledad O’Brien for reporting on the presumptive Republican nominee’s link to birthers like billionaire Donald Trump. –Raw Story
Zoom

Hoekstra Says Feds Should Check Birth Certificates (but it’s not about Obama) – Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra (R) said he’d like to “create a federal office in Washington that would verify that presidential candidates meet the minimum requirements to hold the office,” the Detroit Free Press reports. Said Hoekstra: “This is not brain surgery. It should be an FBI person, maybe a CIA person. If you want to run for president, you’ve got to go with the proper documentation and get it certified that you meet the qualifications to be the President of the United States.”– Political Wire

  • CNN Host Confronts Pete Hoekstra Over Birther Commission Proposal– Baldwin aired a clip of an infamous Hoekstra ad that aired during this year’s Super Bowl, since pulled from his website, in which an actress depicted a Chinese villager thanking Hoekstra’s opponent in broken English for running up the national debt. “Critics called you a racist for that ad,” Baldwin said. “Do you realize that critics might use this office, this proposal for this office, as further proof?” Hoekstra was not happy to see the old wound reopened. “I don’t know why they would take it in that direction,” Hoekstra said. – TPM
  • Romney surrogate: CNN ‘should be embarrassed’ for covering birther story — Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who is now a surrogate for Mitt Romney, on Wednesday blasted CNN host Soledad O’Brien for reporting on the presumptive Republican nominee’s link to birthers like billionaire Donald Trump. –Raw Story
Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday denied he was a “birther,” but found it “odd” that President Barack Obama took so long to release his birth certificate. “You know, I’ve never been a birther,” the Fox News host declared. “You know, it was odd that they didn’t release the birth certificate to me. I’m like, you ask me for my birth certificate, it’s pretty easy to get.” […] During his 2008 bid for the White House then-Sen. Obama did release his short-form birth certificate. FactCheck.org concluded  at the time that “it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. … Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.” After billionaire Donald Trump and other prominent birthers refused to drop the issue, the White House released the president’s long-form birth certificate in April 2011.  –Raw Story
Zoom

Fox News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday denied he was a “birther,” but found it “odd” that President Barack Obama took so long to release his birth certificate. “You know, I’ve never been a birther,” the Fox News host declared. “You know, it was odd that they didn’t release the birth certificate to me. I’m like, you ask me for my birth certificate, it’s pretty easy to get.” […] During his 2008 bid for the White House then-Sen. Obama did release his short-form birth certificate. FactCheck.org concluded  at the time that “it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. … Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.” After billionaire Donald Trump and other prominent birthers refused to drop the issue, the White House released the president’s long-form birth certificate in April 2011.  –Raw Story

“There is no more naked celebrity in America than Donald Trump. He doesn’t do subtlety. He doesn’t do ‘thought.’ To say he has a political calculus is a wild overstatement. His strategy amounts to no more than junior high school algebra. The equation is: Trump + infantile public statement x infinite repetitions on TV and Twitter = maximum publicity for flailing Trump products and insatiable Trump ego.” — Frank Rich  Romney’s birth certificate evokes his father’s controversy – Willard Mitt Romney, the certificate says, was born in Detroit on March 12, 1947. His mother, Lenore, was born in Utah and his father, former Michigan governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate George Romney, was born in Mexico. So on a day when real estate and media mogul Donald Trump was trying to help Mitt Romney by stirring up a new round of questions about whether Democratic President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Romney’s own birth record became a reminder that in the 1968 presidential campaign, his father had faced his own “birther” controversy. –Reuters image: christopherstreet
Zoom

“There is no more naked celebrity in America than Donald Trump. He doesn’t do subtlety. He doesn’t do ‘thought.’ To say he has a political calculus is a wild overstatement. His strategy amounts to no more than junior high school algebra. The equation is: Trump + infantile public statement x infinite repetitions on TV and Twitter = maximum publicity for flailing Trump products and insatiable Trump ego.” — Frank Rich 

Romney’s birth certificate evokes his father’s controversy – Willard Mitt Romney, the certificate says, was born in Detroit on March 12, 1947. His mother, Lenore, was born in Utah and his father, former Michigan governor and one-time Republican presidential candidate George Romney, was born in Mexico. So on a day when real estate and media mogul Donald Trump was trying to help Mitt Romney by stirring up a new round of questions about whether Democratic President Barack Obama was born in the United States, Romney’s own birth record became a reminder that in the 1968 presidential campaign, his father had faced his own “birther” controversy. –Reuters

image: christopherstreet

Where’s Mitt Romney’s Long-Form Birth Certificate? – Just one problem: The document released by Mitt Romney’s campaign is titled “Certificate of Live Birth.” This is, to be clear, the same thing as a birth certificate (it just has a couple of extra words in there and the order is flipped around). But according to three years of commentary from top conservative media and politicos, it’s not enough. “There’s a difference between a birth certificate, apparently, and a certificate of live birth,” said Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a segment last April on the President’s supposedly missing paper trail. The President’s certificate of live birth, reported Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy, “is not the exact birth certificate.” Sarah Palin suggested that the certificate of live birth was insufficient proof of citizenship. As one leading conservative activist put it, “A ‘birth certificate’ and a ‘certificate of live birth’ are in no way the same thing, even though in some cases they use some of the same words.” That was Donald Trump. – Mother Jones
Zoom

Where’s Mitt Romney’s Long-Form Birth Certificate? – Just one problem: The document released by Mitt Romney’s campaign is titled “Certificate of Live Birth.” This is, to be clear, the same thing as a birth certificate (it just has a couple of extra words in there and the order is flipped around). But according to three years of commentary from top conservative media and politicos, it’s not enough. “There’s a difference between a birth certificate, apparently, and a certificate of live birth,” said Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a segment last April on the President’s supposedly missing paper trail. The President’s certificate of live birth, reported Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy, “is not the exact birth certificate.” Sarah Palin suggested that the certificate of live birth was insufficient proof of citizenship. As one leading conservative activist put it, “A ‘birth certificate’ and a ‘certificate of live birth’ are in no way the same thing, even though in some cases they use some of the same words.” That was Donald Trump. – Mother Jones

To Tumblr, Love Pixel Union