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How we insure our presidents are eligible

By on April 20, 2012 in 2012 Presidential Election, Featured Articles

In the wake of the 2008 U. S. Presidential Election some bemoaned the lack of eligibility checking for presidential candidates. Some asserted that there is a “big gaping hole” in the process that led to confusion, turmoil, and, in their view, an ineligible President taking office. Some said that the process is broken and needs to be fixed.

Several state legislatures considered legislation that would establish procedures to vet presidential candidates at the state level, including requirements that candidates present documents and give oaths. None became law. Challenges in at least 18 states were filed alleging that various presidential candidates are ineligible to appear on the ballot, or that state officials have failed in their duty to perform a rigorous eligibility screening for all presidential candidates. Over one hundred failed lawsuits, petitions and challenges later, things are essentially where they began.

I believe that the system is not broken; rather, the confusion and turmoil is solely due to the failure of those suffering the confusion and experiencing the turmoil to read and understand the U. S. Constitution. Our Constitution sets up a two-stage process to insure that only an eligible individual assumes the office of President of the United States.

The first responsibility in selecting an eligible President lies with the citizens of the United States. Citizens are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to speak and to assemble peacefully. At no time in our history has it been easier for an individual to reach large numbers of other voters; the Internet indeed makes speech free. The Constitution also grants freedom of the Press, who have the resources to research, to investigate, interview, and get priority access to Freedom of Information Act material. Candidates can, and do investigate each other in microscopic detail and have ample resources to publish what they find. At any point, should it be suspected that a candidate for President is not eligible under the Constitution to serve in the Office, the opportunity is there to lay that concern before the voters in the election process.

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Born in Africa myth crushed under weight of its complexity

By on March 24, 2012 in Birth Location, Featured Articles

Pulpit detail: Satan crushed by the word of God. Cathedral in Cusco, Peru

Thanks to Loren’s “The Secret Origins of the Birthers” article, we have recorded one of the earliest mentions of the Born in Africa myth. It goes this way:

… Obama’s mother was allegedly visiting Kenya with Obama’s father in the final months of her pregnancy and was not allowed to board a flight in her late term to return home.She allegedly had Obama in Kenya and quickly boarded a flight to Hawaii. Airlines do not accept late term pregancies but do not refuse passage to a newborn, usually issuing a 10% or free fare ticket for the trip.Once in Hawaii, his mother registered him as being born in Hawaii.

There are a few details that I note:

  1. Obama’s mother and father were in Kenya
  2. They flew back to the US

Assuming such a trip took place at all, those details are almost reasonable (except for the prohibitive cost of the air fare). It would seem to make no sense for Ann Obama to travel to Kenya alone—18-years-old, pregnant, not knowing anyone.

However, we now know that this particular scenario didn’t actually happen. The first evidence is from the FOIA files on Barack Obama, Sr. We learn from those files that he did not travel outside of the United States in 1961.

In 1964, Barack Obama Sr.’s last entry into the United States was in 1959.

Now, we have further confirmation of that, from a statistical report of persons entering the United States. Surprisingly only one alien embarked from Kenya and traveled to the United States by air in the entire year ending June 30, 1962. Wow! Only 1 in a whole year: That kind of travel was REALLY UNCOMMON! Since President Obama would have been an alien under US law had he been born in Kenya, he and his alien father could not have both arrived in the US by air. (Please don’t look at the following chart YET—it’ll spoil the surprise.)

Ins report of Passengers arriving in the US FY 1962

So the story gets complicated with no father in the picture. The birthers have concocted an alternative out of whole cloth. They now say that Ann Dunham made the trip to Kenya alone to give the baby up for adoption. That way, baby Barack could have been the only alien.  It’s complicated for all the other reasons of the original story, but it requires a reason for adoption. One reason given for the adoption is that Ann Dunham’s family was outraged by their daughter having a mixed-race child. That contention is borne out by this tense photo of Obama with his grandfather in Hawaii:

image

Add that to the fact that Obama Sr.’s father was furious at his son for marrying a white woman. That’s really complex.

But the greatest complexity of all is not only was it impossible for Barack Obama Sr. to have flown to the United States with his new-born son. It was also impossible for his mother to have flown home either, because according to the INS report, a total of ZERO US citizens arrived in the United States from Kenya by air for the entire year ending June 30, 1962.

OK birthers, dump the air travel. You’ve got to by sea. Or maybe via Canada, yeah, Canada. Ann Obama traveled on her husband’s British passport—oops, he wasn’t there.

Obots in HISTORY! George Bancroft

By on March 16, 2012 in Citizenship, Featured Articles, Obots in HISTORY!

The subject of dictionaries came up in a previous article. As these remarkable coincidences go, I found myself at an estate sale this morning where I found, and purchased, the great granddaddy of dictionaries, The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1971. Of course, after getting it home, I got out the high-powered magnifying glass and looked up “natural-born.” It has one definition that says:

Having a specified position or character by birth; used esp. with subject.

That was hardly worth lugging 20 pounds of books home, except, in addition to the definition, there were some examples of usage, and one of  particular relevance by George Bancroft. It’s not a name I was familiar with, but perhaps I should have been. From the Wikipedia:

George BancroftGeorge Bancroft (October 3, 1800 – January 17, 1891) was an American historian and statesman who was prominent in promoting secondary education both in his home state and at the national level. During his tenure as U.S. Secretary of the Navy, he established the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845. Among his best-known writings is the magisterial series, History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent.

It is from that latter work that the OED quotes:

Every one who first saw the light on American soil was a natural-born American citizen.

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What the heck is a PIKA stamp anyway?

By on March 8, 2012 in Books, Featured Articles, Joe Arpaio, Mike Zullo

I am a sometimes collector of postage stamps, and I must admit that I had never heard of a USPS “PIKA” stamp, as described by Jerome Corsi and Mike Zullo in their book A Question of Eligibility. In fact, the only USPS PIKA stamp I know of is this one:

US postage stamp showing small rodent called a pika

Then I realized the problem (palm meets forehead). They weren’t talking about a PIKA stamp, they were taking about a PICA stamp. This simple mistake is all the more remarkable in the light of what the book writes about this part of the investigation:

Sheriff Arpaio’s investigators located and interviewed several 1980s-era U.S.P.S. former-employees who provided affidavits attesting that it was standard U.S.P.S. procedure to utilize a four-digit date stamp.

Of course you might think that this is just a typo (made 8 times), and really doesn’t affect the investigation. But you would be very wrong!

The following is not in the Corsi/Zullo book, but it was said at the Maricopa County press conference (Mike Zullo speaking):

This piece of evidence is extremely disturbing, given the fact that there was no logical reason in 1980 for any post office employee to cut a PIKA date stamp. It is one solid piece of rubber1, it sits there for a year. In addition, the PIKA date stamp – the date. The stamp itself, the stamper, is no longer manufactured. It was manufactured until about 1980. However, the inserts are still manufactured. But you can’t go on the street and buy them. They come from postal supply houses. The only way we were able to get ‘em was under the venue of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Offices.

The implication is that although the faker was somehow able to get an authentic date cancellation device for the Honolulu Post Office manufactured before 1970 (a remarkable feat, I must say), he could not get any date slug but a current one from  2008 to fit in it2. And having only “2008” to work with, the forger was forced to  invert the “08” into “80” and do without the all-important “19.” Now maybe the forger couldn’t get one of those 1980 PIKA slugs, but maybe he could get a PICA one.

And now my Obama Conspiracy Theories Debunker Posse arrives on the scene to begin its own investigation in to the Cold Case Posse investigation (Hey, they’re not the only amateurs who can do investigations.) Now follow along closely. Here’s Exhibit F taken from Chapter 3 of Corsi’s book showing the date slugs not available publicly.

image

Exhibit F

Look carefully at the stamp box and its label (which by the way says PICA, not PIKA).

Here is the fatal error that the investigators made. While you cannot buy PIKA [sic] date slugs on the street, you can buy PICA ones [wait for it]

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The crisis is over

By on February 9, 2012 in Ballot Challenges, Citizenship, Featured Articles, Lawsuits

Two camps

Among those birthers who claim that Barack Obama is not a natural born citizen because his father was British, there are two camps. One camp says that their view is trivially obvious, well settled in Supreme Court decisions; everybody knows this, they learned it in high school, and anyone who disagrees with them hasn’t read the Constitution. This by far comprises the largest group.

The slightly more realistic camp contends that the courts went awry some time back and that the parental requirement for Presidential eligibility has been lost (and rediscovered by them). This was the approach Leo Donofrio took at the beginning, saying US v Wong was wrongly decided and that he wanted to make “new law.” Such a loss of original intent is plausible, they might argue, because the issue doesn’t come up very often: the only effect of the phrase “natural born citizen” is in Article II of the Constitution in regards to who can be President (and all US Presidents except the first few and Chester A. Arthur have been born in the United States to two US Citizen Parents).

Today a new article has appeared at The American Thinker under the name Monte Kuligowski titled: The Obama Ballot Challenge: A Crisis of Confidence. It seems to come from the second camp’s point of view. The author wrote:

In former times, there would have been doubts as to whether Obama would even be a citizen without a formal renouncing of foreign allegiance. But based on wayward interpretations of the 14th Amendment, if we believe Obama was Hawaii-born, we must conclude that he is at least a U.S. citizen — regardless of his British/Kenyan allegiance at birth and his adoption1 in Islamic Indonesia.

But a 14th-Amendment citizen is not necessarily a natural born citizen.  Contrary to 14th-Amendment jurisprudence, the requirement of sole allegiance to the United States from birth onward has never been stricken from the Constitution’s eligibility clause.

The writer understands that judicial interpretations are not in his favor. What he doesn’t understand is that it is the Birthers who have forgotten the Constitution’s original intent, not the courts.

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New Congressional report on presidential eligibility

By on November 29, 2011 in Citizenship, Featured Articles

The Congressional Research Service has completed a new report on the question of what “natural born citizen” means in the context of the Article II qualifications for the President of the United States.

The Congressional Research Service is a part of the Library of Congress, providing professional, objective and non-partisan public policy research to members of Congress and their staffers. CRS reports by constitutional attorney Jack Maskell, the author of this report, have been featured on this web site before. I’m sure that my readers will be much more interested in what the report says than what I say about it, so without further introduction, the report is presented. I can anticipate a lively discussion to follow.

Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement

WND document expert says: not quite accurate

By on July 28, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Featured Articles, WorldNetDaily

I’ve been on WorldNetDaily’s case lately for trotting out a steady stream of crank self-proclaimed document experts while avoiding the recognized professionals in the field.

I have not been completely fair in my criticism. WorldNetDaily, according to an article by Bob Unruh back on May 1, 2011, actually contacted two forensics professionals and asked them to look at the Obama long form PDF.

While WND has published links to the full reports of some of its crank experts, they have treated the real experts differently.

Ivan Zatkovich

Unruh spends most of his article treating the report of Ivan Zatkovich of eComp Consultants. Mr. Zatkovich has an impressive career, having given forensic testimony in federal civil and criminal trials. While most of his activity seems to be related to patents and telephony, at least one case involved images. Mr. Zatkovich is not a crank by any means. What seemed odd to me then is why a link to his actual report was not published along with Unruh’s article.

To clear the matter up, I emailed Mr. Zatkovich with my questions, and he was kind enough to reply, and to include the missing report provided to WorldNetDaily. Mr. Zatkovich said:

Here is a copy of the full Obama birth certificate report which I submitted to World Net Daily. I believe it is fairly objective, and don’t believe WND’s excerpt was quite accurate.

Ivan

I must agree. WND readers say that every expert who has looked at the long form concludes that it’s a fake/fraud/forgery. Mr. Zatkovich, while maintaining that the separation of the document into layers was manual, concludes:

All of the modifications to the PDF document that can be identified are consistent with someone enhancing the legibility of the document.

The Zatkovich report directly contradicts the report of WND crank expert Douglas Vogt, by saying: “A certificate was produced by the State of Hawaii and copied onto green safety paper, as per normal procedure.” Vogt claims the State of Hawaii produced no paper document at all. He also contradicts WND crank expert Mara Zebest when he reports that the layers were not due to Adobe Illustrator.

John Berryhill

Jon Berryhill is the COO of  Berryhill Computer Forensics. Bob Unruh says only:

A second opinion, from Jon Berryhill of Berryhill Computer Forensics, said for a complete analysis, access to the original document would be best.

No indication is given whether or not a report was provided by Mr. Berryhill, and what else Berryhill might have said. However, if Berryhill had called the long form PDF a fake, there is no doubt that Mr. Unruh would have said so. He didn’t.

Conclusion

WorldNetDaily contacted two legitimate document experts and asked them to look into the Obama long form birth certificate PDF. Neither of them called it a fake.

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