Supersocialist

Back in 1952, the Man of Steel appeared in an issue of the comic book The Adventures of Bob Hope, urging us to "hop on the welfare wagon" and support health care for all because it's good for everyone:

If that comic were published today, not only would Glenn Beck et al rant that Superman's "S" insignia stands for "Socialist," he would be accused of being an America-hating Marxist and hounded for his Smallville birth certificate to boot.

We're all in this together. Making sure we as a nation are as healthy as possible makes us more productive, meaning we get a better economy and a better quality of life for everyone. We knew it even at the height of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, so why is it so hard to realize now?

Into the Lion's Den

The other night, I attended a town hall meeting by my Congressional representative to discuss the health reform bill currently in Congress. Actually, I tried to attend the meeting, but it was full up long before I got there. Instead, I found myself on the lawn outside the meeting place, where the man hoping to defeat my rep in 2010 set up a campaign rally. The usual crowd of teabaggers (holding signs like "GOVT. HEALTHCARE HOTLINE / 1-800-YOU'RE-DEAD!"), pro-lifers (with their requisite gory photos of aborted fetuses) and Lyndon LaRouche disciples (sporting posters of Obama with a Hitler mustache) was very much in attendance.

The general atmosphere was like something out of another dimension, where up is down, black is white, and an effort to make sure everyone can get the health care they need is actually a plot to destroy America.

Person after person railed to me against "socialism," "death books," "Marxism" and other canards, citing the paranoid ravings of Glenn Beck as if they were holy gospel.

"Have you read the bill?" I was asked over and over, and my response of "yes, have you?" flummoxed them. Such people apparently believe that their refusal to read the bill for themselves means that no one else will read it either, and so they're caught unprepared when talking with someone who actually took the time and effort to debunk the scare stories.

People carried signs denouncing the bill as "unconstitutional" and demanding its supporters be tried for treason. They have evidently never read Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, which clearly gives Congress the power to "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." One would think that health care definitely belongs in the category of "general Welfare."

And then there were the arguments over the "death panels." I argued myself blue in the face that there are no death panels and that it's all a monstrous lie. I explained the actual purpose of the attacked section - namely, if you choose to discuss a living will and/or other advance care planning with your doctor, Medicare will cover the cost of the consultation - and it made no difference whatsoever.

Same thing with the Veterans Administration's supposed "death book," Your Life, Your Choices, whose actual purpose is to educate veterans about advance care planning. People had already made up their minds, and no amount of facts was going to change them.

When people over 65 denounced "government run health care" and I mentioned a little something called Medicare, they didn't even slow down. When they fulminated against "socialism" and I asked if they receive Social Security, they accused me of twisting their words against them.

But the absolute low point was a woman in a wheelchair shakily taking the microphone to say that as a "cripple" she was on the list of "disposable" people who would not receive care. The crowd replied with a mixture of cheers (for her) and boos (for Obama and anyone else who supports the bill).

"That's not true!" I blurted out, only to be shouted down.

The thought of someone deliberately twisting that woman's mind with fear and terror into believing something no sane person would ever suggest is simply obscene. And the realization that far too many Americans wholeheartedly believe it as well makes me despair for our nation.

Death Panels 2.0

With the "death panels" smear having gone down in flames, exposed for the monstrous lie it is, the right wing is taking another tack in attacking the Obama Administration - saying it wants elderly veterans to die.

Call it Death Panels 2.0.

All during the Bush Administration, the Veterans Administration distributed a booklet titled Your Life, Your Choices, educating veterans about advance care planning and encouraging them to discuss the issue with their families, doctors and spiritual advisers. Advance care planning, which became widely known after the Terri Schiavo fiasco, lets people dictate the terms of their health care in advance should they become incapacitated. For example, via a living will you can tell your doctors to keep you alive by any means needed, or you can direct that treatment be withheld. With a health care proxy, you can specify that someone else has the right to make health-care decisions on your behalf.

The point of such planning is that you control your treatment and thus spare your family from having to make painful decisions on your behalf. So it is thus not surprising that the booklet, first issued by the Clinton Administration and retained for twelve years, is being distorted beyond all recognition.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and again on Fox News, Jim Towey called Your Life, Your Choices a "death book," saying that it "presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political 'push poll.' For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be 'not worth living.'"

If he genuinely believes veterans (or anyone else, for that matter) would tell their doctor to pull the plug based solely on a worksheet, he must really think they're morons.

Of course, since the booklet is freely available online, Towey exhibits the same haughty arrogance shown by other death-panel scaremongers - he apparently believes his readers are either too stupid or too lazy to look it up for themselves. Anyone who actually looks at the booklet quickly sees that the worksheet helps veterans consider their feelings about the subject and thus decide for themselves what treatment they may want done (or not done, as the case may be) if the worst happens. It does not favor one outcome or another. Indeed, it explicitly says, "You can help assure that your wishes will direct future health care decisions through the process of advance care planning."

So Towey is lying. But we already knew that.

What we didn't know is that for years, Towey repeatedly lobbied the VA to buy millions of copies of Five Wishes (his own for-sale "living will with a heart" booklet) but was turned down. So by smearing the free VA booklet, he's not only lying and fear-mongering, he's also trying to drum up business.

This is really terrible. Base political opportunism combined with scaremongering and crass exploitation makes for a very bad combination. Preying on elderly people is always bad, but preying on elderly veterans who have given their all for their country is particularly awful.

Now He Tells Us

Several years ago, quite a few people noticed a distinct pattern to how the Administration blared scary terrorist warnings - namely, that a disproportionate number of them were announced in such a way as to offset bad publicity or to ratchet up the fear level in advance of the 2004 election. MSNBC pundit Keith Olbermann called it "the nexus of politics and terror" and often commented on how terror plots were foiled with such perfect timing.

Now we know that was no coincidence. Tom Ridge, President Bush's first Secretary of Homeland Security who resigned less than a month after the 2004 election, has come forward to confirm what so many of us already suspected - that the terror alert system was blatantly politicized to bolster Bush's poll numbers and to ensure his re-election.

In his upcoming book The Test of Our Times, Ridge writes that when a new Osama bin Laden videotape surfaced only a few days before the election, he was pressured to raise the alert level despite the lack of any actual need for it: "There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None. I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?' Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president's approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level."

Not surprisingly, other former Administration insiders have disputed his claim, but it all comes together. Prior to the election, it was obvious that the system was being misused. Terror alerts were issued in such a way as to wipe out Democratic poll advantages, divert from whistle-blower testimony about the FBI's pre-9/11 activities (or lack thereof) and distract from the Abu Ghraib revelations. And the number of alerts dropped off sharply right after the election, when they were no longer needed so urgently.

But really, we should not be surprised. After all, the Bush team politicized everything, from the criminal justice system to science to 9/11 itself. Every function of government was twisted to serve not the nation, but George W. Bush and the Republican Party.

Disgusted, yes, but not surprised.

A Different Kind of Marxist

When it comes to health-insurance reform, the Republican Party has officially moved from opposition to obstructionism. First they screamed that the "public option" was socialist (despite the similarly "un-American" existence of Medicare), then they screamed that "co-ops" are the same thing and thus still socialist. It seems that the only non-socialist reform is none at all, leaving us stuck with what we have now. This works just fine for a few of us, works less well or barely at all for many more of us, and leaves almost fifty million of us out in the cold altogether.

So with their determination to oppose anything supported by the White House, it seems the GOP has become a bunch of Marxists. No, not Karl - Groucho:

Yes, it's true. The movie Horse Feathers predicted the Republican reaction to the Obama Administration a full seventy-seven years before it took office. After all, as Oscar Wilde said, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life."

Since the GOP has made it very plain that they will oppose health reform no matter what, it's way past time for the Democrats to tell them to take a hike. The Dems have a strong majority in Congress, and it's about time they used it.

Fearing Fear Itself

After the Terri Schiavo spectacle a few years ago, many people started thinking about living wills, health care proxies and other methods of avoiding the same nightmarish limbo. So when the health-care reform bill was introduced in Congress last month, it included a provision (section 1233, pages 424-434) extending Medicare to cover "advance care planning consultations" should you choose to discuss such options with your doctor.

Eminently sensible. After all, making it easier for you to plan ahead for such a tragedy is a good thing.

But that was before Sarah Palin, former governor and present full-time provocateur, seized hold of the section and mangled it into something out of the Holocaust. Screaming about nonexistent "death panels" and raising the equally imaginary specter of killing off the elderly and disabled, she lied and lied and lied, scaring the pants off people solely to advance her political ambitions and gain street cred with the GOP.

(Of course, Palin would not be Palin without some rank it's-OK-for-me-but-not-for-you hypocrisy. You see, last year she proclaimed "Healthcare Decisions Day in Alaska," praising the exact same things she now denounces. Why am I not surprised?)

As if on cue, the airwaves were promptly filled with equally dishonest shrieking. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and others all fear-mongered about how the bill supposedly decides which Americans would get the axe. The fact that it wasn't in the bill, would never be in the bill and indeed would never be considered by anyone in their right mind was irrelevant. There were people to terrorize and cheap points to score.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In 2009, fear has won. In an unconditional surrender to mindless demagoguery and lies, the Senate Finance Committee yesterday stripped the provision from the bill. Senator Charles Grassley claimed it was dropped because it could be "misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly."

By him, perhaps? Grassley had lied to his constituents only the previous day, depicting the section as "a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

It was so incredibly false the thesaurus does not have enough words to convey just how false it was.

And yet it worked.

Yes, you have been protected from the horror of being able to decide your own fate without having to worry about paying the cost of the decision. If you want to plan ahead for a possible future, you're on your own.

And to everyone who terrorized their fellow Americans with blatant untruths - let's just wait and see what happens. God forbid you or your loved ones wind up condemned to exist in mute suffering, unable to express anything, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. All because in the name of partisan politics you made it harder for everyone to plan ahead.

Way to go, guys.

It's All Happening at the Zoo

When the late great Molly Ivins wrote, "You pick up the paper in the morning and it's kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator," she was describing Texas politics. But it works for pretty much anything, such as this item from the Tulsa World:

Republican mayoral candidate Anna Falling said Tuesday that putting a Christian creationism display in the Tulsa Zoo is No. 1 in importance among city issues that also include violent crime, budget woes and bumpy streets. "It's first," she said to calls of "hallelujah" at a rally outside the zoo. "If we can't come to the foundation of faith in this community, those other answers will never come. We need to first of all recognize the fact that God needs to be honored in this city."

The notion of an explicitly Christian creationism exhibit at a zoo (much less a publicly-owned zoo) is sort of like the Pope becoming a Bar Mitzvah - the two just don't go together. It seems Falling has never considered the possibility that people who go to the zoo want to learn about animals and science. People who want to learn about creationism would go to - oh, I don't know - church, maybe.

And Falling apparently doesn't care about what just might take precedence on a mayoral agenda - you know, all that boring secular stuff like budgeting and education and police departments.

But just for the heck of it, what would a creationist zoo exhibit look like? Would we see a mock-up of the Garden of Eden, showing the snake tempting an Eve whose naughty bits are tastefully shielded? Would we have a display showing all the animals which went extinct because they never made it onto the Ark? Perhaps something showing which animals were created on which day. The possibilities are endless.

Falling herself, at least according to her campaign website, appears to be just another generic fundamentalist wacko, charged by God with pushing her personal religious beliefs on everyone else whether we want them or not. Indeed, in her zoo speech she promised to turn city government into a Gilead-ish system of clerical control: "Unless the churches of Tulsa are brought into City Hall to begin to address our community's greatest ills - the City of Tulsa will go bankrupt, spiritually, morally and financially."

The article on the Tulsa World's website has already garnered hundreds of comments, from the aghast ("she's kidding,right? right? please someone tell me she's kidding,right?") to the supportive ("Maybe some need to ask themselves 'why be offended by this honest effort to work on root cause of rot in this city?'") to the puckish ("You can see animals at the Tulsa Zoo performing the acts of creationism most any day of the week!").

Somehow, I think Falling's mayoral campaign is not long for this world. After all, the people of Tulsa see all too well how she's turning their city into a laughingstock. Even if she doesn't.

It Must Be True in a Parallel Universe!

Some arguments by opponents of health care are distorted, some are bizarrely so, and some are just...well, read on.

"How House Bill Runs Over Grandma" is a tastefully titled editorial from the July 31 Investors Business Daily. In the middle of pushing the Obama-wants-to-kill-everyone-over-the-age-of-65 lie, they present this tidbit:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Hawking is a theoretical physicist who is almost completely paralyzed from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig's disease) but hasn't let that stop him. In addition to being a college professor, he has written a series of books in which he explains such mind-bruising topics as cosmology and quantum gravity in language accessible to everyone, not just those with multiple PhD's.

Oh yes, and he lives in the UK. In fact, he's lived there all his life. Not only is he not ineligible for health care, he was hospitalized earlier this year.

You may think IBD's editors just might be slightly abashed that their central "gotcha" point is in fact wildly wrong, but I doubt they noticed. After all, they're too busy pushing health-care lies to be bothered with something as trivial as accuracy.

On the other hand, since Hawking theorizes the existence of "baby universes" via black holes, perhaps the editorial is true in one of those other universes. Makes more sense than the rubbish they usually churn out.

Paranoia on Parade

"A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on. "

Mark Twain (also attributed to Winston Churchill)

The White House's plan to reform America's health system has been attacked by wild distortions and lies designed not to inform but to terrify. Sarah Palin reached the nadir (so far) of this fear campaign yesterday, shrieking,

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

It's all complete garbage, a dark and twisted fantasy spun out of thin air by people desperate to stop reform in its tracks but who are utterly unable to argue their case on the merits. (And by the way, Sarah, for someone who whines all the time about how your family is supposedly hounded by the media, you sure do love using them as props whenever it suits your purposes.)

In doing so, they are simply falling into line with the standard right-wing playbook: if the facts do not support your position, screw the facts and lie like hell, scaring the crap out of your audience wherever possible.

Horrifyingly, this terror campaign is working. Congressional town hall meetings have been inundated by mobs whipped into a frenzy by false talking points, and have been the location of numerous fights and physical attacks. At least one representative has received death threats and one other has decided to cancel town halls entirely rather than have them become occasions for more mob intimidation.

Thuggish paranoia is on the march in America, and the home of the brave has become the home of the frightened. People's minds are pumped full of terror on a daily basis, and some will believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, as long as it caters to their fears.

For example, a few days ago the White House announced an E-mail address to which people can send the more pernicious lies encountered in this whole miserable situation so they can be quickly debunked. The right wing issued a bloodcurdling scream en masse, and a new phony talking point was born. "The White House wants you to turn in your neighbors!" this one goes. "Report anyone who does not agree with the president!"

And people are believing it.

(Deep and disgusted sigh)

What kind of a country are we, where our people fall so easily for the most outrageous lies? Have we really forgotten how to determine if something is true or not? How many ways can we say, "It is a lie?" How many times must we say, "It is not true?"

A few years ago, it was revealed that the Bush Administration ran a massive (and massively illegal) spying program, snooping on Americans' phone calls, E-mails, web browsing, and anything else they wanted. It was also revealed that the Administration attempted to set up a civilian corps of informants who would spy on people in their own homes and report anything "suspicious." (That one was never put into operation not because it was illegal or immoral, but because the American people would never have accepted it.)

Those violations of our privacy were real. This one is imaginary. And it is a particularly bitter irony that the very same people who a few years ago lambasted the Bush Administration's critics are now leading the shrieking chorus of paranoia. When the Bush spying operation was revealed, Senator John Cornyn, who started this latest freak-out, notably snapped, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Ah, what a difference a change in presidents makes.

The fear level is stoked ever higher by the talking heads who revel in terrorizing their listeners and viewers and who live for turning them into quivering lumps of paranoid jelly. Rush Limbaugh growls with dreary regularity that President Obama is like Hitler. Glenn Beck's broadcasts have become so drenched in paranoia that he actually had to plead with his viewers not to be violent. (They do not appear to be listening.)

Is it any wonder Obama receives 400% more death threats than President Bush did? How long will it be before someone with more guns than brains takes Limbaugh or Beck or Palin or whoever seriously, and decides to murder the president for the supposed good of the country? Or perhaps it will be "just" a senator or representative, perhaps at a town hall meeting. Have the people who get their kicks from terrorizing people with sickening lies considered that possibility? Or will they get it only when someone gets killed? (Then again, they didn't get it when Kansas doctor George Tiller was killed in church after years of vilification on Fox News.)

In the meantime, I'm making a direct appeal to anyone who reads what I write today. Don't believe the scare stories. Do the research. Think for yourself. Verify what you are told and decide for yourself whether it is true or not. And if it's crap, call them on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

If You Can't Win the Argument, Scream Louder

Earlier this year, lobbyists and Republicans joined together to manufacture astroturf "tea parties" at which President Obama was attacked for economic policies which actually began under the previous administration. Fox News did their part as well, abandoning any pretense of journalistic integrity as they aggressively promoted the protests. One Fox reporter even went so far as to rail on air against "the Democrat fascist stimulus package."

The "tea parties" were something of a bust, attracting far fewer (and far crazier) attendees than their organizers were hoping for, but you know what they say - if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

And so they are indeed trying again, this time under the guise of derailing the current push for health-insurance reform. With Congress away for the August recess, many senators and representatives are holding "town hall" meetings with their constituents. This is, of course, a good thing - our representatives in Congress need to hear from us, loudly and regularly.

But right-wing lobbyists and political groups are packing such meetings with their own supporters, whose only purpose is to yell, scream, disrupt and intimidate by any means necessary. And not surprisingly, GOP TV - er, Fox News - is once again backing this to the hilt.

In fact, a memo leaked last week outlines the exact strategy in almost gleeful terms:

Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington...

You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation. Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early... The purpose is to make him uneasy early on and set the tone for the hall as clearly informal, and free-wheeling. The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.

Since opponents know they have no case (after all, does anyone really like fighting insurance companies which refuse to pay for needed treatment?) and aren't even trying to argue on the merits, they have resorted to plan B - outright thuggery. This is not dialogue or conversation, this is designed to shut down dialogue and prevent conversation.

Furthermore, where does it go from here? Let's face it - when people are sent solely to disrupt meetings, any difference between screaming at participants and beating them up is only one of degree.

Tactics like this are profoundly anti-democratic (with a small "d"). Of course we have the right, indeed the duty, to challenge our elected representatives when we don't agree with them. This is America, and I wouldn't have it any other way. But when it crosses the line from discourse to stage-managed harassment, it becomes unacceptable.

And is it just me, or are there a lot of older people screaming about "government control of health care" at these things? Do they not know they even have health care thanks to a little something called Medicare?

The mind boggles.

Her Own Worst Enemy

"We have met the enemy and he is us," the comic-strip character Pogo famously said. So it is with Orly Taitz, the Soviet-born dentist-turned-correspondent-school-lawyer who has put herself at the forefront of the birther movement. In her relentless quest to prove that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen and so cannot be president, she has done more damage to her cause than a whole squad of debunkers could possibly accomplish.

For example, take this little tête-à-tête yesterday with MSNBC's David Shuster and Tamron Hall:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

She seems to believe that rambling incoherently and yelling at the interviewers will somehow make everyone flock magically to her side.

And if that wasn't enough, she also shrieked on her website (sorry, no link - a virus tried to infect my computer the instant the page came up):

I also did MSNBC TV show with David Schuster [sic] and Tamaryl [sic] Hall- two of them are just Nazi brown shirts, they and their network should be prosecuted under RICO act, a number of people will have to serve lengthy prison terms for aiding and abetting treason

Way to go, Orly. Hope your dentistry skills are up to snuff, because I don't think this lawyering thing is working out.

One Year of Birther Madness

As amazing (appalling?) as it sounds, it really has been an entire year since this Barack-Obama-is-not-a-natural-born-citizen-and-so-can't-be-president nonsense began. (For the record, Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961.) The birthers have not only managed to push themselves onto the national stage, but actually pose a real threat of taking over the Republican Party.

A poll released July 31 on the DailyKos website revealed that an astounding 58% of Republicans either believe that President Obama was not born in the United States or don't know for sure. Some GOP politicians visiting their districts face crowds of constituents jeering their assurances that Obama is a natural-born citizen, while others prefer not to confront a growing segment of their party rather than admit the simple truth. As the rest of the country watches in a sort of horrified train-wreck fascination, the GOP is fast spiraling down the hole of birtherism, and may not be able to climb out.

So in (dubious) honor of the one-year anniversary of Birther Madness, here is a list of the birthers' arguments (so far) and why they don't hold water. In no particular order:

1. The image of Obama's birth certificate is a fake.

No, it's real. It was verified as both genuine and accurate by the Hawaii Department of Health.

2. The "Certification of Live Birth" presented by the Obama campaign is not the same as a birth certificate and is not accepted when applying for a passport.

Sure it is. It's the exact same document anyone receives from the state when requesting a copy of their birth certificate, and is the standard form issued by Hawaii (and, indeed, many other states) for all births. It is perfectly acceptable at all levels of government as proof of citizenship, including for passport applications. The "certification" vs. "certificate" business is a matter of semantics and nothing more.

3. Why doesn't Obama release his original "long form" certificate?

Why should he? He already proved his citizenship status by releasing his birth certificate, and the Hawaii state government has confirmed its authenticity multiple times. It's not his job to cater to the birthers' paranoia - or anyone else's paranoia, for that matter - and surrendering will only keep this farce going ad infinitum.

4. Hawaii allows children born in other locations to receive Hawaii birth certificates.

Hold on to your hats, people - all states allow this. Children who were adopted from out of state or who were born while their parents were traveling receive birth certificates from the state of their parents' residence. It happens all the time. The birthers' argument fails because (a) Hawaii did not allow this until Obama was in his twenties and (b) all birth certificates include the place of birth regardless of where the child was born. If the child was born in New York City, it gives the place of birth as New York City. If the child was born in China, it gives the place of birth as China. No exceptions.

5. Anyone can contact the Hawaii state government, say his or her child was born in-state, and get a Hawaii birth certificate and thus American citizenship.

No evidence for this claim has been presented. This one apparently represents the next round of birther (il)logic. As long as the long-form certificate is unavailable, the birthers can claim Obama's hiding something. But if he gives in and releases it, they can then claim the document is meaningless because it could possibly be fake. Such is birther doublethink: the long-form document is both crucial and useless, relevant and irrelevant.

6. Sun Yat-Sen, who was born in China, fraudulently obtained a birth certificate saying he was born in Hawaii.

He did indeed - in 1904. Hawaii was an American territory at the time and so he did not become an American citizen. Both Hawaii and the United States had very different citizenship laws than they had after statehood in 1959.

7. Obama has dual citizenship because his father was a Kenyan citizen.

Not any more. Kenyan law allows dual citizenship in children, but terminates it on the child's 21st birthday unless he renounces his other citizenship and swears an oath of allegiance to Kenya. Since Obama did neither, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on August 4, 1982.

Besides, if dual citizens cannot be president, then any country in the world - Iran, for example - has the power to remove an elected American president simply by declaring him to be a citizen of their own country as well as the US. Is that really what the birthers want? I didn't think so.

8. Both parents must be American citizens in order to be a natural-born citizen.

Wrong again. American law recognizes only two types of citizen: natural-born and naturalized. All that is required for natural-born status is for a person to be born either (a) in the United States or (b) outside the United States to at least one citizen parent. The first requirement covers Obama, who was born in Hawaii, while the second covers John McCain, who was born in Panama when his father was stationed there as a naval officer. (Somehow, I doubt all this would now be happening had a white man with an Anglo-Saxon name been elected.)

Not only that, three other presidents have been born in the U.S. to one non-citizen parent: Chester Arthur's father was Irish, Woodrow Wilson's mother was Scottish, and Herbert Hoover's father was Canadian. Were they illegitimate presidents as well?

9. Obama's stepfather listed him as an Indonesian citizen on his school registration form.

Since no evidence of Obama's alleged Indonesian citizenship has ever been presented, it seems Lolo Soetoro simply lied so his six-year-old stepson could go to school. Oh yes, and the very same form clearly gives Obama's place of birth as Honolulu.

10. American citizens were not allowed to enter Pakistan when Obama went there in 1981.

Not true. The State Department's 1981 travel advisory does not bar Americans from visiting Pakistan and even gives instructions on how to obtain a visa.

11. Obama's grandmother said she was there when he was born in Kenya.

The cropped recording of Ron McRae's interview with Sarah Obama (conducted via translator over a bad phone connection) ends abruptly after her statement, even cutting off McRae mid-word. In the complete recording, Sarah Obama and her translator immediately realize the error and tell McRae over and over that Barack Obama was in fact born in America.

12. The certificate provided by the Obama campaign was printed on a laser printer, which had not yet been invented in 1961.

No one said the released certificate is from 1961. It was issued by the Hawaii Department of Health in 2007.

13. The short-form certificate Obama released is not recognized as valid by the Hawaii state government.

Barely true once upon a time and for the wrong reasons. The state Home Lands program leases state land to people with at least 50% indigenous Hawaiian ancestry. Because eligibility for this one program concerns ethnicity rather than place of birth, it used to require long-form certificates when applying but now accepts short-form certificates as well. Since Obama never claimed to be of indigenous Hawaiian descent nor applied for the program, it has nothing to do with him anyway.

14. Obama's birth announcements, sent to Honolulu newspapers by the state Department of Health, could have been falsely placed there by Obama's parents or anyone else.

No evidence for this claim has been presented.

15. A Kenyan birth certificate for Obama has been discovered.

A photo of the supposed document was announced by Orly Taitz and trumpeted by WorldNetDaily, but was exposed as a hoax within hours.

There will be other arguments, I'm sure. As long as the sky remains blue and Barack Obama remains president, Lord knows there will be others.