a piglet's perspective

The caviary gives their perspective on pet health insurance on The Daily Dish.

natural born citizen

I was wrong in the previous post. You don't have to be "naturalized" if you are born in another country to an American parent.

Which makes the birther stupidity even more stupid. Someone (such as John McCain) who was born outside of the US is an American citizen and "natural born" if one or both parents is an American citizen.

One is "naturalized" if he or she was not an American citizen at birth, immigrates, and then becomes a citizen.

As Josh Marshall at TPM says, "the best way to understand the 'birther' craze is as a proxy for people who don't want to accept a black man with a Arabic-derived first name as President of the United States. Really as simple as that."

Panamanian conspiracy?

BTW, McCain was born in Panama.

feed a cold, starve a delusion

God knows this Birther paranoia doesn't need any more oxygen. But in a Chris Matthews-like attempt to expose this farce as unfit for civilized discussion, let's dispose of a couple of "arguments."

One thing that has bugged me from the first inklings of this wretched nonsense is the futility of wrangling over whether Obama was born in Hawaii (yes, which is part of the United States of America) or in another country such as Kenya.

So what? I thought. His mother's an American citizen, doesn't matter where exactly he was born, he's a citizen too.

Then i gather that one has to go through a naturalization process to be "official" if you were born elsewhere. Probably necessary to obtain a social security number and a passport. That lends support to the Birther claim that engineering a birth announcement in the Hawaii paper was a hoax of convenience: you'd avoid a bit of bureaucratic hassle if BHO was born in Hawaii rather than another country.

But forging a certificate of live birth (which IS a BIRTH CERTIFICATE) is well, a Nixon level of hoax-perpetrating and cover-up.

One other shred of evidence to cling desperately to: Catatonic Gordon Liddy on Hardball persisted in a fantasy about a "sworn deposition" by O's step-grandmother. Sorry, G, totally wishful thinking. (Debunked here.) Poor woman doesn't speak English, in a phone conversation through a translator she appeared to think she was being asked, "Where were *you* when O was born?" Well, right there where she was in Kenya. But "the boy" was born in Hawaii.

I'm getting the feeling that certain segments of the population really can't deal with black people living in big houses. esp big white ones.

the art of elocution: you can't make this stuff up

Direct quote from Sarah Palin, in a recent speech:

Reagan knew that real change and real change requiring shaking things up and maybe takin' off the entrenched interest thwarting the will of the people with their ignoring of our concerns about future peril caused by selfish short-sighted advocacy for growing government and digging more debt, and taking away individual and state's rights and hampering opportunity to responsibly develop our resources, and coddling those who would seek to harm America and her allies.

The good news is, the Alaskan legislature is set to override her veto of the appropriations bill accepting $27 million in federal energy stimulus.

there's a lieutenant governor primary too

The Virginia Democratic primary is Tuesday, June 9.

Candidates for governor are Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe, and Brian Moran.

Candidates for lieutenant governor are Mike Signer and Jody Wagner.

Steve Shannon is the candidate for attorney general, running (I presume) against Bil Mims, who replaced Bob McDonnell when he resigned to run for governor.

the imago dei

A reader writes Andrew Sullivan:

Mancow has glimpsed the real evil of torture: every act of torture--even "play" torture like this--betrays the deepest core of human trust: the trust in God.

Why? Because every man, created in the image of God, the imago dei, must--whether he wishes to or not, whether he knows it or not--stand and act in the place of God, with every decision, with every action, in every human relationship. The torturer therefore does not simply betray the laws of war, he betrays the imago dei: he betrays God, he betrays the other, he betrays himself, he betrays Trust itself.

The inarticulate terror you see flash for a moment across Mancow's face is the existential terror of a child--and we are all children--who sees that: a child faced with a world in which God cannot be trusted, in which God may indeed be actively evil: capricious, all-powerful, hateful, inexorable, inescapable. This is the deepest betrayal of all. This is the utter failure of human love.

resist the fear

Stepping back from current events and news analysis for a couple of months while I completed The Move to a new place, I am resistant to being sucked back into the news cycle.

With a little detachment, the Swine Flu hysteria appeared as the circus it was. Any political bickering I caught wind of, well, who gives a F? Next week it'll be another Cheney reality-defying escapade.

And speaking of Dick, as Andrew Sullivan says, "Cheney-dead-enders will continue to stoke fear and division."

Today I say, I'm not getting sucked into the fear and reaction. I don't know what to make of all this shit. A calm, thoughtful mind will make better sense of it over time than a fearful, chaotic mind.

post-defeat entrenchment

Rod Dreher, responding to CPAC (via The Daily Dish):

Do they really believe politics is dogmatic religion? They must. And if so, they're hopeless. Can you imagine going to such a liberal gathering in 1985, after Fritz Mondale had his head handed to him by Ronald Reagan, and listening to the de facto leader of US liberalism talking this way, saying that, "Liberalism is what it is and it is forever. It's not something you can bend and shape and flake and form"? If you were a conservative, you would have chortled and taken comfort in the evidence that the opposition was going to be spending a lot more time in the woods before the light of reality dawned upon their furrowed faces.

so far, obama will honor status-of-forces agreement

From Obama's Iraq speech on Friday:

As I have long said, we will retain a transitional force to carry out three distinct functions: training, equipping, and advising Iraqi security forces, as long as they remain non-sectarian; conducting targeted counterterrorism missions; and protecting our ongoing civilian and military efforts within Iraq. Initially, this force will likely be made up of 35,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops. Through this period of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

So far, Obama intends to honor the SOFA. I would like to hear a little language, however, from both the administration and the media, acknowledging that Iraqis have at least some say whether foreign troops are occupying their country. They have formally asked us to leave. And we already agreed.