4um: Supremes to review Barack's citizenship - Case challenging his name on ballot set for 'conference'

A case that challenges President-elect Barack Obama's name on the 2008 election ballot citing questions over his citizenship has been scheduled for a "conference" at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Conferences are private meetings of the justices at which they review cases and decide which ones to accept for formal review. This case is set for a conference Dec. 5, just 10 days before the Electoral College is scheduled to meet to make formal the election of Obama as the nation's next president.

The Supreme Court's website listed the date for the case brought by Leo C. Donofrio against Nina Wells, the secretary of state in New Jersey, over not only Obama's name on the 2008 election ballot but those of two others, Sen. John McCain and Roger Calero.

GA_googleFillSlot("WND_NWS_C0200"); GA_googleFillSlot("WND_NWS_C0201");

The case, unsuccessful at the state level, had been submitted to Justice David Souter, who rejected it. The case then was resubmitted to Justice Clarence Thomas. The next line on the court's docket says: "DISTRIBUTED for Conference of December 5, 2008."

If four of the nine justices vote to hear the case in full, oral argument may be scheduled.

The action questions whether any of the three candidates is qualified under the U.S. Constitution's requirement that a president be a "natural-born citizen."

Get the book that started it all – Jerome Corsi's "The Obama Nation," personally autographed for only $4.95 – an amazing $23 discount!

According to America's Right blogger Jeff Schreiber, there also was a development in a second case presented to the Supreme Court on the same issue.

His report said the Federal Election Commission now has waived its right to respond to a complaint brought by attorney Philip Berg.

"There are a number of reasons why the respondents here would choose not to respond. First, because the court only grants between 70 and 120 of the 8,000 or so petitions it receives every year, perhaps they just liked their odds of Berg's petition getting denied. Second, because they have made arguments as to Berg's lack of standing several times at the district court level and beyond, perhaps they felt as though any arguments had already been made and were available on the record. Or, perhaps the waiver shows that the FEC and other respondents do not take seriously the allegations put forth by Berg, and did not wish to legitimize the claims with a response," the blogger speculated.

"Another thing which is not completely clear is whether the FEC is filing for itself or on behalf of all respondents," he added.

"If it were just the FEC filing the waiver, I must say that I'm surprised," Berg told America's Right. "I'm surprised because I think they should take the position that the Supreme Court should grant standing to us. I think they have a responsibility not only to Phil Berg, but to all citizens of this country, to put forth a sense of balance which otherwise doesn't seem to exist.

"However, if this was filed by the FEC on behalf of the DNC and Barack Obama too, it reeks of collusion," he said, noting that the attorney from the solicitor general's office should be representing federal respondents and not the DNC or Obama.

But he noted that "questions surrounding this aspect of Obama's candidacy are seemingly beginning to see the light of day."

Just last week, WND reported on worries over a "constitutional crisis" that could be looming over the issue of Obama's citizenship.

Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes and others filed a court petition in California asking the secretary of state to refuse to allow the state's 55 Electoral College votes to be cast in the 2008 presidential election until Obama verifies his eligibility to hold the office.

Alan Keyes

The disputes all cite "natural-born citizen" requirement set by the U.S. Constitution.

WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi even traveled to Kenya and Hawaii prior to the election to investigate issues surrounding Obama's birth. But his research and discoveries only raised more questions.

The biggest question is why Obama, if a Hawaii birth certificate exists as his campaign has stated, simply hasn't ordered it made available to settle the rumors.

The governor's office in Hawaii said there is a valid certificate but rejected requests for access and left ambiguous its origin: Does the certificate on file with the Department of Health indicate a Hawaii birth or was it generated after the Obama family registered a Kenyan birth in Hawaii?

Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro, has named two different Hawaii hospitals where Obama could have been born. There have been other allegations that Obama actually was born in Kenya during a time when his father was a British subject.

The California action was filed by Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation on behalf of Keyes, the presidential candidate of the American Independent Party, along with Wiley S. Drake and Markham Robinson, both California electors.

"Should Senator Obama be discovered, after he takes office, to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void, Petitioners, as well as other Americans, will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal," the action challenges.

An Obama spokesman interviewed by WND described such lawsuits as "garbage."

The popular vote Nov. 4 favored Obama over Sen. John McCain by several percentage points. But because of the distribution of the votes, Obama is projected to take the Electoral College vote, when it is held in December, by a 2-to-1 margin.

The California case states, "There is a reasonable and common expectation by the voters that to qualify for the ballot, the individuals running for office must meet minimum qualifications as outlined in the federal and state Constitutions and statutes, and that compliance with those minimum qualifications has been confirmed by the officials overseeing the election process," the complaint said, when in fact the only documentation currently required is a signed statement from the candidate attesting to those qualifications.

"Since [the secretary of state] has, as its core, the mission of certifying and establishing the validity of the election process, this writ seeks a Court Order barring SOS from certifying the California Electors until documentary proof that Senator Obama is a 'natural born' citizen of the United States of America is received by her," the document said.

"This proof could include items such as his original birth certificate, showing the name of the hospital and the name and the signature of the doctor, all of his passports with immigration stamps, and verification from the governments where the candidate has resided, verifying that he did not, and does not, hold citizenship of these countries, and any other documents that certify an individual’s citizenship and/or qualification for office.

The "certificate of live birth" posted by the Obama campaign cannot be viewed as authoritative, the case alleges.

"Hawaii Revised Statute 338-178 allows registration of birth in Hawaii for a child that was born outside of Hawaii to parents who, for a year preceding the child’s birth, claimed Hawaii as their place of residence," the document said. "The only way to know where Senator Obama was actually born is to view Senator Obama's original birth certificate from 1961 that shows the name of the hospital and the name and signature of the doctor that delivered him."

The case also raises the circumstances of Obama's time during his youth in Indonesia, where he was listed as having Indonesian citizenship. Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship, raising the possibility of Obama's mother having given up his U.S. citizenship.

Any subsequent U.S. citizenship then, the case claims, would be "naturalized," not "natural-born."

WND has reported other challenges that have been raised in Ohio, Connecticut, Washington, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Hawaii.

With the economy going to hell, what does it matter which elite puppet sits in the White House? The destruction of America is almost complete, arguing over the head stooge's qualifications is a moot point.

The Hell it is! I want to see some freeking SOBs got to jail if this clown turns out to have lied. And what kind of country allows the POTUS to become president merely by his "attesting" to these things with NO PROOF?? OMG! Hell yes it matters!

Why do you keep focusing on this when there are important issues? The state of Hawaii has said he has a valid original birth certificate. This is just more neocon propaganda to try and distract from the important issues.

That's not what they said. They said that there was a certificate on file. They did not specify what kind. No constitutional issue is trivial no matter how small.

What issues would you have us focus on? My primary issue is the establishment of a one world government funded by carbon credits.

Health Department Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said Friday she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama's original birth certificate.

Fukino says that no state official, including Republican Gov. Linda Lingle, ever instructed that Obama's certificate be handled differently.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2008/10/31/20081031obama-birth1031-ON.html

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-birth-certificate-30-oct30,0,1742172.story

why are American citizens being held for years in prisons without access to courts or attorneys?

why are Americans still being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to be killed when it was all a hoax and nothing but lies?

why is the federal government training the U.S. military to peform local police functions?

where did the missing 2.3 trillion dollars go in 2001-2002 from the Pentagon budget?

why has commie bush been able to void over 800 pieces of legislation with simple signing statements?

why in 2004 was the Border Patrol advised to allow all other than Mexican illegal immigrants to enter the country and just give them a piece of paper with an immigration court date and assume they will show up for it?

why hasn't anybody raised hell about the administration attacking more than 20 countries claiming they are engaging terrorists - illegal wars/conflict?

why has obama chosen neocons and atheist war monger Ashkenazim for his administration?

why was the EPA allowed to change the law so that pesticides could be used on certain children and others for testing purposes?

why was China allowed to observe our classified military practice functions, allowed to buy and take back to China a company that makes almost all the specialized magnetic compounds for smart bombs etc?

why are vets coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and being denied proper heath care by the VA?

Of course we can rely on the integrity of the media and politically influenced minions of the state. Right? Neither one ever lies - right?

Given the controversy, and suits, if Oh'Bummer could produce it he would produce it because doing so immediately makes it all go away.

The most interesting datum is his adamant refusal to do so and in fact the legal maneuvering used to get suits dismissed upon technical grounds.

Now that is not proof of anything in and of itself, but the absence of any validating documents is a form of negative proof.

Again, while some such as yourself worry about issues that if true or false would have little impact on the future of our country, the rest of us will concentrate on the those who are working to destroy it and the things they are doing.

I never thought I would see so many Americans be so easily controlled by marginalization, distraction by phenomenon and distraction by nationalism. I can understand how it worked in countries like the USSR, Cuba and such but not in the U.S.

My suspicions were obviously correct. If your not a nationalist then get the fuck out. You are the problem not the solution. Only to stupid to know it. I know retards smarter then you with better morals.

Nationialists are the scum of the earth They are the ones that those like Hitler and the others were able to control.

Uh huh...and why am I not surprised that you would associate nationalism with Hitler? Be careful, you've dropped your mask of patriotism more than once.

This may be to complex for some of you but give it a shot. Maybe, just maybe you'll see the difference between patriotism and nationalism.

To understand the critical difference between the commendable impulse called patriotism, and the murderous group psychosis called nationalism, it's useful to think of the contrast between the organic reality called family ties and the silly fiction called “school spirit.”

While the terms patriotism and nationalism can refer to the same thing – the love of one's native country – in practice they have acquired very different meanings. Nationalism, in practice, describes not to the love of a country but rather the veneration of its central government.

Patriotism is not built on zero-sum assumptions: It is quite possible to love one's country ardently, while recognizing and respecting the love that patriots of other countries display for their homelands. I am convinced that one result of a global pandemic of genuine patriotism would be a general abatement of warfare, since people who really love their country would spare it the horrors of war in all but the most exigent of circumstances.

Authentic patriots thrust into combat against each other would be likely to seek the earliest possible end to conflict, as well as to pursue a just and sustainable peace. The objective, after all, would be to preserve what's best for one's own country, not to impose the will of one's government on another country.

As historian John J. Dwyer notes, nationalism is a degenerate impostor of patriotism. “The patriot says, `I love my country,' works for its good, and defends it if necessary – against enemies within and without,” writes Dwyer. “He strives and prays not primarily that God will bless his country, but that his country will bless God. The nationalist, meanwhile, says, `My country is better than yours.' `My country is the greatest there has ever been.' `The greatest nation on God’s green earth.' `They hate my country because it is so good.'”

Nationalism focuses on the State, rather than the community. It is unambiguously based on zero-sum assumptions about power, and nationalists define victory in terms of imposing their will on others.

It takes relatively little prompting to teach an individual to love his country. It requires a considerable investment of time and effort to indoctrinate him into the love of the State that rules him. The former can be taught in the home by parents who have a decent grasp of their country's history and culture. The latter, however, requires the efforts of the state's paid clergy..

Typically, an individual doesn't need prompting to love his family, even if there are some within it he doesn't like very much. Familial affection is not the product of ritualized peer pressure, like pep rallies and similar liturgies.

“School spirit,” by way of contrast, is an entirely synthetic pseudo-emotion. Public schools are about as organic as polystyrene, and the “communities” they create are the product of geographic accidents and arbitrary government decisions. They have those traits in common with the “nations” brought into being by the Power Elite after World War I.

Like those artificial “nations,” public schools compensate for their lack of community authenticity through the cynical propagation of convenient myths and the state-managed manufacture of ersatz enthusiasm.

Last fall (for reasons I'll explain below), my wife and I found it necessary to put our three oldest children into the local government school, whose mascot is the Pirate (an appropriate choice for a government-run institution). As a result we became aware of the school district's incessant efforts to instill “school spirit” in them – through competitions involving the sale of Pirate t-shirts, or classroom participation in “Pirate Fridays” by wearing the school colors.

None of this has anything to do with athletic competition; we're discussing an elementary school here. So why is there such an effort underway to confect “school spirit”?

I suspect that teaching students to revere their school is the first stage of indoctrinating them in the state-worship called nationalism. “Be true to your school” is the first line of a catechism that concludes with some variation on the theme of der staat uber alles.

As Gary North observes, this is nothing new: “Throughout the West after the rise of Napoleon, nationalism became the State's substitute for organized religion. The public schools universally inculcated some form of State-deifying nationalism.” What North describes is Rousseau's Civil Religion, in which the State -- as the instrument of collective human power -- is treated as "God."

Since the State is an abstraction, it is the most visible representative of the central government – in our case, the president – who is deified as the State Incarnate. As in the early Roman empire, our presidents are generally deified after death: Witness, for example, the revoltingly blasphemous depiction of Washington' apotheosis (literally, “ascent to godhood”) in the national Capitol, or the routine depiction of Lincoln as “the martyred Christ in democracy's passion play,” as neocon Walter Berns puts it.

In this, as in so much else having to do with executive despotism, the beady-eyed, slack-jawed, bloody-handed, illiterate little troll in the Oval Office has turned over new ground: He claims to commune with the Shekinah, or divine presence.

Recounting a recent White House lunch with Bush, British commentator Irwin Steltzer reports:

“The president divulged with convincing calm that when it comes to pressure, `I just don’t feel any.' Why? His constituency, he feels, is the divine presence, to whom he must answer. Don’t misunderstand: God didn’t tell him to put troops in harm’s way in Iraq; his belief only goes so far as to inform him that there is good and evil. It is the president who must figure out how to promote the former and destroy the latter. And he is confident that his policies are doing just that.”

How much of this is narcissism, and how much is a serious psychological disorder (I do not say that flippantly), it is difficult to say. The truly terrifying thing is that the purpose of government schools is to catechize the young in an official religion that would make them accept such grandiose claims without so much as a tremor of critical thought.

It has occurred to me, over the years of watching my fellow Americans, that there is a difference between nationalism and patriotism. It also appears that many people don't know the difference. I'm not even sure if it's proper for me to use the words that I use for the two groups that I see. But it is clear that there are these two groups, and in my personal lexicon, these are the two words I've come to label them with.

So what is the difference? The difference lies in what they are loyal to. Most of the time, the difference is difficult to spot. In the best of times, their goals align perfectly, and you can't tell the difference at all. But in times of stress, or when confronted with certain issues, the difference becomes visible, even glaring. Both are ostensively loyal to the USA, both love their country, but in truth the object of their affection differs. The former loves an institution and its trappings, while the latter loves an ideal and its principles.

Perhaps the best way to see the difference is through examples. One of the clearest is their reaction to the idea of a constitutional amendment banning flag burning. Nationalists support it because they love the flag, and want to protect it. Patriots oppose it because they love the American ideals that the flag represents, and such an amendment would be an assault on those ideals of liberty and freedom of expression.

"Now wait a minute," the astute reader might say, "aren't you just defining patriotism to match your own views on things, to justify your own self-image as a true patriot?" Certainly, a case could be made that this is indeed my motive, and indeed the motive of nearly everyone who engages in the act of trying to define 'patriotism'. By now, you've probably already formed an opinion of my view, and the motive behind your opinion is the same. But the truth of any proposition is independent of the motives of the person who proposes it. The important question here is not why I think what I do, the question is, is it true? Are there good reasons for thinking what I think on the subject?

Believe it or not, I did not come up with this definition by working backwards from my opinions on issues to what definition would justify them. I came up with it by working forward from a premise that certain people were indeed patriots. If what it means to be a patriot is in question, then who is or isn't a patriot is in question, but I figured if there are certain historical figures who we can rest assured were patriots, we could do the reverse, weeding out bad definitions of patriotism based on their agreement with the given facts.

So, we start with our given: the founding fathers were patriots. I take this as a given, since I take it that any definition that would imply that George Washington or Thomas Jefferson was not a patriot would be absurd. If Ben Franklin or Thomas Paine don't fit into someone else's notion of what it means to be a patriot, then I'm not going to be overly concerned with the fact that I don't either.

Did these people fight for the flag? Nope -- the Stars and Stripes hadn't been created yet. Okay, but did they fight for the flag they were born under? No, in fact they fought a war against those who were fighting for that flag. True patriots do not fight and die for a flag -- those who say we need to protect the flag because it's what our forefathers fought and died for have no idea what our forefathers fought and died for.

Were they fighting because it's what their government asked them to do? Again, no -- in fact their government was what they rebelled against. Ah, but they were fighting for the government yet to come, right? That's the government they were loyal to (and we should be to). Sorry, no, that would be the government they tried and then threw out 11 years later when it didn't work. Clearly these men had no particular affection for any government, not even the ones they created.

When these people fought for their country, they were not fighting for a flag, and they weren't fighting for a government, either. There was no United States at the time -- America was just an ideal, and it was that ideal that they fought for, fought to try to bring about, to bring that ideal into reality. That's what patriots do, then and now -- try to bring that ideal into reality.

"But, they already did it! Surely that can't be what modern patriots must do, if the task has already been done." But it isn't done! Take a look at the ideals they wrote about. Have all of them been fully realized? Have any of them? These are still things that need to be fought for, and the true patriot is the one that does what they did -- continues to fight for those ideals.

"But those ideals aren't what's really important -- our forefathers only fought for them because it's what they believed was in the country's best interest." That would certainly not be true for many of these men, Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin in particular, but perhaps I'm looking too closely at the most idealistic of the group, and not coincidentally, those with whom I most agree.

The defining moment, when I saw the difference most clearly, was not in fact when the flag burning issue came up; I merely use that as the most clear cut example. For me, the difference became clear when the elder George Bush criticized Bill Clinton for participating in protests against the Vietnam War, saying that it was an unpatriotic act. But wait, didn't Bill Clinton think at that that the war was not in the nation's best interest? He was right, but that's not actually relevant, the point is, if he genuinely did think that, then would not patriotism require that he act as he did? Given what he believed, it would have been unpatriotic of him to refrain from protest. If nothing else, this example showed that Bush was a nationalist, and had no idea what real patriotism is. (Of course, whether Bill Clinton was actually a patriot or not is an open question...)

Here's the real annoying thing about this other definition of patriotism. If indeed to be patriotic is to do what you think is in the nation's best interest, it becomes damn near impossible to brand the people who disagree with you as unpatriotic. As long as they're doing what they think is in the nation's best interest, they're patriotic too. There were patriots who were for the war, and patriots who were against it. This is doubtless true, no matter which war we're talking about. You can no longer spot the patriots by which side of the protest line they are on.

The nationalists, at least, are easy to spot. They wrap themselves in the red, white and blue. Their houses have American flags hanging by the front door, their cars have flag decals and bumper stickers, their walls are decorated with art depicting bald eagles, and one I know even has a bald eagle statue on his desk.

My temptation is always to contrast such people with true patriots, as if nationalism precludes patriotism, but alas, some of these people are patriots, too. Even some of the ones that don't know the difference.