--streiff]

Last week Mr. Obama publically referred to the controversy surrounding his eligibility for the Office of the Presidency – and Allahpundit, writing for hot air, said this about Mr. Obama’s decision to raise the issue:

It’s newsworthy as a rare example of The One addressing Birthers directly and as proof of how useful this dopey controversy is to him, letting him take the high road – during a speech about faith, no less – vis-a-vis opponents looking to discredit him by all available means. The citizenship line is delivered almost as an afterthought, but I doubt it was unscripted: Remember, Birtherism is part of the Dems’ midterm strategy, to frighten indies into believing that the GOP’s too fringe-y to be trusted with governance.

I believe a lot of smart people want to agree with Allahpundit on this, but that the bitter truths of the birther issue do not – and as the denier vindication going on in the various climategate scandals shows, reality always triumphs in the end.

The importance of the birther issue is both simple and complex: simple because the bottom line reality of birther claims is blatantly obvious, and complex because birther reality is compounded out of deep emotional conflicts within themselves, among members of the birther community, and between birthers and those who try to use the label “birthers” to denigrate them.

Notice that there are two very different issues here: what’s right about birther beliefs, and what risks deniers run as pressures building inside the cauldron of birther emotional response seek outlets.

The most obvious conflict arises from the “birther” label, because most birthers adopting it know it’s a lie.

The term appears to have originated with, and was certainly popularized by, a number of major media players whose general zealotry on behalf of Mr. Obama’s perceived agenda leads easily to the assumption that the coinage incorporates a sneering reference to the 9/11 truthers with a sophisticated attempt to limit public attention paid birther concerns to the matter of Mr. Obama’s missing birth certificate.

In reality, however, relatively few birthers put the missing birth certificate at the center of their concerns. On the contrary, most see it only as simultaneously the easiest example to publicize of all the missing Obama documentation, and as the most glaring example of mass media hypocrisy in that the latter went full bore after proof that Sarah Palin’s son is really her’s and repeatedly demanded that John McCain prove his eligibility for office, but not only viciously attack anyone unwilling to accept an obviously inadequate profer as sufficient proof of Mr. Obama’s American birth, but appear to deliberately mislead their audience by conflating legal citizenship with natural citizenship.

The deeper conflict birthers feel is both more complex and more subtle. In general birthers are Americans who deeply love their country or foreigners, like me, who deeply love the American ideal of one nation, under law – and it’s the “under law” component here that carries the emotional firepower for birthers. Under the highest law of the American nation, The Constitution, Mr.Obama’s ineligibility for the office he pretends to is unquestionable – but moral law, and today’s social values, contradict that to catch birthers between two deeply held value sets.

The intellectual side is easy: Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution requires that the President be a natural born citizen and as long as Mr. Obama claims that his father was a Kenyan of British citizenship (by coincidence precisely the loyalty split the founders were concerned about and their successors fought a war over twenty five years later) he cannot be eligible for the office he pretends to.

The emotional one is harder: the constitution was written at a time when family rights and obligations descended exclusively through the father, but we now treat the mother as of equal importance – and since Mr. Obama’s mother is thought to have been an American at the time of his birth, the emotional response is to treat his electoral victories as a kind of jury nullification of this particular constitutional requirement.

And as if that isn’t conflict enough, there’s one that’s even more important: birthers tend to be people who respect the law, respect opposing viewpoints, and generally avoid both person to person and political conflict – but being a birther stands in opposition to all that: it means making yourself a target for the two ends of the democratic spectrum still supporting Mr. Obama: the unemployable illiterates whose forte is hate, and the weak minded public intellectuals whose forte is self-justifying mis-information.

To really understand how deep seated this conflict is, contrast the least reported of all consistent tea party phenomena: their neatness and politesse, with what happens when Mr. Obama’s supporters get together. Put 200,000 tea partiers on the lawn in front of the Washington monument, and they leave the place clean – but Obama’s people leave an open garbage dump behind them.

Every city holding an Obama rally both before and after the 2008 elections ended up with a garbage problem, a police overtime budget problem, and a collections problem when they went after the organizers. Tea parties and Palin rallies, in contrast, leave none of this hang-over – and people who don’t litter, don’t shout, and don’t address illiterate rants to editors also don’t want to get down and dirty in the birther conflicts.

Taken together these conflicts wouldn’t matter if the birther movement wasn’t growing – but it is, and in that growth there’s both danger and opportunity.

There’s danger, because the emotional load carried by birthers could be discharged into the tea party movement and the 2010/12 elections. After all, one of Mr. Alinksy’s more cogent bits of advice (cadged of course, from someone else) is that winners understand their enemy’s strengths, and use those strengths against them – and because the greatest strength of the tea partiers and birthers is that they’re basically decent Americans, Mr. Obama’s people may be able to build birther conflicts nearly to the point of explosion and then bleed all that energy into a “one brush tars all” rejection of conservative views (and any further discussion of his eligibility) by conflating birtherism with the tea party movement and then publically producing a genuine Hawaiian birth certificate.

The opportunity, of course, is in seizing the issue: educating the public to understand that it’s about where his allegiances are, not about where he was born -and including his prompt ejection from office in the November 2010 contract with America. campaign.

The root of what’s wrong is that the United States is a nation of law, but a small number of people who for various reasons hold themselves above the law have become a coalition of haters united only through their control of the Democratic party and the mass media it depends on – and now have no regard for consequence or law as they try to justify themselves by serially satisficing the entourage of nuts, hangers-on, careerists, and idealogues they picked up on their way to power.

Look at this politically, and what we have is the hyperpartisan Pelosi presidency in which the acting president continues to campaign because that’s what he knows how to do; Holder, Rahm, and other deeply corrupted partisans run the executive branch; and, the big media players who see their democratic prophecies failing double down on hatred for Republicans as the messengers of a rejected reality.

Worse, look at things from outside the political trenches and what you see is the weathermen in charge in Washington: people whose lifelong contempt for American values leads them to disregard the law in making and enforcing decisions aimed squarely at destroying the American Republic -and if you think that’s overblown: name one thing done by Messrs Obama, Reid, and Pelosi that Wright, Ayers, and Dohrn wouldn’t have done in their places.

So what to do? I see three interlocking strategies for Republicans: for the short term, the medium term, and the long term.

Short term

The strategy for 2010 is to focus campaigning and publicity heavily on law, the limitations of law, and the abuse of law by democrats.

In particular the tea party movement could be directed toward support for law and the widespread recognition of democrat contempt for it – simply by pointing out that realities like the political exemption from prosecution accorded ACORN and the illegal seizure of Chrysler and GM shareholder assets for transfer to the Unions, are part and parcel of the same political agenda leading the Democrats to significant new taxes and enormous deficits.

One of the subtler consequences of doing this would be longer term: almost every state Republican organization has a significant number of “states rights” members – people who hold that the United States is a union of states, not a kingdom assembled from collected fiefs. With minor exceptions, almost every unconstitutional action undertaken by the Pelosi democrats is also a contractual violation of the terms under which the states undertook the union -and Republican leadership putting a real focus on law would almost certainly attract strong states rights support within the party.

In the short term, however, the highest profile example of democrat lawlessness, Mr. Obama’s legal ineligibility for the office he pretends to, also offers Republicans a direct path to an electoral sweep in 2010.

The facts on this are clear: every senator, and every representative, has taken the same oath to defend the constitution. That oath is enforcible both in federal court and at the polls – with removal from office as the least of the available penalties.

The current administration commits arguable constitutional violations on a daily basis: every congressman and every senator accepting actions ranging from giving ACORN de facto control of the census to the Chrysler fiasco, is in violation of the oath of office.

More directly, Mr. Obama claims to be the son of a Kenyan holding British citizenship; therefore cannot meet the constitutional requirement that the president be a natural born citizen; and was accordingly ineligible to run for that office.

In addition, Mr. Obama is known to be the son of a woman who married an Indonesian Muslim and sent her son to a local Muslim school when doing so would not have been possible without first renouncing American citizenship for herself and her dependent son. Since he could have reclaimed his birthright on or after his return to Hawaii but apparently choose to express his mother’s contempt for American values by not doing so, Mr. Obama is most probably not legally a citizen of the United States – and was therefore ineligible to run for the presidency.

Notice that his place of birth has nothing to do with either issue, and that production of a real Hawaiian birth certificate naming an American father would mark him as a natural born citizen, but not address his failure to reclaim his American birthright and thus still leave him ineligible for office.

Notice too that there are people who believe that somehow, somewhere, there’s a loophole making him eligible, but because no sane person can deny that the question has been raised any congressman or senator who does not personally act to verify Mr. Obama’s eligibility is in violation of the oath of office – a failure to investigate which, independently of the likely outcome of that investigation, should technically be sufficient to get a federal court to order that person’s removal from office.

The strategy, therefore, is to repeatedly and forcefully raise this issue in the press as well as the house and the senate – and thus force every representative, and at least one third of the senators, to consider what’s at stake for them between now and November 2010.

Notice that this strategy works for Republicans whether or not congressional action invokes the silver bullet – frog marching Mr. Obama out of the Whitehouse, re-establishing a Presidential check on Pelosi and Reid by giving the presidency to McCain/Palin, and trading inner city riots now for re-establishing constitutional government and wiping out every order, every appointment, and every act of Congress Obama has signed since taking the office.

The mid range strategy

The mid range strategy is to bring honest reporting back to American news coverage.

To see how critical this is try to imagine what the outcome of the 2008 elections would have been had the media treated Sarah Palin, or Joe the plumber, fairly – or if the New York Times, which not only regularly attacked John McCain in articles presented as news but repeatedly raised the issue of his eligibility for office, had treated Mr. Obama the same way.

Most importantly, ask why if only 11.2% of Obama voters knew of his commitment to bankrupting the coal industry, the other 87.8% did not.

Tactically, the easiest and most effective way to do this is to put together a consortium to buy and run a company like Gannet Communications – owners of USAtoday, 21 television stations, 88 smaller newspapers, and eight properties, like The Army Times, serving DOD markets.

That consortium would not front for the Republican party; instead it would focus the business on making money through the practice of traditional, independent, journalism.

The financial opportunity here is enormous: the print media across the United States appear to be in deep trouble, but the actual losers are those which, like USAtoday and the New York Times Company (also owners of the Boston Globe and the IHT) act as proud sponsors and spokesmen for the far left wing of the Democratic party. In contrast, media players like Fox and the Wall Street Journal which have tried to maintain reasonable editorial balance have come under continuous attack from Democrats who see them as parts of some vast far right conspiracy, but generally held their own, both financially and in terms of audience share, during a period of radically increased web competition and reduced advertiser spending.

There are a lot of good people coming out of failing media companies – and a lot of assets coming for sale at pennies on the dollar. A player big enough to pay for solid editorial content and directed by people whose first focus is honesty in reporting, should experience significant, low cost, growth in American media markets.

And honest reporting is, of course, all Republicans need to win.

The long term strategy

The long term strategy is to position Republicans as the people who view education and science as the enablers of both liberty and economic productivity.

To rephrase Karl Popper in context, actions based on hypotheses that have been proven false through experience or experiment are contra-indicated – in other words rational people do not shut down free markets, double debt and taxes, release terrorists among their own people, increase abortion funding, or destroy national energy production on the basis of long discredited economic or social theories -unless their goals are to destroy whatever social structures exist.

Lining up Republicanism with the forces that improve life for mankind puts the democrat’s assumption of support from the lazy and illiterates in a context everyone can understand: teach a man to fish and you feed him for life, give him a fish and you create an entitlement program forcing you to take from those who know how to fish.

There is a long term tactical corollary to this strategy: the extreme green movement can legitimately be portrayed as a religion because its views run counter to observed reality and thus require faith the believe.

The polar bear, for example, didn’t just evolve in the last few hundred years – meaning that the genuine global warming experienced during the medieval warming period (800 – 1300) didn’t kill them off. The evidence on CO2 as a greenhouse gas doesn’t exist (the phrase comes from a paper on the effect of water vapor in the atmosphere on Venus) – and neither does evidence of anthropogenic warming, while the ability to use nuclear energy to reconstitute hydrocarbons from atmospheric gases and water makes today’s petrochemical based energy distribution system the most renewable and efficient one we know.

And here’s the zinger: if the short term strategy brings back the rule of law, and the mid range strategy provides an audience for reasoned debate, then it will become possible for the courts to see Gaiaism as a religion, and thus to enforce the constitutional separation of church and state by imposing some standard of rationality for environmental regulation and obstructionism.

Right now a handful of people dominating the Democratic Party have the Republicans, and the country, in front of the firing squads of their choice – and lots of good Republicans are whispering “don’t make trouble.”

I’m a Canadian, and although we have as much at stake as Americans do we have no vote, no right to organize, and no right to contribute directly to the Republican party – but I can give advice and that advice is simple: You’re not dead yet, so make all the trouble you can.

A lot of people don’t understand just how desperate the situation is so what I want to do before discussing a particular way to make trouble is ask a rhetorical question, raise an example, and then point out the underlying problem.

The rhetorical question is this: if the Reverend Wright were President, Ms. Dohrn the speaker of the house, and Bill Ayers in charge in the senate, what would they do different from Obama, Pelosi, and Reid?

This Thursday, Crysler filed for bankruptcy protection – and not from creditors, from the Obama administration: because the latter’s move to value $10 billion in union investments at 40% of General Motors common while valuing the $27 Billion held by others at only 10%, sets aside the rule of law in favor of the kind of brazen political theft and patronage normally characteristic of third world dictorships and communist revolutions.

This is theft on the grand scale, but the consequences presage even worse: no union with a 40% stake in GM can negotiate fairly with Ford – and no administration so deeply committed to the unions can reject either card check, and thus the unleashing of 19th century union thuggery on America, or demands for protectionist trade policy leading to indirect tariff wars where nobody wins, and everybody loses.

The underlying problem is this: the United States is a nation of law, but a small number of people who for various reasons hold themselves above the law have become a coalition of haters united only through their control of the Democratic party and the mass media it depends on – and now have no regard for consequence or law as they try to justify themselves by serially satisficing the entourage of nuts, hangers-on, careerists, and idealogues they picked up on their way to power.

The most obvious example of the contempt for law among leading democrats is Mr. Obama’s ineligibily for the office he pretends to. The constitution is absolutely clear on this: the president must be a natural born citizen, and on his own testimony Mr. Obama isn’t.

There is a lot of confusion about this, but no actual question. a natural born citizen of the United States is born to a father fully under the jurisdiction of the United States: Mr. Obama claims his father was a Kenyan of British citizenship, and therefore he can not qualify as a natural born citizen.

In addition, Mr. Obama tells us, and other documentation supports this, that his mother married an Indonesian Muslim and sent him, however briefly, to a local Muslim school. That could not have happened unless she first renounced her own citizenship along with that of any dependent children – including the young Mr. Obama. He was entitled, under American law, to reclaim his birthright after his return to Hawaii, but there is nothing to suggest that he did so. As a result he is currently at best an undocumented alien and certainly not eligible for the office he pretends to hold.

Notice that his place of birth has nothing to do with either issue: “natural born citizen” status depends on the father, not where the child is born. Similarly, the issues raised by Mr. Obama’s failure to reclaim American citizenship reflect on judgements he made and held to over a long period of time, not where he was born.

Production of a valid Hawaiian birth certificate might prove him a natural born citizen if it shows an American, not Mr. Obama sr., as his father and this could be supported by other evidence – but it would say exactly nothing about the utter contempt for American society and American values revealed by his continued refusal to reclaim birth rights his mother originally renounced on his behalf.

Mr. Obama has spent millions of other people’s dollars defending hundreds of lawsuits on eligibility, but so far the courts have found legal reasons not to act – although reasonable people might reasonably think that the real reasons are liberal sympathies and a fear of the riots that Mr. Obama’s forced removal from office will almost certainly trigger.

There is a better way: every senator and every congressman, swears the same oath of office: an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States. If Mr. Obama is, as I and many others assert, rather obviously ineligible for the office he pretends to, then the act of sending him any legislation for signature, or following any order he issues under presidential authority, is unconstitutional, therefore in contravention of the oath of office, and consequentially punishable by criminal sanction and removal from office.

Thus the way to bring back the rule of law is to force each congressman, and each senator, to either act in accordanance with their oath of office, or resign – because congress can, and should, declare Mr. Obama to have been ineligible for election, and thus void all of the recent “democrat” legislation, appointments, orders, and related actions while re-establishing the traditional presidential check on congressional action by handing the White House first to Mr. McCain, and on his resignation to Sarah Palin and a new vice president such as Newt Gingrich.

The cleanup would be difficult, the economic and political hangovers fierce, and the riots worse – but because none of this would be remotely as damaging as the current, on going, destruction of the American republic the only  real question is how to make it happen.

The answer to that starts with another goal: to use the courts and the media to force every congressman, and every senator, to prove that working with Mr. Obama does not break the law – to prove, in other words, Mr. Obama eligible for the office he pretends to.

Doing that will require civil grand juries, the Constitution’s fourth branch of government, to assemble in each electoral constituency to issue an indictment, actionable through the federal courts, alleging that the local congressman or senator is in default of his oath by failing to do so. Properly drafted, with documented signatures from local voters, and with video evidence of the deliberations such indictments can force action by federal prosecutors – even those who ultimately report to the redoubtable Mr. Holder.

And those deliberations? tea parties, but this time with real clout.

Because most people believe that it’s too late to act: that the Pelosi-Reid attacks on the economy: on Detroit, on the financial system, on your job, can’t be stopped; that Obama’s abandonment of Israel, Taiwan, and Pakistan are done deals; that everything from show trials for “bushies” to gutting defense and refocusing homeland security from Islamic terror to right wing extremists are just parts of the cross every American has to bear.

Many believe, in fact, that a majority of Americans voted for this – that a government whose actions are so destructive of American value that it’s indistinguishable from what we’d get if the Reverend Wright were in the Whitehouse with Bill Ayers and Ms. Dohrn ruling Congress, is what the electorate wanted – and that any action you take to stop them is therefore anti-democratic.

All of that’s wrong – the current destruction of the American republic be stopped, it should be stopped, and you can help.

The reality on the electoral mandate claim is that only about 2% of those who voted for Mr. Obama were able to correctly answer 12 simple questions about the campaign – most of those who voted for him believed he would cut taxes, balance the budget, fix the economy, gain respect abroad, and reduce partisan conflict in Congress – instead, he’s letting Pelosi and Reid raise taxes while doubling the cumulative federal deficit; destroying the energy, automotive, and health care industries; demonstrating vicious partisanship in appointments; and, demeaning himself and the country abroad.

An electorate that’s been lied to should hold the liars responsible, not itself.

To do that, we need to get Congress to declare that Mr. Obama was ineligible as a candidate – because no vote for an ineligible candidate can be counted in either a general election or in the electoral college and this would wipe out every action he’s taken, every bit of legislation he’s signed, every appointment he’s made.

In effect, Congress can force a do over on the last six months – with McCain/Palin in the Whitehouse to reestablish the system of checks and balances that has preserved the American Republic until now.

What that means is that the $2.4 trillion in debt Pelosi and Obama have put together goes away; the economy booms; you keep your job; Detroit survives; ACORN and some key democrats face prosecution on electoral fraud; and we’d even have a good chance of eventually seeing people like Chris Dodds, and Barney Franks jailed for their roles in the financial meltdown.

This strategy is obviously controversial and you’ll hear a lot of people tell you lots of nonsense about it; but the argument is simple:

• The Constitution requires that the President be a “natural born citizen:” not just an American citizen by birth, but one born on American soil to an American father.

  Since Mr. Obama claims to have had a British citizen from Kenya for a father, he does not qualify as natural born. Period.

  Mr. Obama’s supporters will lie to you about this – usually claiming that the 14th amendment allows him in. It does not – and a quick google search will find you the definitions and the arguments needed to settle this.

• Mr. Obama’s America hating mother cannot have married, as he claims and the historical record supports, an Indonesian citizen and then sent the young Obama to a state approved Indonesian school without first renouncing both her own American citizenship and that of any dependent children, including Mr. Obama.Since it is certain that he lost his American citizenship while a dependent child and there’s nothing to suggest he ever bothered to reclaim it after his return to Hawaii, he cannot now be a citizen at all -no matter where he was born, and no matter who his father was.

So how can you help make the do-over happen? simple: you know who your congress critters are, so get in their faces on this issue – hit them with three questions:

1. Do they remember that their oaths of office included swearing to uphold the Constitution of the United States – and are enforcible by criminal sanction and removal from office?
2. Can they prove that Mr. Obama is constitutionally eligible?
3. And, if not, why aren’t they acting, in Congress, to bring an immediate end to an unconstitutional Presidency?

At first you’ll be dismissed by answering machines and bottom level flunkies, but if you stick to it – go to their campaign offices and their public meetings; get after the media people they depend on for positive publicity; write, fax, email, and telephone them – the answers you get will gradually improve from attacks on you as a birther, a nutcase, an ignorant redneck to the usual list of excuses: from it’s too late (not true) and he was elected (irrelevant); to he’s a citizen because born in Hawaii (irrelevant).

Remember those little homilies you learned in grade school? – stuff like “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”? and those uplifting little quotes – stuff like Franklin’s “We have given you a Republic, now see if you can keep it”? Well, now’s the time to add a little action to those. It’s your country: defend it.

Keep asking them the same questions: how can someone with a British father be natural born? How could his mother have married a Muslim in Indonesia and sent him to school there without renouncing his citizenship? and “as my representative, you swore to defend the constitution against all enemies, so why aren’t you acting against the usurper pretending to be President?”

Understand up front that neither your senator nor your congressman is going to want to hear anything about eligibility because the discussion catches them between rocks and hard places: between having sworn to defend the constitution against people like Mr. Obama and being afraid to act; afraid to rock the boat; afraid of media reaction; afraid of violence by a thugish few; afraid of being seen wrong.

So be polite, but be persistent: show them there’s more to fear from inaction than action – and if you can’t get their attention any other way, start a personal or class action asking that their oath be enforced – and continually point out that they have both the silver bullet, and the duty, to put an end to the current destruction of the American Republic.

Remember: it’s your country: defend it, or lose it.

Dear Mr. McCain:

I’m a Canadian, but what happens in your country affects mine – and because what’s happening in your country is an unmitigated disaster, I’m writing to ask you to stop it.

I don’t think you need a detailed litany; everywhere you look the Pelosi idealogues are in action: every dollar in new debt works against the economy, corruption and ignorance are rewarded, and every action they take in defense, in energy, in education, in international diplomacy is globally catastrophic.

And the President, meanwhile, does what he knows how to do: he campaigns – for himself.

Mr. McCain, it’s time to end this – and you have the means.

If you will suspend disbelief for just a moment, I believe I can show you that Mr. Obama’s ineligibility for office is both real and the silver bullet needed to put an end to this.

It’s a silver bullet because, were you to put together a sufficient coalition of Republican, Independent, and “blue dog” Democratic Senators and Representatives to carry Mr. Obama’s impeachment and removal from Office on eligibility grounds, two things would happen:

1. most of the harm that’s been done to the United States over the last four months would simply go away, leaving significant new opportunities for reform as part of the hangover; and,

2. most importantly, your presence with Sarah Palin in the Whitehouse would re-establish the system of checks and balances that keeps America free – meaning that the Pelosi Democrats would lose any short term opportunities to retake control of the agenda.

Since these outcomes are highly desirable, the question is whether Mr. Obama can be proven ineligible to the satisfaction of a sufficient majority of the members of Congress – and with sufficient dispatch that he doesn’t simply resign and thus promote Biden and Clinton while leaving Pelosi and Reid in place.

To show you that the answer is a resounding “yes”, I want to start by quoting the entirety of a resolution introduced in the Senate by Mrs. McCaskill and other leading democrats including Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton:

RESOLUTION

Recognizing that John Sidney McCain, III, is a natural born citizen.

Whereas the Constitution of the United States requires that, to be eligible for the Office of the President, a person must be a “natural born Citizen” of the United States;

Whereas the term “natural born Citizen”, as that term appears in Article II, Section 1, is not defined in the Constitution of the United States;

Whereas there is no evidence of the intention of the Framers or any Congress to limit the constitutional rights of children born to American citizens serving in the military nor to prevent those children from serving as their country’s President;

Whereas such limitations would be inconsistent with the purpose and intent of the “natural born Citizen” clause of the Constitution of the United States, as evidenced by the First Congress’s own statute defining the term “natural born Citizen”;

Whereas the well-being of all citizens of the United States is preserved and enhanced by the men and women who are assigned to serve our country outside of our national borders;

Whereas previous presidential candidates were born outside of the United States of America and were understood to be eligible to be President; and

Whereas John Sidney McCain, III, was born to American citizens on an American military base in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That John Sidney McCain, III, is a “natural born Citizen” under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States.

This is cleverly worded to focus attention on this line from the March 26, 1790 Act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization:

And the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens:

while quietly establishing a recent Senate precedent for the claim that the absence of a definition for the term “natural born citizen” in the Constitution leaves the term undefined.

In reality there are hundreds of undefined words and terms in the Constitution because, of course, Americans were expected to understand their plain English meaning. Today we don’t use the phrase “natural born citizen” much, but the meaning is clear from a comparable phrase we do use fairly often: “natural justice” – meaning justice according to God’s law, not Man’s.

To quote from the federalist blog :

One universal point most all early publicists agreed on was natural-born citizen must mean one who is a citizen by no act of law. If a person owes their citizenship to some act of law (naturalization for example), they cannot be considered a natural-born citizen. This leads us to defining natural-born citizen under the laws of nature – laws the founders recognized and embraced.

Under the laws of nature, every child born requires no act of law to establish the fact the child inherits through nature his/her father’s citizenship as well as his name (or even his property) through birth. This law of nature is also recognized by law of nations. Sen. Howard said the citizenship clause under the Fourteenth Amendment was by virtue of ‘natural law and national law.’

The advantages of Natural Law is competing allegiances between nations are avoided, or at least with those nations whose custom is to not make citizens of other countries citizens without their consent. Any alternations or conflicts due to a child’s natural citizenship are strictly a creature of local municipal law. In the year 1866, the United States for the first time adopted a local municipal law under Sec. 1992 of U.S. Revised Statutes that read: ‘All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are declared to be citizens of the United States.’

Rep. Bingham commenting on Section 1992 said it means ‘every human being born within the jurisdiction of the United States of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is, in the language of your Constitution itself, a natural born citizen.’ (Cong. Globe, 39th, 1st Sess., 1291 (1866))

Bingham subscribed to the same view as most everyone in Congress at the time that in order to be born a citizen of the United States one must be born within the allegiance of the Nation. Bingham had explained that to be born within the allegiance of the United States the parents, or more precisely, the father, must not owe allegiance to some other foreign sovereignty (remember the U.S. abandoned England’s ‘natural allegiance’ doctrine). This of course, explains why emphasis of not owing allegiance to anyone else was the affect of being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

All special pleading to the contrary, there’s no actual argument here: if, as Mr. Obama claims, his father was a Kenyan holding British citizenship, then he cannot be a natural born citizen and is therefore constitutionally barred from holding the Office of the Presidency.

There are, however, two issues to consider with respect to Mr. Obama’s ineligibility under the natural born clause in the Constitution:

1. First, Mr, Obama does have a possible defense: he could explain his initial refusal to release his birth and educational records on the grounds of the embarrassment this would have caused his grandmother, and then produce a birth certificate showing his father to be an American – perhaps the activist Mr. Davis – because that, if genuine, would prove him a natural born citizen.

2. and, second, Mr. Obama’s ineligibility is easily presented as merely a technical issue comparable to Mrs. Clinton’s ineligibility to serve as Secretary of State – something that’s obvious but too distasteful to enforce in light of his claimed electoral victory.

Part of the right response to both issues is to point out that Mr. Obama is also ineligible on different grounds – grounds that produce a much stronger emotional reaction.

The issue here is that his mother married an Indonesian national and sent the young Obama to a government approved school at a time when this would not have been possible had she not first formally renounced her American citizenship and that of any dependent children, including the future Mr. Obama.

Since there is no record that he availed himself of the opportunity presented under American law to reclaim his birthright on or after his return to the United States, we are entitled first to assume that he is currently an illegal alien, and secondly to speculate about his reasons for failing to take the simple steps needed to regain his status as an American – and the obvious speculation in light of his friendships with people like the Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers is that his long term adherence to an initial decision not to do this celebrates and continues his mother’s deep contempt for American values, American democracy, and the American people.

Again there is simply no issue of fact here: his mother’s actions are a matter of public record, and so are both Indonesian and American law then and since. Thus, always assuming he doesn’t suddenly produce records affirming that he did at some point reclaim his birthright, he most probably has no workable defense on this – except possibly claiming that his mother’s Indonesian marriage was a sham and his return to Hawaii precipitated by concern over his status and safety in Indonesia.

Notice that both defenses: a different father, a fake marriage; force him to present himself as a life long convenience liar on major issues of character and background – making his survival in office Pyhrric in the extreme and leaving him and his allies facing a three year lame duck session.

So how to do it?

Well Sir, you know the process and the players far better than any outsider ever could; but I want to mention something you know but most of the others reading this open letter do not: the final vote will be a straight yea or nay on upholding the Constitution of the United States with all those voting having taken the same oath to do precisely that – this one, I believe, from U.S.C. 3331:

I, (name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

Since the penalties for oath breaking include removal from office and even abstaining won’t protect people from legal or electoral retribution, the entire process should come down to argument about his father’s citizenship and his failure to reclaim his American birthright – and because these arguments are simple enough, and clear enough, to win elections for Republican candidates across the nation in 2010, you are almost guaranteed to succeed; now or in 2011.

And that brings us to a brief final discussion of five extraneous political issues that need to be faced head on:

1. first the media has been portraying the eligibility issue as tin foil hat stuff.
   

   
   In looking at media coverage of the eligibility issue it becomes obvious that many major media players use the same talking points limiting the issue to deriding the so-called “birthers” – people who assume that Mr. Obama’s willingness to spend millions preventing the public release of his birth and educational records proves that these documents cast doubt on his claim to having been born in Hawaii.

   
   However, his ineligibility under the “natural born citizen” requirement depends on his father’s citizenship, not his place of birth – and the move by some of his associates to amend the Constitution to remove this stupidest provision (PDF) suggests their knowledge of his vulnerability on this issue.

   
   Similarly, his ineligibility under his failure to reclaim an American birthright renounced on his behalf by his mother, has nothing to do with his place of birth – and his failure to follow up on his claims to having gained foreign policy expertise by traveling in Pakistan when it was illegal for Americans to do so, suggests that at least one of his handlers saw the vulnerabilities in doing this.

   
   It is possible, therefore, that the withholding of the birth certificate and the media focus on the much decried birthers are components of a plan to permanently side track any deeper scrutiny of the real eligibility issues discussed here by opportune production of an Hawaiian birth certificate.

2. the whole idea of impeaching and removing an elected president is distasteful.
   

   
   It is, but it’s the necessity of the thing, not the thing itself, that is so distasteful – and then only to Republicans: The New York Times, effectively the gravitas organ of the Democratic party, has, for example, repeatedly been pleased to question your own eligibility on much weaker grounds.

3. there’s the threat of riot;
   

   
   I have little doubt that some inner cities will burn if Mr. Obama is frog marched out of the Whitehouse – to me, the million man victory party he announced for Chicago last October was always at least in part a threat to burn down the city if he lost.

   
   History shows, however, that appeasement may slow, but certainly ensures, the process of defeat – and thus that capitulation to this threat now essentially guarantees the end of American democracy in the not too distant future.

   
   The cold bottom line on this is that major riots, accompanied by significant death and injury to both participants and bystanders, amount to nothing compared to the damage the people now controlling the Democratic Party are doing to the economy, to democracy, to American ideals, and to the strength of the Republic.

   
   Mr. McCain, as you know far too well every war has “collateral damage”, every revolution its share of death and destruction – but let me urge you to consider first the greater good, and secondly the fact of the threat as a siren call for honest reform in education, welfare, and justice.

4. on the issue of whether or not Mr. Obama’s claimed electoral victory trumps the Constitution, please consider:
   
   
   
   • that presidential elections are not part of the constitutional change process;
     
   • that his claimed total popular vote amounts to only 32% of the count of eligible voters – nowhere near a majority and hardly an overwhelming mandate;
     
   • that the two professional polls commissioned by John Ziegler suggest that 98% of the people who voted for Mr. Obama did so largely on the basis of media supplied mis-information about the issues and candidates – with Zogby reporting, for example, that only 11.2% of Obama voters were aware of his promise to bankrupt America’s coal industry;
     
   • that almost everything about his victory, from the role played by key media supporters, through fund raising practices, to the role of ACORN, has the smell of corruption, power politics, and manipulation about it;
     
   • and, consider too, please, the numerous losses suffered by good Republicans because of media dishonesty and Democrat manipulation of the courts: Senator Coleman, for example, won the election, but seems slated to lose it in court – and Senator Stevens, of course, was the victim of such gross political misconduct by his prosecutors that even Mr. Holder found it more expedient to dismiss them, and thus the charges against Senator Stevens, than to defend them.
   
   
5. and, finally, there’s the issue of damage to the Republic and the Office of the President if you come to occupy that office as a result of ousting Mr.Obama; can you, in other words, function as President if your actions bring Mr. Obama down?
   

   
   I believe you could, but I also think that pre-committing to resigning in Ms. Palin’s favor immediately after the swearing in ceremony would be the wooden stake to go with the silver bullet, something that by reducing and redirecting the media reaction ensures that your actions produce the greatest gift you could give the Republic: a new commitment to democracy and a fresh start with a popular and powerful new leader.

Mr. McCain your entire life has been one of honor and service to the Republic: you know you have the right, the means, and the duty to act.

]]> http://www.redstate.com/paul_murphy/2009/04/05/an-appeal-to-john-mccain/feed/ 40 http://www.redstate.com/paul_murphy/2009/03/22/president-pelosi/ http://www.redstate.com/paul_murphy/2009/03/22/president-pelosi/#comments Sun, 22 Mar 2009 16:00:54 +0000 Paul_Murphy (Diary) http://www.redstate.com/paul_murphy/?p=26 People do what they know how to do. Obama knows how to campaign – and that’s what he’s doing.

He has no executive experience – and the Whitehouse is accordingly a shambles.

So what are we left with? President Pelosi – with Dodds, Rangel, and Reid as leading cabinet members.

And vice president Rahm – using the situation room for political breifings? – just part of burning down the economy while the whitehouse fiddles with its teleprompter.

It would be brilliant, but obviously so only if he’s vulnerable on eligibility grounds; and that’s just tin hat stuff, right?

Wrong, first there is simply no issue with respect to his inability to meet the “natural born citizen” requirement if you accept that his father was a British citizen from Kenya.

The use of “natural” in this context is an assertion of birth rights over legal rights; of God’s law over Man’s – and if Mr. Obama is, as he claims, the Hawaiian born son of an underage mother and a father holding British citizenship, then his American citizenship is clearly an artifact of law, not natural right – and he’s therefore ineligible for the office of the Presidency.

This is simple, black letter, stuff; apologists to the contrary there’s no issue in law here: no confusion, no scope for argument – but, very much like Mrs. Clinton’s ineligibility to serve as Secretary of State, it’s a technical issue perceived as unfair to a leading Democrat and therefore both off the table in terms of mass media coverage and terrifying to a liberal judiciary hurting from eight years of unrelenting media condemnation over Bush V. Gore.

Notice, however, that he could beat this charge simply by producing a birth certificate showing an American father – not a Kenyan diplomat in training but a far left American idealogue named Davis.

In contrast he has no obvious defense against the charge that he failed to reclaim American citizenship after returning to Hawaii, is therefore technically an illegal alien – and certainly not remotely eligible for the Office of the Presidency.

The reasoning here is simple:

1. we know, from multiple sources including Obama himself, that his mother married a Muslim Indonesian citizen in 1966 and subsequently sent the young Obama to an Indonesian public school.
2. we know, from multiple sources, that neither Indonesian nor religious law either at the time or after the citizenship reforms of the late 1960s would allow either the marriage or the school attendance unless his mother had first renounced her American citizenship and that of any dependent children, including Obama; and,
3. we know that American law would have allowed the young Obama to reclaim his American citizenship after his return to Hawaii.

Since he studied law, especially constitutional law, and because we have no evidence that he ever reclaimed his American citizenship, we are entitled to conclude that he consciously decided not to – that he choose, instead, to honor his mother’s deep contempt for American values by perpetuating a significant electoral fraud on the country.

You don’t perp walk an elected president out of the Whitehouse because he failed to consider that his Kenyan father denied him natural born citizen status, but you do for expressing his contempt for the American constitution, and the American people, by consciously refusing to reclaim his citizenship.

And that, of course, is where the race to depose comes from: getting him quietly off stage promotes Mrs. Clinton, protects the agenda, and keeps people like Franks and Dodds out of jail – but getting him declared ineligible in court not only hands the Whitehouse to McCain/Palin while rolling back every action he’s taken, but also creates natural opportunities and constituencies for further investigation into the culture of corruption at the top of the Democratic party.

He could resign.

It seems ridiculous, counter-intuitive, utterly absurd – but good strategic play often does – so let me explain.

Assume for the moment that Mr. Obama believes his role as President to be vulnerable on eligibility – that he sees, in other words, a real possibility that either a court of sufficient jurisdiction or public opinion could turn against him on this issue. If so, he should see his options in terms of the following major scenarios:

• public opinion turns against him, but no court of sufficient jurisdiction has the courage to order him forced out.

  In this situation, his term becomes the mother of all lame duck sessions, the “blue dog” democrats abandon him, Republicans prevent the implementation of most of his agenda, the democrats lose big in 2010, and he spends the rest of his life hoping to hide in obscurity.

• it goes to a court of sufficient jurisdiction but he’s allowed to resign before the verdict comes down.In this case he still loses any hope of returning to power in America, but Biden takes over as President; Mrs Clinton moves up; and a long running battle begins with Republicans and blue dogs trying to prevent implementation, Biden and Reid doing little either way, and Pelosi fighting Clinton for personal prominence throughout the remainder of their terms in office.
• The appropriate court makes the appropriate ruling and he’s effectively perp walked out of the Whitehouse.In this case he and his backers lose everything – while Republicans win big.

  McCain becomes president; Palin, Gingrich, and Romney take over on energy and the economy; the Dow doubles overnight; the foreign policy reversals get reversed; and there are suddenly enough blue democrats in the House and Senate to bring the Liebermann wing of the party back to power – sending leading democrats including Dodd, Franks, Reid, and Pelosi to jail or retirement.

  On the downside Wilkerson’s vision of inner city riots and looting comes true – but people like me point out first that history always rewards those who confront and resolve over those who appease, and second that the economic surge triggered by the CAFE repeal and Drill Here. Drill now program offers new opportunities for dealing with the underlying problem: educational failure.

• He resigns, claiming a sudden realization that he doesn’t meet the natural born requirement – and says that yes, it’s a mere technicality, but the President of the United States swears to uphold the constitution and so, with regrets, it’s both his duty and his honor to resign.In this case Biden takes over; Mrs. Clinton moves up; Obama’s powerbase is strengthened by huge worldwide media accolades; blue dogs become redder; opposition to the agenda withers; he gains public and party power over Pelosi and Reid, chairs a constitutional conference nominally called to remove the “stupidest” clause from the constitution but which also eliminates the 2nd (right to arms) and 22nd (term limits) amendments; and, nobody would dare raise the eligibility issue again before his triumphant return as President for life in 2012.

In other words, if he feels any vulnerability on eligibility, then resigning over the natural born clause now would be a strategic master stroke – and so the question is: does he feel vulnerable?

He should: he claims that his father was Kenyan holding British citizenship – and while his birth in Hawaii makes him a legal American citizen, his father’s citizenship denies him natural born status.

More subtly, his failure to reclaim American citizenship after his mother’s renunciation of that status in Indonesia makes him an illegal immigrant today.

I’ll have more on this tomorrow, but it’s his inability to meet the natural born criteria that counts here: first because it’s forgivable as in no way his fault; and more importantly because it’s mutable: meaning that he benefits from “noticing” it, resigning, and then getting the constitution changed to accommodate him.

Qui bono? Who benefits? the very rich; far left idealogues; Islamic terrorists; and, dictatorships in countries like Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and communist China.

Inside the United States there’s a tremendous re-distribution of wealth going on: the stimulus bill mortgages the incomes of future taxpayers; the current budget increases both taxes on the employed and the disincentives to investment; and announced Pelosi/Reid plans supported by the President seem designed to increase energy costs, increase indirect taxation, decrease health care quality, stop the educational drift back to teaching, and penalize American business productivity.

Who benefits? Increasing unionization benefits union leadership; reducing educational standards rewards educational bureaucrats and strengthens the political power base for democrats; reducing middle class opportunities increases social stratification for the very rich while strengthening the fund raising base for democrats; reductions in American economic power reduce American strategic power and thus strengthen terrorists and dictators worldwide; increasing energy prices funds terrorism and far left revolutions from Somalia to the Philippines; and, of course, tearing down the middle class expresses some of the hatreds enjoyed by America’s unemployables and some illegals.

This is all bad enough that otherwise sane people are starting to ask the obvious question: did Mr. Obama and the people who put him in place intend the destructive consequences of bringing the weathermen to the Whitehouse?

It’s a good question – but I think this is the wrong time to be asking it. The reality we have to deal with is that we are where we are and the right question isn’t about how we got here, it’s about what we can do to fix things.

Right after the 2008 elections a guy named John Ziegler had a poll done – and he got so much bad press over it that he commissioned another one a bit later.

The first poll asked people who claimed to have voted for Mr. Obama 12 pretty basic questions about the people and positions they were voting for or against. The second asked McCain/Palin voters the same 12 questions plus a 13th.

Mr. Ziegler’s goal in this was to measure the extent to which the media left the public uninformed, or misinformed, on crucial issues during this campaign – but mine is to use his numbers to support a humble proposal: weighting votes according to the voter’s knowledge of the issues.

The execution on this idea would be “simple”:

1. electoral officials draw up a list of 100 simple, multiple choice, questions each with five mutually exclusive, but sensible looking, possible answers from which any knowledgeable elector should be able to pick the right one;
2. each ballot contains five questions randomly chosen from that list;
3. every valid ballot counts for one vote;
4. ballots with three right answers count for three votes;
5. ballots with five right answers count for five votes;

Making this work requires an effective e-voting system but getting electoral fraud under control is an urgent priority anyway.

To see how this might have turned out in 2008, we can use Mr. Ziegler’s percentages:

You’ll notice that no one’s disenfranchised by this – but we get a more sensible result and both major parties, along with their media supporters, get strong incentives to educate rather than mislead the public on the real issues in the campaign.

Notice too that Zogby’s results show that Mr.Obama, a man slightly more than two thirds of the eligible voters choose Not to vote for, actually has the knowledgeable support of only about 1,389,137 people.

Now, about that constitutional conference Mr. Obama wants…

There are three big problems with the Pelosi/Reid stimulus plan Mr. Obama has now signed into law:

1. the Keynesian macro economic ideas underlying the stimulus part of the bill do not fit the problem and will not work;
2. the bill is heavily loaded with unreviewed and undiscussed agenda spending; and,
3. there has been no significant discussion of alternatives on either the agenda or the economic policy issues.

At this point, of course, it would take a miracle to stop implementation of the bill – so that’s what this article is about: proposing an alternative and then discussing two ways of getting it accepted in place of this bill.
The Keynesian macro-economic idea: that an economy in trouble can borrow to spend its way out of recession, has a 100% record of failure. From American experience in the 1930s to Japan’s enormous public works programs in the 1990s, the application of Keynesian “levers of power” in national policy has consistently resulted in reduced employment, greater national debt, and longer term currency devaluation (expressed internally to the economy as inflation).
The reason for that becomes immediately obvious if you think about the stimulus strategy in the context of a large family in which one or two members lose their sources of outside income. In that situation the Keynesian recommendation is that other family members loan these people money in the expectation that they will use it to buy food, lodging, and other services from family members.
In the very short term this can help those who’ve lost their income, it can make the family feel good about taking care of their own, and it can transfer some of the family’s wealth to those providing the food and other support. Unfortunately, however, the longer term effect is to cause the family as a whole to lose wealth because the people providing that food and lodging have to get it by spending some of their money with strangers.
What’s wrong with the application of Keynesian economic theory, in other words, is that the theory assumes something that doesn’t exist in reality: an economy closed off from others by high tariff barriers – and what the dismal failure of every attempt to implement his ideas demonstrates is that even Japan’s barriers aren’t high enough. Some leakage always occurs, and making up for this by simply printing more money just devalues the currency as more and more of it is backed by less and less real wealth.
To really respond to the problem what the family has to do, and what the United States has to do, is to decrease short term spending while increasing earnings -at least until the lost income has been replaced and normal spending can be resumed.
The stimulus part of the Obama package does the opposite, and it can take a very long time for an economy damaged by this kind of thing to recover: eighteen years after Prime Minister Kaifu and his liberal democrats tried the stimulus idea Japan still hasn’t fully recovered; the damage inflicted by the Trudeau liberals in Canada during the Carter years didn’t get worked out until price change drove resource export revenues up over the last few years – and it took roughly seventeen years before the productive capacity built to fight World War II bought the United States out of FDR’s New Deal.

The economic plan

For a public policy response to a recession in an open economy to work, it has to create wealth rather than borrow it – and the recipe for doing that is well known: tax cuts lead to investment, investment creates jobs, the work done in those jobs creates wealth.
From the public’s perspective the cheapest and most effective tax cuts come as regulatory relief because these marginally reduce government spending, cost government nothing in lost taxes, and tend to produce new direct jobs with very high economic multipliers.
Canceling CAFE – the fleet fuel economy standards imposed on Detroit – would, for example, cost the taxpayer nothing while lifting the death sentence handed Detroit by congressional democrats: quickly putting tens of thousands back to work, protecting hundreds of thousands of jobs and pensions, and giving the American consumer back the right to choose which vehicle to buy.

But, doesn’t that endanger the earth?

There’s no doubt that repealing the CAFE rules would free Detroit to act rationally: making the big vehicles Americans want and the left professes to hate for environmental reasons, and any move to stand down the CAFE rules would therefore collide head on with three beliefs so deeply entrenched in the media psyche that questioning them looks politically impossible:

1. that CAFE responds to the economic cost and national security consequences of a reliance on imported oil;
2. that CAFE responds to the threat posed by global warming; and,
3. that CAFE is a forward looking response to the peak oil hypothesis – the idea that the world will run out of oil.

Fortunately, however, all three beliefs are unfounded:

1. America’s need to import energy is the direct result of regulation. Remove the regulatory barriers to American energy production and that production will happen.Implementing Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill now” for everything from oil and gas to nuclear will make Americans more secure while redirecting the flow of consumer cash now going to foreign despots to American workers and investors – and in that process generate hundreds of thousands of American jobs, tens of billions in new American wealth, and enough new energy to shift the balance of world financial and manufacturing power back to the United States.
   The rationale for most of the regulations that would have to be weakened to let this happen is environmental – but:
   1. the alternative to American energy production is foreign energy production – without any of the environmental controls and expectations Americans take for granted. Pollution is a world problem: producing energy in a cash hungry dictatorship like Venezuela is a lot dirtier than producing it in the United States – meaning that the “pro-environment” regulations forcing Americans to import energy have the opposite effect: that of increasing pollution.
   2. the bad press Nuclear power always gets is ultimately traceable to a Soviet disinformation program intended to slow American progress to the hydrogen economy widely predicted in the 1950s – a program instituted after Kennedy’s election and subsequent collapse allowed Stalinist hardliners within the Soviet politburo to re-assert control.The China Syndrome, for example, was a hugely influential propaganda movie staring “Hanoi Jane” -an American who publically praised the Viet Cong for killing Americans and has since exerted considerable influence over CNN editorial direction- but has no basis in fact.
      In reality the safety and environmental record of the American nuclear program has been astonishingly good with no significant accidents in more than fifty years – even the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, although frequently cited by anti-nuclear activists as a community horror story, in itself produced no objectively verifiable harm to anyone.
      The Chernobyl hydrogen explosion did, of course, cause significant harm to tens of thousands of people but isn’t generally cited by environmentalists – presumably because everything about it, from substandard construction based on overscaling a 1943 American research reactor, to the inevitable response failure, illustrates both what’s wrong with the system of government they espouse and what’s right about the American approach to industrial safety.
   3. Al Gore to the contrary, using American hydrocarbon resources will not trigger a climate Armageddon.The fundamental claim: that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels cause superlinear change in atmospheric heat retention, has no scientific foundation.
      Adding CO2 to a flask of air does increase both the heat carrying capacity of the gas in the flask and its thermal opacity, but both effects happen because CO2 is denser than air, not because of any magical greenhouse properties – the phrase itself, by the way, comes from a 1969 technical publication by Dr. A.P. Ingersoll whose full title is: The Runaway Greenhouse: A History of Water on Venus, and refers to water vapor, not CO2 – and the popular misunderstanding that atmospheric CO2 traps thermal radiation was actually disproven by physicist R.W. Wood in 1909.
      Thus it’s not surprising that what is known of the historical record suggests that atmospheric CO2 increases follow, and do not lead periods in which global average temperatures have risen – and, of course, the average temperatures thought to have occurred in Europe and Asia during the medieval warming period not only preceded any significant human CO2 emissions, but completely failed to wipe out the polar bear or otherwise permanently affect the arctic ecology despite exceeding, over a continuous two hundred year period and by significant margins, average temperatures recorded in 1998 – the hottest year since the 1930s.
      Basically the entire gambit of selling human produced CO2 as a significant cause of negative climate change is scientific nonsense – something underlined by the tendency of climates on planets, including Mars and Venus, where there are no American SUVs, to move in near lock step with change on earth.
   4. On its surface the peak oil hypothesis looks reasonable: keep using oil and at some point we’ll run out of it – but this is a bit simple minded. In reality, the oil based infrastructure we have, with refined products like gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel powering most of our transportation system, is indefinitely sustainable.This seems absurd, but it’s high school chemistry: burning oil does not destroy any of its constituents, it just liberates some of the chemical energy stored in its molecular bonds – and because the earth is very nearly a closed system with respect to hydrocarbons, this means that any adequate energy source can be used to recombine those constituents to make as much fuel as we need from nothing more than seawater and atmospheric gases (particularly C02).
      Of course these plants will take years to design, prove, and build – so peak oil believers will tell you that the world doesn’t have time to get them in place – but in reality there’s no terrible urgency to this. In reality, free flowing oil and gas typically represent a few percent of the real reserve in each known field – and as scarcities produce price increases, tapping more of the rest becomes economically viable. Thus a field that’s 90% depleted at $30 oil, is usually less than 10% depleted at $90 oil – meaning that present levels of consumption can easily be sustained for perhaps hundreds of years – and certainly for however long it takes to get recombination technology into production.

   Thus the bottom line on this is simple: we have two groups of interacting regulations: those which, like CAFE, seek to ration energy use; and those which, like the tangle constraining drilling and nuclear, seek to limit energy production – but neither one has any basis in reality and both can therefore be rolled back without threatening the environment.

   But it’s too late – the bill is law

   Democrats would have you believe that the bill is law, a done deal – and there’s nothing you can do about it.
   That’s a lie: there are at least two, complementary, attack strategies:

   1. the first strategy is to fight each agenda item – like the attacks on states rights or the commitment to state controlled medical services rationing – in the traditional ways: using politics, the courts, and the press to slow spending and the imposition of change.This approach will mitigate the damage: slowing adoption of the worst excesses and eventually leading to some new and stable compromise – and of course we can all dream of full repeal after the election of a sensible Congress in 2010.
   2. the second strategy amounts to a Hail Mary pass – now that Obama has signed the bill into law, action on proof of his ineligibility for the office of the Presidency will both void the bill and create an enormous opportunity for reasonable people in Congress to put together a deregulatory alternative.

   Pursuing the first strategy is natural – difficult, but natural: and some people, particularly partisan Republicans and states rights advocates, will undoubtedly be doing this. However, theirs will be an uphill battle against a committed national media, a liberal judiciary, and significant democrat majorities in both houses of Congress.
   The Hail Mary pass should be absurd – but isn’t. There’s little doubt that the Obama campaign committed various financial frauds on its way to victory – the only real issues there are that the review and prosecution processes take a very long time and are likely, because Obama won, to focus almost exclusively on the junior players involved.
   The personal eligibility issue is more interesting; because you’d think this should be tin foil hat stuff – but then you find that there isn’t any actual doubt about his technical ineligibility.
   The constitution requires that the president be a “natural born citizen” – and while democrats would have you believe there’s some ambiguity about this, there isn’t. Think about the term “natural justice” – the idea that some concepts of right and wrong supersede the law – and you’ll understand the general usage of “natural” in this context to indicate the precedence of God’s law over Man’s.
   Thus what the term “natural born citizen” means today, and has meant for three centuries, is someone whose citizenship is established by right of birth, not right of law – and Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution therefore specifically bars anyone whose citizenship is established only by law, and thus not by nature, from the Office of the Presidency.

   There’s no issue here: you cannot have both a British citizen as your father and natural born status in the United States.  Obama, by his own testimony, indisputably holds his American citizenship by right of law, not right of birth; and is therefore specifically excluded by both wording and intent from the Office of the Presidency.
   Given the fact that the senate choose to investigate John McCain’s citizenship status on far flimsier grounds, this means that the English citizenship Obama inherited at birth would surely have disqualified him from the beginning had he run as a Republican – but media inequities are what they are, and Obama’s obvious ineligibility for the office is being treated exactly like Mrs Clinton’s ineligibility to serve as Secretary of State: perfectly clear in law, but widely ignored because it’s seen as a unfair to a leading democrat in its application.
   Most of the challenges, however, don’t take this as their primary basis. Most of the challenges invoke, instead, one of three alternate theories to declare him ineligible:

   1. that he was born in Kenya, then returned to Hawaii by his mother and is ineligible by both birth and citizenship;This claim has no obvious factual support – other than eyewitness claims by interested parties including his Kenyan grandmother and the absence of birth documentation in Hawaiian hospital records – but cannot be disproven by the evidence at hand either:
      1. No one in the Hawaii government has said he was born there: what they’ve said is that they have the records.
      2. The certificate of live birth provided by the Obama campaign appears to be a crude forgery. Comparable certificates for other mixed race children born in Hawaii during that period have the words “Negro” or “Negroid” for the father’s race – not the apologetic modern “African” shown on Obama’s.
      3. The source for the newspaper announcements pointed to by those arguing for Obama’s Hawaiian birth is not known. If his grandmother placed them, she could have done so whether he was born in in her front parlor or in Kenya and on his way to her.
   2. that he knows his real father was a far left activist named Davis and is ineligible because he’s running under an alias;The “Davis” hypothesis raises some interesting issues, but on net would actually strengthen his claim to eligibility since Davis was an American – and would also provide cover for his refusal to provide documentation.
      What’s most intriguing about it, however, is that it’s also the only explanation anyone has offered for the extraordinary support that got him into, and kept him in, very expensive (and very left wing) private schools in Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
   3. or, that his adoption in Indonesia and subsequent travel in Pakistan demonstrate that he was not, and did not consider himself to be, an American citizen at the time and is ineligible because he gave up, or his mother gave up on his behalf, his American citizenship.
      1. The Pakistan travel argument is simple: He claims to have traveled in Pakistan when it was illegal for Americans to do so. Therefore he didn’t travel on an American passport -and if he traveled in Pakistan as a foreign national then he’s ineligible either because he’s not American or because he traveled under a false passport without appropriate official sanction.Unfortunately, we only have his word for the travel: this was something he cited to give himself foreign experience during the campaign – something that can be easily dismissed as just one more lie on the trail to electoral success.
      2. His defenders claim that the Indonesian citizenship issue is obfuscated by a tangle of applicable law in both countries – basically, mid sixties Indonesian law on citizenship was in a state of flux (leading to serious bloodshed a few years later) – and American law has changed a few times too. This is true, but not relevant – what is relevant is that under Indonesian law, then and now, his mother could not have married into an Indonesian Muslim family without formally renouncing both her own American citizenship and that of any dependent children – including Obama.Since she did marry, did accept Islam, and did send Obama to a Muslim school, she had to have signed the renunciations – making Obama either British (Indonesian law at the time passed citizenship through the father) or Indonesian (Indonesian law after the citizenship reforms of the late sixties).
         Under American law, which allows dependent children whose parents renounce their citizenship to formally reclaim their American birthright on or after their return to America, Obama could have reversed this on or after his return to Hawaii – but no one has produced any evidence that he did.
         As a result his legal citizenship today is either Indonesian or British – and on this it doesn’t matter whether he born in Hawaii or Kenya, or whether his father was Obama or Davis – his failure to reclaim his citizenship on his return to the United States makes him ineligible for the Office he holds.

   The bottom line on these allegations is that the British citizenship inherited from his claimed father is certainly correct but a technicality which many feel would be unfair to hold against the son. The Davis as father hypothesis is interesting but embarrassing rather than determinative, and the travel in Pakistan business easily side-stepped by claiming the lesser lie.
   The failure to reclaim American citizenship is, in contrast, both indisputable on the record as we have it and easily seen as a continuation of his mother’s deep contempt for, and rejection of, American values -and not by a dependent child: by the young man who has since “brought a good speech” to his current role as President of the United States.
   It’s this continuation of his mother’s contempt for American values that makes the citizenship issue easily exploitable politically – and the vulnerability this creates probably explains his willingness to spend millions of other people’s dollars to prevent public release of the applicable records: most recently hiring the high profile law firm of Strumwasser & Woocher to intervene against a subpoena directing California’s Occidental College to produce his enrollment records by threatening those questioning his status with personal financial ruin.
   There are two important and disturbing notes to this:

   1. first, the whole birth certificate issue appears to be a sacrificial red herring – possibly even designed and prompted by the Obama campaign itself to ensure that if public scrutiny of his actual immigration status ever develops real momentum, it can be permanently derailed by production of the real certificate – even though his place of birth has absolutely nothing to do with either his inability to meet the technical standard as natural born, or his failure to reclaim his American citizenship after his mother renounced it on his behalf.
   2. second, Obama’s continued success in surpressing discussion of the eligibility question by disparaging those who raise it as “truthers” undoubtedly resonates with those who still see the 2000 Bush V. Gore decision as wrong, but is ultimately leveraged on the threat of riot if he is removed on constitutional grounds.Accepting this is an act of cowardice: here, as elsewhere, silence is acquiescence and the mass media’s failure to raise the issue a dishonourable act of appeasement with nothing less at stake than the foundations of American freedoms in constitutional law.

   There is no doubt that Obama’s forcible removal from office is a distasteful prospect, but there is equally no reasonable basis for doubt about his ineligibility for that office – and therefore that all of the orders and bills he has signed, or will sign while in office – including his appointments, overtures to Iran, abandonment of Israel, and the stimulus bill – are null and void in law.
   Getting the job done will be hard – but it’s a job that has to be done: the stakes are simply too high not to fight. Obama and the democrats have just handed America a ten to fifteen year economic setback, a trillion dollars in new public debt, and a sweeping social agenda guaranteed to seriously weaken America in the face of the world’s problems – all of which will naturally get worse: from a nuclear Iran and the collapse of Pakistan to the Communist takeover of Taiwan, the price for America’s failure will be paid in American freedoms, world progress, and generations of blood.

Side with Hamas against Israel? Done. Release Al Quaida prisoners? In progress. Abandon American commitments to freedom worldwide – and particularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Taiwan? In progress.

Create internment camps inside the United States? In progress. Stack the courts to reduce legislative precedence in social regulation? In progress. Reduce military budgets? In progress. Reverse the educational trend toward teaching basic skills? In progress. Stage show trials for Bushies? in progress. Reduce impediments to illegal immigration and welfare? In progress. Increase the power of unions, and thereby decrease economic productivity? In progress. Reduce internal dissent by silencing right wing radio and the blogosphere? In progress.

And how about destroying the free market system? That’s been a longer term project, but it’s in progress too.

The housing collapse, subsequent credit crunch, and consequent loss of solvency by major banks all have direct roots in democrat congressional action and misguided government intervention in the markets. The timing of the collapse contributed to bringing Obama, Pelosi, and Reid to near absolute power – and their proposed response, an enormous spending binge, is about to make matters a lot worse.

The reason the stimulus will make matters worse is simple and easily understood: you don’t spend your way out of a financial crisis, you earn your way out. Consider the family analogy: if your primary income disappears, can you fix the problem by borrowing? No. You can use minimal borrowing to get yourself to the point where new income comes in, but you can only fix your financial problem by going out and earning more money.

For the U.S. economy to recover the U.S. has to produce, not borrow, wealth. The recipe for doing that is well known: tax cuts lead to investment, investment creates jobs, the work done in those jobs creates wealth.

In thinking about this we need to be very clear about one thing: regulations impose costs and are therefore economically like taxes – and, conversely, the removal of onerous regulations is economically indistinguishable from a tax reduction.

So what regulations could most usefully be reduced? The linchpin on that list is CAFE – the fleet fuel economy constraints imposed by congress.

After fifty years of marketing Americans have been conditioned to believe that Detroit makes big, inefficient, vehicles; Asia makes small efficient vehicles; and, Europe makes either cheap junk or high cost and high prestige stuff. There is very little truth to any of this, but it has a significant real consequence: a small car made by Ford won’t sell against one labeled “Toyota” – even if the latter is actually made by GM in California.

That reality combines with another historical artifact: the structure of management obligations to labor in plants run directly by the “big three”. That structure means the companies’ make money selling the vehicles Americans want: big, heavy, fast vehicles providing safety and convenience on today’s freeways – but lose money on the vehicles mandated by CAFE that few customers actually want: small and light collapsibles without the power to compete on today’s streets and highways.

Thus removing the CAFE standards would remove the death sentence handed Detroit by congressional democrats – putting hundreds of thousands back to work, protecting millions of jobs, and costing the taxpayer nothing while giving back the American consumer’s right to free choice.

But what about other costs? After all CAFE was sold to and by democrats as a joint response to the short term cost of importing energy, the need to reduce CO2 emission in response to global warming, and the need to adapt our energy use pattern in response to the peak oil hypothesis.

America’s need to import energy is the direct result of regulation: remove the regulatory barriers to American energy production and that production will happen. Implementing Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill now” for everything from oil and gas to nuclear will generate billions in new American wealth along with hundreds of thousands of American jobs and enough energy to shift the balance of world financial power back to the United States.

Al Gore to the contrary, using these resources will not trigger a climate Armageddon: what is known of the historical record shows that CO2 accumulations follow, and do not lead periods in which global average temperatures have apparently risen; the average temperatures known to have occurred in Europe and Asia during the medieval warming period not only seriously exceeded those recorded in the same areas in 1998 (the hottest recent year) but completely failed to wipe out the polar bear or otherwise significantly affect the arctic ecology; and, the lock step atmospheric expansion seen on Earth, Mars, Venus, and Pluto in the twenty five years prior to about 2000 have now reversed to an equally lock step contraction – a reality that writes an absolute finis to the human causation argument.

The peak oil hypothesis makes the apparently reasonable argument that the earth’s oil and gas resources are finite and therefore that using them will eventually lead to scarcity – but this is wrong. In reality burning oil does not destroy its constituents, it merely liberates some of the chemical energy stored in its molecular bonds. As a result the long run answer is that nuclear energy can be used to make arbitrary amounts of oil from water and atmospheric gasses – and the short term answer is that free flowing oil and gas typically represent a few percent of the real reserve in each known field – and as scarcities produce price increases tapping the rest becomes increasingly economically viable.

Thus reversing CAFE and implementing the Drill Here, Drill now program would, together, stop the slide into depression – and leave only market uncertainty as the remaining economic threat.

That can only be dealt with through political action: through the stimulation of shared belief in a positive future: one in which the rules are known, government doesn’t play favorites, and business decisions are made by business people, not politicians, bureaucrats, or judges.

Thus for the battle of Obama to become the GOP’s finest hour – a battle generations of Americans will celebrate – two things are needed:

1. an absolute commitment to impeaching this president right after the 2010 elections put enough honest people into both houses of congress to do it; and,
2. an equally absolute commitment to oppose democrat missrule in all its forms, starting by forcing the repeal of the CAFE legislation and the implementation of the full Drill here, Drill now program instead of incurring a trillion dollar deficit, and ending only with the defeat and possible prosecution of corruption from Franks to Obama, and from Pelosi to Reid.

So how?

Attack Obama in every possible way, and on every possible ground: explore every vulnerability from citizenship and eligibility to terrorist connections – throw gasoline on every misstep, expose the corruption of his allies and the moral bankruptcy allowing him to agree with both sides on everything while actually pursuing a far left agenda.

And do the same in congress: get people working now to target every democrat running in 2010: make gutting Obama and punishing those responsible for the current economic mess a centerpiece of every campaign – be clear with everyone: his agenda cannot stand scrutiny, so you will scrutinize. Make it absolutely clear that the GOP will move to impeach just as soon as it’s legally and electorally possible to do so. Make every congressional election, every senate election, about Obama: not about policies, not about local players and personalities: about Obama – about all the mistakes he’ll make, about the economic disaster his friends have created, about the foreign policy setbacks and diminutions of freedom democrat reign is bringing about.

When you win, and you will, then you’ll face the next great challenge: helping rebuild the democratic party as an opposition to be proud of.

1. Deny Obama the halo of election.
   

   
   Attack, attack, attack: on electoral fraud, on financial fraud, on cronies, on abortion, on contacts with Hamas, on media bias, on eligibility, anything and everything.
   

   
   Do what McCain wouldn’t: get down and dirty and make it clear that he will be impeached and removed from office the day after Republicans elected to the House and Senate in 2010 are sworn in.
   

   
   

2. Focus on 2010.
   

   
   Commit every party resource, every effort, to sweeping the House, the Senate races, and the governor’s mansions in 2010.
   

   
   In particular, fight every action taken in congress to limit human and economic freedom: make repeal in 2011 the automatic corollary to anything that gets past the defenders in both the house and senate.
   

   
   

3. Use the Office of the Presidency to protect the United States from Obama’s extremism.
   

   
   Mr. Bush has to act and can act – against tradition, but for the United States: on defense, on the economy, on appointments, and on electoral reform. In each case he can both do the right thing, and create situations in which the idealogues in the House and Senate will be forced to antagonize their “blue dog” colleagues while publically choosing to support Obama over their country and their constituents.
   

   
   Some examples:
   

   
   

   • Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Obama’s campaign finances. There’s no reasonable doubt that he received illegal contributions and did not reject them, there is no reasonable question about whether this was against the law. He should not get away with it simply because he appears to have won election.
     

     
     

   • Appoint a special prosecutor to look into vote fraud – from ACORN through to counting process issues in the various states. A federal investigation co-ordinated with the various states attorney’s general is needed to ensure the integrity of the voting result.
     

     
     

   • Appoint a special prosecutor to pursue charges, particularly with respect to executives and legislators acting on payoffs, against those involved in the Fannie/Freddie frauds.
     

     
     

   • On energy, the President can cite a national economic emergency to directly issue permits for drilling, recovery operations, and both nuclear and coal plant construction.
     

     
     

   • On the economy, the President can suspend the CAFE standards, suspend Sarbanes-Oxley (at a minimum suspend FASB 157), and direct that the mortgage bailout funds be spent entirely, or as nearly so as may now be possible, to support a new federal mortgage authority whose job it is to bet on Americans: through a leveraged buy up of home mortgage risk.
     

     
     A simple announcement now: “we will do this, hold foreclosures” and the credit crunch goes away – without another penny for bailouts to institutions and with a good chance that virtually all of the money can be recovered over time.
     

     
     

   • On defense, the President can order a number of purchases and deployments. For example, he could order that the tankers be purchased from Boeing, that SDI be allocated more funds, and that all forces personnel now stationed in Germany be brought home as quickly as possible.
     

     
     

   • On foreign affairs the President can order full recognition, including support for its membership in the United Nations, of Taiwan.
     

     
     

   • On show trials for Republicans, the President can issue a general pardon – allowing for prosecution only when clear criminal code violations have been proven to exist before this President’s term expires.

Each one of these actions will enrage the press, enrage opposed interest groups, and draw the harshest possible condemnations from congressional democrats. But so what? Once they’re done, they’re done – and in both the House and the Senate there are enough sane democrats to make them almost impossible for Obama, Reid, and Pelosi to reverse.

And what of 2010 and beyond? Beyond 2010 we have the big issues – the ones Republicans like to fight about: God, Country, personal freedom, and community – but lets take care of the little things first: things like restoring the economy, restoring electoral fairness, and reversing whatever damage he’s done in international affairs and defense.