TINY CROWD PRAYS SUPREME COURT WILL INVALIDATE PRES.-ELECT OBAMA'S ELECTION

A small but virulent group of rightwing fanatics is hoping the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Donofrio v. Wells, which argues that Obama's placement on the New Jersey presidential election ballot was invalid because he is not a natural born citizen. The justices are expected to dismiss the case.

Undaunted, this tiny, noisy group of deluded nutcases showed up on the steps of the Supreme Court on Friday to pray that the justices will nullify the election, where 67 million Americans voted to have Barack Obama as their next president.

Certain elements on the right have been at this underhanded villany since they tried to get Bill Clinton thrown out of office and nullify that election as well. And then there's the group of agitators in December 2000 who showed up in Florida and bullied and screamed all during the recount. Rush Limbaugh had suggested that Obama's trip to Hawaii to see his ailing grandmother, who died not long after, was somehow connected to the controversy. Others, like Michael Savage, followed Limbaugh's lead, saying Obama was going to Hawaii to alter the record.

It appears that these people, when they lose an election, need to invalidate it at any cost and by any means. When we see this sort of behavior in third world countries, we are aghast and are thankful for the legal and orderly way we conduct our elections. How have these poor, misguided, misinformed losers become the face of the Republican party?

(And what's up with this "praying" that the Supreme Court will hear the case and invalidate Obama's election? Do these people actually believe GOD will step into American politics and somehow influence the SCOTUS to throw out the election results of Nov. 4? Whew! That is serious crazy.)

The essence of the case being appealed to the Supreme Court, Donofrio v. Wells, is that Obama does not meet the Constitution's requirement that the president be a natural-born citizen because his Kenyan father was a British Citizen when Obama was born in 1961. Plaintiffs argue that Obama would have had dual US and British citizen when he was born, making him ineligible.Roger Bredow, who traveled to Washington from Bethlehem, GA, helped organize the small protest. He said the case rests on an interpretation of Article II of the Constitution and immigration laws written in 1790 and 1795.

He did acknowledge that citizenship laws had been substantially amended in the last two centuries. But, "The reason that you look at those is to determine the intent of the Founding Fathers," he said.To be clear, the questions of Obama's birth have been roundly and convincingly debunked.

More on this from Slate:

The faux controversy isn't going to go away soon. Yes, Obama was born in Hawaii, and yes, he is eligible to be president. But according to several experts in conspiracy theories, and in the psychology of people who believe in conspiracy theories, there's little chance those people who think Obama is barred from the presidency will ever be convinced otherwise. "There's no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody's mind," says Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, and who holds an undergraduate and a master's degree in psychology. "The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it ... Once you're committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind."

Any inconvenient facts are irrelevant. People who believe in a conspiracy theory "develop a selective perception, their mind refuses to accept contrary evidence," Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates who studies such theories, says. "As soon as you criticize a conspiracy theory, you become part of the conspiracy."

Evan Harrington, a social psychologist who is an associate professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, agrees. "One of the tendencies of the conspiracy notion, the whole appeal, is that a lot of the information the believer has is secret or special," Harrington says. "The real evidence is out there, [and] you can give them all this evidence, but they'll have convenient ways to discredit [it]."

Whatever can't be ignored can be twisted to fit into the narrative; every new disclosure of something that should, by rights, end the controversy only opens up new questions, identifies new plotters. Perhaps the most common argument of those questioning Obama's eligibility is that he should just release his full, original birth certificate, rather than the shorter certification, which is a copy. His failure to do so only proves there is reason to be suspicious, they say, and if the document was released, the issue would go away. But that's unlikely. It was, after all, the Obama campaign's release of the certification this summer that stoked the fever of conspiracy mongers.

For believers, it works like this: So what if Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the director of Hawaii's Department of Health, released a statement saying she has verified that the state has the original birth certificate on record? So what if she said separately that the certification looks identical to one she was issued for her own Hawaii birth certificate? Why didn't her statement specify Obama's birthplace? So what if a Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman later clarified that Fukino meant that Obama was born in Hawaii? So what if researchers for FactCheck.org actually saw the physical copy of the certification and debunked much of the key "evidence" supposedly proving that the image posted online is a forgery? They're not really independent. They're funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Obama once (with Bill Ayers, no less) ran an entirely unrelated program that happened to be paid for with money donated by Walter Annenberg. And on and on and on.


If the long-form birth certificate were released, with its unequivocal identification of Hawaii as Obama's place of birth, the cycle would almost certainly continue. Rush Limbaugh already suggested that Obama's trip to Hawaii to see his ailing grandmother, who died not long after, was somehow connected to the controversy. Others, like Michael Savage, followed Limbaugh's lead, saying Obama was going to Hawaii to alter the record.

Not surprisingly, almost all of the people who've been most prominent in pushing this story have a history of conspiracist thought. There's Jerome Corsi, who's best known as the co-author of the book that launched the Swift boat vets; he's a chief proponent of the claim that the government is secretly planning to form a "North American Union" with Canada and Mexico.

Philip Berg, who filed the lawsuit that had until now drawn the most public attention, is a 9/11 Truther.

Andy Martin, who's credited with starting the myth that Obama is a Muslim and has been intimately involved in the birth certificate mess as well, was denied admission to the Illinois bar because of a psychiatric evaluation that showed he had "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character." He also has a long history of anti-Semitism.

Robert Schulz, who's responsible for the ads in the Tribune, is a fairly notorious tax protester. In 2007, a federal judge ordered Schulz to shutter his Web site because he and his organization were, in the words of the Justice Department's Tax Division, using the site to promote "a nationwide tax-fraud scheme."