French president taken to hospital for tests after falling ill during exercise.
As the stock market rallies, says Robert Reich, watch your wallets.
Sarah Palin exits, stage far-right. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Sunday Roundup.
As of today, Sarah Palin is now the former Governor of Alaska. We take a look back at scenes from her illustrious career.
For all the obvious reasons, I hesitate to even enter this discussion. But (famous last words) I can’t help myself.
As you know, high on the list of current right-wing conspiracy theorizing (and sort of a stalking horse for underlying beliefs that President Obama’s race and name make him rather less than fully American) is the claim that President Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii but was rather born abroad. And because of this, we’re led to believe, he’s ineligible to serve as president and therefore actually is not, as we speak, president.
Now, I don’t want to get into all the claptrap about the birth certificate. Because the whole story is just unadulterated, raw nonsense. What I do want to figure out, however, is a question that’s been rattling around my head for something like a year now. I have never seen any serious argument that the child of an American citizen, even if born abroad, isn’t him or herself a natural born American citizen. Yes, it’s now and again been raised as a topic with a wrinkle of ambiguity in the law; but the issue has never been that people actually believe such children aren’t ‘natural born’, only that it’s a phrase that was never expressly defined and there’s never been an opportunity to have a court review it since there’s never been a case with the relevant set of facts.
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Says he misspoke when he said the F-22 was necessary to fight America’s coming war with India.
From the Politico on the birthers …
But as if to illustrate the touchiness of the subject, Hoekstra quickly added: “Not that this isn’t important.”
Sen. Jim Inhofe has also tried to find the elusive middle ground.
“They have a point,” he said of the birthers. “I don’t discourage it. … But I’m going to pursue defeating [Obama] on things that I think are very destructive to America.”
You know things are getting good when Inhofe’s at the ‘elusive middle ground’.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says that when she brings a health care reform bill to the floor of the House, “it will win.” But Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) says “it is not possible, and perhaps not desirable” to pass health care reform with Democratic votes alone. If nothing else was clear from the Sunday shows, one thing that was is that there is still a long way to go to reach health care reform …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
Former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) tells the media to honor our troops — by not saying bad things about her. That and other political news in today’s TPMDC Morning Roundup.
As you can imagine, we’re getting lots of emails on the ‘birther’ question this morning. But I thought I would add one point to the issue of what ‘natural born’ means. Most of the people discussing this are lawyers. And overwhelmingly they seem to come down against the predominantly racist ‘birther’ contingent. But lawyers aren’t the only ones who have some professional claim to the question. As a trained historian whose expertise is in this period of our history (yes, I was trained for something beside being a blogger), the debate strikes me as nonsense. I have seen no evidence that John Jay’s phrasing ‘natural born’ is anything but his way of distinguishing citizens by birth from citizens by naturalization, which fits the logic of the constitutional provision. So the analytical question of the ‘meaning’ of the phrase is a bunch of over-determined nonsense. It doesn’t ‘mean’ anything but that. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, please let me know.