I’m not normally one to argue that there should be requirements on who can run for office. Shoot, I’d like to see the House of Representatives run like jury duty. You vote, you have a chance of being picked to serve.
But it’s things like discovering that four of our state representatives have so little a grasp on how our system works that makes me think that maybe you ought to have to be able to demonstrate a working knowledge of how things work before you can run for office.
I mean, shoot, on the one hand, I don’t care if you want to file eight million lawsuits against the President (though, when you do, don’t expect me to have a whole lot of sympathy when you come back later and piss and moan about frivilous lawsuits). I don’t believe anyone is angry at you, so much as laughing at you and trying to prevent you from making bigger fools of yourselves.
On the other hand, I do expect that you, as an elected official, in charge of making laws, understand what GoldnI points out here.
If you file a lawsuit against someone else, that makes you the plaintiff. That means you have to prove something to the court. You cannot simply walk into the courtroom and say, “Hey judge, we have a suspicion that Obama’s birth certificate may not be real, make him show it to us!” You have to show actual evidence that it may have been falsified, and at that point the judge can decide whether or not to compel Obama to show the birth certificate.
And it is scary to me that these state legislators don’t get that. Jeff, if you do requests, I’m begging you, could you ask them what evidence they have that the birth certificate has been falsified? Because it’s sounding like, from what you report that Glen Casada says, they don’t think it has been. So, maybe a follow-up question should be whether they know what their roles as plaintiffs are and, if they don’t, whether their constituents should be worried about their abilities to understand, make, and pass basic laws.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Obama’s stealing the census from Congress has suddenly awakened and enraged the Republicans. Maybe this will arouse them as well to challenge Obama for stealing the Presidency itself. They surely know he is not an Article 2 “natural born citizen” (which is more than merely being a 14th Amendment “citizen”) by virtue of either Obama’s birth to a dad of Kenyan/British citizenship or birth in Kenya itself — as manifested by his unwillingness to supply his long form birth certificate now under seal.
Ted, when did y’all invent the idea that a child born in the US is not a natural born citizen here? Did you not study the Constitution in your Civics classes?
Nm, when have any of them worried about what that pesky ol’ Constitution says, until now? And the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are just elitist constructs holding the people down.
Yeah, you know that none of the people who wrote the Constitution were U.S. citizens when they were born, so who trusts their opinion on anything?
There are times when I want to apologize to the World for all the bad things we’ve done as an empire, but then I read a comment like Ted’s and I think, World, it’s your own fucking fault for letting a country populated by such aggressively stupid and petty people dominate you. Shame on you, World.
Sam, comments like that make me want to have your imaginary internet babies. Which I will name after notorious prostitute/woman’s libber/brokerage house owner Tennessee Celeste Claflin. I think Tennessee Holloway has a nice ring to it.
Of course, being a notorious woman’s libber, my imaginary babies will be free to choose their own last names. I’m merely throwing that out there to crush your hopes later.
Aunt B., you should have no problem having imaginary Internet babies, your vagina is apparently that powerful and mysterious.
:)
I just want to point out that the question of whether being born here confers citizenship is moot in Obama’s case, since his mother was a citizen and he became a citizen at birth for that reason no matter where he was born, it wasn’t moot for, say, my parents. So I get kind of pissed when people are wrong about it.
No hope-crushing there, B. My wife practically insisted that our first-born have my surname. I told her that if we have another– boy or girl– the little tot should have hers. Of course, that would involve having another child, so we’ll file that under distant hypothetical.
In other words, B., as long as I have joint ideological custody, I’m down with you naming the imaginary little rugrats anything you wish.
But, NM, “can’t you see that that man is a ni–?!”
The rules are different for his kind.
Ya know what? While my first reaction is to agree with you wholeheartedly, my second reaction is to note that, for certain people, every Democratic president (all two of ’em) since Reagan established the Imaginary Imperial Permanent Republican Ascendancy has been illegitimate, and that race has nothing to do with it except as another stick to beat their drums with.
Racism is at the core of the GOP. It is how they built their contemporary base. Just about every opposition to Democratic policy can somehow be tied to racism, and that is obviously no accident.
I honestly believe that certain members of the GOP regard the Obama presidency as a godsend; they can now dispense with spurious and oblique references to Democratic nigger-lovin’ now that there’s an actual darkie in the Oval Office. That’s why the racist anti-Obama rhetoric hasn’t been as virulent as one might expect because it doesn’t have to be. The GOP can simply sit back and wait for the Democrats’ tepid and pro-corporate ‘reforms’ to fail miserably, then they can go apeshit pointing out how the liberal hippies and nigger-lovers finally destroyed the country.
Never underestimate the power, stamina, and reach of racism. It is our nation’s most prominent and afflictive birth defect.
Does having imaginary internet babies require an imaginary internet vagina and imaginary internet uterus? If so, we must regulate them!