Day: March 8, 2012

This is a follow-up to my article on Arpaio’s quest to de-legitimize President Obama.  In response to that article published today, one of my commenters said that I “make a lot of noise,” but “haven’t answered or disputed the facts that have been found.” The commenter went on to say that the “official long form posted on the White House website is said to be a forgery.”  That along “with the other evidence,” I “ignore it all and are just shouting louder instead of answering the question” where is a legal document that will pass scrutiny? The commenter said that my “article is very hollow.”

While each of us is entitled to our views and opinions, concerning the authenticity of President Obama‘s birth certificate, either some are naïve, misinformed or have bought into that ridiculous and debunked theory that President Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery.  Here are the facts for their benefit although the facts probably won’t matter:

On October 31, 2008, the director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, confirmed that Obama was born in Honolulu.  The Associated Press quoted Dr. Fukino as saying that both she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama’s original birth certificate.  According to the Honolulu Advertiser, Dr. Fukino was also quoted as saying that the agency had been bombarded by requests and the registrar of statistics had even been called at her home in the middle of the night.  Fukino also said that she has “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Senator Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures.”

The White House released the long-form version of President Obama’s birth certificate confirming (yet again) that he was born in the United States.  The Hawaii Department of Health made an exception in Obama’s case and issued copies of the “Certificate of Live Birth.”  But speculation on his citizenship continued. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate on his Web page.

As part of its research, Fact Check representatives got a chance to spend some time with Obama’s birth certificate, they attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. They have assured readers that the certificate bears a raised seal and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). According to Fact Check, the certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version and you can see the seal above.  They went on to say that the document is a “certification of birth,” also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents’ hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of the long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. Fact Check tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.  In case you were not aware, Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, a Republican organization.  Walter Annenberg’s served in Richard Nixon’s cabinet as Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the Annenberg’s are personal friends of the Reagans.

Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama’s birth certificate are very imaginative. One conservative blogger has suggested that the Obama campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama’s information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn’t have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible “scenario” without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible. It should also be noted that none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect.

PolitiFact.com also dug into some of the loopy theories and said, “It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.”  The conspiracy would need to be even deeper than realized. In fact in July 2008, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, August 13, 1961.  Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents “may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday.” The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

On May 13, 2010, Hawaiian Governor Linda Lingle signed a law allowing state agencies to ignore requests for information if they determine the requests duplicate or are substantially similar to earlier ones. The law targets the birthers who contend Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. Hawaii officials tell requesters the same thing over and over: State law prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who doesn’t have a tangible interest in the matter. Obama requested and obtained a copy of his own birth certificate and released it publicly in 2008. That document is legal proof of citizenship, and it’s the only type of birth record the state issues. Nevertheless, some wanted more.  So under the direction of Governor Lingle, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the Hawaiian State Health Director, issued a statement on July 27, 2009, that she has seen the original vital records verifying that Obama was born in Hawaii and “is a natural-born American citizen.”  Governor Lingle is a Republican who stumped for John McCain in 2008, and she is a Republican senatorial candidate from Hawaii.

The Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a $20,000 sanction against Queen Birther, Orly Taitz, the most visible of those pressing the Obama-as-foreigner theory.  As the court wrote, a lower court judge imposed the fine to punish Taitz’ “misconduct” in filing “frivolous” legal claims on behalf of an Army officer who didn’t want to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that Obama’s presidency was illegitimate.  On October 13, 2009, Judge Clay D. Land wrote:  “While the Court derives no pleasure from its imposition of sanctions upon counsel Orly Taitz, it likewise has no reservations about the necessity of doing so. A clearer case could not exist; a weaker message would not suffice.”  Judge Land was named to the bench by former President George W. Bush.

Hawaiian officials continue to say that the certification is, in fact, only one piece of abundant evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii. Joshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii Attorney General’s Office, noted that a public index of vital records, available for inspection in a bound volume at the Health Department’s Office of Health Status Monitoring, lists a male child named “Obama II, Barack Hussein” as having been born in the state. In addition, as Factcheck.org and other media organizations have repeatedly pointed out, both of Honolulu’s newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, and the Honolulu Star Bulletin, on Aug. 14, 1961, both ran birth announcements listing Obama’s birth on August 4, 1961.

Even Fukino accepts that her comments are not likely to end the matter for the die-hard birthers. Arpaio, Trump and other skeptics have questioned why the original birth certificate has not been released. But Wisch, the spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of “vital records,” including an original “record of live birth” — even to the individual whose birth it records.

“It’s a Department of Health record and it can’t be released to anybody,” he said. Nor do state laws have any provision that authorizes such records to be photocopied, Wisch said. If Obama wanted to personally visit the state health department, he would be permitted to inspect his birth record, Wisch said. But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated “certification of live birth” form that everybody else gets — which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.

The people who are saying that the President’s long form posted on the White House website is a forgery are the very people guilty of carrying on this bizarre theory.  No matter what Donald Trump, Joe Arpaio or other birthers say, President Obama was born in the United States.  Obviously, the right-wing radicals and birthers choose not to believe the Republican Governor of Hawaii that Obama’s birth certificate is authentic and will continue this charade of nonsensical idiosity.

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Conservative Republican Joseph M. “Joe” Arpaio was first voted into office in 1992 in Maricopa County, Arizona.  Arpaio styles himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” and is well known for his outspoken stance against illegal immigration.  The problem, however, is that Arpaio has been accused of everything from racial profiling to abuse of power.  To avert some of his negative attention, Arpaio has revisited the discredited “birther” conspiracy.  Let’s first discuss a few of his legal problems.

In June 2008, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department began investigating Arpaio along with accusations of discrimination and unconstitutional searches and seizures. This investigation was conducted under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlaws discrimination related to programs that receive federal funds.  In 2009, Arpaio announced at a press conference that he would not cooperate with the Federal investigation and in September 2010, the Justice Department filed suit against Arpaio to compel his cooperation.  The suit was settled in June, 2011, after Arpaio agreed to allow federal investigators to interview his employees and access thousands of documents.  Following this 3-year investigation, the Justice Department released its report that concluded that the Sheriff’s Office has “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.”  The report accused Arpaio of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest and retaliating against critics and was the worst pattern of racial profiling in U. S. History.  As a result of the Justice Department report, this past December 2011, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Arpaio’s authority to identify and detain illegal immigrants.  In a separate action on December 23, 2011, a federal judge enjoined Arpaio’s office from “detaining any person based only on knowledge or reasonable belief, without more, that the person is unlawfully present within the United States,” substantially putting an end to his anti-illegal immigration enforcement.

In 2008 a federal grand jury began an inquiry of Arpaio for abuse of power.  He is being investigated for politically motivated and “bogus” prosecutions which Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon has called “a reign of terror.” The targets of Arpaio’s alleged abuse of power have included Mayor Gordon, a Democrat, and a long list of other state, county and judicial officials.  If you got in Arpaio’s way, whether Democrat or Republican, he was coming after you.

In July 2010, Arpaio established the “Campaign to Re-Elect Joe Arpaio 2012,” to fund ads critical of Rick Romley, a candidate in the Republican Primary for Maricopa County Attorney and Arizona Attorney General candidate Republican Tom Horne even though Arpaio was not running for re-election since his term does not expire until the end of 2012.  One of the ads, a direct mailer, promoted the defeat of Romley and was an in-kind contribution to Bill Montgomery, Romley’s opponent, in violation of Arizona election laws.  Although the “Campaign to Re-Elect Joe Arpaio 2012” was fined $153,978, the ads apparently worked because Montgomery defeated Romley.

An analysis by the Maricopa County Office of Management and Budget found Arpaio misspent almost $100 million in taxpayer dollars.  The analysis showed that money from a restricted detention fund only to be used to pay for jail items such as food, detention officers’ salaries and equipment, was used by Arpaio to pay employees to patrol Maricopa County.  The analysis also showed that many Sheriff’s Office employees, whose salaries were paid from the restricted detention fund, were working job assignments different from those recorded in their personnel records.  Arpaio’s office apparently kept a separate set of personnel books detailing actual work assignments that were different from information kept on the county’s official human-resources records.  Arpaio also used the detention fund to pay for investigations of political rivals and activities involving his human-smuggling unit.  In addition, the analysis showed a number of inappropriate spending items including a trip to Alaska where deputies stayed at a fishing resort, and trips to Disneyland.

After receiving a copy of an internal memo written by Maricopa Deputy Chief Frank Munnell alleging misconduct and mismanagement by Arpaio’s second in command and his top officers, in October 2010, the US Attorney for Arizona confirmed that the FBI and Department of Justice were conducting criminal investigations into its allegations.

Apparently to move the publicity of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation away from him, Arpaio claimed that after receiving a petition of 300 signatures from the Tea Party, he decided to launch an investigation into President Obama’s birth place, something that has been debunked on numerous occasions.  (You may recall that Donald Trump claimed that his “investigators” uncovered evidence that the President was not born in the United States, but Trump never released anything supporting his claim.)

We all know that Tea Party conspiracy theories allege that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore not eligible to be President.  Some theories even contend that President Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, or that his birth certificate is a forgery.  Still others claim that because his father was from Kenya, that means he held dual citizenship at birth (British and American), and the dual citizenship means Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States. These bizarre theories have been characterized by some commentators as racist or a racial reaction to the first African American president of the United States.  I agree with their characterization.

Belief in the conspiracy theories has persisted despite Obama’s pre-election release of his official birth certificate from Hawaii in 2008.  There was also confirmation by the Hawaii Department of Health, concurred in by its Republican Governor based on the original documents, and the April 2011 release of a certified copy of Obama’s original Certificate of Live Birth. Other evidence of Obama’s Hawaiian birth also surfaced such as birth announcements published in August 1961 in two Hawaii newspapers.  Of course, the Tea Party and other right-wing radical folks will not let the facts get in the way of their theories.

Other than the baseless claim that Obama’s birth certificate was a “forgery,” Arapaio didn’t give any hints as to what his birther “Cold Case Posse” had found, but insisted his press conference was not driven by a desire to gain media attention. “I don’t have press conferences just to get my name on television,” he said.

“What should I do, throw it in the waste basket and forget about it, like everyone else is this country has done?” Arpaio said. “But once again, I take my elected sheriff’s status very serious, and when the people ask me to do something I try to do it regardless of the repercussions, the politics and the media.”

Arpaio knows he is in trouble with the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation and is also trying to “rally the birthers” for support.  To say that Arpaio is “America’s Toughest Sheriff” does not mean that he has integrity.  On the contrary, based on his narcissistic, unscrupulous and devious behavior over the years, Arpaio should be in prison.  Depending on the results of the Justice Department’s investigation, that may very well be the outcome, but that’s just my take.