I love the internet

Earlier this week, the birther folks who believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya thought they had a humdinger of a smoking gun. They received a birth certificate showing that Obama was born in Mombassa, Kenya. It took less than two days for the internet to find the source document from which it was generated, an Australian birth certificate posted online at a geneaology website. Internet sleuths are so badass!

But, the only thing I love better than good sleuthing is parody, so you can imagine my joy and cackling when I discovered that someone has already put up a Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator. I love the internet!

Why the birthers lose

Slate finally asks the question that we should have been posing to the birthers all along: suppose Barack Obama was really born outside the U.S....legally, would it really matter? Among the not very complicated legal reasons why there would be virtually no way the birthers would prevail in a challenge to the legitimacy of Obama's presidency even if they finally found the smoking gun of Kenya birth:

1. No citizen in the U.S. would have standing to sue to challenge his presidency, because every citizen would be impacted equivalently and courts routinely interpret such situations as not conferring standing.

2. The people who ran against Obama in 2008 also wouldn't have standing because there is no legal relief available that would address their injury. Basically, if Hillary Clinton sued and won, it still wouldn't make her the winner of the Democratic primary or President. Instead it would just make Joe Biden President.

3. Even if someone established standing, courts would probably decide it was a political question not appropriate for adjudication. Courts would be very wary of forcing a Constitutional crisis that would oust a sitting President, particularly when there is a procedure specifically spelled out in the Constitution for that. Which brings us to...

4. Congress could impeach him, but it would be difficult to prove he committed a high crime or misdemeanor unless he actually knew he had been born in Kenya and conspired to hide it, thereby committing a fraud. If he didn't know, he wouldn't have done anything criminal that would qualify. Also, there's no way in hell this Congress votes to impeach him.

Of course this article doesn't go into the other big reason why it might not even matter: Obama was born to an American citizen, Stanley Ann Dunham, so much like John McCain he would have been a natural born citizen of the U.S. even though not born on American soil. (There is some question of whether she had been a citizen for 5 years beyond her 14th birthday, a requirement under some statutes to be considered a full citizen, but it's not even clear that applies.) Being a natural born citizen is all the constitution requires, and does not necessarily require birth on U.S. soil despite the ravings of people who have obviously never read said Constitution. Being born on U.S. soil is the easiest, but not the ONLY, way to be a legally natural born citizen.

(The Constitution also does not require that both biological or legal parents be American citizens, but that won't stop some of the whackjobbier birthers from claiming it anyway.)

So there you have it, even if you assume the crazy things they would have you assume, it still won't change anything. Can we move on to more important matters now?

Quote of the Day

From Glenn Thrush at Politico:

When do we start a serious dialog about the Birther movement being a proxy for racism that is unacceptable to articulate in more direct terms?

Now.

Disgusting

This will be the last and only time this blog links to Peach Pundit.

This is simply disgusting. I refuse to associate myself in any fashion with a race-baiting crazy person or any site that he runs.

It would be nice if the Republican party had the same no-tolerance policy for hateful crazy, but the sad events of the past few weeks have proven otherwise. Given that 28% of them also believe the complete whackjob nonsense about Obama being born outside the U.S., they deserve all the decades of wandering in the wilderness and being forced to pander to a lunatic fringe base that they're about to get.

Anyone who makes excuses for or is willing to tolerate the insanely offensive shit spewed at Peach Pundit today is also on my ignore list. I'm done with you folks.

Kenya smell the crazy?

Slowly but steadily over the past few weeks, the so-called "birthers" (people who believe Barack Obama was not actually born on U.S. soil and is therefore ineligible for the presidency) have picked up recruits to their cause. Just this week, both CNN's Lou Dobbs and right wing fire breathing radio host Rush Limbaugh signed on to the rumbling hordes demanding proof of citizenship.

But Gawker has a damn good point: even if you believe that the birth certificate that Obama's campaign produced last year was faked or created after the fact, how do you explain the birth announcement in the Honolulu paper that's been available on microfiche for decades?

Regardless, I agree with what Marc Ambinder wrote yesterday. The rise of this movement is more problematic for Republicans than Democrats:

Republicans have to be extra careful. If they give credence to the birthers, they're (not only advancing ignorance but also) betraying the narrowness of their base. If they dismiss this growing movement, they might drive birthers to find more extreme candidates, which will fragment a Republican political coalition.

Abortion juice

I wrote about this briefly on Twitter, and realized it was one of those strange but funny stories that would be perfect for a blog post.

Back in college, I spent a year living with a fun-loving and completely batshit crazy woman we will call A. I had been an RA and A had been one of my residents, and we became fast friends. A liked to live on the wild side, though, and in that regard we really could not be more different. (I merely occasionally dabbled.) By way of example, I went to a Bush concert with A during that year, and she was tripping on acid. She decided during the show that Gavin Rossdale was her soulmate, and proceeded to force me to travel to other Bush shows for the better part of a year until she finally actually met the guy in person and he showed her zero interest. (Even back then he was hooking up with Gwen Stefani as they toured together.)

Anyhow, A was a bit of a hellion. She kept sheets of acid in our freezer, she had a fake ID she'd obtained by stealing a military ID from someone she babysat for in high school and altering the photograph with one of her own, and she was the first friend I ever had who was just unabashedly and unapologetically promiscuous. A had an endless stream of guys in her life, and somewhat famously kept a list on our refrigerator that she called her "Fuck List." In order, it listed every guy she slept with and she updated it religiously. (At the time, she made a Fuck List for me that was blank for most of that year, until I started dating the guy that I would move in with by the end of that year. Yes, I was a late bloomer.)

A wasn't great about birth control, however, since she was still on her father's military health insurance and had to go all the way to Panama City to get her birth control prescriptions filled. She somehow let the prescription lapse for awhile, and then she unexpectedly got pregnant. We panicked together as she peed on stick after stick, and tried to figure out what to do. At the time I was active in the FSU Women's Center and FSU NOW, and my good feminist friends with their knowledge of pre-Roe v. Wade methods of dealing with unwanted pregnancy told us about an old wives' tale that drinking a strong concoction of ginger juice could induce miscarriage.

A and I decided to try this, in the hopes that we could avoid the expensive and painful surgical abortion that she was otherwise going to have. We went to Publix and bought several pounds of raw ginger. I peeled it, cut it up, and boiled it in some water until it reduced down to a few cups. I made her try it, and it was awful. She said she couldn't possibly drink it, so we decided to add it to a jug of Kool-Aid. I mixed half of a large jug of red cherry Kool-Aid, and added the ginger liquid. We let it cool, and then I poured A a big glass. She insisted that I had to try it first, because she was worried she might hurl. I will never EVER forget the terrible flavor of that one sip that I took. I thought it might burn my throat, the spiciness of the ginger was so strong. But I tried to keep a brave face and show A that she could drink this stuff. She managed to suffer through about half a glass before giving up. We put the jug back into the fridge, intending to try again the next day.

We must have either given up on the "abortion juice" or forgotten about it, because a week later it was still in the back of the fridge. Around about this time I had started getting semi-involved with G, and after a party at our place he had slept over on the sofa. (We weren't officially dating at this point.) I woke up early the next day to go to class, and when I returned he was sleeping in my bed. I woke him up, and after we talked for awhile he asked me what the hell kind of alcohol we were brewing in our fridge. I stared at him puzzled for a second, and then realized that he meant the abortion juice. Turns out, G had gotten up in the middle of the night looking for a drink, and had found what looked like a jug of red Kool-Aid in the back of the fridge. He had poured a big glass, taken a swig, and been met with the unholy burn of concentrated ginger. When I told him the story of what he had just drank, I laughed so hard I nearly peed.

Ultimately we abandoned the abortion juice idea, and A went through the usual method of terminating the pregnancy. I was there, holding her hand, through the whole procedure. That entire experience made me hyper-vigilant about my own birth control methods once I had occasion to employ them a couple months later, when I finally wrote a name on my own Fuck List. But, I had completely forgotten about abortion juice until a friend from college blogged today about making homemade ginger beer, and that awful taste memory came flooding back. None for me, thanks.

Protests at Shopping Malls

Protest minded right wingers in the Atlanta area were displeased yesterday when Simon Malls, owner of the Gwinnett Place mall, refused to allow a July 4th "Tea Party" to occur on its property. Immediately the right wingers assumed that the company and its owner wanted to support a Democratic agenda, but the real reason behind the company's objection is probably far simpler: they have a legal interest in not allowing protests on their property.

There is a long and storied line of case law establishing when private landowners that open their property to the public must allow members of the public to petition or protest on their property, and when they can remove such individuals. Generally speaking, private landowners are not bound by the First Amendment's rights to speech or assembly. However, many litigants have attempted to expand the First Amendment's requirements to private property that is opened to the general public. From hare krishnas in airports to union picketers at shopping centers, the last fifty years of Supreme Court jurisprudence is littered with cases defining the parameters for the owners of these "quasi-public spaces," such as shopping malls.

The essential rule after years of legal battles by owners of shopping centers and malls is this: as long as the owner of the mall has not dedicated their private property to "public use," they can legally exclude individuals who intend to conduct non-business activities on the property. This includes protesting, petitioning, gathering, and picketing. However, where a landowner has in the past allowed the property to be used much like a town square, such prior use of the property could be used as a bar by a court to prevent that landowner from arguing that his property should now be treated like any other private property (on which there is no right to free speech or assembly.)

So, Simon Malls could have faced future difficulty excluding other groups from protesting, petitioning, gathering or picketing on their property if they had allowed the Tea Party to occur there. I suspect that someone on their legal team finally told them that it was a bad idea from a legal standpoint to allow this protest to occur. It probably had very little to do with politics or PR, and everything to do with avoiding opening the floodgates to every crazy group that might want to congregate in the mall in the future. And it seems like a smart move.

Jobs I've Had Part IX: Law School Jobs

During law school, I worked for two different small plaintiffs' firms in my second and then third year. The first was a job I acquired midway through the first semester of my second year, when I decided that I really needed some extra money because Boston was so damned expensive. I worked for a two man firm that did a little of everything, though personal injury was sort of the filler in between the cracks of their other cases. I worked 20 hours per week answering phones, drafting legal documents, doing legal research, and basically helping them out on whatever they needed done.

I remember working on documents for the arbitration of a post-divorce case all about stock options. The former husband had been quite high up at a technology company and had acquired millions of dollars' worth of stock options, and a portion of those options had been granted to the former wife in their divorce settlement, with the catch that she only obtained the rights to the stock options once they'd been both vested and exercised. The ex-wife claimed that the ex-husband had been deliberately NOT exercising his options in order to keep them from her. The ex-husband claimed that as a company executive his ability to exercise options was restricted for much of the year due to blackout provisions for stock transactions on company executives who might have foreknowledge of information that could affect stock prices. We represented the ex-husband in the case. I worked there for nearly 6 months and the arbitration still wasn't even completely over by the time I left, so you can imagine I came away from it with a dim view of how well arbitration provides a faster, less expensive alternative to traditional litigation.

One of the two lawyers was also in-house counsel part-time for a technology company, and that company had a patent litigation action that involved most of the other big firms in the city. I don't remember many details, beyond feeling like the poor guy representing them was a little outmatched given the firepower on all the other sides.

Another law student who actually looked enough like me that she could have been my sister shared my schedule there, and we occasionally overlapped enough that we could hang out and talk for a few minutes. I've long since forgotten how it came about, but one of us somehow discovered that we could search the cache of the computer at our desk and see what the 2 lawyers were viewing on the internet when we weren't around. We found URLS to beastiality sites in that computer, and were quite scandalized by trying to figure out who was responsible for it. I don't think we ever figured it out, though we had our suspicions. (One of the attorneys had a teenage son who occasionally came with him to the office on Saturdays.)

I left that job to serve as a summer associate at a big firm in Boston, which I would later join as a first year associate fresh out of law school. It was a cushy gig, since I was paid $1800 a week to do research projects, go to lunch with attorneys, go to cocktail parties and dinners all paid for by the firm, and even take a weekend trip sponsored by the firm to the Vermont mountains. Of course the firm was NOTHING like this when I returned as a real employee, but it was still lovely while it lasted. We had a big class of 30 law students from various schools, and there were several romances and scandals that summer. At the end of the summer I got an offer for full time employment, so I knew I could relax my third year of law school rather than sweating it through another interview process.

Third year I again needed to earn a bit of extra money, so I went to work part time for a solo practitioner. While I don't really want to put her name here because I'd prefer not to have her find this blog through a Google search, let's just say that her first name was the name of a famous main character from a Shakespeare play about star-crossed lovers, while her last name was the last name of the rival family. It was her married name, and she'd long since divorced Mr. M, but she kept the name because people found it distinctive. Also, she was crazy.

She had won a few huge cases in the years before I joined her practice, and I think she still fancied herself as a legal badass. The problem was that the money had started to wear a little thin, and the only cases that we had were not quite the moneymakers she hoped. I worked on a personal injury suit against a large Atlanta-based building supply chain (again, do the math) that really exposed me for the first time to the downfalls of dealing with plaintiffs. It's the reason I will never do that work again: plaintiffs lie, and they're almost all crazy.

I also worked on my first employment litigation case at that firm, a woman who had worked for a large banking organization and had been demoted after refusing her boss's sexual advances. It was a great case for us for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which was that the woman had kept copies of all sorts of emails from the boss saying how qualified she was for this new job, as well as a diary of all the things he tried to get into her pants. Ultimately we settled that case for nearly two years' pay, which is about as good as a sexual harassment case can turn out. (It had some warts, too, but we managed to keep those under wraps.) I had essentially been allowed to bring in and run that case entirely on my own, so I was very proud to get that result.

The lawyer I worked for was constantly trying to expand her repertoire, but sometimes before she really knew enough to take on a new type of work. She was called by a former personal injury client who has arrested for bank robbery, and decided that she could learn how to do criminal defense work. I recall frantically trying to research what I needed to put into a motion to suppress that she had decided we needed to file, and feeling stressed to the end of my rope out of fear that we were flying TOO blind in the case. Thankfully, that case was before a judge who was notoriously lenient on criminal defendants (to the point that she later was the subject of a campaign to kick her off the bench), and my boss managed to secure a deal for 6 months probation and a drug treatment program for the guy. I was amazed, because our client had signed a confession! (While high as a kite on Vicodin, but still...)

I worked there for the second half of my third year of law school, and while I studied for the bar exam. I left that office about a week before I started at my "real" firm, and when I left she asked if there was any way she could convince me to stay. Given what big firms were paying starting lawyers, I told her that I had to take the other deal. Honestly, she was such a strange bird--her depositions were excruciating to read because she liked to do weird things like stand on her chair to intimidate witnesses--that I really didn't think I could in good conscience keep working for her any longer.

However, I ended up being very happy she was still around and wanted me back 2 years later when I was laid off from that cushy firm gig. I worked for her part time for 6 months while I interviewed for full time positions at other firms, and strangely enough the same woman who had been the plaintiff in my first sexual harassment case had somehow managed to acquire a NEW sexual harassment case. I managed to settle that one too, though the terms were far less lucrative. By the time I left there a second time, the boss had started to talk about moving up to Vermont to retire, and it was clear her heart wasn't in it anymore. I ran into her in the courthouse a few years later and she was still working (and still crazy)...and told me a story about how she had an ethics complaint filed against her because she shoved opposing counsel at a hearing. She said this with pride.

"It's supposed to taste like a shit taco"

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Hey, you're a crazy bitch

Now that Sarah Palin has been relegated back to Alaska at least until late 2010, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann would like to reassert her prior role as the crazy bitch standard bearer of the Republican party, one carefully wrestled from the clutches of one Katharine Harris.

Bachmann has been known for saying whacked out or stupid things for years now, (really, the list is too long to recount but you can peruse it here) but having another pretty face in the party really put a damper on her profile for awhile.

Well, take a listen to this insanity and see if she hasn't put herself back on your radar screen (the good stuff is at about the 2 minute mark).

Yes, she actually thinks that we might turn Americorps into mandatory reeducation camps. It is a bad sign when you make Rush Limbaugh appear eminently reasonable.