Who are you going to believe? A former Solicitor General/former Acting Solicitor General or some random guy on the Internet? /Updated

Scott Rohter is a Tea Party guy. His full bio state that his accomplishments in life are: “being a property rights activist since 1995” and writing articles for such noted law journals as Free Republic and Red State. It’s really quite an extraordinary life!  Which, in his own mind, qualifies him to interpret the Constitution.

And so, he states with full conviction:

The United States Constitution says that you have to be a Natural Born Citizen to be the President of the United States.  That means that you have to be born in the United States in order to be the President of the United States.  That just seems like common sense to me…  the kind of common sense that our Founding Fathers had plenty of.  It is also the kind of common sense that makes perfect sense in the dangerous world that we live in today.

There is no definition listed in the Constitution for what it means to be a Natural Born Citizen, but the Founding Fathers knew exactly what it meant.

This is because he personally knew the Founding Fathers, I guess. At any rate, he quotes as his authority The Law of Nations by Emerich [sic; it’s actually Emmerich, and also written Emer] de Vattel. de Vattel is of course the best source to cite because (a) he was Swiss, and (b) he died in 1767, well before the writing of the Constitution. The fact that the American Supreme Court has considered the issue, and despite the fact that in making rulings about the law they reviewed the proceedings of the Founders, it doesn’t count because:

The definition of what it means to be a Natural Born Citizen has been vigorously debated over the centuries and thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions it has been watered down by progressive judges to the point that it means just about anything they want it to mean.

Well, if by “recent,” you mean the Naturalization Act of 1790 and Supreme Court decisions from the 19th century, yeah, I guess if you make “recent” mean anything you want it to, then sure, Mr. Rohter’s ascension to the Higher-than-Supreme Court of the United States makes sense.

On the other hand, you could look at the work of a former Bush Solicitor General and a former Obama Acting Solicitor General, both now distinguished law professors at Georgetown who write in the Harvard Law Review:

All the sources routinely used to interpret the Constitution confirm that the phrase “natural born Citizen” has a specific meaning: namely, someone who was a U.S. citizen at birth with no need to go through a naturalization proceeding at some later time. And Congress has made equally clear from the time of the framing of the Constitution to the current day that, subject to certain residency requirements on the parents, someone born to a U.S. citizen parent generally becomes a U.S. citizen without regard to whether the birth takes place in Canada, the Canal Zone, or the continental United States.
…
The Supreme Court has long recognized that two particularly useful sources in understanding constitutional terms are British common law
and enactments of the First Congress.

Both confirm that the original meaning of the phrase “natural born Citizen” includes persons born abroad who are citizens from birth based on the citizenship of a parent.
…
The Framers, of course, would have been intimately familiar with these statutes and the way they used terms like “natural born,” since the statutes were binding law in the colonies before the Revolutionary War. They were also well documented in Blackstone’s Commentaries, a text widely circulated and read by the Framers and routinely invoked in interpreting the Constitution.
…
No doubt informed by this longstanding tradition, just three years after the drafting of the Constitution, the First Congress established that children born abroad to U.S. citizens were U.S. citizens at birth, and explicitly recognized that such children were “natural born Citizens.” The Naturalization Act of 1790 provided that “the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States . . . .”

The actions and understandings of the First Congress are particularly persuasive because so many of the Framers of the Constitution were also members of the First Congress.

Rohter can’t even be called a liar or a fool, because he clearly inhabits some alternate reality where facts and history and reason bend to fit his prejudices. But of course, he call call people he disagree with liars and fools at will, because nothing matters except his opinion.

Arrogance will destroy this country. As we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, the Ukraine and the Bakken, Ferguson and Baltimore, it is already well underway. We’re all so d–ned sure of ourselves that we can’t take the time to look and listen.
______________
Update: It turns out the the case is not cut-and-dried. Mary Brigid McManamon written a piece in the WaPo describing her research on the topic:

First, although Katyal and Clement correctly declare that the Supreme Court has recognized that common law is useful to explain constitutional terms, they ignore that law. Instead, they rely on three radical 18th-century British statutes. While it is understandable for a layperson to make such a mistake, it is unforgivable for two lawyers of such experience to equate the common law with statutory law. The common law was unequivocal: Natural-born subjects had to be born in English territory. The then-new statutes were a revolutionary departure from that law.

Second, the authors appropriately ask the question whether the Constitution includes the common-law definition or the statutory approach. But they fail to examine any U.S. sources for the answer. Instead, Katyal and Clement refer to the brand-new British statutes as part of a “longstanding tradition” and conclude that the framers followed that law because they “would have been intimately familiar with these statutes.” But when one reviews all the relevant American writings of the early period, including congressional debates, well-respected treatises and Supreme Court precedent, it becomes clear that the common-law definition was accepted in the United States, not the newfangled British statutory approach.

Third, Katyal and Clement put much weight on the first U.S. naturalization statute, enacted in 1790. Because it contains the phrase “natural born,” they infer that such citizens must include children born abroad to American parents. The first Congress, however, had no such intent. The debates on the matter reveal that the congressmen were aware that such children were not citizens and had to be naturalized; hence, Congress enacted a statute to provide for them. Moreover, that statute did not say the children were natural born, only that they should “be considered as” such. Finally, as soon as Madison, then a member of Congress, was assigned to redraft the statute in 1795, he deleted the phrase “natural born,” and it has never reappeared in a naturalization statute.

So,it’s not settled law. I don’t think McManamon’s view would prevail simply because it creates complications that the Supreme Court would avoid by defining away “natural born.” Otherwise we have two classes of citizen with different rights. What other rights are to be denied those not “natural born”? On what possible rational basis? But I will have to say: Scott Rohter might be right… even if it’s totally by accident. Only the Supreme Court can say for sure.

Alleged Breitbart source busted for terrorism

This is one of those stories that is almost too strange to believe (Via DailyKos via MsInformed at Eschaton).

Elise Potaka and Luke McMahon, Sidney Morning Herald:

A young Jewish American man has been charged with pretending to be an Australian-based Islamic State jihadist after a FBI joint investigation with the Australian Federal Police based on information provided by Fairfax Media. Joshua Ryne Goldberg, a 20-year old living at his parents’ house in US state of Florida, is accused of posing online as “Australi Witness,” an IS supporter who publicly called for a series of attacks against individuals and events in western countries:
…
Early on Friday, Australian time, Goldberg, who is non-Muslim and has no real-world links with extremism, was arrested at his home by Florida police for “distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction”.

This was not all he was involved in.

Katie Zavadski, Daily Beast:

Goldberg had several online personas: an Islamic radical who was popular in ISIS social media; a white supremacist on hate site Daily Stormer; a feminist on Daily Kos; a radical free-speech advocate on Q&A site Ask.fm, and a sympathizer with GamerGate. Goldberg is also accused of being behind a Times of Israel blog post that called Palestinians “subhuman.”
…
Goldberg, who comes from a Jewish family, had Australi Witness spout a special kind of rage when discussing Jews.

“The Jews are the worst enemies of Allah (SWT). When Islam conquers Australia, every single Jew will be slaughtered like the filthy cockroaches that they are,” he wrote on JustPaste.it.

Goldberg as Australi Witness also threatened attacks on synagogues in Melbourne and Los Angeles on JustPaste.it and on 8Chan’s Islamic State page.

He also had recurring obsessions with certain people and ideas, attacking them with one persona while praising them with another.

Posing as “Michael Slay” on white supremacist site Daily Stormer, he viciously attacked an Australian Muslim activist Mariam Veiszadeh, calling her a “Moslem pig.” Yet Goldberg praised Veiszadeh as Australi Witness, calling her his “biggest inspiration.” Yet another alleged online identity, MoonMetropolis, cheered grotesque caricatures of Veiszadeh.

Goldberg also had another alter ego, Tanya Cohen, whom he attacked using Michael Slay on the Daily Stormer. Cohen was evidently a parody of far-left social justice activists. Slay called her “a Jew bitch who specializes in writing about how the US needs to ban ‘hate speech’ and any other speech that goes against the Jewish cultural Marxist agenda.” An email in Tanya Cohen’s name was linked to Goldberg’s IP address, and articles in her name appeared on Thought Catalog, Daily Kos, and feminist website Feministing.

On Twitter, Goldberg frequently posted about Gamer Gate, a controversy about sexism in gaming that resulted in personal attacks on feminist activists. While Goldberg doesn’t appear to have posted any threats on social media, his tweets used the hashtag #gamergate to mock people he had previously derided as “social justice warriors.”

In articles published under the Moon Metropolis alias and under Goldberg’s own name on Thought Catalog, he expresses the opinions of a free-speech fundamentalist.

“Nothing that anyone could possibly say could ever be worse than a law preventing them from saying it,” he wrote. “If you expressed the opinion that I should be killed, I would still defend your right to say that.”

On Thought Catalog, Goldberg wrote “that neo-Nazis tend to look positively civil and rational when compared to SJWs [social justice warriors].”

And it appears that may have been Breitbart.com’s “source” for claiming that Shaun King, an activist who posts regularly on Daily Kos regarding Black Lives Matter issues, is not partly African American. Anomaly on FreakOut Nation posted evidence from social media to that effect. While I haven’t seen evidence beyond the BlazingCatFur post, the evidence persuades me that this is likely so. It has been denied by “Nero” aka Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer.

The charge that a terrorist troll had anything to do with our reporting is a crackpot internet conspiracy theory. http://t.co/8YJTfMUwvX

— Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) September 12, 2015

But this is in Google cache:

So I would guess that “Nero” is just fiddling for time.

The kind of hate we see in Goldberg’s multiple personas–not to mention “Nero’s Twitter feed–is remarkable, even in the hateful age in which we live in.

Our post-racial society: the shootings in Charleston

Republicans are saying that no one knows why Dylann Roof murdered nine innocent people:

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, currently running for the GOP presidential nomination, linked the church murder to his pet topic, the “assault” on religious liberty.
…
On the same program, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani also confessed to being baffled about possible motives. “We have no idea what’s in his mind,” he said. “Maybe he hates Christian churches. …”
…
South Carolina Senator and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham questioned whether this was a “hate crime” and tried to suggest factors other than race were involved.

Most digustingly, Roof prayed with the congregation before massacring them. What greater act of blasphemy is there than to ask God for aid just prior to destroying those made in His image?

And of course John Lott is out there saying the reason that Dylann Roof murdered those nince people is that they didn’t have any guns in church.

Because, of course, Jesus Christ was such a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. He owned a Glock and a Heckler & Koch.

This is the real Emanuel AME church, courtesy of Harry Bruinius of the Christian Science Monitor:

The seeds for Mother Emanuel were planted in 1791, during the era of “the segregated alter”: A group of slaves and free blacks worshiped under the auspices of Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church, a white denomination that provided the group’s ministers. But in 1816, when the white congregation decided to use the black members’ segregated burial grounds to erect a new building, they broke away, joining the nascent movement of black Christians that would become the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

One of the new congregation’s founding members, Denmark Vesey, a slave of a slave trader, organized a major slave revolt. City officials crushed the rebellion before it began, hanging Vesey and at least 34 others. The incident sparked other violence, and a white mob burned the church – and eventually, officials banned independent black churches outright in Charleston.

The Republican Party is surely going to hell for using this evil deed to spin their talking points. I just wish the good Lord would grant them early entry.

Donate to the Emanuel AME here

Secede already

This is an image of a local newspaper from a town near Abilene, Texas. The article on the left says that right-wingers are being labeled “terrorists.” The article on the right is about Obama, written by a Viet Vet-Green Beret-novelist from Colorado, is remarkably historically illiterate, and even says that Barack Obama “claims to have been a law professor.”  Apparently, the statement by the University of Chicago that he was a law professor is not enough for Mr. Bendell. Nor is Mr. Bendell aware that many of the slaves brought here were Muslims and that some fought for independence in the Revolutionary War and (presumably against slavery) in the Civil War. Sure, most early Americans were Christians or Deists, along with a few Jews, some atheists/agnostics, and so on. But when Barack Obama says that Islam is woven into the American tapestry from the beginning, he’s right. Being right used to count for something.

There are plenty of other articles typical of right-wing extremists. Brian Sussman tells us that “zealous environmentalists … are green on the outside and red (like Marx and Lenin) on the inside.”  He’s making a film about how the state of California is hoarding water to keep it away from (corporate) farmers.  I hope he likes drinking dust, because it looks like there’s going to be more of that than water in California. African American (No! American!) Lloyd Marcus is afraid that white people are so badly beaten upon that they might engage in backlash that would be like a race war but totally justifiable. When he is not praising the Lord that Rush is on, he’s being a “prolific writer, singer and songwriter.” (true. It may not be good writing, singing, or songwriting, but it is prolific.)

The point is not that this kind of stuff is remarkable. It’s that it’s normal, and not just in Texas. These people spread hatred and division and yet it’s the red states that take the most in government payments, have the highest level of social pathologies, and generally resemble all the things they rail against.

So secede already.

Allegation that BP may be harassing, issuing death threats against critics

Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera (via t/o):

[Through international PR company Ogilvy & Mather,] BP has been accused of hiring internet “trolls” to purposefully attack, harass, and sometimes threaten people who have been critical of how the oil giant has handled its disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
…
[On the BP America Facebook page,] when people posted comments that were critical of how BP was handling the crisis, they were often attacked, bullied, and sometimes directly threatened.
…
Threats included identifying where somebody lived, an internet troll making reference to having a shotgun and making use of it, and “others just being more derogatory”, according to [Government Accountability Project investigator Shanna] Devine. “We’ve seen all this documentation and that’s why we thought it was worth bringing to the ombudsman’s office of BP, and we told them we thought some of it even warranted calling the police about.”
…
One troll using the name “Griffin” makes several allusions to gun violence, while another, named “Ken Smith” also harassed and threatened users, even going so far as to edit a photo of a BP critic’s pet bird into the crosshairs of a gunsight, before posting the photo online – along with photos of an arsenal of semi-automatic weapons.

Another instance occurred involving “Griffin” and an environmentalist who posted a picture of a rendition of Mother Earth saying “Mother Earth Has Been Waiting for Her Day in Court, BP”. “Griffin” posted a comment to the picture that read, “A few rounds from a .50 cal will stop that b**ch”.

According to Marie, Lockman and GAP, BP’s “astroturfing” efforts and use of “trolls” have been reported as pursuing users’ personal information, then tracking and posting IP addresses of users, contacting their employers, threatening to contact family members, and using photos of critics’ family members to create false Facebook profiles, and even threatening to affect the potential outcome of individual compensation claims against BP.
…
Linda Hooper Bui, an associate professor of entomology at Louisiana State University, experienced a different form of harassment from BP while working on a study about the impact of the oil disaster on spiders and insects.

“BP was desperately trying to control the science, and that was what I ran into,” Bui told Al Jazeera. According to her, BP’s chief science officer “tried to intimidate me”, and the harassment included BP “bullying my people” who were working in the field with her on her study that revealed how “insects and spiders in the oiled areas were completely decimated”.

While collecting data for the study, Bui and her colleagues regularly ran into problems with BP, she said.

“Local sheriffs working under the auspices of BP, as well as personnel with Wildlife and Fisheries, the US Coast Guard – all of these folks working under BP were preventing us from doing our job,” Bui explained. “We were barred from going into areas to collect data where we had previous data.”

Bui said personnel from the USCG, Fish and Wildlife, and even local sheriffs departments, always accompanied by BP staff, worked to prevent her from entering areas to collect data, confiscated her samples, and “if I’d refused to oblige they would have arrested me” – despite her having state permits to carry out her work.

In the toljaso what justain’tso column… [Bush AWOL story]

(Thanks to Norwegianity-in-exile for providing the link to this story)

So, we all know the facts. Dan Rather, working with information provided by Lt. Col. Bill Burkett through 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes, aired a sensational story that there was definitive proof that George W Bush had at best been casual about his National Guard service. But brilliant and courageous right-wing bloggers quickly (like, so quickly that they had to have been supplied some assistance from the Bush White House) unraveled the truth: the documents were forgeries, proven by the fact that no typewriter of that era could possibly have typed them and that they could be reproduced by Microsoft Word.

The Washington Post in particular rushed the bloggers’ conclusions into print. Amid all the breathless talk about kerning, fonts, and proportional spacing, and cries of “Rathergate” from the right, official harrumphing about journalistic standards gave way to a commission which promptly found… well, not exactly anything except that Mapes and Rather had to go. There wasn’t any arguing from any quarter that they had rushed the story onto the air without properly vetting the documents, relying instead on the reputation of Lt. Col. Burkett. Alas, Burkett had not verified their provenance. Mapes and Rather were left to (metaphorically) swing.

But, of course, everything other than the fact that the source of the documents had not been established wasn’t true. The documents, if they were forgeries, were much better forgeries than the right-wing gave credit for. They could indeed have been produced by a typewriter of that vintage. That, in fact, was a more likely explanation than what the right-wing claimed.

read more

Breaking Mr. George Tierney of Greenville South Carolina Flash Update

I know it’s a sin to laugh at mental illness, and this will be old news to people who were paying attention for the last couple of days, but George Tierney (of Greenville South Carolina) has granted an interview to Brian White of GlossyNews:

George Tierney – Do you realize there are cures for cancer out there and I found nine of them. I went to the Oncologist…

GlossyNews.com – I saw that tweet. It didn’t make sense out of context.

George Tierney – I found nine cures for cancer and my oncologist told me, he said, there’s not a cure for cancer yet. Really? That’s why four guys that found cures for cancer ended up with arsenic death. [Andrew] Breitbart was getting ready to explode Obama and he ended up with arsenic death? The guy that last saw Breitbart ended up with arsenic death? [Coroner: Breitbart Died of Heart Failure]

GlossyNews.com – What do you make of that?
George Tierney – Obama’s frickin killing these people.

GlossyNews.com – Obama is killing these people?
George Tierney – Yes he is.

GlossyNews.com – That’s awfully specific. Is it because they’re political enemies?

George Tierney – No it’s because the, here’s the thing, the guy that got killed for the cancer got killed years ago, Obama had nothing to do with that. But Breitbart and his guy got killed by Obama. I’ll go down on radio, tv or whatever and and and say that because the reason is is is those tapes come out, Obama goes down. And they’re coming out anyway…

My one regret about this interview. George Tierney declared that Bush stole Florida. Now, no one will believe it.

Another great kidder from the Tea Party

From the Puffington Host:

Jules Manson, a failed Tea Party candidate for local office in California, recently called for the assassination of President Obama and his daughters in a racial epithet-ridden Facebook screed.

The post, originally about his opposition to the recent passage of the controversial National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a measure allowing the indefinite detention of suspected foreign terrorists, referred to the president as a “monkey.” Then it got much worse.

“Assassinate the f—– n—– and his monkey children,” Manson commented on his own post, according to a screen shot captured by Your Black Politics blog.
…
Manson, an avid Ron Paul supporter and libertarian…[announced his plans to run as a fake Democrat]

No, he’s not a senior Tea Partier. But where does this rage against Obama–for that matter, against Democrats– come from? For all I complain about Obama, he’s more competent and less venal than his predecessor. Low bar, I know. But where were these people when Bush was blowing up the economy, turning the US into an authoritarian state, and entangling us in the longest wars in American history?

Helping him swing the axe against the root of the Tree of Liberty, of course.

Mao’s glorious march… to Boise/now with bonus link

A century ago, following a long agony beginning in the 19th century China was dismembered by the imperial nations of the West. It has spent the interim first being further humiliated by the West and later invaded by Japan, then another half century reconstructing from war and the tyranny established under Mao. In the process, the march toward national sovereignty changed tactics and methods, but not direction. Now they want to own us. Rocky Barker, Idaho Statesman:

A Chinese national company is interested in developing a 10,000- to 30,000-acre technology zone for industry, retail centers and homes south of the Boise Airport.

Officials of the China National Machinery Industry Corp. have broached the idea — based on a concept popular in China today — to city and state leaders.
…
Sinomach is not looking only at Idaho.

The company sent delegations to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania this year to talk about setting up research and development bases and industrial parks. It has an interest in electric transmission projects and alternative energy as well.

Now, seen through the eyes of American nationalism, this looks a lot like what the Japanese did in China (i.e., economic expansion and imperial control followed by invasion). Here’s a fairly tempered and plausible example of the American nationalist viewpoint (via Ritholtz):

Thanks to the trillions of dollars that the Chinese have made flooding our shores with cheap products, China is now in a position of tremendous economic power. So what is China going to do with all of that money? One thing that they have decided to do is to buy up pieces of the United States and set up “special economic zones” inside our country from which they can continue to extend their economic domination. One of these “special economic zones” would be just south of Boise, Idaho and the Idaho government is eager to give it to them. China National Machinery Industry Corporation (Sinomach for short) plans to construct a “technology zone” south of Boise Airport which would ultimately be up to 50 square miles in size. The Chinese Communist Party is the majority owner of Sinomach, so the 10,000 to 30,000 acre “self-sustaining city” that is being planned would essentially belong to the Chinese government.

I think the writer is accurate in calling these, in quotes, “special economic zones.” While The Statesman article does not talk about extraterritorial law that would prevail within this zone, it’s pretty clear that a 10,000 acre (15 square mile) facility is the size of a small town. Presumably Sinomach would use its rights and incorporate as a town, with a separate government, and since Sinomach is a government-owned entity, it would be susceptible not just to influence by the Chinese government, but to outright manipulation. [Added 7/15: I should note that it’s not clear from the Statesman article that it’s not clear that Sinomach would be the only company in the zone. The article, and probably the plans, are ambiguous.] In Idaho, with its weak state government, there wouldn’t be much interference with whatever happened in Sinomachville: the area would, in effect, be under foreign rule. If they wanted to establish a listening post to intercept satellite communications or a radar to track flights, there’s not much that could be done… unless the federal government does it.

This is the imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt come home.

And it exposes the utter folly of wrecking our national government. It was in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, after the destruction of the Qing dynasty, that the Western powers were able to dictate terms to China. Granted, the weak, corrupt central government of the Qing–dependent on local warlord/governors and businessmen–was no bargain.

There are some real parallels to America 2011. The only real difference is that the Boxers were honorable people, while the Tea Party is not.

No comment necessary

From Elliot Olshansky, AOL News