Thread: Judge dismantles Seattle woman’s ‘birther’ claims

September 2, 2012 in City

Spin Control: Judge dismantles Seattle woman’s ‘birther’ claims

By Jim CamdenThe Spokesman-Review

OLYMPIA – It’s Labor Day weekend, the traditional start of serious campaigning, so one can assume the silly season for politics is either over or nearly so.

Before the clock ran out on the political dog days of summer, however, Washington was treated to the latest “birther” challenge to Barack Obama’s ability to run for president.

One had to be fairly attentive, though, as Thurston County Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee quickly rejected the effort to keep Obama’s name off Washington’s general election ballot, saying such “birther” allegations have been around for years and rejected for years as well.

McPhee was fairly blistering Wednesday in dismissing a lawsuit filed Monday by Linda Jordan, of Seattle, who said Obama didn’t meet citizenship requirements in the U.S. Constitution. Among her sources was Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who claims to have sent top investigators to Hawaii and proclaimed the birth certificate was a fraud. Either crime is so slow in the Phoenix area that Arpaio has staff to spare or his staff was better at lobbying for a trip to Hawaii to check out this whole birther thing than I was with my boss.

McPhee devoted six pages of the opinion to dismantling Jordan’s claims and legal arguments, based on findings in other courts that rejected similar challenges.

“I do not usually devote so much time quoting the decisions of other courts in other cases. I do so here to make the point that just as all the so-called evidence offered by (Jordan) has been in the blogosphere for years, in one form or another, so too has all the law rejecting plaintiff’s allegations. I can conceive of no reason why this lawsuit was brought, except to join the chorus of noise in that blogosphere.”

The opinion had a fun bit of political trivia: Chester A. Arthur’s birthplace was challenged in 1880 as being in Canada rather than Vermont. That rumor didn’t gain much traction, McPhee said, “perhaps because the Internet had not been as fully developed then as it is now.”

The opinion is a fun read and can be found on the Spin Control blog.

Spin Control: Judge dismantles Seattle woman

Big PDF file.

JUDGE'S RULLING on Obama ballot challenge

@ http://media.spokesman.com/documents...andorder_2.pdf

RELATED

http://www.alipac.us/f9/judge-tosses...ballot-260459/

“I do not usually devote so much time quoting the decisions of other courts in other cases. I do so here to make the point that just as all the so-called evidence offered by (Jordan) has been in the blogosphere for years, in one form or another, so too has all the law rejecting plaintiff’s allegations. I can conceive of no reason why this lawsuit was brought, except to join the chorus of noise in that blogosphere.”

That is absolutely incorrect. The information coming from Sheriff Joe Arpaio's investigators is new and has only been released in the last six months.

And even if the claims and information were older than that, the age of the information has no basis on whether it is factual or not. We are within the 7 year statute of limitations on these federal crimes.

W

Far to many secrets about this man to not have doubts about his eligibility.