Here's the proper response to the "birther" question, Governor...

I'm certain he was born in Hawaii. But it is quite clear that there either does or should exist an original birth certificate form prepared at his birth and submitted to the vital records registry of Hawaii. This has not been released, presumably because the President has not authorized its release. From a legal standpoint, the computer-generated extract of Hawaii's records which he made public during the campaign suffices to establish him as a natural-born citizen of the United States, as far as I'm concerned. But there's no reason for him to refuse to release the original document, and we generally require abundant disclosure of otherwise private data by our Presidents (tax returns, etc.), so I think he should disclose it, or at least authorize Hawaii to confirm or deny that it exists at all in any form.

Which is why I phrased what I think she should have said as I did. It is true that he has refused to release that, and his refusal to do so is what allows the issue to continue to have any legs at all. If he would release it, then one could definitively shut down ALL of the birthers' rhetoric with the truth, not merely a statement as I have just made, that the legal evidence is sufficient.

Also, as you note the hard-core people (the same sort of people who still believe the Clintons killed Vince Foster, or who truly believe that Dick Cheney started the Iraq war to help Halliburton) will not be convinced of anything regarding Obama. Thus, my phrasing is also an attempt to explain to them why, whether they are right or wrong, THEY should want to move past the issue. They're not going to be convinced to drop it by arguments over the legality of the computer record extract; explaining how they are making socialism in this country more likely by causing a distraction, that has a better chance, in my opinion, of getting them to get off the issue.

actually, I agree with her. The moment she stepped onto the platform with McCain, Palin had to deal with the most ridiculous accusations against her. Not because they were true, but were cooked up by a frightened Democratic base who thought this woman would take away Obama's moment of glory (and theirs too) by encouraging Republicans to vote. So she had every right to mention this conspiracy over Obama - she too has been a victim of several.

He did all that's required of anyone to legally establish his birth in Hawaii. He just decided not to feed the burner of the runaway nutburger freight train.

He did precisely the opposite. By resisting these suits on jurisdictional grounds—which, alas, always seem to be pejoratively dismissed as "technical" grounds by laymen—instead of just filing the birth certificate with the courts, he fed the fire. I warned it would happen. IIRC, one of these cases is proceeding to discovery in California, and I suspect that the reason is that the judge there is smart enough to understand that the only chance of putting this to rest is to require Obama to file the certificate. The case can then be dismissed on standing grounds, so everyone will be happy.

Now, of course, I agree that some of this nonsense will persist. The crazies are, well, crazy. But if a court accepts the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate, or at least offers itself as a proxy through which that material can be entered into the public record and validated, you will detach the core group of crazies who positively believe he wasn't born here from their fellow-travelers who merely have doubts. The latter constitute the bulk of the "movement," I have no doubt, just as the opposition to climate change legislation comprises a large cloud of people who doubt AGW orbiting a small nucleus of people who positively reject it.

And going forward, I continue to agree with Roxanna de Luca's prescription on this point.

Michael, always happy to help educate our European cousins about America and our politics. You ask some good questions, but there are good answers to be had.

First, the "lack of regulation" of which you speak is not a Republican or a Democrat phenomenon. The regulations (and deregulations) of the financial industry go back many decades, generally, and have not been seriously challenged by either party. Whichever side is in power at the time something bad happens gets blamed for the entire status quo by the party not in power at that time.

The regulation that gets the most political blame for the financial crisis is the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act (the repeal of the Act was an initiative of 2 GOP Senators in 1999, but was supported by a large bi-partisan majority in the House of Representatives. This allowed a number of the traditional lines between banks and investment houses to be blurred, which some say led to banks becoming too speculative. However, there are quite a few studies suggesting that in fact the repeal functioned properly throughout the financial collapse, and allowed many financial institutions to survive precisely because they had diversified their assets in ways which would have been prohibited under Glass-Steagal. So that's one significant issue regarding who is "really" to blame for the financial crisis right there (and at any rate, the repeal of Glass-Steagall long pre-dated George W. Bush).

Moreover, DURING the Bush Administration, Congress enacted and President Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which tightened accounting controls over large businesses, in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. Generally speaking, there were no significant financial deregulatory acts passed during the Bush Administration, and at least one significant INCREASE in regulations over businesses, Sarbanes-Oxley. And note that it was the Bush Administration Justice Department which prosecuted both Enron and WorldCom, sending the founders and CEOs of those enterprises to jail, as well as destroying the Arthur Anderson accounting firm by charging its corporate entity with a crime. It is, frankly, foolish to say that President Bush somehow fostered an environment of law-breaking within the financial world.

Now let's look at the specifics of the financial crisis. The triggering event was the collapse of the housing bubble. Why did we have a housing bubble? Well, to be blunt we had one because the government-owned financial entities known as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae used a combination of strong financial incentives and political pressure to encourage banks to issue a lot of high-risk mortgages (high-risk either because the borrowers were relatively poor or, more often, because the loan was for nearly 100% of the value of the purchased property). They bought such mortgages, and were exceedingly influential in creating the entire market for Mortgage-Backed Securities, and their more risky cousins, the collateralized mortgage obligations. It was the massive buying and selling of the MBSs and CMOs by financial institutions who didn't really examine the risks associated with them which led to the explosion of the housing bubble, which was the root of the financial crisis.

And support for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was, alas, bipartisan. As I noted in The Foreseen Crisis, my own Congressman back then, Republican Richard Baker, was the leader in the fight to impose significantly greater regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a result of their financial risk-taking. His efforts were opposed by members of both parties, though also supported by members of both parties. For example, Greg Mankiw, who was chair of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisors in 2003, was in favor of Baker's efforts to strongly regulate Fannie and Freddie (as they were called). So too was former President Bill Clinton (though his support became rather tepid when his party's opposition to the reforms mounted). Opposed, however, were people like Democratic Representative Barney Frank (who became chair of the subcommittee overseeing Fannie and Freddie when the Democrats took over in 2008). In the end, Baker was unable to get any Democrats to vote with him, and while he had a majority of his fellow Republicans on the committee supporting him, he could not get enough Republicans to overcome the unanimous Democratic opposition to the bill in the House banking committee. (Note that I'm going mostly from memory here, so I might have a detail or two wrong, but this is the gist of what happened.)

When the housing market collapsed, taking with it a large chunk of Wall Street, there was bipartisan support, among national politicians, for what's now called TARP I, the financial bail-out under President Bush. While rank-and-file Republicans raised a number of serious concerns, in the end Congress passed Tarp I with bipartisan support, passing the House 263-171, with 172 Democrats voting yes, and only 91 Republicans voting yes. In the Senate, the vote was 74-25, and then-Senator Obama (at the time campaigning for the Presidency) voted Yes on the TARP program.

It was the TARP program, and related programs pushed by President Obama shortly after he was elected, which have contributed substantially to our national debt crisis. I think it is fair to say that most rank-and-file conservatives in the country remain opposed to TARP and its progeny, and think they were a severe over-reaction to the crisis by both President Bush and President Obama. So the fact that President Bush supported it hardly makes it "hypocritical" for conservatives generally to criticize President Obama for "destroying the economy with draconian taxes on energy." We didn't support President Bush when he enacted TARP, and many of us were screaming loudly to wait, at least for Just One Week before railroading such a monumental bill through.

Incidentally, I think that's a factor that Europeans, hearing about American politics mostly through media filters, just don't get. The Tea Party movement really, truly is a grass-roots movement of people who got really fed up at the federal government tossing money around like so much free candy. They're pissed at both sides. They're more pissed at the Democrats, because historically the Democrats have been bigger money-spenders than Republicans, and they tend to spend it on things that most of the Tea Party members don't like, but the Tea Party folks really are non-partisan in their opposition to spending. They've been very consistent, on the whole, in rejecting Republicans who won't toe their line on spending reforms. Most of the "moderate" Republicans who got pushed out of their Congressional positions by the Tea Parties in primary elections were not "fiscal conservatives, social liberals or moderates" as the myth would have it. Arlen Specter, for example, was not anywhere close to fiscally conservative. They're tired of spending money we don't have, and they pretty much oppose anybody, Republican or Democrat, who wants to continue spending money we don't have.

Now, back to the financial crisis. I would note in further defense of President Bush that while his Justice Department prosecuted Enron and Worldcom and Arthur Anderson and others, there have been NO prosecutions during the Obama Administration of any prominent financiers for their role in precipitating the financial crisis. Most of the big firms, even the riskiest, survived because of the bail-outs, and are still run by many of the same executives who presided over them while they were making all those risky investments. And the bail-out, by setting a precedent that the market will rely on in the future, has actually, to my mind, increased the risk that those financial officials will take even greater financial risks in the future. It would have been far, far better to have let the market take its course, so that the people who made the most foolish financial decisions were left holding the bag. A lot of decent people would also have been hurt in the process, but the next bunch of guys would think twice before taking on that much risk, because they would have seen the bad things that happened to the last guy who took that much risk.

And finally, there's this point. Even if one holds President Bush entirely responsible for the financial crisis (which is a truly insane and uniformed position to take), it would still not be hypocritical to oppose the imposition of "draconian taxes on energy" on the grounds that they would do serious damage to the economy. Would the economy be helped or hurt, in the short and medium term, by a massive increase in costs and prices which would be caused by the cap-and-trade tax increases on energy production and consumption? Clearly the economy would be damaged rather than helped by such. The cost of electricity rises, the cost of shipping rises, etc. Does it make sense to do more damage to the economy when it is already in a perilous state (even if you think that perilous state was caused by the last President)? Not to me, it doesn't.