Greatkim, rather than withdraw from posting your speculative threads, I hope you will do something like mark them "Speculative: (Title)" - or similar, so that people who have no interest in participating in these explorations will pass them by rather than find offense. I think the way you pull strings of research together in search of answers is a good thing, and there is nothing wrong with questioning without making any claim one way or another. Eventually, this is how all evidence on this site is confirmed or thrown out. Carry on, I say.

First, I never suggested that we alone could solve any of these problems, merely that the people here would be fantastic to discuss them with and potentially come up with some intriguing ideas.

Second, WHAT debate? I've said this many times before and I'll say many times more, it seems... THERE ISN'T ANY BIRTHER ISSUE TO DEBATE. Read that statement again, because it's plain as day. It was wholly fabricated by Berg and Orly is simply running with the ball after he fumbled it. It doesn't exist. It never did. There isn't any debate that needs to be ended. Whether PJ ever came into existence or not, any case that came before a judge was going to get tossed on lack of legal standing. That's the fact of the matter. What we HAVE had an impact on is forcing certain birthers into silence and submission through exposing their backgrounds and lies, mostly for our own amusement. I never said the topic should be abandoned.... merely that our tactics should change going forward. Mocking them on THEIR turf only encourages them to keep fighting and posting everything they say on ours has the same effect. Behind the scenes is where the actions against the morons should be taken if the true purpose is to negate them as much as possible. I wholeheartedly encourage contacting authorities, the media, etc. when it comes to keeping tabs on the morons. I find that our current approach has become somewhat hypocritical, which is no one's fault in particular. We can't continue to bait the birthers to their faces and expect them to go away. That is ineffective, it doesn't work. It's time for the strategy to change.

I more or less agree. I try not to engage in Birther-mocking for the sake of mocking itself, but I do often find myself compelled to engage Birthers for the purpose of rebutting and correcting outright factual falsehoods. Like a Freeper the other day who claimed that there's no audio of Obama's second oath (there is). Or the article writer who claimed that Obama's half-sister said she was present for a Kenyan birth (pure urban legend). Even if I can't change some people's minds, I think it at least does some good to keep small falsehoods from growing into full-blown mythic memes.

I join the chorus in agreeing that the birther issue is not so silly that it's not worth obsessing over anymore. In fact, that will never be true. The percentage of Americans who believe the Holocaust is a fiction is appalling, and it has now been 64 years since the last concentration camp was liberated. The same is true of Americans who think that 9/11 was an act of treason by our own government. These are not trivial problems or silly facts in my opinion. I am deeply offended and angered by the fact that actual people are so ignorant and stupid as to believe them, and I have had to deal with such people in my actual life before.

The reason such ludicrous myths survive for as long as they do is that most people don't obsess over the details, so there's no way to rebut a moron armed with lies about the issue. If a truther claims all of the 9/11 hijackers have been found to be alive and prospering in other parts of the world, what are most people going to say to contradict that? Usually: nothing. What if someone tells you that photographs prove that there were never any crematory ovens constructed in Dachau?

For the morons obsessed with the wrong side of these issues, there always must be smart and reasonable people obsessed with the right side.

I totally agree with Justin. The legal outcome of birther actions has never been in doubt. The end result is however in their favor: there are now scores of people who doubt Obama's legitimacy. And elections are won or lost by no more than 3-5 % of the electorate swinging. Just bringing up the argument and seeing it spread on hundreds of forums is in itself a victory. Democrats have obviously not learned yet how to contrast right wing smear tactics. When people are capable of saying that death panels will come with health care reform they are capable of anything, and they will do anything to achieve their scopes, The smearsters that bashed Kerry are the same now spinning the birth in Kenya story. They are allways attacking and we are allways playing defense. Exposing them as liars is not sufficient, we have to trace the ringleaders, and expose the conspiracy.

Seems to me we documented her lies before she scrubbed her site. That may be useful.

We discovered that CEL3 was writing her stuff, against the rules. That may be useful.

The information gathered here was possibly used by some who have contacted the California Bar.

The bloggers who are exposing Orly's lies don't get the information from her site. I know many come here to read. I know I notified 4 well-known bloggers last night and gave the link to where the discussion was taking place here. I saw another was notified by a PJ-er. Orly's press was not flattering today.

Bloggers don't necessarily understand the procedures and/or how Orly abuses them without the discussions here.

And, sometimes poking the nest seems to help. The phone calls to Orly during birther radio shows have given clues to some things. That radio clip featuring Mario & Charlie was revealing as well.

The statistics show that a large percentage of Americans still question the President's Birthplace. Until Orly and the Birthers are shown to have fabricated the issues, I think the discussion is valid.

The majority of members who participate in discussion in the eligibility area of the forum also particpate in the General Politics section. Though, admittedly, I do much of that outside PJ's.

Discussions on policy issues alone is gone. The TeaBaggers/Birthers/Deathers have arrived. Politics will never be the same. They aren't the majority. But, they are a loud and obnoxious bunch who have somehow managed to steer what the talking points are. Even if they are crazy to begin with.

You may argue that PJ's is complicit by giving them a voice. Fox News has done that. Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and others have provided their voice. Should they go unchallenged?

Just my opinion here, but I would really prefer to see the eligibility forums keep going. I really enjoy the conversation there! I've also started branching out in to some of the other forums because I know the eligibility stuff fill start to fade, and I figure I might as well get going on what else is out there.

My preference would be to just leave the eligibility forums going - they draw in a lot of new users and are the most active forums on the site. Eventually as there's less and less news to be reported or commented on, the eligibility forums will die out on their own. In the meantime, as they gradually start slowing down, many of the new people who find the site through the eligibility section will also migrate to the more general sections, and traffic (not to mention conversation) in those areas will just naturally pick up.

Hear, hear. I also do not consider the birthers to be a new type of thing, or birther suits to be a new type of thing. I also view them as more than just a joke. Birthers, or at least birther litigation, is simply a new manifestation of an old problem: the abuse of the court system by political extremists. While someone like Orly's legal antics and arguments are laughably pathetic, dealing with these cases consumes real judicial resources, costs real money to taxpayers, and clogs up dockets.

Most of the people involved in this nonsense have shown up previously and are quite familiar to those of us who watch extremist kook litigation as a hobby. Andy Martin has been around for some time. People like Charles Edward Lincoln III with his bogus mortgage redemption scams have been around for some time. And people with these theories and patterns of abusive litigation, often described as "paper terrorism," have often been connected to real terrorists. Timothy McVeigh sprang from the same febrile swamps of delusion as birthers.

If PJ ever decides to dump the eligibility issues entirely, there are probably uses for the information gathered and discussed about birthers. As an example of what I'm talking about, the Anti-Defamation League once put together an excellent casebook of idiot legal arguments for use by attorneys who have to deal with these clowns.

With the growing body of case law doing away with these arguments once and for all, which will soon include appeals court rulings (assuming they are not all curt per curiam smackdowns), there is less and less ability for "real" lawyers to make these arguments without being sanctioned for frivolous litigation. While Orly's arguments are patent nonsense, she ended up sanctioned more for her abusive motion practice than the vacuousness of her arguments. Now, the arguments themselves are likely to be sanctionably frivolous.

There are also a number of bases to cover in such a document, since there are various tactics likely to be more or less successful against this kind of suit. Obviously, the standing issue is of particular importance to disposing of birther suits rapidly, and conduct warranting an imposition of sanctions should, as a policy matter, be pursued more aggressively in these suits than against ordinary citizen-litigants, and a procedural roadmap for speedy dismissal, sanctions awards, arguments for dismissal with prejudice instead of with leave to amend, etc. would save people from having to reinvent the wheel.

I'm not sure whether a casebook format would be more useful, or some other format, perhaps more resembling a bench memo or an in-house memo or a law review article or some other format. It's possible the end result would be worthy of publication in a law review or journal of some sort.

Just throwing around ideas; I can't really devote the time to such a project that it would deserve, at least not in the near term.

There is not much debate on PJ because the occasionally birther or right wing conspiracist that wanders in here has no appetite for the truth, and they quickly leave.

Debate is not quite the proper word, perhaps it should be called the monitoring and exposure of the entire right wing anti-government pro-militia hate movement that has been around for many years. Bitherism is just the latest variety of US hate groups. There are birthers active in the KKK, hardly a new group. The Klan is alive and growing today in some areas of the country. If you admit that the birthers are one part of the right-wing Hate and Intolerance extremists in the US today, then PJ should continue our exposure of these despicable and dangerous people.

You should all read, or reread this Fall 2009 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Our job is in no way completed.

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=1092
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Personally, I think it would be fantastic if we could put together a Wiki-type project that would be able to address not only the birther's in particular, but rather the general spectrum of sovereign citizens, militias, tax protesters, religious extremists, domestic terrorists and other right-wing threats. The only thing is that instead of having editing available to just everyone (because if we did that, we'd spend so much time un-writing all the changes the extremists would keep making, nothing else would get done) we'd need to have a way to restrict editing privileges to trusted users. Spreading the workload would help make it easier to get info into the document and with the range of knowledge and experience we have here, we could probably create a reasonably reliable resource.

Unfortuantely, as much as I would love to, I can't volunteer to take charge of something because sometimes my disabilities just give me too much trouble to focus on something like that - and it can last anywhere from a few days to a couple months, and I've learned it's just not fair for me to even try.