How can I write this caption when the good citizens of New Jersey haven't even voted? Simple--in any blue state, it is not enough to win an election, you must win it by a margin so vast, that it overcomes the inevitable shenanigans of Democrats (tell me again why we call them that?) and their allies in ACORN and the election board.

Corzine is entering the election within the statistical margin of error, which means it will be relatively easy for he and his cronies to steal the election.

Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York appear to have moved into the state. An independent candidate for mayor in Camden has already leveled charges that voter fraud is occurring in his city. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is taking advantage of a new loosely written vote-by-mail law to pressure county clerks not to vigorously use signature checks to evaluate the authenticity of absentee ballots, the only verification procedure allowed.

The state has received a flood of 180,000 absentee ballot requests. On some 3,000 forms the signature doesn't match the one on file with county clerks. Yet citing concerns that voters would be disenfranchised, Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey's secretary of state asking her "to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone." Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks "may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis" and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots. Those ballots, of course, would then provide a pool of votes that would be subject to litigation in any recount, with the occupant of New Jersey's highest office determined by Florida 2000-style scrutiny of ballot applications.

Absentee voter fraud is in danger of becoming a hardy perennial in New Jersey. Atlantic City Councilman Marty Small and 13 campaign workers were indicted in September on charges of conspiring to commit election fraud using absentee ballots. One worker pleaded guilty last month. In Newark, five campaign workers were indicted in August on charges involving absentee ballot fraud.

Democrats don't even bother denying these allegations, relying instead on the silence of their compliant media accessories-after-the-fact. The Obama Justice Department walked away from an open-and-shut case of voter intimidation in Philadelpia while David Axelrod today commented on the cancellation of the Afghan election runoff by stating that the election was redundant anyways since Karzai was "ahead in the polls". Apparently we don't need elections anymore, we just need to publish some polls to insure the safety of democracy--not that anyone ever manipulates those.

I'm not much a fan of French politics, but there was one aspect I thought showed promise--banishment to Devil's island.

Politico reports the White House comment that 'Birthers' aren't rational. It's linked by Drudge. I eyeballed the first 300 comments on Politico and didn't spot 1 that didn't want Obama to release his birth certificate. Politico is far from a conservative site.

As another 'Birther', Professor William Jacobson of Cornell Law School, writes at Legal Insurrection:

No one really knows who Obama is, because almost everything we know about Obama prior to his entering public life comes from Obama alone.

Friend says Governor says there is no birth certificate in Hawaii.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Governor's friend who said the Governor told him there was no birth certificate now recants. Is there something in the water in Hawaii? There's still no birth certificate and it looks as tho there's the votes in several state legislatures to require it of Presidential candidates in 2012. So this thing has traction with Drudge, Limbaugh, The Daily Mail, Arizona et al. Obama need only pick up the phone to kill the story. Go figure.
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Drudge, top dead centre.

I tend to agree with the Governor of Hawaii, it looks like there is no birth certificate. Anyone who examines this rationally must conclude that Obama has not shown that he's constitutionally qualified as a natural born citizen and is acting as tho he has something to hide.

Those who believe that this issue won't gain traction have this on their side: no leading politician, no leading journalist and no judge has dared ask Obama to release his birth certificate tho last August a CNN poll found that 58% of Americans have doubts that he was born in America.

This is an interesting test of The Whole Establishment v The Internet. My money's on The Internet.

UPDATE:

Knowing me as a long-time Birther, Dave Calder, who is not, generously referred me to this piece in very liberal Mother Jones, The Birther Plan To Block Obama's Reelection. Apart from the writer's message that the Birthers have a potentially effective plan ( is that 'traction'? ), the thing that strikes me is the casual assumption that Obama may be unable to produce a birth certificate. Hold on, whoa! Isn't that the reason why the White House calls Birthers 'irrational', that Hawaii has supposedly produced the functional equivalent of a birth certificate based on sight of the very private original in its records and that it's crazy talk to ask to see the original?

Has the plot changed or has it been lost?

Dave Adds: I also picked up on the "casual assumption" Mark notes above. I'm still firmly a "non-birther" because I don't share that assumption, but it is interesting to find that assumption among some liberals. It speaks volumes about the liberal mindset by indicating they would willingly override the Constitution to retain Obama (not to mention they support a President they don't fully trust). If not, they would be clamoring to resolve the doubt in their mind too. Instead the article reminds me of the Imperial officer's warning in Star Wars: "We've analyzed their attack, sir, and there is a danger."

MARK adds: Spot on. Bear in mind that a Birther isn't someone who denies there's a birth certificate, it's someone who wants to see it. Kinda like the government if you want a sensitive job.

This speaks for itself:

Something is rotten in the state of Hawaii:

Just a guess, but maybe the phrase 'original birth certificate' used by both Factcheck and Hawaii's health director, Fukino, is weasel words for 'original certificate of live birth generated in 2008 in response to a request from Obama's campaign.' After all how could Factcheck get to see the real original birth certificate if that's against the law without Obama's say-so?

Once again, there's no need to parse all this stuff or speculate on motives. 'The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.'

Notes:

- It's just plain fact that Obama is either hiding his birth certificate or it doesn't exist and he won't say so. If you strip away all the distractions (he's black, he's an American citizen, he's President, conservatives dislike him anyway) it's really just a matter of common sense: you want a job that has a "born in the USA" lock in the Constitution, fine, show your birth certificate like McCain. No birth certificate, no job. This is not brain surgery and it's not crazy. It's bleedin' obvious. Like the man says "The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."

- The birth announcements are evidence that Obama's parents or grandparents or a Hawaii hospital registrar told the Hawaii health department that Obama had been born. Nothing else. It is untrue that the birth announcements say he was "born here". Were he born on the moon it's perfectly feasible that his US mother or grandparents would want to register his birth with their state of residence. 2 of my children were born overseas and we immediately registered that in the USA, incentivised to ensure US citizenship and passport. Like Obama their mother is American and their father a British subject. To quote myself:

You can see the announcement here. It doesn't say "born in Hawaii" which is the point at issue. There's no dispute that Obama was born or that his grandparents lived at the address in the announcement. It's not known who made the announcement - his parents, his grandparents or whether it was automatically triggered by a birth registration at Hawaii Health Bureau. The column's headed "Health Bureau Statistics" atop a sequence of identically worded announcements. A similar announcement appears in another paper. Long/short - the birth announcement is evidence that Obama was born into a family resident in Hawaii.

- There's another view along the lines of "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've shown he's hiding something or else he's a liar. Politicians are liars. What else is new? Anyway who really cares whether he meets a technical requirement of the Constitution? He was elected fair and square, that's what counts." I have some respect for that view. It's internally consistent, if cynical. But the birth certificate issue is emblematic of the unprecedented fraud of the whole Obama phenomenon. So it's fine by me if he's copped on this issue, or palling around with terrorists, or using Indonesian citizenship to get college grants (unproven but entirely possible - we can't tell because he's sealed the records), or instrumentality in legitimizing the murder of babies which survive abortion (documented fact), or all the other stuff.

- It's amusing to wonder what Chris Matthews' game is. Until recently the liberals' strategy was suppression and marginalization of the issue. Matthews can't just tell the truth about the evidence as his audience's heads would explode. His current treatment of the issue is consistent with someone who thinks Obama has a big problem which is better resolved in time for liberals to rally round Hillary for 2012 rather than have Obama as a crippled nominee.

- It's quite likely that some states will require a birth certificate for the 2012 Presidential ballot. It is well established that states, not the feds, set the standard for eligibility documentation for federal elections. Should the issue go to the Supreme Court with the argument that the problematic 2007 Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth is conclusive and that it's unconstitutional to require a birth certificate, even if Obama won that victory, the price of victory, ie having to explain the inexplicable - why it's reasonable to withhold his birth certificate - that would be political suicide. So I conclude that it's likely that Obama will not run in 2012 unless the new documentation moves can be thwarted.

- There's a reality distortion field around Obama that's shielded him from many disqualifying facts in his background. The energy that powers that reality distortion field used to be the fantasies of liberals and others that projected messianic qualities onto Obama. Now the energy that protects Obama is just a refusal to admit error and give satisfaction to one's opponents. Many conservatives are still cowed by the distortion field and afraid of the 'crazy' label. They think it's true when they hear on tv that Obama has produced a birth certificate or that the birth announcements say where he was born. Would a journalist lie on tv in front of millions? Well, yes, but as a founder of the Republican Party said "You can't fool all of the people all of the time." Eventually reality bites.

Dave Comments: "Tingle-Legs" is trying to use the birther issue in an attempt to marginalize Republicans. Seems to me he thinks his side will benefit by keeping this issue in the media because he thinks it will drive independents away from the right.

The Hawaiian state health official who personally reviewed Barack Obama's original birth certificate has affirmed again that the document is "real" and denounced "conspiracy theorists" in the so-called "birther" movement for continuing to spread bogus claims about the issue. "It’s kind of ludicrous at this point," Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former director of Hawaii's Department of Health, said in a rare telephone interview with NBC. Fukino, sounding both exasperated and amused, spoke to a reporter in the aftermath of Donald Trump's statements on the NBC Today show last week questioning whether Obama has a legitimate birth certificate. [..........] She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files.

Ok, great, so let's see it and we can all shut up. But wait.....a new glitch....

Wisch, the spokesman for the [Hawaii] attorney general's office, said state law does not in fact permit the release of "vital records," including an original "record of live birth" — even to the individual whose birth it records. "It's a Department of Health record and it can't be released to anybody," he said. Nor do state laws have any provision that authorizes such records to be photocopied, Wisch said. If Obama wanted to personally visit the state health department, he would be permitted to inspect his birth record, Wisch said.

Naturally NBC omits that Wisch was chairman of Howard Dean's presidential campaign in Hawaii. But wait, what's this?

Hawaii Revised Statutes, Paragraph 38-13(a) specifies that the agency "shall, upon request, furnish an applicant a certified copy of any certificate, or the contents of any certificate, or any part thereof." Further, subparagraph C allows that copies of birth certificates "may be made by photograph, dry copy reproduction, typing, computer printout or other process approved by the director of health."

For a fisking and recently supplied certified copies of long-form birth certificates from Hawaii see here. At this point conservatives like Karl Rove and, alas, Ann Coulter who pooh-poohed the modest idea that Obama should show his birth certificate look like dupes. If it's there, fine, Obama's been toying with the rubes, ho-ho-ho. There's the small matter of all his other biographical records which have been wiped or sealed, but the birth certificate is basic.

This won't go away because it's so simple - why won't Obama show his birth certificate? Trump gets it and any a-political person gets it. You need to be sophisticated not to get it.