In one respect, Obama would be lucky if the Keyes and other lawsuits proved him ineligible: presidents evidently are not allowed to use email.

The Times reports that they would be confiscating his Blackberry and shutting down his email account.

Before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, there is the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A final decision has not been made on whether Obama could go against precedent and become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that was unlikely.

But would he be allowed to play on-line RPGs?

Philip J. Berg’s federal lawsuit challenging Barack Obama to document his US citizenship was dismissed last month in Philadelphia on the grounds that the plaintiff lacked standing.

Now, Alan Keyes, who does possess standing, having himself appeared on the California ballot this year as candidate for president of the American Independent Party, is suing the Secretary of State of California in Superior Court in Sacramento, asking the court to order that she refrain from certifying the election of the democrat party’s individual presidential electors until Barack Obama provides proof of his eligibility with respect to citizenship for the presidency.

Keyes v. Bowen pdf

In case Senator Obama cannot present proper documentation verifying his citizenship, he cannot be elected President of the United States, and SOS (Secretary of State) has a duty to bar the casting of votes by California Electors in support of his candidacy.

84. Based on all of the above, it is the duty of the SOS to obtain proper documentation of Senator Obama’s citizenship to confirm his eligibility for the office of the President of the United States.

If Keyes, Berg, et. al. are correct in their suspicions, it appears that Americans will have inadvertently elected Joseph Biden president.

Remember the Obama Campaign denouncing NRA criticisms as falsehoods and claiming Obama had no animus toward private gun ownership?

The Chicago Tribune reports an Obama transition team detail that provides a glimpse of the future administration’s real perspective on private firearms ownership.

A 63-item questionnaire for prospective members of Barack Obama’s White House team has upset the Illinois State Rifle Association because it includes a question on firearms that the organization reads as hostile to gun owners.

“Do you or any members of your immediate family own a gun?” asks Question 59. “If so, provide complete ownership and registration information. Has the registration ever lapsed? Please also describe how and by whom it is used and whether it has been the cause of any personal injuries or property damage.

Philip Terzian, in the Weekly Standard, waxes ironical on the dawning of the Chosen One’s Brave New America.

You may have noticed that some presidential Transitions are more equal than others.

Here is my theory: When a Democrat is succeeded by a Republican in the White House, it is seen as a civic regression, the triumph of dirty politics over clean statesmanship (see Willie Horton, the October Surprise, Lee Atwater, etc.). But when a Democrat replaces a Republican, it’s a national rebirth, a celebration of renewal and the natural order of things.

An expatriate Briton, now deceased, liked to tell the story of dining one evening in early 1969, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s first inaugural, at the Rive Gauche, a fashionable Georgetown restaurant favored by Jackie Kennedy and friends, long since gone. As their meal progressed, he and his companion observed that the place was swiftly filling up with people they didn’t know, or even recognize, total strangers. And then it hit them: The Republicans had arrived!

Of course, this mixture of alarm and condescension–Tip O’Neill to Ronald Reagan: “You’re in the big leagues now” (1981)–is very different from the tone currently surrounding Barack Obama, or the arrival of Bill Clinton–“Bill and Al’s Excellent Adventure,” the Washington Post (1992)–a decade-and-a-half ago. Certainly as far as the media are concerned, a Democrat-to-Republican Transition is an ominous thing, as the black clouds and killer insects descend on the nation’s capital; a Republican-to-Democrat Transition, by contrast, is a tribute to life, an Ode to Joy on the Mighty Wurlitzer of political Washington.

Catherine Vogt

John Kass, at the Chicago Tribune, has a little story of a middle school student’s experiment which tells us a lot about life in America today. Catherine Vogt’s Oak Park, Illinois could just as easily have been any other fashionable upper middle class community from coast to coast.

Just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

“McCain Girl.”

“I was just really curious how they’d react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters,” Catherine told us. “I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be.”

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain’s name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

“People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn’t be wearing it,” Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

“One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed,” Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

“In one class, I had one teacher say she will not judge me for my choice, but that she was surprised that I supported McCain,” Catherine said.

If Catherine was shocked by such passive-aggressive threats from instructors, just wait until she goes to college. …

One student suggested that she be put up on a cross for her political beliefs.

“He said, ‘You should be crucifixed.’ It was kind of funny because, I was like, don’t you mean ‘crucified?’ ” Catherine said.

Other entries in her notebook involved suggestions by classmates that she be “burned with her shirt on” for “being a filthy-rich Republican.”

Some said that because she supported McCain, by extension she supported a plan by deranged skinheads to kill Obama before the election.

Camille Paglia feels a reflexive, not exactly objective, need to bash Republicans every time she criticizes democrats. One must be even-handed, after all. Her observations on the failure of the MSM to investigate the democrat candidate and her defense of Sarah Palin, though, are well worth reading.

In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media’s avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama — even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama’s birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. …

Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the “short-form” certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don’t need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don’t like feeling gamed or played.

Another issue that I initially dismissed was the flap over William Ayers, the Chicago-based former member of the violent Weather Underground. Conservative radio host Sean Hannity began the drumbeat about Ayers’ association with Obama a year ago — a theme that most of the mainstream media refused to investigate or even report until this summer. I had never heard of Ayers and couldn’t have cared less. I was irritated by Hillary Clinton’s aggressive flagging of Ayers in a debate, and I accepted Obama’s curt dismissal of the issue.

Hence my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been “pallin’ around” with Ayers, in Sarah Palin’s memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. …

Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.

How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the State University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.

Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. …

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.

When Barack Obama named the Machiavelli of the democratic left, Rahm Emanuel, as White House Chief of Staff, the move, amounting to the selection of “a wartime consigliere,” was widely interpreted as evidence of the new administration’s intention of pursuing a highly polarized agenda, rather than, as Obama promised throughout his campaign, moving beyond partisanship.

Further signs of President-elect Obama’s intentions will come with ongoing appointments. Transition team chief John Podesta promised major cabinet-level appointments would be announced next month.

US News & World Reports published an unofficial transition flowchart (.pdf), currently circulating within the Beltway, which has some real eye-openers: e.g., Al Gore as “Climate Czar” and druggie-playboy-turned-Conspiracy-Theorist-and-Environmental-Prophet Robert Kennedy, Jr. as head of the EPA.

Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Walter Olson recently sounded the alarm about this possible appointment in Forbes, profiling Kennedy’s recent career promoting scary theories about childhood vaccinations causing Autism (complete with a CDC cover-up shielding the Drug Industry), air pollution causing Down’s Syndrome, and the Republican Party stealing the 2004 election.

The Politico blog describes government in action enforcing honesty and fairness in campaign finance. John McCain should be proud of his own contributions to the present system.

The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul.

Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

Through the end of September, McCain had socked away $9.4 million in a special fund to pay for the audit.

The Obama campaign does not expect to be audited, but spokesman Ben LaBolt said it would be ready in the event it is.

M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands, 1948.

In a now famous 2002 radio interview, Barack Obama regretted the Warren Court’s failure to break free from “the essential constraints placed in the Constitution by the founding fathers.”

In Newsweek, George Will discusses how Obama’s very candidacy represented a fundamental break with constraints intended by the founding fathers. Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate in US history to achieve election, in the manner of an Escher print, on the basis of no personal achievement beyond the competence and well-oiled organization of his actual campaign for the presidency.

James W. Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, notes that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Constitution created not three but four “national institutions.” They are the Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency—and the presidential selection system, based on the Electoral College. “The question of presidential selection,” Ceaser writes, “was just that important to the Founders.”

Under their plan, the nomination of candidates and the election of the president were to occur simultaneously. Electors meeting in their respective states, in numbers equal to their states’ senators and representatives, would vote for two people for president. The electors’ winnowing of aspirants was the nomination process. When the votes were opened in the U.S. House of Representatives, the candidate with a majority would become president, the runner-up would become vice president. If no person achieved a majority of electoral votes, the House would pick from among the top five vote getters. Note well: The selection of presidential nominees was to be controlled by the Constitution.

The Founders’ intent, Ceaser writes, was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the “popular arts” of campaigning, such as rhetoric. The Founders, Ceaser says, “were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction.” That deployment would invite demagoguery, which subverts moderation. “Brilliant appearances,” wrote John Jay in The Federalist Papers 64, “… sometimes mislead as well as dazzle.” By telling members of the political class how not to get considered for the presidency, the Founders hoped to (in Ceaser’s words) “make virtue the ally of interest” and shape the behavior of that class.

Barack Obama completed the long march away from the Founders’ intent. Most recent presidential candidacies have been exercises of personal political entrepreneurship; his campaign, powered by the “popular art” of oratory, was the antithesis of the Founders’ system.

The Progressives of 100 years ago wanted to popularize presidential selection by rewarding candidates gifted in the popular art of inflaming excitement through oratory. They opened a door through which, eventually, strode George Wallace, Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean and others.

Ceaser notes that the candidate whose path to the presidency most resembled Obama’s was Jimmy Carter. He, too, used an intensely personal and inspirational appeal to compensate for a thin résumé. Having courted the public with flattering rhetoric—promising “a government as good as the American people”—Carter came a cropper as president, partly because he was a one-man political startup. He had been selected by a process that rewarded running as a solitary savior, offering his personal qualities—his supposed moral excellence—as the key to national improvement.

Even CNN has noticed that the Obama Transition web-site has changed its mind about disclosing the specifics of the new administration’s intentions and agenda.

Somebody might start opposing them. Better make them a surprise.

Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.

Now they’re gone.

The “agenda” Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a “comprehensive and detailed agenda” that will “bring about the kind of change America needs,” with the individual pages deleted entirely.

A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft’s Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet “a strategic asset,” and establish a $2 billion fund to “counter al-Qaeda propaganda.” Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site. …

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: “That section of the Web site is being retooled.”

Under “Domestic Policy,” the transition web-site formerly promised to enact a variety of gun control proposals favored by anti-gun groups. The NRA Institute For Legislative Action still remembers what those were:

Making the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent.

In other words, restoring a ban on firearms which are not actually assault weapons by calling them “assault weapons,” relying on public confusion based upon cosmetic resemblances.

Repeal the Tiahrt Amendment.

The Tiahrt amendment, and appropriations rider introduced in 2003 by Rep Todd Tiahrt (R – 4th District Kansas) prohibits the release of federal firearm tracing information to anyone other than a law enforcement agency conducting a bona fide criminal investigation. Anti-gun activists oppose the restriction, because it prevents them from obtaining tracing information and using it in frivolous lawsuits against law-abiding firearm manufacturers.

“Closing the gun show loophole.”

An attempt to prohibit private sales of firearms by individuals not licensed as Federal Firearms Dealers.

“Making guns in this country childproof.”

“Childproofing” is a codeword for a variety of schemes intended to ban firearms by imposing impossible or highly expensive design requirements, such as biometric shooter-identification systems.

———————————

Hat tip to Ben Slotznik.

With all of President Obama’s accomplishments, is it any wonder that some are now promoting a national holiday in his honor?

Topeka Capital-Journal:

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation’s 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

“Yes We Can” planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.
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At 7:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Obama Cake will be served at the downtown McDonald’s, and a celebration is scheduled for 8 p.m. to midnight Jan. 20 at the Ramada Hotel and Convention Center, 420 S.E. 6th.

Peter Hitchens vents his spleen on America’s decline in the Daily Mail.

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

Read the whole thing.