A Letter to the Arizona Legislature

(my conception of what may shortly be the new Arizona flag)

So, you’ve no doubt now heard about Arizona’s new Birther bill. If not, here is a concise review aptly describing what is but yet another stupidly-toxic batch cooked up in the meth lab of democracy that is our Arizona. “The Show us Your Penis State”, we might now call it. It has recently passed the Arizona House, and now heads to Governor “Headless” Jan’s office for her signature in what is yet another racist, nullifying tendency to do South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun proud.

Arizona entered the union on the fiftieth anniversary of its entry into the Confederate States of America, on February 14, 1912. Apparently, the Battle of Picacho Pass wasn’t the last battle of the Civil War to be fought in Arizona. They’re still doing their darned best short of introducing a resolution renaming the state ‘West Mississippi’. For more on the capitol meth mirth making, see cartoonist David Fitzsimmons’ special, “A Day at the Arizona Legislature”.

But now without further ado, it is my pleasure to reproduce an email a father of a friend wrote to his State Senator that was forwarded to me, addressing this “Birther” Bill. The opinions in the introduction above were my own. His opinions speak for themselves!

—————–

Dear Senator Barto:

This email is not about being a Republican or being a Democrat.  It is about having some integrity and specifically, your lack thereof.

As one of your constituents in Arizona’s 7th Legislative District I wanted to let you know that I am outraged as a taxpayer at the time, money and effort spent on the ridiculous AZ “Birther” bill sponsored by State Rep. Carl Seel.  As a genealogy buff with over 20 years at the craft, I was already aware that the so called “long form” that seems to be the subject of the conspiracy theorists only exists in bound form in Hawaii’s State’s Archives of the Dept. of Health.  Hawaii like many other states issues an abbreviated version to any person requesting a copy and this abbreviated version is called “Certification of Live Birth”.  Any idiot with an account on ANCESTRY.COM knows that.  So my first impression was that you and your colleagues that voted for the bill must simply be ignorant of the facts.  Being ignorant is not a crime but does call into question your fitness for legislative duties; i.e., if you don’t know or understand something you should take the time to research the subject.  But after I saw that the vote was strictly across party lines it gave me pause in that I had to conclude one of two options.  Either every member of the body that voted for the bill shares the same level as ignorance of the facts as you, or they are intentionally trying to mislead the citizens of Arizona.  I came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to conclude that all of you could be that ill informed.  When we eliminate that possibility the only thing that is left is an intentional ruse aimed at deceiving the citizens of Arizona.  Indeed there is a battle for the hearts and minds of the voters and you and your colleagues showed how low you will go to lie and mislead people.  You prey on the weak minded and uneducated.  Rep. Seel introduced a bill that had no basis in past violations and was clearly unneeded.  In doing so, you wasted our tax dollars, in fact, actually spent our money in an attempt to deceive us.  You should be ashamed of your behavior because it shows you as a dishonest person.  We elected you to do a job; we pay you to do a job.  It is not unreasonable that we should expect you to have a shred of integrity.

Perhaps you should ask the Hawaii State GOP chairman Jonah Kaauwai to produce his so called “long form” version of his birth certificate.  Moreover, Hawaii’s former GOP Governor Linda Lingle has repeatedly stated that the President was born in Hawaii and she has personally reviewed the original bound long form contained in the State’s Archives of the Dept. of Health.  Finally whether or not the President’s grandmother said something about him being born in Kenya is irrelevant.  Before her death in 1992 my grandmother said all kinds of strange things about me that were not true.  Talking about things I did growing up in the Delaware in the 1940s.  I was not born until 1959.  The last time I saw her alive she thought I was my father or my Uncle Pete.  That these so called “birthers” including you would attempt to leverage a statement like this simply shows your insensitivity to people who are dealing with aging parents and grandparents who are suffering from Alzheimer’s and dementia.  Your actions in that vein are nothing short of disgusting.  I am a Federal employee of the FAA and veteran (USAF) with over 30 years of Government service.  Your actions bring discredit to all of us in government service and I truly hope you are voted out of office at the next election because you are simply unfit to serve.  As for Rep. Seel’s comments that if the law is found to be preempted by Federal law– “we will fight it out in court” just shows how out of touch you all are.  Republican or Democrat–it does not matter.  We the citizens of Arizona are sick and tired of you and your colleagues Republican and Democrat alike, wasting our tax dollars on this type of partisan crap when our State has so many problems that need to be addressed and dealt with.  In summary, if you want to sit home on a Sunday morning in your underwear on your computer and research every goofy conspiracy theory out there that’s your business.  Perhaps you believe in ancient aliens—that they built the pyramids, maybe you think the US Government is behind 9/11, maybe you think Elvis is alive and well and living out his retirement in Boca.  But when you start spending our tax dollars on this crap you make the rest of us very angry.  Start doing the job we pay you to do.  I am sending this email to all my friends here in AZ, Republican and Democrat alike.  I hope it goes viral here in AZ and that you and your colleagues will be voted out of office next term because you have shown that you do not deserve to be there.

Here are the facts.  Please feel free to independently verify them:

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 questioning whether Obama has a legitimate birth certificate.  Trump, who says he is considering a run for president, repeated his claims on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, saying that “nobody has any information” about the president’s birth and that “if he wasn’t born in this country, he shouldn’t be president of the United States.”  No matter what state officials release on the issue, the “birthers” are going to question it, said Fukino. “They’re going to question the ink on which it was written or say it was fabricated,” said Fukino. “The whole thing is silly.”

As the top Hawaiian official in charge of state health records in 2008, when the issue of Obama’s birth first arose, Fukino said she thought she had put the matter to rest. Contacted by NBC, Fukino expanded on previous public statements and made two key points when asked about Trump’s recent comments.  The first is that the original so-called “long form” birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a “record of live birth” — absolutely exists, located in a bound volume in a file cabinet on the first floor of the state Department of Health. Fukimo said she has personally inspected it — twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign, when the communications director for the state’s then Republican governor, Linda Lingle (who appointed Fukino) asked if she could make a public statement in response to claims then circulating on the Internet that Obama was actually born in Kenya.

Before she would do so, Fukino said, she wanted to inspect the files — and did so, taking with her the state official in charge of vital records. 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. She then put out a public statement asserting to the document’s validity. She later put out another public statement in July 2009 — after reviewing the original birth record a second time.

“It is real, and no amount of saying it is not, is going to change that,” Fukino said. Moreover, she added, her boss at the time, Republican Governor Lingle — who was backing John McCain for president — would presumably have to be in on any cover up since Fukino made her public comment at the governor’s office’s request. “Why would a Republican governor — who was stumping for the other guy — hold out on a big secret?” she asked.  Her second point — one she made repeatedly in the interview — is that the shorter, computer generated “certification of live birth” that was obtained by the Obama campaign in 2007 and has since been publicly released is the standard document that anybody requesting their birth certificate from the state of Hawaii would receive from the health department.

The document was distributed to the Obama campaign in 2007 after Obama, at the request of a campaign official, personally signed a Hawaii birth certificate request form downloaded on the Internet, according to a former campaign official who asked for anonymity. (Obama was “testy” when asked to sign the form but did so anyway to put the issue to rest, the former campaign official said. The White House has dismissed all questions about the president’s birth as “fictional nonsense.”  The certification that the campaign received back — which shows that the President was born in Honolulu at 7:24 p.m. on August 4, 1961 — was based on the content of the original document in state files, Fukino said. “What he got, everybody got,” said Fukino. “He put out exactly what everybody gets when they ask for a birth certificate.”  Hawaiian officials say that the certification is, in fact, only one piece of abundant evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii. Joshua Wisch, a spokesman for the Hawaii attorney general’s office, noted that a public index of vital records, available for inspection in a bound volume at the Health Department’s Office of Health Status Monitoring, lists a male child named “Obama II, Barack Hussein” as having been born in the state.  In addition, as Factcheck.org and other media organizations have repeatedly pointed out, both of Honolulu’s newspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser on Aug. 13, 1961, and the Honolulu Star Bulletin, on Aug. 14, 1961, both ran birth announcements listing Obama’s birth on Aug. 4 of that year.  Even Fukino accepts that her comments are not likely to end the matter for the die-hard birthers. Trump and other skeptics have questioned why the original birth certificate has not been released.  But Wisch, the spokesman for the 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.  But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated “certification of live birth” form that everybody else gets — which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.

Eugene Riley
Cave Creek, AZ