Canny McPhee Hangs Birthers Out To Dry!!!

Well, it looks like more and more judges are getting fed up with the Birther pseudo-legal crap. Washington State Birther Linda Jordan went through the wash and rinse cycle in record time.  She filed the challenge on Monday, August 27, 2012, and she was dismissed WITH PREJUDICE on Wednesday August 30, 2012.

Once again, The Fogbow and Jack Ryan are there first with a copy of the decision:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/104349709/WA-2012-08-29-JvSoS-Reed-Court-Opinion-and-Decision

Here is a pdf in case you have trouble using scribd:

Washington State Birther Spanking Order

Judge Wm. Thomas McPhee went out of his way to castigate not just Ms. Jordan, but the whole Birther movement. Here are some excerpts which deal specifically with the Birther issue.  I wrote them out this way so they are copy and pastable. I have bolded and paragraphed them a little to make it easier to read:

The birther movement has been a subplot on the fringe of the political spectrum in the U.S. for about five years. Recent history is not the first time it has been raised. In 1880 Chester Arthur, the son of a father of Irish citizenship and a mother of U.S. citizenship, was rumored to have been born not in Vermont where all credible evidence established his birthplace, but in Canada. This unfounded rumor did not receive niuch traction, perhaps because the internet had not been as fully developed then as it is now.

In the past five years all manner of court action has sought to entice courts to enter into the process of determining the qualifications of two persons who were nominated for president in 2008, and one who has served; a process reserved in the U.S. Constitution to the congress, not the courts.

The vast majority of these cases however involved President Obama. The first wave occurred during the presidential campaign of 2008, and involved issues similar or identical to those raised in this case. Plaintiff Linda Jordan cannot be unaware of those cases. None were successful. Most were dismissed on standing grounds; a question not directly at issue in this case because plaintiff purports to bring this case under RCW 29A.68.011, subparts 1 and 3, which confers standing on any elector. But others, including Ankeny v. Governor of State of Indiana, 916 N .E.2d (2009) addressed the merits.

I began this explanation of my decision with some history of the birther movement, and I conclude with some more history. Even after the election of 2008, so-called birther lawsuits continued. A lawyer, self styled as the leader of the birther movement, filed a series of lawsuits on behalf of service members seeking to avoid deployment to war zones on the grounds that President Obama did not legitimately hold that office. Some federal courts eventually forbade him from filing any additional lawsuits.

One such case, Rhodes v. MacDonald, 2009 WL 2997605 (M.D. Ga. 2009), contained a passage that particularly resonated in light of the type of evidence plaintiff offers in this case. The federal district court wrote, in relevant part at paragraph 3:

[Plaintiff] has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as President of the United States . . .. Then, implying that the President is either a wandering nomad or a prolific identity fraud crook, she alleges that the President “might have used as many as 149 addresses and 39 social security numbers prior to assuming the office of President.

Acknowledging the existence of a document that shows the President was born in Hawaii,  Plaintiff alleges that the document “cannot be verified as genuine, and should be presumed fraudulent.” .. . Finally, in a remarkable shifting of the traditional legal burden of proof, Plaintiff unashamedly alleges that Defendant has the burden to prove his “natural born” status.

Thus, Plaintiffs counsel, who champions herself as a defender of liberty and freedom, seeks to use the power of the judiciary to compel a citizen, albeit the President of the United States, to “prove his innocence” to “charges” that are based upon conjecture and speculation. Any middle school civics student would readily recognize the irony of abandoning fundamental principles upon which our Country was founded in order to purportedly “protect and preserve” those very principles.

In her Memorandum, plaintiff Jordan seems to anticipate that the Secretary of State would seek dismissal under CR 12(b)(6), and argues that she has presented substantial evidence that President Obama’s birth certificate is forged. She quotes the standard for substantial evidence. “Substantial evidence exists where there is a sufficient quantity of evidence in the record to persuade a fair-minded, rational person of the truth of the finding.”

She offers as evidence the musings of the infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpiao, supported by the report by a part-time computer programmer last employed in May 2007, who examined a copy of the pdf image of President Obama’s birth certificate and concluded that the original was forged.

She offers the affidavit of a private investigator who opines that President Obama is fraudulently using the social security number of another person who was born in 1890 and was issued the social security number in 1977. The investigator is not able to identify the person  and does not offer any insight as to why this hypothetical person waited until he or she was 87 years old before applying for and receiving a social security number. The rest of plaintiffs evidence is the standard fare of the blogosphere that has been floating around since 2008.

In light of this evidence, I close with an additional passage from Rhodes v McDonald, cited above. On the issue of evidence~ the court wrote at paragraph 4:

Although the Court has determined that the appropriate analysis here involves principles of abstention and not an examination of whether Plaintiffs complaint fails to state a claim under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)( 6), the Court does find the Rule 12(b)( 6) analysis helpful in confirming the Court’s conclusion that Plaintiffs claim has no merit. To state a claim upon which relief may be granted, Plaintiff must allege sufficient facts to state a claim to relief that is “plausible on its face.” For a complaint to be facially plausible, the Court must be able “to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged” based upon a review of the factual content pled by the Plaintiff. The factual allegations must be sufficient “to raise a right to relief above the speculative level.”

Plaintiffs complaint is not plausible on its face . . .. Unlike in Alice in Wonderland, simply saying something is so does not make it so. 

I do not usually devote so much time quoting the decisions of other courts in other cases. I do so here to make the point that just as all the so-called evidence offered by plaintiff has been in the blogosphere for years, in one form or another, so too has all the law rejecting plaintiff’s allegations. I can conceive of no reason why this lawsuit was brought, except to join the chorus of noise in that blogosphere. The case is dismissed.

Plaintiff Jordan, and the other Birthers who are filing this crap in the courts should be ashamed of themselves. But they won’t be.

Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter

Note 1. The Title and Captions. For ESL’s,  Canny McPhee is a word play based on film’s Nanny McPhee, who constantly is one step ahead of bratty little children. Which ties in with the image. Canny means, having or showing shrewdness and good judgment.

The Innuendo Song and Dance is from the song, Dirty Laundry by Don Henley:

We can do “The Innuendo”
We can dance and sing
When it’s said and done we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that Crap is King
Give us dirty laundry!

The idiom “hang out to dry” means:

1. to not support or help someone;

2. to defeat or punish someone;

3. to get someone into trouble, especially by making them take the blame for a bad situation.

Note 2. Here is a link to the onset of Jordan’s legal action as reported at ObamaReleaseYourRecords:

http://obamareleaseyourrecords.blogspot.com/2012/08/linda-jordan-files-obama-general.html