Baseball: the Roy Halladay deal–it’ll be the Phillies

Which contender will pop for ace Roy Halladay, who has shown he can beat the Yanks and Red Sox?
Let’s eliminate the Dodgers. Would the Jays take Andre Ethier plus some rag taggers? nahh….and the Dodgers aren’t going to trade Russell Martin or Clayton Kershaw.
Yankees: forget it. Jays don’t want Chamberlain or Hughes, or Melky Cabrera.
Red Sox: Clay Bucholz is tempting. But overall the Red Sox don’t feel the need, unless they think the Yanks might get er done.
Phils: This is the team that really needs Halladay, and has the prospects to trade: Kyle Drabek, Michael Taylor, Jason Knapp and Dominic Brown.
Cardinals: sorry, they don’t have the prospects. ditto the Angels.

UPDATED: Barack Obama’s birth certificate looks like mine.

Many years ago, I requested a copy of my birth certificate from Michigan and got one back from them that looked pretty much like this except it was mustard-colored. Nobody ever questioned it. I used it to get a passport, professional licenses, etc. It IS a birth certificate. This is what states issue as proof of birth. Everyone knows this.
Oh, by the way, Hawaii became a state in 1959. FYI. Oh, and by the way,

In 2001 – the state of Hawaii Health Department went paperless. Paper documents were discarded. The official record of Obama’s birth is now an official ELECTRONIC record Janice Okubo, spokeswoman for the Health Department told the Honolulu Star Bulletin, “At that time, all information for births from 1908 (on) was put into electronic files for consistent reporting,” she said.

And of course his birth was announced in two newspapers at the time: The Advertiser on Aug 13, and the Star Bulletin on Aug 14:
And there is at least one person who recalls the event:

“I may be the only person left who specifically remembers his birth. His parents are gone, his grandmother is gone, the obstetrician who delivered him is gone,” said Nelson, referring to Dr. Rodney T. West, who died in February at the age of 98. Here’s the story: Nelson was having dinner at the Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki Beach with Dr. West, the father of her college friend, Jo-Anne. Making conversation, Nelson turned to Dr. West and said: “‘So, tell me something interesting that happened this week,’” she recalls.

His response: “Well, today, Stanley had a baby. Now that’s something to write home about.”

The new mother was Stanley (later referred to by her middle name of Ann) Dunham, and the baby was Barack Hussein Obama.

“I penned the name on a napkin, and I did write home about it,” said Nelson, knowing that her father, Stanley A. Czurles, director of the Art Education Department at Buffalo State College, would be interested in the “Stanley” connection.

She also remembers Dr. West mentioning that the baby’s father was the first black student at the University of Hawaii and how taken he was by the baby’s name.

“I remember Dr. West saying ‘Barack Hussein Obama, now that’s a musical name,’” said Nelson, who grew up in Kenmore and went to Hawaii in 1959 to be in Jo-Anne’s wedding party. When Nelson was offered a job as a newspaper reporter and photographer at her friend’s wedding reception, it led to her living in Hawaii for 47 years.

Of course, for these insaniac birthers, there can be no proof. Whatever proof is produced, will not be enough for the whacko Republicans who control that party…..there’s always another conspiracy theory ready…

Sean Braswell:

One of the most famous examples of a well-packaged but verifiable historical fiction going dangerously unchallenged was the 1915 blockbuster silent film, The Birth of a Nation (also known as The Clansman). Directed by D.W. Griffith, the story follows two families—one Northern and one Southern—through the Civil War and then Reconstruction in the ante-bellum South, including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The film shattered box-office records and was praised by critics for its innovative filmmaking techniques. Yet beneath the craft lay the unmistakably racist message that Reconstruction was a failure, that blacks could not be integrated into civil society, and that the rise of the KKK was necessary to restore order and protect white women from marauding white men.

Birth of a Nation was divisive from the moment it was released, prompting protest from the newly formed NAACP and riots in several major cities. But while critics praised the film’s technique and President Woodrow Wilson privately called it an “unfortunate production,” no chorus of mainstream voices arose to condemn the film’s message. And, left unchecked, the myths propagated by the film not only led to violence against blacks in the immediate aftermath of its release, but also provided an invaluable propaganda tool to KKK recruiters for decades after.

It is a free country. Lou Dobbs, Liz Cheney, and other Birther-sympathizers in Congress are free to question the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birthplace and Presidency all they want. But that does not mean that news outlets should employ or give airtime to such purveyors of the palpably false, or let their words float into the ether. Every minute of additional coverage, every extra line of print allows the virus to spread and infect others susceptible to such race-baiting and conspiratorial thinking.

Maybe this vote by the House will put a sock in this nonsense:

The U.S. House of Representatives said happy birthday to the 50th State yesterday, peripherally stepping into the “birther” fray with a resolution that notes, “President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961.”
…
The House approved the resolution that was offered by U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, a personal friend of Obama’s father. Hawaii became a state on Aug. 21, 1959, and this year is the 50th anniversary.

The measure, House Resolution 593, passed without objection, with 378 aye votes and 55 representatives not voting. Voting in favor were 158 Republicans and 220 Democrats.

P.s….the passport thing:
in 1981 U.S. citizens could travel freely to Pakistan. And Obama is not a citizen of Kenya.

Jeff Sessions, racist, and now hypocrite racist

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. As in Jefferson Davis and Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard. Sessions is the chief interrogator of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court.Sessions’ nomination to the Federal bench was

… rejected by the very same committee twenty years ago for ‘racially insensitive’ statements asserting that he thought that the Klan was OK until he found out they smoked ‘dope’ and calling white civil rights lawyers ‘race traitors.’Nor did it help Sessions when he admitted to routinely referring to an African-American attorney who worked for him as “boy” — even once warning that attorney to “be careful what you say to white folks!”

And it wasn’t just talk, either.

Sessions, it was disclosed, had a disturbing record of indicting black civil rights activists as US Attorney in Mobile, Alabama. Invariably the cases were later dismissed. He was also accused of not investigating the spate of black church burnings that swept the state of Alabama the year he became attorney general.

Sessions further injured his own reputation when he prosecuted a black couple who suggested in a news article that US Attorney Sessions may have been less than diligent during his investigation of a jail lynching of a black man accused of shoplifting.

During his own confirmation hearings, Sessions at first lied but later admitted that “I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American and Communist, but I meant nothing by it.”
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Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers–including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.–on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the “Black Belt” counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions’s focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. The activists, known as the Marion Three, were acquitted in four hours and became a cause c?l?bre. Civil rights groups charged that Sessions had been looking for voter fraud in the black community and overlooking the same violations among whites, at least partly to help reelect his friend Senator Denton.

On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “un-American” and “Communist-inspired.” Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” In his confirmation hearings, Sessions sealed his own fate by saying such groups could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy. Hebert testified that the young lawyer tended to “pop off” on such topics regularly, noting that Sessions had called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for litigating voting rights cases. Sessions acknowledged making many of the statements attributed to him but claimed that most of the time he had been joking, saying he was sometimes “loose with [his] tongue.” He further admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “piece of intrusive legislation,” a phrase he stood behind even in his confirmation hearings.
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