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From Camille Paglia, a left-leaning pro-choice feminist (who also has nice things to say about Sarah Palin):

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

As I've watched Obama gracefully step up to podiums or move through crowds, I've been reminded not of basketball, with its feints and pivots, but of surfing, that art form of his native Hawaii. A photograph of Obama body surfing on vacation was widely publicized in August. But I'm talking about big-time competitive surfing, as in this stunning video tribute to the death-defying Laird Hamilton (who, like Obama, was raised fatherless in Hawaii). Obama's ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer.

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. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.

But 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. Blame for the failure of this issue to take hold must also accrue to the conservative talk shows, which use the scare term "radical" with simplistic sensationalism, blanketing everyone under the sun from scraggly ex-hippies to lipstick-chic Nancy Pelosi.
( . . . )
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.

It's worth reading the whole article.

Let me back up and declare that I'm not saying the arguments are valid, only that I'm trying to explain what the arguments are.

During the primary season, there were people trying to claim McCain was not a "natural born citizen", which was obviously not the case. Both of his parents were U.S. citizens, so he is "natural born" by the Naturalization Act of 1790, even though he was born "out of the limits of the United States", in Panama. (Just for trivia fun, the first U.S. presidential candidate to face the same accusation was McCain's predecessor in the same Senate seat that McCain holds today: Barry Goldwater, who was born in Arizona when it was a U.S. Territory.)

There is also an argument, which I have not researched (so don't take it as valid), that if Obama was born in Kenya (or anywhere else outside of the U.S.), that his mother had not been a resident of the U.S. for the 5 years supposedly required after the age of 16, for jus sanguinis to apply.

Then there is the additional argument, which I casually referred to in my first post, that if Obama was legally adopted by his Indonesian stepfather Lolo Soetoro, his U.S. citizenship (if any) was forfeited. This argument holds that Indonesia and the U.S. did not allow dual citizenship at the time, and that public schools like those Obama intended were restricted to Indonesian citizens. Thus, if he became a citizen of Indonesia, he was no longer a U.S. citizen. He would actually be an illegal immigrant at this point, an interesting twist on things.

Please understand that I do NOT hold that any of these arguments are valid; I am merely presenting them by way of explanation. I spent a couple of months of the GOP primary season swatting down the "McCain isn't a 'natural born citizen'" argument, even while I campaigned against him, and I've also spent much time making the same defense of Obama even though he obviously was not my candidate!

Philip Berg, the plaintiff in this case, is a lifelong Democrat. He supported Hillary Clinton, which is why he started these claims. I am not learned enough to know if his claims are valid, but I do try to present every option.

I should note that snopes.com, normally a reliable fact-checker, cannot be trusted on political issues, and has been shown to display a notable partisan bias in favor of Democrats.

Kevin

It's not just the birth certificate. If he was legitimately born in Hawaii, but adopted by his Indonesian stepfather, then his citizenship lies in Indonesia.