Is Barack Obama a citizen? Less than half of Republicans think so.

This can’t be right, can it?

A forthcoming DailyKos/Research 2000 poll found 77% of Americans believe President Obama was born in the United States, 11% do not, and 12% are not sure.

Among Republicans only, 42% think he’s an American citizen, 28% do not, and 30% are not sure.

I’m sure we’ll get a chance to dive into the poll’s methodology shortly. But on the face of it, one is tempted to conclude the majority of Republicans are insane.

Is Barack Obama really an American citizen? (Yes.)

But not everybody thinks so. Why is that? That’s the question Ben and I take on in this week’s Scripps Howard column. My take:

First, some praise for mainstream Republicans: They’ve been as vigorous as anybody in smacking down the false rumors about Barack Obama’s origins. National Review, the conservative bible, emphatically denounced the “birther” allegations in a recent editorial. And Congressional backers of the birth certificate bill have, when pressed, said they believe the president is a U.S.-born citizen. It’s clear the GOP doesn’t want to die on the hill of fringe conspiracy theories.

Does that mean that conservative hands are clean in this smear? No.

Although they’ve distanced themselves from the loonier charges, Republicans have long tried to sell the public on the idea that there’s a “secret” Barack Obama whose darker instincts endanger the country.

Obama has, at various times, been depicted as a “secret” socialist, a “secret” black nationalist and a “secret” friend to terrorists — as a man whose professions of patriotism can’t be trusted, who is willing to sell out America because, well, he doesn’t love the country as much as you or I.

The Republican Party has been hard at work tilling the conspiracy soil. Is it any wonder that fringe flowers have bloomed? Again, this is a staple of GOP commentary — on radio talk shows, on Fox News and in other conservative bully pulpits.

And it’s not exactly a new trick: Remember the 1990s, when Bill and Hillary Clinton were widely accused in Republican circles of orchestrating the murder of Vince Foster?

Given that history, maybe GOP leaders are rejecting the “birther” theory not because it’s false, but because it’s bad politics for them. The most extreme conspiracy theories are more damaging to the Republican brand than to the president. Rejecting the fringe might put Republicans on the side of truth, but in this case that may just be a happy accident.

Fred Phelps is coming to Philadelphia

I spent eight years in Lawrence, Kansas before moving to Philadelphia — so I’m pretty familiar with the sight of a Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church (really, just his family) protest against teh gays. “God Hates Fags” yadda yadda yadda; one thing we learned about Fred pretty quickly was that it was best to ignore him. Of course, he doesn’t want to be ignored, which is why he keeps upping the ante — bringing his vitriol to the funerals of Iraq soldiers, celebrities and politicians.

He’s a dick, in other words.

Anyway, it looks like Fred’s crew will be in Philadelphia this weekend, protesting “outside a number of synagogues, Jewish institutions and events in Center City.” See, in addition to being a homophobe, Fred is also anti-Semitic.

In fact, one of the shortest and most pungent interviews I ever did was with Fred Phelps, right after the Anti-Defamation League condemned him for his anti-Jewish utterances. He got on the phone, and all I had to say was: “Reverend Phelps? The Anti-Defamation League has issued a report on you…”

“HAW HAW HAW!” he screamed in laughter. “I welcome anything those God-hating, Christ-rejecting pervert Jews have to say about me.”

And that was pretty much it. I’d gotten my quote.

Anyway: Despite Fred’s provocations, we Kansans have gotten pretty good at ignoring him — but then, it’s easy to ignore the air, because it’s all around you. Philadelphians, though, aren’t used to him. He’s going to be harder to ignore. But try. And if you can’t, well: Don’t do anything stupid. His family is full of lawyers, and they’re very, very good at suing people who mess with them.

Henry Gates might’ve acted stupidly. But he shouldn’t have been arrested.

I was enjoying a nice vacation when the Henry Gates brouhaha went down, and I more or less resisted the temptation to comment. Since I’m back, though, and since the topic still seems reasonably warm, let me throw in my two cents.

I’ve read the police report in the Gates case. Assuming that the cop presented an accurate picture of the incident — a mildly huge assumption — it’s still apparent Gates got a raw deal in being arrested. Was Gates loud, arrogant, rude and wrongheaded?  If the police report is correct, yes. Should being loud, arrogant, rude and wrongheaded be considered criminal behavior, even if to a cop? I don’t think so.

Conservatives have been piping up in defense of the cop in this case, and while I shouldn’t be astonished, I am. Conservatives – especially in recent months – talk a lot about government’s potential for tyranny. I often think such talk is overblown, but I also think it a useful reminder to be vigilant in defense of freedom.

But these last few days, I’ve watched the conservative movement mock Gates and largely defend his arrest. If conservatives see creeping tyranny in DMV lines and slightly higher marginal tax rates, why do they not see it in the power of a police officer to arrest a citizen in front of his home for the crime of being loudly disrespectful?

I think Adam Serwer is spot on here:

If Gates had been white, or had he been a conservative, had he been say, Sarah Palin, the right would be using the incident as another example of the ruthlessness of the Obama police state.

The right’s paranoia over guns is instructive in this instance. At least some of those rushing to buy weapons and ammo are not concerned simply about the prospect of gun bans, but about their ability to “resist tyranny” from the government. They’re talking about armed resistance–who else would they be violently opposing but armed agents of the state such as police?

Right. It undermines conservative claims to the defense of freedom when they celebrate and defend such arrests. They behave similarly when it comes to torture and eavesdropping. If conservatives want to cheer the police but complain about the possibility of a police state, I’m left confused, suspicious and cynical.

Arlen Specter is actually a loyal Democrat

Over on the home page, Brendan Skwire makes the case that Gov. Ed Rendell ought to shut up and butt out of a Joe Sestak challenge to Democrat-come-lately Arlen Specter. Now, at the Five Thirty Eight blog, Nate Silver produces evidence that the mere thought of a Sestak challenge has turned “independent” Arlen Specter into an ever-more-loyal Democrat:

Even if you’re a loyal Democrat, this isn’t really a reason to cheer Specter, is it? All it proves is that Arlen Specter blows in the wind, in whichever direction is most likely to help him hang onto his Senate seat. You want your elected officials to be responsive to their constituents, but more than that you want them to have some foundational principles that allow you to predict how they’ll serve you once elected. Specter’s “independence” is more accurately termed “unmoored.”

Walter Cronkite was just a TV guy

You know what? Walter Cronkite wasn’t so great.

I know, I know, we’re all supposed to be beating our breasts about Cronkite’s passing and lamenting how TV news was never the same after he retired and damnit, they just don’t make journalists like they used to anymore. And at first, I was tempted to join in the nostalgia: My first memories of news — such as they are — are memories of Cronkite, intoning in a baritone staccato how many days had passed since Americans had been taken hostage in Iran.

But you know what? Walter Cronkite really wasn’t that great.

To understand why he wasn’t so great, though, you’ve got to understand what lots of folks are lamenting this week: A bygone era of TV journalism that never really existed. Here’s a typical — and typically misguided — rant from litblogger Edward Champion:

In Cronkite’s time, it was the journalist’s job to question everything, provide dependable veracity, and present vital information for the public to consider. But today’s anchormen and editors are more concerned about money. When there’s a mortgage and a college tuition to pay off, the “journalist” knows damn well where his bread is buttered.

Right. And here’s Salon’s Glenn Greenwald:

So, too, with the death of Walter Cronkite.  Tellingly, his most celebrated and significant moment — Greg Mitchell says “this broadcast would help save many thousands of lives, U.S. and Vietnamese, perhaps even a million” — was when he stood up and announced that Americans shouldn’t trust the statements being made about the war by the U.S. Government and military, and that the specific claims they were making were almost certainly false.  In other words, Cronkite’s best moment was when he did exactly that which the modern journalist today insists they must not ever do — directly contradict claims from government and military officials and suggest that such claims should not be believed.

You know what shouldn’t be believed? Extravagant claims about how some journalists used to do things the right way. Because you know what? Walter Cronkite wasn’t that great.

Here’s why:

1. He was crushingly dull. Everybody remembers — or has seen the old videos — of Cronkite’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination, or the moon landing, the the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination. But any monkey can anchor a disaster and come away looking like a gray eminence. Look at what Hurricane Katrina did for Anderson Cooper’s career.

The truth is, the assassinations and other calamities spanned just a few days of Cronkite’s anchoring career. More often, a day in the news looked something like this in March 1977:

Blah, blah, blah. If you can get five minutes into this 10-minute video without being bored to tears, you’re a better human than I am. Lament Uncle Walter all you want, kids: There’s no way you’d sit through this stuff long enough to make him the most-trusted man in America these days. To the extent that Cronkite had influence, it’s because Americans had only two other TV news options at the time — ABC and NBC. No CNN, no FOX, nothing like that. People watched Walter Cronkite because there was nothing else to do before the good shows came on.

2. He was a sellout. Never mind the cigarette commercials he did — and botched. Never mind that he co-hosted the CBS Morning News with a puppet. A lion puppet, to be precise, Named Charlemagne. We will chalk these small embarrassments to the early days of television working its kinks out.

Cast that stuff aside, though, and the truth is that Walter Cronkite — his op-edding against the Vietnam War notwithstanding — didn’t exactly speak truth to power. He courted it. Check out these excerpts from his first half-hour nightly newscast for CBS:

There’s no other way to say it: He’s palling around with Kennedy. So, Mr. President, there’s this little civil rights problem down in Alabama. How’s that going to affect your re-election? It’s country-clubby horse-race journalism, the kind of stuff people like Glenn Greenwald say they hate unless it’s viewed through the hazy light of 45-year-old memories.

Oh, and check Cronkite’s smirk when he quotes Castro accusing the CIA of fomenting instability in Cuba. Because the CIA never would’ve done that, right? Right?

And far from being a riches-rejecting tribune of the people, Walter Cronkite owned a yacht. Which he used to go sailing with the Clintons.

3. He didn’t really make a big difference. This speaks to, as Greenwald says, Cronkite’s most celebrated act: Opining against American involvement in Vietnam. The anecdote that LBJ watched the broadcast and despaired: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Only the war went on seven more years. Most of the Americans who would die in Vietnam died after the Tet Offensive, and after Cronkite’s pronouncement. That’s not Cronkite’s fault, of course, but the telling of his story makes it sound like Walter Cronkite pushed the Vietnam War to its end. It didn’t.

Truth is, most of the journalists who dug up the truth about American involvement in Vietnam were newspaper and wire guys. David Halberstam of the New York Times was challenging Army generals in Saigon in 1963 while Cronkite was playing grab-ass with Kennedy in Hyannisport. The Pentagon Papers, which revealed the doubts America’s own leadership had about the enterprise, appeared in the Times and the Washington Post. These reporters didn’t need to take a trip to Vietnam, come back and make a celebrated speech. They laid out the facts, pointed out the discrepancies between the official story and the truth, and they did it for years and years and years.

Which leads me to the last point.

4. At end of the day he was a TV guy. Cronkite was, in the end, the grandfather of everything that Jon Stewart makes fun of every night. There’s no other way to say it.

The truth is, there’s never been a golden age of journalism. Oh, maybe for about six months in 1974 when Woodward and Bernstein were on a hot streak. But that’s about it. And it never existed for TV journalism. TV is good at wowing us, after all — good at showing us the Reagan assassination attempt, or the Kennedy assassination, or the space shuttle blowing up. It’s not so great at explaining how or why those things occur. Walter Cronkite was ringmaster for many of those memorable moments — which is why we remember him — but for the most part, that’s all he was. Anybody who says different is peddling ideological malarkey to make their own points about what the media needs to be.

And that’s the way it is.

I won’t be buying a Kindle until Amazon changes this policy

The great thing about paper books — however “old fashioned” they may be — is that once you buy a book, it stays bought. You might sell them or give them away, but the bookstore generally doesn’t steal it back from you.

Not so with the Kindle:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

After my declaration of Kindle non-buying, I had recently been drifting back to the idea of buying an e-reader. As it stands now, that e-reader won’t be a Kindle. I guess I’ll wait to see what Plastic Logic comes out with in a few months.

‘Family Guy’ nominated for a Best Comedy Emmy

An honor that never went to The Simpsons. I believe South Park expressed my feelings about this:

What we learned from the Sotomayor hearings: Nothing

Charlie Savage at the New York Times is usually indispensible, but there’s a certain level of faux naivete in today’s analysis of the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. We learned nothing about what kind of judge she’ll be, he says, because she talked a lot without betraying what her ideological inclinations will be on the bench:

On most issues — gun rights, the death penalty, campaign finance restrictions, the scope of presidential and Congressional power, property rights and affirmative action — she simply described precedents until she had talked for a while, and then stopped and waited for the next question.

The performance left some observers seeking meaning in the hearing’s absence of meaning. Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, said her approach might carry over into how she would behave as a Supreme Court justice.

“Frankly,” Professor Levinson said, “I’d be more than a bit surprised if she became one of its intellectual leaders on the court inasmuch as she’s been revealed as a basically cautious person.”

Savage tosses in a line at the very end of the piece about how it’s traditional for nominees to refrain from saying anything important. But it’s a throwaway line, one that doesn’t play nearly as big a role in his analysis as it should.

The truth is, every nominee — left and right — has been trained to go before the Senate to demonstrate that they understand the law without tipping their hands how they actually feel about it. This truth was acknowledged in the New York Times during Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2005 hearings:

But this week, as the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up its first Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 11 years, the bridegroom faces a new challenge: how to speak without saying anything.

For weeks, Republicans have been saying that Judge Roberts should not have to address hot-button topics, like abortion and freedom of religion, which could come before the court. Senators and conservative commentators are invoking the “Ginsburg precedent,” a reference to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was nominated by President Clinton.

“Justice Ginsburg declined to answer senators’ questions 55 times,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. The senator said he would love to know Judge Roberts’s views of court rulings on the taking of private property and the display of the Ten Commandments. “But,” he said, “I recognize that there are limits.”

And:

Judge John G. Roberts Jr. faced increasingly contentious questions from Democrats on Wednesday as he outlined his views on an array of legal issues, but repeatedly declined to address some of the most ideologically charged matters, including whether the Constitution establishes a right to abortion and a right to die.

Now this is hardly satisfying. But Sotomayor is following a well-worn path here. So why did Charlie Savage make it seem as though Sotomayor’s non-responsiveness in the Senate will make her a dummy on the Supreme Court?

The moon landing is a triumph that all white men can be proud of

Tom Piatak writes about the good ol’ days, when we got to the moon and the astronauts were white dudes:

They were selected to go into space for the simple reason that they were the best men for the job, a criterion that today is often no longer enough, as Frank Ricci discovered.  Today’s NASA seems as interested in trumpeting its commitment to multiculturalism and diversity as in the exploration of space, a commitment that would have struck the men who actually planned and achieved multiple landings on the moon as simply irrelevant to what they were doing.

America’s first astronauts may well have been the best men for the job, but the pool of qualified applicants — test pilots — was overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) white and completely male. Women were shut out of the job completely; and the moon race was going on precisely at the same time as the most intense years of the Civil Rights movement — unsurprisingly, African Americans didn’t have the same opportunities to obtain the qualifications they do now.

But Piatak gets wrong what lots of conservatives get wrong about the liberal commitment to diversity. The point is not to let any person strap themselves into an Apollo module merely for the sake of having a Skittles rainbow of colors in outer space; it’s to ensure that all qualified people — no matter their race or gender — have such opportunities, and that people who have historically lacked the opportunity to earn qualifications get that opportunity. It’s about expanding merit, not disbanding it. And that merit has been expanded: It defies common sense to believe that the only people qualified to be astronauts these days would be white dudes.