John McCain, doing a feeble impression of the old and reasonable John McCain, says that Barack Obama's name will definitely appear on the ballot in Arizona. He's stating the obvious but it's nice to hear him say it.
David Weigel explains about all the "Birther" lawsuits and beliefs. By the way, the McCain campaign lawyer he quotes in there, Trevor Potter, is the gent you've seen occasionally on The Colbert Report advising Stephen Colbert about his Super PAC.
While we're on this subject: Dennis Donohoe wrote me to say…
I also am confused by what the Arizona Secretary of State is doing. However, I beg to differ when you say that people who questioned Bush's victory over Gore in Florida have dropped the matter. Many public figures (Democrats) still complain about and question the results of that election. I also seem to recall you referring to Bush's "alleged" victory over Gore. However, it may have been a joke or my memory may be bad. Just this past weekend we had a barbecue with friends and one of them brought up the Florida issue and still didn't accept that Bush had won and clearly has not dropped the matter.
You're right. There are Democrats who still moan about Bush/Gore but it's not the mainstream. You never saw Democratic leaders fanning the flames to anger their base the way many elected Republicans still do about Obama's citizenship. I also think there's more to complain about there, not about the count itself but about five Supreme Court Justices who many of us think threw the law and logic aside to just install the guy they wanted.
My own feeling for what it's worth is that we do a sloppy job of counting votes in this country. The banking system would collapse if it was as bad at counting your money as the election system is at counting your vote. I don't think people are stuffing ballot boxes. I think the folks opening them are doing a clumsy job at tallying what's in them. That bothers me as does this mindset of "If we won, the election was fair." I didn't see one Republican who said, "I'm glad Bush won but I'm real uncomfortable with how the counting was done…and how it was stopped."
But getting back to what I said: I should have remembered the Internet Rule that I made up long ago, which is that you need to avoid most absolute statements and stick in a "most" or other qualifier. If I write here that "No one in the world believes that John Quincy Adams is alive and running an Arby's on the planet Neptune," I'll eventually hear from someone who'll write, "That's not so. My uncle believes he has proof of that!" I should have just said that Democrats were more accepting of the loss to Bush than Republicans have been of the loss to Obama.