We reported last Tuesday from Dr. Orly Taitz's hearing in Santa Ana. You remember Taitz, the Laguna Niguel “birther”/dentist/mother/lawyer/Weekly cover girl that's trying to sue Barack Obama out of office, right?
Taitz's lawsuit with more than a hundred of plaintiffs before federal judge David Carter in Santa Ana… it's not the only pot she's got cooking. The good doctor took a red-eye flight to Georgia this week to represent another plaintiff in court: Capt. Connie Rhodes, an Army flight surgeon who's objecting to being sent to Iraq on the grounds that the commander in chief is, supposedly, not actually the commander in chief.
If you're lucky enough to be one of the tens of thousands media outlets (at least, that's the number Philip Berg, Taitz's birther attorney nemesis, claims in his defamation lawsuit against her) on Taitz's emailing list, today you would have received an article from the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer recapping Taitz's appearance on behalf of Rhodes in U.S. District Court in Georgia on Monday. Taitz also posted the article on her blog. She says it's “incomplete,” but if all the quotes from it are true, then it's at least a pretty entertaining read.
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First off: The name of the judge is Clay Land. That's pretty great, right? Apparently, he wanted to confine the argument in court to the subject of whether or not Rhodes could be deployed. You can guess what Taitz wanted to talk about, though:
Taitz kept going back to Obama's birth certificate. Twice she called Obama a “usurper.”
Land repeatedly pointed out it was a courtroom where the rule of law was all that mattered.
“Whenever I give you a minute, you go off on these talking points,” Land said.
“We have not seen Mr. Obama's birth certificate,” Taitz responded.
“This is not a forum to lay ground work for a press conference,” Land said. “This is a court of law.”
In her final argument, Taitz asked Land why she had to prove a “Kenyan birth certificate” she submitted as evidence was authentic, yet her opponents didn't have to prove Obama had an authentic United States birth certificate.
“Who has the burden of establishing that the president of the United States is not eligible to serve in his office?” Land asked Taitz.
The judge then pointed out that burden fell on Rhodes because she sought the restraining order to stop her deployment.
And there's this:
At one point in testimony, Rhodes expressed concerns she would not be covered by the rules of the Geneva Convention if she were captured.
“If you don't have such protections, you can be beheaded,” Tatiz said at one point during her questioning of Rhodes.
That prompted Land to later say, “The possibility of being beheaded exists whether Obama, Bush, Reagan or George Washington was president. The question is not, is it a dangerous place? It is how does it relate to her claim that denies her constitutional rights under the current commander in chief.”
By Wednesday, the judge will issue an ruling on Rhodes' request for a temporary restraining order against her deployment to Iraq. Land already tossed out a similar suit filed by Taitz on behalf of a military officer who sought conscientious objector status. Conscientious objection to going to war for America… sounds a little commie, doesn't it?
