Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic - a blogger who tries to pretend that he's a real reporter - offers "Discourse Watch: Obama's Citizenship A Legit Topic?" (link) in which he falsely states that questions over where exactly Barack Obama was born are "specious" and have "been convincingly refuted". At his post, the last bit links to Snopes, which is not a reliable source.

In fact, where exactly Barack Obama was born has not been definitively proven. Ambinder might want it to be in the U.S., but that's simply wishful thinking. Statements from Obama himself are not proof, since he might not even know. JPEGs on websites - especially one run by an organization that receives money from a foundation that also funded an organization led by Obama - are not definitive proof. In fact, Obama has studiously avoided providing even basic information about his past, including not just his vault birth certificate but also his college applications and other documentation.

It is simply false to state that we definitively know where Obama was born. And, Ambinder is simply an establishment hack who wants to substitute what might be a useful fiction for the truth.

He also goes further:

Today, the Townhall.com spotlight [an advertising supplement] features a fundraising plea from a foundation [the United States Justice Foundation, link] that wants to prove, in court, that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president and therefore wants to do a whole lot of bad things involving amnesty, illegal aliens and the United Nations.

Hack that he is, Ambinder didn't include the whole ad, but presumably the "bad things" refers to ending birthright citizenship, something that is certainly a valid topic for discussion. And, presumably they want to block amnesty, something that is not a "bad thing" but which is supported by millions of Americans, and would be supported by a vast majority if they weren't constantly lied to by hacks like Ambinder.

UPDATE: No matter what I do, trackbacks I send to Ambinder's entries never show up. This site should have sent an automatic ping, I clicked the link twice in an attempt to invoke auto-discovery, and I twice got a success message from some PHP code I wrote to use a trackback class. It's almost like Ambinder doesn't have the guts to approve trackbacks that show how much of a hack he is.

UPDATE 2: He offers a follow-up called "Beating The Dead Donkey: Your Next President Is Eligible For His Job" [1]. I haven't verified the rest of it, but the following is a lie:

Well, his birth certificate is valid, for one thing; it's survived scrutiny and has been sanctioned as valid by the legal authority empowered to sanction such things. A conspiracy to cover this up is -- would be -- preposterous.

Once again: the state of Hawaii has not "sanctioned" his cert, they've only said it's on file. "Sanctioning" it - i.e., validating it - would be illegal without Obama's permission, something that he has not given.

[1] 8/24/10 UPDATE: The Donkey link above appears to have disappeared; it was originally at
marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/12/_citizen_yes_but_not.php. An excerpt is here.