It's Sunshine Week - a celebration of access to government records (sunshineweek.org) - and some in Hawaii want to go the other way: their state House Judiciary Committee was presented with a proposed bill that would allow state officials to ignore requests about the Obama citizenship issue. Needless to say, such a move would be cheered by plenty of borderline fascists on the mainland too; they'd like nothing more than for everyone to accept the official story, stop asking questions, and just move on. Such a desire shows, among other things, how incompetent they are.

From this:

"Sometimes we may be dealing with a cohort of people who believe lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy," said Lorrin Kim, chief of the Hawaii Department of Health's Office of Planning, Policy and Program Development.

So-called "birthers" claim Obama is ineligible to be president because, they argue, he was actually born outside the United States, and therefore doesn't meet a constitutional requirement for being president.

Hawaii Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino issued statements last year and in October 2008 saying that she's seen vital records that prove Obama is a natural-born American citizen.

But the state still gets between 10 and 20 e-mails seeking verification of Obama's birth each week, most of them from outside Hawaii, Kim said Tuesday.

A few of these requesters continue to pepper the Health Department with the same letters seeking the same information, even after they're told state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest. Responding wastes time and money, Kim said.

Note also that Mark Niesse of the Associated Press may have either lied or at least been unclear above: only the second Fukino statement said that he was a "natural-born American citizen", not the first. And, she's not qualified to make such a judgment, although her statement was approved by Hawaii's AG. To those who want to sweep this under the rug, an AP reporter lying and an AG making a legal determination behind closed doors doesn't matter.