We last heard from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio back in December, when a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, grilled his lawyer on the sheriff's alleged violation of an Arizona newspaper's First Amendment rights. (Disclosure: That newspaper is the Phoenix New Times, owned by SF Weekly parent company Village Voice Media.)
Arpaio emerged into the national spotlight again yesterday with an important piece of news: The "Cold Case Posse" he formed to investigate the circumstances of President Obama's birth has concluded that Obama's birth certificate is a forgery.
We happily direct you to the coverage of this momentous discovery by our sister paper in Phoenix, which has also published the 10-page "report" on his investigation Arpaio brandished at a press conference yesterday. As New Times news blogger Matthew Hendley put it, "Yes, the year is 2012, and yes, New Times and several dozen other media outlets just listened to more than two hours of a 'birther' conspiracy theory facilitated by Joe Arpaio."
The birther movement, if you remain blissfully unaware of it, is the name given to a functionally illiterate quest to prove that Barack Obama is a citizen of Kenya and/or the Abbasid Caliphate and/or the planet Vulcan. Since Obama is not an American citizen, birthers argue, he cannot constitutionally occupy the White House. A keystone of their theories is the contention that Obama's U.S. birth certificate, on record in his home state of Hawaii, is fake.
Arpaio apparently tried to toe the line, inasmuch as lines can be toed during an announcement like this, by claiming that he is "not accusing the sitting President of the United States of committing a crime." However, he called for a congressional investigation of the evidence he uncovered, and claimed to have identified an unnamed "person of interest" behind the forgery of Obama's birth certificate and Selective Service card, and the destruction of his immigration records.
By the way, here is the president's birth certificate.
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