Thomas Scheveck’s promulgation of lies about natural-born American citizen Barack Hussein Obama are small potatoes. The State Board of Elections didn’t refute them yesterday, but they did at least affirm my conclusion that Scheveck doesn’t understand the law. Secretary of State Jason Gant and his six fellow board members spent eleven minutes on the phone yesterday dismissing Scheveck’s effort to erase President Obama’s name from the South Dakota ballot.

Scheveck wrapped his birther baloney in the paperwork of a complaint under the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002, which allows any person to complain about irregularities in voting technology and procedures. The State Board of Elections ruled that Scheveck’s moaning does not fall within the jurisdiction of this federal law.

Scheveck didn’t call in to the meeting to make his point. Apparently he’s not interested in defending his words in a formal public setting. As Mr. Gebhart suggests, Scheveck also likely won’t learn his lesson and stop wasting our time and tax dollars. He will likely remain hidden behind his computer screen, latching onto whatever birther queen ant Orly Taitz tells him to do. Taitz filed a similarly incorrect HAVA complaint in Indiana on February 9, 2012; Scheveck filed his HAVA complaint in South Dakota on February 22, 2012.

Update 08:20 MDT: I wonder how Scheveck would have felt about his fellow Black Hills wingnuts promoting a Swiss citizen for President of the United States?

Robert Reich likely finds President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage as hunky-dory as I do. But he reminds us that bedroom morality is the smokescreen Republicans use to keep our minds off the cause of America’s real problems: boardroom immorality:

We’re not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We’re in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign “donations.”

Our crisis has nothing to do with private morality. It’s a crisis of public morality – of abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy and have led millions of Americans to conclude the game is rigged.

What’s truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults. It’s what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us [Robert Reich, "Of Bedrooms and Boardrooms," blog, 2012.05.09].

Some screwing is none of our business. But screwing by business for business is.

The Displaced Plainsman bumps the record player at the party with his cantankerous suggestion that the President himself may want to distract supporters from his numerous other policy failings. Citing Conor Friedersdorf, LK notes that the President has played Lucy with the football on medical marijuana, war in Libya, war in Iraq, whistleblowers, immigration reform, signing statements, and indefinite detention.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of the President’s recognition of equal rights in marriage. But Reich, LK, and Friedersdorf all make clear that once we get everyone married up to their preferred partners, we still have a lot of work to do to fix America.

Comes now desperate clinger Thomas Scheveck to waste our State Election Board’s time with his petition claiming President Barack Hussein Obama is not an American citizen and thus should not be allowed on the South Dakota ballot. (Scheveck recites the usual claims… and blog neighbor Tim Gebhart duly link-rebuts:

Now, granted, I don’t keep up on the news, particularly Fox News or what passes for “facts” on WorldNetDaily. But it only takes a trip to theSnopes website to see that the claims of Obama not being a natural born citizen, using a dead man’s Social Security number and having a forged birth certificate claims have been debunked. But then, I’m probably unaware that Snopes is owned and operated by the same Jewish banker Masonic cabal commanding the black helicopters of the New World Order [Tim Gebhart, "Elections + Obama + Zealots = Ballot Challenge," A Progressive on the Prairie, 2012.05.09].

Politifact also pretty thoroughly documents and disposes of every paranoid chain e-mail Scheveck will cite in his arguments… which FactCheck declared bogus before Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in 2008.

No evidence has been offered that Scheveck himself is an American citizen. Fortunately for Scheveck, Section 402 of the Help Americans Vote Act of 2002 under which Scheveck files his complaint allows any person to file such a complaint, not just citizens.

Unfortunately for Scheveck, HAVA Section 402 allows complaints addressing violations of HAVA Title III, which addresses states voting systems, the “total combination of mechanical, electromechanical, or electronic equipment (including the software, firmware, and documentation required to program, control, and support the         equipment)”. Scheveck is raising a Constitutional question about qualification to be placed on the ballot, not a legal question about the adherence of South Dakota’s ballot and voting technology to HAVA. Scheveck thus does not have a legal HAVA complaint, and the State Election Board can throw this illegal complaint out at its hearing tomorrow without saying a word about the lies contained therein.

Jeepers, I go to work for a few measly hours, and President Barack Obama has an epiphany about equal rights for citizens of different sexual orientations:

Barack Obama doesn’t sound like a man waging war on marriage. He sounds like a decent, thoughtful man who respects a variety of beliefs, who has looked for reasonable policy solutions, and who has decided he needs to take bolder steps to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens enjoy the same basic rights he and other fellow Americans do to enjoy the full legal rights of committed, loving relationships.

President Obama also doesn’t sound like a man who feels his marriage is threatened by all those non-heterosexual folks working on his staff and fighting his wars while hugging and kissing and raising kids. Barack and Michelle celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary in October. (My lovely wife and I mark Year 10 on Friday; we don’t feel threatened by anybody else’s kanoodling, either.)

Oh yeah, Mitt Romney offered a predictable, smiling response:

The big news, the good news, is that President Obama is doing the right thing. He’s standing for inclusion, for declaring more citizens full members of the American family.

On the political side of things, the President’s announcement may be a non-event. THe folks who love him for dropping Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and enforcement of the Clinton-signed Defense of Marriage Act will love him just a bit more for supporting same-sex marriage. The folks who think he’s waging war on marriage already thought that, and there’s no changing their minds.

But I take some pleasure in seeing the President announce his shift of conscience and policy in response to North Carolina’s decision Tuesday to ban same-sex marriage and civil unions. In the midst of a Presidential election, he’s willing to look in the eye of 61% of voters in a state he narrowly won in 2008 and say, “Folks, you’re wrong.” (Yes, he could have pulled the trigger Monday and tried to help defeat North Carolina’s odious amendment… but then the right would be screaming about the President’s interference in a state ballot issue, right?)

More important (though not as important as the transcendent morality and justice of the President’s decision) is the appearance the President gives of saying to Mitt Romney and the radical right running the GOP, “Game on.” On an issue the Right is counting on, the President is abandoning triangulation for straight opposition. The President isn’t speaking like a man worried that Romney could take him in November. The President seems to be daring Romney to tack harder right. And to motivate the Tea-ocrats and theocrats, Romney has to do just that.

The President today did the right thing. His clear words will force Mitt Romney to keep doing the wrong thing. GLBT brothers and sisters, congratulations on this latest step toward equality.

A couple weeks ago, we discussed the appropriateness of Governor Dennis Daugaard’s donning of military duds during his April visit to Afghanistan.

South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard visiting National Guard troops in Afghanistan, April 2012

My reasonable commenters offered protocol and security justifications for our civilian Governor to appear in official military gear in country. But check out the above picture from the Governor’s office: look behind the clutch of soldiers, and you’ll see civilians in civvies. Maybe those civilians are just decoys for enemy fire. Or maybe David Newquist is right and putting the Governor in camos is about PR for the military and acknowledging his nominal status as commander in chief of those Guard troops.

But check out the real Commander in Chief on his latest visit to our troops in Afghanistan:

President Barack Obama visits U.S. soldiers at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, May 2, 2012

On base, surrounded by soldiers… and not even wearing his suit jacket, never mind a BDU. Much like Lincoln (why yes, DWC, let’s make comparisons), President Obama makes clear in clothes his proper status as civilian commander of the military. His Secret Service guys don’t play soldier, either; they maintain their usual men-in-black presence.

This is a small issue, but the question remains open: why does the civilian governor of a state don a military uniform jacket to visit National Guard troops over whom he has little real authority, while the President of the United States appears before the troops he commands in the same foreign war zone in civilian shirtsleeves?

Hey, y’all remember Dan Lederman and John Thune and their SDGOP friends’ braying about President Obama’s clever strategy to win re-election by raising gas prices, right? Turns out that man in the White House can’t even do that right:

Officials at AAA South Dakota said residents can look forward to [gasoline] prices diving even lower in the near future.

“Headed towards summer, it would start to bounce back and that’s exactly what we’re seeing so I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve seen the worst of it and we’re on our way downhill which is great news for the summer driving season,” said Mark Madeja.

…Madeja said that the price of regular gasoline in South Dakota is $0.12 lower than one month ago.

The last time Sioux Falls had a summer spike in gas prices was in July 2008, where the regular gasoline was $4.04 per gallon [Ashley Kringen, "Residents Happy about Low Gas Prices," KDLT, 2012.04.28].

That last line points out the salient fact that President Obama or oil speculators or the Flying Spaghetti Monster blunted the gasoline price spike before it reached its historic high under President Bush.

So, Dan, John, GOP: gas prices up, you give Obama the blame. Gas prices down, you give Obama the credit, right? Right?!?

Or would you like to pretend to take the long view and continue to blame Obama for an overall upward gasoline price trend over the last three years? I might grant you that point and say that yes, President Obama did increase gasoline prices… by stopping the recession that killed global demand and caused gas prices to tank?

Or do you want to surrender to the Mitt Romney thesis that the President can’t set the price at the pump and move on to other issues?

Mr. Sohl highlights the distastefulness of Republican efforts to stoke our fear of the other to win elections. He also notes new data that shows that Republican freak-outs over illegal immigration may not provide a winning issue against President Obama. A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center finds that since 2007, the number of illegal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. has declined 15% from 7 million to 6.1 million.

The recession has accounted for much of that change, but so have decreasing birth rates among Mexicans. Worth noting, however, is the fact that the economic downturn has not descreased legal immigration: from 2007 to 2011, the number of legal Mexican immigrants in the U.S. increased from 5.6 million to 5.8 million. Still, the total Mexican-born population in the United States has dropped for the first time since the Depression.

This change in immigration changes leaves our Border Patrol agents less busy than they’ve been in four decades:

In spite of (and perhaps because of) increases in the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents, apprehensions of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally have plummeted in recent years—from more than 1 million in 2005 to 286,000 in 2011—a likely indication that fewer unauthorized migrants are trying to cross. Border Patrol apprehensions of all unauthorized immigrants are now at their lowest level since 1971 [Jeffrey Passel, D’Vera Cohn, and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, "Net Migration from Mexico Falls to Zero—and Perhaps Less," Pew Hispanic Center, 2012].

We are deporting Mexican illegal immigrants at records levels: the Obama Administration deported 282,000 in 2010.

The net result of these economic, demographic, and policy changes: after seeing the number of illegal Mexican immigrants surge above the number of legal Mexican immigrants in 2002 and stay above that level throughout the Bush Administration, the Obama Administration is seeing the number of illegals return to parity with the number of legals. That trendline shows that we can add illegal immigration enforcement to the list of Obama Administration policies that appear to be working.

Update 06:54 MDT: Interestingly, I just heard an immigration expert on the  Marketplace Morning Report contend that militarizing the border during the Bush Administration actually increased the illegal immigrant population here, since illegals found it more difficult to head back home to Mexico.

Mitt Romney’s trip last week to the Ohio drywall factory that closed during the Bush Administration speaks volumes about the GOP’s disconnect from economic reality. Romney and the Tea Party (there’s an odd couple) need you to believe that President Barack Obama is killing jobs by expanding the government.

Actually, President Obama is killing jobs… by shrinking government:

Compare President Obama’s first term to President Bush’s, and you see a phenomenon we’ve discussed previously: Contrary to crazy cries of creeping socialism, President Obama has overseen a steady decrease of folks working for the government, with the predictable exception of the Census hiring spike. The Obama decrease in public payrolls is so far almost 3%. At this point in President George W. Bush’s first term, we had seen an increase in government of over 3%.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, President Obama has been gaining ground on private-sector job losses. As of February, the net private-sector job losses under President Obama stood at 274,000. At the same time in President Bush’s first term, the private sector had lost ten times as many jobs, 2.7 million, since inauguration.

If President Obama had simply behaved like that socialist President Bush and raided the private sector to hire lots more government workers, President Obama could right now brag of a net increase in jobs under his administration. Let’s see Mitt Romney drop by a closed Extension office and campaign on that issue.