And here's an article about the birther issue:

Investigations have concluded that President Obama was, in fact, born in Hawaii in 1961, as he has always said.

Just this week, on the news program "Good Morning America" on ABC, George Stephanopoulos produced a copy of the president's Certification of Live Birth, causing a potential presidential aspirant, Michele Bachmann, the Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, to say that the issue appeared settled. In 2008, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case challenging that proof.

But the so-called birther controversy stubbornly refuses to go away.

The issue, which has simmered at the fringes of the nation's political discourse for years, even got a recent burst of attention when it was adopted as a talking point by Donald Trump, a potential Republican presidential candidate.

The result is that what had been a wispy tale of purportedly buried documents and cover-ups designed to hide the president's supposed birth in Kenya — a tale that has been dismissed by most mainstream members of both political parties — now appears to have staying power as the political season lurches toward 2012.

A New York Times/CBS News Poll released Thursday found that 57 percent of adults surveyed nationwide said they thought Mr. Obama was born in the United States, versus 25 percent who said he was born elsewhere.

But digging deeper into the numbers shows striking disparities along party lines and regions of the country. Among Republicans, for instance, 33 percent said they thought Mr. Obama was born in America, while 45 percent said his birth occurred in another country. The nationwide telephone poll, conducted April 15-20 with 1,224 adults and a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, said that majorities in all regions of the nation think the president was born in the United States, but that those majorities were smaller in the South and Midwest than in the Northeast and Far West.

Around the country, the issue has proved to be a sure winner for the conservative base, with bills popping up in more than a dozen state legislatures to force future presidential candidates to prove their citizenship. Those legislatures, though, have been much more reluctant to turn this issue into concrete law.

Birther bills have foundered or fallen dormant in at least five states and are still being debated in more than a half-dozen others. In Arizona, where both legislative chambers passed one such bill, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, vetoed it this week, calling it "a bridge too far."

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