Citizens for a Greater America was started by Mike Toomey, Perry’s former chief of staff and now a lobbyist for Merck, a global health care company. He has been described by the director of Back to Basics, a Texas-based liberal PAC, as cozy with big business and “Perry’s best friend.”

According to an article in iWatch news, a Perry fundraiser said he received a fact sheet about Citizens for a Greater America when he asked Toomey whether Perry’s Super PAC, Make Us Great Again, “had a 501(c)(4) arm for people who wanted to remain anonymous.”

The new tax-exempt group has been formed in addition to at least five Super PACs that can accept unlimited checks for Perry’s campaign, but is the first that isn’t legally obligated to reveal its donors.

“After a year of debate and a century of trying, after so many of you shared your stories and your heartaches and your hopes, that promise was finally fulfilled,” Obama told more than 3,000 people packed into the University of Iowa Field House gymnasium, located just around the corner from where he initially made his promise nearly three years ago. “And today, health insurance reform is the law of the land.” [...]

“Over the last year, there’s been a lot of misinformation spread about health care reform. There has been plenty of fear-mongering and overheated rhetoric,” Obama said. “And if you turn on the news, you’ll see that those same folks are still shouting about how the world will end because we passed this bill. This is not an exaggeration. Leaders of the Republican Party have actually been calling the passage of this bill ‘Armageddon.’”

You can read the full story here.

Typically, a front-running campaign might hold fewer events to minimize the snafus that might occur and affect the race. The incredible thing about Coakley’s verbal and visual stumbles is that none occurred while stumping in Massachusetts. Her (perhaps unfairly mangled) “no terrorists in Afghanistan” malapropism happened during the final debate. Her gaffe about preferring to meet local politicians than to “stand outside of Fenway, shaking hands, in the cold” was made in a Boston Globe interview. When she left the trail last week for a Washington, D.C., fundraiser — one of the most baffling campaign decisions I’ve ever seen — she got negative storylines about lobbyist ties and the accidental knock-down of a conservative reporter. And her stumbles about whether “devout Catholics” could work in emergency rooms and who Curt Schilling was both happened in radio interviews.

In retrospect, Coakley had plenty to gain by working the campaign trail. By avoiding it for weeks, she created a massive opening for Scott Brown.

The overflowing crowd at Worcester’s Mechanics Hall on Sunday, expecting the joke, roared in approval. The former Red Sox pitcher, a hero to Massachusetts sports fans for driving the team to an upset pennant victory over the New York Yankees in 2004, had flirted with a Senate run before passing on it and endorsing State Senator Scott Brown. Twice in the past week, he had been roused to write angry blog posts after Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, the state’s attorney general, made baffling gaffes seemingly at sports fans’ expense. First, she derided the idea that “shaking hands outside of Fenway, in the cold,” was more worthwhile than meet-and-greets with local politicians. Then, she claimed that Schilling was a Yankees fan.

For Brown’s supporters, many still unable to believe that their candidate was increasingly being seen as the likely winner of Tuesday’s election, Coakley’s remarkable run of verbal snafus were proof that the Democrat was aloof, didn’t care about them, and expected the seat of former Sen. Ted Kennedy to be handed to her without a fight.

“You know who Scott Brown’s best campaigner is?” said Chris Pinto of Worcester. “Martha Coakley. Every time she opens her mouth, he goes up a point.”

Before Brown’s rally, hundreds of supporters gathered outside the venue to wave signs and catch a glimpse of the stars he’d brought with him–Schilling, football great Doug Flutie, former “Cheers” star John Ratzenberger. They taunted a small line of Democratic counter-protesters by making references to other Coakley gaffes.

“Can you spell Massachusetts?” chanted one group of Brown backers, mocking an early Coakley attack ad that gave the state an extra “E.”

“No terrorists in Afghanistan!” yelled Wayne Kilburn, a Connecticut voter who walked through the crowd ringing a bell, mocking an argument that Coakley made about America’s strategy in central Asia. “No terrorists in Afghanistan!”

Coakley’s troubles on the stump have done more than sink in with voters through the clutter of the campaign. At the “People’s Rally,” they allowed Brown to portray himself as an everyman candidate, an insurgent who didn’t even mention his party affiliation, up against a “machine” of outsiders and elitists. Speakers stuck to the script, talking about the thrill of come-from-behind victories. Only Ratzenberger touched on ideology, with an off-topic musing about how Democrats had become a party of “Saul Alinsky and Woodstock.” Brown’s daughter Ayla, a six-foot-tall basketball player at Boston College, was more on point–she simply informed the crowd that her team had beaten Georgia Tech today, and that her father could pull the upset, too.

For most of its 24 minutes, Brown’s speech eschewed ideology and focused on the “machine” out to get him. “You’re my machine!” he said, pointing into the crowd. “And you! And you! And you! And you!” If elected, he’d “open the back rooms” and tell the Senate to “start over” on health care, because that’s what voters were screaming for Washington to do.

“One of the great things about being an independent,” said Brown, “is you meet voters of every kind.”

Brown only made reference to two presidents. The first was Barack Obama, who he chided for showing up to a Coakley event in Boston. Obama, said Brown, should recognize an unlikely political story when he saw one. “Whoever heard of a guy from Wrentham getting elected to the Senate?”

The second president Brown acknowledged was John F. Kennedy. Brown’s first TV ad had Kennedy morphing into the GOP candidate, both of them talking about tax cuts. Democrats’ failure to punch back on the ad was an early sign of their failure to grapple with the election. Brown, unbowed, promised that he’d work “like Kennedy” and back “across-the-board tax cuts for businesses and families.”

Brown’s supporters weren’t quite so nonpartisan. Only a few that TWI spoke to said they’d backed Ted Kennedy in the past; none had voted for Obama. In the rallies before and after the speech they waved signs with slogans like “Tea Party Republican” and “B.O. Lies What Do You Expect.” Some greeted Brown’s arrival by yelling that “the real Americans are coming!” But most of them transferred their anger at the White House into full-throated support for Brown. A health care worker named Sarah Farren even held up a sign that read “Scott Brown for President.”

“Yeah, I’m getting ahead of myself,” said Farren.

President Obama will campaign for Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley on Sunday, POLITICO has learned, a sign that Democrats are deeply worried about her prospects and the party’s 60-seat majority.

Here’s the full video of Hoffman’s speech at the Watertown rally last night, which gives a sense of just how un-politician-like he is.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during his presidential campaign (WDCpix)

In the final months of the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign learned of a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that asked the state to strip Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of the Democratic nomination on suspicion that he was not an American citizen. The complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief was filed by Phil Berg, a former deputy state attorney general who left government in 1990 for a series of gadfly political campaigns. His last round of notoriety had come when he filed RICO complaints against George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and multiple members of the Bush administration for “accountability” for the 9/11 attacks. Still, Berg’s complaint had gotten glancing local media attention, and the Democratic National Committee’s counsel had filed a motion to dismiss it. One lawyer who was doing some work for the campaign was tasked with reading Berg’s lawsuit and gauging its chances of success.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“The conversation was along the lines of ‘this is idiotic, but explain to me why,’” said the lawyer, who spoke under condition of anonymity to TWI. “I looked at whether the lawsuit was going to be dismissed. I said yes.”

Berg’s main problem was the one that has bedeviled the small, but growing, number of lawyers and amateur attorneys who have filed frivolous lawsuits against President Obama on the “question” of his American citizenship. He and they have run up against the doctrine of standing, which requires plaintiffs to prove that they have been or will be harmed by the law that they’re challenging. Like the people who challenged McCain’s citizenship in 2008 and 2000, or the people who challenged Dick Cheney’s right to run for vice president because he, like George W. Bush, resided in Texas, “birther” plaintiffs have failed again and again to get their cases heard because they lack standing.

“We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” said Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain presidential campaigns. “The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.”

But the flawed conception of the many “birther” lawsuits, coupled with the inexperience and foul-ups of “birther” lawyers, have only fed the frenzy over Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president of the United States. A survey of the lawsuits filed against Obama reveals a reliance on widely debunked rumors, bogus stories sourced back to web sites, affidavits from “experts” who refuse to provide credentials or even their real names, and frequent and blatant misunderstandings of basic constitutional law. The dismissal of “birther” lawsuits has allowed conspiracy theorists to believe that the information in those suits is accurate–a belief that manifests itself in the emails, phone calls, and town hall meeting rants that have pushed the theories into the mainstream media and the halls of Congress.

While they ruled out any chance of the “birther” lawsuits holding up in court, lawyers for the McCain campaign did check into the rumors about Obama’s birth and the assertions made by Berg and others. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” said Potter. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

“Birther” lawyers and bloggers, who gained an unexpected prominence in the mainstream media, have consistently denied Hawaii’s own records of Obama’s birth. They have also built up a corpus of information which, they argue, would invalidate Obama’s claim on the White House even if he was born in the United States. These rumors, and the inability of “birther” lawyers to test them in court, have proven pervasive enough to fuel the conspiracy theories.

After the DNC requested a dismissal of Berg’s lawsuit, he responded in a Sept. 29, 2008 filing that cited numerous Internet rumors and incorrect citations of American and international law. Berg cited “Wikipedia Italian version” and “Rainbow Edition News Letter” as evidence that Obama had not been clear about which hospital he was born in; he alleged that Obama must have been adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian man who married Obama’s mother when the future president was five years old, because he attended elementary school in that country. Because a contemporary school record referred to Obama as “Barry Soetoro” and listed his nationality as “Indonesian,” Berg argued that there was “absolutely no way Obama could have ever regained ‘natural born’ status.”

“That’s just completely wrong,” said Mitzi Torri, an Arizona-based immigration lawyer. Torri pointed to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which sets a high bar for renunciation of American citizenship. According to the INA, an American can only forfeit his citizenship if he commits treason, if he makes a “formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state,” or if he becomes a citizen of another country “upon his own application or upon an application filed by a duly authorized agent.”

“Berg wants to say,” said Torri, “that this document from a school in Indonesia, which has no signature, which has no standing whatsoever, is more important than Obama’s birth certificate or our immigration law.”

Berg’s filings made other claims that have shown up in anti-Obama lawsuits and in the proliferation of “birther” Website. One relies on an audio tape of Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama, who lives in Kenya, being goaded into saying (through a translator) that the future president was born in Kenya before quickly correcting herself. (A doctored version of this tape, which cuts off before the retraction, is posted on YouTube.) Another claim: Obama traveled to Pakistan in 1981, when it was illegal for an American to do so, suggesting that he used a non-American passport. The problem is that there never was any such ban.

“We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since,” said Noel Clay, a spokesman for the State Department.

“We got that from someplace,” Berg told TWI on Thursday. In an email, he added his paralegal was “reviewing” his files on Pakistan. Yet the false claim appears in Orly Taitz’s lawsuit on behalf of perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes, which argues that Obama visited Pakistan “when entrance to Pakistan was banned to Americans, Christians and Jews,” proof that he gave up his American citizenship.

In October 2008, when Berg v. Obama et al was dismissed for lack of standing, the attorney told sympathetic reporters that the DNC had “admitted” the truth about Obama’s citizenship by not rebutting his claims. Joseph Sandler, who filed motions to dismiss Berg’s case and other Obama citizenship lawsuits as general counsel, explained why claims like these are never debunked by lawyers for the president.

“When you file a motion to dismiss, to try to get the case thrown out before any factual inquiry is made, the facts that the plaintiffs put into their complaint are assumed to be true,” said Sandler. “You have to show that even if the facts were true, they don’t have a case.”

As a result of that, extremely questionable theories and “facts” have become linchpins of ‘birther’ theories. ‘Birthers’ who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth often cite the expertise of “Dr. Ron Polarik,” a self-described “expert in computer graphics” who maintains a blog at Townhall.com and has recorded a video, in which his face and voice are blurred, explaining how the image was “forged” with Adobe Photoshop. “Polarik” submitted an affidavit in support of Orly Taitz’s Keyes case that is signed “XXXXXXXXXXX,” making it inadmissible.

“If it ever comes down to it,” explained Gary Kreep, another lawyer for Keyes, “we’ll use his real name.”

Some anti-Obama claims take the issue entirely out of the hands of the president or Hawaii officials. Carl Swensson, a conservative activist from Georgia, has organized “Citizens’ Grand Juries” that have indicted the president for treason. Mario Apuzzo, a New Jersey attorney, has sued Obama on the grounds that he never was, and never could be, a “natural born” citizen. Both men pass over precedent for “The Law of Nations,” the 1758 treatise by the 18th century French scholar Emerich de Vattel. In one translation, de Vattel writes that “the natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” That’s enough for some Obama ‘birthers’ to say that Obama might be a citizen of Kenya–as one constituent of Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) put it–but he cannot be a natural born citizen of the United States. “It’s what the founding fathers used,” explained Swensson.

Constitutional scholars consider this a dubious argument at best. “The framers of the 14th Amendment thought about this,” explained Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center. “They wanted to make sure that the children of slaves who were brought here illegally, slaves who were brought into this country after the end of the slave trade, would be citizens.”

Apuzzo is not convinced. He argued that the founders wrote the phrase “natural born citizen” for a reason; to make sure that no one with “blood ties” to another country could become president. He speculated what might happen if Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), whose parents were Indian, became president. “India is a nuclear power. Here comes the president, who says we have to go in and attack Pakistan. Are we doing that because we are defending India’s interests? You just don’t know. You can’t have Constitutional rule if you allow this.”

Because of the dismissal tactics used by lawyers for the president, John McCain, and both political parties, believers in these various theories and readings of the Constitution argue that they have never been proven wrong. Although Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) explained his support of a House bill that would require copies of birth certificates from presidential candidates by saying it would “put all this to rest,” the very frivolity and obscurity of the challenges to Obama suggest the beginning of a conspiracy theory that will never be debunked to the satisfaction of its believers.

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A review Blagojevich‘s campaign contributions show that he received at $80,000 in contributions from firms with connections to state road building companies last summer and fall, including a $10,000 cash infusion the day the governor announced a series of toll road projects worth a total of $1.8 billion.

This series of toll-related projects was later mentioned in the federal criminal complaint filed against the governor in December. The complaint alleges that Blagojevich told an associate on Oct 6 that he was deliberately underplaying the announcement to see if a particular contractor would make good on a promise to raise $500,000 for Blago before the end of the year.

Tollroad News hints that Blagojevich, while not officially in charge of these toll projects, had an unusually close relationship with the corporation that manages Illinois’ toll roads. Other states with major public toll systems, like Pennsylvania and New Jersey, have stronger firewalls between the governor and the corporation to minimize untoward political pressure.

Blagojevich is an extreme example, but corruption at the state and local levels should not be discounted when the merits of the stimulus package are debated.

For comparison, I dug up a presentation (PDF) by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe from the same month.

The result: The Obama campaign was spot-on in its assessment of its prospects, while the McCain people were way off the mark. Let’s take a look.

First, here’s Davis’ perceived electoral map, just four months ago:

Looking at today’s RealClearPolitics map (below), we can see that every single toss-up state is now in Sen. Barack Obama’s column. While all the “Lean GOP” states have held, three of the “Solid GOP” states — Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana — have turned blue:

Meanwhile, Plouffe was announcing the Obama team’s plan to turn these red states blue:

Lo and behold, every one of these is now in Obama’s column, mostly by substantial margins.

Another slide in Plouffe’s presentation indicated the states in which the Obama campaign would be advertising early and extensively:

Admittedly, a few of these are still unlikely to go for Obama — Alaska, for instance, effectively came off the table when Gov. Sarah Palin joined Sen. John McCain’ticket — but for the most part, Obama’s strategy paid off.

Here’s proof:

Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana, which McCain considered in the bag, now lean Obama by 7, 2 and 2 points, respectively, according to RealClearPolitics.

Connecticut, which McCain hoped to nab, is going for Obama by 19 points.