Let’s start with the big news: The Soviet Jewish “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz will not be the Golden State’s Secretary of State. She lost decisively to former NFL player Damon Dunn despite the fact that he refused to dignify his opponent with an actual campaign. Of course, as the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out, the news may be that 368,316 people voted for a woman with fewer than two dozen donors who claims that Barack Obama’s presidency is procedurally illegitimate. Thank you, California.

Now, the Senate races. On the Democratic side, incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer cruised to an easy victory over Slate blogger and descendant-of-Jewish-Gold-Rushers Mickey Kaus; he picked up just five percent of the vote share, although he does now have the right to say that 93,599 voters really, really like him. (Thank you, California.) Among the Republicans, Carly Fiorina, who made Israel an issue early in the race, earned a decisive win, polling 56 percent over moderate Tom Campbell (22 percent) and Tea Party conservative Chuck DeVore (19 percent). Was Israel the deciding factor, in the end? Almost certainly not: The venerable Field Poll indicated that Republican voters were angling not so much for their favorite choice as for the best setup for a slam-dunk win over Boxer in the fall. So, stay tuned!

Meantime, we learned exactly how much Israel is worth in the Los Angeles congressional district represented by Jane Harman, the Blue Dog Democrat who has been a longtime AIPAC supporter. Harman’s opponent, peace activist Marcy Winograd, tried to make the Gaza flotilla raid into a wedge issue in the last week of the race, and managed to net 41 percent against Harman’s 59 percent. That’s not bad for an underfunded upstart against a wealthy longtime incumbent, but when you note that she was starting from a base of 38 percent in the 2006 primary, well, it looks like Israel is worth approximately 3.7 points in said district.

See you in November!

Earlier: Israel Hits the West Coast
Related: In Doubt’s Shadow [Tablet Magazine]

Worth remember: Madsen reported last year that the Emperors Club, the prostitution outfit frequented by fallen former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, was actually a Mossad front that outed Spitzer in retaliation for his investigations of Russian-Israeli organized crime rings.

Here’s the Russia Today clip:

Previously: Birthers Melt Down

Then yesterday, Andy Martin, the self-described “Internet powerhouse” who was largely responsible, way back in 2004, for originating the crypto-Muslim smear against Obama, issued a press release with the following headline:

ANDY MARTIN SAYS THE MEATHEAD MEDIA (FORMERLY MAINSTREAM MEDIA) LOVE ORLY TAITZ AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE BIRTHER MOVEMENT BECAUSE TAITZ IS AN OBVIOUS CRACKPOT

TAITZ’ LATEST OUTBURST ON MSNBC DISQUALIFIES HER AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF ANYONE, MARTIN SUGGESTS

In his press release, he explained that, while he assumes Taitz must be an excellent dentist “because she was trained in Israel,” she “is not professionally competent” to handle the lawsuits she has filed on behalf of other birthers and “has become an impediment to reasoned discussion concerning the gaps in Obama’s family and personal history.” It does not, of course, follow that Martin is any more capable of lending reason to the birthers’ cause. As The New York Times reported last year, he’s a trained lawyer whose bar admission was blocked after a psychiatrist diagnosed him as having moderately severe character defects manifested by paranoia. He ran for president in 1988 and 2000, and has also made a name for himself as a prodigious filer of frivolous lawsuits, some of which included fairly nasty language about Jews. (“I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did,” he wrote in one.)

We can’t wait to see who joins the circus next week!

Birther Vs. Birther [TPM]
Related: In Doubt’s Shadow [Tablet]

It hasn’t been a great week for her cause: on Monday, House Republicans who had once appeared sympathetic to the birthers’ claims voted unanimously for a bill that stipulated that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961—which is what his, y’know, birth certificate says. Taitz told Tablet Magazine earlier this week that her real concern is that Obama could be some sort of “Manchurian candidate.” For whom, she wouldn’t say.

You can watch her appearance below.

Previously: In Doubt’s Shadow

Taitz, whose life’s trajectory has brought her from Moldova to Southern California, has been described as the unofficial head of the West Coast faction of the “birthers”—those who believe, against all available evidence, that there is something fishy about Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. Her opposite number on the East Coast is Philip J. Berg, a Jewish Democrat and former Pennsylvania deputy attorney general who sued George Bush in 2004 for alleged complicity in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks; last summer, he unsuccessfully sued the Democratic National Committee on the grounds that Obama wasn’t adequately qualified to be the party’s presidential nominee.

But earlier this month, when Lou Dobbs, following Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, took it upon himself to re-animate the whole issue—he described a certification of birth posted online and verified by FactCheck.org as “a peculiar little document” that left him “a little annoyed”—he cited his inspiration as Taitz’s recent lawsuit on behalf of an Army reserve major who wants his deployment orders reversed on the grounds that Obama isn’t a legitimate commander-in-chief. Yesterday, the website Politico elevated Taitz to the movement’s ringleader, a sign that the movement has now, perhaps inevitably, become the province of right-wing grassroots activists committed to perpetuating the notion that Obama—invariably referred to by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama—isn’t really American enough to run the country.

“When you allow somebody with allegiance to other nations to become president, that’s extremely dangerous,” Taitz told Tablet in a phone interview from her car. “He can be the Trojan horse; he can be the Manchurian candidate.”

Taitz, who appears in countless YouTube videos, is a pert, peroxide blonde in her late 40s, who expounds quickly, with a pronounced Russian accent, on the various facets of birther doubt; she throws out a steady stream of speculations, from whether Obama’s grandmother procured him a fake Social Security number from a dead person while she was working in a probate court to whether the birth certificate provided by Hawaiian officials could have been digitally altered, that have no basis in documented reality.

She said she was raised in Kishinev (or Chisinau, now the capital of Moldova), but was granted permission in 1981 to leave and join an uncle who had moved to Israel; once there, she learned Hebrew and earned a degree in dentistry from Hebrew University. Her chance to get to America—a place her father had always told her was full of opportunities to reap the rewards of hard work—came in 1987, when one of her mother’s fellow schoolteachers offered to set her up with a software engineer named Yosef Taitz who was visiting from California; on their second date, she said, he proposed, and she accepted. (They got married in Las Vegas.)

Taitz opened a dental practice, which now has offices in the upper-middle-class Orange County enclaves of Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita, and got a law degree by correspondence from William Howard Taft University; meantime, the pair had three sons, the eldest of whom is now a student at Cornell University.

When the boys were young, she said, she was too busy shuttling them to tae kwon do lessons and the like to get involved with politics, but she said she got involved enough with AIPAC that the whole family—with the boys stuffed into fancy suits—attended the organization’s convention in Washington in 2006. That summer, during the Israel’s Lebanon War, she attended a pro-Israel rally in Irvine, California,  where she told a reporter for the Orange County Register, “It is unfortunate that collateral damage happens, but it is necessary to exterminate terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Taitz speaks to her husband in Hebrew, and boasts that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed up to be her friend on Facebook (he does not appear in her public friend list, though Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Republican Whip, does). But she demurred when asked whether her involvement with the birther movement had anything to do with opposition to Obama’s policies toward Israel. “I am an attorney,” she said, “so when I see something that is totally illegal, that bothers me, particularly when we are talking about presidents of the United States.”

She said she learned about the “eligibility issue” last summer, after reading a blog item about Obama’s childhood school enrollment in Indonesia under his stepfather’s surname, Soetoro. (One question she posed in our conversation was about whether Obama had ever legally changed his name back from Soetoro, and if not, whether he was inaugurated under the wrong name.) In October, she contacted California Secretary of State Debra Bowen—a Democrat—to ask whether her office had verified Obama’s citizenship status; when Bowen’s office responded that she had not, Taitz retorted with a series of angry letters to local newspapers, earning her an invitation to address a meeting of an anti-illegal immigration group, and, in turn, an invitation to appear on the radio with Wiley Drake, who happened to be running for vice-president on the American Independent Party ticket headed by Alan Keyes—the onetime diplomat and four-time presidential candidate who ran, as a Republican, in the 2004 Illinois Senate race that Obama ultimately won.

By November, shortly after the election, Taitz had been drafted to represent Keyes in a rearguard challenge; she filed suit against Bowen, asking that California investigate Obama’s eligibility to serve. The case was quashed, but not before Taitz took her challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court—and then, in March, showed up at a speech given by Chief Justice John Roberts in Idaho, where she challenged him from the microphone to hear it.

Now she has the military case, and Lou Dobbs’s attention; the Orange County Weekly recently labeled her the “Queen Bee of people obsessed with Barack Obama’s birth certificate.” Taitz insisted her doggedness had nothing to with partisanship; she claimed support from Berg’s wing, “Blue Dog Democrats, Hillary Clinton supporters.”

“People think I’m a right-wing conservative, a Christian conservative—one reporter called me anti-Semitic,” Taitz said, laughing. “Why did she think that? I don’t know.”