Remember the birther craze, based on the notion that Barack Obama was really born in Africa, and was therefore ineligible for the Presidency? Well, it's back, baby -- in mutant form.

Someone found an old agency promo booklet for Obama's first, never-published book. The bio described him as "born in Kenya."

As most non-insane articles that refer to Obama's birthplace -- including the first New York Times story on him, written in 1990 -- say it's Hawaii, you'd imagine normal people would find this just an amusing birther-ific coincidence.

But our subjects, the rightbloggers, are not like normal people. Their reaction has spawned afterbirtherism -- in which Obama is attacked, not for pretending to be from America, but for pretending to be from Kenya.

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As everyone has heard by now, Pride Week came a little early to the White House as President Obama declared, "I think same sex couples should be able to get married." He didn't push any legislation, and he said legalization should be left up to the states. But he is a U.S. President who has endorsed gay marriage, and before last week there had been no such thing. So there's that.

Rightbloggers were against it, of course. But in their defense, it had nothing to do with their feelings about gay people -- whether they hated them or pretended to like them, they still felt the same way.

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Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama came out in 1995 and has sold over a million copies, but to rightbloggers it is a constantly fresh source of discovery.

For years, some of them have insisted that Obama didn't really write it. A few weeks back, they made much of the fact that a passage from it revealed as boy in Indonesia he had eaten dog meat.

Last week somebody noticed that some people in the 17-year-old book were described in the introduction as "composites." Rightbloggers were outraged. Whoever heard of such a thing -- besides, that is, the hundreds of thousands of people who read it?

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Aside from pushing and shoving and a relatively paltry 50 arrests, the May Day protests yesterday were largely peaceful. The credit for that should go to the police officers assigned yesterday to the protests throughout lower Manhattan.

The cops held it together even though many of them had to work ridiculous hours and face verbal abuse from some protesters. Ordered to bring helmets and batons, cops started arriving before midnight on Tuesday and some worked up to 24 hours, a lot of it standing on posts hour after hour, which is mind numbing work.

"I was worried about violence, I don't want to get hurt, nobody wants to get hurt," one police officer tells the Voice. "But it went pretty smoothly all things considered. It was pretty peaceful."

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We're coming up to the first anniversary of Osama Bin Laden's demise. Some media outlets celebrated with cute headlines ("Osama Bin Laden Used Viagra And 'Just-For-Men' To Keep His Wives Interested In Him"). President Obama celebrated with an ad reminding everyone that he killed him.

To rightbloggers, this was an outrage. So was Obama cutting up on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. How dare he thus demean the office of the Presidency? That's their job.

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From the land of the seriously hard to believe, a major statistical report by the New York city Department of Education, which oversees our public schools, to the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights is so riddled with obvious errors as to be laughable.

The exhaustive report covers 2009-2010, but was released earlier this year. It gives overall and school by school data for the largest public school system in the country.

Consider: The Ed. bosses at Tweed Courthouse reported that of the 979,960 students in the system, there isn't a single one who receives free or reduced price lunch.

They claimed that of 1,530 schools, there are no charter or alternative schools in the city. And they say there was one student expelled for the entire year in the entire system, nor was a single student referred to law enforcement, or arrested in school.

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We learned last night that a federal judge has granted class certification to a lawsuit which claims the NYPD's quota policy is unconstitutional and results in summonses and stop and frisks being done without probable cause.

The lawsuit, which could turn into a fairly big problem for Mayor Bloomberg, relies heavily on tape recordings of police supervisors ordering officers to hit specific monthly summons numbers--all of which was first reported in the Village Voice's award winning "NYPD Tapes" series.

The decision allows the lawsuit, filed by 22 New Yorkers, to move forward, and to in essence speak for all city folks similarly aggrieved.

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For months, the growing probability that Mitt Romney, least acceptably conservative of the Republican Presidential contenders, would face Obama in November made rightbloggers moody and irritable.

They've been coming around, but slowly. When Newt Gingrich's supporters attacked Romney's years as a corporate raider, and Hilary Rosen sassed his wife Ann, some rightbloggers reflexively rallied to Romney's defense. Still, a more positive motivation for Mittism was lacking.

That came last week, via an old story about Obama eating dog meat as a boy.

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In the past month, because they endorsed multiple (and sometimes bizarre) anti-abortion laws and denounced efforts to have contraception included in health insurance plans, conservatives found themselves advertised as making a "war on women."

But last week they were able to turn the tables, because a Democratic operative said that the wife of Mitt Romney was, due to her great wealth, unfamiliar with the world of work.

Or, at least, this is how recent history has been recorded by rightbloggers.

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From the depths of Rikers Island comes an appalling case of alleged jailhouse brutality, involving correction officers beating a handcuffed inmate within an inch of his life for protesting after he was denied a baloney sandwich, the Voice has learned.

The April 3 assault on 26-year-old Robert Hinton in the George R. Vierno Center on Rikers is currently under internal investigation, but he was choked so badly during the beating, his eyeballs filled with blood, and his face swelled to three times its normal size, his mother and his lawyer tell the Voice.

"His nose is broken, his lips are broken and bruised, his tongue is cut, he has two loose front teeth," says his mother, Parys Johnson. "You pull up his eyelids and you see nothing but blood."

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