Salon has here in its (virtual) hand a list of 17 names of members of Congress who have either expressed support for, or refused to oppose, the idea that America has a foreign president problem. You’d be surprised how hard it is to get a member of Congress to say that Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen with the right to be president. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Meet the Birthers on the Hill:

Rep: Bill Posey, R-Fla.: Though rumors of then-candidate Barack Obama’s ineligibility for office incubated in right-wing fever swamps during the campaign, they found their first congressional ally in the actual swamps of Florida. Posey, a first-term representative from the “Space Coast” of Florida, is the sponsor of a bill that would require presidential candidates to submit their birth certificates. Posey has said that he can’t “swear on a stack of Bibles” that Obama is a citizen. The congressman told Lou Dobbs, “The eligibility of the president to serve under the Constitution has arisen five times, and Congress has failed to do anything about it thus far.” Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona Territory, Posey points out. George Romney was born in Mexico. Shoot, John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and, claims Posey, the New York Times and Washington Post thought that made him ineligible. (We must have missed those editions of the Times and the Post. Posey’s office has not responded to a request for comment.)

Meanwhile, Stephen Colbert has demanded that Posey disprove the rumors about his own parentage. An outraged Posey denies the allegation. “There is no reason to say that I’m the illegitimate grandson of an alligator.”

Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif.: Though he wasn’t the first member of Congress to board the birther train, Campbell is perhaps the most infamous, thanks to an interview on the topic with an unamused Chris Matthews. Campbell cites the same talking points — Romney, Goldwater and McCain — as Posey did. “Nice try,” responds Matthews, who then showed him the president’s birth certificate. “You’re verifying the paranoia out there. You’re saying to the people, ‘You’re right, that’s a reasonable question, whether he’s a citizen or not.’”

Campbell spends the interview trying to weasel out of the question. “As far as I know, yes,” he says of Obama’s legitimacy. “Say it now: Barack Obama is president of the United States and he was born in this country,” Matthews insists. “He is president of the United States,” responds Campbell. Finally, under duress, Campbell concedes that Obama enjoys natural-born status: “Yes, I believe so.”

With a hint of malice, Matthews half-jokes his way through the end of the segment, saying, “Congressman John Campbell, who does believe — watch the rerun at 7 — that Barack Obama is a native-born American. So those wackos in your district out there, don’t vote for this guy, because he fundamentally disagrees with you. I’m just kidding.” Campbell winces visibly.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.: Probably the know-nothingest member of the Senate, Inhofe thinks climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Coming in second, presumably, is the current fraudulent presidency. The Oklahoma conservative recently told Politico that the Birthers “have a point,” adding, “I don’t discourage it … But I’m going to pursue defeating [Obama] on things that I think are very destructive to America.” In a later clarification, he accused the White House of not doing “a very good job of dispelling the concerns of these citizens.”

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.: Asked about the president’s eligibility at an Alabama town hall meeting back in February, Shelby said, “Well, his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven’t seen any birth certificate. You have to be born in America to be president.” Almost immediately afterward, his spokesperson was saying that the local paper had distorted what happened, adding, “While [Shelby] hasn’t personally seen the president’s birth certificate, he is confident that the matter has been thoroughly examined.”

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.: This Tennessee politician, a co-sponsor of the Posey bill, trusts that the president is a natural-born citizen, says a spokesperson. She just thinks it’s mighty odd that candidates for office don’t have to meet “the same basic identifying standard as a 16-year-old Tennessean aspiring to a driver’s license.” Obviously, as government bloats and journalism withers, the DMV is much easier to trick than the international media. 

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.: Paranoia is how Burton gets in the news. In the 1990s, the Indiana Republican shot a pumpkin in his backyard to demonstrate how the Clintons could have whacked Vince Foster. Now he’s a co-sponsor of the birther bill. Says a spokesperson, explaining Burton’s co-sponsorhip, “You don’t want to needlessly expose presidents to crazy conspiracy theories.” No, of course not.

Team Stonewall: Mike Stark, of the blog FireDogLake, wandered around the Capitol trying, and mainly failing, to get a straight answer. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., tells Stark she “would like to see the documents.” One wonders what’s stopping her. Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., says the issue of Obama’s eligibility “is certainly being looked at.” (Though apparently not by him.) “I think there are questions. We’ll have to see.”

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., asks Stark, “Do you have some evidence that he is or isn’t?” Rep. Greg Harper, R-Miss., says that he thinks that “the Constitution speaks for itself, and it’ll be up to others to look into that.” Michigan’s Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, asked whether Obama was born in the United States, says, “I’m focused on healthcare issues.” (When the question was reiterated by Salon, a McCotter spokesperson again refused to comment, saying, “He’s focused on healthcare like he said.”) However, Rep. Tom Price, who sprinted away from Stark’s camera, apparently doesn’t want to be a member of Team Stonewall. A Price spokesman told Salon that Price was only running because he was late for a vote, and that Price does in fact believe that Obama was born in the United States.

The Gaggle of Unknown Texans: Reps. John Carter, John Culberson, Kenny Marchant, Ted Poe and Randy Neugebauer, all backbench Texas Republicans, have signed on to the Posey bill. Says Neugebauer, “I don’t have the documentation one way or the other. And so my assumption is that he is a natural-born citizen, that hopefully the appropriate people checked that.” Apparently, Neugebauer also does not have access to the Internet. Explains a spokesperson for Carter, “The requirement is there in the law upfront. So all of our candidates in the future should respond and present the documentation upfront, and then there can’t be any of these type of charges.” Chalk all these charges against Obama to his tardiness in presenting his documentation. He waited all the way until June of 2008.

The Facebook Friends: A number of prominent Republicans are friends with birther leaders on Facebook. Of course, Facebook friendship need not imply an endorsement, in any form, of the denial of the president’s eligibility for office. For example, New Jersey’s Rep. Scott Garrett is Facebook friends with Philip Berg, a big-time Birther. “Oh my,” said Garrett communications director Erica Elliott in response to this information. Elliott had never heard of Berg, but explained that Garrett doesn’t manage his Facebook account, and a staffer must have confirmed Berg’s friendship request, unaware of who he is.

The most aggressive Facebook user among the Birthers is Orly Taitz, the California dentist-lawyer-real estate agent who may also be the best-known Birther, even though she is a Facebook novice. “Today,” she posted Sunday, “is the first day my assistants Vivian and Theresa opened my Facebook account to wide audience.” Already she counts Rep. Eric Cantor, the House minority whip, among her virtual friends. But Cantor’s spokesperson says much the same thing that Garrett’s did: “She is registering her support for Eric Cantor, and nothing more. Not vice versa.” (Taitz is also Facebook friends with Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, whose office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Finally, Taitz claims that she was friended by Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California shortly after becoming active on Facebook. “Amazingly, Congresswoman Mary Bono asked to be my friend on Facebook.”

A spokeswoman for Bono Mack told Salon that the Facebook friendship with Taitz doesn’t indicate support for Taitz, and is just a form of general, broad outreach. However, given three opportunities to agree on behalf of Bono Mack that the president was born in the United States and is qualified to command the armed forces, the spokeswoman refused to comment.

Counting the Facebook friends, that’s 17 Republican elected officials who either seem doubtful that Obama is a legal head of state or are more than willing to indulge and even fan the unfounded doubts of their constituents. Nearly one in 10 members of the House Republican Caucus can fairly be said to have Birther sympathies, and those are just the ones we know about. The evasiveness doesn’t really look great either. After all, as Posey says, the only people who won’t take drug tests are the ones doing drugs. 

Obviously Blitzer could have cut “beginning to look a little” from his put-down, but those were harsh words coming from Blitzer. Trump had already insulted the CNN anchor’s ratings, telling him, “Frankly, if you would report [the birther conspiracy] accurately, I think you would probably get better ratings than you’re getting, which are pretty small.”

So Obama surrogates Hilary Rosen and Cory Booker were almost universally denounced for ill-chosen words on behalf of the president, but Trump gets to insult not just Obama but an influential cable news anchor on behalf of Romney with no reprisals? That’s the old IOKIYAR double standard at work, but this time, it might actually backfire and hurt Romney.

For his part, Romney refused to either cut ties with Trump or denounce him. And his refusal to do so was a craven exercise in electoral groveling. “You know,” he told reporters Monday night, “I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in. But I need to get 50.1 percent or more, and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.” What else will Romney do to get to 50.1 percent? Stay tuned.

Of course, that’s not the first time Romney has refused to denounce or distance himself from a Republican supporter. When Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” he merely said it was “not the language I would have used.” When Ted Nugent said “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year,” Romney simply asked for more civility in politics. When a supporter said Obama should be “tried for treason,” Romney didn’t challenge her at all and later told reporters: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.” Romney keeps getting served big fat pitches to let him take a swing at a defining moment of political courage, pitches that he could knock out of the park. He just watches them float by.

Maybe Romney thinks he needs the birther loons to get elected. The base isn’t crazy about him. And Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reveals that Orly Taitz and Joseph Farah are thrilled that Trump continues to advance their cause. But this can’t end well. For better or worse, independents are likely to decide this election, and birther nonsense isn’t going to win them over.

I’ve probably reached my own personal low when I’m fact checking Trump’s lies, but today he consistently claimed – referencing a Breitbart.com story – that Obama’s “publisher” wrote that he was born in Kenya; in fact, the dubious story makes clear it was his literary agent, in a publicity brochure about her clients. (A former agency assistant quickly took the blame for the mistake and said the information didn’t come from Obama.)

Also, when talking about the agent’s brochure to the Daily Beast, Trump said it was a mistake made by a young man who “didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth.”  But when dismissing Blitzer’s reference to the Honolulu Star Bulletin’s Barack Obama birth announcement just days after he was born, Trump argues “many people put those announcements in because they wanted to get the benefit of being so-called born in this country.” So his parents knew enough to fake a birth announcement, but the young Harvard Law Review president threw all their hard work away to sell a book? Uh oh, I’m trying to find consistency in a Donald Trump argument. Time to close. Romney owns everything Trump says, and it will cost him in November.

The Breitbart.com empire must be proud Trump is using their story as “proof” of his birther nonsense. Even as they printed the allegation, they stressed that Breitbart himself didn’t support birtherism, and they insisted that they only published the story about the agent’s brochure just to prove the media didn’t vet Obama. Let’s get this straight: So they’re chiding the media for not publishing something that they themselves believe to be false. That’s awesome journalism.

In related news: Regarding the revival of Trump birtherism, I said Friday on “Hardball” that Breitbart’s journalistic proteges were “bottom feeders,” and one of them quickly proved it.  I appreciate all the support I got on Twitter, but to me it was a dog bites man story, and utterly predictable. (I apologize to dogs everywhere for that unfair comparison.)

I talked about how Trump hurts Romney on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” Tuesday afternoon:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Orly Taitz, the dentist cum lawyer cum California Senate candidate who has filed numerous colorful lawsuits challenging Obama’s birth certificate, is thrilled. “Romney is correct, this is long overdue,” Taitz told Salon. “I do believe that the Romney campaign is sending a message that they are questioning Obama’s eligibility.”

Joseph Farah, the publisher of the conservative news outfit WorldNetDaily, which devotes the vast majority of its time to advancing new grist for the birth certificate mill, agrees. Farah sees the campaign’s use of Trump as a subtle way to appease what he sees as a surprisingly large voting bloc who still have doubts about Obama’s birth, all without making the candidate actually say it himself.

“Trump, whether he’s out there publicly talking about eligibility or not during the campaign, because of what he’s previously said and done on the subject, has already won the hearts and minds of people out there who are suspicious about this, so they associate Trump with suspicions about Obama’s story,” Farah told Salon.

“So that will help Romney solidify a base that he desperately needs to carry overwhelmingly, and Romney doesn’t need to say anything,” he said. In a sense, they’re “doing each others’ bidding” — Romney gets to associate with the issue while Trump gets to be Trump.

Farah said as many as 50 percent of Americans have doubts about Obama’s story, while Taitz pointed to a dubious online poll which found that 99 percent of Tea Party supporters do not believe that Obama was born in Hawaii.

Though a recent YouGov poll found the number of doubters to be about 25 percent, Farah may have a point about Romney’s need to appeal to skeptical arch-conservatives who really hate Obama. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) strongly repudiated the birthers in 2008, but as Trump himself tweeted today, “@BarackObama is practically begging @MittRomney to disavow the place of birth movement, he is afraid of it and for good reason. He keeps using @SenJohnMcCain as an example, however, @SenJohnMcCain lost the election. Don’t let it happen again.”

Still, Trump may not be an ideal advocate for the cause, Farah acknowledged, saying his characteristically flamboyant and self-centered approach to pursuing the issue is not always the most informed. “Does Donald Trump know all that stuff? I don’t know,” he said.

Though neither said they’ve been contacted by the Romney campaign, Taitz said she has been invited to two Romney fundraisers by their hosts, including one who was a Bush-era ambassador to Spain.

Meanwhile, Taitz called on Romney to release his birth certificate as well (he has not, so far), and she has said both vice presidential candidates should, too. “We have to be consistent,” she explained.

Today it’s appalling: puffed up by Romney’s flattery, the preening, orange-haired narcissist doubled down on his idiotic birther claims against the president, telling the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove: “Look, it’s very simple. A book publisher came out three days ago and said that in his written synopsis of his book, he said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia. His mother never spent a day in the hospital.”

If you haven’t been following the story, and I tried not to, the addled spawn of Andrew Breitbart found a dusty 20-year-old catalog from Obama’s former literary agency that said he was born in Kenya. An assistant quickly said that she wrote down incorrect information. Trump doesn’t believe her.

“That’s what he told the literary agent,” Trump told Grove. “That’s the way life works … He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth. The literary agent wrote down what he said … He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia … Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

Give us a break, Mitt. It was already embarrassing that you were using Trump as a fundraising lure – why not raffle off a dinner with Dick Cheney, who’s hosting a fundraiser for you in July? At least Darth Vader has gravitas; Trump is a joke. Pretending to run for president, Trump made birtherism his big issue, and ultimately Obama responded by prevailing on the state of Hawaii to release his long-form birth certificate – a truly sad moment for this country, when the overwhelmingly elected president, a black man, has to show a nasty rich white guy his papers.

If you ever want an example of the vicious political double standard that helps Republicans in this country, here it is: Democrat Hilary Rosen said something inartful about Ann Romney being a stay-at-home mom, and the entire Democratic Party had to denounce her; Obama campaign leaders tripped over themselves to be the first to push her under the bus; Rosen immediately apologized. But Romney has been able to keep his ties to Trump as well as misogynist Rush Limbaugh without political penalty — so far.

This is a moment for the presumptive Republican nominee to stand up for sanity and distance himself from the crackpot birther fringe, and tell Trump he’s going to have to cancel their dinner date. Maybe he’s got to wash his hair that night. Or one of Ann Romney’s cars.

Does Romney have the integrity and courage to do that? I don’t think so, but I’d love to be surprised.

Now that “Celebrity Apprentice” is done, Trump is back to pretending to be a major political player. He just announced his intention to start his own super PAC, because he is a weird attention-hungry idiot with a bit of money to burn (though not as much money to burn as he would like you to think he has to burn).

He is just, essentially, begging the party to let him be on TV at their convention. But Maggie Haberman wrote today that while Trump is just definitely not going to be anyone’s running mate, the Republicans might actually have him speak at their convention. Because Romney is actually getting a lot of use out of Trump:

He’s been a surrogate for Romney, recorded robocalls for him and pushed him on the Fox News airwaves and over Twitter. He’s also raised money for him, and both Ann and Mitt Romney have thanked him in public for his help. There is no question that he has an appeal to some voters and that Romney has been better off having Trump with him than against him.

“Some voters.” Awful voters. The worst voters. But yes, it is basically true: Romney embraces Trump because there’s very little downside. He gets support from horrible people, and he is not really taken to task by non-horrible people (or, for the most part, journalists) for associating with him. This is how Trump will end up at the convention, despite being the most prominent birther in the nation.

In fact, the Romney campaign is auctioning off dinner with Donald Trump, in case you have a couple thousand dollars and some sort of horrible grudge against someone. That does not suggest that anyone at the Romney campaign is particularly wary of the guy.

Here’s another line from Trump’s Newsmax interview, just so we understand that this Donald Trump is not any less invested in conspiratorial race-tinged dog-whistle Jerome Corsi nonsense than he was last year:

He adds: “If you’re going to look at that, on something that I don’t believe ever happened, you have to look into Barack Obama saying that he was heavy into drugs, heavy into alcohol, was a total disaster, was a horrible student. Then you have to say if he was a horrible student, how did he get into Columbia? How did he get into Harvard?

Suspicious! How did Obama get into Harvard? (Maybe his father was secretly … Charles Kushner!)