Since President Barack Obama released his birth certificate in April in an attempt to silence the "carnival barkers," as he called them, who doubted his citizenship, those barkers have been at something of a loss for what to do next. They can't get much traction as birthers these days, and while Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio's double-down on that issue has pushed him into the realm of the supermarket tabloids, his fellow birther, Orly Taitz, has decided to go mainstream. She told The Sacramento Bee she was "absolutely" considering challenging longstanding California Senator Dianne Feinstein in the 2012 national election. From The Bee's Capitol Alert blog:

"I think I do have a chance specifically because I do speak Spanish and I speak Hebrew," Taitz told The Bee after attending a town hall-style event on Latino issues at the California Republican Party convention in Los Angeles.

It wouldn't be Taitz's first foray into politics. The lawyer and dentist from Irvine challenged Damon Dunn as California secretary of state in 2010, losing by more than 50 percentage points, The Bee reminds us. Feinstein has seen her poll numbers slide to 41 percent recently, but former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that that wouldn't matter. "I know this is the first time that she has gone into a race with a number so low, but she is still very much the third rail of state politics. Touch her and you go down."

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Adam Martin