Birthers will not give up on Obama's birth certificate and the White House does everything to help them out

UPDATE: The president finally released his official birth certificate. The document, his full statement and our commentary is now posted over here.)

Because the question of Barack Hussein Obama's birth certificate and true nationality is such a sensitive and completely embarrassing issue for the Democratic president that just won't go away, the White House Tuesday talked it up again.

Our LATimes.com colleague quoted a White House spokesman as calling it a "settled issue."

Press Secretary Jay Carney, who claims to have been born in Washington on May 22, 1965, reportedly said:

I just think it's a distraction and it's an unfortunate distraction from the issues that I think most Americans care about.

Obama wishes the issue that makes proponents look goofy would go away so badly that he makes smiling references to it in speeches, in case anyone's forgotten.

In 2008, his campaign even gave The Ticket a copy of Obama's so-called birth certificate from Hawaii. We reproduce it here again today; click on the image to enlarge it for closer examination.

Readers will now flock in to eagerly point out that this is not actually....

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer says 'birthers' are 'leading our country down a path of destruction'

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, no stranger to controversy, is saying that the "birther" discussion has become a "huge distraction."

While talking with CNN's John King on Monday, the governor said that she believes President Obama was indeed born in Hawaii in 1961, as his certificate of live birth states, and that after two years the debate has no more merit.

"It's just something I believe is leading our country down a path of destruction and it just is not serving any good purpose," Brewer said, obviously ignoring the fact that all of the birther talk has helped billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump take an early lead in the polls. 

Some may say that Brewer, a Republican, is out of step with her constituents. Last week a CBS News/New York Times poll discovered that 45% of Republicans don't believe that Obama was born in the U.S.  But Brewer says it's time to focus on something else.

"I think we really just need to move on," Brewer suggested. "Everybody's had two years to prove, if they wanted to, that he was not born in Hawaii. They haven't come up with any of that kind of proof."