(UPDATE: Alan Keyes stoked the Obama birth certificate controversy anew in February 2009. See Ticket coverage here.)

[See August update here.]

Click on the certificate to enlarge for better reading.

First, last fall, there were all kinds of people, a number of them Ron Paul supporters, dashing from Internet site to Internet site suggesting that John McCain could not serve as president of the United States.

That was because he was born outside the United States and, therefore, not native-born, as presidents must be constitutionally.

McCain was, in fact, born in a U.S. military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was serving in the Navy. That was, in fact, American-controlled territory at the time.

More importantly, his parents were both American citizens, so he could have been born on Mars and still been an American at birth. And a sense of the Senate resolution took care of any lingering doubts.

Now come the rumors about Barack Obama's birthplace, that he was really born in his father's native Kenya, so like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria, he can't become a U.S. president.

Same rule would apply as for McCain. Obama's mother was an American. So is her son.

The Obama campaign has provided at The Ticket's request what it says is a copy of the Illinois senator's official birth certificate, reproduced here, showing he was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m., which means he was late for dinner, just like a politician. Click on the photo to enlarge for reading.

Now, about the citizenship of all those people planting these rumors.

(UPDATE: In reaction to some of the comments left below challenging the veracity of the document, Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, sent the following reaction to The Ticket: "I can confirm that that is Sen. Obama's birth certificate.")

--Andrew Malcolm

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