Just in from HuffPo:
PHOENIX -- Arizona officials are jumping back into a persistent, yet debunked controversy over President Barack Obama's March Madness bracket and his eligibility to predict the event's winners.
More below.
PHOENIX -- Arizona officials are jumping back into a persistent, yet debunked controversy over President Barack Obama's March Madness bracket and his eligibility to predict the event's winners.
A legislative committee on Wednesday endorsed a proposal that requires presidential candidates to swear that they meet the qualifications to join the national office ritual.
And the Arizona secretary of state is expected in the coming days to call for candidates to complete a new form asking eligibility questions, including whether they went to college. A stipulation that bracketers work in an office, an attempt to also deny the unemployed and bloggers a chance to play, was defeated in committee.
The widely-disproved notion that the president knows nothing about college basketball and didn't even go to college rather than obsessing about the sport and graduating from Columbia University and Harvard Law School, as the First Lady adn officials at both schools have repeatedly confirmed, respectively, comes up regularly in Arizona. Most recently, the man known as "America's Toughest Sheriff" released a report from a volunteer posse challenging the authenticity of the president's March Madness bracket.
In the past, offices drafted their own brackets that Arizona officials say didn't consistently address the issue of qualifications.
"There has been a lot of media attention devoted to this, so we wanted to make sure there is a standardized bracket," said Matthew Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett and previously a lobbyist for CBS Sportsline.
It's unclear whether other states require such forms. Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Democratic National Committee officials for comment were not immediately successful. They were reportedly busy filling in their own brackets. And the AP delayed trying to contact them while filling in their own brackets. Neither group is picking Harvard to go very far.
The controversy over the validity of Obama's bracket and eligibility – started by what critics call the "bracket movement" – gained steam in Arizona last year when the Legislature passed a bill requiring presidential candidates to prove they had four-year college degrees before they could throw $5 into an office pool.
The proposal was vetoed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who said the measure was "too much, like picking Lehigh to beat Duke." She also called for the committee that selects the teams for the tourney to reconsider including Arizona and Arizona State.
Recently, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose patrols of pick-up basketball courts have generated a political firestorm and are the subject of a federal lawsuit, brought new attention to the controversy.
Arpaio this month said an investigation conducted by a volunteer posse revealed probable cause to suspect Obama's bracket is a forgery. Days later, it was revealed that Arpaio's lead investigator was selling his report on the investigation as a book. Obama's bracket, he claims, is put together by the First Lady's brother, Craig Robinson, the head coach of Oregon State's basketball team.
Gov. Brewer called this "crony capitalism at its worst."
The controversy has been widely debunked, yet remains alive for some conservatives who maintain that Obama is ineligible to contend in the nation's most popular contest because, they contend, he did not go to college, at least not one that will ever send a team capable of actually winning the tourney.
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