Like Sisyphus and his boulder, the task of convincing skeptical Republicans that President Obama is indeed an American citizen is a daily struggle.

A full year after Obama released his birth certificate, a significant number of Republican officials across the country still are unable to disavow themselves of the notion that the president was not born in this country.

This week, a leading Republican candidate in one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country revealed himself as the newest member of the birther club. Richard Hudson, a former congressional chief of staff, told a Tea Party in Salisbury on Tuesday that “there’s no question President Obama’s hiding something on his citizenship.” Hudson, “the frontrunner for the GOP nomination” in North Carolina’s 8th congressional district according to Roll Call, also pledged that if elected he would introduce legislation “that requires any candidate for president or vice president to be certified by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as being a citizen.”

HUDSON: There’s no question President Obama’s hiding something on his citizenship. If you elect me to Congress to represent you, I’ll introduce legislation that requires any candidate for president or vice president to be certified by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as being a citizen. Whether that’s a birth certificate or whatever it means, I’m going to make real simple from now on if you want to run for president, you’re need to know you’re going to have to prove you’re a citizen.

Hudson still faces four challengers in the May 8 GOP primary, but he has been endorsed by establishment figures in the state like Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and the wife of former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC). Whoever emerges will enjoy a significant leg up against Rep. Larry Kissell (D-NC) after North Carolina Republicans gerrymanded congressional districts in their favor last year. Roll Call currently rates the race as Likely Republican.

Birtherism has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the past month as GOPers cater to the fringe of their base. Two members of Congress found themselves in hot water recently — Reps. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL) — after both pitched their tent in the birther camp during recent town hall meetings. In addition, embattled Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio has led a quixotic birther investigation where he concluded that Obama’s birth certificate is a “forgery and fraud.”

Last year, after Hispanic farm workers fled the state because of a far-reaching anti-immigrant bill the Georgia legislature passed, Gov. Nathan Deal (R) suggested replacing them with inmates. The plan only had mixed success, with many inmates walking off the job early, and farmers still lost millions because of crops that rotted in the field before they could be harvested.

Ahead of this year’s Vidalia onion harvest, farmers are still seeing a shortage of workers a year later because of Georgia’s immigration law, so state officials are again sending inmates to help farmers despite the failure of last year’s plan:

The Corrections department has sent ten transitional inmates from Smith State Prison to work in a packing and grading facility run by an onion grower in Glennville, which is near Vidalia. Transitional inmates are in the process of completing their prison sentences.

Grower Wayne Durrance says he’s used transitional inmates, and says it’s been a success so far. Durrance says they’re motivated and work hard.

At best, however, this is a patch over a larger problem created by Georgia’s immigration law. State lawmakers approved a harmful immigration law that drove workers out of the state without having a plan in place to replace them. Now, as farmers report difficulties bringing in Hispanic workers through the guest worker visa program and other problems retaining workers, farmers are again on track to lose millions in unharvested crops because of the lawmakers’ failed policy.

Earlier this year, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) led a Republican effort to block renewal of the Violence Against Women Act because he objected to the fact that the reauthorization bill includes certain protections for LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans. Grassley said that he would abandon this effort last night, however — likely because the reauthorization now has the supermajority of supporters it needs to defeat a Republican filibuster. Nevertheless, the bill must still survive the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, where it faces a much rougher ride, before its longstanding protections for domestic violence victims can be continued.

In light of these recent Republican efforts to hold some domestic violence survivors hostage to block protections for others, formerGov. Mitt Romney’s campaign was recently asked whether he supports including the protections for gay people, undocumented immigrants and Native Americans or not. Team Romney would not answer the question:

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, said in an e-mail, “Gov. Romney supports the Violence Against Women Act and hopes it can be reauthorized without turning it into a political football.” But she declined to specify which version he supported.

As Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday, it is “inconceivable” that there is actually a debate over whether to protect domestic violence victims or not. It is equally inconceivable that anyone could deem some victims more worthy of protection than others. Romney, however, doesn’t seem willing to even go that far. He won’t even tell us which people caught in a horrific spiral of domestic violence deserve the law’s full protection against domestic violence.

For the second time, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) rebuffed gun lobbyists’ efforts to enable people to bring firearms into public buildings by vetoing one of their pet bills:

Brewer’s veto of the bill, which could have let guns into city halls, police stations, county courts, senior centers, swimming pools, libraries and the state Capitol, was the latest setback for a push to expand the right to carry guns in public places in Arizona. . . .

Citing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in her veto letter, Brewer, who vetoed a similar bill last year, recognized the legitimacy of laws banning guns in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.

“The decisions to permit or prohibit guns in these extremely sensitive locations — whether a city council chamber or branch office staffed with state workers — should be cooperatively reached and supported by a broad coalition of stakeholders, including citizens, law-enforcement officials and local government leaders,” Brewer wrote in her veto letter.

Brewer’s citation to Scalia might seem counterintuitive, but it is not particularly surprising. As Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Second Amendment should not be read “to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”

Indeed, the fact that even staunch conservatives like Jan Brewer and Antonin Scalia find the gun lobby’s reading of the Second Amendment to be a bridge too far indicates just how radical those groups have become — and how out of touch their supporters in elected office are as well.

Despite the fact that the number of Mexican undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. is dropping, an anti-immigrant California group incorrectly blames immigrants for increasing carbon emissions in the U.S., leading to “environmental degradation.” Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), which is airing TV ads on MSNBC and other channels to promote the false link between immigration and climate change, bases its research on a flawed report by the nativist Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which is connected to the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“Concerned about Americans’ huge carbon footprint? Then you should be concerned about immigration,” a man in the ad says in an attempt to scare viewers:

MAN: Immigrants produce four times more carbon emissions in the U.S. than their home countries. [...] Reducing immigration won’t solve global warming, but it is part of the solution.

Watch it here:

The problem? The claim that immigrants have a carbon footprint four times larger in the U.S. comes from a CIS report, which has deeply flawed methodology. The report claims that a person’s CO2 emissions is directly related to his or her personal income — so a person making $110,000 per year will emit 10 percent more carbon than a person who earns $100,000 per year under the report’s methodology. Thus, because the report claims that each Mexican immigrant earns 53.2 percent of the average U.S. resident, it claims that these immigrants must also produce 53.2 percent of the carbon emissions.

But this is simply absurd. If such a relationship actually did exist, that would mean that Mitt Romney, who earned $21.6 million in 2010 — or more than 600 times the average annual income according to the CIS report — also must have produced 600 times the CO2 emissions. That’s enough of a carbon footprint to fuel over 2,200 vehicles or power more than 1,400 homes for an entire year. Not even John McCain owns that many houses.

There’s also robust data showing that immigrants produce less carbon emissions than their native-born citizen counterparts. Brookings found in 2008 that the 10 highest carbon-emitting cities have an average immigrant population below 5 percent, while the cities with the lowest carbon footprint have an average immigrant population of 26 percent. And as CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light told ThinkProgress, even if we could suddenly remove the entire carbon impact created by immigrants, it would only decrease the U.S.’s carbon emissions by 7.32 percent in a good year. Clearly, immigrants are not to blame for the U.S.’s large climate footprint.

Rather than falsely blame immigrants for carbon emissions that have fed global warming, Americans should focus on practical solutions like better land use policies and landscape design to conserve resources. Los Angeles, which has a burgeoning second- and third-generation immigrant population, has seen its water usage decline to a 32-year low despite a population increase of 1 million people. It can be done, but using anti-immigrant sentiment to misplace blame to one section of the population distracts from what the U.S. should be doing to address global warming instead.

Sarah Glynn, policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, contributed to this report.

Yum! Brands, the owner of fast food brands KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut told Color of Change that they will no longer support the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing front group that, until recently, was a driving force behind state voter suppression and “stand your ground” gun laws. Yum!’s decision means a dozen corporations (plus the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have now dropped the conservative group:

“Now we know that Yum! Brands has joined the 11 other companies that have announced in recent weeks that they’re no longer members of ALEC. These companies are McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Mars Inc., Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Intuit, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Reed Elsevier (owner of LexisNexis and publisher of science and health information), American Traffic Solutions and Arizona Public Service.

“We want to thank these companies for making the right decision, and we want to thank ColorOfChange members and our partners. We continue to call on all major corporations to stop funding ALEC given its involvement in voter suppression. Our members and allied groups are prepared to hold accountable companies that continue to associate themselves with an organization that has attacked voting rights, causing irreparable damage nationwide.”

Yum!’s decision to remove ALEC from the Colonel’s Special Recipe is particularly significant because it shows that the group remains toxic even after it announced earlier this week that it would shut down its “Public Safety and Elections task force,” which led ALEC’s efforts on voter disenfranchisement and guns. Even without a task force devoted to promoting firearms and hindering democracy, ALEC remains committed to a regressive economic agenda that includes union-busting, repealing the minimum wage, and, of course, cutting taxes on the very rich.

The loss of Yum! is also a significant loss for ALEC because the fast food giant held an important leadership role within the conservative group. YUM! co-chaired ALEC’s Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee which, among other things, fought to repeal laws guaranteeing paid sick leave to workers.