Despite the best efforts of chronic self-loathers Justice Clarence Thomas and perpetual sore loser Alan Keyes, the U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an emergency appeal of a suit brought by some crank named Leo Donofrio claiming that president-elect Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

Donofrio claimed that because Obama’s Kenyan father had British citizenship, Barack Obama Jr. was British, not American, although his mother was both a U.S. citizen and was physically in Hawaii — by most accounts a U.S. state at the time — when she birthed him, or as they said in the movie “Mandingo,” she “slipped a suckah.”

Apparently, no one but Donofrio was surprised at the ruling:

“This is the least surprising move by the Supreme Court in years,” said CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. “No serious legal scholar believed that the Justices would take the case and overturn the election.”

Another crackpot, Phillip J. Berg, contends that Obama is actually a citizen of Kenya and Indonesia, apparently believing that if one spends any length of time in a country, one automatically becomes a citizen thereof. Berg’s suit looks like it is going the way of Donofrio’s and several other nuisance suits challenging Obama’s citizenship status.

But, invoking the “one-drop rule,” almost everyone agrees that Obama is a black man, even though he spent nine months in a white woman’s womb.