What if They Bailed Us Out Instead

As many of you are painfully aware, assuming you have not been hiding under a rock for the past five years our national treasury, and the wealth of our future generations has been hijacked in what amounts to the largest redistribution of wealth in the history of the United States (what, you thought only Democrats like redistributing the dough?).  That’s right more more than 1.3 Billion dollars of your money and the credit of future generations has been redistributed into the pockets of bankers who opposed the regulation which would have prevented the near disaster we are currently suffering through as well as the defense contractors who happened to be close friends of the Bush administration.  I realize there is divided opinion about the war in Iraq and all that jazz -and really that is not germane to the topic of this post- but considering all the money that the Bush Administration spent bailing out the wealthy who run the banks, military industrialists, and oil barons and fighting an unnecessary war I have to ask what would happen if instead of going to war and instead of bailing out Wall Street they had bailed out the American people?

Do your remember those puny little IRS stimulus checks that some tax payers got over the past summer?  You know, the little checks  that started at 300 bucks and went as high as 1500?  The reason I ask is because those checks would be  chump change compared to what the tax payer could get in return if the government had decided to equally refund the monies given carelessly to the defense contractors, oil kingpins, and bankers  to every single one of us 310 million Americans.

If all 310 million American citizens were given an equal share of the 1.321 trillion  every last one of us would get a check for 4261 dollars and 29 cents. Could you imagine how that would stimulate the economy?  I promise you that this kind of money would prevent people from missing their rent payments, mortgage payments, car payments, they could pay off debts, and they could get food for their families and if they were fortunate enough they could start a decent little savings account.

It gets even better if instead of giving this money to every American, we make it mandatory that only taxpayers could get a stimulus check.:

For a nice round number lets say America has 200 million taxpayers. If we gave every tax payer an equal share of that 1.321 trillion we are talking about 6605 dollars.

How to Cut Spending, lower Taxes, Save social programs, and Make America Stronger in the World

As you know our economy is headed towards basketcase status, but there is a simple solution to saving our economy and it doesn’t involve a single tax increase to anyone in the United States.  However, those who believe war heals all wounds and is a preventative cure all will not like this solution because quite simply the most effective way to save the economy is to drastically reduce defense spending.  The way I see it we could reduce our annual defense spending by about 500 billion. We’d still be spending about 200 billion annually on defense expenditures, but  we’d still be spending more than three times as much money per year on defense than our leading competitors, and we’d still outspend them if they all combined against us.

2 France 61,571,330,000
3 United Kingdom 61,280,890,000
4 People’s Republic of China 61,036,400,000

For what its worth out of the second, third, and fourth ranked nations in yearly military spending (we are in first place at over 700 billion) only China could be deemed as a threat to our national security and they have an annual budget of a little more than 61 billion. You wanna toss in the big bad Russkies, they must be bad because I saw Red Dawn the other day, and you get another 50 billion per year. China and Russia together (arguably our biggest rivals) spend 111 billion a year on defense.  Somewhere out there at least one hawk is thinking about the doomsday scenario of what would happen if the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Russian Federation linked up with the two remaining members of the fantastical Axis of Evil.  As far as spending goes this would not be a problem as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea combined only spend 112 billion combined.   Iran, alone,  spends six billion a year on military expenditures, and I have to say that  I have to agree with John McCain a nation that spends that little on military expenses has got to be “an exististional threat to the United States.”  The other member of Axis of Evil, North Korea, spends 5.5 billion dollars.

Of course the member nations of the Axis of Evil may be looking for new members since uber evil and overwhelmingly powerful Iraq (you know the ones who were going to take out Israel, Kuwait and make Europe into a Caliphate before they marched through Downtown Manhattan, but who oddly enough were completely occupied in less than four weeks) was squashed.  So lets say, for hypothetical purposes, that the Axis of Evil in its usual comic book style knights Cuba and Venezuela as evil enough for membership.  Lets say for a moment that both Cuba and Venezuela (two nations with governments we don’t like so surely thats recipricol and not just empty rhetoric spewed from those in the military industrial lobbyists on K-Street) should combine their spending power with the traditional boogey men countries of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.  First lets examine Cuba, this tropical gulag is led by Castro who has to be the worst man alive considering the millions of man hours the CIA has invested, along with a billion or so dollars, over the years to kill him. Cuba spends 694 million per anum on defense. The other Latin candidate for the Axis of Evil is Venezuela. Chavez spends 4 billion per year on defense. Our biggest threats, as far as nation states go, spend a combined 127 billion a year. Which means that we could cut our spending by more than 500 billion and still nearly spend twice the amount of money a year on defense that they spend combined.

Oh sure, this would mean less foreign adventures such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. No cool quagmires or humanitarian disasters, not as many new toys either. We’d have to cancel our antagonistic manhood measuring contest, aka our missile defense shield, in Poland and the Czech Republic. We’d have to leave the Balkans, we’d have to stop training the Georgians on how to commit genocide and blame the Russians for it, but we’d still be able to have a well equipped Army, Air Force, and Navy.   Naturally, we would have to quit the cowboy diplomacy of the past eight years with actual diplomacy and we could do this and still have a defense budget that is more than three times larger than that of our nearest competitor.  We’d still be able to respond to threats and while we wouldn’t be able to do away with the yearly income tax we could give every single American tax payer a stimulus check for the amount of 2500 dollars.

So to reiterate, all we would have to do would be to cut defense spending from 700 billion to 200 billion (a slash of 500 billion) per year and we could either take that money and save social security, have universal healthcare, build new energy and transportation infrastructure, build and fund more schools and universities, or just simply give every American tax payer (all two hundred million) a 2500 dollar stimulus check.

All info regarding spending numbers was retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of…y_expenditures

He Died So For Less, and What Christmas is About

This is a season where we show thanks for what we have and consider the less fortunate, but unfortunately -like everything else in our materialistic society- this season has moved from a season where we celebrate the birth of Christ Jesus to a place of unabated avarice.  It is sad to see that in this nation we have forgotten how to love our neighbor, how to care about others, how to respect the lives of our countrymen and have become a nation of hedonistic spiritual bastards who have forgotten how to have love, kindness, self control, and basic human decency.  This “American” value system reared its ugly head on Blitz Day, current and former Wal-Slaves know the literal Hell on Earth that this is, which took place the day after Thanksgiving in a Wal-Mart Store in the suburbs of New York City.  What can only be described as a riotous mob decided that saving a few dollars on a television that they really did not need was more important than the life of another human being.

This mob literally broke down the front door to get at  bargains and stomped out the life of a guy who was doing seasonal work in overnight maintenance, which is arguably the worst position at Wal-Mart, just so they could save a few bucks.  Its really disturbing that this guy’s fellow associates were blocked by the surge of inhumanity from coming to his assistance so idiots could get bargains.  It was quite telling to watch the surveillance footage of the EMTs taking the guy to the ambulance and watching a customer just carelessly sauntering by with his 32 inch flat screen television without even giving a glance at the victim of avarice.  I really hope that the cattle who did this enjoy their Christmas and their cheap piece of Chinese crap and I really hope they are able to tell their children that they got a real steal and all it cost was a guy getting trampled to death.  What was even more shocking than the guy getting trampled underfoot was the fact that morons complained that they shut the store down to take care of the injured and the dead.  Yeah, ain’t that sad, they couldn’t get a bargain because some guy got trampled by a bunch of miserable excuses for human beings.

After the experience of working at Wal-Mart for about a year (praise Jesus that I no longer work there) and seeing what happened to this poor man I have reevaluated what Christmas is all about.  I never really took part, other than working retail, in the Black Friday insanity but I did try to get nice things for Christmas.  I realize now that this is not what Christmas is about.  This year I am going to attend Christmas Eve communion service, spend time with those I love, and I am also going to help those who cannot have a Christmas because of dire economic straits.  Christmas is not about gimme gimme gimme, its about giving of yourself.  Christmas is about emulating the love of Christ.  Its about giving to others.  This Christmas don’t shop for yourself, buy stuff for someone who has nothing.  Don’t look for bargains, but look for people whom you can be a blessing for.  If you know of someone who is struggling with their utility bills bless them by paying their bills for them.  If you know someone who is going hungry buy them groceries.  Many of us are blessed enough that we do not need gifts, heck I know this because last year at Wal-Mart lots and lots and lots of people were in the returns line trying to give back their gifts.  Instead of trying to get money for a gift you don’t want how about giving it to someone who may appreciate it.

Trust me folks there is not a foreign power strong enough to take us down, but our greed has a good chance of ripping us apart.  So this holiday season don’t be a selfish ogre, but be a blessing.  Teach your kids to be giving, this is not something they discover one day, so if they complain about what you give them then take something they love and give it to a kid who is less fortunate.  If this country does not learn about giving, generosity, kindness, love, and humility we will be brought low.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

After Action Report of The 2008 Campaign

As you know, unless you were in outer space for the past couple of years, last nigh America ended eight years of GOP presidency and voted its first Democrat into the White House since Clinton.   There are some who may wonder why the election went the way it did, and so I will try to break it down for you.  This election went Obama’s way and against McCain because of fund raising, management, message, platform, Palin, political climate, geography, and voter registration.

The first, and the biggest reason, Obama won was that he raised more than 200,000,000 more dollars in funds for his campaign (some six hundred million compared to around four hundred million to McCain) than McCain.  This meant that he could travel more, fund more commercials in more markets, and keep hammering home his message in many more markets than McCain did.  With the money he was able to raise he was able to keep hammering away in states such as Indiana, Virginia, Florida, and Colorado, North Carolina, Montana, and others that normally went Republican.  His money helped him conduct voter registration drives, put ads on television and kept his name in people’s minds.  McCain was forced to do somewhat less and because of this he went off the air very early in a lot of so called blue states and he even had to abandon some such as Michigan and Wisconsin all together because he simply did not have the cash on hand to go there.

Almost as important to fund raising in deciding this campaign was management, or in McCain’s case mismanagement.   Money alone is not what won this campaign, sure it was important, but managing resources and making decisions was far more decisive towards the outcome of this campaign.  Quite simply Obama’s staff did a far better job of running this campaign than McCain’s did.  Obama put together a brilliant fundraising campaign, put together a better message, a better attack strategy (the geography segment that we will talk about later), made better decisions about vice presidential choices, and did not make the so many crucial mistakes that McCain made.  McCain’s poor decision making cost him the advantage of the attackad as attack ads only work if you are above the reproach of the message of your own commercial (you can read more about this in the message section). Obama looked like the seasoned political veteran who knew how to win and McCain just looked old and outclassed.

Staying in the Ms, message and/or message confusion, cost McCain dearly.  Obama came out early as the candidate of hope and change.  McCain came out as country first and then change you can believe in.  Both had the words change in their slogans and at the end of the day this hurt McCain especially because Obama, using McCain’s own words about him voting with Bush more than ninety percent of the time, proved that McCain offered no change.  So every time that McCain talked about change people thought Barack Obama.  The negative attack ads that McCain used almost exclusively was equivelant to him shooting himself in the foot because while Obama did use attack ads he also had many campaign ads about policy and issue stances and McCain did not.  This was to McCain’s detriment as the only issue ad that McCain had was about energy.   Even worse for McCain was the fact that his decisions cost him the advantage of his attack ads.  The strongest example of this was his pre Palin ads where he attacked Obama’s inexperience, but this message was shot down when he brought in Palin who is arguably one of the most inexperienced people at any level of American politics.  McCain’s message further backfired when he linked Obama to the Wall Street Meltdown but retained Phil Gramm (the man who’s senate committee passed the legislation for the imbroglio) and was involved in the Keating Five fiasco of the late 1980s.  Even McCain’s Joe the Plumber Attack ad fell on a sour note because Joe was not Joe, was not a plumber, and was behind on his taxes anyway.   Last but not least McCain/Palin’s attack ad linking Obama to ACORN and Ayers backfired because you betcha McCain had ties to both as well.  McCain’s attack ad strategy went awry because again attack ads only work if you are not guilty of what you accuse your opponent of doing.  Ultimately McCain’s message was muddled and confused whereas Obama’s message was coherent, concises, and clear.  He simply ran on the I am not Bush ticket and he was able to deliver the death knell to McCain’s Maverick status by linking him to big oil, Bush, and the ignorance of the past eight years.  Obama promised hope and stayed on message even during the debate and in a time when McCain should have just ran away with it all (the debates) he failed because he engaged in tawdry attacks on McCain.  Oh yeah and McCain was not helped by the insipid personal attacks on Obama claiming he was not an American, was a Muslim, and all the other empty crap that only worked on a few ignoramouses.

Platform was critical to this year’s election.  McCain was forced to address an unpopular war, a horrible economy, education, energy and he had to prove he would not be four or eight more years of Bush while doing so.  This really hurt him bad because he could not.  Obama was able to shape a platform that was ultimately very similar to McCain but that did not have the stigma of George W Bush on it.  McCain tried to call Obama’s platform the ideas of congressional liberals, but he forgot that in 2006 the American people voted in those very same congressional liberals.

Sarah Palin was the decision that ultimately ended up costing McCain the election.  She did galvanize the religious right, but she scared the hell out of everyone else.  Palin took away McCain’s best shot which was to say McCain has experience to deal with the tough times ahead, but Obama is a novice.  This meant that even though McCain tried to continue the Obama “not ready to lead” attack that it fell on deaf ears.  Even worse, Palin came off as stupid (no, not Simple [one could argue Harry Truman was simple]) and in a George W Bush type of way.  People saw her and they imagined McCain dying of old age and her as the next president of the United States and they quite literally freaked out, and for what its worth so did I.  Palin literally failed in her multiple interviews with the press and came off looking as a backwoods buffoon and it did not help that in her satire Tina Fey’s impression came off as more intelligent than Palin.  Palin did get a few Hillary votes as some women voted her because she was a woman, but too many people saw her as the second Bush especially after she spouted the bit of Iraq is God’s will.  Palin also forced McCain to not even think about Jeremiah Wright, becuase Palin’s Pastor was even more bizaare (seriously her pastor in Wasilla, while in Kenya got about four people killed because he literally started a witch hunt), and her pastor had some pretty wierd (for Assembly of God Rapturists) ideas about the last day because he believed Alaska would be a refuge state in the last days and that the church must be there to support people, but thats a topic we’ve already talked about so scrounge around and enjoy what you see here.  Palin was the person who destroyed the McCain campaign.

Political climate caused McCain considerable grief as well as he had to run as Republican in a nation soured on the entire GOP because of George Bush and the legacy of the Bush and GOP congress government.  People are tired of Iraq, they are tired of bailouts for billionaires and the shafting of the poor, of ignorance and the politics of fear and so they took it out on McCain.  McCain was, politically speaking, in the wrong place at the wrong time because this election was a referendum on the Bush Administration and so people voted out Bush and it did not help McCain for going on record as saying he voted with Bush more than ninety percent of the time.

In addition to the above comes the factor of geography because as in real estate elections are made or broken by location, location, location.  Quite simply  McCain spent way too much time in Pennsylvania in the last couple of weeks of the election and there was no really sound reason for this.  McCain spending all that time in Pennsylvania would be akin to Obama spending the last two weeks of the election in Texas and it would have yielded the same results.  Obama was very smart to drop by a few of the solid blue states, but he focused most of his time in Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, and New Mexico and this really helped him win whereas McCain spent most of the final phase of this election going to Pennsylvania which hurt McCain because he threw away Millions of dollars on that state that could have bought precious campaign ad minutes and electioneering in Florida and Virgina.  Obama mastered Geography while McCain did not

Finally, but certainly not least, Obama launched a powerful voter registration drive.  It was so well ran and so effective that McCain even tried to make it an attack issue via ACORN.  Obama got people to get out the vote.  This allowed him to bury McCain.  Quite simply if you get more people registered to vote and you get them to vote for you than the other guy you win.  Obama did this very well.

To sum it up there was a variety of reasons Obama won and McCain lost and chief among these were Money, management, message, platform, political climate, Palin, geography, and voter registration.  McCain was, as the kids say, pwnd by Obama in all these areas.

I Told You So

First off I would like to commend the BBC for a spot on bit of journalistic excellence.  It seems that Mikheil Saakashvili is indeed culpable in a spat of war crimes and that indeed it was him and not the Russians who were engaged in Genocide

The BBC has discovered evidence that Georgia may have committed war crimes in its attack on its breakaway region of South Ossetia in August.

Eyewitnesses have described how its tanks fired directly into an apartment block, and how civilians were shot at as they tried to escape the fighting.

Research by the international investigative organisation Human Rights Watch also points to indiscriminate use of force by the Georgian military, and the possible deliberate targeting of civilians.

Indiscriminate use of force is a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and serious violations are considered to be war crimes.

The allegations are now raising concerns among Georgia’s supporters in the West.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told the BBC the attack on South Ossetia was “reckless”.

He said he had raised the issue of possible Georgian war crimes with the government in Tbilisi.

The evidence was gathered by the BBC on the first unrestricted visit to South Ossetia by a foreign news organisation since the conflict.

Georgia’s attempt to re-conquer the territory triggered a Russian invasion and the most serious crisis in relations between the Kremlin and the West since the Cold War.

They went on firing all the next day without stopping. At some point there was a pause, and we saw Georgian soldiers going along the street in their Nato uniforms Taya Sitnik

And Georgians themselves have suffered. We confirmed the systematic destruction of former Georgian villages inside South Ossetia.

Some homes appear to have been not just burned by Ossetians, but also bulldozed by the territory’s Russian-backed authorities.

The war began when Georgia launched artillery attacks on targets in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, at about 2330 on 7 August 2008.

Georgia said at the time that it was responding to increasing attacks on its own villages by South Ossetia militia, although it later said its action was provoked by an earlier Russian invasion.

. . . .

The Russian prosecutor’s office is investigating more than 300 possible cases of civilians killed by the Georgian military.

Some of those may be Ossetian paramilitaries, but Human Rights Watch believes the figure of 300-400 civilians is a “useful starting point”.

That would represent more than 1% of the population of Tskhinvali – the equivalent of 70,000 deaths in London.

Find Out More Listen to File On 4, Radio 4 Tuesday 28 October 2008 2000 GMT, repeated Sunday 2 November 1700 GMT Or catch up at Radio 4’s Listen Again site Listen to Assignment on BBC World Service Assignment Tim Whewell meets a mother stricken with grief after the death of her son in South Ossetia Newsnight

Allison Gill, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, said: “We’re very concerned at the use of indiscriminate force by the Georgian military in Tskhinvali.

“Tskhinvali is a densely populated city and as such military action needs to be very careful that it doesn’t endanger civilians.”

“We know that in the early stages there were tank attacks and Grad rockets used by Georgian forces,” she added.

“Grad rockets cannot be used in densely populated areas because they cannot be precisely targeted, and as such they are inherently indiscriminate.

“Our researchers were on the ground in Tskhinvali as early as 12 August.

“And we gained evidence and witness testimony of Grad rocket attacks and tank attacks on apartment buildings, including tank attacks that shot at the basement level.

“And basements are typically areas where civilians will hide for their own protection.

“So all of this points to the misuse, the inappropriate use of force by Georgia against civilian targets,” according to Alison Gill.

Human Rights Watch will talk only of the “possible” deliberate targeting by Georgian forces of individual civilians, a still more serious charge, though some Ossetians the BBC spoke to in Tskhinvali claim to have witnessed such cases.

Wreckage

Marina Kochieva, a doctor at Tskhinvali’s main hospital, says she herself was targeted by a Georgian tank as she and three relatives were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She says the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, forcing them to crash into a ditch.

The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground.

She showed the BBC the burnt-out wreckage of the car on the town’s ring-road, riddled with bullet holes and with a much larger hole, apparently from a tank round, in the front passenger door.

Ms Kochieva says a nurse from her hospital was killed while fleeing Tskhinvali in similar circumstances.

She says she counted 18 burnt-out cars on the ring-road on 13 August, at the end of the war, suggesting there may have been more casualties.

Many Tskhinvali buildings were damaged during the conflict

Asked if, at night, Georgian soldiers might not have suspected her car of carrying Ossetian fighters, Ms Kochieva said: “Fighters wouldn’t have gone away from town, they would have gone towards town. We were escaping like other refugees.

“The Georgians knew this was the ‘Road of Life’ for Ossetians. They were sitting here waiting to kill us,” she said.

Georgia’s Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili told the BBC, “I can firmly say that the Georgian military, on intention, never attacked directly any civilian object.

“On the surface, the damage to some of the houses in Tskhinvali that can be observed might lead to this conclusion. But to see if some is damage inflicted by direct targeting, for that an in-depth military assessment needs to be done.

“I think the best response is a fully-fledged independent, impartial international inquiry into the issue,” she added.

Her British counterpart David Miliband, who visited Georgia immediately after the war to show solidarity with its government, said he took the allegations of war crimes “extremely seriously” and had raised them “at the highest level” in Tbilisi.

Apparently hardening his language towards Georgia, he called its actions “reckless”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7692751.stm

Keep this in mind when you vote as McCain took one million dollars from the Saakashvili government and keep in mind that this purchased his support for Georgia’s genocidal aggression.

Friday Funnies

A bit of humor to get you ready for the Weekend

In our first clip we find out who is to blame for leaving McCain on his campaign bus all alone

Ironically the press secretary in the Onion’s parody is more direct than any of our recent press secretaries

How messed up is our current political system? Well children are funding attack ads

Trust me this one’s truer than you want to admit.

Bert, the real enemy of freedom and democracy

and finally a tribute to the Miami Dolphins:

Go Bills

John McCain and Barack Obama, Where Were They Born?

A lot of GOPers are giddy over the ever weakening prospect that Barack Obama does not meet the citizenship requirements for the American presidency. To support their claim they suggest that Obama’s father is Kenyan, that he has siblings in Kenya, and that he will not release his birth certificate for public scrutiny. When Obama produced evidence to prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he is an American citizen by birth, the dullards in the GOP hardliner camp said that this document was clearly a forgery. Fortunately, as they always do, FactCheck.Org came through with the final verdict in this matter. Here is the full findings of FactCheck:

Since we first wrote about Obama’s birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.

Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?

Doocy: What do you mean they have a “false birth certificate” on their Web site?

Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.

Doocy: Well, couldn’t it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?

Corsi: No, it’s a — there’s been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it’s been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It’s a fake document that’s on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.

Corsi isn’t the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:

• The birth certificate doesn’t have a raised seal.
• It isn’t signed.
• No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
  
• In the zoomed-in view, there’s a strange halo around the letters.
• The certificate number is blacked out.
• The date bleeding through from the back seems to say “2007,” but the document wasn’t released until 2008.
• The document is a “certification of birth,” not a “certificate of birth.”
  

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it’s stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller

Alvin T. Onaka’s signature stamp

The raised seal

Blowup of text

You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven’t been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.

The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.

The document is a “certification of birth,” also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents’ hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.

We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that’s when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and “all the records we could get our hands on” according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn’t release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama’s citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: “[We] couldn’t get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we’ve found out it’s pretty irrelevant for the outside world.” The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 – 010641.

Blowup of certificate number

Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama’s information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn’t have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible “scenario” without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.

We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn’t meet the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural-born citizen.”

We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: “It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over.”

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:

Obama’s birth announcement

The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama “likely” was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.

Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn’t tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama’s father’s race listed as “African”? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father’s race and mother’s race are supplied by the parents, and that “we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be.” We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as “African.” It’s certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be.

When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said “The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised.” He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for “all reasonable purposes.”

–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller

Sources

United States Department of State. “Application for a U.S. Passport.” Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.

State of Hawaii Department of Health. “Request for Certified Copy of Birth Record.” Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.

Hollyfield, Amy. “Obama’s Birth Certificate: Final Chapter.” Politifact.com. 27 Jun. 2008.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

Regardless of the insipid hopes of the most banal members of the GOP elite -including Pat Robertson, Carl Rove, and Trailer Park Trash across the land- Barack Obama is an American citizen by birth, but what about John Sydney McCain?  The All American grumpy old white guy running for the GOP.  Well, his citizenship is at least as questionable as Obama.  McCain, you see, was born in the Panama Canal Zone which -although at the time was an American territory- is not a part of the United States.  According to the New York Times:

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

Almost since those words were written in 1787 with scant explanation, their precise meaning has been the stuff of confusion, law school review articles, whisper campaigns and civics class debates over whether only those delivered on American soil can be truly natural born. To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states.

“There are powerful arguments that Senator McCain or anyone else in this position is constitutionally qualified, but there is certainly no precedent,” said Sarah H. Duggin, an associate professor of law at Catholic University who has studied the issue extensively. “It is not a slam-dunk situation.”

Mr. McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a Navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that Mr. McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

But given mounting interest, the campaign recently asked Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general now advising Mr. McCain, to prepare a detailed legal analysis. “I don’t have much doubt about it,” said Mr. Olson, who added, though, that he still needed to finish his research.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of Mr. McCain’s closest allies, said it would be incomprehensible to him if the son of a military member born in a military station could not run for president.

“He was posted there on orders from the United States government,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. McCain’s father. “If that becomes a problem, we need to tell every military family that your kid can’t be president if they take an overseas assignment.”

The phrase “natural born” was in early drafts of the Constitution. Scholars say notes of the Constitutional Convention give away little of the intent of the framers. Its origin may be traced to a letter from John Jay to George Washington, with Jay suggesting that to prevent foreigners from becoming commander in chief, the Constitution needed to “declare expressly” that only a natural-born citizen could be president.

Ms. Duggin and others who have explored the arcane subject in depth say legal argument and basic fairness may indeed be on the side of Mr. McCain, a longtime member of Congress from Arizona. But multiple experts and scholarly reviews say the issue has never been definitively resolved by either Congress or the Supreme Court.

Ms. Duggin favors a constitutional amendment to settle the matter. Others have called on Congress to guarantee that Americans born outside the national boundaries can legitimately see themselves as potential contenders for the Oval Office.

“They ought to have the same rights,” said Don Nickles, a former Republican senator from Oklahoma who in 2004 introduced legislation that would have established that children born abroad to American citizens could harbor presidential ambitions without a legal cloud over their hopes. “There is some ambiguity because there has never been a court case on what ‘natural-born citizen’ means.”

Mr. McCain’s situation is different from those of the current governors of California and Michigan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer M. Granholm, who were born in other countries and were first citizens of those nations, rendering them naturalized Americans ineligible under current interpretations. The conflict that could conceivably ensnare Mr. McCain goes more to the interpretation of “natural born” when weighed against intent and decades of immigration law.

Mr. McCain is not the first person to find himself in these circumstances. The last Arizona Republican to be a presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, faced the issue. He was born in the Arizona territory in 1909, three years before it became a state. But Goldwater did not win, and the view at the time was that since he was born in a continental territory that later became a state, he probably met the standard.

It also surfaced in the 1968 candidacy of George Romney, who was born in Mexico, but again was not tested. The former Connecticut politician Lowell P. Weicker Jr., born in Paris, sought a legal analysis when considering the presidency, an aide said, and was assured he was eligible. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was once viewed as a potential successor to his father, but was seen by some as ineligible since he had been born on Campobello Island in Canada. The 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, whose birthplace is Vermont, was rumored to have actually been born in Canada, prompting some to question his eligibility.

Quickly recognizing confusion over the evolving nature of citizenship, the First Congress in 1790 passed a measure that did define children of citizens “born beyond the sea, or out of the limits of the United States to be natural born.” But that law is still seen as potentially unconstitutional and was overtaken by subsequent legislation that omitted the “natural-born” phrase.

Mr. McCain’s citizenship was established by statutes covering the offspring of Americans abroad and laws specific to the Canal Zone as Congress realized that Americans would be living and working in the area for extended periods. But whether he qualifies as natural-born has been a topic of Internet buzz for months, with some declaring him ineligible while others assert that he meets all the basic constitutional qualifications — a natural-born citizen at least 35 years of age with 14 years of residence.

“I don’t think he has any problem whatsoever,” said Mr. Nickles, a McCain supporter. “But I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if somebody is going to try to make an issue out of it. If it goes to court, I think he will win.”

Lawyers who have examined the topic say there is not just confusion about the provision itself, but uncertainty about who would have the legal standing to challenge a candidate on such grounds, what form a challenge could take and whether it would have to wait until after the election or could be made at any time.

In a paper written 20 years ago for the Yale Law Journal on the natural-born enigma, Jill Pryor, now a lawyer in Atlanta, said that any legal challenge to a presidential candidate born outside national boundaries would be “unpredictable and unsatisfactory.”

“If I were on the Supreme Court, I would decide for John McCain,” Ms. Pryor said in a recent interview. “But it is certainly not a frivolous issue.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/politics/28mccain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

In my personal opinion Obama, by virtue of his Hawaiin birth certificatem and McCain, by virtue of being born on a United States Military Base to parents who were in the service of the United States government, both meet the citizenship qualifications required of them in the constitution.  However, if you want to make an argument out of it then it would appear that McCain would have a much rougher time proving his citizenship by birth than Obama would.  After all Obama has a birth certificate issued by the state of Hawaii -and contrary to the bizaare apocalyptic ramblings of Pat Robertson he has been quite open regarding his birth certificate- whereas McCain has a Panamanian registration.

Hey Saakashvili, South Ossetia is a Sovereign Country

Waaah, Waaaah, Waaaah, in case you are wondering those whining sounds are the words of Mikheil American Neocon Puppet Saakashvili regarding Russia’s latest dealings with South Ossetia. Now, Mr. Saakashvili South Ossetia is a sovereign state -oh sure your handlers in DC have not yet recognized South Ossetia’s independence, but Moscow and many other capitals have- and you need to stay out of their affairs. So Russia has placed 2000 troops in a sovereign state who have requested Russian support.

I understand that from reading Yahoo’s article on this: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081023/wl_nm/us_georgia_ossetia_troops#full that you would believe that Russia has launched more aggression, but when you consider that a Georgian wrote this article it becomes little more than an Op-Ed piece and once again the American media has been shamefully biased. Russia is protecting the sovereignty of a state that has been at least nominally independent since 1991 and it would be aggression on the part of Georgia if Russia was forced to remove their protective forces from South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Make no mistake Saakashvili is a neoconservative thug who has attempted to embroil the United States into his anti Ossetian and Abkhazian ethnic cleansing. Even more shameful is the fact that he has quite literally purchased -via one million dollars in campaign contributions- McCain’s support for his genocidal aggression. Saakashvili has cracked down on the freedoms of the Georgian people, he has arrested political dissidents, and he has waged a war of ethnic cleansing on Ethnic Russians. My prayers are with the Russian, Georgian, South Ossetian, and Abkhazian people but Saakashvili is a thug.

According to Article 51 of the UN charter and the recent peace deal brokered by the French, the Russians have every right to remain in South Ossetia to protect the Ossetians from Georgian aggression. It is a disgraceful day in world affairs when Saakashvili gets to dictate, or even tries to dictate, the relationship between two sovereign states. The people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are predominantly Russian and they should have every right to secede from Georgia or to merge with the Russian Federation.

Now I realize that some people, who unfortunately only watch the American media (which is dominated by the geopolitical interests of its corporate parents who happen to be heavily invested in oil and military manufacture), will blubber and spout that Russia is the aggressor here. However, this could not be further from the truth. It was Georgia, not Russia, who launched the aggression into South Ossetia. Russia stopped an ethnic cleansing and gets blamed for it? There is something seriously wrong with that and for us, with our record of preemption in the Balkans and Irag, to condemn them is down right hypocritical.

So Sarah Palin Doesn’t Know What She’s Talking About? You Betcha!

Poor John McCain, he thought he would run a positive campaign and make Sarah Palin his attack dog. Unfortunately Palin has come across as clueless. The poor girl is attacking Obama for publicly claiming that if Pakistan knew where Osama Bin Laden was and refused to hand him over to us that he would have no problem going into Pakistan to get him. Really now, what is her problem with Obama restating the Bush doctrine of “you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists?” We have spent nearly a trillion dollars prosecuting a war against a nation that had no WMDs, posed no threat to its neighbors or us, and was quite frankly the wrong war at the wrong time and we fought this in an aggressive fashion. Now Palin comes out and says that it would be wrong to go into Pakistan to fight Al Qaeda even though the Bush administration has recently done the exact same thing Obama has proposed. From Yahoo News here is a series of other things that Palin has appeared clueless in.

In Palin’s view, the potential crises would be sparked by Obama’s own actions. Playing off the Republican ticket’s previous criticisms of the Democratic nominee, she criticized Obama for:

_Advancing the idea of invading Pakistan without that government’s permission. Obama has said he would authorize an attack if the whereabouts of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden were known and Pakistan’s government were unable or unwilling to go after him.

Palin’s criticism, however, comes as the Bush administration has authorized attacks on al-Qaida targets within Pakistan, sparking criticism at times from Pakistan’s government. McCain, for his part, has said he would pursue bin Laden “to the gates of hell.”

_Advocating sitting down with “the world’s worst dictators” without preconditions. Palin noted that Obama has said he would meet with the Iranian regime even though it has threatened Israel with destruction. For his part, Obama has contended that the U.S. should not be afraid to meet with its adversaries.

_Opposing the troop surge in Iraq and voting to cut funding to troops, which Palin said left those in Iraq at grave risk. Obama’s lone vote against a funding measure came because the bill did not include a timetable for withdrawal of troops; he followed with a vote for funding and has supported every other funding measure.

_Offering a weak response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia, which Palin said would encourage Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to invade the Ukraine. In August, when the two sides were fighting, Obama condemned Russia’s action and called for diplomacy and restraint by both countries.

Palin also repeated familiar campaign slogans, contrasting Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal with McCain as a fiscal conservative who will do more to help struggling families and small businesses. Palin said a McCain administration would create more jobs and lead the country to energy independence.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081021/ap_on_el_pr/palin#full

Bottom line is that Palin is capable of spewing the same empty Republican rhetoric we have heard the past eight years, but she is quite incapable of independent thought and policy analysis. Should Palin be sent back to Alaska and into political oblivion? You betcha!

Friday Funnies

As you know we are less than three weeks away from the upcoming presidential election, so lets have a look, humorous of course, into the ideas behind the guys and gals running for elected office. We will of course finish up with a look at sports.

In our first clip GOPers from all walks of life discuss why they are voting Republican:

In our second Clip we learn how to speak like a Republican

Next we learn the difference between a Democrat and Republican in a clip strangely reminiscent of a Mac advertisement.

In our next clip the folks at Jib Jab remind us one and all that its time for some campaigning

In this Video McCain reminds us that he has nothing to offer in No We Can’t

In Our Two Clips, I’m just going to let the two candidates poke fun at each other

And finally as a Bills fan, and because we play San Diego on Sunday, its time to Roast the Chargers

Go Bills.