The state of Hawaii actually passed a law the other day that allowed the state to refuse any more request for his birth certificate.
It was a law that said that the same people can't continually ask for the same record over and over and over, as many out-of-state people and organizations have been doing for the past two years. As I said, some people don't want to believe the truth, it would impede on their hatred.
The picture (in this thread) could be doctored, but the other one (that is blurry) would be much harder to doctor. of course, the original document could be a fake, but it just seems difficult to believe that his parents (and the newspaper) would go through such detail to fake his citizenship.
Well, for starters, I believe that was done in retaliation to the Kenyan born rumors. Plus, no one took them seriously or had rallies. Nor did they keep going on and on about it. And it's incredibly doubtful they'd give a shit about it had he become president. Plus, I think it was done to show how asinine people can be about that crap.
Why? It only benefits Obama to have his opposition look like crazies. Oh, right. Well, you can't blame Obama for not saving birthers from themselves.
I have no doubt that either one is qualified by the constitution. Natural Born seems nebulous, but if you became a US citizen by birth it seems the test. There are interesting questions raised by both circumstances. In Obama's case, his father wasn't a US citizen. In McCain's case, both his parents were citizens. The first question becomes one of dual citizenship. Our constitution says that any Person born on US soil is a citizen - the president is thus a citizen. But his father was a Kenyan citizen. Similarly, McCain's parents were overseas (Panama) on govt. business. Since McCain is a US citizen, it's likely that President Obama is or was a citizen of Kenya, too. The reverse is true for McCain - is he a citizen of Panama as well as of the USA? Meaning, they both may have dual citizenships. The constitution doesn't preclude people who have dual citizenships from being president, so I don't see that as an issue. In fact, FactCheck.org says Obama was a Kenyan citizen until his 23rd birthday. http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/does_barack_obama_have_kenyan_citizenship.html I suspect McCain either was a dual citizen until a certain age as well, or could have been had he chosen to have dual citizenship. All this raises a second question - should this requirement be eliminated altogether? The reasoning for it is clear - we don't want some official (officially or not) of a foreign nation to be our commander in chief. However, there are plenty of good and otherwise qualified people whose allegiance is clearly to the United States and they're US citizens, though not Naturally Born. Maybe they deserve to be eligible. What do you think?
I think that it, as well as the age requirement, should be dropped. Both seem arbitrary. Once all the facts are out about a candidate, including their age and where they were born, let the people decide. The only requirement to be President should be that a majority of people want you to be President at the time of the election (I'd drop the Electoral College, too).
I think we need to keep the age requirement. Look at how excited certain people got about the supposedly hot Palin. Now imagine if McCain had picked some 20-year-old supermodel instead. And speaking of McCain, I'd also institute an upper limit on age as well. barfo
I think we've been over the electoral college thing before. While it seems great on the surface that "majority wins," the problem is that the strategy for winning would be to start marketing at the biggest cities and work your way down. It wouldn't take much, in that respect, to get to the 50% + 1. Even though a state like Wyoming might have less population than the city of San Jose CA, it deserves attention and its state's needs addressed by the feds. IMO.
Why? Because of some borders that were more or less arbitrarily drawn ~150 years ago? What we need to do is redraw state boundaries. barfo
Which makes perfect sense. Biggest cities = more of the people. Government is of the people, for the people. More population should mean more representation. It deserves attention in proportion with the number of people it has. Thus, it "deserves" less attention than the city of San Jose. Government isn't representing land mass...it's representing people. If there was a state with 1 person in it, it would deserve plenty of representation? The electoral college makes the votes of people in small states worth more than the votes of people in larger states, because they get disproportionate representation. That's quite counter to the democratic ideal of one person, one (equal) vote.
No, govt. is of the people BUT no tyranny of the masses. People in cities have very different interests and issues than people in urban areas. And govt. sure is interested in the less populated land. Your guy Clinton nationalized a huge part of the state of Utah near the end of his 2nd term. The offshore drilling ban is another good example.
Not a tyranny, no. That's what the Constitution (and Bill of Rights) is for. Majority vote can't abridge rights of others. Majority rules on non-Constitutionally-protected issues, though. Interested in it is quite a bit different than representing it. Government does nothing about land mass for the happiness of the land mass. It does things with/about land because people want that. Your examples aren't counters to what I said, they're still examples of government representing people, not land mass.
Government TAKES from those people in Utah, and TAKES rights away from people where offshore drilling would make sense. The people whose rights and resources are TAKEN by the feds absolutely deserve to address the candidates in person. The constitution is itself a bill of rights for the states. We're a Republic, not a Democracy, exactly for the reasons I've stated (taking without equal representation). The electoral college is required to have a republic. If you think your argument has merit, then argue why there should be a senate at all.
