Betsy is right - voters react to pocketbook issues and the "attitude" from the one article (along with its stats about all the EXPORTED jobs flowing to India) coupled with the alarming chart in the second article point to the kind of economic trends that make for voter anger being expressed at the polls. A mood of "Expel Congress" might be brewing.Quote:
Originally Posted by BetsyRoss
Until a major party points to a POSITIVE PLATFORM for addressing what ails, the vast majority of voters aren't going to see a clear and preferred choice that does SOMETHING for THEM. Anger only gets you so far. (Look where anger over Bush/Cheney landed us last fall. Change? Hope? Vague promises to many and, no matter one's views about eligibility, we've ended up with an under-qualified POTUS in terms of any tangible accomplishments except for promoting himself.)
The planks of that positive platform need to be:
- * Enforcement of laws respecting immigration such that our nation returns to "Rule of Law" sanity and the domestic labor pool is no longer subjected to the wage/employment distortions caused by porous borders and flaut-the-law attitudes.
* Getting OUT of the nationalization / socialization / big-time bailout "Business" which relies on running up the debt, putting printing presses on overdrive, and adds a whole new comma as placeholder for all the zeros on the annual deficit.
* Regulatory overhaul (and enforcement) of the Financial Sector to restore the now-lost "trust" of investors -- both domestic and foreign -- about what transpires on Wall Street. Bring back Glass-Steagall, for starters.
* A bigger "voice" in economic policy given to the manufacturing and service sector in cabinet and advisory posts in D.C. and far LESS WEIGHT given over to the bankers on Wall St. -- the decline of Britain as a power was marked by the same kind of over-reliance on its financial sector and diminution of its manufacturing sector back in the day.
The list could go on and on.
I don't invest much optimism in the newly discovered document being authenticated. Several things look bogus to me. For starters: That "Republic of Kenya" name entered at the bottom of the form may not have been in use in early 1964 since their Constitutional adoption date making them a Republic was not until the end of that same year. My further research after someone in another BC posting questioned it found the initial year of their independence from Dec. of '63 to Dec. of '64 seems to have found Kenya calling itself a "Dominion" until the political parties got formed and the actual structure of their governmental future got figured out. Only a check of contemporaneous BC's issued to others after independence but before December 1964 would confirm what Standardized Form was in use.
As a practical matter, if Obama were to get some magical "booting" out of office because Kenyan documents get authenticated, that would leave us with what? Joe BIDEN? That'd be a trade-off of a non-NBC POTUS (and "citizen of the world") with an all-American DOOFUS. (The only hope would be that he'd feel so chastised about the comeuppance of his running mate, he might become a Do Nothing lame duck.) It's the stuff of classic Pick Your Poison options. And if Biden were somehow tainted for being part of a ticket deemed ineligible, then what. President PELOSI?
Make no mistake: I think that SCOTUS needs to rule about the definition of natural born citizen and end the "fog" that has surrounded candidate qualifications not just in this year, but over the years. (Going back even further than the questions about AuH2O in '64.) And the state laws need to tighten things up to demand documented proofs from candidates instead of self-serving sworn statements that they find themselves "eligible" when they file to run in the primaries. But given the racial and religious connotations surrounding Obama, and the "racial sensitivites" exposed with that whole Gates incident, I'm worried that the political climate would find the Supreme Court making "bad law" if it were to entertain an eligibility case centered on Obama, and needed to issue a ruling now. They already trampled a lot of states' rights and federalist principles with Bush v. Gore the last time they were put into a hurried and rushed and very politicized environment in 2000. Odds, to me, seem to be 5-4 on "bad law" being made that would conflate citizen-at-birth with natural-born-citizen and give the 21st Century a ruling just as bad as Wong Kim Ark gave the end of the 19th.
Just my 2 cents.