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Has Obama done even one single thing about guns during his entire administration?

I believe they were voicing their opposition to the last Supreme Court decision on how states could ban guns.

They've supported trying to the Ammunition Accountability legislation.

I found this quote from an article:

'I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar,' President Obama told Sarah Brady, the former president of the Brady Campaign, this past spring.

Some others:

Trying to ban shooters off public lands.

Banning import of historic guns into the US.

Defining high powered guns as those being over .22 cal?

And his judge appointments, many of whom are anti-gun like Justice Sonia Sotomayor has signed on to a Supreme Court opinion stating that there is no individual right to "private self-defense" with guns.

I am bothered by one part of this article, the idea that Science Debate 2008 was only moderately successful. True, they were unable to get the candidates to debate science topics live on television, but the organization DID succeed in getting the candidates to debate science. The organization gave the candidates a list of questions and then posted their answers online side by side for comparison (I wrote up a score card on who I thought gave the best answer to each question).

This was more than the Federation of American Scientists or Union of Concerned Scientists have accomplished in their decades of activism. This was HUGE for an organization that had just come into existence. This success is why I abandoned my memberships to these other organizations and committed my donations to Science Debate.

(Side Note: Newt Gingrich is a scumbag, but if he gets the nomination I can't wait to see him and Obama throw-down on Science... I've seen Newt destroy John Kerry on how to tackle Climate Change and I believe his nomination would bring scientific issues into the spotlight since Obama is something of a science geek himself.)

With the prebate program in effect, those earning less than $15,000 per year would see their share of the federal tax burden drop from -0.7 percent to -6.3 percent. Of course, if the poorest Americans are paying less under the FairTax plan, then someone else pays more. As it turns out, according to the Treasury Department, “someone else” is everybody earning between $15,000 and $200,000 per year.

Which seems to contradict your statement about saving money until you look at this graph, which includes payroll taxes. So, yes, someone like you making more than $74,000 would save money. As would someone making less than $24,000. However, the $24,000 - $74,000 group (let's call them the lower-middle class) are the ones paying for it. That doesn't sit well with me.

Moreover, I'm not convinced that abolishing corporate taxes would bring all those American manufacturing jobs streaming back. For something like software development, where you'd be paying a high wage to your employees no matter where you were located, sure. But manufacturing? Even with 0% corporate taxes, American labor still costs a hell of a lot more than Chinese or Thai labor.

With the prebate program in effect, those earning less than $15,000 per year would see their share of the federal tax burden drop from -0.7 percent to -6.3 percent. Of course, if the poorest Americans are paying less under the FairTax plan, then someone else pays more. As it turns out, according to the Treasury Department, “someone else” is everybody earning between $15,000 and $200,000 per year.

Which seems to contradict your statement about saving money until you look at this graph, which includes payroll taxes. So, yes, someone like you making more than $74,000 would save money. As would someone making less than $24,000. However, the $24,000 - $74,000 group (let's call them the lower-middle class) are the ones paying for it. That doesn't sit well with me.

Moreover, I'm not convinced that abolishing corporate taxes would bring all those American manufacturing jobs streaming back. For something like software development, where you'd be paying a high wage to your employees no matter where you were located, sure. But manufacturing? Even with 0% corporate taxes, American labor still costs a hell of a lot more than Chinese or Thai labor.

House Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has been holding hearings on the corruption he accuses Obama having when Federal loan guarantees were given to Solyndra, the large solar startup that went out of business this year. Issa has also been busy denying his own work using his own power to try to get the same loan guarantees for Aptera, which is in his own district. Now Aptera has also failed. Will Issa investigate himself for corruption?

Nope.
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/leftover-campaign-funds/

err, no?

This would be a giant tax cut for the absurdly wealthy and atleast a kick in the pants to the middle class, and possibly a kick in the pants to the lower classes. Even if the bottom isn't completely screwed by the income tax, the middle is going to get a huge squeeze and the guys who could really afford to take it in the pants, the rich, get off easy. When you're in the upper tax brackets, the 20, 10, and 1 percent ranges, you're going to be spending less in terms of percent of your income, on the basic necessities of life. Even if you live lavishly. You're not going to hit the 100% usage levels that those in the lower middle and lower classes hit.

This would be incredibly bad.

FactCheck also did a great run down on the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax isn't fair. It'll crunch those of us who are in the middle pretty hard. Fact Check figures that If you make more than 15k a year but less than $200k a year, you're taking it in the shorts. Given that the federal minimum wage is 15.08k a year at full time, nearly everyone who's got full time work is going to get pretty hard by this. Even if you play with the numbers, the middle class gets screwed by a "fair" tax that well, isn't fair.

Yes, this is assuming that certain numbers are true, however, no matter what numbers you pick for the bottom end to receive, in order for this to be revenue neutral, someone has to get screwed.

Of course, under a progressive income tax, those at the bottom pay less, and those at the top pay more. The 1%'ers can afford the extra percentage points in their income. The 99%ers can't.

Fuck the rich.

Bush never actually said that, by the way.

http://factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper/

you'll get a flight on a Paul Wellstone plane!

So is a Wellstone plane a plane that is piloted by two borderline-incompetent pilots with a history of needing corrective reminders? Pilots who failed to maintain a safe airspeed and put the plane into an unrecoverable stall because they weren't paying attention to the instruments while looking for the airport that they were having difficulty finding under IFR flight? I don't see what incompetent pilots making a mistake have to do with a lawsuit against the government, perhaps you could explain this a little more, using facts and logic?

I think it says a lot that you appear to believe the tripe you're spewing. Let me guess: 9/11 was also an inside job, and the Illuminati control all the world governments from the shadows?

from FactCheck:

The report that Bush "screamed" those words at Republican congressional leaders in November 2005 is unsubstantiated, to put it charitably.

We judge that the odds that the report is accurate hover near zero. It comes from Capitol Hill Blue, a Web site that has a history of relying on phony sources, retracting stories and apologizing to its readers.

From Capitol Hill Blue:

I also let my prejudices get in the way. When some White House sources came to me with a story that claimed George W. Bush called the Constitution a “god damned piece of paper, I believed it without question because of my personal prejudices against Bush. I now believe I was wrong and that the incident never happened. The story in our database was modified to reflect my belief that I was lied to about the statement and I was wrong to print it.

Yeah it doesn't seem that he ever said that (although it's easy to believe he did, considering the other things that came out of his mouth):

http://factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper/

Fact check first... The "piece of paper" quote is phony.

As far as i can tell, this is the original article (it has been retracted): http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml
FactCheck.org: http://factcheck.org/2007/12/bush-the-constitution-a-goddamned-piece-of-paper/

The oil industry does not receive significant subsidies from the government. The idea that they do has been repeated so often by the likes of Rachel Maddow that everybody seems to believe it. Whether you believe in subsidizing green energy or not (and there are good arguments on both sides), it seems to me that you can't possibly have an informed opinion if you're not willing to do the most basic research on how our government approaches taxation and subsidization of the energy sector.

The two pieces to this 'inconvenient truth' are carrying over loss and the actual energy subsidies we do have. Carrying over loss is usually when you hear about other big companies receiving 'tax breaks' or 'subsidies' -- like GM or GE. Basically, if you lose a hundred million bucks in 2006, you get to write that off against a 100 mil profit in 2007 and pay zero taxes. This is not new and it's the basis of most taxes, which tax profits. There are some gross revenue taxes out there but they're pretty specifically targeted and even so are pretty ugly, since you can end up paying a tax on a transaction where you only made $100 but had to spend $500,000 to get there.

The other part is our actual national energy subsidies, which go almost entirely to 'green' energy. We do sometimes subsidize oil companies, but we typically also figure out ways to tax them that don't apply to other industries such that the oil companies do not come out ahead, and the oil companies have said that they'd much rather wipe out all the subsidies than receive any. Sorry it doesn't fit with the 'oil companies buy every election' worldview.

Source: http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/oil-and-gas-company-tax-breaks/

Hey everyone worrying about the debt is being played - the US can borrow money at 1.25% that means the interest paid on a trillion of debt is 12.5Billion dollars, which is rounding error in the US budget - the US now pays less interest on debt than it did during Bush I. Also people fail to recall that if you borrow money to create assets, such as roads and infrastructure it is not the same as borrowing money to spend on hookers and blow - since that assets you create have some long term value. We, as a people, are getting played by the rich and the powerful - it is very sad to see this country getting played by a bunch of ultra-rich right wing plutocrats who create one phony crisis after another to scare us into enriching them further.

The problem is the gap between spending and revenue has not been this high since WW II. So the concern is not about the debt - right now its pretty manageable. Its about the deficit which is out of control.

Actually, this same problem occurred in 1996 and 2002-2004, in some cases coming within millions of dollars of reaching an inability to make payments.

It's getting much more airplay now than it did in those years, but the growing national debt has always been a political football.

That is the biggest lie in US political history. Tax cuts do NOT increase revenues.

The fact is that revenues increases are due to the organic growth of the US economy, population growth, and inflation. Once you factor these principle causes out one finds that tax cuts actually decrease revenues.

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/07/14/197886/tax-cuts-dont-increase-revenues/

However tax cuts are great at increasing the deficit because they are rarely accompanied by spending cuts.

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

The idea that federal tax revenue cannot go above 20% based on US historical data is off-cited but is really the result of cherry-picking results so that non-US data are not considered. Expand the data set to include historical results from outside the US and you will immediately see that it is utter nonsense.

Err, there is an inconvenient errors in your grandstanding.

Not one penny of US debt has been repaid for 51 years: the last time US government funded debt actually decresed on a year-over-year basis was 1960

Clinton had 4 years where budget was in surplus and the US was paying down the debt.

http://factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/hist01z2.xls

Bush Jr. like Bush Sr. are on both sides of the chart.

Obama projects 2.5% Fed Funds rate in budget calculations through 2020. Average Fed Funds rate since 1980: 5.7%;

You may have noticed bond rates near 0% for extended period of time, and little inflation. These days, US doesn't have inflation for number of reason, one being that China is exporting deflation worldwide. Of course, this may end, but that's another story.

Anyway, your comparison to 1980 is irrelevant and wrong. We are in a global economic environment today. US is no longer the only nation that matters w.r.t. inflation.

The US government borrows 40-50 cents for every dollar it spends. A balanced budget would mean cutting government spending in half

Negative. To balance the current budget by cutting spending alone would require spending cut of 70%. Each $1 spent by the US governement is returned as 25-30% taxes, thus effectively costing $0.75. The reverse is true as well, Each dollar cut will only decrease the deficit by $0.75 or so, as there will be less revenue.

This is why cuts in Greece are so painful. They have to cut A LOT more than mere 10% of their budget.

In other words, cut the US budget in half to stop the situation from getting worse. Then start working on your debt mountains.

Or how about raise taxes by 50%? Institute 100% inclusion rate for capital gains, as Buffet indicated?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/hist04z2.xls

So basically, if you cut all agri subsidies, cut all of military spending, cut all the health and human services, the veterans affairs and social security, then you have a balanced budget. If you don't cut the military by at least 50%, you can't balance the budget...

PS. Interesting note from the attached spreadsheet. The Executive Office of the President ALWAYS had less than 0.05% of the entire budget. But during the Bush years, it swelled to 0.3% in 2006, equivalent to the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than the entire congress and that is A LOT more people! That was about $5-6 billion! WTF?

I really wanted to believe you... which is why I looked it up. Looks like those laws were on the books before W. came into office.

http://factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms

Have a nice day you AC puss.

If you really want to bring technological dominance back to the US, reduce or eliminate the corporate income tax. Right now, the US rate is crippling pretty much every industry that relies on large-cap businesses and forcing them outside the country.

Even Barack Obama and Bill Clinton favor a cut in the corporate tax rate.

Skeptics claim this trove of e-mails shows the scientists at the U.K. research center were engaging in evidence-tampering, and they are portraying the affair as a major scandal: "Climategate." ... An article from the conservative-leaning Canada Free Press claims that the stolen files are proof of a "deliberate fraud" and "the greatest deception in history." We find such claims to be far wide of the mark. The e-mails (which have been made available by an unidentified individual here) do show a few scientists talking frankly among themselves — sometimes being rude, dismissive, insular, or even behaving like jerks. Whether they show anything beyond that is still in doubt. An investigation is being conducted by East Anglia University, and the head of CRU, Phil Jones, has "stepped aside" until it is completed. However, many of the e-mails that are being held up as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented by global-warming skeptics eager to find evidence of a conspiracy. And even if they showed what the critics claim, there remains ample evidence that the earth is getting warmer.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/

As for carbon-taxes, you can still believe Anthropogenic Global Warming is happening and disagree with the carbon-tax solution. In fact, I've seen experiment that show that, if you present people with arguments that global warming is real and carbon-tax is the solution, and then show a second group of people an argument that global warming is real and nuclear power is the solution, people are more likely to accept the idea of global warming+nuclear power solution. What this says to me is that people aren't making up their minds from the facts of global warming, but they're making decisions about the reality of global warming based on their fears of what happens if they accept it.

Excellent point. The only thing which could improve it is if it were true.

Factcheck.org says "limiting malpractice liability would reduce total national health care spending by about one-half of 1 percent". As always they list all of their sources so you can check them yourself if needed.

I'm a big fan of reducing health care costs, but the only way to do that is to start with facts. Hint: Whoever you heard say "tort law is a big part of healthcare costs" is either misinformed or being deceptive; either way I'd treat anything else he/she says with a grain of salt from now on.

Well, it would help if you could put your thoughts down clearly and consistently, you originally claimed she was crazy, not a thief. According to the article you linked "Pelosi saw her wealth rise due to some stock gains and real estate investments made by her husband, Paul." It looks like they had a really good year, for example one of the companies he invested in quintupled in value over the year, another one he invested in released an iPhone. You may have heard of it.

As for the planes, according to a slightly more non-partisan source it's been normal for the Speaker of the House to use a government jet since 2001. It's a security requirement that was imposed by the Bush government.

At no point in the last 60 years has our government been able to spend less than what they take in.

Clinton did it.

At some point, you have to acknowledge the real source of the problem... out of control spending.

And insufficient revenue. Conservatives can't continue to pretend that half of the equation doesn't exist.

1. Both the senate and house were under democrat control for a long long time, until the awesome election in 2010, did they pass a budget, nope.

You mean like from 2000-2006 when the bulk of this deficit problem was created? How much did the GOP do to fix Medicare then hmm?

2. Sure, our welfare is very comfortable compared to lots of other countries

Riiight. One quote from a clear asshole and you're ready to throw out hundreds of needy children on the street. How very charming. I'm willing to suffer some fraud if it means health care for all. And I said 'some', no system is perfect.

3. I am 27, i will never ever see SSN or Medicare. According to the democratic plan, medicare ends in 13 years anyways

And I'm 40. Ask your grand parents how much it would cost to insure them through private insurance. Trust me, it's not economical for people to buy private insurance. You know what Ryan's solution was to that? Exchanges. The very same exchanges that Obama's plan will set up. Oops.

4. Will you give charity away to able bodied people who refuse to work. If they can work, they should do something for the money.

Who said money should be given away. Unemployment is paid for out of the taxes you paid in while you were working. It's called 'insurance'. You don't pay in the amount of life insurance that you get at pay out. You pay in with the plan that you won't need it but the security that it will be there if you do need it. Unemployment is no different. Not everybody needs it but everybody *might* need it someday.

How do you conclude that 9.1% unemployment means these are lazy bums living high on the hog? Seriously how?

5. As for the GOP, yeah, lets out alot of them tooo, they tend to just be socialism light, the answer is smaller government all around.

Again, ask your grand parents if it's 'socialism' lite. Trust me, they won't agree. Modern America was built on the capitalist system, but harnessed to provide the benefits of socialized risk. Best of both worlds with hopefully a minimum of the ills of both. That 'compromise' thing the GOP seem to misunderstand so much.

6. LOL, GM will go bankrupt again, eventually. Do you know how many Americans will never ever buy GM again?

About the same number as will buy Toyota? I'm sorry you shit all over America, but hey it is your opinion. Remember, GM is a glorious private company...that ran itself into the ground. Private enterprise isn't by default any smarter than anything else. It sure isn't the savior of the poor and disadvantaged.

You preach about sources, but site none yourself

Google 'Bikini Graph'. Clearly shows the number of job losses per month quite quickly turning around as Obama took office.

Food Stamps the best economic stimulus

3 million jobs lost - this is a worst case scenario and FactCheck says it would likely be closer to a million. Still a massive hit to the economy that we didn't have *because* of Obama's policies.

Your turn for sources...

Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org and polifact.com, for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.

Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.

No it wouldn't be a waste. For a mere 8 figures, we could put whichever political party is in power in control of what is considered the "truth". And they would be "independant", just like NPR is "independant".

Quite apart from all the other good reasons why this is a BAD idea, it is another way to wase money a broke country dosn't have.

First, the US is very far from broke. We have a huge national income, and (relative to our peers) choose to spend relatively little of it on taxes. We could in theory go "broke" if we fail to raise revenues to cover growing health care costs and/or cut benefits to our aging population. Nobody (least of all the people putting their money where there mouths are and buying US debt) seems to think it's likely that we'll do neither, and thus default.

Second, the proposal in question would require a trivial amount of money; factcheck.org and polifact.com, for example, already do this kind of work. I wonder what their budgets are--probably 6 or 7 figures? A government with a 13-figure budget could do contribute significantly to that kind of work with money that would amount to a rounding error. BBC news appears to be around 8 figures, for a complete news organization with international coverage.

Third, this hardly strikes me as a "waste". If we could better educate our voters with such a tiny fraction of our budget, that sounds like spending that could pay for itself.

if we have snopes.com?

I think Snopes has been caught out on some hot political issues. They are great for debunking urban legends. But there is FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and to a lesser extent The Washington Post.

I've yet to check out your site, but will. As I've yet to judge how successful you are at your mission, I can only say I appreciate that you're trying.

For politics, there's also FactCheck.org.

The trouble is that you have to approach these grains-of-salt sites and the like with a grain of salt. The idea of a "fact agency" sounds very tempting as a quick fix, and I'm certain that if such a thing were created, it would do wonders at the beginning. But once there's a fair amount of public trust in it, that's when the potential for abuse becomes great.

Nothing will ever eclipse thorough research and hard questioning.

Sarcastic, probably yes, straw man, it's not.

I cited a government official verifying that the certificate of live birth was real, was given by them, and accurately represented underlying paperwork. You said "you think we should believe everything the government or people in the government says at face value and never question it". I offered a data point; you claimed I made a categorical statement about the trustworthiness of government officials. That's a straw man.

The only difference is you supported one and likely didn't like or believe the other.

No, the difference is that one has multiple, independently verified pieces of evidence directly supporting it; the other had a lot of self-interested government officials saying "trust me".

There are obscured documents- check, the same with WMDs

The certificate of live birth was released generally in obscured form at one point, but members of the media were invited to see and photograph the document. Several did, including staffers from factcheck.org; Here's their photograph of it, unobscured, so go crazy verifying the serial number that was available back in 2008.

News papers and websites reported it as true

More than that, members of the media were able to visit the archives of the newspapers that published the birth announcement and view the archived newspapers with the birth announcement in them, proving pretty conclusively that the announcement (which was placed by the hospital as a matter of procedure) was made at the correct time, in the correct place, providing independent corroboration of the certificate of live birth.

Did I miss something?

That the serial number was available in 2008 from independent sources in the media, who found (i.e., saw and touched) corroborating evidence of his birth in the form of news announcements.

In the case of Iraqi WMDs, the only people claiming to have direct proof were the government officials, and they weren't sharing that proof; the news media was simply reporting on what they were told, not claiming to have direct evidence themselves.

the UN weapons inspection quarterly reports were saying it was likely that Iraq both still had WMDs and the capability to create them

The key word there being "likely", meaning the inspectors had no direct evidence of WMDs. By comparison, the certificate of live birth and the newspaper announcements were directly accessible to the media, who took pictures of them.

No, a conspiracy to hide the truth about Obama's birth isn't impossible at this stage (meaning prior to the release of the long form), but the reasonable belief is that Obama's status as a natural born citizen was demonstrated as well as could be expected in 2008.

the entire point of demanding an un-obfuscated document was to be able to independently verify it. It's just another piece of paper until it's verified. That will take some time as you pointed out earlier. Hell, it hasn't even been a month.

Actually, it's been three years that the serial number has been available--plenty of time to independently verify it.

But you do not even know what that stuff is and are blindly making those conclusions based on your faith.

Again with the straw man. I have heard the birther arguments, I have evaluated them and found them loony, and by comparison, Obama's certificate of live birth and the independent verification of it seems to demonstrate to me quite sufficiently that he was a natural born U.S. citizen. You, however, assume that I'm just an o-bot, when I've spent all this time without returning your sarcasm, presenting actual facts and verifiable evidence.

I'm going to wave the bullshit flag on this one. The tax cuts Walker enacted in Wisconsin take effect next year. He had a budget shortfall this year. Ergo, Walker's tax cuts did not cause the budget shortfall.

It you want to say TV isn't a failure, then cut off CAFR funding for it. Cut off Obama's giveaway to the networks. Let's have the FCC panel made up of engineers who the public votes in, not the one's the POTUS appoints. Today you have to get your daily dose of propaganda BS along with your local news (which could possibly warn if a tsunami is on the way) what a nasty trade off, listening to how jobs are so good, and the economy is recovering, and OBL shot and dumped at sea, just to try to know if the rain might have nuclear fallout or if some earthquake has a 100' wave headed your way. Let us not forget the switch to DTV which sucks more money people don't have. Plus when it's really windy from the haarp technology mucking with the weather, the DTV packets break up. Where in analog, it was just snow and noise, now it's BSOD (black screen of death)

Ya want to talk about the telcos? Start with NSA fios splitters, move on to wiretaps, spying, and all the rest of the crap. You couldn't GIVE me a mobile phone.

You want to talk about the internet and law? Miserable failure. *.AA , DMCA, streaming stations, copyright/patent trolls, SEO blackhats, the intelligence community spying, Chamber of Commerce, facebook. You can't look me in the eye and tell me that's not a failure for the US Constitution which is now intermittent.

When the monetary system financial terrorism come to fruition and mark to market is realized and the funding sources are added up, and the financial terrorists are prosecuted, these technologies will be a failure. It's just that it isn't measured this way currently because of the corruption and payola.

Watch: sock puppet / trolls will vote this message off the radar they don't like the truth.

Listen. I'm not uh-merican, I don't live there, so I don't really give a rat's ass anyway. Anything is better than Dubya. I'm content.

That being said, here's what I saw:

In 2008 the Obama campaign released a "certification of live birth". This certification is printed on a laser printer (it says so right there in the bottom left corner) and so has no relationship whatsoever to the original document from 1961, other than that it is claimed to contain the same info. The serial number is blacked out for some reason.

FactCheck.org then released more photos of the same certification of live birth. It is dated Jun 7 2007. The serial number is now shown: 151 1961 - 010641.

The scandal grows more, almost spilling over from the right-wingnuts channels to the regular media.

The white house releases a digital impression of a certified copy of the long-form certificate. Certified means, in context, that there's this Alvin T. Onaka again and his signature stamp is shown at the bottom of the picture: "I certify this is a true copy or abstract of the record on file in the Hawaii state department of health".

Typewriters do not create pixellated white margins on letters. Look at the letters NHA where it says DUNHAM in the pdf.

Look at the date stamp. The 6 in 1961 is of a different color than the 1 and the 9 and the other 1 (they're black, it's greenish).
Look at the serial number in the top left corner: 151 61 10641. That 1 at the end is greenish, the other figures are black.

So this is not a straight copy. To me, it looks like a scan of a microfiche that was superimposed on that greenish background, none too expertly.

I did not follow this story too closely. Has Obama ever publicly declared "I was born in the USA"?

Listen. I'm not uh-merican, I don't live there, so I don't really give a rat's ass anyway. Anything is better than Dubya. I'm content.

That being said, here's what I saw:

In 2008 the Obama campaign released a "certification of live birth". This certification is printed on a laser printer (it says so right there in the bottom left corner) and so has no relationship whatsoever to the original document from 1961, other than that it is claimed to contain the same info. The serial number is blacked out for some reason.

FactCheck.org then released more photos of the same certification of live birth. It is dated Jun 7 2007. The serial number is now shown: 151 1961 - 010641.

The scandal grows more, almost spilling over from the right-wingnuts channels to the regular media.

The white house releases a digital impression of a certified copy of the long-form certificate. Certified means, in context, that there's this Alvin T. Onaka again and his signature stamp is shown at the bottom of the picture: "I certify this is a true copy or abstract of the record on file in the Hawaii state department of health".

Typewriters do not create pixellated white margins on letters. Look at the letters NHA where it says DUNHAM in the pdf.

Look at the date stamp. The 6 in 1961 is of a different color than the 1 and the 9 and the other 1 (they're black, it's greenish).
Look at the serial number in the top left corner: 151 61 10641. That 1 at the end is greenish, the other figures are black.

So this is not a straight copy. To me, it looks like a scan of a microfiche that was superimposed on that greenish background, none too expertly.

I did not follow this story too closely. Has Obama ever publicly declared "I was born in the USA"?

Ah, the supply side fairy tale.

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html

Given that I can't find any actual address involving anything remotely like that, I'll say yes. The thing I could find was a quote of "goddamned piece of paper", but I'm not the only one to miss that.

Your response makes good headlines but misses the whole of the situation. FairTax has a prebate for most of those same folks you decry for not paying their fair share so there's no change there. Other people who think like you do say we should just do a 10% flat tax for everyone. Yeah, the 25% tax cut for the rich will easily be offset by the 10% tax on the guy making 12,000. In your world those numbers are equal. Even the 1,200X (X being the number of people now paying that much) wouldn't equal what you lost. Never mind the negative ramifications that come from making poor people destitute.

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/do_40_percent_of_americans_pay_no.html

Even Adam Smith said that the rich would have to burden extra to make the system work.

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

http://books.google.com/books?id=KrxMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA286&dq=The+necessaries+of+life+occasion+the+great+expense+of+the+poor&hl=en&ei=cv37TN3yNoGB8gbJsJiyCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-thumbnail&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6wEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20necessaries%20of%20life%20occasion%20the%20great%20expense%20of%20the%20poor&f=false

Apparently, Adam Smith was a fucking socialist.

Or a realist, you can never tell really.

While I agree with you, you know these people probably still pay far more taxes than I do and are certainly covering their services. These people have to subsidize the 50% of the population that legally doesn't pay taxes.

Your numbers are off, for two reasons: 1. Not paying income tax is not the same as not paying taxes, SS, Medicare, Medicade still apply. 2. Your number is too high even for income taxes Here are some real numbers: http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/do_40_percent_of_americans_pay_no.html I welcome your updated numbers if you can find them.

Heck, I doubt my taxes cover all the services I receive and I am in the top 20% of income earners. Of course this depends on how I factor defense spending as a service.

We have way too much of our tax burden assigned to the wealthy.

We have way too little of our tax burden assigned to the wealthy. As a percentage of income, they are paying historically low rates. See the wikipedia page on income tax, look for the tax rates section: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States. I'd be all for returning us to the rates of Reagan year of 1986. How does that sound? Combine the low rates with the huge shift of income to the highest percentage earners, and we have a tax code that is systematically letting the rich steal from the middle class.

The accurate statement is 90% of traceable guns that were submitted to the AFT were U.S. origin, and they were submitted because they were likely to be of U.S. origin.

Actually the part I emphasized in bold is incorrect also. From the FactCheck article you linked (emphasis mine):

Correction, April 22: We originally concluded that Obama’s 90 percent figure was “not true” and based on a “badly biased” sample of recovered guns. We are retracting both those characterizations, and we apologize to our readers for this error. We have rewritten the article throughout to correct this.
Our error was to think we had confirmed that Mexican officials submit for tracing only those guns they believe likely to have come from the U.S. Law enforcement officials say they don’t know if that’s the case.

Would you care to post a link to these statistics? Unless you have information I've not seen published anywhere else, your statement is incorrect and you are spreading misinformation.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/

I read some statistics showing that almost all illegal guns in Mexico could be traced back to legally bought guns in the US, and we're not talking hunting rifles here.

You read wrong. Only a fraction of all weapons seized could be traced back to the US. Of those, some were stolen, some purchased illegally, and some purchased "legally" for resale. The real figure for what can be traced back to the US is probably around 1/3. See http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/

And the military weapons (machine guns, full-auto assault rifles, grenades, etc.) being used by the drug gangs certainly didn't come from the US, where automatic weapons are heavily regulated and controlled, and grenades and explosives are banned from civilian possession. The heavy stuff is stolen or bought from the Mexican police and military, or smuggled in from the south where they were bought or stolen from the military and police of other countries.

actually, that's a lie made by certain BATF agents and aped by Obama, and some congressmen. The accurate statement is 90% of traceable guns that were submitted to the AFT were U.S. origin, and they were submitted because they were likely to be of U.S. origin. Most drug cartel guns in Mexico come from overseas black markets.

Also Fox News made a false statement, that 17% of the cartel guns were U.S. and the rest foreign. Figure might be twice that or more.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/

Nearly all? Try maybe half:

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/

You know what would stop all this violence though? Going after the source of the money that buys the guns: drugs. Lets just make drugs illegal and.... oh, wait.

Interesting theory... except for the fact that Obama's birth certificat has been produced, a copy is available on-line, and its validity has been repeatedly verified by the state of Hawaii.

And yours is an interesting theory, aside from the whole not being true part.

It's true.

The debate, incidentally, isn't over his nationality, but over the timing of the requirement that he be a "natural born citizen," which is a reference to his parents, not to him.

Just keep moving that goalpost: No matter where the ball lands, as long as you can keep moving that goalpost, the game ain't over.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/04/counting-mexicos-guns/ Between 36% and 93% of guns recovered by Mexican LE are traced to US sources.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081116211345AAiwdoQ How to make a AR15 into a M16. Seems to be pretty easy.

http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/charged-121070-connection-grenade.html Does this mean there were successful attempts? IDK, but it's been tried in USA...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-arms-race15-2009mar15,0,229992.story This article says that many of the grenade launchers and rocket launchers come from south of the (Mexican) border, but note the gem in par. 5: "Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said."

McDonalds didn't "buy" an exemption; the Department of Health and Human Services said it granted waivers in late September so workers with such plans wouldn't lose coverage from employers who might choose instead to drop health insurance altogether.

I found it interesting that you chose to mention "Lots of Megacorps" but failed to mention all the unions that "bought" their exemptions too! And, oh, by the way, waivers are available until 2014.

From FactCheck:

Q: Has the Obama administration allowed corporations to "opt out" of the new health care law?

A: No. The government has granted more than 200 waivers, but these merely give companies a temporary delay before being required to improve the coverage of cheap, bare-bones plans they currently offer.

And here's the entire fuckin article for you so you can share with your racist buddies so you can contine to deny this based upon the paper it was written or the ink that was used or whatever bullshit conspiracy you will use to deny a black president.

And for the record dumbass, here it is without the ID redacted... so you still have nothing but your bedsheet and burning cross to cling to.

And for the record dumbass, here it is without the ID redacted... so you still have nothing but your bedsheet and burning cross to cling to.

    What the other person replying is referencing is other sources who verified the document, such as this one. They touched it, viewed it, took high resolution photos of it, and confirmed it's authenticity.

    The serial number was available, and was provided by other sources. The campaign rightly redacted particular information. It can easily be believed that some information should remain private.

    Really, has any other President, or Presidential candidate been subject to such nonsense? Prove your an American. No, your own statement isn't good enough. No, your birth certificate isn't good enough. No, witnesses of your birth and childhood in America aren't good enough. No a personal statement by the caretaker of records where you were born stating the birth certificate isn't good enough. Damn, he can provide more than I can about my place of birth. The people arguing the point are biggoted racists, looking to do anything they could to him.

    Since you're agreeing that he is an American, I don't even know what you're arguing. Just the redacted serial number? Since that *has* been provided more than 2 years ago, please tell me you have some better arguing point. Well, other than just trolling to annoy people.

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

Or is factcheck.org an evil liberal leftist commie pinko site? Because I've seen them call out both sides on their lies more than once. Usually whichever party isn't currently in power has a habit of lying or distorting the truth the most, because they have the most to gain and least to lose by doing so.