AP - Barack Obama celebrated "active faith" as an obligation of religious Americans and a chief agent of societal change while speaking Saturday to a nearly all-black roomful of churchgoers, but hoping to reach far beyond them.

The Governor of Michigan says she is supporting presumptive Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama for a number of reasons.

"For us, it's really who's going to be standing up for the middle class and who's going to be standing up for our economy in this country and that's really where the crux of the matter will lie in November," says Governor Jennifer Granholm who was a guest on Thursday's MetroNews Talkline.

Granholm says her state has watched 400,000 manufacturing jobs move out of Michigan in the time since George W. Bush has been President and, she says, people are looking for a change.  That change will not come, she says, from presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain.

UPDATE:

Missed this on Thursday in the National Journal:

Obama, with his huge fundraising capacity, has also already started airing television ads in 14 states--from Alaska to Georgia--that backed Bush. The Obama campaign, Hilde-brand says, is committed to pursuing those states "with a full complement of staff, a full complement of media, and a large number of [candidate] trips." Obama's aides are also eyeing four other potential red targets--Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and West Virginia. By contrast, McCain's advisers acknowledge that his financial limits--he's accepting public money for the general election--will compel him to focus his ad and organizing dollars more narrowly.

Tonight's Rescue Rangers are jlms qkw, Shayera, Got a Grip, dadanation, srkp23, joyful and vcmvo2 as editor.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just~ Abraham Lincoln~

The diaries up for rescue this evening are:

Probability of failure

• gjohnsit discusses the personal impact of our financial system in Wall Street's Haute Con Job. (jlms qkw)
• In just ten minutes' time, the length of the embedded video in the diary, mconvente's Guardian (UK) video shows Mugabe's vote rigging, makes real the corruption of Robert Mugabe, and showcases what real journalism looks like. (dadanation)
• Using charts, graphs, and tables Migeru fills us in on the finger-pointing going on within OPEC as to why they think oil prices are so high in OPEC blames speculation. (Got a Grip)

the struggle

• DAMMIT! The Lobbyist "Express" Rolls Along, and StuHunter rolls with it to bring us the long list of McCain advisors you'll recognize as Bush/Rove cronies. (joyful)
• iampunha fills in the gaps in a piece of well-known history you only thought you knew in July 5, 1905: Horton helped the Whos be heard. (Got a Grip)
• The Republican presidential candidate spent July 4th not in this country, but schmoozing down in Colombia and Mexico. murrayewv brings us the details in John McCain's Excellent Latin American Adventure! (joyful)
• With the death of Jesse Helms yesterday, the revisionism machine is working overtime. Thankfully, Maaarrrk's Understanding the Far Right by Studying Senator "NO" puts the Helms legacy into a proper context, while Avenging Angel contrasts Bush's remarks about Helms' passing with those Bush gave regarding the death of Senator Paul Wellstone in Helms, Wellstone and the Partisan Eulogies of George W. Bush. Thus reminding us of how disrespectful partisan politics can sound. (dadanation)

support of a cause

• Morus informs us that the USA is not the only country where liberty versus security is a battle in "Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?!" (jlms qkw), while Mentarch examines how Democracy is faring across the pond and finds it wanting in Democracies In Trouble. (Got a Grip)
• gmoke takes us on a well-narrated photo tour of Old Solar: 1980 Barnraised Solar Air Heater. (srkp23)
• Lib Dem FoP celebrates the life of a universal health care program in A Grand 60th Birthday. (jlms qkw)

what we believe

• jimstaro asks us to join him in viewing the stories of some of our veterans and their lives in "In Their Boots"-Premiere-Episode 1- Video. (Got a Grip)
• First-time diarist The Dave relates how he is dealing with his shock now that A friend of mine has come out. (vcmvo2)
• DeanDemocrat has an unwelcome encounter with an old acquaintance and realizes why it was he never really liked the guy in the first place in Ed. (Got a Grip)
• Tchrldy shares the heart-filling reason why we do what we do in "I Never Felt Like a Citizen Till Now". (jlms qkw)

jotter has High Impact Diaries - July 4, 2008.

monkeybiz has Top Comments 7. 5 . 08 : Nobody Home But Us Chickens.

Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this Open Thread.

If you enjoy Diary Rescue, please consider joining the Rescue Rangers. It's a great way to become more involved with the Daily Kos community. Did we mention it's rewarding and fun? To volunteer or learn more, please contact us (don't forget to tell us your screen name) at: dkos.rescuerangers@gmail.com

::

In response to the request for a new open thread, here it is.

And in keeping with the weekend's celebration of American history and values:

Virginia is a distant second to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 1976. The trend in Virginia has slowed recently. Why? Among the many reasons, this one should give everyone pause:

Jon Gould, director of the Center for Justice, Law and Society at George Mason University, thinks prosecutors may be more cautious in seeking the death penalty because he said the state has had 12 wrongful convictions for rape or murder since the late 1990s.

It's good to see a fair and balanced article about the death penalty in The Washington Times. Conservatives do not uniformly support the death penalty. Traditional conservatives have always distrusted government. [more ...]

The most conservative argument against the death penalty is that the government cannot be entrusted with the most important decision that can be made about an individual's life: whether to end it. Neocons have replaced that distrust with absolute faith that the government can do no wrong as long as Dick Cheney is running the show, but traditional conservatives and libertarians often join with the progressive view that our government should not be empowered to punish crime with death.

Other reasons for the decline in executions:

Lawmakers in 1994 also allowed juries to sentence convicts to life in prison without parole - a change former State Attorney General William G. Broaddus thinks is "the single biggest factor" in the decline of executions. ...

Virginia's changing demographics and increasing lean to the left also could play a role in the declining execution rate: Residents in recent years have elected two Democratic governors in a row, allowed a Democrat to take over an incumbent Republican's seat in the U.S. Senate and pushed Democrats into the state Senate majority.

Executions were also delayed while the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of most popular method of delivering a lethal injection.

By Tom Philpott

The "Republican war on science" has evidently opened a new front: economics, a discipline often fetishized by the right.

In a startling article published July 4, the Guardian reports that in a "secret" study, a World Bank senior economist concluded that the recent explosion in biofuels use has driven global food prices up by 75 percent -- a number much higher than estimates from other major sources. The USDA -- which has vigorously defended President Bush's seemingly bottomless support for crop-based fuels -- claims biofuels account for only 3 percent of recent food price hikes.

The World Bank study's author, Don Mitchell, finished his assessment in April, the Guardian reports. But it never saw light of day until the British newspaper got hold of a leaked copy.

Why was it suppressed? "Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush," the Guardian reports.

I hope the Guardian piece inspires World Bank to release that report. It's been extremely difficult to find reliable analysis on how U.S. and European biofuel mandates and subsidies have been affecting food prices.

Biofuel booster/investors like Vinod Khosla like to point to studies from private research houses like Informa (PDF) and LECG (PDF), both of which concur with the USDA's assessment that the biofuel boom has virtually nothing to do with higher food prices.

But click on the above Informa link, and you find its report was "prepared for the Renewable Fuels Foundation." Meanwhile, the author of the LECG paper lists among his clients "the Renewable Fuels Association, National Corn Growers Association, American Soybean Association, and United Soybean Board, the National Biodiesel Board, [and] the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association."

Other studies, too, deliver conclusions that intersect with the interests of their funders. Keith Collins, for example, recently sashayed through the USDA/food industry revolving door, changing his gig from chief USDA economist to researcher for Kraft Foods. Transnational food processors like Kraft compete with ethanol makers for corn, and they would prefer to see ethanol mandates be discarded.

Coincidentally or not, Collins's recent Kraft-funded study (PDF) found that the ethanol boom has pushed up food prices by 25-35 percent.

These conflicting conclusions -- and the conflicting interests that fund them -- make the repressed World Bank report all the more important. The World Bank is hardly a neutral institution; indeed, Bush himself appointed the bank's current director, Robert Zoelick, last year. Zoelick has been bouncing between high-level posts in Republican administrations and the private sector since the 1980s. To claim the World Bank position, he left a plumb job at Goldman Sachs -- which he gained after five years of high-level posts in the Bush administration.

Indeed, Zoelick's loyalty could explain why the World Bank has been hiding the biofuel study from the public since April. One unnamed "senior development source" told the Guardian that, if released, the report would "put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House."

But even though the bank's leadership is politically beholden to Washington, its staff has always been capable of producing work cogently critical of Washington's agenda. Unlike Kieth Collins or the rent-a-researchers cited by Vinod Khosla, World Bank staffers don't answer directly to people with a specific agenda on the biofuel question.

Indeed, given that 100 million additional people have been pushed under the poverty line worldwide by the recent spike in food prices, the World Bank has an interest in figuring out exactly what's behind the spike.

Until the report goes public, it's impossible to figure out exactly what's in it; all we've got is the Guardian account. So why is its estimate for the effect of biofuels on food prices so much higher than others? Here's what the Guardian says:

It argues that production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

The third factor -- speculation -- is often treated as an independent cause for the price spikes. But when you think about it, why did speculators suddenly start bidding up the price of grains and soybeans two years ago? Answer: because they knew the U.S. and European governments were insuring a steady, and rising, market for those goods in the years ahead. So the big speculation wave stems from the welter of mandates and subsidies propping up the biofuels market.

Meanwhile, Robert Zoelick has plenty of explaining to do about why it took a leak to bring this important study to light.

The uproar over Sen. Obama’s plan to keep President Bush’s White House Office of Community and Faith Based Initiatives from the left of the Democratic Party shows the growing split in the nation’s largest political party. This is a split between the vocal and to their credit active liberal wing that icons like Howard Dean, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Russ Feingold, and more. It is clear that they are at odds with their inter-party rivals who are quickly gaining attention as progressives with leaders like Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and more. This week while progressives who use to call themselves moderates praised the new position of the Junior Senator from Illinois to make outreach and involvement with communities of faith a cornerstone of his campaign and if elected administration, liberals led by the Executive Director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State took it to the trash. However Obama’s plan and the reaction by the very group that propelled him to the forefront of the parties nomination for President who why so many people refuse to own the liberal label. THEY ARE WRONG!

I must be up front and remind some that I was a very vocal and supportive advocate for Senator Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. We refuse to be called moderates because we believe that our values and our politics are what built the party to the strength we have today. A party that is center left as opposed to one that is far left. The reaction to Sen. Obama saying that he intends to reform and revitalize an office that believes that organizations of faith don’t deserve equal funding opportunities to serve their communities instead of special treatment.

The sad opposition from the liberals on the far left can be summed up in the fact that this is a failed Bush Administration policy as Rev. Berry Lynn said. What their opposition refuses to hear is the reform and change that during the primary they belted was a call to unite behind and what the Senator is proposing. A gut opposition rooted in being the opposition for the sake of opposition instead of listening and hearing the change and positive services these programs can provide is why liberals lose out to progressives on a number of issues that include: education reform, the economy, FISA, healthcare, and the list goes on. It is hard for many of the most passionate liberals to get past the ideology and compare it with the very real lives of the American.

An example of this disconnect with their reality verses real reality is their unwillingness to view Sen. Obama’s plan for faith outreach compared with our knowledge of the Bush Administration. As I see it the new President’s Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships will from the plan the campaign released, “work to engage faith-based organizations and help them abide by the principals that federal funds cannot be used to proselytize, that they should not discriminate in providing their services, and they should be held to the same standards as other federal grant recipients.”

Liberals like Rev. Berry Lynn and others who are up in arms about Sen. Obama’s plan have offered no real alternative for the communities that the plan was created to reach out to. Communities like mine. Communities that have been underserved by the government in the past and some that have an unwelcoming attitude towards government authority. It is communities like these that are held up by these very churches who provide in some instances education, health advice, legal counsel, and so much more. For instance:

1. It was the white protestants in need of religious independence from the British Crown that fought for American independence and risked their lives for the freedoms we have today (I will eagerly acknowledge that some founding fathers weren’t religious at all)
2. It was the northern leaders of faith who took on the powerful southerners to fight for both emancipation for slaves and the right to vote for women
3. It was the black religious elders joined with white northern men of God who organized people into the streets for civil rights
4. And now today it is houses of God in inner-cities that are first to respond to natural disasters, the uprising in crime that has gotten cease fires in urban cities all over, host job trainings, ex-offender reentry services, and services that other organizations just don’t have the power to be successful at.

Once ideological liberals can get off their high stool that allows a seat at the tall table of the concept for American democracy and actually started to live in the American nation is when and how a united party can see just how right Obama’s plan (if put into practice as it is written) is right for America.

It was once said that America was founded by people hungry for their own freedom of religion. Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion.

Tha-Kid JK

tha-kid@revkitchen.com

Post from: Think Youth

President Bush heads to Japan on Saturday for his final G-8 summit of world leaders as the global economy slumps, energy prices soar and food shortages loom in the developing world.

Had Bush chosen to be the leader of the American people rather than the leader of a fringe group of radicals, he would have been able to carve for himself a place in the proud tradition of American diplomacy.  As it is, he leaves the opportunity to face the real challenges of the new millennium to his successor and the American people.
 

A former administration official who served on the National Security Council under Bush says the G-8's purpose is not to come up with quick solutions.

"This is not a meeting of heads of state that leads to a treaty. It's really kind of public opinion shaping and trying to get people to agree that issues are important," said Michael Green, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Only PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, will stand in history as an initiative of true American greatness, and a cabal of radical conservatives have even put that life-saving program on the chopping block.  The rest of this administration's record has served to undermine America's standing in the world, and will be seen forever as a weak and craven record of historic cowardice.  

A presidency which could have mobilized a nation to achieve energy independence, lead the world on climate change, stop nuclear proliferation and terrorism, and spread the benefits of democracy and freedom the the world, has instead hidden from every challenge, choosing to protect the aristocratic interests of the conservative country club, while leaving the world to shudder and quake as the unprecedented failure of this administration's stewardship has been revealed.

Conservatism has run its course.  It leaves in its wake an increasingly united and progressive America prepared to take the responsibility and opportunity to rebuild and lead the world. 01.20.09 can't come fast enough.  Those of us who are rising up to renew America are hungry to face the challenges of the future, but we will never forget the damage they and their incompetent figurehead have done to America and the world.

I am an admitted Twitter addict along with so many others. It's a great place to vent, to brag, to make new friends. What surprised me several months ago was how many folk identify themselves with nicknames based upon their crafty addiction. Knitters, quilters, crafters are abundant on the site. Getting to know them in short 140 character bursts then encouraged to find them again on their blogs, on Ravelry and other places on the nets.

So who are the twittering crafters?

Controversial former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms has died at the age of 86. The following two quotes from Jesse Helms are not, on their surface, offensive...which is why they are so important.

I believe they provide insight into understanding the motivations behind all of the other reprehensible Jesse Helms quotations. You see, what you will find in the hearts of many who are outspoken is an unfortunate and misguided righteousness derived from their religious beliefs. He had every right to his beliefs. Unfortunately, some of his actions suggest he didn't support the same for others.

"I want our government to encourage and protect freedom as well as our traditions of faith and family."

"I have tried at every point to seek God's wisdom on the decisions I made, and I made it my business to speak up on behalf of the things God tells us are important to Him."

Note in the first quote how the protection of freedom is modified by the need to support traditions of faith and family. In other words, freedom should be available to those whose notions of faith and family comports with his own. The inference is that those who do not support his notion of faith and family may not deserve the same freedoms.

In the second quote, we see the certainty to enact the beliefs expressed in the first quote...and to do so unabashedly. Again, this Helms quote implies that God spoke to him...which entitled him to speak his mind...regardless of who it injured.

Further, I suspect he was convinced that it also granted him the authority to pass legislation to abridge the rights of those who didn't follow his interpretation of God's edicts or to block the passage of measures intended to grant equality to those he deemed inferior.

Helms' legacy is therefore a testament to intolerance and intransigence. Rather than see himself as a cog in the wheel of humanity, he saw himself as the pilot designated to steer the course of his fellow man. In the end, his legacy is steeped in arrogance and wholly lacking in the ability to demonstrate the very humanity he must have believed his actions were upholding.

And now the quotes that the history books will undoubtedly use when defining Jesse Helms.

"I've been portrayed as a caveman by some. That's not true. I'm a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners, or niggers."
- Jesse Helms, North Carolina Progressive, February 6, 1985, quoted from the Democratic Alliance.

"There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy."
-States News Service, 5/17/88

"I've never heard once in this chamber anybody say to the homosexuals, 'stop what you're doing.' If they would stop what they're doing there would not be one additional case of AIDS in the United State."

"To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing."

"The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."

"Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches."
- 1995 radio broadcast

"She's a damn lesbian. I am not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine."
- Explaining why he was opposing the appointment of a woman for a cabinet post.

"They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro."
- In response to Duke University students holding a vigil after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, 1968

"We've got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaged in unnatural acts."
- Arguing for reduced AIDS funding, The New York Times, 1985

"These people are intellectually dishonest in just about everything they do or say,".... He added, "They start by pretending that it is just another form of love. It's sickening."
- From Variety

I doubt it's possible, but I've often wondered if the dead can look back and see their legacy. It would be nice to know that Jesse Helms would want to modify portions of the one he leaves.

AP - The government on Saturday increased the number of people reported being sickened in a record salmonella outbreak in which tomatoes are the leading suspect although investigators are testing other types of fresh produce.

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Yeah, it’s the theme song for the new Discovery Channel promo, but it’s more than that, campers.

It’s Robert Randolph and the Family Band. As I missed Feel Good Friday, let’s just call this one a Saturday make-up song.

For those not frequent readers of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, not every item that appears there is actually fiction -- though sometimes we may wish it were. This month's column by Robert Silverberg focuses on the depletion of resources that don't get as much press as oil.

The element gallium is in very short supply and the world may well run out of it in just a few years. Indium is threatened too, says Armin Reller, a materials chemist at Germany’s University of Augsburg. He estimates that our planet’s stock of indium will last no more than another decade. All the hafnium will be gone by 2017 also, and another twenty years will see the extinction of zinc.

If some of these elements seem rather exotic, odds are you're looking at them right this moment. Both gallium and indium are used in the making of flat-screen displays (along with other electronics). If there's one name on that list that should stand out, it's zinc.  Zinc is not particularly rare, but we're consuming it at a rate that's far faster than we're finding new sources. That's also true of our old friend copper, which is why construction sites the world over are often plagued with thieves who ransack locations for copper plumbing and wiring.  

But the sobering truth is that we still have millions of years to go before our own extinction date, or so we hope, and at our present rate of consumption we are likely to deplete most of the natural resources this planet has handed us. We have set up breeding and conservation programs to guard the few remaining whooping cranes, Indian rhinoceroses, and Siberian tigers. But we can’t exactly set up a reservation somewhere where the supply of gallium and hafnium can quietly replenish itself. And once the scientists have started talking about our chances of running out of copper, we know that the future is rapidly moving in on us and big changes lie ahead.

Of course, we're not really consuming these metals, not in the way we do oil or coal.  They're not actually gone, merely spread out in forms that are extremely difficult to recover. Even with our best efforts at recycling electronics, it's likely that we're years, not decades, away from making do without some of these rare earth elements. In the last twenty years alone, we've consumed about one third of available resources.  Want to make a guess as to how long this can continue?

A 2007 study published in the journal New Scientist, looked at of the elements used in producing electronics and came to the same conclusion. Indium is gone within a decade. Zinc and tantalum in about twice that. The increasing scarcity of some metals is reflected in their prices.

He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium. Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram.

This report also highlights a similarity between oil and rare earth elements used in electronics -- the vast majority are imported, often from politically unstable countries.  

In fact, these elements can contribute directly to that instability.  For some of the elements, like gallium, there's simply no good source of high quality ore.  Oddly enough, that's one aspect of this story that might be a good thing.  Those elements that are both extremely rare and isolated to a few high quality sources are a spark for corruption, murder, and environmental destruction. We may be currently engaged in a war for oil, but corporate proxies are also taking brutal actions in a war for tantalum, better known these days by the name of it's principle ore, coltan.  

There are steps we can take, including rethinking ordnances that require copper pipes and making it easier to recycle electronics (which is similar to broadband in that it's simple in many municipalities, while rural areas often lack access).  Those are good steps, and the sooner we act, the easier it will be to avoid fighting wars over copper, zinc, and their rarer cousins.

There are also those who suggest mining of landfills, and undoubtedly this is going to be tempting in the next few decades.  After all, rare elements may be found at a higher concentration in some landfills than can be located in any source of ore.  They're also a domestic source.  However, metals trapped in consumer goods are often soundly locked in stable, complex compounds.  Mining them, and freeing these elements for reuse could mean all the same disruptions to the water table, toxic chemicals used in extraction, and smelting familiar in traditional metals mining.  Anyone cheering for broad application of landfill mining as a solution to our shortage of rare metals needs first to look at the pits remaining from copper mines in the west -- then think about how many of these you want next to your home town.

An exhaustive in-depth investigation conducted by right wing citizen journalists, digital imaging experts, and Google users has established convincingly that Barack Hussein Obama's alleged "birth certificate" is an incontrovertible fraud. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is ineligible to become president and is in fact an illegal immigrant and that is only the first and indeed least terrifying of the implications of this shocking scandal.

The image to the left is the one posted at the far-left liberal "blog" named "Daily Kos," run by one "Markos Moulitsas" (pictured here); the title of the blog is misleading as it is updated more often than "daily" and "Kos" is not the real name of its proprietor ("Kos" is in fact the Middle Arabic word for "Che"). "Kos," or "Che," posted this so-called "birth certificate" on the command of the Barack Hussein campaign, probably at gunpoint.

The forgery is laughable on its face. (1) It is well known that Hawaii did not have typefaces in 1961, the year of "Barack Hussein Obama's" "birth." There are several typefaces in the "birth certificate"; once these are transferred from Photoshop to Microsoft Word, the tell-tale traces of kerning become clear to even the most disbelieving eye. (2) I for one have always been skeptical that someone as wildly ambitious as Barack Hussein Obama would have chosen to be born in Hawaii. No successful presidential candidate has ever come from Hawaii (though it was often remarked that Warren G. Harding suspiciously reeked of pineapple). Hawaii has few if any electoral votes and it is unclear if the climate there is even capable of supporting life -- human life, at any rate. (3) Other contemporary birth records from the "state" of Hawaii feature the official "state" logo and mascot (pictured right).

Responsible speculation continues below.

Only the most rabid of partisans would place their blind trust in the candidacy of a man who cannot even prove he was born. What evidence do we have that this "Barack Hussein Obama" even exists? After all, detailed investigation reveals that his name, "Barack Hussein Obama," is an anagram for either "Dread Cthulu," or else, even more frighteningly, "Tom Boerwinkle." Why, his "father's" "race" is listed as "African," when he was really Black! Ha! HAH! Heh. Ho. Hum.

Can we afford to ignore that this alleged "Barack Hussein Obama" is very likely a being who has lain for ages ucounted in stone houses in His great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of a mighty undead God-being for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Him to secure the Democratic presidential nomination? Or perhaps he is the reincarnated dark-miened tyrant Xerxes, sent to compel all Sparta as well as Heartland Religious Values Voters to kneel before him and render unto him tribute and the very flower of their womanhood! (Spartans loved them their womenfolk, you know.)

These are serious questions, and it is incumbent upon the so-called "Barack Hussein Obama" to immediately produce valid copies of his "birth certificate," driver's license, immunization record, junior high school report card, passport, hair follicles, toenail clippings, grocery lists, shoe size, marriage license, firstborn child, Master Card number, bowling scores, and other crucial documents and testimonies so that we can pore over them in minute, even ludicrous detail in order to disprove something we will insist on believing anyway. This is, after all, America.