Marriage under Assault in Federal Courts: Why It Matters | The Foundry

Marriage under Assault in Federal Courts: Why It Matters | The Foundry

Efforts to restrict the right to marriage from homosexuals is akin to that of racism, but this is legislated. The government is attempting to set laws that exclude a groups of individuals and deny them rights. The only other time in America's history I can recall this happening was under the Chinese Exclusion Act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

While I believe that the government has not right to legislate certain aspects of our lives, including marriage, I believe they are invalidating the separation of church and state by taking a traditional religious perspective on legislating who can be married. If you have religious beliefs on marriage, good for you. Those are your beliefs and you are entitled to them. What you are not entitled to is forcing your views on another human. That is bigotry, plain and simple.

Gays have just as much right to be married and miserable as straights. Anyone putting that much effort in to trying to prevent it should probably concentrate on their own relationships. Views that gays don't make good parents (I think everyone understands that they don't have the ability to create biological children) is simply ignorant and ill-conceived. An attempt to legislate away the rights of another is a failure of freedom, and it chips further away at the strength of America.

Keynes and Hayek - The Boom and the Bust

Here are a couple of tasty treats explaining economics in a more palatable manner. John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who worked toward minimizing the negative impacts of recessions and depressions. Friedrich August von Hayek was an economist who thought that markets should be free, rather than to sustain the state. Hayek felt that application of Keynes's policies would give too much power to the state and would lead to socialism. Gee, ya think?

Our Obese Federal Govt. Needs to Go on a Strict Diet

Our Obese Federal Govt. Needs to Go on a Strict Diet
Written by Sam Blumenfeld for the New American

The author makes some very valid points about the history of how America went from a country of independent citizens to one with a large percentage of people who are now incapable of doing for themselves. America has trained many of it's children to rely on government handouts, teaching them to play the system.

The total worth of all American billionaires is $1.3 trillion. So if the government confiscated the total worth of all these billionaires it would not even pay for half of Obama’s budget. In addition, we have a national debt of $14.3 trillion. To keep the government as fat as possible, it has had to borrow trillions of dollars.

To reign in this massive excess, we need to reduce the scope and authority of the government. It needs to be limited in what it provides the citizens, allowing the People to regain strength and independence.

Our government in Washington needs to be put on a strict weight loss program that will reduce its size. We can no longer afford to support this humongous fat slob that the Democrats want to make fatter. It’s time to put the federal government on a strict diet that will reduce its size and bring down its weight to a level commensurate with what is needed.

Barack Obama's Birth Certificate Scandal

The media attention surrounding Obama's birth certificate has been astounding. It was difficult for a while to have media attention on anything else. First, his Live Birth certificate was released, then his Long Form certificate.

In 2008, in response to media inquiries, the President’s campaign requested his birth certificate from the state of Hawaii. The state sent the campaign the President’s birth certificate, the same legal documentation provided to all Hawaiians as proof of birth in state, and the campaign immediately posted it on the internet. That birth certificate can be seen here (PDF).

When any citizen born in Hawaii requests their birth certificate, they receive exactly what the President received. In fact, the document posted on the campaign website is what Hawaiians use to get a driver’s license from the state and the document recognized by the Federal Government and the courts for all legal purposes. That’s because it is the birth certificate. This is not and should not be an open question.
The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting. President Barack Obama's long form birth certificate can be seen here (PDF):

Birth certificate-long-form

Correspondence with the Hawaii State Department of Health can be seen here (PDF).
At a time of great consequence for this country – when we should be debating how we win the future, reduce our deficit, deal with high gas prices, and bring stability to the Middle East, Washington, DC, was once again distracted by a fake issue.  The President’s hope is that with this step, we can move on to debating the bigger issues that matter to the American people and the future of the country.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/27/president-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl

Here is the Certificate of Live Birth, image courtesy Snopes:

 http://msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg

 Here is the "official" Certificate of Live Birth posted on the White House site.

http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate.pdf

Why is the "official" Live Birth certificate from the White House a low-quality copy? Why does it have a URL from Snopes at the bottom?

And the Long Form Live Birth certificate.


http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate.pdf

Any original document would have been simply scanned and released in it's unedited form. It would simply be a single layer of raster (pixels) art saved as a PDF file. The thing to be critical about is the fact that the Live Birth certificate is exactly that, a single layer image, but the Long Form is heavily modified. The information in the document states that it was created in Mac OS X 10.6.7 as well.

Here is a video that shows what happens when one opens the official PDF file in Adobe Illustrator:



It appears that Snopes is more credible in providing Obama's Live Birth certificate than the White House, so the administration posted the one they found on the Snopes site.

It also appears that the Long Form certificate for some reason was altered or cleaned up. This is the only reason that there would be visible layers in the file. The quality of the works implies minimum experience of graphic design software, such as you might find as Kinko's.