What Is This World Coming To?

Change is what he promised.  And change is about all that will be left. The country is in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,  or so the rumor goes.   And Barack Obama has promised an administration that will govern for the ordinary guy, unlike the cozy relationship the Bush administration had with Wall Street fat cats.

But it is the Wall Street fat cats (and the government) who are ponying up one hundred and seventy million dollars ($170,000,000.00) for the Obama Nation lallapaloozas.

The federal government estimates that it will spend roughly $49 million on the inaugural weekend. Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland have requested another $75 million from the federal government to help pay for their share of police, fire and medical services.

There is another $45 million for parties, paid for courtesy of Wall Street fat cats and West Coast liberals.

Noted ABCNews,   “They are not the $20 and $50 donors who helped propel Obama through Election Day,” said Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. “These are people giving mostly $50,000 apiece. They tend to be corporate executives, celebrities, the elite of the elite.”

Really?   The elite?

Billionaire investor George Soros and his family contributed $250,000 to the inauguration, and Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt each donated $25,000.

Other big-name donors who gave $50,000 include filmmaker George Lucas, artist Dale Chihuly, Los Angeles Dodgers President Jamie McCourt. Citigroup managing director Raymond J. McGuire; Oracle President Charles E. Phillips Jr.; actresses Halle Berry and Sharon Stone; and Melvin Simon, co-founder of Simon Property Group, the largest mall owner in the United States.esides Wall Street firms, a large chunk of the money came from employees at companies such as Microsoft, Google and DreamWorks Animation, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer and his wife, Connie, both gave $50,000. So did Microsoft chairman and co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda.

DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife, Marilyn, both gave $50,000. Filmmaker and DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his wife, Kate, both also gave $50,000. And DreamWorks employees gave a total of $275,000.

Just like Lincoln. By the people and for the people.  If they can swing it.

Nobody has said it out loud, but the silence could not make it any more clear.   It doesn’t matter if Barack Hussein Obama is Constitutionally eligible to be the President of the United States.   He’s The One, and that’s all there is to it.

If we have to change the Constititution, we’d better get to it, because Barack Hussein Obama is The One.

Enough with silly lawsuits, it’s time to change Constitution on presidential eligibility.

Citizenship — natural-born or naturalized — has a bit role in a presidential drama, with an important constitutional lesson. The United States Constitution says that “No person except a natural-born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President …”  This provision is “an anachronism that discriminates against far too many Americans.”

That is the “Our View” page from the Merced Sun-Star expressing its contention that Obama ought to be allowed to serve, even if he is only “naturalized.”    (The citizens of Merced are poorly served  — if Obama isn’t natural-born, he isn’t naturalized, either, since naturalization is NOT automatic under any circumstances, but must be officially applied for and granted)

One Otis L. Sanford of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal writes in that paper’s op-ed section:

“Hear ye, hear ye. The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken.Or more precisely, it has refused to listen. And every rational-thinking American should be grateful.”

This establishes what passes for ‘thinking’ among Obama’s supporters — that a refusal to listen is the same thing has rendering a favorable opinion.  Call me crazy, but if the Supreme Court expected Obama could and would prove his eligibility, they would have heard the case just to eliminate future challenges.

It is far more likely they refused to hear it because they didn’t want to be forced into a position where they had to rule on what to do when the president elect is not eligible to serve.

Salon published a column by Alex Koppleman making fun of the idiots who insist that Barack Obama’s refusal to provide a birth certificate means something.

You might think these rumors would have died off after Obama produced proof in June that he was, in fact, born in Hawaii to an American citizen, his mother, Ann, or after Hawaii state officials confirmed in October that he was born there. You might think the rumors would have died off after he was elected by a comfortable margin. Instead, they’ve intensified. There have been paid advertisements in the Chicago Tribune questioning the president-elect’s birth certificate and eligibility, and one group is raising money to run a similar ad on television. The right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily has been reporting on the issue almost nonstop. Numerous plaintiffs have filed lawsuits in various states.

You might think Koppleman would read the ‘evidence’ he is citing.  All Hawaii state officials did was confirm that there is a certificate on file for Barack Obama — not that he was born there.

Perhaps the most common argument of those questioning Obama’s eligibility is that he should just release his full, original birth certificate, rather than the shorter certification, which is a copy. His failure to do so only proves there is reason to be suspicious, they say, and if the document was released, the issue would go away.

Koppleman concludes that even that evidence wouldn’t satisfy Obama’s critics”

If the long-form birth certificate were released, with its unequivocal identification of Hawaii as Obama’s place of birth, the cycle would almost certainly continue.

THIS is Obama-journalism:  It would ‘almost certainly’ continue anyway, so why release the proof?  Koppleman concludes:

We could be dealing with the repercussions of the tangled web these people have woven for years after Obama is inaugurated.

But the only way Koppleman will be correct is if Obama is successful for years in keeping his birth records shielded from ‘these people’.  But if Koppleman is right and Obama is inaugurated without putting the controversy to rest, what then?

In the worse case scenario we will have taken just another baby step towards losing our Republic and the rule of law when that dusty and irritating Constitution becomes something to just be ignored or set aside whenever it might be inconvenient, or upset some people, or just be impractical for this particular “situation”.

Maybe we have reached the point where we just set aside parts of the Constitution if they are inconvenient and that might potentially be a problem for He Who Will Slow the Rising of the Seas and the fainting, ecstatic, potentially angry mob who propelled him to power. We have already journeyed a ways down the road once traveled by ancient Rome where the elites began to worry about the mood and reactions of the masses who openly threatened disorder and mayhem if they were unhappy, while those who held the reigns of power increasingly ignored the once revered rules that had held their political system together.