The birth certificate provided by Barack Obama is an obviously altered document, according to multiple digital forensics experts.  Have you ever wondered why such a blatant forgery was presented?  Were the Obama handlers that incompetent?  Didn't anybody in the White House care that such a shoddy piece of photoshop work was made public? The answer lies within our legal system. Obama and his DNC and Holder Justice lawyers are notorious for using the mechanisms of the system to gain power and abuse it, thwarting the law in the process. This is a part of their strategy. In fact, the ongoing furor over the place of birth is exactly what Obama wants. It is a red herring, a distraction.  Here's why.

Now we know:  Mitt Romney will paint with bold colors, not pale pastels. No politician knows more about our fiscal woes than Rep. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, and no politician can explain them better.  But he brings much more to the ticket than nonpareil economic expertise. Paul Ryan is a full spectrum conservative.  His views differ little from those of Sarah Palin.  But his warm, friendly, low key style makes him harder to demonize.  Yet no one gets under the president's skin more than does Paul Ryan. Conservative Web sites linked all weekend to the Youtube video of Rep. Ryan's evisceration of Obamacare during a meeting at the White House in February, 2010, and Mr. Obama's nonplussed reaction. Despite Mr. Ryan's manifest and manifold virtues, however, the best thing about his selection is what it tells us about Mitt Romney.

Do you admire what the Olympic athletes have been able to accomplish, and do you think they should be applauded for their outstanding performances? The good side of humanity is revealed when we praise and reward such people. The bad side of humanity is shown by those who wish to punish success. Socialists of all stripes, whether they be politicians, tenured professors, unthinking students, bureaucrats in government (including those enjoying tax-free salaries at international organizations, such as the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) have a common refrain that they want equality of outcomes in the name of "fairness" (but not for themselves, of course). In the name of fairness, should we not allow anyone more than 6 feet tall to play basketball? Should we have given medals to all of the Olympic athletes so none of them would feel bad because they did not get medals? After all, they tried. If we did reward them equally, what affect do you think it would have on the future level of performance?

Whenever the president or his aides and allies have gilded, massaged, stretched, twisted, shaved or mugged the truth, most in the mainstream media have covered for them. In consequence, Team Obama's departures from the truth have grown more frequent; the distance between what they say and the facts has gotten ever further.  There seemed to be no limit to the dissimulation, deceit and dishonesty the news media would overlook... So they put out an ad - the now-infamous "Romney killed my wife" ad - charging Mitt Romney with the cancer death of the wife of a steelworker. There must have been shock in Team Obama when many of their friends in journalism sharply criticized them for it.  Even Time Magazine called it "despicable."

Which level of government do you think should have the responsibility for protecting the rights of the disabled -- local, state, federal or the United Nations? The United States has been a global leader in protecting the disabled and advancing its interests. Over the past few decades, this has been accomplished through a combination of federal, state and local laws and regulations. But now the United Nations is trying to get involved. The United Nations was originally established to prevent war among countries. Having repetitively failed in that mission, it has been interjecting itself into virtually every other aspect of human life, including demands for various forms of global taxes to be collected and distributed by U.N. bureaucrats. On May 18, President Obama sent the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities to the Senate for ratification. Such a treaty requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has just passed this convention, and it is now awaiting floor action by the entire Senate. This treaty must be disabled.

The kids are screwed.  The unemployment rate among Americans aged 18-29 is 50 percent higher than the national average. More than 43 percent of recent college graduates who have jobs do work which does not require a college education. If the Obama administration policies which keep unemployment high are reversed, for most of us the recession will end.  But the kids will still be screwed, because they don't know what they need to know to survive in the global economy. The key is STEM education -- Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.  The US used to be the world's leader.  Today, we're one of just 3 of the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development where the kids know no more about these subjects than their parents did. The kids don't know much of anything else, either.  They've taken Sam Cooke's 1959 hit, Don't know much about history, don't know much about geography, to heart.