Just wanted to add this link to help clarify the difference between an original long form birth certificate and a newer short form ceritifcate. Both are valid documentation and proof of birthplace and citizenship. Find it here

Also keep checking the Hardball site (<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697)" target="_blank"><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697)" target="_blank">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697) for the video of Chris Matthews interviewing G. Gordon Liddy, who can't come up with any better evidence than the testimony of a step grandmother. Apparently, for conservatives, what someone says off the top of their head is more valid than longstanding documented evidence. I thought they were against legislating from the bench.

Unfortunately, "people in general" are not getting richer. Only a select few are getting richer. This is the point I was trying to make. There is a disparity in the GDP per capita and household income which indicates there is a growing gap in the "availability" of wealth to a growing number of people. My source for this is the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which is part of the US Chamber of Commerce. I think the veracity of your sources is suspect when Wikipedia is your primary source.

The GDP per capita in some countries, specifically in the continent of Africa, have been steadily falling over time. So, increasing wealth is not a constant worldwide. The extreme disparity in wealth, especially when over 80% of people worldwide are below the poverty level, is extremely relevant to addressing your statement as well as the overall issue of where the money will come from to address problems like global warming.

I would like to commend you on your progressive attitude toward the role of a strong government. You wrote "Surely government can spend money to clean up the environment also." I agree. This does not speak directly to individual wealth however. Adding more wealth does not magicvally make the environment cleaner or control pollution. Good government regulation to keep industries in check and protect our natural resources can do this however.

This is all kind of pointless, however, if your original assertion is adopted by others in their own time. If we just keep saying that people in the future will be richer, so let's leave it to them, then eventually throwing all the money in the world at it will not be enough.

Isak, On what are you basing the assumption that people in the future will be richer? That sounds utterly absurd and a very poor reason to avoid taking action on global warming. If, in fact, you recognize it as a "big problem", then putting off a solution to the weather and environental issues that affect the health and productivity of us all because of costs seems misguided and short-sighted.

So even if ALL people were getting richer, the costs associated with tackling global warming will increase as well. Plus the problem will become greater and more complex, since the richer we are, the more we consume and the more we pollute (look at China and India as prime examples). This assumes that we can fix the problem later and do not wait until the they cannot be reversed.

According to World Bank stats and Forbes, the GDP of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined. In the United States, the top 1% of incomes has increased over the past 25 years. In more recent history, Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California, states that during the Bush expansion, real incomes for the bottom 99 percent remained fairly stagnant, while the top 1 percent captured 73 percent of the growth.

To the specific point at hand, tackling global warming, infrastructure project costs are significantly higher today, accounting for inflation, than they were in the past. For example the Forth Bridge in Scotland would cost so much to build today(around 2.5 billion pounds according to estimates), that it might not be built at all. Poverty is not only great in rural areas, but in urban areas as well. Urban slum growth is outpacing urban growth in general. So just because we are becoming more urban does not mean we are becoming richer.

Your original statement was that people in the future will be "richer" than today.
Some people are certainly getting richer, but that number is small. Many sources reveal that GDP has steadily increased over time. However, in the last 25 years, GDP has continued to climb while personal household income has declined.

While poverty has been reduced since 1980 (largely thanks to growth in the Chinese economy), World Bank statistics show that around 80% of the world's population lives on $10 per day or under, which is considered under the poverty line in the US. So it is correct to say that wealth overall is increasing, but to say "peop'e are getting richer" is an oversimplification and mistakenly assumes that a rising tide lifts all boats.

I like the term cynical humanist. Cynic is a good word, though I might prefer skeptic. I think skeptic covers a lot of ground and fully expresses the underlying attitude that leads one away from religious belief and toward all the terms I noted.

Excellent posting! You are dead on with the distinctions of belief versus faith. The distinction is the warrant of the belief, or whether it is well supported with evidence. The problem with "belief" when it comes to religion, i.e. faith, is the warrant. Religious belief is based on raw and unsubstantiated acceptance of a proposition. Empirical evidence is often seen as the enemy of faith, but the cornerstone of humanism. I "believe" in evolution because it is a proposition that is best supported by evidence among its rivals. Faith, however, is described in the Bible as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Evidence you can't see, don't have and can't explain is faith, whether you "believe" it or not.

It is with breakneck speed that all those who claimed it was unAmerican to criticize the president when Bush was in office have become the vanguards of revolution against Obama. Aside from trying to replace Sam Adams as a son of liberty, why does Beck feel the need to produce this list at all? If this is an attempt to create an exclusive group that rallies around a set of principals, why are they all so generic as to provide no real structure at all?

The one that makes me the angriest is "I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.” As if all taxes are a way to take from the rich and give personal income to the poor. Maybe we should just forget the notion of taxes all together. After all, I work hard for what I have, so I should be the one who gets to make the choice to share my money with the body shop when my car runs into a pothole the size of a Buick because there are no more public works.

Clearly this is full of enough conservative jargon to target a specific audience. Which, to me, is indicative of the trouble with the right. Desperataion to adhere to a set of principals that are ill-defined and not practically useful to the majority of Americans.

I think a quote from Richard Dawkins sums up this post most clearly - "...one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding."