As long as people who are so bitter and vindictive over the election of the man who will be the President of the United States until at least January 20, 2013...at the expense of discussing and deciding what the really important issues are that are facing this country...they will deserve the consequences. While I hope the consequences don't involve the rest of us, I suspect they probably will.

Might I suggest just a couple of other issues for people to talk about other than Barack Obama's birth certificate?

How about thinking about and debating the following...

• What discretionary federal spending are we willing to cut in an effort to create a balanced federal budget? The national parks, PBS, the FBI, DEA and Border Patrol, the air traffic controllers, a bunch of the duplicative social programs, the departments of Energy and Education, foreign aid? Where should we cut spending?

• What changes to Medicare and Social Security are we willing to accept--changes that will actually effect us as well as coming generations? How about means testing for any of these benefits? If people have incomes well above an average level, should they get Social Security or Medicare at all?

• Should we be withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan and let the rest of the world take the lead on settling the unrest in the Middle East? How many troops do we really have to have deployed all over the world? Why?

• How much should the defense budget be cut? Do we need eleven carrier groups? Do we need 18 active ballistic missle submarines which have no other purpose than to serve as a platform to launch ICBMs? Why are we actually building six more submarines as this is being written? Do we need an Air Force at all? Navy and Marine aviation does almost all of the combat support missions. We haven't employed high-level bombing by the Air Force since Viet Nam. Other than flying materiel and ammunition all over the world, what does the Air Force really do these days?

• How can we actually reduce the cost of healthcare in this country, which is already double that on a per capita basis than almost all other developed countries and growing at a clearly unsustainable rate? Is either Medicare or private insurance really the answer? What has either program done to actually contain the cost of healthcare and slow the rate of such expenditures as a percentage of our GDP?

• How can we develop and adopt an energy policy that will truly be long term and not be effected by the political whimsy that happens ever two or four years? We don't have any such policy now? I wonder why?

I suppose if I had a few more minutes I could come up with a few other questions that seem more important to Americans than whether or not Barack Obama has a birth certificate. But then, maybe there are a lot of people who so hate our current President that they would prefer not to even think about questions such as these.