On the steamy, chaotic  floor of the Democratic national convention,  you get a choice: See or be seen.

For the Hawaii delegates their fate is to be seen. The delegation is directly adjacent to the convention floor, which means easy access and a steady parade of delegates and celebrities passing by. The delegation just got through chatting with former Hawaii resident and war hero Tammy Duckworth.

But getting a gander of the podium is a bit of a problem. The delegation is directly behind a big camera platform that partially blocks the view. But the upside to that is that Hawaii makes a convenient target when the cameraman needs a cutaway shot of the audience. All the flowers and aloha wear don’t hurt either.

Apparently multi-ethnic, globally schooled, Hawaii born and bred Barack Obama just isn’t complex or exotic enough for folks.

The darker corners of the blogosphere keep looking for something mysterious or unknown about the candidate. Aren’t the facts enough?

The Obama campaign is concerned enough to launch its own anti-rumor website, but that’s a little like Whack-a-Mole. Knock down one and another pops up.

A favorite among the conspiracy theorists is the absence of a birth certificate for Obama, who came into the world on Aug. 4, 1961. The Obama campaign has provided a copy of the certificate, and you can see it HERE.

But apparently that’s not good enough. Conspiracy folks want the original dog-eared version, apparently.

If they get it, they’ll just move on to the next goofy rumor. Apparently looking at what the candidate actually says and promises to do is just too much work.

(And we’ll thank you not to follow up with jokes about the McCain birth certificate being written on papyrus)

Now that favorite son Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic Presidential nomination, curiosity about the candidate and what made him what he is will only become more intense.

One key, probably still not fully explored, is the impact of Obama’s childhood and schooling in Hawaii as well as his years in Indonesia with his mother and step-father.

He talks about those two experiences in his first book. But the biographical focus (and probably rightly so) has been on Obama’s years as a community organizer and then up-and-coming politician in Chicago. That’s where Obama the candidate took shape.

Still, the impact of those earlier days at Punahou and in Indonesia cannot be ignored. All that will eventually get fleshed out. But for the moment, one of the best reflections on what it means to be an “outsider” growing up and going to school in Hawaii appeared in the most unlikely place: The Portland Oregonian.

The article is by an emeritus professor of English at Southern Oregon University named Michael Baughman. It is a sensitive look at the “process of maturation” that Baughman believes he and Obama might share.

Read the article HERE. Do you think it helps explain to the rest of the world what the experience of growing up in multi-cultural Hawaii means? Does it help others understand who Obama is?

So there I was talking about how tax credits are an easy path for lawmakers to take, since they generally please the specific while causing little direct pain to the general. For that reason, I said, they are hard to repeal and easy to stick into the tax code.

Well, who would know that lawmakers have — at least on paper — actually made a stab at rationalizing the ever-growing list of exemptions to our excise tax code! A bill, SB2829, “sunsets” or kills off tax credits in batches between now and 2012.

But wait a minute. (more…)