White House releases Obama Birth Certificate

The White House released copies of President Barack Obama's original long-form birth certificate Wednesday, seeking to put an end to persistent rumors that he was not born in the United States. Below is a digital copy of the original birth certificate released by the White House on Wednesday.



http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2011/04/politics/interactive.obama.birth.certificate/index.html

Somehow, I don't think this issue is now laid to rest. Conspiracy theorists will always find a way to maintain their delusions.

I have to say, I'm about as far as you can get from a "birther"--I think the entire question is a ridiculous waste of time--but I always wondered why he didn't just release the long form to shut the birthers up. He should've done this years ago and spared us the headache. Why now?

But yeah, to the die-hard birthers, no evidence will convince them.

According to Aaronovitch's book Voodoo Histories (the paperback edition has an additional chapter on the "birther" conspiracy) apparently the long-form document is not easy to get hold of. I'm not American so I cannot comment on the veracity of that claim.

kronos wrote:I have to say, I'm about as far as you can get from a "birther"--I think the entire question is a ridiculous waste of time--but I always wondered why he didn't just release the long form to shut the birthers up. He should've done this years ago and spared us the headache. Why now?

But yeah, to the die-hard birthers, no evidence will convince them.

Even as a conservative Libertarian, I never bought into the birther claims. But I wondered as you did as to why he just didn't do what he did today. It'll be interesting to read the skeptics' shit tonight on the sites I scour. If I find anything good, I'll post it.... just because, and not because I believe what they're saying.

By the way Matt, it's skeptic, not sceptic.

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:According to Aaronovitch's book Voodoo Histories (the paperback edition has an additional chapter on the "birther" conspiracy) apparently the long-form document is not easy to get hold of. I'm not American so I cannot comment on the veracity of that claim.

Ah, I see. I wouldn't know either. I've never tried to obtain my long form.

Still, how hard can it be for the freakin' POTUS?

TexasBlue wrote:

kronos wrote:I have to say, I'm about as far as you can get from a "birther"--I think the entire question is a ridiculous waste of time--but I always wondered why he didn't just release the long form to shut the birthers up. He should've done this years ago and spared us the headache. Why now?

But yeah, to the die-hard birthers, no evidence will convince them.

Even as a conservative Libertarian, I never bought into the birther claims. But I wondered as you did as to why he just didn't do what he did today. It'll be interesting to read the skeptics' shit tonight on the sites I scour. If I find anything good, I'll post it.... just because, and not because I believe what they're saying.

By the way Matt, it's skeptic, not sceptic.

The time you spend reading up on what the birthers are saying, you'll never get back. I'll just tell you:

Apparently the long form "raises more questions than it answers."

Some lady is claiming that in 1961, Obama's dad's race would've been listed as "Negro," not "African," and that therefore the long form is a forgery--exposed by political correctness!

This will never end. There is no evidence that would convince the birthers, none whatsoever.

Yeah, the whole thing is silly.

It occurred to me while making supper (I like to think while cooking) that Obama could've dismissed Trump on into the election season.... then he could've pounced the document on the masses. I say that because the birthers are dismissed by many as typical conspiracy theorists like the 9/11 folks. If the GOP would've kept pushing the issue during the campaign, it would've made them look silly in the end.

Here's an article I read tonight...........

PDF Layers in Obama’s Birth Certificate

Nathan Goulding
National Review
April 27, 2011

We have received several e-mails today calling into question the validity of the PDF that the White House released, namely that there are embedded layers in the document. There are now several other people on the case. We looked into it and dismissed it.

The PDF is composed of multiple images. That’s correct. Using a photo editor or PDF viewer of your choice, you can extract this image data, view it, hide it, etc. But these layers, as they’re being called, aren’t layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. They’re not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human.

What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way — from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition) — these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that.

UPDATE: I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.

Dear Mr. President: What took you so long?

Jonathan Strong
DailyCaller.com
April 27, 2011

President Obama released his long form birth certificate Wednesday after years of speculation about the issue metastasized into a major political phenomenon he could no longer ignore.

But the question remains: Why did Obama, who has proudly vowed his administration would be the “most open and transparent in history,” wait so long?

The document itself is unremarkable. It includes details not on the short form birth certificate released by Obama’s campaign in 2008 – the age of his mother (18) and father (25) on the day he was born, for instance – but nothing scandalous or even unusual.

Only on April 22 did Obama initiate, through outside legal council, a request to the Hawaii Department of Health to waive normal policy and send him a copy of the long form document.

After all the explanations given by Hawaii officials, including from the attorney general – that it was against the law to release a copy of the document — Director of Health Loretta Fuddy approved the request three days later.

“I have the legal authority to approve the process by which copies of such records are made … I am making an exception to current departmental policy,” Fuddy wrote.

Two main factors elevated the issue such that Obama could no longer ignore requests for a simple, unremarkable document.

First, likely GOP presidential candidate and real estate mogul Donald Trump pushed the issue as no one else could. His knack for publicity and skill on television allowed him to bypass a culture in polite political society in which the issue was taboo. The move was part of a political strategy – one that has worked – of appealing to GOP primary voters. But it’s unclear how it will pan out now that Obama has come forward with the long form birth certificate.

Second, Matt Drudge, one of the most powerful drivers of the news cycle, followed the story relentlessly on the Drudge Report, including highlighting a forthcoming book on the subject by controversial author Jerome Corsi.

As Obama noted in a press conference Wednesday, when Republicans announced their budget, and Obama later gave a speech announcing a vague new plan separate from the budget he had already released, “during that entire week, the dominant news story wasn’t about the monumental choices we’re gonna have to make as a nation, it was about my birth certificate.”

Certainly, conspiracy theorists who peddled lies and half-truths on the issue – and there were many – are at fault for the explosion of the issue.

But did Obama provide them cover in failing to fully address a simple document request for over two years?

The political world in Washington was rife with speculation from Democrats and Republicans about whether Obama was using the “birther” issue for political advantage, as a way to make his conservative critics appear fringe.

According to Obama, it was just one of many issues he “normally would not comment on [since] there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on any given day.”

There’s an important precedent for Obama’s political team ignoring a burgeoning issue for too long: when for months Obama declined to answer questions about the job former-Rep. Joe Sestak had been offered as payment if he chose not to run in the Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania.

Former President Bill Clinton had called Sestak on Obama’s behalf to discuss job options for Sestak, and top GOP oversight official Darrell Issa, then only a ranking member on the oversight committee, was able to drive the issue seemingly endlessly.

At the time, even Democrats privately faulted the Obama White House for allowing the issue to metastasize into a mini-scandal, even though the underlying facts were more-or-less commonplace political practice.

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:According to Aaronovitch's book Voodoo Histories (the paperback edition has an additional chapter on the "birther" conspiracy) apparently the long-form document is not easy to get hold of. I'm not American so I cannot comment on the veracity of that claim.

Actually, the "long form" version of one's birth certificate is quite simple to obtain. But more to the point, the so-called "short form" certificate of live birth that Obama initially presented is an entirely valid document for proving citizenship. The talking heads on this issue have been talking out of their asses. Part of my job (I work with the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in my state) is assessing the validity of a wide variety of documents that are required to prove place of birth, name, date of birth, Social Security number and legal residence - and these standards are becoming more and more nationally standardized n our post-9/11 world. All documents proving citizenship, DOB, name and Social Security have an amazing number of security features that very few people know about that allow persons in jobs like mine to determine fakes from the real thing. It would only take a brief look at Obama's certificate of live birth to determine if it was in fact a valid document - and if it was, then it is more than adequate proof of his citizenship, name and DOB.

This whole thing has been a huge waste of time and has taken the focus off of many, many more important issues respecting this President.

Birth Certificate: Where Are the Indignant Questions to Obama?

Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review
April 28, 2011

I certainly get why National Review, among others, is pressing Joseph Farah, World Net Daily, and others who’ve been aggressively pushing the matter of President Obama’s birth certificate and, derivatively, questioning his constitutional qualifications to be president. And though I’ve never taken Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate, I also appreciate why the Republican Beltway insiders are gleefully joining the mainstream media in ridiculing him as a buffoon. But what I don’t get is why there is not more anger at Obama and that selfsame mainstream media.

One of the things Obama said yesterday was unintentionally striking. He contended that no one should ever have questioned his birth certificate because credible people who had seen it had described it in affidavits. Naturally, he didn’t mention why they were in the position of having to describe it in affidavits: namely, because Obama had refused to authorize production of the actual birth certificate, which he could have done at any moment over the last three years. Look how easy it would have been.

When I read in Dan’s post yesterday about how the White House was also releasing the relevant correspondence between Obama’s lawyers and the Hawaii health department regarding the certificate, I said to myself: “Okay, we are finally going to learn that there’s been some bureaucratic complication beneath all this intrigue.” But no: The request for certified copies of the birth certificate was (finally) made last week, on a Friday, in two short letters — including a four-sentence letter signed by the president that obviously took him considerably less time to review than it takes to stretch before teeing off at the first hole. The birth certificate was produced the following business day (Monday) — with the health department expressing hope that its production “will end the numerous inquiries” it had gotten over the years, which “have been disruptive to staff operations and have strained State resources.” And Obama was able to do his dog-and-pony show yesterday morning, only five days after asking the health department to produce the document.

If George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, or even a Republican the media likes (say, John McCain) had taken purposeful steps to block examination of so basic a document, the media would surely have turned such obstinacy into a scandal. The public might not have leapt to extravagant conclusions about whether they’d really been born in Kenya, or on Mars, or wherever. But they’d have thought it was intolerably strange that campaigns were retaining lawyers and amassing affidavits rather than just producing a seemingly innocuous, readily producible document. The story would never have been about the people asking for the birth certificate; it would have been about the candidate who was moving heaven and earth to prevent people from seeing it.

And let’s not ignore that Obama did move heaven and earth. This is not just a matter of him thumbing his nose at a fringe collection of nutty “birthers.” There have been several court cases. It is flat out bizarre that one should have to be sued to compel conformance with a routine that millions of Americans comply with every day. Many of these court cases, if not all, could have been short-circuited (indeed, many of the later ones would not have been filed at all) if Obama had just produced the birth certificate. Instead, he not only refused to produce it; he and his campaign paid thousands of dollars in legal fees (in some places it is reported to be well over a million dollars) to fight the lawsuits — and Obama’s lawyers even threatened to seek disciplinary sanctions against lawyers for daring to file the lawsuits. Since Obama has been president, moreover, not just the time of courts and private lawyers has been tied up; government lawyers have had to spend their time — on the public’s dime — on this nonsense.

There appears to be nothing remarkable about the president’s long-form birth certificate. As I’ve said before, the vast majority of people have long rightly accepted the fact that he was born in Hawaii and is an American citizen, no meaningful evidence to the contrary every having been produced to rebut the short-form certificate and the contemporaneous birth announcements in local newspapers. The constitutional question material to the matter of Obama’s eligibility — and one that is unlikely ever to get serious consideration — is whether Obama is a “natural born” citizen. That question centers on the ramifications, if any, of the fact that Obama’s father was not an American, and of Obama’s status as a dual citizen (of Kenya for a time, and possibly of Indonesia). Obama had to know that he had nothing to fear from production of the long-form certificate on this score — it doesn’t provide any relevant information that wasn’t already known.

So, assuming as we should the legitimacy of the long-form birth certificate produced yesterday, the only thing that makes sense is that Obama knows the mainstream media is in his hip pocket. That is, he knew that he would not be held to the same standard as other politicians, and that if he acted in an unreasonable manner by withholding basic, easily available information that any other person seeking the presidency would be expected — be compelled — to produce, the media would portray as weirdos those demanding the information, not Obama and his stonewalling accomplices. And he also knows that, having now finally produced the document only because the game was starting to hurt him politically, the media will not focus on how easy it would have been to produce the birth certificate three years ago, or on how much time and money has been wasted by his gamesmanship; they’ll instead portray him as beleaguered and the people who have been seeking the basic information (i.e., doing the media’s job) as discredited whackos.

It’s hard to say what’s more depressing, Obama’s cynicism or the zeal with which the media does his bidding.

And he also knows that, having now finally produced the document only because the game was starting to hurt him politically, the media will not focus on how easy it would have been to produce the birth certificate three years ago, or on how much time and money has been wasted by his gamesmanship; they’ll instead portray him as beleaguered and the people who have been seeking the basic information (i.e., doing the media’s job) as discredited whackos.

Okay. This author does make a valid point. While anyone who knows anything about primary documents would have been more than satisfied with the production of Obama's "short-form" birth certificate, it is true that most people do not know about these things and thus Obama's refusal to produce the "long-form" birth certificate was needless and only encouraged speculation as to why he would refuse to produce it.

And that sentence I've quoted above just proves media bias to the left because we've seen that the media have not questioned why Obama waited 3 years and spent huge amounts of money to keep his birth certificate under wraps.