I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to the claims of the birther movement. Some of the early claims were intriguing, but the discovery of the Hawaiian newspaper birth announcements pretty much ended my interest. I’m willing to entertain a lot of ideas about leftists working to subvert the Constitution for nefarious ends (see: any gun control bill ever), but some decades long conspiracy to train some nobody baby of nobody parents to someday slime his way into the White House is way beyond believability.
That said, the recent release of Obamas birth certificate does have some oddities to it. The first, of course, is the timing: if it’s worth doing now, it was worth doing a few years ago, when the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the US first cropped up. And if he didn’t want to release it (for reasons that are murky at best), why release it at all? And why now, as opposed to, say, just before the 2012 election when it could be used to smack down a potential Trump run for President?
And then there’s this:
[youtube QNJfdKClbH4]
I don’t know squat about Adobe Illustrator. Is what this guy talking about accurate? If so, there sure do seem to be some weirdnesses with the birth certificate that would seem to indicate that it’s a digital forgery.
And if it is… why? Seems to me if the White House went to the effort to fake up a birth certificate, they’d take an extra five minute to print out a high quality paper version of it, then scan that. Releasing a birth certificate that has easily discovered digital “fingerprints” is beyond lazy. So, what possible explanations would there be for this?
UPDATE: Check the comments for a plausible, indeed probable, explanation for why the text is on a separate layer from the background.
18 Responses to “Obamas Birth Certificate”
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Great deal of respect for you has just been lost. To fall for a youtube video is rather disconcerting.
> To fall for a youtube video …
So are you saying the video itself is a hoax? If so, I would not be surprised. But is it really a “respect loser” to ask if something outside ones area of expertise is accurate or if it means anything?
I’ve scanned a buttload of documents, and they always show up as a single image on a single layer. The text has never been separated from the background in any way.
He didn’t fall for a youtube video. He brought up the youtube video, admitted he had no idea whether it was true, and said that if it WAS true, then the behavior from the white house was beyond bizarre.
The only reason I could think of to release a crappy fake is to fuel the birther conspiracy beyond all believability. The birthers are already discredited, which makes their message mostly unbelievable to begin with. Releasing a plausible birth certificate with semi-plausible anomalies would both fuel the birthers and completely discredit them; it would fuel them because of the anomalies, but discredit them because the continued cries of the birthers after Obama has finally done as they asked would steal their last shred of credibility in any non-birther eyes. Classic case of cry-wolf.
What I just saw seems plausible – i.e. that a document could have different content in multiple layers – but I have reason to give it any significance: I have no way of knowing if that is the document as released, nor whether or not any of the screencap was falsified.
What I do know is that it wasn’t released til now – why now, and why not when asked the first time?
Jim
IF there are irregularities in the scanned image of the LFBC (long form birth certificate), wouldn’t it be relatively easy to duplicate them? I.e., find out what type of scanner was used, see what it does to the image (layers, no layers, OCR inserting objects, etc.). Seems like someone would be working on this already.
In the meantime, there are enough legitmate issues to contend with. And lastly, Osama Bin Laden is still dead.
Thing is, an image with different content in each layer – adding up to the composite image shown – isn’t something you would get straight from a scanner. The scanned image would be one flat layer, and you wouldn’t be able to manipulate the appearance of the text by toggling layers between visible and not. Either you’d see all of it, or none.
The fact that the image in question has different bits of the text in different layers shows that someone at very least divided the original text into different layers, apparently randomly. The thing is, there is no logical reason to go that trouble if the final image represents the original form.
Again, I don’t suggest anything about the ultimate argument that he is or is not a US citizen, but that video shows plausible – not certain – evidence of deliberate manipulation an image.
Jim
I think he understood the concept of “Give them enough rope, and they’ll hang themselves”.
He let Trump and the birthers get worked up into a frenzy, then pulled the rug out from under them, making them look like idiots.
Assuming that… why *now?* The election is a year and a half away. That’s ten and a half dog-years, and about three millenia in politician-years.
Probably figured the birther stuff had hit a peak with Trump, and wanted to milk it for all it was worth.
More likely that he intended to tie the Birthers around the neck of the Republican candidate in Fall of 2012, and didn’t expect anyone to raise the issue to prominence so early. But polls indicated that, thanks to Trump, a substantial fraction of the population had heard about the controversy, and people were beginning to ask “Well, if there’s nothing to it, why won’t he release it?”
I don’t know what application they used to scan that document, but I have an HP scanner with OCR software. When it scans with the OCR stuff turned on, it tries to seperate foreground text from background. It looks for blocks of text to the software and pulls that out from the “paper” it’s printed on.
I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re seening there, artifacts of the OCR software trying to find text. It also explains the weirdness with some blocks of text showing up broken into two sections (the serial number on top) is because the OCR software isn’t as smart as a human.
OK, that makes a good deal of sense. None of my scanning has ever involved OCR, so I’ve never seen that before. It would seem that the producer of the video might not have, either.
Had a guy on local radio morning program that said this is exactly what happens when you scan with OCR turned on in Illustrator. It separates each bit of potential text, etc. into individual layers. The last time I used OCR of any kind I got tons of separations and odd selections, but that was years ago.
If you scan with OCR turned off, you get a single image that has to be edited in a graphics program.
As far as the timing, the only thing I can figure is that someone on Obama’s team realized a few years back that the “birther” issue worked out to Obama’s favor as long as it was perceived to be a “fringe” issue. Therefore they intentionally held the long form back against the day that the issue went mainstream. (I.E. 38% of Americans having doubts about Obama’s place of birth).
The document contains no ASCII representation of the included text as would be expected of OCR.
I’ll allow that the occupier of the white house was born in Hawaii, with dual citizenship. The latter conflict of loyalties invalidates him as a ‘natural born’ citizen for purposes of being the president. I’ve also heard that for a time as a youth he held no US citizenship. His college transcripts may illuminate the latter point.
Does this mean John McCain also has Panamanian citizenship? 😉
Per the U.S. Code, Title 8, Chapter 12, Subchapter III, Section 1401, subsection (g), he’s a natural born citizen because his mother was and she lived in the US for more than five of her first 18 years.
See:
link
Why this particular legal nicety was never pointed out, by the Administration OR its defenders, before now is something that I’m confused by, but it makes the entire birth certificate question a non-issue (unless you want to claim that he was adopted).
The OCR bit does put a different light on the technical aspect. Perhaps a staffer could do a video of their workflow leading to this bit of intrigue?
Jim