Obama's Birth Certificate

Folks,

As the news media reports, the Obama birth certificate has been released. We need to remember that being murderers of unborn babies and sanctifiers of homosexual filth, by definition Obama and the people with him are liars. Yet liberal Catholics enamoured with the false gospel of social justice, the common good and peace at any price will continue to sacrifice all reason and logic at the altar of their false god, the first black president who actually is half black and half white, not that that makes any difference for what does make a difference is their racial bias often against their own race in putting skin color before such logic and reason - "we have to support The One no matter what in order to show ourselves diverse and tolerant and accepting and nice." What freaking nonsense!

The American Catholic blogiste has an interesting discussion on this matter: Obama Releases Birth Certificate. Why Now?

Dr. Pournelle's thoughts over at Chaos Manor are these:

-----

Well That's Over...

Subj: Obama's Birth Certificate

Jerry,

The prez released his long-form birth certificate, and none of the speculation is borne out...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/8477589/Barack-Obama-hits-back-at-birthers-and-releases-birth-certificate.html

Cecil Rose

Which leaves only the question of why the heck didn't this happen two years ago? The question was moot from the day he was inaugurated.

We may now be amused by the coming storms over who won what in this latest round. Perhaps there ought to be a pool on just how long it will go on, except that the likelihood is that it will never end. Can we now get on with the most open administration in the history of the nation?

===========

Checking for myself

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I downloaded the Barack Hussein Obama, II long form birth certificate .pdf file directly from whitehouse.gov. I opened it in Illustrator. Released the clipping mask. Yes, there are multiple layers. The lines of the form are not the same layer as the captions of the form. Individual letters in names and words are in separate layers from the rest of the name or word (i.e., 'K' in Kenya, 'S' in Stanley, 'R' in BARACK, and many more). It sure looks like it has been assembled from multiple elements. I can not think of an innocent reason for these facts. I also find it hard to understand how and why, if it's a forgery, it's such a clumsy forgery. Am I missing some reasonable technical explanation for these issues?

The file has also been scrubbed clean of most meta data. It was created on a Mac using OS X 10.6.7, but I don't see anything else useful.

Greg Hemsath

I have no idea here. There was a time when I could legitimately claim to be well versed in the uses of high technology for various purposes, but it's been a while since I did that sort of thing: I have to rely on advisors and experts. At least I understand what they tell me, even if I don't spend so much time doing silly things so you don't have to.

I would have thought that the simplest solution to all this would be a photograph of the original document. Presumably a release on the web would require digitization, but that's a simple scan, or even a digital photograph. I know there are some problems with pdf software, but surely the simplest processes would not produce a complex multi-layered document. I can conceive of too clever by half "plots" to make things complex and thus suck more people into arguing over moot points, but I can't think that even the kids who hang around in the White House are not above that sort of nonsense.

Ye flipping gods. Barrack Obama was born before Macs existed. Clearly the source of this was some document that existed prior to the Mac. The notion is to get this silly discussion out of the news and let us get to something important? Of course a computer had to be be used to produce a pdf copy -- pdf didn't exist in the days that the document was created -- but release of a pdf isn't the release of the original document. Perhaps we've just got the story wrong, and the original is on display for examination by qualified journalists in Honolulu. Surely this is just another silliness brought about by the modern "journalism", yet another reason I don't like to get involved in breaking stories. Surely it will all come out in the wash, and someone will produce an undoctored, non-layered, certified copy of the original document and we can all get on with more important matters. We have many experts on these matters in this readership and I'll wait to hear from them. Until then I assume that this was a release in good faith, and the original will be available in Honolulu, where someone is photocopying it even as I write this.