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How do they know?

By on March 3, 2013 in Birth Location, Debunking

Recently, birthers have been recycling long-discredited rumors about Barack Obama. One way to recycle rumors is to aggregate them into a pile, where they look more impressive than singly. One such aggregation of old news appeared on the Orly Taitz blog from a commenter named “Adam.” I respond to this compilation of people who have said Obama was born in Kenya by asking the obvious question: how do they know? I ask because if there is no way they could have know, then they don’t know.

Kenyan National Assembly members state at various times that Obama was born in Kenya and is not a native born American:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/36604073/

The link in the proceeding is not any official source; it’s to a newspaper ad,  but there are a couple of quotations from Kenyan politicians that say, or might be understood to say, that President Obama was born in Kenya. I ask: how do they know? They were not speaking about where Obama was born, but about something else, using Obama just as an example. They weren’t authoritative statements on the subject of the President’s birthplace. Have you never heard a US politician make a glaring mistake, shoot from the hip, run off their mouth with their brain not engaged? If the Kenyan politicians don’t give a source, then don’t know any more than anyone else.

Kenyan Ambassador to the United States says on a U.S. radio show that Obama’s birth location in Kenya is well known:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH4GX3Otf14

In this case the Ambassador was misunderstood. He talked about the Obama birth place being a popular tourist attraction. That refers to Kogelo Village where Barack Obama Sr. was born. When contacted next day, a spokesperson for the Ambassador stated flat out that the Ambassador had no information about where President Obama was born. We needn’t ask how he knew, because he tells us that he didn’t.

Newspapers in Kenya and other African countries report as far back as 2004 that Obama is Kenyan born:
http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/2441535

A very few, relatively speaking, of these did appear. However, they never give sources, and they don’t explain how they knew. Some printed retractions.

Obama’s family members in Kenya say he was born there:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=107524

Obama family members might reasonably know where the President was born, but they never said he was born in Kenya. They consistently say he was born in Hawaii.

Michelle Obama the wife of Barack Hussein Obama says in 2008 that Kenya is her husband’s “home country”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4Afe1NVYI

Figure of speech. Even if Michelle Obama knew her husband were born in Kenya, she would never say so in public.

Michelle Obama the wife of Barack Hussein Obama in 2007 says her husband is a Kenyan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rep-MB-wbkU

Figure of speech. Even if Michelle Obama knew her husband were born in Kenya, she would never say so in public.

NPR radio says that Obama is Kenyan born:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=138293

How do they know? What source do they have that is not available to all of us? Anyway, they corrected the mistake quickly.

Gov Richardson of New Mexico says Obama is an immigrant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEjGmT1gmcw

How does he know? Whatever he meant, he has no way to know if President Obama was born in Kenya.

School records in Indonesia report that he is an Indonesian citizen:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=72667

Those school records also say he was born in Hawaii. If you accept the school record, then you have to throw out everything that says Obama was born in Kenya. According to school officials, the nationality of the parent (in this case Lolo Soetoro) was usually put down for nationality, as was the religion, Islam. Obama becoming an Indonesian citizen was impossible both under US and Indonesian law.

No hospital records exist in Hawaii proving Obama was born there per Tim Adams a 2008 Hawaii Election official’s sworn affidavit:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=254401

How does Adams know? The best he has said is that it was an office rumor or something his supervisor told him. How did the supervisor know? The Elections Division does not have access to any birth records in Hawaii. They had no way to know, so they don’t know.

Obama’s Hawaiian birth registration records was likely created by an affidavit led by Obama’s maternal grandmother declaring him born at home with no witnesses using a simple mail-in form available in 1961 simply to gain her new foreign born grandson Citizenship. Birth registration fraud to gain Citizenship occurs now and it occurred then. His vital records were likely subsequently amended upon the marriage of his mother to her second husband, Lolo Soetoro in Hawaii. His official name in the vital records of Hawaii may show his name still as Soetoro. The online Certification of Live Birth (COLB) is a forgery:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZpwcRf3FQ

So how do they know this? Given that all the details on Obama long-form birth certificate have been verified by the State of Hawaii, and in particular that President Obama was born in a hospital, this is clearly not true.

This particular list omitted the publicist’s brochure mentioning that Obama was born in Kenya. However, the author of that brochure stated specifically that she had no information from Obama that it was true. So asking how did she know, we know the answer: she didn’t.

The general response: how did then know, or how do you know, is a fairly non-aggressive way to argue, and quickly arrive at the result that the speaker believes something without good reason and really does not know.

Read more:

Anomalies

By on October 27, 2012 in Debunking

“Life is difficult.”

I hope you don’t do what I did after reading those words from M. Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled: I stopped reading. The opening sentence of Chapter 1 struck me as so profound at the time that I paused to contemplate it for 30 years, and never got back to the rest of the book, which sits on the shelf unread to this day.

imageSavvy readers might infer from my philosophical tone that I have been mowing grass again, and they would be right. As I mowed, I contemplated something else that I read, just last night, from Loren Collins’ new book, Bullspotting. Loren was commenting on how 9/11 conspiracy theorists frame arguments and said in a section titled Anomaly Hunting:

What Truthers do instead [of providing concrete evidence], and what they do a lot , is try to “poke holes” in the accepted version of the events of 9/11.  This often involves a lot of open-ended questions…

I understand Loren’s point, but it caused me some disquiet because “poking holes” is what I do a lot too. So this article tries to make some distinctions between anomaly hunting the way I do it and the way some birthers do it.

Loren makes one important point about “debunking” and that is the debunker usually approaches questions with his mind made up, and is just trying to prove something he already believes to be bunk actually is. Obviously after 4 years of arguing about Obama’s birthplace, I have made up my mind about where Barack Obama was born, and I do approach every new argument to the contrary with the view that it is bunk. I think, however, with basic integrity and commitment to honesty, plus the methodology of proof I learned as a math student, that honest investigation can be done even by someone somewhat biased. Knowing you’re biased at the start helps compensate. So one difference is that when I make an anomaly argument I take my own admitted bias into consideration.

I’d like to compare and contrast two particular debunking efforts. One deals with my treatment of the fake birth certificate, the so-called Bomford certificate (named from the person named on the source document from which the fake was made). The second deals a popular birther debunking of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the presence of the word “African.”

When I looked at the Bomford certificate, I noticed that the price listed on the 1964 document form was shown in shillings and pence. That is an anomaly because Kenya used cents and not pence in 1964 (and before and after). The debunking argument goes: “since Kenya used money denominated in cents in 1964, any purported official Kenyan document denominated in pence is a fake.” Government agencies use official currency in their transactions and no objection to this argument has been put forward. The Bomford certificate is a fake. QED.

Many birthers looking at Obama’s birth certificate made an argument: “No official document in 1961 would have used the term ‘African’ as a race, so any purported official document using that term is a fake.” The argument form is the same as mine. The difference is that the premise is false. It was possible to establish from other contemporary birth certificates and a vital statistics data entry manual that national and regional groups could appear on birth certificates, and that black Kenyans considered their race as “African.” Not only is the “official version” plausible, it is exactly what it should be based on this evidence. The difference is that the anomaly in the Bomford Certificate proved decisive based on well-sourced fact, while the alleged anomaly in the Obama certificate didn’t hold up against the facts.

Whenever some new Obama Conspiracy evidence comes forward there is a flurry of activity on the Internet with various people on the “other side” trying to find anomalies, to poke holes in the evidence. We had a world of fun poking holes in the Lucas Smith’s POSFKBC for a year. Most recently, we’ve seen a flurry of anomalies directed at the Peter Rehnquist Obama birth video: Why does the baby have teeth? Why is there so little blood; Why is the flag wrong?

What happens over time is that crowd-sourced research on the Internet sorts through the anomalies, separating the plausible from the implausible, from the impossible. New information is found, corner cases are located, and the arguments are tested. In the case of the birth video, that process resulted in an “impossible” verdict quite quickly. It goes: “An image appears in the video that was created in 2005; therefore, any video that claims to be from 1961 with that image is a fake.” QED

As far as I know, the Obama birth video has so many problems that no one except Peter Rehnquist defends it. However, with other evidence regarding Obama’s long-form birth certificate, the birthers have refused to join the consensus, preferring to rely on themselves as sources. There’s no help for that. They don’t admit that they are biased.

Birther activist joins Romney press cohort

By on October 18, 2012 in 2012 Presidential Election, Debunking, Jerome Corsi, Videos, WorldNetDaily

Rachel Maddow did a wonderful segment on her program about what she calls the “conservative media bubble” and attributes such in-bred thinking for Mitt Romney’s major debate gaffe disbelieving Obama when he said that he lad labeled the Libya embassy attack an “act of terror” the day after it happened.  She talked about conservatives holding to contrafactual views because it makes them feel comfortable. The segment was titled “Right-wing truthers lead Romney to debate disaster.”

The lead in was the appearance of Where’s the Real Birth Certificate author Jerome Corsi as part of the accredited press corps traveling with the Romney campaign. Maddow barely scratches the surface of available examples of the nuttiness of Corsi and the online tabloid web site he works for, WorldNetDaily. Politico.com’s Dylan Byers broke the story and did a feature on the Corsi appearance on the Romney plane. I’ll be interested to see what if anything the Romney Campaign does in response to these news stories: defend the freedom of the press, or throw Corsi under the bus out the emergency exit without a parachute.

We see the same insular news sources in birtherism all the time, where they actually believe that Sheriff Arpaio conducted a real police investigation, that everybody was taught in Civics class that US Presidents must have citizen parents, Ann Dunham posed nude for Frank Marshall Davis in 1960, and that Obama stole the social-security number of a guy born in Connecticut in 1890.

Maddow made the quote of the day when she said:

Do not confuse your WorldNetDaily-caliber conservative therapeutic alternative reality fantasy babble for what actually happened.

Of course, debate gaffe’s are not all that important in my book. What is important is that those who actually govern us (not to be confused with political candidates) do so based on the best available facts, and not what they tell each other.

Here’s the video from Maddow’s show:

Continue Reading →

Obama executive orders: debunked

By on October 11, 2012 in Debunking, Misc. Conspiracies

A friend forwarded the following alarming email saying that Obama has issued massive numbers of executive orders, some designed to enslave the country. Here’s the text, in which every number is totally made up:

You have to read this— He could take control of EVERYTHING and we could do nothing about it!  Keep your guns close and pray hard.   Have not read anything like this since I read the book 7 Days in May.   God Help us.  The Village People

EXECUTIVE ORDERS ISSUED…

Teddy Roosevelt       3
Others to FDR         NONE
FDR                         11 in 16 years
Truman                   5 in 7 years
Ike                            2 in 8 years
Kennedy                  4 in 3 years
LBJ                           4 in 5 years
Nixon                       1 in 6 years
Ford                         3 in 2 years
Carter                      3 in 4 years
Reagan                    5 in 8 years
Bush                          3 in 4 years
Clinton                     15 in 8 years
George W. Bush     62 in 8 years
Obama                   923 in 3 1/2 years!

If you don’t get the implications you’re not paying attention.   How many warnings do you need? Read the brief list of some of his Executive Orders near the bottom of this email.

923 Executive Orders in 40 Months

During my lifetime,  All Presidents have issued Executive Orders, for reasons that vary, some more than others. When a President issued as many as 30  Ex. Orders during a term in Office, people thought there was something Amiss.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT  923  EX. ORDERS IN ONE PART OF ONE TERM  ??????

YES,  THERE IS A REASON. IT IS THAT THE PRESIDENT IS DETERMINED TO TAKE CONTROL AWAY FROM THE HOUSE AND THE SENATE.

Even some Democrats in the House have turned on him, plus a very small number of Democrat Senators question him.

HE SHOULD BE QUESTIONED.

WHAT IS HE REALLY TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH    ????

DOES THIS SCARE YOU AS MUCH AS IT DOES ME? ________________________________

….THIS IS NOT FUNNY, AND IF YOU VOTE FOR HIM AGAIN, YOU CAN EXPECT MORE!

Remember what he told Russia ‘s Putin: “I’ll be more flexible after I’m re-elected”.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: Obama has signed 923 Executive Orders in 40 months!

What did Congress do in those 40 months? (The House – considerable. The Senate  -nothing, not even a budget nor allowing any House bill to be considered.) A  whole new order must prevail in Wash. DC as a result of this next election! Now  look at these:

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10990 allows the government to take over all modes of  transportation and control of highways and seaports.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10995 allows the government to seize and control the  communication media.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power,  gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 10998 allows the government to take over all food resources and  farms.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11000 allows the government to mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11001 allows the government to take over all health, education  and welfare functions.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11002 designates the registration of all persons. Postmaster General to  operate a national registration

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate  communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be  abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and public storage facilities.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal  departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative Executive Orders issued  over a fifteen year period.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency  Planning and gives authorization to put all Executive Orders into effect in  times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce  the plans set out in Executive Orders, to institute industrial support, to  establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate  penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President.

-EXECUTIVE ORDER 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to  develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money  in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also  provides that when a state of emergency is declared by the President, Congress cannot review the action for six months.

Feel free to verify the “executive orders” at will… and these are just the major ones I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of the “Frog in the Pot”… you all comfortable???

Watch Obama’s actions, not his words! By his actions he will show you where America is headed. Sounds to me like he is superceeding the Constitution of the USA … But, yet I did not find any provision in the US Constitution for such Executive Orders.

Just this week, Obama has issued a new executive order that seeks to “harmonize” U.S. economic regulations with the rest of the world.  This new executive order is yet another incremental step that is pushing us closer to a North American Union and a one world economic system.

Unfortunately, most Americans have absolutely no idea what is happening. The American people need to understand that Barack Obama is constantly looking for ways to integrate the United States more deeply with the rest of the world. The globalization of the world economy has accelerated under Obama, and this latest executive order represents a fundamental change in U.S. economic policy. Now federal regulators will be required to “harmonize” their work with the international community.

THIS IS DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE??

THEN PROVE TO YOURSELF IT’S WRONG.

Naturally as a debunker I took that challenge to heart and discovered that besides the names of the former Presidents, there not a real fact in it anywhere.

Let’s start with the number of executive orders issued. They are totally made up. All presidential orders since FDR are conveniently tabulated at the National Archives. Here’s a comparison of chain email numbers and actual numbers:

President Email number of Executive Orders Actual Executive Orders
Franklin Roosevelt 11 3728
Truman 5 896
Eisenhower 2 486
Kennedy 4 214
Johnson 4 324
Nixon 1 346
Ford 3 169
Carter 3 320
Reagan 5 381
George H. W. Bush 3 166
Clinton 15 364
George W. Bush 62 291
Obama 923 135

Rather than the highest number of executive orders, Obama is the lowest!

So what about those specific Obama executive orders mentioned in the email? Made up as well. The email lists orders in the range of 10990 to 11921. Executive orders are numbered sequentially. Obama executive order numbers start at 13489. The numbers listed go back to President Kennedy, and have nothing to do with what’s in the email, for example: 10994 is for The President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped.

The bunk stops here

By on August 23, 2012 in 2012 Presidential Election, Debunking, Misc. Conspiracies

In addition to my blogging here I have a real life, and in real life of late I’ve been getting some chain emails (“urgent forward this to all your friends”) that are filled with false information, and interestingly enough it is all of a conservative bias, even though I don’t usually gravitate towards that group. People who send me chain emails quickly learn that I “REPLY ALL” with some pretty strong debunking. Usually they stop sending them.

Since Barack Obama usually gets blamed for everything, I find a little justification for making this article, which is a list of some of the bunk floating around. Commenters will no doubt know of lots more, and I anticipate adding to the article over the next few days.

  • Obama told veterans stop whining about having to pay for their own health care. Never happened. Debunked at PolitiFact.com.
  • ObamaCare includes a 3.8% sales tax when you sell your home. It’s a gains tax that will apply only a few very wealthy homeowners. Debunked at FactCheck.org.
  • ObamaCare is the largest tax increase in history. Only if you ignore inflation and population growth. Discussed at FactCheck.org. Rated “pants on fire” at Politifact.com.
  • Obama is going to ban all guns in the US through a UN Treaty. Not true. Debunked at FactCheck.org.
  • President Obama has doubled the size of government since he took office. Not true. Debunked at Politifact.com.
  • Obama signed “in secret” a law restricting free speech. If it was a secret, how do they know he signed it? Debunked at Politifact.com and also at FactCheck.org.
  • Obama canceled the National Day of Prayer. Nope. Debunked everywhere including Snopes.com.
  • Obama will cancel the 2012 election. Debunking of this will be available on November 7, 2012.

The items listed above are just a few of the many that I found are out there once I started looking. The links below have many more.

Readers may note the conspicuous absence of Snopes.com from my article until this most recent update. That’s mainly because the professional journalistic sites I mentioned I consider more authoritative, although Snopes certainly does good work too. One of the rejoinders I get when doing my “REPLY ALL” debunking using any of these sources, is that they themselves are biased or part of the disinformation conspiracy. Attacking Snopes is almost a reflex for some people, and attacking FactCheck is common for Obama denialists who have their  own conspiracy theories about connections between Obama, Bill Ayers and FactCheck – all nonsense, but we’re talking about birthers here.

Related links:

They all look alike

By on August 1, 2012 in Debunking, Obama Family, Questioned Photos

image

These two hands are obviously from the same person because they show 4 knuckles. The image on the left is from Stanley Ann Dunham, and the one on the right is from Frank Marshall Davis, family friend of the Dunhams in Hawaii.

As you know, birthers claim that all photos of Barack Obama prior to him becoming a national figure are fake, including those in contemporary school yearbooks. Now in an article by birther and anti-Christ contender Jerome Corsi, another photo is called into question. Not only is the photo considered fake, but somehow the figure of Frank Marshall Davis is replaced by the diminutive Stanley Ann Dunham.

Here’s the color adjusted image Corsi showed, and yes Dunham’s hand looks dark:

You can read Corsi’s July 19 article for all of the details of why some guy named Robert Nikolakakis concluded that the photo from which the above is taken is a fake. I am not a graphics expert, so I wouldn’t really know “airbrush” from “hairbrush.” However, when I was in elementary school they taught us a useful technique called “measuring things with a ruler.”

Mr. Nikolalakis says:

The chair on the far left next to Ann Dunham is brown and smaller than the chairs on the right, which are white. The horizontal support bar for the brown chair does not align with the white chairs’ support bar.

The problem is, however, that the chair on the left is not smaller than the chair on the right (within the precision I was able to cut and position). I took a vertical slice of the picture from the right side and pasted next to the chair on the left (note that the top part of the left chair is brown):

image

 

 

Continue Reading →

The African Race: the final chapter

By on July 30, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Debunking, Featured Articles, Orly Taitz

Ever since Barack Obama released his long form, birthers have said things like these:

Within 24-hours of the release of the long form Certificate of Live Birth on April 27, intelligence agencies from Britain and China to Germany and Russia examined the document and concluded it was a forgery based on the fact that Barack H. Obama Sr.’s race, listed as “African,” was a monumental error, considering that not only the United States, but other English-speaking nations described Africans and those of African descent as either “Negroes” or “blacks” in 1961. – Wayne Madsen

Why was Obama’s father’s race noted as ” AFRICAN ” when official documents issued in 1961 never used the term ” AFRICAN ” to refer to someone’s race but rather used the term ” N-E-G-R-O ” or ” N-E-G-R-O -I-D ” ? – Yahoo Answers

In those days nobody wrote African as a race, it just wasn’t one of the options. It sounds like it would be written today, in the age of political correctness, and not in 1961 when they wrote white or Asian or ‘Negro’. – Orly Taitz

Poor poor Obamatards, there was no political correctness in 1961. Which means that Obama’s birth certificate would list his father’s race as “Negro” not “African”. Fraud. Failed again.

I would have to do some due diligence to see what protocol was in the new state of Hawaii in 1961 but it certainly seems that if Barack Hussein Obama II was born in the lower 48 that even though we all know that his father is an Arab-African his father’s race on the Obama’s birth certificate would have been listed as NEGRO or perhaps BLACK in 1961… Certainly not African as is clearly shown on his official birth certificate.

To use “Caucausian” (sic) to describe the mother and “African” to describe the father is a no-brainer error. Hospitals were and are pretty careful in their terminology – it’s a legal thing1. Political correctness did not exist.

Back in 1961 people of color were called ‘Negroes.’ So how can the Obama ‘birth certificate’ state he is ‘African-American’ when the term wasn’t even used at that time?2

NO document in 1961 EVER listed ethnicity as “African” — it would have said “Negro”.

And there are inconsistencies, such as “African” for father’s race – that term wasn’t used when Obama was born. Until 1980 the word “N e g r o e” was the official term. If something else was used for foreigners, the correct term would have been “Kenyan”, not “African” – Africa is not a nation, there is no African citizenship3.

Because she had just asked something about the “race” field on the birth certificate she was working on, I asked, “Back in 1961, would anyone have ever entered ‘African’ as the race of a parent?” She said, “No, back then they probably would have listed a black person’s race as ‘negro.’” I asked, “So, the word ‘African’ wouldn’t have been used, because that is a nationality and not a race, right?” And she responded, “Right. Nowadays we can use ‘African American’ though.” To which I added, “But, the word ‘African’ by itself has never been used as an entry for race?” And she simply said, “No. Never.” – Dean Haskins

it states “african” which is a term that was never used in those days. Africa is a continent. People from all the countries on that continent with negroid skin and characteristics were call “Negroes” – It was Not a term of derision, as some think it is today. A birth certificate in that year would have said Negro. I bet you can not find one birth certificate from anywhere in the world that lists race as African (except Obama’s). It wasn’t until the 1970’s that the word ‘negro’ was replace by “african american”

“African”? On a birth certificate from that time? Not. A. Chance. Correct forms are in the government blood. Admin clerks freak if the wrong colored ink is used to sign documents. hat word wouldn’t make it past the first chain of editors before being corrected back to the government approved term.

No, “African” would not have been plausible as race in 1961 or any other time. There are millions of people who are not black who are African and whose ancestors have been for hundreds to thousands of years. In 1962 the term used for black as race was Negro. “African” on a document purporting to be official is pretty much clear evidence of something being wrong with that document. It would be like someone offering you an ancient coin with the date of 7 BC.

I think the relevant department would “translate” whatever they see on a foreign BC into whatever the equivalent and legal term is here. In Barry’s case, it would have been Negro. I think “African” on the purported birth certificate is an artifact of 1. the forger’s relative ignorance of things before his birth and 2. the modern, liberal forger’s almost unconscious shying away from the politically-incorrect “Negro.” Remember that school that characterized the photographer’s exhibit of black South Africans as “African-American South Africans”? I think the same level of brain stem “thought” was at work in this forgery.

According to the actual federal coding manual for vital statistics in 1961, they were expecting to receive answers such as “Afro-American” and national groups such as “Mongolian.”

If the racial entry is ... "Afro-American" ...

If the racial entry is "Yellow," "Oriental," or "Mongolian" ...

In fact, other Hawaiian birth certificates from 1961 make it clear how open-ended the race response was:

Race of Mother: Hawaiian Fil Port Sp

There was never a prescribed list of choices for race. Race is whatever the parents said they were and in 1961 black Kenyans called themselves “African” as evidenced by the 1962 Kenya Census forms.

Race. -- Write Eurpoean, Arab, Somali or African, etc. Asians must write Indian or Pakistan.

Birthers speak with great confidence about things they know nothing about, and in the case of Mr. Madsen, just make stuff up.

1Hospitals get parent race information from the informant, usually the mother.

2Barack Obama’s birth certificate does not say that he is “African American.”

3Race and citizenship are distinct categories. I don’t think all those who wrote “Caucasian” were citizens of the Caucasus.

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