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Obots make stuff up too

By on June 21, 2012 in Anti-birthers, Evidence

Birthers make stuff up all the time, and will say pretty much whatever is needed to justify their position. Since birtherism is in essence a big lie, one would expect a lot of what is said in support of it to be lies too. We anti-birthers pride ourselves on being right and having the facts, and I have over 2,000 articles on this web site that I believe are factual and well-supported – and when someone claims they are not, I check it out rigorously.

That said, there is no divine law that says that people who are right in their conclusions can’t fall prey to the same errors of thinking as people who are wrong. Case in point, this comment I found on the Internet:

The eminent biographer Dave Maraniss new book, "Barack Obama: The Story," underscores how stupid, unnecessary and misguided this whole birther thing and issues about President Obama’s birth certificate are.

In the book, Maraniss interviews several OB-GYN physicians concerning complications with Stanley Ann Dunham’s pregnancy with Barack. She consulted with doctors in Hawaii and in the continental U.S. They fill in the details about Obama’s gestation and birth in Hawaii.

I have the book, and I can tell you that no physicians were interviewed, there is no discussion of the Dunham pregnancy, and certainly nothing about consultations with mainland doctors. That’s totally made up. The only two doctors mentioned are both deceased: Dr. Sinclair who delivered Obama, and Dr. West who is reported to have mentioned the odd name of Obama’s mother (“Stanley”) to a family friend.

I don’t see things like this a lot from anti-birthers, but they come up from time to time, providing us with a cautionary tale against letting wishful thinking get the better of us. If it’s “too good to be true” it’s probably time to check sources.

Grading the American Thinker

By on May 22, 2012 in Evidence

I was intrigued by the title of a post at The American Thinker blog by Jason Kissner, titled: “Bayes’ Theorem and Mr. Obama’s Literary Agency.” Dr. Kissner is reported to hold a Ph. D. in criminology. Bayes’ Theorem is a result from probability theory.  The Wikipedia article gives one interpretation1 of it: “it expresses how a subjective degree of belief should rationally change to account for evidence.” “Obama’s Literary Agent” refers to a 1991 publisher’s author portfolio brochure that says Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

I’m a mathematician by training and in graduate school I taught math and graded papers. I thought I’d see if there were something I could grade in this paper at The American Thinker. In order to grade a paper, one must first get inside what the writer is saying and understand the argument. I’ll save everyone a lot of time and say that Dr.  Kissner concludes that the answer to how likely it is Obama was born in Kenya is about 50%, which is remarkable, to say the least.

Continue Reading →

Expert witnesses in Georgia

By on January 15, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Evidence, Fakes and frauds, Lawsuits, Orly Taitz, Ron Polarik, Supreme Court

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This article is my informed opinion.

Courts in the United States have rules to exclude junk science and cranks posing as experts. At the federal level, experts are subject to what is called the “Daubert standard” defined by three Supreme Court cases: Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, General Electric Co. v. Joiner, and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael. These decisions are incorporated in the Federal Rules of Evidence 702 and 703.

At the most  basic level, the Court said that an expert must meet two criteria:

  1. the expert witness used generally accepted practices and standards and
  2. the expert witness was property credentialed.

Their testimony must meet additional standards of relevance and methodology.

The Standard

The Supreme Court’s ruling sets up the following standards for relevance and reliability of expert testimony:

  1. whether the theory at issue can and has been tested,
  2. whether the theory has been subjected to peer review and publication,
  3. whether there is a known or potential error rate, and
  4. whether the theory has been generally accepted within the scientific community

Farrar v Obama

The “witness list” presented by Orly Taitz for the January 26 hearing of Farrar v. Obama includes two individuals, Dr. Ron Polland and Douglas Vogt; both have published papers in which they claimed expertise in forensic document analysis. Dr. Polland concluded that President Obama’s short form was created from images of other certificates (no actual physical certificate exists), and Mr. Vogt has said that the PDF copy of the long form birth certificate released by the White House is not a scan of any real document but rather something composed electronically. Both allege criminal fraud by the President and Hawaiian officials. Neither have any credentials as document experts.

The rule in Georgia

In 2005, the State of Georgia adopted tort reform that, among other things, established standards for expert testimony in civil cases similar to the Supreme Court’s standards in Daubert. Georgia law now essentially adopts the Federal Rules of Evidence  702 and 703 with minor differences in wording from Federal Rule 703. (Georgia has not adopted the entire Federal Rules of Evidence or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, so the context under which Rule 702 and 703 are applied is different.) The Georgia statute also states:

(f) It is the intent of the legislature that, in all civil cases, the courts of the State of Georgia not be viewed as open to expert evidence that would not be admissible in other states.  Therefore, in interpreting and applying this Code section, the courts of this state may draw from the opinions of the United States Supreme Court in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993); General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997); Kumho Tire Co. Ltd. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999); and other cases in federal courts applying the standards announced by the United States Supreme Court in these cases.

The Georgia statute also provides for an optional pre-trial hearing hearing to assess proposed expert testimony.

Conclusion

If Orly Taitz tries to present Polland and Vogt as expert witnesses I would expect an objection to be made by Obama’s attorney. There is also the issue of relevance. I cannot imagine anyone presenting a JPG or PDF image of a birth certificate as evidence at the hearing. If a birth certificate is presented, it will be on paper. Looking rules, I don’t see any chance that either Polland or Vogt will be allowed to testify as expert witnesses.

Read more:

Hawaii confirms COLB — again!

By on April 23, 2011 in Birth Location, Debunking, Evidence, Hawaii Dept. of Health, Media

The Associated Press reports [alternate link] an interview with special assistant to the Hawaii state attorney general Joshua Wisch. The AP article said:

Wisch also said Obama obtained a copy of his own certification of live birth and publicly released it.

The AP is perhaps reporting this based on an interview Wisch gave to MSNBC, who reported:

But if he or anybody else wanted a copy of their birth records, they would be told to fill out the appropriate state form and receive back the same computer generated “certification of live birth” form that everybody else gets –” which is exactly what Obama did four years ago.

An AP reporter visited the Hawaii Department of Health, and snapped this photo from the 1961 public birth index.

The Atlantic predicts demise of birtherism

By on April 21, 2011 in Birthers, Evidence, Media

A major article has appeared on The Atlantic web site, titled How Donald Trump Will Kill Birtherism. The thesis of the article is that Donald Trump is calling attention to birtherism and  leading the media into a frenzy of fact-checking — information that will destroy the birther movement.

Wishful thinking, I would call it

Granted, there are a number of people who have mild doubts about Obama because they saw some misinformation in an email or stumbled on s0me fact-averse web site; and maybe some of them could be swayed by a stiff dose of facts from fact checkers like FactCheck.org, or PolitiFact.com (ignoring the fact that those organizations plus every major newspaper in the country has already said the birthers are coo coo, and CNN called them “whack jobs” as early as 2008). And maybe the percentage numbers for doubt go down a little. That hardly matters. The birther movement consists of militant, hard-core denialists, regularly fanned by a host of web sites like WorldNetDaily (and worse), who have a proven track record of biting off the facts, chewing them up, and spitting them back out as proof that everybody’s lying, a traitor, and deathly afraid of Obama. Birtherism is a tar baby, rarely allowing escape for anyone once caught.

2011 Hawaii long form appears?

By on April 7, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Evidence

Hawaii announced back in 2009 that they don’t issue long forms any more (Hawaii went “paperless” in 2001). One Hawaiian-born person, posting under the name of Danae, presented a image that she claimed to be a recently-issued, non-certified copy of her birth certificate. There was no date of issuance physically on that certificate to validate when it was issued. There is a purported video of someone ordering a long form, although the form was now shown.

Now, after a considerable wait, an image has surfaced that appears to be a certified photocopy of an original birth certificate from Hawaii, issued in 2011. The certificate, of a 1995 birth, has what appears to be the Alvin Onaka’s signature stamp, and a rubber date stamp of March 15, 2011.

Hawaiian long form Birth Certificate issued in 2011?

I’ve said from the start that I believed that such a document could be obtained based on my reading of Hawaiian law, so I am not surprised to see this. I observe that the blurry, low-resolution image could have been easily faked, there is not a trace of a raised seal (even under photo enhancement), part of the certificate number is missing, and the Mother’s race is combination of ethnicities which birthers have always said were not really races.

I  have no personal opinion as to the authenticity of this certificate. If it’s true, then it is consistent with what I have said in the past. If it is a fake, then it is consistent with fakes from birthers in the past. Nothing has really changed. What this does tell us for certain is that some birthers are willing to accept this poorly-documented and poorly-rendered image without question while at the same time utterly rejecting a well-attested and sharply-rendered document from Barack Obama, even though the former has characteristics (seal, race and altered certificate number ) that birthers have used to impeach the latter. This is confirmation bias at work.

Remembering Barack Obama

By on March 25, 2011 in Debunking, Evidence, Featured Articles

I keep wanting to call Donald Trump an “idiot.” Every time I see him blathering on about “nobody remembers ‘em”, “idiot” just pops into my mind. The conundrum is how an idiot could be so rich. So I won’t call Trump an idiot, but I’ll think it.

That brings us to the point. Barack Obama’s kindergarten teachers do remember him and here’s the proof courtesy of the Maui News, January 21, 2009.

Obama kindergarten teachers holding class photo. Photo from the Maui News.

Little Barry is on the left in the second row in front of teachers Aimee Yatsushiro and Katherine Nakamoto. Continue Reading →

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