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Indiana order to show cause

By on November 21, 2012 in Lawsuits, Orly Taitz, Research Notes

Scales of Justice imageI’ve been wondering exactly what this was about ever since I learned about a court date for November 27 where Orly Taitz is ordered to appear before judge S. K. Reid in Indiana to “show cause.” In my limited legal experience, an order to show cause is usually a bad thing for the one who receives it, and that turns out to be the case here.

Taitz disclosed on her blog yesterday what it is about in a published copy of a letter to Judge Reid that says in part:

Orly Taita photoI received from you a letter stating that this court intends to hold a hearing to show cause regarding release and publication of a certain audio transcript of the October 22 hearing, which contains expert testimony of forgery in the birth certificate of Barack Obama. “Parties are ordered to show cause  whether or not they should be in Contempt of Court for the release and posting on “Youtube” of the audio recording of October 22, 2012 hearing, all in violation of this court order and pursuant to the Code of Judicial Conduct rule 2.17”

I can understand why Judge Reid is upset by the release of the recording because it puts her in a very bad light. Reid allowed Taitz to get testimony into the record from unqualified experts. I think the trial should never have been held while motions to dismiss were pending and that the audio recording is an embarrassment to the judge (as well as to Taitz). The only mitigating factor for Judge Reid is that she vacated the entire trial afterwards.

If Taitz is to believed, and I personally do in this instance, the audio recording in question was made by the court reporter and sold to Taitz. The court ordered the parties not to make recordings, but Taitz didn’t do that. What she probably did was to publish, or to allow to be published, the recording she properly obtained and after the recording was published on YouTube, she published the embedded YouTube copy of it on her web site. As of this morning, the YouTube video itself has been made private.

YouTube "This video is private" logo

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Birther politics: follow the money

By on July 20, 2012 in Follow the money, Joe Arpaio, Research Notes

My interest was piqued by something Jack Adams left as a comment on my article about a political advertisement for an opponent of Joe Arpaio. He said:

We can beat Joe and his $4 million raised from birthers across the country.

$4 million dollars is a hell of a lot of money for a county sheriff’s race. All along, I’ve thought that the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse faux investigation of Barack Obama’s documents was all about revenge for the US Justice Department’s investigation of him and I speculated about financial gain through WorldNetDaily. I thought the investigation was bad politics at home and I never considered what a fantastic fundraising opportunity it might be nationally.

So where is Arpaio’s money coming from? Thanks to finance campaign disclosure laws in Arizona, candidates must report contributions of $25 or more, and the details are available at the County Recorder’s website. The $6.8 million dollar figure is the total contributions to date to the Arpaio campaign as of May 31, 2012, more precisely $6,864,685.68; $4 million is what Arpaio has left to spend.

The bulk of the quarter million dollars spent on the campaign in January – May went to the Phoenix-based Summit Consulting Group for, of all things, fundraising! Well done, Summit, well done!

Unfortunately for a researcher, the two campaign finance  contributor reports total over 1,000 pages of scans of mixed computer-printed and hand-written documentation, not a data file. It is easy to see, however, that a large number of the contributions come from persons who describe their occupation as “retired” (the next largest category is “housewife”) and a large number come from out of state. $430 is the maximum amount an individual can contribute to a local election in Arizona. It’s hard to summarize numbers by scanning 1000 pages visually.

I quickly skimmed the most recent report (562) pages, but didn’t see any names I recognized; however, I didn’t see the vast majority of the names, and I don’t keep up with folks’ real names anyway.

Mining the Metadata

By on June 25, 2012 in Ballot Challenges, Research Notes

Last night, before I publicized the referral of the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse to the IRS, I double checked that the name of the complainant, redacted in the PDF file uploaded to Scribd, was well and truly redacted, and not lurking1 somewhere in the document properties, what is called the “metadata.” The name was totally removed, and I republished the document without worry.

However, when I was in there, I found one interesting bit in the document properties, and that was that the document was created by Adobe Acrobat Pro Version 9. The professional edition of Adobe Acrobat is somewhere around $200 more than the standard edition, and it adds features that high-end users need and home users like myself don’t. One of those pro features is the ability to remove sensitive material from a document, redaction. The pro version is targeted at, among others, law firms, so it reinforces my feeling that a practicing lawyer filed the complaint against the MSCOCCP.

I wanted to verify that the Acrobat version is a characteristic of the PDF file uploaded to Scribd and not something Scribd does, and to test that I downloaded a few other documents. One from Jerry Collette was created with OpenOffice.org. One from attorney Mark Herron defending the Florida Democratic Party in the Voeltz case was created by Adobe Acrobat 10 (version not indicated) — I know it’s from Mark Herron because his name appears in the metadata as author.

This leads us finally to the Voeltz Complaints. The  “Second Amended Complaint” in Voeltz v. Obama was created by a PDF software package called iText, while Microsoft Word 2007’s “save to PDF” created the “Amended Complaint”. What is interesting about the “Amended Complaint” is that it, like the submission from the Florida Democratic Party, has an author name in the metadata, and the name is not Larry Klayman as one would expect. I got all excited that I had uncovered a bit of hidden information that might lead to an interesting discovery. Alas, no. The name in there is the CEO of a company called U.S. Legal Forms, and I presume that whoever wrote the complaint just used a template2 from that company and didn’t change the author in the metadata. I won’t mention the name because of the site policy against publishing the names of non-public persons, in case I have misconstrued the significance of the author information.

1I learned the name of Orly Taitz’ dental practice, Appealing Dentistry, from metadata in one of her documents.

2U. S. Legal Forms sells a multi-state “Complaint regarding Defamation, Fraud, Deceitful Business Practices” for $12.95. I didn’t see anything specifically for birther lawsuits.

Strike out with the Bayard Papers

By on May 22, 2012 in Chester A. Arthur, Research Notes

One of my particular interests is a story concocted by Leo Donofrio to explain away the fact that President Chester A. Arthur had a non-US-citizen father. In Donofrio’s alternative history, Arthur, knowing that he was ineligible, purposely hid the fact that his father naturalized after the President’s birth.

imageIn any case, the story leads to a Democrat lawyer named Arthur P. Hinman, who traipsed all over Northeast looking for proof that Arthur was really born in Canada, and wrote an 1884 book titled: How a British Subject Became President of the United States. Hinman’s argument had nothing about the father’s naturalization except for a curious letter that he wrote to New York Senator Thomas F. Bayard (pictured right).

image

This letter hints that Bayard knew about the Arthur naturalization and wanted to nail down any speculation that this would make the son a natural-born citizen. I got a copy of the book through interlibrary loan and scanned it. My copy was put on Scribd by someone.

What was intriguing is that the text of the Hinman letter is elided. I recently learned that the Library of Congress has a collection of the Papers of Thomas F. Bayard that includes correspondence for 1881, and I commissioned a search for the Hinman letter. It’s not there. The researcher suggested that the letter might be in some other collection besides that of the Library of Congress.

Sigh.

A new way of looking at “birthers”

By on May 14, 2012 in Birthers, Research Notes

A few years back, I was referred to a web-based tool that displayed Google API results as a graphical image of a small slice of the World Wide Web. You could put in a URL and it would show the web site as a box in the middle of the screen with lines spreading out to other boxes that linked to the center box. You could specify a few levels and see these neat linked clusters of related sites. The technology was called “TouchGraph” and one site that implements it for hyperlinked web sites is at TouchGraph.com. Double-click on a node to expand it. With such a graphic display the viewer can visualize how websites related to each other, and sometimes you’ll find things you didn’t expect.

In researching this article I found a number of other web search tools that go beyond basic search listings1, either with graphic displays or through clustering results in some way. Here are some of the ones that gave useful or at least interesting results. I’ll be back to some of them in the future when exploring the Birther universe.

The first was the Cluuz search. I used Cluuz to search for keyword “birther” and it seemed to understand a little about birthers. It highlighted Orly Taitz and Donald Trump, for example. The site lets you just search news, or the entire Web. It pointed out some articles I was familiar with, and some interesting ones I hadn’t seen. Some of the site features don’t seem to work.

The Constellations web site works somewhat like TouchGraph. It’s visually somewhat confusing, but I can see the linkages well enough. The mouse wheel scrolls in and out, and you can highlight linkages by hovering the mouse pointer over the site. Here’s the cluster results for BirtherReport.com. Some of the site features don’t seem to work.

IBoogie is just a search engine; however, it clusters subtopics together and returns pretty clean results.

PolyMeta is another graph of related search terms. Click on “Topics Graph” to get the graphic window to pop up – it takes a while the first time. It alternately displays subtopics in a tree like IBoogie.

I searched for “Birther” at the Spezify web site and was presented with an interesting collage of web page images on the subject, including an image from BirtherThinkTank and some neat cartoons.

The UMLS Visualizer uses similar technology to TouchGraph, but works on semantic relationships rather than hyperlinks. Unfortunately “birther” isn’t one of the topics it understands. You can type in “paranoia” and then expand the node (by clicking on the blue box). Be sure to check the box “All relations” before you start. Visuwords is another semantic graphic site that doesn’t understand “birther.”

The Wiki Summarizer works with the Wikipedia to organize topical information for ease of research in a tree view. Give it a try and click the “+” to expand the results.

1Google is retuning around 3.6 million hits for “birther” these days.

Birther backfire

By on March 29, 2012 in Birthers, Citizenship, Research Notes

Despite what birthers say, my experience is that those of us who believe that Barack Obama is an eligible President don’t put much effort into supporting that hypothesis.  We it take for granted. What gets folks like me energized is a false or suspect statement of fact and perhaps birthers would be better off letting sleeping dogs lie.

If I and the majority of Americans are right about Obama’s eligibility, then one would expect that the results of careful research would support that theory and work against those who disagree. And from that, one would expect that the more research a birther does, the worse off they are in the evidence department. Indeed there are notable examples where birther research backfired or it goaded opponents to dig deeper and find evidence to refute the birthers, evidence that normally one wouldn’t look for.

I think it was RC who said on his radio program last night that every time the birthers start digging, it turns against them.

For example,

  • The newspaper announcements of Obama’s birth in Honolulu, something devastating to the birther mythology, were found by a birther!
  • A birther got the infamous tape of Obama’s grandmother saying she was present (somewhere) when Obama was born—a tape that in its entirety emphatically states the the President was born in Hawaii, where his father was living.
  • A birther article at The Daily Pen about a 1962 INS report led to the discovery that no US citizen departed from Kenya and arrived by plane in the US during the entire year ending June 30, 1962, covering the period when the birthers claim Obama’s mother gave birth in Kenya and flew back to the US.
  • Birthers citing a Hawaiian statute on the registration of out-of-state births led to the discovery that the law was passed in 1982, thereby eliminating the possibility that such registrations were authorized before then.
  • Birther Donald Trump finally raised so much media attention that Obama released his long-form birth certificate, cutting the ranks of the birthers almost in half.
  • Birthers digging in the Immigration files of Lolo Soetoro and Barack Obama Sr. uncovered contemporary references to Obama’s birth in Honolulu and a State Department report stating that Obama was born in Honolulu.

This lengthy introduction leads us to yet another bit of birther research gone awry. In this case birthers pressing an issue that I looked at before, egged me on to look deeper and discover something inconvenient to birthers.

Birthers located an obscure interpretation of US Nationality law that mentions “native- and natural-born citizen.” The birther argument is that since they are used separately, they most have distinct meaning, and that implies that some persons born citizens in the country (native born) are not natural born. Digging into that claim lead me to look at the law underlying the interpretation and the to discovery that the birthers are wrong. Here’s the argument, and I apologize for it being so tedious.

Let me begin with three statements that I think everyone will agree with:

  • Among those citizens born or naturalized in the United States, the only difference under law is that some may run for President or Vice-President and some may not.
  • A native-born citizen is a citizen born in the United States.
  • Persons born citizens outside of the United States (not born in the United States and not naturalized in the United States) are not entitled to the protections of the 14th Amendment, see: Rogers v. Bellei – 401 U.S. 815 (1971). Congress may make and has made laws placing additional requirements on their retention of citizenship.

Let’s look at the INS interpretation: “Interpretation 324.2 Reacquisition of citizenship lost by marriage.”

The repatriation provisions of these two most recent enactments also apply to a native- and natural-born citizen woman who expatriated herself by marriage to an alien racially ineligible to citizenship, a category of expatriate not covered by the earlier 1936 legislation.

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Time anomalies in the White House long form PDF

By on August 11, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Research Notes

Obama Conspiracy Theories original research

I have seen various reports on the Internet that there are two versions of the White House-issued PDF version of the President’s long-form birth certificate: an original and an unexplained replacement. I am skeptical about these claims because I haven’t seen any good evidence that two versions from the White House really exist.

However, there is one difference that may appear and that I address in this article.

If one uses Adobe Acrobat Reader (or full Acrobat) to display the PDF document properties, a dialog such as the one following appears showing that the file was created at 12:09:24 PM on April 27, 2011.

image

When we open the PDF with a text editor, the only readily-visible occurrence of the string “2011” is this:

image

Adding some punctuation to the date, we get:  2011-04-27 12:09:24 Z00.

According to the PDF standard Page 88 what follows the Z is the time zone.

Some reporters see different dates when they examine the properties of purported White House PDF files using other software. In particular one from the US Pacific Time Zone saw a time of 04:09:24 AM using a Windows XP properties dialog (I’m not exactly sure the software involved).

The time zone 00 is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC1) ,  what some may know as Greenwich Mean Time. It appears that the Quartz PDFContext software used by the White House does not set the local time zone in the file to the correct value of eastern US time. I know other PDF software has this same limitation, such as Image2PDF. Adobe Acrobat Distiller does set the time zone.

So the Adobe software displays the file date as-is: 12:09:24 PM but the “local time” for this on the west coast is –8 hours (in the summer), or 04:09:24 AM.

That is, depending on the software used, a White House PDF may appear to have been created at different times, but this doesn’t mean that the files are different, only that different software in different time zones can display different results.

To be sure a file has changed, use a cryptographic hash function.

1UTC is not a typo. The recognized abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time is based on a hybrid English-French version of the phrase.

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