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Decoding the long form (Part 1)

By on March 4, 2012 in Birth Certificate, Ron Polarik

Update:

After writing my new article: Decoding the long form (Part 2), I did additional research into 1961 coding practices. I will mark inserted material to appear underscored.

In truth, I thought I had written this article long ago, but apparently not. Now some new bunk about the long form has surfaced from Penbrook Johannson and Dan Crosby in “Vital Records Indicate Obama not Born in Hospital (Part 2)” at The Daily Pen (Part 1 was debunked in my article: More Birther certificate numbering BS) and it’s time to spend a little effort describing the penciled notations on the President’s long-form birth certificate.

Part 1 of this article deals specifically with the Daily Pen article. Part 2 discusses what can be determined from the pencil marks on the Obama form itself, and publishing for the first time new documentation on the process.

By way of background, my first job out of college was at the Appalachia II District Health Department in Greenville, SC. What I did between 1974 and 1980 was essentially to create their automated data processing operation from scratch. I was in charge of procuring equipment, hiring staff, programming, and overseeing operations. Part of that job involved the direct supervision of data entry operators using key punch machines. I know a lot about the preparation of documents for data entry and what key operators will and will not put up with (still have the scars to prove it). In 1978 I personally designed and programmed a system for issuing birth certificates, and since that time up until my retirement January 1, 2011, I worked with vital records systems and software.

One of the remarkable marks of authenticity, something a naive forger couldn’t have imagined, is the penciled notations on Obama’s long form. In 1961 Hawaii, for the first second time, participated in the National Center of Health Statistics statistical report on births, 1961 Vital Statistics of the US – Volume 1: Natality (VSUS). That report indicates in a footnote that data were submitted on punched cards. The pencil marks on Obama’s form are codes for data entry.

According to the response to my FOIA request to the Department of Health and Human Services, the unpublished manual “Coding and Punching Geographical and Personal Particulars for Births Occurring in 1961” that is referenced on PDF page 228 of VSUS could not be found and they suggest that such a document never actually existed. However, they did point me to Geographic coding manual for 1961 and provided tape layouts for that year (but no coding manual). In particular, they told me that the “Vital Statistics Instruction Manual for 1961” (cited by Johansson and Crosby) with the exception of the Geographic coding manual could not be located. I filed an appeal and they replied that they checked again with  all the subject matter experts, and no such document exists today.

Johannson and Crosby’s article opens with this remarkable claim to anonymous authority:

An intensive examination of the contents of Obama’s alleged 1961 “Certificate of Live Birth” image by the most respected experts in vital records accounting and identity investigation reveals that much of the contrived information about his alleged Hawaiian birth simply renders his Natural-born status impossible.

Having been a long time member of NAPHSIS and having served on two national advisory committees, including their Vital Records Fraud Prevention Committee for two years, I think I qualify as an expert. Who are theirs? It’s hard for me to imagine that there are ANY vital records professionals who are birthers.

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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.

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Birther rogues gallery to appear in Atlanta

By on January 15, 2012 in Orly Taitz, Ron Polarik

The Georgia ballot challenge administrative hearings (Farrar v Obama and others) scheduled for January 26 is shaping up to be quite a show. I said before that it’s probably the most important Obama Conspiracy story of the year and birthers seem to think so too, based on the participants lined up to appear [link to Taitz web site]. (Photo right of previous birther rally in Atlanta taken by Loren Collins.)

  1. Felicito Papa
  2. Douglas Vogt
  3. Susan Daniels
  4. Dr. Ron Polland
  5. Linda Jordan
  6. Chris Strunk

Looking at Orly’s witness list, I see half of the people relate to her claims that Obama uses a fraudulent social-security number. I fail to see how this is relevant to whether Obama can appear on the Georgia primary ballot. Likely Judge Malihi won’t see it either.

Taitz has claimed to have hired a real attorney to help her just in case. She is excusing herself as having been too busy with her personal lawsuit (Liberi v Taitz) to properly prepare. She says that the timing is not a coincidence – so this implies what – that Phil Berg and Gary Kreep are in Obama’s pocket?

At this point, I suggest that readers unplug any irony meters they have, and put on a pair of irony-reducing glasses to prevent injury. Here’s what Taitz said about the Liberi suit:

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FactCheck responds to Polland challenge

By on December 31, 2011 in Birth Certificate, FactCheck.org, Ron Polarik, WorldNetDaily

Brooks Jackson, Director of FactCheck.org, a nationally acclaimed journalistic organization dedicated to truth in politics, has responded to the recent attack by Ron Polland published in WorldNetDaily. In an email to Obama Conspiracy Theories, Jackson wrote:

On advice of counsel, I am losing not one second of sleep over this comical "challenge."

Donations to FactCheck.org are deductible because we are a part of the University of Pennsylvania, a 501(c)3 organization. So if Polland has actually filed some challenge against FactCheck.org as he claims — and I’ve seen nothing either from him or from the IRS to confirm that — then he’s challenged the wrong legal entity.

Should he realize his error and try to correct it, I think he’ll have zero chance of making a case that an Ivy League university should not be tax exempt.

I’m also mystified at his claim to have filed something with the Federal Election Commission, which has no jurisdiction over tax matters.

That’s a big OOPS, Ron. In my earlier article on Polland’s challenge, I omitted the part about the Federal Election Commission because it didn’t make any sense to me either and I was trying to avoid “piling on.”

Polland v FactCheck.org

By on December 31, 2011 in Birth Certificate, FactCheck.org, Ron Polarik, WorldNetDaily

imageIf we have to blame someone for the foolishness that is the Birther movement, Dr. Ron Polland (pictured right) is a good place to start. Just days after then presidential candidate Barack Obama released his birth certificate in 2008, Polland (writing under the pseudonym “Ron Polarik”) began his seemingly obsessive career of claiming that it’s a fake.

Now WorldNetDaily reports that Polland has filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service over the tax-exempt status of non-profit FactCheck.org, one of the organizations who have published photos and scans of Obama’s Certification of Live Birth. Polland alleges that the photos that FactCheck published of Obama’s certificate were actually photos of a document that FactCheck itself created from the scanned image provided by the Obama Campaign. Polland told WND:

When I saw the photos that Factcheck published in August 2008, I knew that they had photographed a printout of the forged COLB scan they published in June 2008.

Polland argues that the Obama Campaign scan has some of the same dust spots that the FactCheck photos have, which leads him to conclude that the photos were of the scans, not the original document.

We’ll look at Polland’s argument in detail in a future article. However, Polland is assuming that every speck on both images come from the scanner plate and not from the original document. That’s a big assumption without which Polland’s analysis is just hot air.

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Polarik punks White House?

By on August 12, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Jerome Corsi, Ron Polarik, WorldNetDaily

Dr. Ronald Polland (AKA Ron Polarik – pictured right) has been promoting a claim recently. He says that the White House has been distributing copies of a fake Obama 2007 Certification of Live Birth (COLB) that he made. WorldNetDaily, the all birther all the time outlet for crank claims about Obama birth certificates, obliged with a new article by WND Birther in Chief Jerome Corsi, “I created Obama’s certification of birth”.

Is it true and if so, what does it mean?

Polland starts with a true statement. The White House did publish a black and white copy [link to image on White House web site] of the COLB that it got from Snopes.com [link to Snopes article showing COLB image]. You can see that the White House image is a “screen print” of a Snopes image because the Snopes file name is shown in the page footer. That means that rather than contacting the Obama Campaign, getting the Certification (which at last report was in Chicago) and scanning it, the White House staffer in charge of putting together the press kit snapped up a copy from a trusted source, Snopes.com, and used that. So as far as the White House: end of story. There’s nothing to see here; move along. There’s certainly no proof that an original COLB doesn’t exist.

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Taitz watch

By on August 7, 2011 in Hawaii Dept. of Health, Orly Taitz, Ron Polarik

imageI’ve put Orly Taitz (pictured right) on a 24-hour watch starting at 4 PM EDT tomorrow in anticipation of some sort of grand implosion by Taitz as she executes Plan “B” (or Plan “C”) following the inevitable refusal by the Hawaii Department of Health to break Hawaiian law in response to her subpoena [link to Taitz web site] and let her peek at, photograph and scan Obama’s original birth certificate. According to Taitz, unqualified volunteers Douglas Vogt1 and Paul Irey2 will be serving as her “experts”, and a reporter from the New York Times will record the fiasco.

In a related story [link to Taitz web site], Orly Taitz is actually exhibiting some skepticism about Dr. Ron Polland’s assertion [link to Polland web site] that he forged Obama’s short-form birth certificate. When I read Polland’s claim that he had forged the certificate that resides on Obama’s Fight The Smears web site, I assumed that I had just misunderstood what he meant – and didn’t really care to waste the time to figure it out. Taitz, however, takes Polland literally and is demanding a sworn affidavit from him, which she says he refused to give, before she’ll accept it. After all, Lucas Smith provided a sworn affidavit associated with his birth certificate forgery, why shouldn’t Polland be held to the standard?

Back before Polland’s real name was revealed, he was willing to sign affidavits for Orly:

1I will concede that Douglas Vogt is expertly-qualified to operate a scanner. Of course, Vogt denies that there is any original to look at. If he should ever get a chance to look at the original document, his theory is shot to hell.

2I had the opportunity to talk directly with Paul Irey on the Reality Check radio program, and for all his odd views and biases, he is an honest and straight-shooting guy. If he should ever get a chance to look at the original document in person, he may well recant his analysis (or perhaps claim the White House copy wasn’t based on the original).

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