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Archive | April, 2011

Birther Bishop back

By on April 29, 2011 in Birthers, Religion

You remember the “grandmother tape,” the edited recording that kick-started the birther movement? The fellow on the US end of the call was street preacher and Anabaptist Bishop Ron McRae. McRae has now joined the ranks of the forensic document analysts in a paper titled Obama’s Hawaii Certificate, courtesy of the ObamaCrimes web site.

McRae’s thesis is that Obama’s long-form birth certificate was a clumsy copy made from the Nordyke Certificate. Never mind that Hawaii Department of Health Director Fuddy supervised the creation of the form and former Director Fukino has stated in writing and on camera that Obama was born in Hawaii.

No Ron, your theory is wrong, and invoking God just makes you more reprehensible.

Equal time for idiots, crooks and liars

I am considering a policy of ignoring crank theories from now on, and not wasting the time necessary to debunk them. Obama was born in Hawaii; get over it already.

Berg is not thinking…

By on April 29, 2011 in Misc. Conspiracies, Philip Berg

Philip J. Berg

Not to be upstaged by Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate, Phil Berg, the grandaddy of the birthers, has come up with a press release, titled: What about Obama’s Indonesian Citizenship? In that release he says:

Soetoro/Obama renewed his Indonesian Passport when he traveled to Pakistan that is why he had to stop in Indonesia first. Remember, in 1981, Dunham was divorcing Soetoro in Hawaii and was not in Indonesia. Obama/Soetoro admits to traveling to Indonesia first and then onto Pakistan. Soetoro/Obama claims in his book “Dreams from my father” that he stopped in Indonesia to visit his mother. But again, his mother was not in Indonesia, she was in Hawaii with Maya, divorcing Lolo Soetoro. In addition, the State Department has stated in response to a FOIA [Freedom of Information] request that they do not have a U.S. Passport application on file for Barack H. Obama.”

So if Obama’s Indonesian passport had expired and he didn’t have a U.S. Passport what passport did Obama use to travel to Indonesia? Hmmm? Of course, there has never been any FOIA response that Obama never had a US passport application, nor any reason he couldn’t travel to Pakistan on a US passport.

Taitz v O’Donnell

By on April 28, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Birthers, Misc. Conspiracies, Orly Taitz

What’s Orly Taitz been up to lately? I checked her web site yesterday to see what she had to say about Obama’s long form birth certificate, and there was nothing; however, Orly did have something to say yesterday, or at least something she tried to say.

Taitz was a guest on the Larry O’Donnell show on MSNBC. O’Donnell wanted to ask her to apologize for leading a campaign of false information about Obama’s place of birth. She wanted to talk about something else, the interview devolved into a shouting match, and O’Donnell cut the interview short, saying:

Look, she’s crazy. I invited a crazy person on this show to see if the crazy person…could say something responsive, something human, to the document that was released today…and she wants to play with all of her other kid’s toys.

Looking at the Taitz web site today, we see these stories:

  • Obama’s long form birth certificate opens in Adobe illustrator as an altered, photoshopped document
  • I need help of photoshop experts to provide affidavits, that I can submit to court
  • Birth Certificate affair shows total failure of the federal and state government to protect us from flagrant fraud
  • according to my friends, Obama brainwashed puppett on Obama-machine MSNBC looked scared. They don’t get it, that most Americans don’t want to be brainwashed
  • there are over a 100,000 articles like these in the last 24 hours posted on Google. People want to know the truth, no photoshpped piece of garbage, flaunted by Obama yesterday, will quash the truth Can someone put this NBC report on you-tube? It has important docs.

 

Will the release of the president’s birth certificate settle the so-called birthers issue?

By on April 28, 2011 in Birthers, Polls

National Public Radio (NPR) hosts an unscientific poll that says “no.”

Will the release of the president's birth certificate settle the so-called birthers issue?

It has been the conventional wisdom on my side of the fence that the NPR web site visitors are right. I, and many others have said, nothing will convince the birthers. But what about now, with all the media debunking, new evidence and Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate all over the Internet? Hey, it’s been “shock and awe” over Birthistan.

Visiting the “usual subjects” birther web sites confirms that birthers have reacted to the long form just as they reacted to the short form, with accusations and denunciations. At least for the vocal birthers we deal with daily, nothing has changed. However, I would not jump to the conclusion that we will not see a sharp decrease in the number of people toying with the idea that Obama was not born in Hawaii. I’m sure there will be a poll upcoming to answer exactly that question.

Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital

By on April 28, 2011 in Birth Location

A misleading sentence in the Wikipedia article on Kapi’olani Hospital has led some to believe that the hospital where President Obama was born was not named what his birth certificate says it was in 1961. The Wikipedia has been corrected and the true name in 1961 has been documented, and it is Kapi’olani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. Thanks to expelliarmus who looked up references and those who fixed the Wikipedia in such a comprehensive way.

Update:

Since this rumor is still circulating as of today, December 27, 2013, I decided to expand this article and to include it in The Debunker’s Guide to Obama Conspiracy Theories.

A few long-form 1961 birther certificates are available from Kapi’olani hospital. They all show the same hospital name. A good example is that of the twins born to Susan Nordyke (click to enlarge):

Nordyke

Published articles both before and after 1961 show clearly that the hospital was named Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital, just as it says on the President’s birth certificate. There is simply no contrary evidence to this fact. The Wikipedia article on the hospital has full details.

Layers, and layers and layers, oh my!

By on April 28, 2011 in Birth Certificate, Debunking

The PDF provided by the White House is not a simple image, but is comprised of multiple layers. The the background appears in one layer (plus some of the handwriting), Dr. Onaka’s stamp is another layer, and most of the text of the form and the balance of the handwriting is in a third layer. Others have reported more layers, and the layers I exported don’t cover all the information on the form — so there must be other layers that don’t export using the following procedure. What I did was simply open the PDF from the White House in Adobe Acrobat Standard 9.0 and export the images. I got these three images:

Layer 1 (click to enlarge)
Layer 2
Layer 3

Does this mean that the image was faked? No!

I took a document (actually a printed copy of the long form) and used Adobe Acrobat Standard 9.0 to scan it into a new PDF document. Then I used the “Optimize Scanned PDF” feature. The result was layers a lot like what we see in the Obama long form.

The Obama long form was made with “Max OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext.”

Birthers have said things about “left on the clipboard” and identified specific areas they claim were altered. I don’t have the background to comment on those claims, and I don’t have a copy of Adobe Illustrator ($579 on Amazon.com) to try to replicate their steps. In any case, the layers we see appear to be standard PDF artifacts and not proof that the document has been tampered with at all.

Huge thanks to commenter James Moorer and others for the tips that helped me get the facts on this story.

See also debunking at the National Review. Even WorldNetDaily has rejected the altered layers theory!