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.
But did the Snopes copy come from Polland? That’s harder to pin down. Polland presents a screen shot [link to image at WND] where he supposedly hovers his mouse cursor over the Snopes hyperlink as he claims it existed some time in the past (it is significant that Polland does not say when he made this screen shot and one can’t tell from the image). The hover text shows a URL to Polarik’s Photobucket account. (When I tried it with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome, the hover text did not appear in the position where Polland’s image shows and it doesn’t point to Photobucket.) The problem here is that Polland claims to be a consummate forger and expert on the manipulation of images. He’s also been on a crusade for over 3 years to convince others that Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. So we have motive, method and opportunity for Polland to have faked this screen shot. How about the Wayback Machine? No help there; it excludes Snopes.com. We basically only have Polland’s word for the authenticity of this exhibit.
What we do know from the White House screen print is that the file that Snopes linked to on April 25, 2011 was not Polarik’s Photobucket account, but a copy on Snopes own server (the URL is shown in the image footer). We also know that the image on Snopes is not like the image on Polland’s Photobucket account today [link to Polarik’s Photobucket image] (they differ in resolution and file size and in another important detail we’ll discuss following).
Now here it gets really confusing. Polland claims that that after he made it public that Snopes had his fake COLB, Snopes changed the image, so that today, they aren’t using the Polarik link. But that’s not all. Polland says that the image in his Photobucket account today is not the same one that was there earlier either. Polland’s “new image” was altered by taking the “prima facie evidence” line at the bottom and tilting it. This tilt is not visible in either the Snopes image today, nor the White House image from April 25. So we are faced with a claim of the equivalence of two images in the past, neither of which supposedly remains in their original form today, and neither of which can be tied to any particular date and time in the past.
Let’s return to Polland’s claim that Snopes linked to his image. In support of this Polland presents a reader comment posted at Salon.com that mentions the Snopes article and the Polarik Photobucket URL. The 2008 Salon comment, and the one that follows it that also mentions the Polarik URL, may well have been written by Polland himself, based on the ranting style and subject matter, and in no case does the comment actually say that the Snopes article points the the Polarik URL. Polland then points to another comment, this time at the Huffington Post from 2011, but it doesn’t even mention Snopes.
I did, however, find a suggestive letter to the Editor of the Fort Meyers News-Press from January 3, 2009:
Obama’s birth certificate online
Recent published letters have challenged the birth right of President-elect Obama. Mr. Obama’s birth certificate is viewable on line through the Snopes channel. Cynics should go to http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn227/Polarik/BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg to see for themselves the certificate issued by the Department of Health, State of Hawaii.
[name redacted]
Fort Myers
One wonders, though, why the writer wouldn’t just link to the Snopes page where the image was embedded if the information had come from Snopes, rather than right clicking the image and copying the image URL. This, the best example I could find, still doesn’t say Snopes linked to Photobucket. Further, we don’t know whether in January of 2009 the image in the Polarik account was authentic or his fake. Polland could have put a real certificate on his site, then spread the URL around; folks could have used it, and then he changed the image for a fake. Easy enough. In fact Polland admits to doing just about same thing – altering his putative fake on Photobucket by tilting some of the text just to “see if anyone noticed.”
In contradiction to Polland’s claim, I found this message on Snopes.com from July 24, 2009, indicating that Snopes had its own copy of the birth certificate on its own server.
An act of patriotism is required by citizens of this country. We need to stand behind our duly and fairly elected president.
Recently the Times-Herald published a letter to the editor by one righteous individual ("Stand behind Obama? I don’t think so," Bob Ireland, July 20) who proclaimed his reasons for not supporting President Obama. My advice to this gentleman is to turn off Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and turn on your brain.
Mr. Ireland says Mr. Obama is not a U.S. citizen. Here is a link to his birth certificate: msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg.
Loren found one from November 16, 2008. An entry on Yahoo Answers labeled “three years ago” also lists it, which would put it August 12, 2008 or before.
It is therefore extremely unlikely that Snopes linked to Polarik’s Photobucket account for its images between November 16, 2009 and present.
So far, we have very weak evidence that Snopes ever linked to the Polarik Photobucket image, some to the contrary, and no evidence whatever about what was in Polarik’s Photobucket account in 2009. In an attempt to cement his case, Polland goes into disinformation mode and loses any claim to truthfulness. He says through Corsi:
The Snopes.com link to the Polland fake document was still in place at the time of the April 27 White House press conference, as demonstrated by a reference to Polland’s Photobucket website. At Polland’s site, the hits to his fake document peaked April 27, as seen in Exhibit 8.
Polland shows an April spike in traffic on his PhotoBucket account:
However, we know from the White House screen print from April 25 that Snopes was NOT linking to Polarik’s Photobucket account on that date. Snopes.com operates a forum in addition to its regular site, and it is possible that the hits generated in April (and the graphic is for the whole month of April, not just April 27) were from forum comments where anyone could have posted a message and generated hits. In fact, the number of hits from Snopes is far too small for Snopes to have been using Polarik’s image. Look at my hits for April:
I had 34,307 page views on April 27 alone. It stands to reason that a major site like Snopes.com would get more hits on their Obama birth certificate page than I did, so for Snopes to be embedding the Polarik image on its page, there should be one hit at Photobucket for each hit at Snopes, but Polarik’s number is way too small for that be the case.
In conclusion, Ron Polland presents some very weak evidence, mostly his own testimony, that Snopes.com at one time linked to his image of the Obama Birth Certificate which he claims to have forged. However, Polland’s image has changed, and Snopes article has changed, and nothing can be verified. Even if Snopes did at one time link to the Polarik Photobucket image, we can’t verify that when that happened, the image was a forgery. All we know for sure is that today the Polarik Photobucket image is a fake, and the Snopes.com image is not.
If Snopes ever linked to the Polarik Photobucket image they had stopped doing so by November of 2008. Polarik offers no evidence that the birth certificate image on Snopes servers after January of 2009 came from him, nor that what the White House published came from him.
Learn more:
If only they had something better to do. Like dig a ditch.
I find it ironic that an Obot claims to have created a fake Kenyan birth certificate for Obama and a birther claims to have created a fake Hawaiian one.
This reminds me of P.T. Barnum and the Jersey Devil.
He claimed to have a live Jersey Devil on display in his New York Museum. When visitors pointed out that his “devil” was nothing more than a kanagroo wearing a vest with wings sewn on the back, he replied, “of course it’s a fake! I invented the entire legend!!” Given that the earliest written reports of the leged predate his birth by 75 years, that’s pretty good.
I guess there’s a birther born every minute.
Polland admits to 1) Faking images, 2) altering internal file information in images and 3) switching out images on his Photobucket account with altered versions.
Why should we think he’s not doing the same thing here?
Maybe they could help with the Panama Canal lock expansion.
All of the Dr.’s well articulated arguments aside, we’re still left with two stubborn details. And let me say from the get go, that these two points do NOT mean that Barack Obama does not have a legitimate birth certificate. They are just observations. Facts, but just observations – which neither prove nor disprove anything.
The first is that the White House screwed up. For an issue that has garnered national – and even international – scrutiny and debate (heated debate) you would think the White House (blame it on those nameless, faceless “staffers”) could do better than grabbing some unknown source document off of the Internet! My children in middle and high school know better than to do some fool thing like that for their homework assignments – getting unverified source material off of the Internet! Come on now folks. Even if there is nothing nefarious going on here, that is, at the least, just plain sloppy and stooopid.
Secondly, assuming what is alleged is true, that what the White House presented was from the Snope’s site – whether Polland’s version got snatched up or if it is some yet unknown source – we are back at square one. We, then, STILL, do not have a scanned copy of the birth certificate from the White House – as in FROM the White House. Zippy skip.
Polland is probably telling the truth. Birthers make it a point to screen capture everything for just such a reason – As those who protect Obama will do internet scrubbing when something incriminating comes up about him. It is very likely, that some birthers out there has all of this screen captured and filed or that reason.
I have made numerous small updates to the article since it’s original publication. Some are just wordsmithing and some are substantive. The most important addition was the reference demonstrating that Snopes had its own copy of the birth certificate on its site in January of 2009, belying Polland’s claim that Snopes was still linking to his image in April of 2011.
Even if Polland is telling the truth about this screen shot, he omits one vital piece of information, WHEN he took it. Without that, it means next to nothing.
It’s important to keep the time frame in mind. The COLB was released by the Obama Campaign in Chicago in June of 2008. We have scanned versions FROM THE CAMPAIGN reported at DailyKOS, Fight the Smears, FactCheck and Politico. That was before there was an Obama White House. So far as I know, after FactCheck.org photographed the form (Polland claims the FactCheck photos are fake too) no one has mentioned the original document. There’s no reason to believe that the White House even has a copy.
Snopes.com is a pretty reputable web site and I don’t think getting an image from there is really a screw up.
Even if that were true, which it is not, of course, of what possible importance would that be?
Both the COLB and LFBC have been certified and verified, the only people responsible for determining Obama’s eligibility are satisfied, the general public is satisfied, and you birthers don’t have a scanned BC from any other President either…
Come to think of it, you never even cared about the BC of any other President….
Why is that?
What is the one characteristic of this President, that is different from every other President, that makes you demand of him wheat you never demanded before?
Ah yes i get it John if something doesn’t exist to back up your paranoia then it must have been scrubbed. Polland already admitted he created forgeries so it wouldn’t be a stretch for him to forge a screen shot as well
you should alert hawaii’s doh to these shenanigans. after all, they’ve already vouched for two birth certificates now. and you should tell congress too. they might be concerned.
Since there is no such thing as an honest birther or a birther with integrity or character, it is assured that “Polarick” is lying….again.
It is not for no reason that in 124 judicial attempts no trier of fact or panel of appeals court justices, including the nine Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States has ever ruled that Barack Hussein Obama II is ineligible for the office that he holds.
“The state of Hawaii has said that he was born there. That’s good enough for me.”–Representative John Boehner (R-OH), Speaker of the House of Representatives
Snopes had its own copy on its website at least as early as November 2008:
http://forums.online-sweepstakes.com/showpost.php?p=7965660&postcount=137
The metadata I can see in Firefox for the Snopes image says it was last modified “Saturday, November 15, 2008.”
Meanwhile, the metadata for Polarik’s image says it was last modified “Saturday, March 12, 2011.”
Polland has a “story” to explain this. He says he changed his Photobucket image by tilting some of the text just see if anyone noticed. Given that Snopes had it’s own copy for years, it would be reasonable that no one would notice.
A search for Polarik’s URL at Google news returns three hits: the WND story and two newspaper letters to the editor, one cited in my story.
Yet he claims to have changed his earlier “forged” photobucket image to the current “forged-with-crooked-prima facie-line-just to see if they’d notice” image some time last year? Was it not crooked enough?
When I look at his photobucket URL in the Wayback machine, it only provides random dates from July 2008 up through November 2010…all of which seem to be the non- “forged-with-crooked-prima facie-line-just to see if they’d notice” version…
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20100701000000*/http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn227/Polarik/BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg
Is there an alternative “not-so Wayback” machine that would include dates from 2011?
Call me crazy Obot or whatever, but if someone admits to these actions, why/how can anyone put stock in anything they say about image files they have touched? I am sure birthers accept what he says if it’s convenient, of course.
So the White House has a one page pdf that appears to be a scanned in print-out of an image from Snopes. I have two questions.
1) How did anybody find this? There must be a whitehouse.gov page with a link to it. Does anyone know where it is?
2) Why is it there at all? Was this just a staffer experimenting to see what steps would be required to scan a piece of paper in and put it on the web? If so, wouldn’t they use a color original?
And 3) What exactly did Polland make a forgery of? Which sounds like a stupid question, but the BC was released in 2008. He’s claiming that he made a copy that was so good that the white house confused it with the real thing? Well, kudos to him, I guess. What’s next, prank phone calls?
Polland said,
“The current forgery clone with the tilting “prima facie” statement is a replacement I put in its place last year to see if anyone would notice the “obvious flaw.”
“Nobody did. Now if I knew that the WH would be using a b&w copy of my previous image in the future, I would have left it alone.”
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2011/08/the-occasional-open-thread-lizard-people-edition/
So if the tilted COLB has been there since 2010, why would the White House version linked to it in 2011, not be tilted?
The link to it is prominently present in the White House page covering the release of the long form here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/27/president-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate
I presume that it was a scan of the B&W copy handed out to the press.
The WND story seems to contradict itself.
This isn’t the first time Polland has used the ‘I put the error-filled BC on my site to see if anyone would catch it’. He tried the same thing at freerepublic awhile back and got caught. Needless to say the freepers were not happy.
My take on all of Ron’s nonsense:
http://barackryphal.blogspot.com/2011/08/polariks-breaking-news-is-broken.html
Exactly how big of a brush (and how much soap) would one need to scrub the internet?
Gasp!! 😯
” causes one on the right to wonder . . .”
if perhaps he isn’t at the center of a 47-year long worldwide conspiracy involving thousands of people or perhaps a reptilian, shape-shifting alien?
Besides that, not wanting the US to default on it’s payment obligations vs. wanting the US to default. Who’s the “radical” here?
I certainly don’t believe 80% of america and a majority of america wants a tax increase–it is all in how the pollster words the question–with a class warfare bias or objectively.
” The only way the White House published Polarik’s image was if Snopes uploaded Polarik’s image to its own server and published it at this address.”
Loren – you got that exactly right. Probably the only thing you have ever gotten right about Polarik without lying about it.
You all know how Loren found out that I was Polarik, right? No, he did not “out” me. Nobody “outed” me.
Back in July 2009 when Ed Hale and Linda Sue Belcher, aka Linda Starr, were being sued by Phil Berg, Belcher threatened to reveal the legal names of all of his expert witnesses, saying that the world’s going to know who is Ron Polarik!”
And, just for spite, she had the judge unseal my court-submitted affidavit with my full legal name and my 100% accurate credentials. Those other affidavits posted on the Internet were for show purposes, and because the Obots wer so focused on reading into what I said or did not say, I changed them around to jerk around folks like Loren and Neil Krapwetz (sic) who could not wrap his brain around the COLB border being made separately, or that people can actually learn skills outside of a college classroom.
Loren is also the one who came up with the canard that I called myself a “forensic document expert.” Never happened. I never called myself a document expert or document examiner, forensic or otherwise, because there has never been any physical document to examine.
Just JPGs. A forensic document examiner would be as useful as a screen door on a submarine with Obama’s bogus birth certificates.
You do realize that all of you are defending a black & white outline that looks like it was made with the first fax machine. It would have been great if Team Obama had gone with that one in June 2008. I could have saved myself two years of work.
I know when and why Snopes rolled my image onto their server. I have checked their web link about every three months since then to confirm that they were still showing the same image that I had on my Photobucket account.
The first and only person to put that JPG on the Internet was yours truly because yours truly made it. You will not find another 1024 x 1000 pixel image originating from any other source. Do an image search.
Why would the “premier myth-busting site” (I think you called it) Snopes link to my image on my Photobucket account LONG AFTER the Obama Campaign had already annointed the image on their Fight The Smears site as being “Barack Obama’s Official Birth Certificate?”
Maybe Snopes ascribes to the “Bigger is better” since my image was 175% larger than theirs?
What did the Campaign Proclamation mean for the other images on the Net, such as those on Factcheck, Politifact, and the other leftwing “nonpartisan” propagandists?
Sure, it would have been nice if they dubbed my image his “Official Birth Certificate” but that’s what the White House did on april 25, 2011, albeit indirectly.
The beautiful thing about having Obots linking to my image on Photobucket since June 22, 2008, is it gave me the ability to play “musical JPGs.” Now, Kevin, you make it sound like that is a crime or something. After all, everyone else had switched their images at least twice, including the Daily Kos, the Obama Campaign, Politifact, TampaBay.com, Chicago Tribune, and the LA Times,
With the links still in place, I changed history, so to speak. It was like sending whatever image I wanted back through Time.
Speaking of Time, during the week before the WH made a fifth-generation copy of my image, there was a lively discussion on one of the many generic “anti-Birther” sites, featuring a link to my Photobucket image, and also to your site, Kev:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn227/Polarik/Twofer.jpg
Yep, it’s a twofer, for sure.
There have been a lot of classic works of art over time: Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa; Michelangelo’s David. the Taj Mahal.
And now Polarik’s COLB:
http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn227/Polarik/BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg
Ah, but alas, no one here appreciates my artistry. Now, if i was an anti-Birther, I’d be lionized as a hero. A genius. Obots would be renaming their first-born after me.
Then again, if Leonardo were alive today, the Obots would also have laughed at him if he said he was a military engineer. “Why,” they’d mock, “You’re just a painter!”
Or, if Einstein was writing on the forum, there would someone like Loren here, getting his boyfriend to go back to his work before 1920 just so that he claim that Alfred was a liar and never came up with E-mc2.
The more things change, the more this blog stays the same.
Dear Mr Polland or Polarik or whatever your name is:
Arrogant much? Comparing yourself to da Vinci, Einstein? Why not at least a true genius in your line of work-say Madoff?
thanks for confirming that having no credentials doesn’t stop you from claiming them.
Ron,
“Loren is also the one who came up with the canard that I called myself a “forensic document expert.” Never happened. I never called myself a document expert or document examiner, forensic or otherwise, because there has never been any physical document to examine.”
http://m803.photobucket.com/linkcodes/?mediaUrl=http%3A%2F%2Femob803.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fyy314%2FLorenCC%2FPolarik_comment_2008-12-23copy.jpg
Berg also repeatedly called you a forensic expert on his website and, IIRC, also in his pleadings.
“Those other affidavits posted on the Internet were for show purposes, and because the Obots wer so focused on reading into what I said or did not say, I changed them around to jerk around folks”
I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about he, but it sure sounds like you’re claiming to have altered the content of legal filings before posting them online. You’re really not doing your credibility any favors here.
“I know when and why Snopes rolled my image onto their server.”
Ok, let’s assume this is true. That Snopes downloaded it’s server’s copy of the COLB off your account, an image that you had downloaded from Kos (hence the file name) and had resized to be these particular dimensions.
Except that’s not the story your video and Corsi’s article tells. The article’s not titled “I resized Obama’s birth certificate.”. You claimed to have *created * the image the White House produced, and that they released a fake you made. And you had a ton to say about the tilted-line image that now doesn’t relate to your narrative at all. The story now becomes nothing more than saying that the White House’s printout is a second-generation copy of the jpeg it originally released, and that it passed through your computer in-between, with the only change being a resizing. That’s not a real story, and it’s not what you were claiming earlier this week.
” I never called myself a document expert or document examiner, forensic or otherwise”
I neglected to include this above:
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=82503
The first four words of the article: “A document expert contends..”
Ah looks like Loren caught Ron lying once again.
Man, PooPooPolarik, you are such a bad liar. How the hell you can look at your face in the morning when you brush your teeth is beyond me…you have no honor, 0, none, a totally worthless human being.
Then perhaps you would be willing to share this “when and why” information. I Am also confused by another point. You seem to be admitting in your comment here that COLB the White House published on April 27 came from the Snopes.com server. If that is the case, what is all that material in the WND article (which I presume came from you) about the hits from Snopes.com to your Photobucket account in April? If Snopes linked to their own server, how does that translate to hits on your Photobucket site?
It was certainly not my intent to say that your switching Photobucket images was a “crime.” It does show, however, that you like to play tricks. This raises two issues: the question of whether you’re playing tricks again and how anyone can verify your claim now that the original Photobucket image has been replaced.
I’m willing to grant that it is remotely possible that Snopes carried at one time a copy of a fake birth certificate you made, but there is nothing in the way of evidence that I have seen to make me believe it.
[Note: When I say that Snopes carried an image, I mean specifically mean on the page http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthcertificate.asp pictured in the WND article.]
Well, you can’t believe anything WND says, but the quote you captured from Polarik is the smoking gun.
Polland:
I’m sorry, why do you think we should believe anything you say, again?
How did you make it through law school, again?
Those are Bob Unruh’s words, not mine, after I told him that I was a document imaging expert.
Now, we define “expert” entirely differently that liberals do.
A liberal “expert” is someone who knows the same shit as everybody else does but is someone who has accumulated more of it than anyone else.
But, even then, credentials or credibility are not requirements – because, all it takes if for Facthceck, Politifact, or Snopes to call someone an “expert,” and voila, he’s an expert.
“Expert” defined by consensus or word-of-mouth.
I define “expert” in terms of capabilities, and it confuses liberal to no end that I can do more than one thing well, and that what I have learned over the past three years you cannot get in a computer science classroom.
I’ve made 150,000-200,000 or more document scans on twenty different scanning devices. That’s not counting other imaging methods like photostats and microfilm.
So, am I a “document imaging expert” as I’ve said all along? Hell, yeah.
And, I am a computer expert despite Krapwetz’s inability to read a resume. He was the one who told you that I had “no discernible experience….” because he has no clue what it means to build, program, author, and apply computers in one’s line of work.
To quote:
“A job is where you go to apply a skill, not to learn a new skill.”
Since 1970, I have built and programmed computers, authored software programs and became an expert in their application. What Krapwetz dissed as , “He only ‘worked with computers,” is the real-world application of computers and computer programs to solving real-world problems.
Not book knowledge.
Now, Kevin would understand when I tell him that I built an S100, programmed in machine language, APL, DB2, COBOL, COGNOS, SQL, and the various permutations of BASIC and C. I have also “used” routinely for about 21 years, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB, and CLEMENTINE as a Research Associate in FSU’s the Dept, of Statistics for six years and as an Institutional Research at UNF for nine years, and an Instructional Systems Designer for six years.
Am I a “computer expert?” Way too limiting for all that I have done..
And, yes, Corsi was kind enough to change that moniker as soon as I brought it to his attention.
The whole “expert” business with which the Left seems to be so obsessed, is crap, IMHO. Either you can prove it or you can’t.
Loren, you are allegedly a lawyer, yet you still don’t know the proper definition of “forensics” versus “forensic.” “Forensic” tends to mean “legal” as an adjective, while all that “forensics” means is applying the Scientific Method to solving crimes.
Forensics, btw, was invented by cops to catch crooks, not by scientists. Not knocking the field because there are very capable scientists – but you, of all people, should know just how much junk science gets passed off in a court of law. It is not a matter of finding the truth, but convincing the jury listening to it.
I applied forensics methodology to deconstructing and reconstructing the COLB – I did not need a piece of paper to tell me whether or not i could do it. As for the legal angle, its existence may or may not be evidence for a chargeable crime, but that is something for the courts to decide.
In the early going, I made mistakes, but so did everyone else. i learned from mine whereas many have yet to do so.
I have been applying the Scientific Method for 45 years and there is no such thing as “debunking” an experiment that follows it, based on valid assumptions, using appropriate methods of data collection and analyses.
If you wish to refute the results of a study, you replicate the study as it was done. To date, I have never found anyone willing to do that – especially that unhinged, untrained, and unqualified sociopath who wrote that malicious libel you posted.
That is what sent him over the edge. I asked him to do a simple experiment – measure the COLB border instead of the outer image dimensions – and he refused. After a few rounds of it, he shot back, “You’re a f**king retard,” and went off to write his endless screeds about me. Thank you so much for giving him a soap box.
Just how irresponsible was that?
You should have had Krapwetz fact-check him, although Neil would rather have had twenty root canals instead.
All of the images you posted on your site and claimed that I made are not my originals. That is because you left a moron to do your work for you.
Instead of downloading my images, Eddy right-clicked on a thumbnail or a reduced image displayed at 72DPI, clicks COPY, and then PASTES it in the only graphics program he knows how to use, Xara. It is not even a file until he saves it as one, and when he does, it becomes a totally different file from mine.
I’ve saved all of his original works going back to 2008, with titles like “More Vomit from Polarik.” Here’s one of his Eddyisms:
“The only fair way to compare two images is to compare two images.”
It’s so…Zen!
In other words, things like differences in image dimensions, canvas size, resolution, compression algorithms, subsampling, and everything else that goes into creating a JPG are all irrelevant.
Your arrogance is exceeded only by your ignorance.
For Dr. Polland, and anyone else here who wants to learn something about digital image forensics, I commend this presentation to you:
https://www.cio.wisc.edu/events/lockdown/08/docs/DigitalPhotoForensics.pdf
(Did I mention that the author is Neal Krawetz?)
I should hope not! Our universities should be teaching the scientific method, not the conspiracy theory method.
Snappy retort aside, confirmation bias is the primary ingredient of all the birther image analysis I have seen, and among birthers, your bias is one of the most extreme, making outlandish claims far beyond the usual birther nonsense.
I know it sounds confusing because it is confusing. First of all, there is some confusion between “creating an image from an existing one to prove its provenance” and “recreating an image forgery from scratch to prove that it was done in that way.”
I did both, but not at the same time.
OK, pull up a chair and grab a beer because this is going to be a long post.
Let me start by telling you the bottom line first:
The Obama Campaign, and later the Obama Administration, never made any image scans nor did they distribute to others any image scans they made. On the contrary, the images they posted and distributed came from outside sources – one of which was me.
Now, here’s the history:
On June 12, 2008, at 8:42am EDT, Markos Moulitsas posts the very first image of Obama’s COLB on his Daily Kos blog. He did not say from where it came or who sent it to him. If you review all 648 comments left on his blog, you will not see him saying anything about the campaign sending it to him. That was an assumption reached by a few of his members. the only thing he did say was “The journalism thing worked” but that response had to do with the journalist who sent him the image, and as good journalists never divulge their sources.
Markos said that he “trimmed the scan in case anyone wants to debunk it based on the size of a Hawaiian birth certificate.”
That was a red flag. Why would he trim the most sought-after image in political history and risk damaging its authenticity? The answer to that is in my book.
Continuing, later that day, in the afternoon, Fight The Smears officially launched (although it was still a part of my.barackobama.com) and posted a PDF, called BO_Birth_Certificate.pdf, with what looked like a reduced copy of the same COLB image shown on the Daily Kos AFTER Markos had trimmed it.
In other words, it was NOT an original scan image.
Another red flag.
If the Obama Campaign is the one who had the COLB since 2007, made a “digital scan” of it in 2008, and then sent out copies to Factcheck and Politifact as the factcheckers claimed, then why are they using Markos’ image?
It even had the same name!
I decided to create a JPG image from the PDF and put it on my Photobucket account. I believe that Snopes first posted their :The COLB is a forgery” story on June 22, 2008 and posted the link to my image.
I originally had saved it at 100% quality.
To see if, in fact, the Obama Campaign had used the image that Markos trimmed, and also to see if his image was a trimmed version of the full-page scan that appeared on Factcheck, June 16, I took the full-page image, trimmed it exactly as Markos had done, going from a 2550 x 3300px image to one that was 2427 x 2369px – an odd size I thought until I finally figured out why it was trimmed in that way.
Then, from the Kos replica, I reduced it to 1024 x 1000 – a proportional reduction – and compared it to the image I made from the PDF. It matched perfectly.
Markos had used an unknown image editor to reduce it to approximately 44% quality. It still had the Exif data identical to Factcheck’s image, proving further evidence that they had copies of the same image. I saved my replica at 44% in Irfanview.
This is the image that is about 111k, 33,000 colors, saved in Irfanview at quality 44, etc.
Snopes was now linking to this revised image.
Right after the election, I decided that i was going to switch that image with a “forgery” i made – although it was not a true forgery yet or even a good one because I had copied the border directly from the Obama COLB and had used a cut-and-paste of the background from Michele’s COLB to make the “security paper.”
It would take me another year to figure out how the border and the “security paper” was made.
On or about November 6, 2008, I uploaded the image to Photobucket as BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg after moving the existing file to a private folder. However, Photobucket had renamed my revised image with random letters. Apparently, they instituted a policy of uploading only alphanumeric filenames, and mine had those underscores.
Panic set in because i had already severed the link to the prior image that I moved to another folder. By the time I figured out wha happened to the image I uploaded, and changed its name to BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg, about 15 minutes had gone by.
For the next few days, I checked the Snopes story and my stats to see if the link was still there. It was but the visits had immediately tanked. It took about two months before it was back up to where it was.
Then, as closely as I can figure it, on or around November 16, Snopes had removed my link from their main page with one of their own to a file named birth.jpg This was still my FTS replica, however.
.The order here is important to remember because when I did make a true forgery from scratch, one that uses nothing from any Obama image, I followed the same steps:
Forge the Factcheck image, trim it to make the forged Kos image, and reduce it to make the forged FTS image. This is how it was done, folks.
Now, the reason why Snopes copied my replica image to their server was because of the downtime to Photobucket while I was doing the switch.
I have since learned to swap images from folder to folder as opposed to uploading a replacement. Even so, i held off on posting the tilted forgery until February-March of this year.
To recap, my replica is now Snopes “birth.jpg” and it has remained there until Snopes replaced it on August 2 or 3rd after the WND article.
THAT is my image that the WH copied.
Is it a forgery? Not exactly. Is it a fake? Not at all. It all depends on your point of view. I created a replica of the FTS image I saw in the PDF to prove that FTS never had a legitimate image of their own.
The findings are what is important and the fact that I made them.
I mentioned this fact repeatedly ever since: that the Obama Campaign copied Markos’ trimmed image instead of making one of their own.
But, it is also only the first part of the story. Now is where the true forgery comes into play and how I figured out from whom FTS got their 2nd image (also in my book).
Although Snopes had changed the link on their main page, the link to my image on my Photobucket account was still on the message boards and that is when I decided to replace it with a true forgery, one I created from scratch in November 2009.
In early May 2010, i released my first video on how I constructed this forgery, and it is a variant of this true forgery that has been on my Photobucket account until February of this year when i decided to replace it with a lousy forgery to see if anyone would now notice that they had been linking to an illegitimate image all along.
The first one I made was apparently too good as nobody noticed it. I did not get that many views on the forgery reconstruction video, either. Because of the prior incident on Photobucket when I swapped images, I held off replacing it all throughout 2010 and it was only in late February 2011 that I posted it – but this time I uploaded it directly to a private folder instead of the main public one, and did a simultaneous renaming of both files (or as close to simultaneous as a person can get).
Then April 27th rolls around, but I had not seen the link to Snopes yet. Now that i did, I’m kicking myself for doing that lousy forgery swap. After 6,000 people had viewed it on or after April 27, I could not swap it back without someone noticing.
Maybe i should have, given all of the confusion over the tilted version.
Three months go by after everyone has gone gaga over the long-form. I chose to stay on the sidelines – one BC forgery was enough for me.
Then, I downloaded the PDF of the b&w COLB from the White House site and saw the link to Snopes and to my replica.
I’m sure that what I said above will be reported differently and taken out-of-context
But, I’ll summarize it for posterity sake and for the poster who wants only to get the story straight:
The WH copied an image off of the Snopes website. That image is one I created from the Factcheck image to make a replica of the Kos image and then from the Kos replica to make a replica of the FTS image that briefly appeared in a PDF posted on June 12, 2008 – only to be replaced by FTS on the next day.
The only JPGs of Obama’s COLB having the dimensions, 1024 x 1000 pixels, are the ones I originally made. If any others exist, such as the one on Snopes, it is because they were copied from mine.
The End (I hope).
Whether you go by Polland or Polarik, you are a shande. The reason you, Orly and Berg keep beating this dead horse, is because you feel Obama is bad for Israel.
“Dr.” Huh? Where did you get your Phd – the JC Penny catalog?
Well, I was a kibbutznik, and I’m tired of seeing Arabs kicked around. You can get red in the face for all I care, but Israel has apartheid for Arabs. Take a good look at the West Bank. There are roads only Settlers can use, for openers. Bedouins are treated like stray dogs. They are second class citizens – deny it all you want. Don’t get me started on how badly black Jews are treated. Call me a self-hating Jew or a Quisling, and feel good about yourself.
I’m not going to support Bachmann, Palin, Romney, Perry or other shallow, stupid shiksas and shaygetzes so Israel can hang onto some settlements and the rest of their self-destructive actions.
The only reason evangelicals support Israel, is so their lord comes back. There may be a difference between Armageddon and Auschwitz, but the distinction escapes me.
Oh, and the real Promised Land is Brooklyn.
Well said, Doc!
Why hasn’t Polland and WND given dates for when he created his forgery? Wouldn’t Polland want people to know how long he has supposedly pulled this off? Hmmmmm.
All that WND and Polland show is that some folks on the internet used Polland’s photobucket page. Seriously; where is the scoop in that!
Polland states that all of this is “evidence” that Obama had a fake COLB. It isn’t. All this shows is that Polland created a document that differed from the WH COLB. I could paint a copy of the Mona Lisa. That wouldn’t make the original Mona Lisa fraudulent.
Good timing, Polland. Pimping your self-published ebook is the perfect time to reveal that you made a fake document after the LFBC was released!
So you are the office gofer? Or a printer operator maybe?
What a ridiculous line of argument that is.
I have driven several millions of miles in over twenty different vehicles from golf carts to prime movers.
Does that make me an expert race car driver or motor mechanic or automotive designer or assembly line screw turner?
It is not that my liberal friends are idiots. It is that they know so much about things that are simply not true.
Why is it so difficult to believe that this man is an fraud? Some day you will truly wish you had listen to the more educated half of the country that calls a spade a spade.
Try this one one Mr. I Think I know it all.
King Obama is not a natural born citizen, by his own words. So therefore. How do you feel he is entitled to be either president or vice president? He is not.
Keep drinking the cool-aid and you too will end up sickened.
Real nice how you think all those that disagree with you are either the Bad or the Ugly?
Do you ever read the nonsense you write?
Ever consider putting this blog under the category of Obots?
So… let me get this straight… All the liberals are right and the conservatives are all wrong?
The liberal agenda simply is a loosing one. They all think they are Robin Hood. Sad fact: They are Robbing the Hood not Robin Hood.
Libs make me puke. Go count your own money… when your monthly check arrives.
How hard is it to get votes when you bribe your voters? “Vote for me and I will steal for you” You libs should be so proud.
Show me on successful SOCIALIST country. Doesn’t happen.
Get your damn hands out of my pockets and get a fricking job.
You know what makes the WND reporting even more awkward for Ron and/or WND? This line, further down in the article:
“WND verified that he is not misrepresenting his credentials or expertise.”
So either Ron lied about his expertise, or Bob lied about verifying it.
Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France, Germany, Japan, etc.
the fact that obama’s father was kenyan was well known before the election. not a single congressman ( current or former ), judge, legal professor or constitutional scholar came forward to say he wasn’t a NBC. why do you think that was?
J. Madsen has been paying attention. You earned a cookie for getting the answer right!
My more serious response:
Just because the world is black and white to you does not mean it is black and white to everyone else. There are many conservative ideals that I disagree with. However, there are also many progressive ideals that I disagree with. I am an issues girl; if I disagree with a party on an issue, I disagree with them on that specific issue. The party to whom the ideal belongs to is irrelevant. It is my hope that I am independent minded enough to evaluate issues critically rather than “drink the cool-aid”. When I combine my personal ideals into a holistic belief system, I end up agreeing with progressives much more than I do conservatives.
Have you read about the Confirmation Bias, J. Madsen? Something I really enjoy about this blog is that Doc C challenges all of us, regardless of party affiliation, to be careful about falling victim to the Confirmation Bias. I would encourage you to read more about the Confirmation Bias as well as the Belief-Bias Effect.
I have this bias for evidence over rumor.
Yes, I do. Besides a dozen drafts done for nearly every article of substance that appears here (that involve reading and re-reading sections) I really enjoy looking over some of the old articles. Some of them are, in my opinion, quite good. It does irk me sometimes when I find a misspelled word in a two-year-old article.
Frankly I am proud of the body of work that makes up this web site, and your unsubstantiated insults really don’t mean a thing to me.
Your comment: “Get your damn hands out of my pockets and get a fricking job” seems particularly stupid to me. I worked for 36 years and I retired. I don’t draw Social Security or any government benefits. So I hardly see how I have my hands in YOUR pockets and chances are I worked more years than you have.
Thank you for saying that. A lot of the motivation behind my writing on the web, both here, and long before, is self-discovery. Whenever I challenge readers here on confirmation bias, I am challenging myself too. Long ago I developed a concept called “failure modes” to describe my own character and how I go wrong in certain situations. I hope I make fewer mistakes from my examination of past failures.
No, of course not. The “bad” category is for web sites that routinely carry false information and the “ugly” category is for those web sites that I believe intentionally fabricate false information, or incite criminal behavior including the violent overthrow of the US Government.
Lots of folks disagree with me on all sorts of issues, and I don’t call them “bad” or “ugly;” however, I do call the deliberate or negligent misrepresentation of the facts “bad” or “ugly.”
This is why I blog, not because I support Obama, but because I support evidence-based decision making.
Don’t forget to add Finland and Iceland to the list of socialist countries that are successful..
Both Finland and Iceland have female Presidents who are socialists. Tarja Halonen has been President of Finland since 2000 and the President of Iceland is Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir.
Halonen and Siguroardotir are Social Democrats.
In our free country, you’re allowed not to like liberals and to puke if you need to. That isn’t going to change the fact that the United States has been a multiparty democratic-republic since the election of 1800 and I don’t see that changing. A majority of Americans seem to like their politics in the middle of the political spectrum with the two major parties, one right of center and one left of center alternating control of the government back and forth.
Sorry about that.
I don’t need to have my hand in your pocket, I have had a job for 30 years now and I pay my taxes. I’ll even have some money left over to donate to the President’s reelection campaign!
The word is “losing,” not “loosing.”
I have been working full-time in the private sector without interruption for the past 37 years. I have been fortunate enough to never have needed unemployment benefits or welfare benefits. However, I do not begrudge those who need such assistance.
I did, however, collect V.A. benefits while I was attending college.
Polarik —
There’s a special place in hell for you.
Gary
By the way, pushing some simple arithmetic, Ron’s numbers come out to a minimum of 30 documents a day, every working day for over 20 years.
While the office gofer in a busy office may well scan 30 documents in a single day 2 or 3 times a week, it just defies credibility to assume that it would be done every day for 20 years.
Even if it was the case, because of the nature of the business to do that much scanning, would one not expect that eventually even the most dullard office gofer would be promoted? I wonder what it is that has kept Ron back so long? Maybe its a conspiracy against fraudsters.
Frickin’ libs and their constant need to correct my typos. If you were to use the same magnifying glass to view the FRAUD IN THE WHITE HOUSE you might see things as they are not as you wish.
How do you explain away the FORGERY Obama claimed was his birth certificate that is still on the White House website? How many professional graphic artists, Adobe experts do you need before you see the truth?
Do you just ignore facts or do you just make up your own?
Of all the people the black race could choose for their president they pick this guy? Of all the quality out there they pick Obama? Shows the intelligence of the base.
Keep drinkin’ the cool-aid and you too will be sickened.
That reminds me of Wilt Chamberlain’s claim that he had sex with 20,000 women during his lifetime.
I am a conservative, and it’s morons like you that are handing the next election to the democrats on a silver platter.
If you really are concerned about returning to a more conservative America, why don’t you just shut the hell up and let us real conservatives take care of it for you?
Chaim Weitz, better known as Gene Simmons of Kiss, claims to have slept with 500 women. He was born in Haifa.
Haifa was always my favorite city. It’s known as Israel’s San Francisco.
Because he is saying what they must believe, does not matter the integrity of the person saying it, it is what they want to hear.
You’re delusional!
I have no problem believing it, I also have no problem believing Obama was born in Hawaii.
No one is saying we want to be a socialist country, we want a mix of socialism and capitalism. If you believe otherwise you don’t know a thing about liberals!
Hmm…I think you mis-attributed that quote to me. It was a response to john’s comment about internet scrubbing.
Because all the evidence actually points to him being born in Hawaii, and not a shred of evidence has been provided to show anything different. It also defies logic that an 18 year old, heavily pregnant, white girl from Kansas would fly alone to a third world country, where her husbands first, not divorced wife lives, and then travel to the opposite side of that country to give birth. Those are just to top reasons.
Let’s see…you’re certainly not more educted, people of your ilk certainly do not make up half the country, and I’ll just assume that final comment is just a tragic choice of phrases, and nothing more.
He was born on US soil. Neither of his parents were diplomats. He is a natural born citizen. He meets the residency requirements, he is of proper age. He was elected by a majority of citizens, and electors of the electoral college. The vote was confirmed by congress, and he was sworn in by the chief justice. So not only is he entitled to be the President. He IS the President.
No one has ever said that….just all birthers are wrong.
Blah, blah, blah. Mindless ranting.
More of the same. And thank you, I do count my own money, but I get paid every other week, thank you for asking.
Funny how some of the richest Americans are liberal. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet. Funny how there are also so many conservative midwest farmers collecting government subsidies (Mrs. Bachman?).
I don’t know what socialism has to do with anything at this point, since no one is suggesting anything remotely socialist…but as said before, there are many successful socialist countries in europe, that are recovering much faster than we are. Heck, even Canada has rebounded from this recession much more quickly than we.
Well, judging from your displayed educational level here, I’m guessing you’re probably part of the population that isn’t too well educated, so is paying little to no income tax, so there really isn’t much interest in your pockets…and thank you for asking, I do have a job.
Here’s a definition for you….would you survive voire dire in a Daubert hearing? Perhaps if it was a question of the physical process of scanning a document…because scanning a 100,000 documents might qualify you on what your average office intern does to make a physical document into a pdf…but that certainly doesn’t qualify you to analyze the the final product. I can see you’re still pretty bitter that you were called out by an actual expert. Rather sad and pathetic really. Get over it. Dr. Krawetz has a PhD in Computer Science. You may have a PhD, but not in anything related to computers. Dr. Krawetz has the CV and experience to back him up. You have neither. Dr. Krawetz has testified in court as an expert witness, on various computer related maters. You have not. You even try to be dismissive about the title of “expert.” The reason we’re so “obsessed” with the title, is because things like your declaration that was attempted to be offered in a court of law, aren’t admissible unless you reach a certain level of education and/or experience, which you have neither. You’re just a crack pot spouting off your poorly founded theories that were completely debunked by a person with actual credentials.
The very fact that not one non-birther news outlet has reported any of this is sufficient proof that there is nothing to it. If there were, it would be the story of the year with a Pulitzer for whoever made the case. I’ve looked at many of these so-called experts, and found them all cranks. The only “expert” who could objectively claim that title, Ivan Zatkovich, didn’t find evidence of forgery.
So while I fully understand the body of “expert testimony” published by WorldNetDaily, birther blogs and YouTube and how it appears to be overwhelming to the uncritical mind, upon examination it’s all a pile of crap.
OK, thanks for the chronology.
First in response to your comment at the bottom, I disagree. Even you admit that the 1024 x 1000 image Snopes TODAY is not yours, so it’s not true that all 1024 x 1000 versions are yours. The question is how long that “not yours” image has been on Snopes, and while you assert that it was replaced in August, I have not seem any evidence of that. In fact, I’ve not seen any evidence to support that Snopes EVER had a copy of a certificate you faked on their server. I’m not saying it’s impossible; just that there’s no evidence. There is simply no way to verity much of anything in your chronology either about what Snopes had, or what you had.
You further say:
While Daily KOS didn’t mention their source, Amy Hollyfield at Politico said of the image: “…the birth certificate arrived from the Obama campaign.”
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jun/27/obamas-birth-certificate-part-ii/
And FactCheck said: “We asked for and received a copy from the Obama campaign.”
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/06/obamas-birth-certificate/
Absolutely nothing you’ve said is inconsistent with the Obama campaign scanning the document and sending copies, all obviously with the same file name, to the Daily KOS, Politico and FactCheck with the first two cropping the document to cut off a lot of blank space at the top, and FactCheck leaving it as-is.
So far, there is nothing to your story to make one believe it. Also this whole business of musical certificate images you’re playing portrays you more as a prankster than a serious investigator.
I think he did. Commenter ‘Boston to Salem’ asked “Kos, how hard was it to get this?” And Kos replied “I asked the campaign.”
Damn. You can’t trust Polland for anything.
Direct link to kos’ comment, for anyone in doubt:
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/534616/19991984#c172
Wow, for a moment, I thought you were Lyin’ LorenC.
Of course I would survive a Daubert hearing. Nobody knows more about real and fake Hawaiian birth certificates than I do, including the people who make them.
Do your research. The courts decided awhile ago that an expert witness does not need to be a “forensics” anything. People who have specialized knowledge and training are considered as expert witnesses, or did you not watch the Casey Anthony trial?
Obama’s is the one who is lying, Obama has something to hide. Obama produced a fake birth certificate,
So, for anyone to say that I “lied or “faked” anything to prove that Obama’s BC is bogus, is ludicrous. It is also a non sequitur since that person would have to know the difference between what is real and what is fake – a skill that LorenC clearly lacks since he persists in calling what Obama posted online as being “real” and my forensic reconstruction of it, a “fake.”
I have to believe that if Obama, himself, got on National TV, in prime time, and told the public that “I faked my birth certificate and I was not born here,” that folks would refuse to believe it. They would cry, “it’s a vast rightwing conspiracy!” and claim that Obama was being “whitemailed” (can’t say”blackmaill” because that would be “racist,” or “xenophobic,” right?) by the Birthers, or something equally as “turgid.”
I can make Obama clones look better or worse than his anytime I want and have. But, I had to be the one to point that out.
Which brings me back to Loren. He claimed to have downloaded a copy of the “real” Obama COLB on July 20, 2009 from my Photobucket account. He has done that frequently – downloading images of mine without any knowledge of what they represent and putting his own spin on them.
Now, if that image is the “real one,” then why isn’t Snopes posting it on their web server instead of what is there now?
It is also 1024 x 1000 pixels.
Serously, would anyone bet the ranch on Obama’s COLB image being an authentic scan copy of a genuine paper Certification of Live Birth?
You are truely delusional. You would be laughed out of any court. You are correct in that you do not need to be a “‘forensics’ anything” to testify as an expert (however, it does help establishing your credentials), but you must demonstrate that you have knowledge beyond what the jury has our could obtain, through experience, training, or education, How many real Hawaiian birth certificates have you even held? How many times have you been called upon to professionally review a Hawaiian birth certificate? What is your formal training in examining Hawaiian birth certificates? What is your professional experience in examining these documents? How many peer reviewed articles have you written on the subject? How many times have you testifed in court on the subject? Just because you fancy yourself an expert, and that the court do try to be generally liberal in allowing expert testimony, doesn’t mean they will allow any crackpot that stewed up a theory in his mom’s basement to testify. And I don’t have to rely on CourtTV to know this. Some of us have professional experience on getting experts testimony admitted, or limited. It would take an attorney on the level of Orly to fail to have you completely excluded as an expert.
And on top of that, even assuming by some miracle, you did manage to get qualified as an expert, your expert report, would also be subject to the Daubert standard, which includes have your theories been published and subject to peer review, known error rates, and degree to which the theory and technique is generally accepted by a relevant scientific community. You’re a crackpot. You wouldn’t stand a chance.
So says the internet crackpot. All of which is irrelevant to the fact that you still would never survive a Daubert hearing. The rest of your rant is also pretty much irrelevant. First off, your analysis was debunked by a real expert, who unlike you, has testified in court as an expert, and has education, training, and experience, to make such statements. Secondly, the scan is pretty much irrelevant, because it is not admissible. The real paper document is what would be offered to a court, and considering the statements of various government officials in Hawaii, the birth announcements, and the near impossibility of the required events to have a Kenyan birth, I see no reason to doubt that the paper copy will look exactly like the scans.
It’s so easy to speculate about the outcome of situations that will never, ever occur.
I say this completely outside the realm of the birth certificate issue. An expert who testified 50 times had to have testified the first time.
Not out of the realm. Past qualification as an expert in court is a method of determining if someone is qualified. If he claims he is better qualified to examine Hawaiian birth certificates than the people who create them (a rather silly claim), then I would assume he has some background in examining Hawaian birth certificates issued to individuals not named Obama, and I would assume that experience should actually predate President Obama even coming on the scene. Past expert testimony is a valid question. And while every expert will testify for a first time, that is where the other criteria come in. His education, peer reviewed publications, experience (some experience with birth certificates issued to people not named Obama would be nice), etc.
Fact is he has nothing that would remotely qualify him as an expert.
I think the better phrase would be, “so easy to make rediculous claims that will never, ever occur.” Due to past experience, I can easily speculate what the likely outcome would be, and it isn’t what the Dr. here claims.
I would expect that there is no expert available who would meet the Daubert standard as you describe below:
How many real Hawaiian birth certificates have you even held? How many times have you been called upon to professionally review a Hawaiian birth certificate? What is your formal training in examining Hawaiian birth certificates? What is your professional experience in examining these documents? How many peer reviewed articles have you written on the subject? How many times have you testifed in court on the subject?
I’m…sorry?
No you wouldn’t. Even if we assume that a court would grant expertise on a subject as narrow as “Hawaiian birth certificates,” you haven’t looked at the computer(s) used to produce COLBs. You haven’t seen or inspected the printer(s). You know nothing about the computer program. You don’t know how the data was input into the system, how it’s stored, or how it’s delivered onto the form. You don’t know what went into the design of the COLB, or anything about the paper. You have no immediate familiarity with the Hawaii Department of Health. I daresay you haven’t even set foot in the state of Hawaii since 2008.
Exactly how low do you think the Daubert standard is?
Who said anything about needing “forensics” anything? “Forensics” only came up when you said you never claimed to be a forensics expert, and I provided a screenshot of when you did *exactly* that. And it’s not like you could’ve forgotten; I’ve shared that screenshot with you before.
But yes, expert witnesses need to have specialized knowledge or training. You, however, have neither. Time spent on your home computer does not translate into “specialized knowledge.”
What “forensic reconstruction”? The tilted-line thing? It’s fake. And the 1024×1000 jpeg that’s just a shrunken copy of the Kos image is, obviously, a shrunken copy of the real thing.
Funny thing, Birthers said for a long time that Obama could end the whole Birther controversy “tomorrow” if he just produced his long-form birth certificate. Obots said this was a lie, because Birthers would just move the goalposts and would probably claim the long-form was a fake too.
So when Obama had a White House press conference, spoke to the press on TV, and released his long-form, whose prediction turned out to be right?
You mean like when I showed that one of your claimed ‘forensic reconstructions’ was nothing more than the normal COLB with the date changed?
http://barackryphal.blogspot.com/2009/07/polariks-faked-forgery.html
The image currently posted to their server at http://msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg is a 1024×1000 jpeg copy of the image that was first posted on the Daily Kos. Maybe it’s a jpeg copy you made, maybe not. But who cares? A photograph of the President doesn’t get less “real” if it’s copied and resized on another news website.
Yes. I am as certain of that as I am that we landed on the moon in 1969.
Alvin Onaka would qualify.
That’s not necessarily true. There may have been court cases in Hawaii, cases which we are unaware of, in the past in which the authenticity of a birth certificate was at issue and in which experts testified. Also, I suspect that there are more than a few former employees of Hawaii DOH who gave extensive experience in creating birth certificates who might be qualified to testify as to whether Obama’s birth certificate appears to be genuine. Presumably handwriting experts could determine if the signatures of Dr. Sinclair and Stanley Ann are genuine (by the way, Dr. Sinclair’s widow says that it is his signature).
The point is that Ron Polland has no experience in Hawaii birth certificates, no experience in authenticating signatures, and in fact there is nothing in has background which would qualify him to give an expert opinion on the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.
However, in the real world no outsider is ever going to be allowed to handle Obama’s birth certificate. If it ever comes to it. Hawaii DOH will simply provide another certified copy of it and any court in the country will accept it.
checkmate
Not at all. You could find an achievist, geneologist, former registrar, or several other government employees who have worked with those documents from day to day. None of the factors listed are alone determinative of whether an expert is qualified, and neither do you need to satisfy every qualification. I listed only the questions that would ask in trying to disqualify the witness in this particular instance. The fact that his purported “expertise” exists soley as a matter of looking at a pdf President Obama’s birth certificate, and only arose in the context of President Obama is pretty damning.
I thought we were talking about computer forensics (I may be using the incorrect terminology) and how specifically the Hawaiian birth certificates were made. That seems to be a fairly new field.
I have somewhat of a medical emerg. here (kid got bit by unidentified flying species…)
It would be a bogus field. One cannot just create a field, and then purport to be an expert in it, because no one else is doing it. One can be an expert in Hawaiian birth certificates, one can be an expert as a forensic document examiner, one can also be an expert in computer forensics, or even more generally a computer expert that can testify generally on the details of a pdf document (of even experts on pdfs). There are many different angels one can look at to qualify an expert here. If there was an actual need, I suppose at some point a person with general qualifications as an expert could narrow their expertise to be computer experts with a specified ability of examining pdfs of Hawaiian birth certificates. But when an offered expert doesn’t have the skill set, experience or training to even do the broader field, how exactly can he narrow his expertise?
One can hardly be an expert on electronic copies of Hawaiian BCs (a field I would claim as bogus to being with) based on studying a few pdf of President Obama’s birth certificates and the odd handful of other Hawaiian BCs circulating on the internet.
To add to what JoZeppy says, Obama’s LFBC was not made with a computer The original was made using a paper birth certificate form, a typewriter, pen and ink.
I’ll assume you simply mean that you don’t know which insect bit your kid instead of something larger like a bird, bat or extinct pterosaur… 😉
Sounds like it may be time for the EpiPen.
There’s a bush that everyone seems to be beating around, and that is the authenticity of the source from which TheDailyKos obtained their image. From what I’ve read, it has not been credibly linked to Obama, Hawaii, nor the Obama campaign, so why is there any presumption as to its authenticity? I see carts being put in front of horses here. If there is no attestation as to the source of the original image, then how can one presume that the subsequent images are any more authentic than the questionable original from which they are derived? Then the White House joins in by “sharing with the public” the image of the true authentic Hawaiian COLB by linking to or displaying the unauthenticated mysterious original? Once there exists an unauthenticated image in the public domain, no print of it can be taken as being anything other than a print of an image that is from and unknown source. That is definitely not any form of certification in anyone’s book. The fact that someone at the Pro-Obama COLB hosting sites says that they got their image from the campaign is about as certifiable as asking a criminal suspect to validate his own alibi. Their word is not the word of an independent unbiased observer. What they said would be no different whether they were telling the truth or telling a lie, and there’s no way to discern which it is.
Also, why no discussion of how Dr. Pollard created a forgery from scatch? That seems rather significant if true (I haven’t seen it or any video, -dial-up internet service), While I’m on that subject, I created a fake of my own, thinking there must be a half dozen or more that might be a year or more older than johnny-come-lately version, but now I’m seriously wondering if that is true after all, since I’ve never seen mention nor link to anything like what I made. I’d sure like to get some feedback on what I’ve fashioned with as much humor in mind as possible and word of any others like it. Here’s the URL: http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v77/arnash/obama_files/Obama fake COLB.jpg
If that doesn’t work for some reason (blank spaces) then just visit the page it’s on, which also contains my extensive graphics expose of the long form BC, at http://photobucket.com/obama_bc
I’d like to add one thing, as usual, both sides present believable accounts of what facts are known, but what is forever lacking is more and deeper facts that are provable or proven, which explain the unanswered questions that linger like a bad fart.
I fail to follow your objection. The Daily KOS said that they asked the campaign for it. Politico emailed their copy to the State of Hawaii who said it was an authentic Hawaiian birth certificate. Dr. Fukino, testifying before the Hawaii legislature said that Obama put his birth certificate on his web site.
So yes, there is a strong presumption of its authenticity. You say “from what I’ve read…” and all that means is that you don’t read very much and your research is inadequate.
There are credentialed forensic document examiners that specialize in electronic documents. There are, no doubt, software engineers that can testify about how the Quartz PDFContext software works — maybe that Derek, the guy whose name is embedded in very document that software creates.
Looks like we’ve got us another “concern troll”
Only to those like yourself who come into a room expecting a bad smell in the first place.
Let’s put it in the simplest possible terms for you – HI birth certificates are issued and maintained by the HI DOH. They have consistently backed the documents and they are THE authority of record. Every bit of evidence as well as both the COLB and the LFBC say the EXACT same thing – born in Honolulu, HI. Full Faith and Credit. End of story.
This is one of the most hilarious and delusional statements I have ever read, anywhere.
Time for the strait-jacket.
I suggest that you reserve your opinions until you’ve read the material. It wastes peoples’ time giving you remedial classes.
And it must be a terribly jaundiced view of the world where everybody’s lying.
Of course not. They emailed a digital image of the certified copy. Nobody is claiming that a digital image, whether the format is PDF or JPEG or TIFF or any other encoding scheme is a legal certified copy of the document.
What is claimed is that Hawai’i has confirmed that the digital image is a faithful rendition of a standard Hawai’ian birth certificate within the limits of that image encoding scheme.
You are arguing over irrelevant trivia, you know. It doesn’t really matter if the image is Polarik’s or not; that is all just a distraction from what does matter about the birth certificate. What matters is the information that is on the document and on the image. That information establishes the President’s Constitutional eligibility as to age and place of birth.
Hawai’i has made it abundantly clear, over and over again, that the information on the birth certificate images published by the Obama Campaign and the White House matches exactly with the information in the Hawai’ian DoH archives.
Since this is the case, there is no reason what-so-ever to consider fraud on Obama’s part. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Done and dusted. End of Story. Period. Full Stop.
“This question in many ways continues to astound me. The state of Hawaii provided a copy, with a seal, of the president’s birth. I know there are apparently at least 400,000 people that continue to doubt the existence of and the certification by the state of Hawaii of the president’s birth there, but it’s on the Internet because we put it on the Internet for each of those 400,000 to download. I certainly hope by the fourth year of our administration that we’ll have dealt with this burgeoning birth controversy.”
— White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs
I did learn one new thing from reading it. I learned that AR Nash is a moron. I suspected that from his postings here, but his blog provided ample confirmation. Now is that an “important’ new thing? Not really.
I can take for face value the documents produced by both the Obama Campaign, and the Obama Administration. To back them up, we have the statements of both Republican (who, btw, strongly backed McCain) and Democratic administrations of the State of Hawaii. The birth announcements dating back from the time of the President’s birth. The fact that not only does it make no sense, but it very whell may be impossible that an 18 year old, heavily pregnant white girl from Kansas would take the very expensive trip half way around the world, all by her self, to give birth in the thrid world country of her husband, where is yet undivorced wife still lives, and then travel across that country by land, to give birth at the opposite end of the country. Oh, and the fact that there is not the slightest shred of evidence to support a birth anywhere but Hawaii.
Your “concern” is down right silly. You claim it’s naive to take things for face value because bad people do bad things. You don’t have an iota of evidence to support it, but hey, if bad people do bad things, I don’t have to believe anything that I don’t want to. Evidence be damned. Even sillier is part of your premise is that you can dismiss everything by the state of Hawaii because for some unknown reason, you claim “they’re his biggest fans” ignoring the fact that not only are there Republicans in the Hawaiian Legislature, but the first governor that went to bat for the birth certificate was a Republican, that was head of McCain’s campaign in Hawaii. Also, Fukino was a Republican apointee. So you can call our faith in the documents “innocent.” I call it reality and fact based. I also call your “concerns” delusional.
Have you read the Lord Coke’s analysis in the Calvin’s Case, Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” or Chief Justice Cockburn’s “Nationality”?
Under English Common law children of two british subjects born outside the realm did not become natural born subjects, it was later under English Statutory Laws that they were made them natural born subjects. But children of aliens born in the realm were natural born subjects.
Fortunately, most of us are not afflicted with the problem of Poppy Montgomery on this fall’s “Unforgettable”. I hope you will, in time, be able to clear this treatise from your memory. You won’t, however, be able to get the time back that you spent in reading it.
Furthermore, Nash’s citation of primogeniture is laughable, since it doesn’t apply even in American inheritance law. If a parent dies intestate in the US the property does not all pass to the first born son, it is divided amongst all children equally. Nor is inheritance only from fathers. Mothers and fathers are equal under inheritance law.
So I learned nothing new or interesting from reading Nash’s claptrap. Nor anything true.
And Thomas Jefferson wrote the legislation that outlawed primogeniture in Virginia.
It is quite revealing indeed. It reveals you don’t have a bloody clue what you’re talking about. I note that you don’t cite to a single source in your “treatise”? I’m guessing because that great deal of reading you tend to do trends more towards fiction, and very little towards law. Needless to say, I’d be very hard pressed to find a signle point of law you actually got right.
A little clue for you…..if you want to write about the law, you may want to learn something about it. You’ll look less silly that way.