There have been numerous discussions here regarding the certificate number on President Obama’s birth certificate and how that number relates to the numbers assigned to the Nordyke twins who were born about the same time. I’ve written articles before including:
- Date Filed v Date Accepted: APPEALED!
- Birther math (part 5)
- Birther math (part 6)
- Where is the Nordyke birth announcement? (update)
- Obama Certificate Number Proves It’s a Fake – Busted
I have used my background in public health and vital statistics information processing to attempt to describe what seems to me the most likely workflow for the certificate process based on my experience, sample certificates, information from state spokesperson Janice Okubo, and logical deduction. I begin by noting some facts and assumptions. (If you don’t want to read a long and ponderous article, you could skip down to the last paragraph and get the main point.)
I assume that the Kapi’olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital had someone on staff designated as a local registrar by the state health director. We know from legislation of the period that the Board of Health could appoint local registrars. We also know that one certificate from 1963 for the Tripler army base in Honolulu was signed by an Army officer as local registrar. It stands to reason that if the Army base had a local registrar, then the main birthing hospital in the state would have one too.
We know from state’s spokesperson, Janice Okubo, that file numbers were applied at the central office, and not by the local registrar, or pre-numbered on the form. I have placed the numbering towards the end of the process to facilitate handling, because once the number is assigned, the certificates have to be kept in order for filing.
I am assuming that Kapi’olani hospital sent certificates to the Bureau of Vital Statistics on a daily basis. This assumption is plausible given the volume of births involved and the single example of the Nordyke twins certificate where the local registrar date is the same as the registrar general date (and the same date the doctor signed the form). Further, the fact that Obama and Nordyke announcements appeared at different times in Honolulu newspapers speaks against them both being sent to the Bureau of Vital Statistics on the same day.
Following is my draft processing flow:
- Hospital admission
- Child Delivered
- Mother (typically) completes worksheet
- Hospital clerical staff types original Certificate of Live Birth based on information from the worksheet and the medical record.
- Mother (or whoever completed the worksheet) signs Certificate
- Physician signs Certificate
- Local registrar (probably a Hospital employee) signs a batch of certificates and stamps Date Accepted by the Local Reg.
- Certificates are batched (daily in Honolulu) and sent to the Bureau of Vital Statistics.
- The Bureau of Vital Statistics verifies that the Certificate is in order
- The Certificate is entered for transmission to the Hawaii Newspaper Agency (daily? batch)
- The Date Accepted by the Reg. General is stamped on the form and the form is numbered by a numbering machine (batch)
- The Certificate is entered into a log for indexing
- The Certificate is filed by number into a volume and shelved
Now comes some educated guesswork on how Barack Obama’s certificate fits into all of this. There are three things we know for sure that constrain the possibilities. Barack Obama was born the evening of Friday, August 4, 1961; some registrar signed his certificate on August 8, 1961, and a newspaper published the announcement on August 13. Given that Obama was born on a Friday night, it seems reasonable that the typed certificate was not ready for the doctor’s signature until Monday the 7th at the earliest, and a signature date of August 8 by the physician is reasonable. This suggests that the “Date Filed” on President Obama Certification of Live Birth (August 8 ) is actually the Date accepted by the local reg. (there is no “Date Filed” on the actual birth certificate form). Obama’s certificate would then be ready to go to the Bureau of Vital Statistics on August 8 (Tuesday) and most likely completed by them August 11 (Friday) for inclusion in the Sunday newspaper (August 13). This puts a maximum processing time at the Bureau of Vital Statistics at 4 days. Obama’s certificate was numbered 10641.
Now let’s apply the same process to the Nordyke certificate. In this case, we have more dates. The Nordyke twins were born on Saturday, August 5, in the afternoon. Mrs. Nordyke signed the form August 7, the doctor signed the form Friday, August 11 and both registrars’ dates are the form as August 11 also. The newspaper announcement appeared on August 16. Susan Nordyke received certificate 10637.
Based on the fact that all the Obama dates are before the Nordyke dates, one would think that Obama’s certificate should have a lower number. It doesn’t, but not by much. There is a difference of only 4 between the two. One then asks: how is it that two certificates that presumably arrived and processed on different days (based on the fact that they appeared in the newspaper on different days) got numbers that close?
Here I have to speculate, but in all honesty I feel pretty good about this suggestion (and frankly, this is the first time I really feel comfortable about a conclusion on this topic). One important aspect of the processing is making the records available to the public, and this means indexing them by name and date of birth. Another factor is the need to file records efficiently by certificate number. Filing by number, means assigning the number at the last possible moment in the process so that it is easy keep the records in order to put the records into volumes by number without having to remove pages and insert pages in the book. Indexing the records for public access means maintaining an alphabetic index. Records have to be insertable into the alphabetic index because of delays in receiving certificates from the other islands and because of late registrations. The easiest way, however, to merge records into a sorted index is by sorting the batch of records to be inserted first. So here comes the good part. If, as I believe, a batch of records was numbered on or after August 11 (a batch containing both Obama and Nordyke), then it would have simplified the task if those certificates had been alphabetized before numbering. An alphabetized stack would be Nordyke…Obama and Nordyke would have a slightly lower number, which is what we find is the case. The two certificates cannot have been numbered on separate days or else they would be more than 4 apart (on average, there were 33 babies born per day in 1961).
This then leads us to a revision to the workflow, the addition of step (11a) “Certificates in batch are alphabetized by last name of child.”
This was a very long article to arrive at some simple conclusions. The fact that the Obama and Nordyke certificate numbers differ only by 4 implies that they were numbered on the same day. If they were numbered on the same day then most any processing variation could have influenced the order. The fact that the numbers are very close, and that “Nordyke” and “Obama” are alphabetically very close, suggests that the forms were alphabetized before numbering.
[Update: later information including additional examples suggests that the certificates were alphabetized in monthly batches before numbering, and possibly that they were first grouped by birthing facility.’
Thank you for your serious scholarship and efforts on this, Dr. C.
There’s only one problem…
If they were alphabetized, then Gretchen Nordyke would have been before Susan Nordyke. Susan Nordyke got 10637, Gretchen Nordyke got 10638. It could be a miss in the numbering (mistakes do happen), but seems to argue against alphabetizing.
My personal theory is that there are basically 2 weekly batches from Kaplioaini: Tuesday (when Obama’s was sent), and Friday (where the Nordyke twins were sent). However, they only assign numbers of Fridays. So, The tuesday batch comes, and the Friday Batch is set on top of the Tuesday batch in the machine. The Friday batch, therefore, got lower numbers than the Tuesday batch.
Simple stack data structure…
That’s a point and I commend you for thinking critically about the article. The person indexes that I am familiar with are by last name and date of birth, not last name and first name. Since most surnames in the stack are going to be distinct within a batch, additional alphabetization by first name doesn’t bring much to the table, nor does ordering by date of birth.
Certainly possible, but for for this to work Nordyke has to be at or very near the end of the first batch, and Obama at or very near the beginning of the next to make the numbers come up so close. With only two batches, each batch would average 100 and something births making the coincidence of position unlikely (but within the realm of possibility). With alphabetization, what we observe becomes very likely.
Well done, Doc! A very plausible hypothesis originating from sound scholarship and reasoning. The birthers should compare this to the work of Ms. Tickly and Ladyforest – maybe they’d learn something… okay, probably not. 🙁
Additionally, isn’t it possible that whoever did the numbering, or the alphabetizing for that matter, noticed that they were dealing with a set of twins. And since Gretchen was actually born 5 minutes later than Susan…..made a deliberate effort to make sure that the oldest daughter would receive a lower number than the youngest daughter. Just a thought.
I think this suggestion makes perfect sense. I could well imagine complaints from parents about the numbers being out of order for their twins, and a policy created to prevent it from happening, or just a little extra zeal on the part of the staff.
Isn’t there a much simpler possibility here? Obama’s born on the 4th, the Nordyke twins on the 5th. Imagine you are filling out paperwork. You fill out the first form – the earliest birth. You place it wherever you place them (I’m imagining a wire basket of some sort). Then the next form comes along. Do you pick up the first form and put the second one below it? No – you put the second form – the later one – on top. Whoever assigns the numbers would receive them in that order, thus accounting for the newer form getting a lower number than the older form.
There were probably a few babies born between Obama and the Nordykes, thus accounting for the several missing numbers in between.
Whose wire basket we’re talking about?
Obama’s birth was signed by a registrar 3 days before the doctor signed the Nordyke certificate, so it wasn’t in the doctor’s wire basket or the local registrar’s wire basket close together. There were 14,906 births in Honolulu in 1961, with the majority born at Kapi’olani. There should be well over 100 babies born at Kapi’olani during those three days. So whether they all went to the Bureau on the 11th or Obama’s went on the 8th and Nordyke on the 11th, there has to be some mechanism that brings these certificate numbers to within 4.
Didn’t Obama’s mother & Mrs. Nordyke have the same doctor? Maybe they are grouped by doctor.
Mrs. Nordyke told me that she and Stanley went to the same group of doctors but I do not know if they had the same doctor. I don’t think that has been established.
I think your explanation makes a lot of sense Doc but I think it is one of several plausible explanations on the certificate number sequence. The pertinent point is that the proximity of the certificate numbers is supportive of the validity of the Obama certificate since this was all handled in the days before automated records. Birthers argue otherwise as if the certificates absolutely have to be numbered in chronological order of birth even though there is no evidence to say that was the case.
Feel free to share.
Since Obama made the Sunday paper and Nordyke didn’t, I think Obama’s certificate must have reached the Bureau before Nordyke. That means it had to arrive between the 8th and the 10th.
I’m still pondering how the search indexes could have been designed to accommodate insertions. A card catalog would work, but that’d be an awful lot of cards.
Dr. C.
“and both registrars signed the form on August 11 also.”
On the Nordyke BCs, isn’t there only the doctor’s and the local registrar’s (deputy) signatures on August 11th?
Also, at what point in the process does the information for the newspaper announcements get typed up, before a cert number is added or after?
I didn’t word that very well. Only the local registrar signs the form. However, there is a date stamp of the date it was accepted by the Registrar General.
Any way I can figure it, the newspaper announcements are sent before the forms are numbered.
off topic– sort of
Your quote of the day prompted me dig up this passage from Douglass’. My bondage, My freedom. I have happily pointed his literary genius to scores of students, his rarified IQ distant from most, but his story locked to the American political experience as assuredly as the federalist papers or on walden pond. He is an American Milton. A revoiced Jefferson.
“It was in this dull, flat, and unthrifty district, or neighborhood, surrounded by a white population of the lowest order, indolent and drunken to a proverb, and among slaves, who seemed to ask, _”Oh! what’s the use?”_ every time they lifted a hoe, that I–without any fault of mine was born, and spent the first years of my childhood.
The reader will pardon so much about the place of my birth, on the score that it is always a fact of some importance to know where a man is born, if, indeed, it be important to know anything about him. In regard to the _time_ of my birth, I cannot be as definite as I have been respecting the _place_. Nor, indeed, can I impart much knowledge concerning my parents. Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. A person of some consequence here in the north, sometimes designated _father_, is literally abolished in slave law and slave practice. It is only once in a while that an exception is found to this statement. I never met with a slave who could tell me how old he was. Few slave-mothers know anything of the months of the year, nor of the days of the month. They keep no family records, with marriages, births, and deaths. They measure the ages of their children by spring time, winter time, harvest time, planting time, and the like; but these soon become undistinguishable and forgotten. Like other slaves, I cannot tell how old I am. This destitution was among my earliest troubles. I learned when I grew up, that my master–and this is the case with masters generally–allowed no questions to be put to him, by which a slave might learn hisage. Such questions deemed evidence of impatience, and even of impudent curiosity. From certain events, however, the dates of which I have since learned, I suppose myself to have been born about the year 1817.”
For me this section both harmonizes and dischords the politics, psychology, and mythology surrounding the conspiracy you explore on this blog.
Doc
I read the article again and I really appreciate the thought you put into this. It makes a lot of sense that some presorting in alphabetical order took place. If it were a random process then it makes it harder to explain the consecutive numbers for the Nordyke twins and a birth with “O” following with only a few intervening numbers. I was going to suggest that they might have come sorted by last name from the hospital but that makes it harder to explain the lag in the newspaper announcements for the Nordykes. I think it is reasonable to assume that Thursday might be the cutoff day for inclusion of a birth announcement to have appeared in the following Sunday newspaper. I suspect that most of the layouts for the Sunday papers are set on Friday so as little as possible had to be done on the weekend. If the Obama BC were signed by the local registrar on the 8th it would have made the cut while the Nordyke twins announcements were delayed because the physician and local registrar didn’t sign until Friday the 11th.
Wouldn’t it be great if a reporter could find someone who worked in that department of the Hawaii DOH in the 1960’s and would be familiar with the process that they used then?
I did some calculation on the probability that two particular records would be within 4 numbers in consecutive batches. It came out to be (approx) .0009, which is pretty small.
I thank you for calling attention to the quote and giving me the opportunity to say a couple of things about the feature. One of the benefits of writing and researching this blog is all of the ancillary material I find, sometimes tangentially on topic, but usually interesting.
I wondered if people read the quote of the day, and I see now that least someone does. Yesterday, I started archiving quotes of the day, and they can be found under the Features menu on the blog.
In the spirit of your good scholarship I thought I’d offer you another meticulous find, from a site that would not be part of your readers every day unless they were morbid pulse takers. He presents not only as a full on birther, but as an omnibus Obama conspiracist.
You have been pitching (and i have been swinging) that birtherism is a narrative set to distract. This blog pitches the levels of knowledge involved needed to construct it, as well as what it intents to conceal.
http://lamecherry.blogspot.com/2011/01/obama-world.html
Once again, forgive me if this has already been covered…
In trying to wrap my head around this reconstructed process, I keep coming back to the thought that blank “CtsOLB” are DoH paperwork. Since we are operating under the fact that they were not pre-numbered, I have a problem with the idea that they were available to hospital staff other than the Local Registrar who, as has been pointed out, could have also been a hospital staff member. Isn’t it possible that the fully filled out “hospital paperwork”, which in my mind would have been the “real long form” (the one which would have included how many cups of coffee Stanley drank in a day), was taken to the Local Registrar who took the information from this form and used it to fill out a blank “CtOLB”. At this point, everything on the form would have been filled down through box 17b, except of course for the number at the top. They would then have been taken to get signed by the mother and the doctor.
I enjoy the quote of the day and always read it.
As long as were going to attempt to create a plausible sequence of events that would serve any purpose, let’s see if we can use the same process to create a plausible sequence that would coincide with a non-institutional birth.
Let’s start by not introducing things that lack any evidence to support them; i.e. deputy local registrars stationed at the hospital. There is zero evidence to support this.
We can reliably assume, based on evidence made publically available, that the Nordyke twins were born in Kapiolani Hospital on the afternoon of August 5th 1961. That was a Saturday afternoon. If we consider that public offices, like that of the local registrar for the District of Honolulu, Hawaii, would be closed for the weekend, it would be expected that the notification of that birth would have been transmitted to the local registrar on Monday.
If the local registrar assigns the “File Number”, it could be that the numbers assigned to the Nordyke twins would have been assigned sometime on Monday.
If Obama’s birth was reported as a home birth on Tuesday morning, it could have received a number very close to, but following, that of the Nordyke twins. (I know this is a big “IF”, but speculation as to the registration process is full if “ifs”)
Who fills out the original “Certificate of Live Birth”?
According to the CDC (in 1961), the “physician, other professional, attendant, or hospital authority” fills out the Certificate of Live Birth. After it is filled out and the attendant signs it, it is submitted to the local registrar for the district.
When is the file number associated with a particular birth?
This is an important question. It could come from a block allocated to each hospital, or it could be assigned as late as when the Certificate is submitted to the State Registrar (Registrar General), or anywhere in between.
Again, according to the CDC (1961), the local registrar’s office is the one who enters the birth information into the index. However, that doesn’t mean the file number is not assigned prior to that point. In the case of hospitals, the number could be assigned when the hospital calls the birth in to the local registrar. (We don’t know.)
In short, all of this speculation may be a good way to plant seeds or provide talking points for use against the opposition, but it does nothing to validate or invalidate anything that has been made public.
My major bone of contention is with Dr. Conspiracy’s items 7 thru 13. They are not backed by ANY supporting evidence, and they deviate from the routine path identified by the CDC without any justification for doing so. In short, they are based on pure speculation solely for the purpose of presenting a scenario that would fit the limited evidence.
Dr. Conspiracy claims to have some knowledge of vital records. However, he does not claim to have any knowledge of vital records with regard to birth registration that would permit anyone to consider him to be an expert in that area. I submit that Dr. Conspiracy should admit that, in reality, he has no more knowledge in regard to birth registration than the rest of us. Further, I would be interest to know if Dr. Conspiracy, in conjunction with his former employer, was under renewable contract with the Hawaii Department of Health while he has been defending them on his blog?
For anyone interested in viewing what the CDC considers to be the standard flow of birth registration, the chart can be seen on page 5 of this 1961 report.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsus_1961_1.pdf
It should also be noted that 1961 Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth conforms to the standard certificate established by the CDC. As such, there is no reason to believe that the flow of registration would deviate from that pescribed by the CDC without evidence to support such deviation.
It doesn’t make much sense to me that Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children would publish a letter from Barack Hussein Obama in their Centennial Magazine that names Kapiolani as “the place of my birth” if he wasn’t born there.
http://www.kapiolanigift.org/doc/centennial-magazine.pdf
And why would the former Republican Governor of Hawaii Linda Lingle emphasize that Kapiolani was Obama’s birthplace if that hospital is not named on his Certificate of Live Birth?
“You know, during the campaign of 2008, I was actually in the mainland campaigning for Sen. McCain. This issue kept coming up so much in the campaign, and again I think it’s one of those issues that is simply a distraction from the more critical issues that are facing the country. And so I had my health director, who is a physician by background, go personally view the birth certificate in the birth records of the Department of Health, and we issued a news release at that time saying that the president was, in fact, born at Kapi’olani Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii. And that’s just a fact. And yet people continue to call up and e-mail and want to make it an issue. And I think it’s, again, a horrible distraction for the country by those people who continue this. … It’s been established. He was born here.”–Linda Lingle, R-HI
I think that it is highly likely that Obama’s birth certificate says “Kapiolani” whether that is the exact location of his birth or not, that’s what is most likely on the certificate.
This is exactly what many of us have been saying about WND and the rest of the birthers in their obsession with minutia that neither invalidates or validates but only plants seeds of “doubt.” Even without the Doc’s well though out process flow (and having worked on many process flows as of late, there is much that appears to make sense), we are still left with a pile of evidence that states Obama is born in Hawaii. The rest from the birthers has been simple speculation without any evidence that he was born elsewhere.
“Deputy” is your word. I never suggested such a thing. There are three pieces of evidence supporting local registrars.
1) The law allows it
2) There is a spot on the form for a “local registrar” to sign it
3) A 1963 birth at the Tripler army base is signed by an army officer as local registrar.
The first part of the article, the part that discusses the local registrar and the registration process was written before I did any analysis of how that process affected the question of the certificate numbers. I did this so as not to bias the first part. It turns out that the assumption of a hospital employee local registrar, or any local registrar at all has no bearing on the validity of my conclusion. You will note that in the concluding analysis, I simply say “some registrar”.
I’ve been to Lame Cherry’s blog, but not lately. It should probably be listed in the page footer.
This is all completely contradicted by the facts. The doctor didn’t sign the Nordyke certificate until August 11, and that is the date the local registrar signed it. The certificate couldn’t have gone to the local registrar before August 11 because of the doctor’s signature, and it couldn’t have gone to the local registrar after August 11 because of the local registrar’s date stamp. Therefore, the Nordyke certificate went to the local registrar on August 11.
The Hawaii department of Health has already said that file numbers were assigned by the central office.
I think that both Lame Cherry and Dr. Kate belong in ‘THE UGLY’ (if Lame Cherry isn’t ugly, then I don’t know what is…).
Dr. Conspiracy,
The word “DEPUTY” appears on the Nordyke twins Certificates of Live Birth. I didn’t make it up. You failed to take notice of it.
Show me the “Law” in force in 1961 that you are referring to.
A birth taking place at Tripler is a birth on U.S. territory that happens to be located in the State of Hawaii. As such, it would not be strange to have the local registrar be the local registrar for that territory. Since it is under the jurisdiction of the Army, it would be an Army Officer charged with being the local registrar. That local registrar would then send the certificate to the state registrar.
You should compare apples to apples.
But they did not say when in the process the number was assigned.
I have no doubt that the file number originates with the State Registrar. However, we don’t know if the file number is assigned when a report of birth is called in by the hospital or if it waits for assignment until the end of the process.
We do know the regulations governing reporting of non-hospital births, and it is not a phone-it-in type thing. Among other things, there has to be a doctor examining the newborn along the way — or an investigation by the registrar. If there was a physician-attended homebirth – or an emergency delivery at home in Hawaii with a doctor arriving later on the scene — then it doesn’t matter for purposes of birthright citizenship. The law doesn’t require that babies be born in hospitals.
But my point is the birther scenario of a false report of birth by grandma while the family is in transit from Africa doesn’t work with the dates we do have (passage of time between date of birth and date of registration) — and doesn’t explain the supposed out-of-sequence numbering.
(I say “supposed” because the fallacy lies in the assumption that there is a practice that results in in-sequence numbers in the first place, rather than a batching of entries coupled with random arrangement within each batch.)
You almost have to create a new category of EXTREMELY UGLY for Lame Cherry. Probably the most diseased site out there. Whoever Lame Cherry has, they are definitely insane and have severely depraved issues with sex, race and religion…
Any category for Lame Cherry would best be titled Putrid Filth.
Obots contend that birther’s supposed claim of Obama being born in Kenya and the date his COLB was registered occurred in too short of time to be plausible. It must noted, that we don’t know for certain if Obama was actually born on Augest [sic] 4, 1961. Obama could have been earlier perhaps my many months earlier which would have made such situation possible.
[This is the banned James/John/Ron. I approved this message, Doc.]
I approved the comment because James makes a valid point. If one rejects the Lucas Smith fake Kenyan birth certificate, the Bomford hoax Kenyan birth certificate and the official Hawaiian birth certificate’s date of birth, then of course the date is up for grabs. Would you like to pick a date out of thin air?
But then if you reject the two Kenyan birth certificates, why in the world would you doubt that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in the first place?
Instead of repeating falsehoods you should review the Chapter 57 of the Revised Laws of Hawaii (territorial) that remained in effect in 1961. The applicable law, not superceded by State Law until 1982.
§ 57-9. Local registrar to prepare birth certificate.
“(a) If neither parent of the newborn child whose birth is unattended as above provided is able to prepare a birth certificate, the local registrar shall secure the necessary information from any person having knowledge of the birth and prepare and file the certificate.”
Dr. Conspiracy would have you believe that a grandparent would not have been permitted to file the birth report. He is basing that on the availability of the parent. However, Chapter 8, Section 2 of the Public Health Regulations required the report to be filed within 7 days. Back in the 60s, mothers generally remained in the hospital for a week, before going home. It would not have raised an eyebrow if it was claimed that the new mother was unavailable to register a birth at the local registrar’s office. As for the father, we have nothing but speculation to indicate that Obama Sr. was even on the Island when Obama was born. He could have been anywhere. Being that he was here on a student visa, no one would question why Obama’s Kenyan father was not available.
Those Revised Laws of Hawaii also tell us more about the local registrar.
§ 57- 31. Transmittal of certificates to registrar general. Local registrars shall transmit all certificates filed with them to the registrar general in accordance with regulations of the board. [R. L. 1945, s. 3100.32; add. L. 1949, c. 327, s. 32.]
§ 57-7. Appointment of local reboistrars and deputies. The board, on the recommendation of the registrar general, shall appoint local registrars, provided that the county health officer may be designated as local registrar in counties having
organized health units. A local registrar with the approval of the registrar general may appoint deputies. Local registrars shall immediately report to the registrar general violations of this part or the regulations of the board. [R. L. 1945, s. 3100.08; add. L. 1949, c. 327, s. 8.]
§ 57-7 indicates that the local registrar would have been the Honolulu County Health Officer.
§ 57- 31. Transmittal of certificates to registrar general. Local registrars shall transmit all certificates filed with them to the registrar general in accordance with regulations of the board. [R. L. 1945, s. 3100.32; add. L. 1949, c. 327, s. 32.]
For all we know, someone made a mistake on a form.
Perhaps someone assumed there was only Nordyke child born, was told there were twins, tore the first one up, filled out two others afterward, lost one… who knows?
Perhaps one of the mothers had a long or complicated labor.
They started to fill a form out, the mother took days to deliver, then they completed the form(s) afterward.
Perhaps the numbers are codified to include day of week, district or some other minor data?
But none of this matters because it IS all speculation.
While not necessarily a waste of time, I feel it’s a superfluous exercise to wrap things up tighter than ever needed.
Call me a pragmatist, but I feel evidence need not be replete on our side at this point.
The man IS president and birtherism is (and always has been) purely entertainment.
Laugh! There’s nothing necessary to prove.
Actually, no it could not have been many, many months. The Presidents mother graduated from high school in the spring of 1960 and first went to the University of Hawaii in the fall of 1960. So even if she got pregnant in September, the birth would have occurred in late May, early June. But contemporary letters to friends suggust that the known timeline is fairly accurate.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-0703270151mar27-archive,0,2623808.story?page=1
………..If we are to believe that in the 60s a grandparent or anyone else other than a parent could routinely register a home birth within 7 days of the alleged birth and obtain a birth certificate without producing the baby or any firm substantiating evidence that a 7 day old (or less) new born baby actually existed, there could be thousands of Hawaian birth certificates kicking around for non existent people being used for all kinds of nefarious purposes such as fraudulent benefit claims etc.
Yet, just like the other birther claim that “in the 60s anyone born abroad could routinely get a birth certificate saying they were born in Hawaii” there is so far not a shred of evidence that this was/is the case.
Just like any normal objective person was not prepared to believe, without evidence, the initial claim some time ago that in the 60s Hawaii routinely issued born in Hawaii birth certificates for babies they knew to have been born abroad (a claim which, in the continuing absence of a shred of evidence such as one solitary proven example of that “common” happening despite extensive birther searches for one, it is now pretty clear was false) I for one am not readily prepared to believe at the moment, without evidence, this claim that Hawaii would gaily hand out birth certificates to a grandmother (or parent for that matter) without a degree of investigation, at the very least requiring sight of the baby by somebody qualified to confirm that it was a new born.
JudgeMental,
Trying to reduce the argument to the point of absurdity? Nobody ever said that fraudulent birth registration was an established routine. It has only been exhibited to be a possibility.
Next time try leaving the absurdity out of your argument and see how strong it is.
Your entire argument relies on fraud needing to have become commonplace. Mine only requires that it could take place.
The Certificate of Live Birth blank form is just a plain sheet of paper with some labels and boxes on it. There is nothing special or secure about the blank form.
When a certified copy is made for the public, the long form (or the COLB) is printed/photocopied onto security paper, stamped and sealed to make the certified copy. The certified copy has security features, not the blank form. It’s like a drivers license; the security features are built into the license you get, not the piece of paper you sign.
Security paper is designed to photocopy poorly, so the original could never be on security paper, else you couldn’t make copies for the public.
Exactly!
Agreed! Put me in that same pragmatist category.
Your problem is that by weakening your assumption, you weaken your conclusion to the point of pointlessness… 😉 The overwhelming probability is that President Obama was born in Hawaii – the law says that makes him natural born and the truth is that anyone not suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome wont feel the need to revisit this issue unless significant additional evidence comes to light…
Doc,
Thanks for this thread – it has provided a nice example of how birthers fail to understand how rational inquiry and analysis work (at least it seems that way to me).
Your entire arguement also rests on a bunch of “what ifs” of extremely low probability, which combine to make an increasingly improbable scenario, while completely ignoring the most common and plausible, simple reasons that his birth was exactly what it claims to be.
The overwhelming probability is that everyone with a Certificate of Live Birth, or even a Certification of Live Birth, was born where the document says they were, but we all know that some people with birth certificates issued by a state were not born where the document says they were.
“the law says that makes him natural born”
Not true. That may be the general concensus, but it is not an established fact determined by the Supreme Court.
So you are complaining that I fabricated the existence of deputy registrars, and now are arguing they existed based on the signature on a 1961 certificate. OK, you refuted yourself. The fact that you changed your story, and didn’t admit it troubles me greatly and threatens your continued participation on this web site.
I found your comment about an army base in Hawaii being “US Territory” is bizarre. Hawaii was a STATE in 1963 (the date on the Alan birth certificate). Here is link to Alan certificate:
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/sample-certificatelivebirth-hi-med2.jpg
I think it’s rather silly for you to demand that I produce the law in 1961 authorizing local registrars, when the birth certificates from that period have a box labeled “local registrar.” Are you trying to attain troll status by raising meaningless objections? And if you’re so knowledgeable, why don’t you know this already?
The law is Section 57-7 “Appointment of local registrars and deputies” and you can see a copy here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24948817/Joint-Motion-with-HI-Territorial-Law-57
We see from the Nordyke certificate that the doctor signed the certificate, the deputy local registrar signed the certificate AND the Registrar General accepted the certificate all on the same day. Having three offices rather stretches the time line. It makes MUCH MORE SENSE that the hospital had a deputy registrar on site.
If the term “natural born” is undefined, then I guess ALL of our presidents served under a cloud except those who were citizens of the United States when the Constitution was ratified. But then the Constitution doesn’t define who was a citizen of the United States either. Hmmm.
The court in Ankeny seemed to feel that the SCOTUS established that fact in the Wong Kim Ark decision – and Constitutional scholars (including the one in the Oval Office) seem to agree…
If it’s so obvious and so legit, why doesn’t he just release the vital stats? He doesn’t have a birth certificate according to Fukino’s last statement. He won’t release because there’s no birth cert from Kapiolani and probably a lot more embarrassing stuff. Period.
Why don’t you just say, open it up, Barack? This is well beyond ridicuous. Your grasping for reasons why he’s legit when he won’t open it up is pathetic.
First, neither I nor my former employer has ever had a vital records contract with the State of Hawaii. If my former employer did any business with the State of Hawaii. I don’t know about it. Hawaii does their own software internally.
In fact I am familiar with vital records work flows in several states, having participated in documenting those work flows and developing new ones. I have also worked on 4 local registrar systems. When I worked for the State of South Carolina in the 1970’s, I developed and implemented a local registrar system, converting them from a manual process to an automated one. (Unfortunately, I don’t remember how the manual system worked.) My experience is with automated systems and it does not include Hawaii. What I can say from my experience is that different states do it differently. Some states assign two numbers, a “local file number” and a “state file number” when local registrars are involved.
I commend you for pulling up the 1961 CDC document, which has been mentioned on this blog a few times. It’s where those birth counts I’ve been citing come from. I see nothing inconsistent between my work flow and the CDC work flow beyond what we already know from certificates and legislation–that there were deputy local registrars in Hawaii. The CDC document says that the local registrar MAY be a county health department, not that it always is. It says nothing about where deputy local registrars might be.
At 3:01 PM Dr. Conspiracy says;
““Deputy” is your word. I never suggested such a thing. There are three pieces of evidence supporting local registrars.”
At 3:19 PM I responded;
“The word “DEPUTY” appears on the Nordyke twins Certificates of Live Birth. I didn’t make it up. You failed to take notice of it.”
I didn’t change my story, Dr. Conspiracy.
Dr. Conspiracy said; “I found your comment about an army base in Hawaii being “US Territory” is bizarre. Hawaii was a STATE in 1963 (the date on the Alan birth certificate). Here is link to Alan certificate:”
You don’t get it. Hawaii did not have local jurisdiction over the military base. That is why the local registrar for births that take place on a military base is a military officer. It’s the same way at all military bases located in the states. This is done in accordance with 32 CFR 735.3.
The dates and signatures on the Nordyke birth certificates:
As I previously pointed out, Birth reports are required to be filed with the local registrar withing 7 days. The Nordykes were born on August 5th. That means their birth reports had to be filed by the 12th. I suspect the reason the doctor, the (deputy) local registrar, and the registrar general all signed it on the same day was because the certificate was immediately taken to the local registrar after the doctor signed it. Since, in Honolulu, the local registrar’s office is in the same location as the Registrar General’s Office, it would be easy to facilitate have it signed on the same day.
It wasn’t the CDC that said anything about the “County Health Officer” it was the Hawaii Law.
If you’re going to suggest that deputy local registrars were stationed in private hospitals, maybe it would be a good idea to show some/any evidence to support that being the case in 1961.
The dictum of the state appellate court has no precedential value. It has no value in the state of Indiana and it has no value at the federal level.
It is the only indication we have of how the courts might rule on this issue were standing satisfied. I think you will find that if a federal court ever rules on this issue it will follow similar reasoning (please remember this prediction should a federal court ever rule on the issue – I doubt you’ll be very happy should that day come…). But thank you for the work you and the rest of the birthers have done – it’s going to help get President Obama re-elected… every little bit counts!
NdHL Why didn’t the birthers appeal the Ankeny case? That would have given the U.S. Supreme Court a chance to weigh in on the issue, which is what they birthers have been fervently seeking. Yet they let this golden opportunity slide. My guess is they didn’t want to take a chance that the court would rule that the 14th Amendment makes everyone born here not just citizens, but natural born citizens, with limited exceptions. That would have killed the Vattelist theory outright.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I understand that Emerich de Vattel wrote his treatise, which eventually came to be titled in English as The Law of Nations in 1758, and died in 1766. His writings are used to prove a distinction between being born a citizen and being born a natural born citizen. But at the time he wrote, and even at the time he died, the United States of America was hardly a glimmer even in American patriots’ eyes. Did any of Vattel’s writings ever even vaguely allude to the territory that then constituted the British colonies in North American and later would become the United States of America?
What I’m getting around to is, did Vattel ever make this distinction in his treatise between being born merely a citizen, and being born a natural born citizen? Best I can tell, the birthers use the distinction between citizenship by soil and citizenship by blood ( jus soli and jus sanguinis) as a proxy for the distinction they assert exists between merely being born a citizen, and being born a natural born citizen.
But did Vattel ever assert in clear language, or even make a vague allusion to, this distinction? Did he cite privileges enjoyed by the natural born citizens and no others? In fact, was there any political society on earth then, or preceding, that made such a distinction, and gave any exclusive privilege to the natural born?
The birthers vigorously assert that U.S. citizenship with the adoption of the constitution was by blood. If this was so, wouldn’t the first sentence of the 14th Amendment have obliterated that meaning by conferring citizenship on all who were born here and under the jurisdiction? I think the courts have made crystal clear the meaning of “under the jurisdiction” by looking to – to the chagrin of the birthers – English common law, which designates the only ones who do not automatically qualify for citizenship by birth, the offspring of diplomats and invading armies.
It occurs to me that if citizenship was not automatically conferred at birth with the adoption of the constitution, archived records might settle the matter. If being born here of noncitizens did not a citizen make, then it stands to reason that people in this category would have needed to go through the naturalization process to become citizens.
If then that was the case, naturalization records from the late 1700s and the pre-14th Amendment 1800s (if they exist today) logically would show a lot of people naturalized that had listed birthplaces in the U.S. (We had lots of children then being born here to not-yet-citizen immigrants)
Does this make sense?
Perhaps census records might also provide usable data.
Oh, yes, I’ve heard the “naturalization at birth” theory, which if you accepted, the native-born child of noncitizen immigrants would automatically and instantaneously become a citizen, just not a natural born citizen. But for this theory to fly, I think you’d need evidence in the form of records of court cases or statutory law dating from the early years of the Republic, that in unambiguous, unmistakable language, verifies such a practice was followed.
Again, you show that you have to pin your hopes on the highly improbable, with only a few meager minutae of unlikely “what if” suppositions to go on.
The point about the “overwhelming probabiliy” and “general consensus” you like to complain about is that they are the DEFAULT positions and the only ones supported by all actual evidence to date.
Paranoid speculation and far-out “what ifs” don’t count for beans unless you have solid and credible evidence to back them up, which actually sufficiently contradicts the body of evidence that exists.
Our legal system and our democracy does not run on improbable what-ifs. The burden of proof rests on the accuser – and that means you must START with substansive evidence for your points…not mere hypothetical imaginings.
Until such time, the “overwhelming probabiliy” and “general consensus” rules the day.
JD Reed,
I’m not arguing Vattel. This is a thread about Hawaiian Certificates of Live Birth.
“Why didn’t the bnirthers appeal the Ankeny case?”
Just to be clear, the “birthers” did file Ankeny. To the best of my knowledge, the “birthers” are not an organization. The term is slang for how some people interpret the Constitution and/or are willing to rely on the online COLB for adequacy. If you want to know why the party in that case did or did not attempt to do something, I suggest you contact them.
Now, as to why it was not appealed to SCOTUS; the answer is “comity”. The decision in Ankeny presented no federal question. It was all about whether or not Indiana Law required the Governor to verify the qualifications of the candidates. There was no path that would have given SCOTUS jurisdiction.
NdH, “Birther” is not slang for how people interpret the constitution. It’s a word for people who ignore 200 years of American Juris Prudence, in order to believe that the scary black man is not legitimate.
It’s not slang for how people don’t interpret the documents, it’s a word for how people, despite having legitimate proof that would prove beyond a reasonable doubt in any court of law, keep on going, “I’m sorry, but your birth certificate doesn’t have a image of your foot on it. It’s not legitimate. Show me another document.”
It’s a term for people who accuse the scary black man and his family of crimes, despite having no evidence that these crimes actually happen. It’s a term for people who are so hell-bent in their little conspiracy world that they’ll basically say that the scary black man’s political enemies are lying for him in order to cover up the fact that he’s illegitimate. It’s a term for people who will never accept the scary black man’s legitimacy, even if they some how invent a time machine, and go back in time to witness the birth themselves.
This isn’t about constitutional interpretation. It’s about people who look for excuses as to why the scary black man in the White House isn’t actually legitimately the President. They start with that conclusion, and work backwards for their arguments.
If they didn’t do this, they wouldn’t be birthers, and would actually accept that Barack Obama was legitimately the President of the United States.
It reminds me of an old in living colour sketch i think with David Allen Grier. The white man goes to pay with his credit card and no questions are asked. The black man goes to pay and they ask for mother’s maiden name, street address, what school he went to, various forms of other IDs.
Oh, and NDH, you state that it’s the “overwhelming probability that people with a COLB were born where it says.” Thank you for saying that Barack Obama has proved that he was born in the United States. The standard for citizenship proof is preponderance of the evidence, not anything higher (though you described clear and convincing proof, and probably beyond a reasonable doubt as well). So Obama has proved that he was born in the United States, with the documents that he has shown.
By the way, in a court of law, in order to claim something is a fraud, you have to show that the document is a fraud. You’d be laughed out of court if you went to court saying, “You know, here’s one person from 50 years before Obama was born, who got a document that Obama didn’t get, which says he was born in Hawaii, despite not being born here. Therefore, Obama should have to prove that this didn’t happen beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
Birthers keep on moving the goalposts. The Federal Standard for proof on Citizenship related matters is Preponderance of the Evidence. Is it more likely than not? Obama does not have to prove to the mythical standard of “Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt” but only to more likely than not.
And as far as the Ankeny case, part of the decision in the Appeals Court (probably Orbiter Dictum) was that anybody born in the United States was a Natural Born Citizen, based upon the 14th Amendment (specifically citing upon U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark). The birthers (Mr. Ankeny in this instance) didn’t even try for an appeal based upon those grounds.
Of course, since there is absolutely no way that 4 Justices would have voted to take the case considering the 100+ years of settled case law, it doesn’t make much difference anyways.
And since we’ve started discussing U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the argument that the majority uses (in this 6-2 decision, would have been 7-2, but one justice retired before issuing the ruling):
1. For undefined terms in the Constitution, we look outside the Constitution including to English Common Law.
2. English Common Law says born here = natural born subject (NBS).
3. NBC = NBS (pp. 658-666)
4. We didn’t adopt the “law of nations” on citizenship because there was no law of nations on citizenship.
5. The 14th Amendment didn’t limit the rule.
6. The courts cannot limit citizenship for policy reasons.
7. Wong didn’t lose his citizenship by any action after his birth.
I’ll give you this much. You’re a zealous advocate. Unfortunately, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
What do I mean? Be patient. By this time tomorrow you will have been made aware of the new information. I’d love to share it today, but you’re gonna have to wait until tomorrow like everyone else.
I’ll give you a hint. It’s about what you don’t see on Obama’s COLB and why that information has been deemed relevant.
“For undefined terms in the Constitution, we look outside the Constitution including to English Common Law.”
Don’t tell me you’re one of those who doesn’t know the difference between “common law” and “English Common Law”. OR That there even is a difference.
In what state did you attend law school?
Ahhh the old I’m going to release the “Kill Whitey” Michelle Obama video right before the election trick. On what planet did you attend law school? It obviously wasn’t here on Planet Earth.
Perhaps you might try an English as a Second Language course. Your reading comprehension leaves something to be desired.
Are you really that dumb?
If Ms. Obama were in the hospital, the hospital would have submitted the certificate.
Doc you should know better than to ask rhetorical questions.
So? I said county health department not officer, following the CDC flow.
Why do you continually reply to me complaining of language I never used, and suggesting as a result that I’m wrong.
Wow! This article, which I thought was tedious, bland and only mildly interesting really hit a nerve with the birthers.
It’s more accurate to say that it is the obligation of the parent, and a report by someone else would have to come with an explanation of why neither parent was able to file it. I have not seen any scenario suggested that could provide such an explanation.
You said Obama Sr. was not in Hawaii, but Abercrombie places him there soon after the birth. You said Stanley Ann was in the hospital, but they have paper and ink in hospitals, making a 7-day hospital stay no barrier to completing the certificate.
Why don’t you try reading Ankeny again. It came before the appellate court on the decision that there was a failure to state a claim. The appellate court ruled that no one born here could be called anything other than a natural born citizen. It was not dictum.
I went to law school in Massachusetts. I know how to read a case. For example, I can read this part of Ankeny, and see that it is a failure to state a claim analysis:
I know from reading this sentence, that the court didn’t even really address whether the Governor of Indiana had to “verify the qualifications of the candidates:”
I know from this sentence that the case was focused on the “Vattelite” definition of natural born citizen:
It is clear from READING the case that the decision was that whether or not the governor had to verify the qualifications of a candidate no one could argue that the child born here in the United States was anything other than natural born.
Where do you pull this from? If the case was about “whether or not Indiana Law required the Governor to verify the qualifications of the candidates, don’t you think the case would have mentioned that? Instead, they said, essentially, “we don’t have to decide that, because under federal law, Obama and McCain are eligible.” To wit:
In fact, as far as I can tell, there was not a single state-law ground mentioned in the appellate case, much less an adequate and independent state-law ground that would require the Supreme Court to abstain from hearing an appeal.
So, master of the legal system, walk this poor JD through the Ankeny case and show me how it was decided on solely state-law grounds. If you can show me how a court saying the state claim was irrelevant because the federal law controls is a state-law ground the Feds cannot hear, I’ll ask for a refund from my law school.
I’m not qualified to comment on that; however, two birthers, Lightfoot and Wrotnowski both appealed similar cases to the Supreme Court — not that they were granted cert.
True, it just goes to show what normal legal minds think.
Because Obama was born in Kenya!! That’s why.
And we should believe you because you’ve been right so often in the past?
Dr. Conspiracy,
I noticed that my last comment was left awaiting moderation and was then deleted. Thank you. You’ve been destroyed to the point of squelching the speech of your opponent. You lose.
I used the word “regulations” for a reason. Statutes set for broad outlines; administrative regulations set for the the actual procedures followed. Go pull up the administrative regs in place from 1961 … you will see that it is not as simple as a single person making a report.
Since when did that stop anyone?
NdH:
What do I mean? Be patient. By this time tomorrow you will have been made aware of the new information. I’d love to share it today, but you’re gonna have to wait until tomorrow like everyone else.
Wow, now I won’t be able to sleep tonight. Is this new information going to be released before or after the Michelle Obama “whitey” tape?
Well, the last “new information” we got was the false statement by that Evans character; that ran the propaganda cycle for about 48 hours before the curtain was dropped on it. Wonder if this will last a little longer before it is thoroughly debunked.
Oh, then you admit that your purpose was to be so obnoxious that I wouldn’t put up you any more. The troll game. So yes, you won the obnoxiousness race. I concede.
I should have shut you down when you made that personal smear suggesting that I was defending the Hawaii department of health out of some business relationship.
[BTW, the deleted comment was
]
If Stanley Ann were not in the hospital, then the “usual hospital stay” means nothing. Mothers in 1961 could recover from an at-home vaginal delivery just as fast as they do today.
I’m gonna go sulk after being so “demolished.” Not.
OMG, birther klan trolls will say anything that they just pull out of their butts on the spur of the moment.
Dr. C,
Your scenario is based on two key assuptions:
1. Local registrar sent daily batches to central DoH office
What happened to Okubo’s statement that this was done on a weekly basis?
2. Your theory also needs a step (11a) – central office sorts weekly registrations alphabetically prior to assigning numbers.
The problem you have with this scenario is simple – what would DoH gain by sorting records alphabetically on a weekly basis? The physical files kept in the storage area are not stored in alphabetic order, therefore there is no benefit of keeping the pile in the office for partial weekly sort.
Why would local registrar in Honolulu follow different process and send daily batches while other registrars followed weekly schedule? It is a needless extra work for local Kapiolani registrar.
If you wanted to stick to the weekly pre-sorting requirement, more reasonable process would include local registrar sending weekly batch pre-sorted according to the previously agreed upon criteria.
After 2 and a half years of blockbuster new birther information that was nothing, I’m not going to get excited.
Now we’ll never know what horrid things were left off of Obama’s COLB, rendering him ineligible!
The suspense!
The suspense!
No, the daily transmission of certificates is not a key assumption to explain the number order; it has no bearing at all. It is a key assumption to explain why the Nordyke certificate appeared in a different newspaper edition (which is an undisputed fact). The Nordyke certificate had to arrive at the State office on the 11th (no sooner because the Doctor hadn’t signed it, and no later because the Registrar General stamped it on the 11th). So for Obama to be in time for the Sunday paper and Nordyke not, you just about have to say that Obama’s certificate arrived before Friday.
If Nordyke and Obama arrived at the state both on the 11th, then my explanation gets very simple.
The only reason for Kapi’olani to follow a more than once a week schedule is volume. 14,000 out of 17,000 births in Hawaii occurred in Honolulu, and Kapi’olani was the main maternity hospital.
The reason to sort the certificates alphabetically before storage is to facilitate the creating of an alphabetic log (that includes certificate number) for indexing purposes.
Grow up for heaven’s sake.
If all you have to contribute, or all you were seeking to contribute, was the equivalent of someone posting that Elvis “could” still be alive, you could have saved the wasted effort as In my experience on here so far there is nobody posting regularly who would ever disagree with such a position.
However we both know that is not all that you were seeking to do.
Actually, I do. Read the actual opinion of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Justice Gray actually outlines his opinion based upon that
What do I mean? Be patient. By this time tomorrow you will have been made aware of the new information. I’d love to share it today, but you’re gonna have to wait until tomorrow like everyone else.
I’ll give you a hint. It’s about what you don’t see on Obama’s COLB and why that information has been deemed relevant.
“For undefined terms in the Constitution, we look outside the Constitution including to English Common Law.”
Don’t tell me you’re one of those who doesn’t know the difference between “common law” and “English Common Law”. OR That there even is a difference.
In what state did you attend law school?
And you know nothing about the law, and what the basis of our legal system actually is. I’ll give you a hint…
The founders did not take a term of art with 400+ years of tradition in English Common Law, and redefine it based upon a work that didn’t include the phrase in it’s original writing, or any English Translation until 10 years after the Constitution was written. (The Natural Born phrase in Vattel dates to an English Translation that was made in 1797. The phrase was not in the original French, and the English Translation that was around in 1787 left the term indinges untranslated.)
As far as English Common Law vs. American Common Law, yes, there are some differences. However, jus soli citizenship is not one of them.
Actually read the opinion of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Read the reasoning behind the opinion, and you’ll see that Gray thought that anybody born on American Soil was an Natural Born Citizen, and directly ruled that the citizenship of America followed the same rules as Citizenship of England. In fact, Justice Gray says, “That all children born within the dominion of the United States of foreign parents holding no diplomatic office became citizens at the time of their birth does not appear to have been contested or doubted until more than fifty years after the adoption of the Constitution”.
He further quotes authority after authority, such as Kent which he quotes: “And if, at common law, all human beings born within the ligeance of the King, and under the King’s obedience, were natural-born subjects, and not aliens, I do not perceive why this doctrine does not apply to these United States, in all cases in which there is no express constitutional or statute declaration to the contrary. . . . Subject and citizen are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives, and though the term citizen seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, subjects, for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land.”
The only thing that a Supreme Court might have a question about is whether foreign-born citizens-by-birth (such as George Romney, John McCain, and other unsuccessful Presidential Candidates) would be eligible. Honestly, I see the court upholding a notion that there are only two types of citizens: Those that are born Natural, and those that are made Natural after their birth. The first is eligible for the President, the second are not.
==================================================================
If daily batches were sent from Kapiolani to the central DoH office (which is a pure speculation on your part at this point) it would have been easier to process registrations on a daily basis and insert index cards into the main index on that same day rather than waiting until the end of the week, sorting the weekly batch, assigning numbers to sorted weekly batch and finally seprating sorted weekly batch into the main index (I assume that this would be an anual index).
Your first argument for sending data from Kapiolani on daily basis because of the volume of incoming data is in contradiction with the assumption that those records were not processed by central office on the same day but once at the end of the week.
Thank you for the above posted by you in reply to ndH.
This complements the essence of the common sense I was trying to convey to ndH regarding what could be reasonably expected to happen in reality during attempted registration of a home birth by someone other than a parent.
His answer to you will of course also be something along the lines of “yes but what if the registrar decide not to make any enquiries or any kind of inestigation and was willing to just hand over a certificate…..THEN the grandma ‘could’ have got a certificate for a baby that was actually still somewhere in the midst of 5 changes of aeroplane on the way back from Kenya”.
Well of course she “could”…..she “could” have got a certificate by just lifting the phone and asking for one in return for buying the registrar two tickets for the movie at the Honolulu drive-in that coming Saturday. The granny “could” have given birth to octuplets herself earlier that morning, strangled all but one of them and presented the survivor in person at the registrar’s office as the new born son of her daughter and son-in-law who were actually still in a remote part of Kenya having a cordial lunch with his other wife before passing by the local jungle branch of Staples to get the materials they needed to quickly knock up some forged papers to help get the newly Kenyan born future President through immigration when they arrived back in USA.
It’s life Jim but not as we know it.
I’d point out that this was a task done by human beings, and there may not have been a particular rule or procedure as to how the individuals on staff handled their paperwork responsibilities on a day to day basis.
That is, there might have been one or more employees in the office tasked with the job of processing the paperwork that arrived from the hospital each day, and they might each have had different practices on how they ordered stuff. For all we know there were several typists, who each simply grabbed several certificates off the top of a stack of papers waiting to be processed — each working at a slightly different pace. Or maybe the same people who were supposed to do the paperwork and data entry (data entry at the time meaning entry into a log book) — also had to attend to other tasks, like answering the telephone and responding to customer inquiries at the front desk. So maybe one person gets interrupted and delayed, while another is able to finish whatever task she has at a faster rate.
I think people now expect a level of efficiency that is a result of ready access to computers that simply didn’t exist back in 1961, when the Dept of Health in Hawaii was probably still operating with manual typewriters. (I think electric typewriters had been invented, but they didn’t become standardized as office equipment until much later, especially in government offices, which seemed to be the last to catch up with advances in technology). It’s quite possible that they didn’t yet have a Xerox machine, either — that was also newfangled technology at the time.
That is a point I have been saying all along. Passenger jets were not in regular service in 1961. The 707 was not introduced until late 1959. The airfare was around $22K in constant dollars, and credit cards were limited to American Express and Diners Club. There was not transcontinental telephone service. The hospital in Mombasa was dependent on a generator.
People still insist Ann Dunham made an 11K mile trip, in her third trimester, with all these primitive conditions.
VP Biden made the same mistake. During the campaign, he told a reporter that Roosevelt addressed the nation on television, after the ’29 crash. Television broadcasts did not begin with any regularity until 1948, and Hoover was president.
ndh
“The dictum of the state appellate court has no precedential value. It has no value in the state of Indiana and it has no value at the federal level.”
True, it just goes to show what normal legal minds think.
Also the other NINETY losses and THIRTY lost appeals demonstrate how normal legal minds think.
NDH please explain the ninety FAILURES by birthers and why the SCOTUS has turned down at least ten cert requests. Why is that?
What do you know that the ninety plantiffs and ninety judges all missed?
The IN court went out of their way to squash the two parent gibberish.
LOL
Why have you not file your own case?
I remember that even in the 70s, LA to New York flights were damn expensive and so were coast to coast phone calls. To fly to Europe you had to be rich. I was one of the first to take advantage of Freddie Laker’s cheap flights. Ah, the nights spent at Gatwick…
Some of the birthers responding to this article, and perhaps you, misunderstand what the article is.
The first part of article is my attempt, using my experience and the available facts, to derive the most likely workflow for certificate processing. The second part is to ask what this implies towards understanding the numbering sequence we observe in a couple of examples. The first part of the article is not an argument built to support an explanation of the numbering sequence.
It’s probably not he case that a single individual took a certificate from the incoming batch and carried it all the way through to numbering. There is also a step of abstracting statistical data that I didn’t even mention. Things were done in piles. We don’t know how far they were backed up or how big the piles were.
I challenge anyone critical of my article to come up with an equally detailed, reasoned and documented alternative, and see how well it stands up to scrutiny.
I think those folks in 1961 would have tried to be clever in reducing the inefficiency of their processes within the technological constraints of the time.
I suppose that some birthers would say out that $22K is nothing when you’re part of a conspiracy that will eventually raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a Presidential campaign. I am still waiting for an explanation of why such a conspiracy wouldn’t choose to just have Stanley Ann Obama stay in Hawii to give birth.
Libel by the doc. It has come to this.
Again, why are you mad at me for pointing out the obfuscation by Obama?
You should be mad at him for not releasing, not us. I just want transparency.
If you even knew what my educational background / level were, you would take back your pathetic attempts of ad hominem.
Obama was not born at Kapi’olani. If he were, why wouldn’t they just confirm?
There would have been absolutely no reason to even release an online image of anything if Kapi’olani just confirmed (zero privacy lost).
Proof positive, and you have no explanation except some petty saying like “Because he doesn’t have to”
And I don’t have to believe his deception, either. Go get some vinegar and water.
I’m waiting for someone to explain why a teenage girl, 8 months pregnant, would fly to Africa, to meet her new in-laws, when she could wait and go later when they could also meet their new grandchild. It defies logic. Which never stopped the birthers.
In the late sixties, a round-trip coach ticket from NY to California cost about $300. That’s $1900 in today’s dollars.
> I am still waiting for an explanation of why such a conspiracy wouldn’t choose to just have Stanley Ann Obama stay in Hawii to give birth.
As with any “good” conspiracy theory, this one also has an answer to everything and I’ve read it before on many birther sites: “If Obama really were a natural-born citizen, what would the conspiracy masterminds have to blackmail him? So they had him born in Kenya so they could pull the plug any time he turns his back on them.”
Actually, you would suppose that any conspiracy of that dimension would simply have chosen a candidate with much less “attacking space”. I mean, if he were white and a Republican, no-one would even bother asking all these questions.
The conspiracy believers somehow think that “they need something to blackmail him with” is a reasonable argument when, according to them, the conspiracy is so powerful they could get rid of anyone, US president or not, who stands in their way. It just doesn’t add up, but when did that ever happen with a conspiracy theory? 😉
Less than 12 hours now… We’re all awaiting your big news… I’m sure it’s going to be epic! 😉
“Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins”!
Doc
Certainly, that is correct. The danger with putting a scenario together like this, despite your disclaimers that it is educated speculation, is that birthers will turn this around and assume that since the “obot” Doc C said this is the way it happened they can pick at it and think that if one or more detail is wrong it is proof the Obama COLB is a forgery. We need to be clear that that the Nordyke birth certificates and certificate numbers in absolutely no way impugn the validity of the Obama COLB.
It’s like waiting for Christmas morning… What do you think Santa NdH will bring us?
I am on pins and needles with the latest “Birther” gotcha moment.
Will it be another Hollywood reporter who got overexcited and mispoke?
Will it be another law suit filed that ‘will blow the lid off of this fraud!”
Will it be an anonymous “Obama insider” telling us how Obama admits he was born on a camel outside of Mecca?
The possibilities are endless!
I can’t stand it! Why can’t tomorrow get here already? This isn’t fair. Is my clock broken….no it works.
Is it tomorrow yet? Why do we have to wait? I WANNA KNOW NOW!!!
The Birther “God of the gaps” is people were given hush money or killed to cover up the truth.
I read this site via Google Reader. If the quote of the day has a RSS feed, I’t read it too. (Hint…)
I am willing to defend any time any place, your lack of reading comprehension based on your misreading of Dr. Fukino’s statement.
You might try disclosing your “educational background / level” and see if it has any effect. Bragging about a secret doesn’t impress anyone.
I tell you what. Why don’t you provide us with an exact quote and link to “Fukino’s last statement” and we’ll grade you on your reading comprehension. It must be a link to a primary source, not some paraphrase on Free Republic. Then we’ll see if Fukino said that Obama doesn’t have a birth certificate.
Just a thanks to Doc for this thread (and blog in general.)
I do come here purely for entertainment.
While I’m not a lawyer, I am still a professional with over 35 years experience.
(electrical and mechanical engineering.)
Birtherism and their adherents therefore fascinate me because I otherwise operate in a logical, factual and rule-bound discipline.
Unfortunately I’m also a disabled engineer and subject to the effects of various medications.
So if I write something nonsensical or bizarre, please just ignore or humor me.
I’m not always completely lucid.
But I am appreciative.
So thanks again to Doc and the many other excellent members I’ve enjoyed reading posts from here.
I’ve never found any government office to be particularly “clever” when it comes to reducing inefficiency.
Also it’s not particularly helpful to alphabetize a stack of documents when you’ve got a continuous in-flow — it just adds one more task and doing an alphabetical sort is no small task if you have a pile of 100’s of documents. It makes more sense to process each document in whatever order it reaches the desk, assign a certificate number, type up a set of duplicate index cards to track the document (one card for the date sort, one card for the name sort, and possibly one additional card for a numerical sort, though perhaps the log book suffices for that) — and then file away the original doc.
There is no particular need to explain why Obama’s number is very close to the Nordyke number — we know that the births took place near the same time. Even if there were 500 births that week, the odds of Obama’s certificate being within 5 spots of Nordyke’s are no different than the odds of the certificate being 50 or 100 or 499 spots away. It’s random. Obama’s is going to have whatever number he gets within the set of numbers assigned within that time frame. The Nordyke’s certificates are sequential because their certificates were probably clipped together so as to keep them together for processing.
So the point is,, you don’t *need* to explain the order. It’s random, but it comes from within a given set.
If the certificate number is used for tracking purposes, then the certificate number has to be assigned FIRST, as soon as the document comes into the office, before anything else is done (indexing, abstracting, etc.) — otherwise the number would be useless for tracking — and if it is not used for tracking, then why have it?
So logically a bunch of docs get stuck into a bin. Some employee comes along, grabs the docs out of the bin, and stamps each one with a number, possibly also entering number, name & date of birth in a log book as part of the process. Then the now-stamped certificates put in the next bin for the next stage of processing. (Abstracting data, creation of index cards, microfilming/creation of computer punch cards as technology advances) No particular reason to carry one doc through the entire process. But the number has to be assigned at the beginning of the process that takes place within the registrar’s office, not the end — as it needs to be on the certificate before any of the reset of the processing can take place.
Again, in no particular order. The docs are in a bin, the employee is going to grab a stack and start stamping from the top down.
I don’t think the # can be assigned until all the info is verified. After that, though, your process would make sense. What say you, Doc?
Yes its just a number used to identify the records, there is no information contained in the number itself. duh…The DoH has the birthdate and time of day if they want to sort the records later. Its just a control method. The sequence does not matter.
Also the birthers should get other BCs from the same period and see how it all works.
Then again they’d be simply confirming the birth in Hawaii.
Idiots.
I want a miniature horse, and a place in the country to ride him.
I truly hope Obama ignoring your ilk makes you miserable.
===================================================================
Your steps are fine except for the claim that daily batches were received by the DoH office and then kept until the end of the week.
First of all there is no evidence that daily batches were sent – Okubo mentioned weekly transfers. Few days ago somebody on this blog posted a link to a document describing the DoH policy – it mentioned weekly transfers.
If, for the sake of argument, we accept that daily batches were sent from Kapiolani, it would then make sense that those records were processed the same day rather than waiting in a pile until the end of the week.
Why would they have a process forcing local registrar to send data on a daily basis when weekly transfer would suffice?
That is the inconsistency in your argument.
In addition this issue should not be looked at in isolation. It is a fact that Abercrombie can release the full birth registration index data any time he wants. He explicitly said that he wanted to end the speculation about Obama’s birthplace. Then he stopped talking about the issue – why did he accept to look like a fool when he can at least release the birth registration index data?
Perhaps (s)he referrs to the new information on Donofrio’s blog:
http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/shame-on-the-state-department-the-mario-marroquin-story-how-war-veterans-and-other-citizens-born-in-a-house-are-denied-passorts-despite-having-birth-certificates
State Department does not honor all long form birth certificates when it comes to issuing passports.
It’s called protection against fraud. I thought you people were all for that.
> Perhaps (s)he referrs to the new information on Donofrio’s blog
Wouldn’t that just expose the birthers’ hypocrisy and not, as they allege, the government’s?
After all, it was the state birther bills that called for “proven hospital birth”. And now they’re whining if that is demanded in other situations? Would they accept Obama in case of a home birth with only the mother as witness? I don’t think so, Tim.
What a pathetic, puerile, pointless piece of poo…
Has Leo spent all this time to come up with this lame false equivalency? And to use veterans denied passports (I’m guessing due to policy changes following 9/11…) to lend credibility to his straw man is pretty low, in my opinion.
Epic, indeed – epic fail.
Which speaks to what I said about it would be easier to commit fraud with the so-called long form from 1961 as it’s much easier to fake than the newer security enhanced short forms.
I’m dying from the suspense too. Another one of those supposed birther gotcha moments. Maybe he’s going to trot out Polarik’s new photoshopping techniques to try to say something is wrong with the short form.
Could you explain what you think is the security enhancement?
Sure, that is exactly what state laws are supposed to do in future presidential elections – protect against fraudulent candidates running for POTUS.
Who is whining about proposed state laws asking for submission of the original birth certificate (including hospital name and attending physician signature) when running for US presidency?
Obama supporters argue that such laws are unconstitutional. Yet the State Department is free to ask for such documents from ordinary citizens to prove their status.
It is also very interesting that State Department will not take all COLBs from California and Texas at face value – additional information may be requested.
This is my reply to Donofrio’s article posted on his blog:
I hope he gets to Peru. It’s a great destination.
I’m saying that it would be easier to fake the long form as opposed to the form nowadays with the seal and security paper.
Which I (and I suspect many others) would say is unConstitutional (in my opinion). I’m guessing that this is one of the many Constitutional rights lost in the wake of 9/11 – the Bush administration doing al-Qaeda’s job for them – I hope Leo takes Doc’s suggestion to represent Mr. Marroquin pro bono. If one of the states says it’s good enough then the Constitution says it’s good enough as far as I’m concerned – that goes for Mr. Marroquin and President Obama. Why do you seem to think that there is an inconsistency in the obot postion?
Some time ago NBC’s site and maybe this site also, documented that there are some new fields that have been added to the right side of the COLB. Maybe that is what NdH is talking about.
Slartibartfast, it’s not unconstitutional for the Federal Government to set standards and what they will and will not accept. That is given in the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution (2nd Sentence): “And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.”
What is unconstitutional is for a State go go off on it’s own and say, “You know, this document that the State of Hawaii and the Federal Government says is adequate, we’re going to say that it’s not adequate and force the state to produce another document.” That’s where the Full Faith and Credit Clause takes effect. If the Federal Government says that it’s not adequate, than that is within their powers, and the states can follow the Federal Government’s lead. However, if the Federal Government says that it is adequate (as they have done with the Hawaii COLB), then the States must accept it.
Thanks for clarifying – I forgot that the federal government isn’t bound by the ‘Full Faith and Credit’ clause. They have to accept the COLB because it meets the federal definition of a birth certificate. I’m guessing that Leo’s veterans’ birth certificates do not meet this standard – in which case the government is acting Constitutionally, but, in my opinion, this just implies that the standard should be changed.
“My own disabled veteran father was born in a house and his birth was not registered until he was an adult. Nevertheless”
.
I was born at home and did not have a birth certificate, my baptism certifice got me in to the Marines, that’s all I had. When I applied for a passport at age 36 my baptism cert was turned down, I needed a state issued birth certificate. It took over 6 moths for me to get a delayed birth certificaate from Illinois, it seemed impossible till I got my neice from Hawaii involved, she works for dept of State, after she and her boss got involved I got my delayed BC in 2 wks, the priest who baptised me was still alive, plus I got affidavits from 9 people (6 related) This was really hard. . (i.e. big hassle, my right arm is still raised)
.
my daughter born in Hawaii in 1965 tried to use her long form hospital birth certificate to get a passport, no go, she needed a state issued BC, she got a COLB and the passport.
The standard, according to the State Department Passport application is a birth certificate filed within 1 year of birth, having certain information (it may be more complicated than that, but I don’t know). My gut is that none of these people had birth certificates filed within 1 year of birth.
My favorite is that Leo says it’s a red flag to have a birth certificate filed only a few days after the birth is a giant red flag…
While these examples are a clear example of what is wrong with bureaucracies, it should be pointed out that Mr. Marroquin applied for a passport in 2000. It is a little disingenuous of Leo to blame the Obama State Department without a mention of the Clinton and Bush State Departments.
“I’ll give you a hint. It’s about what you don’t see on Obama’s COLB and why that information has been deemed relevant.”
.
why is it when tomorrow comes, these people and their claims are absent? ALWAYS ABSENT!
Just ‘a little disingenuous’? Considering that his entire point is to (falsely) assert that President Obama is somehow using a double standard, I’d say his failure to mention the prior two administrations is a pretty much an egregious lie (unless Leo is far less intelligent than I think he is…)
If the birthers were intellectually honest (and I had a unicorn farted rainbows and crapped gold – just checking…) they would at least try to find out what the normal interval between birth and filing was before raising this issue. Without some kind of control, all of their research and examples are pretty much pointless.
I all fairness to NdH, I did ban him. However, if he had tried to post this mysterious piece of missing information, I would have published it.
Dr. Conspiracy, at February 21, 2011 at 6:11, said he had posted a reply at Leo’s site, but it was not on the site when I just checked.
nc1, on February 21, 2011 at 6:02 pm, said “Obama supporters argue that such laws are unconstitutional. Yet the State Department is free to ask for such documents from ordinary citizens to prove their status.”
I hope nc1 realizes by now that the State Department is mandated by federal law to accept only birth certificates issued by government agencies or custodians.
All comments posted at Donofrio’s site require his approval before they appear.
More than 24 hours have passed, yet no blockbuster from NdH. I guess I can go to bed now.
“yet no blockbuster from NdH”
.
if I had a dollar for every birther OMG blockbuster that prove true, I would have no money at all.
What did he do to get banned?
No, the certificate number is not a verification of authenticity — it’s just a number assigned to track the document. As soon as the document is delivered to the registrar’s office, they are responsible for keeping track of it. That’s why I think, with 1960’s technology, the most logical thing first step is to stamp a certificate number on the document and then make an entry in a ledger book, along with data such as name and date of birth.
If there is a problem with a particular document — it’s filled out improperly and has to be resubmitted — then that particular number could be voided out, and a note made in the ledger book. But that would be a fairly rare situation.
The problem with waiting before assigning the number is then a document could get mislaid, and there would be no way of even knowing that it was missing. That is, there would be no audit trail because some documents would be floating around without a record of having ever existed.
This might be what NdH was talking about.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2678076/posts
Wow – nothing but the same long-debunked crap from Polarik – he’s not even trying anymore…
And alot of the FR denizens aren’t buying it either.
But I love the ones who swallow it hook line and sinker, They are just absolutely sure this is the smoking gun.
It looks like the freepers over at FR are using the discredited nonsense of the infamous “dragginhg canoe” as some sort of evidence that the founders relied on Vattel….The blind leading the blind…
http://s870.photobucket.com/albums/ab264/Dragging_Canoe/?action=view¤t=ScreenHunter_04Nov210812.gif
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2678076/posts?q=1&;page=101
I never looked at mine with a magnifying glass. It’s been taken in and out of the Envelope often enough to be pretty worn. I have always thought it looked like mine, but I never examined it closely in extreme detail. I would not be able to say anyway with out barry’s to compare it to. Side by side.
I have believed for some time that Barry was born in Hawaii, but there is realistic reasons to doubt that, so I put it at 70%. He does have the ability to get a Hawaiian COLB, but so did anyone IN Hawaii regardless of where they were from, and hawaii made it EASY to register a foreign born baby, those are two separate issues there.
Honestly, I don’t think he is a Natural Born Citizen. Not because of where he was born, but because of who he was born TO. The son of a British man can NEVER be born a Natural Born Citizen unless his father became a naturalized citizen before the birth.
Two parents who are citizens and born on the soil of their nation. We do not have a constitutional government as long as that criminal remains the apparent head of state.
200 posted on Wednesday, February 23, 2011 10:36:20 AM by Danae
Ahh good old Danae repeating the same old crap from last year. At least she’s no longer claiming anyone from Hawaii can get a Certified Long Form certificate anymore. She quickly got off the COLB when that’s what Hawaii sent her.
Thanks.
If I had actually read the CDC flowchart which was included in a sub-link of your main post, I would have never made such a bone-headed suggestion.
Is this true?
If so, wouldn’t it suggest that reports which had been delayed for whatever reason (i.e. unavailability of doctor for signature) may have been subject to some kind of policy that would expedite their processing in order to meet the deadline and possibly make them not a part of the normal batching process?
I’m curious where you little red bow is?
Now that you have accounted for every little detail and tied up all the loose ends, seems you forgot to put a little red bow on it.
Your contrivances are all fine and good, except we are talking years ago – in Hawaii no less. A state that had just become a state, that was not connected to the mainland, where I would imagine they continued to do things ‘the way they had always been done’ for years. I mean, even to day, Hawaii does not wish to be a state in the United States.
Unless you can talk to and garner insight from an employee that worked there during that time frame – it’s all speculation at best….and in all likelihood, has no resemblance of the actual events I’m not disputing the end results – only the method by which you have dreamed up at arriving at them..
Do you even read what you write?
> where I would imagine
and then
> it’s all speculation at best
? Besides, the latter pretty much sums up the birthers’ conspiracy theories about Obama’s mother flying pregnant to Kenya or whatnot.
> I mean, even to day, Hawaii does not wish to be a state in the United States.
And that ridiculous statement should somehow explain that “everything Hawaii did 50 years ago is not to be trusted”?
That’s the same stupid argument I read from the 9/11 truthers. They keep flogging the “a couple of goat-herders and cave-dwellers” meme as if the terrorists all had an IQ of 20 when any second-rate Hollywood script writer could have come up with the 9/11 plan. (That’s what really scares the conspiracy nutters – it’s not rocket science, most anyone could have done it. But dreaming up a conspiracy theory that requires the resources of FBI, CIA, NSA and Mossad to pull off 9/11 of course placates these fears.)
I’m not calling you racist here, but the “Hawaii can’t be trusted, they* don’t even want to be a state” is simply outlandish and childish at the same time.
*) Who is “they” anyway? How does a legal entity “not wish to be” something?
Birthers have zero respect for U.S. law and the Constitution and another birther just proved it once again.
we should keep our eye on texas.