I had a nice vacation in Virginia the this week, and I took lots of photos. One of my favorites is this one:
It encapsulates a conversation that I had with Ms. Conspiracy about whether the birther business was winding down. It certainly has wound down since an unrepentant Donald Trump took credit for the “long-awaited” release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate, and promptly dropped off the credible list of presidential hopefuls, and as Barack Obama hoped, the news media is finally covering the budget as its lead story.
By rights, the birther business should be over, but there are a group of dedicated partisans spending time trying to come up with ways to energize their base and keep their conspiracy theories before the public. Expecting it to go away would be nothing more than wishful thinking.
Birtherism is definitely waning. With the exception of Taitz (and her desire to lose even more court cases), birtherism has been reduced to whiny rants on vanity blogs and writing to officials whiny letters that get promptly ignored.
But, in 2012, there’ll be new lawsuits, new outrageous allegations, new claims of “any day now,” etc.
I wouldn’t buy that house.
The deed is obviously forged.
Ahem.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20077587-503544.html
“Three months after President Obama moved to end what he described as “the silliness” of the controversy over his birth certificate, the issue is back.
But this time it is the Democratic National Committee raising the issue in a pitch for campaign money.”
LOL! Good for them! Serves the Birthers right if their hate-based sore-loserism only results in raising more money to get Obama and more Democrats re-elected. Obama’s sale of the Born in the USA mugs & t-shirts with his LFBC posted on it was a brilliant marketing tactic by his campaign too.
Also, raising money in this way, off of reminding people of slights they’ve been subject to is nothing new and is done by nearly all fundraising campaigns.
Heh, it was a trailer.
Now why isn’t that surprising.
Personally, I think Google trends is the most compelling evidence of the death of birtherism. Well, that, and the WTBC? firesale at WND.
Well, it hasn’t gona away for the TPers:
“Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation is taking a stand for the Birther movement, months after President Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate to quash discredited claims that he was born outside of the U.S. Naturally, conspiracy theorists were not satisfied by evidence, and the president of one of the country’s leading tea party groups still doubts President Obama’s citizenship. In a column sent to Tea Party Nation members praising Orly Taitz, the fanatical birther activist who has floated armed rebellion against Obama and is now embarking on yet another lawsuit based on research from the birther website World Net Daily, Phillips writes that Taitz should receive an award from the American Bar Association for her campaign to prove that Obama isn’t eligible to serve as president, suggesting she may ‘deserve a place among the great lawyers of this country.'” (http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-party-nation-goes-birther)
I wish I could make this stuff up ….
LOL! Well, as they say, “stupid is as stupid does!”. I see in Judson Phillips rant that he’s under the wishful fantasy that if you only remove Obama, the past 3 years and every decision he made “magically goes away”.
Too bad for him that it would never work that way. If you remove the President, the past 3 years still happened and all of the decisions, bills, Supreme Court appointments, etc. are just as real tomorrow as they were yesterday…
It just astounds me how certain people actually trick themselves into believing the “make believe” pretend fantasies in their own head. Just how do they manage to function in the real world on a daily basis with that delusional minset without turning themselves into Darwin Awards recipient??? Now that is the million dollar question!
Even Mario is making it up. And he even cites from Dr. C.
http://puzo1.blogspot.com/2011/07/democratic-national-committee-uses.html
“what Dr. Conspiracy and the DNC fail to understand is that the DNC has committed a monumental mistake. They are soliciting from the public political contributions based on a forged government document. This is clearly fraud of great proportions.”
Now that is really funny. What’s he going to do, take a federal grand jury hostage until they indict Obama or issue a subpoena for his birth certificate? 🙄
AKA tornado magnet.
I’m a “Truther”……I’m not a Republican, and I’m no Birther, but Stevie Wonder could see the Birth Certificate released by the White House in April of this year, is a really bad attempt to make it look authentic. Have you looked at it? Even in Adobe Reader (Just like it opens up from the WH website) you can see abnormalities. Why are thousands upon thousands of software experts proving it’s doctored, but ZERO are proving it’s real?
I’m no expert, but I know enough to tell a fraud when I see it. Open it up in Adobe Illistrator, or Inkscape, and you will see it has layers. Scanned document NEVER have layers. These layers show editing………… Either Obama is a total idiot, or somebody is out to set him up. You can’t claim it’s real if you haven’t even attempoted to study it. That would make you look like the idiot!
Please just take time to look at it…….. Let me know what you find. The truth shall set you free!
Sorry chap, but I had a look at your blog. Anyone who beleves the “BC is false” nonsnese, who believes the Vattelite nonsense and who hates Rachel Maddow is a birther. You are a birther.
Whether you are also a truther is for Phil Berg to decide. He has the copyright to that theory.
Any Hawaiians playing soccer on your team?
Why would the state of Hawaii forge their own certified document?
You’re 100% a birther and in heavy denial.
Thousands upon thousands?
Either you’re a total idiot or slinging asinine hyperbole is a cheap excuse for your own bigotry and confessed ignorance.
Great lawyers win cases every now and then.
Thousands ? Hahahahaha Try a handful of “self-described” experts.
Layers – try talking to a real expert – someone who was recognized as an expert before the COLB was released in 2007.
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/428-After-Birth.html&comment-submitted
I’m not talking about the COLB of 2007, I’m talking about the document the White House put out in April of 2011. A handful of “Self-Described” Experts include one of the worlds most knowledgeable Adobe Experts, Mara Zebest. Google her name and you’ll see she has authored many books on Adobe Software.
You can claim it’s real all you want without looking at it, but if you looked at it with Adobe Illistrator or Inkscape (one of these programs was used to edit it) you will see the forgery. Helen Keller could see it’s a fake! Why did it take 3 years to get released?
I go into more detail, and even show you how to look at it here…. Try it for yourself, unless you’re affraid of the results!
http://coachsemanko.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/bc/
@ Paul, Yes as a matter of fact I have 2 players with Hawaiian decent. Thanks for asking!
Which document did they show you when joining?
Hogwash. Mara Zebest has no experience with PDFs. If I want to make a nice digital image I’ll look to Zebest. She however; is no document examiner. Are you talking about the layers again? Do you notice something about them? If you hide certain layers like say the foreground and look behind them. The background is not continuous. If this was forged someone would have made the layers and it would not end up with broken patches when you hide certain layers. This instead denotes that the compression algorithm separated certain parts into layers.
No it was not. By the way, googling for Adobe Illistrator did not only take me to the video you put on Youtube, but also to
http://www.ecombase.de/PRO-RC-PANZER//0/tag/obama%20birth%20certificate%20fake.html
You’ve got nice friends. Warn them that Germany still has a lese majeste law, which punishes those who slander the head of state of a friendly nation with prison sentences.
It does not really matter that Mara Zebest is a known birther and not an expert in what is being discussed here, because the PDF that the White House released, has nothing to do with Adobe. It was not even created on a Windows PC.
The only thing that counts is the actual two copies that Obama had made and certified by Hawaii state, not the PDF scan of one of them, and various journalists (including one that worked for WND at the time) were allowed to have a good look and one was even allowed to touch it.
You have no case. You may still have one in Berlin
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k91fmvQxRw
(I just wanted to post some video more relevant than yours)
but you will not like the contents.
Well I’ll agree to disagree, because you are never going to beleive any different, your mind is made up. I do know that a “scanned” document does not have layers, no matter what format it is saved in………… Obamas BC downloaded from http://www.whitehouse.gov has 9 layers.
I would love to see an adobe expert, or even somebody with enough knowledge to debunk the BC “Frauders”. And yes I know it was created on a Mac. And you just said the magic word in your comment above…. “CREATED”.
Not an expert in PDF’s. And Dr. Krawetz said this about Adobe software and the LFBC,
“False claim #2: The PDf was created with an Adobe tool. Some false claims say Photoshop, while others say Adobe Illustrator or some other Adobe program. The truth is seen in the PDF meta data (object IDs 36 0, 33 0, and 1 0): it was created using Apple Preview on a Mac OS X 10.6.7 system. The PDF encoder was “Mac OS X 10.6.7 Quartz PDFContext” (that’s the back-end system library on a Mac). No Adobe front-end application was used to create this document.”
Still does not explain the layers, no matter what program you open it with.
A scanned document does not have layers.
And why was it “Created”? All that needed to be done was a scan of the “Original Document”. Nothing should have been “Created”.
“In the land of the blind the one-eyed`man is king.”
If you read the Adobe manual (look for “Adaptive”) and not WorldNetDaily, you would know better.
To quote the real expert, Dr Krawetz, ” people who think that a segmented image equates to tampering clearly do not know how PDF documents work.” Quite simply, you are wrong, and you don’t know how PDF documents work.
And what exactly do you think happens when you scan the original document? You “create” a PDF document. Seriously, are you intentionally trying to seem dense?
All PDF documents are “created.” That’s the term used in PDF documentation for making a PDF. You might (stupidly) object to the document being a PDF, but given that it is a PDF, it had to be created because PDFs do not spontaneously come into being devoid of human agency, just as the crank analyses of the PDF on YouTube were “created”. Only the White House PDF is true and its detractors are not.
You gave me a thought there. The birthers should sue Obama in a British court, since they believe British law determines who is a natural born US citizen.
Well if you call a scanned document “Created” then you’d be right, but that’s not what I meant. You are changing the meaning of what I said.(@ Jozeppy)
So let’s call a scanned document a “Copy” because that’s exactly what it is. A “Copy” will not have layers, would not show the background, would have the words “Void” or “Copy” in a watermark, and would show the seal of Hawaii. Obama’s is the oppisite of all these.
All that needed to be done was make a copy (Scan) save it as whatever, in this case PDF, and send it or post it.
Even with OCR (optical character recognition) a simple scan will not have layers. So at the very least it’s “Fishy”. Even just opening it up in Adobe Reader you can tell it’s been edited. You can’t tell me you opened it up (in Adobe Reader), zoomed in at 400% or more, and didn’t see anything funny.
Sorry Paul, I didn’t see your question about what documents my players showed me. Both of the players born in Hawaii showed me a Real BC, you know, the ones with foot prints. I’d say about 70% of the BC’s I get are that way. The others are from people who lost their original, and had to send for a copy…. Like the one Obama supposedly had to send for. What they get back depends on what state they were born in. Some are actually copies, some are COLB’s.
Tea Partiers such as Judson Phillips don’t realize that if their fantasies came true, it would mean that the Bush tax cuts expired on December 31 and everyone’s taxes are immediately going up.
Thanks for confirming that you are a liar. Hawaii birth certificates don’t have footprints, and never have had footprints.
Why are thousands upon thousands of software experts proving it’s doctored.
“Thousands upon thousands?” I count five people who say that they are experts and not one of them is a Board Certified Forensic Document Examiner from the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners. Those are the experts who are qualified to testify in a court of law about the authenticity of a document.
Furthermore, why hasn’t any of the so-called experts examined a copy of the ORIGINAL Certificate of Live Birth that resides at the Hawaii Department of Health? If you wanted to prove that a twenty dollar bill was counterfeit, would you examine scanned and photocopied images of the twenty dollar bill or would you want to hold the twenty in your hand for your analysis?
Every new generation of reproduction of a document introduces its own set of artifacts to the original.
In short, none of the youtube analyses would hold up as “expert” in a court of law and the most telling fact is that none of the “expert” analyses has been submitted to a law enforcement agency or a prosecuting attorney to see if it stands up to scrutiny as a possible precusor to a charge of felony document forgery.
If anyone really, truly, honestly just MUST examine Barack Hussein Obama II’s long form Certification of Live Birth, they need to go to their friendly, neighborhood judge and get him or her to issue a court order for that document and with a cour order from a judge, the state of Hawaii will issue a certified copy of the original for REAL forensic examination by a certified EXPERT.
The Coach has fallen for the hype.
The Coach also came here under false pretenses, claiming “I’m no birther.” But if you check out his blog, you’ll see that he has fallen for every birther lie, including the “two citizen parent requirement” to be a natural-born citizen.
http://coachsemanko.wordpress.com/
Not surprisingly, he frequently posts articles from WND on his blog.
A copy created using OCR would in fact have layers if the tool used optimizes for size. Furthermore, the ‘void’ or ‘copy’ showing up in copied, not ocr’ed documents is not a requirement and finally, the raised seal of Hawaii shows up.
Your problem is that you are extrapolating from a few examples with which you are familiar to what Hawaiian birth certificates look like. And finally, a hospital novelty certificate with footprints is not really acceptable as it has no official value. And finally, the parents are not given an original but rather a copy of the original. The original is archived.
Show us a state which adds footprints to its official birth certificate. So far your ‘expertise’ on these matters appears somewhat superficial,which is the same for these other self professed ‘experts’.
Well, if you start with a source like WND then you deserve to look foolish for accepting their ignorance as fact.
I doubt that our ‘coach’ could defend much of any of these positions.
The coach makes claims about this Hawaiian birth certificate showing void and other security features but we know that none of these features so far have been found in the various Hawaiian forms that have been provided, including President Obama’s.
So I am calling the ‘coach’s bluff and would encourage him to provide some supporting evidence.
Thanks for confirming that you are a liar. Hawaii birth certificates don’t have footprints, and never have had footprints.
“Coach” has proven himself to be a liar and a fraud. Case closed.
I suppose that folks could be giving him hospital souvenir certificates instead of the legal ones from the state. It’s not like they are running for President, so the hospital souvenirs are a reasonable substitute.
If indeed you are seeing “birth certificates” with footprints on them, they are undoubtedly hospital certicates, and you will see the lack of any state certification on them, only that of the hospital. These are called “souvenirs” in the industry. They are not legal documents and are not valid for things like getting a passport, drivers license or a social security card.
What you are describing as something folks get when they “lost their original” is actually the only legal birth certificate. A legal birth certificate must be issued by a jurisdiction, not a hospital.
Hospital certificates are used as “secondary evidence” along with other contemporary records when the birth wasn’t registered at the time of birth.
I suggest you visit the US State Department web site and read up on what is a legal birth certificate, and then check up on the section about “secondary evidence.”
http://travel.state.gov/passport/get/first/first_830.html
I was going to suggest that by learning the facts you could prevent making a fool of yourself, but then if you had the facts, the birthers would call you a fool, so maybe ignorance is bliss.
When a PDF is saved from the Scan (Preview on a Mac) the PDF is “created” with layers.
I scanned a document myself using Adobe Acrobat Standard, and I got layers. I didn’t do anything to get the layers, they were just there when I opened the PDF.
So don’t tell me that scanning a document to PDF doesn’t create layers, because I tried it myself and I saw the layers. All you know how to do, apparently, is repeat the stupidity of others.
There are a number of copies of Hawaiian birth certificates on the Internet and none of them have the words “Void” or “Copy” on them. Hawaii just doesn’t use that particular security feature on their paper. As for the seal, it’s visible if you look carefully.
My Alabama certificate shows “void” (when printed), but that’s just how the Alabama paper is. The seal, however, is not visible in a scan.
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/DocC_BC.jpg
And he hates Rachel Maddow. (you posted his blog address, but I want Rachel to win the google fight against that one)
Well, Orly’s former lawyer. Mr Levy, distinguished member of the government-in-exile of Cabinda and Taft alumnus, once on the Fogbow threatened to sue Obots for diffamation in a British court, and Orly is still sending copies of her suits to The Hague and Geneva, something he probably advised her to do (Mr Levy speaks a fair bit of Russian, so Orly for once understood what she was being told).
The rationale behind that madness is “since the USA is at war, supporting an illegal President constitutes a war crime, punishable by International Courts.”
Of course, Orly and her supporters would be the first to protest if Obama were to accept the authority of those international courts. And when Lakin was being tried, the same people conveniently forgot that “the USA is at war”.
No, actually you were trying to change the meaning of what everyone else said and imply something nefarious with the common usage of the word “create” when saying what software was used to create the pdf.
Anybody doubting the use of the word “create” in the context being discussed here can simply use their favorite search engine to search on the term “create pdf files” and read to their heart’s content.
Hmm … “many books” … “one of the worlds most knowledgeable Adobe Experts” … Let’s take a look. Over at Amazon her name shows up as a contributing author and editor on four Adobe books from the Photoshop 6/7 era roughly a decade ago. According to one author blurb she is a “graphic artist” who “design[s] brochures, newspaper and magazine ads.” Nothing at all about PDFs, OCR, optimization algorithms, forensic document examination, or anything at all that would suggest anything remotely like expertise in any field reemotely related to forgery detection. Your “world’s most knowledgeable Adobe Expert” is nothing more than a garden variety brochure designer.
Not to mention that said “expert” is so competent and switched on that she can’t work out how to open the file on the laptop at the Corsi/Farah Usurperthon, Sue Esquire and Chicken Diner FAIL.
On the video of the whineathon, it takes her and Corsi 2 mins 34 seconds to click and open the PDF, a particularly telling example of the competence of this “expert”.
Coach completely redid his site and got rid of all the comments.
His latest entry shows his kid’s COLB with the names blacked out.
I thought the COLB didn’t prove anything.
Hmmmmmmmm.
And a PUMA birther with documented extreme biases and animosity for the POTUS.
What happened to ‘coach’? Having a hard time supporting his claims? Well, well… color me surprised.
Yeah, I did notice that, but I thought I’d be nice and give her the benefit of the doubt — like maybe someone forgot to create a desktop shortcut to the PDF.
I was more impressed with the way this “expert” unenthusiastically mumbled her way through the standard WND talking points on her way to the big finish. Something along the lines of:
“Mumble-brmp-phft-gorstblat-LAYERS!-bibble-buddle-mumsy-fwarp-RESOLUTION!-slub-drep-outgrabe-ITS-A-FAKE! Thank you very much.”
Nah, no chance at all she was coached.
I don’t birthers know to handle forums where people actually require facts instead of believing anything bad about Obama and his documentation that someone invents.
Does it have any footprints on it?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat while someone tried to fumble through starting a PowerPoint presentation, and I wanted to jump up and yell, “Hit F5.” (Of course the better way is to save it as a PPS and then you can just start it from the desktop.)
Were they having problems finding the “any” key?
Sorry no f*ing sympathy, I’ve had to present to audiences of a 500 plus of my peers and if you can’t spend 5 minutes in prep first then you stand out as an incompetent prick.
Someone who touts the myriad hundreds of publications they are supposed to have published and is lauded as a national, nay world renowned expert gets no leeway when they can’t even open the application they are basing their “expertise” on.
Not just that Steve but he claimed that the birth certificate he had wouldn’t scan correctly and said copy on the watermark. It isn’t supported by the certificate he posted.
There is no need to feel sorry for Corsi and Zebest. Only two people showed for the event, a reporter from Advertising Week and Terry Krepel from ConWebWatch. They could have held the conference in the back of a taxicab.
It’s a pdf of a COLB from Hawaii which looks just like Obama’s COLB. No footprints. No name of doctor or hospital. He also says “when you print it out on a copy machine, or a printer it does have a watermark that says Copy.”
I printed both sides of his son’s COLB on a Brother laser printer, and I don’t see any “Copy” watermark. Others are welcome to try on their printers and see if they can make out a watermark. He also makes the irrelevant point that his son’s COLB has two fold marks. He apparently has never seen the FactCheck photos of Obama’s COLB, which show two folds.
http://factcheck.org/Images/image/birth_certificate_images/birth_certificate_2.jpg
Of course, we don’t know when Obama’s COLB was folded, but we don’t know when the Semanko COLB was folded, either.
I should clarify that there is one difference in the Semanko COLB – it says “DATE ACCEPTED BY STATE REGISTRAR.” It was issued in 2003, whereas Obama’s was of course issued in 2007.
That’s a good point, but not posting it would have gone against my tendency to want to provide links to document my sources. Apparently it did send quite a few people to his site today.
No argument there. I was willing to give Zebest (not Corsi) the benefit of the doubt both on the assumption that any pre-conference preparation was Corsi’s responsibility, not hers, and because there were so many other, more relevant, points at which her presentation fell down (I didn’t bother watching the video past the end of her presentation; I don’t figure it got any better).
Bovril:
Someone who touts the myriad hundreds of publications they are supposed to have published and is lauded as a national, nay world renowned expert gets no leeway when they can’t even open the application they are basing their “expertise” on.
In Zebest’s defense, it’s the birther sites that are making up her resume, not her. On the other hand, I don’t see where she’s made much effort to correct them.
It’s amazing how fast these “experts” go from graphics designer to “world renowned Adobe authority” and author of “many” books, from scanner salesman or typographer to “document expert” (whatever that is). If I wanted to invent a resume, I think I’d just log into WND, claim the LFBC was a forgery based on my expertise in canine feces, and let the birther brain trust do the rest.
Finally, apropos of nothing, ran across his birther attempt at an analogy over at Decoded Science:
He crows about his participation here and how he single-handedly defeated all us “mentally-disordered liberals”, but he gets the name of the site wrong (“over on a Blog called Used Conspiracy Theory For Sale”) and doesn’t bother providing a linkback so his readers can see for themselves how he single-handedly brought down liberalism.
I was going to invite him back to finish our conversation, but comments aren’t working.
The Coach’s own dispay COLB does not have little footprints on it. If you blow up Onaka’ signature the stamp has a boo boo on the O, so sorry for Coach.
He also believes the site name is birth conspiracy for sale cheap. He brags about telling us all about it and we called him names.
In the rabbit hole.
Back before I came to my senses, I watched the show “Penn and Teller’s BS”. They explained once that the people they target for debunking know all about the nature of the show, and are even sent free copies of episodes of the show for them to watch before their interviews. So the subjects know what they’re getting in to. The thing is, Penn explains, they think they’re bulletproof and can overcome any criticism because up to that point they had only been exposed to softball criticism and shills, if there was any criticism at all.
To give another example of how their minds work, a Navy veteran I know posted a note on Facebook bashing Obama because he saw a story at Newsmax (or whatever) which said that Obama is “considering” an adjustment to the way the Social Security COLA is calculated. The guy made a comment along the lines of “We have to get this guy out of office. Now he wants to cut our Social Security.”
I pointed out to him that the article actually says that the adjustment is being pushed by Republicans and mentions three Republican senators by name who support it. The article doesn’t mention a single Democrat who supports it, and in fact quotes a few who oppose it. I further pointed out that “considering” is not the same as “supporting.”
His response was to go on a tirade about people who are still blaming Bush for the state of the economy.
I believe that some of those people are so blinded by hatred that they cannot think rationally when the subject is Obama.
When I posted on Coach’s site about how the state of Hawaii vouches for the document’s authenticity, his reply was something to the effect of “Do you believe everything the government tells you? Did you even read what I posted?”
Why do I need to read the document analysis when the state of Hawaii said everything I need to know about the document?
Because as I’ve said many times before, you can argue about layers and “TXE” and smiley faces all you want, it’s all meaningless if the Hawaii DOH says the document is legitimate.
Well, there’s your answer to his retort. Simply tell him that yes, you most certainly believe the official authority in charge of such matters over some random, uncredentialed anonymous blogger such as him.
“Do you believe everything the government tells you?”
Sickening birther cop-out.
How would the “Coach” feel about being accused of a felony without credible evidence?
Some of these birthers would have been right at home during the Salem witch trials.
I’ve had more than one of them tell me that when they get “their” country back, they’re going to go back to the death penalty for we Witches, just like they apparently think their Bible says to.
Pretty scary people
It appears that the appellation, “birther,” is also being put to other uses.
http://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/news/2011/07/pro-abortionist-bemoan-pro-lifers-celebrate-string-of-state-legislative-successes/
An attempt to lump together the entire conservative movement under one epithet? Seems all the pro-life conservatives were excommunicated along with Goldwater.
The designation “forced-birther” was actually in use as a derogatory term for those who favor a complete and total ban on all abortions for whatever reason… long before most people had ever heard of Barack Obama.
Here’s the DKos post by Meteor Blades (definitely not a she) that Mr. Andrusko was responding to.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/13/994233/-States-more-than-double-previous-record-for-anti-abortion-legislation-in-2011