Thread: President Obama News Thread

^ Look under "country of birth"

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

^ Look under "country of birth"

it says county of birth, not country of birth.

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

^ Look under "country of birth"

What does it say?

Honolulu.

Originally Posted by Norton

Honolulu.

Under "county" I believe.

As usual, we don't know if the birth certificate is even real.

This is still a dead issue, IMO.

yes, still many questions, it seems this potentially raises more than it answers..

Originally Posted by Milkman

Under "county" I believe.

Indeed. Occasionally Jettie reads things a wee bit different than most. In this case, a minor infraction not noticing the absence of the 'r'.

Oops. Didn't have my lens in. 555 No, the letters were smucked. OK, erm, is Honolulu a county? I thought it was a resort town.

Originally Posted by Milkman

As usual, we don't know if the birth certificate is even real.

Ah hah, Watson. We don't even know if it's real! Is that the Honolulu one or the Kenyan one?

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

I want to talk about those two chickies released from N Korea. If they were captured at the border, and were in prison, how come they have major pieces of luggage to bring home? Carrying souvenirs, a baby, food?

Reckon they travelled into China with just the clothes on their backs?
One of them is a videographer - stands to reason she would have been carrying equipment.

Originally Posted by Milkman

Originally Posted by Jet Gorgon

Originally Posted by Milkman

As usual, we don't know if the birth certificate is even real.

Ah hah, Watson. We don't even know if it's real! Is that the Honolulu one or the Kenyan one?

His birth certificate (no, not the long form) is sealed in Honolulu, because of the bru-ha-ha.

Lots of fake stories on this.

Quite foolish, IMO. If he wasn't born in Hawaii, the political opposition would have dug it up during the campaign, IMO.

Dead story.

not them directly as they wouldn't do that since McCain was outwardly trying to run a non divisive campaign for lack of a better word, but it was brought up by the supporters of his campaign.. that's why this copy has a 2007 date stamp on it..

Originally Posted by DrivingForce

McCain was outwardly trying to run a non divisive campaign

Where was McCain born?

ok slick, but that was on a military base.. exempt N/A

Another take:

Born in the U.S.A.
August 21, 2008
Updated: November 1, 2008
The truth about Obama's birth certificate.
Summary
In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake."

We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.

Update, Nov. 1: The director of Hawaii’s Department of Health confirmed Oct. 31 that Obama was born in Honolulu.

Analysis
Update Nov. 1: The Associated Press quoted Chiyome Fukino as saying that both she and the registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, have personally verified that the health department holds Obama's original birth certificate.

Fukino also was quoted by several other news organizations. The Honolulu Advertiser quoted Fukino as saying the agency had been bombarded by requests, and that the registrar of statistics had even been called in at home in the middle of the night.

Honolulu Advertiser, Nov. 1 2008: "This has gotten ridiculous," state health director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said yesterday. "There are plenty of other, important things to focus on, like the economy, taxes, energy." . . . Will this be enough to quiet the doubters? "I hope so," Fukino said. "We need to get some work done."

Fukino said she has “personally seen and verified that the Hawaii State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures."

Since we first the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.

Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?
Doocy: What do you mean they have a "false birth certificate" on their Web site?
Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.
Doocy: Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?
Corsi: No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.

Corsi isn't the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:

• The birth certificate doesn't have a raised seal.
• It isn't signed.
• No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
  
• In the zoomed-in view, there's a strange halo around the letters.
• The certificate number is blacked out.
• The date bleeding through from the back seems to say "2007," but the document wasn't released until 2008.
• The document is a "certification of birth," not a "certificate of birth."
  

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it's stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller

Alvin T. Onaka's signature stamp

The raised seal

Blowup of text

You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven't been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.

The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records." The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.

The document is a "certification of birth," also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that's when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and "all the records we could get our hands on" according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn't release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama's citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: "[We] couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world." The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641.

Blowup of certificate number

Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama's information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn't have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible "scenario" without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.

We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn't meet the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural-born citizen."

We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: "It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over."
In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:

Obama's birth announcement

The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama "likely" was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.

Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn't tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama's father's race listed as "African"? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father's race and mother's race are supplied by the parents, and that "we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be." We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as "African." It's certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be.

When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said "The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised." He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for "all reasonable purposes."

–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller
Sources
United States Department of State. "Application for a U.S. Passport." Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.

State of Hawaii Department of Health. "Request for Certified Copy of Birth Record." Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.

Hollyfield, Amy. "Obama's Birth Certificate: Final Chapter." Politifact.com. 27 Jun. 2008.

The Associated Press. "State declares Obama birth certificate genuine" 31 Oct 2008.

Nakaso, Dan. "Obama's certificate of birth OK, state says; Health director issues voucher in response to 'ridiculous' barrage" Honolulu Advertiser 1 Nov 2008.

Originally Posted by slackula

Also, the whole "socialism" thing; none of them complain about socialised police, fire dept, road building etc. In comparison to most of the rest of the world Obama is a center-right corporatist.

Exactly. Or the FAA, FCC, FDA etc.

complete morons.

Originally Posted by slackula

none of them complain about socialised police, fire dept, road building etc.

I say privatize the military!

Oops too late. Someone went and done it already.

10 civilian contractors for every military person all adding to big increases in costs having private business doing what could be done just as well by military personnel. Even have civilian cooks feeding the troops.

Originally Posted by Norton

Oops too late. Someone went and done it already.

Funny that, in some ways the military is the most "socialist" of all institutions: Govt. funded medical care, promotion based on time served rather than merit etc. An interesting dilemma for the right wing to be sure.

Hell, even Iraqi citizens get universal med care since the invasion! But that's supposed to be a Good Thing, for US citizens it's a Socialist nightmare or something..

^ In the old days, and even now in many small communities, the fire depts were voluntary. I wouldn't call any of these services where folks are govt employees "socialist" services. Part of the govt's role, just like Immigration, CIA, FBI -- keeping the country's citizens safe.

Originally Posted by Norton

Even have civilian cooks feeding the troops.

The Canuck soldiers have Timmy Horton's. Mind, that was bought out by a US firm.

Originally Posted by slackula

Originally Posted by Norton

Oops too late. Someone went and done it already.

Funny that, in some ways the military is the most "socialist" of all institutions: Govt. funded medical care, promotion based on time served rather than merit etc. An interesting dilemma for the right wing to be sure.

The military is a socialist monopoly. And a very expensive one when you add the Pentagon budget, and the Military-Industrial Complex corporations.

^ Funny, Congress just passed a defense bill with $2 or $3 mil for three Gulfstream jets -- for use by Congress.
You're right, the military is socialist.

Here ya go:

Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator - Make your own! Invalidating legitimate presidencies since 2009!