St. Petersburgh Times Closes the Case on BHO COLB?

St. Petersburgh Times ^ | JackofHearts

[jackofhearts]

St Petersberg Times spoke with the DoH months ago.The St Petersberg Times fact checkers had running story on this back in June and actually contacted the HI DoH and were satisfied. When the birth certificate arrived from the Obama campaign it confirmed his name as the other documents already showed it. Still, we took an extra step: We e-mailed it to the Hawaii Department of Health, which maintains such records, to ask if it was real.

“It’s a valid Hawaii state birth certificate,” spokesman Janice Okubo told us.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jun/27/obamas-birth-certificate-part-ii/

[Eagles6]

They also conveniently ignore the large elephant at the tea party. Forged or not this is a “Certification of Live Birth” not a “Certificate of Live Birth”.

[OneTimeComment]

Maybe they should ask Obama why he is e-mailing a digitized image of this document to their newspaper and to a friendly web site BUT REFUSES TO SUBMIT IT TO THE COURTS, which would end all of this madness.

P.S.: They don’t teach logical thinking in journalism school.

[WOSG]

That statement is indeed weak, but wasnt the final chapter on what the State of Hawaii said. The KEY issue is whether Obama has records on file with state of Hawaii and do they match the CoLB that’s been publicly presented.

see here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2145278/posts?page=201#201

4) Now lets review the statement of the Hawaii officials:

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/17866037/detail.html

“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate. State law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record,” DOH Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said. State officials said Saturday they have personally verified that the health department holds Obama’s original birth certificate. “Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawai‘i, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawai‘i State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures,” Fukino said.

So we have state of Hawaii vouching for existence of Obama’s records. This makes the ‘CoLB is a forgery’ claim even more dubious to irrelevent.

[WOSG]

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama really was born in Hawaii and he’s just playing a game of teasing conservatives.”

I am 99% certain that is indeed the case.
Obama - a born in the USA socialist

[OneTimeComment]

Didn’t this all start with Mr. Berg, a Democrat, many months ago, not conservatives?

[WOSG]

Both are genuine. One is the long-form, the other is the short-form CoLB. One was made in 1962 and the other in 2007.

The format is not the issue. The issue is whether the CoLB that Obama shared with factcheck and others represents the data on file with the State of Hawaii. that cuts to the chase of the issue. so this statement addresses that point:

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/politics/17866037/detail.html

“There have been numerous requests for Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s official birth certificate. State law (Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §338-18) prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record,” DOH Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino said. State officials said Saturday they have personally verified that the health department holds Obama’s original birth certificate. “Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawai‘i, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawai‘i State Department of Health has Sen. Obama’s original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures,” Fukino said.

[WOSG]

AFAIK, it started with Kos throwing out an image on the net that - whether genuine or not - could have easily been manipulated/created/forged. Some people jumped to the conlcusion that it therefore was forged, since Obama hides so much of his life. I suspect that the Kos crowd doesnt mind at all if right-wingers are distracted on this conspiracy theory.

[OneTimeComment]

Thank you for the information.

What do you think about what seems to be an assault on the natural-born citizen requirement for the presidency?

I remember hearing Orrin Hatch talking about changing the law for Arnold. After reading about this birth certificate controversy, I now realize that Congress passed a resolution for McCain, a naturalized citizen ran on the Socialist Party ticket (incrementalism!) without interference, and others are talking about this provision being antiquated.

Would the Supreme Court be interested in taking one of these cases simply because we seem to be at a turning point on this issue? It seems to me that unless they rule on it soon, the politicians/secretaries of state, etc., might just ignore this requirement.

Why doesn’t every citizen have standing on this issue? After all, each one of us would be harmed if a natural-born citizen became president in violation of the Constitution.

[OneTimeComment]

Correction: That is not a natural-born citizen.

[Uncle Chip]

All of these spinmeisters have got to know this isn't going away until solid proof is offered that he is a legal, natural born, citizen. There are so many wordgames being played over this, and so much money being spent to protect it from the light of day, that everyone deserves to see it...if it exists. Folks, the burden of proof is on Obama...he is the one who is supposed to have "qualified" under the Constitution to become president. Don't let the left and the media goad you with "prove it" statements...it's not ours to prove...it's theirs.

EXACTLY --

[NewEnglander]

You seem to have a major problem understanding the English language.

No where in the press release statement by the Hawaii Director of Health does she say what is in the document she controls in regard to a place of birth. Like Farm, plantation, manger, hospital, pineapple field, surfboard etc. In 1961 there was a lot of farming done on Oahu.

The direct response I have received from the Governor of Hawaii's office did not address the place of birth question. If the 2007 document is genuine, why is there no embossed Hawaii Department of Health State seal visible.

Please prove to me that the 2007 document is a genuine original document issued by the State of Hawaii Department of Health.

[Uncle Chip]

So we have state of Hawaii vouching for existence of Obama’s records. This makes the ‘CoLB is a forgery’ claim even more dubious to irrelevent.

No your gullibility on this vouch just makes your entire post dubious and irrelevant, along with your pretentious tagline.

[El Gato]

Here's the Okubo quote I've been looking for. What do you all think?

I imagine what she really said was something like, "it looks like a valid Hawaii state birth certificate"

If she said it was one, especially based on being sent a print out of image obtained on the Internet, she was in violation of the law, since that would be confirming the information on it, and that she cannot do, except to those who would be eligible to obtain a certified copy. The St. Petersburgh Times does not fall into that category

[El Gato]

When we looked at that image you guys sent us, our registrar, he thought he could see pieces of the embossed image through it.”

This is the image they are taling about, same resoution and everything, and from the newspapers own site. Look for yourself and see if you can see any trace of the reverse embossing.

I certainly can not. I downloaded it, and then zoomed in to the point where the JPEG artifacts begin to be visible. No trace of any "seal". Try it yourself.

[El Gato]

And I wonder if they actually handled it or sent the downloaded image to Hawaii.

The later as the full article makes somewhat more clear.

[El Gato]

So we have state of Hawaii vouching for existence of Obama’s records. This makes the ‘CoLB is a forgery’ claim even more dubious to irrelevent.

Existence, yes. there are many ways for someone not a Natural Born Citizen to have a Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth. And the Certification of Live Birth is much easier to forge, or just alter slightly to change any inconvenient entries to something more acceptable.

[El Gato]

The issue is whether the CoLB that Obama shared with factcheck and others represents the data on file with the State of Hawaii. that cuts to the chase of the issue. so this statement addresses that point:

It doesn't address it at all. There has been no, zero, nada, confirmation of the contents of the CoLB that Obama "shared". What has been confirmed is the existance of a Certificate of Live Birth, not that what's on it confirms what is on the "shared" CoLB.

[El Gato]

If she said it was one, especially based on being sent a print out of image obtained on the Internet,

Correction:

...on being sent a jpeg file obtained on the Internet of an image...

Without the actual paper document, there is no way they could confirm it was real, or photoshop. Well, not with a cursory look at the image that is. Traces of photoshopping can be found, although the lower the resolution of the original scanned in image, the harder those are to ferret out conclusively. Working with an image that has been compressed (as jpeg images have been) is also problematic as their are artifacts of the compression process to contend with. But the metadate may show if the file has been touched by Photoshop, or other imagine manipulation software. In this case, it does. But even that doesn't prove the was modified, since photoshop could have been used to obtain the image from a scanner. It could also have been used, and probably was, to block out the certificate number, rather than just putting a piece of black tape over it before scanning. Makes a good excuse anyway for having Photoshop's fingerprints in the file.

[reasonisfaith]

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Obama really was born in Hawaii and he’s just playing a game of teasing conservatives.”

If so, it would be a different kind of proof of his ineligibility to be president.

[autumnraine]

I missed that part I guess, but that is even worse! Basically the person was just saying “Yes, this is a format we use”. Not stating it was actually his Birth Certificate!