Moderated Obama birth certificate CT / SSN CT / Birther discussion

[Robert Prey]

I'm still waiting for a legal theory that validates the Birther position at all. The Birther argument seems to be, "Full Faith and Credit doesn't count when there is a question of forgery." What they don't seem to realize is that this is the only time when Full Faith and Credit counts! It is the doctrine prescribed in the Constitution for handling questions of authenticity. The issuing authority's certification of the information, in facsimile or abstract form, is by definition the authenticity of any document. None of the Birther law suits seems yet to appreciate this point. Hence your question is practically the only one in this thread that's right on the money: The Birthers state that they're saving the Constitution from a crisis, when in fact they're the ones trying to manufacture a crisis by ignoring the constitution.

So at one end of the playing field there is Full Faith and Credit, the legal concept that has governed interstate relations and commerce for well over 200 years, and has a wealth of case law surrounding it. And at the other end you have the Birthers with a factually bankrupt case for forgery and a desperate desire to overturn Full Faith and Credit with it. They are required to chart a legal course across that playing field, citing any federal precedents that should shape a court's eventual ruling.. So far their case has been simply to demand that the other team respect their homemade goalposts instead of the real ones. Not one single Birther lawsuit advances a legal theory showing how Full Faith and Credit should not apply here and subvert their evidentiary case -- non-existent as it already is. I'm baffled at the plaintiffs' reaction to these rulings. It's literally as if they don't know what Full Faith and Credit is or what it means.

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

 

[Mojo]

I'd just like an answer to my long standing question: what was wrong, legally, with the original COLB Obama provided?

Legally, absolutely nothing.

It just didn't say what certain people wanted it to say. The same goes for the "long form" certificate and, I suspect, for any other document or evidence that could ever be produced.

 

[Bob001]

.... What they don't seem to realize is that this is the only time when Full Faith and Credit counts! It is the doctrine prescribed in the Constitution for handling questions of authenticity. The issuing authority's certification of the information, in facsimile or abstract form, is by definition the authenticity of any document.....

I have no doubt that the President's BC is authentic. But just hypothetically, suppose you had -- or thought you had -- reason to believe that an official document had been tampered with. The issuing authority says, "Yeah, that one's ours. Go away." Would you have any other place to go? Or suppose you agreed that the document was authentic, in the sense that it was issued by the proper authority, but that the information in it was not correct. Would there be any legal mechanism to pursue an investigation? I can imagine that in the area of land titles, deeds etc. there might be plenty of incentive to doctor the docs.

 

[Hans]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

Then they would be seen as being foolish and could be challenged, but in our little case we are discussing no just obvious failure exists in this case.....unless of course you liked to point out what it is

Give us your reason to think there is a vast conspiracy by that part of the government of the State of Hawaii? We've been over this and over this, there is no 'smoking gun'. Why should an independent investigation be made of one persons documents and not others?

 

[erwinl]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

But did they?

 

[JayUtah]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

That's not a legal theory. That's just sour grapes.

Full Faith and Credit governs how states must interact when, among other things, there is a question regarding a vital record. Such interstate relations are not just a matter of "common sense," but rather of centuries of jurisprudence. You seem to think that the evidentiary case for fraud is both relevant and a foregone conclusion. Neither you nor any of the Birther litigants seems to realize you must first prove the evidentiary case is legally relevant. Can you do that?

 

[Straw Man]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

As mentioned, something like this would be would be foolish and challenged.

The thing is, the laws of Hawaii were not just created for the reason of protecting BHOII, but for the citizens of the state. As with most of the documents the birthers are chasing, they are protected by the same laws that protect all of us.

Why birthers seem to think they have the right to try and violate them is beyond me.

 

[Mojo]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

...people would take it just as seriously as if they had tried to rule that Pi is 3.2.

 

[Border Reiver]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

The States do issue birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, drivers licenses, etc. and those are what we are talking about. Various state authorities maintain the origin records and issue copies to the required parties - those documents being certified by relevant officials to be accurate.

If one of those documents is thought to be inaccurate, then the party suspecting that the document is wrong must check with that state's issueing authority who checks the original and either verifies the document, or declares it to be inaccurate. If the issuing authority is in another state, then it is just as valid as if it was from the state of the checking party. That's the way it works.

For example, if I sue you in the state of Utah for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and obtain a judgement from the courts in the amount of $1.00 I can then go to what ever state you reside in with a certified copy of that judgment and register it as a lien on your property until you statisfy the judgement. You cannot argue that the judgement does not apply to you as you live in a different state.

Alternately, if you are police officer in the state of Michigan and stop someone for speeding, and they present an Ohio state driver's license you cannot further claim that they are driving with an invalid license because the license is not from Michigan, and if you check with the Ohio DMV and they tell you that. "Yes, Mr. Reiver is a licensed driver, and the information you have sent us matches the information on file here" your boss will tell you to drop the charges for driving without a license because of "Full Faith and Credit".

If you wish to deal with the legal challenges of Full Faith and Credit, wonderful. We can do that. If your intent is to throw up pointless examples like the quote above, then there really is no point in any of this, except to ensure that people realize just what your purpose here is.

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

And if a state rules that 2 plus 2 equals 5, then.....

Excellent reasoning.

No state can claim possession or authority over the expression "2 + 2 = 5", therefore Full Faith and Credit does not apply.

 

[JayUtah]

Please list his qualifications in refuting the PDF of BHOII's COLB.

Robert has failed to provide it, hence none.

Here is Tom Harrison's "report" upon which Corsi has apparently based his WND article. http://www.wnd.com/files/2011/07/110726whitedots.pdf

Here is Harrison's "computer" business. http://www.ts4.com/ As you can see, a grab-bag of handyman-type occupations. He can write you some scripted web sites or fix the fuel-pump controller in your Volvo. Here is the Google Maps readout of his "business" address -- a very nice-looking Oregon farmhouse, but not the office of a "computer expert." https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&so...382763,-122.557951&spn=0.003442,0.006534&z=18

His WND bio says he has a "background" in mathematics, physics, and computer science. (Hint: "background in" is faux bio double-speak for "takes an amateur interest in"). It also says he is a graduate of the liberal arts college Dartmouth, where he supposedly obtained a BA (not BS) degree in the above rigorous pursuits -- all in a brief 4 years (1972-1975). That would have been especially difficult since Dartmouth didn't offer a computer science degree until 1979. And while Dartmouth's engineering program is ABET accredited, its computer science program is not.

Harrison's "report" is riddled with ignorance and misconception.

...there are artifacts which cannot exist as the result of the scan of a paper document into a computer.

Indeed, they are the artifacts of optimizing the PDF after scanning.

Indeed, those defending the document as genuine would have every citizen believe that the computer software responsible for scanning a simple piece of paper and converting it into a “pdf” file could not only see what was on the surface of that piece of paper, but could also see colors and detail underneath that paper surface, and that is an unashamed deception.

Nonsensical straw-man argument. Harrison doesn't understand the PDF imaging model and clearly hasn't attempted any PDF optimization exercises himself. Nor does he even raise the issue of what happens to portions of the image as they undergo optimization. Thus completely ignorant of those factors, in his mind the only factors that would determine the outcome of what he sees in the PDF objects would be the physics and optics of the scanner. Since they cannot explain what he sees, and his untrained imagination fails to consider any other reason, he concludes by default that it must be some kind of fraud or forgery.

This is simply the "finding" of a non-expert parading his ignorance in front of the world.

Now Harrison tries to explain a z-buffer rendering algorithm, such a that used in Photoshop. However that is not the algorithm used in PDF. Harrison has plainly not read the PDF language reference manual nor understands PDF's ideosyncratic clipping and rendering behavior. As with the other non-expert Mara Zebest, he simply believes PDF behaves as he sees layers operate in Adobe's creative products.

Typically, he "opens" the PDF in Adobe Illustrator and proceeds to attribute everything he sees in the imported document to some imaginary forger's actions, oblivious to any other potential cause.

On page 4 he commits a cardinal error in examining an optimized scanned PDF: he renders objects against a different background. With his misconceived mindset that this was an image composed as layers in some other software, this makes sense. In the context of an optimized PDF of a scanned image, it is worse than nonsensical -- it's downright wrong. Optimized PDFs of scanned documents are only expected to make sense visually when all the objects are rendered according to PDF's imaging model.

Specifically the optimization process happily copies elements between "foreground" and "background" objects freely, so that examining any one object results in seeing pixels from different logical parts of the document. For example, if you paint a background in Photoshop, type text over it, then paint some more in the foreground to obscure part of the text, the objects you get after you flatten, save, and optimize are the background, and then a "foreground object" containing all the pixels near the text, but clipped by the text path. Three Photoshop layers become two PDF objects, where neither object bears any resemblance to one of the "creative" layers.

The bulk of Harrison's ignorance can be found in pages 5-7. In figures 3-5 he makes the mistake of turning on and off the clipping mask, not the object. He is astounded to find pixels "behind" the object he says is a foreground object in the (irrelevant) z-buffer stacking order. What he's seeing, of course, is the transparency and opacity applied to the background by the foreground clip as it accumulates in the PDF-style render, and shows the current graphics state pen color. In other words, he doesn't know what he's looking at.

The "white dots" are not supposed to be part of the visual document, they're the equivalent of a hold-out matte in optical compositing, from which the PDF rendering engine was conceptually derived. This is how object order in the render becomes irrelevant, whereas in a z-buffer method it's crucial.

As noted previously, some complex portions of an image are extracted and put in their own object because they are outlying (yet visually significant) elements in an indexed color space. That's what we have here. The "white dots" when masked out are simply the current pen color of the graphics context (not the color that's supposed to be displayed). The object is, instead, the smoothly-varying portion of the safety paper that couldn't be represented in the background object without an unacceptable error in the error-diffusion algorithm. You see in Fig. 5 that, with everything properly turned on, the image contains small variances in color and includes bluish hues that aren't in the mostly-green indexed color map.

Figs. 6-10 improve on Harrison's method if only in that he's turning the right objects on and off in Illustrator. (Put it this way, that error alone would disqualify him from expert status in court.) But again he fails to understand PDF's hold-out type rendering engine, and the optimization process. Again, the black hard-edged objects are single-value bitmasks that alternatively hold out the safety background object and clip the current pen color (black for some printed text in the Obama PDF, gray for others) for other objects.

However, Harrison does not realize that in order to remove the black and gray pixels for the purpose of shrinking the color space for optimization, the pixels in the background object have to be replaced with pixels that belong to the new indexed color space. Black and gray are not indexed colors in this image, so the optimizer filters them from adjancent pixels using a DCT method.

Naturally those pixels appear to be part of the background image because by definition the optimizer can only use colors already indexed as part of it. It's as if you are handed only green crayons and must color in all the spaces with them.

This is perfectly legal and appropriate in an optimized PDF, because it's supposed to make sense visually only when properly clipped and rendered as a whole page, not just as individual objects. Hence the replacement pixels are clipped away by the hold-outs in other objects.

Harrison simply has no clue. He patently does not understand the PDF rendering pipeline nor PDF optimization and hence has no knowledge of the underlying mechanisms that are working to produce what he sees in the resulting image. He wrongly thinks his critics have no more knowledge than he, so he concludes that the only way his critics can believe in that these pixels belong there in the PDF is if the scanner originally saw them that way -- i.e., in "x-ray fashion." No, this is not what his critics believe, and he's simply throwing a ridiculous straw man into the fray.

As does Zebest, Harrison argues that since "magic" scanners don't exist, the only way you'd get friendly pixels in the "layers" in the "background" is if they came from some graphics program such as Photoshop that let an artist compose in layers, knowing that foreground layers would obscure the background where appropriate.

However on page 1 Harrison deftly sidesteps the smoking gun. He says that he is undertaking this analysis without any attempt at contextual or larger-scale framing. And with that he ignores the same glaring, egregious hole in his claim that Zebest does: that the "foreground" text is divided half between the "background layer" and half between the "text layer".

Basically, Tom Harrison is patently not an expert and his analysis further ignores practically everything about PDF files that is pertinent. It is as wrong as it can possibly be.

 

[JayUtah]

[...]
Black and gray are not indexed colors in this image, so the optimizer filters them from adjancent pixels using a DCT method.

Naturally those pixels appear to be part of the background image because by definition the optimizer can only use colors already indexed as part of it. It's as if you are handed only green crayons and must color in all the spaces with them.

One correction: the safey-paper object does have blacks and grays in its color index because a substantial portion of the text is included in that object. While the extracted pixels could have been rendered in grays, to do so would interfere with the hold-out mechanism. And since they were candidates for removal precisely because of the high-frequency signal across the pixels, the resulting DCT requirement to store the non-replaced pixels would obviate the optimization.

 

[A'isha]

I hope this isn't already in another post waiting mod approval, but the third official State of Hawaii verification letter, requested by and sent to the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas, has been released.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106576604/2012-09-14-KS-SoS-Kobach-Letter-to-Onaka-and-Response

Hawaii State Registrar Dr. Onaka, yet again, says that the PDF at the White House website matches exactly with what they have on file for Barack Obama's birth certificate.

 

[Mojo]

No state can claim possession or authority over the expression "2 + 2 = 5", therefore Full Faith and Credit does not apply.

I suspect that if such an issue were to come up in any court, the reaction might be a little like this comment by the court in Rout v. Hutchinson & Ors:

This Court does not have any jurisdiction over the laws of mathematics and physics.

 

[Border Reiver]

Well, if the Birthers have any respect for the US Constitution this should end it.

Who am I kidding?

 

[rowrbazzle]

I'm new here, and the argument about BHO's birth certificate doesn't concern me very much (and I as a Mexican resident could only register to vote in Kansas where my vote wouldn't matter since everybody else is going to vote for rMoney), but I did read the first twenty and the last ten pages, so forgive me it this has been asked-and-answered earlier.
But: has any birther ever, in the 212 pages here or anywhere else, tried to explain how and why an eighteen year old girl, nine months pregnant, would or could travel to Kenys, have her baby in an African hospital, (when the world-class Queen Kapiolani hospital was right down the road) and immediately fly back to the USA with a mixed-race newborn, explain to la migra that the baby was actually an American, and proceed on to Honolulu to register her baby as born there?

 

[Travis]

I hope this isn't already in another post waiting mod approval, but the third official State of Hawaii verification letter, requested by and sent to the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas, has been released.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106576604/2012-09-14-KS-SoS-Kobach-Letter-to-Onaka-and-Response

Hawaii State Registrar Dr. Onaka, yet again, says that the PDF at the White House website matches exactly with what they have on file for Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Robert, a single straight question for you: do you think Dr. Onaka is lying?

 

[Mudcat]

I hope this isn't already in another post waiting mod approval, but the third official State of Hawaii verification letter, requested by and sent to the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas, has been released.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106576604/2012-09-14-KS-SoS-Kobach-Letter-to-Onaka-and-Response

Hawaii State Registrar Dr. Onaka, yet again, says that the PDF at the White House website matches exactly with what they have on file for Barack Obama's birth certificate.

You know it's looking like the Birthers don't have any legitimate concerns concerning the birth certificate after all. But that can't be, right? Right?

 

[Arus808]

And yesterday, the worst lawyer in the world, got smacked down by the Mississippi court and the judge lectured her, on exactly HOW the legal process works.

Several members of the forum, thefogbow, were able to attend and provide a report of the event:

Part 1:
http://www.thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=8315#p421973

Part 2:
http://www.thefogbow.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=88&t=8315#p421994


Also, the lawyer for Obama appeared on RC Radio to provide his personal experience in the court case:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/rcr/2012/09/25/mess-in-mississippi

Court transcripts are being ordered, but at an "expedited" expense. Will post a link when the members have been able to scan and add to their scribd account.

 

[Arus808]

I hope this isn't already in another post waiting mod approval, but the third official State of Hawaii verification letter, requested by and sent to the Republican Secretary of State of Kansas, has been released.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/106576604/2012-09-14-KS-SoS-Kobach-Letter-to-Onaka-and-Response

Hawaii State Registrar Dr. Onaka, yet again, says that the PDF at the White House website matches exactly with what they have on file for Barack Obama's birth certificate.

And butterdezillion will twist anything that is presented in that letter to mean the exact opposite (she did that already earlier):
http://butterdezillion.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/wheel-of-fortune-v-family-feud-final.pdf

She did that for the last 2 verification letters, she'll do it to this one.


Oh wait she already did that:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2934384/posts