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Certificate Of Rumor Death

by West Virginia Rebel

This should be the last word on the “Phoney birth certificate” non-story, but knowing the Obama-fearing fringe, it probably won’t be.

Days ago I looked into the forged Obama Birth Certificate Myth and realized it was all BS. Basically, we have a lot of people running around making mistakes and then trying to pretend revelations that destroyed their first claims are exposing other, new issues. All I see are people making wild claims, being proved wrong, and then moving onto new wild claims - to be proved wrong again. As proof of this pattern let me point to one of these ‘experts’ who did a poor job of examining the documents in the first place, a person called Polirak over at Town Hall.

Before we get into this I want to share what I discovered when I looked into these files, before I even began to look around the blogosphere.

First I noted the certificate was a recent production that is made by a laser printer and is on a form put in place in 2001 (look at the lower right hand corner of any version of the certificate for this information).

I also noted a stamped date from the back which bled through on the two version (one on the DailyKos and one on the Obama campaign site) which shows this modern version was produced around Jun 6 2007

I discovered 2 dots from the laser printer that can be found on all three files (some folks just recently discovered the large one next to the image of the state seal)

I could detect the impression of the state seal stamp and signature area on two of the files.

There are three electronic images of birth certificates at the center of this silly controversy: (1) a BHO certificate Daily Kos posted initially [image loaded here], which Kos says he obtained electronically from the Obama campaign [image here], (2) the version of the certificate on the Obama website, and (3) a clearly mocked up “blank” form produced by a blogger who goes by the name Opendna (aka John Mckinnon). 

In my analysis I find the Kos version to be the highest quality image file of the original document, produced in Jun of 2007 by the state of Hawaii. I find the Obama campaign site version to be a lower quality version of the original, probably because someone decided to shrink the file size to optimize download size for the web. And I find the Opendna version to be a deliberately manipulated version of the original Kos image, because the Opendna version has no evidence of bleed through from the back side, no imprinted time stamp, no weak impression of the state seal and signature area. 

This analysis took about 30-60 minutes, not days and days.

But rumor mills and conspiracy theories are forever, at least out on the blogosphere frontier.

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