Jeepers Freepers: Tales of Obama’s SFCOLB

Recently, World Net Daily (WND) ran an article about Barack Hussein Obama’s short-form certification of live birth (SFCOLB), copies of which the White House (WH) released to the media on April 27, 2011.  Besides giving out copies of a document alleged to have been obtained by the Obama campaign in 2007, the WH blog linked to a digital image that they said represented that same SFCOLB. 

In the WND article, Ron Polland, Ph.D., said that he created the digital image from which the WH copies were made.  Dr. P. (as some call him on our blog) claims that he created the image while trying to prove to skeptics that it was possible (i.e., possible to forge an authentic-looking SFCOLB).

He placed the image into his personal photobucket, and apparently linked to it from other sites on the Internet. According to Dr. P., at some point in time, Snopes.com, a myth-busting/fact-checking website, began to link to Dr. P.’s bogus SFCOLB instead of to the (similarly bogus) digital image allegedly provided to partisan blogs by the Obama campaign in 2008.

Since Dr. P. visits our blog and comments occasionally, we’ve discussed this issue several times. Our blog has a long history of analyzing and discussing the SFCOLB digital image that was placed on the Web by the Obama campaign in June 2008.

Since Free Republic commenters (aka Freepers) are weighing in about this issue as discussed on our blog (see comment 115 at the link), I have clarifications to make, especially after reading the thread at Free Republic, re-reading what WND said, and what Dr. P. has said.

We report; you decide.  (Where did we hear that before?)  Just because we present all points of view does not mean that we “just took” anyone’s word as FACT (although sometimes we’re as susceptible to being duped as the next person.  I’m NOT saying that Dr. P. duped anyone, so don’t infer it.)  Please do give us credit for having open minds. We’re ready, willing, and able to change our minds and our conclusions, when new evidence turns up.

What Dr. P. says is that the image that was at Snopes is the image that the WH printed and passed out to the media.  He has screen shots that he says prove that at some point in time, Snopes linked to his photobucket when referencing the SFCOLB.

If you don’t believe his evidence, that’s your prerogative.  Certainly, independent confirmation of what Dr. P. saw would be helpful (which he arguably supplies in the WND story, when he cites commenters on other blogs who noted the mistake Snopes made, although only those blog owners know the identity of those making the observations.) 

As one astute freeper pointed out (comment 224), KNOWN obot krewes don’t dispute Dr. P.’s contention; but instead rationalize that it doesn’t matter anyway.  Paraphrasing:  “Just because the WH may have used a printout of a website page doesn’t prove that there is no REAL SFCOLB.”

Of course, everybody knows that you can’t prove a negative. 

Whatever, obots! It certainly is CURIOUS, nonetheless.  A jury might take it as convincing CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence because …

If you have the real deal, why not plop that three-dimensional certified puppy onto the copy machine with the rest of the paperwork? 

We’re supposed to believe that the president of the United States (POTUS) had minions hand out a display screen printed from a rumor-debunking website as proof of his eligibility for the presidency?!

Obots want us to believe that perhaps it was easier for said vassals of the Annointed One to print out the displayed image at Snopes than to hunt down the original.

Consider this:   Regarding an issue of such great importance (Obama’s eligibility for the presidency), this POTUS–himself a lawyer and a “constitutional law lecturer”–gave authority to his staff to just cop any image off the Internet, no provenance necessary, instead of giving them the LEGAL document that he contends he’s had since 2007! (Or , variously, 2008–see former WH counsel Robert Bauer’s “mistake”, when he repeated WH communications director Dan Pfeiffer’s mistake that the SFCOLB was requested in 2008.)

Even if Robert Bauer gave the authority, we’re supposed to believe that he, a lawyer, thinks a screen print from a non-governmental website is better LEGAL evidence than the actual document? 

If you buy that one, I have a Kenyan birth certificate for sale.

Do note that currently, if you hover your cursor over the link to the SFCOLB at Snopes, the URL (for the linked image) does NOT display in any small window.  I checked other articles at Snopes and this doesn’t happen on them, either, which begs the question: 

Why does Dr. P.’s evidence at WND seem to show a popup with a URL to his photobucket, if that isn’t a feature on the Snopes website? 

Since Snopes is excluded from the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine), there’s no way to know whether they disabled that function when this issue arose, or whether they never had it in the first place. 

In any case,  if the image that the WH distributed was created by Dr. P., only he knows for sure.  It’s up to him to prove it.  Here’s part of what he said, as quoted by a freeper who copied his quote from another site:

Snopes has always used my image, either from their server or from my Photobucket account and the direct to my image on Photobucket has never been changed.

Only the image itself has been changed.

More than 5,900 views to my forged image came from Snopes on April 27, and the people posting that link all thought that it went to a copy of Obama’s “genuine” COLB scan.

I can prove that Snopes continued to use my image and only my image from June 22, 2008 until Aug 1, 2011.

Sometime between Aug 1 and Aug 3, however, they resampled and resaved the image. Although it looks the same, and the luminance values are the same, the chrominance values are higher because of chroma subsampling. Before the change both tables had nearly the same quality values. The file size was also bumped up to 113k and the DPI had not been set.”  (From comment 224 at the link.)

If what Dr. P. said about Snopes is true, they changed the link at the beginning of this month, although he also said that “the direct to my image has never been changed.” Only Dr. P. can explain what he means by that. I’m at a loss. If I copy the URL from the link at Snopes, I get a link to an image on their site. 

So what’s known is that Snopes no longer points to Dr. P.’s photobucket and the Wayback Machine does NOT archive Snopes.  The only way that can happen is if Snopes requested to be excluded from the archive. Is this how a transparent myth-debunking website should behave?  But I digress …

To show that we have open minds here at WTPOTUS, I will tell you this. I don’t believe, after further investigation, that the copies that the WH distributed to the media were made FROM the image that Dr. P. created.  Why not?  A little black dot.

WND says in its article,

When Snopes.com posted Polland’s fake document, he took a screen shot of the Snopes.com website, showing that the link to the Obama document was the URL at which Polland had posted his forgery.

Within that sentence, there’s a link to Dr. P.’s photobucket. Go there and click the link. I took a screen shot of what you’ll see (8/12/11);  click to enlarge:

This isn’t the entire SFCOLB, but the part you need to see is there.  According to WND and to Dr. P., via WND, that’s a digital image of the fake SFCOLB that Dr. P. created. 

The screen print from Snopes, which the WH copied and linked to on their blog, was likely used to create the image that was handed out to the media on April 27, 2011.  Note that the screen print was taken on April 25, two days before the press gaggle (roll to the bottom to see the Snopes reference and the date).  At the top right, it reads, ”Page 1 of 1″, but it’s a PDF, which seems to indicate that after printing out the page from Snopes, they scanned that page into a PDF (or vice versa–print to file and then print on paper. An awful lot of work, if you have the real document to copy.)

Below is part of the image, from a screen shot taken 8/12/11 (I added the red circle.):

What was given to the media on April 27 was likely derived from the printout of the screen from Snopes, but the copy handed to the media did not have the telltale Snopes URL at the bottom.  It was apparently cropped off.  Here’s the image as it currently exists at Snopes (red circle added):

Photojournalist J. Scott Applewhite of the AP, uploaded a digital image of the SFCOLB on April 27–he copied the paper that he was given at the WH gaggle. Below is his image (red circle added):

Here’s the EXIF data: 

This handout image provided by the White House shows a copy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate from Hawaii. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
By Line: J. Scott Applewhite
Credit: AP
Special Instructions: HANDOUT IMAGE PROVIDED BY THE WHITE HOUSE
Date: April 27, 2011   8:53:21AM (timezone is GMT)
(3 months, 14 days, 11 hours, 31 minutes, 55 seconds ago) 
Location: Washington, DC, USA
File: 512 × 465 JPEG
33,356 bytes (0.032 megabytes)
Image compression: 95%

Now why does it say, “Page 1 of “?  Because the copy handed to the media was probably printed from that black-and-white PDF to which the WH blog links. 

The copies of the long form certificate of live birth (LFCOLB) given to the media were also on white paper; they weren’t on green security paper–you can barely see the crosshatching, if at all.  

As noted by Dr. P. and butterdezillion, you can see traces of another document showing through the SFCOLB as well as the LFCOLB.  The text artifacts appear to come from letters that allegedly passed between the WH and the Hawaiian Department of Health (HDOH). If these artifacts were on the papers when they were handed to the media, the white paper upon which the documents were copied must have been quite thin.  

Why print and then duplicate the documents from PDF’s instead of copying the original certified documents?

Getty images has a slide show which seems to indicate that the artifacts were not created when Applewhite scanned his stack of documents, but existed when the documents were handed out to the media. This image from CBS also shows the artifacts, so it’s apparent that the WH made the error.  The SFCOLB and the LFCOLB were not on GREEN SECURITY PAPER at the time they were copied.  If they were, no text from another document could show through.  

But that’s merely another unexplained anomaly.  Back to why I don’t I believe that the image given to the media came from Dr. P.’s version.  Here’s the version of the SFCOLB as it appeared at the Daily Kos on June 14, 2008 (red circle added):

Look carefully at the top of each version of the SFCOLB.  Right below the “E” in “Certification”, on a horizontal line with “State of Hawaii”, you’ll see a smudgy black dot.  That dot appears on the Snopes version, the WH version, Applewhite’s version, and on the Daily Kos/FactCheck blog/Fight the Smears version from June 2008, but NOT on Dr. P.’s version.  If Dr. P. can explain, we’re open to hearing why that dot is on the other versions but not on his–if, as he says, they used his forgery to pass out to the media on April 27.  

Don’t bother looking for that black dot on the photograph that FactCheck blog contends they took of the original document in 2008. It’s not there. 

As of today, the WH continues to link to a printout from Snopes so people can see Obama’s purported real SFCOLB.   But before giving out copies of the SFCOLB, the WH staff cropped the bottom of the page.  They left “Page 1 of 1″, which indicates that what they handed out was a copy of a printout from a webpage. Whether that was a page from Snopes, we don’t know for certain, because the image was cropped. 

Some very important questions remain unanswered:

Why didn’t the WH staff scan the original, certified SFCOLB that they said Obama’s campaign posted on the Internet in 2007; that FactCheck blog supposedly photographed in Chicago, in March, 2008; and which Robert Bauer said they obtained from the HDOH in 2008? 

Why didn’t they scan the REAL certified SFCOLB, put that scan on the WH website, and link to that image, instead of to an image from a rumor-debunking website? 

Why did they print the images of the documents in black and white, instead of in color, with the security paper crosshatching readily apparent? 

Why didn’t they copy the back side of the REAL SFCOLB and give that image to the media, since the registrar’s stamp and certification of authenticity is on the back side? Snopes, like everyone else, had a digital image of only the front side of that supposed document. If they wanted to prove that the document was stamped, dated, and certified authentic by the HDOH registrar, then it would have been far more persuasive to make a two-sided copy of the ORIGINAL–you know, that one photographed by FactCheck blog in March 2008.  (To see the significance of that date, see this.  At the press gaggle, WH spokesperson Dan Pfeiffer claimed that they posted both sides of the SFCOLB on the Internet, in 2008. An outright lie.  The entire back side of that supposed document has NEVER been placed on the Internet.  No copy of the back side has EVER been given to the media, or even been seen by the media, so far as we know.) 

Why didn’t the WH do the same for the LFCOLB, of which Obama’s personal lawyer had two recently produced copies?  Especially because the waiver that lawyer Judith Corley received was granted on the EXCUSE that the document was TO BE MADE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC!

Why not scan both sides of the actual documents and give copies to the media?  Why instead copy one-sided images, with vague security features, with little evidence of certification, and with artifacts from other documents showing through? 

Why was only Savannah Guthrie allegedly allowed to SEE and FEEL the real LFCOLB in person, and to photograph it (one side only)? 

Why was the LFCOLB only flashed at the media from the podium and why was it SPECIFICALLY removed from the room before the POTUS arrived?

Why was no audio allowed and why were cameras and video forbidden at that WH press gaggle?  Was it so nobody could snap a high resolution image of the supposed real document, for further analysis?

Why did Obama never speak about THAT supposed document–the original LFCOLB?  Instead, on Oprah, he talked about the SFCOLB from 2008.

Wheels within wheels. Obfuscation within obfuscation. Plausible deniability within plausible (even implausible) deniability. 

Jeepers Creepers, Freeper Peepers!  You sure need some good eyes to see through the smoke and mirrors. 

These are links to other articles at WTPOTUS that address these documents: WTPOTUS post from the day of the “reveal” of the “computer generated” LFCOLB. A summary of what’s wrong with the LFCOLB in relation to the “father’s” immigration records.  An analysis of the LFCOLB press gaggle.   An analysis of the LFCOLB itself.   An analysis of the photographs that Savannah Guthrie says she took of the  LFCOLB. 

These are only a few.  Search our blog for “birth certificate” and you’ll find many more.

Read more at We the People of the United States