The Market Ticker – Tickerguy: 1, ObaBots: 0
Oh do come on folks.
There’s an old saying: When the facts support your position, use them. When they don’t, or when you get caught lying, throw crap at the wall and hope something sticks!
The latest is the National Review which had this to say about my analysis on the birth certificate:
The PDF is composed of multiple images. Thats correct. Using a photo editor or PDF viewer of your choice, you can extract this image data, view it, hide it, etc. But these layers, as theyre being called, arent layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. Theyre not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human.
This is what happens when you don’t bother actually watching the video I posted, or looking into the provenance of what you’re arguing over – you just throw crap at the wall. Nathan goes on to post a PDF that he scanned which shows his "layers."
Unfortunately, in doing so, he proved that I’m correct.
See, the issue isn’t layers. Yes, the layers are suspicious, but they’re not the smoking gun. The smoking gun is that there are no chromatic artifacts in the Obama document, but the document is allegedly a color scan of an actual piece of paper, and we know it had to be a color scan because the background is allegedly color safety paper.
National Review’s document, unsurprisingly, is a scan of a color document. How do we know? Because if you simply pull it up in your web browser (which will open the embedded Acrobat Reader) and zoom it up, you will see this:
Note the chromatic aberration. This document is in fact a color scan.
And here is a blown-up piece of the so-called "scan" of Obama’s document:
Note the absence of chromatic aberration. The Obama White House document is not an unaltered color scan.
Folks, this is physics. It is "how things work." It is why you see rainbows. Light always is refracted slightly differently depending on wavelength when it goes through a lens – as is necessary to focus it so as to make an image.
Could I scan an image in color and then make this "go away" in an image program? Probably. Why would you? The intent of the release, remember, is to produce an actual image of a physical document and the claim made was that this was a copy of a physical piece of paper.
The Obots were all over me yesterday with the claim that "well, it could have been an electronic copy." No, it wasn’t. Beyond the fact that certified copies are always printed to paper and then authenticated (e.g. with a raised seal) there is documentary evidence that Hawaii did exactly that. Look here. Hawaii produced photocopies – not electronic copies, photostatic copies of the original.
Well, that’s even more troublesome, because if they were photocopies how is it that the Associated Press and the White House wound up with two very different-looking documents? How do you take a photocopy and have two different "versions" of that same piece of paper magically appear – one with a green safety paper background and the other not?
My next question (which I’ve tried to get answered without success) is where did the AP get the piece of paper that they put into a scanner? And note carefully: AP did, in fact, place a piece of paper into a scanner and published what came out. There is no evidence that AP tampered with the digital representation of what they scanned, while there’s plenty of evidence that the White House did, and in fact what the White House produced does not appear to be an actual scan at all but is a created digital document.
The question, therefore, is what was the source and provenance of the document AP scanned? We know the apparent answer: It came from the White House, and had to, since the correspondence says that there were only two copies produced and both went directly to White House counsel. What AP presented is only as good as the source of the paper they were handed.
There are others who have noted a number of other problems with the document presented. Among them are that there are no apparent tab stops used on the Obama "birth certificate." 1961 was the day of the typewriter, and nobody hand-centered things like that. Production typists used tab stops and if you look at other, known-authentic birth certificates from the time, you’ll note that they’re tab-aligned. Obama’s is not. Remember Dan Rather and his little forgery? 20-something idiots in the White House IT department have never used an actual typewriter in their life. 40-something bloggers and their girlfriends (and "Batgirl" deserves recognition for the catch on this one) most certainly did during our school and college years, and we remember how they worked too. Nobody ever manually centered or manually-aligned production documents in a typewriter. Can that be explained? Maybe the janitor typed Obama’s birth certificate. Or maybe he was "really special" compared to the thousands of other births in Hawaii, and a lowly typist in 1961 "knew" he should have a "really pretty" typed certificate because he’d be President 40 years later. It’s also entirely plausible that aliens really did land in Roswell, you know.
Other curiosities include the fact that the time of birth is exactly the same on the (now-discredited – or is it?) Kenyan birth certificate that has been floating around the Internet. How did a purely fraudulent document in a foreign nation happen to wind up with the exact same time of birth as the alleged "real" certificate – if Hawaii never released that information until now?
This debate is not, at this point, about whether Obama was born in the United States. There are plenty of people who question that, but this case simply isn’t about that any more.
This case is about whether a sitting President presented an altered – that is, forged – document to the American public and claimed it was authentic.
If he did so, and the evidence strongly suggests that he did exactly that, then the obvious next question is this: What, Mr. President, are you trying to hide, and we then must turn to whether a sitting President should be permitted to erase the tapes that document his knowledge of a break-in to a hotel….
The Market Ticker – Tickerguy: 1, ObaBots: 0
