A Freeper rebuttal to AJ Strata's claim of debunking the Obama Birthgate doubters, part 1!

PA Times | 7/7/08 | Pissant

[pissant]

I will debunk the debunking in bold. AJStrata's text will be normal instead of italicized for easier reading.

AJStrata:

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.

Pissant: So far nothing but hyperbole, calling detailed analysis "wild claims". But he is setting himself up as a debunker extraordinaire (at least his source LJStrata as such) without telling us what makes their analysis so compelling. Is AJ or LJ a graphics expert? What training do they have? Townhall blogger Polirak (sic) has twenty years experience with electronic documents and graphics programs. And he is certainly not alone in the blogosphere of experts that have likewise concluded this to be a forgery.

AJSrata: 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.

1. 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).

Pissant: Fluff point, as everyone who has looked at this understands this.

2. 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

Pissant: Another fluff point, as we all saw that as well.

3. 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)

Pissant: More fluff. Dots were published on July 3rd by Polarik and No Quarter and noted by freepers as well.

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

Pissant: There is no way that the 'hidden seal' can be detected with the naked eye on any of the docs. Using specialty software did indeed illuminate a seal on the KOS version, but not on the Obama version (Fight the Smears) according to 3 independent attempts. The only one claiming a seal on the Obama version was actually using the version from the KOS site.

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).

Pissant: yes, yes we all know this.

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.

Pissant: yes, yes we all know this.

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.

Pissant: According to multiple sources, the hacks at Fight the Smears posted the low quality version AFTER originally posting a high resolution version like KOS did.

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.

Pissant: yes, we all know that the OpenDNA/John McKinnon version was missing the KOS stamp and the bleedthrough date, as well as BHO's data. But there is nothing that tells us which came first, the chicken or the egg.

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

Solly chollie, but just reading through and properly analyzing Polarik's multiple posts would take more than 30-60 minutes. Not to mention the work done by bloggers on Atlas Shrugged, FreeRepublic, Texas Darlin and JimJ of No Quarter. I call BS.

I have been putting off this posting on this matter because there has never been anything ‘discovered’ that proved a forgery, but simply proved people were running wild with their imaginations. Polarik provides the best example of this.

Pissant: More nonsensical hyperbole. It was not wild imaginations that had bloggers downloading new software tools and spending hours analyzing the borders, etc. I think AJ didn't post because he has no clue what he is talking about. But that is just my 'wild' speculation.

On 6/20/08 the ‘expert’ Polarik claimed this certificate clearly produced a year ago was a forgery of an original from 1961, which Barack Obama claimed he had in one of his books from years ago. I have no idea if he has the original, but no ‘expert’ would jump to the initial conclusion this was a forgery, unless they did not understand how government document versions are controlled. He even noted the evidence that clearly indicates this is a modern document in his (Polarik's) post:

At the bottom of the JPG image, reading right from left, one can see following text:

OHSM 1.1 (Rev. 11/01) Laser This copy serves as prima facie evidence of the fact of birth in any court proceeding. [HRS 338-13(b), 338-19]

There are a lot of problems with this statement, foremost of which is that the text in this document were produced by a graphics program and not a laser print, or any other printer, for that matter.

Pissant: AJStrata does not grasp the argument that Polarik is making. AJ seems to think Polarik is claiming that the KOS document should have been a laser printed 'original' copy of his historic BC. Instead, Polarik is making the claim that I did when I saw the Kos document: That this was a computer generated, computer edited JPG as opposed to a scanned image of a hard copy from the Hawaiian authorities. I still contend that is the case of the Kos document, and it is hardly a stretch to think this such. It makes it hard to debunk the debunkers AJ when you don't understand the arguments being made. No one with any sense thinks this was intended to be a copy of his original BC!

Actually, all the text on the document is produced by a laser printer (via a graphics program). All the text on the two complete versions (which means they have the bleed through images from the back) have a ‘haze’ around the letters. Polarik assumed this was because the text was photo shopped. My view is this is simply standard anti-aliasing of the text, something many word processing programs do:

Polarik mistakes this anti-aliasing feature with forgery, which is completely ridiculous. Anti-aliasing would show up on all Hawaii certificates since they are now digitally produced (and later I note this is the case). The biggest mistake Polarik makes here is comparing a laser generated certificate to an older type from NY. Unless your comparing apples to apples there is no way to determine a forgery.

Pissant: No, Polarik does not mistake the anti-aliasing with evidence of forgery. He is instead arguing, once again, that comparing the Kos image to a legit scanned certificate produced by a laser or other high quality printer demonstrates the discrepancies we see on a computer created/manipulated jpeg: namely, the "shadowing" present on the legit scan but not on the Kos document, the pixilation surrounding the KOS letters, and the missing green backgroung below the Kos text.

Next he discovers, two days later, the image went through Photoshop, which is not really a revelation since someone could scan the original document and prepare if for email or web posting using photo shop. Somehow in his mind just using Photoshop is evidence of a forgery, which of course is ridiculous - as many have since noted. So I’ll just skip that mistaken jump to a conclusion for now.

Pissant: No AJ, it was not "just using" photoshop that Polarik claims as evidence of forgery. He is simply documenting additional circumstantial evidence. However, it is without doubt that photoshop or similar was used to black out the certification number. It is also a piece of evidence (originally noted by freeper Buckhead, BTW) that has made others continue to plug away on it, and examine the EXIF history of the KOS document as well as the openDNA versions. It is just another piece of evidence that reinforces all the other arguments.

Then 8 days after his original forgery claim, Polarik finally discovers the items that bleed through from the back, providing hard evidence the two version from Kos and the BHO campaign are actually digital images of an authentically produced birth certificate, created last year. But he was all confused because the Opendna version of the file did not have any bleed through section - thus forgery was at hand again. One day before Polarik’s post on the time stamp, Doug Ross did a great job of showing the time stamp, the stamp of the state seal and the signature area impressions coming in from the back of the Kos and BHO Campaign images, further proving their authenticity - not proving a forgery:

Pissant: The GIMP software was used by Polarik and by others. It showed ONLY the supposed stamp on the KOS document, not on the Obama website version, or the allegedly higher resolution openDNA's versions. AJ has not shown the stamp from the Obama site doc, and neither did Doug Ross. What AJ and Doug both show on their sites is something demonstrated by a reader on Atlas Shrugged who was the FIRST one to make the claim that there was a seal on the Obama version. However, its utter faintness, especially compared to the easily viewable date bleed through is more a sign of photoshop removal than a stamp actually being there. IOW, it is just as possible that the Decosta doc was partially used for creating a forgery but with the stamp edited out leaving only it's ghost on the Obama doc. As Doug Ross said about the Kos and Decosta documents: "When I overlaid the two certificates, the candidate's certificate matched up almost precisely with DeCosta's."

[txhurl]

Problem is, we already have McCain's real paper BC.

[Kevmo]

The campaign can put up any kind of forgery for any kind of document — as long as they have the original and the document is important enough to draw the attention of the media. Something like a forged check from someone from whom they have the real check, or a forged letter or an obviously forged affidavit when they have the real one.

[pissant]

We can’t expect the McCainiacs to do any of the heavy lifting to expose Obama as the lying commie POS that he is.