If there is a Real Estate Title Office near you, ask any Title Officer what the difference is between a "Certified Copy," and an "Abstract." E.G., there is a "An Abstract of Deed," which may, or more likely may not, have all of the info that is on the actual Deed, and thus would be in a "Certified Copy" of the Deed.
What we don't know, as you quite correctly point out, is exactly who put the digital data from various sources into the one document. Neither do we know what was in the document picked up in Hawaii by Obama's lawyers. Since the WH released it, it legally their responsibility.
And that is strange, too. If there indeed is a BC on file, the normal procedure would be to photocopy it, certify it as a true copy of the original document on file and FEDEX it, or perhaps telephonically or digitally fax it on over. This is done every day in every city in the country!
If there were a simple explanation, it would have been proffered. Instead, a blinding fog, an Obamian miasma, a cloud of boolshiite has descended over the whole thing.
Personally, I believe there is no Birth Certificate. On the odd chance one does exist, I'll bet it is the old Hawaiian canard, "The Certificate of Home Birth." An Hawaiian (wink-wink) institution that flourished for 60 years or so, this usually handwritten document is the attestation of witnesses and relatives that little Wong, Hiro, or Barry, was born in Grandma's pad down on Fungi Street. The truth of the matter is that Hawaii is awash with Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Pacific Islanders of every sort who have this kind of documentation, usually issued several years after the fact of their birth is some far off land! If you're going to be POTUS, this would be a good thing to hide.
A Honolulu Dog License? Now that's a reliable Hawaiian document from the past.
I can make no statements about what is or is not on file in HI, and if those are or are not legal/certified/whatever. I’ll leave that to the professionals in those fields.
My field is desktop publishing. So that’s why I waded into this issue originally. The WH-released BC has layers and very odd discrepancies like anti-aliased/multicolor text together with sharp black text—which absolutely points to some kind of alteration of the scan. There’s no way those two kinds of text should be appearing together without some kind of digital manipulation.
However—it hasn’t been proven to my satisfaction that said manipulation was human in origin. If, as it sure seems, the Optimize PDF function can do these kinds of things all by itself, then there’s an innocent explanation here that needs to be taken into account before everyone (including me) screams “forgery!”
You are still assuming that *someone* cut and pasted digital data. I am not there yet. Particularly since, from this Photoshop user’s perspective, if this was a forgery it was done so HIDEOUSLY badly that I have trouble believing the WH would be that stupid. Craven, yes. But not that stupid.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I was not familiar with the Hawaiian "Certificate of Home Birth." I had always assumed there was such a thing, but I didn't know it was a ubiquitous as you imply in your message. I have ALWAYS believed Obama's original document is some sort of Affidavit attesting he was born at Grandma Dunham's residence.
My understanding of Hawaiian law is that you have up to a year to bring the child in to be examined by a doctor to complete the process, and that such doctor will "sign off" as the presiding physician during birth.
Do you have an example of one of these Hawaiian "Certificate of Home Birth" documents? I think it would be very useful in getting people to understand the concept.
I have read other articles alleging that Hawaii is running a clearinghouse for foreign born children getting American birth certificates. It makes sense to me that this sort of thing would occur given Hawaii's lax birth documentation laws.