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Perhaps you have read posts on the web by other folks claiming to be lawyers that they sympathize with her effort and have privately attempted to give her advice, but she chooses not to take the advance and sometimes ends up doing something embarrassing.

To a certain extent, this is one of the pitfalls of being a legal David against a legal Goliath. Sometimes things happen. We are all human and all humans make mistakes at one time or another.

At times, many people succumb to the dangers of wishful thinking and hasty decisions.

This is possibly why most major legal cases are conducted using lawyer teams. Certainly Obama has a formal paid lawyer team representing him. It is unlikely that one Obama lawyer would make a statement or file a motion without the statement or motion being reviewed by many other paid lawyers in the team. Anything wishful or ill-advised would tend to be screened out in the reviews. Obama has lots of money with which to buy the services of lots of lawyers who only need to read and review carefully the advance versions of statements and filings by other lawyers. Maybe this is why the saying in law schools and courthouses is that he who has the most money usually wins.

As to the UIPA, if one looks at the web, there are some folks who regard it as one of the weaker variants of state level FOIAs in the country. FIOAs were passed in the mid 1970’s after Watergate and the federal FIOA was passed. Ever since, bureaucrats have been chipping away at the lower that the public-enabling laws initially granted, usually with some success.

As a result many researchers and many bureaucrats have gradually grown accustomed to viewing FIOAs and FIOA requests as no longer very serious in nature. To be serious, one has to dot i’s and cross t’s and in extreme cases be willing to take the departments and officers involved to court, and even then the laws have been weakened by subsequent laws and lax caselaw decisions that tend to favor the bureaucrats over the public at large. We can recognize this as a symptom of entrenched bureaucracy protecting its power, but it is also an expectable realistic outcome in a sense.

Lawyers (BTW IANAL) to my awareness do not use FIOAs to get at vital records. The laws protecting privacy tend to modeled after California’s, which was passed after a Hollywood actress was slashed after a stalker looked up her address courtesy of the California DMV in the 1990s. Either independently or as a result, or as a result of subsequent case law (probably less common), state FOIAs and state privacy laws tend to act in concert to prevent such incidents from happening again. In any case lawyers tend to use FOIAs as a last resort and don’t rely on them— subpoenas tend to work a lot better and have a lot more legal enabling force behind them.

Also I have been told behind the scenes that the Hawaii Department of Health records were always in questionable shape and late to be converted to electronic format relative to the records of other states’ departments of health. This translates to considerably more uncertainty in preservation of and access to such records. From there it is relatively easy to begin to understand the situation of the bureaucrats at the Hawaii Department of Health. They feel they are under siege by rude out-of-state birthers on the one hand and the actual records may be a legacy of shambles on the other hand, but they would be ill advised to admit that to anyone in public or private since it would reflect poorly on the department and the state as well as on their self-worth.

At any rate IMHO Orly has probably done a significant amount of damage to the Obama image and thrown a lot of his statements and actions in an unfavorable public light. IMHO Obama is not looking for this kind of publicity and would be ill advised to draw attention to his own legal and personal shortcomings in the way that the vital records issue has in the past year. Someone might actually discover something that does not fit the Obama mythos and that would be a PR disaster for Obama.

So I personally am not very concerned that Orly is working in concert with Obama. I am also very hesitant to rely on the use of the Hawaii UIPA for anything that could potentially be viewed as personal information (and sometimes even beyond because of entrenched bureaucratic disdain and disregard for such laws).

Against a powerful foe, it is easy to fall prey to the temptation to attack allies as potential double agents the moment they display alleged weakness. It may be better to take a deep breath and let things cool for a while. Obama’s overt allies form a potentially target rich environment. Rather than expend one’s energies on a hunch that one of Obama’s detractors is a double agent, it may be more productive to focus one’s excess energy on on another of Obama’s overt allies. Meanwhile people who work together for a common effort may want to maintain effective teamwork by viewing the actions of others in a favorable light whenever possible.

Just my $0.02... :-)