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You said — “I mean, except for the obvious step his mother took of putting a birth announcement in a Hawaii newspaper, just in case he ever wanted to run for President someday despite being, you know, born in Kenya.”

This is where people are mistaken in their “assessment” of why the mother would have put that announcement in the paper. People make it out to be that the mother is somehow looking ahead to Obama being a Presidential Candidate. No, she’s not. She’s merely trying to get it so that he’s a “citizen” of the United States, and therefore has the benefits of being that citizen. It’s nothing more than that, otherwise, he would be an immigrant.

That’s all she was doing, nothing more...

The problem comes in later, when Obama does decide to run for President. Then the facts start coming out.

People put birth and death announcements in my local paper all the time for people who neither died nor were born here. Grandparents frequently put in a birth announcement of grandchildren born elsewhere just as a way of letting people know.

If it was the hospital that submitted the announcement, however, that would be a different matter. When my kids were born in San Francisco in the 1960-70s, the hospitals used to release the birth announcements. I don’t know what Hawaii did.

First, I doubt that his 18-year-old mother would have been aware that she was one year too young to qualify her son for citizenship under the current law; hasn't everyone always believed that a US citizen's baby, born anywhere in the world, is automatically a US citizen (and, of course, may or may not also be a citizen of the country in which he is born?)

Second, I don't think the timeline makes a lot of sense -- his parents married in February, and he was born in August. I can't imagine a young pregnant woman deciding to travel to Kenya -- pretty much on the exact opposite side of the world from Hawaii -- especially in 1961. (And I don't think I've ever heard of evidence she DID travel to Kenya then, though I also haven't heard stories of people standing up to say "oh, I was her hospital roommate when she had Barack in Honolulu, look, you can see her in the corner of this old family photo." (Haven't been looking for such, either.)

Finally, there's the inconvenience of the birth certificate that lists his place of birth as Honolulu, along with the maybe corroborating evidence of the birth announcement. I realize it's a 2007 printout, so aside from the unlikeliness of it actually being a forgery, we'd also need to account for the fact that he would also have had to forge his birth certificate on PREVIOUS occasions, such as to get a US passport. Since this CURRENT forgery, produced while running for President, is apparently so clumsy that random anonymous experts on the internet can determine so, how is it that the state department fell for his previous, likely even clumsier forgeries?

I'm sorry, it's just all too much, and requires way too much belief in bad faith by everyone from his 18 year old mom to the city clerk in Honolulu. I don't buy it.