Certifigate and the document defector

The one and only document expert consulted by any U.S. media to proclaim Barack Obama's "birth certificate" as legitimate has rejected that position, claiming he was misquoted by Fox News. He has further stated that Fox refuses to answer his demand for a correction.

Jean Claude Tremblay is the only computer graphics expert consulted by any media other than WND on the validity of the so-called "long-form birth certificate" released by the White House in April. He was also the only expert to lend credibility to the document.

Tremblay told WND none of his comments to Fox would permit the conclusion that the Obama birth certificate is an authentic document.

In other words, the entire news media establishment, besides WND, accepted Obama's document at face value, without the slightest effort at due diligence.

"I no longer trust Fox News," he said. "Despite my protests, Fox News will not allow me to correct their story."

The Fox News story by reporter Jana Winter, published two days after the White House released the document, remains in its original form despite Tremblay's protests, under the headline, "Expert: No Doubt Obama's Birth Certificate is Legit."

He should sue them. Make sure they can’t get away with it - or at least that the general public knows that Fox is NOT the great bastion of conservatism, but is actually aiding and abetting Obama’s crimes just like the other networks.

Nobody will touch Obama; he’s the place-holder for the mafia, so nobody will confront him at all.

But in the course of the cover-up, lots of “little people” are being used and abused and have real grievances that should be flooding the court system. The media, law enforcement system, government bureaucrats, and courtsare indeed screwing us all, but they need to be buried under an avalanche of pebbles from each one of us being screwed in real and tangible ways that give us “legal standing”.

The courts are insisting none of us peons has standing to bring down the big one. But we do have standing to move one pebble, and if everybody moved one pebble, the avalanche would bring down the big one.

I no longer trust

Trust has very little to do with news any longer.

I have a strong preference for Fox News because I don't rely on trust. Fox presents the news in a reasonable matter. I take my own decisions on what impact that news has on me, my family, and the nation.

What I find most noticeable is the amount of political news content other news sources omit. It is impossible to juxtapose what Fox reports with what other news media reports when the other media reports are missing.

Fox News is the news of choice for people who think critically and are able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the news.

The massive tactics the nation’s progressives employ to discredit Fox News is ample evidence that Fox News reports correctly.

But you would concede that Fox should acknowledge its misrepresentations concerning the document expert’s testimony, right? Is Fox presenting the news in a reasonable manner, as you call it, when it brazenly lies about this man’s opinion? And how is deeming their presentation “reasonable” not an act of blind trust on your part? You are trusting that what you are hearing from them is “true enough” that you can make your own judgment, correct? But if they lie here, where else might they be lying, or at least fudging, or hiding, or otherwise misrepresenting? Unless you benchmark everything they say against multiple alternative data sources, you don’t know, you can’t know. They get in front of a camera and talk. Anybody can do that, given the financial resources to set up the infrastructure. I am sorry these questions displease you (so much so that even we with honest questions are lumped by you into some conspiratorial effort to discredit Fox), but if we don’t hold them accountable, then who will?

Hi butter, long time no talk. I agree with you. He may have a suit. There’s a little-known tort claim called “false light,” basically, you can’t put words in someone’s mouth, like making a commercial where a famous actor appear to endorse your product, when in fact his actual statements and beliefs don’t support that. It’s part of the larger body of law designed to protect reputation, and there’s another area to look into, as misrepresenting his evaluation could impact his professional standing and his ability to get future work. Who would hire him for similar work after hearing he thought that obvious fraud was authentic? Might be other things too, but that’s the stuff that pops into my head at the moment.

One of Nebraska’s state senators responded to a constituent that anybody who is a “birther” is a racist, period - automatically.

I’m wondering whether there are any libel or defamation laws that could be used to at least bring the issue to a lawsuit. Even if the suit couldn’t be won, what would have to be present for the case to have “standing” so that the claims of “birthers” could be heard in court and seen to be anything but “racist”.

When does spouting off at the mouth actually reach the point where there could be a legitimate libel suit?

If you go to Tremblay’s blog site he makes the following statement which WND doesn’t seem keen to big up:

“I want to add that if this document was changed (such as layers created) in Adobe Photoshop and saved as PDF (or converted to PDF with the MacOS Preview application, as we see by the PDF Metadata), the result would have been that each images with a single and identical resolution values which is not the case in the this PDF.

That being said, this absolutely not proof either way that changes could have been made during and after scanning.

In my humble opinion, what I see about how the PDF is built does not prove any unusual falsification. If there was tampering, we must look elsewhere and not how the PDF was constructed.”

http://www.proficiografik.com/2011/05/02/rectifications-regarding-obama-birth-certificate-pdf-validity-foxnews.html

In general, standing is based on a combination of things:

First, you have to have a specific injury, to you personally, that can be quantified in some way, i.e., “concrete”.

Second, you have to show causation, that the individual or entity you are suing is the actual cause of the harm you are experiencing.

Third, the nature of your claim must be redressable, i.e., there is something within the power of the court to actually fix the problem and remove the harm or compensate for the injury.

This, BTW, is why taxpayer suits per se typically fail on standing. The injury is too diffuse, it didn’t settle on and harm you in some unique way not like a million other people. One major exception is Establishment Clause violations. Show that the act harms your right to practice your own religion without government imposition of their religion, and you’ve got a real shot at taxpayer standing. That’s one of my backup strategies long-term should Obamacare not get repealed before I have to act on it individually.

But being dubbed “racist” by a politician doesn’t seem to fit that template, so I think you’d have to go back to the basics first listed, individualized injury, causation, and redressability.

Injury in defamation goes two different directions. There is libel per se versus libel that must show individual, personal injury, i.e., make out a claim for quantifiable damages.

Libel per se is less demanding on proof of injury, but only certain kinds of reputational attacks qualify, such as a charge of “moral turpitude,” or a charge of professional misconduct. Publicly accusing someone of a specific act of adultery, for example, would qualify as “presumed injurious” for standing purposes, not requiring a proof of damages. If racism could be similarly qualified as a charge of “moral turpitude, or injurious to one’s professional reputation, and I think it could, then one might get over the injury hurdle.

But the ultimate problem is going to be specificity. Throwing that charge out to cover some big, nebulous group is “safe” bomb-throwing, because no one was named specifically.

The only alternative to individualized defamation is what amounts to “hate speech” laws, i.e., group libel laws based on some unifying characteristic of the group, race, sexual orientation, etc. But as we already know, hate speech laws are a particularly dangerous place to go if one cares at all about free speech, because way too many things that are important to be able to freely talk about could get shut down under such group libel laws.

That’s why the founders provided for alternative mechanisms of redress, such as elections. It’s quite the balancing act, and there are some things, in a free society, which sometimes we simply have to put up with rather than fix, as unsatisfying as that can be.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this post constitutes legal advice, but is merely general information on how the law works, and dispensed for educational purposes only.

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