A lot of the discussion of the whole thing has consisted of repeating things that have already been looked at and dealt with already.
Some of it has consisted of posting stuff that pretends to be authoritative by some expert, but when you watch it it's nonsense that has already been debunked, and then they go off on some thing about how Obama was told at age 18 that he was going to be a future US President because there was this secret time travel program by the CIA and DARPA that has allowed them to look into the future and preidentify future US Presidents so that they can groom the for the job.
And no, I'm not kidding.
What I personally know about it is (mostly) contained in this thread. Exception is a few new things I've read and maybe even posted on but not had a chance to add to that thread.
I've been trying to keep up with all the theories and speculations but honestly it's like trying to keep up with a tsunami. Most of it (to mix metaphors in an unfortunate way) doesn't hold water, but there are a few things at least that could merit some further examination.
At this point I personally don't (yet) see a smoking gun in the layers. Someone needs to run a real scanning experiment (more sophisticated than the one run by reegs which was helpful but not definitive in terms of some of the finer details) to see how close one can get to the results seen - bearing in mind also that we are severely limited by not having the original with the same security paper, the same characteristics of ink, and have very little idea precisely what software (package AND version) OR what hardware was used to scan the document.
I'm not an expert in such matters, though probably competent enough when it comes to software and graphics in general. But at this point I don't think I have the resources to do the experiment (or more likely, series of experiments) that needs to be run.
So yes, we do need an expert, and one who is honest enough not to skew or falsify the results just because they don't turn out the way that a great many of us would like for them to.
I do know this. From a political standpoint, Obama thought he scored by dropping this on us Wednesday morning, then the taping on Oprah - "Why didn't you release it sooner?" Oprah asks, to get it out there, over and done with and now STFU. I wouldn't be surprised if Oprah and Valerie discussed this to "get it out of the way".
From a shrink angle I think most of America is po'ed about this from the standpoint of 1. waiting 3 years 2. his smug, "You folks are silly" comment 3. the whole Lakin thing 3. the time people have put in this trying, in their minds, to patriotically uphold the constitution 4. putting another scan, copy out there that means nothing - basically doesn't prove or disprove anything - nothing but the real original paper will do that with separate forensic document examination and verification.
Now the media meme is case closed and any further discussion of even the natural born citizen clarification by SCOTUS or a Constitutional Amendment is going to be viewed as fringe. That's fine, we'll push ahead. Hopefully the states will put Natural Born Citizen in their eligibility bills which will necessitate a court ruling, maybe up to SCOTUS.
Overall, I think he has miscalculated how much anger there is out there about this. In basic shrink training, you learn early on that beneath frustration, aggravation and disappointment, there's anger. If there's 'something every day' as I've alluded to, it builds. Have you felt frustrated, aggravated and disappointed with Obama? I guess we'll see how much it builds up to November 6, 2012. . . By then will America be angry enough?