After days of anxiously awaiting the news, manically checking The Page and Drudge, constructing unscientific formulae for determining the most likely choice and gripping our cell phones as we slept so as not to miss the moment the Obama campaign sent the text to announce the VP selection, it's finally official: Joe Biden (whose Intrade stock has gone up and down like a rollercoaster over the past few days) will be Barack Obama's running mate. At last, we can all get some rest before the convention.
Will as much drama surround McCain's announcement next weekend?
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can't believe they didn't demand a copy of his birth certificate
> before he entered the race for Presidency!
>
> Dear Friends,
>
> The following is an article from the July 7, 2008, issue #27 from
"The
> American Free Press" Newspaper, an article by Assistant editor, Pat
> Shannon.
>
> "It now appears that Barack Obama is consitutionally ineligible for
the
> office of president. John McCain's eligibility was established in
1964,
> when courts ruled Sen. Barry Goldwater was eligible although he was
> born in Arizona when it was a territory, not a state. McCain was born
> in the
> Panama Canal Zone when it was a U.S.territory.
>
> And, even as the controlled media continues to ignore the ineligibility
> of Obama, it wil l not go away.While few doubt that the Democrats will
> manage to pull off his nomination, all remain poised to view the legal
> performance.
>
> The first hurdle will be having Obama produce his birth certificate,
> which so far he has refused to do, and prove that he was born in Hawaii on
> August 4, 1961, as he has always claimed. There is speculation that his
> American mother may have brought him to Honolulu shortly after his
> birth in
> Kenya, but no proof of that has been shown.
>
> According to the law on the books at the time of Obama's birth, the
> office of president requires that a candidate be a natural citizen if the
> child was not born to two U.S.citizen parents. Since he was not,
> should it be
> proven that Obama was not born in Hawaii, as claimed, he is ineligible
> without further debate. But assuring that he was born there, he has
> another problem.
>
> According to a legal researcher who has contacted the AFP, U.S.law very
> clearly states: "If only one parent is a U.S.citizen at the time of
> one's birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for a
> minimum of 10 years, five of which must be after the age of 16." And
> therein lies Obama's new problem.
>
> Barack Obama's father was never a U.S.citizen.
>
> Interestingly, there isn't much paperwork on the marriage of
Obama's
> parents, and this has a few researchers speculating that it never took
> place at all. On page 27 of "Obama: From Promise to Power",
David
> Mendell writes: "Obama later confessed that he never searched for the
> government documents on the marriage, although Madelyn (Obama's
maternal
> grandmother) insisted they were legally married." He also notes that
> Obama's father apparently was not legally divorced from his first wife
> back in Kenya at the time, a point of contention that ultimately led to
> their separation.
>
> This also would suggest that there may never have been any legal
> marriage by Obama's parents at all, but the Constitution does not ban
an
> illegitimate child from the White House, as long as he was born inside
> the U.S.
>
> Obama's mother was born in Kansas and was only 18 when Obama was born.
> This means even though she satisfied the citizen requirement for 10 years,
> she was not a citizen for at least five years prior to Obama's birth.
In
> essence, the mother alone is not old enough to qualify her som for
> automatic U.S.citizenship. At most, two years elapsed from his mother
> turning 16 to the time of Barack Obama's birth when she was 18. His
> mother would have needed to have been 16 + 5 = 21 years old at the time of
> Barack Obama's birth for him to be a natural-born citizen. Barack
> Obama was
> already three years old at the time his mother turned 21.
>
> Technically, Obama should have been naturalized as a citizen, but that,
> of course, would disqualify him from holding the office of president.;
> If the allegations are accurate, Americacould install in January of
> 2009 a new president who is not even a U.S.citizen, neither born nor
> naturalized.
>
> It should be demanded that Obama produce his 1961 Hawaiian birth
> certificate.
>
> If he cannot satisfactorily do so, he should be deemed immediately
> ineligible to hold the office of president."
>
> Please pass this on to everyone you know.
>
> For our Freedom and Liberties
Image of Birth Certificate: http://i305.photobucket.com/albums/nn227/Polarik/BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg
Also,
From FactCheck.Org
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html
Born in the U.S.A.
August 21, 2008
The truth about Obama's birth certificate.
Summary
In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake."
We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. We have posted high-resolution photographs of the document as "supporting documents" to this article. Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said.
Analysis
Since we first wrote about Obama's birth certificate on June 16, speculation on his citizenship has continued apace. Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.
Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?
Doocy: What do you mean they have a "false birth certificate" on their Web site?
Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.
Doocy: Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?
Corsi: No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.
Corsi isn't the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:
The birth certificate doesn't have a raised seal.
It isn't signed.
No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
In the zoomed-in view, there's a strange halo around the letters.
The certificate number is blacked out.
The date bleeding through from the back seems to say "2007," but the document wasn't released until 2008.
The document is a "certification of birth," not a "certificate of birth."
Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it's stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.
The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller
Alvin T. Onaka's signature stamp
The raised seal
Blowup of text
You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven't been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.
The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records." The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.
The document is a "certification of birth," also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.
The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.
We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that's when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and "all the records we could get our hands on" according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn't release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama's citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: "[We] couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world." The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641.
Blowup of certificate number
Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama's information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn't have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible "scenario" without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.
We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn't meet the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural-born citizen."
We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: "It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over."
In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:
Obama's birth announcement
The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama "likely" was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.
Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.
–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller
Sources
United States Department of State. "Application for a U.S. Passport." Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.
State of Hawaii Department of Health. "Request for Certified Copy of Birth Record." Accessed 20 Aug. 2008.
Hollyfield, Amy. "Obama's Birth Certificate: Final Chapter." Politifact.com. 27 Jun. 2008.
Copyright © 2003 - 2008, Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
FactCheck.org's staff, not the Annenberg Center, is responsible for this material.
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