Jesus Christ these people are morons [Update x3: The Seal appears!]

I know I said I’d try winding down how much I talk about No Quarter, but my god, every time I think about doing it, they come up with a brand new way to blow away what should be common sense.

And that’s what they’ve done with their lateast post on Obama’s birth certificate.

First there is this:

The first thing I noticed when I re-read the Kos story is that Kos does not explain how he acquired Obama’s certification, which seems curious given his alleged credentials as a serious blogger.

…

However, within the substantial body of comments (648 at this writing) to Kos’s diary, several posters referenced a comment by Kos in which he explains that he asked the Obama campaign for the certification via e-mail, and they sent it to him. The problem is that I cannot find the original comment from Kos which so many other posters reference; perhaps my search tool is not working well and I could not find it among the 648 comments, and someone else can locate it.

Here you go. OK that took about 10 seconds.

Second, there is this:

Second, this sentence by Kos caught my eye: “Note, I have trimmed the edges of the scan, so before someone tries to inevitably ‘debunk’ this based on the dimensions of a Hawaiian birth certificate, that should be noted.”

…

If the certification was sent to Kos by the Obama campaign electronically, why would he “trim” the “scan”? Why not just re-post the image that was sent to him the way that it was sent? Now, I write tons of html-coded diaries and all you need to do, if the original image is too big, is insert a measurement into the jpg code to decrease the size of the image.

Maybe to make it look better and cleaner, so it wouldn’t look like this? Maybe?  Oh the horror! He trimmed the edges!

Third:

Third, I found a comment by Opendna about a third of the way into the comments section of Kos’s story, posted at 4:35:46 PM EST on June 12….

Where did Opendna get that template, which JimJ pointed out shows the same time and county as Obama’s alleged certification? And why did he boldly publish this template in a comment?

Given that opendna appears to have posted it as a joke in response to someone asking “where is McCain’s birth certificate?,” my guess is that he took the one Kos had posted and used photoshop to create the “template.”  It wouldn’t be hard to do, and is supported by the fact that it was posted by opendna in his own photobucket account.  Even further proof of it can be a second birth certificate posted on the same photobucket account with the name “Haye I. B. Ahphorgerie” (Hey, I be a forgery).

As to why it has the same time and county on it…probably because Opendna left it on it.  In response, I would ask why would a “template” even have a time and county (but nothing else) on it to begin with?

Fourth, luckily not a major point:

Finally, I noticed that Kos posted his diary at 11:44:37 AM EST on June 12, according to the DailyKos site. For some reason, though, the first comment, by “Addison” shows an earlier time: Thu Jun 12, 2008 at 11:10:34 AM EST. I don’t know how Kos’s timestamps operate, but I thought it was strange. Maybe someone else can explain.

Just a quirk sometimes on the site. It’s not uncommon to have the datestamps on comments to be earlier than the post being commented on. Why it happens? I’m sure someone might know, but it isn’t a sign of foul play or anything.

Fifth:

Although the certification posted by Kos and the one posted by the Obama campaign appear to be identical, people who have “peered” inside the images say that each has been opened in Photoshop or some other Adobe program.

…

Why would “Ducky” be working on Obama’s birth certificate? To cover up the certificate number with a black block? If that’s the reason, and it was sent to Kos after the certificate number was hidden, why then would Kos open this image in Photoshop? To “trim” it? (See questions above about that).

Yes, exactly. It was opened up in an image editor to put a black box on in the Obama’s campaign. That should have been obvious from the start. The fact that they’re just now realizing that’s what happened seems to just show much little they know what they’re talking about. And yes, then kos opened it up again to trim it so that it was cleaner. I probably would have used photoshop myself for both of these tasks and it basically means absolutely zero.

And to just add to their stupidity, they add this:

Please note again the prominent language at the bottom of the form: “ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFICATE”.

Um, yeah? Your point is what? The digital version wouldn’t be valid anyway in a court of law. The original, which I presume hasn’t been altered, would be.

Next:

If Barack Obama ordered his certificate of birth, one would logically presume that upon receipt of that actual document, a simple scan would be made of both sides, and the images from the scans then published. The certificate number could have been covered with a simple piece of black tape before scanning the document.

Instead, if one is to believe that this certification is authentic, it appears that the Obama campaign scanned the document sent by Hawaii OHSM, then altered the scanned image in some kind of Adobe program. This should be explained in light of the importance of presenting an authentic document that has not been altered.

Oh dear god stop the stupid.

First, no, one wouldn’t “logically presume” that a scan would be made of both sides. Why would they scan both sides, when one side doesn’t have any of the birth information on it? I wouldn’t have automatically scanned it.

Second, the very fact of the warning against altering the original is probably a good reason not to use a strip of black tape to cover the certificate number.

First off, if you left the tape on, it would obviously “alter” the document. Second, if they took the tape off and it ripped the paper, that would alter the document, making it invalid. Third, you’re almost certainly going to have to run it through Photoshop to resize and straighten the image out anyway, even if you used tape to cover over the number (so you just as well do it digitally).

This argument of “OMG THEY OPENED IT IN PHOTOSHOP” is so fake since it is pretty obvious that they would have opened/did open it in an image editor at some point along the way to make cosmetic changes (trimming, covering up personal info, resizing and possibly straightening the image out, since one almost never scans something perfectly straight).

Finally:

There has been much written, also, about the missing embossed seal and registrar’s stamp/signature on Obama’s document. If it’s on the back, let’s see the entire document in real time (like at a press conference)….Obama should make available the long version of his birth certificate, which includes more detail about his birth. The State of Hawaii should have that on file, in case he’s lost the original that he said he had located in High School (per Dreams From My Father).

Why should Obama go out of his way to satisfy your own personal paranoia. He’s released a certificate of birth. The State of Hawaii has confirmed it to be legitimate.  There is zero reason to doubt it’s authenticity other than continued and unfounded paranoia (though I do like their note about someone at the Hawaii Department of Health “backtracking” on the legitimacy of the certificate of birth with no link, no quote, no nothing to actually say this is what they actually did (and given No Quarter’s penchant for taking things out of context or otherwise picking and choosing, I think we definitely need an actual full quote in context of what was said to believe them).  Actually, I’d almost like a transcript of the entire conversation since No Quarter apparently called the Attorney General along the way too.  Did the Attorney General talk to the Department of Health, or did NQ talk to the Attorney General, then misrepresent to the Department of Health what the Attorney General told them?  We have no way to know.  Too bad they aren’t as transparent as they demand Obama to be).

And somehow I have a feeling that even if he did what they asked of him, they’d find some reason to doubt it.  (“Oh, he waved A document in the air, but was it his real birth certificate?  We couldn’t tell on TV!  We demand that he give his copy over to an unbiased media source (like us!) to check it out for themselves!” or “How do we know that that’s his REAL long birth certificate? How do we know he didn’t forge that too?)

See, even if he gave in and did that, they would just find another reason to doubt it, and it would give No Quarter and others the opportunity to challenge anything and everything of Obama’s, making them waste time and resources to debunk every little thing, no matter how silly (which is, of course, exactly the point).

Update

I ran across this post showing how manipulating the image can bring out the seal, so I did it myself (I ran it through find edges once) and what do you know:

You can barely see it, but it is there. You can do it yourself by downloading the digital copy of the image and running “find edges” on it in Photoshop.  I’m sure someone else can maniulate the image better than I get bring it out more.

Update 2

Apparently the new thing is to disprove the seal by going and using a copy of the birth certficate from Polarik at Town Hall which used the “original” copy of the birth certificate on kos’ site.

However, there are several problems with this:

First, the “last edited” date and time on Polarik’s image is June 16th:

While the version currently linked from kos’ post was last edited on June 12, the day kos posted the birth certificate:

Now, this means 1 of 2 things:

1) Either kos made an image on the 12, but linked it on the 16th or later, after Polarik grabbed his copy, or

2) Polarik’s grabbed a copy of what is currently linked from kos’ post

Also, you’ll notice another difference:

The size of the image on kos’ post is 2427×2369 while the resolution on Polarik’s post is 1024×1000.  In other words, the image has been resized.

Not only this, but it has been resaved as a jpg at a lower quality.  This could just be a byproduct of resaving the image after resizing it, but you can definitely see the difference here:

The top text is from kos’ version resized down to 1024×1000 in photoshop.  The second text is directly from Polarik’s copy with no alterations.  You can clearly see that the 2nd version has more pixilation and is of lower quality (with both samples enlarged at the same time to maintain consistency).

Given how faint the seal is on Obama’s certificate of birth, such a reduction in quality may very well be enough to obscure it if you try to run the same test that I did above on his version (and indeed, the seal doesn’t show up when one does it – though it also has the interesting side effect of being much darker when I run the “find edges” filter – probably due to the increased pixilization of the image.

So we have a situation where we have an image linked from kos’s site which either is the same version there originally, or was edited at the same time as the original, which shows a seal, or a version by Polarik which has been reduced in size and quality and created after kos’ version, which doesn’t show the seal.

To me the evidence on this one points in one direction -> the seal can’t be seen on Polarik’s version because of the increased pixilization on his copy due to resaving it.

Update 3

Indeed, saving the original copy at the same resolution as Polarik when doing “save for web” at 20% gets almost the same file size as the image Polarik has.  Indeed, saving it as such creates a similar amount of pixilation and, low and behold, if I run “find edges” on that image, the seal no longer appears.  I think this mystery is solved.