Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion

And Trump knew that all along. Takes one to know one. Heh.

So, any breach in the dam of Obama's opacity is something to be exploited. I don't expect the GOP to have any idea of how to do that. They thoroughly squandered their last opportunity for relevance [looking at you, Newt]and leadership.

How does ego explain Obama's going through courtfights with all the attendant political complications and expense rather than release independently authenticated birth documentation?

Seems more likely that Obama and his handlers must have had some tangible reason for not releasing his BC and had hoped the issue would go away or at least be kept marginalized by a partisan press piling on "birthers."

So far, his team has been able to have all? most? of the eligibility lawsuits dismissed. It's only now, after some of his media fans, the HI Gov, and now Trump have jumped on the Show Us bandwagon, that Obama finally produces the/ a doc. Too, perhaps there are some ongoing court cases that haven't been dismissed and that may turn on his producing a document. And now there is one.

Certainly, the upcoming re-election bid may hinge on Obama's perceived loyalties and the BC issue had to be put to rest. For most, this doc will do.

Trump smells blood in the water ... he will hammer Obama about college transcripts and gas prices and jobs for the rest of the year ...

Internal polls on the BC must be looking bad for Obama.

I love that no one in the MSM could force this. No one in the GOP could force it. No one in the DNC could force it - not even the Clintons. And this flea-bitten, reality-show, B-List celebrity achieved what they couldn't/wouldn't. THAT is who the President is forced to respond to. THAT is who the President is forced to respect. What a small man we have as President that he let this minor issue get this far, and that he had to deal with it at the hands of a Trump.

And note, Trump isn't taking the release as some kind of defeat. Oh no. He's using it as leverage to press for even more - college transcipts. Trump is calling the shots. Trump may not be anybody's ideal candidate, but at least he knows how the game is played and he plays to win.

@The Ghost

All anyone needs to do is keep asking (in a reasonable tone),

"Why" all the secrets?

No need to get into the weeds about authenticity of documents, etc.

Just, "why" ?

And keep asking until they are compelled to answer.

The Left completely misreads the tea leaves on this issue.

Which is okay with me.

Someone at Gateway Pundit pointed out that Lt. Col. Larkin refused to follow an order from the commander in chief because he honestly believed Obama was not eligible to hold the office of President. Larkin trashed his own reputation, forfeited all pay and benefits, torpedoed his military career, and went to jail.

And it all could have been avoided if Obama had the decency to prove he was constitutionally eligible to be president.

If AZ and a few other states are considering Proof of Eligibility laws for Presidential candidates, Obama would be forced to cough up a birth certificate, anyway. Might as well do it now while Trump is blasting him over it and be done with it (or vet it for acceptance before the campaign goes in full swing.)

I don't necessarily accept the validity of what he's providing as proof, but I'm not going to vote for the man, anyway anyhow, and think most of what we're told by our esteemed public servants in DC is bologna that the Times and CNN put between two pieces of Baird's with a little mayo and feed us.

I think that's all true. I also think that because the President's campaign fund raising is now fully underway, he probably didn't want to chance a single dollar not making it into his war chest. Today, he leaves for NY. Coincidence? I don't think so.

After Rather's Memo-gate, I can't believe this could possibly be true ... but this guy claims to show the document has been tampered ... includes screen shots with magnification ...

http://market-ticker.org/post=185094

Frankly, this has all the earmarks of an inside joke gone bad.

Anyone can download the WH file and see the layering techniques in Adobe.

I was joking to someone right after the release that "it took three years to forge that? I coulda done it in 15 minutes!"

Seriously though. Why tamper? Either Hawaii had someone gussy up the deterioration of the document, or Obama's team cleaned it up.

If we assume the latter then we have more questions as to why they felt it was necessary to make it look all shiny and new, why they tampered with certain dates (not saying they changed them). If they tampered with them for clarity, just say so, but that won't do. It's obvious that what was posted is not the original, so why pretend? His peeps aren't that stupid are they?

If Hawaii is to blame, take the wild horses of speculation back to bridle-post and start over: the ORIGINAL, if you please.

Obama says, "Now, I normally would not comment on something like this. . ."

Yes, but he would spend millions to keep it out of the spotlight.

Why?

as i say over a patterico's, the disgusting thing is that Lt. Col. Lukin went to prison over this, and obama might have been able to solve this in an instant.

http://patterico.com/2011/04/27/the-damage-done-by-obama%e2%80%99s-obstinance/

Not to mention the thousands of dollars that might have been saved in birther suits.

Joan of Argghh!: The document released on the White House web site looks like it's been highly massaged. That doesn't mean it's fake, the starting image is pretty clearly microfilm or microfiche of a bound document (I believe I've read that and it's clear it's a copy (well, of course :-) from the curvature of the left edge) and at best case some clever person felt they had to release something a lot more legible. Whoever "polished" the image wasn't exactly expert in this sort of thing and left all sorts of artifacts in both the pixels and the image file (the .PDF format file which Karl Denninger of the Market Ticker site pulled apart (thanks LukeHandCool)).

I'll leave it at that, anything more is speculation which goes beyond my personal knowedge of document imaging (which is pretty serious in the black and white area).

@LukeHandCool, I was just going to ask for opinions from someone who knows more than I do about image manipulation about this article: http://selfevidenttruths-euripides.blogspot.com/2011/04/obama-birth-certificate-released-fogery.html

I would have no idea what to look for or how to spot tampering with such an item, but apparently several commenters here do.

Here's a posting that does a great job of showing the different layers. Note that I've confirmed they exist by opening the file in a programmer's text editor, but I don't have any graphics program that will separate out the layers when it imports a PDF file so I haven't personally been able to confirm what they look like.

Once again I'll emphasize that while this is "tampering" of a sort there's no evidence that I can see that this is anything more than a ham-handed effort to make the document more legible. This really could be "Fake but Accurate", akin to Andrew Breitbart's honest editing of long videos to skip the boring parts or to drag out an exposé.

Only one person is allowed to see the original. What a country!

Working from a comment by "cartan" on National Review's The Corner, automatic compression using the mixed raster content approach would seem to be the most likely explanation for what we're seeing. It sure doesn't "smell" like something done by hand, no human would fail to pick up a leading or trailing character like the various examples we can see. Whereas it's easy to see how a computer program could make that "mistake".

Since two different planes, e.g. in the upper right the certificate number "61 1064" in the main foreground plane and the trailing "1" in the background plane, are then compressed differently, I'm not surprised they come out with different compression artifacts, e.g. the big differences between the trailing '1" and the preceding "1"s.

This would appear to be technology that was fielded after I left the document imaging field in mid-'96 (which through that time couldn't afford to do more than pure black and white images) so I'm not surprised I hadn't heard about it previously. That said, it speaks of the usual sloppiness we've come to expect from this Administration that they'd not work with an expert before releasing something that they should have known would be examined with a microscope.

In politics, as in humor, timing is everything. I agree with you about his ego getting in the way.

His big ego had convinced BO that his sense of timing (for the eventual release) was impeccable. But his timing was off and this quick release proved to be a case of premature enfeoffment of the issue to Trump.

And Trump is not even a serious contender!

Obama had every intention of eventually going public with the "long form," but he really did not want to do so quite yet. He would have much preferred to release it at a time when it would either distract from some damaging issue during the campaign, or ideally serve as a response to what the public saw as an overreaching assertion made by one of the serious Republican contenders, or perhaps even a recognized spokesman for Republicans – maybe even a statement during the Republican convention raising the issue. In other words, I think he was trying to taunt Republicans with it and wanted to use it at some point to try and grab the microphone away from them.

But Donald Trump played the issue like he was in a one-on-one poker game with Obama, and was seen as having called BO "with a big pair." Obama felt forced to either show his hand now, or risk being perceived as having folded.

I think that explains Obama’s obvious testy reaction to the issue yesterday by dismissively calling the whole "silly." The obvious question someone should have asked him at that point was, "If it is so silly, was your campaign being silly by releasing it?"

Obama and his team viewed it as a potential weapon in his campaign arsenal. As long as large numbers of Americans (on both sides of the aisle) continued to believe that he was indeed born in the United States, and that the issue was a non-starter, entertained only by a fringe element, he could ignore it and hold the form in reserve. He wanted to time the release in a way to tar as many Republicans as possible with that "fringe" brush, and hopefully thereby win back some of the independents that have been slipping away.

But my sense is his campaign was forced to act now because real skepticism about him was beginning to metastasize.

When Pat Buchanan can freely mock Chris Matthews on MSNBC by reminding him that he is supposed to be a journalist, they had to know that they were in a little trouble!

"What are you hiding?" remains (as it should)one of the most powerful questions in politics.

36% in a recent poll doubted his citizenship. that is a lot.

However, the key may not be the certificate but what was on it. How it was made out, then signed at the time it happened reflects on who is mother was and her mindset.

Pay attention to the details