This birth certificate pdf is a dubious document

[mick e]

mick e has opened the document in Adobe Illustrator.

It is a multi-layered concoction of placed graphics. Why the White House would release such an obvious construction as PDF with LAYERS INTACT is simply too bizarre to understand.

It is just as outlined here in this vid:
http://www.youtube.com/v/2eOfYwYyS_c

Is this some kind of strange bait? A larger diversion? Taking a dive?

WTF?

[john dough]

There are some who would rather have his death certificate.

[Chakravartin]

Okay, that's f-ing weird.

I just played with it, myself. The PDF from the Whitehouse web site.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/2...ertificate

It's got layers of text that are clearly not original to the document.

It's possible that the text was originally illegible and they cleaned it up, but yeah, this raises some legit questions even if you aren't a nutso birther.

This is what it looks like with all of the linked images disabled except the background:


They replaced a whole lot of text.

It's almost as if the intention was to keep the conspiracy theories going even stronger.

...

Actually, another option just occurred to me.

It's possible that this was the actual document that was provided to Obama from the officials in Hawaii. If they scanned their old archives to preserve them then this might make sense. This may be an artifact from an OCR process.

[cbelt3]

I'll simply assume that they used a scanner that did all the OCR and stuff for them.

Of course it may just be conspiracy nut bait. Sort of the equivalent of my opening my back door, yelling "Squirrel !" and watching the Chihuahuas run outside, barking their little heads off and running around hysterically.

[mick e]

mick e has been informed that OCR software will indeed separate layers in this way.

SO:



Why they wouldn't flatten it before releasing it is another question entirely.

[OWC Jamie]

[rjmacs]

mick e wrote:
Why they wouldn't flatten it before releasing it is another question entirely.

Ever worked in a bureaucracy? :booty:

It almost works better for the President to have a flawed document that can be adequately explained, because it highlights that some people will just not let go of this issue no matter what.

[$tevie]

mick e wrote: Why they wouldn't flatten it before releasing it is another question entirely.

I wonder if they were trying to avoid having their "fingerprints" on the document, so to speak? In other words, they decided it was preferable to release a confusing document than one that had been modified since they obtained it?

[cbelt3]

And of course MEDIA never forges documents, right ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_doc...ontroversy

(Killian Documents controversy, which caused Dan Rather to retire after broadcasting what seem to have been forged documents discussing George W Bush's poor career in the Air National Guard.)

[$tevie]

Huh?