The issue of the eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama hold the office of President of the United States has euphemistically become known as the “Birther” Movement, coined by those in the Mainstream Media and their ilk who take pleasure in deriding so-called “conspiracy theorists.”

Barack Hussein Obama's birth certificate?

I had previously thought it extremely odd that Obama’s VERY FIRST official act as President was to issue Executive Order No. 13489, sealing his records from public view.  Primarily directed at the National Archives, it is also carefully crafted to include other records.  I was inclined to agree with radio talk show host and friend Michael Rivero of whatreallyhappened.com fame and defer to his judgment, since Rivero at the time lived in Obama’s reported home state of Hawaii and, presumably, has local contacts which he can use to confirm and verify his position.  He also bases his opinion on the well-archived birth announcement of the birth in both of Honolulu’s major newspapers (the Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin) which published announcements in August 1961, documenting the birth, in Honolulu, of a son to “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama” on August 4th, 1961.

Barack Obama Birth Announcement on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu Advertiser

The only problem with this is that is has been widely reported that Obama was, in fact, adopted by his mother’s second “companion,” Lolo Soetoro and it is well-documented that Obama used the moniker Barry Soetoro during his college tenure.

President Barack Obama’s father told federal immigration officials in 1961 that he planned to put his unborn son up for adoption, The Boston Globe reports.

Obama’s father, Barack H. Obama, declared his intention while studying at the University of Hawaii during an interview with an immigration officer who had become concerned with Obama’s “playboy ways.”

The Globe relays the official’s recollection of the April 12, 1961 conversation with the senior Obama.

Subject got his USC [United States Citizen] wife ‘Hapai’ [Hawaiian for pregnant] and although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away,” according to a memo describing the conversation with Obama written by Lyle H. Dahling, an administrator in the Honolulu office of what was then called the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.”

Here is an excerpt from an interview that Obama’s wife, Michelle, gave to African Press International (API):

African Press International is supposed to support Africans and African-American view,” she said. “It is strange that API has chosen to support the racists against my husband. There is no shame in being adopted by a stepfather. All dirt has been thrown onto my husband’s face and yet he loves this country. My husband and I know that there is no law that will stop him from becoming the president, just because some American white racists are bringing up the issue of my husband’s adoption by his stepfather. The important thing here is where my husband’s heart is at the moment. I can tell the American people that my husband loves this country and his adoption never changed his love for this country. He was born in Hawaii, yes, and that gives him all the right to be an American citizen even though he was adopted by a foreigner.” [Emphasis added]

Of course, you should not be surprised that API has taken this document down from their website and there is no Internet Archive of the original article, but there are thousands of credible citations to the original article.  Jerome Cori on WorldNetDaily writes that API claims to have an audio recording of the conversation, read here.  Michelle slipped again and referring to her husband said “…his home country in Kenya.”  YouTube video here.

Setting aside for a moment the usual well-worn rhetoric that everyone who disagrees with Obama is a racist, we must presume that the one person, other than the parents, who would be truly “in the know” about the adoption issue would be the wife.  Um, Michelle, did you tell API that Barack was adopted?  Did you state that Barack’s “home country” is Kenya?  Sounds to me like you did.  I guess your handlers left you off the leash.  Oops!

And don’t you dare call me a racist, Michelle.  I have had more black girlfriends than you have had white boyfriends (I’ll venture none).  Two of my childhood playmates are now very, very famous African American actors.  Don’t you dare!  You people who try to play the “race” card all of the time are the real racists.  DON’T YOU DARE!

(Just for the record, I have equal contempt for Obama’s predecessors, kindly read my rant on the REAL neo-Nazis.)

So The Obama has two names?  Which one is his legal name?  You can call yourself anything you want, so long as fraud is not intended.  If his name was changed at some point in time, I find it peculiar that he changed BOTH his first AND last names.  I know of many, many adoptees who all just changed their last names.  Was it a scam to garner the African American vote.  In any eventuality, I believe a fraud has taken place at some point in time.

I must admit that I have been very skeptical of the claims made by the “Birthers,” as they have come to be known, until the Obama Administration released what they claimed to be a copy of Obama’s birth certificate.

Then I, like thousands of others, decided to pick apart the purported birth certificate with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks.

Allow me to qualify myself first.  As most of you who have been following me for any length of time know, I proudly proclaim that I have been “Geeking for Over 50 Years” as part of my professional mantra.  I can say this with credulity since there are at least three Wikipedia mentions to prove it.  I was editing photos long before Photoshop was even created.  I also successfully altered my own birth certificate back in the late 1960′s for the purpose of obtaining a driver’s license (it took me over two decades to get my birth date corrected).  Incidentally, I no longer have a driver’s license nor do I use any form of identification whatsoever.  I have no need of it.  I know who I am and do not care one whit if anybody else does, particularly the Government.

Having made that admission (yikes!), I feel that I am eminently qualified to opine on what was presented as Obama’s birth document.  I found that what most others who have evaluated the document have stated to be true.  Some of them are:

• The images are in what we call “unflattened layers,” that is to say that there are actually multiple images electronically “pasted” one on top of the other.
• There are “blooms” of nearly white around some objects in the document that make it appear to have been altered.
• And most damming is the fact that the typeface in some areas appears to be “kerned,” a typesetting term used to describe the spacing between letters.  To simplify this description, let me just say that a standard typewriter, readily in use in the 1960′s had even letter spacing, that is to say that each letter occupied the same horizontal spacing on a line regardless of the width of the letter, so that an ‘i’ took up the same space as an ‘m’ and so forth.  The only place you saw what is called “proportional spaced” letters at the time was in print, such as newspapers, magazines and books, where the type was set, generally on a Linotype machine.  I was, just a few years later, the editor of my high school newspaper and we had access to a then state-of-the-art, proportional font typewriter, a $5,000.00 machine which actually printed in proportional font.  In order to type a page, one had to blindly type the line (enter the characters without seeing anything print on the paper), then when the end-of-line signal came on, you had to press print and the typewriter would calculate the letter spacings and print the line out.  I seriously doubt that the Clerk’s office in Hawaii had such a machine, if it even was manufactured in 1961.  Nowdays even the cheapest computer and printer is capable of performing this same task.  Some of the letters in the Obama document are proportionally spaced!

After making this finding for myself, I deduced that there were only two possible scenarios for this.  First, Obama and his minions are so full of themselves that they actually thought that they could pull off this little scheme with a duplicitous media covering up for them and that the American public is so incredibly stupid and complacent that it would work.  Or secondly, Obama and his handlers are so stupid as to not know that their forgery was a poor one and would be easily discovered.

I am inclined to toward the latter, but the reality is would be that it doesn’t matter which statement is true.   Hey, couldn’t you guys at least have sprung some forger out of Federal Prison to do the job?  No, probably not on such a sensitive blackmailable issue.  Why, it wouldn’t surprise me if the person or persons who committed the forgery were long dead by now.

What is even more odd (or not) is the silence of the one agency that claims to be the premier document expert with reportedly thousands of typewriters, ink and paper specimens on file with which to compare, the United States Secret Service,  if they could not be politically impuned, that is.  Why not give them a go at the ORIGINAL document?  Of course we all know the answer to that question.

So that is how and why I came to be a Birther.  Maybe.

It has been reported that the George W. Bush Administration made quiet inquiries as to Obama’s eligibility, undoubtedly at the behest of the Republican Party.  What did they find and why was it not released during Obama’s election campaign?  The argument made often here is that if the Republicans were aware of the inconsistencies in Obama’s eligibility why was it not made into a campaign issue?  Well, I will tell you why and no one, not one soul, has come up with an answer.  The reason is simple (and you read it here first):  The reason that the Republicans kept silent during the campaign is because of the simple fact that Obama’s opponent, Senator John McCain was ineligible as well!  That’s right, neither man running for President of the United States was eligible to hold that office!  How so, you ask?  That’s because McCain was not born in the United States either!  He was born on the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was stationed in the United States Navy.

The United States Constitution sets forth the eligibility requirements for serving as President of the United States:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.” [Section 1, Article Two]

The problem is would be that the Constitution does not define the term “natural born Citizen,” the meaning of which has been left open to the courts to decide and the U.S. Supreme court has never has a case brought before it to make the final determination.  What Wikipedia says about the subject can be read here.

By most interpretations however, McCain did, in point of fact, probably meet the requirements for “natural born Citizen,” but I believe that the Republicans did not want to take a chance to create that controversy.  So they said nothing.  There is no other reasoning for this, excepting for, perhaps collusion, but I won’t go there at this time.

The other never before fact is the swearing-in problem.  Remember that little faux pas that John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States (That’s his official title, by the way; it is often mis-stated), said:

I will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully.”

instead of:

I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.”

According to most media reports, White House lawyers and constitutional experts agreed that the re-do was not necessary, but the Administration wanted to allay the growing conspiracy theories already abounding on the Internet in the less than 24 hours after the first ceremony.  But the official oath is actually in the Constitution, word-for-word, according to Wikipedia:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” [Article Two, Section One, Clause Eight]

Okay fellas.  Here’s a brand-spanking-new conspiracy theory for ya:  Suppose that Roberts blunder was intentional.  Suppose Mister Chief Justice was somehow cajoled/coerced/blackmailed into deliberately making the error?  Or perhaps he did it “for the good of the country” to avert a constitutional crisis that would certainly evolve.  Of course there ARE all sorts of conspiracy theories anyway, such as the (untrue) allegation that a Muslim Imam was, for some reason, present, although the few official photos of the event show no Bible, or for that matter, the Holy Qur’an.  But suppose that in the second, private swearing-in ceremony the following day Roberts used Obama’s real name, Barry Soetoro.  Okay, I won’t go out on THAT limb, for fear of the derision.  But there you have it!

But I digress.  The fact remains that the birth certificate presented to the public was a forgery, for whatever reason and purpose.  I believe that the Obama Administration decided to get this issue out of the way once and for all by getting Donald Trump to bring the issue to light; that is, to give it a little more credibility in the Mainstream Media and then presented the forgery as fact.  The Mainstream Media then supposedly vetted it with their supposed “experts” and its all said and done now.  Over.  Finished.  Water under the bridge.  Buried.  Done.

Never to be mentioned again in the Mainstream Media excepting to poke fun at all those “Birther Nutcases.”

That’s what I think.  It was planned that way.  The Donald did a good job and will certainly be rewarded.  Vice-president Joe Biden may not run again, so why not put The Donald in there?  It would be a smart move.  Coax the left-of-center Republicans away.  Get an actual businessman in there.  You know the drill.

There seems to be two principal leaders of the Birthers.  On one hand you have Phillip Berg, Philadelphia attorney, former Assistant Pennsylvania Attorney General, life-long Democrat and quick to proclaim a member of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and Orley Taitz, attorney, dentist, immigrant from the former USSR.

Not unlike so many people in the various and sundry “Movements,” i.e., Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party or the more general “Patriot Movement,” they don’t get along with each other.  I wonder aloud if one (or both) are just “ringers,” or deliberate “plants,” designed to fail.  As per usual, they seem to be working for the same goal, all while competing with each other.  They both come across as oddballs, to me, but that should come as no surprise to you.  There seems to be a lot of that going around these days.  I won’t take sides; I will leave you to your own discernment.

And again just like the other “Movements,” the organizers, or the prime movers-and-shakers that are presented to the general public by the Mainstream Media, are missing the “big picture,” either accidentally or, perhaps, deliberately.  The big picture is not, in point of fact, whether Barack Hussein Obama was born in the United States or Kenya or, for that matter, Pluto.  The REAL issue should be if he is actually using his legal name now, or if he used an alias in college.  Its either one or the other, there is no denying it.  In any event, it comports with fraud, no matter how you look at it!

Only time will tell if Barack Obama was/is truly eligible for the Presidency.  With the pendency of the many and several court cases, we may find out.  But we may not know in our lifetimes, if ever.  But like so many other questionable actions taken by those in our Government, there is no denying that the suspicions, the conflicts, the obfuscation and the mysteries abound, like always, business as usual for those in government.

So does this make me a “Birther?”  Probably not.  I’m just your average, run-of-the-mill skeptic.