Posted by
Polarik on Sunday, June 22, 2008 2:35:43 PM
Or, since this involves Hawaii, "pineapples to pineapples:"
With many thanks to Bloggers
TexasDarlin, Freeper, and Shainzona, I am posting a copy of Hawaiian-born, Patricia Decosta's certified "Certification of Live Birth," which is what this Certification
should look like. If you go back to the points I raised in my original post, specifically about the differences in typeface, letter artifacts, and the border, these points are further reinforced from comparing Decosta's certified document with Obama's uncertified one.
Once again, here is Obama's
uncertified (and suspect) "Certification of Live Birth":
And, now, Ms. Decosta's
certified (and not suspect) "Certification of Live Birth:"
For comparison purposes, I created a cropped image of each that are approximately the same dimensions in terms of image height and text height. Additionally, each image -- one for Obama's and one for Decosta's -- has approximately the same amount of JPG compression.
Before comparing these and deconstructing them, I draw your attention to the previous images showing the entire certificates. Both have the same "tag line" indicating the form number and revision,
OHSM 1.1 (Rev. 11/01) LASER, and the "prima facie evidence" statement
.
Given that both have that same tag line, one can assume, for the moment, that this tag line does appear on valid COB's produced by the Office of Health Status Monitoring during the time that Rev. 11/01 was being used.
However, the thing that should jump out at you, besides the visual differences in the typefaces, are the obvious, visual differences in the borders.
But, first, let me reiterate what is my main contention about the images posted on the Daily Kos and Fight The Smears websites.
I maintain that a copy of a real, Hawaiian Certification of Live Birth was graphically modified to resemble what Obama's "Certification of Live Birth"
might look like, IF, and only IF, it were a genuine reproduction of a genuine document.
Thus, the crux of my argument is as follows:
Because the image of Obama's copy has so many distinct, visual differences from the image of a copy certified as accurate, like Ms. Decosta's, and that these visual differences represent what could only result from a deliberate, graphical modification of an existing image, that the image itself, and the paper copy it purports to represent, casts doubt on the validity of the claims made for them.
These claims are that Barack Obama's "Certification of Live Birth" does exists somewhere, and that the JPG images posted on the Daily Kos and Fight The Smears websites are genuine reproductions of it.
As I highlighted in my first post, the evidence says otherwise. Here are close-up views of both the Obama and Decosta images:
The typeface on the Decosta image is much darker and thicker, and has less kerning (spacing between the letters), than the Obama image. Moreover, the color of the green paper comes through almost all of the letters regardless of magnification or image compression.
By comparison, you will not see the grey and white pixels found between the letters on the Obama image.
When you enlarge the letters in the Decosta image, they all tend to remain solid, especially letters like "I, L, B, E, H," that continue to look the same no matter how large you make them. Conversely, when you enlarge the letters in the Obama image, they start to fall apart -- that is, they start losing pixels. This is exactly what happens to bitmapped text created by a graphics program.
OK, now let's compare the borders of both images.
In the Obama image -- or, should I say, "images," because the edges of the vertical borders in the Kos image overlap the horizontal ones, whereas the Smears image has them lining up -- the pattern is different from the Decosta image.
The borders in the Obama image might be extremely faint versions of the Decosta image, but then why is so much image information missing, if not because it was a bad reproduction to begin with.
Other bloggers have already noted the reversed, embossed seals and signature imprints that appear on the Decosta image but which are totally absent on the Obama image. The conclusion from this would be that the Obama image never had them, for if they did, wouldn't they be prominently shown as verification?
We still have more questions than answers