In the spirit of the most transparent Presidency ever - I mean, because he said so, I have examined our leaders' background so that we as voters can be informed. I probably am stepping all over the toes of the professional media / journalists whose job it is to track these things down. I apologize in advance.
Let's get transparent about Obama shall we?
Occidental College Records - sealed
Columbia College Records - sealed
Columbia Thesis Papers - sealed
Harvard College Records - sealed
Selective Service Registration - sealed
Medical Records - sealed
Illinois State Senate Attendance Records - sealed
Illinois State Senate Records - sealed
Law Practice Client List - sealed
Certified Copy of Original Birth Certificate - sealed
Signed Embossed Certificate of Live Birth - sealed
Baptism Record - sealed
Reasons Michelle Obama can no longer practice law - sealed
Reasons Michelle Obama has 22 assistants and other first ladies have one - sealed
"Foreign Student Aid" Records - sealed
Name of Country Passport used to visit Pakistan in 1981 - sealed
Ah yes, I can see it now...well, no, we actually can't. I'm sure there is nothing there. Move along knuckle draggers, move along....
Romney has not released his college records either. Or his selective service registration, or his baptism record, or any details of his business, or his birth certificate, or his passport, or his foreign student aid records.
ReplyDeleteNor did he promise to do so if elected President. But he will.
DeleteHere's where Obama won't release his SS records:
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/freedom-press-not-free/2012/may/17/president-obama-draft-card-selective-service-block/
And here is Romneys actual SS records:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/mitt-romney-selective-service-record
I'm pretty sure Romney will release his birth certificate when required. He is delaying because he doesn't want the public to realize his real name is Milton.
The point is that he has not released his birth certificate or any of the other things you mentioned. In fact, no president released his birth certificate before Obama and none released their own (as opposed to having an enemy leak it) college transcripts. None released kindergarten records, grade school records, high school records, passport records, etc. So the idea that Obama should is crazy. He doesn't have to, and he only will if Romney releases exactly the same thing---such as his college transcripts.
DeleteHere's where Reagan released his birth certificate. It's on display at the Presidential Library. Are you blind to the obvious?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.safeguardourconstitution.com/news/reagans-birth-certificate.html
Obama caused his own scrutiny not because he is black, but because by his own admission, and validated by his publicist, he was born in Kenya. Even if he was using the Kenyan angle to spice up his resume, don't you think he was the ant that shined the magnifying glass on his own head. In the past you didn't release them, they were public record, and for the most part, any records could be looked up. Nobody hid anything, and nobody asked for anything, because it was all public record.
And good lord - Im not even a birther - I'm just saying that 1) he brought it on himself 2) the media, as usual did a piss-poor job gathering the facts that would nip all this birther stuff in the bud and c) there is a new, more ridiculous day upon us whne, as you say, people are going to have to "produce" every stoopid document about their stoopid lives ever. I got a speeding ticket in 1991. I called the cop an asshole. Because he was. I'm glad I got that out in the open.
ReplyDeleteWTF?!?! You're not *seriously* one of those conspiracy theorists, are you?!?
ReplyDeleteGetcher free debunkings here!!!
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/bookmarks/fact-checking-and-debunking/the-debunkers-guide-to-obama-conspiracy-theories/#legalsealing
Methinks I need to rewrite the article. I don't want to get lumped into the birther group, re-enactors or accused of being a Wiccan or something!
ReplyDeleteRe: "http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/mitt-romney-selective-service-record"
ReplyDeleteThat does not show Romney releasing his SS records. It show someone else, whose name is blacked out, applying for the record. It is not posted by Romney. It is not not his site. Therefore it does NOT show that Romney released it.
Reagan's birth certificate was released after his death. Not the same thing as a president releasing it while he was president or during the campaign for presidency.
Re: "I'm pretty sure Romney will release his birth certificate when required. He is delaying because he doesn't want the public to realize his real name is Milton."
I will believe it when I see it. Moreover, it is not required. There's no law that says that he must release his BC. No president did (Reagan's was released after his death, but Bush, Clinton, Bush 41, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Etc--did not release their birth certificates, or their college transcripts or their kindergarten records or their SS records or their passports or their baptism records.
However, one thing that Obama did release, which the other presidents did not--and which you have said in error that he did not release was the signed embossed Certificate of Live Birth. Obama released both that, and the short form birth certificate, known as the Certification of Live Birth. He showed both the images of them and the physical copies of them--with the embossed seals on the back (which is where they are supposed to be).
The physical copy of the certificate of live birth was passed around in the White House press room and everyone there got a chance to hold it, feel the seal, and one reporter even photographed it.
Most recently the Sec of State of Arizona sent an image of Obama's birth certificate to the officials in Hawaii for them to confirm the facts on it, and they did---every single fact.
You were right. Mitt Romney did publish something that MIGHT be his birth certificate.
ReplyDeleteToday, apparently, Mitt Romney had his campaign release his birth certificate, and guess what, it is a computer-generated short-form birth certificate.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-campaign-romney-birth-certificatebre84s1gf-20120529,0,5483593.story
It does not have the name of the hospital or the delivery doctor or any signatures. The image of the document provided does not show the color of the security paper or an embossed seal, and there is a clear "void" on the document.
It's a fake - he's clearly hiding his past because of his Mexican father. He was born in a van in juarez and shipped via UPS to Detroit in 1947. Told ya so.
ReplyDeleteYes it is indeed a fake. Why doesn't Arizona demand that the officials in Michigan confirm that there is indeed a birth certificate in their files and that the facts on it are the same as on this published "birth certificate?"
ReplyDeleteWhy won't they? Because they were willing to believe that Obama was born outside of Hawaii, which is thousands of miles from any foreign country. And they are unwilling to believe that Romney was born outside of Detroit, Michigan, which is about a mile or less from Canada.
Arizona only asked for it from Obama because they are a racist state that wants to undermine the Presidency of a black man. I know for a fact they won't ever ask Romney, a white man, er, a Latino, er, I mean a Latino, white Mexican American 1%'er to product his. Ain't gonna happen.
ReplyDeleteRe: "Arizona only asked for it from Obama because they are a racist state that wants to undermine the Presidency of a black man. "
ReplyDeleteThis is possible, but it is equally possible that the Secretary of State of Arizona, who is co-chair of Romney's campaign in the state, wants to hurt Obama and help Romney.
I agree with you that it is extremely unlikely that the Secretary of State of Arizona will check on Romney's birth certificate--one reason being that who would believe such a check was fair and accurate when he is the co-chair of Romney's campaign.
Yet, if he wants to avoid the appearance of being unfair and a racist, he simply must to the checking. He is in a bind.
In any case, Obama has shown his birth certificate twice--short form and long form--and the facts on it have been repeatedly confirmed. Romney has only shown his short form, and the facts on it have not been confirmedf.
The truth is, the protocol in Arizona is that candidates do not have to produce actual certificates to be certified unless that certification is questioned by a voter. The SoS acted on the behest of a citizen of the state to check Obama's NOVEMBER certification, and that was done and closed. According to the SoS, nobody has asked for Romney's - although, I am sure it will be coming. There is a certification panel of which the SoS is a member, so unless ALLLLL 6 of them are biased, and there are already published standards of acceptable ID, I'm sure any citizen requested review will be fair. The point of my discourse is that the media did a crap job of vetting out what would be obvious questions raised as to Obama's legitimate birth place. They were so caught in defending a black man against anything "racist" that they didn't investigate anything - and this caused all this birther non-sense. And on top of that, Obama himself caused a lot of this with his reflections - published documents - on his Kenyan birth, or at the very least Kenyan heritage, a la that publishing house pamphlet that said he was born in Kenya.
ReplyDeleteRe: "The point of my discourse is that the media did a crap job of vetting out what would be obvious questions raised as to Obama's legitimate birth place."
ReplyDeleteFirst, it is a wimp's cry "why didn't the media 'vet.?"
The job of the media is not to vet, it is to sell advertising. The media never vetted any president before, not Bush or Clinton or any of them. It didn't because doing investigative work into the place of birth of a candidate is expensive and does not sell newspapers.
It did not, and will not "vet" Obama or Romney in this election either.
Moreover when a news organization is asked to check out something totally improbably, such as an alleged birth in Kenya when there is a birth certificate showing that the guy was born in Hawaii, and it was terribly expensive and risky for a pregnant woman to make such a trip at the time, they might regard the whole effort as a highly expensive investigation with low chances of getting any news out of it.
After all, if the NYT really had a correspondent in Kenya (which it probably does at least passing through there), and he went to the files and looked for a record of Obama's mother having arrived there in 1961, and there wasn't any, and he reported that fact, the news desk would scrap the story because it isn't news. Only if he found that there was a record of her arriving would it be news.
Re: "la that publishing house pamphlet that said he was born in Kenya."
Yes that was a mistake. Because someone makes a mistake, does that mean that you have to believe that Obama was born in Kenya? Because someone was stupid, does that mean you have to be just as stupid?
If anyone in the universe had shown more evidence of the place of his birth than Obama--please tell me about it. The birth certificate--short-form and long-form--the repeated confirmations of the official, the "Index Data" (A public file that has been available for years listing the birth certificates on file, of which one in 1961 is for Obama) and the birth notices in the Hawaii newspapers.
Birthers however have been able to undermine this with some lies. There have been several forged "Kenyan birth certificates," and the claim that his grandmother said that he was born in Kenya (she didn't) and the claim that when Michelle said "home country" she meant the land of his birth.
Thanks for the details on the protocols in Arizona. If, as you say, a voter asks for confirmation of Romney's place of birth, do you really think that Arizona will do it?
HOWEVER, I can find no reference to an existing six-member election eligibility panel. (Brewer recommended one, but so far it does not exist.) Please provide any links to it that are possible.
I think you have a valid point. The job of the media is to sell advertising or subscriptions. The job of a journalist is to provide access and communication of the facts to those that are interested. In this case, the media did a wonderful job of selling things and the journalists missed the obvious questions of interest to the American public. I stand corrected.
ReplyDeleteIn order to sell more papers my local paper is now only showing porn and recipes. I enjoy it a lot more than the old "news" stories of the past. Hey, whatever it takes to sell papers I guess....
I am confident that if asked, the SoS of Arizona will ask for the Romney credentials based on the fact that in every previous case that someone has asked, the office has complied.
Just as there are markets for pornography there are also markets for what appears to be serious news--but is not necessarily it. Yes, I am cynical--probably far more cynical than you.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, news does not require "beyond a reasonable doubt" certainty. If X person has a birth certificate, and you ask the officials in the DOH "does he have a birth certificate?," and they say "Yes", that is where it will stop. Do not expect a newspaper to go further on the possibility that the officials are lying.
Yes, carrying stories about the release of a birth certificate would normally be considered news. But, running an expensive investigation whether the seal matches or to make an expensive effort to determine a place of birth that might not pan out is not something that papers will do.
People who feel that papers should do things like that can band together and support their own newspaper. Or hire private investigators.
The latest news is that although there are reports that some Arizona voters have indeed asked Secretary of State Bennett to check on the authenticity of Romney's birth certificate just the way that he did with Obama, Bennett is refusing.
ReplyDeleteSo much for the story that a check is legally required if voters ask for it. So much for the idea that Bennett would indeed treat Romney just the way that he treated Obama.
http://www.azhousedemocrats.com/2012/06/campbell-to-bennett-are-you-secretary.html
Indeed, he has painted himself into a pickle if that is possible. In the Arizona Republic article he said he WOULD enquire if a citizen voiced a legitimate concern and then today he said he would only enquire if LAW ENFORCEMENT requested so. Bennett has stated publicly that enquired into Obama's birth data as a result of BOTH law requests and citizen requests.
ReplyDeleteOooops. His record for unbiased inquiry fall to 1 and 1....
Your statistics are off by 50%.
ReplyDeleteBennett has a 0 for 2 record of unbiased inquiry. He has a record of checking the eligibility of a candidate of the opposing party and has refused to check on the eligibility of the candidate of his own party. One biased check. One biased refusal to check.