The Final Report - The Pressing Issue

What do you do when a supposed computer graphics expert of twenty or more years, claims he is a PhD., and publishes a report of great interest to the public, but the name he is using is probably a pseudonym? What confidence can we have in the report of "great interest to the public," when we cannot verify the author of the report? I do not know the answer, but read these author's comments before you declare this a ruse:

I had no idea that this issue would mushroom and take on a life of its own. What I did know, however, was that from the first time I saw the Daily Kos image, or what I now call, "Obama's bogus birth certificate," that something was just not right about it. As someone who has scanned hundreds of thousands of documents in his lifetime, I had a hard time accepting that this was an original scan image made from an original paper document. As Fate would have it, right then, on June 13, I was looking at the conclusive evidence that the text on this image had been graphically altered, or "manufactured," as my first blog post would claim. From that point onward, I had no inkling of what was to come. I had no idea that I would wind up being the only person on the Planet (at that time) to have spotted the anomalies that I knew were the by-products of intentional, graphic alteration, and to go on record as stating that the Daily Kos image was a fake.

This, of course, concerns Barack Obama's citizenship. Ron Polarik, PhD, published this long and comprehensive report on his Towhall blog on November 22, 2008, as the culmination of months of research. I'm not advocating for it, or sanctioning it, of course, but there is a lot of detailed information from someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about. Polarik describes: 1. The scanning process 2. Everything you ever wanted to know about pixels, and the lack of them 3. Compression percentages 4. Image size and portions of image sizes 5. Color counts 6. Image cropping 7. Papers 8. Borders and WHY the border tells a story, and why it matters 9. The same "dirty" spot on all of the acclaimed birth certificates 10. Fold lines, seals and stamps 11. Photoshopping or something else 12. Overlays and "cloning" Here are some intriguing snippets to whet your interest: Red Flags: 1. Predominance of white and gray pixels in between the letters of the child's name. 2. Almost total lack of green pixels on green paper

This deficit in the total number of colors counted in an image, coupled with the specific deficit in green pixels, is absolutely the result of human intervention, and not any artifacts known to Man.

With that fact firmly in place, then it is a somewhat simple, but lengthy and tedious, process, to figure out what would cause these deficits to be there, and then to reproduce the conditions to validate the process. The answer turned out to be, that the original scan image was saved as a GIF file, with its restricted color count, then edited as a GIF image, and finally, resaved as a JPG file with a moderate amount of compression. It should also be noted that neither the GIF nor the JPG, were subjected to any additional smoothing techniques to enhance the image. Had these techniques been applied, then the pixel patterns I found would likely not be there.

Only through sheer determination and a lengthy trial-and-error process, that produced over 400 test images, was I able to discern the right combination of factors that not only marked the image as a forgery, but also outlined the steps necessary to produce it. As I mentioned...while the forged image was most likely distributed to these four websites by the Obama Campaign, the person who manufactured it could be anyone inside or outside of the Campaign, or even inside Factcheck. The reason why I believe that the original forgery might have been made at Factcheck, is by virtue of their photo session with Obama's alleged real COLB and their efforts to squelch any claims of fraud on their part or on Fight The Smears.

From Polarik's report: First, from Obama's proported certificate, second from a real certificate:

From Polarik (snippets):

There is a difference between questioning the authenticity of a document image and questioning whether the document image is a deliberate forgery -- especially in this era of manufactured news stories like Dan Rather's discredited "expose" of President Bush's military records. There is a quantum leap of a difference between someone who just suspects that the image might have been "Photoshopped," (a term I define below), to someone actually conducting empirical studies to answer the question of its authenticity. The three major players in this little" con game include Obama, his campaign staff, and Annenberg's Factcheck group, with a supporting role played by Politifact: a Factcheck sister organization allied with the St. Petersburg Times. The Daily Kos was just picked as a testing ground for the fledgling forgery. If the Left bought it, and they did, hook, line, and sinker, then with enough word-of-mouth, the rest of the American electorate would also buy it. From the very beginning, this was a clever plan to both deflect any claims that Obama might not be a natural-born US citizen and qualified to run for President, and to promote Obama to the American electorate as a fully American, a self-made man. There are no gray areas concerning the evidence I've collected and presented about the COLB image being a bogus, nonexistent document, and that same reality must apply to any and all images and photographs allegedly made from that same document: they cannot be real if their source is bogus. If even one aspect of one photo is demonstrated to be fraudulent, i.e., intentionally altered to create the illusion of authenticity, then all of the other photographs must also be fraudulent.

This is a mind-boggling report supported by many photos, and the above doesn't come close to doing it justice. If you have expertise in this area, please leave a comment and let me know what you think. If you do not have the expertise, let me know what you think too. I hope you'll read it. Let's keep the discussion going. Polarik says he is "one bulldog that will not let go." I hope he means what he says. Read it all at: Obama's 'Born' Conspiracy: Forged images, phony photos, and felony fraud by Ron Polarik, PhD