Whether or not he's being paid I think there's real batshit-crazy conviction there. If you read Glenn Greenwald he's also a proponent of the... I don't know the formal name for this one but it's the belief that some or all of 9/11 (the collapse of the buildings?) was engineered by the US government to bolster the arguments for the Iraqi war and a more authoritarian regime.

Whatever. I've had my fun for the afternoon. Happy Halloween.

I was just providing context for what constitutes valid ID and proof for Americans born in the 1960's.

You don't want context for normal Americans because context proves you wrong.

Obama's special so he needs special proof. But special proof, if it existed for him and no one else, would simply prove a conspiracy anyway. Good for you. Airtight argument.

You are a natural born citizen if you are born on American soil, whatever the nationality of your parents. Wingnuts have tried to revisit this since 9/11, but it was certainly true in 1961.

No I've got a better idea - I'll do the fucking translating not you. First off, don't for one minute try and fool me yourself or anyone else that any American government branch that issues birth certificates would issue them with LESS information than they did in the past.

They do. Sorry, but it's a fact, and a fact you HAVE WRONG. My official birth certificate has my name, date of birth and city of birth. Not my weight, not my footprints, not the hospital name or address. I think it has my parent's names on it, too. It's pretty yellow with blue designs on it (that part may be specific to Pennsylvania). As CeliaInSF and numerous other people have pointed out, it's a VALID FORM OF ID that is acceptable for obtaining other government documents, including federal ones.

I remember when I was 13 and went to take the SATs (in that Johns Hopkins talent search thing) my dad used the hospital birth certificate with all of the personal information and stuff on it as my ID, because I didn't have a Social Security number yet, but that's the last time I saw that piece of paper. Of course, you don't have to take my word on this.

And quite frankly, if some deranged cracker from deepest Appalachia (or a deranged Ukrainian immigrant dentist with a mail-order law degree, or a deranged British "biographer") suddenly developed an irrational prejudice against Sicilian half-breeds, I would be hard put to prove my citizenship to them.

For example: My parents traveled extensively in Europe in 1964 with my then 13-year-old aunt. My birth certificate says I was born in 1967, but can I prove I'm only 42, or did my parents do a private adoption in France (maybe my aunt is really my mother and gave birth over there) and fail to complete the citizenship papers? My private grade school is shutting down at the end of this year. There go the school records from the 1970s. Birth announcements can be faked. Photos can be forged, and really who can tell to the exact year they were taken? Eyewitnesses can lie (plus a lot of them that would have very specific memories of the circumstances of my birth and cooed over my crib are now dead). But fortunately, I don't have to worry.

Another thing: birth certificates are issued by the individual state, not by the federal government, so I don't believe you're even clear in your thinking about "any American government branch that issues birth certificates". We don't have a required national ID. Americans are rabid on refusing that.

And if it had not been the idea that copies would later be made they would have not made a comprehensive record to begin with now would they?

Unless somebody at a later date took a look at the comprehensive information FOR ALL BIRTH CERTIFICATES, maybe when it was about to be computerized, and said "We don't need to keep all this shit. It was important at the time, but really all we need is DOB, name, city and parents' name. Why should we spend all this time and money recording the babies' weight in the state system?"

Do you keep all of your credit card statements from 1996, or do you chuck them after a while? People simply don't handle old information the way you claim. A lot of it, particularly paper from records before everything was comprehensively computerized, got reviewed and then discarded. Not just for half-black Hawaiians but for everybody.

Just because we have all this computer storage capacity and ability to trap information about everyone NOW doesn't mean that every bit data on old paper was entered into the mainframes in the 1970's.

(Unless they kept special proof for Obama because of the great conspiracy. In which case if the long form ever IS released, you'll argue that normal Hawaiians can't find their long form so this long form must have been manufactured specially.)

You'll keep clinging to any shreds of excuse, consistent or not, to keep arguing naturally, but I had to put my two cents in.