Not that anyone but fellow my word nerds could possibly care, but...

In Hebrew and other Semitic languages, baraq means lightning; note the "q". Modern Hebrew speakers do not distinguish between the "q" and "k" sounds, but most Arabic and Aramaic speakers do, and ancient Hebrew speakers did as well. That's why we now hear NPR announcers pronouncing Qatar as "Gutter" -- they are trying to duplicate the Semitic "q" sound in English, which is hard to do because our language lacks it. (If you want to try, it sounds similar to a k but is pronounced far back in mouth, with your tongue shoved up against the little hangy-down thing, not in the middle-front as a k is.)

The name "Barack," on the other hand, derives from the Semitic word for "blessing," which is Barak (not baraq) in Arabic (though acc. to Wikipedia, the form Mubarak is more common as an Arabic name), Baruch in Hebrew, and Varakh in Aramaic. (The "kh" here is pronounced like the "ch" in Loch or a strong "j" in Spanish.)

So instead of linking Barack to the Antichrist, they should be looking to the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the..." etc.

As a PS, I am finally reading all of War and Peace this summer (fourteen years after first taking up and abandoning it), and given all the Obama-as-Antichrist that has gone around the loony Xian right for the past couple of years, I was interested to see Pierre's obsession with the idea that Napoleon was the Antichrist. He proved his conviction with every bit as much logic and common sense as your You Tube poster ("Writing L'Empereur Napoleon in numbers, it appears that the sum of them is 666, and that Napoleon was therefore the beast foretold in the Apocalypse"),so maybe we should consider that the Antichrist has already come and gone?...

This is important breaking information in the world-wide effort to track down the antichrist. Using the numerical table that Pierre used to prove "l'empereur Napoleon" was the (first) antichrist (see War and Peace, Norton Critical Edition, p. 737), I calculated the numerical value of the phrase "the ppsimmons video." Remarkably, the sum of the letters in this phrase is 766. Surely there is some mistake, I thought. And indeed there is: the proper phrase is "Video Ppsimmons: He," the value of which adds to precisely 666. I cannot understate the world-shaking implications of this discovery. Someone "out there" (I cannot say who, but I THINK YOU ALL KNOW WHO IT IS) is trying to tell us to "watch out" for this "PPSIMMONS" character and his "video" because "HE" is 666 -- the BEAST HIMSELF!!!

Now that his perfidious identity has been revealed, my only question is: what next? I feel like a dog who just caught the car he was chasing. What am I supposed to do with this "ppsimmons" antichrist character? Just keep an eye on him?

I've been listening to these rightwingers, and it has become apparent that they now use "community organizer" as racial and class code language -- implying that such people organize the poor, the nonwhite, the foreigners, everybody but "real Americans" (i.e. the former electoral majority).

One good thing about the program (to the degree that it works at all and takes some of the hulking SUVs off the road) is that it will keep monsters from being bought by kids with learner's permits, who tend to buy whatever they can afford. Think of it as keeping "the world's worst cars out of the hands of the world's worst drivers." That's a win-win to me.

The links to the larger images need to be fixed (as of now, 11:17 am Eastern DST). The links on the page are:

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/03/australia_certificate/storylarge02.jpg

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/03/australia_certificate/storylarge01.jpg

They should be:

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/04/australia_certificate/storylarge02.jpg

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2009/08/04/australia_certificate/storylarge01.jpg

BTW, comparing the two images, it seems apparent to me that the forgery is not just photoshopped from the original. Instead, it looks like the forger recreated the original format (including, for some reason, the original numbers) in similiar if not identical fonts. The folds are not in the same place, lines do not line up at the same place, etc. But newly found image is clearly the source for the forgery.

Regarding the question of "why bother report about this" -- two thoughts.

1) The birthers are not only crazy, they are also obsessed, and many of them are armed. They are potentially a dangerous bunch.

2) Their poisonous mindframe is infecting the entire GOP establishment.

And one final thought: if you think that Salon can make this go away by ignoring it, well, you are ignoring reality.

Have you seen Taitz on MSNBC? I'm pretty sure she's a Romulan. No doubt sent to Earth by the Empire to destroy us all.

North Korea arrests journalists just because they crossed its border illegally, and to gain their release Bill Clinton went so far as to (gasp!) talk with the North Koreans! This is a terrible, terrible precedent. Just imagine: the next time the US wants one of our citizens released, we may have to talk with the government that arrested them! What if we have another president like GWB who doesn't know how to talk? What then? Clearly this policy was not well thought through.