thorswitch,

Remove ALL your references to birthers, and anyone who thinks like a birfer, and restate your arguments. You continue to be birfer-centric in this debate.
Let me remind you that 1/2 of the general population has an IQ of less than 100, and does not have the critical thinking abilities that your are assuming.

"Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
Elbert Hubbard

The Hawaiian government has issued official statements validating both Obama's birth in Hawaii and the COLB itself, and they are the only authority that *can* validate his COLB. They are also, however, the only authority that would be able to validate his LFBC. If Hawaii's validation of the COLB is insufficient to make it acceptable, logically there is no reason their validation of the LFBC would make it any more acceptable, and there is nothing about the LFBC itself that would make it more convincing in the absence of official validation.

Anyone questioning the validity of the COLB in spite of Hawaii's validation must believe that Hawaii is lying - otherwise, they wouldn't be questioning it any more. If they already believe that the Hawaiian government is lying about one document, why would they believe that they're telling the truth about a second one? As a result, it is unlikely that releasing the LFBC would gain Obama enough votes to make a difference.

There is, however, the risk of losing votes because no matter what justification is given for releasing the COLB, it *will* be seen as capitulating to a small fringe group. Many voters who supported Obama in 2008 are already concerned about what they see as Obama giving in to his political enemies too easily and too often, and they will only see this as further weakness, becoming more disillusioned with Obama than they are already. I believe that there are far more votes to lose among these disappointed supporters than there are people who reject the COLB but would be willing to accept the LFBC.

If all voters were attorneys or logical thinkers (not that all attorneys are logical thinkers ), that would be true. Most voters are not interested in the legalities of certification; they have their signed hospital BC with the footprints and their original state issued copy with a seal. Obama has produced neither - and this does make a difference to the less sophisticated voters. You again assume too much from the average voter.


Possibly because, unlike the birfers, some voters think if the original is really there, why not show it, and not some computer generated record from 2007. Some still think the COLB is a forgery, since the HI DOH has never said that it is the COLB they sent to Obama's campaign headquarters, only that it looks like the kind of COLB they sent out in 2007. A simple statement from the HI DOH stating they did send a COLB to Obama as requested, dated as shown, would further counter the lies of Polarik. Since the COLB was a public release approved by Obama, whose privacy are they violating by simply confirming his COLB is real? You can quote the privacy laws as justification for their measured response, but this doesn't impress some of the doubters because it goes against their common sense to deny what is already public. Not everyone is unreasonable when provided with enough verification. The hard-core will always claim it is just further evidence of a conspiracy. So what? They are not the 2% swing voters I am talking about.


The only voters concerned that Obama is not standing up to the Republicans are the hard core liberals, Obama's own loyal constituency. So they are pissed. Who else are they going to vote for? Are they going to sit out the next election and let the Republicans win just because they want Obama to refuse to compromise? This whole argument that Obama will lose votes among his most loyal supporters if he compromises with his opposition makes no sense. Are his loyalists that stupid?

Had Obama not compromised with the right wing Republicans in Congress these last two years, Obama would have accomplished nothing. He never had a 60 vote super majority in the Senate. There would be no Health Care Act, no tax and unemployment extensions act, no DADT act, and possibly no arms reduction treaty, if Obama had refused to back down a bit. I think it is better to have have accomplished all that he has by compromise, no matter how objectionable it was, then to end up with nothing. Obama knows he had two years to make any major changes. He knows what happens in mid-term elections. He did what he had to do while he had the window open. Thank god he didn't listen to the rigid leftists, and up with no accomplishments.

When I meet birthers face to face with an opportunity for an interactive argument I can win every point with solid fact and evidence except one. That one exception is the question: if Barack Obama has nothing to hide, why would he allow the controversy to fester with 20% of the population believing he wasn't born in the United States, when a simple release of the birth certificate would clear everything up?

Now you know and I know that the simple release of the birth certificate wouldn't answer all the claims of the birthers, and that birther smear web sites would be running three shifts pumping out new rumors about what was released. We probably can't imagine the ways that the birther disease will mutate among birther activists if and when a birth certificate is published.

Still, there are some points that are just too complicated to be convincing, specifically those that say a certified computer abstract copy has to say exactly the same thing as the original birth certificate, and how certain laws were passed in certain years and that out of state registrations don't get a COLB, etc. If Abercrombie finds a way to release the original birth certificate, I can win the final point with semi-reasonable birthers. (I agree that it won't win Obama any votes.)

Doc.

He's going to have to get some laws changed/written to do it, and I hope that does not happen. I think that's a very slippery slope.

I have yet to hear him say that's what he wants to do. I've heard him say he wants to find a way to legally release "more information." I've yet to hear HIM say he wants to release the so-called "long-form BC," I've only heard that from others.

Perhaps I've missed something, but...

Keep in mind that voting isn't just a choice between voting Democratic or voting Republican. There is also the option of not voting AT ALL. In 2008, a higher percentage of the voting-age public voted than any other year since 1968, and 10.3 million more people voted than did in 2004. Many of those people voted because they believed in Obama and what he was promising. It's not just hardcore liberals who are disillusioned with Obama - his overall approval numbers are down considerably, too.

I believe that there are more people among those who voted in 2008 but hadn't been regular voters prior to that who could be turned off by Obama being seen as giving into a fringe group (and, again, regardless of what justification is given for releasing the info, that's what it will be seen as) than there are people who would decide to vote for him because of it - and a lot of those who are turned off simply won't vote. Low voter turnout is generally good for Republicans, which is why they engage in so many voter suppression tactics.

Beyond that, we'll just have to agree to disagree, Smithereens, because I'm still unconvinced that it would do more good than harm to release the LFBC - not just for Obama, but for any future candidate who might have ugly rumours spread about him or her and find themselves being hounded for documents the general public has no right to see.

Text in bold; I agree. In my opinion, releasing a copy of the LFBC would do more harm than good because the birthers would only move the goalposts and demand other documents be released--some that don't even exist. Remember this list of documents the birthers wanted released?



http://209.157.64.200/focus/bloggers/26 ... s?page=104

emphasis mine

Newark Star-Ledger editorial:

The above link I posted is current info regarding the Hawaii gov. birther comments. Here is another current thread regarding this issue. Heck, there are some allegations on this thread that I hadn't even seen.


http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/democrats- ... her-issue/

Happy New Year, bogus, and thanks for that link.

It's the "usual" hogwash. As always, the comments are priceless. I particularly like this one:





I wonder what this idiot's BC shows under "religion."

A good part of the discussion about Gov. Abercrombie's plan (whatever it might be) to deal with suspicions about President Obama's place of birth turns upon the argument that there exists somewhere between 20% and 30% of the American adult population who are "not certain" that the President was born in Hawaii and that release of some other form of birth certificate would allay the concerns of these people who have slight doubts. That would supposedly create a large majority of Americans who believe that the President was born in this country.

I'm not sure at all that the "20% to 30%" number means much. That percentage may simply be an artifact of polling. Despite what Birfers say and pretend to believe, this is a non-issue for most Americans. Many have spent precious little time thinking about it, if they have thought about it at all. Others have heard vague rumors about doubts or "concerns" but have done no investigation whatsoever of the matter. Indeed, there is little reason for Americans to have thought much about this, because it is not a real issue. It is rational to remain ignorant about this issue, just as it is rational to remain ignorant about chemtrails or Morgellon's Disease. It is very much like asking them whether they think the three large objects speeding towards Earth are UFO's or natural phenomena. I would expect a percentage breakdown about like that seen in the Obama place of birth question.

So when confronted by a pollster with an out-of-the-blue question about where the President was born and given a forced-choice set of answers ("Definitely born in U.S.," "Probably born in the U.S.," "Probably born in another country," and "Definitely born in another country"), many respondents do as they do on almost every other forced-choice Likert scale question asked by pollsters: they choose towards the middle, avoiding the extremes. The middle is a safer choice in that it requires no firm committal to the answer and thus reduces the chance of being embarrassed by the answer.

The phenomenon is so well-known that pollsters routinely exclude a true middle (such as "Neither agree nor disagree") because people will choose that response disproportionately ("central tendency bias"). In the absence of a true middle or an explicitly offered "Don't know" choice, where people who have not followed this issue might logically belong, people choose the less extreme version of the side that comes closer to their guess about the facts. If the question had been about whether the Metals and Rare Minerals Management Act of 2010 is a good law, the same phenomenon would be observed -- despite the fact that no such act exists. Not giving people an explicit "Don't know" response option and not providing a true middle forces people to express an opinion about something of which they have no knowledge.

In other words, the asking of a question in a poll can create what appears to be an opinion where none really existed before. If the media that sponsor the polls were truly interested in gauging the extent of Birfer sentiment in the U.S., they would ask a loose open-ended question, such as "Could you tell me what you know about President Obama's background?" However, open-ended questions are notoriously hard to code and expensive to administer, so we get these opinion-creating forced-choice questions instead.

I recognize that this argument puts most conventional polling results into doubt. I am in good company: Daniel Yankelovich, a prominent pollster, expressed the same concerns about "off-the-cuff" opinion in his 1991 Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World. James Fishkin at Stanford has been experimenting with another way to elicit public opinion, called "Deliberative Polling". As Prof. Fishkin states the problem:

Deliberative polling allows people to garner information, making their opinions meaningful.

Tollie - this could have been the post of the year, had you been a little faster. Excellent analysis. Where can I enroll (online) for your classes?

Thanks. I'm slow. As for online classes, I'll start teaching them when somebody develops a real-time means for me to tell whether or not a class is understanding what I am saying, or is bored beyond tears.

Another editorial - Seattle Times

Actually I'll have to disagree with this statement. Obama's polling numbers are actually slightly better at this stage of his first term then Reagan or Clinton's were.

According to Gallup, at 703 days into their first terms, approval ratings for the last twelve Presidents were:

Obama - 47%
GW Bush - 63%
Clinton - 40%
GHW Bush - 58%
Reagan - 37%
Carter - 50%
Ford - n/a
Nixon - 56%
Johnson - 65%
Kennedy - 74%
Eisenhower - 70%
Truman - 60%

So as you see, Obama's ratings aren't much different from Reagan or Clinton's. And while Carter and GHW Bush both had higher ratings, neither went on to a second term. GW Bush was still on the crest of the post 9-11 wave at that point in his Presidency as well.

And they have held in the 45-48% range for a year and a half now.

OH MY!!! Our favorite Private Attorney General (and hairdresser) Paul Andrew Mitchell, who, in case you didn't know is also the

Private Attorney General writes to Governor of Hawai'i re: The Qualification Clause for President / Concludes he does not legally occupy the Office of President of the United States of America

Subject:
Private Attorney General writes to Governor of Hawai'i re: The Qualification Clause for President



Most of his citations to authority are to himself.

http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/mitch ... ummies.htm

http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/mitch ... ummies.htm
http://www.supremelaw.org/ref/whuscons/whuscons.htm#5


http://www.supremelaw.org/authors/mitchell/quals.htm


There's much, much more at the link. It would probably take a week to point out all the lies posted in this letter/article.

I can't resist a couple more funnies.






emphasis original

The Governor's going to get a letter like this from every crackpot birther out there. (Why does he say he's a private investigator for the United States in the case? I wish he'd spend more time on products to make my hair shiny!)

This is why Abercrombie was stupid to even touch this subject:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=252833

You don't have to step in crap to prove that it's crap, Mr. Governor. Alas, this is why everyone on the Island knows you aren't the sharpest bulb in the tool shed.

3-page Nightline report -- was it on the air?

Hawaii Gov. Says Proof of Obama's Birth Certificate Exists but Hasn't Produced the Document
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-birth-hawaii-gov-proof-presidents-birth-certificate/story?id=12721552&page=1

'Birther' Says, 'If You Have It, Show It to Us'

Post a Comment
By RUSSELL GOLDMAN and DEVIN DWYER
Jan. 20,2011



Hundreds? It only feels that way.

The Governor can't produce the document without consent from Obama.

Dammit to Hell, Abercrombie is such an idiot.