I think this whole thing is a stupid sideshow.  The dude has a damned passport for cripes sake, he’s had to prove citizenship to get that, so people need to get over it.   Frankly a US passport is WAY more secure as a form of identification than a birth certificate, and that is one of the reasons birth certs are no longer accepted for entry into the united states.

The Kos image is almost certainly a scan of a valid copy.  The seal is there, if faint, and this is easily explained by it being mailed — these embossments often get flattened quite successfully in modern mail processing machines.

  My guess as to the difference between the decosta cert and Obama is the digitizing of the form.  The decosta form is likly a ‘transition’ period form where they were moving from old style forms to full digital forms.  It was most likely printed by laser printer on form stock (where the ‘form image’ was already printed on the paper) and the Obama form is likely ‘full digital’ where the whole form, sans the security paper, is printed.  I bet if I went back and examined some of the digital forms I’ve designed over the years, I’d find some overlaps on the corners.  Those mean jack shit.

There however, is one TECHNICALITY (mentioned above) that is argued to invalidate his citizenship.  In 1961,in order to be a citizen, you had to have one parent who was a resident of a state for 5 years over the age of 16 (Obama’s mother was 18 or 19 at the time of his birth).  However, if I remember correctly the 1986 revision of that law seems to have made the 1986 guidelines retroactive to 1952, so this appears to be a technicality that would only be won if someone were to take it to USSC, and I don’t see that one happening, or even being entertained by the court if it was (I could be wrong)

Frankly I think this is a stupid road to travel down, though.  I utterly dislike Obama.  I think he’d be TOTALLY the wrong direction for this country.   I’d vote for hillary before him, and I think hillary is a little bit less than dirt, and that’s saying something.

Agmartin: The update I posted indicates that yes, technically, if she’d been outside the US then maybe he wouldn’t have been natural-born. I regret even bringing it up, this is still just so silly.

Don’t remember where I read this but at the time of Obama’s birth if a child was born outside the U.S. one of the parent’s had to have been a U.S resident for at least five years after the age of 16 for the child to be a natural born citizen. His mother, being 18 at the time, did not meet this requirement.

That said I doubt he was born anyplace other than Hawaii. This alleged scandal looks like it started as payback for the equivalent story about McCain and has been latched onto by some bloggers who think they can duplicate Rathergate. Sort of like so many reporters play the gotcha game imagining themselves as the next Woodward and Bernstein.

And up until this weekend, I practically never heard about the Senator’s birth certificate without there being a lot of spittle and lunacy on the part of the speaker.

But try your search engine, and you’ll see lots of credulous hits for some of the more fever-swampish spots on the right. And not just minor bloggers, but some larger players like Free Republic, American Thinker, and NRO. (To their credit, NRO has reported but mostly dismissed the rumors. Free Republic, also to their, credit, seems to have as many debunkers as believers.)

Plus there are also some die-hard Clinton supporters who seem to cling desperately to this rumor. A live.com search for Obama "birth certificate" yields 231,000 hits.

And I can’t recall which radio show it was, because I changed the channel as soon as it came  up; but come up it did on some nationally syndicated show in the last couple of weeks. It almost had to be Neil Boortz, because his is the only national show on locally in the a.m. drive, and that’s when it happened. Mr. Boortz is so full of ODS that he’s passed beyond caricature.

It’s a non-issue really.