Is Obama A Natural Born Citizen?

So I'm going through my RSS feeds and I see a great conspiracist post from my good buddy The Dean of Cincinnati rambling on a bit about the possibility that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States.

Oh that's heavy.

Now the "official" story at the moment is that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, a couple of years after Hawaii became a state.

Now apparently there is a pretty savage rumor going around that Obama may have actually been born in Kenya.

Now Obama's "Fight The Smears" page (Obama's own personal Snopes - isn't that cute?) contains what purports to be an image of Obama's birth certificate, which of course looks remarkably similar to an image of Obama's birth certificate that appeared in a post on Daily Kos.

Now, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE to authenticate a JPG image. However, presuming for a moment that we're actually looking at an image of an authentic document, what I recognized immediately is that we're not looking at a birth certificate copy at all. What we're looking at is a birth certificate TRANSCRIPT - the Suitably Flip blog suggesting that they used the transcript rather than the actual birth certificate because the actual birth certificate may show Obama's parents were never married.

Now, mind you, if someone HANDS YOU IN PERSON a document like this with appropriate seals and signatures along with a picture ID or something else from "List B" of an I-9, you can legally put them to work. However, obviously Obama did not hand us this document in person, so the whole discussion is academic.

On top of that, we're not talking about hiring Obama as a law clerk or something of the sort - we are talking about some serious Article II issues here.

There are several sites that have been Photoshopping the hell out of the various JPG images to try to see if they can see a seal.

People -

You can't authenticate a seal through a JPG image.

You have to examine the actual document.

AND Obama has to hand it to you.

In person.

Along with his driver's license.

And that's just if you want to hire him to do your taxes.

I'm not entirely sure how this thing would go down if there does turn out to be some funny business going on.

Do we have to wait until he's elected?

Would we have to file suit with the Supreme Court to have the election annulled on Constitutional grounds?

And, for the purposes of blog-mongering, are there ANY other extant records that would put Obama and his mother in Hawaii at the time when he was supposed to be there?

And I'm not talking individual testimony - I'm talking medical records, gas station receipts, local newspaper announcements, phone bills - anything at all that would "paint a picture" of Obama's mother belting him out on the island of Oahu on August 4, 1961 ...

Or not ...

Oh, and connecting to another favorite topic of mine ...

Just as Mrs. Axinar walking the streets of Cincinnati is "Black", but walking the streets of certain predominantly Puerto Rican sections of New Jersey is "Cuban", so Obama in America is "Black", but in Africa is ARAB ...

Oh that's heavy ...