Yesterday, there was an interesting post at Israel Insider questioning whether Daily Kos had been involved in forging the Barack Obama birth certificate Kos posted a few months ago when questions started circulating about where Obama was actually born. A similar looking certificate is now posted at Obama's "Fight The Smears" site. If he was born outside the United States, he would not be eligible to run for President despite one parent (his mother) having been a citizen.

Ares Demertzis sends in the latest on this controversy also from Israel Insider.

A senior official in the State of Hawaii's Department of Health, Director of Communications Janice Okubo, confirms that the image published and circulated by the Obama campaign as his "birth certificate" lacks the necessary embossed seal and signature. Backing away from a quote attributed to her that the image on the campaign site was "valid," she told the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times in an article published yesterday: "I don't know that it's possible for us to even say beyond a doubt what the image on the site represents."

Barack Obama has claimed in writing to have a valid printed document: In the first chapter of his book Dreams From My Father, describing his origins, he wrote about finding a local Hawaiian newspaper article about his Kenyan father: "I discovered this article, folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I was in high school." ...

Amy Hollyfield of the St. Petersburg Times, and a reporter for the paper's "Politifact" blog, said that she has been seeking the birth certificate "for months." She was frustrated: "Hawaii birth certificates aren't public record. Only family members can request copies, so when the campaign declined to give us one, we were stalled."  ...

Hollyfield brings up other issues that her readers raised, although she does not address them or explain them [bracketed comments from Israel Insider]:

• Where is the embossed seal and the registrar's signature? [Required for validity]
  
• Comparing it to other Hawaii birth certificates, the color shade is different.
  
• Isn't the date stamp bleeding through [in reverse] the back of the document [image] "June [6] 2007?" (Odd since it was supposedly released in June 2008.)
  
• There's no crease from being folded and mailed. [Hawaii requires printing and mailing, according to Okubo. Electronic images are never released, she assured us, nor are they valid.]
  

Here is the image of the Obama birth certificate released to the public:

Here is a real one scanned: