Yep, it's still happening. Conservatives are still making an issue out of President Obama's birthplace. Sheriff Joe Arpaio will announce results of his "investigation" in a press conference at 3 PM ET. You can watch it live here and we'll provide updates throughout this "BREAKING" news event.
12:10 PM PT: So the original link for this didn't work; the new link is just posted above. Some guy whose name I don't know just basically said he wasn't born in the U.S. And he's asking people to watch about 10 minutes worth of videos—6 ninety second videos. They seem to be having some trouble getting the video to work.
12:11 PM PT: I have no idea what the audio to the video is saying, but it appears to show a scanner. So, apparently, video of a scanner scanning a document is their first bit of proof.
12:13 PM PT: The video seems to be trying to come up with "possible" explanations for why Obama's birth certificate was a fake. So, great, start with the presumption that it was fake ... and figure out how. These guys really are nuts. Welcome to the GOP grassroots, folks.
12:14 PM PT: I will say this: I'd rather have these guys taking aim at President Obama's birth certificate than the public's access to birth control.
12:15 PM PT: Based on the computer screenshots, I think these guys are still using Windows Vista. Case closed.
12:18 PM PT (kos): So "LAYERS!!!!!" is the big piece of evidence of forgery. Except it's not.
12:18 PM PT: If I understand their argument correctly, they are saying that the fonts used in the birth certificate were born in Kenya. They may soon also say that Mitt Romneybot knew the computer that produced this obvious forgery when the computer was still a baby calculator.
12:20 PM PT: More proof, I think: The document says President Obama was born in Hawaii. We know he was born in Kenya. Therefore, it is fake. By the way, it's been about 10 minutes since this guy said he'd have 6 90 second videos. I think he's shown just 3 videos.
12:22 PM PT:
Arpaio's birther investigation shows that it's a great idea to have cops in AZ demanding proof of citizenship from Latino residents.
— @AdamSerwer via web
12:23 PM PT: Amazing but true: nobody at the press conference has presented proof that they were born in the United States. Hopefully somebody arrests them.
12:25 PM PT:
.@RealSheriffJoe's report: "Obama's long-form birth certificate released on April 27, 2011, is suspected to be a computer-generated forgery"
— @ZekeJMiller via TweetDeck
Yeah, sure. Suspected by a bunch of guys who can't even prove they were born in the U.S. Arrest them all!
12:26 PM PT: They've been going on and on about something called the "white halo" effect. I think that's EXACTLY the problem here.
12:27 PM PT: If Sheriff Orly Joe ever needs a new nickname, I say we call him "The White Halo."
12:29 PM PT: OH MY GOD! Obama's birth certificate was born on Mitt Romney's hard drive!
12:30 PM PT: Even FoxNews.com points out that these guys are nuts, citing a software expert dismissing their odd "layers" videos.
12:31 PM PT (kos): A year ago, the whole "layers" argument was dismissed ... by FOX NEWS.
“When you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesn’t look like someone built it from scratch. If someone made a fake it wouldn’t look like this," said [Jean-Claude Tremblay, a certified Adobe expert]. “Some scanning software is trying to separate the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers.” [...]
“I’d be more afraid it’d be fake if it was one in piece. It would be harder to check if it’s a good one if it’s a fake,” Tremblay said.
12:31 PM PT: Quote from press conference: "randomized computer optimization process." Just because they can speak gibberish doesn't mean they know what they are talking about.
12:33 PM PT (kos):
If Obama put together a forgery that was found out by this "posse" of mustachioed tree stumps, then he deserves impeachment. #Arpaio
— @SimonMaloy via web
12:33 PM PT: "Far too problematic to discuss all the issues in just one press conference." Awesome. They're going to do another press conference. What a bunch of nuts. Too bad this didn't come before the presidential primary, because Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would've been forced to endorse these clowns.
12:36 PM PT: By the way, on a serious note, this entire "analysis" of the birth certificate is based on the birth certificate as released by the White House. They are looking at the same thing that millions of other people have looked at. And they want people to believe that they and only they have uncovered that it is a fake. That defies all logic and common sense, not to mention the fact that their analysis is crackpot.
12:39 PM PT: Still going on the videos. And they haven't taken a question yet. But this whole thing is typical of most conspiracy theory "evidence" — a convoluted, complicated set of intertwined theories that are nearly impossible to think about all at once, presented by an official sounding voice with fast moving images.
12:43 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The white halo hilarity continues here.
