Should Hawaii look for Ann Soetoro's delivery records?

Apparently Governor Ambercrombie wants to lay the birthers to rest for good.

From here:

*"For Abercrombie, it’s personal. The 72-year-old governor actually knew Obama’s parents, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham, when they were young university students in Hawaii. He told The New York Times that questioning where the president was born is ‘an insult to his mother and to his father.’

Abercrombie has told the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, CNN’s Ed Henry and others that he’s asked the state attorney general and health officials to determine what additional information he can release to prove that Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961."*

The answer is easy: release Ann Dunham Soetoro’s delivery record. A birth certificate is the lowest “proof” of birth. It’s nothing more than a low-level clerk’s recording of whatever they were instructed to record. So the governor, (having been there when he was born, apparently), should ask the Hospital to release the records of Ann Soetoro’s confinement for delivery if he wants to help his buddy out with proof. It’s not possible to give birth in a Hospital without creating records–even in 1961–and it’s easy to uncover records from a given period of time. They are essentially never destroyed. At the time of Mr Obama’s birth, even simple things like a log of every patient and the reason for admission would have been recorded and kept. If the actual Hospital is in question, it’s a simple matter to review all logs from the putative time frame. There’s no “privacy issue” if you are just helping someone prove what they are already claiming.

Good idea, because it settles the issue?
Bad idea, because the birthers will move on to complain about President Obama’s cigarette habit, or something?

Bad idea because the issue has long since been settled to anyone with common sense, and any further time and resources spent on it are wasted. Nothing will satisfy these idiots.

The only thing that could possibly shut the “Birthers” up would be to laugh directly into their faces and tell them to shut the hell up. Anything dug up will automatically be declared fraudulent and/or inconsequential by them, and(imho) the only thing that should be presented to them is the bill for all this digging and wasting of time.

Your mistake is thinking they’re looking for the truth.

They can’t handle the truth.

Pointless. It’s reached the point of “unfalsifiable belief”. You could invent a time machine and show them first hand Obama emerging from the womb in a Hawaii hospital. “It’s a Kenyan hospital, and you made it look like Hawaii!”

They would claim the time machine had a liberal bias.

You can’t fix stupid or crazy. Attempting to do so would come off as an appearance of pandering to insanity. I’m sure Obama would rather not give that impression. It would be beneath him (and us).

I’m convinced birthers all know that their “movement” is a haha-funny-joke anyway. If Obama weren’t a native-born citizen, his nomination would never have been approved in the first place.

Why waste the time? Conspiracy theorists, by definition, will not be convinced by evidence. After being presented with his birth certificate as they’re asking now, they’d just come up with more ridiculous demands in the future.

They’ve denied the reality of his birth certificate. They’ve denied the reality of two different newspaper announcements. What makes you think they’d accept the reality of a delivery record?

You might as well try to explain physics to a 9/11 truther.

He might not, but it’s not up to him either way. A lot of birthers assert that he can just order the state of Hawaii to release those records because he’s the president because, you know, the president has the power to tell anybody to do anything he wants, or because they’re supposed to be his records to release (which they aren’t). The laws of Hawaii are what matters here. Changing them so more of these records are released won’t do anything.

False.

And at the time, Obama’s mother was known as Ann Dunham or Ann Obama. Calling her “Soetoro” is the quickest way to torpedo your own credibility.

That’s what I was going to say. Soetoro was her second husband’s name, who she married four years after Barack Obama was born.

These birthers have been fed so much misinformation that they can’t even keep the conspiracy theories straight anymore.

According to an article in TIME (via Wikipedia) her legal name at the time she died was Ann Dunham Sutoro.

ETA: Obviously, she wasn’t a Soetoro at the time Barack was born.

Good catch. I hadn’t noticed that.

Nowhere in the linked article is she referred to as Soetoro. Obviously, she was known by her maiden name, Dunham, or her married name at the time, Obama. Referring to her by any other name is weird and may very well reflect the underlying psychological problems among Birthers.

Bad idea - because it let’s the crazies set the agenda. It opens up the possibility of a permanent “whack-a-mole” scenario, where you have to constantly answer every nutty challenge that pops up.

Bad idea. What if they can’t find it?

In Florida, the law only requires a health care provider to keep a patient’s records for seven years. Anything older than that almost certainly has been destroyed.

<snerk!> That’s exactly what I was thinking. Even worse if they can find the records for the supposed day from all sorts of other patients, but not his mother’s!

Chris Matthews is right.

I think it is time to put an end to this argument and controversy once and for all.

Just release the complete detailed long form birth certificate with the doctor’s signature and hospital name, also release the hospital patient records, and release all the school and passport records and then we dont need to discuss this anymore.

And they’ll move the goalposts again. Just like before.

And there’s no controversy.

Yet another indication that reasonable people understand this issue was resolved years ago: Chris Matthews says it isn’t. :wink:

We never needed to discuss it, and even people who were dubious were provided with enough evidence years ago.