Glenn Beck on birther issue: 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'.

While other top radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Mark Levin and Lou Dobbs, have all said unequivocally and publicly that the Obama eligibility issue is legitimate and worthy, a few – including Beck and fellow Fox TV host Bill O'Reilly – have taken the position that the issue is, in O'Reilly's words, "bogus." Both Beck and O'Reilly cite the contemporaneous appearance of birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers as prima facie evidence Obama was born in Hawaii and "birthers" are conspiracy nuts. However, what neither talk host realizes is that newspaper birth announcements are not placed by parents phoning their local paper with the good news that they had a child. Rather, as WND has reported based on interviews with the two Hawaii papers involved, the Obama newspaper birth announcements stemmed from information automatically sent to the papers by Hawaii's Department of Health upon the state's issuance of a "Certification of Live Birth," which, as WND has also reported, is considered insufficient on its own to positively document the president's birthplace. Many people remain unaware that a child does not even have to be born in Hawaii to receive a "Certification of Live Birth – that's the "short form" that provides no hospital name, delivering physician or any of the o