Transparent Presidency...

[Nightshade]

...that wasn't.

Why won't Obama release his own school records?

What's Obama afraid of?

http://tinyurl.com/bssjsxv

[callmeslick]

who the feck cares? And, why? I can't recall the school records of any elected official being of any importance. Why Obama?
Hell, what do we know about Romney's schooling except that he was some sort of arrogant prep-school bully(a dime a dozen, trust me)? And, once again, why would it matter. I'd be surprised if the Indonesian International School even had records extant for Obama's tenure there.

Oh, and your link doesn't work.

[Isaac]

If I ever do an animation based on this forum, TB's character is going to be easy.

"What if... obama... had a B in... social studies? What then? Checkmate, liberals..."

[CobGobbler]

There is a difference between the school records and the tax returns.

The school record requests only exist for those that still do not believe that President Obama was born in Hawaii. His school records have absolutely no bearing on anything related to his policies or his presidency. While I think the whole tax return fiasco is a little bit silly, I do enjoy it just for the fact that Romney is making it worse on himself. Everyone knows the guy is uber-rich, we all know he has hundreds of millions of dollars. But to think that a guy running for office maybe, just maybe, failed to pay taxes either at all or an appropriate percentage of his income is rather intriguing. We already know he paid a small percentage (13%) in the years he released, so it begs the question of what would be in the other ones that he thinks is so damning.

If it wasn't so bad, his political team is doing a bad job by letting this linger around. It is not going away.

[woodchip]

There is a difference between the school records and the tax returns.

The school record requests only exist for those that still do not believe that President Obama was born in Hawaii. His school records have absolutely no bearing on anything related to his policies or his presidency.

Maybe and maybe not. The following is from a fellow Columbia University student:

"Why are the college records, of a 51-year-old President of the United States, so important to keep secret? I think I know the answer.

If anyone should have questions about Obama’s record at Columbia University, it’s me. We both graduated (according to Obama) Columbia University, Class of ’83. We were both (according to Obama) Pre-Law and Political Science majors. And I thought I knew most everyone at Columbia. I certainly thought I’d heard of all of my fellow Political Science majors. But not Obama (or as he was known then- Barry Soetoro). I never met him. Never saw him. Never even heard of him. And none of the classmates that I knew at Columbia have ever met him, saw him, or heard of him."

"Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not."

"If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:

A) He rarely ever attended class.

B) His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.

C) He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

D) He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia."

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/o ... -columbia/

In a odd way, what Obama's (then known as Barry Soetoro? wtf) classmate writes has a ring of reality to it. So where are the great investigative journalists at?

[CobGobbler]

Dude you're grasping at straws.

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/02/obama- ... niversity/

Again, every bit of your list there equates to being a birther. He released his long form birth certificate because that was what you guys wanted. When your little asinine theory came crashing down, you all quickly turned to this. It's really, really, really pathetic guy. You're a grown man and this is what you sit around and think of?

I hope he doesn't unseal records. Doing so would be akin to President Bush giving the time of day to 9/11 Truthers. Those people are idiots, and so are the birthers.

Oh and by the way, President Bush's grades were not good enough to get into either Yale OR Harvard and he did. So there isn't a set of rules that is in concrete, sometimes you get in, sometimes you don't. Simple as that.

[flip]

I'm not a "birther" mostly because I think they are all full of ★■◆●, but Woodchip's post rings of truth. It's like they got the Obama crowd expertly brainwashed. Instead of contemplating any of the account, their conditioning compels them to immediately start running around and hollering out "Birther,Birther..........Birther." It would be funny as hell if it wasn't so sad.

[CobGobbler]

Ok then, since I'm apparently part of the brainwashed crowd, what is the exact purpose of looking at President Obama's collegiate record? Will we gain knowledge of his Middle East policy by looking at his social sciences requirement grade during his junior year at Columbia? Oh wait, I got it, let us look at his math grades and that will tell us how he came to believe in his tax policy right?

The whole foreign exchange student fiasco is yet another attempt to try and say that the President was not born in America.

[flip]

I think it all goes to his love and devotion;) but i say don't get sidetracked with all the bull★■◆●. I say just look at what he has done for this country. Everything goes against sound principal and since no one can see the future, sound principals is all you got. One has to take the time to see the long-term repercussions of his policies.

[Sergeant Thorne]

When your little asinine theory came crashing down, ...

I've seen the long form birth certificate. It was released from the White House website. My dad has a copy on his computer. It contains separate layers. Explain to me how a scanned document is encoded in PDF format with the text on a different layer from the graphics, on a different layer from the background. Honestly, I have a hard time imagining how someone associated with high office could even be incompetent enough to release a forgery like that.

On the other hand... it obviously did the job.

He released his long form birth certificate because that was what you guys wanted.

[CobGobbler]

Seriously, if you guys want to keep peddling in this theory that the vast majority of your party laid to rest then be my guest. But the reasonable people within the GOP have given up on this argument. If you want to be associated with the delusional, the crazy, and the clinically insane, well there is nothing I can do about it.

This board is full of some serious lunatics. How about that Foil? Does being general constitute a personal attack as well?

[Foil]

Explain to me how a scanned document is encoded in PDF format with the text on a different layer from the graphics, on a different layer from the background.

That's exactly what scanners and/or PDF software do during OCR.

...This board is full of some serious lunatics. How about that Foil? Does being general constitute a personal attack as well?

No, by definition.

[vision]

Explain to me how a scanned document is encoded in PDF format with the text on a different layer from the graphics, on a different layer from the background.

That's exactly what scanners and/or PDF software do during OCR.

I lol'd at this. I thought OCR layers were common knowledge. I've known about them forever, but then again I've had to make them for work. Mystery solved! haha. Seriously, the quickest Internet search would have revealed this answer from a reputable source.

[Sergeant Thorne]

That was one of my first thoughts. But the text is not OCR, as far as I can tell--it's not selectable. I've attached the document. I can't view the layers from Acrobat Reader 9 on this computer, but the way it renders when you zoom and move shows that the black on the text is separate from the white text on green background, and the signatures are separate again. Don't know where I got "graphics", I thought for sure I remembered there being a logo or something on there. Maybe I was thinking of another document...

Anyway, here's the document attached... or not, the max file size appears to be 256 KoolBear units, whatever that is. Here's a link to the file on my webhost.

I lol'd at this. I thought OCR layers were common knowledge. I've known about them forever, but then again I've had to make them for work. Mystery solved! haha. Seriously, the quickest Internet search would have revealed this answer from a reputable source.

Your mother must be very proud.

[Foil]

But the text is not OCR, as far as I can tell--it's not selectable.

The OCR process would not create selectable text blocks in the PDF, particularly if the OCR happened during the scan. Pasting the image into the PDF (or importing from a scanned image) would not import any text, leaving only the layered image.

[Spidey]

Foil, aren’t you the one that told Woody that PDFs can only contain “images”? I do believe this subject is a little outside your expertise…nothing personal.

I would go into exactly what OCR is used for, and just what a pdf can contain, but I don’t want to sound like a damn birther.

(I am a graphics professional)

There are basically 2 reasons why “OCR” was not used to produce this document.

1. You wouldn’t want such a thing out in the wild with editable text.

2. The document would no longer look like the original.

I do believe I explained this before.

[Foil]

Foil, aren’t you the one that told Woody that PDFs can only contain “images”?

No.

I do believe this subject is a little outside your expertise…nothing personal.

I was just working in some pdf-generating code this week.

There are basically 2 reasons why “OCR” was not used to produce this document.

1. You wouldn’t want such a thing out in the wild with editable text.

2. The document would no longer look like the original.

I do believe I explained this before.

No one said that OCR produced the document... only that the scanner was using OCR during the scan (thus the image and layers were retained, but not any OCR text). It's very easily reproducible.

[Sergeant Thorne]

But the text is not OCR, as far as I can tell--it's not selectable.

The OCR process would not create selectable text blocks in the PDF, particularly if the OCR happened during the scan. Pasting the image into the PDF (or importing from a scanned image) would not import any text, leaving only the layered image.

You're saying that the image was scanned in OCR mode and then the OCR data was lost/left out, leaving just the layers recognized and separated out by the OCR process? I have at least a basic knowledge of most things PC-related--my experience with OCR, however, is limited to having used it years ago and knowing pretty well what it's for.

EDIT: Looks like you already answered.

Not that it necessarily has any bearing on the facts, but why would someone do that?

[Foil]

Occam's razor... The simplest explanation, in my opinion, is that the image (which contains the layers but not the OCR text) was simply pasted/imported into a PDF for distribution, since it's such a near-universal format. [By the way, some scanners have OCR functionality on by default.]

The thing that surprises me is that this was missed by the PR staff who released it. Seems they could have easily flattened the image or obtained a clean scan and avoided this continued conspiracy-theory.

[Spidey]

Foil, this is the post I was thinking of, sorry I have to stop using my faulty memory.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13913&p=219174#p219174

I remembered it as you telling woody that PDFs can only contain images (rastors), when in fact that was not what you said.

sorry

[Foil]

Ah, I do remember that thread! I was doing some work in CAD software at the time, and had seen cases where people were trying to save architectural data in images embedded in PDFs. The data isn't actually in there, but there are some software packages out there that are surprisingly good at recreating CAD models from images.


... Should we get back to the original topic (relevance of school records)?