Orly Taitz’ latest shiny object is a report from Al Hendershot, a skip tracer from Alabama, that he found a 2010 record in one of his databases that lists a “Barry Soetoro” with a Columbia University address. Hendershot thinks this is evidence Obama attended Columbia as a foreign student. He’s being silly.
The original story was an April Fool joke that Obama attended Occidental College as a foreign student. This may be one of the most successful April Fool jokes of all time, surpassing the Orson Wells radio broadcast that Martians had landed in New Jersey (which was not broadcast on April 1 anyway).
First, there is no way a name and address from the 1980’s is going to appear in for the first time in some skip-tracing database in 2010 unless somebody intentionally created a transaction, such as a credit application, for the purpose of inserting the record. This is obviously a birther trick and only somebody hopelessly naive would fail to recognize this.
For the benefit of readers who have never been to college in the US, this is how things work. When you apply to a college, you have your high school submit a transcript. Well President Obama went high school in Hawaii under the name of Barack (or Barry) Obama, not Soetoro. Lots of people remember him from high school. Some of his friends even wrote a book about it. Obama is in the Punahau yearbook, and Punahou School proudly celebrates its famous alumnus named Obama, not Soetoro.
Barack Obama graduated from high school as Barack Obama, ergo, he entered Occidental College as Barack Obama. There are many references and published interviews confirming the President at Occidental, under the name Obama. Occidental College proudly celebrates its famous alumnus named Obama, not Soetoro.
The president then transferred from Occidental to Columbia University. When you transfer from one college to another, you have a transcript sent; you don’t send it yourself, the school does. The President attended Occidental as Barack Obama, ergo he attended Columbia University as Barack Obama.
His name appears on the list of graduates supplied to Brietbart News by Columbia University:
And we also see Barack Obama, not Barry Soetoro, in the Columbia graduation program. Columbia celebrates its famous alumnus, Barack Obama, not Barry Soetoro.
Following graduation from Columbia University, Barack Obama attended Harvard University. When one applies to graduate school, one must have the undergraduate transcript sent to the graduate school. The President went to Harvard as Barack Obama, ergo it said Barack Obama on his transcript from Columbia, not Soetoro. Harvard Law School celebrates its famous alumnus, Barack Obama, not Barry Soetoro.
As a normal human being, it is hard to grasp how someone would fall for an April Fool joke and try to keep it alive for years, risking their professional livelihood by violating the terms of service of a critical tool used in their job, and making themself the object of universal ridicule on the Internet.
He actually found that the name was Barack Soetoro but eveything else still applies.
http://theobamahustle.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/untitled1.png
our “friends” at fox recently interviewed one of his classmates from Punahau, the very articulate Bernice Bowers
as an obama fan, i read a lot into fox’s questions – perhaps fox didn’t receive the responses they hoped for
oreilly’s Jesse Watters is not know for being very kind when he (attacks) interviews people
Obama Classmate Dishes to Fox News
http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2013/01/04/obama-classmate-dishes-fox-news
btw, doc, ANOTHER excellent article
I had Al Hendershot types calling me for months because somebody used to live at my address who had the same last name and first initial as somebody they were looking for, and when I say “used to live” I mean dead, may he rest in peace. They’re really good at finding new people to bother, but they’re not very good at all at finding old facts.
“that he found a 2010 record”
Obama attended Columbia in 1983/84, what does a 2010 record have to do with Columbia?
That is silly!
That, my friend, is beyond “silly.”
That is birther. Like Medusa or the Gorgon, don’t stare at it or you will turn to stone.
With any luck such ideas will someday be called by a new term, “taitz,” lower-case common noun. As in “Don’t pay any attention… that’s just a bunch of taitz.”
Here is the complete definition of ‘taitz’: http://spreadingtaitz.tumblr.com/
Spread the word.
They believe it because they want to. They need to and so any misinformation becomes information. It is impossible for them to believe othewise since they have invested so much of themselves into it. They are indeed a sad bunch.
The computer age has introduced a new twist to such mistakes. Not long ago, I was asked by a private water company to pay the arrears of someone who shared my family name and lived at an address that sounded vaguely familiar. After a talk with my parents, it turned out I had lived at that address with my parents when I was 4. The private company had somehow got hold of the official records of anyone who ever lived in that town. Why did not they go after my father? It seems like Belgian records limit the number of former addresses that are kept on file. My parents having moved about a lot after my marriage, that address had disappeared from their records. The 254-character limit of DBase.
So where is the real computer glitch? Visiting the street IRL (Google View was in its infancy), I noticed the address was not where I had lived after all. The building I had lived in was still standing, but had another, much higher, street number now, due to new houses being built. I sent the company a panoramic photograph of the street and a habitation record (yes, overhere we can ask our town and village to draw up a document stating how long we have been living at our present address and with whom) proving the building my namesake had used the tap of, was obviously built after I moved to my present address.
Of course, for birfers the fact that two people with the same name would live at the same address with 40 years’ difference without being related to each other or even knowing each other would be simply incredible. They prefer to believe things which are far more incredible, like an 8-month pregnant woman spending two years’ average income on a flight to colonial Africa to meet with the other wife of her husband.
The water company was more rational. They wrote me back saying that they would write off the 10 dollar bill (yes, I was not saying that the whole affair was rational) as unrecoverable.
We have a common surname Brown. I have had rude collectors call us looking for people with the same first names of my son. I expect that when the good dentist decided to publish the President’s Social Security Number she created a great opportunity for mischief. She knows that we are all aware of what has happened to others who gave their number to a bogus caller. I expect that may local news outlets like the ones in Omaha have featured stories about the results for these folks.
Is Hendershot an actual skip tracer? Not a birfer amateur skip tracer?
Used car dealers and skip tracers as birfers …. this is triggering my patternicity 😉
Every time he pops up I think of Unforgiven.
This happened in about 1920 (edited from Wikipedia):
Author of books Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, “Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City. West displayed little ambition in academics, dropping out of high school and only gaining admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student who was also named Nathan Weinstein.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanael_West
His Twitter bio says he is “in the Insurance Business.”
His daffydavit on ORYR says he is “a professional debt collector.”
Acxiom says he is a semiprofessional rodeo clown and scrimshaw artiste living with his two wives in a hollow tree stump outside of Elko, Nevada. Or it could, if someone would just make a minimal effort.
“First, there is no way a name and address from the 1980’s is going to appear in for the first time in some skip-tracing database in 2010 unless somebody intentionally created a transaction, such as a credit application, for the purpose of inserting the record. This is obviously a birther trick and only somebody hopelessly naive would fail to recognize this.”
Why is everything about Obama always a typo:
Connecticut SSN – Zip Code Typo
Pamphlet – typo by the literary agent.
Any person who said Obama was born in Kenya – Typo – They meant Obama’s father
I think it comes with being famous.
Typos happen all the time to everybody. I was reported dead in a public database. My father’s name is a typo on my birth certificate and my mother’s name is a typo on my hospital souvenir certificate. My bank changed my address even though I didn’t move, and so a public record probably existed at one time saying I lived in Torrance, California. The president of a state university once introduced me to a crowd of 5,000 people as a professor at that institution, even though I have never been on the faculty there. In my lifetime I have been called Keevan, Calvin, Kazin, Kelvin, Nevin, and Dave more times than I can count. I used to get mail for the Reverend N. W. Davidson although I have never been a clergyman.
What’s so odd about the Social Security Administration keying a zero for a nine on Obama’s Social Security application? The IRS did exactly the same thing on my tax return one year.
Because Obama is a public figure, more things are said about him in public than about me. Many documents are available and have been examined minutely by the news media and the birther, and thereby the typos are concentrated and made more obvious.
Obama is a victim of the inevitable confusion when a father and son share the same name.
A book about George Washington, printed in England, said he was born there. And indeed there were birthers back then too, who repeated persistent rumors (after his death) that the Father of Our Country was foreign born.
I don’t think that there is anything at all remarkable about Obama’s typos.
Believe whatever you want to believe about Obama’s origins. It just doesn’t matter. In fact, it never mattered.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Typical John comment. Talks about the skip-trace, does not attempt to refute Doc’s logic, but shifts the subject to past (failed) birther memes, and seems to imply that they somehow give credence to the skip-trace misadventure.
So a challenge, John: tell us how, the 2010 sighting of the Soetoro name is plausible.
John, why do we have to keep explaining to you how one goes about basic reasoning?
You cited three pieces of erroneous information attributed to typos, as if that were significant. But actually there are many thousands of accurate data points… documents, memoirs, living memories, photos, audio recordings, video, journal entries, physical evidence… that accurately reflect the facts of the President’s exemplary history.
Got it? Hundreds of thousands of pieces of reliable evidence vs. a dozen or so ‘anomalies’ which have a simple explanation.
The real evidence presents a coherent narrative, and the ‘anomalies’ are errors. That’s how sane, objective persons see the situation.
Out of the many birther commenters, I think there is hope for you. You have come a long way; you just need to bust yourself loose from that crappy thinking.
If Barack’s dad had been named “Fred Obama,” that would make confusion of the father’s and son’s vital information worthy of suspicion. But since they share the same first and last names, calling such misprisions suspicious is irrational.
That’s how thinking is supposed to go.
Just as some Fundie Christian ex-young-earthers can keep their deepest beliefs even after it finally dawns on them that the world really is an enormously ancient wonder, you don’t need to like President Obama one little bit in order to accept that he is a natural-born citizen, and not a usurper. That the typos and mistakes are just typos and mistakes.
As Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
All well and good, but is it on YOUR credit record history?
Much like police are distrustful of witnesses that tell the exact same story, I think I would be more suspicious of someone whose public record doesn’t contain a single anomaly. It seems likely that such a person would actually be a forged identity inserted into the system.
I’ve been getting debt collection calls since 2007 for some guy with an unpronounceable Chinese-sounding name who had my phone number before me. Just when I thought I finally had the records fixed, I got another one last week.
Because a couple of typos is much more plausible than the idea that a man rich and powerful enough to spend trillions of dollars in hush money and able to guarantee the complete and total silence of millions of people including his political opponents, somehow couldn’t find a forger capable of fooling a handful of armchair detectives and typewriter salesmen?
Right after I retired from the Army in 1994 we were living in a small city in Pennsylvania and our address was on Philadelphia Ave. A couple of years later we had move to a new address in a different city yet my wife received a letter from DISCOVER credit card company demanding that she pay a past due bill of over $2000. Needless to say since we had never had a DISCOVER card, or lived in the city of Philadelphia, we were pretty shocked. Well to make a long story short. The person who they were actually looking for had the same name but lived in the city of Philadelphia. After a telephone call and get this, having to mail them a copy of her drivers license they decided she wasn’t the person they were looking for.
They must have done some kind of search that combined her name with Philadelphia, decided that Philadelphia Ave. in one city in Pennsylvania was good enough for them and must mean my wife was the person they were looking for. I’m sure that there are even worse cases out there. I’ve been getting calls on my cell for months looking for some guy who either had the same number or just gave them my number, after numerous requests to stop calling I think I have finally convinced the debt collector I’m not the person they think they are calling. Get’s pretty damn annoying after a while.
I read on the ‘Net that Hendershot is a polygamist and pedophile. Hendershot has to prove his innocence.
—
These three things are “everything” about Obama?
Funny, that guy actually wrote a short story with the title “The Imposter”. Whenever I read Orly ranting about Obama fraud, I wonder to what extent she knows how it is done. The episode about the Clerk who had studied in Slovakia (in fact, he had not, the Slovak University concerned was not some obscure Romanian diploma mill and the course he was supposed to have taken was only taught in Slovak) was particularly educating.
Though the way our government keeps records and tracks our past sometimes looks positively Orwellian (even to the Dutch), the agency that keeps track of failures to pay back credit does not track unpaid utility bills (or the fact that you are or were once put on limited supply because of reduced ability to pay) , though it has been suggested to include that as well, I am guessing the utilities do exchange information so the fact that I have no problem switching electricity or internet providers means that the utility at least did not communicate this factoid to others.
john: “Why is everything about Obama always a typo:”
Types the birther whose proper noun name is an uncapitalized typo (unless he is a toilet or a whore’s customer) and asks a question without a question mark.
Boom goes the irony meter.
You know what they say about all generalizations.
I will be turning 65 next month, and I had a hassle getting my online application for Medicare approved because of something which happened 57 years ago. Apparently when I applied for my Social Security Number I wrote down my middle name as “Thomas.” Actually, I do not have a middle name – Thomas is my Confirmation name.
Since then I have served in the U.S. Navy, registered to vote, obtained a U.S. passport, and have had driver’s licenses in multiple states, all of which list my first and last name but no middle name or middle initial, even though all these years the SSA’s records have me with the middle initial T. I was able to get it sorted out, but to permanently expunge the middle initial from my Social Security file I have to go to my nearest SSA office with my birth certificate and photo ID.
My Medicare card, which arrived a couple of weeks ago, has just my first and last name on it.
Contrary to birther site headlines which always contain a statement followed by a question mark (as in “Busted: Barry Soetoro found ineligible by SCOTUS?”), knowing very well (simple) people’s minds will tend to “auto-correct” this by ignoring the question mark.
Besides, I would be surprised if *anyone*’s life were without errors in documents. If there was absolutely nothing “anomalous” about Obama’s records, birthers would immediately claim that this is absolutely statistically impossible (that nobody makes a single error in 50 years) and therefore proof that the Almighty Konspiracee doctored all documents to perfection.
According to birthers, my brown eyes are blue (or my ID card is a forgery) because my previous ID card said so.
According to birthers, Orly Taitz is always suing the wrong people because she can never spell any name right.
According to birthers, Leonard Nimoy is an extraterrestrial born on Vulcan because his book’s title “I am Spock” says so.
According to birthers, my mother is still alive because she posthumously was awarded a higher level in long term care insurance.
According to Sandy Hookers, my Facebook page is a forgery because it says “in a relationship” but I wasn’t in one when the page was created.
That׳s an interesting twist to “doubting Thomas”.
oh i have major fun and games here in spain.
because the spanish have one forename and 2 surnames (one from the mother, one from the father), mine being english throws up all sorts of things.
on various documents the don’t get my forename right despite me showing my i.d. to them, my middle name gets used as a surname, and my surname being seriously gaelic screws them totally!
luckily having been working within a beurocracy developed under a dictatorship, problems like this are normally sorted out with a shrug, a laugh, and a stroke of a pen by the people in the offices..
I just got back from housesitting at a friends place in the locality of Denver, Victoria. Its basically an intersection on a tertiary highway with a line of mail boxes for the surrounding properties. I’ve suggested to the locals that they lobby the Shire Council to establish a roadside rest stop there. They could call it the “Denver John”.
You’re really lucky, usually a bureaucracy developed under a dictatorshop resolves such things by putting you in a neat little cell until your “anomalies” are sorted out. 😉
Well, pretty much what birthers demand should happen with Obama.
None of the things john lists are typos.
The ZIP code issue is (assuming the CT SSN was issued due to a “9” being changed to a “0”). The others are not:
“Meaning Obama’s father” (or mixing up Obama with his father) is not a typo but nonetheless an error.
Again, you are rather inclined to assume the Hawaiian DOH is lying than that some Kenyans were wrong, relaying wrong information or, if I have to be conspiracist about it, lying for whatever reason?
john, can I sum up your argument as “I believe every word every Kenyan, except Obama, says over the entire federal and all state governments, judges all the way up to SCOTUS, legal scholars etc.”?
Stepping up to the “plate” and releasing these “secret” documents, Obama is spending millions of dollars to keep secret, would be UN-American! The highway of the absurd is so well traveled.
Why are you lying?
Once again, John goes out of his way to utter an absurdly worded “Nuh-uh!”. Then he scurries back to his hole, never to be seen from again, until the next article attacking birther foolishness is posted.
I shouldn’t try to parse something like this before coffee, but giving it my best shot, you seem to be saying that releasing secret documents would be un-American. I can’t argue with that.
We of course all know that no one “spent millions of dollars” to keep any documents related to Obama secret. Presumably the idea that anyone did so is what you’re referring to as “absurd”.
So although by this interpretation your intentions are good, I would advise working on your clarity, or folks here will leap to the conclusion that you’re a birther. HTH!
Let’s see what happened…
The birthers say that “if he’d just release the birth certificate, this would all go away.”
Obama scans in his birth certificate, gives it to several media outlets, and places it on his official Campaign website. The State of Hawaii says that this is an “official Hawaii State Birth Certificate” and further releases multiple statements that also say that Obama was born in Hawaii.
The birthers say, “It’s a forgery. It doesn’t actually mean he was born in Hawaii. Plus, it doesn’t matter anyways, he’s ineligible no matter where he was born. If he’d just release his long-form birth certificate, this would all go away. Why is he spending millions to hide this?”
Obama then takes out, and gets special permission from the State of Hawaii to get a copy of his “long-form” birth certificate. He then walks into the White House Briefing room, goes and shows it to the White House Press Corps. He gives every member of the press corps a photocopy. He also scans it and puts it on the White House website.
The birthers say, “It’s a forgery. It doesn’t actually mean he was born in Hawaii. Plus, it doesn’t matter anyways, he’s ineligible no matter where he was born. If he’d just release his college records, this would all go away. Why is he spending millions to hide this?”
Forgive us if we don’t believe you. If Obama did release his college records, the birthers would move onto something else from the list, such as Kindergarten records (I kid you not).
Gabe has posted idiotic birther blather here several times.
We simply don’t give a damn what you want released and neither should the president. A bunch of random people asking for something doesn’t mean it should be released. No president has released the types of documents birthers claim they want released.
Show me where you demanded this of any other candidate.
Do you understand the concept of political enemy?
Did you demand to see Romney’s transcripts? Or any of Romney’s records protected by law?
It appears that you spend much of your time traveling the highway of the absurd.
Please name a single President who released his college records (and George W. Bush doesn’t count – his partial transcript was leaked, not released).
Your problem john is that you pick out 3 weak examples. We can point out thousands of correct examples. So basically you have a very small rate of “typos” frankly. Life is not perfect is any process – anomolies/outliers occur all the time. In Quality Control, you examine the outlier to ensure you can document that event, however you spend the vast majority of your time improving/controlling issues that are within the band of error.
Oh. That’s different, then.
Never mind!
A few reasons. One, there is no reason for him to do so. He has already produced more documentation than any other presidential candidate in history.
My offer to birthers stands: Name one document any other candidate in history has produced that Obama has not.
Two, it would achieve nothing. For any given record he produced, birthers would happily ignore them and ask for yet more records.
This is not idle speculation: It is exactly what has already happened.
Three, it would set a rather odd precedent, which would inevitably culminate in a regular phone-in show, Ask the President for a Random Pointless Document. This week: Bo’s neutering records! (See point two: “Yeah, but where’s the video?”)
He, and the country, really have better things to do.
Four, most of the records y’all are asking him for either no longer exist or are not under his control to release.
Five, you’ve never explained in any rational fashion why this president, unlike any other, has to show his papers. Leaving us to our own conjecture as to your point of concern.
Well, I did assume that “spending millions” had to be satire and wit, since it’s been refuted as utter crap on practically a daily basis here. Otherwise, it was just idiocy. So I gave you the benefit of the doubt. You’re welcome!
The “Obama spent Millions to hide his records” rumor was started by WND. Jerome Corsi linked to the FEC website that showed payments to the law firm of Obama’s PAC- 1.7MM and made a logic leap that it was to pay for legal fees defending him in eligibility cases. The payments had no breakdown of their purpose.
McCain had similar amounts of legal fees.. It was for winding down his election PAC.
Interestingly, those funds cannot be used to defend a candidate in court cases without written, express permission from the FEC itself, a copy of which does not exist on the Obama PAC documents.
So, If WND actually had actual proof that any of the 1.7MM was used to defend Obama without approval from the FEC, they could prove campaign fraud. But they don’t. The “Millions” was changed to “hundreds of thousands” in later articles. Then they dropped it entirely. But it’s still cited as gospel truth today by birthers.
For those such as Al, Orly, Linda, Susan and Neil who believe that the SSA NEVER makes typos or keystroke errors, I offer Rebuttal Exhibit A: My eight-year battle with the SSA over it’s attempt to recover dependent survivor benefits that the agency contended were overpaid to my daughter. According to a SSA transcript she became ineligible for benefits when she got married in 1996 and failed to report the marriage to the agency, which continued to send me monrhly benefits as her representative payee. The SSA has on file a copy of her birth certificate — she was born in 1989, making her seven years old on the date of the alleged nuptials. Her second grade teacher reported never having heard my daughter mention the name of her paramour or their wedding (to which I was not invited).
An appeal resulted in an ALJ “annulling” the marriage in 2005 and restoring the benefits.
In case you were worried: since it had been nine years, etiquette no longer demands she return any of the wedding gifts.
Are you the issuing authority for that? No? Allrighty then, none of your business. Besides which the actual issueing authority for security clearances perviously granted one to Obama. So apparently his documentation was sufficient.
Well aside from the fact that your question made no grammatical sense…. He meets the requirement, according to multiple court rulings, and according to the only body mandated by the Constitution to vette him on it…. Congress.
Why do you hate the Constitution, Gabe?
We’re trying to get you off the road called absurdity, Gabe, but you have to meet us halfway. Put the brakes on your delusions, and we’ll help you as best we can.
Since the President without doubt has a Top Secret Clearance, then obviously he has passed the background check. But since the entire matter is Top Secret, it can’t be shared on a message board, now can it? Because if it was, then it wouldn’t be Top Secret any more, would it?
You are aware that one’s academic records are SEPARATE from one’s FINANCIAL records, right? It’s COMPLETELY reasonable that he would function as Barack Obama but PAY FOR IT as Barry Soetero… Understand?
Make up your mind.
You were whining about transparency and salivating over finding dirt in his academic transcripts.
Did you think the security clearance process involved you as well?
You have yet to refute any of the facts offered to you for your nonsensical claims.
You’re making less and less sense but your motives are pretty clear.
I don’t know how many times I have to explain to you guys about time travel.
If we reveal the secrets, that revelation will create a paradox and there never will have been a Revolution and the United States wouldn’t even exist. If you could see the real college transcripts, you would figure out which century is Obama’s true origin point, and you would get distracted by his Alpha Centauri heritage, and while you would indeed prove that he was born in a future time on the moon of *New* Honolulu, by doing so you would unravel the fabric of space and time. How you ask? You think Obama is the first time traveler? If you find out about time travel too soon, you’ll never let Jefferson and Adams travel back in time and get the whole thing started. I’ve seen how that timeline turns out.
With your focus on birth certificates, have you ever once wondered about Jefferson and Adams dying on the same day? No, you haven’t, have you? You think the date of July 4th is just a coincidence? And you think you know from conspiracies!
I keep telling the head office that all these self-taught natural born detectives make a mess of things every time. They keep telling me to just do my job, that you’ve got your first amendment rights, even if you don’t yet have your thirty-third amendment rights.
Why do you think we keep getting sent back to clean up the timeline? You’ve already seen the college transcripts about seventeen times. How many more times do we have to erase your memory already?!
Happy someone finally answered your question? Excuse my chattiness. You won’t remember any of it anyway. All best.
There may even be a rest stop named for him.
Utter nonsense. For example, you CANNOT GET FINANCIAL aid unless you are ACCEPTED BY THE COLLEGE. How does accepted Obama and financial aid Soetoro work? Oh and to keep financial aid, you have to maintain a grade point average. How does grade report Obama work with financial aid Soetoro?
I don’t guess you ever went to college, or maybe daddy paid all your bills and you didn’t have to deal with financial aid. Whatever the case, you don’t have a clue about financial aid. Once again, birthers trying to rewrite the world to suit their conspiracy theories.
Understand? No, you don’t have a clue.
Where in the Constitution does it say that the President has to go through a background check?
The President is the Commander-in-Chief. No one in government can deny him a Top Secret clearance. He has the authority to give himself a Top Secret clearance.
You birthers have dreamed up this imaginary requirement that all candidates for President have to pass a background investigation. If that were the case, Cody Robert Judy would not have been able to be a candidate (not to mention Orly’s client, Keith Judd, who is doing time in a Federal prison).
That said, Barack Obama undoubtedly went through a background check and had to get a Top Secret clearance in order for him to serve on the Homeland Security Committee and Committee on Foreign Relations when he was in the Senate. But guess what? You don’t get to see the results of that background check, because it is classified! I had a Top Secret clearance when I was in the Navy and I couldn’t see my own background investigation, much less anyone else’s.
No, it’s not reasonable. Regardless of who is paying the tuition, the account is set up in the name of the student.
And, as Doc has suggested, we know that Obama took out student loans to help pay his tuition. You cannot apply for financial aid under one name and use it under another name.
Understand?
Bwahahahaha!
That was funny. Thanks.
If it makes you feel any better: the sun will come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there’ll be sun. It’s always a day away!
No, could you provide some proof for that statement? I think it is completely ludicrous. Why would the entry only appear in 2010 if your crazy theory is correct?
Gabe: Lets start with the background check for a Top Secret Clearance.
Having been vetted in 1977 by a Top Secret Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) for a military job that wasn’t nearly as sensitive as, say being a United States Senator; I know that when the investigators showed up in my little town in West Virginia asking my neighbors about me, they were pretty sure I must have done something terrible, or I was going to be the next James Bond. Neither of which was true.
Are you claiming that the Federal Investigative Services was initiated over 60 years ago and put into place as part of the conspiracy that allowed Barrack Hussein Obama to usurp the highest office in the United States. http://www.opm.gov/investigations/background-investigations/reference/annual-report-for-fiscal-year-2012.pdf
Gabe: The highway of the absurd is so well traveled.
You got that right, the birfer mentality…. the length of absurdity needed to put yourself on this trip of conspiratorial belief, is surely a journey that will never end.
You quote two of my reasons:
…and then respond:
How does that relate in any way to the two reasons I gave that you chose to quote?
The government has treated Obama and his documentation no differently than any other president. It’s only birtherdom that is asking for unreasonable amounts of information beyond what has been asked of any other president or candidate.
And how does one “opaque a requirement”?
So, how would that work? A check written to cover tuition for Barry Soetoro would somehow be applied to the account of Barack Obama? Please explain.
In birther universe, 1+1 = 3 is a true statement.
I thought it was 2+2 = Fish.
The Fugitive Slave Act
Post of the month. 🙂
Birthers have already let the cat out of the bag w.r.t. the birth certificate – even if the original vault BC was “produced” and “verified by a court”, birthers (apart from calling the judge a traitor and liar) will simply move the goalposts to “we need to see the hospital records”.
In fact, the exact reaction that I predicted has already happened – that birthers claim “even if the BC is legit, it doesn’t mean the information on it is the truth”.
Actually, once he was elected President, Obama had every clearance in the US government by virtue of his office. It’s not like the standard security clearance process. It’s not like they’re going to give him a polygraph before giving him his first daily brief.
So, no, I don;t think they looked to see if he was born in Kenya. Why? Because the accusation is so mindbogglingly STUPID that they wouldn’t waste their time.
Well, birthers want precisely that – like an Iranian Council of Guardians that says “you may have voted for this man, but we’re not gonna let him do any presidenting whatsoever, because Muslim”.
That’s rich. A Birfoon asking us to try and understand something.
Let me put this in the simplest possible terms:
You can’t counter an argument based on “is” with one based on “could be.” You have to counter with an “is.”
Take Global Warming. The scientists say it “is” anthropogenic, and the deniers say it “could be” a result of natural cycles. Well, that’s nonsense because the findings have taken natural cycles into account.
The reason the deniers have only convinced scientific illiterates is precisely that the climate scientists have a ton of “is,” and all the deniers have is “could be.” No rigorous thinker will buy that. To prevail, the deniers would have to produce ACTUAL SCIENCE showing how natural effects have produced the warming, AND exactly how the greenhouse gas calculations proving human activities have caused the warming are in error.
The odds are about 99.999% that will never happen.
Same with Birfoonery. There is a mountain of evidence that Obama IS a natural-born citizen, perfectly eligible to serve. You can’t counter that with “could be,” although the Birfer Grifters have made a tidy profit off of such arguments, believed by the weak-minded. The records “could be” forged. BHO “could be” a Manchurian Candidate. The definition of NBC “could be” having two citizen parents.
No score. Those are the arguments of children (“Somebody could have snuck in and broken the lamp!”), but we need adults to guide America. No you gullible little children.
Take the “Barry Soetoro” garbage. You can’t just say it “could have” been the case that BHO’s financials were under the other name. You’d have to produce an argument based on “is.” Show authenticated records of BHO using the name Barry Soetoro, at any time in his life, ever. Can you? No, because they don’t exist.
I suppose you Birfoons deserve credit, though: you’ve caused an iron-clad, irrefutable picture of the President’s past to come into view… a better life document than any other President, ever. You have helped prove BHO is exactly who he always was.
I wasn’t aware of that. In fact, I don’t think they were separate in the 1980s. How would the Bursar know how many credits to bill you for otherwise? Or if you withdrew from a course in time to avoid most of the tuition bill? Or if your grades were enough to maintain your student loan or scholarship? Or if, as in my husband’s case, instead of a diploma, the case he was handed should contain a piece of paper saying he still owed money?
Why would the bills be under Soetoro anyway? International students aren’t eligible for Undergraduate US foreign aid.
Just to pile one– a university’s financial records are tied very closely to enrollment information. Any college student who ever had an unpaid library fine would know that. Students who are behind on paying fees, even for a trivial amount, may be barred from enrolling in classes, and will not be able to get their diploma or a transcript when needed.
The Bursar’s office will accept a check from anyone — but the account record is tied to an account number that is tied to the student’s enrollment ID number.
Many of the comments made by birthers simply demonstrate that neither they nor anyone in their immediate family has actually ever attended college. They simply have no clue as to how the process of admissions, enrollment, fee payment, and financial aid actually work.
Yes, imagine the potential for mischief if someone in the government had the authority to deny the President a security clearance. “I’m sorry, Mr. President. The CIA is giving a briefing on the latest developments in the Middle East but you can’t attend because you don’t have a Top Secret clearance.”
I went round and round with one guy on EXACTLY that topic. He had written this huge treatise about how the modellers were missing the obvious solar cycles and there wouldn’t be any ACC if they would just realize that the sun isn’t constant. He railed on and on and on about the models and their total inadequacy in the face of this obvious defect.
When I showed him the various peer reviewed papers that explicitly showed that they most certainly did factor in solar variability, all he could do is put his fingers in his ears and say ‘na na na na na’ (or rather ‘no they didn’t, no they didn’t, not they didn’t…).
The same thing with the ‘truthers’ who look at the picture of a 100 foot wide hole in the side of the Pentagon and swear up, down, and sideways that it is only 12 feet wide.
If you are talking about this picture of the inside of the pentagon then they are right, unless you are saying that a “no parking” sign is 20 feet high
http://www.scienceof911.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Exit-hole_early.jpg
Now if you are looking at this pic of the outside of the pentagon then you have more of a case.
http://911research.wtc7.net/mirrors/guardian2/pentagon/fireball-at-pent.jpg
Though I’d put the hole at around the 60 foot mark personally but its a bad angle to estimate.But regardless its still a big freaking hole.
Oops! I don’t know what just happened, but my keyboard froze when I tried to type in my comment. As I was about to say………..
My snarkiness level must be working overtime. I honestly thought Annie’s post was completely facetious, since I couldn’t believe someone could be that stupid. My first reaction to it was, “How clever and how funny!”. Now, of course, I realize how wrong I was.
Has Annie posted before? I don’t remember seeing her name, which is why I didn’t react as I would have to John or gabe, for example.
This seems to be a one-time drive-by commenter, and not the same person as the Annie who has posted here in the past.
No. I was talking about this picture:
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/st911/docs/hole11.jpg
I think my second photo was a lot clearer than that, to be fair. Hand on heart, I could not tell much from that one way or another as all I can really see is smoke.
But anyway, off topic and stuff.
I used to think that.