The American president's addiction to king-like power must end

[Spendulus]

I'm not quite sure what you are saying.  FACT.  Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history.

You can't deny that.  I think what you are saying is "It doesn't matter."  Well, that wouldn't quite qualify someone with your attitude to review backgrounds and qualifications of 20 people for a job in the private sector, or make either reasonable or best decisions on such a matter.

I'm saying you're ridiculous. FACT.

See, just because you slap "FACT" on something doesn't make it a fact.

For example, you stated an opinion: "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history."

Justify this "fact" with sources and evidence, or just stop it.

I have no idea whatever the rest of your response was about, it was wholly unrelated to everything else in this thread.

Why not respond to the bolded section of my reply?

I did. I bolded my answer to it since you missed it.

Now how about you get back on topic and justify all the opinions you're spouting off as fact.

Because you premised a conspiracy argument, which is not what I made.  Then you tried to ridicule the conspiracy argument.  That's stawman work.  I responded by simply indicating that the sort of facts that one would review in a hire/not hire decision are certainly within the group of secreted documents.

I get the impression you just don't like that.

Have to agree....it's not terribly likeable....

[Gumbork]

YES! Down with the kenyan muslim arabic terrorist president who isn't American!

I can't help but wonder about his legacy, after his 8 years he's out, can we then find out some of the background mystery data?

Kind of like cans of SPAM.  You always wonder, what is that mystery meat?

The Media sent people to check w bush's college scores out, to compare them with kerry's... then silence. He had a higher score than kerry's. That is why they kept quiet.

The weirdest thing is it is impossible to do the same thing now as all of 0bama's school papers from colombia and harvard are sealed. What was he thinking? Was he an exceptional student? The first US black president and none of the media wanted to know. At least for his presidential library? It is as if no one cares.

The dude was doing cocaine while in new york back in the days, according to his own biography. Cocaine back then was not a cheap drug like crack. From whom was he getting all that money from? Colombia and harvard are not cheap.

Time to put my tinfoil hat back on. I will still wonder though.

I know that he had a lot of student loans so the tuition was probably paid for with debt.

I would suspect that there are allegations against him during his time at columbia. It could be either an assault or him cheating but it is almost certainly much worse then just bad grades

[Spendulus]

YES! Down with the kenyan muslim arabic terrorist president who isn't American!

I can't help but wonder about his legacy, after his 8 years he's out, can we then find out some of the background mystery data?

Kind of like cans of SPAM.  You always wonder, what is that mystery meat?

The Media sent people to check w bush's college scores out, to compare them with kerry's... then silence. He had a higher score than kerry's. That is why they kept quiet.

The weirdest thing is it is impossible to do the same thing now as all of 0bama's school papers from colombia and harvard are sealed. What was he thinking? Was he an exceptional student? The first US black president and none of the media wanted to know. At least for his presidential library? It is as if no one cares.

The dude was doing cocaine while in new york back in the days, according to his own biography. Cocaine back then was not a cheap drug like crack. From whom was he getting all that money from? Colombia and harvard are not cheap.

Time to put my tinfoil hat back on. I will still wonder though.

I know that he had a lot of student loans so the tuition was probably paid for with debt.

I would suspect that there are allegations against him during his time at columbia. It could be either an assault or him cheating but it is almost certainly much worse then just bad grades

Yeah, that's more or less my thinking - embarrassing stuff, things that would have eliminated him from the running for the presidency - but nothing earth shattering.  The kind of stuff someone could get past by just admitting he was stupid and made bad decisions - but The One wouldn't ever do anything like that.

Hell, he acts in many ways like someone on cocaine in the now.

[jaysabi]

I'm not quite sure what you are saying.  FACT.  Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history.

You can't deny that.  I think what you are saying is "It doesn't matter."  Well, that wouldn't quite qualify someone with your attitude to review backgrounds and qualifications of 20 people for a job in the private sector, or make either reasonable or best decisions on such a matter.

I'm saying you're ridiculous. FACT.

See, just because you slap "FACT" on something doesn't make it a fact.

For example, you stated an opinion: "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history."

Justify this "fact" with sources and evidence, or just stop it.

I have no idea whatever the rest of your response was about, it was wholly unrelated to everything else in this thread.

From the WSJ in 2008:

Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights.

The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of them. Why not release his Columbia transcript? Why has his senior essay gone missing?

Now in our view, the college years shouldn't normally be used to judge a politician's fitness for office. We're not sure the transcripts of Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush -- which showed them to be C students -- illuminated much for voters. The McCain campaign won't release his records, but we know he graduated at the bottom of his Naval Academy class.

But Mr. Obama is a case apart. His personal story, as told by him, made possible his rise from obscurity four years ago to possibly the White House. He doesn't have a long track record in government. We mainly have him in his own words. As any autobiographer, Mr. Obama played up certain chapters in his life -- perhaps even exaggerating his drug use in adolescence to drive home his theme of youthful alienation -- and ignored others. What's more, as acknowledged in "Dreams From My Father," Mr. Obama reconstructed conversations and gave some people pseudonyms or created "composite" characters.

Voters and the media are now exercising due diligence before Election Day, and they are meeting resistance from Mr. Obama in checking his past. Earlier this year, the AP tracked down Mr. Obama's New York-era roommate, "Sadik," in Seattle after the campaign refused to reveal his name. Sohale Siddiqi, his real name, confirmed Mr. Obama's account that he turned serious in New York and "stopped getting high." "We were both very lost," Mr. Siddiqi said. "We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay." For some reason the Obama camp wanted this to stay out of public view.

Such caginess is grist for speculation. Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference. Yet he later graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude, so he knows how to get good grades. Others speculate about ties to the Black Students Organization, though students active then don't seem to remember him. And on the far reaches of the Web can be found conspiracies about former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became the candidate's "guru and controller" while at Columbia in the early 1980s. Mr. Brzezinski laughs, and tells us he doesn't "remember meeting him."

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him. He had transferred from Occidental College in California after his sophomore year because, he told the Boston Globe in 1990, "I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities." He got a degree in political science without honors. "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot," he told his biographer David Mendell.

Put that way, his time at Columbia sounds unremarkable. Maybe that's what most pains a young memoirist and an ambitious politician who strains to make his life anything but unremarkable.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB122108881386721289

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The WSJ is not known for conspiracy theories. Maybe he was a very average student. Maybe not. What kind of financial aid did he get? Thousands of other questions. How come all those little details were VERY helpful and HISTORIC for every single president, but not him. All we know from him are what he told us from TWO autobiographies, from whom he won Two Grammy Awards!

Fact: those documents are not available to the public a.k.a. they are sealed...

A data point of one does not support your assertion that "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history." Don't forget, you preceded that opinion with "FACT." Fact is something objectively verifiable. You made a subjective statement.

[Spendulus]

I'm not quite sure what you are saying.  FACT.  Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history.

You can't deny that.  I think what you are saying is "It doesn't matter."  Well, that wouldn't quite qualify someone with your attitude to review backgrounds and qualifications of 20 people for a job in the private sector, or make either reasonable or best decisions on such a matter.

I'm saying you're ridiculous. FACT.

See, just because you slap "FACT" on something doesn't make it a fact.

For example, you stated an opinion: "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history."

Justify this "fact" with sources and evidence, or just stop it.

I have no idea whatever the rest of your response was about, it was wholly unrelated to everything else in this thread.

From the WSJ in 2008:

Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights.

The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of them. Why not release his Columbia transcript? Why has his senior essay gone missing?

Now in our view, the college years shouldn't normally be used to judge a politician's fitness for office. We're not sure the transcripts of Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush -- which showed them to be C students -- illuminated much for voters. The McCain campaign won't release his records, but we know he graduated at the bottom of his Naval Academy class.

But Mr. Obama is a case apart. His personal story, as told by him, made possible his rise from obscurity four years ago to possibly the White House. He doesn't have a long track record in government. We mainly have him in his own words. As any autobiographer, Mr. Obama played up certain chapters in his life -- perhaps even exaggerating his drug use in adolescence to drive home his theme of youthful alienation -- and ignored others. What's more, as acknowledged in "Dreams From My Father," Mr. Obama reconstructed conversations and gave some people pseudonyms or created "composite" characters.

Voters and the media are now exercising due diligence before Election Day, and they are meeting resistance from Mr. Obama in checking his past. Earlier this year, the AP tracked down Mr. Obama's New York-era roommate, "Sadik," in Seattle after the campaign refused to reveal his name. Sohale Siddiqi, his real name, confirmed Mr. Obama's account that he turned serious in New York and "stopped getting high." "We were both very lost," Mr. Siddiqi said. "We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay." For some reason the Obama camp wanted this to stay out of public view.

Such caginess is grist for speculation. Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference. Yet he later graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude, so he knows how to get good grades. Others speculate about ties to the Black Students Organization, though students active then don't seem to remember him. And on the far reaches of the Web can be found conspiracies about former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became the candidate's "guru and controller" while at Columbia in the early 1980s. Mr. Brzezinski laughs, and tells us he doesn't "remember meeting him."

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him. He had transferred from Occidental College in California after his sophomore year because, he told the Boston Globe in 1990, "I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities." He got a degree in political science without honors. "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot," he told his biographer David Mendell.

Put that way, his time at Columbia sounds unremarkable. Maybe that's what most pains a young memoirist and an ambitious politician who strains to make his life anything but unremarkable.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB122108881386721289

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The WSJ is not known for conspiracy theories. Maybe he was a very average student. Maybe not. What kind of financial aid did he get? Thousands of other questions. How come all those little details were VERY helpful and HISTORIC for every single president, but not him. All we know from him are what he told us from TWO autobiographies, from whom he won Two Grammy Awards!

Fact: those documents are not available to the public a.k.a. they are sealed...

A data point of one does not support your assertion that "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history." Don't forget, you preceded that opinion with "FACT." Fact is something objectively verifiable. You made a subjective statement.

Let's ask the matter a different way.

What if any US president, other than Obama,  has sealed under court and presidental order, ANY of their personal history?

ANY.

........

[jaysabi]

I'm not quite sure what you are saying.  FACT.  Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history.

You can't deny that.  I think what you are saying is "It doesn't matter."  Well, that wouldn't quite qualify someone with your attitude to review backgrounds and qualifications of 20 people for a job in the private sector, or make either reasonable or best decisions on such a matter.

I'm saying you're ridiculous. FACT.

See, just because you slap "FACT" on something doesn't make it a fact.

For example, you stated an opinion: "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history."

Justify this "fact" with sources and evidence, or just stop it.

I have no idea whatever the rest of your response was about, it was wholly unrelated to everything else in this thread.

From the WSJ in 2008:

Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights.

The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of them. Why not release his Columbia transcript? Why has his senior essay gone missing?

Now in our view, the college years shouldn't normally be used to judge a politician's fitness for office. We're not sure the transcripts of Al Gore, John Kerry and George W. Bush -- which showed them to be C students -- illuminated much for voters. The McCain campaign won't release his records, but we know he graduated at the bottom of his Naval Academy class.

But Mr. Obama is a case apart. His personal story, as told by him, made possible his rise from obscurity four years ago to possibly the White House. He doesn't have a long track record in government. We mainly have him in his own words. As any autobiographer, Mr. Obama played up certain chapters in his life -- perhaps even exaggerating his drug use in adolescence to drive home his theme of youthful alienation -- and ignored others. What's more, as acknowledged in "Dreams From My Father," Mr. Obama reconstructed conversations and gave some people pseudonyms or created "composite" characters.

Voters and the media are now exercising due diligence before Election Day, and they are meeting resistance from Mr. Obama in checking his past. Earlier this year, the AP tracked down Mr. Obama's New York-era roommate, "Sadik," in Seattle after the campaign refused to reveal his name. Sohale Siddiqi, his real name, confirmed Mr. Obama's account that he turned serious in New York and "stopped getting high." "We were both very lost," Mr. Siddiqi said. "We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay." For some reason the Obama camp wanted this to stay out of public view.

Such caginess is grist for speculation. Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference. Yet he later graduated from Harvard Law School magna cum laude, so he knows how to get good grades. Others speculate about ties to the Black Students Organization, though students active then don't seem to remember him. And on the far reaches of the Web can be found conspiracies about former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who became the candidate's "guru and controller" while at Columbia in the early 1980s. Mr. Brzezinski laughs, and tells us he doesn't "remember meeting him."

What can be said with some certainty is that Mr. Obama lived off campus while at Columbia in 1981-83 and made few friends. Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him. He had transferred from Occidental College in California after his sophomore year because, he told the Boston Globe in 1990, "I was concerned with urban issues and I wanted to be around more black folks in big cities." He got a degree in political science without honors. "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot," he told his biographer David Mendell.

Put that way, his time at Columbia sounds unremarkable. Maybe that's what most pains a young memoirist and an ambitious politician who strains to make his life anything but unremarkable.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB122108881386721289

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The WSJ is not known for conspiracy theories. Maybe he was a very average student. Maybe not. What kind of financial aid did he get? Thousands of other questions. How come all those little details were VERY helpful and HISTORIC for every single president, but not him. All we know from him are what he told us from TWO autobiographies, from whom he won Two Grammy Awards!

Fact: those documents are not available to the public a.k.a. they are sealed...

A data point of one does not support your assertion that "Obama has secreted away personal data to an extent unprecedented in the entire US POTUS history." Don't forget, you preceded that opinion with "FACT." Fact is something objectively verifiable. You made a subjective statement.

Let's ask the matter a different way.

What if any US president, other than Obama,  has sealed under court and presidental order, ANY of their personal history?

ANY.

........

You're the one trying to prove your opinion is valid, the onus is on you to prove it. Saying 'I haven't looked it up, but name one thing that doesn't prove my opinion true' doesn't make your point valid. You want to convince someone, bring evidence. Lack of evidence to the contrary is not evidence you are right.

Also, it's not sealed under court order. The fact that it's not public does not mean it's "sealed under court order," which is why you're so confused. Your home address is not public. That doesn't mean it's sealed by court order. Sealed by court order is your phrase, not the WSJ's phrase, and it's not a description of the situation in reality.

As for naming nonpublic details about other presidents: there is far more stuff about the personal histories of presidents that is not public than there is public. Literally everything you do not know about a president's personal life is secret, which is the gist of what you're asking for. It just lacks the "court order," which doesn't exist in your Obama example either. Further, your own source talks about how McCain wouldn't release his transcripts either. Also worth pointing out, that one is also NOT sealed by a court, but it's just as not public as the information you're seeking about Obama.

To recap, non-public information does not equal "sealed by a court." So you have a data point of 1, factually misrepresented, ignoring all similar circumstances of candidates that were running in that same election, and also ignoring the fact that every detail of every other president's life is not in the public domain, which leaves you with nothing to prop up the opinion that Obama is the most secretive POTUS in US history.

This is why I can't take anything you say seriously. You get a small factual detail, then blow it up and misconstrue it to be something it's not in an attempt to prove your conspiracy theory. Now it's the FACT that his college records are not public, which you have taken to mean it's under court-ordered seal (it's not) and therefore he's the most secretive POTUS in US history. (Opinion is based on something not true, which renders the opinion dismissable.)

[Spendulus]

....
This is why I can't take anything you say seriously. You get a small factual detail, then blow it up and misconstrue it to be something it's not in an attempt to prove your conspiracy theory. Now it's the FACT that his college records are not public, which you have taken to mean it's under court-ordered seal (it's not) and therefore he's the most secretive POTUS in US history. (Opinion is based on something not true, which renders the opinion dismissable.)

The problem with your assertion is that as you have already been told, repeatedly, I don't have a conspiracy theory.  You've been repeatedly trying to throw conspiracies out and see if any stuck.  That's an attempt to re frame the argument into a strawman argument that you could then knock down as ridiculous.

Here is my original comment which I stand by 100%:

I can't help but wonder about his legacy, after his 8 years he's out, can we then find out some of the background mystery data?

Kind of like cans of SPAM.  You always wonder, what is that mystery meat?

You immediately tried and are still trying to conjure up a conspiracy to laugh at:

Are you referring to where he was born? Because that's such a toothless conspiracy theory.

[Divinespark]

The American president is not even master of his own destiny. Clueless describes him pretty well. Not sure what king like powers he has...

[Spendulus]

The American president is not even master of his own destiny. Clueless describes him pretty well. Not sure what king like powers he has...

http://vimeo.com/14503514

http://vimeo.com/27546027

http://vimeo.com/14138865