Memo to Limbaugh: Try CTRL+F before blasting Dems for purportedly unsearchable bill
SUMMARY: Rush Limbaugh falsely claimed that Democrats "have reformatted the [economic recovery] bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. ... And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this." In fact, as Adobe Systems notes of PDFs: "You can run a search using either the Search window or the Find toolbar. In either case, Reader searches the PDF body text, layers, form fields, and digital signatures."
During the February 13 broadcast of his syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh claimed that Democrats "have reformatted the bill -- they've made it a PDF [Portable Document Format, created by Adobe Systems] file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this." In fact, PDFs are searchable in multiple ways. In its Help Resource Center for Adobe Reader, a program that reads PDFs, Adobe Systems writes: "You can run a simple search, looking for a search term within in a single file, or you can run a more complex search, looking for various kinds of data in one or more PDFs. You can run a search using either the Search window or the Find toolbar. In either case, Reader searches the PDF body text, layers, form fields, and digital signatures. You can also include bookmarks and comments in the search."
From a Media Matters for America search of "false" in the Recovery_Bill_Div_B.pdf -- Division B of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 -- in Adobe Reader:
From the February 13 broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:
LIMBAUGH: In addition, they have reformatted the bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it.
I think what you can't do is copy/paste things out or add things in.
But how Limbaugh got word verification tools confused with PDFs is beyond me.
You can't paste anything out in any program. You cut out and paste in.
Acrobat Reader allows searching, copying, but not cutting or pasting.
So everyone from Human Resources to Rush is a liar. I can abide a liar but not one who assumes my stupidity.
Oh come on, you guys - Rush was just doing another one of his parodies. A parody of an imbecile...
An uneducated imbecile.
An uneducated imbecile who advises people of things less complicated than computers. Things like economics, and foreign policy and stuff...
And all the while battling the unsearchable pdf file in his brain...
Don't worry, mary. Someone will be along soon enough to either esplain to us what he really meant or to tell us he is being taken out of context again.
Ain't it amazing, Neon? This guy talking to his zombies as if he's an expert on everything, only able to pull it off because of the brain dead nature of that same audience.
I heard a little of this today, as Fat Boy introduced it with "for those of you who don't work with computers". He went on to describe a pdf file as a picture of a document, one that doesn't allow any searching within the document.
Rush's greatest achievement is that he successfully predicted that there were enough Americans stupider than he is to make him rich.
I believe that older manuscripts of just about anything were originally scanned pages that were .jpegs or .tiffs that were placed into a .pdf maker. So for most older .pdf's you cant do a search or copy text.
Still doesn't change the fact that the .pdf in question you can do that.
OK, so I just re-stated a couple of things that are in the item above. Cut me some slack, I listened to this, I didn't think reading a transcript was going to give me any new insight into the nuances of Rudgy the Whales insights.
Listening to limbaugh is kinda like watching jumper. Like the part where Samuel Jackson meets Hayden in his apartment for the first time and Hayden tried to leave using the door? Jackson says "kinda hard opening a door when you haven't done it in awhile, isn't it?".
Lord Rush LYING?! gulp! that cannot be true please please please.....NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
this is Sith Lord Limbaugh we are talkin about here, apprentice to the Dark Lord Rove, lying to them is a natural thing
What an idiot, and this is the guy the Republicans placed on a throne to bow before. Amazing.
LIMBAUGH: Now, for those of you that don't use computers...
So now Limbaugh is the computer guru, too. I often hear his listeners tell him how they rely on him to instruct them. I guees Limbaugh's realm of topics and expertise is expanding. And apparently Limbaugh is just as knowledgeable about computers as everything else he teaches. What a guy...! Maybe he should be President. If it just weren't for those three divorces, drug addiction and lack of a college education maybe he could get himself elected President. ;>)
Why do I get the feeling that a sizeable portion of Rush's listeners are included in that "those of you who don't use computers" statement?
I can't imagine anyone who has access to real sources for information willingly keeps listening to this guy.
I looked for an unsearchable PDF, but I couldn't find one.
It really depends how the file was created. Google Books lets you download books as PDF files, but the ones I've seen are, with the exception of some Google boilerplate text at the beginning, just photocopies of the original pages and aren't searchable. Maybe this is the only kind Rush has ever encountered.
OTOH how hard would it have been for him or someone on his staff to at least try a search on the actual file in question before ranting about it?
Acrobat files (aka .PDF) are pretty sophisticated piece of work.
There is ability to include multiple layers
- bit mapped images (pictures of a document that have been scanned)
- multiple digitally compressed pictures in form such as .jpg
- ASCII text (which is the searchable text)
- text engine for displaying fonts with fidelity to original. Not same as PostScript, but similar
- plus hyperlinks, and a full application programming language.
About 9 years ago I was with a startup that was building software engine to convert tens of millions of legal documents into searchable PDF for SEC litigation. Of course, Bush & Cheney gutted funding for SEC enforcement, eliminating most litigation, and allowing crooks like Madoff a free ride.
I'm guessing his screen has white out all over it too.
Hmm, this computer stuff is hard. Where's my Tab?
y-e-s
y-e-s
Oh, I can just type the Y
You've just tripled your productivity, Ol' Ben!
Awsome! I can knock off early...
You're too kind to Rush. The manual and help section are not needed for Ctrl-F to be your first guess to run a search.
This incident has wide-ranging implications, so let's not laugh this away too quickly. Next time Rush tells us what Bush's job numbers were, we can observe that he came up with them the same way he decided that PDF's aren't searchable.
what's a computer?
It's that thing that puts your words into the internet tubes.
I'm still trying to figure out how the paper goes through the little wires when you FAX something. And SCANNING, now that is the ultimate. BEEPERS sending those numbers and words to you. What a world.
what's a computer?
Its that object who's parts are made in Germany or Japan... assembled in China... inspected in Mexico.... and then sold to Americans by corporations (American in name only) who's huge profits end up in some account in Switzerland or the Caymen Islands... that few Americans can afford anymore.... that only works as well as those that make them... and seem to only be fixed by some poor sap in India!
Come to think of it..... the only thing American about much anymore.... is that any of this stuff is here in America at all...
Limbuagh can go Ctrl-F himself. How did those guys get in power again?
"They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it."
Wow, deja vu.
The USA PATRIOT Act... printed at 3am, voted on that same morning at 11am.
Was it over 800 pages long?
No.
Did everyone know what was in it?
My congressman, who has been there for 30+ years, says a congressman NEVER reads every document. It is both impossible timewise, as well as a poor use of his time. He has staff to read, prioritize what's important, and then elevate to him. He's literally behaving like a CEO.
But, of course, we know this whole thing is a canard (that's a false argument for those who can't use a computer).
What's so bad isn't that he didn't know that he could search the PDF that Congress created.
What's so bad about what he said was that he claimed that the Dems made it unsearchable so that critics wouldn't be able to find offensive stuff in it!
I don't understand why so many seem to miss that very important distinction.
Limbaugh probably heard this on his grapevine or from one of his staff. He wouldn't know anything about it himself. He reviews the flotsam, and picks out enough to fill his show.
It was a Drudge headline for a while today.
a guy who made himself deaf by taking oxycontin by the dozen every day and then lied about it by saying he had some mysterious autoimmune disease his doctors couldn't figure out. liar and hypocrite.
Actually, "search" is shift-ctrl-F. It would have been nice if the PDF had been created with bookmarks, but I suspect they were in a rush. A PDF is the perfect file format for a document like this because people can read it with a free application that takes minutes to install; anyone publishing a 500 pp document as a "text file" is nuts.
Aren't any of the dittoheads computer literate, at least?
On a Mac...its â + F
In Adobe reader, it is Ctrl-F
I love the wingnut logic at work here. By Rush's reasoning this would mean that anything published on paper, and not electronically, is done so in order to foil Rush's attempts to get at the information. For centuries, smart people have been hiding important knowledge in books so that dumb people can't get at it.
I like the assertion that this is some attempt to hide something. If they really don't want people to know what's in the bill, then why put it out so people can read it? Don't conservatives have at least a couple of people who can wade through this and analyze it? It would seem more likely that if they really wanted to hide something, they'd come up with an excuse to delay publishing it for a month or so.
Oops! My attempted graphics post didn't work!
A user of of a Mac should be able to find anything he/she wants by just using the mouse, the keyboard is sooo '80s.
Oi.
I am sure I am not saying anything in addition to what has been said.
FASCIST PROPAGANDA!
I have made / used / search PDF files for years and Mr. Limbaugh is WRONG (as the Media Matters post states).
I am so sick of this crap.
I saw Huckabee on Hannity today (sounds like a bad movie!) and it was more of the same. At one point I had some respect for the former. No more.
Mr. Obama needs to go on the OFFENSIVE against these idiots who poison the minds of the mis-informed.
I don't understand economics very well (I am a person in medicine and science). I have always been told "it takes money to make money."
While tax cuts sometimes make sense, they have not lately.
We are in trouble. Give the plan a chance. The old way OBVIOUSLY did not work.
Thank you.
CH
Limbaugh's computer also has a foot pedal!
And a coffee mug holder. And it is plagued with ID10T problems.
dont forget the secret compartment to dole out vicodin
The OFFICIAL House Web Site which published the tome said ON THAT SITE that portions of the bill were unsearchable. Those siting examples above chose wisely. The rest of you obviously haven't even tried. How sad.
If Rush was looking at a scaned version of this bill, then he could not word search it. Not deffending if he had actual searchable version.
I have technical manuals that I scaned into pdf files on my laptop. I refference these in the field when working on older equipment. I cannot search for key words in any of these files, I cannot even highlight sections to cut and paste for additional refference even though every access option is selected as ALLOWED.
As to: pete592 Posting as follows;
"They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it."
Wow, deja vu.
The USA PATRIOT Act... printed at 3am, voted on that same morning at 11am
The US PATRIOT Act is 342 pages long, easier to comprehend and had to do with National Security to protect us as US Citizens. "We haven't been hit since."
This revized Economic Recovery bill is almost 1100 pages long and has refferences to past laws and executive orders. Even with a team of scrutinizers, it would take longer to analyze than the time allotted to vote on it. One would think that YOU would want to know the full extent of what is in and what will become of 1 trillion US Citizen Tax Payer dollars and how are our great grand children are going to pay it back.
Enjoy the Future: Comrade
Did they create a PDF file specifically for Limbaugh? One with embedded images instead of searchable text?
The documents posted were searchable files, end of story.
Limbaugh and the Republican party are committed to the stimulus package failing. They've made a decision to place party before country and the country be damned.
There's a concerted effort underway to kill any chance of the stimulus succeeding. In addition they're attempting to destroy the nations social safety net, the working class and any program designed to help those in need or to allow the poor to move up to the middle class.
They're only interested in seeing that the flow of wealth continue in the direction it's been going for the last eight years, up.
Since you're concerned with other generations footing the bill for our folly, I'm sure you've been out demonstrating against our wasting lives and money in the deserts of the Middle East.
As I said before: Iwasn't defending rush unless he actually had a not searchable PDF file.
Question: What will come of the monies: given to the poor, provided to maybe create jobs or given to groups for various projects?
Answer: It will wind up inj the pockets of the allready rich and/or other countries. You will still have the: Poor, Middle class and the Rich, whether it's 6 months or 15yrs from now, and you will still be furious.
"It will wind up inj the pockets of the allready rich and/or other countries."
Especially since the Republicans got their undies in a twist over the "buy America" provision.
But wasn't it a "buy America" problem that help lead us down the path to the Great Depression?
Yes. Too many people bought Renaults instead of Fords.
Of course it didn't.
The Media Matters comments have been devoid of people who tried to search the document in question when it first came out. All PDF documents are not searchable, and initially that was true of the one in question.
As part of her job, my wife, who is a computer whiz, tried to search the stimulus bill conference report and here's what happened. What was posted at about 10:30 pm Thursday night was a PDF created simply by taking images of the markup bill, and not an OCR version. My wife has a full installation of Adobe Acrobat, and had to run the optical character recognition to make the document searchable. It took 90 minutes to do the OCR conversion. There were four documents, at about 3.5 second a page.
It is possible that the Congressional staff members were not computer savvy, or were too rushed to do the OCR conversion themselves.
I think what the authors of this comment did was tried to search a later version that had been properly conversted. But for the early readers, searching could not be done until an OCR conversion.
p.s. I think Rush Limbaugh is an idiot.
Read an interesting article in this mornings paper. According to that article (which cited AFL/CIO among others as sources) executive compensation in the US grew from 107 x average American workers wage in 1990 to 525 x in 2000 to 344 x in 2007. May not be totally apples to apples (maybe Granny Smith to Red Delicious) but interesting never-the-less.
"We haven't been hit since."
And you can conclusively attribute this solely to the Patriot Act? Or do you simply take Dick Cheney's word for it?
"This revized Economic Recovery bill is almost 1100 pages long"
The house version was introduced on January 25th. I am amused by the Republicans that whine and cry that they haven't had a chance to read the bill, yet at the same time, they can recite, noun-and-verse, exactly what they think is wrong with it.
Of course, others choose to make things up that aren't in the bill at all (e.g. ACORN). At least I can find these guys more believeable if they say they haven't read it.
"YOU would want to know the full extent of what is in and what will become of 1 trillion US Citizen Tax Payer dollars and how are our great grand children are going to pay it back."
Yes, I would, but for the last 5 years, I've also been wondering the same thing about the hundreds of billions that have disappeared into a black hole in the middle of Iraq. This sudden attack of budgetary conscience on the part of the right-wing is so ridiculously hypocritical.
Hundreds of billions to invade and rebuild Iraq? NO PROBLEM. Hundreds of billions to rebuild, reemploy and revitalize America? WOAH! We can't have that! That's Socialism!
So you tell me, which trillion stands the better chance of being paid back? The one flushed down the toilet in Iraq, or the one invested in America?
Our elected official might as well just say there going to spend 1 trillion and not even write it done as to how it's going to be spent.
FYI: The house version introduced Jan 25th is NOT the one just voted on.
As to the US not being hit, I base that on; WE HAVEN"T BEEN HIT, unless something has fell in your back yard that didn't get reported.
You seem to over look that the people of Iraq, whom live in worse conditions, finally for the first time are allowed (men & women) to vote for a change to have a lifestyle compairable to what MOST Americans take for GRANTED.
"You seem to over look that the people of Iraq, whom live in worse conditions, finally for the first time are allowed (men & women) to vote for a change to have a lifestyle compairable to what MOST Americans take for GRANTED."
And you seem to think the people of Iraq are a better investment than the people of America. Despite the hundreds of billions invested, the Iraqis now live in far worse conditions than before Saddam was removed from power. Untold thousands have died. Millions of people have been displaced. Millions live in poverty. The Middle East is even further from peace than before. There are no WMD stockpiles. Yet somehow, it was all worth it.
Spare me the baloney hinting at a new era of gender equality in Iraq. The simple fact is, women are still subservient under Iraq's new constitution. In addition, Iraqi women are routinely beaten, raped, abducted and murdered in the name of "honour killings," and authorities are pretty much powerless to stop it.
"As to the US not being hit, I base that on; WE HAVEN"T BEEN HIT..."
He asked you how you could conclusively attribute that to the Patriot Act. Using your faulty logic, you would have to credit Bill Clinton with keeping us safe from terrorist attacks as a result of everything he did after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Or how about the attacks in Spain? They stopped after the Spanish prime minister withdrew his troops from Iraq. How do reconcile that with your assertion that we haven't been attacked because of the Patriot Act? You could just as easily claim that we haven't been attacked since you stopped wearing the color yellow.
"you would have to credit Bill Clinton with keeping us safe from terrorist attacks as a result of everything he did after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing."
If Clinton would have put foot to (_!_). 9/11 may have been prevented.
You people are so hypocritical. You want to spin everything that is said and ask for proof, where's your proof & we need proof. Meanwhile MM provides
You people are so hypocritical. You want to spin everything that is said and ask for proof, where's your proof & we need proof. Meanwhile MM feeds you only part of the story with links to their so called facts, and you people jump in without even researching MM fact links.
Let me know when you want me to provide you the PROOF.
I have no idea what you're blathering about. Just more proof that reasoning with a wingnut is pointless and futile.
I had your Liberal beliefs at one time. Until I got tired of not getting any where, opened my eyes and started doing thing for myself to improve my lifestyle. You don't get anywhere unless YOU make the move.
yes and when MMFA gives proof that discredits the high council of Sith Lords (Dick, Rove, W, Beck, Limbaugh, Mannity, Dobbs, Goldberg, Billo and all of Fox Noise) you neo cons go up in arms.
Why? Do you need to be asked five times before you'll try and back up your baloney with evidence? Waht was wrong with the previous requests?
Go to this thread: http://mediamatters.org/items/200902150005?f=h_top
Another thread that proves you have no clue what you're talking about. Well played, sir.
is that you Glenn Beck?
"Wheee!" says Rush. "Broadcasting my ignorance is fun!"
Randy