Katie Pavlich's Latest Books, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless
Cover-Up are available on Amazon
FOR EIGHT YEARS BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC
HOLDER SABOTAGED HOMELAND SECURITY TO EASE MORE MEXICANS OVER OUR BORDERS AND
INTO OUR JOBS AND VOTING BOOTHS.
OBAMA NEEDED THESE ILLEGALS TO FINISH OFF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, WHAT WAS LEFT OF THEM AFTER OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS' PLUNDER.
“The watchdogs at
Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's
close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the
fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
When Obama Tried to
'Red Flag' Vets and Seniors
We
saw the presumption of innocence under assault during the confirmation hearings
for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh and it is once again under assault
with the consideration of so-called “red flag” laws after the mass shootings in
Dayton and El Paso. These laws would allow authorities to disarm
law-abiding citizens on the basis that it had been somehow determined that they
are an “unstable threat” to themselves and to society.
This
determination can be made based on reports from vengeful former spouses,
ex-girlfriends and boyfriends, former coworkers, hostile neighbors, just
about anybody with a grievance, even by government agencies pushing a
gun-control agenda.
We
are assured that the gun owner guilty of no crime can pursue what is laughingly
called “due process” and petition the judge to have his legally purchased
firearm returned to him by proving to a judge he is not crazy or dangerous.
Just how do you do that, pray tell? And just how can a state have a “red flag”
law anyway, infringing on a federal and national right established by the
Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which says the right to keep and bear
arms shall not be infringed? Which part of “shall not be infringed” do red flag
law advocates not understand?
As
noted at NewsTarget:
That’s a process that could take weeks or even
months, and in the meantime, you and your family are left defenseless to the
world. Plus, there is no guarantee that a court will find that you’re not a
threat and authorize police to give you back your guns; maybe the judge is a
judicial activist who hates the Second Amendment on principle.
Red Flag laws are unconstitutional “prior
restraint” laws that violate our basic civil rights. What's particularly
alarming is that to take away a person's Second Amendment rights, such laws
violate the protections found in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the
U.S. Constitution! And all of that based on an unnamed person's secret
allegation that someone else “might” do something dangerous to
themselves or others in the future…
The person accused of being “dangerous” has no
notice there is a problem until the police show up, pre-dawn, with guns drawn
and confiscate the accused's firearms [we have already had on gun owner killed in this exact scenario]. The
accused is not given due process to defend himself or herself in court from the
accusation for weeks or months after the confiscation. It is up to the accused
to prove that he or she is not dangerous! Until such proof is provided to the
Court's satisfaction, the guns are not returned. This could drag on for months,
years, or indefinitely!
Sadly,
even Second Amendment supporter President Donald J. Trump has entertained the
idea of such laws, notwithstanding their threat to the Constitution, Second
Amendment, and the presumption of innocence. This isn’t the first time
gun-control advocates have tried to use “red flags” to disarm the law-abiding.
The
Obama administration has already tried to use mental health as a means, not to
make us safer, but to deny us our gun rights under the Second
Amendment. Obama selected Dr. Vivek Murthy to be our Surgeon General, someone
who firmly believed that gun control is a health issue, a means to gut our
Second Amendment rights. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized during his
confirmation process:
The 37-year-old Murthy is president and
co-founder of the anti-gun group Doctors for America, which advocates ObamaCare
and gun control laws. His group, which has been dubbed Docs vs. Glocks, has
pushed Congress to ban "assault" weapons and "high
capacity" magazines.
Doctors for America has promoted the invasion of
privacy by doctors by advocating they ask patients if they have guns at home,
including asking children if their parents own guns. He would have doctors
counsel their patients against exercising their Second Amendment rights. One
wonders how private that information would remain if entered into the medical
records the government would be privy to under ObamaCare.
Back
in 2013, a piece of legislation called Toomey-Manchin proposed that
doctors be allowed to unilaterally place a patient’s name in the background
check system in a way that violated patient doctor confidentially as well as
our Second Amendment Rights:
The Toomey-Manchin proposal contains a provision
that lets a doctor add a patient to the National Instant Criminal Background
Check System (NICS) without ever telling the patient he or she has been added.
This would seem to violate doctor-patient
confidentiality, due process and the presumption of innocence in one fell
swoop.
As the Heritage Foundation reports, this
"gun control legislation eliminates any (Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act) privacy protection for mental health records in connection
with the NICS system, leaving only what privacy protection the attorney general
cares to provide."
The
Obama administration’s idea of keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally
ill was based on a bizarre and discriminatory definition of who might be
mentally unstable. In 2013 it was reported that the Veterans Administration was
sending letters to vets warning them that they might be
declared mentally incompetent and denied their Second Amendment rights unless
they could prove otherwise:
The contempt by the Obama administration for our
Constitution and our rights has reached a new low with news the Veterans
Administration has begun sending letters to veterans telling them they will be
declared mentally incompetent and stripped of the Second Amendment rights
unless they can prove to unnamed bureaucrats to the contrary…
"A determination of incompetency will
prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm
or ammunition. If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be
fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention
Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code
924(a)(2)," the letter reads…
While mental health is a factor in the current
gun control debate and recent mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora,
Colo., and elsewhere have in common the questionable mental state of the
shooters, to single out returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan this way is
unconscionable and unconstitutional.
As
the Los Angeles Times has reported, the Obama
administration would have liked like to make our Social Security records part
of the background check system. The move would have stripped some four million
Americans who receive payments though a “representative payee” of their gun
rights. It would be the largest gun grab in U.S. history.
A potentially large group within Social Security
are people who, in the language of federal gun laws, are unable to manage their
own affairs due to "marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness,
incompetency, condition, or disease."
There is no simple way to identify that group,
but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of
the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared
incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.
Keeping
guns out of the hands of the truly mentally unstable is a worthy goal, but it
should not be used as a cause for disarming veterans who carried a weapon in
defense of their country or seniors who might need some assistance in paying
their bills.
They
deserve the presumption of innocence, and sanity, every bit as much as Vester
Flanagan. Stripping away their Second Amendment rights in the name ofmental health would be a gross
injustice that would not make us safer, but would merely create millions of
unarmed victims for the next shooter with an agenda.
Daniel John Sobieski is a former
editorial writer for Investor’s Business Dailyand freelance writer whose
pieces have appeared in Human Events, ReasonMagazine, and the
Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
Mexico’s
President Wants Answers On Operation Fast & Furious
Something tells me the Trump administration may be far more eager
to help Mexico president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador get to the bottom of the
Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal than the Obama administration ever was. The
administration that implemented the program that sent thousands of guns across
the border under the direction of the BATFE and the Justice Department headed
by then-Attorney General Eric Holder never said much about how much information
they gave Mexico about the fact that the American government was arming Mexican
drug cartels.
Lopez Obrador said during a press conference on Friday that he wants
to get to the bottom of who, if anyone, in the Mexican government was informed
of the operation before it was revealed after the death of border patrol agent
Brian Terry in December of 2010 by a member of a Mexican drug cartel using a
firearm that the BATFE had allowed to enter into Mexico in the hands of a
gunrunner.
Lopez Obrador on Friday said he will ask the U.S. government if it
had alerted Mexican officials that agents were carrying out the undercover
operation where U.S. agents lost track of guns they had allowed to enter the
Latin American nation with the goal of tracking Mexico’s brutal drug gangs.
“What seems serious to me is that a violation of our sovereignty
was carried out, a secret operation, and that Mexicans were killed with these
weapons,” Lopez Obrador said during his morning press conference in Mexico
City. “There is still time for the U.S. to apologize.”
Foreign Affairs Minister
Marcelo Ebrard said he would send a letter to the U.S. on Friday asking for
detailed information on the U.S. investigation over the operation, dubbed “Fast
and Furious.”
It makes a great deal of sense for the Trump administration to
offer full cooperation in helping Mexico get to the bottom of Operation Fast
and Furious and what, if anything, any ATF, DOJ, or State Department employees
ever mentioned to their counterparts in the Mexican government. Trump might
even want to apologize to the Mexican government on behalf of the U.S.
government, while noting of course that the gunrunning scandal took place under
the previous administration. You know, the administration that featured Joe
Biden as vice-president.
Fast and Furious has emerged as a political issue in Mexico
because Lopez Obrador has blamed past president Felipe Calderon for the recent
rise in homicides in the country, alleging that Calderon’s strategy of trying
to crack down on drug cartels with the Mexican military only exacerbated the
violence in the country without destroying or really weakening the cartels
themselves and accusing Calderon of knowingly allowing the Obama administration
to allow guns to be trafficked into Mexico under Operation Fast and Furious.
Calderon said on Twitter on Thursday that the allegations were false, and
called Fast and Furious a “secret operation” that was only disclosed to the Mexican
government after Terry’s death.
Es falso que el gobierno de México haya
tenido un acuerdo con el gobierno de EUA para introducir armas al país. Durante
la Administración 2006-2012, el gobierno mexicano exigió firmemente al gobierno
de EUA detener el tráfico de armas que llegaban a los criminales. Abro hilo...
In the former president’s Twitter thread,
Calderon also made it explicitly clear that no one in the Obama administration
informed him of the operation. Instead, Calderon alleges that the Obama
administration spoke generally to the Mexican government about cracking down on
cross-border arms trafficking, but didn’t elaborate on how they planned to do
it.
At no time was the content or
specific implementation of said American judicial strategy an issue that was
the subject of knowledge, discussion, and least of all agreement between
Presidential offices.
No one in the Obama administration has adequately explained just
how exactly Operation Fast and Furious was supposed to work. The plan was
supposedly to allow firearms to be trafficked into Mexico, where they would be
tracked to high level members of the drug cartels. Instead, thousands of
firearms flowed into the country, often while ATF agents watched from afar. No
indictments were handed down until after Terry’s murder in 2010, and then the
indictments were against alleged traffickers, not high ranking cartel members.
Worse, the Obama administration originally denied that they had
knowingly allowed guns to be walked into Mexico, and maintained that position
for months before then-Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that he had
unintentionally described the program inaccurately in previous statements to
Congress, while alleging that he and other top DOJ officials were completely in
the dark about the gunwalking aspects of the operation.
Obama, Holder, and Joe Biden should be the ones apologizing to the
Mexican president, not President Trump. However, it makes sense from both a
moral and political perspective for the current administration to do what they
can to provide the answers that Lopez Obrador is asking for, while making it
clear that the Trump administration would never engage in the kind of
underhanded, deceptive, and illegal tactics used under Barack Obama that have
fueled the cartel wars in Mexico for more than a decade now.
David
Bernstein & The Heritage Foundation - “Lawless: The Obama Administration’s
Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law.”
“The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending
story.” Michael
Barone – American Historian – Washington Examiner
Obama’s
50 Lies / Obama Not Exactly
List documents fifty
lies told by Barack Obama.
Claim
A
list circulating online contains 50 false statements by President Barack Obama
· Selma Got Me Born –
LIAR, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 – Selma had no effect
on your birth, as Selma was in 1965.
This criticism is based on an overly-literal interpretation of
Barack Obama’s 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama, which we covered in a
separate article.
· Father Was A Goat
Herder – LIAR, he was a privileged, well educated youth, who went on to work
with the Kenyan Government.
These attributes are not mutually exclusive: Barack Obama’s
(biological) father was all of these things at different times in his life, as
Obama described in his book, Dreams from My Father:
[My father] was as
African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake
Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father —
my other grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama — had been a
prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers. My
father grew up herding his father’s goats and attending the local school, set
up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He
eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of
Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American
sponsors to attend a university in the United States.
· Father Was A Proud
Freedom Fighter – LIAR, he was part of one of the most corrupt and violent
governments Kenya has ever had.
We are unaware of Barack Obama’s ever having claimed his father
was a “proud freedom fighter.” Obama has written (and spoken) at length about
his father’s returning to Africa from America to work for the Kenyan
government, with that country’s political turmoil eventually leaving him a
“bitter drunk” and “a defeated, lonely bureaucrat.”
· My Family Has Strong
Ties To African Freedom – LIAR, your cousin Raila Odinga has created mass
violence in attempting to overturn a legitimate election in 2007, in Kenya. It
is the first widespread violence in decades.
As we discussed in a separate article, Kenyan
politician Raila Odinga has recently claimed to be Barack Obama’s cousin, but
there is no substantive evidence documenting his claim, and the two men share
no meaningful familial connection.
· My Grandmother Has
Always Been A Christian – LIAR, she does her daily Salat prayers at 5am
according to her own interviews. According to the New York Times: “I
am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent
interview in Kenya.’ Not to mention, Christianity wouldn’t allow her to have
been one of 14 wives to 1 man.
The author has apparently confused Obama’s grandmothers. In the
instance cited above, Obama was speaking of his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, not his paternal grandmother. (In 2007 Obama described
his maternal grandparents as “nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists.”)
· My Name is African
Swahili – LIAR, your name is Arabic and ‘Baraka’ (from which Barack came) means
‘blessed’ in that language. Hussein is also Arabic and so is Obama.
Many Swahili words and names are of Arabic origin (just as many English words originated with other
languages). “Barack” is a Swahili name that entered the language via historical
trade and cultural ties with Arabia.
· I Never Practiced
Islam – LIAR, you practiced it daily at school, where you were registered as a
Muslim and kept that faith for 31 years, until your wife made you change, so
you could run for office.
The topic is already covered in our separate article about the
(false) claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
· My School In
Indonesia Was Christian – LIAR, you were registered as Muslim there and got in
trouble in Koranic Studies for making faces (check your own book).
Barack Obama
attended more than one school in Indonesia, one of which was a public school
that included Islamic religious instruction among its curriculum, and one of
which was a private Catholic school.
· I Was Fluent In
Indonesian – LIAR, not one teacher says you could speak the language.
We are unaware of Barack Obama’s ever having claimed he was
“fluent” in any Indonesian language (beyond the level of competence that could
reasonably be expected of the non-native child speaker he was at the time he
lived in that country). He did acquire (and apparently still has) a passable
command of Bahasa, as Time magazine noted in a 2007 article:
When prominent
Indonesians visit the U.S., the first person they want to meet is Obama, says
Parnohadiningrat Sudjadnan, the Indonesian ambassador to the U.S. “Back home
people think of him as one of us, or at least one who understands us,” he says,
adding that they are delighted to find that Obama speaks passable Bahasa, the
language spoken in Indonesia and Malaysia.
· Because I Lived In
Indonesia, I Have More Foreign Experience – LIAR, you were there from the ages
of 6 to 10, and couldn’t even speak the language.
We have not found any citation for Obama’s having claimed that
his childhood in Indonesia qualified him as having “more foreign experience”
(what the comparative “more” refers to also isn’t clear). Barack Obama did live
in Indonesia for four years as a child, and he could in fact speak the local
language passably well. Whether his time in that country provided him more
“foreign experience” is argumentative, but people other than Obama himself have
suggested that it might:
Some would argue that
his childhood experiences, as well as his mixed heritage (his father was
Kenyan, his mother from Kansas), gives him a better inner compass on foreign
policy than most Americans. They cite the pioneering work of Ruth Hill Useem,
the late sociologist of Michigan State University, who spent her career
studying what she called Third Culture Kids — the millions of U.S. children (an
estimated 20 million since the advent of mass air travel) who have been carted
abroad by their missionary, diplomatic, corporate or military parents. These
frequent-flier kids don’t spend enough time in their adopted countries to
become fully bicultural, but they take pieces and add it to their home values
and traditions — creating millions of “Third Cultures.” Studies have shows that
kids who have spent time abroad are more likely to go to college, to relate to
one another despite the influences of vastly differing cultures, and to latch
on to one aspect of their culture — in Obama’s case African Americanism.
· I Am Stronger On
Foreign Affairs – LIAR, except for Africa (surprise) and the Middle East
(bigger surprise), you have never been anywhere else on the planet and thus
have NO experience with our closest allies.
Barack Obama has lived in, traveled to, or otherwise spent time
in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Russia, Ukraine,
Azerbaijan, Israel, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, the Palestinian Territories,
Afghanistan Chad, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as
serving as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Whether his
experiences make him “stronger on foreign affairs” is argumentative, but again,
people other than Obama have suggested that it might:
“Living abroad does
give you a wider view of the world,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National
Security Adviser under Jimmy Carter, and a Polish-American who spent four years
as a child living in Germany with his diplomat father. Obama is “a person with
genuine sensitivity of world affairs,” says Brzenzinski, who is supporting Obama.
“It’s not the conventional mouthing of culture sensitivities.” Brzezinski
points to Obama’s greater willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations and
his early resistance to the war in Iraq as examples of his superior intuition
on foreign policy.
· I Blame My Early Drug
Use On Ethnic Confusion – LIAR, you were quite content in high school to be
Barry Obama, no mention of Kenya and no mention of struggle to identify – your
classmates said you were just fine.
Obama wrote at length in his two books about his experiences
growing up as the child of mixed-race parents and the issues that accompanied
that status, and he noted in his first book, Dreams From My Father that
before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine. His drug use, he
wrote, was “… something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind,
something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of
my memory” and said in a 2006 interview that his drug use was “… reflective of
the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy. Teenage boys are frequently
confused.”
· An Ebony Article
Moved Me To Run For Office – LIAR, Ebony has yet to find the article you
mention in your book. It doesn’t, and never did, exist.
We could not find an instance in either of Barack Obama’s books
(or elsewhere) where he claimed that his decision to run for public office was
influenced by an article in Ebony magazine.
· A Life Magazine
Article Changed My Outlook On Life – LIAR, Life has yet to find the article you
mention in your book. It doesn’t, and never did, exist.
In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes of a
childhood experience occurring on a day when his mother dropped him off at a
library on her way to work, and he began thumbing through issues of LIFE magazine:
Eventually I came
across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down
an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed
nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph,
this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural
pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first
picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad fleshy
nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.
He must be terrible
sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybem or an albino — I had seen one of
those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such
things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it
at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to
lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed
some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about
how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were
thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d
undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised
happiness as a white person.
I felt my face and neck
get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother
know about this? What about her boss — why was he so calm, reading through his
reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my
seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance.
But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear.
By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the
magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as
before.
As far as we
know, no one has yet found any matching article in the pages of LIFE magazine.
However, that does necessarily not mean Barack Obama saw no such article; it
may simply mean that, writing decades after the fact, he misremembered the
title of the magazine he was viewing.
· I Won’t Run On A
National Ticket In ’08 – LIAR, here you are, despite saying, live on TV, that
you would not have enough experience by then, and you are all about having
experience first.
In 2004, just after winning election to the U.S. Senate, Barack
Obama said during apress conference, in
response to a question about his possibly running for national office, that:
I am a believer in
knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job, and I think that if I were
to seriously consider running on a national ticket I would essentially have to
start now, before having served a day in the Senate. Now, there are some people
who might be comfortable doing that, but I’m not one of them.
· Present Votes Are
Common In Illinois – LIAR, they are common for YOU, but not many others have
130 NO VOTES.
A legislative “present” vote (which essentially counts as a “No”
vote but does not go on record as such) is, as the New York Times observed,
“not unusual in Illinois,” a tactic often used in concert with other party
members and leaders:
An examination of
Illinois records shows at least 36 times when Mr. Obama was either the only
state senator to vote present or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote
that way.
In more than 50 votes,
he seemed to be acting in concert with other Democrats as part of a strategy.
In other cases, Mr.
Obama’s present votes stood out among widespread support as he tried to use
them to register legal and other objections to parts of the bills.
In Illinois, political
experts say voting present is a relatively common way for lawmakers to express
disapproval of a measure. It can at times help avoid running the risks of
voting no, they add.
· Oops, I Misvoted –
LIAR, only when caught by church groups and Democrats, did you beg to change
your misvote.
We’re unsure what supposed “misvote” this line references.
· I Was A Professor Of
Law – LIAR, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
Barack Obama was indeed a professor at the University of
Chicago’s Law School, a fact verified by that institution itself:
The Law School has
received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as
“Senior Lecturer.”
From 1992 until his
election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the
Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from
1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior
Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are
regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of
Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct
status. Like Obama, each of the Law School’s Senior Lecturers has high-demand
careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching.
Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was
invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he
declined.
· I Was A
Constitutional Lawyer – LIAR, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
Between 1993 and 2002, Barack Obama worked as a civil rights lawyer with the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
· Without Me, There
Would Be No Ethics Bill – LIAR, you didn’t write it, introduce it, change it,
or create it.
It’s unclear what ethics bill this statement references. Obama
did help pass a major ethics reform bill as an Illinois State Senator,
and 110th U.S. Congress passed the Legislative Transparency and
Accountability Act, which
“closely mirrored and drew key provisions from a bill (S. 230) that Senators
Obama and Feingold introduced in January 2007.” We could find no reference to
document Obama’s supposedly having said that neither of those bills would exist
if not for him.
· The Ethics Bill Was
Hard To Pass – LIAR, it took just 14 days from start to finish.
Again, it’s unclear which ethics bill this statement references,
nor could we find any reference to document Obama’s supposedly having said such
a bill was “hard to pass.’
· I Wrote A Tough
Nuclear Bill – LIAR, your bill was rejected by your own party for its pandering
and lack of all regulation – mainly because of your Nuclear Donor, Exelon, from
which David Axelrod came.
As the New York Times reported in February
2008:
When residents in
Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation
had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state’s
freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
Mr. Obama scolded
Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all
plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small
leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in
December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”
“I just did that last
year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the
path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially
fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to
force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect
changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new
bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to
regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.
Those revisions
propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s
comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full
Senate.
· I Have Released My
State Records – LIAR, as of March, 2008, state bills you sponsored or voted for
have yet to be released, exposing all the special interests pork hidden within.
We couldn’t find a reference for Barack Obama’s supposedly
claiming that he had “released” his state records, only that he said he “didn’t
have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records” and that they
might not exist. Politico.com noted in October 2008 that:
Obama’s Senate files
became an issue after he pressed Hillary Rodham Clinton during their nomination
battle to release the schedules from her eight years as first lady.
When her campaign
demanded Obama release his state Senate files, he told reporters he did not
“maintain a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn’t
have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records.” The records
“could have been thrown out. I haven’t been in the state Senate now for quite
some time,” he said.
His campaign later said
that “files pertinent to ongoing casework” were passed to his successor, but
Obama didn’t save correspondence with the general public, state associations or
lobbyists, or memos on legislation and correspondence with Illinois state
agencies. Some of the records that have surfaced have done little to dampen the
demand for a more complete accounting.
· I Took On The
Asbestos Altgeld Gardens Mess – LIAR, you were part of a large group of people
who remedied Altgeld Gardens. You failed to mention anyone else but yourself,
in your books.
In Barack Obama’s book Dreams from My Father,
beginning at the start of Chapter 9, he writes in detail about the
efforts of community organizers to push a grassroots campaign advocating the
removal of asbestos from the Altgeld Gardens housing project in Chicago.
Although in his book Obama emphasizes his own role in the effort, many other
people who took part in are indeed mentioned as well.
· My Economics Bill
Will Help America – LIAR, your 111 economic policies were just combined into a
proposal which lost 99-0, and even YOU voted against your own bill.
It is unclear to us what bill or statement is supposedly being referenced
here.
· I Have Been A Bold
Leader In Illinois – LIAR, even your own supporters claim to have not seen BOLD
action on your part.
We couldn’t find a reference for Barack Obama’s having described
himself as a “bold leader in Illinois,” but certainly some of his supporters have
claimed that of him (just as some of his critics have claimed the opposite).
· I Passed 26 Of My Own
Bills In One Year – LIAR, they were not YOUR bills, but rather handed to you,
after their creation by a fellow Senator, to assist you in a future bid for
higher office.
Barack Obama did pass 26 bills in his final year as an Illinois
state senator. We could not find any reference to his claiming that all of them
were “my own” bills, but he certainly received a boost in passing them from
Illinois Senate President (and fellow Democrat) Emil Jones, who “helped Obama
learn the ways of the state legislature and gave Obama the chance to work on
the ethics legislation and death penalty reforms that Obama now boasts about in
his presidential campaign”:
Emil Jones Jr. helped
Obama master the intricacies of the Legislature. When Democrats took control of
the state Senate, Jones, though he risked offending colleagues who had toiled
futilely on key issues under Republican rule, tapped Obama to take the lead on
high-profile legislative initiatives that he now boasts about in his
presidential campaign.
And when Obama wanted a
promotion to the U.S. Senate, Jones provided critical support that gave the
little-known legislator legitimacy, keeping him from being instantly trampled
by the front-runners.
· No One Contacted
Canada About NAFTA – LIAR, the Candian Government issued the names and a memo
of the conversation your campaign had with them.
It’s now clear that a
Canadian news report that started this flap wasn’t accurate. No evidence has
surfaced to show that any Obama “staffer” telephoned the Canadian ambassador in
Washington, and all concerned deny that any such conversation took place. But
it is equally clear that Obama’s senior economic adviser did
visit Canada’s consulate in Chicago on Feb. 8, and that NAFTA was one
of the several topics discussed.
Exactly what was said
is not so clear, however. The memo says Obama’s anti-NAFTA stance was described
as just “political maneuvering,” but the adviser says he said no such thing.
The campaign says the adviser wasn’t authorized to convey any message from the
candidate anyway. No audio recording or verbatim transcript of the disputed
conversation is available, and there’s no reason to expect that any exists.
· I Am Tough On
Terrorism – LIAR, you missed the Iran Resolution vote on terrorism.
In September 2007, the U.S. Senate voted on a resolution to
designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization:
Charged with defending
the system put in place after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Guards answer
to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and are revered by many for their defense of the
country during the 1980s war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The legislative move to
classify Shiite Muslim-dominated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard force as
terrorist would be first such move against a foreign government entity and
would freeze any of its assets under U.S. jurisdiction.
It would also allow the
U.S. Treasury Department to move against firms subject to U.S. law that do
business with the Guard, which have vast commercial interests at home and
abroad.
Senator Obama
was on the campaign trail at the time and did not return to Washington for the
vote.
· I Am Not Acting As
President Yet – LIAR, after the NAFTA Memo, a dead terrorist in the FARC, in
Colombia, was found with a letter stating how you and he were working together
on getting FARC recognized officially.
On March 1, a Columbian Army strike on a FARC (Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia) rebel camp in Columbia killed 24 people, including
Raul Reyes, the FARC’s foreign minister. Files in a laptop computer seized from
the wreckage of the rebel camp included references to U.S. diplomatic overtures
which the Associated Press described as “scintillating, if vague”:
In a Dec. 11 message to
the secretariat, [Ivan] Marquez writes: “If you are in agreement, I can receive
Jim and Tucker to hear the proposal of the gringos.”
Writing two days before
his death, Reyes tells his comrades that “the gringos,” working through
Ecuador’s government, are interested “in talking to us on various issues.”
“They say the new
president of their country will be (Barack) Obama,” he writes, saying Obama
rejects both the Bush administration’s free trade agreement with Colombia and
the current military aid program.
Exactly who
the referenced “gringos” were and whether they had any substantive connection
to Barack Obama is unknown.
· I Didn’t Run Ads In
Florida – LIAR, you allowed national ads to run 8-12 times per day for two
weeks – and you still lost.
In August 2007, major Democratic candidates signed a pledge to
not campaign in Florida because that state had moved its primary election up
to 29 January 2008, one week earlier than the Democratic national
rules allowed. In January 2008, the Obama campaign launched national television
advertisements on CNN and MSNBC that were also shown in Florida. Obama campaign
spokesman Bill Burton maintainted that they had asked CNN and MSNBC to pull
Florida from the ad buy, but those networks said they could not.
· I Won Michigan –
LIAR, no you didn’t.
Senator Obama didn’t seriously claim to have “won” Michigan;
during an 8 March 2008 Today Show interview he misspoke and
inadvertently mentioned Michigan among a list of states which he had won. In
accordance with the agreement mentioned in the previous entry, Barack Obama’s
name didn’t even appear on the Michigan ballot.
· I won Nevada – LIAR,
no you did not.
Senator Obama didn’t claim to have “won” Nevada (a state that
holds caucuses rather than direct-election primaries); he noted, correctly,
that although Senator Hillary Clinton tallied more overall votes at the Nevada
caucuses, he actually picked up more national delegates from that state:
Mitt Romney took
Nevada’s Republican caucuses, while Democrats debated whether their party had
rendered a split decision.
New York Sen. Hillary
Rodham Clinton won the vote count among those at the caucuses, but Illinois
Sen. Barack Obama claimed a slight advantage in national convention delegates
on the strength of his showing in rural areas.
Obama said in a
statement released by his campaign that he came from 25 points behind
and nearly beat Clinton today because he did well across all of Nevada —
“including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled.”
Obama’s campaign said
his performance in rural areas of the state helped him win a total of 13
national convention delegates, versus 12 for Clinton.
· I Want Americans To Decide
– LIAR, you prefer caucuses that limit the vote, confuse the voters, force a
public vote, and only operate during small windows of time.
Senator Obama has no influence or power over the holding of
caucuses rather than primary elections; that choice is made by each state
individually, and candidates have to abide by whatever is decided.
· I passed 900 Bills in
the State Senate – LIAR, you passed 26, most of which you didn’t write
yourself.
We could not find any reference to document Barack Obama’s
having claimed he passied “900 bills in the [Illinois] state senate.”
· My Campaign Was
Extorted By A Friend – LIAR, that friend is threatening to sue if you do not
stop saying this. Obama has stopped saying this.
We are unsure what “extortion” claim this statement supposedly
references.
· I Believe In
Fairness, Not Tactics – LIAR, you used tactics to eliminate Alice Palmer from
running against you.
In April 2007, the Chicago Tribune wrote of
Barack Obama’s first campaign for public office:
The day after New
Year’s 1996, operatives for Barack Obama filed into a barren hearing room of
the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners.
There they began the
tedious process of challenging hundreds of signatures on the nominating
petitions of state Sen. Alice Palmer, the longtime progressive activist from
the city’s South Side. And they kept challenging petitions until every one of
Obama’s four Democratic primary rivals was forced off the ballot.
Fresh from his work as
a civil rights lawyer and head of a voter registration project that expanded
access to the ballot box, Obama launched his first campaign for the Illinois
Senate saying he wanted to empower disenfranchised citizens.
But in that initial bid
for political office, Obama quickly mastered the bare-knuckled arts of Chicago
electoral politics. His overwhelming legal onslaught signaled his impatience to
gain office, even if that meant elbowing aside an elder stateswoman like
Palmer.
· I Don’t Take PAC
Money – LIAR, you take loads of it.
Senator Obama didn’t say that has never accepted money from
political action committees. (He used PAC money in his previous U.S.
Senate and Illinois state Senate races.) He pledged that he would not
accept PAC money for his 2008 presidential bid, a pledge that he has upheld.
· I don’t Have
Lobbysists – LIAR, you have over 47 lobbyists, and counting.
As Politico.com noted in May 2008:
In his campaign for the
Democratic presidential nomination, Obama is refusing donations from federally
registered lobbyists and excluding them from his official campaign staff. (They
can still be advisers and volunteers, and their spouses’ checks are certainly
welcome.)
The Wall
Street Journal observed in November 2008 that:
Democratic lobbyists
are wondering about their future in an Obama administration. Although Sen.
Obama has taken a tough line toward registered lobbyists, he has allowed
himself some maneuvering room. Like Sen. McCain, Sen. Obama has banned
lobbyists from working on his campaign until after they quit their lobbying
jobs.
Senator Obama
also said that his administration would not employ federally registered
lobbyists, although (as the New York Times noted) he has
allowed himself some “wiggle room” in that regard:
Turning to campaign
promises in which he pledged sweeping ethics restrictions, President-elect
Barack Obama will bar lobbyists from helping to pay the costs of his transition
to power or working for it in any area in which they have represented clients
in the last year, his transition team said.
The new rules do seem
to leave some wiggle room. Aides to Mr. Obama, who declared during the campaign
that lobbyists would not “find a job in my White House,” said the guidelines
allowed for lobbyists to work on the transition in areas where they have not
done any lobbying.
Further, the rules
apply to lobbyists who must register with the federal government; many people
who work for lobbying firms or in other areas of the influence business in
Washington do not have to register, because they do not personally lobby
federal officials on specific issues.
· My Campaign Had
Nothing To Do With The 1984 Ad – LIAR, your own campaign worker made the ad on
his Apple in one afternoon.
A widely-circulated spoof of Apple Computer’s famous 1984 television advertisement
for their (then-new) Macintosh computer was not created by an Obama campaign
worker. It was, as explained in a statement issued by the managing director of Blue State Digital (a
firm contracted to provide technology services to the Obama Campaign), created
without authorization by an employee of that company:
Statement from Thomas
Gensemer, Managing Director, Blue State Digital
On Wednesday afternoon,
March the 21st, an employee at our firm, Phillip de Vellis, received a call
from Arianna Huffington of “The Huffington Post” regarding the “1984” video
currently circulating online. Initially, de Vellis refused to respond to her
requests. He has since acknowledged to Blue State Digital that he was the
creator of the video.
Pursuant to company
policy regarding outside political work or commentary on behalf of our clients
or otherwise, Mr. de Vellis has been terminated from Blue State Digital
effective immediately.
Blue State Digital is
under contract with the Obama Campaign for technology pursuits including
software development and hosting. Additionally, one of our founding partners is
on leave from the company to work directly for the campaign at headquarters.
However, Blue State
Digital is not currently engaged in any relationship with the Obama Campaign
for creative or non-technical services.
Mr. de Vellis created
this video on his own time. It was done without the knowledge of management,
and was in no way tied to his work at the firm or our formal engagement [on
technology pursuits] with the Obama campaign.
I have spoken with
David Plouffe, Sen. Obama’s campaign manager, to inform him of this action and
am appreciative of his understanding and ongoing support of our work.
· I Have Always Been
Against Iraq – LIAR, you weren’t in office to vote against it AND you have
voted to fund it every single time, unlike Kucinich, who seems to be out
gutting you Obama. You also seem to be stepping back from your departure date –
AGAIN.
Senator Obama expressed opposition to the war in Iraq well
before he gained a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The vote that authorized
U.S. military action in Iraq was held in 2002.) He has since voted in the
Senate to authorize funding for that war, for reasons he defended in a February
2008 Democratic debate:
The two Democrats
exchanged pointed words over each other’s records on the war in Iraq, which
contrast sharply even as economic and domestic concerns become dominant in the
race. Clinton voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion, which Obama opposed from
the start. After Obama again touted a high-profile antiwar speech he gave in
Chicago before the war, Clinton pointed out that he, like her, had subsequently
voted for war funding, and that their records on Iraq were similar since he
came to the Senate in 2005.
“When it wasn’t just a
speech, but it was actually action, where is the difference?” she said. “Where
is the comparison that would in some way give a real credibility to the speech
that he gave against the war?”
Obama shot back: “Once
we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get
out.”
· I Am As Patriotic As
Anyone – LIAR, you won’t wear a flag pin and you don’t put your hand over your
heart during the Anthem. There is a Cuban Flag with Che Guevara Displayed at Barack
Obama Campaign Office which you allow to be displayed. You voted against making
english the official language of the United States. You voted to give illegal
aliens social security benefits, which would bankrupt the social security
system for Americans legally paying into it.
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