Obama’s Oscar-Winning ‘American Factory’ Omits His Own Role in Ohio Factory’s Closing
4:01
Former President Barack Obama played a direct role in the hardships of the workers featured in American Factory, the Oscar-winning documentary his new production company produced.
The former president and First Lady Michelle Obama are celebrating the Oscar win for their new production company, Higher Ground, which saw American Factory win Best Documentary Feature on Sunday evening.
The film follows the travails of a shuttered General Motors factory in Ohio that is re-opened by Chinese investors, who save American jobs but encounter cultural and economic clashes with American workers.
But as Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), the former mayor of nearby Dayton, Ohio, wrote last year, the movie leaves out President Obama’s own role in making life worse for the GM workers who lost their jobs.
Obama’s auto bailout, he recalled, helped force the plant’s closure and made it harder for the workers to find new jobs because his administration was dealing political favors to its favored union allies — and they were in the “wrong” union.
Turner wrote in the Wall Street Journal last September, after the film’s release:
It’s a fascinating and at times moving film. What’s interesting about it, though, is that it never once alludes to the part Mr. Obama played in diminishing the ability of Moraine’s laid off workers to transfer to other GM plants. The president’s role wasn’t indirect and isn’t a matter of dispute: His administration’s bailout deal for GM included a backroom exclusive agreement with the United Auto Workers.…A quick refresher. The Obama administration’s auto bailout highly favored the UAW and its members. The GM plant in Moraine was unionized by the IUE-CWA. So—despite being one of the top GM facilities for quality, efficiency and production in the country—it was shuttered, and its employees were put at the back of the line when requesting transfers to other GM plants. Any non-UAW employees looking to transfer were forced to start as new hires, wiping clean any wages, tenure, and benefits built up during careers at other GM plants.“American Factory” documents the UAW’s efforts to unionize the reopened auto glass factory without any mention of the same union’s direct role in the GM plant’s closure. The Dayton community was left out in the cold—thousands of jobs lost, families devastated, longtime GM workers out on the street looking for work.…The hypocrisy of this Obama-backed film is astounding. Mr. Obama fails to acknowledge his direct role in creating the hardships the Moraine workers weathered. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the plant’s reopening—that was all the work of state and local officials and community leaders.
As Rep. Turner recalled, his retired father — who had once worked at the plant — lost his health insurance in Obama’s auto bailout.
It was only because of bipartisan efforts, assisted by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), that the plant was re-opened with Chinese help, Rep. Turner wrote.
Turner was incredulous at the film’s silence about the Obama administration’s policies. “How does a nearly two-hour film telling the story of these workers fail even to mention the direct role the co-owner of the film’s production company played in creating their hardships? Did the filmmakers think no one would remember?”
Evidently, they did — at least no one in Hollywood. And they were right.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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.
As FactCheck.org noted in March 2008 about the ‘NAFTA-Gate‘controversy:
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.
These items are covered here in separate articles about the
national anthem, Che Guevara, and Social
Security.
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