The Corruption Chronicles: Obama's Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government
by
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton exposes Obama administration secrecy, secrets, and corruption by providing behind-the-scenes details of what America’s leading government watchdog has uncovered in its and successful legal battles to pry loose secret documents from a stonewalling Obama administration.
WASHINGTON’S MOST CORRUPT: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
FLOUTING
WASHINGTON’S MOST CORRUPT: PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
FLOUTING
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
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.
Think Obama Administration Wasn't Corrupt? Think Again
Obama Scandal: Former President Obama and his political supporters have repeatedly stated that his administration was scandal-free, unlike administrations before and after. "We're probably the first administration in modern history that hasn't had a major scandal in the White House," Obama himself said. A new book puts the lie to that statement.
Never mind that the left-leaning big media basically ignored major scandals during the Obama years, ranging from the IRS targeting scandal and the VA's deadly waiting lists for veterans to Hillary Clinton's illegal use of an unsecured, hackable home-brew server for her official duties as secretary of state and the Fast and Furious gunwalking program.
These and others were epic scandals that the media simply ignored or downplayed.
The media have contrasted Obama's supposed honesty and forthrightness with President Trump's supposed venality and political unscrupulousness, as embodied in the year-and-a-half long Russia-Trump scandal investigation that shows few signs of letting up.
But now comes Peter Schweizer's new book, "Secret Empires: How Our Politicians Hide Corruption and Enrich Their Families and Friends," which shows that the Obama administration and its cronies were up to their necks in questionable business deals and may even have intentionally distorted public policy to accommodate their own profit-making.
The book claims "Obama and his administration would deem industries either destructive to the environment or exploitative for the financial and professional gain of his friends, including industries such as coal mining, offshore drilling, cash advance companies, and for-profit colleges," wrote Katelyn Caralle of the Washington Examiner.
Schweizer's book, based on extensive research, says that Obama acted to regulate certain industries in such a way that the regulations lowered the value of some of the companies, wrote Katelyn Caralle of the Washington Examiner. These actions let two family friends to profit handsomely on deals through their own investment firm.
Here's how it worked: Obama buddies Marty Nesbitt and Harreld Kirkpatrick III formed a private equity investment firm called Vistria, right around the time Obama was re-elected in 2012.
Nothing wrong with that, except, as Schweizer notes in his book, "A curious pattern began to emerge. Obama and his administration would attack industries with government power, which led to substantially lower valuations for these companies. Nesbitt and Vistria, or others close to Obama, could then acquire those assets for pennies on the dollar."
As an example, Schweizer cites the case of for-profit higher education schools like University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute, and DeVry University. In 2013, Obama blamed the schools for taking advantage of students by saddling them with massive amounts of student debt, ruining their credit and making a profit on it. He ordered the Federal Trade Commission to go after them.
In the case of the University of Phoenix, its parent Apollo Education Group was suspended after a Federal Trade Commission investigation in 2015. The following year, three companies, including Vistria, swooped in to buy what remained of Apollo at a price 90% below its share price before the investigation.
As Vistria's education investment portfolio bulged, a number of Obama Education Department officials, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, ended up taking high-level jobs with Vistria.
That's just one example. There are others.
Schweizer noted in his book, for instance, that both Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry were deeply involved in trade and security talks with China even as that country began its aggressive campaign to expand its military and physical presence in the South China Sea. Contrary to standard diplomatic practice, however, both played "good cop," not seriously confronting China on its misbehavior.
Remember, Biden and Kerry were close friends from their years spent together in the Senate. So there was little surprise when Biden's son, Hunter, and Kerry's stepson, Christopher Heinz, one of the heirs to the Heinz ketchup fortune, went into business together in 2009.
They created a number of equity and real estate investment firms allied to Rosemont Capital, "the alternative investment fund of the Heinz Family Office."
So far so good. Except, "Over the next seven years, as both Joe Biden and John Kerry negotiated sensitive and high-stakes deals with foreign governments, Rosemont entities secured a series of exclusive deals with those same foreign governments."
In December of 2013, for instance, Biden traveled to China for talks. He brought Hunter Biden along. While there, the senior Biden soft-pedaled China's clear aggression, and played up the bilateral trade partnership. Ten days after the trip concluded, China's central bank, the Bank of China, set up a $1 billion investment joint venture called Bohai Harvest RST. For the record, the "RS" referred to Biden's son's firm, Rosemont Seneca.
That's questionable enough.
But months later, in July 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to China, also for talks. Kerry talked little of China's clear aggression, but did conspicuously note that "China and the United States represent the greatest economic alliance trading partnership in the history of humankind."
He should know. In the ensuing months, Chinese government-linked firms took major stakes in several of the firms owned or controlled by Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz, and provided them with massive funding totaling billions of dollars. Nor is this the only scandal involving John Kerry.
And this just scratches the surface. The book is a catalog, a virtual roadmap, to the way corrupt business gets done in Washington — and why Americans are smart to question why their representative go to Washington as paupers, and return as millionaires.
We can only hope that as Biden or Kerry gears up for a challenge to Trump in the 2020 presidential contest, they will receive the same relentless scrutiny that a Republican with the same record of venality would get. But we won't hold our breath.
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