This page speaks for itself, unlike Senator Obama.
Also, here’s another one:
http://obamawtf.blogspot.com/
Add at will, my friends
This one is so amazing I had to post it here:
This is from April 5,2004.
This is straight from his campaign site on his judgement:
Judgment You Can Trust
As a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002, Obama put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq, and warned of “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences.” Obama has been a consistent, principled and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.
And one with some great info on Obama’s associates … Really really slimy associates
This is from Marie:
An ignorant gaffe is made because one does not have experience in doing what one is doing.
Marking the anniversary of the March 1965 “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., Obama, speaking at a church, said his parents got together “because of what happened in Selma.” Obama was born in 1961.
Obama told Larry King on CNN — asked about that anti-Hillary Rodham Clinton YouTube ad, a doctored version of a spot created for Apple computers — “We don’t have the technical capacity to create something like that.”
The Tribune dug this up: Obama, in his memoir, Dreams of My Father, writes of a story in Life magazine that influenced him — about a black man trying to bleach his skin white. No such article could be found in Life or Ebony.
Insider or outsider?
• Another Obama stump line — he said it again Tuesday morning to the Communications Workers of America here — is that “I’ve been long enough in Washington to know that Washington needs to change.” He is running against Washington yet his campaign is populated with political professionals who are Washington insiders.
Barack Obama came up with some novel reasons why the U.S. may be struggling in the war in Afghanistan”We don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with it — and it’s not just the troops,” Obama, D-Ill., told a cro
We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan,”
Obama posited — incorrectly — that Arabic translators deployed in Iraq are needed in Afghanistan — forgetting, momentarily, that Afghans don’t speak Arabic.
“We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists,” he said.
So far, so good.
“But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they’re not in Afghanistan,” Obama said.
In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – Barack Obama, caught up in the fervor of a campaign speech Tuesday, drastically overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll, saying 10,000 had died.
The death toll was 12.
That’s because he made a speech in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy that was not only inappropriate but downright painful to listen to. He compared that tragedy to every liberal cause you can think of: abortion, Iraq, verbal violence, and my personal favorite the violence of losing one’s job to outsourcing. short of shocking. Imagine if your loved was killed in the tragedy and Barack Obama is comparing that pain to the pain of losing your job
Once again it took Politico to break the story of Obama’s 1996 survey in which he supported a total ban on guns. Obama’s story on this memo shifted multiple times. First, he said he had nothing to do with it and that a staffer wrote it. Then, his handwriting was found in notes on the survey. Then, Politico again broke that the group to whom the survey was done, Independent Voters of Illinois, did an interview with Obama himself about the survey and his answers mirrored that of the survey
At the end of 2006, Amanda Carpenter reported on a bill that Obama supported in the Illinois Senate that would have legalized the practice of infanticide. In this case, it would have been legal to kill the baby even after an abortion failed.
He was speaking at the start of a two-day swoop through Oregon, which is already a state.
In Beaverton, which is not a state yet, the Democrat let it slip that during this marathon 16-month party presidential nomination struggle against a bunch of dropouts and this female political zombie from New York who won’t surrender short of a silver stake, he had already visited 57 states with one more to go.
The Democratic frontrunner Sen. Barack Obama of another state, Illinois, had an enthusiastic double-barreled stump introduction from two local luminaries, former Sens. Tom Daschle and George McGovern, Both South Dakotans lavished all sorts of praise on Obama, As the large, enthusiastic crowd of some 7,000 supporters roared and waved
“We can do it” signs and Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” blared, Obama bounded onto stage, grabbed the microphone and said, “Thank you, Sioux City!”
Trouble is, Obama was in Sioux Falls.
So was the crowd, which suddenly fell silent. “I’m sorry,” Obama quickly caught himself. “Sioux Falls. I’ve been in Iowa too long.”
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Obama just last week referred to the ‘president’ of Canada. Canada has a prime minister, not a president.
Obama showed how little regard he had for human life at a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Barrack told the crowd that he didn’t want his daughters to be “punished with a baby” if they made a mistake, of a sexual nature. The statement taken with his extreme Pro Partial-birth abortion voting record, shows the honest observer how radical he really is. The msm silence on his far left stances is shameful.
And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us”–cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm– and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”
Now, I saved the best for last, and it’s a whopper. Speaking about the need to “Clean up our Water”, Barack made this solemn pledge to the people of Oregon:
[H]e will continue his leadership in protecting national treasures like the Great Lakes from threats such as industrial pollution, water diversion, and invasive species.
Oregon to Barack: the Great Lakes are not in Oregon!
Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s “Dreams from My Father:”
“Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”
It’s SUNRISE, not “Sunshine,” sweetie.
At first, it seemed as if Barack Obama might just be speaking figuratively, as is his wont sometimes. “How’s it going, Sunshine? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. It’s good to be in Sunshine!” But then he said it again, and again — “When we are unified sunshine, nobody can stop us!” — and it became clear: Obama thought he was in Sunshine, Fla. But he was not. He was in Sunrise,
Comment by dakinikat — June 8, 2008 @ 9:04 pm |
How about the One saying (or yelling – he usually yells) to a Jewish group last week that he would never divide Jerusalem and then changing his mind the next day when the Palestinians got upset?
Major flop flop which is, I have heard, causing a stir in theJewish community.
Comment by Chi4hillary — June 8, 2008 @ 3:32 pm |
Hi dakinkat
Love Love Love you site!! ~ just an “FYI” ~ the first ‘gaffe’ link is not functioning… the last two characters are not ‘linked’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7e4uL95×1Y
Keep up the good work!!
Comment by Jill L — June 8, 2008 @ 5:07 pm |
Barack Obama: Gaffe machine
By Michelle Malkin • May 21, 2008 07:43 AM
Here’s my syndicated column this week. Hardly a comprehensive list–and sure to grow.
***
Barack Obama: Gaffe machine
Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2008
All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of “potatoe.” The New York Times distorted and misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.
But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:
* Last May, he claimed that Kansas tornadoes killed a whopping 10,000 people: “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.
*Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”
*Last week, in front of a roaring Sioux Falls, South Dakota audience, Obama exulted: “Thank you Sioux City…I said it wrong. I’ve been in Iowa for too long. I’m sorry.”
*Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?
*Obama has as much trouble with numbers as he has with maps. Last March, on the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama, he claimed his parents united as a direct result of the civil rights movement:
“There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.”
Obama was born in 1961. The Selma march took place in 1965. His spokesman, Bill Burton, later explained that Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil rights movement as a whole.”
*Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by honing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.
*Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of the decades-old, multi-billion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear waste clean-up:
“Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.”
I assume on that ride, a staffer reminded him that he’s voted on at least one defense authorization bill that addressed the “costs, schedules, and technical issues” dealing with the nation’s most contaminated nuclear waste site.
*Last March, the Chicago Tribune reported this little-noticed nugget about a fake autobiographical detail in Obama’s “Dreams from My Father:”
“Then, there’s the copy of Life magazine that Obama presents as his racial awakening at age 9. In it, he wrote, was an article and two accompanying photographs of an African-American man physically and mentally scarred by his efforts to lighten his skin. In fact, the Life article and the photographs don’t exist, say the magazine’s own historians.”
* And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us”–cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm– and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”
Barack Obama–promoted by the Left and the media as an all-knowing, articulate, transcendent Messiah–is a walking, talking gaffe machine. How many more passes does he get? How many more can we afford?
Source: http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/21/barack-obama-gaffe-machine/
Comment by dakinikat — June 8, 2008 @ 5:47 pm |
from : http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/05/what-the-farc-w.html
What the FARC Was Obama Talking About?
Jack Tapper (ABC)
May 25, 2008 11:08 AM
“I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Sen. Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, said, “And I think that is what happened here. Sen. Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it, and I would take her at her word on that.”
One reason why Obama may be so forgiving (even if his campaign was not) about Sen. Hillary Clinton’s assassination reference?
The man has been a one-man gaffe machine.
On Friday afternoon in Sunrise, Florida, Obama said, “how’s it going, Sunshine?” (Watch HERE.)
Wrote the local Sun-Sentinel: “It wasnât clear if Barack Obama knew exactly where he was Friday afternoon when he spoke at his mass rally at the BankAtlantic Center.”
He did the same thing in Sioux Falls, SD, calling it “Sioux City.” (Watch HERE.)
“Obama starts speech with a gaffe,” wrote the Argus Leader.
But those are the relatively silly ones. There have also been gaffes of more consequence.
As ABC News’ David Wright and Sunlen Miller wrote, Obama seemed to either think Arabic is spoken in Afghanistan or he misunderstands the nature of military translators.
More recently, Obama as he traveled through Florida seemed to give some contradictory statements about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and the Colombian terrorist group FARC.
On Thursday Obama told the Orlando Sentinel that he would meet with Chavez and “one of the obvious high priorities in my talks with President Hugo Chavez would be the fermentation of anti-American sentiment in Latin America, his support of FARC in Colombia and other issues he would want to talk about.”
OK, so a strong declaration that Chavez is supporting FARC, which Obama intends to push him on.
But then on Friday he said any government supporting FARC should be isolated.
“We will shine a light on any support for the FARC that comes from neighboring governments,” he said in a speech in Miami. “This behavior must be exposed to international condemnation, regional isolation, and – if need be – strong sanctions. It must not stand.”
So he will meet with the leader of a country he simultaneously says should be isolated? Huh?
On Friday in an interview with the Miami Herald, Obama also used language suggesting that he’s not as positive that Venezuela is supporting FARC.
“When I asked him what he would do about the estimated 37,000 Interpol-certified Colombian FARC guerrilla computer files that indicate an active support from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa to the Colombian rebels, Obama went farther than the Bush administration,” wrote the Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer.
Said Obama: “I think the Organization of American States and the international community should launch an immediate investigation into this situation. We have to hold Venezuela accountable if, in fact, it is trying to ferment terrorist activities in other borders. If Venezuela has violated those rules, we should mobilize all the countries to sanction Venezuela and let them know that that’s not acceptable behavior.”
“If” Venezuela “is trying to ferment terrorist activities in other borders”? Just one day before Obama had asserted that Chavez was supporting FARC in Colombia.
I’ve asked the Obama campaign for a clarification and will get back to you as to what they say.
- jpt
UPDATE: The Obama campaign says there’s nothing unusual about proposing the isolation of a country at the same time a President talks about meeting with its country’s leader. (The Obama campaign cites how the U.S. is talking to North Korea via the Six-Party talks as an example. Though it might be observed, those diplomatic efforts are quite different than a presidential-level meeting.)
As for the statement, and then the very qualified “if” statement about Chavez and FARC, the Obama campaign says Obama is laying out his principles. The U.S. government says all the time, “If Iran continues its nuclear program,” the Obama campaign says. I don’t know. Saying, “if in fact” Venezuela is aiding FARC seemed to me at least to be different than saying “if Chavez continues aiding FARC.” What do you think?
UPDATE 2: So, I just spoke to an Obama campaign foreign policy adviser and this is how he explains any confusion.
Obama, he says, believes that Chavez is supportive of the FARC, both ideologically and tangibly. The Obama campaign disagrees that Obama’s language — “if, in fact, it (Chavez) is trying to ferment terrorist activities in other borders” — is hedging language at all. Obama has been very clear that he believes that Chavez is supportive of the FARC, the adviser says.
As to the question of whether one can pledge to isolate a country while also proposing a presidential-level meeting, the adviser says that I was inaccurate in characterizing Obama as proposing such a meeting — the reality was that Obama was merely acknowledging a willingness to meet.
But “if we are going to isolate the Venezuelans, it may be that we have to engage in a full-on diplomatic strategy with them,” the adviser says. Obama was not saying he, himself, would propose such a meeting, nor that he would necessarily participate in that meeting. When Obama referred to “my talks with President Hugo Chavez,” he did not mean “my talks,” literally (necessarily) — he meant his administration’s talks — “though it could be him engaging in this diplomacy directly and personally,” the adviser says. The point is, all the tools need to be in the diplomacy kit — isolation, willingness to hold presidential meetings, and everything in between.
Got it?
Comment by dakinikat — June 8, 2008 @ 5:50 pm |
From Sara:
Video gaffes and flipflops:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7e4uL95×1Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8oHLJSvrFA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKBs15WrDTA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLdba0KHhHc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHq3avztIFg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQY_9ZcsjpQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAQit50zKhU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLC1f6mCOMc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6Gx1KrvTw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D36OHolrdOg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS5T4W0XZRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D36OHolrdOg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9yv5C1xd1U
Comment by dakinikat — June 8, 2008 @ 9:18 pm |
He told his followers in Idaho that “no one would take their guns away.” Within a week (might even have been within a day or two) he told the folks in D.C. that he favored “thoughtful gun control.” I put those in quotes in order to illuminate the points he made, but those are not official quotes (but they are very close).
Comment by newfrickinname — June 9, 2008 @ 1:43 am |
Some more gaffe videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ldsKtfQJhc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-Ak9WuUio
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbpWonUzlrc
Comment by sarainitaly — June 9, 2008 @ 2:19 pm |
http://falsani.blogspot.com/2008/04/barack-obama-2004-god-factor-interview.html
Obama from an interview done on 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, 2004, when by the religion reporter (now its religion columnist) at the Chicago Sun-Times
GG:
Do you still attend Trinity?
OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.
Ever been there? Good service.
I actually wrote a book called Dreams from My Father, it’s kind of a meditation on race. There’s a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.
Earlier Obama said this:
I became much more familiar with the ongoing tradition of the historic black church and it’s importance in the community.
And the power of that culture to give people strength in very difficult circumstances, and the power of that church to give people courage against great odds. And it moved me deeply.
So that, one of the churches I met, or one of the churches that I became involved in was Trinity United Church of Christ. And the pastor there, Jeremiah Wright, became a good friend. So I joined that church and committed myself to Christ in that church.
Also later:
OBAMA:
Obviously as an African American politician rooted in the African American community, I spend a lot of time in the black church. I have no qualms in those settings in participating fully in those services and celebrating my God in that wonderful community that is the black church.
Okay, which one is it Senator throw the church and pastor under the bus? Barely, there, didn’t hear these things or agree with them?
Comment by dakinikat — June 11, 2008 @ 5:20 pm |
Did you get the one on the Hanford Nuclear cleanup?
When asked about it by someone on the audience, he did not know anything about it.
Why this is even more important is he voted on a bill regarding it.
Comment by TriciaNC — June 11, 2008 @ 6:47 pm |
I’d rather a person who isn’t solid enough on some issues than a fascist, would-be mass murderer.
I wouldn’t want it on my conscience that I’d given sanction to half a million Iranians dying horrific deaths because Obama didn’t mention abortion strongly enough or often enough. But that’s just me, and opposing mass murder at all costs is such an odd idea…
Comment by Ben Kilpatrick — June 11, 2008 @ 7:05 pm |
Obama And The Giant Blogosphere Conspiracy
WEDNESDAY, 11TH JUNE 2008
From the Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/765631/obama-and-the-giant-blogosphere-conspiracy.thtml
Today’s Guardian reports that Barack Obama is setting up an entire unit to combat ‘virulent rumours’ about him on the internet. Doubtless one of the blogs in the sights of team Obama is Little Green Footballs, which in the last few days has been excavating examples of wildly anti-Jewish and anti-American prejudice and conspiracy theories posted up by fans on Obama’s own website. LGF is making hay with the fact that the Obamanables are belatedly taking (some of) this stuff down from the site while simultaneously insisting that its presence is nothing to do with them because the website has no moderators. Yeah, right.
The Guardian quotes the director of some monitoring outfit as saying that the blogosphere’s smears about Obama are particularly vicious.
He added that one of the most persistent is that Obama, a Christian, is ‘some kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate, planted by Islamic fundamentalists to betray the country and it is very widespread’.
Well now. Crazed Jew-hating American-loathing moonbats posting comments on Obama’s website are one thing. But the fact is that there are serious and troubling questions about Obama’s ancestry and associations and what he himself has said about them, which have surfaced in the blogosphere but have been almost wholly ignored by the mainstream media in its collective Obamanic swoon.
First is his childhood background. Last November, his campaign website carried a statement with the headline:
Barack Obama Is Not and Has Never Been a Muslim
followed by
Obama never prayed in a mosque. He has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.
Obama has also said:
I’ve always been a Christian
and
I’ve never practised Islam.
But none of this is true. As is explored in detail on Daniel Pipes’s website, Obama was enrolled at his primary schools in Indonesia as a Muslim; he attended the mosque during that period; his friends from that time testify that he was a devout Muslim boy. A former teacher at one of these schools, Tine Hahiyary, remembers a young Obama who was quite religious and actively took part in ‘mengaji’ classes which teach how to read the Koran in Arabic. The blogger from Indonesia who reported this commented:
‘Mengagi’ is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, “mengaji classes” are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to… The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet.
His father was a Muslim, as was his stepfather. His grandfather was a Muslim convert. His wider family appear to have been largely devout Muslims. Yes, we only know about Obama’s early years as a Muslim; and yes, twenty years ago he became a Christian. The issue, however, is why he has been less than candid about his early background and his family. Indeed, he appears to have actively deceived the public about it. That is why the blogosphere is so exercised about it.
Now here’s another curious thing. Much has been made of his membership of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago whose former pastor and his long-standing mentor, Jeremiah Wright, Obama was forced finally to renounce on account of his obnoxious views (although he has signally failed unequivocally to denounce those views themselves and the no less obnoxious philosophy of the Trinity United black power church). But according to a passing reference in a profile in The New Republic last year, Pastor Wright was himself a Muslim convert to Christianity. He seems to have moved from being a Muslim black power fanatic to a Christian black power fanatic – which might go some way to explaining his close affinity to the Muslim black power ideologue Louis Farrakhan.
Then there is also Obama’s troubling support for the Kenyan opposition leader — and his cousin — Raila Odinga, the leader of the violent uprising a few months ago against the newly elected Kenyan government and who signed a memorandum of understanding with Kenyan Muslims to turn Kenya into an Islamic state governed by sharia law. At the time, the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya released a statement in which church leaders said Odinga
comes across as a presumptive Muslim president bent on forcing Islamic law, religion and culture down the throats of the Kenyan people in total disregard of the Constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of worship and equal protection of the law for all Kenyans.
As the Atlas Shrugs site reported, Obama actually went to Kenya in 2006 and spoke at rallies in support of Odinga, causing the Kenyan government to denounce him as ‘Raila’s stooge’. Why was Obama supporting such a person? Why has no-one bothered to find out??
Daniel Pipes makes another highly significant point about Obama’s Muslim background. He points out that, in the eyes of the Muslim world, Obama remains a Muslim regardless of what religion he now professes because he was born to a Muslim father. By his own admission (of Christianity) therefore, he is a Muslim apostate – a status regarded by the Muslim world as a sin to be punished by death. Pipes thinks this would put his life in danger and undermine his initiatives towards the Muslim world. But surely the more significant point is that much of that Muslim world has actually embraced him. Indeed the Muslim Brothers of Hamas – who most certainly would regard any Muslim apostate as someone to be eliminated – actually came out publicly in support of him (until Obama blotted his copybook by professing undying support for Israel).
We are entitled therefore to ask whether the Muslim world supports him because it believes he is still a Muslim. We are entitled to ask precisely when he stopped being a Muslim, and why. Did Obama embrace Christianity as a tactical manoeuvre to get himself elected? Why indeed has he dissembled about his family background if not for that end?
These multiple known deceptions by someone who may become President of the United States are deeply alarming. The concealment is the issue. To dismiss such concerns and the related questions they provoke as a smear campaign is to attempt to browbeat into silence those who legitimately raise them and require urgent answers as a matter of the most acute public interest.
Update: In this entry I originally included the following quote from the American Expatriate in Indonesia blog quoted above: ‘Another of Obama’s former classmates, Emirsyah Satar, now CEO of Garuda Indonesia, has been quoted as saying: At that time, he was quite religious in Islam but after marrying Michelle, he changed his religion.’ It has been pointed out to me that comments posted on that blog claimed that this was a mistranslation, and that the quote attributed to Satar was written instead by the author of the article.
Comment by dakinikat — June 13, 2008 @ 2:18 pm |
Another from Tapper:
This time Obama Lies about his conversation with an Iraqi Minister according to the Minister; okay ‘mischaracterizes’… whatever!
Obama and Iraqi Foreign Minister Have Different Memories of their Conversation
June 18, 2008 8:09 AM
On Monday, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, talked on the phone with the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari.
At a press availability in Michigan, I asked Obama if Zebari had expressed any concern to him that his plans to withdrawal U.S. troops as president would undo any security advances.
“No, he did not express that,” Obama said. “He did emphasize his belief that we’ve made real progress and I think was eager to see political accommodations between the factions follow up in the wake of this progress.
“I think that he expressed what President Maliki has expressed as well,” Obama continued, “which is that the Iraqis are obviously concerned about their sovereignty and are not seeking a long term occupation by the U.S. And so my sense is that we should be able to execute a withdrawal and set a timeframe – a timetable that continues to allow US forces to support Iraqi forces in going after terrorists, that continues to train the Iraqi police and military as long as we’re not training militias that are turning on each other. One area that I think is important to emphasize is that as a consequence of a huge spike in oil prices – the Iraqi government’s budget is twice as large as it anticipated and so I think its important for the Iraqis to start picking up more of the tab both for reconstruction efforts as well as the need to continue to boost their military capacity.”
But today comes this report that Zebari told the Washington Post “that he had some frank talk for the candidate: ‘The foreign minister said ‘my message’ to Mr. Obama ‘was very clear…Really, we are making progress. I hope any actions you will take will not endanger this progress.’”
source: http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/06/obama-and-iraqi.html
Comment by dakinikat — June 19, 2008 @ 8:17 am |
June 19, 2008
Obama’s Broken Promise on Public Funding of Elections Is Disappointment; Candidate Must Champion Fixing Public Funding System
Statement of Joan Claybrook, President of Public Citizen
Public Citizen is deeply disappointed by presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s decision this morning to opt out of the presidential public financing system for the general election. This decision would make Sen. Obama the first presidential candidate since the Watergate reforms to refuse public financing in the general election and fund his presidential bid instead with private money, which often comes with expectations of special access or favors. Sen. Obama has made this choice even though the presumptive Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, said he would participate in the public funding system if his opponent did.
The benefits of reducing the role of special interests in selecting our lawmakers can be huge. Public financing of federal campaigns is at a critical crossroads this year. Important legislation to strengthen the presidential public financing system and to establish full public financing of congressional elections is now pending in Congress. Lawmakers are waiting to assess the fall-out of the November elections before acting.
Obama has been a champion of ethics reforms and campaign finance reform, including public funding of elections. If he is elected president, the nation will need his continuing leadership on these issues. To advance these efforts, his own campaign should be a model. Now that he has decided to opt out of public funding, it will be more difficult for him to show that he has not abandoned the concept and will champion clean elections and ensure that Congress passes much-needed reforms immediately.
The presidential public financing system falls woefully short in providing sufficient funds in the primary election, which is why the fix-it legislation is need. But the system provides a hefty $84.1 million grant to each of the general election nominees for the two-month-long general election campaign – plenty of money to run successfully, as three decades’ worth of elections have shown.
This presidential election is going to set all-time records for spending. Public Citizen can only hope that, despite Sen. Obama’s decision, he will remain disgusted with private interests buying our White House and that after the campaign, he will lead the charge for a system that removes special interest money from politics.
Comment by dakinikat — June 19, 2008 @ 12:29 pm |
http://www.audacityofhypocrisy.com/fashion-shows/
Another great site that bHB shared with me!!!
Comment by dakinikat — June 21, 2008 @ 9:31 am |
From Weekly Standard Blog:
“So Obama’s new ad, the first of the general election, “cites Public Law 110-181 when he talks about his efforts to extend ‘health care for wounded troops who’d been neglected.’” The problem? Obama never showed up to the vote. He was actually too busy campaigning to make it back to Washington to vote for the bill, but wants the American people to think he deserves the credit. Sounds a lot like the 2005 Energy Bill, which Obama has the gall to attack John McCain on even though the junior senator from Illinois voted for it and McCain voted against it.”
Check out the vote roll here: U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 110th Congress – 2nd Session
Beginning to notice how i’m adding things about twice a day now … WOW!
Comment by dakinikat — June 21, 2008 @ 1:02 pm |
EVER-CHANGING ‘CHANGE’
June 21, 2008 — Awash in campaign cash, Barack Obama this week announced that he’s opting out of the public-financing system for presidential campaigns. He’ll be the first general-election candidate to do that since the system was set up.
This gives new meaning to the notion of “politics of change.”
“In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public-financing system in the 2008 election,” he wrote in November. “My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fund-raising truce, return excess money from donors and stay within the public-financing system for the general election.”
So much for that.
This isn’t the first time Obama has, um, “changed” political lanes:
* He ripped Hillary Clinton for months for voting to list Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. Days after Clinton conceded, Obama flipped and said he supported the definition.
* Obama repeatedly vowed to meet with various heads of terror states – most notably Ahmadinejad of Iran – “without preconditions.” Then, with the nomination in sight, he zigzagged: “There’s no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad. He’s not the most powerful person in Iran.”
* In October, he supported NAFTA expansion. In March, campaigning in the Ohio primary, he called for a “reopening” of the trade pact’s terms. This week, he called his own primary rhetoric “overheated” and said NAFTA has had a positive effect on the US economy.
* Yesterday, after signaling opposition to nuclear power, he told Democratic governors he’s open to expanding it.
Change, yes.
But “change we can believe in”?
That remains to be seen.
source: http://www.nypost.com/seven/06212008/postopinion/editorials/ever_changing_change_116538.htm
Comment by dakinikat — June 21, 2008 @ 11:14 pm |
From the Black Agenda Report:
News Flash: Obama Tells Lies PDF Print E-mail
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
by Paul Street
The author has kept a scrupulous record of untruths, half-truths and evolving reconstructions of truth from Barack Obama’s mouth, over the years – and there’s always a fresh supply to chronicle. It’s hard – truly hard – to woo Black and progressive voters while plotting a wholly different agenda with captains of industry and finance and military expansionists. However, Obama’s many transgressions against truth don’t set him apart. “The American narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted presidential election extravaganza is not about truth-telling – it’s about corporate-managed deception.”
News Flash: Obama Tells Lies
PaulStreetObamaStrutby Paul Street
This article originally appeared in Znet.
U.S. politicians lie. They lie a lot.
Oh, you knew that.
But try this one: Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is no special exception to the rule. Beneath all his claims to represent a “new kind of politics,” one based on honesty and transparency, he lies too. He does it a lot.
This is less well known.
The latest example is Obama’s decision to choose winning over his word on public campaign financing in the general election.
Just the other day Obama coldly contradicted his earlier promise to go with money from the U.S. presidential public financing system and to accept accompanying spending limits if his Republican opponent did the same. He admitted that he will rely solely on private financing in the general election, making him the first presidential candidate to do so since the public system was set up after Watergate.
“Obama is disproportionately funded by people from the top 1 percent of Americans.”
There is no mystery about why: the opportunity to financially bury John McCain is irresistible to Obama, who did not imagine that he was going to set obscene new campaign fundraising records, fueled largely by the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Obama has raised $265 million – a new record, at this stage – so far, nearly three times as much as John McCain ($97).
When Obama offered his populist-sounding public-financing pledge last year, the reactionary Republican arch-militarist McCain said he would abide by the limits and accept public money.
McCain is in fact going to go with taxpayer funds, agreeing to accept spending limits. There will no such limits for Obama.
Obama’s defiance of his previous oath was announced in a creepy video to supporters in which he praised ordinary Americans for “fueling” his candidacy with donations of “five dollars, ten dollars, twenty dollars, whatever you can afford.” He said, “Let’s build the first general election campaign that’s truly funded by the American people.”
Too bad the system he’s rejecting is funded by taxpayers who give $3 to the presidential election fund when they file their taxes.
Too bad Obama is disproportionately funded by people from the top 1 percent of Americans, who own nearly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth ands who account for more than 80 percent of campaign contributions above $250. Through April of 2008, the Campaign Finance Institute reports, Obama received more than $89 million in contributions of $1000 or more, just $8 million less than McCain’s total take ($97.3 million)[1].
According to the Center for Responsive Politics Obama’s top contributors include Goldman Sachs (#1 at $571,000), UBSAG (#3 at $365,000), JP Morgan Chase (#4 at $362,000), Citigroup (#5 at $358,000), Lehman Bros. (#7 at 4319,000), Google (#8 at $318,000), multinational corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP (#10 at $294,000)and nuclear energy powerhouse Exelon (#15 at $236,000}[2].
Obama’s campaign finance comments are pretty damn disingenuous: not exactly the “straight shooter” talk he claims to represent.
But it’s hardly the first Obama deception to date – not by a long shot. Here (below) are some of the bigger examples of stark dishonesty I’ve discovered in the process of writing a book on the Obama phenomenon and U.S. political culture.
“Nuclear Legislation I’ve Passed”: False Posturing
During the pivotal Iowa campaign, Obama sought to burnish his populist “tinge” by telling a misleading story about his response to an Exelon nuclear accident that outraged Illinois residents in late 2005 and early 2006. On December 1 of 2005, Exelon admitted that it had discovered radioactive by-products of nuclear power in monitoring wells at its Braidwood plant, located in central Illinois. Citizen concerns deepened when radioactive tritium was discovered in a home drinking well near the plant and Exelon revealed that this substance came from millions of gallons of water that had leaked from the plant over many years. Exelon had not been required to report the leaks since the radioactive discharges had not reached the level of what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission called “an emergency.”
Last November, Obama told a campaign crowd in Iowa that he had introduced a U.S. Senate bill that required nuclear plant owners to notify local and state authorities immediately when even small leaks had occurred. The bill, he told Iowa voters, was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed. I just did that last year,” Obama claimed, eliciting “murmurs of approval” [3].
But, as the New York Times reported in a front-page story two days before Super Tuesday, the truth of what happened after the Braidwood leak was very different than Obama’s self-serving version. “While he initially fought to advance” a bill very much like what he claimed to have “passed,” Times reporter Mike McIntire noted, “Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon, and nuclear regulators. 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 despite the removal of language mandating prompt reporting. Instead, the bill simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported links.” As McIntire suggested, this ignominious legislative aftermath contradicted Obama’s campaign claim and followed in natural accord with the following facts [4]:
* Obama had received at least $227,000 in campaign cash from Exelon since 2003.
* “Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.”
* Exelon executives met repeatedly with Obama’s staff to discuss Obama’s ultimately diluted and aborted bill.
* Obama’s chief political strategist David Axlerod had worked as a consultant to Exelon since 2002.
Maytag and Galesburg: “Fundraising, Rhetoric Collide”
In Obama’s stump speech during the long campaign leading up to the Iowa Democratic presidential caucus, the Maytag workers of Galesburg, Illinois played a central role. Obama repeatedly told the story of how their jobs had been shipped to Mexico. “It is a ready applause line, for the Illinois presidential hopeful,” Chicago Tribune reporter Bob Secter noted four days before the Super Tuesday Primaries, “one that he has been reciting almost verbatim since he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2004, when appliance giant Maytag was in the process of shutting a refrigerator plant [in Galesburg], putting 1,600 people out of work.” Obama was trying to steal John Edwards’ laborite thunder in Iowa by inveighing against mean-spirited corporations who used trade pacts to replace highly paid union workers with cheaper labor abroad
Despite Obama’s claims of deep concern for Galesburg’s proletarian victims, however, Maytag union members told Secter that Obama had done remarkably little to save the Galesburg workers’ jobs. Those workers belonged to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, whose president noted that “Obama’s support for Maytag workers was more show than substance.”
“Maytag union members said Obama had done remarkably little to save the Galesburg workers’ jobs.”
Maytag employees and former employees were particularly rankled by Obama’s inaction because he possessed a special relationship with a leading Maytag decision-maker. Between 2003 and 2008, Obama received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the family of Lester Crown, one of Maytag’s directors and largest investors. The Crowns and employees of their family-managed holding company (Henry Crown Investments) gave at least $195,000 to Obama’s senate and presidential campaigns between 2003 and 2008. According to Crown, however, Obama never once raised the fate of Maytag’s Galesburg workers with him.
“The high profile treatment given the Maytag situation” by Obama, Secter noted, “is a reminder of the often awkward intersection of the populist rhetoric, complex issues, and the financial realities of presidential campaigning.” It stood in ironic relation to Obama’s repeated criticism of his Democratic presidential rivals for “straying from their own populist images,” as when he hit Hillary Clinton for serving many years ago on the board of the anti-labor Wal Mart Company [5].
Pseudo-Populist “Campaign Rhetoric” on NAFTA and “Trade”
When addressing working-class audiences in the primary campaign, Obama recurrently boasted of his purported opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – widely and rightly blamed for massive job and wage losses by organized labor and working class voters but deemed a boon to the U.S. economy by the corporate interests that provided campaign dollars for his campaign. “I don’t think NAFTA has been good for Americans, and I never have,” Obama claimed before the Ohio Democratic primary, where “trade” and NAFTA emerged as leading campaign issues [6].
The reality of his record on the corporate-neoliberal “investor rights” bill [7] was considerably less populist than that comment suggested. During his 2004 Senate campaign, he argued for “more deals such as NAFTA,” claimed that one of his primary opponent’s call for higher, job-protecting tariffs would “spark a trade war,” and spoke repeatedly of the “enormous benefits” that “accrued to his state from NAFTA”[8].
In late February of 2008, New York Times business writer David Leaonhardt noted that both Obama and Senator Clinton had been “straddling NAFTA and trade issues.” After quoting an Obama speech telling Youngstown, Ohio workers they’d seen “job after job disappear because of bad trade deals like NAFTA,” Leaonhardt noted that “none of” Obama’s trade agenda was “particularly radical. Neither candidate calls for a repeal of NAFTA, or anything close to it. Both instead want to tinker with the bureaucratic innards of the agreement… It’s a bit of an odd situation,” Leaonhardt added. “They call the country’s trade policy a disaster, and yet their plan starts with, um, cracking down on Mexican pollution” [9].
“During his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama argued for ‘more deals such as NAFTA.’”
Matt Gonzales noted around the same time that Obama had dropped the populist ball when given an opportunity to protect workers from unfair trade agreements. Obama cast the deciding vote against an amendment to a 2005 Commerce Appropriations bill that would have “prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that provide safeguards from unfair foreign trade practices.” The amendment would have been “a vital tool to combat the outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers” [10].
Obama’s ambiguous position on “trade” received some especially unwelcome attention in the week before the Ohio and Texas primaries of early March 2008. That’s when his campaign was hit by the revelation that a top Obama staff member had made a revealing comment to Michael Wilson, the Canadian Ambassador to the United States. As the Canadian Television network (CTV) reported on February 27, 2008, the Obama staffer told Wilson to disregard Obama’s populace-pleasing political language on NAFTA and “trade.” That language was geared toward winning working-class votes in Ohio and should not be taken as a serious threat to the corporate globalizatization agenda U.S. and Canadian elites share, the Obama aid wanted the Canadian government to know. According to CTV News, “Barack Obama has ratcheted up his attacks on NAFTA, but a senior member of his campaign team told a Canadian official not to take his criticisms seriously, CTV News has learned… The staff member reassured Wilson that the criticism would only be campaign rhetoric and should not be taken at face value” [11].
Subsequent inquiry determined that the “staff member” was none other than Obama’s top economic adviser, University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, who also happened to be the chief economist of the regressive corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)[12].
527 Hypocrisy
Late in the Iowa Caucus campaign, Obama criticized John Edwards for serving the same “Washington special interests” that Edwards claimed to oppose because Edwards received support from independent labor-based groups (“527s”) affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) [13]. Obama knew very well (a) that Edwards had spoken against large corporate interests, not labor and (b) that capital, not labor, exercises dominant influence over the federal government. He also turned around and started taking money from the same exact groups prior to the Nevada Caucus. It was all very disingenuous, to say the least.
Wal-Mart Con
Especially when speaking before labor audiences, primary candidate Obama has made a point of slamming Wal-Mart for its notorious low-wage and worker-abusing practices. “I don’t shop there,” he said during the primary campaign. Great, but Obama has appointed as his economic policy director Jason Furman – a corporate-neoliberal economist (from the conservative “Hamilton Group”) who has defended the Wal-Mart as a blessing for poor Americans [14]. Obama also gave his endorsement in the spring of 2007 to the pro-Wal-Mart Alderman Dorothy Tillman, who joined Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in opposing a city council resolution that would have required Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers to pay workers a livable wage in the city of Chicago. Despite Obama’s endorsement, Tillman was defeated by Pat Dowell, who supported the “big box” ordinance, which was vetoed by Obama’s close ally Daley – the business-friendly “mayor for life” with whom Obama shares his chief media consultant (David Axelrod) [14A].
“I believe you care”
Speaking to Wall Street leaders at NASDAQ’s headquarters in the late summer of 2007, Obama told financial elites that “I believe all of you are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America. I believe you care about this country and the future we are leaving to the next generation. I believe your work to be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America. I think the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal” [15].
These were strange beliefs to (claim to) hold in light of the actual historical pattern of business behavior that naturally results from purpose and structure of the system of private profit. An endless army of nonprofit charities and social service-providers, citizens, environmental and community activists, trade union negotiators, and policymakers has spent decades asking (often enough begging) the “American” corporate and financial capitalist over-class to contribute to the domestic social good. The positive results are generally marginal and fleeting as the “business community” works with structurally super-empowered effectiveness to distribute wealth and power ever more upward and to serve the needs of private investors and capital accumulation over and above any considerations of social and environmental health and the common good at home or abroad. Holding no special allegiance to the American people in an age of corporate globalization, the economic elite is more than willing to significantly abandon the domestic U.S. society and its workers and communities to serve the ultimate business purpose: enhancing its bottom line [16].
Obama, no slouch in the brains department, knows all this very well. That means that his NASDAQ comment was a lie.
“Not fundamentally different”
In his campaign book The Audacity of Hope (2006), Obama tried to demonstrate his distance from black Americans who “angrily” denounce American racism and to curry favor with white middle class voters (many of whom want to think that racism and hence legitimate black anger is a “thing of the past”) by claiming that “What ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts” [17]. I am quite certain that he knew this statement to be thoroughly false in a nation where persistent, many-sided institutional racism continues to inflict wildly disproportionate poverty and misery on the black community [18]. A former community organizer, lawyer, and state legislator on the South Side of Chicago, Obama is too smart and too acquainted with basic social facts of U.S. life to believe his statement in Audacity. That would make his statement a lie.
To “protect” Jeremiah Wright
Last February, Obama revoked his then pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s scheduled statement of a public prayer before Obama’s official announcement of his candidacy for the White House, in Springfield, Illinois. A preacher known for fiery sermons against American racism, poverty, and imperialism, Wright was Obama’s avowed spiritual mentor – his personal agent of religious conversion on the South Side of Chicago in the middle 1980s.
Last April, Obama told New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor that he was “only shielding his pastor from the spotlight” when he booted Wright from the stage [19]. In July, Obama told Newsweek reporters Darren Briscoe and Richard Wolffe that he “may have been over-protective” toward Wright [20].
“Obama had acted to protect his campaign when he asked Wright to stand down.”
But anybody with any political common sense knew very well that Obama had acted to protect his campaign when he asked Wright to stand down. Kantor said as much when she wrote that “Mr. Wright’s assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government have drawn criticism, and prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.”
“So they got together and Barack Obama was born”
But the Rev. Wright story was just a little white lie compared to the big black fib Obama told in Selma, Alabama in early March of 2007. Trying to sound authentically African-American during a speech memorializing the forty-second anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights March at the Pettis Bridge in Selma, Obama claimed that his black (Kenyan) father and white (Kansan) mother married and conceived the future corporate-sponsored BaRockstar because of the great Civil Rights struggles fought in Selma and Birmingham, Alabama. “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama,” Obama intoned, “because some folks were willing to march across a bridge. So they [his parents] got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born.”
“So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama,” Obama said. “Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I’m here because somebody marched. I’m here because you all sacrificed for me” [21].
Never mind that Barack Obama Jr. was born in 1961, two years before the famous campaign to desegregate Birmingham, three years before the Civil Rights Act, and four years before the famous Selma march!
It’s true that Obama’s multicultural conception came four years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but his parents “getting together” across racial didn’t have much to do with the Civil Rights Movement. It was more likely a reflection of the fact that his home state of Hawaii was relatively “tolerant” on racial questions – a distant geographic and cultural cry from the racially segregated U.S. South to which Obama absurdly tried to claim strong biographical connection.
McCain, Iraq, The System…
I won’t go here into the deep and dark deception involved in Obama’s “fairy tale” (as Bill Clinton rightly said) claim to have opposed the occupation of Iraq “from the beginning” – a topic I have addressed at some length in an earlier ZNet essay titled “The Audacity of Deception: Barack Obama and the Manufacture of Progressive Illusion and in my forthcoming (August 2008) book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics. You can find many more sources and examples in that volume (order at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
Don’t get me wrong. For what it’s worth, John McCain is a chronic liar and Olympic-level flip-flopper in his own right – on tax cuts, offshore drilling, lobbyists, immigration reform, and more. He also happens to represent an extremist and dangerous right-wing agenda that progressive voters should resist by voting “for” Obama in contested states. There’s more than “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two candidates, not because the centrist Democratic contender is progressive (he’s corporate-neoliberal and imperial) but because the Republican standard-bearer and party is so dangerously far right. Once, again,as in 2004, this isn’t “Coke” (the Democrats) v. “Pepsi” (the Republicans): it’s corporate-neoliberal Coke versus arch-authoritarian and messianic-militaristic Crack [22].
“There’s more than ‘a dime’s worth of difference’ between the two candidates.”
I also think that most of Obama’s lies sadly make perfect sense from the perspective of a campaign that is “in it to win it.” The American narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted presidential election extravaganza is not about truth-telling – it’s about corporate-managed deception. This goes back a long way; it’s not new. Anybody who wants U.S. politicians to stop lying should support the following reforms [23]:
* Take private money out of public elections through the full mandatory equal and public financing of federal campaigns
* Introduce proportional representation in the election of state and congressional representatives.
* Provide extra public resources and public access – a form of political party affirmative action – for third, fourth, and fifth parties that have been discriminated against in the past.
* Introduce a parliamentary system whereby the chief executive is selected by and ultimately subordinated to the representative branch of government.
* If a presidential system remains, introduce “instant run off” voting – a mechanism permitting third and fourth parities to avoid functioning as “spoilers” by requiring that winners must receive at least 50 percent of the total vote. Let all voters mark their second and third favorite choices, hold an instant run off between the top candidates until one candidate secures at least 50 percent plus one.
* Permit “fusion” voting, whereby voters are free to support a major party candidate in the name of their own favorite third (or fourth, etc.) party.
* Mandate free media advertisements for all candidates.
* Remove candidate debates from private media corporations and hand them over to publicly funded, publicly elected, and publicly overseen citizen committees.
* Activate antitrust laws to break up the current corporate media oligopoly and distribute political news and information across a broader and more diverse range of print and media outlets.
* Require media campaign coverage to spend a designated relevant and disproportionate amount of time on policy and ideological differences between and among candidates and parties.
* Sharply restrict corporate lobbying.
* Restrict the right of corporations to draft laws governing their industries.
* Make it illegal to use shareholder funds for political reasons.
* Forbid former high-level politicians from becoming business lobbyists for ten years or more.
* Forbid current or former high-level corporate officers from sitting on commissions with regulatory power over their industries.
* Make it illegal for corporations to try to influence their employees’ votes.
* Repeal “investor rights” clauses in trade agreements, which let foreign and multinational corporations sue a national government for passing environmental, safety (job and consumer), labor, and/or anti-discrimination laws.
* Prohibit the granting of subsidies to companies who do not contribute to social and ecological health.
* Institute penalties for companies that extort concessions from workers, communities, and governments by threatening to leave a city, county, state or country.
* Significantly expand public media and provide significant new public subsidies and other resources for alternative and grassroots citizen’s media.
Introducing many of the top reforms suggested above, it should be acknowledged, would almost certainly require a Constitutional Amendment. However they are pursued and implemented, these are meaningful changes that should be consistently advanced by progressives. All of them are consistent with Obama’s recurrent call for Americans to act to change not just policies but also the very process and nature of U.S. politics itself.
Veteran radical historian Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (forthcoming in summer of 2008).
NOTES
1. Read at http://www.cfinst.org/pr/prRelease.aspx?ReleaseID=191.
2. Read at http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N000096380.
3. Mike McIntire, “Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama,” New York Times, 3 February, 2008, section 1, p. 1.
4. McIntire, “Nuclear Leaks.”
5. Bob Secter, “Obama’s Fundraising, Rhetoric Collide,” Chicago Tribune, February 2008, sec.1, p.7.
6. Public Broadcasting System, PBP News Hour, “Free Trade Agreement is Issue for Ohio Voters” (March 3, 2008), read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/us/jan-june08/nafta_3-03.html
7. For a useful and powerful analysis of NAFTA, see Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future and What It Will Take to Win it Back (New York: Wiley, 2006),pp. 9-37, 45-47, 126-54..
8. Associated Press, February 28, 2008.
9. David Leonhardt, “The Politics of Trade in Ohio,” New York Times, 27 February, 2008.
10. Matt Gonzales, “The Obama Craze: Count Me Out,” BeyondChron: San Francisco’s Online Daily (February 28 2008) read online at http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/index.php?itemid=5413#more.
11. CTV.ca News Staff, “Obama Staffer Gave Warning of NAFTA Rhetoric,” http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080227/dems_nafta_080227/20080227
12. Doug Henwood, “Would You like Change With That?” Left Business Observer, No. 117 (March 2008). From here on, I dispense with sources and people are referred to my forthcoming (due out in August) book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Paradigm Publishers).
13. Paul Krugman, “State of the Unions,” New York Times, December 24, 2007.
14. Josh Gerstein, “Wal-Mart Defender to Direct Obama’s Economic Policy,” New York Sun (June 10, 2008).
14A. For details, see Paul Street, “Obama’s Forgotten Wal-Mart Endorsement,” ZNet (August 28, 2007).
15. Barack Obama, “Our Common Stake in America’s Prosperity,” New York, New York (September 17, 2007).
16. An excellent account is Faux, The Global Class War.
17. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (New York: 2006), p. 247.
18. For an investigation of this in Obama’s own metropolitan backyard, see Paul Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
19. Jodi Kantor, “A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith,” New York Times, 30 April 2007, p. A1.
20. Richard Wolffe and Darren Briscoe, “Across the Divide: Barack Obama’s Road to Racial Reconstruction,” Newsweek (July 16, 2007).
21. Barack Obama, “Selma Voting Rights Commemoration,” Selma, Alabama, March 4, 2007. read at http://www.barackobama.com
22. “Kerry is Coke, Bush is Crack,” ZNet Magazine (March 24, 2004), available online at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=33&ItemID=5204.
23. Much of what follows comes from Charles Derber, Hidden Power: What You Need to Know to Save Our Democracy (San Francisco, CA: 2005)
Comment by dakinikat — June 25, 2008 @ 1:52 pm |
I have more flip flop stories..they are everywhere
stop by when you get a chance.
http://hillaryisourchoice.com/flip_flop.htm
and at the forum
http://hillaryisourchoice.com/simplemachinesforum/
I love our fight for our voices..
Comment by MM — June 27, 2008 @ 12:51 pm |
Obama Shifts on Welfare Reform
July 01, 2008 12:19 AM
ABC News’ Teddy Davis and Gregory Wallace Report: Barack Obama aligned himself with welfare reform on Monday, launching a television ad which touts the way the overhaul “slashed the rolls by 80 percent.” Obama leaves out, however, that he was against the 1996 federal legislation which precipitated the caseload reduction.
“I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare,” Obama said on the floor of the Illinois state Senate on May 31, 1997. “Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems.”
Obama’s transformation from critic to champion of welfare reform is the latest in a series of moves to the center. Since capturing the Democratic nomination, Obama has altered his stances on Social Security taxes, meeting with rogue leaders without preconditions, and the constitutionality of Washington, D.C.’s, sweeping gun ban.
The shift in Obama’s rhetoric on welfare reform has proceeded in stages. When Clinton was poised to sign welfare reform while running for re-election in 1996, Obama called it “disturbing.” A decade later, as an underdog running for president against Clinton’s wife, he spent 2007 avoiding the subject. By the time Obama emerged as the Democratic frontrunner in the spring of 2008, he began leaving the impression that he was for it all along.
During a 1996 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Obama could not conceal his disappointment in his fellow Democrat. “Bill Clinton? Well, his campaign’s fascinating to a student of politics. It’s disturbing to someone who cares about certain issues. But politically, it seems to be working,” said Obama.
Calling himself a believer in “making lemonade out of lemons,” Obama co-sponsored a bill in the Illinois legislature in 1997 which made changes to state programs to help move people from welfare to work.
He made clear at the time, however, that he probably would have opposed the federal welfare overhaul. Speaking on the floor of the Illinois state senate, Obama described his on-going concerns as including a lack of job training, insufficient oversight, and provisions blocking legal immigrants from receiving benefits.
While the states played an important role in helping people make the transition from welfare to work, the truly controversial decision which sparked the dramatic reduction in the welfare rolls was the one made by Clinton at the federal level to go along with work requirements and time limits.
Clinton said it was far from perfect legislation. But he signed it, saying, “Today, we are taking an historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be, a second chance, not a way of life.”
While campaigning for president in 2007, Obama refused on two occasions to say if he would have signed the same welfare-reform bill approved by the husband of his top rival.
After addressing the International Association of Firefighters on March 14, 2007, Obama told ABC News, “I tend not to look back to what would have been done 10 years ago. We’re talking about what I’m going to be doing for the next 10 years.”
When ABC News posed the same question four months later, Obama again refused to answer.
“I’m not going to re-litigate what happened back in the 90s,” said Obama at a July 17, 2007, press conference in Washington, D.C. “I’m talking about what’s going to be happening going forward.”
“Bill Clinton isn’t on the ballot,” he added.
Once he had become the Democratic frontrunner in the spring of 2008, Obama signaled that he had always backed the 1996 welfare reform.
Asked if he would have vetoed the reform measure, Obama told The New York Times in a story published on April 11, “I won’t second guess President Clinton for signing.”
Now, with the Democratic nomination firmly in hand, Obama is going one step further. In an ad airing in 18 states, including 14 carried by President Bush in 2004, Obama is celebrating a reduction in the welfare caseload made possible by legislation he originally opposed.
Watch the ad.
By glossing over his early opposition to welfare reform, Obama is stepping closer to the political mainstream. But by undergoing this transformation only once it became politically convenient, Obama’s critics will charge that he puts calculation ahead of conviction.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/06/obama-shifts-on.html
Comment by dakinikat — July 1, 2008 @ 10:29 am |
Also July 1:
Obama said in his speech yesterday:
“One of my earliest memories is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders and watching the astronauts come to shore in Hawaii.”
The astronauts arrived aboard the USS Hornet in July 1969. Obama claims he moved to Indonesia at the age of 6 and returned to live with his grandparents in 1971. Unless Obama was spending summers with his grandparents there is no way he could have seen the USS Hornet arrive in Hawaii.
Comment by dakinikat — July 1, 2008 @ 10:32 am |
57 states are the 57 states of Islam
check out OIC website………
Actually until last week it said 57, now it says 56
Check into the nation of islam and it will suggest that there are 57 states of Islam
Comment by Alecki — July 3, 2008 @ 11:23 am |
City Edition and Larry Pinkney from The Black Commentator has great articles on being bamboozled by Obama:
http://www.thecityedition.com/Pages/Archive/Winter08/2008Election.html
http://www.thecityedition.com/Pages/Archive/Winter08/OctoberSurprise.html
http://www.blackcommentator.com/263/263_cover_1_keeping_it_real_obama_euphoria.html
http://www.blackcommentator.com/265/265_keeping_it_real_goose_steppiong_behind_obama.html
Comment by yeshe — July 4, 2008 @ 10:48 pm |
More flip flop stories.they are endless..i added this site to my forum too
http://www.hillaryisourchoice.com/
Comment by Mary — July 9, 2008 @ 9:16 am |
Another Obama gaffe from his West Lafayette, Indiana speech,
“…..Throughout our history, America’s confronted constantly evolving danger, from the oppression of an empire, to the lawlessness of the frontier, from the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor, to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Americans have adapted to the threats posed by an ever-changing world. “ (emphasis added.)
Just “one bomb”? Obama lived in Hawaii so he should be familiar with the history of Pearl Harbor.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0807/16/ino.01.html
Comment by dakinikat — July 18, 2008 @ 12:53 am |
It looks like John McCain has won Missouri — the last state not marked in either red or blue on the electoral map. The Missouri Secretary of State’s office said Tuesday night the Arizona Republican led President-elect Barack Obama by
Comment by daschle obama — December 16, 2008 @ 2:23 pm |