Broken Promises
_
“Barack
Obama has an elastic (capable of being stretched) approach to reality. Facts that do not suit him are set aside and
replaced with fabrications . . . “
Ben Wallace-Wells, “Destiny’s Child”, Rolling Stone, 2/22/2007
"I don't know really what to say about myself. Why am I doing this? It grew out an experience I have with a person who was at our Headquarters that when asked a question, had no idea of how to answer and did not offer to look for the information. I, along with some others, in the club felt it was important to give our volunteers basic information about the campaign for the 2012 General Election. This is the most important election of our lifetime and Florida is a key state. Further the Route 4 corridor is going to be as important or more so that the state of Florida.
This information will examine Obama's promises that he had not fulfilled to the American people, his destructive policies and his bad judgement. I am hoping to focus on the Republican Plans especially for the economy and jobs.
I am hoping that people will pass some of this onto their friends and that the Young Republicans who read it will be better informed to talk to their peers." --- Susan Stambersky
TRANSPARENCY
Obama promised to be the most transparent president in history and make himself readily available to the press.
· Facts: At one point, it was well over 300 days without a press conference.
· Facts: Obama promised that he would publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days so that the public could read it before the President signed it. Obama grossly and repeatedly breached this promise. The Cato Institute as of April 2009, reports he broke this five day posting pledge, 10 times.
· Fact: The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, State Children Health Insurance Program, $800 billion Stimulus Bill, appropriation bills, and the Omnibus Spending Bill are examples.
· Fact: The Health Care Bill was not even given to Congress in enough time for them to read it before they voted on it.
· Fact: Obama promised (the promise was caught on videotape no fewer than eight separate times) he would televise the healthcare debates on C-SPAN. Until the final few weeks of the process, he wouldn’t even allow Republicans to participate, much less open the process to the cameras. PolitiFact agreed, declaring his promise “broken”.
BIPARTISANSHIP
This was a central theme of Obama’s campaign; he proclaimed Biden would “help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people”
· Fact: Obama deliberately and consistently cordoned Republicans off from the political process i.e. the Health Care Bill.
· Fact: It was seen in his false assertion that he adopted numerous Republican ideas in his health care bill. He promised bipartisanship in pretending to look into the Republican idea of tort reform saying “defensive medicine (that) may be contributing to unnecessary cost”
CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
PolitiFact called Obama out on his boast that “the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors across the country”.
· Fact: Obama did raise money from small donors but the majority of his funds came from large donors. Overall, PolitiFact reports that the evidence shows otherwise and his statement was completely false.
ENDING NO-BID CONTRACT
Candidate Obama said 10/2/2008, “I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all. The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton and the like will be over when I am in the White House.”
· Fact: Less than a year later, his administration awarded a $25 million no-bid federal contract for work in Afghanistan to Checchi and Company, a firm owned by a major donor to Democratic campaign.
EARMARKS
Obama declared, “The truth is our earmark system . . . is fraught with abuse. . . .I‘ve pledged to slash earmarks by more than half when I am president of the United States.”
· Fact: Once in office, he quickly broke this promise . . . apart from his $800 billion stimulus bill, which could be said to be one gigantic package of earmarks.
· Fact: The $410 billion omnibus bill had more than 8,500 earmarks.
· Fact: Taxpayers for Common Sense reported that for the fiscal year 2010 appropriations bills contained 9,499 congressional earmarks worth $15.9 billion up from the $15.6 billion the previous year.
LOBBYISTS
President Obama said in January 2010 “We must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve. . . And that’s why we’re excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seals on federal boards and commissions.”
· Fact: Obama signed an executive Order on Ethics Commitments, which prohibited lobbyists from working in his administration for two years on issues for which they had lobbied. PolitiFact reported 1/27/2010 that the White House had issued seven waivers to its ethics rules, which apply to lobbyists and to people who served as officers and directors of a company or organization, while executive branch agencies have issued an additional fifteen waivers. It is not possible to list then all in this paper.
BUDGET ACCOUNTING GIMMICKS
Obama promised to end budgetary accounting gimmicks used by his whipping boy predecessor, George Bush.
· Fact: Yet ObamaCare was defined by egregious budgetary gimmicks. In Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress he claimed to have identified $2 trillion in savings but $1.6 trillion of those were based on the Iraq surge continuing for ten more years.
· Fact: The New York Times David Brooks acknowledged ObamaCare was “stuffed . . . with gimmicks and dodges designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.”
THE FREE MARKET
In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week, Obama called himself a “fierce advocate” of the free market. “You would be hard pressed”, he said, “to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses.” Again 4/22/10 in New York City, Obama averred, “As I said two years ago on this stage, I believe in the power of the free market.”
· Fact: He was doing everything in his power to permanently dismantle much of it from his auto takeover to ObamaCare, to Cap and Trade, to the financial overhaul bill.
· Fact: Obama government takeover of GM and Chrysler, (in the reorganization, the retired teachers and policemen of Indiana retirement funds loss big while the UAW was the favored child), firing its CEOs and its board of directors, intervening by force in the mortgage business, interfering with existing private contracts, subsuming one-sixth of the economy with ObamaCare, trying to saddle businesses with stifling cap and trade laws (when it did not pass Congress, he passed regulations by executive order), preventing TARP companies from paying their loans back, setting executive compensation, demonizing the insurance industry and Big Pharma, and paving the way for the abolition of private health insurers.
FISCAL HAWK
Obama characterizes himself as a fiscal hawk, vowing to usher in a “new era of responsibility” to rise above petty politics and to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. He says he wants to steer America “from an era of borrow and spend” to one of “save and invest”
· Fact: The Congressional Budget Office reported that the national debt would double in six years under Obama and triple in ten years.
READ MY LIPS
Obama said, “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax, not any of your taxes.”9/12/2008
· Fact: Obama signed a law to triple the excise tax on cigarettes, from 39 cents to $1.01 a pack. There are at least 19 taxes included in the Health Care bill; seven of these which unquestionably violate Obama’s pledge. Fourteen of these taxes in the Health Care Bill will cost the middle class $316 billion dollars
· Fact: Obama attacks the media for even asking whether he would still keep his no-new-taxes pledge. Clearly, Obama can’t allow these pesky questions about old promises to obstruct his quest to transform America
CAP AND TAX
Obama also attempted to violate his tax pledge with the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill.
· Fact: The Heritage Foundation described the bill as nothing more than an energy tax in disguise and the most convoluted attempt at economic central planning this nation has ever attempted.
· Fact: Senator Lieberman explained the way the bill works is by “raising the cost of energy high enough so that individuals and businesses are forced to use less of it.”
· Fact: In the next two decades, electricity costs are projected to increase by 90%, gasoline by 58%, and natural gas by 55%. Lieberman further estimates manufacturing jobs losses will average 1.14 million.
· Fact: Following Obama’s vow to “bankrupt” the coal industry with draconian EPA regulations (these were through executive order), that dictate utility companies be forced to an initial outlay of $800 million dollars, he gave GE , one of his largest campaign donors, a waiver that makes GE completely exempt. The EPS regulations mandates “harmful” emissions be reduced under the Clean Air Act. This will drive up the cost of energy which will be passed on to the consumers and will exacerbate the problem of rolling blackouts. written by V2A 8/22/11
VAT
April 21, 2010, Obama suggested a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table.
· Fact: Adopting a VAT (Value Added Tax) would flagrantly breach his promise not to raise taxes.
ELIMINATION OF CAPITAL GAINS TAX
Obama promised on the campaign trail to end capital gains taxes for small businesses.
· Fact: It is no secret that Obama plans on increasing the capital gains tax rate from 15% to 20%. His 3.8% tax Medicare tax also constitutes a capital gains tax increase as well as a tax on individuals.
JOBS: “THE MOST IMPORTANT DOMESTIC PRIORITY
In his first State of the Union speech, Obama said “That is why jobs must be our number one focus in 2010 and that is why I am calling for a new bill tonight.”
· Fact: After cancelling his trip to Asia to lobby for the final passage of ObamaCare, Obama told an Indonesian TV reporter that healthcare is the “most important domestic priority here in the United States.”
UNEMPLOYMENT
Obama insisted unemployment would spinal out of control unless Congress passed his stimulus bill, which he said would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%
· Fact: more than a year after the bill passed, unemployment continued to hover between 9 and 10%
· Fact: Time Magazine declared the $787 billion stimulus turned out to far from stimulating and was failing by its own measure.
STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
The Associated Press followed Obama’s speech with a damming fact check
· Fact: Obama said starting in 2011 he would “freeze government spending for three years” except for national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Cato Institute reported the freeze only covers 13% of the total federal budget, and doesn’t cover the enormous spending mandated by the stimulus bill.
· Fact: Obama said that ObamaCare “would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan”. But he knew his plan had no such guarantee and he also knew the plan would likely crowd out our private insurers. The chief actuary of the Medicare program estimates 14 million people will lose their employer coverage. Many companies are now evaluating whether they can save money by paying the penalty in lieu of providing their employees healthcare coverage. It is estimated 51% of employers and 66% of small businesses will relinquishing their current health coverage by 2013.
· Fact: Obama said that the White House and Congress should “do our work openly, and . . . give our people the government they deserve.” AP noted that instead of working with Republicans, Democrats and the White House had made their private multi-million dollar deals behind closed doors with hospitals, pharmaceuticals and other stakeholders.
· Fact: Obama claimed he had saved two million jobs through his “stimulus” bill and was “on track to add another one and a half million more jobs to this total by the end of the year”. This is not based on any actual numbers but on Obama’s unshakable belief that deficit spending must create jobs and growth (blind faith on his part). The Heritage Foundation points out the important number to this discussion is 6.3 million, which represents the Obama jobs gap - the difference between the 3.3 million net jobs President Obama said would be created (not just saved) and the nearly 3 million additional net jobs that have since been lost.
· Fact: Obama claims he inherited overwhelming deficits from his predecessor. It was shown by Jeb Hensarling that average deficits during the twelve years when Republicans controlled the House were $104 billion, contrasted with the average deficits under the three years of Democratic control of $1.1 trillion.
· Fact: Obama announced, “Let me repeat: we cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95% of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first time home buyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college. As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas, and food, and other necessities, all of which helped business keep more workers.” Actually, according to the Cato Institute. Obama could not cut taxes for 95% of the Americans, since 40% of Americans pay no federal income taxes in the first place.
HEALTHCARE LIES
· Fact: “Under our plan no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions” The bill that finally went through obviously allowed federal funding for abortion
· Fact: “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage”. The inaccuracies in the statistic were the including of millions of uninsured who were not U.S. citizens. Also the millions included in the number were people who could afford health insurance but chose not to purchase it and millions more were already eligible for government benefits but did not avail themselves of them.
SINGLE-PAYER PLAN AND THE PUBLIC OPTION
Obama has routinely misrepresented his position on healthcare reform. He repeatedly denied a single-payer healthcare system, for example telling a New Hampshire townhall meeting, 8/11/09, that he never said he supported a single-payer healthcare system.
· Fact: In a videotape 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare plan.”
· Fact: In a SEIU healthcare forum, 3/24/07, “The public option is your friend”.
· Fact: The Washington Examiner’s editors agree that the public option as alive and well, but hidden . . . residing in Section 1334, pages 87-100 of the new heathcare law.
GOP HEALTHCARE PROPOSALS
Decrying the GOP as the “Party of No”, Obama denied for months that Republicans had any healthcare solutions.
· Fact: He did, however, invite them to a televised healthcare summit to discuss their ideas which was odd, as he had insisted that those ideas didn’t exist.
· Fact: The Republicans put forth for one, market-based solutions, in proposals as Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future.
IRAN AND ISRAEL
In Obama’s campaign, he denied any rumors that he was unfriendly to Israel and to Jewish interests. He told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee his goal would be to eliminate the nuclear threat to Israel from Iran.
· Fact: Clinton told Benjamin Netanyahu all issues between Israel and Palestine, including the possibility of a divided Jerusalem, must remain part of the negotiations, while Obama demanded that the Israeli government halt any new settlements or expansion in Eastern Jerusalem and demanded that the Israelis pull back to the 1967 borders.
WITHDRAWING TROOPS FROM IRAQ
Candidate Obama was adamant that he would withdraw “one to two combat brigades each month and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months”, even against the advice of the generals on the ground.
· Fact: He didn’t even come close to meeting this schedule and even abandoned his insistence on complete withdrawal, saying he would leave a residual force of 35,000 to 50,000 until the end of 2011.
NATIONAL SCURITY
Obama lashed out at President George Bush for employing legal justifications to support enhanced interrogation. He piously pledged to “abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our “highest ideals”.
· Fact: Obama’s own justice department used those same legal arguments when trying to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss Rasul vs Rumsfeld saying that the plaintiffs didn’t clearly establish that their constitutional right had been violated.
· Fact: Obama also vowed to stop “extraordinary rendition” and again his own justice department used Bush’s Justice Department’s supposedly unacceptable arguments in Mohamed et al. vs Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.
THE BORN ALIVE INFANT PROTECTION ACT
During the campaign, Obama repeatedly lied about his record on this while audaciously accusing his critics of lying. In a CBN interview with David Brody, he said the National Right to Life had lied in asserting that he had voted against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. He also claimed that doctors would take care of such infants who were born alive and therefore no law was needed.
· Fact: While in the Illinois Senate, Obama opposed the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Bill – a measure almost identical to the federal Born Alive Infant Protection bill.
· Fact: Obama voted against the bill in committee but in Illinois Senate he voted “present”.
· Fact: In 2002 in the U.S. Senate, he voted “no” in committee, gave a floor speech opposing it and voted “no” on the floor.
MORE BROKEN PROMISES:
· Fact: Pushing bills through Congress without the promised transparency was part of Obama administration’s overall strategy to weaken the impact of any organized opposition. Another component of the strategy was to overwhelm the opposition with the sheer volume of programs the White House pushed at any one time.
· Fact: . . . more consequential, his surreptitious packaging of unpopular provisions in larger pieces of legislation to avoid public scrutiny. These included his reversal of the highly successful welfare reform of the 1990s and his establishment of a super medical board . . . as well as the government takeover of student loans.
· Fact: We all saw it in his belated push for off shore drilling, his promise to jump start nuclear energy production, and his duplicitous overtures to the coal industry after he promised to bankrupt it.
· Fact: In addition, Obama’s past advocacy of using federal regulations to squelch conservative talk radio, his withholding of documents requested by Republicans from private meetings between the White House and medical providers, his withholding of data from the “Cash for Clunkers” program, his hiding of information on the expenditure of union dues, his failed effort to exclude FOX News from access to his pay czar, Kenneth Fienberg and his “secret slush fund” . . .for taxes and spending on climate change.
· Fact: Hidden inside the administration’s 2011 budget are other examples of his unwillingness to be “the most transparent president in history”.
Information secured from: Crimes Against Liberty, David Limbaugh
The Wall Street Journal
Ben Wallace-Wells, “Destiny’s Child”, Rolling Stone, 2/22/2007
"I don't know really what to say about myself. Why am I doing this? It grew out an experience I have with a person who was at our Headquarters that when asked a question, had no idea of how to answer and did not offer to look for the information. I, along with some others, in the club felt it was important to give our volunteers basic information about the campaign for the 2012 General Election. This is the most important election of our lifetime and Florida is a key state. Further the Route 4 corridor is going to be as important or more so that the state of Florida.
This information will examine Obama's promises that he had not fulfilled to the American people, his destructive policies and his bad judgement. I am hoping to focus on the Republican Plans especially for the economy and jobs.
I am hoping that people will pass some of this onto their friends and that the Young Republicans who read it will be better informed to talk to their peers." --- Susan Stambersky
TRANSPARENCY
Obama promised to be the most transparent president in history and make himself readily available to the press.
· Facts: At one point, it was well over 300 days without a press conference.
· Facts: Obama promised that he would publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days so that the public could read it before the President signed it. Obama grossly and repeatedly breached this promise. The Cato Institute as of April 2009, reports he broke this five day posting pledge, 10 times.
· Fact: The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, State Children Health Insurance Program, $800 billion Stimulus Bill, appropriation bills, and the Omnibus Spending Bill are examples.
· Fact: The Health Care Bill was not even given to Congress in enough time for them to read it before they voted on it.
· Fact: Obama promised (the promise was caught on videotape no fewer than eight separate times) he would televise the healthcare debates on C-SPAN. Until the final few weeks of the process, he wouldn’t even allow Republicans to participate, much less open the process to the cameras. PolitiFact agreed, declaring his promise “broken”.
BIPARTISANSHIP
This was a central theme of Obama’s campaign; he proclaimed Biden would “help me turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington, so we can bring Democrats and Republicans together to pass an agenda that works for the American people”
· Fact: Obama deliberately and consistently cordoned Republicans off from the political process i.e. the Health Care Bill.
· Fact: It was seen in his false assertion that he adopted numerous Republican ideas in his health care bill. He promised bipartisanship in pretending to look into the Republican idea of tort reform saying “defensive medicine (that) may be contributing to unnecessary cost”
CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
PolitiFact called Obama out on his boast that “the vast majority of the money I got was from small donors across the country”.
· Fact: Obama did raise money from small donors but the majority of his funds came from large donors. Overall, PolitiFact reports that the evidence shows otherwise and his statement was completely false.
ENDING NO-BID CONTRACT
Candidate Obama said 10/2/2008, “I will finally end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all. The days of sweetheart deals for Halliburton and the like will be over when I am in the White House.”
· Fact: Less than a year later, his administration awarded a $25 million no-bid federal contract for work in Afghanistan to Checchi and Company, a firm owned by a major donor to Democratic campaign.
EARMARKS
Obama declared, “The truth is our earmark system . . . is fraught with abuse. . . .I‘ve pledged to slash earmarks by more than half when I am president of the United States.”
· Fact: Once in office, he quickly broke this promise . . . apart from his $800 billion stimulus bill, which could be said to be one gigantic package of earmarks.
· Fact: The $410 billion omnibus bill had more than 8,500 earmarks.
· Fact: Taxpayers for Common Sense reported that for the fiscal year 2010 appropriations bills contained 9,499 congressional earmarks worth $15.9 billion up from the $15.6 billion the previous year.
LOBBYISTS
President Obama said in January 2010 “We must take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; and to give our people the government they deserve. . . And that’s why we’re excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seals on federal boards and commissions.”
· Fact: Obama signed an executive Order on Ethics Commitments, which prohibited lobbyists from working in his administration for two years on issues for which they had lobbied. PolitiFact reported 1/27/2010 that the White House had issued seven waivers to its ethics rules, which apply to lobbyists and to people who served as officers and directors of a company or organization, while executive branch agencies have issued an additional fifteen waivers. It is not possible to list then all in this paper.
BUDGET ACCOUNTING GIMMICKS
Obama promised to end budgetary accounting gimmicks used by his whipping boy predecessor, George Bush.
· Fact: Yet ObamaCare was defined by egregious budgetary gimmicks. In Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress he claimed to have identified $2 trillion in savings but $1.6 trillion of those were based on the Iraq surge continuing for ten more years.
· Fact: The New York Times David Brooks acknowledged ObamaCare was “stuffed . . . with gimmicks and dodges designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.”
THE FREE MARKET
In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week, Obama called himself a “fierce advocate” of the free market. “You would be hard pressed”, he said, “to identify a piece of legislation that we have proposed out there that, net, is not good for businesses.” Again 4/22/10 in New York City, Obama averred, “As I said two years ago on this stage, I believe in the power of the free market.”
· Fact: He was doing everything in his power to permanently dismantle much of it from his auto takeover to ObamaCare, to Cap and Trade, to the financial overhaul bill.
· Fact: Obama government takeover of GM and Chrysler, (in the reorganization, the retired teachers and policemen of Indiana retirement funds loss big while the UAW was the favored child), firing its CEOs and its board of directors, intervening by force in the mortgage business, interfering with existing private contracts, subsuming one-sixth of the economy with ObamaCare, trying to saddle businesses with stifling cap and trade laws (when it did not pass Congress, he passed regulations by executive order), preventing TARP companies from paying their loans back, setting executive compensation, demonizing the insurance industry and Big Pharma, and paving the way for the abolition of private health insurers.
FISCAL HAWK
Obama characterizes himself as a fiscal hawk, vowing to usher in a “new era of responsibility” to rise above petty politics and to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. He says he wants to steer America “from an era of borrow and spend” to one of “save and invest”
· Fact: The Congressional Budget Office reported that the national debt would double in six years under Obama and triple in ten years.
READ MY LIPS
Obama said, “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax, not any of your taxes.”9/12/2008
· Fact: Obama signed a law to triple the excise tax on cigarettes, from 39 cents to $1.01 a pack. There are at least 19 taxes included in the Health Care bill; seven of these which unquestionably violate Obama’s pledge. Fourteen of these taxes in the Health Care Bill will cost the middle class $316 billion dollars
· Fact: Obama attacks the media for even asking whether he would still keep his no-new-taxes pledge. Clearly, Obama can’t allow these pesky questions about old promises to obstruct his quest to transform America
CAP AND TAX
Obama also attempted to violate his tax pledge with the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill.
· Fact: The Heritage Foundation described the bill as nothing more than an energy tax in disguise and the most convoluted attempt at economic central planning this nation has ever attempted.
· Fact: Senator Lieberman explained the way the bill works is by “raising the cost of energy high enough so that individuals and businesses are forced to use less of it.”
· Fact: In the next two decades, electricity costs are projected to increase by 90%, gasoline by 58%, and natural gas by 55%. Lieberman further estimates manufacturing jobs losses will average 1.14 million.
· Fact: Following Obama’s vow to “bankrupt” the coal industry with draconian EPA regulations (these were through executive order), that dictate utility companies be forced to an initial outlay of $800 million dollars, he gave GE , one of his largest campaign donors, a waiver that makes GE completely exempt. The EPS regulations mandates “harmful” emissions be reduced under the Clean Air Act. This will drive up the cost of energy which will be passed on to the consumers and will exacerbate the problem of rolling blackouts. written by V2A 8/22/11
VAT
April 21, 2010, Obama suggested a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table.
· Fact: Adopting a VAT (Value Added Tax) would flagrantly breach his promise not to raise taxes.
ELIMINATION OF CAPITAL GAINS TAX
Obama promised on the campaign trail to end capital gains taxes for small businesses.
· Fact: It is no secret that Obama plans on increasing the capital gains tax rate from 15% to 20%. His 3.8% tax Medicare tax also constitutes a capital gains tax increase as well as a tax on individuals.
JOBS: “THE MOST IMPORTANT DOMESTIC PRIORITY
In his first State of the Union speech, Obama said “That is why jobs must be our number one focus in 2010 and that is why I am calling for a new bill tonight.”
· Fact: After cancelling his trip to Asia to lobby for the final passage of ObamaCare, Obama told an Indonesian TV reporter that healthcare is the “most important domestic priority here in the United States.”
UNEMPLOYMENT
Obama insisted unemployment would spinal out of control unless Congress passed his stimulus bill, which he said would boost the economy and keep the unemployment rate below 8%
· Fact: more than a year after the bill passed, unemployment continued to hover between 9 and 10%
· Fact: Time Magazine declared the $787 billion stimulus turned out to far from stimulating and was failing by its own measure.
STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
The Associated Press followed Obama’s speech with a damming fact check
· Fact: Obama said starting in 2011 he would “freeze government spending for three years” except for national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Cato Institute reported the freeze only covers 13% of the total federal budget, and doesn’t cover the enormous spending mandated by the stimulus bill.
· Fact: Obama said that ObamaCare “would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan”. But he knew his plan had no such guarantee and he also knew the plan would likely crowd out our private insurers. The chief actuary of the Medicare program estimates 14 million people will lose their employer coverage. Many companies are now evaluating whether they can save money by paying the penalty in lieu of providing their employees healthcare coverage. It is estimated 51% of employers and 66% of small businesses will relinquishing their current health coverage by 2013.
· Fact: Obama said that the White House and Congress should “do our work openly, and . . . give our people the government they deserve.” AP noted that instead of working with Republicans, Democrats and the White House had made their private multi-million dollar deals behind closed doors with hospitals, pharmaceuticals and other stakeholders.
· Fact: Obama claimed he had saved two million jobs through his “stimulus” bill and was “on track to add another one and a half million more jobs to this total by the end of the year”. This is not based on any actual numbers but on Obama’s unshakable belief that deficit spending must create jobs and growth (blind faith on his part). The Heritage Foundation points out the important number to this discussion is 6.3 million, which represents the Obama jobs gap - the difference between the 3.3 million net jobs President Obama said would be created (not just saved) and the nearly 3 million additional net jobs that have since been lost.
· Fact: Obama claims he inherited overwhelming deficits from his predecessor. It was shown by Jeb Hensarling that average deficits during the twelve years when Republicans controlled the House were $104 billion, contrasted with the average deficits under the three years of Democratic control of $1.1 trillion.
· Fact: Obama announced, “Let me repeat: we cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95% of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first time home buyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college. As a result, millions of Americans had more to spend on gas, and food, and other necessities, all of which helped business keep more workers.” Actually, according to the Cato Institute. Obama could not cut taxes for 95% of the Americans, since 40% of Americans pay no federal income taxes in the first place.
HEALTHCARE LIES
· Fact: “Under our plan no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions” The bill that finally went through obviously allowed federal funding for abortion
· Fact: “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage”. The inaccuracies in the statistic were the including of millions of uninsured who were not U.S. citizens. Also the millions included in the number were people who could afford health insurance but chose not to purchase it and millions more were already eligible for government benefits but did not avail themselves of them.
SINGLE-PAYER PLAN AND THE PUBLIC OPTION
Obama has routinely misrepresented his position on healthcare reform. He repeatedly denied a single-payer healthcare system, for example telling a New Hampshire townhall meeting, 8/11/09, that he never said he supported a single-payer healthcare system.
· Fact: In a videotape 2003, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal healthcare plan.”
· Fact: In a SEIU healthcare forum, 3/24/07, “The public option is your friend”.
· Fact: The Washington Examiner’s editors agree that the public option as alive and well, but hidden . . . residing in Section 1334, pages 87-100 of the new heathcare law.
GOP HEALTHCARE PROPOSALS
Decrying the GOP as the “Party of No”, Obama denied for months that Republicans had any healthcare solutions.
· Fact: He did, however, invite them to a televised healthcare summit to discuss their ideas which was odd, as he had insisted that those ideas didn’t exist.
· Fact: The Republicans put forth for one, market-based solutions, in proposals as Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America’s Future.
IRAN AND ISRAEL
In Obama’s campaign, he denied any rumors that he was unfriendly to Israel and to Jewish interests. He told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee his goal would be to eliminate the nuclear threat to Israel from Iran.
· Fact: Clinton told Benjamin Netanyahu all issues between Israel and Palestine, including the possibility of a divided Jerusalem, must remain part of the negotiations, while Obama demanded that the Israeli government halt any new settlements or expansion in Eastern Jerusalem and demanded that the Israelis pull back to the 1967 borders.
WITHDRAWING TROOPS FROM IRAQ
Candidate Obama was adamant that he would withdraw “one to two combat brigades each month and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months”, even against the advice of the generals on the ground.
· Fact: He didn’t even come close to meeting this schedule and even abandoned his insistence on complete withdrawal, saying he would leave a residual force of 35,000 to 50,000 until the end of 2011.
NATIONAL SCURITY
Obama lashed out at President George Bush for employing legal justifications to support enhanced interrogation. He piously pledged to “abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our “highest ideals”.
· Fact: Obama’s own justice department used those same legal arguments when trying to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss Rasul vs Rumsfeld saying that the plaintiffs didn’t clearly establish that their constitutional right had been violated.
· Fact: Obama also vowed to stop “extraordinary rendition” and again his own justice department used Bush’s Justice Department’s supposedly unacceptable arguments in Mohamed et al. vs Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc.
THE BORN ALIVE INFANT PROTECTION ACT
During the campaign, Obama repeatedly lied about his record on this while audaciously accusing his critics of lying. In a CBN interview with David Brody, he said the National Right to Life had lied in asserting that he had voted against the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. He also claimed that doctors would take care of such infants who were born alive and therefore no law was needed.
· Fact: While in the Illinois Senate, Obama opposed the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Bill – a measure almost identical to the federal Born Alive Infant Protection bill.
· Fact: Obama voted against the bill in committee but in Illinois Senate he voted “present”.
· Fact: In 2002 in the U.S. Senate, he voted “no” in committee, gave a floor speech opposing it and voted “no” on the floor.
MORE BROKEN PROMISES:
· Fact: Pushing bills through Congress without the promised transparency was part of Obama administration’s overall strategy to weaken the impact of any organized opposition. Another component of the strategy was to overwhelm the opposition with the sheer volume of programs the White House pushed at any one time.
· Fact: . . . more consequential, his surreptitious packaging of unpopular provisions in larger pieces of legislation to avoid public scrutiny. These included his reversal of the highly successful welfare reform of the 1990s and his establishment of a super medical board . . . as well as the government takeover of student loans.
· Fact: We all saw it in his belated push for off shore drilling, his promise to jump start nuclear energy production, and his duplicitous overtures to the coal industry after he promised to bankrupt it.
· Fact: In addition, Obama’s past advocacy of using federal regulations to squelch conservative talk radio, his withholding of documents requested by Republicans from private meetings between the White House and medical providers, his withholding of data from the “Cash for Clunkers” program, his hiding of information on the expenditure of union dues, his failed effort to exclude FOX News from access to his pay czar, Kenneth Fienberg and his “secret slush fund” . . .for taxes and spending on climate change.
· Fact: Hidden inside the administration’s 2011 budget are other examples of his unwillingness to be “the most transparent president in history”.
Information secured from: Crimes Against Liberty, David Limbaugh
The Wall Street Journal
