WaPo Fact-Checker: Obama’s Propaganda Film Lied About His Mother Being Denied Health Insurance for Preexisting Conditions

Another day and another Obama lie exposed. This isn’t the first time Obama has lied about his past to push his political ideology.

From WaPo:

Narrator Tom Hanks: “He knew from experience the cost of waiting [on health care reform].”

President Obama : “When my mom got cancer, she wasn’t a wealthy woman and it pretty much drained all her resources”

Michelle Obama: “She developed ovarian cancer, never really had good, consistent insurance. That’s a tough thing to deal with, watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented. I don’t think he wants to see anyone go through that.”

Hanks: “And he remembered the millions of families like of his who feel the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage.”

–series of statements with images of Obama and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in the Obama campaign film “The Road We’ve Traveled”

“The Road We’ve Traveled” is a very slick and impressively produced campaign film—sheer catnip for Obama fans. There are a number of facts and figures that could be challenged, but for now we are going to focus on this sequence. The series of words and images is an excellent example of how such films can create a misleading impression, while skirting as close as possible to the edge of falsehood.

The sequence, in fact, evokes a famous story that candidate Obama told during the 2008 campaign—that his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, fought with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

But the story was later called into question by Dunham’s biographer. The fact that Obama’s initial claim is not directly repeated suggests the filmmakers knew there was a problem with the campaign story, but they clearly wanted to keep some version of it in the film.

The Facts

During the 2008 campaign, Obama frequently suggested his mother had to fight with her health-insurance company for treatment of her cancer because it considered her disease to be a pre-existing condition. In one of the presidential debates with GOP rival John McCain, Obama said:

“For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

But then earlier this year, journalist Janny Scott cast serious doubt on this version of events in her excellent biography, “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s mother.” Scott reviewed letters from Dunham to the CIGNA insurance company, and revealed the dispute was over disability coverage, not health insurance coverage (see pages 335-339).

Disability coverage will help replace wages lost to an illness. (Dunham received a base pay of $82,500, plus a housing allowance and a car, to work in Indonesia for Development Alternatives Inc. of Bethesda, according to Scott.) But that is different than health insurance coverage denied because of a pre-existing condition, which was a major part of the president’s health care law.

Scott writes that Dunham, who died in 1995 of uterine and ovarian cancer, had health insurance that “covered most of the costs of her medical treatment…The hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”

When Scott’s book was published, the White House did not dispute her account. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago,” a spokesman said.

…We use a “reasonable man” standard here, and we think there are few viewers of this film who would watch this sequence and conclude that Dunham was involved in anything but a fight over health-insurance coverage.

The disability-insurance dispute certainly may have motivated the president, but he has never explicitly stated that. In any case, the filmmakers must have known they had a problem with this story or else they would have recounted it as Obama had done in the 2008 campaign, using phrases such as “pre-existing conditions,” “health insurance,” and “treatment.”

Instead, they arranged the quotes and images to leave a misleading impression of what really happened.

 

Three Pinocchios

 

Read Full Post »

Taxpayer Alert: HUD Awards $42 Million in “Housing Counseling Funds” to Liberal Activist Groups

More redistribution of wealth from the US taxpayers to Obama supporters.

(CNSNews.com) – The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) announced the release of $42 million in federal funding for mortgage counseling, including to groups such as La Raza, the Urban League, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

“The HUD-approved counseling agencies this funding supports are crucial in helping struggling families on a one-to-one basis to manage their money, navigate the homebuying process, and secure their financial futures,” HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan said on a conference call Friday.

The same Shaun Donovan who worked with ACORN. You know…that group Obama ‘barely’ knows.

However, some of those “HUD-approved” groups include well-known liberal activist organizations.

One such group, the National Council of La Raza – a Spanish word that translates to “the Race” – received approximately $1.7 million from HUD. La Raza has long supported so-called comprehensive immigration reform that would effectively grant amnesty to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in America.

Another liberal group, the National Urban League, received approximately $1.05 million in HUD funds. The Urban League is one of America’s oldest civil rights organizations with a long history of social justice initiatives. Recently, it has denounced voter ID laws as “voter suppression by another name.”

A third liberal group is the National Community Reinvestment Corporation, which received approximately $2.5 million from HUD. NCRC is an activist group that seeks to combat perceived discrimination in housing and mortgage lending, and advocate for stronger enforcement of the federal Community Reinvestment Act – including expanding the CRA to securities firms, insurance companies, and mortgage companies – despite the fact that many claim the CRA played a major role in the 2008 mortgage crisis.

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

ATF Caught, Then Released, Top “Fast and Furious” Gun Trafficking Suspect

Of course they let him go. This was AG Eric Holder’s attempt to “brainwash” Americans with false information about guns in order to push for stricter gun control laws. Fast and Furious was a deliberate plan to infringe on the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. All the evidence proves Holder is guilty of treason, murder and international firearms trafficking.

Obama’s stimulus paid for the Fast and Furious Operation. Obama order the operation. Holder bragged about the operation. DOJ members attempted to smear the whistleblower.  Holder lied about his knowledge of the operation while testifying to Congress.

From the LATimes:

Seven months after federal agents began the ill-fated Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation, they stumbled upon their main suspect in a remote Arizona outpost on the Mexican border, driving an old BMW with 74 rounds of ammunition and nine cellphones hidden inside.

Detained for questioning that day in May 2010, Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta described to agents from theBureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosiveshis close association with a top Mexican drug cartel member, according to documents obtained this weekend by the Times/Tribune Washington Bureau.

The top Fast and Furious investigator, Special Agent Hope MacAllister, scribbled her phone number on a $10 bill after he pledged to cooperate and keep in touch with investigators.

Then Celis-Acosta disappeared into Mexico. He never called.

Had they arrested him red-handed trying to smuggle ammunition into Mexico, Fast and Furious might have ended quickly. Instead, the program dragged on for another eight months, spiraling out of control.

Celis-Acosta continued slipping back and forth across the border, authorities say, illegally purchasing more U.S. weapons and financing others. He was not arrested until February 2011, a month after Fast and Furious closed down.

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

Obama Subsidized Solar Company Sells Solar Panels To Itself That Taxpayers Paid For

More Obama cronyism. Obama rewards millions to another solar  company who then takes the loan and sells solar panels…to itself.

From The Washington Examiner:

A heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself.

First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama’s insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare.

Here’s the road of subsidies these solar panels followed from Perrysburg, Ohio, to St. Clair, Ontario.

First Solar is an Arizona-based manufacturer of solar panels. In 2010, the Obama administration awarded the company $16.3 million to expand its factory in Ohio — a subsidy Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland touted in his failed re-election bid that year.

Five weeks before the 2010 election, Strickland announced more than a million dollars in job training grants to First Solar. The Ohio Department of Development also lent First Solar $5 million, and the state’s Air Quality Development Authority gave the company an additional $10 million loan.

After First Solar pocketed this $17.3 million in government grants and $15 million in government loans, Ex-Im entered the scene.

In September 2011, Ex-Im approved $455.7 million in loan guarantees to subsidize the sale of solar panels to two wind farms in Canada. That means if the wind farm ever defaults, the taxpayers pick up the tab, ensuring First Solar gets paid.

But the buyer, in this case, was First Solar.

A small corporation called St. Clair Solar owned the wind farm and was the Canadian company buying First Solar’s panels. But St. Clair Solar was a wholly owned subsidiary of First Solar. So, basically, First Solar was shipping its own solar panels from Ohio to a solar farm it owned in Canada, and the U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing this “export.”

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

Anyone Remember the Obama Administration’s Policies Which Sought to Discourage the “Overproduction” of Oil?

Probably not. The media is still in full ‘Cover Obama’s Ass Mode’ and know that high gas prices are bad during an election year.

From RedState:

In May 2009, four months into the Obama presidency, retail gasoline prices averaged $2.32 per gallon. Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA) wrote Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to express concern about the impact that the Administration’s budgeted changes in tax policy would have on the oil and gas industry. Secretary Geithner clearly laid out the Administration position in his letter of response (pdf link).

That was then, this is now.

In just three years’ time, retail gasoline prices are up 68%. $4.00+ gasoline prices loom as a key reelection vulnerability for the President; in response, the Administration’s rhetoric has shifted to “energy friendly”, but its original energy-hostile policies have not changed a whit.

From Secretary Geithner’s May 2009 letter:

The Administration believes that oil and gas preferences distort markets byencouraging more investment in the oil and gas industry than would occur under a neutral system. To the extent the credit (sic) encourages overproduction of oil, it is detrimental to long-term energy security and is also inconsistent with the Administration’s policy of reducing carbon emissions and encouraging the use of renewable energy sources through acap-and-trade program. Moreover, the credit (sic) must ultimately be financed with taxes that result in underinvestment in other, potentially more productive, areas of the economy.

The President campaigned on the idea that, if we are to finally reduce our dependence on foreign oil, we need to set aside old political battles and instead make the investments in new clean energy technology that will create good jobs here at home.

So, to recap:

• Encouraging more investment (drilling) is a bad thing, because
• More drilling leads to too much production(!), which is
• … detrimental to the nation’s long-term energy security (!!)
• Cheaper hydrocarbon fuel would work against the Administration’s goal of reducing carbon emissions.
• Carbon-based fuels were destined cost more (via taxation) under a cap-and-trade system anyway.
• We can raise the taxes on industry by taking away the deductions (not “credits”) which have historically, and successfully, encouraged drilling, and
• Redirect that money, and then some, to our political friends who are invested in “green” technologies (read: Solyndra, Fisker, et al).
• As was pointed out in my blog at the time, we have a Treasury Secretary who doesn’t know the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit. Given his difficulties with TurboTax, perhaps this should not be surprising.

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

ABC Poll: 67% Want the Supreme Court to Rule Against ObamaCare’s Individual Mandate

What is ironic is Obama has been touting his health care takeover as an accomplishment, despite the majority of Americans being against it.

From ABCNews:

Two-thirds of Americans say the U.S. Supreme Court should throw out either the individual mandate  in the federal health care law or the law in its entirety,  signaling the depth of public disagreement with that  element of  the Affordable Care Act.

This ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that Americans oppose the law overall by 52-41 percent. And 67 percent believe  the high court should either ditch the  law or at least the portion that requires nearly all Americans to have coverage.

The high court opens hearings on the law’s constitutionality a week from today.

The law  has never earned majority support in ABC/Post polls – and this update, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds a strong sense its critics are dominating the debate. Seventy percent of Americans report hearing mainly negative things about the law lately;  just 19 percent say the buzz has been positive. Even among its supporters, 53 percent are hearing more negatives than positives. Among opponents this soars to 88 percent.

Intensity of sentiment is more negative as well: Forty-one percent strongly oppose the law, while only a quarter strongly support it.

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

WaPo Contradicts Team Obama and Democrats: Obama Was the One Who Walked Away From Boehner During Debt Talks

As we all know, President McDowngrade is to blame for the failed debt talks and credit downgrade. The WaPo article also proves Obama and the Democrats are liars who attempted to paint Republicans as obstructionist when it was Obama and Democrats obstructing the entire time. Love when liberal myths and lies are exposed. We now learn that Obama ignored his deficit commission (Bowles-Simpson) and he walked away from working out a deal with House Speaker John Boehner.

From Politico:

The verdict is in: Team Boehner has taken Round One of the great journalistic reconstruction of last year’s failed debt talks.

Eight months after deficit talks collapsed between the nation’s top two elected officials, a 4,600-word inside-the-room narrative by The Washington Post on Sunday — the first of several sweeping accounts in the works — paints the Obama administration as walking away from a nearly-done agreement with Boehner. And when the president eventually came around and wanted to cut a deal, Boehner said it was too late.

In short, the Post piece bolsters the Boehner team’s narrative that it was Obama who got cold feet and became unwilling to strike a grand bargain to fix the nation’s finances.

“The story makes it clear that the facts are as we’ve always described them,” said Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, in a Sunday interview. “The speaker showed a great deal of courage by putting $800 billion in revenues through tax reform on the table, and the White House couldn’t close the deal. They moved the goal posts and refused to get serious.”

The White House declined to talk about the story on the record. But senior advisers have long maintained it was GOP intransigence and Boehner’s inability to round up votes from his members that scuttled the deal.

Nothing defeats liberal lies better than one of their own…

…But in the Post’s version of events, Obama is portrayed as getting spooked by a backlash from the left if he pulled the trigger. And former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley provided surprising, on-the-record support of the GOP’s insistence that the president deserves blame for losing his will.

Daley said the White House privately fretted that Democrats would go ballistic if the president agreed to $800 billion in new tax revenues when some Republican senators had signaled willingness to go along with as much as $2 trillion.

“The Democratic leaders already thought we were idiot negotiators,” Daley said, according to the story. “So I called [Boehner Chief of Staff] Barry [Jackson] and said, ‘What are we going to do here? How are we going to sell Democrats to take $800 billion when Republican senators have signed on to” nearly $2 trillion.

This is probably why Daley is Obama’s “former” chief of staff.

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

Democrats and Their Gas Price Hypocrisy (Video)

Democrats when gas prices hit $3 under Bush= it’s Bush’s fault. Democrats when gas doubled under Obama=it’s everyone’s fault but Obama. Smell the hypocrisy?

The difference? Bush didn’t want high gas/energy prices. Obama and his gaggle of goons do.

Read Full Post »

Left-Wing Media Matters Linked to Anti-American/Anti-Israel Al Jazerra Network

Media Matters is the George Soros funded media group that watches Fox News for lefties and spreads Obama’s propaganda. Is it really a shock that they are linked to anti-American/pro-terrorist Al Jazerra?

From the Daily Caller:

Media Matters for America is linked with Al-Jazeera, the anti-American and anti-Israeli cable news channel, The Daily Caller has learned.

Media Matters Action Network senior foreign policy fellow MJ Rosenberg’s column for the liberal organization regularly appears on Al-Jazeera’s website and, in 2010, Rosenberg represented Media Matters at a forum hosted by Al-Jazeera in Doha, Qatar where he praised the news outlet as “mainstream.”

Media Matters Action Network is part of the organization’s political arm.

According to two Daily Caller sources, the then-director general of Al-Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar, also visited Media Matters’ offices in Washington in 2010 and met with the organization’s two top leaders, David Brock and Eric Boehlert.

Representing Media Matters at the first Al-Jazeera “Unplugged” forum on social media at the Sheraton Hotel & Resort in Doha on May 22, 2010, Rosenberg explained that Khanfar invited him to the forum during a meeting in Washington earlier that year.

In his stunning speech at the forum, Rosenberg praised Al-Jazeera as a “mainstream network,” bashed Fox News, suggested that the U.S. government intentionally bombed an Al-Jazeera bureau and expressed unreserved joy that President Obama was treating Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so poorly.

“Bush has been replaced by Obama,” Rosenberg said.

“Yes, I applaud too. Which means people from the United States government go on Al-Jazeera. This is very significant. Under the Bush administration, Al-Jazeera was boycotted by the United — it was worse than boycotted: As you well know, it was bombed by orders of the United States government.”

Rosenberg was presumably referring to either the U.S. bombing of Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau in 2003, which killed one journalist, or the bombing of an Al-Jazeera office in Kabul in 2001. The U.S. government maintains both were accidental, not intentional.

While Rosenberg called Fox News “a very, very dangerous force in the United States” and Fox News host Sean Hannity “one of the biggest right wing liars on Fox News” during the speech, he praised Al-Jazeera as “mainstream” and “factual.”

“It just shows that everywhere in the world people are watching Al-Jazeera because people know it’s going to be — one, it’s factual,” he said.

“It has footage, it has pictures which we are essentially not allowed to see in the United States, that the networks don’t allow of what is going on in Iraq, what’s going on in Afghanistan.”

Bizarrely, Rosenberg also claimed the left-of-center New Republic magazine, which regularly defends President Obama, was “very much of a right wing, Jewish publication.”

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »

President Obama Signs Executive Order Giving Him Control of All US Resources In Times of War or Emergency

Imagine the uproar from foaming-mouth lefties if Bush pulled an Executive Order giving himself control over all US resources. Now why would Obama issue an executive order on a Friday? Hint: so the media wouldn’t make it a story. Another question is why does Obama need control over all US resources? Is the administration planning on something to happen?

Maybe this is tied to the 450 million rounds of ammo the DHS and ICE are requesting.

From The Examiner:

On March 16th, President Obama signed a new Executive Order which expands upon a prior order issued in 1950 for Disaster Preparedness, and gives the office of the President complete control over all the resources in the United States in times of war or emergency.

The National Defense Resources Preparedness order gives the Executive Branch the power to control and allocate energy, production, transportation, food, and even water resources by decree under the auspices of national defense and national security.  The order is not limited to wartime implementation, as one of the order’s functions includes the command and control of resources in peacetime determinations.

Section 101.  Purpose.  This order delegates authorities and addresses national defense resource policies and programs under the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended (the “Act”).

(b)  assess on an ongoing basis the capability of the domestic industrial and technological base to satisfy requirements in peacetime and times of national emergency, specifically evaluating the availability of the most critical resource and production sources, including subcontractors and suppliers, materials, skilled labor, and professional and technical personnel; - White House

Continue reading>>>

Read Full Post »