Utah Free Press

Fact Checking Obama

By Richard Okelberry (Note: This Essay was originally published at KVNU’s, For the People Blog.)

Almost immediately after Obama’s speech last night before Congress, MSNBC of all places put out a rather in depth scrutiny of some of the claims Obama made during his speech.

Fact check: Obama glosses over some realities

In delivering his to-do list, the president’s assertions deserve scrutiny

(abridged)

• “OBAMA: “We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It’s a plan that won’t help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values.”
• THE FACTS: If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money does not go to home buyers who used bad judgment, it hasn’t announced it.
•  
• OBAMA: “We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
• THE FACTS: Although 10-year projections are common in government, they don’t mean much. And at times, they are a way for a president to pass on the most painful steps to his successor, by putting off big tax increases or spending cuts until someone else is in the White House.
•  
• OBAMA: “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”
• THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn’t only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.
•  
• OBAMA: “In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”
• THE FACTS: First, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps. That’s all a president can do, because control over spending rests with Congress. Obama’s proposals here are a wish list and some items, including corporate tax increases and cuts in agricultural aid, will be a tough sale in Congress.
•  
• OBAMA: “In the last eight years, (health insurance) premiums have grown four times faster than wages. And in each of these years, 1 million more Americans have lost their health insurance”
• THE FACTS: The number of uninsured grew by 7 million from 2000 to 2007, the latest year for which Census figures are available, meaning Obama’s claim would be true if had been talking about averages. But it’s not true that the number of uninsured rose each year by 1 million. In 2007, the ranks of the uninsured dropped by 1.3 million from the year before, to 45.7 million.
•  
• OBAMA: “Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years.”
• THE FACTS: While the president’s stimulus package includes billions in aids for renewable energy and conservation, his goal is unlikely to be achieved through the recovery plan alone.
•  
• OBAMA: “Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.”
• THE FACTS: This is a recurrent Obama formulation. But job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers.
•  
• OBAMA: “And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”
• THE FACTS: According to the Library of Congress, the inventor of the first true automobile was probably Germany’s Karl Benz, who created the first auto powered by an internal combustion gasoline, in 1885 or 1886. Nobody disputes that Henry Ford created the first assembly line that made cars affordable.

(Fact check: Obama glosses over some realities: In delivering his to-do list, the president’s assertions deserve scrutiny)

It sure is beginning to sound a lot like Bushmas!  It seems that we have another president in the white house that likes to play stretch Armstrong with the truth.

3 comments to Fact Checking Obama

• Jason Williams

February 25th, 2009 at 12:58 pm ·

Shorter Okelberry: “Ha! His socks don’t match! He’s just as bad as Bush!”

Just have to give you a hard time, Rich. You know I always appreciate your POV. I think it’s important to realize that no matter how excited you get about a candidate (or in my case, a candidate’s campaign), they aren’t going to be perfect (FISA!), and constant pressure needs be applied to get them to go where we want, and to keep them honest.

• Richard Okelberry

February 25th, 2009 at 1:41 pm ·

Jason,

I agree completely. To be honest, I was surprised to see such an assessment come from MSNBC. Also, I don’t care much for such nitpicking. I just can’t help pointing out to those who were either die hard supporters of Bush or those that absolutely love Obama that this is how politics is played in the real world.

In the real world, politicians make exaggerations and stretch slash embellish the truth. Does it make it right? No… Is it completely wrong? Not really… It’s just the nature of the beast. Though you must admit, while every challenging candidate plays the ‘Change’ card, the fact that Obama made it a catch phrase will always make him vulnerable to caparisons to predecessors. I could have just as easily compared Obama to Clinton, Bush Sr. or even Reagan and been just as accurate. But after years of liberals complaining about Bush’s tendency to do what Obama did last night, I couldn’t help myself.

Octuplets a Choice!

By Richard Okelberry (Note: This essay was originally published at KVNU’s, For the People Blog.) 

“… questions have been raised about both the responsibilities of fertility doctors and the psychological aspects of fertility treatment.” – The Octuplets Debate, Part 2 – NYTimes Opinion

For those of you who support a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions yet want to stay on message in light of the ethics debate surrounding the California mother who recent gave birth to octuplets, I am here to help!

First, it is important to put down any debate regarding Ethics surrounding this case.  We need to remember first and foremost that a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions is absolute under the Roe vs. Wade decision.  Not only does this woman have the right to abort a fetus at will, she also has the right to put as many fertilized eggs in her body as she likes.  Any ethics debate in the medical community about placing limits on the number of eggs placed during an in vitro fertilization should be immediately halted.  Only one person has the right to make such a decision and that person is the mother.  As with abortion, no one else should even be talking about this issue.

Even if a woman decides to place 100 fertilized eggs in her womb she must be allowed to do so without any governmental restrictions or oversight. It’s not like this is some other type of medical procedure.  This is a reproductive procedure which enjoys special protections under the Constitution.

Also, We must all remember that these fertilized eggs do not qualify as human life.  As such they are under the absolute control and decision making of the mother alone.  After all, any ethical debate surrounding this issue would have to presume that these eggs are a human life while in reality they are nothing but a lump of cells owned and controlled by the woman who can do with them what she likes.

Second, there is a movement in the medical community to create regulations or guidelines for the number of eggs that can be implanted during in vitro fertilization.  Just as with abortion, doctors should not be allowed to hide behind their ethical standings and refuse a woman this procedure.  Any physician that refuses to perform either an abortion or in vitro fertilization on request should be seen as standing in the way of a woman’s reproductive rights and have their medical license suspended.

Supporters of Roe vs. Wade need to always be on guard against attempts by religious fanatics to impose their religious ideals in the form of “Medical Ethics” on woman who want to control their own reproductive systems.  Advocates of Choice should use this instance as an example of how a woman not only has the right to terminate a pregnancy but also has the right to have as many kids at a time as she wishes.

Just NUKE it!

 

By Richard Okelberry, January 29th, 2009 – One of the most exciting proposals put forward by the Obama administration has to do with putting large amounts of money toward building a new electrical infrastructure to help free us from the dirty electricity produced by coal and natural gas.  Unfortunateltly, President Obama has chosen to focus on developing Wind and Solar power across the Midwest raising questions about whether this truly would be the most efficient way of eliminating our reliance on fossil fuels as a primary power source.  Unfortunately, the numbers just don’t seem to add up when compared to nuclear power.

-

Let me get straight to the numbers.  The average Nuclear power plant produces 14.3 billion Kilowatt-hours of electricity while the average large Wind Turbine produces only 3 million Kilowatt-hours of electricity.  Do a little math and it quickly is apparent that to equal the output of one nuclear power plant, we have to build 4767 Wind Turbines.  To put this into perspective we would have to erect wind turbines end to end down 587 miles of California’s 650 mile coastline to equal the power generated by a single nuclear power plant.

-

Also consider that it would take 93 square miles packed solid with wind turbines to equal the generating capacity of one nuclear station.  While that my not seem like much, Manhattan in New York is 23 square miles in area.  This means that for each nuclear power plant you would consume an area of land equal to 4 Manhattan Islands.  This would be an area, easily seen by the naked eye from space.  To replace our current 3.3 terrawatt (3.3 trillion watt) electric grid with wind power alone, we would have to set up a wind farm covering a solid 21484 square miles or twice the size of Maryland.  Even if viable, this would not allow for the extra production needed to finally convert our automobiles to plug in electric or hydrogen fueled.  Doing so would potentially require a solid belt of wind generators side by side across an area about the size of Texas.
-

Now consider that even if we did build such large numbers of wind farms, we would never truly be free of fossil fuels.  You see, wind and solar power is power generated at the whim of nature not at the demand of consumers.  Because there is no efficient way of storing large quantities of power on the grid, electricity must be produced as it is needed.  As such, any power grid reliant on primarily Wind and Solar would need a second grid of fossil fuel plants like natural gas plants to provide nearly 100 percent of the power when it is dark and the wind simply isn’t blowing across the Midwest where these farms have been proposed.

-

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, I can tell you for certain that while it can be windy with average wind speeds reaching the needed 13mph the wind across the Great Plains is far from constant with weeks going by without a breeze.  At these times we would be almost completely reliant on old fashioned fossil fuels.

-

Nuclear on the other hand is clean, available on demand and already supplying 20 percent of our needs.  In fact, new techniques of recycling nuclear waste developed in France have created systems that thoroughly deplete radioactive by products down to the point where they have a radioactive half life of a mere 20 to 25 years.  This new technology means that rather than having our individual energy foot prints being measure in tons of gasses and toxins a year, each person would only produce on average a marble sized piece of low yield nuclear waste with the entire country producing waste that would easily fit on the surface of a football field.

-

Another topic that isn’t being discussed much is the huge power infrastructure that would be needed to pipe power from the Midwest to the coasts.  Such a project would cause such a burden on the copper industry alone that copper could eventually compete with gold in value.  Spikes in copper prices have already climbed to almost unbearable levels for the housing industry which needs copper to build new homes.  Lining a home’s electrical system with what amounts to gold will have a serious effect on the housing industry and ultimately the price of homes.  Causing such a burden on one of the primary staples of our economy is pure suicide.   For you strong environmentalists out there, I want you also to imagine the massive strip mines that will have to be created to extract such large quantities of copper from the earth.

-

The idea of freeing ourselves from foreign oil and fossil fuels is something that most everyone can get around.  Even those that reject the man made global warming theory will usually admit readily that they too would like cleaner air for their kids to breath and cheaper energy.  As such we all have the same goal.  All that remains is for us to decide how to accomplish this goal.

-

I promise if we follow the direction of President Obama on this issue, our power grid will become the biggest failure of most any administration in history.  It simply won’t work because it can’t work.  I do not blame President Obama for taking this course.  Nuclear energy has long had a stigma about it in this country but the time has come us to finally give our President a viable option and reason to say no to environmentalists that have spent decades demonizing and opposing nuclear energy.  I would invite liberal Democrats to embrace nuclear energy the way that fellow liberal progressives in France have for decades.  Begin writing this administration and tell them that you at least want them to look seriously at nuclear power if they truly want to build the only truly viable, fossil free electric grid.

Steelers Steal the Super Bowl.

By Richard Okelberry (Note: This Essay was originally published at KVNU’s, For the People Blog.) 

Well, maybe they didn’t steal it, but the refs certainly handed it to them.  Now I’m usually not much for if and buts when it comes to football.  I understand that there are always going to be fouls that the refs just don’t see, but when a guy is running a ball back 100 yards for a TD, and on the way there an approaching tackler takes a block in the back, I have to cry foul.  This is the Super Bowl for heavens sake.  While officially the Steelers may hold the title, I just want them to know while they are celebrating that they certainly didn’t earn it.  Pay attention around the 30 yard line!  Sorry, Tyler…

1 comment to Steelers Steal the Super Bowl.

• Jeff P

February 2nd, 2009 at 12:47 pm ·

Amen, Rich!