29 thoughts on “The Obama Campaign “Doesn’t Go Out Of Bounds””

  1. Cutter’s statement:

    Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments.

    In what universe is that calling Romney a felon? Do Republicans not understand the words “either” and “or”?

    There’s nothing on the Obama side that compares with Romney’s welfare reform lies, apology lies, Obamacare deficit lies, trade agreement lies, military voting lies, etc.

    The unprecedented thing about Romney’s lies is that they aren’t fleeting comments, or quickly pulled attack ads. They’re in his stump speech, and featured in ad after ad. They’re all he has.

    1. I think that I will trust my own interpretation of Obama’s speeches than the layers of filters applied to them by politifact.

      On the other issue, when you go read the memo it lays out some ambiguous qualifications for whether a waiver is approved. And if the results don’t match predictions the HHS actions are also ambiguous.

      “The terms and conditions will establish consequences for failing to meet interim performance targets including, but not limited to, the implementation of an improvement plan and, if the failure to meet performance targets continues, termination of the waivers and demonstration project.”

      Also, one must question the implementation of these waivers in an election year.

      “Waiver demonstration projects may be conducted in limited geographic areas or statewide. ”

      Will these waivers be awarded based on battleground status or to reward solid blue states for their loyalty? Will they be used to pander to groups that Obama needs to turn out for the vote?

      Considering the Obama administration’s prior use of wavers, government spending, and twisting of the legalese to meet many different definitions, people should be skeptical of what is actually intended by these waivers.

      There is a lot of speculation because of the open ended nature of the memo and the programs. What we really need to see are the actual programs that get waivers.

      Was Romney’s attack 100% accurate? No but neither was it “pants on fire!11eleventy!!”

      1. Was Romney’s attack 100% accurate?

        The Romney ad says:

        Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check, and ‘welfare to work’ goes back to being plain old welfare.

        That isn’t speculation that there might be loopholes that could be exploited to weaken work requirements. That is a straightforward statement of fact, a statement that is 100% false.

        1. Well at least he didn’t say Obama wanted to throw grandma off a cliff, let people and children starve to death, put black people back in chains, destroy the environment, toss the poor out into the streets, return to the days of Jim Crow, is a felon, tax cheat, ect. All of those and more were said by Obama surrogates not people in the comments of a blog.

          Compare that to your two examples, hardly equivalant.

          1. The difference is that Obama’s campaign hasn’t actually said those things. To pick just one, show me where Obama’s campaign said that Romney is a felon.

            The problem with getting all your news from the right wing echo chamber is that you end up believing nonsense (see: Todd Akin).

          2. Jim, please provide a link to the WSJ opinion page or Fox News story that says women can’t get pregnant from rape.

            Thanks in advance.

          3. I’m not aware of WSJ or Fox offering an opinion on the matter, but evidently the sources Akin (and others) did consult were full of crazy.

            And he’s considered sufficiently well informed (by the GOP) to hold a seat on the House Science committee.

            Getting back to the topic: Wodun thinks the Obama campaign accused Romney of being a felon. It didn’t (the quote is above). How many other false charges does Wodun believe?

          5. So, Jim, you just made a false charge.

            Nope. I said that Todd Akin was spouting nonsense because he got his information from the right wing echo chamber. Do you think he got his rape-prevents-pregnancy idea from The New York Times? He got it from the right-to-life compartment of the right wing media echo chamber.

          6. Dewd, Wodun rightly notes all the horrible things being said by “Obama surrogates” about Romney/Ryan which you happily agree to because you think plausible deniability means something. Then you promptly accuse him of getting all his “news from the right wing echo chamber” just like Atkin. The right-wing echo chamber of Obama’s superPAC!?

          7. At least we can agree that Akin is a turd.

            Also, the Obama campaign said Romney killed a lady with cancer.

            If I want to see the crazy things that the Obama campaign says I just watch his commercials and go to websites like huffpo, DU, Daily Kos, NPR, ect. No right wing echo chamber needed 🙂

    2. Jim, there’s several hundred counts of accessory to murder from Fast and Furious. Where’s the analogue on the Romney side?

      1. According to Jim’s ac hoc moral calculus (aka making sh*t up as he goes along), there’s nothing wrong with being an accessory to murder if “those people were going to die anyway.”

      2. there’s several hundred counts of accessory to murder from Fast and Furious

        I must have missed the news the day that Obama was been indicted.

        Note: there is a difference between reality and your wishful thinking.

        1. His AG has been held in contempt by Congress. The AG is now being sued in civil court to provide the documentation requested by Congress, because the most transparent administration ever doesn’t want to let the American people know why it illegally allowed weapons to cross a friendly border to knowingly be used to commit crimes.

          1. The contempt charge is about providing documents, not being an accessory to murder.

            it illegally allowed

            What law was broken?

            to knowingly be used to commit crimes

            I love this phrasing — so the guns knew they were going to be used to commit crimes?

            The F&F guns were a tiny fraction of all the guns that moved over the border during the period in question. Even today, with F&F shut down, we know that some of the thousands of guns being legally sold in border towns are going to be smuggled to Mexico and used in crimes. You want people to be outraged about the relatively small number of F&F guns — to the point of accusing the President and AG of being accessories to murder — but not care at all about the thousands more that are still being sold.

            The selectivity of your outrage makes clear that F&F isn’t about your concern for crime victims, it’s about politics.

          3. What law was broken?

            Do you believe the BATF has authority within itself to allow firearms to walk across the border of Mexico?

            so the guns knew they were going to be used to commit crimes?

            The BATF knew the firearms were being purchased by illegal straw buyers. They knew because local gun dealers followed the federal regulations and reported the potential purchases to the BATF. The local BATF officials told the gun dealers to go ahead and make the purchase. The question, Jim, is who gave the BATF officials authority to violate the law and allow the gun purchases. There are lawful reasons to break certain laws, such as police officers exceeding speed limits during a chase. But such incidents require authority for elected officials with oversight from the legislators that wrote the laws. Congress was allowed no oversight over this operation, and no elected official has admitted to providing the authority to violate federal law.

            Why should anyone care about citizens violating laws when the government that created the laws finds no reason to follow the laws? I guess that you don’t find this concept outrageous is why you also don’t care about politicians violating insider trading regulations. After all, its a relatively small amount of money, right Jim?

            And what does Fast and Furious have to do with an argument about campaign tactics?

            Fast and Furious is just one of many examples of our current political class violating the laws they expect everyone else to follow. It is the accusation of Obama and others in his campaign that Romney maybe violating laws (he will be required to enforce should he become President), and that such accusations are not out of bounds for discussion. So Jim, the rest of us are operating within these new boundaries too.

            Your team set the goal posts, we are just kicking it through your uprights.

          4. Do you believe the BATF has authority within itself to allow firearms to walk across the border of Mexico?

            BATF “allows” guns to cross the border every day, with or without F&F, because they have no practical way to stop them all. How did F&F — a botched attempt to actually do something about gun running — break the law?

            You are implying that there was a federal law that bars BATF from using the investigative techniques they employed in F&F. If that’s the case, what’s the law? Does it also bar the techniques used in Wide Receiver? If not, how does it draw the distinction?

            The BATF knew the firearms were being purchased by illegal straw buyers.

            They had strong reasons to suspect the buyers of illegal activity, but the buyers had not been charged or convicted of any crime.

            The question, Jim, is who gave the BATF officials authority to violate the law and allow the gun purchases.

            Under what authority could they have stopped them? Do you think the BATF should be able to bar gun sales to legally qualified buyers based on suspicion alone?

            you also don’t care about politicians violating insider trading regulations

            Who said that I didn’t?

            our current political class

            BATF agents are “our current political class”?

            It is the accusation of Obama and others in his campaign that Romney maybe violating laws

            What accusation is that?

          5. Some of the buyers were federal informants. We don’t know how far up the chain of command this goes but we do know that something that involved so many different federal agencies was not a decision made at the state level.

            We also know that someone from the Obama administration was collecting data from the murders tied to F&F guns to be used in a gun control legislation campaign.

            Wide Receiver was stopped when the tracking devices were discovered. In F&F there were no tracking devices. There was no tracking. It looks like the program was designed to only trace the guns once they were found at the scene of a crime and that those crimes would be used as ammunition for legislation.

          6. They had strong reasons to suspect the buyers of illegal activity, but the buyers had not been charged or convicted of any crime.

            You use the wrong tense. They have even stronger reasons to suspect the buyers of illegal activities now, since so many of the guns have turned up at crime scenes in unusual numbers and because they’ve actually arrested a number of these straw buyers.

            But let’s consider the results. I doubt even one gun in ten guns made in the US are used in a crime. But let’s consider what happened with guns from Fast and Furious.

            The gun selling started in November 2009, according to Wikipedia. By June 2010, less than a year later, the ATF had sold 1600 such guns and was aware that roughly 300 had been found at crime scenes in Mexico and the US. They still ran Fast and Furious till mid December 2010 (almost half a year later!) when US Border Agent Brian Terry was killed in a fire fight which included two guns from Fast and Furious. Further, it appears that every one of these guns went to cartels. There’s no illusion that the guns could have been meant for peaceful use.

            So basically, the ATF deliberately armed criminals who they knew were killing people. And we find the guns showing up at crime scenes involving hundreds of murders, both in Mexico and the US. That’s accessory to murder. It’s pretty damn cut and dry.

            It’s also worth noting that the purchasers which bought Fast and Furious guns probably also bought other things as well. So when agents were prevented from stopping F&F guns from crossing the border, what else went with those guns? That may have been the true point of F&F, to allow a cartel a window of about a year to smuggle out of the US into Mexico.

            The Obama administration should be finding the truth of this in court, not protecting the guilty.

          7. I’ll note with Jim’s responses to me that he is way behind what the Congressional hearings has already brought forward. I don’t know if he’s pretending to be ignorant of the findings to date or truly ignorant. I’m certain he’s ignorant of federal firearm regulations, which isn’t suprising.

            As wodun points out, there were no tracking devices yet the operation was approved. Why?

            As Karl points out, once the ATF knew the guns were in the hands of the criminals, why did the operation continue?

            In the bottom line remains what Karl wrote:
            The Obama administration should be finding the truth of this in court, not protecting the guilty.

        2. You’re whistling past the graveyard, Jim. A US government program handed over thousands of weapons, which I gather were better than average quality, to ruthless crime syndicates in the midst of some really nasty warfare. These weapons have turned up at hundreds of murders in Mexico and in the US. They turned up at the murder of a federal law enforcement agent. That’s just statement of fact. It doesn’t take wishful thinking to note that these weapons probably contributed to a number of those murder as well as other crimes. Nor does it take wishing thinking to note that reasonable people would expect what happened to happened. Give better guns to a gang in the middle of a fight, and they use them. It’s not rocket science.

          In the US, if you knowingly provide a weapon to a killer, then you are an accessory to the resulting crimes. I imagine Mexico has similar laws on the books. And these crimes weren’t against people we don’t like, but US and Mexican citizens. So Jim, when is the US government going to enforce the law?

        1. There’s nothing on the Obama side that compares with Romney’s welfare reform lies, apology lies, Obamacare deficit lies, trade agreement lies, military voting lies, etc.

          The fact that key Obama officials are concealing evidence of hundreds of felonies and thus obstructing justice is not at all comparable to anything on the Romney side, such as saying bad things about his opponents.

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