Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced — by beating the daylights out of the accused.Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama’s bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to “solve” crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

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Remember the dude on Chris Matthews….

OBAMA HAS SIGNIFICANT LEGISLATIVE ACHIEVEMENTS both in the Illinois and US Senate.You should be able to discuss his groundbreaking work to reform the Illinois death penalty by getting confessions videotaped against the objections of a Republican governor plus police and prosecutors.

You should be able to discuss his groundbreaking work to create an easily searchable database of federal spending, the Google for Government, bill.

You should be able to discuss his nuclear non-proliferation law co-sponsored with Republican Dick Lugar.

That’s all Watson had to know. But wait, there’s more. So. Much. More.

He says:

Smith did not note that between the time Obama took office and January 4, the Republican Party was the majority party in the Senate and thus controlled the legislative agenda. In such a situation, the oportunities for a bill sponsored by a member of the minority party to see legislative action are particularly limited.

Lets be fair, people!

“I think it is imperative that the whole truth and nothing but the truth gets out about the man who could be our next president. He’s not being completely upfront with the American people, and we all know his devotees in the press will faithfully continue to carry his water, so it’s up to “citizen journalists” to help spread the word.The Washington Post fact check article I linked to noted a few examples, but here are some more:  On August 9, 2007, The Boston Globe reported on Barack Obama’s meteoric rise in politics, and just what types of groups helped make that possible: PACS and lobbyists (emphasis added by me):

A Globe review of Obama’s campaign finance records shows that he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and PACs as a state legislator in Illinois, a US senator, and a presidential aspirant.In Obama’s eight years in the Illinois Senate, from 1996 to 2004, almost two-thirds of the money he raised for his campaigns — $296,000 of $461,000 — came from PACs, corporate contributions, or unions, according to Illinois Board of Elections records. He tapped financial services firms, real estate developers, healthcare providers, oil companies, and many other corporate interests, the records show.

READ FULL POST HERE

***********mORE oBAMA sTUFF****

• One of Sen. Obama’s biggest donors is the energy giant Exelon:

Exelon is the sixth largest donor to Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign and the fourth largest career donor to Obama’s federal campaigns. Exelon employees have donated over $269,100 to his federal campaigns and over $194,750 in 2008. [opensecrets.org, 2008, 2004-2008]

• Daily Kos post: Obama and Exelon Corporation
• Article: Is Barack Obama a True Agent of Change?

Central to Obama’s message of change are claims that he is free of lobbyist influence. But in fact, he has been, and still is being funded by some of the same sort of interests and corporate interests as Clinton and other candidates through big corporate donors known as bundlers.

In fact, he’s received so much funding, an estimated $30 million per month, that his campaign appears to be backpedaling on a November pledge where he said if he was the Democratic nominee, he would aggressively pursue and agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.

“The Washington Post” said in a February 16 editorial that “this kind of backtracking and parsing is’t what the millions of voters who have been inspired by Mr. Obama are looking for.”

More telling, a November 2006 Harpers article “The Making of a Washington Machine” by Ken Silverstein quoted an anonymous Washington lobbyist, “big donors would not be helping out OBama if they didn’t see him as a player.”

Article: Sen. Obama finesses his lobbyist ties - Posted Posted: 04/19/07

In a fundraising e-mail sent to supporters at the beginning of March, the candidate wrote that Washington’s special-interest industry is trying “to own our political process and dictate our policies in Washington.

“We’re not going to play that game. We’re not taking any contributions from Washington lobbyists or political action committees. We’re going to transform the political process by bringing together hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans to build a campaign.”

It’s easy to forget that the Arizona senator is not, in fact, a Democrat. In the past year he has stood against his party on so many prominent and contentious issues that his concurrences with GOP dogma have become more of an exception than a rule. In the conservative media, he has become a figure of vilification on par with Tom Daschle.

Last fall, when his name came up in a meeting of House Republicans, he was booed. And it is no exaggeration to say that he has co-sponsored virtually the entire domestic agenda of the Democratic Party. One prominent Democrat enthuses, “He’s the leader of the loyal opposition.” Typically that role falls to a leader of the opposition party. But the most popular and effective champion of the Democratic Party’s values isn’t Tom Daschle. It’s John McCain.

And at a moment when the party is casting about for a leader to define it against a popular president, and McCain is casting about for a home after his virtual expulsion from the GOP, there is an obvious solution to both dilemmas: John McCain ought to become a Democrat–and a presumptive front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination in 2004.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE -  by Jonathan Chait - The New Republic Post Date Thursday, April 29, 2002