Friday, August 10, 2012

Obama campaign caught in lie over Joe Soptic, possible violation of law

60Right Scoop ‏@trscoop
ABC News equates Burton Super PAC ad with Romney welfare ad, calling Romney ad a lie because OBAMA SAID SO
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10:46 AM - 10 Aug 12 via Tweet Button · Details
1hTiny Klout Flag35BACFA sees circuses ‏@BACFA
 They should be comparing the SuperPac ad to the Obama campaign ad. Guy wearing the same shirt, saying the same thing.

ABC News equates Burton Super PAC ad with Romney welfare ad, calling Romney ad a lie because OBAMA SAID SO


Posted by The Right Scoop The Right Scoop on August 10th, 2012 in Politics | 40 Comments
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It’s this kind of dishonest reporting that makes my blood pressure rise a little. In a news segment on ABC News last night, Jonathan Karl equated Bill Burton’s ad suggesting Romney is responsible for the cancer death of a steel worker’s wife with Romney’s ad saying Obama gutted welfare reform. Now Karl rightly points out that Burton’s ad is the “single most outrageous ad of the campaign”, citing that Soptic’s wife died in 2006, years after Romney left Bain.
But then in transition to Romney’s welfare ad Karl reports “the Romney campaign has hit below the belt too currently with a misleading ad claiming President Obama has gutted welfare reform.” I was on the edge of my seat wondering who they were going to cite as their source calling the ad “misleading”. Ad to my shock it was the Obama campaign:
The Obama campaign is calling that a bold face lie. The administration is allowing states to experiment with changes to the welfare law but insists it is still requiring people to work.
For heaven’s sake Jonathan Karl, do some research on your own for a change and stop taking Obama’s word on its face!
All that said, what really got to me about this ad was the equating of the two campaign ads which is preposterous on its face. One is a provably false, outrageous character assassination attack and the other is an ad about policy that can be honestly debated. How in the world can ABC News compare them? They can’t, at least not honestly.
The purpose of equating these two ads is to take the sting out of Burton’s ad which is connected to the Obama campaign as we all know. By saying Romney did it too, it makes it sound like both campaigns are playing dirty and people are more likely to either dismiss this as a whole or to aim their outrage toward both camps.
And people wonder why we say there is media bias.

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      Obama campaign caught in lie over Joe Soptic, possible violation of law

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      The Obama campaign has been caught in a lie over Joe Soptic, the man in the now infamous "Romney killed my wife" ad put out byPriorities USA.
      After the real timeline of events caused scrutiny of the PAC, the Obama re-election team claimed to have had no knowledge of Soptic's story.
      Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cuttertold CNN she didn't know the facts behind Soptic's story.
      “I don’t know the facts about when Mr. Soptic’s wife got sick or the facts about his health insurance,” she said.
      Robert Gibbs echoed that sentiment when he told reporters on Air Force One that “we don’t have any knowledge of the story of the family.”
      But an article posted Thursday at policymic.com says that Soptic was on a conference call with Cutter on May 4, 2012.
      "Stephanie Cutter knew Joe Soptic, and heard the entire story well before the Priorities USA ad debuted over the airways. It’s now obvious that she lied when trying to deny it this week," Jesse Merkel wrote.
      "It’s highly likely that Robert Gibbs and other high level Obama campaign advisers knew Joe Soptic and his story very well," he added, noting that it is "a violation of federal law" for a campaign to coordinate with a Super PAC.
      Buzzfeed reported Thursday that the campaign also used Soptic's story in a slideshow posted on the internet earlier this year that also fails to mention that Romney was not at Bain when the worker lost his job.
      "Romney campaign spokesman Andrea Saul tweeted 'WOW' in response to the slideshow, while the Obama campaign declined to comment," Andrew Kaczynski wrote.
      "While it could be very difficult to prove that there was any direct coordination going on, at the very least it has now become obvious that the Obama campaign knew the specifics about Soptic, and that they lied about it repeatedly," Merkel wrote.
      Cutter was originally scheduled to appear on ABC's "This Week," but Dana Loesch wrote that David Axelrod will go in her place "as it's likely Cutter would face too many question regarding her dishonesty on Soptic and the campaign's suspected coordination with Priorities USA, which seems ripe for an FEC investigation."
      "We look forward to hearing how Axelrod handles explaining the curious similarities between the campaign's ad and the super PAC's ad -- as well as whether or not this means Obama has changed his mind about super PAC regulations when it seems his campaign may now be flouting existing law," she added.
      Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity Thursday night that the lies have "only just begun."
      "We have the next few months to suffer through the lies of the Obama Administration and the Obama Campaign… The media, 90% of them aren’t calling the Obama Campaign out for the lies including the lie in this latest ad you referenced,” she said.
      Posted by Robby Ball at 9:45 AM