Update: Obama knows his resume needs padding talks about the bill that Obama said he passed, the only federal bill in his commercial, to extend health care to the wounded. Obama did not vote for that bill. (Neither did McCain, it passed by a large majority. But McCain didn’t say he passed it.)

Discriminations has a pattern description concerning Obama. The post is asking for the name of this pattern. It begins:

Barack Obama
opposes school vouchers for poor families but sends his own children to a private school;
supports “campaign finance reform” but opts out of public financing since he can raise more money privately under the old, presumably corrupt system;

Real Clear Politics has an article on Obama’s “new politics.” You know, the one he is promising.

You know how most politicians say one thing and do another? Well, Barack is different. He gave Hillary Clinton quite a dressing down during the primaries in the Rust Belt for having once supported NAFTA, a treaty Barack called “devastating.” Obama said he’d use the threat of withdrawal from the treaty as a “hammer” to wring concessions out of Canada and Mexico. And sure, his top economics aide told a Canadian consulate official on the QT that Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric was “more about political posturing than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

But that only shows how hard it is for Obama to find aides who are as farseeing and honest as he is. Well, yes, the candidate did acknowledge to Fortune magazine last week that he now views NAFTA more favorably and wouldn’t seek to renegotiate its terms. And yes, he did say, “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.” But, oh, the way he employs the passive voice! It’s not that he pandered to or misled the voters. No, the rhetoric got overheated. Who else, I ask you, can so smoothly deploy the passive voice?

George Will’s Washington Post article talks about the narrative of black victimology and crime. He discusses it particularly in regards to what Obama has said and what is accurate.

Last July, Obama said that “more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.” Actually, there are more than twice as many black men ages 18 to 24 in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, “We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives.” But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute’s City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population.
….
Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses: “In 2005 the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. . . . From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders.” Do police excessively arrest blacks? “The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data.”

American Thinker comments on Obama’s comment on how we can’t drive SUVs: “We have what we have here because we don’t empower the government to make decisions for us or allow the government to interfere too strenuously in the free market.” It’s an interesting juxtaposition between what Obama thinks and what conservatives think.

Real Clear Politics discusses changing opinions and not changing them, based on facts. This particular discussion looks at the Iraq war only. But it offers some thoughtful commentary.

If George W. Bush was wrong about the surge from summer 2003 to January 2007, Barack Obama has been wrong about it from January 2007 to today. John McCain seems to have been right on it all along. When asked why he changed his position on an issue, John Maynard Keynes said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” What say you, Sen. Obama?

The Wall Street Journal says, “Barack Obama has been on a class-warfare tirade since he locked up the nomination.” It also says, “In various tax proposals Mr. Obama has set the definition of rich at levels of $100,000, $200,000 and $250,000 in annual income.”

Betsy’s Page asks about the sin of hypocrisy and Obama. “If Obama hadn’t portrayed himself as the pure protector of the people, this [about his vetter] wouldn’t be much of a story. And it probably won’t echo much longer during the campaign unless something else about Jim Johnson or Eric Holder comes out. People aren’t going to vote or not vote for someone based on whom he picked to help him find a vice president. The only people who will really care about this story are those who wouldn’t vote for Obama in the first place. ”

There’s a lot out there about Obama. None of it is going to convince me not to vote for Obama. But it might convince others.