Where Does Barack Obama Stand on the Issues?

Where Barack Obama Stands on Education:

The failure of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind program has education at the forefront of American's minds. Obama thinks that the choice between pouring in more money or mandating more tests and standards is not a good representation of our only options.

To attract and inspire better teachers, he introduced the Innovation Districts for School Improvement Act, which rewards school districts for implementing new and effective methods for improving student achievement and giving raises to teachers who perform well.

To assist disadvantaged children, he sponsored the Summer Term Education Programs for Upward Progress (STEP UP) Act to offer grants for summer learning programs.

To help make college education more affordable, Obama's very first bill was designed to increase the Federal Pell Grant limit from $4,050 to $5,100.

Education Voting Record:

· Yes on the After School Funding Amendment
· Yes on the Education Funding Amendment
· Yes on the Education Amendment
· Yes on the Elementary and Secondary Education Amendment
· Yes on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Amendment
· Yes to Increase the Maximum Federal Pell Grant Amendment

Where Barack Obama Stands on Health Care:

Health care has been an ever-worsening crisis in the United States through several presidential terms. Obama is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and has made affordable, quality health care a top priority. Obama's Hospital Quality Report Card Act would require hospitals to track and report on their quality of care, including safety and timeliness on treatment and services, thus giving consumers greater choice and the information needed to make important healthcare decisions.

To combat medical errors and excessive costs due to outdated technology, he proposed the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program Efficiency Act.

His website lists some startling facts about children's exposure to lead poisoning that has inspired him to introduced two bills to address the issue: the Lead Poisoning Reduction Act and Lead Free Toys Act. These aim to reduce the large amount of lead found in many child care centers and children's toys.

Poor community planning can endanger children and citizens through lack of sidewalks and safe places to play. Obama's Healthy Places Act requires communities to evaluate how new projects and policies would effect the health of community members.

Obama has been traveling inside and outside of the United States to promote HIV testing and expand AIDS research and treatment. He collaborated with other officials to introduce the Microbicide Development Act. Microbicides are topical ointments that women can use to prevent the transmission of various infections, including HIV.

Health Care Voting Record:

· Yes on the Stem Cell Research Bill
· Yes on the Unintended Pregnancy Amendment
· Yes on the Teen Pregnancy Education Amendment
· Yes on the Medicaid Generic Drug Amendment
· Yes on the Hurricane Health Care for Survivors Amendment
· Yes on the Medical Assistance and Prescription Drug Amendment
· Yes on the AIDS Drug Assistance Program Amendment
· No on the Medicaid Amendment
· Yes on the Medicare Part D Amendment
· Yes on the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Amendment
· Yes on the Prescription Drug Plan Amendment
· Yes on the Medicare Premiums Amendment
· Yes on the Prescription Drugs Amendment
· Yes on the Influenza Vaccine Injury Compensation Amendment

Where Barack Obama Stands On National Security and Foreign Affairs:
Obama has been a very vocal opponent of the Iraq War, having voted against it from Day 1. In November 2005 he publicly called for "(1) a reduction in the number of U.S. troops; (2) a time frame for a phased withdrawal; (3) the Iraqi government to make progress on forming a political solution; (4) improved reconstruction efforts to restore basic services in Iraq; and (5) engaging the international community, particularly key neighboring states and Arab nations, to become more involved in Iraq." In January 2008 he introduced an alternative to President Bush's plan. which would reduce American troops in Iraq and pass more responsibility to the Iraqi government.

Together with Senator Richard Lugar, Obama traveled to the Soviet Union and spearheaded an initiative (signed into law in January 2007) which seeks to reduce conventional weapons caches before they fall into the hands of terrorists. It also assists nations with the detection and destruction of weapons of mass destruction before they are smuggled across their borders.

He introduced initiatives to stabilize the Democratic Republic of Congo and end the genocide in Sudan. His efforts included visiting refugee camps in Darfur and meet with Sudanese officials.

He introduced legislation to mandate evacuation plans for people with special needs during emergencies.

He assisted with the creation of legislation aimed at securing United States chemical plants, regulating spent nuclear fuel, requiring nuclear power plants to immediately inform the government about radioactive substance leaks, and preventing attacks on drinking water systems.

National Security and Foreign Affairs Voting Record:

· Yes on the Transit Security Amendment
· Yes on the Defense Department FY 2007 Authorization Bill
· Yes on the Emergency Supplement Appropriations Act, 2006
· Absent/Not Voting on the 2005 Future Military Funding for Iraq Amendment
· Yes on the Homeland Security Grant Program Amendment
· Yes on the Price-Gouging During Emergencies Amendment
· Yes on the Judicial Review of Detainees Amendment
· No on the Detainees at Guantanamo Bay Amendment
· No on the Media in the Middle East Amendment
· Yes on the Reporting Matters in Iraq Amendment
· Yes on the Immigration Reform Bill
· Yes on the Secure Fence Act of 2006
· No on the English as National Language Amendment
· Yes on the Oversight of CIA Interrogation and Detention Amendment
· Yes on the Cluster Munitions Amendment
· No on the 2006 Troop Redeployment Amendment
· Yes on the Security of Cargo Containers Amendment
· Yes on the FEMA Amendment
· No on the CAFTA Implementation Bill

Where Barack Obama Stands On Family Issues:
Obama's website notes that "Children without fathers in their lives are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison." In order to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, enforce child support, and combat domestic violence, he collaborated with Senator Evan Bayh to sponsor the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act.

He presented legislation aimed at lowering the income limit on the Child Tax Credit, allowing 600,000 more families to qualify.

His STOP FRAUD Act is the first federal bill designed to curb and criminalize mortgage fraud.

Family Affairs Voting Record:
· Yes on the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program Amendment
· No on the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Funding Amendment
· No on the Death/Estate Taxes and Minimum Wage Bill of 2006
· Yes on the 2005 Minimum Wage Amendment
· No on the Child Custody Protection
· Yes on the Child Safety Lock Amendment (concerns firearms)
· No on the Same Sex Marriage Resolution

A review of voting records and sponsored legislation also shows Barack Obama involved in improving benefits and programs for United States Veterans, eliminating barriers to voting, cultivating alternative energy resources, and advocating for transparency and accountability in politics.

It is critical that voters understand a candidates platform compared to his or her voting history in order to see if they consistently put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. Use this summary to determine if Barack Obama truly represents you as a voter.

CNN debunks false report about Obama

JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- Allegations that Sen. Barack Obama was educated in a radical Muslim school known as a "madrassa" are not accurate, according to CNN reporting.

Insight Magazine, which is owned by the same company as The Washington Times, reported on its Web site last week that associates of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, had unearthed information the Illinois Democrat and likely presidential candidate attended a Muslim religious school known for teaching the most fundamentalist form of Islam.

Obama lived in Indonesia as a child, from 1967 to 1971, with his mother and stepfather and has acknowledged attending a Muslim school, but an aide said it was not a madrassa. (Watch video of Obama's school Video)

Insight attributed the information in its article to an unnamed source, who said it was discovered by "researchers connected to Senator Clinton." A spokesman for Clinton, who is also weighing a White House bid, denied that the campaign was the source of the Obama claim.

He called the story "an obvious right-wing hit job."

Insight stood by its story in a response posted on its Web site Monday afternoon.

The Insight article was cited several times Friday on Fox News and was also referenced by the New York Post, The Glenn Beck program on CNN Headline News and a number of political blogs. (Watch how the Obama "gossip" spread Video)
School not a madrassa

But reporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate.

He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.

"This is a public school. We don't focus on religion," Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."

Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.

"I came here to Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa ... like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan," Vause said on the "Situation Room" Monday. "I've been to those madrassas in Pakistan ... this school is nothing like that."

Vause also interviewed one of Obama's Basuki classmates, Bandug Winadijanto, who claims that not a lot has changed at the school since the two men were pupils. Insight reported that Obama's political opponents believed the school promoted Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam, "and are seeking to prove it."

"It's not (an) Islamic school. It's general," Winadijanto said. "There is a lot of Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian. ... So that's a mixed school."

The Obama aide described Fox News' broadcasting of the Insight story "appallingly irresponsible."

Fox News executive Bill Shine told CNN "Reliable Sources" anchor Howard Kurtz that some of the network's hosts were simply expressing their opinions and repeatedly cited Insight as the source of the allegations.

Obama has noted in his two books, "Dreams From My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope," that he spent two years in a Muslim school and another two years in a Catholic school while living in Indonesia from age 6 to 10.

Barack Obama Pledge

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: The Great Need of the Hour

The Scripture tells us that when Joshua and the Israelites arrived at the gates of Jericho, they could not enter. The walls of the city were too steep for any one person to climb; too strong to be taken down with brute force. And so they sat for days, unable to pass on through.

But God had a plan for his people. He told them to stand together and march together around the city, and on the seventh day he told them that when they heard the sound of the ram's horn, they should speak with one voice. And at the chosen hour, when the horn sounded and a chorus of voices cried out together, the mighty walls of Jericho came tumbling down.

There are many lessons to take from this passage, just as there are many lessons to take from this day, just as there are many memories that fill the space of this church. As I was thinking about which ones we need to remember at this hour, my mind went back to the very beginning of the modern Civil Rights Era.

Because before Memphis and the mountaintop; before the bridge in Selma and the march on Washington; before Birmingham and the beatings; the fire hoses and the loss of those four little girls; before there was King the icon and his magnificent dream, there was King the young preacher and a people who found themselves suffering under the yoke of oppression.

And on the eve of the bus boycotts in Montgomery, at a time when many were still doubtful about the possibilities of change, a time when those in the black community mistrusted themselves, and at times mistrusted each other, King inspired with words not of anger, but of an urgency that still speaks to us today:

"Unity is the great need of the hour" is what King said. Unity is how we shall overcome.

What Dr. King understood is that if just one person chose to walk instead of ride the bus, those walls of oppression would not be moved. But maybe if a few more walked, the foundation might start to shake. If a few more women were willing to do what Rosa Parks had done, maybe the cracks would start to show. If teenagers took freedom rides from North to South, maybe a few bricks would come loose. Maybe if white folks marched because they had come to understand that their freedom too was at stake in the impending battle, the wall would begin to sway. And if enough Americans were awakened to the injustice; if they joined together, North and South, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, then perhaps that wall would come tumbling down, and justice would flow like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.

I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.

I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.

We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.

We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick.

We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.

We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.

And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.

So we have a deficit to close. We have walls - barriers to justice and equality - that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we've come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We've come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily - that it's just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved.

All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.

But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes - a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.

It's not easy to stand in somebody else's shoes. It's not easy to see past our differences. We've all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart - that puts up walls between us.

We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don't think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.

For most of this country's history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man's inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays - on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.

And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King's vision of a beloved community.

We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.

Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.

So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others - all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face - war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.

Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.

But if changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.

The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed. And if we are to truly bring about the unity that is so crucial in this time, we must find it within ourselves to act on what we know; to understand that living up to this country's ideals and its possibilities will require great effort and resources; sacrifice and stamina.

And that is what is at stake in the great political debate we are having today. The changes that are needed are not just a matter of tinkering at the edges, and they will not come if politicians simply tell us what we want to hear. All of us will be called upon to make some sacrifice. None of us will be exempt from responsibility. We will have to fight to fix our schools, but we will also have to challenge ourselves to be better parents. We will have to confront the biases in our criminal justice system, but we will also have to acknowledge the deep-seated violence that still resides in our own communities and marshal the will to break its grip.

That is how we will bring about the change we seek. That is how Dr. King led this country through the wilderness. He did it with words - words that he spoke not just to the children of slaves, but the children of slave owners. Words that inspired not just black but also white; not just the Christian but the Jew; not just the Southerner but also the Northerner.

He led with words, but he also led with deeds. He also led by example. He led by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family. He led by taking a stand against a war, knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity. He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause discomfort. Dr. King understood that unity cannot be won on the cheap; that we would have to earn it through great effort and determination.

That is the unity - the hard-earned unity - that we need right now. It is that effort, and that determination, that can transform blind optimism into hope - the hope to imagine, and work for, and fight for what seemed impossible before.

The stories that give me such hope don't happen in the spotlight. They don't happen on the presidential stage. They happen in the quiet corners of our lives. They happen in the moments we least expect. Let me give you an example of one of those stories.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we begin. It is why the walls in that room began to crack and shake.

And if they can shake in that room, they can shake in Atlanta.

And if they can shake in Atlanta, they can shake in Georgia.

And if they can shake in Georgia, they can shake all across America. And if enough of our voices join together; we can bring those walls tumbling down. The walls of Jericho can finally come tumbling down. That is our hope - but only if we pray together, and work together, and march together.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone.

In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone

In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.

So I ask you to walk with me, and march with me, and join your voice with mine, and together we will sing the song that tears down the walls that divide us, and lift up an America that is truly indivisible, with liberty, and justice, for all. May God bless the memory of the great pastor of this church, and may God bless the United States of America.