Every politician makes promises in the course of his campaign for election, serious promises and frivolous, that go unkept for one reason or another.  Presidential candidates are no exception , and the promises made by the current Democratic Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, during the course of his 2008 campaign are legion: his promise to keep unemployment under 8%, if Congress would only pass his $800 billion stimulus bill in 2009 comes to mind (unemployment rose above 10% within months of passage and has remained above 8% since), as does his promise to ban lobbyists from his administration (followed by his hiring lobbyists into his Executive Branch, including the president of a lobbying firm to be his envoy to the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India region).  So does his promise to be open and transparent, with legislation being written in public (followed by Obamacare and Dodd-Frank being written behind locked doors and back rooms so secretively that even then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) had to push for passage of Obamacare “so that we may know what is in it.”  And so on.

But I’m not concerned here with broken campaign promises.  Instead, I’m going to write about the outright lies that Obama has made since he took office, taking them in no particular order, but with some rough grouping by general topic.  With that, this is the first in a series of posts I’ll be making this month about the lies of my President.

First up, from Obama’s February speech at the University of Miami on “home-grown energy,” and Investor’s Business Daily‘s fact checking of some of his claims:

“We’re focused on production.”

Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.

Obama has chosen almost always to limit production.  He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.

His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index.  The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011.  Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”

and

“The US consumes more than a fifth of the world’s oil.  But we only have 2% of the world’s oil reserves.”

Fact: Obama constantly refers to this statistic to buttress his claim that “we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices.” The argument goes that since the US supply is limited, it won’t ever make a difference to world prices.

It’s bogus. New exploration and drilling technologies have uncovered vast amounts of recoverable oil.

In fact, the US has a mind-boggling 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to “fuel the present needs in the US for around 250 years,” according to the Institute for Energy Research. The problem is the government has put most of this supply off limits.

Here’s more concerning the “focused on production”…claim, via Power Line who quote from Greenwire, a New York Times specialty publication:

Domestic oil production may be at an all-time high nationwide, but the increase is primarily occurring on state and private lands rather than on federal land and waters, where production appears to have dropped significantly in 2011, according to the most recent government data.

Production of natural gas on public lands and waters in fiscal 2011 dropped 11 percent from the previous year, according to Interior Department data.  Oil production dipped nearly 14 percent…

Finally, here are four graphs that illustrate Obama’s lies about Federal “focus on production,” from the New Orleans Regional Economic Alliance.  They speak for themselves.  And nothing has changed in the year since they were formed.