Obama's bizarre food stamp cred

By Thomas Lifson

Barack and Michelle Obama have taken to invoking the claim that his mother received food stamps, perhaps in part to gain some sort of credibility as an advocate of the poor while pulling in more than 3 million bucks last year. And maybe to erase the memory of Michelle whining about how hard it is for them to pay for everything she wants, while advising the inhabitants of Zanesville, Ohio to avoid selling out to the corporate sector.

Sweetness & Light looks at the chronology of Barry Obama's childhood and wonders when it would have been possible for him to have been getting this form of federal welfare. A correspondent writes:

[Barack Obama] was born in 1961 but his mother could not get food stamps then because a) she was married and b) they were not available then.

Then [Barack Senior] moved to a foreign country. I don't think that we were sending food stamps to foreign nations.

When she moved back in 1965, food stamps were not available in Hawaii in 1965.

In 1967, she married the second time and moved to Jakarta. Nope, no food stamps then.

By the time she moved back once again, he was living with his grandparents who had jobs and food stamps were not being handed out like Halloween candy in those years.

Could a FOIA request supply data on this subject from government records? [update: aparently not. Records are destroyed after 7 years or so, and even if they were in existence, privacy issues would probably prevent their release unless Obama signed off.]

Or is this like Hillary's claim that she was named for the first man to climb Mt. Everest?