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Michelle Obama signed an autograph after giving a campaign speech for Barack Obama in Milwaukee on Feb. 18, 2008, before her husband was elected president. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., a big enough supporter of President Donald Trump that he has been mentioned for a role in the administration, has been a frequent basher of former President Barack Obama.

On Feb. 17, 2017, he turned to attacking the former first lady.

"Michelle Obama said she was never proud of her country til they elected her husband POTUS," Clarke charged on Twitter: "I've never been prouder since we got rid of him."

With the tweet was a photo of Clarke, who is being encouraged by some to run against U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., in 2018. Flexing his biceps, Clarke is shown wearing a T-shirt with an image of Trump standing on a tank and holding a rifle.

During Obamas first presidential campaign, Obama did take some flack for remarks she made in Wisconsin about being proud of her country.

Lets see whether Clarke is accurately describing what she said.

Two Wisconsin speeches

Obama campaigned for her husband in Milwaukee and Madison on Feb. 18, 2008, the day before Wisconsins primary. He had won eight consecutive Democratic primaries and caucuses over Hillary Clinton.

In Milwaukee, Michelle Obama said:

People in this country are ready for change and hungry for a different kind of politics and for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.

But remarks she made later in Madison were the ones that gained widespread media attention. Several minutes into her speech, Obama noted her husbands primary victory in South Carolina and continued by saying:

And then he went on to win throughout the country. And whens the last time weve seen a candidate -- male, female, whatever party -- who has been able to pull together victories that included Utah and Idaho and Louisiana and Maine and Washington and Illinois. I dont think weve seen that. But what weve learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback and let me tell you something: For the first time in my adult lifetime, Im really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. Ive seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues and its made me proud.

So, Obamas remark was made before her husband had won the Democratic nomination and nine months before was elected president.

And Obama said she was proud because Americans were hungry for change, not just because her husband was winning.

But her statement was controversial.

Asked the day after the Wisconsin primary, which her husband won, if she wanted to clarify her remarks, Obama said:

What I was clearly talking about was that I'm proud in how Americans are engaging in the political process. For the first time in my lifetime, I'm seeing people rolling up their sleeves in a way that I haven't seen and really trying to figure this out -- and that's the source of pride that I was talking about.

Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, said at the time that Obamas original comment "was sort of revealing," adding:

She was an adult when we won the Cold War without firing a shot. She was an adult for the last 25 years of economic progress, social progress .I dont think the American people think on the whole that the last 25 years of American history is a narrative of despair and nothing to be proud of.

CNN included the key part of Obamas remark -- "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change" -- in a documentary on her that aired in January 2017. That clip was followed by David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Obama, saying:

Those kinds of moments gave you a heartburn. By the same token, it became clear to me very quickly that we had failed her, because we threw her out there without adequate staffing, without adequate preparation.

For his part, Clarke didnt provide us any information to back his claim. The sheriffs office spokeswoman told us the sheriff said: "Go suck an egg" and that when he does provide us evidence of his claims, PolitiFact Wisconsin "still finds a way to contort a way to say false."

Our rating

Clarke says Obama "said she was never proud of her country til they elected her husband POTUS."

He provided us and we could find no evidence of such a statement.

What Obamasaid -- nine months before her husband was elected president -- was that for the first time in her adult life, she was proud of her country not just because Barack Obama had done well in pursuing the presidential nomination, but also "because I think people are hungry for change."

We rate Clarkes statement False.

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Says Michelle Obama "said she was never proud of her country til they elected her husband POTUS."

David Clarke

Milwaukee County sheriff, Democrat

In a tweet

Friday, February 17, 2017

02/17/2017

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David Clarke says Michelle Obama said she was proud of US only after Barack Obama became president - PolitiFact

The Trump administration has issued new guidance outlining which restrooms transgender students can use, effectively lifting previous guidelines put in place by the Obama administration. USA TODAY NETWORK

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center on Feb. 23, 2017, in National Harbor, Md.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos on Thursday called the transgender bathroom guidelines from the Obama administration "an overreach," a day after the Trump administration rescinded thoserules.

"This issue was a very huge example of the Obama administration's overreach, a one-size-fits-all, top-down approach," DeVos said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. These matters should be handled at a "personal and local level."

DeVos'words came less than a day after the Department of Justice and the Department of Education issued a joint statement aboutthe decision "to withdraw and rescind" guidelines issued last year by the Obama administration requiring that schools allow transgender students to use restrooms matching their chosen gender rather than their birth gender.

The announcement has drawn anger from LGBTQ rights groups. It also comes before the Supreme Court hears the case of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia high school student seeking a nationwide bathroom standard for transgender students. The court will likely hear Grimm's case next month.

On Thursday at CPAC, DeVos kept her comments limited to the overreach statement, pointing to a statement she released on Wednesday night.

"We have a responsibility to protect every student in America and ensure that they have the freedom to learn and thrive in a safe and trusted environment," she said in the statement. "This is not a federal mandate, but a moral obligation no individual, school, district or state can abdicate."

According to TheNew York Times, DeVos had at first resisted rescinding the rules because of the potential harm such actions would cause for transgender students. This put her at odds with Attorney General Jeff Session, the Timesreported, and President Trump told DeVos to end her opposition earlier this week.

More USA TODAY coverage of CPAC:

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Betsy DeVos calls Obama's transgender bathroom rules an 'overreach' - USA TODAY

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Did you know this? Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped in his life, convictions and outlook on the world by reading and writing as Barack Obama.

Frankly, I did not know President Obama was so wedded to books and the printed word as to be compared to Abraham Lincoln, author of the Gettysburg Address, magisterial Second Inaugural, and devotee of Shakespeare.

To be honest, I did not think that Mr. Obama by the wildest leap of imagination could be compared even to Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., or U.S. Grant, the author of until now the finest presidential autobiography of all time. That is, if Mark Twain is to be believed. Twain compared Grants memoirs to Caesars Commentaries.

Yet Michiko Kakutani, the literary critic of the famed Times of New York, has delivered up the above testimonial. Moreover, others who have had the pleasure of reading Mr. Obamas earlier writing have been equally lavish in their praise of his literary saga.

I had known him to deliver passable speeches from a teleprompter, ad lib tolerably well on contemporary life, and to watch sports on television. But to be shaped by books as Lincoln was? As these other presidents were? Michiko, baby, what have you been smoking? What has Barack been smoking?

I know that in Mr. Obamas January interview with Michiko, he mentioned a dozen or so authors and books that had caught his fancy, but so far as I know that is about the only time he ever mentioned them.

Though, of course, there is a very good reason for his artsy name-dropping. He wants to hook a big, fat literary contract from a big, fat lazy publisher of books that are bought but rarely read. Do I hear talk of a $30 million contract?

In this endeavor he has already had help from the likes of Jonathan Raban, Joe Klein and Britains Guardian. All have read or claim to have read Dreams from My Father, Mr. Obamas 1995 best-selling memoir. Supposedly after immersing himself in Dreams, Mr. Raban called Mr. Obama the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.

Mr. Klein called Dreams the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. And the Guardians reviewer esteemed the book the fifth-best nonfiction book of all time yes, of all time.

Unfortunately, others have also read Dreams along with the pathetic drivel that came from Mr. Obamas pen before Dreams. One, The New York Times best-selling author Christopher Andersen, wrote in his 2009 book that Mr. Obama, a hopelessly blocked writer facing a contract deadline, realized that he had taken on more than he could deliver.

So he turned to his Chicago neighbor, Bill Ayers, who was a proven writer, to finish what became Dreams. Bill has remained relatively reticent about his work, but then he shares Mr. Obamas politics. As for Mr. Andersen, he has sources that he has never divulged. Maybe he will when the former president snags his $30 million.

An even more interesting critic is Jack Cashill, a scholar and literary critic. He actually read Mr. Obamas literary outpouring that came before Dreams. Possibly, this is what excited Michiko Kakutani, though Mr. Obamas outpouring was limited. It consists of but two essays. In all those years just two essays.

This week in The American Spectator, Mr. Cashill has demonstrated that the two essays are littered with risible grammatical errors, awkward sentence structure, inappropriate word choice, a weakness for cliches, and an Obama trademark continued failure to get verbs and nouns to agree.

For instance, in his 1988 essay Mr. Obama writes, The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs . Mr. Obama means was.

Now we are expected to believe that a few years later, Mr. Obama was capable of writing what Mr. Cashill calls a graceful and sophisticated memoir, namely, Dreams from My Father.

Well, after a mere eight-and-a-half months in the White House he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In Mr. Obamas world anything is possible.

Mr. Cashills point, and Mr. Andersens, and mine, is that Dreams was, almost certainly, not written exclusively by Mr. Obama.

For a publisher to claim that it was is to commit fraud. To claim that Mr. Obama alone is going to write a book on the order of U.S. Grants memoirs is a fraud and a horselaugh.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is author of The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc.

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Grammar and Obama do not agree - Washington Times

The New York firm that helped shape the recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture will lead the exhibition design for the Obama Presidential Center's museum on Chicago's South Side, the Obama Foundation announced Tuesday.

Ralph Appelbaum Associates will head a team of several firms and individuals with expertise in media, lighting and acoustics, including several Chicago-based collaborators, according to the nonprofit that is developing the library and museum in historic Jackson Park.

The local team members will include the firms Civic Projects and Normal, and the artists and educators Amanda Williams, Andres Hernandez and Norman Teague.

Almost half of the exhibition design work for the OPC will be performed by minority- and women-owned businesses, the foundation said.

RAA, which was not made available to comment, also worked on the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

RAA's exhibit design for the national African-American museum, which opened in September, blends monumentality and minutiae. Dramatic subterranean galleries showcase massive artifacts a prison watch tower, a slave cabin, a train car in an almost cathedral like setting.

Leading into and out of these open spaces, the galleries are stuffed with the narrative, in word and object, of a people's history.

Overall, the design aims to be a metaphor: The history traces a path from the bottom of the structure upward, with the top floors becoming more celebratory, showcasing vibrant looks at the arts, sport and other culture.

The Obama museum team's Civic Projects specializes in bringing community participation to the design process, most recently working with the Bronzeville Retail Initiative and the development of the Englewood Exchange, envisioned as an incubator for food industry start-ups.

Normal has done design work for a number of local institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Theaster Gates Studio.

Williams, who grew up on the South Side, is a visual artist and architect, creator of the Color(ed) Theory series. Hernandez, an artist and educator, is working on a number local projects with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events.

Teague is a designer and educator who examines the complexities and history of communities.

The selections were based on the firms' and individuals' track records on civic projects and "their collective mission to develop interactive, state-of-the art, and dynamic spaces that help visitors connect history to action," David Simas, chief executive of the Obama Foundation, said in a written statement. "We are confident this team will contribute to our building a presidential center that is more than just a library or museum, but that will be an innovative center that inspires communities and individuals to take on our biggest challenges."

kbergen@chicagotribune.com

@kathy_bergen

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Firm that shaped national African-American museum hired for Obama museum - Chicago Tribune

Assertions from the White House that immigration-enforcement agents had their hands tied in the last administration are difficult to square with the massive deportations of Barack Obama's presidency.

President Donald Trump's press secretary made a claim about two agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection:

SEAN SPICER: "For so long, the people at ICE and CBP had their hands cuffed behind them." The Obama administration had so many exceptions for who could be adjudicated "that it made it very difficult for the customs and enforcement people to do their job and enforce the laws of this country."

THE FACTS: Whatever constraints agents might have faced, they deported more than 2 million immigrants during the eight years Obama was in office, more than in previous administrations. They sent back 409,000 in 2012 alone, a record.

Republican lawmakers and some ICE officials did complain that they were directed to ignore some immigrants found living in the country illegally if they didn't have serious criminal histories or otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety.

Spicer outlined a similar priority, saying enforcement would focus "first and foremost" on those who have a criminal record or post a risk to the public. Still there's little question that enforcement will be broadened.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly has signed a pair of memos that eliminate the Obama-era enforcement rules and made clear that nearly any immigrant caught living in the country illegally not just those with a criminal record will now be a target for deportation.

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Fact check: Did immigration agents have hands tied by Obama? - Chicago Tribune