A major cable provider is offering a notorious anti-Obama movie to all its subscribers for free. The company, Armstrong Cable, operates in six states including Pennsylvania and the critical swing state of Ohio. The move comes just days after the Armstrong’s Chairman of the Board donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee.

The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” has been widely panned by fact checkers. Written and narrated by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, it claims Obama’s “worldview…was largely shaped by the anti-colonalist, anti-white and anti-Christian politics of Obama’s supposedly radical Kenyan father,” who was largely absent from his life. The point of the movie, according to a review in the Washington Post, is to convince viewers “that Obama hates America.” It was panned as “fear-mongering of the worst kind.”

Armstrong recently started offering the movie for free, on demand, to all of its subscribers.

An Armstrong executive confirmed to the Pittsburgh City Paper that “this is the first time the cable provider has offered such a deal for a recently released feature film.” Armstrong claims it will offer a free recently released film each month to encourage use of its premium on-demand offerings. But the company acknowledges no other recent releases are currently available without charge.

On September 21, just days before the promotion began, Armstrong Chairman Of The Board Jay Sedwick gave the maximum $5,000 to Mitt Romney’s campaign and an additional $25,000 to the Republican National Committee.

Armstrong cable is available in over 50 cities and towns in 10 Ohio counties. Analysts believe the outcome in Ohio may determine the outcome of the election. Most current polls in the state are within the margin of error.

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has enthusiastically embraced the Romney campaign myth that Obama attributes businesses’ success to government, exemplified by the RNC slogan “We Built It.” When it comes to his own construction business, however, it seems that King did not in fact build it. Salon reports that the construction company King prides himself on building “up from one bulldozer” was in fact sustained by more than $1.66 million in government contracts between 1994 and 2011:

But, as King now acknowledges, government contracts were a key part of his business going back some time. In 1987, he sued a client who had not paid him. An affidavit King filed includes a letter the future congressman sent to a customer in 1985 requesting payment. Explaining his urgency, King wrote at the time, “as you are aware, we are in a very depressed farm economy and my only other market for my works is contract work from various government agencies.”

Documents show that King’s company worked regularly for various local governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In 1994, he demolished a firehouse for the City of Odebolt for $15,500. In 1998, he took about $82,000 from the same city for a memorial walk. In 2002, the company made $64,000 from Crawford County to stabilize a building, followed a few months later by a $141,000 contract with the City of Battle Creek for wastewater treatment improvements.

The next year, King was elected to Congress and his son took over the company, taking in at least 10 other municipal contracts through 2011 worth up to $200,000 each for everything from road construction to water treatment improvements. Altogether, from the firehouse demolition in 1994 to through a grading job for a local utility last year, King Construction made at least $1,665,000 in government contracts.

When asked about his company and its substantial government assistance, King told Salon, “I built it. I built it on low-bid — both private and public — contracts. I created jobs and saved the taxpayers money on every road I built.”

King is just the latest Republican whose anti-government rhetoric is tripped up by a personal experience of how important government assistance can be to business owners. Even vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) family business relied on government contracts, while almost every small business featured by the Romney campaign has had some financial help from the government.

Monday night’s Middle East-heavy question lineup angered a number of observers of international politics concerned that significant issues in the rest of the world won’t get the attention it deserves. ThinkProgress has previously highlighted five international issues — the India/Pakistan conflict, global disease and malnutrition, overfishing, America’s shadow war on terrorism, and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — that were getting short shrift in the campaign debate. Given that last night’s debate failed to expand menu of topics beyond expectations, we’re picking out four more issues outside of the Middle East that the Presidential candidates should have discussed, but didn’t.

GENOCIDE PREVENTION

The Atrocities Prevention Board is one of the Obama Administration’s least well known, yet potentially most far reaching, policy initiatives. The Board’s goal is exceedingly ambitious – developing an effective system for predicting when an episode of mass killing might be about to escalate and then head it off, ideally without using American military force. This idea has come under fire from hawks who argue it’s a bureaucratic roadblock to effective preventative action. Whether Romney agrees with this critique, and whether Obama was willing to and capable defend his policy, would have been valuable topics of conversation given the legion of 20th and 21st century victims of mass murder.

THE END OF THE DRUG WAR IN LATIN AMERICA

A cornerstone of America’s Latin America policy for the past forty years has been drug eradication, partnering with and supporting local governments willing to use harsh tactics in an attempt to limit the spread of drugs in the United States. While President Obama laughs off the idea of changing American policy, Latin American countries are increasingly taking the issue into their own hands. Colombia and Peru are taking the lead on relaxing drug enforcement. A recent Summit of the Americas historically declared the War on Drugs a failure and pledged to look for alternatives, while new Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has called for a debate about legalization.

CLIMATE CHANGE

While it’s commonly lamented that this issue has been missing from the Presidential campaign, its absence is especially acute in a foreign policy debate, as the nature of the problem is intrinsically global and its victims will disproportionately be the world’s poor. A recent study found that the climate change could kill 100 million people, mostly residents of the developing world, by 2030. This is in part a consequence of geography and topography, but also the fact that the massive wealth of the First World gives it many more resources to prepare for the changing climate than poorer nations, despite the fact that the wealthy were responsible for most of the emissions causing the problem in the first place. Any effective solution to this nightmare will require international cooperation, so the question of how best to get that agreement would, in an alternative world, have been an important topic in Monday’s debate.

THE RISE OF THE EUROPEAN FAR RIGHT

Reactionary racists in France. Neo-Nazis in Greece. Around Europe, the economic crisis appears to be fueling a resurgence of right-wing populism. Many of these groups have harsh anti-European Union views which could potentially complicate Europe’s attempt to put its economic house in order down the line, to say nothing of the consequences for the immigrant and minority groups against which they direct their anger. Moreover, the right-wing surge in Europe isn’t necessarily temporary: according to Matt Goodwin, an expert at the London thinktank Chatham House, “the big challenge that we’re going to see over the next 10 years is the rise of far-right groups and networks in Central and Eastern Europe.”