Read this and Don't Fall for Ayer's Whitewash

The Obama-Ayers Education Story: Funding Left-Wing Radicalism In Education

Read It All; This Matters

Today's must-read: after months of investigation, in which he had to weather all manner of stonewalling and intimidation by the Obama camp, StanleyKurtz finally has the story, in today's Wall Street Journal, of Barack Obama's involvement in unrepentant former terrorist BillAyers' project to spread left-wing politics under the guise of'education' in Chicago schools. Here's a flavor of Ayers'project:

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with"external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals fromgroups focused on math/science achievement were turned down.Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left communityorganizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations forReform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars withAcorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama'searly campaigns. External partners like the South Shore AfricanVillage Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused moreon political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism thantraditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensivelystudied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicagopublic-school students. They found no evidence of educationalimprovement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" amongparents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate onbehalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant fundingMr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, torecruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records showthat board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents"organized" by community groups might be viewed by schoolprincipals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetingswith the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

And of Obama's involvement in the activities of a group whoseboard he chaired:
Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit....Mr.Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chairedthrough CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governancecommittee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws.Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr.Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board.Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings ofthe Collaborative.

Kurtz's conclusion:

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr.Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle.

Kurtz makes some references in the article to the Obama camp's pushback, and discusses it (including reprinting the Obama campaign's full response) here, including completing the connection of the dots inObama's involvement in setting up and funding Ayers'activities:

In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, whichmade fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama's formalresponsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination withthe Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CACcorporation, Obama was authorized to "delegate to the Collaborativethe development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals." All this clearly involves significant consultationbetween the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.

Bear in mind the timeline - this is precisely the time at which Obama was launching his political career (including a meeting atAyers' home), signing a contract to support the platform of the Marxist New Party, representing ACORN as its lawyer, and receiving the support and active participation, in return, of ACORN and similar of left-wing groups as ground troops in hiscampaigns. Tom Maguire looks at how far back Obama's relationship with Ayers goes. I continue to be amazed that any civilized person could associate with this terrorist, much less allocate money to give him a role in educating children. But then, recall the words of theChicago Democratic Socialists of America, writing in 2000:

Barak Obama is serving only his second term in the Illinois State Senate so he might be fairly charged with ambition, but the same might have be said of Bobby Rush when he ran against Congressman Charles Hayes. Obama also has put in time at the grassroots, working for five years as a community organizer in Harlem and in Chicago. When Obama participated in a 1996 Uof C YDS Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy.

And of course, besides funding Ayers, Obama once in office was essentially letting groups like PlannedParenthood essentially write sex education bills - not a group as overtly outside the mainstream as Ayers, but consistent with Obama's overall Illinois record as a hard-core left-wing culture warrior looking to empower the whole menagerie of left-wing interest groups (headed by other "communityorganizers" just like Obama himself) with funding and sway over government. Kurtz, who has followed similar stories for years, explains how all of this is symptomatic of the broader left-wingcultural and educational program:

[T]he story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds "captured"by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC's story is aclassic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizationsfor Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky....

Of course, you don't go to a group like the Annenberg Challenge with an explicit promise to promote left-wing radicalism,and you don't pick Bill Ayers as the front man to deal with the donors. You pick someone smoother, less of a known commodity...you pick Barack Obama. In 1995, it was Obama's job to put a pleasant, respectable face on a fundamentally left-wing project.

Not much has changed since then, has it?

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A Couple of Bad Egg(heads): Obama and Ayers

by Janet Crain:
Barack Obama and William Ayers, unrepentant 60's radical Weatherman, were together in April 2002 on a panel. This was 7 months after Ayers publicly declared he wished he had bombed more. Obama's staffers indicate the two were in touch at least through 2005. When asked about their relationship, Obama dismissed Ayers as "Just a guy in my neighborhood". Neglecting to state they shared an office for three years in the 90's,served on numerous boards together and that his political introduction in Chicago was launched in Ayers' living room.

A public gathering sponsored by

The Center for Public Intellectuals& the University of Illinois-Chicago

April 19th-20th, 2002

Chicago Illini Union

828 S. Wolcott

2:15-3:45 p.m.IV. Intellectuals in Times of CrisisExperiences and applications of intellectual work in urgent situations.

William Ayers, UIC, College of Education; author of Fugitive Days

Douglass Cassel, Northwestern University, Center for International Human Rights

Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago, Political Science

Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune; In These Times

Barack Obama, Illinois State Senator

http://www.uic.edu/classes/las/las400/conferencealt.htm

"Just a guy in my neighborhood, a harmless weatherman.
Maybe I'll invite him to dinner at the Whitehouse." BHO

“Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”–Bill Ayers, Weather Underground, 1970“America is not a just and fair and decent place,” Ayers said in 2001. “It makes me want to puke.”

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Everyone is out to destroy Palin - but it's Obama's past we should examine

Last updated at 2:05 AM on 13th October 2008

With all eyes glued to the collapse of global capitalism as we know it, attention has been somewhat distracted from the race to lead what still remains the most powerful nation on earth - the United States. We ignore it at our peril.
From the shockingly partisan presentation by the pro-Obama media on both sides of the Atlantic, you'd think this was a contest between twin pillars of rectitude and inspirational high seriousness on the Democratic side, and a joke Republican ticket consisting of an erratic old man and a brainless, wacko, gun-toting beauty queen, who in a fit of madness John McCain picked as his vice-presidential candidate.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the beauty queen in question, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, has struck an enormous chord with Middle America. As a result, Barack Obama's media supporters are making a huge effort to destroy her.

US Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama: Are we giving him a too much leniency?

Inquiry

Now the Left thinks it has shot its moose. It has been crowing that an inquiry by Alaska's legislature has found Palin abused her office by firing Alaska's Commissioner of Public Safety for refusing to fire in turn Palin's former brother-in-law, Trooper Michael Wooten.

This really is a case of half-baked Alaska. First, the inquiry's conclusions were ambiguous. It found that Palin had violated public trust through using official action for personal interest; but it also said the firing was a proper and lawful exercise of her authority, and that personal interest had only been a contributory factor in the Commissioner's firing.

And just what was that personal interest? Palin wanted a state Trooper fired because he had assaulted his 11-year-old stepson with a stun gun, been caught drinking alcohol in his patrol car, and the Palins say was threatening to kill a member of their family.

Certainly, there was a conflict of interest because Wooten was the Governor's sister's ex-husband. But shouldn't the real question be why such a man was not fired?

What is really astounding, however, is the hue and cry over this non-event in Alaska while a raft of disturbing evidence about Senator Obama's connections is being either glossed over or not reported at all.

This may come as a shock to most people, but Obama is at the centre of a network of radical associations which he has tried to conceal.

Take for example his relationship with William Ayers, founder of the terrorist Weather Underground which bombed federal buildings in the 1960s and who has consistently maintained his radical views ever since.

Sarah Palin: The key target for Democrats

Obama's own political career was actually launched in Ayers's Chicago house at a fundraising-event in 1995 which fired the starting gun for his run at the Illinois Senate.

Not only that, Obama and Ayers both sat on the boards of two organisations, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund. These organisations put into practice Ayers's revolutionary ideology by channelling money supposed to fund regular educational projects into extreme radical groups instead.
Obama now says he didn't know of Ayers's terrorist past and never endorsed his views, simply working with him on an educational project. But it defies belief he didn't know about Ayers, who was notorious in Chicago. In 2001, indeed, Ayers told a magazine: 'I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough.'
The crucial point was that this educational project was itself a vehicle for subversion; in the view of Ayers, its driving force, education was 'the motor-force of revolution'. Moreover, Obama wrote a rave review about Ayers' book on criminal justice, which compared America to South Africa under apartheid.
Scandal

If John McCain had such strong links with ACORN, wouldn't he be torn apart for it?

Through the Woods Fund, Obama also funnelled millions of dollars to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Described by an academic sympathiser as 'a uniquely militant organisation', ACORN played a significant role in the sub-prime scandal - which detonated America's financial crisis - by physically intimidating banks into lowering credit standards for poor and minority customers.

The Obama campaign has paid an ACORN subsidiary $800,000 to register new voters. But now, numerous states are launching investigations into massive voter fraud being carried out by ACORN activists who are being caught falsifying voter registration cards, registering fictitious individuals and hounding voters to register multiple times.

But Obama's connections with ACORN go even deeper. Even though his campaign has denied this, for several years running he trained its activists and in 1992 even ran one of its voter registration projects.

Such radical links fit with other highly dubious associations Obama has made. We all know that, under pressure, he distanced himself from his longstanding mentor Pastor Wright, who infamously coined the phrase 'God damn America!'
But Obama never distanced himself from the anti-white teachings of his church, which was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the black racist James Cone who claimed that 'whiteness is the symbol of the antichrist'.

And after the controversy over Wright, Obama has become close to another preacher, Jim Wallis, who spews out the same anti-American message - once calling the U.S. 'the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life'.

That's not all. ACORN is heavily involved with a Marxist group called the Chicago New Party, whose strategy is to force the Democratic Party to the far Left by infiltrating it and ' burrowing from within'. In 1996, the New Party exulted that one of its members who had just been successful in the political primary season was - Barack Obama.

Guilt

Whenever any of this surfaces, the Left tries to suppress it by screaming 'guilt by association'. Not so. This is guilt by participation.

Full Text:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1076957/MELANIE-PHILIPS-Everyone-destroy-Palin--Obamas-past-examine.html

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Must Watch Video: Ayers Connection

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-45A6I-N5I&eurl=http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-admits-his-work-with-terrorist.html

"Just a guy in my neighborhood,a harmless weatherman. Maybe I'll invite him to dinner at the Whitehouse."

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Ayers and Obama Together Again

Ayers And Obama, Back In The News

Stanley Kurtz has a piece in the WSJ detailing the association of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He also offers insights into Bill Ayers' radical education agenda - soccer moms, listen up!

Mr. Kurtz provides a supplement at the NRO.

Let me chime in on this point from the Journal:

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

Unsettled indeed. But do keep in mind - there was a push for education reform in Chicago in 1988. The ABCs Coalition was coordinated by Bill Ayers, whose father was a key member of major philanthropic group that was also part of the ABCs Coalition. Another member of the ABCs - Barack Obama's Developing Communities Project.

So, did Bill and Barack meet back in 1988, just before Obama went off to Harvard? The timing is tricky - per his autobiography, Obama was working with a city-wide coalition on school reform in early 1988. However, he was planning to leave the Developing Communities Project in May of 1988 and go to Harvard that fall. The ABCs Coalition apparently came together in the spring of 1988 - this detailed history dates the ABCs Coalition to March 1988 (page 20), which leaves plenty of time for Obama and Ayers to meet and greet. The ABCs effort had hammered out a proposal and held a big rally by June 6, so a lot of work was done in April and May while Barack would have been involved.

Unless his name was picked from out of a hat in 1995 it is an excellent bet that Obama and Ayers met in 1988, which explains his subsequent recruitment by Ayers (denied by the campaign, of course) for the Annenberg Challenge in 1995.
Supporting info here and here, and let's hat tip Steve Diamond, who was the first person I know to promote this 1988 connection. I'll leave with this clipping from 1991 linking the ABCs Coalition, Obama's the Developing Communities Project, and Bill Ayers.

I wonder if the mainstream media will poke at this prior to November 5. I guess it depends on whether they will have time and resources left after they track down Sarah Palin's second grade teacher to resolve the allegation that she spilled a paste jar and then covered it up.

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http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2008/09/ayers-and-obama.html

From Wikipedia:

Beginnings

The CAC's successful grant application was written in 1993 by William Ayers, co-founder of the militant organization Weatherman and professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[2][3] After extensive community-based discussions also involving Anne Hallett of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation.

At its founding, the Annenberg Challenge was made up of three constituent parts:

The Chicago School Reform Collaborative, co-chaired by William C. Ayers;

a Board of Directors initially recruited by the Collaborative, which was chaired from 1995 to 2000 by Barack Obama[4], at the time a practicing attorney.

The Chicago Schools Research Consortium, a research arm of the Challenge.
The Research Consortium was responsible for assessing the impact of the expenditure of the Challenge's grant money.

Ironically, they concluded that the $110 million spent in Chicago over six years had little or no impact on outcomes for students.

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The Obama-Ayers Education Story: Funding Left-Wing Radicalism In Education

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle.

The Obama-Ayers Education Story: Funding Left-Wing Radicalism In Education

Read It All; This Matters

Posted by: Dan McLaughlin
Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 11:39AM
20 Comments

Today's must-read: after months of investigation, in which he had to weather all manner of stonewalling and intimidation by the Obama camp, Stanley Kurtz finally has the story, in today's Wall Street Journal, of Barack Obama's involvement in unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers' project to spread left-wing politics under the guise of 'education' in Chicago schools. Here's a flavor of Ayers' project:

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

And of Obama's involvement in the activities of a group whose board he chaired:

Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit....Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.


Kurtz's conclusion:


The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle.

Kurtz makes some references in the article to the Obama camp's pushback, and discusses it (including reprinting the Obama campaign's full response) here, including completing the connection of the dots in Obama's involvement in setting up and funding Ayers' activities:

In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama's formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to "delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals." All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.

Bear in mind the timeline - this is precisely the time at which Obama was launching his political career (including a meeting at Ayers' home), signing a contract to support the platform of the Marxist New Party, representing ACORN as its lawyer, and receiving the support and active participation, in return, of ACORN and similar of left-wing groups as ground troops in his campaigns. Tom Maguire looks at how far back Obama's relationship with Ayers goes. I continue to be amazed that any civilized person could associate with this terrorist, much less allocate money to give him a role in educating children. But then, recall the words of the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, writing in 2000:

Barak Obama is serving only his second term in the Illinois State Senate so he might be fairly charged with ambition, but the same might have be said of Bobby Rush when he ran against Congressman Charles Hayes. Obama also has put in time at the grass roots, working for five years as a community organizer in Harlem and in Chicago. When Obama participated in a 1996 UofC YDS Townhall Meeting on Economic Insecurity, much of what he had to say was well within the mainstream of European social democracy.

And of course, besides funding Ayers, Obama once in office was essentially letting groups like Planned Parenthood essentially write sex education bills* - not a group as overtly outside the mainstream as Ayers, but consistent with Obama's overall Illinois record as a hard-core left-wing culture warrior looking to empower the whole menagerie of left-wing interest groups (headed by other "community organizers" just like Obama himself) with funding and sway over government. Kurtz, who has followed similar stories for years, explains how all of this is symptomatic of the broader left-wing cultural and educational program:


*Those who have seen the blatantly explicit material now being presented by Planned Parenthood directed toward Jr.High kids on the Internet will realize they do not want their kindergarten children seeing this pornography. JC

Can Obama Survive the Annenberg Cover-up?

Everything I can find about the Obama-Ayers relationship indicates this relationship was
much, much closer than Obama has stated. That together they blew through somewhere between $100,000,000 and $160,000,000 on dubious projects that benefitted none of the people the money was intended for. If he could waste that much money as a "community organizer", think how much money he could squander as POTUS. Janet Crain

If voters find out Obama was lying about his past, will it kill his chances in November?

August 24, 2008 - by Clarice Feldman

Throughout the summer months, many voters supporting John McCain have been frustrated by his failure to respond forcefully to Obama’s charges against him. I felt his failure to swat about at each charge was because he was an old fighter pilot, taught to hold his fire and stay concealed as long as possible. If circumstances permitted, he would not budge until his opponent had made a potentially fatal move from which it was going to be exceedingly hard to extricate himself. Whether my assessment was right or not, it appears that the moment to strike has arrived, and like the old fighter pilot descending from the cloud cover, McCain has taken full advantage of Obama’s errors to place him in a position from which I can see no way out for him.

I’m talking about Obama’s role in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and his ill-conceived ad attacking McCain’s associations which opened the door for McCain to bring to public view something Obama has — with clear media connivance — lied about and tried to conceal: His close association with William Ayers in a program he botched.

The last thing Obama should want made public are his dubious associates. The public has had some exposure to his long time spiritual adviser, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, many have heard of the convicted Chicago fixer Tony Rezko, and some have just a bit of knowledge about William Ayers. As McCain said Wednesday: “[I]f Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let’s start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama’s political career was reportedly launched . Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and banks. In recent years Mr. Ayers has stated, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs. … I feel we didn’t do enough.’”

The background of this matter has been hashed out for some months online at Slate, The American Thinker, Just One Minute and Global Labor. National Review Online joined in more recently. But if you missed the story or were unable to keep up with it, it began when Obama lied about the extent of his relationship with Ayers and the press gave him a pass. Obama gave varying accounts of this relationship:

“…a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received an official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from (sic) on a regular basis.”

“Now, Mr. Ayres is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my
neighborhood, who did something I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.”

So, the story was that Ayers was an old professor in Mr. Obama’s neighborhood who just happened to host a fundraiser for him in 1995 which launched his political career.

Cont. here:

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/can-obama-survive-the-annenberg-cover-up/2/