Monday, October 27, 2008
If you love America,
If you love America, if you love freedom, if you oppose Socialism, then listen to Obama in his own voice, his own words advocate his belief in theREDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH, which is the major tenet of MARXISM.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
BREAKING NEWS: Records Reveal Obama Was A Member Of The Socialist Pary--"New Party"
Excerpt from New Party publication (Courtesy New Zeal blog)
________________________________________
Posted: October 24, 2008
12:50 am Eastern
By Aaron Klein
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
JERUSALEM – Evidence has emerged that Sen. Barack Obama belonged to a socialist political party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda.
Several blogs, including Powerline, previously documented that while running for the Illinois state Senate in 1996 as a Democrat, Obama actively sought and received the endorsement of the socialist-oriented New Party, with some blogs claiming Obama was a member of the controversial party.
The New Party, formed by members of the Democratic Socialists for America and leaders of an offshoot of the Community Party USA, was an electoral alliance that worked alongside the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. The New Party's aim was to help elect politicians to office who espouse its policies.
Among New Party members was linguist and radical activist Noam Chomsky.
Obama's campaign has responded to the allegations, denying the presidential candidate was ever a member of the New Party.
But the New Zeal blog dug up print copies of the New Party News, the party's official newspaper, which show Obama posing with New Party leaders, list him as a New Party member and include quotes from him.
The party's Spring 1996 newspaper boasted: "New Party members won three other primaries this Spring in Chicago: Barack Obama (State Senate), Michael Chandler (Democratic Party Committee) and Patricia Martin (Cook County Judiciary). The paper quoted Obama saying "these victories prove that small 'd' democracy can work."
The newspaper lists other politicians it endorsed who were not members but specifies Obama as a New Party member.
Barack Obama pictured in New Party publication (Courtesy New Zeal blog)
New Ground, the newsletter of Chicago's Democratic Socialists for America, reported in its July/August 1996 edition that Obama attended a New Party membership meeting April 11, 1996, in which he expressed his gratitude for the group's support and "encouraged NPers (New Party members) to join in his task forces on Voter Education and Voter Registration."
Becoming a New Party member requires some effort on behalf of the politician. Candidates must be approved by the party's political committee and, once approved, must sign a contract mandating they will have a "visible and active relationship" with the party.
The New Party, established in 1992, took advantage of what was known as electoral "fusion," which enabled candidates to run on two tickets simultaneously, attracting voters from both parties. But the New Party went defunct in 1998, one year after fusion was halted by the Supreme Court.
Following the initial reports of Obama's purported membership in the New Party, Obama associate and former Chicago New Party activist Carl Davidson posted a statement on several blogs claiming his former party was not socialist, but he admitted it worked with ACORN.
"[The New Party] was a pragmatic party of 'small d democracy' mainly promoting economic reforms like the living wage and testing the fusion tactic, common in many countries but only operational in New York in the U.S. The main trend within it was ACORN, an Alinskyist outfit, which is hardly Marxist," wrote Davidson.
But the socialist goals of the New Party were enumerated on its old website.
Among the New Party's stated objectives were "full employment, a shorter work week, and a guaranteed minimum income for all adults; a universal 'social wage' to include such basic benefits as health care, child care, vacation time, and lifelong access to education and training; a systematic phase-in of comparable worth and like programs to ensure gender equity."
The New Party stated it also sought "the democratization of our banking and financial system – including popular election of those charged with public stewardship of our banking system, worker-owner control over their pension assets, community-controlled alternative financial institutions."
Many of the New Party's founding members were Democratic Socialists for America leaders and members of Committees of Correspondence, a breakaway of the Communist Party USA. Obama attended several DSA events and meetings, including a DSA-sponsored town hall meeting Feb. 25, 1996, entitled "Employment and Survival in Urban America." He sought and received an endorsement from the DSA.
According to DSA documents, the New Party worked with ACORN to promote its candidates. ACORN, convicted in massive, nationwide voter fraud cases, has been a point of controversy for Obama over the presidential candidate's ties to the group.
In 1995, the DSA's New Ground newsletter stated, "In Chicago, the New Party's biggest asset and biggest liability is ACORN.
"Like most organizations, ACORN is a mixed bag. On one hand, in Chicago, ACORN is a group that attempts to organize some of the most depressed communities in the city. Chicago organizers for ACORN and organizers for SEIU Local 880 have been given modest monthly recruitment quotas for new New Party members. On the other hand, like most groups that depend on canvassing for fundraising, it's easy enough to find burned out and disgruntled former employees. And ACORN has not had the reputation for being interested in coalition politics – until recently and, happily, not just within the New Party."
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78945
Friday, October 24, 2008
McCain for President
McCain for President
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 24, 2008;
"Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.
I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.
First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.
McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.
Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.
McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.
Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?
There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?
And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.
The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.
Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb."
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 24, 2008;
"Contrarian that I am, I'm voting for John McCain. I'm not talking about bucking the polls or the media consensus that it's over before it's over. I'm talking about bucking the rush of wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they're left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years.
I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe -- neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) -- yelling "Stop!" I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I'd rather lose an election than lose my bearings.
First, I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The "erratic" temperament issue, for example. As if McCain's risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.
McCain the "erratic" is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.
Nor will I countenance the "dirty campaign" pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports "cutting Social Security benefits in half." And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.
McCain's critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What's astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.
Moreover, the most remarkable of all tactical choices of this election season is the attack that never was. Out of extreme (and unnecessary) conscientiousness, McCain refused to raise the legitimate issue of Obama's most egregious association -- with the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dirty campaigning, indeed.
The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who's been cramming on these issues for the past year, who's never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of "a world that stands as one"), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as "the tragedy of 9/11," a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?
There's just no comparison. Obama's own running mate warned this week that Obama's youth and inexperience will invite a crisis -- indeed a crisis "generated" precisely to test him. Can you be serious about national security and vote on Nov. 4 to invite that test?
And how will he pass it? Well, how has he fared on the only two significant foreign policy tests he has faced since he's been in the Senate? The first was the surge. Obama failed spectacularly. He not only opposed it. He tried to denigrate it, stop it and, finally, deny its success.
The second test was Georgia, to which Obama responded instinctively with evenhanded moral equivalence, urging restraint on both sides. McCain did not have to consult his advisers to instantly identify the aggressor.
Today's economic crisis, like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet? I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb."
Monday, October 20, 2008
Proletarianization
The quintessential British historian, Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), in the chapter "Schism In The Soul" from his seminal work, A Study of History, “observed that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites begin to imitate those at the bottom of society and succumb to the sickness of proletarianization”.
A historical and sociological observation of the United States reveals that the elites no longer have a code of their own in which they have confidence. Noted sociologist Charles Murray writes, “The code of the gentleman has collapsed. The collapse of the old codes has left a vacuum that has been filled by tenets characterized by a distinctive "thug code" of underclass males, and the world of hip-hop is an expression of that code. Charles Murray then closes with the following statement: "Bill Clinton's presidency, in both its conduct and in the reaction to that conduct, was a paradigmatic example of elites that have been infected by "the sickness of proletarianization".
Moses Hess, compatriot of Karl Marx, urged Marx to adopt the Hegelian idea that the leveling of society should be accomplished through ‘spreading the wealth’. Such a philosophy plays into the proletarianization plan as advocated by Karl Marl in The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx referred to religion and G-d as the opiate of the people.
Humanism is a Renaissance school of thought that incorporates a broad category of ethical philosophies emphasizing the dignity and worth of all people. Humanism claims to be able to determine right and wrong based on universal human qualities. Rejecting the validity of religious reasoning based on beliefs in G-d, Humanists impugn such texts as merely those of “allegedly divine origin”. Humanism is Ignostic and relishes its status as intellectually superior to persons with religious beliefs. Although Humanists focus on ethical behavior, Humanists simply have no need to be concerned with the existence of G-d.
Combine Humanism with proletarianization and the result is a destruction of society based on religious faith in G-d.
A historical and sociological observation of the United States reveals that the elites no longer have a code of their own in which they have confidence. Noted sociologist Charles Murray writes, “The code of the gentleman has collapsed. The collapse of the old codes has left a vacuum that has been filled by tenets characterized by a distinctive "thug code" of underclass males, and the world of hip-hop is an expression of that code. Charles Murray then closes with the following statement: "Bill Clinton's presidency, in both its conduct and in the reaction to that conduct, was a paradigmatic example of elites that have been infected by "the sickness of proletarianization".
Moses Hess, compatriot of Karl Marx, urged Marx to adopt the Hegelian idea that the leveling of society should be accomplished through ‘spreading the wealth’. Such a philosophy plays into the proletarianization plan as advocated by Karl Marl in The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx referred to religion and G-d as the opiate of the people.
Humanism is a Renaissance school of thought that incorporates a broad category of ethical philosophies emphasizing the dignity and worth of all people. Humanism claims to be able to determine right and wrong based on universal human qualities. Rejecting the validity of religious reasoning based on beliefs in G-d, Humanists impugn such texts as merely those of “allegedly divine origin”. Humanism is Ignostic and relishes its status as intellectually superior to persons with religious beliefs. Although Humanists focus on ethical behavior, Humanists simply have no need to be concerned with the existence of G-d.
Combine Humanism with proletarianization and the result is a destruction of society based on religious faith in G-d.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Once Upon a Time
Once upon a time in the land of Hard Work and Industry, a voice from THE ONE spoke up with a plan to spread the wealth. Why should some people make more than others?
THE ONE struck up the idea that instead of there being different salaries for teachers, professors, actors, movie directors, movie producers, news anchors, journalists, professional athletes, architects, bankers, mortgage lenders, accountants, secretaries, engineers, maintenance crews, doctors, lawyers, nurses, technicians, sales reps,the President and Congress,all government workers,CEOs,military personnel,etc., everyone would receive the same salary.
Say,$35,000. There would be no exceptions. In fact, we could just send every breathing human in the land of Hard Work and Industry a check for simply being alive!! Whoa, isn't that grand?
In fact, there would be no pay increases because of one's training, skill sets,or seniority. Thus, we wouldn't need schools and colleges. In fact, we wouldn't need jobs. The government could just send everyone an annual check.
Wouldn't this be fantastic? No work! No stress! No hassles! No incentives! No motivation to improve! Wow, what a wonderful life! What a wonderful leader and inspiration is THE ONE!
We would all live happily ever after. Ah, to live in utopia!
THE ONE struck up the idea that instead of there being different salaries for teachers, professors, actors, movie directors, movie producers, news anchors, journalists, professional athletes, architects, bankers, mortgage lenders, accountants, secretaries, engineers, maintenance crews, doctors, lawyers, nurses, technicians, sales reps,the President and Congress,all government workers,CEOs,military personnel,etc., everyone would receive the same salary.
Say,$35,000. There would be no exceptions. In fact, we could just send every breathing human in the land of Hard Work and Industry a check for simply being alive!! Whoa, isn't that grand?
In fact, there would be no pay increases because of one's training, skill sets,or seniority. Thus, we wouldn't need schools and colleges. In fact, we wouldn't need jobs. The government could just send everyone an annual check.
Wouldn't this be fantastic? No work! No stress! No hassles! No incentives! No motivation to improve! Wow, what a wonderful life! What a wonderful leader and inspiration is THE ONE!
We would all live happily ever after. Ah, to live in utopia!
Saturday, October 18, 2008
An Open Letter to Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal
Ms. Noonan, after reading your anathematic diatribe attempting to pass judgment on Governor Sarah Palin, I wanted to tell you that the only true claim to notoriety you have is your famous one line in one speech. Had it not been for Ronald Reagan, you would probably be a "journalist professor" in some obscure liberal socialist institution attempting to pass itself off as Academia.
Your weak attempt to pass as a conservative is without a doubt the most appalling farce I have crossed in sometime. I am a conservative, I know what a conservative stands for, and you, Ms. Noonan are not a conservative.
Intent on impugning Governor Palin for not having an Ivy League education, for not being the pretentious snob that radiates from New York City and the East Coast (by the way, I do live on the East Coast and the pretentiousness of the East Coast is disgusting), Ms. Noonan you just don't get small town America, you just don't get it that most Americans find the East Coast Elitist as pure snobs.
Governor Palin may not be the Foreign Policy Expert that Joe the Senator is suppose to be although he really made some glaring mistakes when he discussed the recent events in the Middle East. Governor Palin is not the socialist Marxist who wants to spread the wealth, which most of the Main Stream Media(that would be you, Ms. Noonan) failed to realize is straight out of Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto.
Governor Palin understands energy independence....you do not. Governor Palin understands caring and loving all children and not aborting them because they are imperfect...you do not. Governor Palin understands middleclass working mothers and fathers raising children without seeking a government handout...you do not. Governor Palin understands what it is like to start a business from scratch, to work multiple jobs in order to provide for your family's well being...you do not.
You and your ilk hate Sarah Palin because she has accomplished more than you have on her own because she wanted it badly enough. She knows what small towns are about. She's one of us. She's not one of you and your ilk, and you'll never understand it. Never. You don't try, and you don't care. Why? We're not in your social elite circle, and quite frankly we would not want to be there either.
Until you have walked in her shoes, then why don't you back off your sanctimonious judgment.
R.K. Wetzel, MA, Phi Beta Kappa
Your weak attempt to pass as a conservative is without a doubt the most appalling farce I have crossed in sometime. I am a conservative, I know what a conservative stands for, and you, Ms. Noonan are not a conservative.
Intent on impugning Governor Palin for not having an Ivy League education, for not being the pretentious snob that radiates from New York City and the East Coast (by the way, I do live on the East Coast and the pretentiousness of the East Coast is disgusting), Ms. Noonan you just don't get small town America, you just don't get it that most Americans find the East Coast Elitist as pure snobs.
Governor Palin may not be the Foreign Policy Expert that Joe the Senator is suppose to be although he really made some glaring mistakes when he discussed the recent events in the Middle East. Governor Palin is not the socialist Marxist who wants to spread the wealth, which most of the Main Stream Media(that would be you, Ms. Noonan) failed to realize is straight out of Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto.
Governor Palin understands energy independence....you do not. Governor Palin understands caring and loving all children and not aborting them because they are imperfect...you do not. Governor Palin understands middleclass working mothers and fathers raising children without seeking a government handout...you do not. Governor Palin understands what it is like to start a business from scratch, to work multiple jobs in order to provide for your family's well being...you do not.
You and your ilk hate Sarah Palin because she has accomplished more than you have on her own because she wanted it badly enough. She knows what small towns are about. She's one of us. She's not one of you and your ilk, and you'll never understand it. Never. You don't try, and you don't care. Why? We're not in your social elite circle, and quite frankly we would not want to be there either.
Until you have walked in her shoes, then why don't you back off your sanctimonious judgment.
R.K. Wetzel, MA, Phi Beta Kappa
Friday, October 17, 2008
Dreams of My Father
The following insightful op-ed by Jack Cashill appeared at AmericanThinker.com on Friday, October 17, 2008, and this op-ed is extremely revealing about Barack H. Obama.
"Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
By Jack Cashill
Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The evidence falls into five general categories, here summarized.
The discovery of new matching nautical metaphors from both Ayers and Obama that almost assuredly came from the same source: Ayers, a former merchant seaman.
The discovery of a Bill Ayers' essay on memoir writing, whose postmodern themes and phrases are echoed throughout Dreams.
A newly discovered book chapter from 1990 that shows clearly and painfully the limits of Obama's prose style the year he received a contract to write Dreams.
The revelation by radical Islamicist Rashid Khalidi that Ayers made his "dining room table" available for neighborhood writers who needed help.
A refined timeline that shows Ayers had the means, the motive and the time to help Obama when he needed it most.
The timeline:
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as the Harvard Law Review's first black president in 1990 caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.
Obama repaired to Chicago with advance in hand and dithered. At one point, in order to finish the book without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. His agent hustled him a new, smaller contract.
Ayers published his book "To Teach" in 1993. Between 1993 and 1996, he had no other formal authorial assignment than to co-edit a collection of essays. This was an unusual hole in his very busy publishing career.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
Neighborhood assistance:
Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." There is an element of speculation in this, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive. One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the PLO.
In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi writes of Ayers, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.
Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."
Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center were Ayers and Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.
I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought a sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help."
Obama's limited skills:
Obama needed all the help he could get. Prior to 1990, he had written very close to nothing. In 1981 Occidental College published two of Obama's poems-"Pop" and "Underground. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print, and this only an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review -- more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal.
In 1990 Obama also contributed an essay to a book published by the University of Illinois at Springfield, an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range or lack thereof:
"Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda."
"But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts."
These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas." Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class.
In "Why Organize" Obama makes use of the fully re-created conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams. Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:
"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."
"Why's that?"
" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."
To read "Why Organize" in its entirety is to understand the profound limits of Obama's literary talent. I am sure he sensed those limits if no one else did.
Postmodern themes:
Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and Obama's Dreams From My Father follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
Dreams and Fugitive Days are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.
In true postmodernist fashion, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys, whose "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.
Curiously, Obama says much the same in Dreams and in much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize" into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams, and he did not so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text. The Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." The Obama quotes come from Dreams:
Ayers: "The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. . . . But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency."
Obama: "And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged . . . "
Ayers: "Narrative begins with something to say-content precedes form."
Obama: "I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative . . . "
Ayers: "Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this."
Obama: "Truth is usually the best corrective."
Ayers: "The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page."
Obama: "Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that--on the surface, at least--contradict the world I now occupy."
Ayers: "The reader must actually see the struggle. It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim."
Obama: "But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary."
Ayers: "Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant."
Obama: "I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."
Ayers: "But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification."
Obama: "At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap."
Although I cite one example for each, Dreams offers many more. There are ten "trap" references alone and nearly as many for "narrative," "struggle," and "journey." To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers and fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors of a leftist bent.
The sea metaphors:
A newly discovered anecdote from Bill Ayers' 1993 book, To Teach, solidifies the case that he is indeed the muse behind Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.
In the book, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city. As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one student said, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student said, "No, it has to flow south-down."
Not knowing which was right, the teacher and the students did their research. What they discovered, writes Ayers, was "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama shares a stunningly comparable anecdote about tidal rivers from his own brief New York sojourn. He tells of meeting with "Marty Kauffman" at a Lexington Avenue diner, the man from Chicago who was trying to recruit him as a community organizer.
After the meeting, Obama "took the long way home, along the East River promenade." As "a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea," Obama sat down on a bench to consider his options. While sitting, he noticed a black woman and her young son against the railing. Overly fond of the too well remembered detail, Obama observes that "they stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single silhouette against the twilight."
The boy appeared to ask his mother a question that she could not answer and then approached Obama: "Excuse me, mister," he shouted. "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?"
"The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do with the tides." Obama uses the seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river as a metaphor for his own. Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and heads for Chicago.
Even were there no other clues, Obama's frequent and sophisticated use of nautical metaphors like this one makes a powerful case for Ayers' involvement in the writing of Dreams. Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives no indication than he has had any real experience with the sea or ships. Ayers, however, knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of college, he took up the life of a merchant seaman.
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness." Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea."
More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter." Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."
Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."
In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's The Sea Wolf.
My own semi-memoir, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control here too. The book makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the black nationalist message: "A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.
Why this matters: Obama's handlers have "constructed" his persona around his presumably superior intelligence. Bill Buckley's son Christopher, smitten by Obama's literary skills, is among those who have yielded to this imagery and joined the Obama crusade. Even if someone benign had ghostwritten the book it would present a problem for Obama.
The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then obscure Obama. Before Obama's ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout, and the street cred. Ayers could also write and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had had several of his books published. What Ayers could never do, however, was run for office on his own.
My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and chose to mold it. The calculation in Dreams is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. If it were revealed that the ghostwriter is Ayers, it would suggest that Ayers has played a major role all along in the shaping of Barack Obama. It is unlikely that the McCain camp would have invested so much energy in establishing the Ayers-Obama link if they did not think this was the case.
At the end of the day, the observer is left with only two conclusions: either Barack Obama experienced a quantum surge in his writing skills almost overnight; or someone made a major contribution to the rewriting of his book.
The dispassionate observer has to choose the latter -- the former has no precedent. If he can endure the consequences, he concedes that that contributor had to be Bill Ayers."
"Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
By Jack Cashill
Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The evidence falls into five general categories, here summarized.
The discovery of new matching nautical metaphors from both Ayers and Obama that almost assuredly came from the same source: Ayers, a former merchant seaman.
The discovery of a Bill Ayers' essay on memoir writing, whose postmodern themes and phrases are echoed throughout Dreams.
A newly discovered book chapter from 1990 that shows clearly and painfully the limits of Obama's prose style the year he received a contract to write Dreams.
The revelation by radical Islamicist Rashid Khalidi that Ayers made his "dining room table" available for neighborhood writers who needed help.
A refined timeline that shows Ayers had the means, the motive and the time to help Obama when he needed it most.
The timeline:
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as the Harvard Law Review's first black president in 1990 caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.
Obama repaired to Chicago with advance in hand and dithered. At one point, in order to finish the book without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. His agent hustled him a new, smaller contract.
Ayers published his book "To Teach" in 1993. Between 1993 and 1996, he had no other formal authorial assignment than to co-edit a collection of essays. This was an unusual hole in his very busy publishing career.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
Neighborhood assistance:
Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." There is an element of speculation in this, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive. One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the PLO.
In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi writes of Ayers, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.
Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."
Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center were Ayers and Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.
I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought a sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help."
Obama's limited skills:
Obama needed all the help he could get. Prior to 1990, he had written very close to nothing. In 1981 Occidental College published two of Obama's poems-"Pop" and "Underground. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print, and this only an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review -- more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal.
In 1990 Obama also contributed an essay to a book published by the University of Illinois at Springfield, an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range or lack thereof:
"Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda."
"But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts."
These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas." Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class.
In "Why Organize" Obama makes use of the fully re-created conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams. Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:
"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."
"Why's that?"
" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."
To read "Why Organize" in its entirety is to understand the profound limits of Obama's literary talent. I am sure he sensed those limits if no one else did.
Postmodern themes:
Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and Obama's Dreams From My Father follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
Dreams and Fugitive Days are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.
In true postmodernist fashion, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys, whose "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.
Curiously, Obama says much the same in Dreams and in much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize" into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams, and he did not so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text. The Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." The Obama quotes come from Dreams:
Ayers: "The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. . . . But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency."
Obama: "And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged . . . "
Ayers: "Narrative begins with something to say-content precedes form."
Obama: "I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative . . . "
Ayers: "Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this."
Obama: "Truth is usually the best corrective."
Ayers: "The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page."
Obama: "Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that--on the surface, at least--contradict the world I now occupy."
Ayers: "The reader must actually see the struggle. It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim."
Obama: "But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary."
Ayers: "Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant."
Obama: "I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."
Ayers: "But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification."
Obama: "At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap."
Although I cite one example for each, Dreams offers many more. There are ten "trap" references alone and nearly as many for "narrative," "struggle," and "journey." To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers and fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors of a leftist bent.
The sea metaphors:
A newly discovered anecdote from Bill Ayers' 1993 book, To Teach, solidifies the case that he is indeed the muse behind Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.
In the book, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city. As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one student said, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student said, "No, it has to flow south-down."
Not knowing which was right, the teacher and the students did their research. What they discovered, writes Ayers, was "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama shares a stunningly comparable anecdote about tidal rivers from his own brief New York sojourn. He tells of meeting with "Marty Kauffman" at a Lexington Avenue diner, the man from Chicago who was trying to recruit him as a community organizer.
After the meeting, Obama "took the long way home, along the East River promenade." As "a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea," Obama sat down on a bench to consider his options. While sitting, he noticed a black woman and her young son against the railing. Overly fond of the too well remembered detail, Obama observes that "they stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single silhouette against the twilight."
The boy appeared to ask his mother a question that she could not answer and then approached Obama: "Excuse me, mister," he shouted. "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?"
"The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do with the tides." Obama uses the seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river as a metaphor for his own. Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and heads for Chicago.
Even were there no other clues, Obama's frequent and sophisticated use of nautical metaphors like this one makes a powerful case for Ayers' involvement in the writing of Dreams. Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives no indication than he has had any real experience with the sea or ships. Ayers, however, knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of college, he took up the life of a merchant seaman.
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness." Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea."
More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter." Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."
Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."
In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's The Sea Wolf.
My own semi-memoir, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control here too. The book makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the black nationalist message: "A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.
Why this matters: Obama's handlers have "constructed" his persona around his presumably superior intelligence. Bill Buckley's son Christopher, smitten by Obama's literary skills, is among those who have yielded to this imagery and joined the Obama crusade. Even if someone benign had ghostwritten the book it would present a problem for Obama.
The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then obscure Obama. Before Obama's ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout, and the street cred. Ayers could also write and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had had several of his books published. What Ayers could never do, however, was run for office on his own.
My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and chose to mold it. The calculation in Dreams is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. If it were revealed that the ghostwriter is Ayers, it would suggest that Ayers has played a major role all along in the shaping of Barack Obama. It is unlikely that the McCain camp would have invested so much energy in establishing the Ayers-Obama link if they did not think this was the case.
At the end of the day, the observer is left with only two conclusions: either Barack Obama experienced a quantum surge in his writing skills almost overnight; or someone made a major contribution to the rewriting of his book.
The dispassionate observer has to choose the latter -- the former has no precedent. If he can endure the consequences, he concedes that that contributor had to be Bill Ayers."
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Obama Told Ohio Plumber: I Will Spread the Wealth
If ever a US presidential candidate took a page and quote directly from the father of Communism, Karl Marx, it is Barack H. Obama.
At an Ohio rally, Obama told a struggling businessman, my goal is to spread the wealth from those who have to those who do not have. Read Obama's Remarks
In 1848 in his book,The Communist Manifesto,Karl Marx proposed the Class Struggle Theory in which he called for taking from those who have and giving to those who do not have. To Marx it did not matter if those who did not have were making any efforts to work or not. Marx played the class warfare card.
Look at Obama ads. Listen to his words. Obama is playing the Class Warfare Card. His words and his actions are divisive, yet he claims he is the uniter.
Then there are those who will cheer and say, take it from the wealthy. There is no magic price tag on wealth. Obama has miraculously chosen those making $250,000 income. The truth is that those making $250,000 a year are not wealthy. The wealthy such as the Kennedy clan, the Roosevelts, the Hollywood stars (who incidentally got a tax break in the Bailout plan), don't pay taxes like you and me. Their money is in offshore accounts and Swiss accounts so their money isn't treated as simple income.
When Obama finds that the tax increase on people making $250,000 isn't going to pay for all his Trillion Dollar increase in the budget, when will he lower that $250,000 to say $40,000? He brags he is going to raise the capital gains tax on businesses. What a lie! Capital gains taxes on not levied on businesses...they are levied on anyone who has any kind of investment: savings, Roth IRAs, IRAs, 401ks, stocks, mutuals. If you are short on cash and decide to cash in your investments, guess what? You will pay Obama's new capital gains tax.
Come on folks, think! Are you going to let this man's class warfare tactic sucker you in like the folks in 1917 in Russia who bought into that nightmare?
At an Ohio rally, Obama told a struggling businessman, my goal is to spread the wealth from those who have to those who do not have. Read Obama's Remarks
In 1848 in his book,The Communist Manifesto,Karl Marx proposed the Class Struggle Theory in which he called for taking from those who have and giving to those who do not have. To Marx it did not matter if those who did not have were making any efforts to work or not. Marx played the class warfare card.
Look at Obama ads. Listen to his words. Obama is playing the Class Warfare Card. His words and his actions are divisive, yet he claims he is the uniter.
Then there are those who will cheer and say, take it from the wealthy. There is no magic price tag on wealth. Obama has miraculously chosen those making $250,000 income. The truth is that those making $250,000 a year are not wealthy. The wealthy such as the Kennedy clan, the Roosevelts, the Hollywood stars (who incidentally got a tax break in the Bailout plan), don't pay taxes like you and me. Their money is in offshore accounts and Swiss accounts so their money isn't treated as simple income.
When Obama finds that the tax increase on people making $250,000 isn't going to pay for all his Trillion Dollar increase in the budget, when will he lower that $250,000 to say $40,000? He brags he is going to raise the capital gains tax on businesses. What a lie! Capital gains taxes on not levied on businesses...they are levied on anyone who has any kind of investment: savings, Roth IRAs, IRAs, 401ks, stocks, mutuals. If you are short on cash and decide to cash in your investments, guess what? You will pay Obama's new capital gains tax.
Come on folks, think! Are you going to let this man's class warfare tactic sucker you in like the folks in 1917 in Russia who bought into that nightmare?
Obama, Acorn, and Your Tax Dollars
From the Wall Street Journal Online Opinion Page:
"At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been "community organizers" -- like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country."(Nice try, Laura Linney, but they weren't equivalent to the community organizers of today.)
"Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members....It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government."
"Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd lower credit standards."
"But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn."
"All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real."
"The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted 'a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications.' Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada's Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly."
"Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida's Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, 'making people up or registering people that were still in prison.' "
"Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn."
"That's just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book."
"Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago 'community organizer' at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls."
"During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for 'staging, sound, lighting.' It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote."
(Since when does a political campaign give an organization with ACORN's checkered past money unless it is seeking something in return?)
"The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties."
"The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law -- on the taxpayer's dime."
"At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been "community organizers" -- like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country."(Nice try, Laura Linney, but they weren't equivalent to the community organizers of today.)
"Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members....It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government."
"Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd lower credit standards."
"But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn."
"All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real."
"The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted 'a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications.' Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada's Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly."
"Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida's Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, 'making people up or registering people that were still in prison.' "
"Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn."
"That's just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book."
"Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago 'community organizer' at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls."
"During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for 'staging, sound, lighting.' It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote."
(Since when does a political campaign give an organization with ACORN's checkered past money unless it is seeking something in return?)
"The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties."
"The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law -- on the taxpayer's dime."
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Obama Enlisted Black Congressmen to Back Bailout
From NEWSMAX:
"Barack Obama made calls to members of the House Black Caucus and convinced them to switch their votes and support the Senate-passed $700 billion bailout bill.
Several lawmakers told The Associated Press about receiving calls from Obama, who told them that if elected he would help hard-pressed homeowners keep their houses.
Obama originally kept the bailout measure at arm’s length when House leaders began their all-out push to convert members who had voted "no" on Monday, Sept 29. But he called several wavering Democrats who ended up voting "yes" the following Friday.
Obama "made numerous calls" and "helped us gather the votes on the Democratic side to pass this legislation," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., chairman of his party's House caucus.
In all, 33 House Democrats switched to the "yes" side, along with 25 Republicans.
Obama said in a statement after the House vote that the nation "is facing one of the greatest financial crises in history." The bill's passage, he said, "was absolutely necessary to prevent an economic catastrophe that could have cost millions of jobs and forced businesses across the country into bankruptcy."
In the first vote Monday, 13 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) voted “no,” helping to defeat the measure. It lost in a 228-205 vote. Had the CBC members voted “yes,” the measure would have gotten the 218 votes needed for passage.
Obama keyed in on five of the CBC members: Reps. Elijah Cummings and Donna Edwards of Maryland, John Yarmuth of Kentucky, and Mike Thompson and Barbara Lee of California. All five switched their votes to support the bill after hearing from Obama, Newsmax correspondent Phil Brennan reported.
According to Cummings, Obama told him that if he won in November he would order an official of the Treasury Department to work with homeowners facing foreclosure to restructure their loans. He added that Obama promised he would try to make changes in bankruptcy laws allowing judges to reduce the amount of the mortgages borrowers owe.
"It's not too often you get the future president telling you that his priority matches your priority," Cummings told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rep. Yarmuth said Obama had described the bill as "just patching up a hole in the boat to get it to port."
"Barack Obama made calls to members of the House Black Caucus and convinced them to switch their votes and support the Senate-passed $700 billion bailout bill.
Several lawmakers told The Associated Press about receiving calls from Obama, who told them that if elected he would help hard-pressed homeowners keep their houses.
Obama originally kept the bailout measure at arm’s length when House leaders began their all-out push to convert members who had voted "no" on Monday, Sept 29. But he called several wavering Democrats who ended up voting "yes" the following Friday.
Obama "made numerous calls" and "helped us gather the votes on the Democratic side to pass this legislation," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., chairman of his party's House caucus.
In all, 33 House Democrats switched to the "yes" side, along with 25 Republicans.
Obama said in a statement after the House vote that the nation "is facing one of the greatest financial crises in history." The bill's passage, he said, "was absolutely necessary to prevent an economic catastrophe that could have cost millions of jobs and forced businesses across the country into bankruptcy."
In the first vote Monday, 13 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) voted “no,” helping to defeat the measure. It lost in a 228-205 vote. Had the CBC members voted “yes,” the measure would have gotten the 218 votes needed for passage.
Obama keyed in on five of the CBC members: Reps. Elijah Cummings and Donna Edwards of Maryland, John Yarmuth of Kentucky, and Mike Thompson and Barbara Lee of California. All five switched their votes to support the bill after hearing from Obama, Newsmax correspondent Phil Brennan reported.
According to Cummings, Obama told him that if he won in November he would order an official of the Treasury Department to work with homeowners facing foreclosure to restructure their loans. He added that Obama promised he would try to make changes in bankruptcy laws allowing judges to reduce the amount of the mortgages borrowers owe.
"It's not too often you get the future president telling you that his priority matches your priority," Cummings told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rep. Yarmuth said Obama had described the bill as "just patching up a hole in the boat to get it to port."
Thursday, October 09, 2008
In Plain Sight
The largest radical organization in the United States is none other than ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. ACORN is the successor to the 1960’s radical, extremist group the “New Left”.
Growing out of the "New Left's" most destructive and violent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), ACORN flies under the national radar by operating locally in liberal urban areas.
NWRO in the 1960s operated on an anti-capitalism agenda and its tactics were sit-ins and disruptions in welfare offices. The goal of NWRO was to eliminate welfare eligibility restrictions, flood the welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would collapse. The original theory of the NWRO’s was the overburdened welfare system would cause the destruction of “America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, we got a culture of welfare dependency. Along came welfare reform, and the culture of dependency began to dwindle thus putting a damper on socialist dreams.
ACORN holds to the radical economic framework of NWRO and its 1960’s style tactics, but the strategy and it targets have changed. The new goals are living wages, targeting big-box stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, regulating banks, and combating predatory lending. ACORN organizes bus loads of protesters to intentionally target individuals who oppose their goals by terrifying these persons and their families at their homes.
ACORN’s ultimate goal is to effectively take over the political system of the United States from within. One of ACORN’s more prominent members is none other than Barack H. Obama, who was a community organizer in Chicago in his pre-law days. His job was to organize demonstrations in the mold of the 1960s radical groups.
Presently, ACORN is masterminding widespread voter fraud throughout the United States. Several individuals with ACORN ties recently were found guilty of voter fraud in Alabama and are now doing prison time for the crimes they perpetuated.
Barack H. Obama, attorney for ACORN, filed a class action suit against Citigroup in 1994 for redlining and preventing Blacks from obtaining low cost, zero down payment mortgages. Barack H. Obama was also the attorney for ACORN in 1995 who won a law suit forcing Illinois to implement the federal 'motor-voter' bill.
Barack H. Obama's connections to ACORN are more than extensive. He served as a leadership trainer for ACORN, served as ACORN's attorney, and served on the board of directors of two foundations, the Woods Foundation and the Joyce Foundation, along with Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers, that provided millions of dollars to ACORN. It was through these organizations that Barack H. Obama became connected to and totally involved with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Phleger, and Madeleine Talbot-Director of Chicago ACORN.
Barack H. Obama’s connections to nefarious groups and individuals are frightening. Are we truly prepared to allow this man inside the Citadel of Democracy?
An outstanding investigative report on Obama’s ties to ACORN can be found in Stanley Kurtz’ article,Inside Obama’s Acorn.
Growing out of the "New Left's" most destructive and violent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), ACORN flies under the national radar by operating locally in liberal urban areas.
NWRO in the 1960s operated on an anti-capitalism agenda and its tactics were sit-ins and disruptions in welfare offices. The goal of NWRO was to eliminate welfare eligibility restrictions, flood the welfare rolls with so many clients that the system would collapse. The original theory of the NWRO’s was the overburdened welfare system would cause the destruction of “America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, we got a culture of welfare dependency. Along came welfare reform, and the culture of dependency began to dwindle thus putting a damper on socialist dreams.
ACORN holds to the radical economic framework of NWRO and its 1960’s style tactics, but the strategy and it targets have changed. The new goals are living wages, targeting big-box stores like Wal-Mart, rolling back welfare reform, regulating banks, and combating predatory lending. ACORN organizes bus loads of protesters to intentionally target individuals who oppose their goals by terrifying these persons and their families at their homes.
ACORN’s ultimate goal is to effectively take over the political system of the United States from within. One of ACORN’s more prominent members is none other than Barack H. Obama, who was a community organizer in Chicago in his pre-law days. His job was to organize demonstrations in the mold of the 1960s radical groups.
Presently, ACORN is masterminding widespread voter fraud throughout the United States. Several individuals with ACORN ties recently were found guilty of voter fraud in Alabama and are now doing prison time for the crimes they perpetuated.
Barack H. Obama, attorney for ACORN, filed a class action suit against Citigroup in 1994 for redlining and preventing Blacks from obtaining low cost, zero down payment mortgages. Barack H. Obama was also the attorney for ACORN in 1995 who won a law suit forcing Illinois to implement the federal 'motor-voter' bill.
Barack H. Obama's connections to ACORN are more than extensive. He served as a leadership trainer for ACORN, served as ACORN's attorney, and served on the board of directors of two foundations, the Woods Foundation and the Joyce Foundation, along with Weather Underground Terrorist Bill Ayers, that provided millions of dollars to ACORN. It was through these organizations that Barack H. Obama became connected to and totally involved with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Phleger, and Madeleine Talbot-Director of Chicago ACORN.
Barack H. Obama’s connections to nefarious groups and individuals are frightening. Are we truly prepared to allow this man inside the Citadel of Democracy?
An outstanding investigative report on Obama’s ties to ACORN can be found in Stanley Kurtz’ article,Inside Obama’s Acorn.
The American Dream
The great American Dream to own a home, to own property, to work to your full potential has been around since the first settlement at Jamestown.
Home owners who actually met mortgage requirements got caught up in this mortgage and financial crisis. These are the people that John McCain believes should be helped. Go to McCain-Palin and read the details.
Obama is now ridiculing this proposal which actually was first proposed by Senator Hillary Clinton.
Does Obama believe in the American Dream? Apparently he does for those earning incomes up to $250,000. After that, to Obama, you are toast!
Home owners who actually met mortgage requirements got caught up in this mortgage and financial crisis. These are the people that John McCain believes should be helped. Go to McCain-Palin and read the details.
Obama is now ridiculing this proposal which actually was first proposed by Senator Hillary Clinton.
Does Obama believe in the American Dream? Apparently he does for those earning incomes up to $250,000. After that, to Obama, you are toast!
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Barack Was Only Eight
The Obama campaign's mantra is that Barack H. Obama was only eight when Bill Ayers was a radical terrorist with the Weathermen Underground movement. What they fail to point out is that Obama WAS NOT EIGHT
1. on September 11, 2001 when Bill Ayers said "I regret we didn't do enough bombings."
2. in 2000 when Rashid Khalidi, who ran the Arab American Action Network held a fundraiser for Barack Hussein Obama.
3. in 2001 and 2003 when Barack H. Obama with the radical Woods Foundation gave Rashid Khalidi $75,000 in two different grants for an 'oral history project on the great catastrohe of Israel's founding. This project is named 'an-Nakba'.
4. in 1998 when Barack H. Obama was getting financial funding for Tony Rezko
5. when he sat in the pews for 20 years listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology sermons demonizing whites and Jews.
No he was not eight. Barack H. Obama was an adult associating with persons of nefarious backgrounds. It should come as no surprise that he is willing to sit down without preconditions with the leaders of rogue states who promise the destruction of both Israel and the United States.
1. on September 11, 2001 when Bill Ayers said "I regret we didn't do enough bombings."
2. in 2000 when Rashid Khalidi, who ran the Arab American Action Network held a fundraiser for Barack Hussein Obama.
3. in 2001 and 2003 when Barack H. Obama with the radical Woods Foundation gave Rashid Khalidi $75,000 in two different grants for an 'oral history project on the great catastrohe of Israel's founding. This project is named 'an-Nakba'.
4. in 1998 when Barack H. Obama was getting financial funding for Tony Rezko
5. when he sat in the pews for 20 years listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology sermons demonizing whites and Jews.
No he was not eight. Barack H. Obama was an adult associating with persons of nefarious backgrounds. It should come as no surprise that he is willing to sit down without preconditions with the leaders of rogue states who promise the destruction of both Israel and the United States.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Obama Worked with a Terrorist
ELECTION 2008
In a WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein from Jerusalem, it becomes apparent that Senator Barack H. Obama helped fund an organization that rejects Israel's existence.
Becaue Mr. Klein's article is so well written, it is quoted in its entirety:
"The board of a nonprofit organization on which Sen. Barack Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist granted funding to a controversial Arab group that mourns the establishment of Israel as a "catastrophe" and supports intense immigration reform, including providing drivers licenses and education to illegal aliens.
The co-founder of the Arab group in question, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, also has held a fundraiser for Obama. Khalidi is a harsh critic of Israel, has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror and reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group.
In 2001, the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for which Khalidi's wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002.
Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website. According to tax filings, Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.
Obama served on the Wood's Fund board alongside William C. Ayers, a member of the Weathermen terrorist group which sought to overthrow of the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971.
Ayers, who still serves on the Woods Fund board, contributed $200 to Obama's senatorial campaign fund and has served on panels with Obama at numerous public speaking engagements. Ayers admitted to involvement in the bombings of U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The $40,000 grant from Obama's Woods Fund to the AAAN constituted about a fifth of the Arab group's reported grants for 2001, according to tax filings obtained by WND. The $35,000 Woods Fund grant in 2002 also constituted about one-fifth of AAAN's reported grants for that year.
The AAAN, headquartered in the heart of Chicago's Palestinian immigrant community, describes itself as working to "empower Chicago-area Arab immigrants and Arab Americans through the combined strategies of community organizing, advocacy, education and social services, leadership development, and forging productive relationships with other communities."
It reportedly has worked on projects with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which supports open boarders and education for illegal aliens.
The AAAN in 2005 sent a letter to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson in which it called a billboard opposing a North Carolina-New Mexico joint initiative to deny driver's licenses to illegal aliens a "bigoted attack on Arabs and Muslims."
Speakers at AAAN dinners and events routinely have taken an anti-Israel line.
The group co-sponsored a Palestinian art exhibit, titled, "The Subject of Palestine," that featured works related to what some Palestinians call the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" of Israel's founding in 1948.
According to the widely discredited Nakba narrative, Jews in 1948 forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands - some Palestinians claim over one million - Arabs from their homes and then took over the territory.
Historically, about 600,000 Arabs fled Israel after surrounding Arab countries warned they would destroy the Jewish state in 1948. Some Arabs also were driven out by Jewish forces while they were trying to push back invading Arab armies. At the same time, over 800,000 Jews were expelled or left Arab countries under threat after Israel was founded.
The theme of AAAN's Nakba art exhibit, held at DePaul University in 2005, was "the compelling and continuing tragedy of Palestinian life ... under [Israeli] occupation ... home demolition ... statelessness ... bereavement ... martyrdom, and ... the heroic struggle for life, for safety, and for freedom."
Another AAAN initiative, titled, "Al Nakba 1948 as experienced by Chicago Palestinians," seeks documents related to the "catastrophe" of Israel's founding.
A post on the AAAN site asked users: "Do you have photos, letters or other memories you could share about Al-Nakba-1948?"
That posting was recently removed. The AAAN website currently states the entire site is under construction.
Pro-PLO advocate held Obama fundraiser, describes Obama as 'sympathetic'.
AAAN co-founder Rashid Khalidi was reportedly a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in Beirut from 1976 to 1982, while the PLO committed scores of anti-Western attacks and was labeled by the U.S. as a terror group. Khalidi's wife, AAAN President Mona Khalidi, was reportedly WAFA's English translator during that period.
Rashid Khalidi at times has denied working directly for the PLO but Palestinian diplomatic sources in Ramallah told WND he indeed worked on behalf of WAFA. Khalidi also advised the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991.
During documented speeches and public events, Khalidi has called Israel an "apartheid system in creation" and a destructive "racist" state.
He has multiple times expressed support for Palestinian terror, calling suicide bombings response to "Israeli aggression." He dedicated his 1986 book, "Under Siege," to "those who gave their lives ... in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon." Critics assailed the book as excusing Palestinian terrorism.
While the Woods Fund's contribution to Khalidi's AAAN might be perceived as a one-time run in with Obama, the presidential hopeful and Khalidi evidence a deeper relationship.
According to a professor at the University of Chicago who said he has known Obama for 12 years, the Democratic presidential hopeful first befriended Khalidi when the two worked together at the university. The professor spoke on condition of anonymity. Khalidi lectured at the University of Chicago until 2003 while Obama taught law there from 1993 until his election to the Senate in 2004.
Khalidi in 2000 held what was described as a successful fundraiser for Obama's failed bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, a fact not denied by Khalidi.
Speaking in a joint interview with WND and the John Batchelor Show of New York's WABC Radio and Los Angeles' KFI Radio, Khalidi was asked about his 2000 fundraiser for Obama.
"I was just doing my duties as a Chicago resident to help my local politician," Khalidi stated.
Khalidi said he supports Obama for president "because he is the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause."
Khalidi also lauded Obama for "saying he supports talks with Iran. If the U.S. can talk with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there is no reason it can't talk with the Iranians."
Asked about Obama's role funding the AAAN, Khalidi claimed he had "never heard of the Woods Fund until it popped up on a bunch of blogs a few months ago."
He terminated the call when petitioned further about his links with Obama.
Contacted by phone, Mona Khalidi refused to answer WND's questions about the AAAN's involvement with Obama.
Obama's campaign headquarters did not reply to a list of WND questions sent by e-mail to the senator's press office.
Obama, American terrorist in same circles
Obama served on the board with Ayers, who was a Weathermen leader and has written about his involvement with the group's bombings of the New York City Police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.
"I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," Ayers told the New York Times in an interview released on Sept. 11, 2001
"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon," Ayers wrote in his memoirs, titled "Fugitive Days." He continued with a disclaimer that he didn't personally set the bombs, but his group set the explosives and planned the attack.
A $200 campaign contribution is listed on April 2, 2001 by the "Friends of Barack Obama" campaign fund. The two taught appeared speaking together at several public events, including a 1997 University of Chicago panel entitled, "Should a child ever be called a 'super predator?'" and another panel for the University of Illinois in April 2002, entitled, "Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?"
The charges against Ayers were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.
Ayers is married to another notorious Weathermen terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who has also served on panels with Obama. Dohrn was once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List and was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America." Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left 4 people dead.
Obama advisor wants talks with terrorists
The revelations about Obama's relationship with Khalidi follows a recent WND article quoting Israeli security officials who expressed "concern" about Robert Malley, an adviser to Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group.
Malley, a principal Obama foreign policy adviser, has penned numerous opinion articles, many of them co-written with a former adviser to the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, petitioning for dialogue with Hamas and blasting Israel for numerous policies he says harm the Palestinian cause.
Malley also previously penned a well-circulated New York Review of Books piece largely blaming Israel for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in 2000 when Arafat turned down a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and eastern sections of Jerusalem and instead returned to the Middle East to launch an intifada, or terrorist campaign, against the Jewish state.
Malley's contentions have been strongly refuted by key participants at Camp David, including President Bill Clinton, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and primary U.S. envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, all of whom squarely blamed Arafat's refusal to make peace for the talks' failure."
Mr. Klein's article appeared on WorldNetDaily on February 24, 2008.
In a WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein from Jerusalem, it becomes apparent that Senator Barack H. Obama helped fund an organization that rejects Israel's existence.
Becaue Mr. Klein's article is so well written, it is quoted in its entirety:
"The board of a nonprofit organization on which Sen. Barack Obama served as a paid director alongside a confessed domestic terrorist granted funding to a controversial Arab group that mourns the establishment of Israel as a "catastrophe" and supports intense immigration reform, including providing drivers licenses and education to illegal aliens.
The co-founder of the Arab group in question, Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi, also has held a fundraiser for Obama. Khalidi is a harsh critic of Israel, has made statements supportive of Palestinian terror and reportedly has worked on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization while it was involved in anti-Western terrorism and was labeled by the State Department as a terror group.
In 2001, the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based nonprofit that describes itself as a group helping the disadvantaged, provided a $40,000 grant to the Arab American Action Network, or AAAN, for which Khalidi's wife, Mona, serves as president. The Fund provided a second grant to the AAAN for $35,000 in 2002.
Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website. According to tax filings, Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.
Obama served on the Wood's Fund board alongside William C. Ayers, a member of the Weathermen terrorist group which sought to overthrow of the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971.
Ayers, who still serves on the Woods Fund board, contributed $200 to Obama's senatorial campaign fund and has served on panels with Obama at numerous public speaking engagements. Ayers admitted to involvement in the bombings of U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The $40,000 grant from Obama's Woods Fund to the AAAN constituted about a fifth of the Arab group's reported grants for 2001, according to tax filings obtained by WND. The $35,000 Woods Fund grant in 2002 also constituted about one-fifth of AAAN's reported grants for that year.
The AAAN, headquartered in the heart of Chicago's Palestinian immigrant community, describes itself as working to "empower Chicago-area Arab immigrants and Arab Americans through the combined strategies of community organizing, advocacy, education and social services, leadership development, and forging productive relationships with other communities."
It reportedly has worked on projects with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which supports open boarders and education for illegal aliens.
The AAAN in 2005 sent a letter to New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson in which it called a billboard opposing a North Carolina-New Mexico joint initiative to deny driver's licenses to illegal aliens a "bigoted attack on Arabs and Muslims."
Speakers at AAAN dinners and events routinely have taken an anti-Israel line.
The group co-sponsored a Palestinian art exhibit, titled, "The Subject of Palestine," that featured works related to what some Palestinians call the "Nakba" or "catastrophe" of Israel's founding in 1948.
According to the widely discredited Nakba narrative, Jews in 1948 forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands - some Palestinians claim over one million - Arabs from their homes and then took over the territory.
Historically, about 600,000 Arabs fled Israel after surrounding Arab countries warned they would destroy the Jewish state in 1948. Some Arabs also were driven out by Jewish forces while they were trying to push back invading Arab armies. At the same time, over 800,000 Jews were expelled or left Arab countries under threat after Israel was founded.
The theme of AAAN's Nakba art exhibit, held at DePaul University in 2005, was "the compelling and continuing tragedy of Palestinian life ... under [Israeli] occupation ... home demolition ... statelessness ... bereavement ... martyrdom, and ... the heroic struggle for life, for safety, and for freedom."
Another AAAN initiative, titled, "Al Nakba 1948 as experienced by Chicago Palestinians," seeks documents related to the "catastrophe" of Israel's founding.
A post on the AAAN site asked users: "Do you have photos, letters or other memories you could share about Al-Nakba-1948?"
That posting was recently removed. The AAAN website currently states the entire site is under construction.
Pro-PLO advocate held Obama fundraiser, describes Obama as 'sympathetic'.
AAAN co-founder Rashid Khalidi was reportedly a director of the official PLO press agency WAFA in Beirut from 1976 to 1982, while the PLO committed scores of anti-Western attacks and was labeled by the U.S. as a terror group. Khalidi's wife, AAAN President Mona Khalidi, was reportedly WAFA's English translator during that period.
Rashid Khalidi at times has denied working directly for the PLO but Palestinian diplomatic sources in Ramallah told WND he indeed worked on behalf of WAFA. Khalidi also advised the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid Conference in 1991.
During documented speeches and public events, Khalidi has called Israel an "apartheid system in creation" and a destructive "racist" state.
He has multiple times expressed support for Palestinian terror, calling suicide bombings response to "Israeli aggression." He dedicated his 1986 book, "Under Siege," to "those who gave their lives ... in defense of the cause of Palestine and independence of Lebanon." Critics assailed the book as excusing Palestinian terrorism.
While the Woods Fund's contribution to Khalidi's AAAN might be perceived as a one-time run in with Obama, the presidential hopeful and Khalidi evidence a deeper relationship.
According to a professor at the University of Chicago who said he has known Obama for 12 years, the Democratic presidential hopeful first befriended Khalidi when the two worked together at the university. The professor spoke on condition of anonymity. Khalidi lectured at the University of Chicago until 2003 while Obama taught law there from 1993 until his election to the Senate in 2004.
Khalidi in 2000 held what was described as a successful fundraiser for Obama's failed bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, a fact not denied by Khalidi.
Speaking in a joint interview with WND and the John Batchelor Show of New York's WABC Radio and Los Angeles' KFI Radio, Khalidi was asked about his 2000 fundraiser for Obama.
"I was just doing my duties as a Chicago resident to help my local politician," Khalidi stated.
Khalidi said he supports Obama for president "because he is the only candidate who has expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause."
Khalidi also lauded Obama for "saying he supports talks with Iran. If the U.S. can talk with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there is no reason it can't talk with the Iranians."
Asked about Obama's role funding the AAAN, Khalidi claimed he had "never heard of the Woods Fund until it popped up on a bunch of blogs a few months ago."
He terminated the call when petitioned further about his links with Obama.
Contacted by phone, Mona Khalidi refused to answer WND's questions about the AAAN's involvement with Obama.
Obama's campaign headquarters did not reply to a list of WND questions sent by e-mail to the senator's press office.
Obama, American terrorist in same circles
Obama served on the board with Ayers, who was a Weathermen leader and has written about his involvement with the group's bombings of the New York City Police headquarters in 1970, the Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.
"I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," Ayers told the New York Times in an interview released on Sept. 11, 2001
"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon," Ayers wrote in his memoirs, titled "Fugitive Days." He continued with a disclaimer that he didn't personally set the bombs, but his group set the explosives and planned the attack.
A $200 campaign contribution is listed on April 2, 2001 by the "Friends of Barack Obama" campaign fund. The two taught appeared speaking together at several public events, including a 1997 University of Chicago panel entitled, "Should a child ever be called a 'super predator?'" and another panel for the University of Illinois in April 2002, entitled, "Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?"
The charges against Ayers were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.
Ayers is married to another notorious Weathermen terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn, who has also served on panels with Obama. Dohrn was once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List and was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America." Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left 4 people dead.
Obama advisor wants talks with terrorists
The revelations about Obama's relationship with Khalidi follows a recent WND article quoting Israeli security officials who expressed "concern" about Robert Malley, an adviser to Obama who has advocated negotiations with Hamas and providing international assistance to the terrorist group.
Malley, a principal Obama foreign policy adviser, has penned numerous opinion articles, many of them co-written with a former adviser to the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, petitioning for dialogue with Hamas and blasting Israel for numerous policies he says harm the Palestinian cause.
Malley also previously penned a well-circulated New York Review of Books piece largely blaming Israel for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in 2000 when Arafat turned down a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and eastern sections of Jerusalem and instead returned to the Middle East to launch an intifada, or terrorist campaign, against the Jewish state.
Malley's contentions have been strongly refuted by key participants at Camp David, including President Bill Clinton, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and primary U.S. envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, all of whom squarely blamed Arafat's refusal to make peace for the talks' failure."
Mr. Klein's article appeared on WorldNetDaily on February 24, 2008.
If You Believe in Education
If you believe in American exceptionalism, if you believe in freedom and democracy, if you love America, this may resonate with you.
As a retired educator, the following article based on reporting by Stanley Kurtz of National Review is imperative reading for ALL Americans,
"Rick Moran writes on the American Thinker: September 23, 2008
Kurtz: Obama-Ayers Partnership tried to radicalize Chicago Public Schools
Is there any sanity left in America? Are we really going to do it - elect someone who views our children as soldiers in a revolution?
Obama's ideas on education "reform" sound innocuous enough. But as anyone who knows how government works can tell you, "the devil is in the details." And the devil in this case is just who Obama chooses to implement his education agenda. The project was, in essence, a plan to change Chicago Schools into left wing centers of agitation, controlled by community councils dominated by "community organizers" -- people whose job is to mobilize apathetic people to "class consciousness.
NRO's Stanley Kurtz has pored over the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents and discovered that despite Obama's contention that former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers was "just some guy in my neighborhood," the two worked closely together on the school initiative and that Obama supported many of Ayers more radical ideas about the purpose of public schools:
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
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.
The reason there was no improvement in education was because that was not the goal of "reform." The purpose was to inculcate children with feelings of outrage and turn them into little warriors for Ayers radical agenda for America. I might note that one of Obama's planks in his education proposal calls for mandatory community service of 50 hours a year for all children 1-12 in public schools. This would be included in a "School-Parent Contract" signed by both the teachers and the family.
The goal is apparently to make schools the vanguard of social change by centralizing activism and bringing in community organizations dedicated to fundamentally altering the American experiment:
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
This is the man Obama worked closely with on the CAC, funding Mr. Ayers "Collaborative" and its radical notions of education. Obama knew exactly what Mr. Ayers was doing and evidently approved.
The thought of someone like this becoming president should chill the bones of anyone who supports academic freedom and an educational system that teaches children how to learn and not brainwashes them with a radical political agenda.
Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air:
"Ayers wanted teachers trained to instruct against "oppression" and to push schoolchildren towards political beliefs Ayers valued - apparently valuing them higher than actual education. Barack Obama agreed, and for several years worked in close partnership with Ayers to implement that educational policy. Even had Ayers never tossed a single bomb, this kind of educational philosophy would likely raise eyebrows with most parents, who desire a real education for their children and not some sort of political indoctrination camp. With the context of Ayers' violent radicalism, however, it makes the CAC even worse - a breeding ground for future Weathermen, ready to follow Ayers' lead when the time comes for the revolution that Ayers and his wife (and co-terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn to this day desire."
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/kurtz_obamaayers_partnership_t.html
THIS NEEDS TO BE SHARED WITH ALL AMERICANS!
May G-d Bless the United States.
As a retired educator, the following article based on reporting by Stanley Kurtz of National Review is imperative reading for ALL Americans,
"Rick Moran writes on the American Thinker: September 23, 2008
Kurtz: Obama-Ayers Partnership tried to radicalize Chicago Public Schools
Is there any sanity left in America? Are we really going to do it - elect someone who views our children as soldiers in a revolution?
Obama's ideas on education "reform" sound innocuous enough. But as anyone who knows how government works can tell you, "the devil is in the details." And the devil in this case is just who Obama chooses to implement his education agenda. The project was, in essence, a plan to change Chicago Schools into left wing centers of agitation, controlled by community councils dominated by "community organizers" -- people whose job is to mobilize apathetic people to "class consciousness.
NRO's Stanley Kurtz has pored over the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents and discovered that despite Obama's contention that former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers was "just some guy in my neighborhood," the two worked closely together on the school initiative and that Obama supported many of Ayers more radical ideas about the purpose of public schools:
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
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.
The reason there was no improvement in education was because that was not the goal of "reform." The purpose was to inculcate children with feelings of outrage and turn them into little warriors for Ayers radical agenda for America. I might note that one of Obama's planks in his education proposal calls for mandatory community service of 50 hours a year for all children 1-12 in public schools. This would be included in a "School-Parent Contract" signed by both the teachers and the family.
The goal is apparently to make schools the vanguard of social change by centralizing activism and bringing in community organizations dedicated to fundamentally altering the American experiment:
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
This is the man Obama worked closely with on the CAC, funding Mr. Ayers "Collaborative" and its radical notions of education. Obama knew exactly what Mr. Ayers was doing and evidently approved.
The thought of someone like this becoming president should chill the bones of anyone who supports academic freedom and an educational system that teaches children how to learn and not brainwashes them with a radical political agenda.
Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air:
"Ayers wanted teachers trained to instruct against "oppression" and to push schoolchildren towards political beliefs Ayers valued - apparently valuing them higher than actual education. Barack Obama agreed, and for several years worked in close partnership with Ayers to implement that educational policy. Even had Ayers never tossed a single bomb, this kind of educational philosophy would likely raise eyebrows with most parents, who desire a real education for their children and not some sort of political indoctrination camp. With the context of Ayers' violent radicalism, however, it makes the CAC even worse - a breeding ground for future Weathermen, ready to follow Ayers' lead when the time comes for the revolution that Ayers and his wife (and co-terrorist) Bernardine Dohrn to this day desire."
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/kurtz_obamaayers_partnership_t.html
THIS NEEDS TO BE SHARED WITH ALL AMERICANS!
May G-d Bless the United States.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Mr. Foreign Policy Expert Screws Up!
For the man who is suppose to be the foreign policy brain for Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the Senate Foreign Relations Chair, made several serious foreign policy gaffes in his debate with Governon Palin on Thursday night. If he is the foreign policy expert, it did not come through on the issue of the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian issue. At best, Joe Biden demonstrated that experience does not always equate with good judgment.
First, Biden stated that George Bush waited too long before mediating negotiations between Israel and Palestine. This made Bush's policy in the Middle East an abject failure according to Biden. Wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Foreign Policy that the internal political struggles within Israel may have played any role during this time when Biden was pushing for mediation?
Second, Biden stated that George Bush made a mistake when he insisted on elections in the West Bank which led to a victory for Hamas and thus legitimizing Hamas. Wrong, Joe. The 2006 election took place in Palestine and not in the West Bank. Biden claimed to have warned not to hold the elections in the West Bank. Guess what Joe? They didn't hold them in the West Bank.
Third, Bush failed to establish NATO forces in Lebanon after France and the US drove out Hezbollah. Biden again claimed that he warned that failing to fill the vacuum in Lebanon would leave Hezbollah an opening to establish control. Guess what, Joe? The Lebanese as well as Hezbollah will be very surprised to learn that Hezbollah was kicked out in the 2006 war.
For a man known as Mr. Foreign Policy who promises thoughtful, real live diplomacy, these gaffes alone are frightening, but to think he might actually believe he's an expert is even more frightening.
First, Biden stated that George Bush waited too long before mediating negotiations between Israel and Palestine. This made Bush's policy in the Middle East an abject failure according to Biden. Wonder if it ever occurred to Mr. Foreign Policy that the internal political struggles within Israel may have played any role during this time when Biden was pushing for mediation?
Second, Biden stated that George Bush made a mistake when he insisted on elections in the West Bank which led to a victory for Hamas and thus legitimizing Hamas. Wrong, Joe. The 2006 election took place in Palestine and not in the West Bank. Biden claimed to have warned not to hold the elections in the West Bank. Guess what Joe? They didn't hold them in the West Bank.
Third, Bush failed to establish NATO forces in Lebanon after France and the US drove out Hezbollah. Biden again claimed that he warned that failing to fill the vacuum in Lebanon would leave Hezbollah an opening to establish control. Guess what, Joe? The Lebanese as well as Hezbollah will be very surprised to learn that Hezbollah was kicked out in the 2006 war.
For a man known as Mr. Foreign Policy who promises thoughtful, real live diplomacy, these gaffes alone are frightening, but to think he might actually believe he's an expert is even more frightening.
British Ambassador's Take
Barack Hussein Obama proudly strudded to Europe this summer to bash the United States for all its foibles while seeking the blessings and love of Europeans. One important point not pointed out by the in-the-tank mainstream media was that there were at least two major European rock bands giving a concert before he spoke.
The question should be: Did Obama smooze all the Europeans whose opinion he seeks to influence?
The following comes from the British Minister to the US in an interview with the UK Telegraph:
“Sir Nigel Sheinwald, ambassador in Washington since last year, delivered his unvarnished assessment of the White House front runner in a seven-page letter to the Prime Minister, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, just before the Democratic nominee's visit to Downing Street just over two months ago.
The candid letter, marked as containing "sensitive judgements" and requesting officials to "protect the contents carefully" gives a remarkable insight into how the Foreign Office views the political phenomenon who stunned Mr Brown's inner circle by defeating their favourite, Hillary Clinton, in the Democratic primaries.
Although the picture Sir Nigel paints is a highly complimentary one - Mr Obama's speeches are "elegant" and "mesmerising", he is "highly intelligent" and has "star quality" - he also judges that his "policies are still evolving" and that if elected he will "have less of a track record than any recent president".
The letter's contents suggest that Mr Brown could initially find it difficult to deal with a President Obama because he remains a largely unknown quantity who "resists pigeon-holing" and the leak is likely to complicate relations.
Last month, the prime minister was forced to backtrack after an article written in his name broke with convention by showering praise on the Democratic candidate at the expense of his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona.
Sir Nigel traces the ambition of Mr Obama, 47, to reach the White House right back to his 20s or before. "He has talked at least since the 1980s about a shot at the Presidency."
He also identifies several political vulnerabilities that Sen McCain will seek to exploit in the last month of his campaign against the Illinois senator. The leaked letter will provide him with welcome ammunition.
Mr Obama "can seem to sit on the fence, assiduously balancing pros and cons", Sir Nigel wrote, and "does betray a highly educated and upper middle class mindset". Charges of elitism "are not entirely unfair" and he is "maybe aloof, insensitive" at times.
"He can talk too dispassionately for a national campaign about issues which touch people personally, eg his notorious San Francisco comments [in April] about small-town Pennsylvanians 'clinging' to guns and religion."
Mr Obama's Democratic primary victory over the former First Lady showed that "he is tough and competitive. This is of course the Chicago school.
You don't beat Clinton without being resilient" but "his energy levels do dip and he can be uninspiring e.g. in debates".
Curiously, there is no mention of his wife Michelle - a central figure in his rise and his closest adviser - and little examination of his time in Chicago, where he had radical associations, or his background in Hawaii, essential to understanding why "Obama is cool", as the letter puts it.
Sir Nigel detects a potential clash between Downing Street and an Obama administration over Iran.
"If Obama wins, we will need to consider with him the articulation between (a) his desire for 'unconditional' dialogue with Iran and (b) our and the [United Nations Security Council]'s requirement of prior suspension of enrichment before the nuclear negotiations proper can begin."
But Sir Nigel - who described the Iraq war as "the Iraq expedition" and "Bush's Iraq adventure" - briefed that Mr Obama's Iraq policy gelled with Britain's.
"Whatever the detail, our own proposed transition in south-east Iraq would be consistent with Obama's likely approach. Obama's ideas on a more expansive regional framework for Iraq would also fit well with our thinking."
He wrote approvingly of Mr Obama's "mainstream team of youthful economic advisers, with strong credentials [who] approach policy with refreshingly few prescriptions", his "progressive position on climate change" and his 'pragmatic realism" and "balanced approach to the big security issues".
Sir Nigel concludes that searching for a deal between Israel and the Palestinians is "unlikely to be a top priority for Obama" and he expresses concern about his protectionist trade policy, while noting that he has "repositioned himself somewhat towards free trade".
British officials said that since it became clear that Mr Obama would overcome Mrs Clinton, Sir Nigel had worked hard to dampen down what he viewed as "Obamamania" within Downing Street that had become so strong that he feared it might alienate the McCain campaign.
Sir Nigel's letter, though initially drafted by his political staff, is an intensely personal assessment of Mr Obama and is based largely on the ambassador's owns observations from the campaign trail.
He has travelled to rallies as far afield as New Hampshire and South Carolina - where he had a personal meeting with Mr McCain - and to the party conventions in Denver and St Paul, Minnesota.
Although he has the lowest public profile of any recent British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nigel has won respect for his range of contacts within the Bush administration and the campaigns.
The letter quotes Tom Daschle, a former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant who is hotly tipped to become White House chief of staff should Mr Obama be elected, from a private meeting with Sir Nigel.
There is a strong indication Sir Nigel also consulted Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican who has worked with Mr Obama on legislation and travelled abroad with him.
"Obama's politics and policies are still evolving," Sir Nigel wrote.
"His Illinois and US Senate careers give us only a few clues as to his likely priorities in office.
"In the Senate he took a low profile in 2005-6, but was a diligent member of the Foreign Relations Committee, respectful and friendly to the veteran Republican Senator Lugar, with whom he travelled to London in 2005.
"His voting record was decidedly liberal. But the main impression is of someone who was finding his feet, and then got diverted by his presidential ambitions."
Sir Nigel later reiterates the point: "Although he has been a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for four years, and a regular attender of meetings in his first two, there is little Obama track record to refer back to."
He highlights luck as a key factor in Mr Obama's rise. "He was certainly lucky in having Democratic and Republican opponents for the US Senate in 2004 who were tarnished. He was lucky that Hillary Clinton had such a bad organisation in the primary campaign, and took so long to respond to Obama's threat."
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/3125120/Barack-Obama-is-aloof-says-British-ambassador-to-US.html
Aloof, sitting on the fence, no track record? So it's not only some Americans who have picked up on these tendencies. Do you think the terrorists have determined this as well?
The question should be: Did Obama smooze all the Europeans whose opinion he seeks to influence?
The following comes from the British Minister to the US in an interview with the UK Telegraph:
“Sir Nigel Sheinwald, ambassador in Washington since last year, delivered his unvarnished assessment of the White House front runner in a seven-page letter to the Prime Minister, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, just before the Democratic nominee's visit to Downing Street just over two months ago.
The candid letter, marked as containing "sensitive judgements" and requesting officials to "protect the contents carefully" gives a remarkable insight into how the Foreign Office views the political phenomenon who stunned Mr Brown's inner circle by defeating their favourite, Hillary Clinton, in the Democratic primaries.
Although the picture Sir Nigel paints is a highly complimentary one - Mr Obama's speeches are "elegant" and "mesmerising", he is "highly intelligent" and has "star quality" - he also judges that his "policies are still evolving" and that if elected he will "have less of a track record than any recent president".
The letter's contents suggest that Mr Brown could initially find it difficult to deal with a President Obama because he remains a largely unknown quantity who "resists pigeon-holing" and the leak is likely to complicate relations.
Last month, the prime minister was forced to backtrack after an article written in his name broke with convention by showering praise on the Democratic candidate at the expense of his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona.
Sir Nigel traces the ambition of Mr Obama, 47, to reach the White House right back to his 20s or before. "He has talked at least since the 1980s about a shot at the Presidency."
He also identifies several political vulnerabilities that Sen McCain will seek to exploit in the last month of his campaign against the Illinois senator. The leaked letter will provide him with welcome ammunition.
Mr Obama "can seem to sit on the fence, assiduously balancing pros and cons", Sir Nigel wrote, and "does betray a highly educated and upper middle class mindset". Charges of elitism "are not entirely unfair" and he is "maybe aloof, insensitive" at times.
"He can talk too dispassionately for a national campaign about issues which touch people personally, eg his notorious San Francisco comments [in April] about small-town Pennsylvanians 'clinging' to guns and religion."
Mr Obama's Democratic primary victory over the former First Lady showed that "he is tough and competitive. This is of course the Chicago school.
You don't beat Clinton without being resilient" but "his energy levels do dip and he can be uninspiring e.g. in debates".
Curiously, there is no mention of his wife Michelle - a central figure in his rise and his closest adviser - and little examination of his time in Chicago, where he had radical associations, or his background in Hawaii, essential to understanding why "Obama is cool", as the letter puts it.
Sir Nigel detects a potential clash between Downing Street and an Obama administration over Iran.
"If Obama wins, we will need to consider with him the articulation between (a) his desire for 'unconditional' dialogue with Iran and (b) our and the [United Nations Security Council]'s requirement of prior suspension of enrichment before the nuclear negotiations proper can begin."
But Sir Nigel - who described the Iraq war as "the Iraq expedition" and "Bush's Iraq adventure" - briefed that Mr Obama's Iraq policy gelled with Britain's.
"Whatever the detail, our own proposed transition in south-east Iraq would be consistent with Obama's likely approach. Obama's ideas on a more expansive regional framework for Iraq would also fit well with our thinking."
He wrote approvingly of Mr Obama's "mainstream team of youthful economic advisers, with strong credentials [who] approach policy with refreshingly few prescriptions", his "progressive position on climate change" and his 'pragmatic realism" and "balanced approach to the big security issues".
Sir Nigel concludes that searching for a deal between Israel and the Palestinians is "unlikely to be a top priority for Obama" and he expresses concern about his protectionist trade policy, while noting that he has "repositioned himself somewhat towards free trade".
British officials said that since it became clear that Mr Obama would overcome Mrs Clinton, Sir Nigel had worked hard to dampen down what he viewed as "Obamamania" within Downing Street that had become so strong that he feared it might alienate the McCain campaign.
Sir Nigel's letter, though initially drafted by his political staff, is an intensely personal assessment of Mr Obama and is based largely on the ambassador's owns observations from the campaign trail.
He has travelled to rallies as far afield as New Hampshire and South Carolina - where he had a personal meeting with Mr McCain - and to the party conventions in Denver and St Paul, Minnesota.
Although he has the lowest public profile of any recent British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nigel has won respect for his range of contacts within the Bush administration and the campaigns.
The letter quotes Tom Daschle, a former Senate Majority Leader and Obama confidant who is hotly tipped to become White House chief of staff should Mr Obama be elected, from a private meeting with Sir Nigel.
There is a strong indication Sir Nigel also consulted Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican who has worked with Mr Obama on legislation and travelled abroad with him.
"Obama's politics and policies are still evolving," Sir Nigel wrote.
"His Illinois and US Senate careers give us only a few clues as to his likely priorities in office.
"In the Senate he took a low profile in 2005-6, but was a diligent member of the Foreign Relations Committee, respectful and friendly to the veteran Republican Senator Lugar, with whom he travelled to London in 2005.
"His voting record was decidedly liberal. But the main impression is of someone who was finding his feet, and then got diverted by his presidential ambitions."
Sir Nigel later reiterates the point: "Although he has been a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for four years, and a regular attender of meetings in his first two, there is little Obama track record to refer back to."
He highlights luck as a key factor in Mr Obama's rise. "He was certainly lucky in having Democratic and Republican opponents for the US Senate in 2004 who were tarnished. He was lucky that Hillary Clinton had such a bad organisation in the primary campaign, and took so long to respond to Obama's threat."
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/3125120/Barack-Obama-is-aloof-says-British-ambassador-to-US.html
Aloof, sitting on the fence, no track record? So it's not only some Americans who have picked up on these tendencies. Do you think the terrorists have determined this as well?
Thursday, October 02, 2008
The October Surprise?
Fearmongering. Is that the new October Surprise from the Democrats?
Two weeks ago, registered Democrat Henry Paulson, Sec. of the Treasury, (best friend of Sen. Chuckie Schumer:D-NY and Sen. Chris Dodd:D-CT), told President George Bush that the entire US economy was in peril and would collapse overnight if the Congress did not give him (Paulson) $700 BN. Immediately swinging into action were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid who both blamed the perceived failing economy on George Bush and the Republicans for the last eight years.
Paulson, Pelosi, and Reid have picked up the Democratic Party’s tactic of planting FEAR in the American electorate.
Thus, emerges the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (aka Armageddon Avoidance Act) giving the Sec. of Treasury total economic control of the US economy. Read it if you doubt that statement.
A week after Paulson’s dire SOS warning, the House failed to pass the bill. The economy still is working.
On Wednesday, October 1, 2008, the US Senate took a step which frankly is unconstitutional. The Constitution requires all revenue bills to begin in the House. The new bailout bill calling for over $850 Billion dollar bailout was started in the Senate. Not only is it unconstitutional, this bill is so loaded down with earmarks that even the liberal Congressional Budget Office sent out a red flag warning that we would be paying for this piece of legislation for at least the next 15-20 years. This piece of legislation is so loaded with pork it will sink in the pig sty.
Rather than resolve the economic issues that have generated this financial crisis, the US Congress and Secretary Paulson have chosen to apply a bandaid. In 1977, Congress passed the Community Readjustment Act which gave community organizations such as ACORN the power to tell local banks to whom they must give mortgages. If banks refused to give certain clientele mortgages because they financially could not make their mortgage payments, the banks would be penalized by the US government. Banks who redlined persons not financially qualified for mortgages were then threatened with class action lawsuits or punitive action from the US Department of Justice. In 1994, Citibank was confronted by such a lawsuit filed on behalf of ACORN. The attorney for ACORN filing the lawsuit: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.
Should BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA be elected President, one can only wonder if the ‘economic crisis’ will disappear overnight.
Is this the President we want, one who is willing to play on the fears of the American people in order to win an election? One who desperately wants to deflect the public's attention away from his association with William Ayers and Louis Farrakhan? One who wants the Americans to forget he has voted 94 times in the 143 days in the US Senate for tax increases...even on families with incomes of $42,000? One who has the most liberal voting record in all of Congress---more liberal than the two Socialists who are in Congress?
Two weeks ago, registered Democrat Henry Paulson, Sec. of the Treasury, (best friend of Sen. Chuckie Schumer:D-NY and Sen. Chris Dodd:D-CT), told President George Bush that the entire US economy was in peril and would collapse overnight if the Congress did not give him (Paulson) $700 BN. Immediately swinging into action were House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid who both blamed the perceived failing economy on George Bush and the Republicans for the last eight years.
Paulson, Pelosi, and Reid have picked up the Democratic Party’s tactic of planting FEAR in the American electorate.
Thus, emerges the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (aka Armageddon Avoidance Act) giving the Sec. of Treasury total economic control of the US economy. Read it if you doubt that statement.
A week after Paulson’s dire SOS warning, the House failed to pass the bill. The economy still is working.
On Wednesday, October 1, 2008, the US Senate took a step which frankly is unconstitutional. The Constitution requires all revenue bills to begin in the House. The new bailout bill calling for over $850 Billion dollar bailout was started in the Senate. Not only is it unconstitutional, this bill is so loaded down with earmarks that even the liberal Congressional Budget Office sent out a red flag warning that we would be paying for this piece of legislation for at least the next 15-20 years. This piece of legislation is so loaded with pork it will sink in the pig sty.
Rather than resolve the economic issues that have generated this financial crisis, the US Congress and Secretary Paulson have chosen to apply a bandaid. In 1977, Congress passed the Community Readjustment Act which gave community organizations such as ACORN the power to tell local banks to whom they must give mortgages. If banks refused to give certain clientele mortgages because they financially could not make their mortgage payments, the banks would be penalized by the US government. Banks who redlined persons not financially qualified for mortgages were then threatened with class action lawsuits or punitive action from the US Department of Justice. In 1994, Citibank was confronted by such a lawsuit filed on behalf of ACORN. The attorney for ACORN filing the lawsuit: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.
Should BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA be elected President, one can only wonder if the ‘economic crisis’ will disappear overnight.
Is this the President we want, one who is willing to play on the fears of the American people in order to win an election? One who desperately wants to deflect the public's attention away from his association with William Ayers and Louis Farrakhan? One who wants the Americans to forget he has voted 94 times in the 143 days in the US Senate for tax increases...even on families with incomes of $42,000? One who has the most liberal voting record in all of Congress---more liberal than the two Socialists who are in Congress?
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