Here is what Barack Obama said last night about Bill Ayers and Obama’s role in handing over millions of dollars to “education” programs designed by Ayers, long an advocate of using education for purposes of left-wing indoctrination:
Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago.
Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts. Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.
Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican-leaning newspaper.
And here is an earlier statement by Obama:
The suggestion that Ayers somehow dominated the policy or direction of the bipartisan Challenge Board, imprinting it with radical views, is absurd. The Annenberg Challenge was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend Walter Annenberg. Republican Governor Jim Edgar, who wrote to Walter Annenberg to encourage the creation of the Challenge, joined Mayor Daley to announce the formation of the Challenge and his administration continued to work closely on education reform with the Board.
There are two main problems with Obama’s response. One is that Obama is basically passing the buck for his own decisions to other people – undoubtedly a preview of his presidential leadership style, like during the bailout vote when he essentially did nothing to help his party pass the bill when it came up for the original vote. The other is his effort to conflate the national Annenberg Foundation with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge; Obama served as chairman of the board for the latter.
The first problem is self-evident: Obama, having entrusted money to Ayers and his radical theories and now being embarrassed by CAC/Ayers’ funding of left-wing projects like “Afrocentric” education, wants to blame his partners on the foundation board. Not good enough.Obama’s never been in charge of anything besides CAC and the Harvard Law Review, so maybe he needs to learn: when you are in charge, you are responsible for the decisions you make.
Second, Obama’s trying to conflate the Annenberg Foundation, which provided $49 million in seed money for a grant proposal (partly written, yes, by Ayers as one of CAC’s masterminds) with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which actually signed off on the distribution of those funds to Ayers-designed projects and had a much closer look at what was going on. FactCheck.org, which runs an extended and fairly tendentious apologia for Obama on this, notes that the Annenberg Foundation created by Walter Annenberg in 1989 “supports a wide variety of charitable causes – a total of 5,200 grants during its first 15 years of operation.” The CAC was just one of those. The Foundation itself stresses that:
All participating sites in the Annenberg Challenge for School Reform were locally controlled and locally governed.
The Annenberg Foundation was not directly involved in the daily operations of any of the 18 challenge sites. This includes, but is not limited to: programming, staffing, or board composition.
Work related to programs, fundraising and development, research, and evaluation at individual Challenge sites during the grant period was undertaken through the local Challenge entities.
Which makes the parent foundation’s affiliations (including FactCheck.org, among those thousands of recipients) and those of Walter Annenberg a red herring. If anything, the whole point of people like Obama is to make those folks believe they are giving money to something respectable. As Stanley Kurtz reminds us, this all is too commonly true of foundation work:
The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.
The only real relevant people here are Obama’s partners on the board:
Founding members of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Board were:
Susan Crown, vice president, Henry Crown Company; Patricia Graham, president, The Spencer Foundation, and former dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Stanley Ikenberry, president-emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Handy Lindsey, executive director, Field Foundation; Barack Obama; Arnold Weber, former president, Northwestern University, and president, Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago; and Wanda White, executive director, Community Workshop on Economic Development.
Now, notice a few things about the board. First, when a board like that includes university presidents and the like and they elect a young civil rights lawyer and State Senate candidate chairman…who do you think is doing the work? Second, note the presence of the Crown family, major Obama donors and recipients of significant earmarks from Obama in his legislative career. Once again, all the Obama stories have common threads that tie them together.
In any event, the involvement of other people who should have known better does nothing to absolve Obama of his decision to fund Ayers’ projects. Nothing at all.
Nobody cares it is the ECONOMY the WORLD ECONOMY is crashing and your playing six degrees of seperation with Kevin Bacon. Even John McCain called him a washed up terrorist. Why spend million in ad dollars on a washed up Terrorist?
So now the plan is to say Obama was just a puppet for Ayers and everyone else did the work. Stop it, let it go. The largest bank are now owed by the government, and this is the best you got?
But I guess it would not be that maybe he impressed this group of people as a man would be a future leader.
Ah yes, the old “Obama’s record is irrelevant!” dodge.
Nobody’s suggesting that Ayers is the only issue here. But the record of Obama’s prior associations and decisions about funding priorities is unquestionably relevant to how he would govern – and specifically not just to how he would seed his Administration with hard-left culture warriors but also how he will handle the vastly expanded federal influence in the economy to “spread the wealth”.
Also, were you not the one who raised this whole issue in the other thread?
Finally, here’s a real reason to not vote for Obama…
https://www.sportingnews.com/blog/the_sporting_blog/entry/view/13629/obama_ad_may_delay_game_six_of_world_series
How could he do that? Don’t WS games start late enough as it is? This is a real issue, McCain should have hammered him on this last night…
His record isn’t irrelevant, it just doesn’t show much. Either Obama should have been more careful about checking out who was on the board, or he’s a Manchurian candidate with a secret terrorist plan, who knew all along that a black guy with a strange name would be elected president and thus able to put his dastardly plan into motion. Of those two options, one seems more likely than the other. Too bad it’s the one that doesn’t do much for his reputation.
His record isn’t irrelevant, it just doesn’t show much. Either Obama should have been more careful about checking out who was on the board, or he’s a Manchurian candidate with a secret terrorist plan, who knew all along that a black guy with a strange name would be elected president and thus able to put his dastardly plan into motion. Of those two options, one seems more likely than the other. Too bad it’s the one that doesn’t do much for his reputation.
See, when I look at the overall record – not just Ayers but all the other stuff I went through on Tuesday – I see reason to be very concerned.
You say his record “just doesn’t show much” – and you’re supporting the guy? Are you unconcerned to be supporting a guy whose record leaves you guessing? That’s the core problem. You can find the bad things in his record troublesome, or you can say we don’t know what to make of him …. but there’s no third option. There’s no positive record. There’s the bad stuff and then there’s nothing.
I meant that it doesn’t show much that alarms me. The very fact that people are harping on decades-old vague associations points to the fact that he doesn’t have any “hard-left culture warrior” associations now. Your take on his record is that he’s likely a radical leftist (possibly even a terrorist?) in disguise. There’s very little that bears that out.
I’m sure the radical leftist Obama is perfectly content listening to the right-wing circle jerk collectively fiddle while the world economy burns. You knuckleheads are wasting your limited time and resources trying to peddle a story no one but you cares about.
Now, if you really want to explore Obama’s seedy connections, you could start with financial terrorist Robert Rubin who, along with Alan Greenspan and Phil Gramm, bears the lion’s share of responsibility for Depression 2.0. Of course, I can understand why McCain and his apologists might not want to get into that.
Depression 2.0? Are you out of your flippin’ mind? I’m in middle America and I’m looking out my window at Main Street, and I don’t see a Depression. Are times bad? Sure. But don’t let yourself be hyped into thinking we’re in a Depression. The fact that people call this a Depression only proves how uneducated about history they really are.
And as I’ve said before, to the response “nobody cares”, that’s not the writer’s problem; even if the electorate is too dumb, too naively “hopeful”, too blindly ignorant, or too tied to moral relativity to care about Obama’s connections and associations, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be pointed out.
Crank, tell me the truth. When you can’t fall asleep at night, do you count all the Bill Ayers jumping over you?
Well, no serious person thinks we’re in a depression; I’m not even sure we’re in a recession. But (1) the US and foreign stock markets are pricing in the assumption that at least a nasty recession is coming, (2) there’s all sorts of signs of capital going into hiding, manufacturing slowdowns, crashing consumer confidence, and (3) every day that goes by with credit this tight has ripple effects on economic activity down the road.
Result: there’s pretty much a 100% chance of a recession in the very near future, a very large chance that it will be a bad one, and still an outside chance that it could go the Depression route. I think the latter isn’t that likely – and this week’s recovery in stocks suggests that the markets don’t either – but of course if Obama gets elected and starts in with stuff like high taxes and trade wars, things could get significantly worse.
Daryl, you know, the Brink’s case was the biggest news story in the history of my home town. Ayers and Dohrn’s buddies killed two cops and an armored car guard (all of whom had children), Dohrn went to jail for refusing to cooperate in the investigation, and the two of them raised Kathy Boudin’s kid while she was in prison.
The Brink’s robbery happened when I was 10 years old and my dad was a cop. So, you know, I take groups like the Weather Underground personally.
The fact that people think this is as bad as it’s going to get only proves just how uneducated about economics they really are .
What you see in the stock market this week is volatility, not recovery.
Keep beating the Ayers drum. It’s making a difference. Really.
I’m not touting it as a turnaround. But I believe the market’s up, net, on the week, and that suggests that investors do not expect another Great Depression. The hit the equity markets have already taken suggests that they’ve priced in a recession already, and perhaps an Obama presidency as well.
Crank
It’s 7-6 now in Fenway in the bottom of the 8th, with 1 out for the Sox.
Don’t bother with the usual suspects who here want to ignore Obama but find out everything on Joe The Plumber.
The only thing that kept Ayers from becoming a really successful and fully famous terrorist was his own (or his people’s) inability to properly design and build those last bombs. Had the assemblers not blown themselves up at the cost of three lives, Ayers could have hit the big time with his scores at Columbia University and the Fort Dix dance.
Just think, his name could have been right up there with Timothy McVeigh. What a wonderful educator he would have made then.
There’s no positive record. There’s the bad stuff and then there’s nothing.
His opposition to the War, since 2002, is a very POSITIVE thing to many Americans, Crank. We know you don’t like it, but last I checked, you’re one of about 300 million.
I take groups like the Weather Underground personally.
Once again, that’s your right. But your psychological well-being has very little (read: nothing) to do with the choice of Chief Executive.
* * *
Meanwhile, let me both echo, and then extend, on what others have been saying.
Not only is the constant harping on Ayers an example of political tone-deafness, but I don’t believe you care, Crank. I think, on the other hand, it’s all ya’ got at this point.
McCain is:
1. Far more connected than Obama to the (non-)recession in America right now.
2. devoid of an economic plan, while Obama has no plan but at least tries to put forth some sort of coherent message. At least he’s not panicking like McCain.
3. demonstrating a shocking lack of leadership skills. Too inconsistent, too beholden to his emotions, to over-his-head.
And that last point is the foundation of the nearly-comic spectacle I witness here every day, Crank. You don’t even like the guy! Yet because of your religious devotion to three letters (G. O. P.) you struggle and contort yourself to support a guy that brings none of what you admire and like to the table.
I know you like Rudy. I know you probably liked Huckabee in a way. I know you like Fred Thompson.
But they ain’t running. No, the guy running is this angry, inconsistent guy who picked Sarah Palin (!) to be his running mate.
Assuming no October Surprise comes along, I realize you won’t wake up and decide you actually like Obama. No, I’m quite confident you’ll tee off on him for 4 or 8 years. Will it be articles of impeachment or just a lot of filibustering.
But you WILL acknowledge, if only deep in your own heart, that McCain was a disaster. Politically, policy-wise, personality-wise. A disaster.
(If you haven’t already realized that, quite consciously. I think you certainly have.)
His opposition to the War, since 2002, is a very POSITIVE thing to many Americans
I guess you haven’t read up on his record…it’s not as if the man actually did anything. He gave one speech and disappeared, and two years later told people his position was the same as Bush’s and that he didn’t even know how he would have voted if he’d had access to classified intelligence (notice how the people who were the most strident anti-war voices, like Obama and Howard Dean, were the ones with the least information). If you were a dead-set opponent of the war, that ain’t much of a record. If you justify it on the grounds that he wasn’t willing to just cut and run…well, then, when it came time to decide whether to give up and run away or finish the job, he waited until after the 2006 election returns were in, made the wrong decision to pander to his own party. The President listened to McCain and ignored Obama, and thank God he did.
His record on taxes? Iraq! His record on spending? Iraq! etc. It’s a one-note tune. Please admit that you’re supporting a guy with no experience, no accomplishments, and who his whole career has been beholden to left-wing extremists and the Chicago machine. But you won’t, you just ignore all that stuff on the grounds that deeds don’t matter, only words. You can’t point to anything you want him to do in office that he has any record whatsoever of doing before.
The economy stuff….um, how? McCain actually tried to do something to head off the housing crisis; Obama’s response is “I wrote a letter.” In 2007. When the crisis hit, he again did nothing. Obama’s idea of leadership is to not do anything at all and hope he can blame somebody else. His economic plan is spiteful lunacy, his spending promises are transparent falsehoods, and he won’t even explain his tax plan, which is essentially a bunch of welfare-style transfer payments.
I was never a Huck backer in any sense. I like the guy, but after the Foreign Affairs article it was clear that his instincts on foreign policy were hopelessly wrongheaded.
No, I don’t think McCain is the greatest thing since sliced bread, even though I backed him over Bush 8 years ago. I do think he’s exceptionally well-suited to be Commander-in-Chief, and that he’ll basically be a mixed-bag, middle-of-the-road Eisenhowerish figure on domestic policy, which I don’t love but it’s a compromise with political reality. The main area where I really like his domestic policies and think they have a chance of passing is on energy. As a candidate, I think he’s been the best fit for the GOP for the times.
Am I going to enjoy a return to the Carter years? No. I didn’t enjoy the Dinkins experience, either. If Obama gets elected, goal #1 will be to pressure him to abandon his positions. Fortunately, there’s evidence that he will do that. Even his own supporters tell us contstantly that nothing in his record should be taken as a serious indication of what he will do in office, after all, because he’s a totally different guy from things he has done in the past and even things he said as recently as the primaries.
And you know what? I’m damn sick of people telling me they know better what I believe than I do. It’s about time you apologized for doing that constantly.
I should add spending. McCain has the best spending record of anybody to run in a long time, and I do think he’d make some headway on spending. Obviously that’s a bug, not a feature, if you’re supporting Obama because you like a lot of spending, as his supporters generally do.
Obama=Dinkins that is rich. At least pretend you try with these posts. Now I am sure you willl post how they are connected with Kevin Bacon by six degrees.
Rudy has no appeal outside of NY for long list of reasons.
Last night Letterman asked McCain if he had a relationship with Gordon Liddy said yes, but he had no problem with Liddy. This shows the total fraud of the Obama-Ayers alliance. Liddy is a terrible man who committed serious crimes. Really, is he any different from a guy like Ayers? Letterman struck at the heart of this issue. All politicians know objectionable people, even horrible people. But the focus is always on leftwing miscreants, not rightwing miscreants.
Crank
I sympathize with you as the son of a cop, but please don’t feel you have to feed the trolls.
One guy asks “Really, is [Gordon Liddy] any different from a guy like Ayers?”
Good grief. is he ingenuous or disingenuous?
Judge Murtagh, whose home they tried to bomb lived in Inwood (North Manhattan), right behind my Grandma’s apt house. This was serious stuff, & Obama’s relation with one of them, Ayres, when he, Obama, was more than one & twenty, was a serious, um, head start for him.
https://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html
I’d say that if Ayers would denounce his past it would be a start. But he keeps saying that he wishes he’d done more. What, have killed Judge Murtha?
And thanks to your Pa as a cop for protecting me from bad people like Ayers. And for helping you to become a lawyer without, I assume, crying “victim”.
I assume when you say “liberal media’ you mean the ladies from “The View” and “Late Night’s” David Letterman.
Crank,
Your Dad should arrest those who voted for telecom immunity (and yes, that includes Obama) if he’s into protecting American citizens.
One thing at a time, people: First we bury the GOP in a 20 foot grave enforced with steel and concrete, then we go after the Dems.
Inwood – you obviously know very little about Liddy. I’m no fan of Ayers, but if you attack someone’s “association” with Ayers, then don’t hang around Liddy.
Screw Ayers or Liddy, it’s the fact that Obama and McCain continue to consort with Rubin and Gramm that should be worrisome to people.
I’m damn sick of people telling me they know better what I believe than I do. It’s about time you apologized for doing that constantly.
I admit it’s presumptuous to suggest that I know better than you what you believe. I apologize for that. If I didn’t respect you I wouldn’t bother coming here every day to call you on what strikes me as a never-ending parade of bulls**t from the mind of a man who can do a lot better. Nevertheless, I don’t mean to offend or anger you. Sincerely.
I do mean to challenge you, however, and for that I won’t apologize. Nor do I expect that you’d want me to.
Please admit that you’re supporting a guy with no experience, no accomplishments, and who his whole career has been beholden to left-wing extremists and the Chicago machine.
I hardly “support” Obama in any affirmative sense. I think he’s business-as-usual: spend, lots of platitudes, play ball with the mainstream.
I “support” him because he’s not McCain, not business-as-UNusual, the way we’ve seen it the last 8 years.
But this whole “left wing extremists” thing is just silly. The “left wing” extremist who voted to throw $850 billion at Wall Street and other pork projects. C’mon, get off the Ayers thing. It’s ludicrous.
I’m with Mike. It’s not that I support Obama. It’s that I cannot handle more Republican “leadership.”
Make that three of us.
I am an actual “leftist”, in word and deed, and I can attest to the fact that Obama doesn’t live on my block. Sadly the host here, an apparently bright guy, insists on insulting readers like us by continuing the “talking point” labeling of Obama as a radical rather his addressing the readership as adults, making this just another partisan site.
Even recognizing the essentially binary nature of American politics, I was planning on flipping a coin to decide between Nader (the guy who has been consistently accurate for the past couple of decades in predicting and warning of the consequences of the economics of Friedman, Rubin, Gramm, et al) or McKinney. I swore to myself after Obama’s sell out on the FISA vote I would never vote for him. The recent bipartisan giveaway to Wall Street reinforced that. Then the “Hate Talk” Express got cranked up.
With crowds at McCain and, especially Palin rallies apparently bussed in from 1933 Munich, now instead of flipping a coin to decide between Nader and McKinney, I’ll be flipping the bird to the reptilian brainers that litters the base of the Republican Party and voting for Obama.
apparently bussed in from 1933 Munich
Would that be the personality cult? The lockstep racial loyalty? The iconography, the hand gestures, the songs….
Look, I’m not saying the Obama mass movement is Hitlerish. Just that if you are looking for the hallmarks here and there of a Hitlerish mass movement, you are much more likely to find them on Obama’s side, and have been all year.
This whole idea that somehow it’s dangerous to have crowds of people who don’t like Obama and do things like yell “terrorist” when people mention Bill Ayers (you know, an actual terrorist) … this is a myth, a propaganda fabrication. And that really is scary if you care about free expression and political debate in this country going forward – if this particular myth is built up to delegitimize any organized opposition to Obama, that somehow public safety is threatened by a full and robust political debate, that crowds of people who have genuine and serious concerns about an Obama presidency are to be treated as if they were a movement of violent subversives.
Let me just expand on that a little in two ways.
1. Like I said, I’m not buying into Obama=Hitler or some such nonsense. Just saying those little signs of such things you do see around the edges are almost entirely on his side.
2. A very large portion of the Obama movement, even moreso than usual for the Democrats, has been the effort to delegitimize criticisms of Obama rather than respond to them – characterizing it as racist to discuss his past, his qualifications, and a whole host of other things, arguing that it would violate his family’s privacy to address speeches made by his wife on the campaign trail, etc.
3. It’s objetcionable enough to take this approach during campaigns, and distasteful to carry it into governance, but what is problematic is if the delegitimization of criticism is married to efforts to change the law – and as I’ll probably be coming back to in more detail, there’s a variety of ways in which Obama is likely if elected to change the law to alter the structure of the political process and speech and debate in this country (eg, the Fairness Doctrine). The effort to spread false stories about Republican campaign crowds, when seen as part and parcel of that effort, takes on a more troublesome cast.
You aren’t lecturing an Obama apologist here. Barack as saviour doesn’t strike a chord with me. But trying to sell Obama as leftist to an actual leftist just tells me your political compass is unreliable due to your blinding partisanship. I’ve no doubt his politics are to the left of yourself and some of your minions here, but from where I stand, on the left, the difference between him and McCain is measured in seconds, not degrees.
And I am buying into the Palin personality cult, circa early 20th century Europe, replete with the hate speech, scapegoating, etc. The Republicans have made hate and fear centerpieces of their politics since McCarthy and Nixon, but rarely this transparently. The purposeful conflation of Obama&terrorist&Democrat&Arab&liberal&un-American&community organizer&Muslim is dangerous shit to be dabbling in with the country on the verge of economic chaos and the scared and angry white people who exclusively make up the McCain/Palin electorate afraid that they’re losing their place in the pecking order. Hence the cries of “kill him” at her rallies, the first time I have ever seen that phenomenon in American politics. Don’t feign surprise when another McVeigh rears his ugly head if and when Obama wins this election- that pump has been primed by the McCain/Palin campaign, which is partly designed to question the legitimacy of an Obama victory.
It’s not racist to discuss Obama’s past, but it is racist the way it’s being discussed. Don’t try and pretend that’s not exactly what’s happening here. I’m a white guy living in white America with other white people, who hears their candid speech when microphones or people of color aren’t around. It’s not an attitude exclusive to my neighborhood which, incidentally, is the neighborhood of the Nichol’s farm, where McVeigh refined his bomb making skills.
See, first of all the “kill him” stuff is a myth. It’s the factual falsehood from which the effort flows.
Palin personality cult? Gimme a break. She’s popular, people identify with her as a regular person.
Obama is well to the left of anybody who’s been a national politician in his party. And no, it’s not racist to point out the actual people he has made alliance with in his actual career.
Like I wrote, your partisanship blinds you.
By the way, seen the photo from the Palin rally equating community organizers with Charles Manson?
“trying to sell Obama as leftist to an actual leftist just tells me your political compass is unreliable due to your blinding partisanship.”
B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and BINGO was his name-o!
William Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with whom Barack served on the board of an education-reform organization in the mid-1990’s. According to the Associated Press, they are not close: “No evidence shows they were “pals” or even close when they worked on community boards years ago …” (https://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D93KD6Q00&show_article=1)
Smear groups and now the McCain campaign are trying to connect Obama to acts Ayers committed 40 years ago – when Barack was just eight years old. Here’s what the New York Times reported on the connection (https://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html)
But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
Barack has publicly denouncedAyers’ radical actions from the 1960’s (https://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/obamas_weatherman_connection.html):
Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.
Everyone is doing it? So he and his buddies were terrorist, so it’s okay if everyone is a terrorist? Come on people, we can not be under the rule of the Ivy-League illuminati politicians.