Obama-connection to Bill Ayers--detailed--not just a neighbor! - U.S. Politics Online: A Political Discussion Forum

Oreo · #1 (**permalink**) 09-23-2008

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers: Stanley Kurtz Makes the Connection | NewsBusters.org

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers: Stanley Kurtz Wall Street Jounal Makes the Connection
By Rich Noyes (Bio | Archive)
September 23, 2008 - 14:20 ET

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda.

The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week.

With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “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.”

For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the New York Times profiled the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. '

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. ...

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

A month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn wrote the accompanying article: “Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’”

In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read article can be found here.

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them....

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....

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....

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin....

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

In his National Review Online piece, Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican powerhouse Walter Annenberg:

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 fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees.

Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers....

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

Kurtz has painstakingly documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left. The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of this worth reporting between now and Election Day?

And they talk about Sarah Palin!

Tanngrisnir3 · #2 (**permalink**) 09-23-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oreo

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers: Stanley Kurtz Makes the Connection | NewsBusters.org

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers: Stanley Kurtz Wall Street Jounal Makes the Connection
By Rich Noyes (Bio | Archive)
September 23, 2008 - 14:20 ET

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda.

The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week.

With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “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.”

For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the New York Times profiled the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. '

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. ...

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

A month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn wrote the accompanying article: “Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’”

In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read article can be found here.

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them....

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....

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....

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin....

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

In his National Review Online piece, Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican powerhouse Walter Annenberg:

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 fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees.

Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers....

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

Kurtz has painstakingly documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left. The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of this worth reporting between now and Election Day?

And they talk about Sarah Palin!

Ayup. Contards have been rowing this chickenwire boat for some time now, with absolutely zero success.

And then they look around and wonder why they're on the bottom of the lake.

andy764383 · #3 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tanngrisnir3

Ayup. Contards have been rowing this chickenwire boat for some time now, with absolutely zero success.

And then they look around and wonder why they're on the bottom of the lake.

It's has a slow burning fuse, but don't worry. It will still blow up.

Chocobot · #4 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

It wont be blowing up any time soon.

Why?

Stanley Kurtz has little credibility.

John Drake · #5 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Same old same old, you guys are really beginning to make the board dull

mudwhistle · #6 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chocobot

It wont be blowing up any time soon.

Why?

Stanley Kurtz has little credibility.

Stanley Kurtz isn't the only source for this. Anyone who bothers to look will find it out there.

Obama would use his time on the CAC as an example of his executive managerial skills if it wasn't for the fact that he wants to keep as far away from this part of his past as possible.

Barack Obama and William Ayers started the CAC to radicalize students, turn them into 60s' style protesters.

But this isn't the only nefarious group Obama has been associated with. He also was a Community Organizer with the group ACORN. ACORN has been nabbed numerous times committing voter fraud.

ACORN specializes in signing up new voters. But the kind of voters they target are the youth vote, low income, and minority voters who may have a bone to pick with government or the establishment. This was the kind of voter Obama was interested in.

Quote:

Another strong supporter of Obama’s work–as an organizer, as a lawyer, and now as a candidate–is Madeline Talbott, lead organizer of the feisty ACORN community organization, a group that’s a thorn in the side of most elected officials. “I can’t repeat what most ACORN members think and say about politicians. But Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side. Conducting a session in a New Horizons classroom, Obama, tall and thin, looks very much like an Ivy League graduate student. Dressed casually prep, his tie loosened and his top shirt button unfastened, he leads eight black women from the Grand Boulevard community through a discussion of “what folks should know” about who in Chicago has power and why they have it. It’s one of his favorite topics, and the class bubbles with suggestions about how “they” got to be high and mighty.

“Slow down now. You’re going too fast now,” says Obama. “I want to break this down. We talk ‘they, they, they’ but don’t take the time to break it down. We don’t analyze. Our thinking is sloppy. And to the degree that it is, we’re not going to be able to have the impact we could have. We can’t afford to go out there blind, hollering and acting the fool, and get to the table and don’t know who it is we’re talking to–or what we’re going to ask them–whether it’s someone with real power or just a third-string flak catcher.” …

Interestingly, The Nation puts it this way:

Obama kept his ties to DCP and worked out of its office when he ran a drive that registered 150,000 new voters in 1992 and became the springboard for his own grassroots campaign for Illinois State Senate.

Obama And ACORN - ‘It’s A Power Thing’ | Sweetness & Light

Obama's mother was a 60s' free-spirit. He's just carried on the tradition.

What does Obama have to offer us? He's never done anything in his life that benefited society as a whole. All he has done is advocate change all of his life.

What do you suppose he'll do once he has brought the change he constantly speaks of and has to take the reigns and make his new world work for the benefit of all Americans? Everything he's said so far will cost so much that we now know we can't afford it. Just two of his programs, world poverty and his Global Warming programs will cost over $1 Trillion dollars. That's just two programs.

Obama has never won an election on popularity. He has always found a way of ether disqualifying his competition or forcing them to quit before election day after investigations revealed something in their past that was imbarrassing.

CNN.com - Ryan drops out of Senate race in Illinois - Jun 25, 2004

Obama’s Acorn : NO QUARTER

Obama forged path as Chicago community organizer -- Newsday.com

Angry American · #7 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oreo

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers: Stanley Kurtz Makes the Connection | NewsBusters.org

Barack Obama and Bill Ayers: Stanley Kurtz Wall Street Jounal Makes the Connection
By Rich Noyes (Bio | Archive)
September 23, 2008 - 14:20 ET

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools that was commandeered by Ayers to promote his radical agenda.

The association between Obama and Ayers has received virtually no attention from the three broadcast networks, with the conspicuous exception of a primary-season debate sponsored by ABC when George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his relationship with Ayers. Out of 1,365 broadcast evening news stories about Obama prior to the end of the primaries, only two mentioned Ayers — one a brief mention of the debate question on the April 17 Nightly News, and the other a World News Sunday story about McCain raising the Ayers issue on This Week.

With just 42 days left until Election Day, the broadcast networks have not presented a single in-depth report on Obama’s relationship with Ayers. But Kurtz’s review of the documents at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) shows the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda,” which “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.”

For a flavor of Ayers’ continuing radicalism, the New York Times profiled the 1960s radical back on September 11, 2001, the same day as the al-Qaeda attack that killed thousands of New Yorkers at the World Trade Center. The piece by Dinitia Smith began: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. '

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married. ...

In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

A month earlier, a profile of Ayers in Chicago Magazine included a picture of Ayers stomping on the American flag. Marcia Froelke Coburn wrote the accompanying article: “Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. ‘I think there will be another mass political movement,’ he predicts, ‘because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.’”

In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Here are the key excerpts from Kurtz's op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal; the entire must-read article can be found here.

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them....

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....

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....

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin....

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

In his National Review Online piece, Kurtz adds a valuable point about how the radical left dominated the CAC despite the fact that the funding originated with Republican powerhouse Walter Annenberg:

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 fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees.

Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers....

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

Kurtz has painstakingly documented the connections between Barack Obama and the radical left. The only question is, will the so-called mainstream media find any of this worth reporting between now and Election Day?

And they talk about Sarah Palin!

So should we be concerned about all gun owners, who say they own guns because it is their 2nd Amendment right? As they are all potential domestic terrorists. Maybe we should just use the Bush doctrine, and round them all up now, put them in secret internment camps and throw away the key.

I love the writing in the WSJ piece, it's so full of spin, then again it is an opinion piece, not real journalism. It's funny really, Rich Noyes's opinion piece, using Stanley Kurtz's opinion pieces as material. Now that's not just spin, it's double spin.

All hale Stanley Kurtz.

I still say, so what.

TheHighForester · #8 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

This more evidence that the supporters of Sen. McCain are growing increasingly desperate as the election draws closer and their candidate slips farther and farther behind. They can't seem to come up with any GOOD REASONS to vote for John McCain, so they resort to these attempts to demonize his opponent.

Sorry, folks. The American people have been there and done that. We're not going to put another incompetent boob in the White House.

drgoodtrips · #9 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

This seems like an interesting phenomenon. The partisan talking points from the right side appear to have reverted to what they were pre-Palin and the dynamic of this election appears to be heading for how it was a couple of months ago. That is, instead of talking about how wonderful Palin is and how she's energized the McCain ticket, it's now back to the same old paradigm of "pro-Obama" versus "anti-Obama". It seems to me that this is a bad idea, given that the McCain campaign was enjoying comparably more success from the bump it got with the Palin selection. I think it would make sense for the campaign to focus on what it takes to get the conversation back in that direction so that rank-n-files like the OP are SPAMing pro-McCain stuff instead of the anti-Obama stuff from a few months ago, when Obama was enjoying his lead.

chassisman · #10 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

When I look at the time Bo spent with Ayers, its easy to understand why Michelle said she is "for the first time in my adult life", proud of her country.
Ayers obviously had/has a lot of hate, and birds of a feather, well............you know.

daddio · #11 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chocobot

It wont be blowing up any time soon.

Why?

Stanley Kurtz has little credibility.

Neither does the NYT but people cite it anyway. At least Stan's references are correct.

TSGracchus · #12 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

I find it's often useful to analyze a document first with a pair of scissors. Go through it and cut out anything that's a statement of personal opinion, a characterization, or something not relevant to the actual claim.

In this case, the claim is that Barack Obama has a relationship with Bill Ayers that would show his secret adherence to radical views such as Ayers had in around 1970. Or even the more moderated, but still fairly radical, views he holds today. I am going to go through Oreo's OP, most of which is a quote from Kurtz, and cut out anything that is not relevant to this claim. Note that this includes all statements about Ayers' radicalism. We can obtain that from other sources and it's not really a debated point anyway. It also includes statements about the media treatment of this "issue," which has no relevance to the validity of the issue itself. It includes evaluations of the effectiveness and common practices of CAC, which have no bearing on Obama's relationship with Ayers. And it includes personal opinions and characterizations, such as when any organization is called "far left" or "radical." The result is quite interesting.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oreo

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal and National Review Online, Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Stanley Kurtz traces Barack Obama’s partnership with . . . William Ayers when the two collaborated at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a charity established to help Chicago’s public schools . . .

the two “worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda" . . .

In the mid-1990s, Obama was hired to be the chairman of Ayers’ “brainchild,” the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. . . .

From 1995 to 1999, he [Obama] led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers . . .

Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home. . . .

documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. . . .

Everything else is non-relevant.

Tell me, does anyone see anything in the non-snipped portion that shows Obama to share Ayers' views from around 1970 that the government should be violently overthrown, or that Obama approves of setting bombs for political purposes? I don't. In fact, I don't see anything new. We already knew that Obama and Ayers were both involved in CAC, and that Obama's career was "launched from Ayers' home."

Much ado about nothing, as far as I can see.

Chocobot · #13 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Ive already on another thread put up an opinion pieice that tkea apart Kurtz claims bit by bit until theres little left.

Mudwhistle if you think there's loads out there on this ayers thing then why are we being asked to believe mr kurtz?

Anyway, if anyone wants me to re-post that peice I mention Ill be glad to.

California Girl · #14 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by chassisman

When I look at the time Bo spent with Ayers, its easy to understand why Michelle said she is "for the first time in my adult life", proud of her country.
Ayers obviously had/has a lot of hate, and birds of a feather, well............you know.

Seriously, that bitch needs slapping!

Fact is that Obama (both of 'em), Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan and the rest have an agenda for our country that most Americans would take up arms against.

He should bear in mind that we have the right to bear arms!

Tanngrisnir3 · #15 (**permalink**) 09-24-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by California Girl

Seriously, that bitch needs slapping!

I'll take it you know that from personal experience.

Quote:

Fact is that Obama (both of 'em), Ayers, Wright, Farrakhan and the rest have an agenda for our country that most Americans would take up arms against.

How do they all relate, specifically Obama and Farrakhan, and what is that agenda?

Quote:

He should bear in mind that we have the right to bear arms!

In your case, I recommend more thinking and less shooting.

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