Confusing. Perhaps you can help me to clarify the butter here.

It is tough enough to fathom how a nation with grievous economic difficulties at home and two wars abroad can elect a man with no governing experience, no executive experience and very little legislative experience. Perhaps George Bush so lowered the bar, people figure – ‘hey, how bad can this guy do? At least he gives a good speech.’

Let’s hold that thought for the moment.

Read the rest ->

No matter how unhappy I am with his election or how he got here, I have been pleased with at least some of his cabinet picks. Hmmm. Perhaps he is exhibiting some of that ‘good judgment’ that his supporters keep touting after all.

Surely it is excellent judgment to nominate Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State (no matter how he lied about her ‘lack of experience’ during the campaign). Probably a good idea to keep Robert Gates on as Defense Secretary to insure a smooth transition given our situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Appointing Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, not my favorite pick, but a Hillary fan and a solid enforcer who knows how to get things done and knows where the bodies are buried (which, as it turns out, could be good or bad for him with Chicago festering and ready to explode). Also, his appointing 80% Clintonistas tells me that the self-described “delegator,” P.E. Obama, is smart enough to know what he doesn’t know and hire some adults to mind the store. So far, so good.

So here’s my problem with him in the judgment department. How can a man with the political savvy the media and his followers keep trumpeting be goofy enough to surround himself for twenty years with the likes of Rev. Wright, Rev. Pfleger, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers (now practicing revisionist history on every talk show and newspaper who will have him), Emil Jones, Gov. Blagojevich, Mayor Daley, Jim Johnson, Penny Pritzker, et al….I could go on singing!

According to Politico:

During [Blagojevich’s] reelection campaign in 2006 – with press reports swirling about a grand jury investigation into Blagojevich’s alleged jobs-for-contributions scheme – Obama praised the governor as a leader “who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.”

Yep. He sure exhibited some good judgment there. And didn’t he endorse someone else who got arrested recently? Kwame Kilpatrick, I believe.

Never mind ‘surrounding’ himself with these people, and praising them, surely not the work of someone with good judgment, but when questioned on their negative influence, their crooked actions, questionable ethics or downright criminal behavior, his answer is invariably one of the following:

I didn’t know.
I thought he was reformed.
We never spoke.
Oops, that was a boneheaded move.
He doesn’t work for me.
This is not the man I knew.
I am sobered and saddened.
Come one fellas, can’t I just eat my waffle?

As far as hearing Rev. Wright’s incendiary and racist America-bashing sermons, P.E. Obama contradicted himself on mainstream news six times in one week: ‘I knew. I didn’t know. I knew. I didn’t know.’

My sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter…
She’s my sister AND my daughter!

(Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown…)

It’s downright exhausting keeping track of so many fibs. It is even harder to do this because the press won’t do their jobs and keep track of them for us. Articles getting scrubbed, altered history left and right. What’s a girl to do?

I know Rev. Wright is considered old news to Obama’s more virulent supporters and the media, who keep insisting there is ‘nothing to see here.” They say this even though Wright just came out this weekend to declare the TUCC is responsible for giving us our first black President. But riddle me this, Batman: if a man sits in a church for 20 years where this vile stuff is expounded regularly and gets married by this man and baptizes his children there – he does so for one of two reasons – either he believes this stuff – or he just sat there for TWENTY years for political street cred. Or he slept in church for TWENTY years.

Unfortunately, there is no good way to spin that. Just as there is no good way to spin so many of his other actions and policy reversals. Gee, he hasn’t even been inaugurated yet. What a supreme mess.

So I guess my question is, how much can Mr. Supercalifragilistic-Expialidocously Triple-Coated Teflon Man get away with before the American people start to wonder about a leader who doesn’t ever seem to notice stuff that is happening right under his own nose? Assuming for the moment that it is mere ignorance and not complicity.

I have made mention of this in the past, but I want a President who is going to protect us, not one we have to protect. Everyone in the media is dancing circles around themselves to make sure we know how honorable he is. Do they protest too much? Why is this even necessary?

I guess media talking heads need to protect their investment, since they have so touted Obama, any revelation denting the armor of their ‘chosen one’ would irreparably tarnish their reputations. Well, I hate to tell you, MSM, but that ship already sailed.

I thought the whole reason he was able to get some mileage over the more qualified candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, was that he was supposed to be the “new kind of politics” – a fresh way of doing business in Washington – yet he was and is surrounded by very unsavory influences indeed, and seems very much at home with them all.

And after the fact, he behaves as though he knew nothing, saw nothing, said nothing, heard nothing.

Without even accusing President Elect Obama of wrongdoing, I am terrified at having our leader be someone who constantly acts like he is walking around with his head in a fart, with no knowledge of anything that is happening around him. And that is giving him the benefit of the doubt.

But anyone who has been caught dissembling as much as President-Elect Obama has, stopped getting the benefit of the doubt a long time ago.

Right now, it looks as though we have two choices: he is ignorant of all of this or is being dishonest about his involvement. Which is worse? I can certainly understand his voters aching to believe him when he says this stuff, because they voted for a romantic idea and would hate to see their hopes come crashing down. I worry about a crash too, albeit for very different reasons.

What are you hearing out there? Any buyer’s remorse? Is anyone else concerned?

Listen to the video in its entirety because Matthews describes further how VERY near he was to where that bomb went off. And Ayers (of course, this was not discussed today) is a free man solely because his attorneys managed to prove the FBI improperly conducted wiretaps. (I have MUCH MORE TO SAY about this below, and ask you to read along and then share YOUR reactions and add your own knowledge and your own impressions of what occurred, shamefully, on MSNBC.)

I can only imagine what Concerned Mother would have to say about this travesty.

It is unconscionable to me that we and the MSM constantly RAGE about O.J. Simpson, who murdered two people, but not reject Barack Obama, a presidential candidate, now president-elect, who has associated freely and over a long time with a man who could have killed dozens and dozens of people.

On his remarkable radio show a few weeks ago, Nocturnal Warrior made a brilliant point about PEBO’s selection of numerous former Clinton White House and cabinet members. Warrior said that PEBO has to select such people because he has almost no FRIENDS or LONGTIME ASSOCIATES to appoint to any serious jobs in his administration. This is a situation that has NEVER occurred in the history of the presidency of the United States. Heretofore, every U.S. president has had a rich collection of friends, associates, and allies from whom he could select many qualified for high-ranking administration positions. But not Barack Obama. You faithful readers of No Quarter know of many of Obama’s real longtime associates: Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Father Michael Pfleger, William Ayers, Allison and Cullen Davis, Penny Pritzker, Bernardine Dohrn, and on and on, only a very, very few of them suited for any respectable position at any level in an administration. (I’ve clicked several Categories to provide you with a list.) And now, this week, we learn more about other Obama longtime associates like Rod Bagojevich and his wife.

William Ayers’ Crimes, and Additional Perspective History

The SOLE reason no one died is because Ayers et al. were piss-poor bomb makers. What is the sentence range these days for an attempt to commit murder? And don’t forget all the other bombs that nearly killed many others. Including the judge, his wife, and his children — while they slept — simply because that judge was doing his job: Handling the trial of a Black Panther. I’m not generally in favor of the death penalty, but Ayers’ and the Weather Underground’s attempts, repeatedly, to kill as many people as possible in the Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations, and a judge’s home are the works of people so dangerous that those people should never be freed, and may be eligible to be charged with a capital offense.

Ayers has famously said, “Free as a bird, guilty as hell, ain’t America great.” (From Larry Johnson’s must-read article, “A Statement by a Retired FBI Agent Re William Ayers.”)

Dear readers, please understand this: All that, to Matthews, is just some history. It has some import to Matthews, given that he might have been blown up himself, but apparently not much since the conversation flows easily and reasonably amicably, and Matthews, at the end of the interview, gladly flogs Ayers’ book. THEN, after this interview, Matthews has his panel on. Matthews asks Joan Walsh, Salon‘s editor, why Ayers — who appeared today to be “confessional” in his tone — didn’t do that during the campaign. Ms. Walsh LAUGHS with a SMIRK on her face, and says, “I think he wanted to stay out of it entirely, and not dignify what the McCain campaign and others were doing.”

Thank you, Ms. Walsh. We now know who the real criminals are. Shame on you, John McCain. Shame on you, Sarah Palin.

Ms. Walsh, please share your opinions with John Murtagh. Well, of course. That’s unfair. You don’t know who John Murtagh is.

Uppity Woman can tell you, in her story, “When This Man Was 9 Years Old, Ayers Bombed His Home.”

If I may, I will contrast the actions of William Ayers and the rest of the sociopathic members of the Weather Underground to the actions of a man who — unless you’re my age and you closely followed anti-war activities during the Vietnam War — you’ve probably NEVER heard of, and will not hear of in the MSM.

After all, he didn’t make bombs. He didn’t befriend a future president and excite the easily excitable rightwing. He simply did the hard work of truly changing history and he paid the price that true, albeit boring, heroes do, in anonymity.

His name is David Harris.

He was the resident counselor in the boys’ dormitory across the street from my girls’ dorm. Many of us sat at his feet as he modestly told us his stories about traveling to the South in summers past to try to help black people get the right to vote. He also shared with us the music he’d learned about in the South — the blues. He told us about Muddy Waters and more. We were entranced. With him, with his stories and the very REAL danger he was in during those summers when white racists wanted to kill him and every white college kid who dared to fight for blacks’ right to vote.

He ran for student body president and I worked on his campaign. He ran on the sole condition that, if elected, he would not serve. He won in a landslide. And did not serve.

Then his draft number came up. (My memory is vague these days, but I believe he tried all the normal routes available back then, such as conscientious objector status, and so on. All of those routes failed.)

So he went to prison. Leavenworth. About seven years ago, I did a search on him, curious what his life had been like. I discovered that he had written a book about his time in Leavenworth, along with his then-wife Joan Baez. I bought the book, and read it. It was a heart-wrenching account. I had no idea that being an inmate in Leavenworth was such a horrific, maddening, insane experience.

It is a simple story, really.

He refused to fight for a war he did not believe was right.

The U.S. government tried him and sentenced him to prison.

He served roughly three years, as I recall.

You may disagree with his decision, but he decided to take the punishment like a man.

He had a father who, as I remember it, was an attorney in Fresno, California. His father surely had some means, but not enough to prevent his son from going to prison.

Bill Ayers had a father who was Chairman of Commonwealth Edison and a mover/shaker in Chicago politics, the arts and education. His father had the means to hire a cadre of attorneys who successfully prevented his son from spending a single day in prison.

David Harris did not build bombs.

He tried to help blacks in the South get to vote, at great risk to his own life.

He helped educate and watched over younger students attending the university, which was often a tedious task, listening to those 18-year-olds’ angst and fear and uncertainty and their various problems with and anxieties about their classes.

He helped the students with the difficult reading for the required freshman class, The History of Western Civilization, because he had read all of those works, including all of Plato, Socrates, and more, and he could — and did — explain those works to those anxious students. He spoke with them patiently and kindly and always very softly.

He was a hulk of a man with broad thick shoulders and a large angular head and a blond mustache but he was, as they say, a gentle giant.

He did not teach the younger students to build bombs or burn down buildings.

He taught the students about giving black people the right to vote and about the blues and about philosophy and about literature and about political thinking and about peaceful protest and about Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

He marched and sang folk songs with his wife, who bore their son.

What a dull man.

Doubtless, Chris Matthews will never invite David Harris for a feature interview.

If only he’d built bombs and then buddied up with a future president, he’d be a sought-after guest.

At least he has an entry in Wikipedia.

:::::::::::

Via Google News results:

Matthews to Ayers: ‘I Agitate My Way, You Agitate Your Way‘ – NewsBusters

Chris Matthews invited on Bill Ayers on Wednesday night’s “Hardball,” and actually confronted him about his bombing of Capitol Hill during his days as a member of the ’60s terrorist group Weather Underground, as the former Capitol Hill police officer emotionally observed: “I was a Capitol policeman at the time, so I was one of the guys that could have been killed obviously at the time you put that, your guys put that bomb in there. So I have a little personal interest. It wasn’t just vandalism. To me it was life-threatening to the guys I worked with. And there were some pretty good guys working there.”

However Matthews, who paradoxically may not even be alive to conduct this interview today if the Weather Underground’s bombs were more devastating, devoted most of the interview tossing softballs Ayers’ way, as the two often agreed with each other on Barack Obama and Iraq policy as the “Hardball” host pointed out they only really differed on how to spread their points of view: “Well, Mr. Ayers, with all due respect, you agitate your way, I agitate my way.

Matthews, who back in October dismissed Sarah Palin’s mention of Ayers, as “the politics of distraction,” began the interview by setting up Ayers to play down any association he had with Obama: …

READ ALL: Matthews to Ayers: ‘I Agitate My Way, You Agitate Your Way‘ — NewsBusters

AND READ MORE of NoQuarter’s treasure trove of materials on the bombings conducted by William Ayers.

Turns out that Ayers was not just a guy in the neighborhood. Nor is Minister Louis Farrakhan. Obama has direct and indirect ties to Minister Farrakhan that date back over the past 20 years.

It is no surprise that Minister Farrakhan has spoken so highly of his friend Barack Obama:

First, the circle of friends and associates that Obama joined in Chicago since the early 1980s includes Minister Farrakhan. The staff on their organizations often overlap, their goals are often the same, and their techniques are as well. And, yes, they are neighbors.

Obama spent three weeks in Pakistan in the early 1980s around the same time that Minister Farrakhan and Reverend Wright were making their own trek to visit Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.

Obama likely first met Minister Farrakhan in the mid-1980s after to Chicago. It’d be hard to imagine that he didn’t, considering their shared community interests, Obama’s past with communist and black nationalist Frank Marshall Davis, and his new friend Reverend Wright. Obama doesn’t say much except that he worked with all the local religious leaders because that was the focus of his community organizing. Reverend Jesse Jackson, PUSH, and Rainbow Coalition also fit into the picture. Reverend Jackson and Minister Farrakhan, themselves, made a trip to Syria together in 1986.

Barack Obama would go on to call Reverend Wright his spiritual advisor, mentor, and friend. He married Barack and Michelle Obama in late 1992 then baptized their children. Obama sat in the pews of Reverend Wright’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for nearly 20 years.

In scattered comments throughout the current presidential campaign and in past years, it is clear that Barack Obama also sought out Father Michael Pfleger and Reverend James Meeks as spiritual advisors, mentors, and colleagues on numerous projects. While little is mentioned of Minister Farrakhan, former Farrakhan deputy, Dr. Vibert White, Jr., once known as Brother Vibert L.X., and later as Minister V.L. Muhammad, says they “run deep, and that for many years the two men have had ‘an open line between them’ to discuss policy and strategy, either directly or through intermediaries.” (Obama-Farrakhan Ties Are Close, Ex-Farrakhan Aide Says).

“Remember that for years, if you were a politician in Chicago, you had to have some type of relationship with Louis Farrakhan. You had to. If you didn’t, you would be ostracized out of black Chicago,” said Dr. Vibert White Jr., who spent most of his adult life as a member and ultimately top officer of the Nation of Islam.

In 1995, Reverend Wright and Barack Obama helped their mutual friend, Minister Farrakhan, organize the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March that they all then attended together. In later talking about his black nationalism, Barack explained in a Chicago Reader interview:

“These are mean, cruel times, exemplified by a ‘lock ’em up, take no prisoners’ mentality that dominates the Republican-led Congress. Historically, African-Americans have turned inward and towards black nationalism whenever they have a sense, as we do now, that the mainstream has rebuffed us, and that white Americans couldn’t care less about the profound problems African-Americans are facing.”

Kenneth Timmerman writes, as have others, that Obama’s involvement with the black nationalism of Minister Farrakhan and Reverend Wright, among others, is a connection to Khalid al-Mansour, who helped pay for Barack’s tuition at Harvard Law School:

“Black nationalism” is a current of thought and political action in the African-American community that has been championed by the likes of Farrakhan, Wright, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and Khalid al-Mansour. Obama discussed his attraction to black nationalism at length in his 1995 memoir “Dreams of My Father.”

In interviews, Khalid al-Mansour, lawyer and friend of the Saudi ruling family, has refused to discuss his relationship with Obama and Obama’s law school funding. As he explains to Kenneth Timmerman:

“In respect to Mr. Obama, I have told him, because so many people are running after him, and when stories get printed they usually get distorted and then he has to spend a lot of time trying to unravel them – and then after the experience of Rev. (Jeremiah) Wright whom I’ve never met, but I’ve followed the media coverage – I was determined that I was never going to be in that situation. I never discuss Barack Obama,” al-Mansour said.

The media frenzy surrounding Barack Obama is quite justified in many respects and in others is a bit intrusive.

Dr. Vibert White, Jr., observes and explains in a recent interview that Barack has learned well from Minister Farrakhan:

“If you listen to the rhetoric and you take away Obama’s political jargon, you hear a religious tenor to it that is very much Nation of Islam-like. I don’t know if anyone has ever touched on it, but Obama’s speaking style is very Malcolm-like, very Farrakhan-like.”

….

“I don’t know who was training Obama. But that style is not a ministerial style like in the Christian church. It’s a Nation of Islam style.”

….

“If the Nation of Islam can’t do anything else, it can train people how to speak. And nobody can outspeak a Muslim minister,” he said.

Even Michelle Obama plays a role in this, and very likely an even bigger one than is currently publicly known. Back in June, Larry Johnson at NoQuarterUSA, noted the “role that Louis Farrakhan and his wife, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan, have played in the POLITICAL RISE of Barack and Michelle Obama.”

One happy family: Minister Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Father Michael Pleger, Reverend James Meeks, and, yes, Barack Obama.

From the original post:

Gatewaypundit has a video from Naked Emperor News with some comments from BO back in 1995. Yeah, it’s a few years ago. But he talks about the same thing he mentioned to “Joe the Plumber.” This sounds like the real BO to me – not the sanitized stump speech version. After all, there are no white people who willingly pay taxes for AA children to go to school, are there?

Here’s the audio:

All day yesterday, Memeorandum featured many, many articles about the second video, including one at the National Review.
Read the rest ->

First, the audio from 2001:

The National Review author provided a transcript of the audio and interspersed parts of it with interesting comments. I’m excerpting a few here, but it’s worth the time to read the entire article.

There is nothing vague or ambiguous about [Obama's comments]. Nothing. 

From the top: “…The Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.”

If the second highlighted phrase had been there without the first, Obama’s defenders would have bent over backwards trying to spin the meaning of “political and economic justice.” We all know what political and economic justice means, because Barack Obama has already made it crystal clear a second earlier: It means redistribution of wealth. Not the creation of wealth and certainly not the creation of opportunity, but simply taking money from the successful and hard-working and distributing it to those whom the government decides “deserve” it. 

This redistribution of wealth, he states, “essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.” It is an administrative task. Not suitable for the courts. More suitable for the chief executive.

Wow. “.. . redistribution of wealth. . . essentially is administrative.” Redistributing the wealth, then, is both a job for the President and is simply a matter for planning? And “not suitable for the courts” certainly suggests one would not have much chance for redress. Are you kidding?

Then he adds this:

Now that’s just garden-variety socialism, which apparently is not a big deal to may voters. So I would appeal to any American who claims to love the Constitution and to revere the Founding Fathers… I will not only appeal to you, I will beg you, as one American citizen to another, to consider this next statement with as much care as you can possibly bring to bear: “And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [it] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

To me, when Obama says “[the Warren Court] didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution,” I get the distinct impression he means the court somehow failed in the “breaking free” part. That would mean Obama feels the constraints engineered by the Constitution should be removed or overcome somehow. This is what the NR had to say about that:

The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit government. That limitation of powers is what has unlocked in America the vast human potential available in any population. 

Barack Obama sees that limiting of government not as a lynchpin but rather as a fatal flaw: “…One of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”

So, the Civil Rights movement, by using the courts to address questions of equality missed out on creating “coalitions of power” that would bring about “redistributive change.” The reason the Civil Rights movement used the courts is because that is what the courts are for – to address such problems in a venue everyone believes has legitimacy and the force of government behind it. Why would community organizing have done any better? How in the world would “redistributive change” have occurred outside the courts? What does he MEAN?

In addition to the author’s comments about Obama’s statements, he notes as well that this video – by Naked Emperor News – was found and reported on by an individual. NOT THE MSM. The 1995 video is also from NEN.

I, do however, blame the press for allowing an individual citizen to do the work that they employ standing armies of so-called professionals for. I know they are capable of this kind of investigative journalism: It only took them a day or two to damage Sarah Palin with wild accusations about her baby’s paternity and less time than that to destroy a man who happened to be playing ball when the Messiah decided to roll up looking for a few more votes on the way to the inevitable coronation. 

We no longer have an independent, fair, investigative press. That is abundantly clear to everyone — even the press. It is just another of the facts that they refuse to report, because it does not suit them. 

Remember this, America: The press did not break this story. A single citizen, on the Internet did.

I just did a story on the MSM, noting that it had lost all its integrity. This is just another reason to distrust those providing you “news” on tv and print and radio. At least on the ‘net you can look at multiple sources and are not limited to whatever some editor decides to give air time to.

CBSnews did give some cursory coverage to the story by reporting on a remark by John Boehner.

“As disturbing as Barack Obama’s comments about ‘redistribution of wealth’ are, what’s worse is that seven years later his rhetoric is the same,” Boehner said Monday in a statement.

“Obama still wants to ‘redistribute’ our tax dollars and ‘spread the wealth around,’ giving money to people who don’t pay taxes rather than growing our economy for everybody.”

The Obama campaign immediately pushed back, arguing that the Right is deliberately misinterpreting a narrow legal argument Obama was making about decades-old court cases.
————–
“In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all.

The Obama campaign is whacking away at a straw man here. I don’t think Obama was arguing the courts should redistribute wealth at all either. He plainly said that was an administrative function for the chief executive.

Of course, this audio also has other implications. By discussing the redistribution of wealth and justice within the context of the civil rights movement, Obama also makes this a racial discussion. His context is clearly about AAs and whites.

Obama has said he is all about trans-racial politics even while his past associations with the likes of Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger and other race salary-men suggest otherwise. To me, this audio is simply more of the same in that sense.

And what about the redistribution of wealth and justice? Obviously Obama feels redistribution needs to happen. That’s not even open to question for him. He also seems to think the President can accomplish such redistribution because it is an “administrative function.” And he says the Constitution, rather than define what government cannot do to citizens, should rather define what it HAS to do for citizens. That’s a very different way of approaching the fundamental outlines of how our country works.

And, the Civil Rights movement missed out by ONLY using the courts to work for justice. ONLY? What venues did the Civil Rights movement miss?

Fundamental questions for a candidate, one would think. Will anyone but the bloggers bother to ask? Given that Obama has provided so little about his beliefs (other than his strong Christian beliefs, but NOT at Trinity, no, that was a 20 year fluke) or about him personally (writings, personal information), something like this audio offers a window into what a President Obama would put on his agenda. Had he bothered to make more information available, this audio might be placed within some bigger context. But he hasn’t. So, this audio is as important as it gets.

Obama is remarkably consistent from at least 1995 to 2001 in how he views the ideas of who owes what to whom. I wonder. In the wake of these audio clips, will people try to convince us BO’s politics have changed or his attitudes? Given that he was at Trinity until last spring, I’d say the only viable thing to say is his (mis)representaitons of his politics and his positions have changed. After all, the BO campaign will do whatever they can get away with, not what is true or even passes the sniff test.

It seems that others are noticing the rampant sexism/misogyny, and the hypocrisy of the “liberal elite” when it comes to who can be a feminist or not. Victor David Hanson would be one such person in his article,An Instructive Candidacy: What Sarah Palin taught us about ourselves. In his excellent piece, parts of which are excerpted here, Mr. Hanson takes on not just the Feminist Police, but the journalists who have been “reporting” during this campaign season:

Soon this depressing campaign will be over, and we can reflect on what we learned from our two-month introduction to Sarah Palin.

Clearly, it is more than we would have ever wished to know about ourselves.

First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. Palin’s career as a city councilwoman, mayor, and governor of Alaska was never seen as comparable to, or — indeed, in terms of executive experience — more extensive than, Barack Obama’s own legislative background in Illinois and Washington. Somehow we forgot that a mother of five taking on the Alaskan oil industry and the entrenched male hierarchy was somewhat more challenging than Barack Obama navigating the sympathetic left-wing identity politics of Chicago.

Well, true that. Everyone seems to have convenient amnesia when it comes to the accomplishments of the Governor of Alaska. Far too often, I have seen letters to the editor or comments at blogs claiming she is “just a mother of five.” No, she is that, which is no small thing, by the way, to which my mother can attest, but she is One of FIFTY governors in the entire United States, with the highest approval rating of any governor, as well as one who has taken on her own party, and WON, thank you so much.

But I digress:

So we seem to have forgotten that the standards of censure of her vice-presidential candidacy were not applied equally to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The media at times seems unaware of this embarrassment, namely that their condemnation of Sarah Palin as inexperienced equally might apply to Barack Obama — and to such a degree that by default we were offered the lame apology (reiterated by Colin Powell himself) that Obama’s current impressive campaigning, not his meager political accomplishments, was already an indication of a successful tenure as president. The result is that we now know more about the Palin pregnancies — both of mother and daughter — that we do the relationships of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright, and Father Pfleger with our possible next president.

No FREAKIN’ KIDDING! Obama hasn’t had a tenth of the vetting in eighteen months that Palin has had in two months – nice that some people are keeping score here. Hanson continues:

Indeed, the media itself — in private, I think — would admit that while (we? they?) have learned almost everything about Tasergate and the Bridge to Nowhere, we assume that at some future date a publicity-starved, megalomaniac Rev. Wright will soon offer his post-election memoirs, detailing just how close he and a President Obama were. Or we will learn Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, as long-time friends, in fact, did communicate via phone and e-mail well after Ayers had told the world, about the time of 9/11, that he, like our present-terrorist enemies, likewise wished he had engaged in more bombing attacks against the United States government. And the media never wondered whether a Palin’s falling out with those who ran Alaska might have been more of a touchstone to character than Obama’s own falling in with those who ran Chicago.

Uh, yeah. For some reason, while still in the Primary season, the MSM were all too happy to do their level best to ignore anything to do with Wright. They downplayed the videos, believed Obama when he claimed he certainly didn’t hold the same beliefs that Wright does even though his butt was in the pew in that church for over twenty years, and even though he called Wright his “uncle.” Oh, no – we must take him at his word that he would NEVER believe in that hate mongering theology. Just like we are supposed to take him at his word about Bill Ayers, Domestic Terrorist-Who-Wishes-He-Had-Been-More-Successful! Never you mind that they have been hanging around with each other for the past 13 years, working together, living near each other, and handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Ayers’ “unique” ideology to the youth of Chicago, through Wright, of course. Obama is such a straight shooter, naturally we must believe every word that escapes his lips, right?? Evidently.

And now is when we get to the issue of feminism:

Second, there does not seem to be much left of feminism any more. Of course, feminists once gave liberal pro-choice Bill Clinton a pass for his serial womanizing of vulnerable subordinates, and Oval Office antics with a young female intern. But they gave the game away entirely when they went after Gov. Palin for her looks, accent, pregnancies, and religion, culminating in assessments of her from being no real woman at all to an ingrate — piggy-backing on the pioneer work of self-acclaimed mavericks like themselves.

Feminism, it turns out, is no longer about equal opportunity and equal compensation, but, in fact, little more than a strain of contemporary elitist identity politics, and support for unquestioned abortion. Had Gov. Sarah Palin just been a mother of a single child at Vassar rather than of five in Alaska, married to a novelist rather than a snow-machiner, an advocate of pro-choice, who shot pictures of Alaskan ferns rather than shot moose — feminists would have hailed her as a principled kindred soul, and trumpeted her struggles against Alaskan male grandees.

So there was something creepy about droves of irate women, in lock-step blasting Sarah Palin from the corridors of New York and Washington, when most of them were the recipients of the traditional spoils of either family connections, inherited money, or the advantages that accrue from insider power marriages. Indeed, very few of Palin’s critics on their own could have emerged from a small-town in Alaska, with an intact marriage and five children, to run the state of Alaska.

We have come to understand that — for a TV anchorwoman, op-ed columnist, or professor — it would be a nightmare to birth a Down Syndrome child in her mid-forties, or to have had her pregnant unwed teen actually deliver her baby. In the world outside Sarah Palin’s Wasilla, these are career-ending blunders that abort the next job promotion or book tour— or the future career of a prepped young daughter on her way to the Ivy League.

Right? I’ve known people who couldn’t endure the stress of their partner getting a PhD., for cryin’ out loud, much less the stress of moving from one level of government to another with five kids, one of whom is a Special Needs child. Add to that the lack of support from her own party in doing these things, and you got yourself some stress. Which Sarah Palin has handled with seeming ease, a feat that should have been CELEBRATED by feminists, not ridiculed.

Hanson then takes on the whole Biden v. Palin contest:

Third, from the match-up of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, we discovered that our media does not know anything about the nature of wisdom — how it is found or how it is to be adjudicated. For the last eight weeks, Palin has been demonized as a dunce because she did not, in the fashion of the class toady with his hand constantly up in the first row, impress in flash-card recall, the glasses-on-his-nose Charlie Gibson, or clinched-toothed Katie Couric.

Meanwhile Joe Biden has just been Ol’ Joe Biden — which means not that he can get away with the occasional gaffe, but that can say things so outrageous, so silly, and so empty that, had they come out of the mouth of Sarah Palin, she would have long ago been forced to have stepped aside from the ticket.

Factual knowledge? Biden, in the midst of a financial meltdown on Wall Street, apparently thinks that the last time it happened in 1929, we heard FDR rally us on television. And such made-up nonsense came in the form, as many of Biden’s gaffes do, of a rebuke to the supposedly obtuse George W. Bush…

Amazingly, very, very little is made of either Biden’s OR Obama’s gaffes, though BOTH of them have PLENTY. Had Clinton, or McCain, or Palin, or anyone else made the factual inaccuracies or flat out lies that either of these men have made, they would be running across the bottom of your screen for days on end. But Biden and Obama? Hahaha, they made a mistake, move along, nothing to see here. Sheesh. Here are just a few for you:

Silliness? Imagine the following outbursts, mutatis mutandis, from the mouth of a Sarah Palin — “John McAmerica,” “a Palin-McCain administration,” “Senator George Obama,” “Congressman Joe Biden,” who is both “good looking,” and “drop-dead gorgeous.” Or “I guarantee you, John McCain ain’t taking my shotguns. . . . If he tries to fool with my Beretta, he’s got a problem. I like that little over and under, you know? I’m not bad with it. So give me a break.”

Or “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Or “Mitt Romney is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Quite frankly he might have been a better pick than me.”

Holy toledo. Reversing the positions helps to highlight just how absurd all of this has been…I agree with the following assessment:

The list could go on ad nauseam. But we got the picture. Biden has devolved from the ridiculous to the unhinged, confident that in-house journalism would understand that the law graduate with 36 years in the Senate was simply being Joe, while a Sarah Palin, who flinched when asked to parse the Bush Doctrine, was a Neanderthal creationist. I thought by now the You-tubed exchange of a Congressional Finance Committee hearing between the pompous Harvard Law School graduate Barney Frank and the conniving Harvard Law School graduate Franklin Raines — at the proverbial moment of conception of the financial meltdown — would have put to rest the notion that graduation from law school was any proof of either wisdom or morality.

I don’t know whether Sarah Palin would make a great vice president. But I did learn that by the standard of John Kerry’s pick of John Edwards, and now Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden, as running mates, she is wise and ethical beyond their measure.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He’s got a point, don’t you think?

And in conclusion, while looking for videos for something else, I stumbled upon the following video. From this person’s lips to the powers-that-be in the universe:

Van Susteran’s special will cover Obama’s relationships with Bill Ayers, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ACORN and more.

By the way, will Fox News reair Hannity’s America special two weeks ago? I’m surprised the channel hasn’t done so since it obviously required an investment in personnel and travel.

The recent, reluctantly released papers from Obama’s time as head at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) and his time on the board of the Woods Fund sheds new light on his relationship with Bill Ayers and the seamy milieu of Farrakhan’s Chicago.

The CAC and Woods Fund money paved the way for Obama’s political career:

the monies doled out through the Woods Fund to these groups, including [Bill] Ayers own Annenberg Challenge, helped cement Obama’s political relationships and bond with key players in Chicago.

Stanley Kurtz said that CAC money did not go directly to schools:

“Instead of giving money directly to schools, they gave to what they called external partners, and these external partners were often pretty radical community organizer groups.”

And Steve Diamond writes that Ayers was focused on what:

Ayers calls “social justice” approaches to teaching and “small schools” as well as race-based approaches to curriculum in the public schools.

Ayers and Obama funneled money intended for education to race-based curriculum. Matthew Weaver reports:

let’s also not forget organizations that received funding from Barack and Bill [Ayers], such as:

Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Arab American Action Network (AAAN) founded by husband and wife Rashid and Mona Khalidi. Maoist Mike Klonsky, another terrorist member of the Weatherman Children and Family Justice Center, Bernardine’s organization. Trinity Unity Church and Rev. Wright.

Ayers is an important part of the Chicago racial Left, a loosely affiliated group of churches, academics, and activists who include Jeremiah Wright, Pfleger, Farrakhan, the group ACORN, and many others. The racial Left is not committed to fighting racism — a noble cause — but instead looking at the world through a racial lens. This means that issues of class — which affects whites, women, gays, etc. — is frequently dismissed. Instead, there are disquisitions on “white privilege,” without discussing the fact that poverty knows no color. The racial Left, of course, is a class struggle between those who have and those who do not, and many of it’s proponents have attended the best schools and hold the highest positions in the academy and in government. It’s no accident that Bill Ayers, the scion of a wealthy family, is a primary member of the racial Left. And it’s no accident that Obama, surrounded by millionaires in San Francisco, pointed out that his difficulties in Pennsylvania were due to skin color (identifying those resistant to him as white) and then ridiculing them as religious, intolerant of immigrants, and as the owners of guns, all cultural indicators to the racial Left of the despised lower-income whites. He could just have easily said those who are bitter cling to Jeff Foxworthy, shop at Wal-Mart, and hump their sister, or any other stereotype used against low-income whites.

The racial Left is about protecting status:

Not only is Ayers using Obama’s rapid ascent to celebrity in order to capitalize on his own unquenchable thirst for fame by having his memoir Fugitive Days reissued in January 2009, he is also working with Hollywood to have his memoir turned into a movie. As if that’s not enough, he and his wife, Bernardine Dorhn, have authored a book, soon to be released, entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy.

Belying it’s title, this book is NOT about white supremacists, such as the Aryan Brotherhood, but instead states that “white supremacy is the dominant political system” in American’. From Amazon’s Product Description:

Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors’ own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

Stanley Kurtz has uncovered that Obama attended Farrakhan’s Million Man March, and Obama’s close friend, Michael Pfleger, is close to Farrakhan:

Although it’s been discussed before (because it confirms that Obama attended Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March), a 1995 background piece on Obama from the Chicago Reader has received far too little attention. Careful consideration of this important profile makes it clear that Obama’s long-standing ties to Chicago’s most rabidly radical preachers call into question far more than Obama’s judgment and character (although they certainly do that, as well). Obama’s two-decades at Trinity open a critically important window onto his radical-left political leanings. No mere change of church membership can erase that truth.

As Matthew Weaver posted, Rev. Farrakhan just pronounced Obama the Messiah (watch the video here):

“You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.” – Louis Farrakhan

In addition to being the leader of NOI, Farrakhan is first and foremost a politician, and one of the most powerful in Chicago. And Obama has at least one NOI member on his payroll.

In a June article from Reuters entitled “BREAKING NEWS: Nation of Islam Activists on Obama Camp Payroll” states that

“Sen. Barack Obama employed and continues to employ senior staffers who belong to the Nation of Islam, and the presidential candidate has some “worrying” ties to the controversial group headed by Louis Farrakhan, a former key Obama insider told AARON KLEIN… The former insider confirmed Obama is directly aware of the Nation of Islam members on his staff.”

“A key constituency for Obama was Hyde Park, where Farrakhan lives. To be successful politically in that area, you need to be involved with Farrakhan, since he’s a strong power in the district,” said the former insider.”

“The former insider identified former Obama worker Shakir Muhammad as a Nation of Islam activist. Muhammad was paid by Obama’s office as a photographer…According to a black supremacist source tied to Farrakhan, Muhammad previously worked as a bodyguard for the Nation of Islam chief.”

In fact, according to the article, Cynthia K. Miller, a known Nation of Islam activist who served Obama in his early state Senate days and was treasurer for his U.S. senatorial campaign, and a paid consultant in 2003 and 2004, was the beneficiary of help from Obama by another one of his Chicago friends, Tony Rezko.

“The former insider said Obama asked indicted Chicago businessman and Obama financier Tony Rezko to get his treasurer, Miller, a state government job with
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.”

While researching the source of Michelle Obama’s alleged “whitey” rant, we discovered direct connections between the Nation of Islam (NOI), Stokely Carmichael, Jeremiah Wright’s Black Liberation Theology and, most prominently, Louis Farrakhan.

According to Larry Johnson’s sources, the Michelle Obama tape captures her in sordid company:

The sources who have seen the tape report that Michelle says
disparaging things about “whites” and that Louis Farrakhan is visible.
There is no identifying information on the segment they have seen to
identify the location or time when this was recorded. [emphasis added]

Those who are following this matter will recall that Michelle Obama, when asked about these allegations, is reported to have said that “whitey” is not a word used by African Americans today. However, we documented that Mrs. Obama’s primary text for her Princeton thesis was Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, and we showed how Carmichael used the term “whitey” repeatedly, thereby establishing an epistemological connection between Carmichael and Mrs. Obama. In other words, Michelle Obama is the intellectual offspring of Stokely Carmichael.

Before going further, it should be noted that Reverend Jeremiah Wright was once a member of the Nation of Islam, though it’s not clear when he was involved with NOI. Ryan Lizza of the New Republic first reported that:

Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had
studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”[Emphasis added]

But back to Stokely Carmichael. Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Bureau of Investigations has released hundreds of pages from their files on Stokely Carmichael. It’s a treasure trove for those interested in the history of the civil rights movement. What we found most interesting, however, were the large number of documents connecting Carmichael with the NOI. For instance, the document below is an Airtel sent to Director Hoover on July 29, 1966, from Chicago. The subject is Stokely Carmichael and it concerns NOI leader Elijah Muhammed’s “CALL FOR SUMMIT MEETING, MAJOR CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS.”

There are three areas of interest for us: first, the Airtel came from the city of Chicago; second, the year 1966 (more on that later), and third, that the Nation of Islam — in the manner of the infamous mob meeting in Apalachin in 1957 — was organizing all of the major civil rights groups.

It has been widely reported, and documented here, that Carmichael was an “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party, and that he was the leader of the innocuous sounding Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The following document, however, shows that Carmichael was open to violence as a political tool–see the highlighted sentence below–”This nonviolence bit is just a philanthropic hang-up,” and that he was indeed a founder of the Black Panther Party:

In the following document we initially noticed Carmichael’s willingness to use violence. He is paraphrased as saying that “in his opinion, the black man is justified in using any means at his command to obtain what he believes is due him,” indicating an acceptance of violence as seen through a racial frame. What’s more interesting, however, is the next paragraph. “Louis Walcott, Minister of the New York City Muslim Mosque, Nation of Islam, also participated in this conference.” See the second paragraph below:

The name Louis, of course, was glaring. Could it be he? A quick Google search linked to a 1996 Morning Edition transcription of a Bob Edwards piece on Farrakhan:

The early life of Louis Farrakhan, who grew up as Louis Eugene Walcott, was heavily influenced by his loving but demanding mother and his poor but safe neighborhood of Roxbury, Boston, in the late 1940s.

Over the last decade, Louis Farrakhan has emerged as one of the most visible and formidable black political leaders in America

Let’s add up what we have so far: Stokely Carmichael, Michelle Obama’s primary source and intellectual ancestor, shared the stage with Louis Farrakhan, the same man who she allegedly shared a stage with when she said “whitey.”

Carmichael and Farrakhan may have shared more than a stage. The document below indicates but doesn’t conclude that Carmichael may have been a Muslim himself. Although heavily redacted, the FBI’s source said that “Stokely Carmichael, [redacted] as ‘one of us’ which this source interpreted as meaning a member of the Muslims.”

Whether or not Carmichael was a Muslim is unclear. What is clear is that at sometime in the summer of 1966 there was a meeting of the minds between some civil rights groups, black radicals, and the Nation of Islam. These groups organized into a force promoting and preaching a racist form of black nationalism. The document below describes a meeting that clearly shows this union of forces: Carmichael and Minister Louis “made it clear they wanted to unite with all Negro groups regardless of philosophy.” Note the date of August 18, 1966:

This takes us back to Jeremiah Wright and the question of when Wright was a Muslim. According to Wright’s Wikipedia entry:

In 1963, after two years of service, Wright joined the United States Navy and entered the Corpsman School at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Wright was then trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

“In 1966, as a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman,” the Wikipeida entry continues, Wright assisted with the care of President Johnson. Extrapolating from these dates, it appears that Wright was in Maryland between 1964 and 1966, and this may have been the time when he was a member of NOI. Wright didn’t start at Trinity until 1972, and evidently received spiritual training after receiving a master’s degree in English in 1969.

Also in Maryland in 1964 was Stokely Carmichael, where he was arrested “as a result of demonstrations in that city.” This doesn’t mean that Wright knew Carmichael, but surely Wright was cognizant of Carmichael’s work and of NOI as well. This is likely the time when he was a “Muslim and black nationalist.”

However Wright was radicalized, it is clear that he consciously appropriated the language and tenor of the Nation of Islam.

Wright’s statement that 9/11 was deserved retribution (“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans…America’s chickens are coming home to roost”) is a perfect echo of Malcolm X’s statement that “The assassination of Kennedy is a result of that way of life and thinking. The chickens came home to roost.”

Although it appears that Wright began his focus on Black Liberation Theology sometime after 1966, his racial attitudes and rhetoric have imitated that of NOI since at least 1970. Wright’s blaming the United States for creating AIDS to kill minorities is but just one example of his thinking being in lockstep with NOI.

Black Liberation Theology was first formed in 1966. According to NPR:

Black liberation theology originated on July 31, 1966, when 51 black pastors bought a full page ad in the New York Times and demanded a more aggressive approach to eradicating racism. They echoed the demands of the black power movement, but the new crusade found its source of inspiration in the Bible.

Keep in mind that NOI’s Elijah Mohammad called for a summit of black leaders on July 11, 1966, only 20 days prior to the official formation of Black Liberation Theology. If the dates don’t convince you of a synergy between NOI and Black Liberation Theology, please note Wright’s mentor — and Black Liberation Theology founder — James Cone’s words about NOI’s Malcolm X:

Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’ The false Christianity of the white-devil oppressor must be replaced by an authentic Christianity fully identified with the poor and oppressed.

The black intellectual’s goal, says Cone, is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.”

Couple these words with Wright’s own view that:

There will be no peace in America until whites begin to hate their whiteness, asking from the depths of their being: ‘How can we become black?’

In 1998, Louis A. De-Caro, Jr. published a book titled Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity. De-Caro’s book underscores the racial nature and revolutionary intent of the NOI’s promotion of a black “Christianity”:

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam based their religious orthodoxy more on the Bible than on the Qur’an. In part, this was because they sought to convert black Christians. More- over, Elijah Muhammad taught that the Bible, actually the story of “dark people,” had been distorted by the white man in order to enslave and oppress black people in the United States.

The Nation of Islam and Black Liberation Theology are two doors to the same room. Black Liberation Theology is a “palatable” form of “Christian” black nationalism. The fiery anti-American, race-baiting words of Wright, Ayers, Meeks, Pfleger, and Moss are from the same philosophical cauldron as the Nation of Islam. It’s obvious now why Wright’s Trumpet Magazine featured Farrakhan on the cover:

Some have said that Michelle Obama’s thesis proves nothing because it was written more than 20 years ago. We suggest that it was no accident that the Obamas sought out Wright a mere 2-3 years after she wrote her thesis and stayed with him for nearly 20 years, even while he preached the vilest and most hateful sermons that our nation has been forced to hear. TexasDarlin writes:

It’s no wonder that the Obamas joined Trinity United, grew close to Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, and actively defended the church. And there is no doubt in this alert reader’s mind that Michelle Obama clung to Trinity as long as possible politically and, unfortunately for her husband, perhaps many years too long for most voters’ palates.

But the Obamas’ connections to the Nation of Islam go deeper than Rev. Wright. Louis Farrakhan’s political connections extend to the Obamas directly through Chicago politics and Tony Rezko. Larry Johnson writes that:

Before Barack came on the scene, THE MAN in his political district was Louis Farrakhan. No one could take Alice Palmer’s seat without Farrakhan’s blessing. No one. I do not fault Barack Obama for seeking out the blessing of Farrakhan, but the story of what was done behind the scenes to get rid of Barack’s predecessor—Alice Palmer—has not been told. A knowledgeable source tells me that Tony Rezko played a direct role in this feat. And Rezko has been tight with Farrakhan.

At some point, probably between 1964-66, Jeremiah Wright was a member of the Nation of Islam and was indoctrinated into its odious brand of racist theology. And make no mistake, Wright’s race-baiting is not indicative of the vast majority of black churches. A pastor at LivePrayer writes:

Please hear me very clear. Black liberation theology is a perverse view of the Scriptures and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a radical view held by a very small minority of black pastors. This is NOT representative of the black church or the overwhelming majority of black pastors who preach and teach the true Gospel of Jesus Christ without looking at it thru the lens of color. Every black pastor I know condemns Dr. Wright and this perverse racist theology.

In 1966, a group of “Christian” ministers, at the behest of Elijah Mohammad, began to preach the same teachings as NOI. Stokely Carmichael and Louis Farrakhan actively worked to bridge the gap between these two groups, and Carmichael would soon publish a book espousing much the same separatist ideas. Carmichael’s book “guided” Michelle Obama’s thesis and soon she and Barack would join Trinity United Church of Christ.

The continuity of the teachings of Carmichael, Farrakhan, Cone, Pfleger, Wright, and Ayers is incontrovertible; it’s all about skin color.

Christopher Hitchens asks:

how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

Obama’s targeted use of Malcolm X’s super-charged racial code words (“hoodwink, bamboozled”), and his followers’ continuous charges of racism against Obama’s opponents as a political tool has been well documented. It shows that Obama has a studied understanding of the racial radicalism of Malcolm X, Farrakhan, Wright, Pfleger, and Ayers coupled with the cold-blooded instincts of a heartless politician. The Obama campaign has already smeared as racists vast swaths of the Democratic Party, people who were drawn to the Party for its commitment to civil rights. Now he employs the same tactics against John McCain, a champion of immigrants who has never had a hint of racism associated with his name.

Sinclair Lewis is frequently quoted as saying: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

In today’s upside down world, racism has come to America embodied in a multi-racial politician and carrying the banner of the Democratic Party.

Before ACORN became a household name, Larry Johnson and Eastan McNeal reported that the Obama campaign has been funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to a shady ACORN shell corporation called Citizens Services, Inc. New information, including the photo above, proves that Obama’s past denials of his relationship with ACORN are not the truth.

According to the Leftist Dissent Magazine, the nebulous term, “community organizing,” has shaped Barack Obama:

Although he didn’t make community organizing a lifetime career—he left Chicago to attend Harvard Law School—Obama often says that his organizing experience has shaped his approach to politics.

~snip~

Since embarking on a political career, Obama hasn’t forgotten the lessons that he learned on the streets of Chicago.

Although Obama claims to never have been associated with ACORN, except when he was retained as their attorney, his community organizing experience is indistinguishable from ACORN’s mission:

In 1985, at age 23, Obama was hired by the Developing Communities Project, a coalition of churches on Chicago’s South Side, to help empower residents to win improved playgrounds, after-school programs, job training, housing, and other concerns affecting a neighborhood hurt by large-scale layoffs from the nearby steel mills and neglect by banks, retail stores, and the local government.

ACORN’s mission is to force governments and businesses, by threat of lawsuits and harassment, to support their agenda of obtaining the maximum services from government, coercing corporations to finance their projects, and forcing banks to approve high-risk loans. Additionally, ACORN works on voter registration issues and is suspected in mass voter fraud. This should be of special concern to the supporters of Hillary Clinton, many of whom witnessed caucus fraud during the primary season.

Stanley Kurtz details that ACORN may be at fault for much of the housing crisis we are now experiencing. Kurtz writes:

While the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act did call on banks to increase lending in poor and minority neighborhoods, its exact requirements were vague, and therefore open to a good deal of regulatory interpretation. Banks merger or expansion plans were rarely held up under CRA until the late 1980s, when ACORN perfected its technique of filing CRA complaints in tandem with the sort of intimidation tactics perfected by that original “community organizer” (and Obama idol), Saul Alinsky.

Kurtz states that Obama, in his position on the board of the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) — both with domestic terrorist and Obama benefactor Bill Ayers — funneled large sums of money to ACORN:

as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to Acorn, and sending still more money Acorn’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported Acorn. And Acorn, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis.

It’s become apparent that ACORN is serving as Obama’s red-shirted shock troops for voter “outreach,” a euphemism for the mass voter registration fraud witnessed up to this point in the election. ACORN will do for voting integrity what they did for mortgage lending.

According to Obama’s “Fight the Smears” Web Site, he was never an organizer for ACORN:

Regardless of what the Web site says, Obama’s ties to ACORN go much further than simply writing the group large checks from CAC in his role as Bill Ayers’ toady. Although “Fight the Smears” says that Obama was not an organizer for ACORN, he was an attorney for an ACORN’s voter registration project.

However, in May of this year, Stanley Kurtz discovered that Obama and ACORN have a much closer connection:

While most press accounts imply that Obama just happened to be at the sort of public-interest law firm that would take Acorn’s “motor voter” case, Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama’s representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with Talbot. And while many reports speak of Obama’s post-law school role organizing “Project VOTE” in 1992, Foulkes makes it clear that this project was undertaken in direct partnership with Acorn. Foulkes then stresses Obama’s yearly service as a key figure in Acorn’s leadership-training seminars.

Further, John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, elaborates that Obama was an attorney for ACORN, trained ACORN activists, and dispensed funds to ACORN:

In 1995, then GOP Gov. Jim Edgar refused to implement the federal “Motor Voter” law. Allowing voters to register using only a postcard and blocking the state from culling voter rolls, he argued, could invite fraud. Mr. Obama sued on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and won. Acorn later invited Mr. Obama to help train its staff; Mr. Obama would also sit on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago, which frequently gave this group grants.

Kurtz lays the collapse of the mortgage giants squarely at the feet of ACORN:

Up to now, conventional wisdom on the financial meltdown has relegated ACORN and the CRA to bit parts. The real problem, we’ve been told, lay with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, however, ACORN is at the base of the whole mess. ACORN used CRA and Democratic sympathizers to entangle Fannie and Freddie and the entire financial system in a disastrous disregard of the most basic financial standards. And Barack Obama cut his teeth as an organizer and politician backing up ACORN’s economic madness every step of the way.

In a prescient article from 1998, entitled Capitalist Wealth Underwrites Assaults on Middle America’s Values, Robert Holland reports that ACORN received funding from Fannie Mae and other banks and that ACORN then pressured the federal government to force banks to make high-risk loans:

Corporate leaders may be dispensing this aid in the belief it will curry favor with radical groups, or they may calculate that regulation will favor their business’ interests over competitors. Some of the giving, however, just seems spectacularly misguided: For example, Bank America, Chase Manhattan, and Fannie Mae contributed $315,000 to ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), an outfit that threatens financial institutions with federal sanctions if they fail to issue high-risk loans at bargain rates to borrowers of ACORN’s choosing.

Matthew Weaver originally uncovered this photograph of Obama and The Rev. Michael L. Pfleger protesting payday loans in January 2000.

The caption from NBC 5 photograph does not detail who sponsored the protest. It’s striking, however, that one of ACORN’s primary missions is protesting payday loans. And the yellow signs are ubiquitous in nearly all photographs of ACORN from this period:

The caption reads: “ACORN members demand fair lending, not predatory lending! This march was part of ACORN’s National Convention in Philadelphia, Summer 2000.”

The protest in Chicago attended by Obama and The Rev. Pfleger was likely an ACORN-related event, and significant enough for Pfleger to list the protest on his Curriculum Vitae:

What’s interesting about Pfleger’s CV, in addition to the prominence placed on the lending protest, are the other two actions. In a period of one month, Pfleger was actively attempting to ban Indian bidis cigarettes (with Obama) and coordinating efforts with Rev. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

But Obama’s ties with Pfleger did not end with fighting payday loans and exotic cigarettes, Pfleger is close to Farrakhan and Obama attended Farrakhan’s Million Man March:

Obama was apparently at Farrakhan’s Million Man March, although his precise attitude toward the march is in dispute

Regardless of Obama’s proximity to Farrakhan, he continues to embrace the resurgent far-Left.

Dissent reports that Obama employs Marshall Ganz of Harvard to lead “Camp Obama,” a Saul Alinsky-inspired, ACORN-like retreat for the training of Obama organizers:

Obama enlisted Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor who is one of the country’s leading organizing theorists and practitioners, to help train organizers and volunteers as a key component of his presidential campaign. Ganz was instrumental in shaping the volunteer training experience.

Many Obama campaign volunteers went through several days of intense training sessions called “Camp Obama.” The sessions were led by Ganz and other experienced organizers

Ganz is a respected organizer and academic with long-term associations with ACORN. He was also a member of the Howard Dean campaign.

In an article last year on Talking Points Memo, Ganz notes that recent elections have been remarkably close and that organizing will decide this year’s election. Using Alinsky as his model, he proposes a grass-roots campaign to win in 2008.

Barack Obama, a man we know little truth about, was forced onto the Democratic Party by far-Left activists and obsequious Party elders. ACORN is engaged in fraudulent voter registration on behalf of Obama, and the leader of “Camp Obama” tells us clearly that this election will be about organizing. Obama’s close relationship with ACORN, as documented by Kurtz,

a bit of digging into Obama’s years in the Illinois State Senate indicates strong concern with Acorn’s signature issues, as well as meetings with Acorn and the introduction by Obama of Acorn-friendly legislation on the living wage and banking practices. You begin to wonder whether, in his Springfield days, Obama might have best been characterized as “the Senator from Acorn.”

This is a frightening thought when you consider that ACORN is much to blame for the housing crisis we’re now experiencing. And it’s not surprising that the Obama campaign’s strong-arm tactics, inspired by Alinsky and perfected by ACORN, have made the Democratic Party foreign to so many of its loyal base.

Obama has a friend or associate that is questionable.

Video or articles surface of Obama thanking them, supporting them, writing a blurb for their book, organizing events for them, campaigning for them, campaigning with them, playing poker with them, serving on boards with them, buying homes with them, dining with them, praising them, using them to prove his christian faith, or hiring them.

Obama then denies their tight relationship – brushes the association off as *a guy in the ‘hood*, claims they are someone who doesn’t advise him, minimizes the actual number of times he attended church, says he can’t vet his vetters, or flat out lies.

Obama THEN completely denies any knowledge of who they really are, denies ever knowing who they were, what they said, what they did, how corrupt they were, any fraud they were up to, and what they were preaching.

People – this isn’t a coincidence. One or two nefarious associations can be examined and written off. But there is a looooooooong list of people that Obama is close to – whether they be family members, business partners, friends or co-workers who are either radicals, criminals, racist, or anti-American.

This list, compiled by The Daily Antikos, is great, but forgot a few people/organizations (that I added at the end):

Jeremiah Wright – Obama’s Pastor for 20 years. Obama did not distance himself until it was political.

Father Pflager – Speaks at Obama’s former Church (only after embarrassment) and Obama gave him money & here they are in 2000.

Bill Ayers – Terrorist. Member of the Weather Underground. Killed Americans. Launched Obama’s Political Career.

Tony Rezko – bought land and sold it to Obama at a discount. Oh yeah, and he is a convicted felon.

Raila Odinga – Defeated in his bid for the Kenyan Presidency. Led Supporters in a Violent Uprising. Obama Campaigned for him in 2006. (at tax payer expense)

Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour – I can’t even get started. This is Obama’s Political Grand-father, and his intentions do not seem to be too honorable.

Franklin Raines – Cooked the Books at Fannie Mae. Obama hired him as an advisor on Housing and Urban Affairs.

Frank Marshall David – Communist Obama Mentor.

Emil Jones, Jr. – Ugh… Just Read It.

Rev James Meeks – Spiritual Mentor

Rashid Khalidi – PLO Terrorist.

Here are a few more:

Larry Walsh is the Will County (IL) County Executive, good buddy, political confidante, and frequent poker player with Barack Obama. He is currently being investigated by the FBI.

Kwame Kilpatrick, former mayor of Detroit, convicted felon, has been charged with 10 felonies including perjury, obstruction of justice and assaulting a public safety officer. He will be sentenced October 28th. In June, Kwame Kilpatrick gave Barack Obama his endorsement as a Democratic Party Superdelegate.

Gov. Blagojevich, who is under investigation.

Marilyn Katz, a former member of the ’60′s anti-war group SDS, led protestors against the police outside the Democratic Convention in 1968. Protestors threw nails in the street to impede the police and clashed with police on this occasion and others. Katz has said of her activities that she wanted the U.S. to become a socialist paradise. She is a close friend of Barack Obama. Katz is a member of Obama’s national finance committee.

James Johnson, Former Fannie Mae executive who was vetting candidates for Obama for his VP but had to resign. Johnson is drawing fire over his jumbo home loans from Countrywide Financial, a major actor in the subprime mortgage mess, that may have been below market rates.

Louis Farrakhan, leader of the NOI. Obama helped to organize his Million Man March in ’95, and he is tight with Reverend Wright and Phleger.

Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac – Obama has recieved the most donations, second only to Dodd, from these companies, and also was thanked, in part with the Congressional Black Caucus, for *being like family* with Fannie and Freddi.

ACORN – Obama is the former Director of Illinois Project Vote, and they have been raided and charged for fraudulent voter registration practices. They are also linked to some of the above associations of Obama’s.

Michelle Obama. *First time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.* Nuff said.

How does someone hang out with that many people, who are, as I said, criminals, radicals, racists or just plain anti-American, and not share some of those characteristics?

And the best excuse Obama can ever come up with is *they aren’t the person I thought I knew* or *I never heard them say those things* or *I did not know they were a domestic terrorist when I was having my first fundraiser in their living room*.

Are we to believe that he truly didn’t know, that he is that uninformed, that naive, that, dare I say, stupid? Or is he just lying?

Why would someone who associates with all those people WANT to be President? And more importantly, why would anyone WANT him to be President?

I just don’t get it.

Part 5 of 6

Part 6 of 6

Please share your comments about all six parts here.

::::::::::::

Note: Here are links to the important comments posted by our readers in open threads last night, during and after the show: first thread, second thread, and third thread. (Readers continued to comment throughout the night.)

Part 3 of 6

Part 4 of 6

Please go to the third post for the remaining parts.

::::::::::::

Note: Here are links to the important comments posted by our readers in open threads last night, during and after the show: first thread, second thread, and third thread. (Readers continued to comment throughout the night.)

“This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense…”

The very next day, the Obama campaign posted on its Web site under the title “Fact Check on Obama and Ayers” the following, each prefaced with “Reality” and backed up with one or media reports:

• Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were active
• Ayers connection is “phony,” “tenuous,” “a stretch”
• Ayers comments were published on September 11; the interview occurred prior to publication
• Ayers is a tenured professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and was a “respected adviser” to Mayor Daley on school reform.
• Charges against Ayers were dropped and he served no time

Obama continued his lies about Ayers when he appeared on Fox News Sunday, April 27. Barack repeated the claim that, “Mr. Ayres (sic) is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood…” (Fox News, April 27, 2008).

The campaign to persuade the public that Barack barely knew Ayers got a boost on August 21, 2008 from TruthFightsBack.com (John Kerry’s Web site for the Obama campaign). The site trumpeted, “Barack Obama Barely Knows William Ayers” and wrote that “The Republicans, desperate to smear Barack and try to build on their lies about his religion, insinuate that Barack Obama has a deep relationship with William Ayers. William Ayers was once a member of a radical group in the 1960s.” TruthFightsBack.com calls this lie “The Truth” under the title Barack Obama Barely Knows William Ayers:

“Barack Obama lived in the same area of Chicago as Ayers, and Ayers has been a politically active member of that community for years. Considering that, it’s actually remarkable how little the two have to do with each other. Early in Barack Obama’s career, he attended one reception in his honor at Ayers’s house. They also were separately asked by a charitable organization to serve on that organization’s board. And that’s it. There’s no friendship between the two, no relationship, no history of working together.”

The Obama team’s effort to cover up Barack’s ties to Ayers included an organized campaign to intimidate a Chicago radio station (WGN) that planned to interview Stanley Kurtz, who had succeeded in examining documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC). The campaign emailed an Obama Action Wire to its supporters encouraging them to call in to the show and use following talking points (as found on the report form for supporters to log their call):

• William Ayers was involved with the Weather Underground when Barack Obama was eight years old, and Barack has roundly condemned their actions.
• Last night on Fox News, Kurtz tried to radicalize an education reform program in Chicago called the Annenberg Challenge. The Challenge was funded by Republican Walter Annenberg, introduced by Mayor Daley and Republican Governor Jim Edgar, and one of its initiatives was even praised by John McCain.
• Kurtz claimed on Fox News that William Ayers recruited Obama to the Annenberg Challenge — a flat out lie. Ayers did not serve on the board of the Challenge, and he had nothing to do with Barack’s recruitment.

Lies, big lies, and damned lies. The Obama team offers a disingenuous blend of fact and fiction in trying to cover up the true relationship between Obama and Ayers. The devil is in the detials and details do matter:

Ayers is just a guy who lives in my neighborhood, a tenured professor, and adviser to the local mayor

Ayers does live in Barack’s neighborhood (or vice versa). In fact, Barack and Bill currently live about two blocks apart on Greenwood Avenue and 50^th Street. And before Barack’s “boneheaded” deal with convicted felon Rezko to purchase the Greenwood mansion, Obama lived about 1-1/4 miles from Bill. But the dismissive “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood” is a lie because Ayers was not just some fellow Barack bumped into at the corner market. They have a relationship that goes back nearly 20 years. Ayers was Barack’s friend, employer, colleague, and political supporter.

Ayers also is a tenured professor and multiple reports indicate he also is a buddy of Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley. In fact, Mayor Daley has defended him during the campaign saying they’ve worked together, that Bill Ayers is a respected educator, and valued member of the Chicago community (Chicago Tribune, April 17, 2008).

It is unfair to say that Ayers’ actions 40 years ago when I was only eight should reflect upon me; anyway, charges against him where dropped and he did not serve any jail time. Plus, I’ve condemned the group’s actions

False. It is entirely fair to judge Barack by the people he surrounds himself with. Bill Ayer’s may have beat the terrorism charges but he has remained resolutely unrepentant about his actions. In 1981 David Horowitz quotes him bragging “Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country.” In 2001 he is quoted saying “I don’t regret settings bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” (New York Times, September 11, 2001). Bill’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn went to jail rather than aid the government after the deadly Brinks armored car robbery. I like the comment at Hot Air (February 24, 2008) where See-Dubya expresses concern about Barack’s “…frightening tone-deafness toward terrorism, and a blithe ignorance of the evil and chaos these radicals represent.”

Any connection to Ayers is phony, tenuous, or a stretch. It is ridiculous to suggest any tie with Ayers

False. Everything discovered to date undeniably document that Barack Obama and Bill Ayers have personal, professional, and political ties that span nearly 20 years. Steve Diamond believes they likely first met in 1988 following Chicago’s teacher’s strike. Barack was hired into a Woods Fund sponsored position with Developing Communities Project that was a member of Bill Ayers’ Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABCs) (Global Labor and Politics, June 7, 2008).

Consider as well:

• In November 20, 1997. Michelle Obama, then Associate Dean of Student Services and Director of the University of Chicago Community Service Center, organized and participated in a panel that included Barack and Bill, Should a child ever be called a “super predator?” at the University of Chicago. See also, Chicago Tribune.
• In 1997 Barack wrote a review of Bill’s book “A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court”. Chicago Tribune published a blurb from Obama about books he was reading. See also USA Today.
• April 19-20, 2002, Barack, Bill, and Bernadine participated in a conference and panel “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?“. See also, Chicago Tribune.
• February 2005. Barack and Bill participated in a conference and dinner for Rashid Khalidi at Columbia wherein they offered testimonials to Khalidi. Mayor Daley also attended this hate-fest. (See The Sun and Campus Watch for some commentary. Khalidi subsequently lost his position at Columbia because of his comments, see New York Times.)

Ayers did not help launch my career

False. Back in 1995 after Barack Obama had returned to Chicago upon graduating from Harvard Law School, Bill Ayers hired the young Barack, then a third year associate at Davis, miner, Barnhill & Gallad. Together they spent upwards to $160 million dollars over the next seven years. As well, Bill and his wife Bernadine Dohrn feted him to the community as then-State Senator Palmer’s successor.

Early in Barack Obama’s career, he attended one reception in his honor at Ayers’ house

Not the whole truth. This was not a meet and greet reception. And Barack had more than one isolated sit down with Ayers and Dohrn. The Ayers/Dohrn home is where Barack Obama launched his campaign to oust then-State Senator Alice Palmer. This reception is reported in numerous articles including Ben Smith in Politico (February 22). Maria Warren writes about this gathering in her blog Musings & Migraines on January 27, 2005, “When I first met Barack Obama, he was giving a standard, innocuous little talk in the living room of those two legends-in-their-own-minds, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. They were launching him–introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.” Ari Berman also reports in The Nation (May 1) that Bill hosted a fundraiser for Barack in 1996. (Possibly an error on Berman’s part as this might be the 1995 event since there is no other mention of a 1996 fundraiser.)

Ayers had nothing to do with my joining Annenberg Challenge. He did not recruit me, nor did he serve on its board

False. Bill Ayers founded the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, secured the initial $50 million from Annenberg Challenge, and claims to have co-chaired the Collaborative it with Barack Obama. While there is nothing to explicitly prove that Bill recruited Barack, it is simply not credible to say that Bill Ayers had nothing to do with Barack Obama joining the organization.

I do not exchange ideas with Ayers

Really? Can you say the same thing about your communications director, David Axelrod? According to a source who attended the Democratic National convention in Denver, an old friend of Ayer’s bragged that Axelrod and Ayers are in regular contact and coordinating on how to respond to the claims about the Ayers/Obama relationship.

Ayers has not ‘officially’ endorsed me

Really? So he’s backing McCain? The issue is not who Ayers has endorsed. The issue remains–why did Barack hang out for so many years with a guy like Ayers. Endorsement or not, it is a question that matter.

Ayers has been a politically active member of that community for years

True. First, as a home-grown domestic terrorist, then since around 1987 as a community activist, organizer, and financier. As Lynn Sweet wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times (March 3), “Hyde Park welcomed William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to the neighborhood after they resurfaced as local civic leaders following their years on the lam as members of the Weather Underground.” She notes Ben Smith observing in Politico (February 22), “While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.”

Considering that, it’s actually remarkable how little the two have to do with each other

Oh yeah?! Now this is where the lying really begins. As is increasingly clear, they worked together and shared the same circle of friends and families, same business associates, and same political associates.

They also were separately asked by a charitable organization to serve on that organization’s board

Not true. They were involved in at least three different “charitable” organizations. There was the Woods Fund of Chicago, which Barack joined 1993 and Bill Ayers joined in 1997. But what about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers founded and worked on with Barack Obama from 1995 through 1999. While Barack chaired the Challenge, Bill co-chaired its Collaborative arm. This was actually three connected organizations: Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC, the Board), Chicago School Reform Collaborative (the Collaborative, and Consortium of Chicago Schools Research (CCSR).

And that’s it. There’s no friendship between the two…

Ben Smith in Politico (February 22) writes that Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician, told him that they were “friends”. At the time Smith dismissed this for lack of supporting information and the denial by Barack Obama. (I wonder if Smith has since reconsidered?). Mayor Daley now says they are friends. Even Bill Burton acknowledges that they were friends.

…no relationship

False. They have family, community, business, and political ties. The only tie they appear to not share regards religion.

…no history of working together

False. Why is the media so reluctant to explore the CAC relationship?

At the risk of being redundant, sometime in 1987 Bill and Bernadine returned home to Chicago, where both had family. Michelle likely already knew both through her Robinson family ties and then in her 1988 work at Sidley Austin, where Bernardine was also employed. It is likely that Barack at least knew of Bill Ayers because he was already involving himself among with the Ayers family and their players in the community. Bill Ayers operated in relative obscurity until February 2008 when his ties to Barack and Michelle Obama became a matter of discussion in Barack’s presidential aspirations.

As a community organizer in Chicago from 1985 to 1988 Barack Obama received funding from and worked with numerous groups, such as Developing Communities Project. Bill Ayers joined in this arena upon his return in 1987 through his own group, Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (ABCs). They both surely crossed paths as Ayer’s father, Tom, provided funding to Barack and Bill through Chicago United, a group of businessmen concerned about race and education issues in Chicago. Tom Ayers was once CEO of Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) (Steve Diamond, Global Labor and Politics, June 18, 2008). Michelle, the Robinson daughter, continued her own involvement but details are murky at best. Barack Obama shows up again in Chicago after graduating from Harvard Law School, ends up at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, and joins the Woods Fund board, 1993, as a freshly minted 32 year old law school graduate, where he remained through 2002 and continued association with until gaining a seat in the U.S. Senate. Bill Ayers formally joined the board in 1999 but had ties throughout the earlier years, including receiving funds from the group.

Anyway, in 1993 Bill began organizing the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Despite his unrepentant terrorist past he succeeded in securing nearly $50 million from Annenberg Challenge and immediately named Barack as his co-chair. Together over the next five years they spent at least $110 million for “radical” school reform in Chicago (Steve Diamond, Global Labor and Politics, June 18, 2008 and August 18, 2008). Then, or shortly afterward, the remains of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was handed over to Chicago Public Education Fund.

This was a small circle of people, families, and businesses. They were figuratively partners in crime, Chicago’s political mafia enriching themselves through their political position, through federal, local, and state funding, and through their positions and funds given from private organizations, especially, of immediately focus here, from the Woods Fund and Annenberg Challenge. It is likely that there are other organizations and people involved and this needs to be explored further. Stanley Kurtz, Steve Diamond, and others are now beginning to look into what Annenberg Challenge did with its more than $160 million in private and federal dollars.

But first, let’s get back to Barack, Bill, and Bernadine. Again, Michelle plays at least a bit role in this but to what extent is still unclear. Over the years Barack, Bill, Bernadine, and Michelle show up together, along with other Chicago figures that include Rev. Wright, Minister Farrakhan, Rev. Meeks, Rev. Pfleger, Sen. Jones, and many, many more. Throughout this Barack also had his early ties with friend, businessman, and political financier Tony Rezko and Rezko’s partners and associates. And finally, let’s also not forget organizations that received funding from Barack and Bill, such as:

• Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
• Arab American Action Network (AAAN) founded by husband and wife Rashid and Mona Khalidi.
• Maoist Mike Klonsky, another terrorist member of the Weatherman
• Children and Family Justice Center, Bernardine’s organization.
• Trinity Unity Church and Rev. Wright.

Finally, what role did Barack’s position as a sitting state senator play in all of this?

Summary

Fairly or not, Chicago has a long reputation as a corrupt political city. It is increasingly clear that Barack joined and became a willing partner in this corruption. The families, organizations, and businesses involved enriched themselves off of the private and public funds that Barack controlled. That Barack Obama lied and continues to lie about his relationship with Bill Ayers is a smokescreen and the tip-of-the-iceberg about the depth of his involvement in what are, or may be, corrupt practices among these people and their organizations.

A Bit of Background and Unresolved Items

As long as this post is, it is still embarrassingly incomplete. In writing this I have read every post at Larry Johnson’s NoQuarterUSA and Steve Diamond’s Global Labor and Politics blogs involving terrorist William Ayers. I also dug through scores of articles and posts at various media sites and blogs. While some matters are consistently reported, others vary significantly. I’m sure I’ve missed many salient points.

It is especially dramatic to read earlier compared to newer posts. Consider Ben Smith’s “Obama once visited ’60s radicals” from February 22, 2008. The title alone shows the naivety of Ben and everyone about the level of Obama’s involvement with Bill and Bernadine. That Obama let such false picture spread without correction, including then and now on his campaign Web sites, further reflects his clear intent to deceive voters.

Four unresolved items in an incomplete list of questions are:

• What is Michelle’s involvement in all of this?
• How did Barack’s role in the Illinois Senate affect or was a part of all of this?
• What are Barack’s other board and organization memberships?
• Where did the money go? E.g., to friends, family, personal and professional associates, and political cronies?

Suggested Readings

The body of evidence and discussion on the relationship among and between Barack and Michelle Obama, William Ayers, and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn is growing daily. As we get beyond the lies and begin to follow the money I recommend reading the following:

• Larry Johnson at his Web site NoQuarterUSA and as I have summarized here.
• Steve Diamond at Global Labor and Politics and as often published at NoQuarterUSA.
• Stanley Kurtz at National Review has made a start and it will be worth watching to see what he develops as he researches the Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers he’s now gained access to.
• Selected articles from multiple sources are summarized here.
• My posts at The Problem With Obama and The Independent View.

Matthew Weaver
Reprinted from It’s Not Just a Lie, It’s a Matter of Character

David Freddoso, who will be Nocturnal Warrior’s* guest tonight, reports from Denver in his article, Investing In Obama, Government Favors for Chicago Benefactors:

When state Senator Barack Obama cosponsored legislation creating and increasing subsidies for low-income housing developers in Illinois, and wrote letters to get $14 million specifically for two of them (one was Tony Rezko), his official acts benefited several friends and donors in that industry. A similar thing happened when Obama earmarked $200,000 for Jesse Jackson’s investment fund in Chicago and $225,000 for Father Michael Pfleger’s neighborhood ministry.

Those are just a few among dozens of examples of how, when Senator Obama governs, his friends do well. Such arrangements give the lie to Obama’s self-projected image as a reformer who wants to change government and restore America’s faith in politics. But they do not make him especially awful — such arrangements are typical among politicians in both parties. Earmarks and narrowly crafted bills go one way, campaign contributions go the other. Old friends who deliver votes are rewarded with taxpayers’ money. The “right” former staffers get the six-figure lobbying jobs, and the “right” companies get the contracts.

Read the rest ->
That’s Washington, and it’s definitely Chicago, the city being celebrated tonight at the Democratic convention as various Windy City speakers take the stage. It is the “old politics” that Obama consistently denounces, and which he has consistently practiced throughout his career.

It gets better:

Michelle Obama, [Monday’s] big speaker, received a large payday in 2005 from the University of Chicago Medical Center — a promotion with a $200,000 annual raise. It came just after her husband became a U.S. senator. The following year, Senator Obama inserted a $1 million earmark for the hospital. Given that money is fungible, taxpayers are underwriting Mrs. Obama’s raise through 2010, thanks to her husband’s earmark (she is currently on leave from that job).

When the Chicago Tribune asked about this appearance of impropriety, Senator Obama remarked that he should have given the earmark to another senator instead of handling it himself. “When it comes to earmarks, because of those concerns, it’s probably something that should have been passed on to [Illinois senior Senator] Dick Durbin,” he said.

So the “new politics” way to deal with the appearance of impropriety is to hide it — in this case by having someone else insert your earmark for you.

Sorry, folks. I have a big problem voting for a man with a pitifully meager legislative record asking the American people to trust him to be Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and leader of the free world, in the midst of an economic crisis at home and two wars abroad. And I really can’t vote for him when his entire campaign is built on a lie.

He says he will change the way business is done in Washington. Really? How are we supposed to trust him when all evidence points to the fact that he does not practice what he preaches. And he never stops preaching. No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary.

It is almost as if he is daring someone in the press, or the DNC elite, to call him on it. But so far, so good. Senator Obama must look in the mirror every morning and have a good, long laugh that he is so successful at pulling the wool over people’s eyes.

More evidence of Obama’s shenanigans follows, although this likewise got pitifully little press attention:

Robert Blackwell Jr., a Chicago entrepreneur and CEO of two corporations, is a major Obama donor and fundraiser. He contributed $14,000 to Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign and $4,600 to his presidential run this year. He has even given $2,100 to Obama’s 2010 Senate reelection account. Blackwell has also committed to raise between $100,000 and $200,000 for Obama’s presidential run. The employees at his two companies — Electronic Knowledge Interchange and Killerspin — have contributed at least $18,000 to Obama’s campaigns. They had good reasons to give.
…
In The Audacity of Hope, Obama writes that he had been neglecting his private law practice and needed to get back to it. But legal work was also hard to come by. The law firm’s senior partner, Judson Miner, would say of that time that “it was a very dry period here.”

Obama was short of work and short of cash, but Robert Blackwell Jr. came to his rescue. EKI hired him in March 2001 and paid him $8,000 per month in legal retainers, for a total of $112,000. Obama and his staff then helped Blackwell’s other company, a ping-pong apparel company called Killerspin, get $320,000 in state grants. It began in 2002, months after Obama had received his last legal payment from Blackwell. Obama wrote a letter requesting a $50,000 tourism grant for Killerspin for its annual promotional ping-pong tournament.

Blackwell got only a $20,000 grant that year, but he did much better in 2003 and 2004. Dan Shomon, Obama’s longtime aide, helped Killerspin get $300,000 more in taxpayer-funded grants in those two years. The Times reports that Shomon was working part-time for Obama and part-time for Blackwell when he obtained the grants, which is an irregular arrangement all on its own. (Shomon today works as a lobbyist for the University of Chicago.)

The Times reported that Obama, in his required legal financial disclosures for 2001 and 2002, buried this six-figure financial conflict of interest with respect to Blackwell’s companies amid a list of hundreds of other clients represented by his entire law firm. He did not mention in his ethics paperwork that EKI was his largest source of income in 2001 — nor was he required to. Illinois’s legislative ethics laws are extremely weak.

Freddoso goes on to say that the ever industrious David Axelrod defended Obama by stating:

“Any implication that Sen. Obama would risk an ethical breach in order to secure a small grant for a ping-pong tournament is nuts.”… The real question is: Would it be “nuts” for a modestly paid public official with personal financial difficulties to risk an ethical breach if there was $112,000 involved?

Last Friday’s Washington Post offered more information on Blackwell, a former partner in his father’s consulting firm, Blackwell Consulting. The brief Post piece, “Contracts Went to Longtime Donor,” mentions that the firm won contracts totaling nearly $650,000 from the University of Chicago Medical Center. It happened because of a minority-owned business outreach program started by the newly promoted Michelle Obama. The elder Blackwell says that without that program, “[t]hey might not have ever thought to include Blackwell Consulting.” It also didn’t hurt that the younger Blackwell had been underwriting Obama’s political and personal life.

I see.

So connecting the dots here – investing in Obama is a very lucrative decision indeed.

I am confused as to how his supporters can continue to tout him as the great new hope when he is an example of ‘old politics’ at its best – or its worst – depending on your perspective.

After reneging on his policy promises re FISA, NAFTA, women’s rights, offshore oil drilling, payroll taxes, Iraq and so much more, he has now chosen Senator Joe Biden as a running mate – not exactly a progressive’s dream. Not exactly a wise choice either. Not exactly going to unite the party, is he? All this is addition to Obama’s shocking lack of experience or understanding of this country’s many serious problems.

Unfortunately, these news bites on his political ‘favors’ feel like many other unsavory elements of Senator Obama’s expedient cover-his-behind political career and campaign – if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it didn’t really happen.

Did it?

******************
Be sure to tune in:

On NQR tonight 8/26/2008, 9 pm EST Tuesday,
The Nocturnal Warrior: Special Convention Coverage
In the hour leading up to Hillary’s speech at the convention, the Nocturnal Warrior will be interviewing David Freddoso, author of “The Case Against Barack Obama.”

Then be sure to tune in again at 11 pm as DCMediaGirl and the Warrior team up to discuss Hillary’s speech.
Call-in Number: (347) 677-0792

And then I got this email from Cathy in Michigan:

Larry,

I was a big Hillary supporter, but I just don’t understand why the negative stuff about Obama is coming from Dem Hillary supporters:

#1) Obama is ten times better than McCain

#2 The GOP will and is playing the race card (come on you got to face reality)

#3) I still think Obama and Hillary should run together

So where are you coming from? Do you really want McCain to win?

Cathy B.
Lincoln Park, Michigan

Fair questions Cathy, so here’s my answer.

I prefer that neither win. McCain, by virtue of temperament and his decision to put neo-cons in key foreign policy positions in his campaign, worries me. I cannot support him. But compared to Obama, McCain comes across as King Solomon. McCain at least has a history of legislative accomplishment and has demonstrated he can work with the most progressive of Democrats (McCain/Feingold anyone?).

Obama? He has no significant legislative accomplishments. He has claimed credit for things he did not do, but he has not actually put together the coalitions that he talks about in his stump speeches. The man, attractive and articulate, is an empty suit and a lightweight.

The color of Barack’s skin is irrelevant to the question of his qualification. People should not vote for him or against him because he is black. Doing either is racist. Similarly, you should not vote for or against Hillary because she is a woman. Her sex is equally irrelevant. Character and competence ought to be the issue and on both Obama is found wanting.

Consider how he has distanced himself from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Reverend James Meeks, and the Reverend Michael Pfleger. [PHOTO: Father Pfleger, Rev. Wright, and Barack Obama.] We know now that these gentlemen espouse the most vile racist and homophobic messages.

Barack now claims he knew nothing about the views of these men. That is bullshit! Here is what Barack told Cathleen Falsani about his religious buddies in a 2004 interview:

GG:
Do you have people in your life that you look to for guidance?

OBAMA:
Well, my pastor is certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for.
I have a number of friends who are ministers. Reverend Meeks is a close friend and colleague of mine in the state Senate. Father Michael Pfleger is a dear friend, and somebody I interact with closely.

GG:
Those two will keep you on your toes.

OBAMA:
And theyr’e good friends. Because both of them are in the public eye, there are ways we can all reflect on what’s happening to each of us in ways that are useful.

I think they can help me, they can appreciate certain specific challenges that I go through as a public figure.

And do you remember when Barack had trouble remembering whether he had heard Wright damn America or say any of the other outrageous crap that he spewed? In fact, Wright denounced the United States in 2001 after the 9-11 attacks. Barack now says he doesn’t remember being at Church when Wright spoke those words. Well guess what? That is not what he told Falsani in 2004:

GG:
Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 oclock service.

Ever been there? Good service.

I actually wrote a book called Dreams from My Father, it’s kind of a meditation on race. There’s a whole chapter on the church in that, and my first visits to Trinity.

But it is not just on matters of faith that he lies and dissembles. As we have documented in this blog over the last two weeks he has changed his tune about his position on FISA, about public financing for presidential campaigns, and about NAFTA.

If Barack had simply taken time to chair a hearing on NATO’s role in Afghanistan or had traveled to Europe to fulfill his duties as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee with responsibility for NATO then I would give him the benefit of the doubt that he was trying to prepare himself. But he did not? Why? His words, not mine–he was too busy running for President.

And when it comes to playing the race card, Barack displays the gift of chutzpah. He recently told that Congressional Black Caucus that Hillary Clinton folks spread the rumor that he was a muslim. According to the Telegraph:

He reminded the congressmen and women that he had held his tongue even when Clinton allies had falsely suggested he was a Muslim and when the candidate herself had said he was not ready to be commander-in-chief.

It was not Hillary or her supporters. If anything, it was Barack himself who opened the door to the questions about Islam. He told Falsani:

As I said, we moved to Indonesia. She remarried an Indonesian who wasn’t particularly, he wasn’t a practicing Muslim. I went to a Catholic school in a Muslim country. So I was studying the Bible and catechisms by day, and at night you’d hear the prayer call.

We now know this was a flat out lie. He went to a Muslim school where he learned to recite the Muslim call to prayer. Nicholas Kristoff noted back in March of 2007:

Sorry to give offense to Alabama, but the reality is that Obama’s Muslim connections — his Muslim grandfather, his childhood in Indonesia, his middle name (Hussein), and, yes, his ability to recite the call to prayer — will turn off many voters in red states.

At the CIA we called that “no Shit” analysis. It is Obama’s own comments that raised the issue of his status as a Muslim (or not). That was not Hillary or her supporters. It was Barack himself. Like Nick Kristoff, I could care less if Barack is or was a muslim (I take him at his word that he was not affiliated formally with any religion until he signed up on the Jeremiah Wright Hate Train). What bothers me is he refuses to fully admit that Islam was a part of his life when he lived in Indonesia. He learned the call to prayer but nothing else? Yeah, that is change you can believe in.

Let me close with a terrific video, originating from New England Cable News (NECN), featuring Darragh Murphy. It is worth your time.

First, here is video of Father Michael Pfleger on June 22, 2008, at St. Sabina in Chicago:

Despite the “Statement of Cardinal Francis George” on May 30, 2008 — “concerning remarks of Fr. Michael Pfleger about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton during an address at Trinity United Church of Christ on Sunday May 25, 2008″ — Father Michael Pfleger, a radical activist priest, was permitted to return yesterday, after a three-week suspension, to his St. Sabina parish in Chicago.

Always the self-aggrandizing showman, Fr. Pfleger made a grand entrance — invoking the image of legendary boxing champion Muhammad Ali.

St. Sabina’s ushers distributed “light-blue fliers with a silhouette of boxing great Muhammad Ali in fighting stance that read: ‘Ain’t nothing like a comeback’.” The congregation rose to its feet, cheering Fr. Pfleger on as if he were entering a Las Vegas boxing arena for the championship fight of his life.

So what, you ask. Here’s why it matters: Fr. Michael Pfleger is a decades-long intimate confidante and associate of Barack Obama — as well as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan (Farrakhan’s wife, seen here with Michelle Obama), the homophobic Rev. James Meeks, Trinity’s new minister Otis Moss, and more.

Exhibit One attesting to the Obama/Pfleger closeness:

In April and May, when Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama became estranged, it was Father Pfleger who spoke directly with and counseled both men, frequently. (It is astonishing, to me, that a presumptive presidential nominee would take regular phone calls from Fr. Pfleger, but it is true, according to Chicago media.)

Exhibit Two attesting to Pfleger’s involvement in the Rev. Wright/Obama saga:

Fox News’s Greta Van Susteran reported, on several shows, that she ran into Father Pfleger at Washington, D.C.’s National Press Club, during Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s now infamous Q&A, after which Obama finally severed ties publicly with the Reverend who “is like a father to me.” (At whose behest did Father Pfleger fly to Washington, D.C. for the press club appearance? And why?)

Further, Father Pfleger created quite a group for St. Sabina’s fundraising committee, including Chicago mayor Richard Daley, Illinois state treasurer Alexei Giannoulias, and — get this — Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod.

From Truthteller’s “Saint Sabina Raises the Roof on Obama’s Den of Political Tricks and Corruption [Update]“:

[V]iew some of the names on this list of fundraisers:

• Richard Daley, the corrupt Obama backer behind the Hired Truck Scandal, an elaborate network of cronyism and corruption that rocked Chicago City Hall in 2004, 2005 and 2006;
• David Axelrod, Lead Strategist of the Obama campaign and Political Consultant to Richard “Hired Truck” Daley who also served as Consultant for Exelon, the Illinois nuclear giant whose lobbyists convinced Obama not to regulate companies that contaminated groundwater with radioactive toxic waste; and
• Illinois state Treasurer Alexei Giannoulias, whose bank, the Broadway Bank, granted loans to known mobsters and to indicted political fixer and Obama patron Antoin “Tony” Rezko.

Father Michael Pfleger used to be featured on Barack Obama’s official Web site section for “Faith Testimonials.” Larry Johnson displayed the screenshot of Pfleger’s endorsement — now removed, of course, from Obama’s site — in his April story, “What Would Tip O’Neill Do About Barack’s Pastors? [Updated].”

Fr. Pfleger’s endorsement of Barack Obama is on Obama’s official Web site:

(Click on the image to see the full-sized screenshot of Pfleger’s endorsement [formerly] proudly displayed by Barack Obama.)

Barack Obama’s campaign staff hurriedly removed Father Pfleger’s testimonial after Larry Johnson’s story appeared.

Just as they’ve removed numerous other sections of their Web site when the material was exposed and became embarrassing to the Obama campaign.

These “now you see it, now you don’t” stunts ought to concern every voter.

Why on earth would the Obama campaign post the testimonial of a known radical priest who hangs out regularly — and constantly praises — Minister Louis Farrakhan, a known anti-Semite and black separationist?

What kind of judgment does that show about Obama? And his staff?

Why did Obama and his staff ever post this extremist’s photograph and words in the first place?

Surely Barack Obama himself saw the Father Pfleger testimonial and personally approved its appearance on his official campaign site.

We know that the two men are longtime close friends and fellow collaborators — for at least two decades — so perhaps Obama okayed the testimonial in honor of their friendship. But any politician with even minimal common sense would know better than to put this radical’s photograph and words on prominent display on his official campaign site.

By the way, Larry Johnson wrote in his must-read April story that his own former pastor told him about a conversation he once had with Tip O’Neill. The great Speaker of the House told Larry’s pastor this:

Politicians need to learn an important skill. If you are hearing things that go against your values you get up and walk out.

The troubling problem is that we do not know what Barack Obama’s true “values” are. Are they those of his longtime extremist friends Father Pfleger, Rev. Wright, and Bill Ayers? Or did Obama betray his own true “values” for over two decades by continuing to associate with these radicals and extremists?

In either case, Obama’s judgment is in serious doubt.

::::::

Thanks to V for the video, now up at NoQuarter’s channel at YouTube.