.

This 48 second clip is from the nation of Islam Saviors Day back in February.  It was uploaded onto YouTube only today.

.

…I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

Senator Obama went on to exploit this blank screen concept for maximum political gain. He built a cult of personality around himself, with huge audience events where he delivered soaring but largely meaningless rhetoric about “change.”

Obama presented himself as the ultimate statesman whose messianic presence would “bring America together for change,” without encountering dissent or partisan acrimony. People whose visions of change were vague, purely emotional, impossible to implement, Unconstitutional, or different from the vision of the person next to them, all stood together cheering.  Obama encouraged supporters to project their own visions of desirable change onto his blank screen by telling the cheering throngs that the campaign was about them, not him, and by talking about “change from the bottom up.”

.

William Ayers

Barack Obama’s latest rebuttal to the argument that his association with far left radical and former terrorist William Ayers is problematic was to taunt John McCain for not mentioning it during Tuesday’s debate. In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson he said,

“I am surprised that, you know, we’ve been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn’t willing to say it to my face. But I guess we’ve got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.”

This appears to be another, in a continuous series of diversionary responses to questions regarding William Ayers.

This photo of Mr. Ayers is from a 2001 Chicago Magazine profile of the Sixties radical and leader of the domestic terrorist group, Weather Underground. This wasn’t a candid, unplanned shot of an unintended accident. Mr. Ayers posed for this photo. He wanted readers to see him standing on the wadded up American flag.

Ayers and his convicted terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are folk heroes to the far left. Association with Ayers is an indication of Obama’s political comfort zone, contradicting his claim to be a unifier who is above radical politics.

The day this photo was taken Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the Woods Fund, of Chicago. The Woods fund claims to be trying to reduce poverty, but not by helping the poor. Here’s an excerpt from the Woods Fund website:

The Woods Fund is particularly interested in supporting those organizations and initiatives that focus on enabling work and reducing poverty within Chicago’s less advantaged communities. Grants are given exclusively to organizations with agendas to benefit metropolitan Chicago and are concentrated in three program areas: Community Organizing Public Policy, [and the] Intersection of Community Organizing and Public Policy.

In other words, The Woods fund gives money not to the poor or to charities or to churches, but to political activists who then hound government to use its power to extract more resources from taxpayers.

This approach to “helping” the poor is consistent with the Leftist view that malevolent political forces who prevent government from intervening enough into the lives of The People cause poverty.

.

Obama was only eight years old

In the past 48 hours the Obama campaign has been in a frenzy of repetition of another of it’s diversionary chants, that Obama was only eight years old when Ayers and his wife went on their bombing spree.  Since nobody has accused Obama of throwing the bombs himself, this fact is irrelevant.  What is relevant is that, as an adult, Barack Obama chose to participate with William Ayers in radical leftist political action in Chicago.

Recently, Liberty Works and a blog from the political Left, Global Labor and Politics, and Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Social Anthropoligist and investigative researcher with the prestigious Ethics and Public Policy Center have  disclosed information on one of Mr. Ayers more recent projects, The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a privately funded foundation whose purported mission was to improve Chicago schools. Mr. Ayers appointed Barack Obama Chairman of the Board of Annenberg Challenge, a position he held from 1995 to 1999.

.

This Obama experience is relevant to the Presidential campaign because:

1. It is further evidence that Obama and his campaign attempted to deceive us with claims that Ayers is not an Obama associate and was nothing more than a guy who happened to live in the neighborhood. Records of Annenberg Challenge meetings and activities show Obama and Ayers interacting regularly for several years.
2. The Annenberg Challenge was a failure. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars and achieved no academic improvement in Chicago schoos, reflecting negatively on Barack Obama’s self proclaimed talent for making wonderful things happen, just by “bringing people together.”
3. The funding mechanism for the Annenberg Challenge was convoluted, with vague standards that permitted funds to be distributed not only to schools but to radical political groups, called “External Partners” that were favored by William Ayers.
4. Mr. Ayers’ publicly stated goal is to attempt to achieve through indoctrination of school children the same radical transformation of the culture he was trying to achieve by bombing the pentagon, the capital and several police stations.  Barack Obama must have shared those goals as he was distributing Annenberg grants to local groups engaged in radical politics.
   
5. The Annenberg Challenge experience has been omitted from fawning, national media biographies of Senator Obama.
   

Here is an excerpt from one of several reports that are available at the University of Illinois at Chicago website about the Annenberg Challenge:

Its primary strategy was to create networks of schools with common interests and needs and to link them to individuals and organizations that would serve as External Partners. This strategy followed a logic that schools would find more direction and support for improvement if they worked together and with an External Partner than if they worked alone.

The organizations that became “External Partners” served as funding agents of Annenberg grants. Each External Partner had three or more schools in its “network.” Annenberg gave cash grants to the External Partners who were then supposed to distribute funds to the schools.

Here’s another excerpt from one of the Annenberg reports:

It is difficult without detailed analysis of network budgets to determine how much money was used by External Partners to cover their own costs, to purchase goods and services for schools, or to give directly to schools. Initial budget requirements set by the Challenge limited partners to spend only 10 percent of any total grant to cover their own expenses. Later, however, the challenged recognized that some partners required more money to be effective and it altered this requirement to permit larger percentages of grants to be used by partners to cover their own expenses.

One of the external partners, a group called “South Shore African Village Collaborative” received a grant to teach students about celebrating “Juneteenth,” slang for June 19, a holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery in Texas. In the words of the grant application, “Negroes celebrate Juneteenth instead of 4th of July,” as their national independence day.

From another of the reports at the University of Illinois at Chicago is this excerpt describing the final results of this the Annenberg Challenge program, led by Barack Obama:

Achievement trends in Annenberg schools did not differ from those in demographically similiar non-Annenberg schools. there were no statistically significant differences in reading or math at any grade level in any year between 1995 and 2001. Although Annenberg schools appeared to outperform non-Annenberg schools in some years at particular grade levels, the reverse appeared to occur in other years. None of those differences were statistically significant.

Obama’s association with William Ayers is important because it sheds much needed light on the Senator’s true political philosophy and indicates what sort of policies he would pursue as President.  Obama tries his best to maintain that blank screen, but little by little, the truth begins to appear.

For background see our previous reports:

Barack Obama, William Ayers and The Annenberg Challenge

First Update on Obama, Ayers and The Annenberg Challenge

Second Update on Obama, Ayers and The Annenberg Challenge

On Thursday Evening, Dr. Stanley Kurtz, who has been carefully studying thousands of documents from the archives of the Annenberg Challenge, appeared on Chicago’s WGN radio for an interview with host Milt Rosenberg.  You can hear a podcast of the two hour program here.

In our first Annenberg post we included this excerpt from one of several reports on The Annenberg Challenge that are available at the University of Illinois at Chicago website :

Its primary strategy was to create networks of schools with common interests and needs and to link them to individuals and organizations that would serve as External Partners. This strategy followed a logic that schools would find more direction and support for improvement if they worked together and with an External Partner than if they worked alone.

Dr. Kurtz’s said his preliminary examination of Annenberg Challenge records indicates that the External Partner selection process, the function headed by Barack Obama,  seemed to favor organizations that were politically active with a leftist agenda or focus on ethnic identity over organziations that emphasized improved academic performance.

For example, a group called “South Shore African Village Collaborative” received a grant to teach students about celebrating “Juneteenth” slang for June 19, a holiday commemorating the abolition of slavery in Texas. In the words of the grant application, “Negroes celebrate Juneteenth instead of 4th of July,” as their national independence day.

Dr. Kurtz said William Ayers’ own organization, “Small Schools Network” received a grant for a so-called “Peace School.”

In contrast, a grant application from a group called The Chicago Algebra Project was denied.

Dr. Kurtz research is just beginning and he was hesitant to present any sweeping conclusions.  We can expect to hear more from him later, hopefully before voters decide which candidate to support for President.

A group called The American Issues Project created the ad, and has placed it for broadcast in several markets.  In response, the Obama Campaign has contacted the U.S. Justice Department demanding a criminal investigation of The American Issues Project.  No word yet on the Justice Department’s position.

As we noted yesterday, the Obama Campaign has come up with this response ad, which they hope will dupe voters into believing that William Ayers is a relic of the Sixties, when Obama was a child, and has nothing to do with Barack Obama’s political background or views.

The problem of course is William Ayers still believes that he was justified in bombing the Capital, the Pentagon, and several police stations.  As many others have said, he is an unrepentant terrorist and radical, anti-American leftist.  He was a political mentor to Obama for at least five years, during the nineties, when Obama was an adult in his thirties.

In our report yesterday, we described the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school improvement project headed by Obama and Ayers during the nineties.  Dr. Stanley Kurtz, Social Anthropoligist and investigative researcher with the prestigious Ethics and Public Policy Center has been combing through the archives of the Annenberg Challenge project since they were first released for public scrutiny yesterday.

So far Dr. Kurtz has discovered and reported that some of the Annenberg Challenge cash grants went to ACORN, a radical-left pressure group known for fraudulent voter registration campaigns.  In the Eighties and Nineties ACORN employed Barack Obama as a “community organizer” and trainer.  Some of the Annenberg grant money went to so called “Peace Schools,” operated by William Ayers to indoctrinate children in radical leftist dogma.

Dr. Kurtz is scheduled for a radio interview this evening on WGN, Chicago, where he will report at length on evidence he has discovered in the Annenberg Challenge archives.  Again, the Obama campaign has signaled its deep anxiety about the public learning any more about Obama’s background by sending out a mass email exhorting supporters to try to prevent or disrupt the WGN interview.

Here is the text of the mass email to Obama Fans:

August 28, 2008

In the next few hours, we have a crucial opportunity to fight one of the most cynical and offensive smears ever launched against Barack.

Tonight, WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears. He’s currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.

Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse.

Call into the “Extension 720″ show with Milt Rosenberg at (312) 591-7200

(Show airs from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. tonight)

Then report back on your call at http://my.barackobama.com/WGNstandards

Kurtz has been using his absurd TV appearances in an awkward and dishonest attempt to play the terrorism card. His current ploy is to embellish the relationship between Barack and Ayers.

Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack’s connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has been disproved in numerous press accounts.

It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz’s lies.

Kurtz is scheduled to appear from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. in the Chicago market.

Calling will only take a minute, and it will make a huge difference if we nip this smear in the bud. Confront Kurtz tonight before this goes any further:

http://my.barackobama.com/WGNstandards

Please forward this email to everyone you know who can make a call tonight.

Keep fighting the good fight,

Obama Action Wire

Over at Fox News are portions of a 2004 interview of William Ayers by reporter and author James Rosen, demonstrating that Obama’s mentor is still a leftist radical and still believes bombing the Capitol and the Pentagon was justified as a tool of political action. Here’s an excerpt

Explaining how he became a leader of the radical 1960s antiwar group, the Weathermen (and its subsequent fugitive incarnation, the Weather Underground), Ayers was unrepentant about the group’s planting of bombs in the Capitol, the Pentagon, and other sites. “I think I was on the side of justice and ultimately it will be seen that way,” Ayers said. “I don’t think our move was so much towards violence.

“I think that what we did was to look at this situation of 2,000 people a day being murdered [in Vietnam] and try to figure out a couple of things. One is, how can we effectively resist the war, when we thought our charge was to convince the majority of the American people to oppose it. We did. And still the war went on, and still the murder went on. So what do you do…What we did was try to build the capacity to survive what we saw was an impending American fascism.

“…And so we said to ourselves, ‘What are we going to do?’… And so we set about building a clandestine organization. And the whole point was to survive them and then possibly to take the fight to them against the war and against, against empire, generally … I think we were moving in a direction that said demonstrations — you know, we’ve tried to demonstrate. We’ve tried to petition our government. We’ve gone door to door and knocked on doors. We’ve talked to our neighbors. We’ve talked to, you know, our parents, our Republican parents. And everybody agrees with us; but we can’t stop the war. So what do we do?”

They were unable to persuade voters and politicians to see the world as they saw it with words. So they made bombs.

Back in May we looked into another Obama-Ayers collaboration: serving on the board of The Woods Foundation.

…I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.

Obama organized his Presidential campaign around this blank screen concept. The campaign is a cult of personality drawing in millions of fans with huge audience events where he delivers soaring but largely meaningless rhetoric about “change.” Each fan is subliminally encouraged to project onto the blank screen his/her own notions of what change would be desirable.

Obama presented himself as the ultimate statesman whose messianic presence would “bring America together for change,” without encountering dissent or partisan acrimony. People whose visions of change were vague, purely emotional, impossible to implement, Unconstitutional, or different from the vision of the person next to them, all stood together cheering for the rock-star candidate, each believing he would deliver whatever change they desired.

But some Americans, those who live in Chicago and have watched Obama climb the ranks of the local, corrupt, Democratic machine, have known all along that the Obama campaign was a fraud. The Obama they know is a hard-ball politician from the radical left, with unsavory and corrupt associations.

This photo of one of Barrack Obama’s associates, William Ayers is from a 2001 Chicago Magazine profile. In 2001, Ayers admitted that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. His only regret, expressed in 2001, was that he had not succeeded with other bomb plots.

This photo wasn’t a candid shot of an unintended accident. Mr. Ayers posed for this photo. He wanted readers to see him standing on the wadded up American flag. Ayers and his convicted terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are folk heroes to the far left.

Several months ago, the Obama campaign persuaded some of the national media herd to report that Obama had no significant connection with Ayers, who was just a neighbor, a guy who did some bad things decades ago that Obama dennounced. But Chicago newspapers and local talk radio have persisted in turning over Ayers-Obama rocks, and Chicago residents know better.

Recently, a blog from the political Left, Global Labor and Politics, and Reporter Stanley Kurtz of National Review have begun to uncover information on one of Mr. Ayers more recent projects, The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a privately funded effort to improve Chicago schools. Mr. Ayers appointed Barack Obama Chairman of the Board of Annenberg Challenge, a position he held from 1995 to 1999.

This Obama experience is important because:

1. It is further evidence that Obama and his campaign attempted to deceive us with claims that Ayers is not an Obama associate and was nothing more than a guy who happened to live in the neighborhood. Records of Annenberg Challenge meetings and activities show Obama and Ayers interacting regularly for several years.
2. The Annenberg Challenge was a failure. It spent hundreds of millions of dollars and achieved nothing, reflecting negatively on Barack Obama’s self proclaimed talent for making wonderful things happen, just by “bringing people together.”
3. The funding mechanism for the Annenberg Challenge was convoluted and full of loopholes through which funds could have been funneled to causes other than school improvement and even to benefit individuals.
4. The Annenberg Challenge experience has been omitted from fawning, national media biographies of Senator Obama.
   

Here is an excerpt from one of several reports that are available at the University of Illinois at Chicago website about the Annenberg Challenge:

Its primary strategy was to create networks of schools with common interests and needs and to link them to individuals and organizations that would serve as External Partners. This strategy followed a logic that schools would find more direction and support for improvement if they worked together and with an External Partner than if they worked alone.

The organizations that became “External Partners” served as funding agents of Annenberg grants. Each External Partner had three or more schools in its “network.” Annenberg gave cash grants to the External Partners who then distributed funds to schools.

Here’s another excerpt from one of the Annenberg reports:

It is difficult without detailed analysis of network budgets to determine how much money was used by External Partners to cover their own costs, to purchase goods and services for schools, or to give directly to schools. Initial budget requirements set by the Challenge limited partners to spend only 10 percent of any total grant to cover their own expenses. Later, however, the challenged recognized that some partners required more money to be effective and it altered this requirement to permit larger percentages of grants to be used by partners to cover their own expenses.

Finally, this excerpt describing the results of this huge program, led by Barack Obama:

Achievement trends in Annenberg schools did not differ from those in demographically similiar non-Annenberg schools. there were no statistically significant differences in reading or math at any grade level in any year between 1995 and 2001. Although Annenberg schools appeared to outperform non-Annenberg schools in some years at particular grade levels, the reverse appeared to occur in other years. None of those differences were statistically significant.

Yesterday, Obama attempted, yet again, to deny his Ayers association with this TV ad. This is another, obvious attempt to deceive the viewer by focusing on Ayers’ earliest crimes, committed when Obama was a child. The ad fails to reveal that Ayers does not regret his crimes, is still a radical leftist, and has been a recent political mentor to and associate of Barack Obama.

This photo of Barrack Obama’s friend and associate, William Ayers has ricocheted around the Internet all day, and may eventually be seen on TV news. It’s from a 2001 Chicago Magazine profile of the Sixties radical and leader of the domestic terrorist group, Weather Underground.

This wasn’t a candid, unplanned shot of an unintended accident. Mr. Ayers posed for this photo. He wanted readers to see him standing on the wadded up American flag. This 2001 photo would seem to undermine Obama’s characterization of Ayers as a former radical, turned genteel professor and patriotic citizen.

Ayers and his convicted terrorist wife, Bernardine Dohrn, are folk heroes to the far left. Association with Ayers is an indication of Obama’s political comfort zone, contradicting his claim to be a unifier who is above radical politics.

So far Obama has tried to dismiss his dozen year connection with Ayers as politically inconsequential, the same way he tried to dismiss Reverend Wright – until the Reverend made a spectacle of himself. Perhaps this photo will turn out to be spectacle enough to bring forth a second denunciation and, as the media like to say, “throwing under the bus.”

The day this photo was taken Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the Woods Fund, of Chicago. The Woods fund claims to be trying to reduce poverty, but not by helping the poor. Here’s an excerpt from the Woods Fund website:

The Woods Fund is particularly interested in supporting those organizations and initiatives that focus on enabling work and reducing poverty within Chicago’s less advantaged communities. Grants are given exclusively to organizations with agendas benefit metropolitan Chicago and are concentrated in two program areas: Community Organizing and Public Policy.

In other words, The Woods fund gives money not to the poor or to charities or to churches, but to political activists who then hound government to use its power to extract more resources from taxpayers.

This approach to “helping” the poor is consistent with the Leftist view that malevolent political forces who prevent government from intervening enough into the lives of The People cause poverty.

The federal government already spends almost a Trillion Dollars annually on direct aid to individuals, not including Social Security, military retirement or federal employee retirement. States, counties and cities spend an approximately equal amount.

Obama’s web site, under the heading “poverty,” offers no new ideas. But there is a laundry list of ways to increase Federal spending on aid to individuals. Obama ignores the Trillions already spent over four decades without achieving the promised result, reducing or eliminating poverty. Obama has no proposal to audit these tired old programs to see if they’re not based on flawed assumptions.

The association with Ayers doesn’t make Obama a terrorist. But it does contradict Obama’s claim to be a post-partisan unifier. He is, in fact, an ideologue, very much at home with the radical left.