The Biden choice for VP nominee is two days old and already there is a question about Obama’s feelings toward his guy. What is the sign thing ?
At least Biden gets better treatment than Obama’s brother. Maybe McCain should adopt him.
Posts Tagged ‘Obama’
Obama and his VP choice
Monday, August 25th, 2008Obama/Ayres is all coming out now.
Friday, August 22nd, 2008First, we need to know why Ayres was an Education professor. Now we know. At least we know part of it.
Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.
What is the purpose of his Education career ? His position as a Professor of Education?
Future teachers signing up for Ayers’s course “On Urban Education” can read these exhortations from the course description on the professor’s website:
“Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things.”
“We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”
“In a truly just society there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources.”
For another course, titled “Improving Learning Environments,” Ayers proposes that teachers “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”
For students who might get bored with the purely pedagogic approach to liberation, Ayers also offers a course on the real thing, called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s.” For this class Ayers also posts his introduction to the soon-to-be-published collection of Weather Underground agitprop that he edited with Dohrn—called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small ‘c’ communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block [sic]. . . . We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.”
How long after Obama’s inauguration do you think it would be before Ayres is named Secretary of Education ?
No wonder the SAT scores have been falling.
How should teachers teach science, for example? According to one of the books, Ayers and Greene approved for publishing,
“The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.”
And we thought that science was still safe !
Well. don’t lose hope. Next week, the CAC records are supposed to be available.
We”ll see.
Obama and Ayres
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008UPDATE # 6: Michael Barone adds his comments on the Obama/Ayres story and adds a bit of Chicago color.
UPDATE #4: Drip, drip, drip. A day of reckoning is coming. Maybe we’ll even learn how Ayres got away with his crimes. On the other hand, “Da Mayor” isn’t having any. I don’t know if stone walls are as strong as they were in the old days of 1968 but we might find out this fall.
At least the LA Times, in trying to defend Obama shows a nice photo of Ayres and the American flag.
UPDATE # 3 The Ayres records are starting to hit the MSM.
Drip, drip drip.
UPDATE #3 The McCain campaign is pounding on this topic now. Maybe the New York Times will discover it by November 9.
UPDATE #2: Here is more on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and the roles of Ayres and Obama. A sample:
As Ayers stated in a speech there in November 2006 “La educacion es Revolucion!” He applauded “the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez” and he said he “share[d] the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution.”
When the LSC reform was put in place Bill Ayers wrote an opinion piece for the Chicago newspapers that spoke of combatting the “bureaucracies” that he felt blocked true reform in the school system. I believe he meant by this both the Chicago school board and the Chicago Teachers’ Union. This use of the word “bureaucracies” as his target is, again, evocative of the attempts of figures like Mao Tse Tung to combat “bureaucracy” in the Chinese cultural revolution.
Whoops !
UPDATE: There are more cover-ups going on than the one at U of Illinois. The cover-up is always worse than the crime. Don’t these people know that ? John Edwards should have taught them this just a couple of weeks ago. Maybe there is something really juicy in there.
This may explain why I ran into a smaller version of the door in the face from a university recently. As Global Labor readers know I laid out the basic trajectory of the CAC through a review of the CAC’s financial statements, board minutes and annual and semi-annual reports, provided to me by Brown University, which housed the original national Annenberg Challenge. Once I posted my first discussion of what I found in these records, I sent additional requests for information to Brown.
However, while the representative from the university I originally corresponded with had been quite friendly and accommodating prior to my June 23 post, afterwards my additional requests for further information went unanswered. I did not pursue it at the time because I felt I had told a significant part of the story already. Thanks to the diligent work of Dr. Kurtz, however, we now know there is much more to know.
Oh Oh !
The Obama/Ayres story is starting to leak out in spite of the best efforts of the university of Illinois at Chicago. When Obama was first asked about Ayres, he said he was “a guy who lives in my neighborhood and our kids went to the same school.” In fact, Ayres has been a “mentor” to Obama and their children are nowhere close in age. Ayres children are grown and Obama’s are not yet teenagers. Bill Ayres and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, were members of the Weather Underground, an even more violent branch of the 60s radical group “The Weathemen.” They set off bombs and were fugitives until the 1980s. Ayres, whose father is rich and influential in Chicago, got off scot free on a technical violation by the FBI who wiretapped his group. Dohrn was convicted of a felony. For that reason, she cannot get a bar card in Illnois but that has not stopped Northwestern University from making her an Associate Professor of Law. If your parents are rich enough, they can protect you from any consequences, as long as your criminal acts were committed in “Progressive causes.”
These are Obama’s friends and this is why access to the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is being blocked. Who knows what might be in there. We know the challenge failed to improve Chicago schools. We know that Ayres steered grants to radical associates, one of whom was driving a taxi at the time he got the grant. We just don’t know what there is about Obama.
We do know that Mike Klonsky, the “professor” and ex-taxi driver, was a blogger on the Obama campaign web site until his past (and present) were discovered. He quickly disappeared once that was discovered. Obama has all sorts of radical friends. Like ACORN, for example.
I wonder why ?
The left begins to see the empty suit
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008This piece on Huffington Post may be the beginning of the end for Obama as the left recognizes that they bought a pig in a poke. He has no core values. At last, they seem to recognize this.
Stanley Kurtz, however, sees core values but they aren’t the ones Obama is talking about.
When it comes to issues like affirmative action and set-asides, Obama is anything but the post-racial politician he’s sometimes made out to be. Take set-asides. In 1998, Obama endorsed Democratic gubernatorial hopeful John Schmidt, stressing to the Defender Schmidt’s past support for affirmative action and set-asides.
Obama wrote a column for the Hyde-Park Herald for years while serving in the Illinois legislature. Those columns are the source for Kurtz’s analysis of his convictions.
The overwhelming majority of Obama’s “Springfield Report” columns in the Hyde Park Herald deal with state or local issues. It’s interesting, therefore, that one of the tiny handful of Obama columns explicitly dealing with national politics is a 2000 column pleading with readers to support Al Gore rather than Ralph Nader for president. Obama opens his column noting that he’s heard many people complain that Al Gore and George Bush are beholden to the same “big money interests.”
He was flirting with Ralph Nader’s candidacy in 2000 but urged a vote for Gore to avoid splititng the vote between the two leftist candidates.
Obama’s strong liberalism is nowhere more evident than on the subject of crime. Throughout his Illinois State Senate career, crime was a top Obama concern. Crime is also a key contact-point between Obama and his most celebrated radical associate, William Ayers. We’ve heard a good deal of late about Ayers’s Weatherman terrorism back in the 1960s and his lack of repentance. Ayers refuses to answer questions about his relationship with Obama, while Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
Still, they together fought attempts to toughen juvenile justice handling of violent crime.
Ayers opposes trying even the most vicious juvenile murderers as adults. Beyond that, he’d like to see the prison system itself essentially abolished. Unsatisfied with mere reform, Ayers wants to address the deeper “structural problems of the system.” Drawing explicitly on Michel Foucault, a French philosopher beloved of radical academics, Ayers argues that prisons artificially impose obedience and conformity on society, thereby creating a questionable distinction between the “normal” and the “deviant.”
Foucault has even proposed that mental illness is a “social construct” and his views are at the heart of much of the opposition to treatment of schizophrenia.
The Ayers-Dohrn-Obama nexus was jolted into action in late 1997 and early 1998, when a major juvenile justice reform bill was introduced in the Illinois General Assembly. Written by prosecutors and sponsored by a Republican ex-prosecutor, the bill was neither simplistic nor partisan. Well aware of evidence that sending juveniles to adult prisons can backfire and actually raise recidivism rates, sponsors met rehabilitation-minded critics halfway. The proposed bill was an early example of “blended sentencing,” in which juveniles who have committed serious crimes are given both a juvenile sentence and a parallel adult sentence. So long as the offender keeps his nose clean, doesn’t violate parole, and participates in community-based rehabilitation, he never has to serve his adult sentence.
The bill ended up passing overwhelmingly and Obama, typically, jumped aboard the train just as it was leaving the station and voted for a slightly amended version. His votes and his expressed opinions in the local paper provide a picture of his real views and they are hard left. These views are firmly held but the only thing more important to Obama than his principles is his ambition. That’s why they have been concealed.
Obama and the dollar bill speech
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008UPDATE #2: The polls are showing bad news for Obama.
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.
However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.
McCain’s viral marketing is working.
UPDATE: Those shadows on Obama’s front porch are vultures that flew over from the primary. They are home to roost for a while.
Matt Lauer interviews both campaign managers and Axelrod essentially concedes the racial meaning of the “dollar bill” comment.
[W]hat it means, what he was saying – and he does this in a self mocking way – look, I know I’m not from central casting when it comes to presidents of the United States. I’m new, I’m relatively young, I haven’t spent my life in Washington. And yes, I’m African-American – and that’s going to be some fodder.
The president on the dollar bill, Washington, never spent a day in Washington, DC and he had never held elective office. Andrew Jackson, on the $20 bill was also a general and never spent a day in Washington until he was elected. Abraham Lincoln had been a Congressman for one term and Thomas Jefferson, while he had been governor of Virginia, had not served in Washington. Benjamin Franklin, who had never been president, is on the $100 bill but, again, the capital was in Philadelphia and New York while Franklin spent most of his time in Europe as ambassador. There is just no other interpretation of Obama’s remark except that McCain was referring to his race. Axelrod concedes this. Even the Los Angeles Times admits the fact that the remark was about his race and that Obama accuses McCain of attacking him because of his race.
Obama has since called the race charge “a typical pattern” of the GOP campaign.
But now Obama’s chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admits his candidate was referring in part to his race when he suggested the McCain campaign wants voters to fear Obama because he doesn’t look like other presidents.
Shelby Steele, who is biracial like Obama, has written books about the dilemma of young men who are black but have white mothers. Obama has chosen, by his choice of the church he attended and other choices, to seek his black identity. He has called his grandmother, who raised him in his teens, “a typical white person.” On the other hand, he is trying to attain the highest office in American politics, which requires a majority of votes from whites. Steele has described two tactics used by black strivers to deal with the majority white society. He calls one of them “bargainers,” those who present a nonthreatening face and seek approval from whites. Oprah Winfrey is Steele’s example. David Ehrenstein called Obama, “The Magic Negro” as a way of describing the same persona of a black man who seeks white approval and does not mention the anger and alienation that is felt by other blacks and which he, himself, may feel but conceals.
The other tactic described by Steele is the “challenger” who does show anger and demands concessions from whites to assuage his anger and their guilt for past oppression of blacks. Two examples he gives are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson once tried to run for president but challengers are not going to get any votes from the vast majority of whites who, while aware of past injustices, feel no responsibility for them and who themselves are free of racial bias.
If Obama, under the pressure of the campaign and frustrated at his failure to achieve the high poll numbers he is convinced that he deserves, slips into the challenger role, he will fall quickly from grace. The votes from blacks and guilty whites are not enough to carry more than a couple of big cities. This may have been the first slip. The tactic worked against the Clintons in the primary but Democratic primary voters are far from the American mainstream.
H/T to Powerline and Politico.
Blessed be The One
Friday, August 1st, 2008This new McCain ad is the best yet. He has somebody doing these that is the best I’ve seen. The producer and writer must be geniuses because this is viral marketing at its best. Over a million people have viewed this ad on You Tube and it’s only just out. Of course, to the Obama people it will be racist but they are only reacting to effective tactics, and not very well at that.
Michael Yon in Nepal
Saturday, July 26th, 2008The war in Iraq is over. This from a man who knows.
Many people are coming to realize that the war in Iraq is over. The situation is still violent, but the fast progress is undeniable. The Iraqi government is inept, yet is largely seen as legitimate. The Iraqi government has dramas, but we need look no further than to our friends in Thailand or South Korea or India to see even greater governmental dramas. I remember living in Poland when they traded communism for democracy and capitalism. Unemployment, inflation and economic woes were as bad (perhaps even worse) than in Iraq. Poland is one of America’s closest allies and has been an important partner in Iraq. Poland knows that Iraq can make it, although the war has been divisive in Poland, too.
Even Barry Obama may realize that it is over and we won.
An interesting comparison
Saturday, July 26th, 2008Today, Philip Terzian has a column on the similarity between Obama and Thomas Dewey in 1948. I hadn’t thought of this before but it makes some sense. Republicans hated Roosevelt and were desperate to get the White House back after 16 years. They had just taken control of Congress after 14 years in the wilderness. The Bill Clinton interregnum makes the comparison inexact but the political left is salivating at the chance to finally have both houses of Congress and the White House in their control. They are confident that they are about to triumph. Look at the triumphalism in leftist blogs.
Personally, I still think the chances are better than even that we will have to endure a President Obama for a term but I’m not ready to count McCain out yet. Obama has to close the deal with the American public and he is a ready source of gaffes. There is a widely held theory that Dewey lost the election because of an outburst where he cursed a railroad engineer for moving the train unexpectedly while Dewey was making a speech from the back platform, a common campaign method of the day.
Truman campaigned by telling the voters that Dewey did not understand the needs of the average American. He called Dewey a candidate of rich people.
One day, Dewey got angry at a railroad engineer because his campaign train was late for a speech. Truman charged that this proved that Dewey did not understand the problems of railroad engineers and other working Americans. He tried to make the election a choice between hard-working Democrats and rich Republicans.
The story isn’t quite correct because what really happened was the train moved unexpectedly, risking injury to the spectators listening to Dewey’s speech. He made a remark about the engineer that he thought would be taken as sympathetic to the crowd. However, it fit another scenario; one of a man who had little sympathy for the common man.
Then on Oct. 12, 1948, Dewey’s train pulled into Beaucoup, Ill. As a crowd of 1,000 people surged toward the rear of the train to greet the governor, the train lurched backward. “That’s the first lunatic I’ve had for an engineer,” Dewey said. “He probably should be shot at sunrise,” the candidate muttered into a microphone, “but we’ll let him off this time since nobody was hurt.” Lee Tindle, the 54-year-old engineer whom Dewey had insulted, was a 30-year veteran of the rails. “I think just as much of Dewey as I did before, and that’s not very much,” Tindle told an Associated Press reporter.
Even without the aid of YouTube or television, word of Dewey’s outburst spread, and Truman took full advantage. He praised his “all Democratic” train crew. Supporters wrote “Lunatics for Truman” on dusty boxcars. While Republicans touted Dewey’s New York administration and his campaign for its efficiency, Truman’s running mate, Alben W. Barkley, chimed in with a timely response: “The governor of New York showed his hand recently by advocating ‘shooting at sunrise’ as a cure for his conception of inefficiency,” Barkley quipped. “We at the Democratic Party do not consider ‘ruthlessness’ a proper synonym for ‘efficiency.’ “
Obama has already set the stage by making comments about small town voters.
He said: “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
A few more like that and maybe we can start saying President McCain
A You-Tube campaign
Friday, July 25th, 2008Obama says different things to different groups and often gets away with it. He gets into trouble, however, when he says things on camera. Here are two clips of Obama saying opposite things about the same topic. I hope someone is collecting these things and will use them to run political ads during the fall campaign. There are already a few examples. One is here.
Obama is a gaffe machine saying, for example, that he has campaigned in 57 states and will be dealing with world leaders as president for 8 to 10 years.
Obama supporters, like Alan Colmes on Fox News, tries to counter with alleged McCain gaffes. One was his statement that Iran was supporting Sunni terrorist groups. He was accused of not knowing that Iran is Shiite and will not cooperate with Sunnis. That is untrue. Secondly, this week, Colmes tried to make an issue of McCain saying that the Surge was responsible for the Anbar Awakening. This story is all over the left wing blogs. What they don’t understand is that “The Surge” was not the addition of more troops to Iraq but a change in strategy that required more troops to carry out. That change coincided with the Anbar Awakening. The video linked to by the piece above is absolutely accurate. It is the political left’s ignorance of military strategy that is on exhibition, not McCain’s error.
Here is more on McCain’s statement.
“Yesterday,” a reporter asked McCain, “you suggested that the surge in Iraq predated the Anbar rebellion, and actually the Anbar rebellion came a couple of months previously. Did you misspeak, or did you have something else in mind?”
McCain said that he was referring to the successful counterinsurgency strategy in the Anbar — the co-option of the Sunni sheiks — which provided a model for troops who later surged into the country.
“First of all, a surge is really a counter-insurgency strategy,” McCain said.
I’ll separate that, because McCain says it often. Most of us equate the surge with troop levels, but for McCain, it has always been about a strategy; to executive the strategy, more troops were needed.
Colonel McFarland, in Anbar province, McCain said, “had already initiated that strategy in Ramadi by going in and clearing and holding in certain places. That is a counter-insurgency. And he told me at that time that he believed that that strategy, which is quote the surge, part of the surge, would be, would be, successful. So then, of course, it was very clear that we needed additional troops in order to carry out this insurgency.
Don’t expect to see anything about that from Obama supporters. You-Tube will define this campaign, both supporting and refuting what the candidates say. McCain is consistent and it should help him.
Obama’s security
Monday, July 21st, 2008Obama is set to visit the West Bank and Ramallah soon. His pro-Palestinian sympathies are well known but this goes a bit beyond the expected.
Members of the most active West Bank terror organization are set to serve in security forces being deployed to protect Sen. Barack Obama during his trip to the West Bank tomorrow, WND has learned.
Interesting.