UPDATE # 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 ?