Conffederate
Confederate

August 21, 2008

Charming! Obama's Only Executive Role A Disaster

Anyone the least bit familiar with Barack Obama's rise to power knows "hope" and "change" are just words; he's built his career the old-fashioned way, by making powerful allies and casting those no longer useful to him aside.

It is those same business-as-usual allies in Chicago that are now protecting Obama from deeper scrutiny of his 21-year relationship with the Ayers family, specifically his involvement in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge with infamous domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

At the moment the internal documents for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge are in a special collection at the Richard J. Daley Library. Think they'll ever see the light of day?

As the Chicago Tribune's John Kass put it:

The relationship between the ambitious Obama and the unrepentant Ayers is a subject that excites Republicans, who haven't really thwacked that pinata as hard as they might. It really irritates Obama and his political champion, Chicago's sovereign lord, Mayor Richard M. Daley.

"This is a public entity," Kurtz told us Wednesday. "I don't understand how confidentiality of the donor would be an issue."

You don't understand, Mr. Kurtz? Allow me to explain. The secret is hidden in the name of the library:

The Richard J. Daley Library.

Eureka!

The Richard J. Daley Library doesn't want nobody nobody sent. And Richard J.'s son, Shortshanks, is now the mayor.

Kurtz can forget about getting his hands on those documents in any useful form, and the only way they'll come to light before November is if the mainstream media starts to get irate that Obama is abusing their love for him one again. Even if that were to happen, odds are that any documents released would be "sanitized" to remove embarrassing or incriminating information. The Chicago political machine, if anything, is a wood chipper.

Not all the Chicago Annenberg Challenge documents were buried, however. At least until a few managed to slip out before the door was slammed. Those documents that have been uncovered seem to indicate Barack Obama was a spectacularly incompetent chairman, blowing through tens of millions of dollars of grant money with little or nothing to show for it.

Well, that's not entirely true.

At least $175,000 was funneled to Ayers friend, SDS radical, Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) chairman and Barack Obama supporter Mike Klonsky's Small School Workshop. For a man who gripes about corporate handouts, it seems quite possible that Obama and Ayers may have used Annenberg Foundation grants as a form of welfare for radicals.

Posted by Confederate Yankee at August 21, 2008 09:53 AM
Comments

Ayers and Obama in their CAC career were able to hand out over $100,000,000 in disbursements. Ostensibly these were to improve learning performance in schoolchildren, although the bottom line report at the end of the campaign showed no such improvement.

So what were they up to, exactly? Certainly political organization and agitation, in opposition to the elected Chicago School Board's administration. But a reading of their organizational goals leaves the reader gasping in admiration for the glib verbose clouds of meanlingless drivel and wafty considerations - as if the language deliberately concealed the smallest hint of specific actions the CAC shelled out to support.

We are therefore left to wonder, who benefited? Certainly not the schoolchildren. Nor the elected school board, which was forced to spend significant resources in political defenses against the enormous Obama-Ayers war chest.

Most likely, the beneficiaries were Obama and Ayers themselves, in that those mighty resources enabled them to organize and maintain a very large political network, useful to them in fields far beyond education. One pinpoint view is that of Ayers's endowment of the Maoist Klonsky - and how many other radicals buried within local groups?

I would conclude that Obama's proposal for a Federal do-gooder corps, funded in parity with the US military, is his logical next step after his pilot project with the CAC. If a hundred million organized the radicals well enough to float Obama's political career, think how such Federal resources might be used as a slush fund to endow hundreds of thousands of 'activists' in overwhelming the democratic process in every urban center of the country. Hint: they wouldn't be Republicans.

Posted by: Micropotamus at August 21, 2008 11:41 AM

The above link should be billayers.blogspot.com

Posted by: davod at August 21, 2008 12:19 PM

Amy Ridenour unravels some of the strings Ayers and Daley are apparently pulling:

http://www.nationalcenter.org/2008/08/chicago-annenberg-challenge-mysterious.html

Ayers may be pulling strings behind the scenes but he likely doesn't own the records. The real owner needs to be uncovered, dragged out into the light of day, and put on the hot seat in public view.

Gaining access to the truth before the Demo convention is unlikely, but forcing the issue on to the national stage could still be very problematic for Obama and terrorist Ayers.

Posted by: novaculus at August 21, 2008 12:39 PM

Steve Diamond at Global Labor and Politics has uncovered a trove of crucial CAC documents:

http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/08/behind-annenberg-gate-inside-chicago.html

Conclusion: Obama is lying about the nature and extent of his relationship and cooperation with the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And what they are hiding may be much, much more than just the fact of their cozy political alliance and personal friendship of 20 years. They may be trying to hide the diversion of millions of dollars of charitable funds intended to benefit city students into the coffers of political activists.

Posted by: novaculus at August 21, 2008 12:46 PM

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 08/21/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

Posted by: David M at August 21, 2008 02:19 PM