The Skeletons in Senator Obama's Closet

Stanley Kurtz, investigative reporter

Senator Obama claims that he never knew that his minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright told his congregation that the American government invented AIDS to kill black people.

It's hard for me to believe that Senator Obama didn't even hear about this lie.

The Senator never denounced this lie until he was forced to, and he has still not told his church that this is a KGB lie. Rather than just leave his church when Rev. Wright was exposed, why didn't this U.S. Senator stand up and confront his minister?

Even the KGB has admitted that they spread this lie about our government. The head of the Russian foreign intelligence Yevgeni Primakov is quoted making this admission in Izvestia (3-19-92). [See here and here. ]

AIDS experts write that some black people who believe this lie see no point in protecting themselves from AIDS.

Now Senator Obama's campaign is attacking an investigative journalist named Stanley Kurtz because he is looking into the Senator's early relationship with the self-confessed Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers.

On August 18, 2008, Mr. Kurtz described happened when he tried get access to some documents at the University of Illinois:

[T]hese files [would] illuminate the working relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers, they would also provide significant insight into a web of ties linking Obama to various radical organizations, including Obama-approved foundation gifts to political allies...

Unfortunately, I don’t yet have access to the documents. The Special Collections section of the Richard J. Daley Library agreed to let me read them, but just before I boarded my flight to Chicago, the top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. Circumstances strongly suggest the likelihood that Bill Ayers himself may have played a pivotal role in this denial. Ayers has long taught at UIC, where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge offices were housed, rent-free. Ayers likely arranged for the files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge to be housed in the UIC library, and may well have been consulted during my unsuccessful struggle to gain access to the documents.

Ayers was a terrorist, but he wasn't imprisoned because of an "improper surveillance" technicality. I don't understand why a terrorist was rewarded with a teaching post at the University of Illinois.

The Chicago Tribune/The Swamp (8-28-08) reports on the furious reaction of Senator Obama's campaign:

Sen. Barack Obama's campaign organized its supporters Wednesday night to confront Tribune-owned WGN-AM in Chicago for having a critic of the Illinois Democrat on its air.

"WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears," Obama's campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. "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."

Kurtz, a conservative writer, recently wrote an article for the National Review that looked at Obama's ties to Ayers, a former 1960s radical who later emerged as a school reform advocate in Chicago.

The magazine had been blocked in its initial attempts to obtain records from the University of Illinois at Chicago regarding a school reform initiative called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama chaired and Ayers co-founded.

Obama critics were quick to suggest that political clout could be involved in seeking to protect Obama from embarrassment. The school later reserved its position and made the records available Tuesday.

On Wednesday evening, Obama's campaign urged supporters to call the radio station to complain.

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

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

Zack Christenson, executive producer of "Extension 720 with Milt Rosenburg," said the response was strong.

"I would say this is the biggest response we've ever got from a campaign or a candidate," he said. "This is really unprecedented with the show, the way that people are flooding the calls and our email boxes."

Christenson said the Obama campaign was asked to have someone appear on the show and declined the request.

Today The Wall Street Journal (8-80-08) even has a story that suggests there may be connections between Senator Obama and an Iraqi-born billionaire who may be implicted in the oil-for-food scandal and weapons smuggling:

In May 2004, the Pentagon's inspector general's office cited "significant and credible evidence" of involvement by Mr. Auchi's companies in the Oil for Food scandal, and in illicit smuggling of weapons to Saddam Hussein's regime. Because of the criminal probe, Mr. Auchi's travel visa to the U.S. was revoked in August 2004, even as Mr. Auchi denied all the allegations. According to prosecutors, in November 2005 Rezko was able to get two government officials from Illinois to appeal to the State Department to get the visa restored. Asked if anyone in his office was involved in such an appeal, Mr. Obama told the Chicago Sun-Times last March, "not that I know of." FOIA requests to the State Department for any documents haven't been responded to for months.

Here is a blog called The Real Barak Obama.

Here are some interesting articles:

National Review (8-18-08) Stanley Kurtz, "Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?"

FOX News (8-26-08) "Newly Released Documents Highlight Obama's Relationship with Ayers"

National Review (8-28-08) "Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar"

Michelle Malkin (8-28-08) "Next, the Obama thugs came for Stanley Kurtz"

Chicago Tribune (8-28-08) "Obama's e-mail about WGN-AM"

National Review (8-28-08) "Stanley Kurtz's Fairness Doctrine Preview"

World Net Daily (8-28-08) "Obama camp hits station airing critic"

Wall Street Journal (8-30-08) "Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire"

The Washington Times (2-29-08) Bill Gertz, "Auchi connection"

The Times (2-26-08) Mansion 'mistake' piles the pressure on Barack Obama

The Times (2-25-08) "Timeline: British billionaire and Barack Obama": Events bringing Nadhmi Auchi, British-Iraqi billionaire, together with Antoin Rezko, Barack Obama's fundraiser

The Times (2-1-08) "Obama bagman is sent to jail after failing to declare $3.5m payment by British tycoon"

Senator Obama Channelled Money to His Friends: Communists and Anti-Semites

FOX News (10-27-08) reports:

The Annenberg Challenge and the Woods Fund of Chicago funded numerous controversial groups while Barack Obama served on their boards between 1995 and 2002, an analysis of their tax returns shows.

In 2001, when Obama was a part-time director of The Woods Fund of Chicago, it gave $75,000 to ACORN, the voter registration group now under investigation for voter fraud in 12 states.

The Woods Fund also gave $6,000 to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama attended. The reason for the donation to the church is unclear -- it is simply listed as "for special purposes" in the group's IRS tax form.

It gave a further $60,000 to the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University, which was founded and run by Bernardine Dohrn, the wife of domestic terrorist William Ayers and, with her husband, a former member of the 1960s radical group the Weather Underground.

Other controversial donations that year included $50,000 to the Small Schools Network -- which was founded by Ayers and run by Michael Klonsky, a friend of Ayers' and the former chairman of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), an offshoot of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society -- and $40,000 to the Arab American Action Network, which critics have accused of being anti-Semitic...

When Obama co-chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which calls itself "a public-private partnership improving education for 1.5 million urban and rural public school students," it gave to some of the same groups -- partnering with ACORN to manage funding for schools and giving over $1 million to the Small Schools Network.

It also gave nearly $1 million to a group called the South Shore African Village Collaborative, whose goals, according to Annenberg's archived Web site, are "to develop more collegial relationships between teachers and principals. Professional development topics include school leadership, team building, parent and community involvement, developing thematic units, instructional strategies, strategic planning, and distance learning and teleconferencing."

But the group mentions other goals in its grant application to the Annenberg Challenge:

"Our children need to understand the historical context of our struggles for liberation from those forces that seek to destroy us," one page of the application reads.

Click here to see the application.

Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, found the collaborative's original application when going through Annenberg's archives.

Asked to comment, Yvonne Williams-Kinnison, executive director of the collaborative's parent group, the Coalition for Improved Education in South Shore said, "I don't want to put more fuel on the fire. You can call us back after the election.... I don't want to compromise the position."

Late Afrocentrist scholars Jacob Carruthers and Asa Hilliard were both invited to give SSAVC teachers a training session, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge noted in a report, adding that the "consciousness raising session ... received rave reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey session."

But Carruthers has been a controversial figure because of inflammatory statements he made in writing.

"The submission to Western civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy," Carruthers wrote in his 1999 book, "Intellectual Warfare." "Some of us have chosen to reject the culture of our oppressors and recover our disrupted ancestral culture."

In the book, he compared the process of blacks assimilating into American culture with rape.

"We may not be able to get our virginity back after the rape, but we do not have to marry the rapist," Carruthers said.

Hilliard has come under fire for advocating what many consider an extreme Afrocentric curriculum.

He selected the articles for the "African-American Baseline Essays" published in 1987 and first used in the Portland, Ore., school district. The essays have been criticized for claiming, among other things, that ancient Egyptians were the first to discover manned flight and the theory of evolution.

An Obama spokesman called investigation of these ties "pathetic."

"This is another pathetic attempt by FOX News to distract voters from the economic challenges facing this nation by patching together tenuous links to smear Barack Obama," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told FOXNews.com.

"The Annenberg Challenge was a bipartisan organization dedicated to improving the performance of students and teachers in Chicago Public Schools that was funded by a Republican philanthropist who was friends with President Reagan and launched by Republican Gov. Jim Edgar."

But Kurtz says those founders of the Annenberg Challenge would not have known the details about to whom their Chicago office -- one of 18 around the country -- was giving money.

"If you read Ayers' proposal to Annenberg, it doesn't sound radical. But if you actually read Ayers' education writings, they are very radical indeed," Kurtz said. "Ayers, like so many other savvy professors, knows enough not to state his actual views frankly when applying for money. But you can find the truth in his writings."

The controversial donations make up only a small portion of the overall amount doled out by the Annenberg and Woods funds. The Woods Fund gave over $3.5 million to 115 different groups in 2001, and the Annenberg Chellenge dispensed nearly $11 million to 63 groups at its height in 1999.

Most of the groups are mainstream and well respected, ranging from the Jazz Institute of Chicago to the Successful Schools Project.

But Kurtz says that this should not obscure what he describes as controversial donations.

"If John McCain had given to white supremacist groups and people said, 'Hey, the majority of funding didn't go to supremacist groups' -- that wouldn't even cut the ice," Kurtz said.

"I feel certain [Obama] knew about these radical groups," Kurtz said. "We know that he read the applications because he made statements about the quality of proposals."

Who Elevated Barack Obama to the Chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge?

"New evidence strongly suggests that Barack Obama has been less than forthcoming about the role that unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers may have played in choosing him to lead the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)."--Editors, National Review Online (9-24-08)

Investigative reporter Stanley Kurtz (pictured above; articles archived here) has published two new articles about Senator Obama in the National Review Online: "Obama’s Challenge: The campaign speaks to “Radicalism” (9-23-08) and "Founding Brothers: What’s behind Obama’s early rise?" (8-24-08).

I have written previously about Kurtz' investigative reporting here and here.

In an earlier article, "Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar"(8-28-08), The National Review Online editors explained:

As [blogger Steve] Diamond relates [here (8-20-08)], one of the first CAC [Chicago Annenberg Challenge]awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,” which had been founded by [Weatherman bomber Bill] Ayers and was then headed by [Maoist] Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky — a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization)...

In his current article, "Founding Brothers: What’s behind Obama’s early rise?" (9-24-08), Mr. Kurtz writes:

New evidence strongly suggests that Barack Obama has been less than forthcoming about the role that unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers may have played in choosing him to lead the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

...Obama and his allies are not being fully forthcoming on this issue, quite possibly in an attempt to disguise the fact the Bill Ayers had a substantial role in elevating Barack Obama to the chairmanship of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

...the question of how a young and inexperienced lawyer like Obama was chosen to head a foundation created by Bill Ayers in 1995 is still very much open. [This is a complicated article, so read the original as well as the 9-23-08 article.]

Senator Obama's Alleged Connections to Tony Rezko, Nadhmi Auchi, Weatherman Bill Ayers, and Maoist Mike Klonsky

"As [blogger Steve] Diamond relates [here (8-20-08)], one of the first CAC [Chicago Annenberg Challenge]
awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,” which had been founded by [Weatherman bomber Bill] Ayers and was then headed by [Maoist] Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky — a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization), and who hosted a “social justice” blog on the Obama campaign website until his writings were hastily purged in June [see here] after Diamond called attention to them."--The National Review (8-28-08; page 2)

The famous conservative political columnist Robert Novak (above) has a very serious brain tumor, so he isn't able to write as much. He has been a columnist for 45 years.

Mr. Novak is the journalist who wrote the article that started the CIA leak/Plame scandal that was ultimately investigated by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

On March 3, 2008, the day that Chicago businessman Tony Rezko's corruption trial began, Mr. Novak wrote an article called "Obama and the Fixer" (3-3-08) about Senator Obama's possible financial ties to Tony Rezko and Iraqi-British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi. [See also here; and Novak's 2008 archive.]

It turns out that Tony Rezko's corrupt dealings with politicians were also investigated by the famous United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald.

Mr. Novak's article "Obama and the Fixer" (3-3-08) was published on the very day that Tony Rezko's extortion and money laundering trial opened and is a good overview of concerns about Rezko, Auchi, and Obama being raised by investigative journalists; but a lot more is coming out now.

Two recent articles that helped me to understand Obama's background are "Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?" (8-18-08) by Stanley Kurtz [archive] in the National Review and "Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire" (8-30-08) by John Fund in The Wall Street Journal.

You can read about the Obama campaign's ferocious reaction when Stanley Kurtz appeared on Chicago's WGN Radio. By following the link there you can even listen to this very informative radio program. The Obama campaign sent an e-mail to its supporters asking them to call the show and make the points listed in the e-mail.

It is hard to know the truth about Senator Obama's possible connections to Rezko and Auchi, but it is disturbing that Senator Obama's campaign is threatening to use federal agencies to criminalize his critics. [See NRO "Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar" (8-28-08) page two at the end; See more background here.]

Senator Obama doesn't want investigative journalists snooping into his relationship with the former Weatherman bomber Bill Ayers, who is now a Professor of Education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

The National Review writes (8-28-08):

[Bill] Ayers, as we have previously detailed, is a confessed terrorist who, having escaped prosecution due to surveillance violations that came to light during his decade on the lam after a bombing spree, landed an influential professorship in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). As he has made clear several times before and after helping to launch Obama’s political career, Ayers remains defiantly proud of bombing the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and other targets. He expresses regret only that he didn’t do more. Far from abandoning his radical politics, he has simply changed methods: the classroom, rather than the detonator, is now his instrument for campaigning against an America he portrays as racist and imperialist.

...Obama has lied about his relationship with Ayers, whom he now dismisses as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Ayers and Obama have made joint appearances together; they have argued together for “reforms” of the criminal justice system to make it more criminal-friendly; Obama gushed with praise for Ayers’ 1997 polemical book on the Chicago courts; and they sat together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing enterprise that distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their ideological allies. Most significant, they worked closely together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).

The CAC was a major education reform project, proposed by Ayers, which was underwritten by a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, complemented by another $100 million in private and public funding. The project ran for about five years, beginning in 1995. As the liberal researcher Steve Diamond has recounted, Ayers ran its operational arm, the “Chicago School Reform Collaborative.” Obama, then a 33-year-old, third-year associate at a small law firm, having no executive experience, was brought in to chair the board of directors, which oversaw all “fiscal matters.”

By the time the CAC’s operations were wound down in 2001 it had doled out more than $100 million in grants but had failed to achieve any improvement in the Chicago schools. What little is known about the grants Obama oversaw is troubling. As Diamond relates, one of the first CAC awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,” which had been founded by Ayers and was then headed by Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky — a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization), and who hosted a “social justice” blog on the Obama campaign website until his writings were hastily purged in June after Diamond called attention to them.

Be sure to read blogger Steve Diamond's post "Behind the Annenberg Gate: Inside the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Records" (8-20-08).

The Iraqi-British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi is also using the British libel laws to intimidate investigative journalists who probe his possible connections to Senator Obama.

I think if Senator Obama had nothing to hide--like funding the Maoist Mike Klonsky--he would not be afraid to sit down and answer journalists' questions. I doubt that most Americans would approve of eductional funds going to Maoists.

It seems to me like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) is another case of communists and terrorists plugging themselves into government funding that is intended to lift historically disadvantaged people out of poverty.

Note: Be sure to listen to Stanley Kurtz' account on Chicago's WGN-AM Radio about how the CAC doled out money meant to boost students' achievement to politicized programs.

One good place to find various articles about Senator Obama and his attempts to intimidate the media can be found at Michelle Malkin's blog. Her most recent article on the topic of Senator Obama's agressive moves to silence questions is called "Barack 'The Silencer' Obama’s Gangland Assault on Free Speech" (8-29-08), but she has an archive of related articles at her categories: Bill Ayers and Fairness Doctrine.

What Is the Extent of Senator Obama's Relationship with Weather Underground Bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn?

"Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!"---Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn celebrating the murders orchestrated by Charles Manson

I have posted a series of articles detailing the research done by Stanley Kurtz [search] into Senator Obama's funding of radical educators. According to Kurtz, the money went to indoctrinate rather than educate Chicago's children.

Zombietime has just published an article titled "Barack Obama's Close Encounter with the Weather Underground" (10-27-08).

Jack Cashill has published an article titled "Science Points to Ayers Authorship of Obama's Dreams" (10-29-08). This article is the latest in a series of articles that make the case that Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father (1995).

Youtube has posted an interview with Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather Underground. He describes the Weather Underground's plan to set up reeducation camps in the American Southwest and to eliminate 25 million people who refused to be reeducated. The interview appeared in the 1982 documentary No Place to Hide.

Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated the terrorist Weather Underground Organization (WUO) in the late 1960s, published a book (as told to Frank Reagan) called Bringing Down America (1976). This book was published a year after Grathwohl testified about the WUO in the Senate on 10-18-74.

FOX News has just aired an interview with Larry Grathwohl (10-29-08). Grathwohl describes bombing plots hatched by Bill Ayers. Ayers wanted nails put in the bombs so they would kill more people. Grathwohl also claims that Bernardine Dorhn and Bill Ayers were involved in the 1970 bombing that killed a San Francisco policeman named Brian McDonnell.

Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn authored the communist revolutionary manifesto Praire Fire (1974) while they were underground.

Senator Obama Extolls Terrorist Bill Ayers' Book

"Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."---Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers

This is a picture of the Weather Underground communist-terrorist Bill Ayers. I got this picture from a site that has some interesting information about Ayers' terrorist bombings. Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn admitted to many bombings.

They may have been involved in the 1970 bombing of a San Francisco police station that killed policeman Brian McDonnell. In 2000 this cold case was reopened by the authorities.

Newsmax (10-14-08) explains that Bill Ayers escaped punishment for his crimes because "the FBI used so-called national security wiretaps that could not be used legally in criminal cases." Of course, the Weather Underground terrorists did cooperate with communist intelligence agenceis and some learned how to handle weapons and make bombs in Cuba.

Bill Ayers himself has bragged about his crimes:

"Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."

Weather Underground collaborated with communist intelligence services. They weren't just domestic terrorists.

Some educators support the communist terrorist Bill Ayers. These people are educating our children, but they excuse a man who was a leader of a terrorist organization that bombed a judge, his wife, and his children while the family were asleep in their beds.

Senator Obama has dismissed people's concerns about his relationship with the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers by claiming that Ayers just was a guy who lived in his neighborhood. If Senator Obama was just Bill Ayers' neighbor, then why did he write a glowing review of Bill Ayers' 1997 book A Kind And Just Parent: The Children Of Juvenile Court?

Senator Obama described the terrorist's book as "a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair." (Chicago Tribune, 12/21/97 as cited on an official RNC site ).

Ronald Radosh (see his official site and articles), a former leftist who underwent a change of conscience, has an article in The New York Post titled "A Revolutionary's 'Education' Advice" (1-9-08):

THE Obama campaign hotly denies the McCain camp's charges that Barack Obama has long ties to Bill Ayers, the 1960s Weather Underground terrorist. I'll leave it to others to discuss most aspects of the relationship - and focus on one damning admission made in Obama's defense.

While denying any other meaningful link between the two, the Obama campaign says that Obama has long respected Ayers' work on education; many press accounts refer to him as a "school reformer." Problem is, those "school reforms" boil down to propagandizing for the very ideas that led Ayers to blow up buildings decades ago.

The Obama defense cites the likes of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who told The New York Times that Ayers (now a University of Illinois professor) is an educator who has "done a lot of good in this city and nationally." Thus, if Obama sought Ayers' expertise on his chosen field of childhood education, it was hardly anything to be wary of.

But, as Stanley Kurtz and Sol Stern have pointed out, Obama helped deliver thousands of dollars to fund Ayers' education projects in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge - whose purpose, says Kurtz, is to infuse students "with a radical political commitment."

Ayers makes this very clear in all his writings. K-12 teachers, he has written, must teach "for social justice and liberation" - making classrooms into centers for creating revolutionary change.

Time has only hardened Ayers' views. Consider an interview he gave two years ago to "Revolution," a magazine published by The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a self-described "Marxist, Leninist, Maoist" group.

There, Ayers argues that education can't be separated from "the concept of politics and political change." Urban schools are now merely preparing students "for prison, for unemployment and for war."

So, to create a genuine "progressive" education for our children, teachers must work to overturn the repressive, racist and imperialist system that governs the United States; it is imperative to fight "the most reactionary cabal of ideologues" that control the federal government and the media.

Page 2

Even if the Republicans lose the White House in in 2008, Ayers notes, the ruling class will remain irritated by education - which he proudly proclaims the one area they don't control. To keep it that way, he calls for fighting to stop proposals such as those favoring charter schools and vouchers. (Ayers doesn't seem to realize, or care, that such reforms gain access to good education for precisely the poor whose interests he claims to represents.)

In the interview, Ayers also makes a point of declaring solidarity identifying with perhaps the biggest charlatan in modern American academia - Ward Churchill, who was finally removed from his University of Colorado professorship by the school's president for academic misconduct, including false use of sources, plagiarism and the most extreme politicization of the curriculum conceivable.

As Ayers sees it, Churchill was simply challenging students "with ideas they've never seen before," and with encouraging students "to question things."

In fact, Churchill won his notoriety by saying that the Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks were "busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cellphones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants.

"If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it."

To Ayers, Churchill was simply "being pilloried . . . for being a leftist, for being a critic of US imperialism."
Consider also Ayers' 1997 book on juvenile justice, which Obama praised in a review as a "searing and timely account" of the issue. Yet, Ayers argued against the very existence of prisons in the United States, compared our country and its incarceration system to apartheid in South Africa and called for drastically softer sentences for juveline murderers. In a panel on the book Obama later even agreed with Ayers that the system is an "industrial-prison complex."

Ayers' policies when Obama worked with him were those of the revolutionary left; his views remain the same today. He refers to himself and his comrades as "revolutionaries" who have to "stand up" and fight for revolution. This is a "school reformer" Barack Obama respects?

Weather Underground Terrorist Bernardine Dohrn

"Larry Grathwohl, an FBI mole within the Weathermen, connected Ayers to the planning — and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, to the execution— of a police station bombing in San Francisco in February 1970 that killed one officer and injured two others."---David Freddoso, National Review Online (8-18-08)

This is Bill Ayers' wife Bernardine Dohrn in a 1969 mug shot. Ayers and Dohrn were top leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist bombers during the 60s and 70s.
Often the Weather Underground bombed police stations. They believed that their crimes would spark a communist revolution.

A lot of people think the Weathermen are gone, but an informative article by Jesse Lemisch, Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, suggests otherwise. In "Weather Underground Rises from the Ashes: They're Baack!" Professor Lemisch observes:

Veterans of Weather (as well as some fans) seem to be on a drive to rehabilitate, cleanse, and perhaps revive it -- not necessarily as a new organization, but rather as an ideological component of present and future movements. There have been signs of such a sanitization and romanticization for some time. A landmark in this rehabilitation is Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Beacon Press 2001; Penguin Books 2003).

Senator Obama has had a relationship with the Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

They had a party for him when he was a young politician, and Senator Obama has worked with Bill Ayers on an educational reform project that actually channelled money to radicals such as the Maoist Mike Klonsky. This relationship has been detailed by a NRO reporter named Stanley Kurtz. [Search Kurtz, Klonsky, Ayers, CAC, Annenberg, on this blog.] The radicals did not improve the educational scores of Chicago's children; instead, the money was used for political indoctrination of children.

Senator Obama's supporters have criticized Governor Sarah Palin for hunting moose, but Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dorhn was involved in bombings during the 60s and 70s. Dohrn hunted policemen, but the New York Times (10-4-08) didn't mention Brian McDonnell's name, show his picture, or mention the fact that the investigation into his murder was repoened in about 2000.

When Charles Manson's gang murdered the movie star Sharon Tate and her friends, their names and pictures were in the papers; and their organization was reviled as a violent cult. The young Bernardine Dohrn even celebrated the brutal murders committed by Manson's gang.

Discover the Networks observes:

Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman "fork salute," [Bernardine Dohrn] said of the bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!" The "War Council" ended with a formal declaration of war against "AmeriKKKa," always spelled with three K's to signify the United States' allegedly ineradicable white racism.

As I already noted here and here, Dohrn may have been involved in a bombing that killed a San Francisco policeman named Brian McDonnell.

If Senator Obama can't seem to understand that Ayers and Dohrn are domestic terrorists, how will he be able to protect us from terrorists?

Sarah Barracuda Takes a Bite Out of Katie Couric

UPDATE: See "Who Killed Brian V. McDonnell?"

Recently Katie Couric asked Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin what publications she reads. Governor Palin found the question just a tad condescending. She felt that Couric must think that people in Alaska don't have access to the same media as everyone else. It has now emerged that that Alaska's Governor Sarah Palin reads The New York Times.

On Saturday, October 4, 2008, Governor Palin told an audience in Englewood, Colorado that she read in The New York Times (10-4-08) that Senator Obama is "palling around with terrorists." Governor Palin was referring to Senator Obama's relationship with the Weatherman terrroist Bill Ayers.

Here is Sarah Barracuda on youtube.

Reuters (10-4-08) reports:

Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin accused Democratic candidate Barack Obama on Saturday of "palling around with terrorists"...

"Our opponent though is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," Palin said of Obama, also calling him an embarrassment.

Palin cited a New York Times story on Saturday that examined Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Vietnam-era militant Weather Underground organization who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The Times concluded they were not close...

Obama served with Ayers on the board of a foundation in Chicago, and has said he was only eight-years-old when the Weather Underground committed its best-known bombing. He has also noted that former President Bill Clinton pardoned two members of the group during the last days of his presidency.

A National Republic Online reporter named Stanley Kurtz has investigated Senator Obama's relationship with the Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers. [See here and here.]

Ladies and Germs!

"The health department shut down the food-and-beverage operation at the shop, Vox Pop, in January, because of $29,000 in unpaid fines going back to 2007...The Jan. 28 inspection also turned up eight violations, including 'evidence of mice or live mice' and 'conditions conducive to vermin.'”--New York Times (3-16-2009)

According to Barnes and Noble, the crackpot 9-11 Truther Sander Hicks (search Hicks on this blog and scroll down) seems to have published a book titled Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health (2006). The synopsis of the book claims:

The sixth Critical Art Ensemble book offers a radical reframing of the rhetoric surrounding germ warfare. After refuting the idea that massive biological attack is a probable future occurrence, the book goes on to argue that biological weapons programs primarily serve the economic interests of the military-security complex, squandering resources needed to fight the massive loss of life each year from emerging infectious diseases. The book also includes two appendices examining the case of the U.S. Justice Department against Steve Kurtz, for which the original manuscript of the book was seized in the state's investigation.

On the other hand, Amazon says Marching Plague was written by the Critical Art Ensemble and published by a radical publisher called Autonomedia. Perhaps the actual author is Sander Hicks, but since the Critical Art Ensemble describes itself as a "collective," the actual authorship of Marching Plague is a bit murkey.

Critical Art Ensemble links Marching Plague to a turgid, poorly-composed project position paper titled "Bodies of Fear in a World of Threat." The position paper refers to "the authors" (presumably of Marching Plague) and opines:

CAE's opinion is a simple one. We believe that biowarfare "preparedness" is a euphemism for biowartech development and the militarization of the public sphere. Preparedness, as it now stands, is a madness that continues because it gets votes for politicians, audiences for media venues, profits for corporations, and funds for militarized knowledge production. If there is any real threat to our bodies and health, it is not coming from weaponized germs, but from the institutions that benefit from this weaponization.

Of course, the anonymous Simple Simons of this simple position paper--and perhaps of Marching Plague--don't know the first thing about the dangers of biological agents. Certainly Sander Hicks, who is credited as the author of Marching Plague by Barnes and Noble, is not a scientist with expertise in biological warfare, public health, or emerging infectious deseases. He started a Brooklyn coffee shop called Vox Pop that was closed down in January by the Health Department because of unsanitary conditions.

According to The New York Times (3-16-2009):

The health department shut down the food-and-beverage operation at the shop, Vox Pop, in January, because of $29,000 in unpaid fines going back to 2007.

Vox Pop is also three months behind on the rent. The telephone has been disconnected. And the person who was hired in December to straighten things out has never been paid.

...[A] health inspector walked into the Cortelyou Road shop, at the corner of Stratford Road. That visit was a follow-up to a Jan. 7 inspection that found, among other things, that Vox Pop’s permit had expired. The Jan. 28 inspection also turned up eight violations, including “evidence of mice or live mice” and “conditions conducive to vermin.” Ms. Ryan said those problems were in a part of the basement that was not used for food storage, and were corrected immediately, as were other issues the health department cited. But there remained fines from the earlier inspections — fines that were not paid while Mr. Hicks was in charge.