Ayers And Obama, Back In The News

Stanley Kurtz has a piece in the WSJ detailing the association of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.  He also offers insights into Bill Ayers' radical education agenda - soccer moms, listen up!

Mr. Kurtz provides a supplement at the NRO.

Let me chime in on this point from the Journal:

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

Unsettled indeed.  But do keep in mind - there was a push for education reform in Chicago in 1988.  The ABCs Coalition was coordinated by Bill Ayers, whose father was a key member of major philanthropic group that was also part of the ABCs Coalition.  Another member of the ABCs - Barack Obama's Developing Communities Project.

So, did Bill and Barack meet back in 1988, just before Obama went off to Harvard?  The timing is tricky - per his autobiography, Obama was working with a city-wide coalition on school reform in early 1988.  However, he was planning to leave the Developing Communities Project in May of 1988 and go to Harvard that fall.  The ABCs Coalition apparently came together in the spring of 1988 - this detailed history dates the ABCs Coalition to March 1988 (page 20), which leaves plenty of time for Obama and Ayers to meet and greet.  The ABCs effort had hammered out a proposal and held a big rally by June 6, so a lot of work was done in April and May while Barack would have been involved. 

Unless his name was picked from out of a hat in 1995 it is an excellent bet that Obama and Ayers met in 1988, which explains his subsequent recruitment by Ayers (denied by the campaign, of course) for the Annenberg Challenge in 1995.

Supporting info here and here, and let's hat tip Steve Diamond, who was the first person I know to promote this 1988 connection. I'll leave with this clipping from 1991 linking the ABCs Coalition, Obama's the Developing Communities Project, and Bill Ayers.

I wonder if the mainstream media will poke at this prior to November 5.  I guess it depends on whether they will have time and resources left after they track down Sarah Palin's second grade teacher to resolve the allegation that she spilled a paste jar and then covered it up.

Comments

[Ranger]

I think the hidden jem here is the rejection of funding for basic knowledge programs in favor of "social justice" teaching projects and "community organization" funding by the CAC. I think most parents would rather have their kids learning basic skills in school and social justice at home.

Confirming Obama as a serial liar is just icing on the cake.

[SWarren]

Professor Diamond critiques the Kurtz article, and argues the real goal of the CAC was to wrest control from the unions.

There is a great deal of truth in this. Ayers' speaks widely of his commitment to "social justice" teaching where he sees the classroom as the potential starting point of revolutionary consciousness. Such nonsense deserves the derision that Kurtz' piece suggests.

But one is left wondering, would the national Annenberg Challenge program have really awarded Ayers nearly $50 million if this kind of silliness were the real purpose of the CAC?

Would Chicago area foundations like the MacArthur Foundation and the Pritzker Family Foundation, as well as major corporate and public donors, have provided $110 million in matching funds for such an agenda?

Could anyone have realistically expected such an agenda to have improved student outcomes?

Somehow I doubt it.

Rather, I think there was a more pressing purpose at the heart of the award and the support it engendered among certain elite institutions and individuals in Chicago. Ironically, while Kurtz wants to tar Obama with the red paint brush of the 60s "radical" Ayers, an understanding of the real purpose of the CAC indicates a much closer political alliance between Obama and Ayers.

The grant application itself and much of what the CAC was up to emerged in the heated "Chicago School Wars" underway in that city from the late 1980s until the late 1990s. This war was for the control of Chicago's public schools.

[clarice]

Speaking solely as a partisan hack (per TCO) there are two dynamite gems here:
(1)Obama lied about his connections to Ayers and(2)even more importantly, he pushed an educational agenda which will get any right thinking parent off the barcalounger and into the voting place to vote against him.

(Maybe it was Ayers daddy who greased the skids to Harvard law school--I am increasingly convinced someone on the underground red railroad did.)

[bunky]

The One was "recruited."

[SWarren]

I wonder if the mainstream media will poke at this prior to November 5. I guess it depends on whether they will have time and resources left after they track down Sarah Palin's second grade teacher to resolve the allegation that she spilled a paste jar and then covered it up.

LOL, TM. The MSM is working overtime to make something 'stick' to Sarah.

[Neo]

I'm left with the question ...
who paid for Obama's time at Harvard ?

I know he and Michelle had loans to pay later, but I'm sure they didn't pay for it all.

[Neo]

Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down.

Given the need for the "jobs of the future," this just won't pay well.

[MayBee]

I think we got a taste for how this is going to be handled by most of the media yesterday, when Ben Smith decided the important fact in the Obama/Ayers connection was that the 1995 meeting at Ayers's house was not a fundraiser.

Thus, Schmidt lied about any connection the media is not exploring.

I know Dr. Diamond think Kurtz has the focus wrong, and that may be so. It seems there is enough criticism to be levied against Mr.Judgment that he has lied repetedly about Ayers, and covered up any of this activity at all.

[Semanticleo]

There is nothing of note in the grant process which would indicate anything untoward.

Wishful thinking does not substitute for the facts.

BTW; In case no one knew, the WSJ Editorial staff are the only conservatives working on the Wall Street journal.

[clarice]

Dr. Diamond seems a very nice fellow and he may be right about the Ayers-Obama motivation but his view goes nowhere in the election because the unions are working for Obama and are not going to change that; Obama's views are more in tune with the bulk of public employee union members; and most importantly parents hate teachers' unions, too, or would if they had a notion what they're up to.

[MayBee]

I wonder if the mainstream media will poke at this prior to November 5. I guess it depends on whether they will have time and resources left after they track down Sarah Palin's second grade teacher to resolve the allegation that she spilled a paste jar and then covered it up.

I am not kidding when I say John McCain's Brazilian girlfriend of 51 years ago has been in the news lately.

[Neo]

After reading the snit by Ben Smith of "The Politico" last night, I left reminded that in this political season the 4th estate has done the American public a disservice.

After the Iraq War started, the 4th estate spent months before they finally decided that maybe they were vigilant enough with their reporting running up to the war.

In this election, the 4th estate repeats it's error by falling into the same trap.

Fool me once, shame on you
Fool me twice, shame on me

In this election, the 4th estate has actually allowed one of the candidates to write his own narrative, based on two auto-biographical books, that is full of holes for large time sequences.

Today, with only 40 some days remaining till the election, a bit of one of those 4 year holes is filled in, but much is still left unknown.

Will the 4th estate be comtemplating the navel for that time or will they begin to ask the questions that will give the American people a complete story ?

Not only does the future of their craft stand in balance, the future of the country demands better.

If they are not up to the challenge .. we will look elsewhere.

[TheDiplomatist]

Palin is going to stop all the foreign aid we're throwing away. It's 100s of billions a year. That is why it's the earmarks and how those happened. This is all Biden and Obama are is foreign aid checks. When they don't control this, you'll find they have no use for anyone.

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I guess it depends on whether they will have time and resources left after they track down Sarah Palin's second grade teacher to resolve the allegation that she spilled a paste jar and then covered it up.

Aw hell. 92.

[Ranger]

There is nothing of note in the grant process which would indicate anything untoward.

Posted by: Semanticleo | September 23, 2008 at 11:13 AM

Well, there is nothing "untoward" about funding "social justice" over basic math and science, but it doesn't speak to the judgement of the chair of the foundation, nor do the total lack of results that resulted from making those choices.

And given that the aduits are under seal, the level of actual untowardness is yet to be truely evaluated.

If there is nothing to hide, then why seal the internal audits?

[hit and run]

I noticed that in his NRO piece Kurtz links to DrJ's place ... But the link is wrong.

I've sent a note to Stanley but he doesn't know me from Adam.

There was a space in his URL that translated into a percent sign that should have been a dash.

[MayBee]

After reading the snit by Ben Smith of "The Politico" last night, I left reminded that in this political season the 4th estate has done the American public a disservice.

And Ben Smith was one of the Politico guys that thought his co-worker Roger Simon's sarcastic "the press is wrong to ask Palin questions" piece was clever. Talk about ironic.

[hit and run]

Huh, that was quick. Kurtz just responded.

[TheDiplomatist]

Voters. Bill don't want your vote and neither does anyone else.

[TheDiplomatist]

Hey, let's pain some people. Vote for Bill or you get a disease. Gas is crack, blow some it; love's you. Maybe Obama can change the laws so gas is free too.

[TheDiplomatist]

France tried to be nice to Obama. Not enough cash?

[clarice]

Good work, Hit!

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Huh, that was quick. Kurtz just responded.

He's always been good with that with me. Even when I pointed out that as an anthropologist he was mildly an idiot on marriage customs.

[carbonamon]

Hey, lets some traditional schools arrange some campus shootings. Another technical school. They're so not American. Call ADT they'll be your Obama.

[AJ]

Kurtz's article is all 'hat' and no 'cattle' -- pretty weak journalism. What exactly did Obama & Ayers conspire to do together? Crickets, crickets, crickets... Hmm, get back to us on that one Stanley. Maybe you have more boxes to go through.

If the Obama campaign was really worried about Ayers, we'd be seeing wall to wall Keating Five ads by now.

BTW, I heard Bill Clinton use to run drugs in Arkansas and murdered some people along the way. Yeah, yeah that's it. Let's get Stanley to write a hard hitting 'story' on that one too.

[caramon]

Wheeler has it cold!!!

[AJ]

Kurtz's article is all 'hat' and no 'cattle' -- pretty weak journalism. What exactly did Obama & Ayers conspire to do together? Crickets, crickets, crickets... Hmm, get back to us on that one Stanley. Maybe you have more boxes to go through.

If the Obama campaign was really worried about Ayers, we'd be seeing wall to wall Keating Five ads by now.

BTW, I heard Bill Clinton use to run drugs in Arkansas and murdered some people along the way. Yeah, yeah that's it. Let's get Stanley to write a hard hitting 'story' on that one too.

[glenda waggoner]

Hit-quick response? That's because you are our very important guy!

Where are the republican 527's on this? Surely, a swift-ad seems appropriate!

By the way, because here in Texas, we take care of our own...there have been no press hoards reporting our poor and ??? have been
ignored by the Feds as in New Orleans. Nothing to bash Bush about, so no news coverage about the devasted communities here. I loathe hypocrisy! But when we have a 4th estate that will not question their wunderkind, how will Kurtz's words be known universally?
PFFFTTTT!

[AJ]

Kurtz's article is all 'hat' and no 'cattle' -- pretty weak journalism. What exactly did Obama & Ayers conspire to do together? Crickets, crickets, crickets... Hmm, get back to us on that one Stanley. Maybe you have more boxes to go through.

If the Obama campaign was really worried about Ayers, we'd be seeing wall to wall Keating Five ads by now.

BTW, I heard Bill Clinton use to run drugs in Arkansas and murdered some people along the way. Yeah, yeah that's it. Let's get Stanley to write a hard hitting 'story' on that one too.

[ex-democrat]

"What exactly did Obama & Ayers conspire to do together?

you mean, besides divert monies aimed at educational improvement into a secret scheme to revolutionize society from within? who knows? but it certainly does beg the question, yes.

[MayBee]

I wonder why Obama didn't just release a statement similar to the one he gave Kurtz today, rather than send out the alert to harass him at WGN.

He's had to be pushed, kicking and screaming, to even get this far. The press shouldn't like this.

[AJ]

Let me know when you find that 'secret' memo.

Darn, and I thought W. was trying to 'revolution' education with "No Child Left Behind." Talk about a boondoggle! Guess we'll have come up some more meaningless words.

BTW, can you prove you stopped beating up your spouse? Didn't think so.

[MayBee]

BTW, can you prove you stopped beating up your spouse? Didn't think so

Funny you should bring that up. Did you know David Axelrod got fellow Democrat Brett Hull out of one of Obama's races by publicly asking him about spousal abuse, then having his divorce records unsealed?

[DrJ]

I'll repost what I wrote in the other thread, because that one now seems to be dead.

I view Kurtz's article as "CAC for Beginners," and that he is using this one to raise public awareness and to provide a basis for subsequent articles.

Diamond's follow-up is worthwhile too -- he goes to his expected theme (of authoritarianism), and fills out the local scene well. He asks the question, why did Annenberg fund the effort if it was so leftist, and his answer is that it was intended to fight the Chicago bureaucracy and the teachers' unions. That to me is only a slightly better explanation.

My guess is that both are present, and Annenberg funded this approach as one of a basket of approaches to see what worked.

Does anyone know how the Annenberg grants made to other locations worked in practice?

[DrJ]

Hit,

Where did you see a link to "CAC files" in Jurtz's piece? I didn't see it in the article or the side bar (at least if you view it from the WSJ the Editorial Page" email link).

[DrJ]

Kurtz, not Jurtz. Jeez. (Keez?)

[Sue]

MayBee,

I wonder why Obama didn't just release a statement similar to the one he gave Kurtz today,

Do you have a link to Obama's response? I can't seem to find it on my own.

[hit and run]

DrJ,

It was his NRO article that had the link…

I’ll have more to say about that issue down the road, but you can read the key evaluations for yourself. (See Dorothy Shipps et al.,”The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” here; Alexander Russo, “From Frontline Leader to Rearguard Action: The Chicago Annenberg Challenge,” here; and Mark A. Smylie et al., “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for the Future, Part ,1 here and especially Part 2, here.)

That's without the links (on my blackberry, kinda laborious). The Alexander Russo eval is the one that points to sonatbio, but still has the bad link. I'm sure Kurtz has to notify someone else to actually fix the link in the article.

[PDinDetroit]

OT - Looks like the Gas Prices will rise in Detroit again - 12,000 Gallons of Gas close to going up in a Tanker Fire. I-75 is shutdown...

[DrJ]

Thanks, hit. The NRO piece was much better than the WSJ one, and does indicate that more is coming. That's good.

I did find Obama's response to be a classic for misdirection and putting a positive spin on an explosive situation. It is nicely done for their purposes, though Kurtz deals well with it.

[MayBee]

Sue-
Here in Kurtz's http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTViMGRmMmYxZTgwZTFjYmFjODU5YzM4Y2MwM2ViMjY=>NRO article. (scroll down)

part of it:

Barack Obama months ago confirmed that he had contact with Ayers during the course of his foundation work, and he pointed out that “We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education”. Senator Obama also said earlier this year that Ayers was “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis”, a fact that is not in any way contradicted by their contact through the Annenberg Challenge which ended 12 years ago, or by any of the Challenge records.

No mention of there being 'no evidence' they had any kind of relationship, of Ayers just being a guy in the neighborhood, or of their kids going to school together.

[hit and run]

Sue, Kurtz put it in that same NRO article.

[MayBee]

Kurtz should publicly ask Obama if he would be willing to be interviewed by Kurtz.

[clarice]

Why did Annenberg give these goofballs the CAC money? He didn't the money lifke most foundation funds (often set up by rich conservatices0 is now in the hands of goofballs who will only fund wacko projects by leftists.
You can do a lot to save the world if you encourage all the rich folks you know to spend their $$ on wine women and song (and yachts and cars) and forget about giving it back, doing good, etc etc.

[Sue]

Sue, Kurtz put it in that same NRO article.

That's too simple. Make it harder. Please?????

[sylvia]

"One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation?"

Ah hah. Exactly. Something about Obama makes me question. He's had some shadowy sponsors, it seems. Maybe he's personally innocent, but you know what they say, if you dine with the devil...

[MayBee]

clarice- exactly. It is just the kind of thing one opens oneself up to, to donate money to help a cause you know little about. Except that it needs fixing.
One can be convinced by the best convincers, and not necessarily by those best qualified to fix the problem.

[sylvia]

You know it's amazing how far in life you can go giving a decent speech. Seems Obama was catapulted to the top because of it, Sarah Palin was handpicked for it. I suppose it's one of the few skills that are cash in the bank if you are lucky enough to have it, like being over 5' 10" for a female, or being able to swing a bat and hit the baseball.

[paladin2]

Palin should issue a direct challenge to the media to send investigators to Chicago.

[paladin2]

Palin should issue a direct challenge to the media to send investigatorsto Chicago

[ex-democrat]

AJ - try to move your finger a bit more slowly when reading: then you may notice, for example, that the phrase "revolutionize society" is not quite the same as "'revolution[ize]' education."
oh, and by the way, einstein, if there is evidence that you've been beating your wife when you are running for President you damn well better have evidence that you've stopped.

[ben]

"What exactly did Obama & Ayers conspire to do together?"

One is an unrepentant terrorist bomber....so does it really matter?

[bad]

One author of a book about Obama believes Tom Ayers was behind the Annenberg grant being awarded to Bill Ayers. The person I heard was probably Brad O'Leary, author of "The Audacity of Deceit, Barack Obama's War on America. Steve Diamond is referenced often in this book.

Brad's point was that it is highly unlikely that an unrepentant terrorist, formerly on the FBI's most wanted list, could score a $50 million grant without some serious persuading by someone of influence and someone who could offer assurances.

Tom Ayers is the most likely person.

The book is LUN at Amazon.

[Miri]

Speaking of sports: MayBee, please. It was Blair Hull, not Brett Hull, the hockey player. Understandable mistake, but Brett might object.

You're right about how Obama did in his opponent Hull. He did the same to Jack Ryan, but the media carried the water for him in that instance, as usual. They managed to get Republican Ryan's divorce/custody records unsealed and then they published explosive allegations that his ex-wife made in the heat of the custody battle. She was TV star Jeri Ryan, which only added to the publicity (not to mention the MSM's excuse for running the "story" in the first place, despite that they were asked not to run it for the sake of the children involved.) I believe that since then, she's owned up to exaggerating those allegations, to say the least. But it came too late for Ryan and the rest is history.

I don't think that Obama's ever been elected FAIRLY to any office. He won the state senate (primary?) by getting all of his opponents, including the African-American female incumbent, thrown off the ballot on technicalities.

IMHO, Obama and Ayers met in California, during the 1980s. That may explain why he chose Chicago, of all places, to begin his political career. I suspect that there is something about Obama's stint at Occidental that he is hiding, big time.

Most of what we "know" about Obama comes from his admittedly fictional autobiography.

I heard yesterday that Charlie Gibson's show, when he interviewed Obama, claimed that Obama graduated first in his class from Harvard. That's a new one on me.

How does anyone know--especially the media since they don't vet him--that he was first in class or even, as claimed, that he graduated magna cum laude?

Has he ever released his transcripts? Has anyone ever personally backed up these claims to genius, other than "himself"?

He's extremely secretive about his schooling, grades, associates, and activities while in college. Why?

He mentions those college loans so often that a bell goes off in my head every time I hear it. Disinformation?

It's at least possible that somebody bankrolled his career. Who?

Does anyone know FOR SURE that he took out loans, much less that he and Michelle paid them back all by their little selves?

BTW, who paid for him to spend time in Bali, finishing his memoirs?

Not to mention, who the heck pulled strings to get those memoirs by a relative unknown published in the first place?

Why did his associates in Chicago try to keep these Annenberg documents from Mr. Kurtz? (Reported elsewhere, not mentioned in this article.)

IF there's nothing to hide, then why hide it?

We're NOT talking about 35 years ago. We're talking about 1994-2001. His only "executive" experience, if you want to call it that.

He lied. Just like he lied when he claimed that he didn't know what Rev. Wright said in the pulpit over the past 20 years (even though Obama writes about it his book).

He lied. That's the bottom line. And then he pulled strings to try to keep the truth from coming out.

[Jimmy's Attack Rabbit]

Some of the CAC financed course material, (study guides, selected readings, etc.), should be interesting to read.

[Sara (Pal2Pal)]

I would like to spend a year in Bali writing my memoirs, which I'm convinced I could spice up to be much more interesting than Bambi's, where and how do I get the money to do that?

[RichatUF]

Miri-

IMHO, Obama and Ayers met in California, during the 1980s....

Doubtful. Obama was only in LA for 2 years (curious whom he may have met which would have taken him to Pakistan?) while Ayers and Dohrn were still in hiding at the time. The most plausable place they met before Chicago was in NYC between 1982-1985. They both would have been going to school in the Morningside Heights area at the same time, though their time at Columbia doesn't overlap.

[pagar]

"I'm left with the question ...
who paid for Obama's time at Harvard ?

Here is a new article from Newsmax with more on the Khalid Al-Mansour story:

"He referred Newsmax to a pro-Obama blog published on Politico.com by reporter Ben Smith.

In a September 3 blog entry, Smith wrote that “a spokesman for Sutton’s family, Kevin Wardally” said that Sutton had been mistaken when he made those comments about Obama and Khalid Al-Mansour."

"Newsmax contacted the Sutton family and they categorically denied Wardally’s claims to Smith and the Politico.com. So there was no retraction of Sutton’s original interview, during which he revealed that Khalid Al-Mansour was “raising money” for Obama and had asked Sutton to write a letter of recommendation for Obama to help him get accepted at Harvard Law School."

It would seem there is more than meets the eye to the Sutton Story. My guess is if that puzzle is solved,, we would be a whole lot closer to knowing-who sent Obama.

LUN

[JM Hanes]

I think Steve Diamond is over-sensitive about red paintbrushing for reasons that strike me as more political than scholarly:

Ironically, while Kurtz wants to tar Obama with the red paint brush of the 60s "radical" Ayers, an understanding of the real purpose of the CAC indicates a much closer political alliance between Obama and Ayers.

The grant application itself and much of what the CAC was up to emerged in the heated "Chicago School Wars" underway in that city from the late 1980s until the late 1990s. This war was for the control of Chicago's public schools.

Diamond stops short of asking the most important question of why they were battling for that control in the first place -- which is precisely where the "radical" agenda comes into play. He insists that the objective was authoritarian control of Chicago Education, but resists examining what that authoritarian control was expected to achieve. Nor does he address the apparent fact that, contra his thesis, the centralized control and union domination of the city's school system which Ayers et al were fighting hardly resembles a retreat from authoritarian governance.

Diamond also undercuts his own answer to what he identifies as a pivotal question here:

Ayers speaks widely of his commitment to "social justice" teaching where he sees the classroom as the potential starting point of revolutionary consciousness.  Such nonsense deserves the derision the Kurtz piece suggests.

But one is left wondering, would the national Annenberg Challenge program have really awarded Ayers nearly $50 million if this kind of silliness were the real purpose of the CAC....

Could anyone have realistically expected such an agenda to have improved student outcomes?

When Diamond, himself replies, saying, "I doubt it," he fails, again, to ask the next logical question here either. Assuming Ayers knew the answer to those questions at the outset too, why would he package his proposal as an attempt to subvert the curriculum rather than improve performance? It makes perfect sense to sell the very reform position Diamond himself lays out:

And the other side was led by Ayers and a small group of reformers that had emerged several years earlier in 1988 during a battle to create a new power center in the Chicago schools, the so-called Local School Councils, or LSCs.  The LSCs were an effort to rein in the power of unionized teachers, school principals and school administrators, in the wake of an unpopular teachers' strike in 1987.

The Collaborative, which determined virtually all the particulars of where the money actually went, was immediately detached from the fundraisers who sat on CAC's Board, and it quasi-independent fashion determined where the bulk of CAC funds were committed with, at best, only nominal oversight. While, Diamond dismisses of "the right wing's simplistic view of "radicalism," his own singleminded emphasis on the "authoriatarian" Ayers agenda, seems quite at odds with decentralized model Ayers was pushing and airily ignores the specifics of the curriculum Ayers has consistently touted.

After I answer the phone, I'll crosspost this comment at Quasiblog.

[jpe]

Can't yall get back to real stories, like what scarves Rachel Ray wears?

[JM Hanes]

New Ayers thread is up.

[Mack Johnson]

The following article with preface may be distributed. If used, please contact the author before editing and publication. The author has written and researched for the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Jewish Information Network, among others.

Synopsis: The author opens citing the work of Mr. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. Mr. Cohen’s columns about the “composites,” rearranged timelines, and complete fabrication of events in Sen. Obama’s autobiography are the basis for a further investigation into Mr. Obama’s claim to be “African-American.”

(NOTE: This IS NOT a rehash of the discredited discussion of either his education in Islamic schools, or any other ties to Islam. His religion, and education, outside of citing his Harvard attendance, play no role whatsoever in this article. THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS NEW, PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED documentation concerning his ethnic identity claims. It is based upon original research that the author openly invites for further inquiry and academic verification in his preface to Mr. Cohen.)

Documentation of his actual ethnic background demonstrates Mr. Obama is not an “African-American” as defined in United States law. This research was initiated by a request from a daily news publication of international reputation in New York City.

The story then moves to documenting his father’s genealogy. This study indicates Sen. Obama is actually Arab-American. The significance of this is that “the soul and substance of Mr. Obama’s claim to fame” rest entirely on his being “the first” African-American to achieve whatever it is that Mr. Obama is claiming at the time. If Mr. Obama is not legally an African-American, then his claims collapse. While there may still be historic firsts, for example, being the first Arab-American to be the president of the Harvard Law Review, those claims are not the star-appeal of his entire political life, and the basis of his current celebrity star status. If he is not African-American, then he is not what has propelled him up the political ladder; he is not, as described by one journalist riding Mr. Obama’s campaign plane, what is currently capturing America’s “cult” attention.

The author includes a section that notes the double-standard Oprah Winfrey applied in her handling of Mr. Obama’s autobiographical fabrications vis a vis her reaction to much less in a book by another author she promoted. It calls upon her to explain her double-standards, and asks, reasonably under the circumstances, if her double-standards are racist.

The article concludes by citing the importance of recognizing that Mr. Obama’s image of himself is built on lies. It challenges the reader to ask if his or her own racist presumptions of ethnic identity tied to physical appearance are at play.

The encapsulation of the final question put to the reader is to ask, “If we elect a person whose entire image is based on lies, and citing again the documentation of Mr. Cohen and the Washington Post to show he continues to lie without conscience as a matter of habit, should the burden fall upon him when we feel the anger of being lied to, or in fact, is it we who should be the object of our anger when it is we who first lied to ourselves when we decided to accept his lies, knowing all along that he was lying to us?”

Monday, Feb. 11, 2008

To: Richard Cohen, Columnist, the Washington Post

From: Kenneth E. Lamb
[email protected]

Dear Mr. Cohen:

Earlier today, I sent you an email about Sen. Obama. In the course of reviewing it for final draft, I made some changes; for one thing, I upped the number of references to your columns. What follows below is the final draft – it varies significantly from the prior draft by placing more responsibility upon “us” of the American body politic for lying to ourselves, and using racist presumptions to allow Mr. Obama to lie to us as well.

With this amendment, I send to you what I hope will be the first read of the article, and hopefully it may provoke all of us to reexamine ourselves in light of the Obama mania sweeping America.

That said, the rest of the email and article follows with the introduction I sent below for the sake of continuity with my previous communication to you. While similar at first, it is now much more pointed in its condemnation of us for lying to ourselves, again, about whom we elect, and why.

Dear Mr. Cohen:

I’m using my real name for this, even though I’m not a celebrity so you won’t recognize it; I’m doing it because what will follow is a matter I’m serious about, and I believe you are serious about it too.

There is a professional reason that I am emailing this to you as well. I use your name in it and cite your columns in five different places in this article, and so I owe you the professional respect of making you aware of it.

I’ve written for the NY Times, the Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Jewish Information Network. I add this upfront for credibility. I know you are flooded with crackpots, so I admit that as someone whose name you don’t know, I’m trying to establish my credibility at the top of this email to you.

That said, I would be happy to discuss the contents of the article below with you. It was a News Corp. publication that I refer to in stating the genesis of the research that follows, although I don’t name it for general circulation.

Again, everything in this article is documented, and I can get with your choice of researchers to have them document my documentation.

Let me close this preface with the close I use for my article below:

“Why am I writing this? Maybe I just want a clear conscience, clear that the research I did didn’t get buried because the people who received it are afraid to tell the truth in the face of Sen. Obama’s frenzied celebrity status. I’ve been in the business since 1972 - 35 years - writing and researching for people like the NY Times, the Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, The Jewish Information Network, so I know what it’s like on the newsroom floor right now. Nobody can dare speak against Sen. Obama without generating at least a flickering flame of doubt about his or her own sanity – not to mention the knee-jerk reaction that questioning him is indicative of some deep, dark, racist agenda spurring those questions on.

“And truth? I ask as Pilate asked, ‘What is truth?’ Who cares about truth? This is history; this is the first time ever in America – why let truth get in the way of chronicling history? (. . . I wrote facetiously.)

“Maybe I just want to know that if he gets the presidency, he will get it honestly – if this is general knowledge, and he overcomes it. Maybe I’m just tired of presidents who lie to us; and in this case, I already know Mr. Obama will lie to us, just as he lied in his autobiography, and on so many other occasions documented by Mr. Cohen, by the Washington Post’s fact checker, and so many others.

“And maybe I’m tired of us lying to ourselves. Mr. Obama is what we’ve lied ourselves into believing he is.

“Maybe by saying that I know he lied, and saying that we lied to ourselves, I will say after he is elected that nobody has any right to complain about him lying after he takes the oath of office, when everybody knew he lied about so many other things – when we lied to ourselves about so many other things, so very long before that.”

Here goes:

By Kenneth E. Lamb

Sen. Obama's autobiography is filled with "composite" characters, rearranged timelines, and fantasy events that never occurred. I read that twice in the Washington Post - read Richard Cohen's columns of Jan. 1, 2008, and March 27, 2007, for yourself.

There are more articles than that, by more authors than just Mr. Cohen, but I wanted to get started by saying that what follows isn't just something I'm pulling out of thin air. What follows is serious, documented, and not at all what those who want to write history about the election of the first so-called "African-American" president, want in the least to admit is true - and why its truth matters more than their desire to ignore the truth for the sake of their desire to write history.

While his shrill wife objects, the truth is that Sen. Obama's life, as he wrote about himself in his autobiography, is, in fact, nothing but a fairy tale. Again, don't take my word for it - read Mr. Cohen's, and others, articles about it.

If what Mr. Cohen writes are truths, then what Mr. Obama wrote are lies. It's just as simple as that.

Yet there is not one word from the "Last Bastions of Accuracy" that comprise our first-tier information enterprises about the complete lack of integrity Sen. Obama shows with his fictional life history. He lies, but his lies are swept under the rug by a groupthink mentality that is so desperate to regain leadership positions - as opposed to actual leadership programs to earn those leadership positions - that it ignores the truth that Sen. Obama lies - about himself, about his life, about his actions - and even about his racial composition.

I researched what follows for a NY daily of international reputation. It wasn't what I thought I'd find. I documented it, presented it to the Washington Bureau Chief, but was hardly surprised that it never saw ink. As you'll see for yourself, this is the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

I must pause very briefly to note usage of the word Negro in what follows: In all academic studies of race, the proper scientific word for the ethnic composition I discuss is Negro. For any who scream racist at its mention, I say take it up with the scientific community. It's not my word, it's theirs. I am using it in its proper scientific context.

Why is the fact that Mr. Obama is only 6.25% African Negro not reported?

Because to acknowledge it is to report this devastating truth about him: Mr. Obama is not legally African-American. It is impossible for him to be, in truth, America's first African-American president.

Federal law requires that to claim a minority status, you must be at least 1/8 of the descriptor, but for the sake of this article, I've converted it to a decimal fraction for easier comprehension. You must be at least 12.5% of the racial component you claim for minority status. Mr. Obama, claiming to be African-American, is half the legal threshold.

Again, to let it sink in: Mr. Obama is not legally African-American. It is impossible for him to be, in truth, America's first African-American president.

Yet claiming to be African-American is the soul and substance of his claim to fame. It is what he has used throughout his adult life to distinguish himself from other competitors. It is the ethnic identity he proclaims, and it is the ethnic identity he craves. Without it, he is just another mixed race Caucasian Arab with an African influence playing on his skin’s pigmentation.

But no matter what he craves, no matter what he has used to propel himself through life, no matter the racist presumption of seeing his skin and without question calling him black, the hard, cold, genetically inarguable reality remains: he is not an African-American.

Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian, that from his mother. What those who want Mr. Obama to write history by becoming "America's first African-American president" ignore is that his father was ethnically Arabic, with only 1 relative ethnically African Negro - a maternal great-grandparent (Sen. Obama's great-great grandparent, thus the 6.25% ethnic contribution to the senator's ethnic composition.).

That means that Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother's side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father's side.

Put another way, his father could honestly claim African-American ethnic classification. He was the last generation able to do so.

Sen. Obama could honestly say, "My father was African-American." Racist presumptions led an Ivy League admissions committee, and lazy "newspapers of record" factcheckers, to presume that if his father is African-American, then Sen. Obama must be African-American also.

But it doesn't work that way. Racist presumptions coupled with sloppy vetting don't turn a lie into the truth.

Sen. Obama is one generation too far removed from the ethnic African Negro input to make the same claim as his father, Harvard's Admission's stamp of approval notwithstanding.

As you can see for yourself, Sen. Obama's African-American ethnic claim, when properly researched and documented, is a lie.

The question no one wants to answer - particularly Mr. Obama and his supporters, is, "Why do you think he has an Arabic name? Why does his father have an Arabic name? Why does every ancestor on his father's side have an Arabic name?"

The answer is obvious: They have Arabic names because his father's side of the family tree is Arabic.

Need proof? Research the Kenyan records for yourself. You will find that his father was officially classified as "Arab African" by the Kenyan government.

But in America's current political climate, that truth is heresy; that truth is "an inconvenient truth." It is the political equivalent in our time to what Galileo's scientific pronouncements were in his time: it is true, but nobody wants to know the truth because the lie is so much more comforting.

That is why detractors of this truth will do everything to denounce it, except submit to the discipline of actually researching it.

There's a reason for that: it proves he is not sufficiently Negro to earn classification under American law as an African-American.

For Sen. Obama, telling the truth means he will give up all the accolades about being the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, an accolade that relies on a sleight-of-hand in job titling that changed the name of the top job from Editor to President.

If stated in its absolute truth, Mr. Obama was the second person of color to run the Review. He was beat to the Review's top spot by a true African-American about 60 years before Mr. Obama showed up for classes.

Again, a very inconvenient truth.

That is devastating in itself. The further effect is that Mr. Obama would have to convince Americans still reeling from 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, that now is the time for America's first Arab-American president.

We all know what chance that has of succeeding.

Of course, that would only happen if Mr. Obama told the truth about his racial composition. To tell the truth means Mr. Obama will have to admit that which he has never been forced to admit before, even in the face of the massive lies of his autobiography: Mr. Obama's entire projection of who he is, and what he is, is a lie.

Mr. Obama would have to say to the world: "I am not what I've told you I am. I lied to you in my autobiography when I told you I am black. I lied to the Admission Committee at Harvard so I could get in. I lied to my constituents in Chicago so I could get elected to the State Senate. I lied to my constituents in Illinois so I could get elected to the US Senate. I lied to my supporters across America so I could be President.

"I have lied all during my life to play the race card, and use it, cynically, to advance myself by playing upon the racist presumption of Americans to accept, without question, that anyone of color is African-American. I lied to you, and you blindly accepted it, because of your own racist presumptions about color, and ethnic identity. I looked African-American, and your racist presumptions told you to believe it."

Even as you read this, the overwhelming majority of you will continue to believe it. Even as you know the truth, you will block the truth out of your mind, because you are bred to accept the racist presumption of color, and ethnic identity.

And so many of you reading this will create incredible mental gymnastics, telling yourself why the truth doesn't matter. You will lie to yourself because you want to believe the lie, and then curse the American body politic for being built on lies.

You will do this all while failing to tell yourself the truth that it is your lies, as much as any other lies, that are killing the body. You will commit the very action that you curse as the cause of America's demise, because you are jaded beyond recognizing in yourself the very same disease you so freely condemn in others.

Here is the truth about Mr. Obama's name, and his father's ancestors:

True Negro tribal members of western Kenya where his father was born have Christian names, not Arabic. His father's decision to name him with an Arabic name is a matter of his father establishing his ethnic identity in Africa - it is done deliberately to separate him from the African tribes. He may live among them, but he is not one of them. His father's message is that he is Arabic, not Negro.

Many will find these truths unsettling. I'm often asked, "But I thought his father was Kenyan. How could Mr. Obama not be African-American, how could his ethnic composition be so Arabic?"

The definitive clue to that answer is to look at his name, his father's name, and the names of all his ancestors on his father's side. They are all Arabic.

Researching his roots reveal that on his father's side, he is descended from Arab slave traders. They operated under an extended grant from Queen Victoria, who gave them the right to continue the slave trade in exchange for helping the British defeat the Madhi Army in southern Sudan and the Upper Nile region. Funny how circular is history; now the British again face the Madhi Army, albeit this time Shiite, not Sunni, as in nineteenth century Sudan.

But telling America's black community that while their ancestors were breaking the shackles of slavery, Mr. Obama's ancestors were placing those shackles upon their wrists would hardly play as an Oprah Winfrey best-seller.

Being the son of a poor Kenyan goat-herder plays much better than being the son of a highly placed Arab-African who operated at the top of the Kenyan government following his education at Columbia. You see, even the way he portrays his father is a lie.

We need to linger for a moment on Ms. Winfrey, and her support for Mr. Obama. A very serious problem arises with Ms. Winfrey because of her double-standards: Does everyone remember how she went ballistic when a person whose book she endorsed turned out to be dishonest about what he said about his life in his book?

Of course you do. She pulled the plug on him and forced him into a highly publicized "Mea Culpa" of near groveling for her forgiveness. She publicly humiliated him, and would actually twist-up into contorted faces, visibly hot with anger.

Why then does Ms. Winfrey operate with a double standard for Mr. Obama? She knows his so-called autobiography is replete with "composites" - an Orwellian word for fictional characters that never existed but in Mr. Obama's imagination, even though he addresses them in his autobiography as if they are real people. They aren't; they are lies.

So are his timelines, chopped up and rearranged for Mr. Obama's aggrandizement. And there are the complete lies about events he said specifically impacted his life - events that never occurred despite his writing that they did. They too are lies.

As I said, don’t take my word for it; read Mr. Cohen’s columns in the Washington Post for the details.

Why then does she not hold him to the same standards she held another author?

She doesn't say, but the possibility that the reason is race-based is fair to ask. What Mr. Obama did is far beyond what the other author did. Why then, public humiliation for one, but campaign whistle-stops for the other?

Ms. Winfrey needs to tell us why. Her integrity is on the line.

Mr. Obama has struggled all his life trying to prove that he is black enough to be called black.

The truth is that if Mr. Obama is elected, his primary ethnic composition is Caucasian, but of course, that carries no cachet.

So if we look at his next predominant ethnic component, Mr. Obama would be America's first Arab-American president. The truth is that his name says it all.

What amazes me more than anything else about Mr. Obama's heritage is the unwillingness of anyone in the journalism profession to want to know the truth. While all this is easily documentable, it is so radioactive that no one wants to be on the receiving end of the racist charges that will bombard whoever broaches the truth.

It is another example of how America's political system is further degenerating into fairy tales and lies. Torpedo boat attacks in Viet Nam, WMD's in Iraq, Sen. Obama is African-American; we shamelessly lie to ourselves to rationalize whatever we want to believe.

But I wrote this tonight because I'm tired of reading about "integrity" written by those who have none themselves. They know Mr. Obama's autobiography is filled with lies from start to finish, they know he lies about what his operatives do (the Apple advertisement knock-off against Hills immediately comes to mind), and for those who circulated my research, they know he is not legally black.

But for those longing for Camelot, for those who feel a good story trumps the truth, for those who are so jaded about others that they now live as those they profess to hate, for those who are terrorized by the racist attacks these truths bring, the integrity of Sen. Obama doesn't matter.

Because their own integrity doesn't matter to them either.

Why am I writing this? Maybe I just want a clear conscience, clear that the research I did didn’t get buried because the people who received it are afraid to tell the truth in the face of Sen. Obama’s frenzied celebrity status. I’ve been in the business since 1972 - 35 years - writing and researching for people like the NY Times, the Miami Herald, the St. Petersburg Times, The Jewish Information Network, so I know what it’s like on the newsroom floor right now. Nobody can dare speak against Sen. Obama without generating at least a flickering flame of doubt about his or her own sanity – not to mention the knee-jerk reaction that questioning him is indicative of some deep, dark, racist agenda spurring those questions on.

And truth? I ask as Pilate asked, “What is truth?” Who cares about truth? This is history; this is the first time ever in America – why let truth get in the way of chronicling history? (. . . I wrote facetiously.)

Maybe I just want to know that if he gets the presidency, he will get it honestly – if this is general knowledge, and he overcomes it. Maybe I’m just tired of presidents who lie to us; and in this case, I already know Mr. Obama will lie to us, just as he lied in his autobiography, and on so many other occasions documented by Mr. Cohen, by Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post’s factchecker, and so many others.

And maybe I’m tired of us lying to ourselves. Mr. Obama is what we’ve lied ourselves into believing he is.

Maybe by saying that I know he lied, and saying that we lied to ourselves, I will say after he is elected that nobody has any right to complain about him lying after he takes the oath of office, when everybody knew he lied about so many other things – when we lied to ourselves about so many other things, so very long before that.

[ted]

I have just spent a couple of hours trying to hack my way through the reports and the limited academic literature on what the CAC was trying to do. And there are only three things that are clear to me.

1.) No one has done the work from an objective enough viewpoint to figure out what exactly the CAC did and to explain it in a straightfoward fashion. And Kurz does not fit my definition of objective.

2.) Annenberg gave the money to Chicago with the understanding that it would be used to promote some development in the forms of community control that had been mandated by the 1988 changes in state law that had promoted decentralization. In 1995, when the money arrived, the law had changed to recentralize political power in the mayor's hand. This meant that all previous bets were and everyone was scrambling to figure out how to act in the new system.

3.) There are an unbelievably complex set of actors out there shaping the overall outcome of the fight over Chicago schools. If you look at who received the money with any objectivity, you will see that the idea that this money was being used for some socialist/Marxist/revolutionary plot is highly unlikely. Ayers might at some point this might contribute to this process, but that is clearly not the way that Chicago school politics work.

My humble suggestion--if you want to contribute to our understanding of what the CAC was all about. Brew yourself a big pot of strong coffee and dig into the reports and then the docs that are being posted from the UIC archives. Good luck.