OBAMA’S FRIENDSHIP WITH PFLEGER ( Who is Obama?)

THE AUDACITY OF TRUTH ABOUT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA

I think this is from a Left leaning website...but still gives us some background on Obama...

Another from the Web Site:

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6/1/2008

He’s going to get away with it, of course. No one will dare point to the fact that once again, Barack Obama has disposed of a problem, not by addressing the cause but rather the political garbage that goes along with it.

After 20 years association, the near nominee has decided to end his association with Trinity United Church.

Was it because of the racist, hate mongering sermons of Jeremiah Wright?

Was it because his church has embraced Louis Farrakhan?

Was it because the church allowed a Roman Catholic priest to preach sermons that ape the worst of Reverend Wright’s rants against whites and America?

Was it because almost everything about the church was far from mainstream Christian thought and that he finally rebelled against the message of hate that spewed from its pulpit for 20 years?

Not according to the candidate himself:

“We don’t want to have to answer for everything that’s stated in the church,” the Democratic front-runner said. “We also don’t want the church subjected to the scrutiny that a presidential campaign legitimately undergoes.”
Obama said he was resigning “with some sadness.”
“This is not a decision I come to lightly,” he said. Watch Obama discuss departure »
The resignation comes days after the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a visiting Catholic priest, mocked Obama’s Democratic rival during a sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois.
In the sermon, Pfleger wipes his eyes with a handkerchief and suggests that Sen. Hillary Clinton wept because she thought that as a white person and the wife of a former president, she was entitled to the presidency.
Pfleger is a Catholic priest at St. Sabina Roman Catholic Church on Chicago’s southwest side. He is also a friend of Trinity’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, from whom Obama distanced himself in April.
Obama said the Pfleger controversy made it clear that, as long as he remained a member of the Trinity congregation, remarks from the pulpit would be “imputed” to him, even if they conflicted with his personal views.

In addition to being friends with Wright, Pfleger is also a long time friend of Barack Obama, a relationship that goes back almost as far as the candidate’s relationship with Wright. While in the state senate, Obama steered around $300,000 to various programs headed up by Father Pfleger while the bigot priest gave Obama $1500 in political contributions over the years. Obama has also claimed Pfleger as one of his “spiritual mentors” and the priest has been hanging around the campaign off and on over the past year, offering his “mentoring” whenever the candidate has hit a rough patch.

bring this up because CNN didn’t think it was newsworthy to mention the close, personal relationship Obama has with Pfleger – which is another reason why the candidate is going to slide on the real reason he is quitting the church.

Representative Robert Wexler of Florida gives the media its marching orders:

Some Obama supporters, including U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler of Florida, said that disconnecting from the church signaled a chance for the campaign to move on.
“I think it bodes well for us in the general election that we can put whatever issues there were behind us in respect to the church,” Wexler said.

Don’t worry, Bob. The media already never heard of Trinity Church, or Wright, or Moss, or Meeks, or Pfleger. They are now officially “non-associates” of Barack Obama and can be safely ignored.

What then, to make of Obama’s quitting Trinity Church? Once again, Obama has proven himself to lack any kind of political courage. He makes the Cowardly Lion look like Audie Murphy. He once again tries the straddle approach – trying to disentangle himself from a political problem without alienating his base. And once again, political expediency and not conscience or moral outrage guides his actions.

The calculating nature of this move is made obvious by asking the one, simple, question that no one in the media has yet even raised by my reading so far; what the hell took you so long, Barry? No one believes the candidate when he says he never heard Wright utter his foul diatribes against America and against white people over 20 years of sitting in the pews at Trinity Church. That doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Nor does anyone believe him when he says he was “surprised” at Father Pfleger’s rants. Everyone in Chicago is familiar with Pfleger’s views on whites and on America. Much more so than Wright, Pfleger has been a fixture on local news and is good for a colorful quote or two whenever the media needs one on race or housing or on the Iraq War.

To repeat, what took you so long Obama? The fact is, as long as belonging to Trinity was a political plus – contacts with the movers and shakers in the black community as well as demonstrating his “authentic” blackness to his constituents – Obama embraced his church.

But now, running for president and having his pastor and church exposed as radical adherents to Black Liberation Theology, Obama throws them under the bus without hesitation. (Would that he was so decisive in matters of policy.). They have become a drag, a hindrance to his ambitions and must go the way of his other friends and associates he has summarily dismissed from his royal presence.

You wonder what Tony Rezko is thinking after spending years in promoting the young Obama to where now he stands on the threshold of the presidency and because of his trial, the candidate makes out as if he barely knows Rezko. Same goes for Bill Ayers who plucked Obama from obscurity and made him head of Ayer’s baby – the Chicago Annenberg Challenge – only to see the candidate describe his close relationship with Ayers as him being “just a neighbor.”

He tried to downplay his relationship with Wright, with Pfleger, with Reverend James Meeks (another radical bigot) – anyone and everyone who has proven themselves to be a danger to his ambitions has either been tossed on the garbage heap or dismissed as inconsequential.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Let us take Obama at his word for the moment and pretend that he has a ghost of a chance in realizing his campaign promises to bring “change” to Washington. Doesn’t matter how (the candidate hasn’t told us anyway). Whatever plan he comes up with will demand political courage. He will be going up against the most entrenched of interests who will fight tooth and nail to maintain their privileges and access.

But Obama has shown no sign of possessing the kind of political courage it would take to realize any of his goals with regard to “changing” Washington. This should be obvious even to his most rabid supporters. He has never gone against his party. He has never crossed the aisle to work in a bi-partisan manner on anything consequential. (His anti-Iraq war stance took about as much political courage as an alley cat has. He wasn’t running for any federal office and his state senate district makes Berkley look like Utah as far as ideological makeup is concerned.). In short, Obama is a Flim-Flam Man who has gotten away (so far) with relying on a friendly media to cover his ass for him as he tries to put radical after radical in his past behind him.

Pretty soon, the media is going to have Obama looking like a mainstream politician – something I didn’t think was possible but now believe that is the ultimate goal of the campaign. The sad fact is, as long as Obama doesn’t murder some one between now and the election, he stands a very good chance of winning.

By: Rick Moran at 8:42 am

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing it with us. We need all the info we can get on the Obamanation.

fyi

From the second piece at post #5:

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Same goes for Bill Ayers who plucked Obama from obscurity and made him head of Ayer’s baby – the Chicago Annenberg Challenge – only to see the candidate describe his close relationship with Ayers as him being “just a neighbor.”

**********************************From the Just One Minute Blog**********************

April 27, 2008

Just Fact-Checking

Barack Obama has a new entanglement with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers which I detail below. The gist is this - back in the mid-90's Bill Ayers was instrumental in the creation and early operation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an effort committed to the reform of Chicago's public schools. Barack Obama was Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which suggests he worked closely with Ayers for several years.

Yet in his recent nationally televised appearances and at his website, Obama fails to mention this Ayers entanglement. Why so coy? It's hard to believe he actually forgot his executive role in this important foray into public policy; that said, the Chicago Challenge foundered on the hard rocks of Chicago politics and was widely viewed as ineffective, so perhaps he would prefer not to highlight his failure to bring people together and produce real change.

Or maybe Obama was a do-nothing figurehead who honestly forgot that Bill Ayers was running the show. Awkward spin, that. In any case, there is also a question of shared values. Ayers brings a highly progressive approach to education - dare we ask whether Obama shares his values?

Details and plenty of background links after the break.

With Ayers, two themes are emerging:

(1) It's not the crime, it's the cover-up - why can't Obama manage to deliver a clear answer about his relationship with Ayers? It has long been reported that they both sat on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago. We now also know that Ayers helped found the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund, with Obama as the first Chairman of the Board. We also know that Obama, Thomas Ayers (Bill Ayers father) and John Ayers (Bill's brother) all served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund (described here as "the successor" to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge project).

That is a lot more of a connection than Obama has admitted in two recent appearances on national television or at his websites "Fact Check". At the Philadelphia debate, Ayers was described as

... a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

In Philadelphia, it was left to Hillary to mention the Woods Fund board overlap.

And on Fox News, Obama seemed utterly hazy as to what board he was on with Ayers, offering this:

Now, Mr. Ayres [Ayers] is a 60 plus year old individual who lives in my neighborhood, who did something that I deplore 40 years ago when I was six or seven years old. By the time I met him, he was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.

We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley. Mayor Daley, the same Mayor Daley probably who when he was a state attorney prosecuted Mr. Ayres’s wife for those activities, I (INAUDIBLE) the point is that to somehow suggest that in any way I endorse his deplorable acts 40 years ago, because I serve on a board with him.

Baffling - neither the Woods Fund of Chicago nor the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund could reasonably be described as working for Mayor Daley; the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Schools Education Fund fits that description, but it was the elder Ayers and the other Ayers who served with Obama on that board. There is a theory that Obama is pretty tight with the Ayers family, so maybe that caused his confusion.

Finally, the Obama website presents a "Fact Check on Clinton Attacks on Obama and Ayers" which makes no mention of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Fund. OK, given the fame of Annenberg's FactCheck organization, maybe this was a subconscious cry for recognition. But where is the transparency?

(2) The second emerging theme in this Ayers drama is, what about shared values? OK, so Barack was eight years old when Ayers was blowing things up. But Ayers brings a very, hmm, progressive mindset to his educational agenda, or so I glean from the Ayers website (or this panel presentation). So, does Barack share these views? Seems like a fair question, since Ayers helped found a group Barack promptly chaired.

We have moved a long way past the notion that Ayers was just some guy from Barack's neighborhood who happened to host a fundraiser for him in 1995 and later overlapped with him on a charity board. How much farther this story will move, and how much assistance Barack will provide in moving it, remains to be seen.

C'MON - I enjoy this drollery from the hardworking and surely underpaid chaps at Hot Air:

The obvious exit question: How closely did Obama and Ayers work together at the Challenge? It may be that they had little contact, that Ayers’s role ended in setting the thing up and he was sufficiently uninvolved in day to day operations that Obama sincerely forgot he was associated with the program.

Obama is a bit young to be having memory problems; surely he anticipated an Ayers question and gave the topic some thought. And in fact, he did describe an education-related board, not the Woods Fund board.

DIG IN: Background on the Annenberg Challenge; a final report on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge experience (271 page .pdf).

THIS WILL BECOME IMPORTANT: Some history of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge:

Having secured Annenberg funding for Chicago, the working group would soon evolve into a more formal organization, albeit with strong ties to the groups that wrote the grant proposal. Initially run out of shared space in the offices of the Cross-City Campaign and administered through an existing philanthropic organization called the Donors Forum, the Chicago Challenge soon became its own new foundation with status as an independent fiscal agent. By late 1995, Ken Rolling had been named executive director, a board of directors had been established, and the first round of grants had been awarded. Rolling lacked experience in education but came from the foundation world and was well-versed in community organizing. The board, which was intended to set policy, raise matching funds, and hire an executive director, included prominent educators and business leaders. A second entity, the newly-created Chicago School Reform Collaborative, was also established. Its twenty-plus members were elected from the group of educators and advocates who had helped shape the grant proposal. Initially, at least, this offshoot of the working group functioned as the operations arm of the Chicago Challenge. However, this situation created procedural and ethical concerns and in time the Collaborative was transformed into an advisory body.

Ayers was one of the three original leaders of the working group and eventually co-chaired the Chicago School Reform Collaborative (see his resume). His early involvement:

When three of Chicago's most prominent education reform leaders met for lunch at a Thai restaurant six years ago to discuss the just-announced $500 million Annenberg Challenge, their main goal was to figure out how to ensure that any Annenberg money awarded to Chicago "didn't go down the drain," said William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Ayers, who was at that lunch table in late 1993, helped write the successful Chicago grant application.

The point is that Ayers led the way in securing the Annenberg grant, then co-chaired the Collaborative, which was instrumental in the operation of the Chicago Challenge. It is not likely Barack Obama, as chair of the Board of Directors of the Challenge, was not working closely with the co-chair of the collaborative. At any rate, it is not at all plausible that he could have been unaware of Ayers' role and later forgotten it.

I see trouble in paradise as "Hope and change" morphs to "Hope we can change the subject."

France has learned it. England is learning it. Socialism is Suicide!

Our Constitution, based on Biblical truths, and the government which the forebears devised worked! It was when socialistic measures were devised in the thirties (by a left wing faction, and by secret societies) that we began to wobble.

And now being rendered even more insecure by an openly seditious Congress, pseudo gas prices, no border policy, and unfair trade practices, Obama, the viper, strikes. And the unread public is mesmerized!

If ever a nation needed prayer, it is America, and it is now!

"Pfleger is a very serious Christian and takes the words of Jesus Christ at their most literal"

Like hell he does. Anyone so full of hate hasn't a clue what Christ preached.

Excellent stuff here- thanks :)

It is STILL amazing, simply amazing to me that this man has reached as far, as fast as he’s done.

You might think he was carefully selected and moved ahead....

From another Blog:

Obama Served As Chairman Of Ayers Created “Chicago Annenberg Challenge”

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April, 28, 2008 — nicedeb

Just One Minute has been doing some fact checking on Obama’s relationship with unrepentant Weatherman Underground member, William Ayers.

As most of you know, Obama has repeatedly characterized his relationship with Ayers as insignificant…they lived in the same neighborhood, served on the same board… purely coincidental connections, (which doesn’t at all explain why he held a 1995 campaign event at the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow former terrorist Bernardine Dohrn).

Now, it appears that Obama and Ayers had a working relationship (friendship) that predates their work together on the Woods Fund of Chicago board.

Tom Maguire of Just One Minute:

Barack Obama has a new entanglement with unrepentant Weatherman Bill Ayers which I detail below. The gist is this - back in the mid-90’s Bill Ayers was instrumental in the creation and early operation of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an effort committed to the reform of Chicago’s public schools. Barack Obama was Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which suggests he worked closely with Ayers for several years.
Yet in his recent nationally televised appearances and at his website, Obama fails to mention this Ayers entanglement. Why so coy? It’s hard to believe he actually forgot his executive role in this important foray into public policy; that said, the Chicago Challenge foundered on the hard rocks of Chicago politics and was widely viewed as ineffective, so perhaps he would prefer not to highlight his failure to bring people together and produce real change.
Or maybe Obama was a do-nothing figurehead who honestly forgot that Bill Ayers was running the show. Awkward spin, that. In any case, there is also a question of shared values. Ayers brings a highly progressive approach to education - dare we ask whether Obama shares his values?

See Just One Minute for details and plenty of background links.

Here’s the segment of Obama’s interview on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace where he deals with his relationships with Reverend Wright, and William Ayers. The Ayers portion doesn’t start until about 7:28 in.

Here’s one place where my B.S. Detector started going off:

We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education, who worked for Mayor Daley.

Nobody is suggesting that the board was full of notorious thugs like Ayers, but Republicans? Are we supposed to believe that The Woods Fund of Chicago is a bipartisan organization? I suppose…but I decided to check the political affiliations of its members to see if that panned out, anyway.

Here’s a list of Woods Fund Members:

Accessed April 2008:

Staff

Deborah Harrington* - President
Suzanne R. Boyle*- Treasurer
Consuella L. Brown - Program Director
Deborah D. Clark - Grants and Operations Manager
Jeffrey T. Pinzino - Program Officer

Board of Directors and Officers

Laura S. Washington, Board Chair* - Ida B. Wells-Barnett University Professor and Fellow of the DePaul Humanities Center
Jesus G. Garcia, Vice Chair* - Executive Director, Little Village Community Development Corporation
William C. Ayers - Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago
Lee Bey- Director of Media and Governmental Affairs, Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill LLP
Doris Salomon Chagin- Category Manager - Ethnic Markets, BP Products North America
Beth E. Richie - Professor and Head of the Department of African American Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
Patrick M. Sheahan - Executive Director, Public Affairs, UBS Investment Bank
Charles N. Wheatley - President, Sahara Enterprises, Inc.
Lucia Woods Lindley - Board Member Emeritus

Other Officers

Kristin Patton* - Secretary
I give up. I couldn’t find any Republicans in the 2008 group. I either found them to be donors to Democrat candidates, or I found their bios to contain all the earmarks of Democrat activism, without being able to prove it, (I didn’t link to those). I doubt I’d find any Republicans in the 2001 group, either:
People (2001)
Staff:
Ricardo A. Millett - President
Todd Dietterle - Vice President - Program Director, Community Organizing Program
Deborah Harrington - Program Director, Enabling Work and Reducing Poverty
Phillip Thomas - Program Officer
Sally E. Gonzelez - Grants and Operations Manager

Board of Directors

Howard J. Stanback- Board Chair - Manager, New Kenwood, LLC
Maria G. Valdez - Board Vice Chair - Attorney-at-Law Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
William C. Ayers - Distinguished Professor Of Education, University Of Illinois At Chicago
Cynthia M. Campbell- President, Mccormick Theological Seminary
R. Eden Martin - President, Civic Committee And The Commercial Club
Barack Obama - State Senator And University Of Chicago School Of Law
Charles N. Wheatley - President, Sahara Enterprises, Inc.
Suzanne Boyle, Board Treasurer
Kristin Patton, Board Secretary

I may do some more investigating later, but color me skeptical of the idea that there have more than one or two token Republican Woods Fund members in the whole history of its existence.

Posted in Dems, Scandal!.

A Link from the Nice Deb Article just above is interesting....

Salon War Room:

Kinsley: Obama shouldn't be linked with Ayers

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By Alex Koppelman

Friday, May 30, 2008 18:15 EDT

Kinsley: Obama shouldn't be linked with Ayers

The connection between Barack Obama and former Weather Underground members Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, slightly tenuous though it may be, has already become something of an issue in this campaign, and it will no doubt only get more attention as we get closer to the fall. In a recent column, Michael Kinsley made a preemptive attack against the issue, calling it "absurd."

The connection between Obama and the Weather Underground members certainly isn't as strong as, say, Obama's connection to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But there is a bit of a link -- specifically, as Edward McClelland noted in an article for Salon, "One of [Obama's] first campaign events was at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn ... Obama later served with Ayers on the board of the Woods Fund, which supports projects in poor Chicago communities."

Kinsley's argument isn't that Ayers and Dohrn should be forgiven for their past, or that their connection to Obama is too shaky to be worth discussing, though he does correctly call it "tangential." Instead, he writes:

In America we believe in redemption and even self-reinvention. And we don't usually require stagy Stalinesque recantations. But Dohrn and Ayers test the limits of that generosity. They remain spectacularly unrepentant ...
When it became clear even to them that there would not be violent revolution in America, Ayers and Dohrn shrugged and rejoined society in Chicago, where he had grown up. It wasn't difficult. While he was in hiding, his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, the big utility. Ayers the elder sat on every Establishment board in town -- Northwestern, the Tribune Co., the Chicago Symphony. Ayers the younger and his wife were welcomed back into the fold ... They set off bombs and talked about killing their parents, and the Chicago establishment didn't even care ...

Got some background stuff on Obama,..Pfleger...and some new (to me ) connections with Ayers.....

I believe this is the article that Rick Moran said he was writting for a publication in the article at post #5:

Obama's Alliance with Marxists

AP news....FR Thread:

AP tally: Obama clinches Democratic nomination

Some News....FR Thread:

Pfleger suspended from his church by diocese

Could it be that just maybe these ilks, Ayers, Wright etal have a prearranged deal with the GREAT OBAMA that they know he will talk as if they are all just nodding acquaintances yet once he gets into that greatest of all powerful positions,President of the US, that they will then all come out of the woodwork like termites, unite and poke the American public in the eye? Sad thing is, those of us who do research this Obamanation will have seen this coming and those who supported and put him in office will be the first and loudest to complain.

FYI

” Pfleger is a very serious Christian and takes the words of Jesus Christ at their most literal...”

??