Obama’s Challenge--The campaign speaks to “Radicalism.” [Ayers]

National Review ^ | 9-230-8 | Stanley Kurtz

[SJackson]

Today, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools,” I offer a report on my research into the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation once headed by Barack Obama. As I explained in “Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?” the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago first agreed to grant, then abruptly denied me, access to the files of this foundation. Subsequently, the Daley Library again reversed their decision and made the CAC files available.

As I note in today’s Journal piece, I’ve conveyed the gist of my Annenberg findings to the Obama campaign and offered them a chance to respond. In reply, the Obama campaign has sent me an extended “on the record” statement about Obama’s role at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and about the nature of his relationship with Bill Ayers. I present that statement in its entirety here:

The Annenberg Challenge records only serve to establish clearly that while Barack Obama and Ayers had occasional contact during Obama’s 6 years of service on the bipartisan board, they did not work closely together to exchange and develop policy ideas. In fact, as these records show, Ayers attended a total 6 meetings of the Board during the 6 years of Obama’s Board service. And, as these same records also demonstrate, the advisory committee that Ayers co-chaired played no operational role whatsoever once the Challenge hired its Executive Director at the end of its first year.

Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board. Barack Obama was encouraged to run for Chair by Deborah Leff, with whom he served on another board, recommended by Pat Graham, and elected by the bipartisan founding board members: Susan Crown, Pat Graham, Stanley Ikenberry, Ray Romero, Arnold Weber, and Wanda White.

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.

The suggestion that Ayers somehow dominated the policy or direction of the bipartisan Challenge Board, imprinting it with radical views, is absurd. The Annenberg Challenge was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend Walter Annenberg. Republican Governor Jim Edgar, who wrote to Walter Annenberg to encourage the creation of the Challenge, joined Mayor Daley to announce the formation of the Challenge and his administration continued to work closely on education reform with the Board. John McCain has praised an initiative funded by the Challenge. The Challenge’s work is still carried on today through to the bipartisan Chicago Public Education Fund, which coordinates closely Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley to improve teacher performance and has included such board members as Illinois Republican Party Chair Andrew McKenna.

The Challenge was established to allocate grants targeted to improve student performance and promote teacher training and leadership development in the Chicago Public Schools. One objective of the Challenge was to improve education for the bottom quartile of students attending Chicago Public Schools — whose reading, math, and basic skills scores improved markedly during the years in which the Challenge invested in city schools. Due to the work of the Challenge and the Fund, the number of board certified teachers in Chicago Public Schools has increased by the hundreds.

As is well known, by the time Barack Obama met him, Ayers was a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and he has held the title of ‘distinguished scholar’ the University of South Carolina for many years — Ayers held both positions at universities while Republican Governors served on their Boards of Trustees. The detestable acts that Ayers committed decades before occurred when Senator Obama was 8 years old and the Senator has condemned them in no uncertain terms.

While I’ve addressed this statement in the “Radicalism” piece, I’ll extend my response here.

Let’s first review CAC’s initial setup. In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama’s formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to “delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs...to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals...and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.” All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.

During this initial year of 1995, Ayers also sat as an ex officio member of the board. The Obama campaign is trying to minimize his cooperation with Ayers by counting the number of board meetings where both sat together. That will not do. For one thing, as long as we’re counting occasions on which Obama and Ayers were together, the Obama campaign omits Obama’s appearances before the Collaborative, when it was co-chaired by Ayers. In 1995, Obama and Ayers also sat together on the board’s Governance Committee, with at least one independently scheduled meeting, and who knows how many others. Ayers and Obama were also part of a group of four instructed to draft the bylaws that would govern CAC. Surely that endeavor would have involved significant interaction between them. Then there’s the question of unrecorded meetings of both the board and the Collaborative. For example, the archives contain an intriguing note indicating that, although a CAC board meeting took place on July 25, 1995, “No minutes were recorded.” Were Ayers and Obama both present at that meeting? More important, what took place there?

The partnership between Ayers and Obama is about much more than the number of occasions on which the two were recorded together in the same room. As CAC board chair, Obama was essentially authorizing the funding of Ayers’s own educational projects, and the projects of Ayers’s radical allies. And especially in CAC’s first year, Ayers was largely in charge of the process. One of CAC’s own evaluations notes that during 1995, CAC was a “Founder-Led Foundation.” That is, Ayers was not merely an ex-officio board member that year, but as the key founder and guiding spirit of CAC, he was effectively running the show.

This is consistent with what I found in the documents, which, for example, show Ayers not only speaking for the Collaborative before the board, but speaking in place of absent board members when they couldn’t be present to make a report. In general, in 1995, Ayers seems to be deeply involved in the work of every important body and committee at CAC. Of the three CAC founders, Ayers, Anne Hallett, an urban school advocate, and Warren Chapman, a state school reformer, only two, Ayers and Hallett, were Collaborative co-chairs and ex-officio members of the board. And in a letter, Hallett describes herself as “joined at the hip” with Ayers. Clearly Ayers was the senior partner of the pair, given his prominence as an author, and as a national spokesman for educators consciously committed to politicizing their classrooms. Ayers is not only an activist, but a sort of father-figure to radical educators, authoring not only books of his own, but editing collections of like-minded authors, and putting together coalitions of educators, as he did at CAC. Hallett and Ayers may have co-chaired the Collaborative and together been ex-officio on the board, but this was largely Ayers’s show.

So when CAC’s own evaluators call 1995 the period of the “Founder-Led Foundation,” they are essentially saying that, in 1995, Ayers was the most powerful individual at CAC. The Obama campaign treats that suggestion as “absurd,” yet it is effectively made by CAC’s own evaluators. This needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama campaign’s minimization of the Ayers-Obama connection that year. Ayers’s outsized role at CAC also needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama camp’s claim that Deborah Leff and Patricia Graham first suggested Obama’s name as board chair. Given the degree of Ayers’s power at this early stage, it’s hard to believe that the ultimate decision on Obama’s elevation to the board was not made by Ayers himself. After all, Ayers and his immediate ally, Michael Klonsky, would end up seeking major financial support from CAC for their own “Small Schools” network. Ayers could not have been indifferent to the choice of board chair, since his own funding, and that of his many allies, would depend on it.

This brings us to the ethical concerns that led to a restructuring of the relationship between the CAC board and the Collaborative after 1995. The Obama camp points to this shift as if it quiets questions about the Obama-Ayers relationship. In fact, the post-1995 restructuring of CAC more urgently raises such questions. Precisely because Collaborative members like Ayers were themselves up for CAC grants, stronger barriers had to be created between the board and the Collaborative. So after 1995, Ayers appears to have lost his ex-officio status on the board, and the Collaborative lost its theretofore prominent role in advising the board on grant applications.

I found little explicit discussion, in either board or Collaborative minutes, about the need for this major structural change. Could the unrecorded July 25, 1995, board meeting have addressed the issue? That meeting would have taken place just as the responses to the initial “Request for Proposals” were coming in. At that point, it would have been evident that many Collaborative members were seeking money from CAC itself. This was at the high point of Collaborative’s power, before CAC had an executive director in place. Perhaps discussion of the “self-dealing” issue, and the need to make structural changes, began at that meeting. The specific question of what happened at the unrecorded July 25, 1995 meeting is only speculation, of course. But we do know, from internal and external evaluations of CAC, that ethical concerns did in fact lead to a formal demotion of the Collaborative’s power after 1995.

While the appearance of self-dealing receded after CAC’s first year, the reality may still have been in place. Evaluators, both internal and external, have criticized CAC for over-committing its funds in 1995, and also for doing far too little to demand accountability from grant recipients, very much including the initial batch. Many of the initial grantees continued to receive funds for years. Evaluators consistently note the lack of flexibility in grants, and complain that the huge 1995 commitments, with relatively few changes in follow-on years, significantly undercut CAC’s impact and effectiveness.

So although Ayers may have lost his formal position on the board after 1995, and while the Collaborative he co-chaired may have surrendered its formal influence over the grant-making process, grant decisions Ayers put in place when he was effectively running CAC were respected for years by the board. And according to internal and external evaluations, this appears to have been greatly to the detriment of CAC. Why, then, did the board, chaired by Obama, adhere so assiduously to the funding decisions and strategies put in place by Ayers in 1995, even after CAC’s formal structure changed?

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.)

The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.

The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960’s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006, along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones, Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers.

The Obama campaign notes that during the CAC years, achievement test scores improved markedly in the Chicago public schools. That’s true, but deeply misleading. The real source of improvement was the leadership of accountability-oriented Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, who began to reform CPS in 1995, the year of CAC’s founding. Vallas established clear standards, began high-stakes testing, ended social promotion, forced thousands of students to attend summer school to advance a grade, and put failing schools on probation. That’s what pushed up Chicago test scores. CAC’s own final evaluation carefully compared students at schools with Annenberg projects and schools without. According to CAC’s own report: “There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” It also indicates that Annenberg failed, not because it’s altogether impossible to improve urban schools, but because CAC’s heavily politicized community-organizer partners weren’t any good at doing so.

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.

[snowrip]

Sums it all up perfectly.

[combat_boots]

Look at the reading lists and requirements of study in your children’s classes. Or for a Small Schools ‘initiative.’ Ask your children what their teachers say about politics or America. Look through the tables of contents of your childrens books.

There’s the proof.

[AU72]

CAC was leftist bustout where Obama had a major role.

So much for his experience as a 'community organizer'.

[Oldexpat]

If Obama’s work at the Challenge were so great, good and outstanding, why aren’t the NYT, WP and LAT all boasting about it in articles praising Obama? Why the secrecy and denial if they were good works?
This was the most important monetary thing the Barack ever managed and they should be highlighting it.

[libstripper]

It's becoming clearer and clearer that Obama is a Manchurian Candidate, nurtured from the time he was an empty, semi-abandoned teenager. His first mentor/controller was the old Chicago Communist, Frank Marshall Davis, who came to Hawaii from Chicago in 1948.

According to Jerome Corsi in The Obama Nation, at p. 216, David Axelrod's mother, Myril Axelrod, wrote "for PM, a leftist tabloid newspaper published in New York City from 1940 to 1948." Another leftist, Earl Conrad, wrote for PM and another leftist newspaper, the Negro Story, for which Frank Marshall Davis also wrote, apparently before moving to Hawaii. Davis moved to Hawaii in 1948 to take over the NAACP's Honolulu branch, a move which so upset Roy Wilkins that the national NAACP, "revoked the charter of the Honolulu branch rather than allow this takeover." See, The Case Against Barack Obama, at p. 135. In other words, Davis was an active, virulent Communist who constantly searched for ways to destroy the United States and no doubt maintained active relations with a broad spectrum of Communist groups and individuals on the mainland, especially in Chicago, from which he had come, and which probably included David Axelrod's mother.

Then Davis connected with Grandpa Dunham who introduced him to the highly impressionable and semi-abandoned Barry. Davis became Barry's mentor. It's easy to see what probably happened from there when Barry moved back to the mainland and took up his studies at Occidental College in California. Davis most likely contacted his Chicago comrades, told them about the promising young Barry and how Barry needed a new mentor/controller. Those comrades, knowing Ayres, suggested Ayres take that role and Ayers accepted. Obama then transferred from Occidental to Columbia for his last two years of undergraduate work, met and got to know Ayers at that time, since Ayres was living and studying in the same area.

The foregoing easily explains why Ayres selected Obama to chair the Annenberg Challenge and how Obama probably made his initial connection to Reverend Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ. Given his intense radicalism and being reasonably well read, Wright was the ideal pastor for Ayres to connect Obama with. Concerning the CAC, to Ayres Obama was not simply the bright, young former president of the Harvard Law Review. Rather, Obama was the Manchurian Candidate whom Davis, Ayres, and other anti-American individuals had been mentoring and grooming for many years to come onto the stage; this was Obama's first big role.

[ridesthemiles]

The statem,ent about “only attended 6 meetings in 6 years” could be made clearer.
What if there are only annual meetings? One a year?

[ccmay]

Well, so far the CAC doesn’t seem to be the silver bullet we had hoped. It still does speak poorly of his executive experience that they were able to blow 150 million to no effect.

[igoramus08]

* CAC was a waste of money with no improvement in student achievement
* "Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts."

[grey_whiskers]

Shameless plug ALERT!

Read my take on the article here.

Cheers!

[peridot]

I truly fear this man and his minions. Just knowing that he came out of the Chicago machine should be enough to scare anybody. But, I’ve read and listened and on a mission to inform. I just want to grab people and say don’t you get it. But, since no one would listen to a raving maniac, I present my information consisely and argue to the hilt. There comes a point where the eyes glaze over and they just tune out. We’re a sound bite society and this stuff is so convoluted, nobody has time to listen and heaven forbid they read a little bit. How do we get through?? Do we need another crime syndicate running the country, AGAIN!!! Please pray there is such a thing as the Bradley effect.

[tiger640]

Speaking of the Chicago Machine...today’s Chicago Tribune was fascinating reading. I have provided all links below. THIS is the state of Illinois politics today and Barack Obama is “right in the middle of it” regardless of how much he tries to deny it and appear clean. He is up to his political neck in it and the lid is about to blow off!! The joke is that the Trib makes it sound like everyone else in Chicago Politics is guilty EXCEPT Obama. Excuse me but BULLCRAP! The latest is ethics reform has been aimed at Blago and top admin officials but NOT Illinois lawmakers (Obama’s buds)!! The new ethics reform (IL senate overided the Governor’s veto 55-0) also has loopholes that you could drive a supertanker through! So much for that. Also the Tribune notes that this latest attempt at getting the corrupt Chicago machine off of Obama’s back was Obama’s idea put to his buddy Emil Jones who runs the IL senate like his own private politboro (gee...I wondered where Pelosi got that idea) Trouble is it ain’t gunna work...as any voter who is sick and tired of being taken to the cleaners by their own lawmakers are going to revolt soon...November 4th comes to mind! This crap has GOT TO STOP!! Here are the links: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-ethics-23-sep23,0,1360094.story http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/vox_pop/2008/09/guilty-by-assoc.html http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2008/09/rezko-back-in-court-today.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-090923-campaign-chicago-web,0,5284558.story

[browardchad]

Look through the tables of contents of your childrens books.

Nowadays, you really have to go further than the table of contents:

 from The Negative Influence of Education Schools on the K-12 Curriculum

"To show concretely how a social justice theory of pedagogy affects what students read in the secondary English class and how teachers may approach its goals, I offer examples from the 2000 edition of McDougal Littell’s grade 11 anthology on American literature, a volume in one of the three leading anthology series for grades 7 to 12 in the country. Not only has it been approved for adoption in textbook adoption states,  it is also the anthology that the University of California chose to feature in its online pilot course for a grade 11 course in American literature in 2004....

It is important to note that a large number of “traditional” authors and selections are in this elephantine volume. Why does the anthology contain so many “traditional” authors? Most probably because the absence of mainstream American authors would be noticed immediately in a perusal of the Table of Contents by experienced English teachers and parents, and no textbook publisher for the high school market could afford the controversy that would be ignited by an American literature anthology for grade 10 or 11 that bore no resemblance to the American literary history they studied when they were in high school. The chief problem is therefore not the absence of content or the absence of mainstream American authors but the manipulation of mainstream American literary history and students’ attitudes to advance a particular political agenda. This manipulation is accomplished by (1) use of a selection from an author’s oeuvre that can advance a negative stance toward mainstream America (e.g., the choice of Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” a tale about hypocritical Christians); (2) location of a positive mainstream selection in a unit of study that is governed thematically by a contemporary social or political issue as embodied in a few contemporary selections; and (3) the pedagogical apparatus."

  A long read, but well worth it.

[browardchad]

 This is interesting (from you last link):

The Obama campaign had anticipated the Chicago Machine card would be played in the campaign and the candidate, himself, noted earlier this year that he felt he had done well in rising politically "without being entangled in some of the traditional problems of Chicago politics."

Still, Obama has been faulted by some progressives for his quiet approach and for not forcefully supporting the reform primary challenge of Forrest Claypool to then-incumbent Cook County Board President John Stroger, who was backed by the city's leading Democrats. William Daley, the brother of Mayor Richard Daley, is an economic adviser to Obama. He is Midwest chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and previously was president of SBC Communications Inc. He also was Commerce secretary in the Clinton White House and a leading administration salesman for the North American Free Trade Agreement that Obama has vowed to restructure. Earlier, Daley was a Clinton appointee to the board of now discredited mortgage giant Fannie Mae....

But Obama last week did contact Jones and asked the state Senate president to call a vote on a bipartisan ethics bill that had stalled because of changes made by Blagojevich—a move critics contended was aimed at killing the measure....

The phone call was largely seen as a pre-emptive move by Obama to prevent a stall on Illinois ethics legislation involving Jones from exploding onto the national stage.

Add Daley to Raines and Johnston in the Fannie Mae mess. Throw Emil Jones under the bus, temporarily  -- but he won't really mind -- if Obama makes it to the Whitehouse -- Chicago goes national!

[Interesting Times]

Another important Ayers/Obama article by Stanley Kurtz.

[Travis McGee]

bttt

[ETL]

From Investor's Business Daily (IBD), August 27, 2008:

"Ayers, now a tenured distinguished professor of education at UIC, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

One of Ayer's descriptions for a course called 'Improving Learning Environments' says prospective K-12 teachers need to 'be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and ... be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.

The Annenberg papers are quite extensive — 132 boxes containing 947 file folders with 70 linear feet of material. They undoubtedly contain more surprises regarding Obama's relationship with Ayers, one of many relationships Obama has sought to hide.'..."

Article: Annenberg Papers: Putting On Ayers?
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304729375940845

________________________________________________________

Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA [Maoist]
Revolution #63, October 1, 2006

Interview with Bill Ayers:
"On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of Some in Dangerous Times"
http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html

________________________________________________________

[Obama] is named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge founded by Bill Ayers
(article typo has Ayers instead of Obama)

In late 1993, Bill Ayers, now an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, organized a team to put together a grant proposal to secure nearly $50 million from the Annenberg Challenge. The money was to be used by Ayers and co. to bolster the radical Local School Councils reform project that Ayers and Obama had championed back in 1988 through the ABCs.

The grant application was successful and in early 1995 Barack Obama was named chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers was named co-chair of the Challenge’s operative and strategic body, the Chicago School Reform Collaborative. Ayers and Obama work together for the next five years on raising an additional $60 million in matching money from local foundations and corporations and using the money to intervene in the governance of the Chicago public schools.

The Challenge through a multi-million dollar Leadership Development Initiative intervened in the School Council elections in the middle of what was known as the Chicago School Wars. At the same time Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was pushing, successfully, to gut the power of the Councils.

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/12/the-obama-ayers-top-ten-highlights-of-the-20-year-obama-ayers-connection/

________________________________________________________

"The Small Schools Workshop was founded in 1991 at the University of Illinois at Chicago to provide support for teachers who were trying to create new smaller learning environments. Its director is Michael Klonsky, a former professor of education at UIC."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Schools_Workshop

________________________________________________________

Some background on Bill Ayers' SDS comrade, Michael Klonsky
(Chicago Annenberg Challenge-related)

"One of Bill Ayers’ and Bernardine Dohrn’s comrades in the late 60s Students for a Democratic Society was Mike Klonsky. When Dohrn and Ayers moved in one direction toward the violent tactics of the Weather Underground, Klonsky, in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, dropped the pro-Russian communist politics of his parents and became a committed Maoist. As leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1977 [not to be confused with Communist Party USA. CPML no longer exists, CPUSA formed decades earlier and is still around-ETL], he travelled to Beijing and was toasted by the senior Beijing leadership.

When the crazy left of the 70s died in the 80s, Klonsky went to graduate school in education in Florida and then moved to Chicago.

While driving a cab there he [Michael Klonsky] was recruited by his old friend Bill Ayers to head up a new project called the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. It’s offices were in the Department of Education building at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus where Ayers taught.

In 1995 the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge headed by Ayers and Obama gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000.

The Annenberg Challenge also had its office space in the same building as Ayers Department and the Workshop, rent free courtesy of the University.

In 2008 Klonsky ran a blog on the official Obama campaign website on education policy and “social justice” teaching. When discussion of the Klonsky blog emerged in the blogosphere, it was promptly shut down by the campaign and all of the posts made by Klonsky were removed from the site."

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/12/the-obama-ayers-top-ten-highlights-of-the-20-year-obama-ayers-connection/

________________________________________________________

In 1977, the October League was reorganized as the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) [again, not Communist Party USA (CPUSA) -ETL] and former SDS activist Michael Klonsky became party chairman. Also in 1977, Klonsky traveled to China and the CPML was recognized by the Chinese Communist Party as its official sister party in America.

(snip)

In January 1981, Michael Klonsky resigned as party chairman, and the CPML disbanded that same year.

The previous Red Encyclopedia description of the CPML was incorrectly combined with that of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist).

http://reds.linefeed.org/past.html

________________________________________________________

From Sept 11, 2001, New York Times article/interview with Obama associate and friend, William/Bill Ayers.
Article title: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"

"Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as:

'Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

New York Times, September 11, 2001:
"No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

________________________________________________________

Bill Ayers TODAY (April 6, 2008), from his own red communist star-headed website, begging to debate communism vs capitalism with Sean Hannity and STILL calling for revolution!

"Imperialism. I’m against it, and if Sean Hannity and others were honest, this is the ground they would fight me on. Capitalism played its role historically and is exhausted as a force for progress: built on exploitation, theft, conquest, war, and racism, capitalism and imperialism must be defeated and a world revolution—a revolution against war and racism and materialism, a revolution based on human solidarity and love, cooperation and the common good —must win.

We begin by releasing our most hopeful dreams and our most radical imaginations: a better world is both possible and necessary.

Source: Bill Ayers' own website:
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/page/2/

________________________________________________________

Much more on the ObamaRat-commie connections at my FR Profile/Home page. Everything there is linked directly to its source. I've now added within-page links and a 'clickable' table of contents which makes it easy to hop around to the various sections:
http://www.freerepublic.com/~etl

[PhilDragoo]

Who was "Ann" the teenage girl Davis brags of doing?

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[editor-surveyor]

Bump!