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One other thing...
"Georgia attacked first when they went into south ossetia. russia was respinsive after that."
Concerning-South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Although these territories are located within Georgia's internationally-recognized borders, the Russian government seems determined to challenge Georgia's territorial integrity in both places.
You disagree?
She was asked a question...
and answered it correctly.
Deal with it.
My question was...
Her response was in reference to Georgia being part of nato (future)...no?
GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?
PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.
She is correct...
"she wants to war with russia?"
Her response was in reference to Georgia being part of nato (future)...no?
"I would not allow Georgia into NATO"
"Going forward, the United States and Europe must support the people of Georgia. Beyond immediate humanitarian assistance, we must provide economic assistance, and help rebuild what has been destroyed. I have consistently called for deepening relations between Georgia and transatlantic institutions, including a Membership Action Plan for NATO, and we must continue to press for that deeper relationship."
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/laurinmanning/gG5bh2
"And Obama,Bush, McBush, and Palin don't have a freaking clue the fire they are playing with by pushing Georgia into NATO" EDIT
Chicago Annenberg Challenge
The CAC's successful grant application was written in 1993 by William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.[2][3] After extensive community-based discussions also involving Anne Hallett of the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, and Warren Chapman of the Joyce Foundation.
At its founding, the Annenberg Challenge was made up of three constituent parts:
The Chicago School Reform Collaborative, co-chaired by William C. Ayers;
a Board of Directors initially recruited by the Collaborative, which was chaired from 1995 to 2000 by Barack Obama[4], at the time a practicing attorney.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Annenberg_Challenge
Obama Announces FY08 Federal Funding Requests (112)
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Discloses earmarks to improve government transparency
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) today announced that he had requested federal funding for the following projects, in the amounts designated by his constituents and several national organizations, as part of this year's annual appropriations process:
Adler Planetarium, to support replacement of its projector and related equipment, $3,000,000
One of its most popular attractions and teaching tools at the Adler Planetarium is the Sky Theater. The projection equipment in this theater is 40 years old, and is no longer supported with parts or service by the manufacturer. It has begun to fail, leaving the theater dark and groups of school students and other interested museum-goers without this very valuable and exciting learning experience.
AIDSCARE, Inc., for general operating support, $750,000
AIDSCARE is a non-profit, non-sectarian organization that provides housing and care for homeless children, families and adults living with advanced HIV/AIDS in the Chicago Area.
AIDSCARE, Inc., for completion of the North Lawndale Campus, $2,000,000
Upon its completion, the North Lawndale campus will offer 66 units of service-enriched housing for low-income and homeless individuals and families impacted by HIV/AIDS; an onsite Health Facility and Wellness Center for residents and other members of the community; and an 8,693-square-foot multi-purpose community center.
Aledo, IL, to support its replacement of two aging water towers, $750,000
Two aging 150,000-gallon water towers require replacement. The towers' water pressure is chronically low, and its supply is unreliable. Average daily use for the towers is 420,000 gallons.
American Red Cross of Illinois, for emergency preparedness, $5,000,000
Funding will assist in providing 29 chapters and 3 blood service regions of the American Red Cross with the resources to be able to deliver mass care services in a timely matter in the event of a large-scale disaster. Funding will be used for equipment such as backup generators, shelter trailers, shelter supplies, stockpile cots, heater meals, response vehicles, and communications devices. This equipment will be strategically placed throughout the state, and will allow the Red Cross to serve requests by hospitals and trauma requests immediately and up to 72 hours.
American Theater Company, for the construction of a new facility in Logan Square, $200,000
In the heart of Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood, American Theater Company (ATC) will build an 11,000 square foot theater complex using green construction standards that will provide a state-of-the-art experience for its artists and patrons. The theater will serve as a commercial and cultural hub for this diverse and growing neighborhood, welcoming audiences from within and outside of the community. It will be a home for the development of new American works and re-imagined classic American plays, and a center for the development of new talent.
Army Corps of Engineers in the Chicago District of Illinois, to support permanent construction of the Asian Carp Barrier, $7,500,000
The State of Illinois has been working closely with the Chicago District and other Great Lakes agencies at both the federal and state level to keep Asian Carp from reaching the Great Lakes through the Chicago Waterway system. Funding will fulfill a Project Cooperation Agreement with the Corps to construct a second, more effective and permanent electrical barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
Army Corps of Engineers in the Chicago District of Illinois, to support Operations and Maintenance of the permanent Asian Carp Barrier, $1,000,000
Funding the operation and maintenance of the Asian Carp Barrier is essential to prevent the introduction of Asian Carp, primarily Silver and Bighead Carp, into the Great Lakes ecosystem. The value of the Great Lakes fishery is estimated at around $4.5 billion/year, and experts have predicted that Asian Carp, if allowed to become established in the Great Lakes, would have devastating effects on important fish species such as Lake Trout, Perch and Salmon. An additional and very important benefit from the operation of this barrier is that it will still allow unimpeded navigation between the Illinois Waterway and Great Lakes.
Army Corps of Engineers in the City of Rock Island, to support construction of Sunset Marina Harbor Entrance Improvements, $500,000
The Sunset Marina Harbor Entrance Study, prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers, concluded that it would be cost effective to protect the harbor entrance by constructing an emergent dike. This new structure would deflect much of the silt past the entrance and reduce the harbor dredging frequency from about once every 3 years to once every 7 years.
Army Corps of Engineers in Illinois, to support project UMR-IWW System Navigation Study, IL, IA, MN, MO, & WI, $24,000,000
Pre-Construction Engineering & Design (PED) of seven new 1,200-foot lock chambers and ecosystem restoration. Timely PED work for navigation is consistent with a recent study indicating that without new 1,200-foot lock chambers at the identified seven locations, American farmers stand to lose over $562 million annually in lost exports and domestic demand by 2020. Manufacturers and consumers also stand to lose from deteriorating infrastructure on our " Third Coast" in addition to the 400,000 jobs sustained by this transportation corridor. Construction of these new lock chambers will create at least 48 million man-hours, or up to 6,000 construction jobs each year, providing immediate economic benefits through high-skilled labor, and spurring much-needed economic growth that has historically occurred through investing in our lock and dam infrastructure.
Aurora University, to the Center for Latino Leadership and Education, $400,000
Funding would establish a family-focused after school bilingual program for Latino families that would promote academic preparation and college readiness within an underserved population.
Benedictine University in Lisle, for the First Responder Program – An Education Initiative for Public Safety Officers and Iraqi and Afghanistan Veterans, $1,750,000
Currently, Benedictine offers secondary education degree programs to firefighters, who pay only for their textbooks; the University has absorbed all other costs. This project would expand the program to include Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and first responders throughout Illinois, allowing police, firemen, and Iraq and Afghanistan veterans throughout Illinois to receive a free education from Benedictine University.
Carpentersville, IL, for the Carpentersville Community Response Team, $500,000
To address the growing influence of gang activity in the Village of Carpentersville, the police department created the Community Response Team. This team is a unique, mulit-faceted approach to address the public's concerns through intervention, education and strict enforcement.
Carthage, IL, to develop the Illinois 336 Corridor Carthage Exchange, $1,350,000
This utilities expansion project would enable Memorial Hospital to expand its healthcare campus and would also attract economic development in the area. The hospital is currently developing land acquisition, architectural, and financing plans to for the construction of a new hospital and medical office building, which will help Memorial Hospital better serve the community. In addition to enabling this hospital's expansion, the utilities expansion project would also enable and attract further development in the area.
Center for Advanced Design, Research, and Exploration (CADRE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for development of rapid wound healing therapies, $4,800,000
Funding will assist CADRE in the research and development of therapies to promote rapid wound healing, lessen infection, reduce bleeding and scarring, and reduce operational medical costs using Light Emitting Diodes and directed energy/radio-frequency therapies. CADRE's developments will be extremely critical in managing patients both in theater and those affected by homeland disasters and will potentially allow immediate response to wound healing, lessen infection and scaring, and reduce operation and medical costs.
Center for Advanced Design, Research, and Exploration (CADRE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to develop a hand-held device used in combat, $2,000,000
This device will be able to detect and identify selected energy emissions, biomarkers, chemical and biological signatures; LEP goggles to block high intensity laser radiation while allowing low intensity light transmission for day and night vision. The device will be connected via a global positioning data link for immediate assessment, medical evaluation, and treatment decision-making, allowing the device to access and communicate with various operational, medical, and Defense databases.
Channahon, IL, for road upgrades, $12,000,000
Upgrades include rebuilding the Interstate 55 and U.S. Route 6 Interchange with an eight lane bridge deck and relocated frontage roads.
Chicago Children's Advocacy Center, for Facility Improvements, Renovations, and Expansion of the Chicago Children's Advocacy Center for child abuse support services, $500,000
Funding will assist the Center in building a 51,000 square foot, two-story addition adjacent to its existing facility. The new building will create the additional space needed for the professionals who work on child physical abuse cases as well as the space needed for expanded mental health and social support services. When complete, the Center anticipates that is expanded facility will allow it to serve 1,500 to 2,000 children suspected of physical abuse each year, in addition to the child sexual abuse cases it is already handling.
Chicago Children's Museum, for the construction of a new Chicago Children's Museum facility, $1,000,000
CCM is poised to begin construction of a new facility in Daley Bicentennial Plaza in Grant Park. This proposed construction would provide greater access and visibility for visitors, enhanced programming and coordination with area museums, and a valuable family resource for the neighborhood's growing residential community. Given current space limitations, this construction is integral to CCM's mission of effectively serving the families, children and communities of Chicago.
Chicago Children's Museum, for its Community Health and Wellness Initiatives, $300,000
The Chicago Children's Museum's "Initiatives" were developed in response to growing child health problems such as obesity and asthma, particularly among children from low-income, isolated, African-American and Latino communities. These Initiatives aim to promote health and wellness to children, families, and caregivers through health fairs and child screenings that are part of CCM's weekly Free Family Night events. Attracting over 500,000 visitors a year, CCM is ideally suited as a strategic starting point for addressing these pressing health issues. The requested funding is necessary for continued operation and improvement of the program by supporting labor, training and supply.
Chicago Park District, for the development of DuSable Park, $3,000,000
DuSable Park will be a new 3.24-acre park located in downtown Chicago where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan. The park will be dedicated to Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, and African-American and founder of modern day Chicago. The park will feature elements about DuSable and Chicago, ADA accessible walkways, native habitat, replacement of the damaged seawall, fishing opportunities and a wetland with boardwalk.
Chicago Public Schools, for their Chicago Reading Initiative: Supported Literacy Programs, $4,000,000
Funding would assist CPS to initiate the next phase in an initiative designed to achieve instructional and academic coherence across the district through adoption of a limited number of aligned reading programs. CPS would offer elementary schools the opportunity to adopt a district-endorsed K-5 basal reading program from a list of approved publishers for the 2007-2008 school year. A comprehensive support system for literacy instruction in grades K-5 would be offered to support the use of new books. The support system would include ongoing, intensive professional development for teachers and administrators and modeling, coaching and mentoring for teachers.
Chicago State University, for research into unmanned aerial systems, $5,000,000
Funding will be used to improve the effectiveness of the military's unmanned aerial systems by replacing conventional power supply systems with fuel cell technology packages specifically made for mobile robotics systems.
Chicago State University, to develop a sustainable and portable power system for military operation, $5,000,000
Funding will assist CSU in the development of a solar cell power generating system that can be mounted on a backpack, and rapidly deployed and reconfigured for military operation. The system will include sensors, computing systems, and intelligent processing and communications systems.
Chicago State University, to the HIV/ AIDS Policy and Research Institute, $1,000,000
In response to the growing HIV/AIDS crisis in the African American population, CSU has undertaken comprehensive approach to assist with efforts in the South Side of Chicago. This project would support local outreach, education, prevention and research efforts.
Children's Memorial Hospital, for the construction of Children's Memorial Hospital Intensive Care Unit Facilities, $3,000,000
This funding would help provide care for the most critically ill children, including those with brain tumors or who are born extremely premature. As the only free-standing Level-I pediatric trauma center, new facilities would also provide care to children who may be injured in a mass casualty incident and suffer from traumatic injuries.
Columbia College Department of Dance/Movement Therapy and Counseling in Chicago, for its A.I.M. Program in partnership with the Jesse Brown Veterans Administration Medical Center, $3,000,000
The requested funding will assist in the expansion of the work in progress at the Jesse Brown Veterans Hospital, which has 1,800 returning OIF/ATF veterans that have sought treatment since the start of the war. Under Action-oriented Intervention through Movement Therapy ( A.I.M.), returning veterans actively participate in their treatment through interventions such as breathwork, anger and anxiety management, relaxation training, meditation, guided visualization, thereby reducing anxiety, depression, and increasing self esteem.
Easter Seals Metropolitan Chicago (ESMC), for its therapeutic School and Center for Autism Research, $1,500,000
Illinois has seen a 353% increase in autism since 1993, and the ESMC Therapeutic School and Center for Autism Research responds to this trend. ESMC currently operates three Therapeutic Day Schools that serve students with autism/profound developmental disabilities referred from 50+ Illinois school districts through a broad spectrum of academic and therapeutic services. The new Therapeutic School and Center for Autism Research seeks to build upon this history and provide students from across Illinois with access to a state-of-the-art facility.
Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities in Springfield, for its Training Health Professionals program, $500,000
Illinois and the nation are facing a critical workforce shortage in healthcare across a deep cross section of the industry. The Federation of Independent Illinois Colleges and Universities' challenge and goal is to meet the needs of the small business community and strengthen the technical, scientific, managerial and leadership capacity of our public health workforce. Bradley University, West Suburban College of Nursing and Rosalind Franklin University, in collaboration with the Federation, will develop new infrastructure and programs to increase enrollment in key health profession programs which will provide a better trained work force for the small business sector in the surrounding areas.
Field Museum, for roof repair and rainwater diversion, $4,900,000
The Field Museum encompasses one million square feet under a single roof spanning 5.25 acres protecting precious collections and welcoming millions of visitors. Targeted replacement of old and compromised roof sections is needed to restore integrity to the envelope of the building, and to safeguard the public exhibition galleries, the research laboratories, and the 23 million objects and specimens that constitute the Museum's scientifically irreplaceable collections. In addition, roof repair will allow for environmental engineering to alter the flow of water from the roof, capturing and return clean rainwater back to Lake Michigan and thereby decrease the amount of water entering the City's water treatment facilities.
Field Museum, to support the expansion of the Halls of the Americas, $1,000,000
This exhibition is devoted to the indigenous peoples and cultures of Central and North America prior to the arrival of Europeans. The exhibition will explore the realities of immigration-the influx of innumerable racial, cultural, and religious groups into North and Central America, and the development of a shared heritage over more than 200 years.
Franklin Park, IL, for construction of the Grand Avenue Underpass in Chicago, IL to ease congestion and increase traffic safety, $3,000,000
Grand Avenue, a major arterial street that extends from the edge of Chicago's Central Business District through Franklin Park and other western suburbs, was named by a Federal Railroad Administration/Illinois Commerce Commission study as home of the fourth-worst railroad crossing in the state of Illinois. The construction of the Grand Avenue Underpass allows for the constant flow of traffic under the new combined rail line.
Galesburg, IL, to support construction of a new water treatment facility at the Oquawka, Illinois facility along the Mississippi River, $1,500,000
Governors State University, for the Center of Excellence in Health Professions Education, $1,000,000
The College of Health Professions at Governors State University seeks funding to assist in the creation of a Center of Excellence in Health Professions Education. A program would be created to educate faculty for nursing, occupational therapy and physical therapy, and to improve the ability of health care practitioners to assist in the clinical education of health professions students. Funds would also provide opportunities for career advancement of health professionals.
Illinois Central College, for its Central Illinois Collaborative Advanced Manufacturing Workforce Initiative, $3,000,000
This program would provide candidates with a clear career path by acquiring technical skills and training necessary to transition into the workforce. The program aims to offset the Central Illinois worker shortage in the area of advanced manufacturing maintenance technology.
Illinois Institute of Technology, for research into impact-resistant materials, $1,500,000
Funding supports the analysis and virtual design of a novel class of impact-resistant materials to be employed in light yet extremely protective vehicle armor and explosives protective gear for personnel.
Illinois Institute of Technology, to support its Integrated Advance Energy Systems Research Initiative, $750,000
The Illinois Institute of Technology's Energy and Sustainability Institute is a nationally recognized leader in cutting edge energy research. The Institute has proposed an Integrated Advanced Energy Systems Research Initiative to apply its specialized expertise to solve critical research and development challenges directly related to achieving energy independence through environmentally friendly, commercially feasible approaches.
Illinois Primary Health Care Association (IPHCA), for the Electronic Health Record Project IPHCA, $2,000,000
This undertaking is an effort to assure the clear, concise retention and communication of patient-specific information among providers and payors in a manner that protects privacy. Electronic Health Records promote quality, reduce costs, and prevent medical errors.
Illinois State University, for the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline Programs and Partnerships, $300,000
Funding would expand current partnership activities and further develop the Chicago Teacher Education Pipeline Programs & Partnerships. This would increase urban teacher recruitment, improve teacher preparation, and improve teacher retention.
Illinois State University, for the Great Lakes Teacher and Preparation Leadership Preparation Consortium, $500,000
Illinois State University, Eastern Michigan University and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee would create a Great Lakes Urban Teacher and Leadership Preparation Consortium. Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee Public School Districts would be involved in this consortium. The three partner institutions together with K-12 school districts and community organizations would collaboratively enhance teacher and leadership preparation capacity in these urban communities through recruitment and retention programs for hard to staff schools.
Illinois State University, to improve manufacturing competitiveness with further development of the Integrated Manufacturing Laboratory (IML), $500,000
The IML would provide students with experience in designing, implementing, and using state of the art manufacturing technology. The IML is slated to provide small to medium sized manufacturing businesses in Illinois seminars and courses so that they can learn the most effective ways to automate their operations.
Johnsburg, IL, to support construction of additional sewer lines, $2,000,000
The Village of Johnsburg is the largest municipality on the Illinois portion of the Fox River lacking a sewer system. An estimated 300,000,000 gallons per year of raw or partially treated wastewater is discharged from failing or failed septic tanks into the Fox River. This situation is problematic not only for residents, but also for visitors and the 200,000 individuals for whom the Fox River is a primary source of drinking water.
Lake County, for its Integrated Criminal Justice Information System, $1,000,000
Funding will be used to assist in the integration of each of the County's criminal justice departments and the municipal police computer networks in Lake County. An integrated justice system will improve the quality and uniformity of programs through interdepartmental data accuracy assurance, redefined workflows, and expanded tracking systems. Additionally, integrated justice systems will enhance a police department's timely access to information, including a suspect's past and pending charges.
Lee County Highway Department in Amboy, Illinois, for road upgrades, $300,000
These improvements will include the upgrading of Steward, Elva, Paw Paw and Perry Roads to Class II, 80,000 pound truck routes and the construction of a new Elva Road extension over I-39. This project will be in conjunction with the Greater Rochelle Area Transportation Improvement Plan developed to accommodate the current and future commercial/industrial growth in the region.
Lewis and Clark Community College, for its mobile health clinic to provide healthcare services to rural areas, $350,000
Funds are requested to purchase a mobile health clinic (RV) which will provide dental, general health and mental health care to more than 90,000 patients in four rural Illinois counties (Greene, Calhoun, Jersey and Macoupin). Funding will allow the mobile health clinic to perform ongoing services for 3,500 children in eleven targeted schools, in addition to community services such as pre-natal examinations, obstetric and gynecological examinations, and general public education programs will be provided by the clinic.
Lewis University Airport in Romeoville, for the extension of its primary runway, $3,420,000
The runway extension is to allow existing based and visiting corporate aircraft to safely and efficiently operate at Will County's Airport.
Long Creek, IL, to support construction of new water towers to increase its water capacity, $660,000
Long Creek has three elevated storage tanks with a total capacity of 300,000 gallons, but water demands require and additional storage capacity of 750,000 gallons. This funding would cover approximately half of the expense for necessary construction; the township would raise remaining funding.
Loretto Hospital, for the Launa Thompson Women's Health Pavilion, $550,000
The Loretto Hospital is an acute care hospital dedicated to providing comprehensive, affordable medical care. Funding would enable the construction, renovation and technology upgrade of the Launa Thompson Women's Health Pavilion. The facility would address the needs of women with issues of trauma and substance abuse disorders, and would include psychotherapy, parenting, and education on trauma issues.
Loyola University Chicago, to the Center for School District Leadership for distance learning, $1,000,000
The Center for School District Leadership will implement two interrelated school leadership initiatives to prepare hundreds of uniquely-qualified graduates for senior management positions in the Nation's urban, suburban and rural public school districts. Loyola University Chicago will serve as the host institution for the Center for School District leadership.
Manteno, IL, to connect existing and proposed parks in Kankakee County as part of the Manteno Greenways Trail System, $860,475
The Link system connects existing and proposed parks, educational facilities, commercial districts, and governmental service buildings. In addition, the Village Link proposes connections to the surrounding communities and the Kankakee River State Park.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center in Rock Island, for the renovation and expansion of the Center, $1,000,0000
Expansion would include a technology center, training room, improved space for after school programming, and private counseling rooms.
McHenry County, for its Sheriff's Office law enforcement communication system, $1,000,000
The radio system owned by McHenry County and operated by the McHenry County Sheriff's Office needs to be replaced. This critical link between residents, dispatchers, and public safety officers was designed in 1953 and it has run its useful life and needs to be replaced with a new 800 MHz system. New technology will allow McHenry County to meet the communication needs of its Sheriff's Office and the 9 municipal police agencies for which it provides dispatch services, and will provide McHenry County with regional interoperability.
McHenry County, to widen Miller Road, $500,000
The state routes (Illinois Route 120 and Illinois Route 31) through the City of McHenry are heavily congested. Due to continued growth in this area, the existing Miller Road corridor is also heavily congested. The widened Miller Road corridor would enhance the mobility of the area by reducing congestion and improving safety and decreasing emergency response times.
McHenry County, for Flexible and Sustainable Training Solutions Initiative, $600,000
The Flexible and Sustainable Training Solutions Initiative would provide training so that employers' needs for skilled workers, and residents' needs for livable wages, can be met. "Boot camps" would provide intensive short-term occupational training in fields identified by employers through their participation on the McHenry County Workforce Investment Board.
Memorial Hospital, for necessary equipment upgrades for vascular disease diagnostics and screenings, $1,800,000
Funding would enable equipment upgrades for vascular disease diagnostics and screening. This would allow Memorial Hospital to offer screening and diagnostic tests for earlier intervention and care locally.
Memorial Medical Center, for Advanced Flatplate Cardiac Catherization/Electrophysiology Laboratory, $1,000,000
The Advanced Flatplate Cardiac Catheterization/ Electrophysiology laboratory in Springfield, IL, would perform advanced cardiac catheterizations and interventions, cardiac electrophysiological and mapping studies, and ablation therapy to treat abnormal electrical functions of the heart. The new flatplate delivers less radiation to the patient, produces sharper and clearer images that enhance diagnostic and treatment capabilities, and has the ability to produce 3-D imaging for improved detection and mapping of diseased vessels.
Metra, to expand and improve service, $65,000,000
Metra is the largest commuter rail system in the country in terms of number of lines, total track miles, and numbers of cars and locomotives. Funding will support environmental assessments and preliminary engineering which will establish a key rail connection throughout the northwest, west, and southwest suburbs and also offer the basis for expanded suburban rail service in the future and provide new service and stations for Chicago's south suburbs.
MetroLiNK Transit in Rock Island, to build a new state-of-the-art MetroLiNK Maintenance Facility, $5,000,000
This facility would provide maximum sustainability standards for maintenance, operations, and administrative functions. The new facility will consolidate all MetroLiNK services and vehicles at a single location. It would also provide on-site natural gas and diesel fueling operations, as well as vehicle cleaning and lubrication stations.
Millikin University School of Nursing, for the expansion and upgrade of their nursing program, $500,000
Funding will assist Millikin University School of Nursing to develop and market an accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, improve simulation and laboratory facilities for teaching, target diverse student populations, and provide faculty development to grow the program and meet central and southern Illinois' needs for competent baccalaureate nursing graduates.
Mobile C.A.R.E. Foundation in Chicago, for the acquisition and operation of Asthma Vans, $300,000
Mobile C.A.R.E. provides free and comprehensive asthma care and health education to children in Chicago's underserved communities via mobile medical clinics, the Asthma Vans. Asthma is a growing burden on Chicago. A recent study by the University of Illinois at Chicago reports that 16% of non-Hispanic Black children and 20% of Puerto Rican children in Chicago have asthma while another 16% of each ethnicity exhibit symptoms of asthma without a diagnosis, compared to only 11% with asthma in the general U.S. population. Chicago also has the unwanted distinction of having one of the highest death rates from asthma in the entire nation.
Moline, IL, for the design and construction of River Tech Boulevard Road, $1,595,000
This road will provide vital access to this state supported joint economic development initiative at River Tech and higher education opportunity at Western Illinois University.
Moline, IL, to address congestion in the I-74 Corridor, $8,000,000
The I-74 Corridor extends from Avenue of the Cities in Moline, IL to the 53rd Street in Davenport, IA. The I-74 Bridge, which is significantly over capacity, is located within the corridor and carries almost 78,000 vehicles per day. Adequate access and capacity crossing the Mississippi Rover is imperative for the Quad Cities to remain a vital community.
Morrison, IL, for construction of a railroad overpass, $3,812,000
All Morrison emergency services providers are located on the north side of the rail line--police, fire, hospital, ambulance, two of three medical clinics. More than half of Morrison's population is located on the south side of the tracks. The construction of a railroad overpass to serve the Morrison community and surrounding area alleviates a dangerous condition by creating a transportation route that will protect the community's residents, school, children, the elderly and visitors attending local events from risks association with emergency response delays due to blocked rail crossings.
Mount Carroll, IL, to support reconstruction of its water distribution system, $2,000,000
The City Council of Mount Carroll has described the city's inadequate water service, fire flow protection, need to meet new regulatory requirements. This funding would enable the Water Systems Improvement Project, which includes the following tasks: eliminate ground storage tank and high pumping facility; construct a 300,000-gallon elevated storage tank; construct a new municipal well; improve existing wells; create new mechanical, electrical and control system data; and replace water mains in various areas.
Mujeres Latinas en Accion, for the Parent Support Program and Women in Transition Program, $295,000
These programs provide services crucial to increasing parental efficacy and educate parents about creating a family environment that is supportive and conducive to emotional and academic growth. The curriculum teaches parents to help youth avoid gang involvement, stay in school, and improve their school performance all in a culturally sensitive atmosphere.
National Center for Family Literacy, for its Family Literacy for All Expansion, $250,000
The purpose of the family literacy model development is to meet the unique needs of families through high-quality family literacy programs. Programs would take place on-site in elementary schools, where all four components of services are to be provided: adult education/ESL classes; children's education; parent time; and Parent and Child Together (PACT) Time.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for its cybersecurity initiative, $7,500,000
Funding will assist the University's National Center for Supercomputing Applications—a unique state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyber-infrastructure that advances science and engineering. This initiative will addresses critical security needs and research requirements to develop a dynamic, adaptive cybersecurity infrastructure, focused in areas of data mining, intrusion detection and analysis, development of a variety of security tools, training and SCADA field testing.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for its Technology Research, Education and Commercialization Center (TRECC), $5,000,000
Funding will be used for the research and development of technologies relevant to Navy and Department of Defense requirements, to promote the use of advanced information technology, and encourage public and private sector efforts to commercialize technologies with the potential for use in defense and industrial markets. Additionally, TRECC hosts a web site providing resources identifying government funding opportunities for researchers and businesses.
National Myoclonus Center, for the expansion of the National Myoclonus Center, $400,000
Funding would expand the National Center for Myoclonus, the only medical institution in the country that focuses on the treatment and cure for this neurological auto-immune disorder. The Center also conducts health related activities that impact lupus and multiple sclerosis patients.
Normal, IL, for the construction of a multimodal transportation center, $10,000,000
Normal, working in close collaboration with Illinois State University (ISU) has developed a comprehensive plan for the redevelopment of its downtown, which is adjacent to the ISU campus. The centerpiece of the plan is a Multimodal Transportation Center located in the central business district. The Multimodal Center will provide a focus for multiple transportation modes including: bus, Amtrak, airport shuttles, taxis, park and ride facilities, and pedestrian connections to the downtown and ISU campus.
Northeastern Illinois Sewer Consortium, for sanitary and storm sewer system upgrades, $500,000
Four Lake County communities (Highland Park, Highwood, Lake Bluff, Lake Forest), which make up the Consortium, have experienced significant sewer backup and flooding problems. Funds would improve storm and sanitary sewers in each community through work on sewer lining, broken or collapsed segments, and other necessary upgrades.
Oakwood, IL, to replace its water distribution system, $836,000
Based on an engineering plan's analysis, the Village of Oakwood proposes an eighteen-phase project for repairing its water distribution system. To meet increasing water demands, the seventy year-old system requires fire hydrant construction, water main construction, and "looping" in of dead-end water mains.
Ogle County Highway Department, for the Southwest Rochelle Truck Loop, $150,000
Funding will be used to begin the engineering process on transportation infrastructure improvements. The improvements will include the upgrading of Intermodal Drive, Bush Grove Road, Gurler Road , Thorpe Road, Titus Road, and Center Road to Class II, 80,000 pound truck routes and the construction of a new bridge over the Kyte River. This project will construct designated truck loop around the Southwest Sides of the Union Pacific's Global III Intermodal Facility.
Olympia Fields, IL, to make safety upgrades and improvements of the 203rd Street and Crawford Avenue, $1,000,000
Making safety upgrades to this intersection will significantly improve both vehicular and pedestrian accessibility to St. James Hospital, residential neighborhoods, Rich Central High School , and other adjacent Village amenities, while providing a safer intersection for the residents and visitors.
Oregon, IL, for Route 251 & Steward Road Intersection Improvements, $125,000
These improvements will include the construction of dual right turn lanes from Steward Road and IL Route 251 and dual left turns from IL Route 251 onto Steward Road. Along with these turn lanes the intersection will be signalized.
Orland Park, IL, to expand U.S. 45, $450,000
Funding would be used for the widening of rail bridge and road U.S. 45 (La Grange Road), allowing for a six lane road configuration.
PACE Suburban Bus, to replace the radio system in all of its 672 fixed route buses, $2,500,000
The radio system is currently 11 years old, and because it is the primary method of communication between drivers and dispatchers, it is imperative that it be upgraded. The new radios will solve communication gaps that current buses experience. PACE provides 130,000 trips daily, and passengers throughout the region will experience fewer missed connections with other bus routes.
Patterson, IL, to support replacement of its "Drake Road" water main, $138,000
This water main has ruptured eleven times in the last five years. An Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DECO) Planning Grant assessed the water system and, in its analysis, attributed ruptures to exceedingly high operating pressures. The water main's age and exposure require that it be replaced.
Peoria, IL, to support its construction of its combined sewer overflow replacement, $500,000
This funding enables construction on combined sewer overflow replacement, which is based on a study required by USEPA and IEPA.
Poder Learning Center, for workforce training program, $200,000
The Poder Learning Center responds to the educational needs of the adult immigrant in the primarily Hispanic areas of Chicago's southwest side. The Center offers tuition-free classes to individuals, including ESL, Adult Basic Education, Keyboarding, GED preparation, and MOS and A+ certification to prepare successful graduates to compete for hi-tech positions. Funding will help support the Centers through support of training programs, equipment purchase, curriculum development.
Regional Climate Center, for the Midwestern Regional Climate Center (MRCC)/Illinois State Water Survey, $6,000,000
The MRCC provides climate data and information to users in a number of climate-sensitive sectors. The research and services in which we engage help to provide practical solutions to specific climate problems in economic and environmental areas such as agriculture, energy, risk management, transportation, and water resources.
Riverside Healthcare, for a Computerized Physician Order Entry system for Kankakee, IL, $2,000,000
Riverside Health Care, a regional health care provider, would implement the Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system upgrade in a preliminary phase. This system would employ, in part: physician point of care technologies to promote interdisciplinary collaboration; online medical records to support analysis of patient problems and development of treatment approach; evidence -based order sets to guide best practices in physician and nurse clinician decision making; and immediate and urgent reminders of significant clinical changes to ensure appropriate and rapid response.
Rochelle, IL, for phase two of the Jack Dame Road/Union Pacific Railroad Overpass, $1,000,000
Funding requested will be used for improvements that will include the construction of an overpass ridge structure as well as a roadway that approaches in each direction. This structure will span the Union Pacific Railroad, three local industry spur tracks, and two local roadways to connect back into Illinois Route 38 West.
Rock Island Arsenal, to repair the roof on Building 299 for additional manufacturing space, $6,200,000
Building 299 is a 775,000 square foot warehouse constructed in 1942. The building is generally in good condition with the exception of the original roof, which is severely deteriorated. This project will completely remove, and properly dispose, all asbestos containing roofing components. Currently, a significant portion of the building is being used to support the Global War on Terror in the form of manufacturing, and shipping and receiving armor kits.
Rock Island Arsenal, to support a more robust capability to rapidly produce up-armor vehicle kits, $10,500,000
The Arsenal will upgrade equipment to support the production of lightweight add on vehicle and body armor that is directly used to improve and increase manufacturing efforts in support of the Global War on Terror. Additionally, the equipment will also have significant safety and efficiency benefits for the Arsenal.
Rock Island Arsenal, to renovate and expand Rock Island Arsenal's combined Fire and Police Station facility, $3,500,000
The facility was originally constructed in 1874. Funding will help ensure that first responders have the facilities, resources, and equipment they need to do their jobs in the Quad Cities region. This important funding will modernize and expand the Rock Island Arsenal facility to allow police and fire personnel to effectively and rapidly respond to emergencies.
Rock Island Arsenal, to support the development and enhancement of flexible lightweight metal technology, $1,350,000
This program will improve the government's ability to fabricate new lightweight materials that have many military applications and posture commercial entities in the region to be on the cutting edge of lightweight metal technology.
Rockford College, to enhance classrooms, $490,000
This funding would equip classrooms and enhance student learning by outfitting classrooms and labs that will enable faculty to employ the most modern technology when instructing students and will measurably improve student performance.
Saint Xavier University, for nursing skills lab equipment, $500,000
Saint Xavier University seeks funding to equip laboratory space so that RN-BSN students can have a simulation and practice laboratory to develop stronger clinical skills. To alleviate a significant deficit in teaching, simulation mannequins are required to fully explain the scenarios and issues nurses will face.
Saint Xavier University, for the expansion of an early childhood professional development center, $900,000
Funding would help expand its current demonstration site for early childhood teacher education to meet the demand in the southwest Chicago metropolitan area. The School of Education would establish an Early Childhood Professional Development Center that would build on the work that has already begun with the Barbara Vick Early Childhood and Family center, the child Development Laboratory School, and other services provided to young children and their families.
Shawneetown, IL, to support updates and replacement of its water distribution system, $550,000
The City of Shawneetown's water distribution system—including fire hydrants, valves, and meters—is over 70 years old, and contains cast iron sections with leaded joints.
Shedd Aquarium, for its At-Risk Youth Mentoring Initiative, $600,000
Through Shedd's neighborhood initiative, community organizations in targeted disadvantaged neighborhoods are offered free aquarium field trips, special behind-the-scenes tours and interactive aquatic science workshops. A key component of Shedd's community outreach is stewardship projects that connect neighborhood residents to their local natural environment, instilling a sense of pride and inspiring difference-making in their local community. Shedd offers scholarships to economically disadvantaged students throughout the Chicagoland area.
Spark College, for real-time writers and captioning training project, $750,000
Funding would help train the technological workforce to provide captioning and Communications Access Real-time Translation (CART) services mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act to approximately 1,000,000 deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in Illinois. These funds will assist with continuing curriculum development, technology upgrades, promoting the program and scholarships. With this funding, Sparks will work to curb the shortage of captioners in the workforce and ensure that the highly skilled captioners necessary to meet the mandates will be available in the community and across the state.
Southern Illinois University, for the National Corn to Ethanol Research Center, $2,000,000
The National Corn to Ethanol research facility located in the research Park of Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, is the only full-scale corn to ethanol testing facility in the nation.
Southern Illinois University, for the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, $1,025,000
Funding would provide a permanent and stable source of revenue for the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at SIU, which was founded by former Senator Paul Simon. Federal funding will allow SIU to fulfill Senator Simon's dream for an endowment to support the institute's on-going policy agenda.
Southern Illinois University, for the School of Medicine Simmons Cooper Cancer Institute, $2,200,000
Funding will finish out the space allocated for research laboratories and provide fixed equipment for these labs within the new Simmons Cooper Cancer Institute.
Southern Illinois University, Purdue University, and University of Kentucky, for coal research, $5,000,000
The three universities are members of the Coal to Fuel Alliance that are researching the feasibility of clean coal gasification techniques for fuel technologies. The authorization for this research is in the 2005 Energy Policy Act.
Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), for the National Education, Science, and Critical Skills Capacity Building Initiative, $2,000,000
Building on this fund would expand the number of minority students entering the sciences, and increase opportunities for training and research. The TMCF will forge a partnership with the Department of Education, thereby building on the critical education and skills necessary to give opportunities for high education.
University of Illinois, College of Agriculture Consumer and Environmental Sciences, for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy Research, $1,000,000
The Center will create a facilitative structure for outreach, teaching and research efforts in areas related to bioenergy systems. Research at the Center will focus on the increased output of energy, based on renewable biological resources.
University of Illinois, College of Agriculture Consumer and Environmental Sciences, for the Illinois-Missouri Biotechnology Alliance, $3,000,000
The Alliance is a successful special competitive grants program, focused on biotechnology research on corn and soybeans produced and utilized in the Midwest, and operated jointly by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
University of Illinois, College of Agriculture Consumer and Environmental Sciences, for the Illinois Program for Integrated Sustainable Agriculture, $2,500,000
The Illinois Program for Integrated Sustainable Agriculture will support interdisciplinary research to develop an integrated livestock and corn-soybean production system that will conserve maximal quantities of nutrients within the system, minimize nutrient emissions to the environment, and extract other beneficial compounds, while maintaining producer profitability.
University of Illinois, College of Agriculture Consumer and Environmental Sciences, for the Soybean Disease Biotechnology Center , $2,000,000
The Soybean Disease Biotechnology Center is located within the National Soybean Research Laboratory (NSRL) at the University of Illinois and provides a first line of defense against major soybean diseases. Center researchers are working to identify and create new and improved mechanisms of disease tolerance and resistance to protect the soybean crop and increase profitability for farmers in Illinois.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, College of Engineering, for Nanomedical Technologies, $3,000,000
Funding will be utilized to equip the new addition to the Micro and Nanoelectronics Laboratory in order to carry out advanced research in Nanomedical Technologies. Activities will include the discovery or invention of new nanoparticles for targeting and imaging cancer; how cells are affected by infectious diseases, and how to detect pathogens.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, to encourage further education in technical domains that can be cleared by the Defense Security Service, $2,000,000
Funding will assist in the establishment of Centers at The University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and The Ohio State University to fund students to pursue graduate studies in the critical technology areas used by the Department of Defense. The technological developments and the training of technically-qualified U.S. Citizens to address research issues in these areas have not kept pace with the rapidly escalating difficulties of the problems solved.
University of Illinois, for the Urban Teaching and Leadership Center, $1,000,000
The Center will be established to reduce and eradicate the unacceptable achievement gap within the Chicago Public Schools. The Center will: redesign UIC school personnel preparation programs to focus on preparing educators uniquely equipped to turn around chronically low-performing schools; increase the number of candidates from underrepresented minority populations completing certification and degree requirements, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; and reverse the negative effects on student learning of persistent teacher turnover in high-need Chicago-are schools. The Center's purpose is to develop educators who can offer excellent, culturally responsive, and consistent instruction in struggling schools.
West Frankfort, IL, to support replacement of its Big Ditch Pumping Station, $550,000
The City's Big Ditch Pumping Station, which serves the Big Ditch Drainage System of West Frankfort, cannot adequately pump water during periods of significant waterfall to prevent flooding.
Wetlands Initiative of Illinois, to support its Illinois River Nutrient Farm Pilot Project, $11,810,000
This market-driven wetland restoration project, among other things, addresses nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon pollution in national waters. A pilot project, the Illinois River Nutrient Farming Pilot Project, is organized in highly disturbed backwater lake and wetland complexes (Goose Pond, Sawmill Pocket, Hennepin & Hopper Lakes) adjoining the Illinois River near Hennepin, Illinois.
Women's Sports Foundation, for its GoGirlGo! Chicago Initiative, $1,000,000
The GoGirlGo! Chicago Initiative is a mentoring, education and development program targeting at-risk teens to prevent drop-outs, truancy, crime, violence and drug abuse by promoting participation in sport and physical activity during after school hours when teens are at greatest risk for dysfunctional social behaviors. The GoGirlGo! Initiative is being carried out throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.
SUBMITTED BY NUMEROUS SENATORS (INCLUDING SENATOR OBAMA) ON BEHALF OF NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS
Center for Civic Education, for its National Council for Economic Education, $33,000,000
This program promotes civic competence and responsibility among American students and provides support for education exchange activities in civics and economics between the United States and other nations.
National Writing Project, $30,000,000
This funding would improve student achievement by improving the teaching and uses of writing in the nation's schools.
Reach Out and Read, Inc, $10,000,000
Funding will support a national network of healthcare facilities implementing Reach Out and Read, an evidence-based program that makes literacy intervention a routine part health care for at-risk children. In concert with non-federal dollars, these funds will be used to (1) provide books, specialized physician training and technical assistance to local facilities, (2) develop coordinated state and municipal expansion and quality-improvement projects, and (3) support a national capacity to facilitate and expand these state and local activities. Funding will bring the national reach of this program to serve 3.7 million children in all 50 states and territories.
YMCA of the USA, for pioneering for healthy communities, $5,000,000
YMCA of the USA launched the Pioneering Healthier Communities initiative to jump-start healthy and sustainable community leadership, and to change strategies across the country to rapidly and dynamically advance efforts to curb the chronic disease and obesity epidemics.
http://obama.senate.gov/press/070621-obama_announces_3/
"just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree."
While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/mood_of_america/supreme_court_ratings/supreme_court_update
Joe Vogler...
died in 1993...yet your liberal sources are quoting him as if he is still a active member of the AIP...
U.S. state of Alaska that advocates a state vote which includes several options, including increased state autonomy, territorial status, becoming a separate nation or commonwealth state, and, failing that, for increased Alaskan control of Alaskan land, gun rights, privatization, home schooling, and reduction of governmental intrusion in the private lives of its citizens with adherence to the founding documents of the United States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Independence_Party
I do recall liberals (from certain states) speaking of succeeding from the union at certain times...AIP members??
"simple folk in West Virginia"
Why do liberals think that the people of West Virginia are stupid?
"How come FOX isn't reporting on this?"
Because it isn't news?
"but Tapper found two people to attest to it."
Thats Huge!!!
Were/are they from the kos???
Biden's Lobbyist Ties Complicate Obama's Message
Barack Obama has attacked the Washington lobbying business and has made a ban on financial donations from federal lobbyists a cornerstone of his campaign. But his running mate, Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, has not, and that is likely to spark a new round of questioning about Obama's claim that, as president, he would insulate himself from lobbyists and special interests.
During Biden's 2008 presidential run, which he ended in January, his campaign raised $121,560 from lobbyists, employees at lobbying firms, and family members of lobbyists, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That amount doesn't include donations from in-house lobbyists at corporations or advocacy groups.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/conventions/co_20080825_3949.phpBiden's 2008 Senate re-election campaign has received $193,310 from lobbyists. Since the 1990 election cycle, Biden has received a total of $344,385 from lobbyists. That makes the lobbying sector, commonly referred to as "K Street" (where many firms have their offices in downtown Washington) the 10th-largest industry or profession to contribute to Biden's campaigns, the center says.
Further, a half-dozen or so former Biden staffers are working as Washington lobbyists. They include Jeff Connaughton, vice chairman of Quinn Gillespie & Associates; Mark Gitenstein, partner at Mayer Brown; Neil McBride, vice president for legal affairs at the Business Software Alliance; Jeff Peck, partner at Johnson Madigan Boland Peck & Stewart; Chris Putala, executive vice president of public policy at Earthlink; Jake Seher, senior legislative adviser at Venable; Ryan Spangler, manager of government relations at Monument Policy Group; and James Williams, senior vice president at Ogilvy Government Relations.
Biden also has family ties to K Street. His, son, R. Hunter Biden, is a founding partner at law and lobbying firm Oldaker, Biden & Belair. William Oldaker, one of the firm's other founders, has been a campaign adviser and fundraiser for Biden for 25 years, according to Delaware news reports. Biden is so close to former Rep. Marty Russo, D-Ill., CEO and senior vice chairman at lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates, that he is godfather to Russo's granddaughter.
For a time, Quinn Gillespie's Connaughton was the treasurer of Biden's leadership PAC, Unite Our States. He resigned in early 2006 not long after the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal prompted dozens of lobbyists to cease running leadership PACs for lawmakers. Connaughton declined to comment for this story.
To be sure, the contributions that Biden received from lobbyists represent a tiny portion of the $27.4 million he has raised since 1990. Still, his K Street ties complicate the Obama campaign's lobbyist-free claim.
Read...
the bottom/last sentence.
though this does not mean it should be taken as FACT
hunter biden...
is not getting much air play either.
List me...
as an "American traitor"...
By the way...did clooney invite you to the swiss fundraiser?
ROFL!!!!
Charles C. Adams Jr. $50,000 Switzerland Hogan & Hartson
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:QXfAHolRGooJ:www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-04-15-obama_N.htm+charles+adams+obama&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Earlier, organizer Charles Adams said on local morning radio that the event was "fully subscribed."
"Actually most of our guests for dinner are coming from elsewhere -- people are flying in from Los Angeles, Prague, London, Zurich and so on," said Adams, who serves on Obama's National Finance Committee.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=5706765
Obama: Recession could delay rescinding tax cuts
Sun Sep 7, 2:53 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.
Nevertheless, Obama has no plans to extend the Bush tax cuts beyond their expiration date, as Republican John McCain advocates. Instead, Obama wants to push for his promised tax cuts for the middle class, he said in a broadcast interview aired Sunday.
"Even if we're still in a recession, I'm going to go through with my tax cuts," Obama said. "That's my priority."
What about increasing taxes on the wealthy?
"I think we've got to take a look and see where the economy is. I mean, the economy is weak right now," Obama said on "This Week" on ABC. "The news with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I think, along with the unemployment numbers, indicates that we're fragile."
Obama was referring to the two mortgage companies taken over by the federal government Sunday in what could become a huge taxpayer bailout. The nation's unemployment rate climbed to 6.1 percent in August from 5.7 percent the month before, the government said last week. It was the first time in five years that the unemployment rate had topped 6 percent.
Obama and McCain have sparred over tax policy for months. Obama says McCain wants to continue Bush administration policies, noting that McCain had voted against the Bush tax cuts but then embraced them as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination.
"John McCain likes to talk about fiscal responsibility, but there is no doubt that his proposals blow a hole through the budget," Obama said.
McCain has repeatedly hammered Obama over taxes in an attempt to paint him as a typical tax-and-spend liberal. McCain wants to make permanent the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010.
"We can get this economy back on it's feet," McCain said in an interview aired Sunday on "Face the Nation" on CBS. "Don't raise their taxes. Get it going again. Americans are hurting in a way that they have not hurt for a long time."
The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama's tax plan would benefit middle-income taxpayers more than McCain's. However, Obama would raise payroll taxes on taxpayers with incomes above $250,000, and he would raise corporate taxes. Small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year also would see taxes rise.
McCain's plan cuts taxes across all income levels. It would cut taxes for those in the top 1 percent by more than $125,000, raising their after-tax income an average 9.5 percent, the center concluded.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080907/ap_on_el_pr/obama;_ylt=ApOBQKLmEWQGYV576K2_0QytOrgF
Would/is this considered a flipper?
Clooney's Obama fundraiser in Geneva sells out
"Actually most of our guests for dinner are coming from elsewhere - people are flying in from Los Angeles, Prague, London, Zurich and so on,' said Mr Adams, who serves on Obama's National Finance Committee."
In keeping with US laws, only US citizens were allowed to buy tickets to the fundraiser which has had normally sober Geneva buzzing.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0902/uselection1.html
The liberal elite...
WAFJ
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Invest in Democrats
Published by Lindsay Renick Mayer on July 16, 2008 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
The federal government recently announced that it will come to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two embattled mortgage buyers that for years have pursued a lobbying strategy to get lawmakers on their side. Both companies have poured money into lobbying and campaign contributions to federal candidates, parties and committees as a general tactic, but they've also directed those contributions strategically. In the 2006 election cycle, Fannie Mae was giving 53 percent of its total $1.3 million in contributions to Republicans, who controlled Congress at that time. This cycle, with Democrats in control, they've reversed course, giving the party 56 percent of their total $1.1 million in contributions. Similarly, Freddie Mac has given 53 percent of its $555,700 in contributions to Democrats this cycle, compared to the 44 percent it gave during 2006.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have also strategically given more contributions to lawmakers currently sitting on committees that primarily regulate their industry. Fifteen of the 25 lawmakers who have received the most from the two companies combined since the 1990 election sit on either the House Financial Services Committee; the Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee; or the Senate Finance Committee. The others have seats on the powerful Appropriations or Ways & Means committees, are members of the congressional leadership or have run for president. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate banking committee, has received the most from Fannie and Freddie's PACs and employees ($133,900 since 1989). Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) has received $65,500. Kanjorski chairs the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs.
Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008
Click the link to see who they are:
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/07/top-senate-recipients-of-fanni.html
A consequence of this new algorithm is that in the "News from the Votemaster" section, a new poll may be reported but the map gives a different result. This effect is always due to multiple recent polls being averaged. You will see that this is the case by looking for the "+" sign used to separate multiple pollsters in the Source field of the pop-up box. Another consequence of this algorithm, is that this site may give slightly different results from other polling sites, each of which uses its own algorithm, sometimes a far more complex one.
Mrs. Pelosi, a member of St. Vincent de Paul Parish in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood, said in the interview that church fathers, such as St. Augustine, had not defined over the centuries when life begins nor did they have a solid position on abortion.
The Catholic Church settled on life beginning at conception only about 50 years ago, she added.
Her remarks brought rebukes from 11 prelates, including the archbishops of Washington, New York, Chicago and now San Francisco. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also released a statement condemning and correcting her remarks.
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/sep/06/pelosi-pastor-asks-to-meet-on-abortion/
Map Algorithm Explained
Based on the results of the 2004 election, the algorithm used to generate the map has been modified. The new algorithm did better in 2004. Here is the exact algorithm:
1. The most recent poll in every state is always used.
2. If no other polls were taken within a week of the most recent one, only the most recent poll counts.
3. If one or more polls were taken within a week of the most recent, all of them are averaged, weighted equally.
This algorithm smoothes out fluctations better and produces fewer wild swings and gives a better overall result. You can see which polls were used by putting the mouse on a state. The Source field tells which polls are used and gives the final date of the final poll used. If multiple polls were used, the first five characters of each pollster are listed and the pollsters are separated by a "+" sign.
A consequence of this new algorithm is that in the "News from the Votemaster" section, a new poll may be reported but the map gives a different result. This effect is always due to multiple recent polls being averaged. You will see that this is the case by looking for the "+" sign used to separate multiple pollsters in the Source field of the pop-up box. Another consequence of this algorithm, is that this site may give slightly different results from other polling sites, each of which uses its own algorithm, sometimes a far more complex one.
Why a look-back window of 1 week? It is admittedly arbitrary. If the window is too short, the results gyrate wildly as different polls use different methodologies . If the window is too long, genuine shifts in public opinion take too long to show up. The choice of 1 week is based on my now-extensive experience with examining polling data. Public reaction to news events often takes several days to take effect as people often change their opinions after talking to friends, coworkers, and relatives.
It is worth emphasizing that the margin of error in most state polls is at least 3% for each candidate. Thus if a poll says Smith is beating Jones 52% to 48%, Smith might be as low as 49% and Jones might be as high as 51%. When the difference between two candidates is less than 2x the margin of error, the race is a statistical tie. On the map, the states with a white center are those where the candidates differ by less than 5% and are certainly statistical ties. Even some of the ones in the solid light color may technically be statistical ties, but a lead of 5% or more most likely means the candidate is actually ahead.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Info/map-algorithm.html
Geez...
Parroting the nuts at kos again...
By the way...did you ever apologize/retract the BS you were posting here (that came from kos) concerning Palin's Baby?
SL
"100% in 2008"
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/110/senate/perfect-voters/
"McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time"
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/110/senate/party-voters/
My Son, The Lobbyist: Biden's Son a Well-Paid DC Insider
Firm Lobbies Senator Biden Although Son Does Not
By EMMA SCHWARTZ
Aug. 24, 2008
The son of Barack Obama's vice presidential pick, Sen. Joe Biden, is a top partner at a Washington law firm that has lobbied his father's office, a family tie that could prove embarrassing for a campaign that has positioned itself as fighting lobbyists and special interests in Washington.
hunter biden
In the first six months of this year R. Hunter Biden, a founding partner of Oldaker, Biden & Belair, has worked on accounts that brought it $470,000 from nine clients, according to lobbying disclosure records.
Although firm members say Biden, 38, does not lobby his father, this kind of family tie, said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, "raises the potential of a conflict of interest."
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For its part, the Obama campaign said that Sen. Biden had always followed ethics rules. "Hunter Biden has never lobbied Sen. Biden's office or committees, period," David Wade, Obama-Biden spokesperson, wrote in an email response.
"He's never worked on a client issue where other members of the firm have lobbied the office. Hunter shares expenses not revenues with his partners, so there's no benefit to him when a partner lobbies. Sen. Biden has been as strong a supporter of ethics reform as the Senate has known, and his office follows all ethics laws right down to the letter."
But the connections between the law firm and Biden are very close.
For instance, William Oldaker, another named partner and former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, has been Sen. Biden's campaign treasurer for Congress.
Oldaker has advised Biden on campaign issues, first during the Senator's failed 1988 presidential bid. And while Oldaker has said he does not lobby Biden personally, he has spoken with Biden's staff about some clients.
One example was the University of Delaware, which Oldaker approached in 2002, shortly after founding the firm with Hunter Biden and Robert Belair. Since then, the university has paid Oldaker's firm $1.5 million.
The payoff: as of 2006, $24.8 million in earmarks for defense research, a student-exchange program, and a drug-and-alcohol-studies program.
Biden's then chief-of-staff, Alan Hoffman told Legal Times in 2006, "We help University of Delaware the way we would help a whole other host of institutions in Delaware."
Oldaker did not return a phone call to his home.
Belair, the firm's other named partner, said he has never personally lobbied Sen. Biden, but has on occasion spoken with Biden's staff for a client with issues before the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose membership includes Biden.
Belair said he does not think there is any conflict of interest because he has worked for this client, SEARCH Group, a law enforcement research organization, for decades – long before he ever met or began working with Hunter Biden.
Belair said the firm has no formal policy banning Hunter from lobbying his father but said, "I think in all the years since we've put the firm together I'm unaware of Hunter ever, ever lobbying his dad or that office. I don't think that happened. I never asked him to. I never would ask him and I think he would refuse."
Oldaker and Hunter Biden first formed a firm in 1999. In 2002, they founded what is now known as Oldaker, Biden & Belair, located just blocks from the White House.
Since 2003, Hunter Biden has been registered to lobby for an array of small universities, hospitals, and drug research companies seeking earmarks and other appropriations. Those clients have paid his firm a total of $3.8 million, jumping from $20,000 in 2003 to $1.6 million in 2007, according to lobbying disclosure records.
This year Hunter Biden has lobbied for drug research companies Achaogen and Pulmatrix, Sharp & Barnes on internet gambling, and six universities, Regis University, St. Joseph's University, St. Xavier University, University of Detroit Mercy, Xavier University, and University of Scranton which is located in his father's hometown.
Hunter served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps following graduation and has worked as a presidential appointee in the Department of Commerce, according to his online firm bio. He was also confirmed by the senate as a member of the Amtrak Reform Board in 2006.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5640118&page=1
Lobbying, financial dealings in Biden family face scrutiny
By JEFF MONTGOMERY • The News Journal • August 29, 2008
When Sen. Joe Biden's son Hunter needed investors to help buy a New York-based hedge fund, the first financier to step forward was a Chicago lobbying firm and one of the senator's top campaign contributors.
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After the first attempt to buy the fund soured, one of Joe Biden's top advisers, who co-owns a lobbying and communications firm, jumped in to provide public relations help, and was later identified in court papers as a new investor.
Both deals came to light only after one of the parties -- who describes himself as a longtime acquaintance of the Bidens -- filed a fraud lawsuit against Hunter and James Biden, the senator's younger brother and a partner in the hedge fund.
The case, still working its way through New York's courts, illustrates an often-mentioned vulnerability of Joe Biden after 36 years in the Senate: his ties with Washington lobbyists, including those of his son Hunter.
Democrats were hoping to avoid Republican attacks and insider dealings when they chose the Delaware Democrat to join presidential hopeful Barack Obama and his message of political change.
But the legal dispute has offered inside glimpses of the deals, including revelations that a corporate counsel working for the Hunter Biden-led venture was awaiting sentencing on a federal money-laundering charge, and allegations of drug abuse by one hedge fund's senior officers and prior owners.
Hunter Biden began his effort to buy control of the New York-based Paradigm hedge fund about the time his father began seriously campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president. The only party to put up any large amount of cash for the $21 million deal was Illinois-based SimmonsCooper LLC, a law and lobbying firm that agreed to chip in $2 million to Hunter's effort.
Paradigm controls hundreds of millions of investor assets, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records and New York State Supreme Court files.
SimmonsCooper is a longtime supporter of Joe Biden, and contributed more than $146,300 to Biden through employees and political action committees in the 2007-2008 campaign cycle alone, making the company Biden's second-leading backer.
David Wade, a spokesman for Biden and his vice presidential campaign, said Tuesday that Joe Biden had nothing to do with the deal and knew nothing about it. Wade also said that Hunter Biden had a personal relationship with a partner in SimmonsCooper.
"Jeff Cooper is a longtime friend of Hunter Biden, for several years," Wade said. "Senator Biden was unaware of the business deal."
Sen. Biden has had plenty of dealings, however, that involved SimmonsCooper interests.
Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and has been a staunch supporter of one of the law firm's main legislative priorities: opposition to so-called "tort reform" and attempts to limit payouts to victims in asbestos cases.
And when Hunter Biden's first Paradigm deal dissolved, another Joe Biden acquaintance was waiting in the wings.
Boston-based public relations magnate Lawrence Rasky joined a second effort to buy the fund, this time for $8 million, according to the lawsuit.
Rasky was the communications adviser for Joe Biden's failed presidential campaign and a Biden contributor.
Details of Rasky's financial commitment to or participation in the Paradigm deal are unknown.
First deal fails
Hunter Biden and James Biden first tried to buy control of Paradigm Capital in 2006 for $21 million. Hunter Biden was still working as a Washington, D.C., lobbyist. And Joe Biden already was warming up for his run for the Democratic nomination for president.
According to claims filed as part of the New York case, Hunter launched the takeover bid partly as an effort to find a career outside of direct lobbying.
The senator's son's occupation and connections to two lobbying firms already had drawn some critical attention to his father as the younger Biden lobbied for health care and educational interests.
In 2006, Biden's campaign severed ties with one of the lobbying companies connected with Hunter, after reform measures passed obliging lawmakers to certify that they or their families would not benefit from votes before them.
At about the same time, the younger Biden started exploring other careers.
Anthony V. Lotito Jr., an investment adviser who is now suing Hunter and James Biden and others, claimed in a suit filed last year that James Biden approached him in 2006 to help Hunter acquire Paradigm and get away from lobbying.
Lotito claimed to have known James Biden since 2002, and said the two were once co-investors in a different venture, Americore International Security Advisers.
In 2006, Lotito said in a complaint, James Biden reported that the senator was "concerned with the impact that Hunter's lobbying activities might have" on Biden's presidential primary bid.
Although Hunter and James Biden have a vastly different version of events from Lotito's, Lotito claimed that the three eventually formed a company to buy up Paradigm, a hedge fund investment company actually made up of other hedge funds, managed out of New York City.
According to the lawsuit, a partnership managed by SimmonsCooper put up most of the hard cash for the $21.2 million deal.
SimmonsCooper, a company ranked as one of the country's most active in asbestos injury lawsuits, paid $1 million toward the purchase in 2006 and had pledged another before the partnership fell apart amid allegations of fraud and deception.
In their response to the lawsuit, the two Bidens accused Lotito of misrepresenting his expertise in recruiting investors for the purchase. They also said that Lotito had failed to tell them about drug and absentee problems that a principal investor in Paradigm suffered, and about the fact that a corporate lawyer recommended for the new venture by Lotito was awaiting sentencing for a federal money laundering charge.
They also accused Lotito and the lawyer of plundering the company after the law firm handed over $330,000 and $670,000 payments toward their $2 million stake.
"Almost immediately after SimmonsCooper sent this second payment ... Lotito and Fasciana began submitting questionable expenses," Hunter Biden charged in an affidavit. They issued payments to themselves as reimbursements, he said.
Most of SimmonsCooper's money eventually was consumed by questionable legal fees, retainers and trips to California, where Lotito had a girlfriend, Biden said in his affidavit.
Lotito countered that Hunter Biden was unprepared to run the fund company, a job for which he was to have been paid $1.2 million a year. He claimed that Biden immediately began making mistakes in the business, and accused the two Bidens of elbowing him out of the company. The pair, he alleged, pressed him to sell out his piece of the company that was buying Paradigm, even as the two Bidens were setting up a different, and cheaper, side deal for the buyout.
Nicholas Gravante Jr., an attorney in New York who represents the Bidens in the lawsuit said Lotito's suggestions about any ties to Sen. Biden are "absolutely untrue." He also said the case had been moving slowly through the court system but predicted that it eventually will be dismissed -- despite a judge's observation that the Bidens should have taken a closer look at their partner's claims before signing a deal.
Biden adviser steps in
By late 2006, the original deal was broken and Lotito was preparing a lawsuit.
http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080829/NEWS/808290366
Biden’s Misguided S1515 Will Exacerbate Domestic Violence System’s Problems
By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks
When it comes to domestic violence legislation, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) owns an asphalt company. Biden’s latest domestic violence bill is the National Domestic Violence Volunteer Attorney Network Act, which amends Biden’s Violence Against Women Act to create an extensive network of volunteer attorneys to help abused women. The attorneys would provide free legal help in forging divorce or separation agreements and in winning child custody.
According to Biden, S.1515, which will soon be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee and is co-sponsored by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, will enlist 100,000 volunteer attorneys. The bill is supported by the American Bar Association, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, and the National Organization for Women, which is currently running a campaign in support of the bill.
S.1515 will do some good in aiding abused low-income women. The problem is that the bill will also greatly exacerbate the already widespread problem of false domestic violence claims being used to strip decent, loving fathers of custody of their children. There is no mechanism within the bill to distinguish between false accusations and legitimate ones.
Currently, domestic violence service providers assist women who claim to be abused. Let’s say Bob and Jane are married and have two kids. If Bob abuses Jane, Jane can go to a local shelter and receive legal assistance in obtaining a personal protection order (aka restraining order) against Bob. Bob is forced to vacate his house immediately. A couple weeks later there is a hearing to determine if the protection order will be made permanent, and the domestic violence service provider again furnishes assistance for this hearing. At these hearings, the protection orders are usually extended.
All this is as it should be—provided Bob is guilty. The problem is that the same process and laws which protect a battered Jane from an abusive Bob also allow an unhappy but not abused Jane to boot an innocent Bob out of their home and set a child custody precedent with herself as sole caregiver. This aids Jane greatly during the divorce process.
Many prominent family law professionals are cautioning that this system is being widely misused, and that there are scant protections for the falsely accused. The Family Law News, the official publication of the State Bar of California Family Law Section, recently explained:
"Protective orders are increasingly being used in family law cases to help one side jockey for an advantage in child custody…[the orders are] almost routinely issued by the court in family law proceedings even when there is relatively meager evidence and usually without notice to the restrained person.”
An article in the November, 2007 issue of the Illinois Bar Journal article explains:
"If a parent is willing to abuse the system, it is unlikely the trial court could discover (his or her) improper motives in an Order of Protection hearing."
The hearings to make the orders permanent are often just a formality for which no more than 15 minutes are generally allotted. In fact, the State of California’s website gives the following advice for men who are contesting restraining orders:
“Practice saying why you disagree with the charges. Do not take more than three minutes to say what you disagree with. You can bring witnesses or documents that support your case, but the judge may not have enough time to talk to the witnesses.”
This process is already damaging and unfair to fathers, but S1515 will make it far worse. Once the National Domestic Violence Volunteer Attorney Network is in place, false accusers who have obtained initial assistance through domestic violence service providers will be provided free attorneys to litigate their divorces. This legal assistance will give the mothers a huge advantage over low-income fathers, one which will cause many innocent dads to lose custody and even access to their kids.
What’s needed instead is an overhaul of the domestic violence system to emphasize serving and protecting only those who are legitimately abused. Until there is meaningful judicial oversight of domestic violence claims, Biden’s bill will do much more harm than good.
This column first appeared in The Philadelphia Daily News (12/7/07).
Mike McCormick is the Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. www.acfc.org
Glenn Sacks’ columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of the largest newspapers in the United States. www.GlennSacks.com
http://glennsacks.com/blog/?page_id=1517
"I don't see a single example of anything Bill Ayers teaches."
I do agree with your assessment...
That article would have been better served/understood if I had introduced the reader/readers to an earlier writing/opinion (see below) of Sol Stern.
Thank you bringing it to my attention.
SL
The Ed Schools’ Latest—and Worst—Humbug
Sol Stern
Teaching for “social justice” is a cruel hoax on disadvantaged kids.
In 1980, Bill Ayers and his partner Bernardine Dohrn came up from the underground—the Weather Underground, that is. It had been a wild ride for the Bonnie and Clyde of the sixties New Left. They first went into combat during the 1969 “Days of Rage” in Chicago, smashing storefront windows and assaulting police officers and city officials in the fantasy that they were aiding their Vietnamese allies by “bringing the war back home.” They spent the next few years planting bombs at government buildings around the country, including in restrooms at the Pentagon and the Capitol. When their little war against America sputtered to a halt, the revolutionary couple rationalized that at least they had not caused any deaths. But three of their comrades had blown themselves up in a Manhattan townhouse while preparing a bomb to detonate at a dance at the Fort Dix army base.
Ayers has acknowledged committing crimes during his underground days—crimes that arguably amounted to treason. Yet thanks to procedural complications and a lack of witnesses, he never went to trial or to jail. A few years after stepping out of the shadows, Ayers reflected on his odyssey in a conversation with journalists Peter Collier and David Horowitz: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted.
But that was just half the wonder of it. Ayers would soon go on to disprove thoroughly F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous though mistaken aphorism that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Ayers’s spectacular second act began when he enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in 1984. Then 40, he planned to stay just to get a teaching credential. (He had taught in a “Freedom School” during his pre-underground student radical days.) But he experienced an epiphany in a course taught by Maxine Greene, a leading light of the “critical pedagogy” movement. As Ayers wrote later, he took fire from Greene’s lectures on how the “oppressive hegemony” of the capitalist social order “reproduces” itself through the traditional practice of public schooling—critical pedagogy’s fancy way of saying that the evil corporations exercise thought control through the schools.
It hadn’t occurred to Ayers that an ed-school professor could speak or write as an authentic American radical. “There are vast dislocations in industrial towns, erosions of trade unions; there is little sign of class consciousness today,” Greene had proclaimed in the Harvard Education Review. “Our great cities are burnished on the surfaces, building high technologies, displaying astonishing consumer goods. And on the side streets, in the crevices, in the burnt-out neighborhoods, there are the rootless, the dependent, the sick, the permanently unemployed. There is little sense of agency, even among the brightly successful; there is little capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise.”
Greene told future teachers that they could help change this bleak landscape by developing a “transformative” vision of social justice and democracy in their classrooms. Her vision, though, was a far cry from the democratic optimism of the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr., which most parents would endorse. Instead, critical pedagogy theorists nurse a rancorous view of an America in which it is always two minutes to midnight and a knock on the door by the thought police is imminent. The education professors feel themselves anointed to use the nation’s K–12 classrooms to resist this oppressive system. Thus Maxine Greene urged teachers not to mince words with children about the evils of the existing social order. They should portray “homelessness as a consequence of the private dealings of landlords, an arms buildup as a consequence of corporate decisions, racial exclusion as a consequence of a private property-holder’s choice.” In other words, they should turn the little ones into young socialists and critical theorists.
All music to Bill Ayers’s ears. The ex-Weatherman glimpsed a new radical vocation. He dreamed of bringing the revolution from the streets to the schools. And that’s exactly what he has managed to do.
In record time Ayers acquired an Ed.D. with a dissertation titled “The Discerning ‘I’: Accounts of Teacher Self-Construction Through the Use of Co-Biography, Metaphor, and Image.” There wasn’t much biography, metaphor, or image in the 180-page text. Ayers’s research consisted solely of a few days spent interviewing and observing the classroom practices of three nursery school teachers he knew personally. (In Ayers’s own autobiographical section of the text—de rigueur for Teachers College dissertations—he reminisced about growing up in a wealthy Chicago suburb, about his warm family, and about having been arrested in campus antiwar demonstrations. Of his bomb-making skills or his ten years in the underground he said not a word.)
With his Teachers College credential in hand, Ayers landed an ed-school appointment back in Chicago, where his father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison and nicely plugged in to the city’s political establishment. These days, Ayers carries the joint titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. One of his several books on the moral imperative of teaching for social justice is a bestseller in ed-school courses. Like many other tenured and well-heeled radicals, Ayers keeps hoping for a revolutionary upheaval that will finally bring down American capitalism and imperialism. But now, instead of planting bombs in bathrooms, he has been planting the seeds of resistance and rebellion in America’s future teachers, who will then pass on the lessons to the students in their classrooms.
Future teachers signing up for Ayers’s course “On Urban Education” can read these exhortations from the course description on the professor’s website:
“Homelessness, crime, racism, oppression—we have the resources and knowledge to fight and overcome these things.”
“We need to look beyond our isolated situations, to define our problems globally. We cannot be child advocates . . . in Chicago or New York and ignore the web that links us with the children of India or Palestine.”
“In a truly just society there would be a greater sharing of the burden, a fairer distribution of material and human resources.”
For another course, titled “Improving Learning Environments,” Ayers proposes that teachers “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”
The readings that Ayers assigns are as intellectually stimulating and diverse as a political commissar’s indoctrination session in one of his favorite communist tyrannies. The reading list for his urban education course includes the bible of the critical pedagogy movement, Brazilian Marxist Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; two books by Ayers himself; another by bell hooks, a radical black feminist writer and critical race theorist; and a “Freedom School” curriculum. That’s the entire spectrum of debate.
For students who might get bored with the purely pedagogic approach to liberation, Ayers also offers a course on the real thing, called “Social Conflicts of the 1960’s.” For this class Ayers also posts his introduction to the soon-to-be-published collection of Weather Underground agitprop that he edited with Dohrn—called, with no intended parody, Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974. “Once things were connected,” Ayers’s introduction recollects, “we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amílcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small ‘c’ communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block [sic]. . . . We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.”
Ayers makes clear that his political views haven’t changed much since those glory days. He cites a letter he recently wrote: “I’ve been told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your ‘youthful idealism’ is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don’t grow up! I went to Camp Casey [Cindy Sheehan’s vigil at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas] in August precisely because I’m an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out.”
America’s historical ideal of public schooling as a means of assimilating all children (and particularly the children of new immigrants) into a common civic and democratic culture is already under assault from the multiculturalists and their race- and gender-centered pedagogy. Now Ayers and his social justice movement, by dismissing the civic culture ideal as nothing more than “capitalist hegemony,” subvert the public schools even further—while subsidized by the taxpayers, including the capitalists who supposedly control the schools.
And it’s not just from his government-funded outpost at the University of Illinois that Ayers is spreading the word about radical social justice teaching. He maintains a busy lecture schedule at other ed schools around the country, and he does teacher training and professional development for the Chicago public schools. All that still leaves him enough time to give nostalgic lectures on college campuses about his Weather Underground experiences.
He also turns up from time to time as a guest lecturer at Teachers College, where he gets a hero’s welcome. In describing one of those events, the official college publication, Inside TC, turned as ecstatic as a groupie at a rock concert: “A man sporting sunglasses, an earring in each earlobe, khaki pants, a sweater and tweed jacket strode purposefully past the entry and down the hallway toward the auditorium. . . . His intensity and passion were tangible in the way he walked through the crowd. He was the speaker for the evening, William Ayers. . . . A former leader of the radical Weathermen organization in the 1960s, Ayers not only believes in the obligation to assist people on the bottom, he acts on it.”
In 1997, Ayers and his mentor Maxine Greene persuaded Teachers College Press to launch a series of books on social justice teaching, with Ayers as editor and Greene serving on the editorial board (along with Rashid Khalidi, loyal supporter of the Palestinian cause and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University). Twelve volumes have appeared so far, including one titled Teaching Science for Social Justice.
Teaching science for social justice? Let Teachers College professor Angela Calabrese Barton, the volume’s principal author, try to explain: “The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.” If you still can’t appreciate why it’s necessary for your child’s chemistry teacher to teach for social justice, you are probably hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities.
The series doesn’t yet have a text on mathematics, but it’s sure to come, since the pedagogy for teaching social justice through math is even more fully developed than for science. One of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher. Gutstein’s new book, Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, combines critical pedagogy theory and real live math lessons that Gutstein piloted with his predominantly minority seventh-grade students.
Like Ayers, Gutstein reveres Paolo Freire. He approvingly quotes Freire’s dictum that “there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas.” Gutstein takes this to mean that since all education is political, leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words, “does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character.”
Accordingly, Gutstein has relentlessly politicized his math classes for years, claiming that this approach has improved his students’ math skills while making them more aware of the injustices built in to capitalist society. One lesson, for example, presents charts showing the U.S. income distribution, aiming to get the students to understand the concept of percentages and fractions, while simultaneously showing them how much wealth is concentrated at the top in an economic system that mainly benefits the superrich. After the class does the mathematical calculations, Gutstein asks: “How does all this make you feel?” He triumphantly reports that 19 of 21 students described wealth distribution in America as “bad,” “unfair,” or “shocking,” and he proudly quotes the comments of a child named Rosa: “Well I see that all the wealth in the United States is mostly the wealth of a couple people not the whole nation.”
Gutstein’s book will likely sell very well, not because all math teachers will thrill to his Freirian dialectics or Chomskyite denunciations of American foreign policy, but because they may find his lesson plans and classroom projects useful. After all, they are under intense pressure from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to move away from the traditional emphasis on computational skills like multiplication tables and algorithms—a teaching method that university mathematicians still favor but that many K–12 math teachers dismiss as “drill and kill.” Teachers (particularly liberal and left-leaning teachers) who instead use a “constructivist” or “discovery-based” pedagogy, sometimes called “fuzzy math,” in which students learn mathematical concepts by trying to solve real-life problems, will see Gutstein’s social justice lessons on how military budgets for the war in Iraq deny poor Americans their fair share of resources as an advance beyond problems about baseball statistics, shopping, or building.
Even more important, Gutstein’s book comes with the imprimatur of two of the nation’s most influential ed profs, Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin and William F. Tate of Washington University in St. Louis—the outgoing and incoming presidents of the American Education Research Association. The 25,000-member AERA is the umbrella organization of the ed-school professoriate, and over the past two decades it has moved steadily left, becoming more multicultural, postmodernist, feminist, and enamored of critical race theory and queer theory.
And now the organization has just hired its first national Director of Social Justice. In fact, Ladson-Billings and Tate have coedited their own volume of essays on educational research and social justice, wherein they argue for a critical race theory approach, based on the idea that institutionalized “white supremacy” remains pervasive in American public education. Left unexplained is how these two particular critical race theorists, both black, could have been elected by their overwhelmingly white peers to preside over the education establishment’s premier organization.
One by one, the education schools are lining up behind social justice teaching and enforcing it on their students—especially since they expect aspiring teachers to possess the approved liberal “dispositions,” or individual character traits, that will qualify them to teach in the public schools. The National Council on the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the main accreditor of education schools, now monitors how well the schools comply with their own social justice requirements.
With the caveat that not all education schools have yet joined the trend, here is a sampler, going from east to west.
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York recently declared: “Because democracy requires a substantive concern for equity, the faculty of the School of Education is committed, in theory and practice, to social justice. . . . We believe that an education centered on social justice prepares the highest quality of future teachers. . . . Our teacher candidates and other school personnel are prepared to demonstrate a knowledge of, language for, and the ability to create educational environments based on various theories of social justice.”
The teacher education program at Marquette University in Milwaukee proclaims that it “has a commitment to social justice in schools and society” and to using education “to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture.” It requires that all education degree candidates demonstrate a “desire to work for social justice, particularly in an urban environment.” Similarly, the University of Kansas ed school declares that “addressing issues of diversity includes being more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment.”
On the West Coast, the highly regarded Claremont Graduate University not only requires teacher candidates to commit to social justice teaching but screens applicants to make sure they have that essential “disposition.” According to a recent university publication, “CGU’s recruitment efforts focus upon individuals who have an understanding of societal inequities. . . . By reflecting the cultures and languages of the student populations in area K–12 schools and by caring about issues of social justice, CGU’s teachers are role models to their students in a variety of ways.”
At Humboldt State University in northern California, the social studies methods class required for prospective high school history and social studies teachers best demonstrates the school’s commitment to social justice teaching. The professor, Gayle Olson-Raymer, states the course’s purpose right up front in her syllabus: “It is not an option for history teachers to teach social justice and social responsibility; it is a mandate. History teachers do their best work when they use their knowledge, their commitment, and their courage to help the students grapple with the important issues of social responsibility and when they encourage them to direct their lives towards creating a just society.”
How does your average, traditional-minded future teacher cope in an education class taught from a social justice or critical race theory perspective? Such students are well-advised to bite their tongues or risk career-threatening penalties. For all their talk about teaching for “freedom and democracy,” the professors often run their own classes like leftist political indoctrination sessions.
Brooklyn College and Washington State University, according to recent published reports, have denied students the right to become teachers after they ran afoul of their ed schools’ social justice dispositions requirements. Then there’s the notorious case of Steve Head, a 50-year-old Silicon Valley software engineer who decided to make a career switch a few years ago and obtain a high school math teaching credential. In a rational world, Head would be the poster boy for the federal government’s new initiatives to recruit more math and science teachers for our high schools. Instead, his story sends the message that education professors would rather continue molding future teachers’ attitudes on race and social justice issues than help the U.S. close the math and science achievement gap with other industrialized nations.
Head was smoothly completing all his math-related course work at taxpayer-supported San Jose State University. Then in the fall of 2003, he enrolled in the required “Social, Philosophical, and Multicultural Foundations of Education,” taught by Helen Kress, whose main scholarly interest appears to be “critical whiteness studies,” a noxious branch of critical race theory that posits that white racial identity is a socially constructed characteristic and must be confronted and purged to overcome America’s institutionalized system of white supremacy. The foundations course functions as a sort of military checkpoint to guarantee that every student who passes through toward a teaching credential has properly imbibed the pedagogies of multiculturalism, critical race theory, feminism, and, of course, social justice teaching.
The easy way out would have been for Head to spew back the expected answers on racial and gender oppression and move on, as most traditional-minded education students do. But something about Steve Head—a Christian and a libertarian—made him gag at the big lies and logical absurdities about American race relations and immigration issues that he was being asked to regurgitate. So he turned the tables and deconstructed the hegemony of anti-Americanism in the classroom.
In a sworn legal document, Head recounted that when his professor showed the class a videotape purporting to reveal institutional racism against immigrants, he responded by suggesting that most immigrants actually came here because they realized they would be better off, including benefiting from healthier race relations. Professor Kress responded that anyone holding such opinions was clearly “unfit to teach.” Head further infuriated the professor by suggesting that the class be allowed to read black social scientists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams to provide some intellectual balance on the issues of race and education.
After turning down Kress’s offer to reeducate him on these issues personally, Head received an F for the class, even though a grade below B for a student who has completed all assignments is almost as rare in ed schools as serious intellectual debate. The school wouldn’t let Head enroll in the student teaching class, and so, for the time being, it has blocked him from getting his teaching certificate. After exhausting his appeals to the university, he filed suit earlier this year, charging that the school was applying a political litmus test to become a teacher and had violated his First Amendment rights.
“I could have lied about my beliefs in class, but what is the point of that in America?” Head told me. “We are not free unless we choose to exercise our freedoms without fear of reprisals. I choose freedom, and I choose to defend my beliefs against state indoctrination.”
Though no one has as yet surveyed how far social justice teaching has pervaded America’s 1,500 ed schools, education researchers David Steiner (now Hunter College ed-school dean) and Susan Rozen did a study two years ago on the syllabi of the basic “foundations of education” and “methods” courses in 16 of the nation’s most prestigious ed schools. The mainstays of the foundations courses were works by Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux (a leading critical pedagogy theorist), and the radical education writer Jonathan Kozol (“America’s Most Influential—and Wrongest—School Reformer,” Winter 2000). For the methods courses, Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher tops the bestseller list. Neither list included advocates of a knowledge-based and politically neutral curriculum, such as E. D. Hirsch Jr. or Diane Ravitch.
An ed-school system that bars math teachers like Steve Head, who want to teach without bringing politics into the classroom, while celebrating Eric Gutstein’s Marxist indoctrination of future math teachers, is fundamentally corrupt. And this travesty is now reaching beyond the ed schools to local school boards and district superintendents, who are setting up entire schools dedicated to social justice. Not only do these schools infuse social justice throughout the curriculum, but they also often require students to engage in “community activism” outside of school hours.
New York City teems with many more of these schools than any other district in the country. A handful have been around for years, including El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, with its wacky hip-hop curriculum (“An F for Hip-Hop 101,” Summer 1998). But Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein’s project to break up many of the system’s dysfunctional large high schools and replace them with new small schools has spawned many more. The Department of Education’s website lists at least 15 of the new small high schools that either are explicitly named as social justice schools or whose mission statements declare that their curricula center on social justice concerns. Curiously, while left-wing community organizations, including ultraradical Acorn, helped create some of these schools, some have also received funding from über-capitalist Bill Gates’s charitable foundation. Lenin quipped that “a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.” Now it seems he just gives it to you.
Chancellor Klein sees no problem with social justice schools. “Giving schools ‘leadership’ or ‘social justice’ themes is fine with me, as long as the teachers and principals do not bring politics and ideologies into our classrooms,” he told me—though of course that’s just what ed schools instruct social justice teachers to do. “Themes don’t drive school programs; state standards do. Our small secondary schools are academically rigorous. We cannot afford to vilify schools that help us accomplish our top goal as a school system: boosting our students’ achievement and academic success.”
Of course, the social justice schools have hardly been “vilified,” or even scrutinized. They’re worth a close look. With Chancellor Klein’s approval, for example, Héctor Calderón recently became the new principal of El Puente Academy. Calderón immediately told an interviewer from the leftist education publication Rethinking Schools that he is a dedicated follower of—you guessed it—arch-anticapitalist Paolo Freire. His school, he says, now fully incorporates “the Freirian idea of education for liberation” through a comprehensive social justice curriculum that embraces all academic subjects, including math and science. Calderón declined to invite me to visit to see how his school teaches those subjects.
Another Freirian, Nancy Gannon, was recently recruited from the Leadership Academy, the city’s training program for new principals, to start up the School for Democracy and Leadership, a Gates-funded school in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section. In announcing the school’s opening in September 2004, Gannon declared that it “fulfills a long held belief that empowerment is the foundation of democracy. . . . In the words of Paolo Freire, an internationally acclaimed author and educational thought-leader, our goal is to create a ‘pedagogy of hope.’ ”
Gannon, a Williams graduate in her late thirties, told me that she had seen the relevance of Freire’s theories of a “liberating education” during her Peace Corps experience teaching in a poor village in northern Thailand and then later in a Baltimore school for former dropouts. All the members of Gannon’s school-planning committee—parents, some prospective teachers, and community activists—read Freire’s books on pedagogy during their deliberations about the school’s mission and then decided to infuse the school with social justice projects. “We are incredibly steeped in activism,” she says. “We encourage the students to pick something in the world or the community they want to change and then act on it together.” She gave prospective teachers the same message. “Stop sitting on the sidelines feeling nauseous about the state of our world,” she urged in a recruiting e-mail. “Jump in. Make a difference. . . . We’re political, we’re smart, we believe in the voice of youth and the power of activism and the need for us all to be the change we want to see in the world.”
Accordingly, students in the school’s Education Activism group have put out a brochure saying that they are “committed to fighting against the injustice and inequality within our education system.” They therefore support the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit against the state to secure more funding for New York City schools, and they call for “mandatory African-American history classes in all New York City public schools.” And ninth-grade science teacher Jhumki Basu, inspired by Freire and by the teaching science for social justice approach of Teachers College’s Calabrese Barton, told me that, as one way of making her students attentive to political and social justice issues around the world, she devised a three-week project in her physics class on the international controversy over Iran’s nuclear program.
Another Gates-funded social justice high school, the Leadership Institute on Webster Avenue in the Bronx, illustrates some of the perils inherent in turning over schools to community groups with a political agenda. Three years in the making, the school is the brainchild of the radical Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and its youth branch, Sistas and Brothas United. Almost inevitably, the school’s mission statement is thoroughly Freirian in its pedagogy, assuming that teachers can enhance the academic achievement of disadvantaged children by giving them a voice through “leadership, community action and social justice.” The school opened last September with 100 poor minority students and great hopes. When I visited recently, though, it was already clear that the idea of democratic empowerment for the students was subverting any hope for a rigorous education.
Principal Ron Gonzalez told me that the students learned at their first weekly Town Hall meeting this year that they could pick some policy or institution in the community that they believed should be changed and then work together on a “social action” project to bring about the change. Using the school’s democratic decision-making process, the students decided that the most oppressive thing they could think of was the school’s dress code (students initially had to wear brown or black slacks and a shirt with a collar) and other classroom regulations, and they quickly achieved the goal of changing the code. The school, having established that student democracy and engagement was its prime mission, was instantly hoist with its own petard.
The street culture of the students’ tough Bronx neighborhoods seemed to pervade almost every class I visited. Kids wore ghetto garb, chewed gum, ate potato chips and drank soda pop, talked whenever they wanted to. Girls and boys sometimes snuggled up to each other. Students addressed one teacher as “hey mistah.” The sense of order and decorum necessary for any serious academic effort had unraveled, and teachers and administrators seemed powerless to repair it. But students did engage in one other major social action this year, thus partially fulfilling the school’s mission. They were bused up to Albany to participate in a day of lobbying organized by the teachers’ union to persuade the legislature to appropriate the additional billions in school funds ordered by the courts in the CFE school finance case.
These schools are a perversion of an already misguided idea. Paolo Freire developed his liberation pedagogy out of his experiences teaching illiterate peasants in northeastern Brazil, whom he saw, understandably, as victims of an oppressive, semifeudal society. The traditional “banking” approach to education, as he called it, in which the teacher “deposits” socially approved knowledge into the minds of the oppressed but passive students, is the mechanism that “reproduces” that oppression. In response, Freire proposed instead a liberatory pedagogy, in which the poor students become democratic participants with their teachers as they learn a critical literacy that enables them to analyze the causes of their own oppression.
Whatever might be said about this theory in the context of rural Brazil in the 1950s, it is educational malpractice to apply it to the problem of educating minority children in New York City schools in the twenty-first century. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the bad and oppressive “banking” approach that the city’s public schools used somehow managed to lift millions of children out of poverty—something the social justice schools of today seem unlikely to do.
It cannot be repeated often enough: ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. The Freirian theories that carry over to social justice teaching are incapable of “liberating” the children of America’s so-called oppressed. As E. D. Hirsch has exhaustively shown, the scientific evidence about which classroom methods produce the best results for poor children point conclusively to the very methods that the critical pedagogy and social justice theorists denounce as oppressive and racist. By contrast, not one shred of hard evidence suggests that the pedagogy behind teaching for social justice works to lift the academic achievement of poor and minority students.
Social justice teaching is a frivolous waste of precious school hours, grievously harmful to poor children, who start out with a disadvantage. School is the only place where they are likely to obtain the academic knowledge that could make up for the educational deprivation they suffer in their homes. The last thing they need is a wild-eyed experiment in education through social action.
So why do education professors who claim to care for the poor continue to agitate for instruction that holds back poor children? Either the professors are stupid (possible), or (more likely) they care more about their own anti-American, anticapitalist agendas than they do about the actual education of children. The literature of social justice education is obsessed with the allegedly “dark” side of American political, social, and economic life. Thus in a book about teaching for social justice, Arizona State University ed prof Carole Edelsky whines that she “thinks a lot about dark times—the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, the period of the Third Reich, the McCarthy years. Times when certain knowledge was banned and certain knowers were banished, persecuted, incarcerated, even killed.” In one essay alone Maxine Greene writes that “We live after all in dark times,” that this is a “peculiar and menacing time,” and that “These are dark and shadowed times.” A collection of essays edited by Bill Ayers and dedicated to Greene is called A Light in Dark Times: Maxine Greene and the Unfinished Conversation. In their ideologically induced paranoia about America, the radical education theorists, like most ideologues, cannot see what is right in front of their eyes—that America and democratic capitalism are actually doing very well, thank you, but that the children of the minority poor are getting a lousy education because of the education establishment, and that teaching for social justice provides no solutions.
Unfortunately, there is little chance that the hegemony of social justice teaching in the education schools can be challenged from within that hopelessly closed thought world. That being the case, elected officials will have to address the issue. After all, state legislatures are constitutionally empowered to regulate and oversee almost every aspect of K–12 education, including curriculum and the professional standards for teachers. At the very least, legislatures should be holding hearings to determine the extent to which the radical ideology of the education professors is leading to political indoctrination in public school classrooms and undermining the rights of all children to a solid academic and politics-free education.
They then ought to do something the critical pedagogy theorists accuse them of doing anyhow—reestablishing the hegemony of our open democratic society in the classroom. Bill Ayers has the academic freedom to say and write anything he wants about America and its schools. But academic freedom protects neither him nor the teachers he trains when they bring their leftist version of social justice into the schools. Legislators should ask their state education boards to write a new set of guidelines that discourage teaching for social justice and social justice schools and that forbid teachers from indoctrinating students with their own politics, whether left or right. This ought to be the teacher’s Hippocratic Oath: to do no harm.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:5FyqMaJNF9UJ:www.city-journal.org/html/16_3_ed_school.html+Sol+Stern+ayers&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=firefox-a
Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem
The ex-Weatherman is now a radical educator with influence.
23 April 2008
Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.
A Chicago native son, Ayers first went into combat with his Weatherman comrades during the “Days of Rage” in 1969, smashing storefront windows along the city’s Magnificent Mile and assaulting police officers and city officials. Chicago’s mayor at the time was the Democratic boss of bosses, Richard J. Daley. The city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans. Obama’s supporters can reasonably ask: If Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It’s hard to disagree. Chicago’s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers’s case, and Obama can’t be blamed for that.
What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.
Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, 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, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.
Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms.
Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.
AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.
The next time Obama—the candidate who purports to be our next “education president”—discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Indeed, it’s an appropriate question for all the presidential candidates.
Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0423ss.html
After all, the CAC was the first chance for Barack Obama to take on a serious executive role in a controversial political environment. And the Challenge failed, badly.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=31893620
I shall check them out...eom
al·li·ance
1.
a. A close association of nations or other groups, formed to advance common interests or causes: an alliance of labor unions opposing the bill.
b. A formal agreement establishing such an association, especially an international treaty of friendship.
2. A connection based on kinship, marriage, or common interest; a bond or tie: the shifting alliances within a large family.
3. Close similarity in nature or type; affinity: the ancient alliance between mathematics and music.
4. The act of becoming allied or the condition of being allied: the church, acting in alliance with community groups.
Some people get it...some people do not.
Philip Berg...
Is a democrat
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=31684181
After all, the CAC was the first chance for Barack Obama to take on a serious executive role in a controversial political environment. And the Challenge failed, badly.
Most of the criticism of the longstanding relationship between Bill Ayers, who founded the CAC, and Barack Obama is, unfortunately, coming from the conservative side of the political spectrum. That is natural enough – they want their candidate, John McCain, to win and they know that any association between Ayers and Obama is toxic because of Ayers background as a terrorist.
But silence on this issue from the left is rather puzzling – well, not exactly silence. Critics of the Ayers-Obama alliance whether on the right or, like me, on the left, are actually subject to loud and constant attack.
Of course, those on the attack whether high brows like E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, or Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, or the mobs mobilized a la the Sandinistas or Hugo Chavez by the Obama campaign to attack a Chicago radio talk show host and guest, ignore the facts. So as far as advancing the debate is concerned they might as well be silent.
The left, however, should be particularly concerned about what it is that brought Obama and Ayers together in the same movement some 20 years ago, because there is very little about that movement that can be called progressive or democratic. In fact, it was a bureaucratic and potentially authoritarian movement to control the public school system in the city of Chicago against the Chicago Teachers’ Union, the Chicago School Board and the Mayor’s office, in particular, Mayor Daley, in the mid-1990s.
The whole story:
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/08/authoritarian-radicals-barack-obama.html
My apologies...
Maybe this will help:
The Obama Ayers Alliance: Inside the $160 Million Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Here is a second group of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ("CAC"), the education reform project founded by Bill Ayers and which he led with Barack Obama from 1995 until 2001. The Challenge spent some $160 million in the Chicago Public School system during that time period with the explicit goal of improving educational outcomes for students. The Challenge failed in that attempt.
These documents were provided to me by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. They include the original grant application submitted by Bill Ayers and Anne Hallett to Brown which hosted the national Annenberg Challenge.
In addition these documents include the program reports and annual and semi-annual reports prepared on a regular basis by the Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Ken Rolling. Rolling had been recruited to head the CAC from a position at the Woods Fund where he had been active in support for the controversial 1988 reform of Chicago schools. Obama's Developing Communities Project received more than $27,000 from the Woods Fund during that period.
I have posted the documents in the precise form that they were provided to me. There are some missing pages. Within the annual reports are included financial statements and minutes of the Board of Directors, which was chaired by Obama.
My analysis of the history of the CAC can be found here. The key to understanding the CAC is its political context. The CAC was established to shore up support for the Local School Councils established in 1988. The LSCs were a new power center set up to watchdog teachers, principals and school administrators. While Ayers celebrates it as a form of battling "bureaucracies" and as a democratic reform, in fact it has disturbing authoritarian overtones and was the source of resistance by union teachers and professional administrators and was not actively supported by major black organizations like Operation Push.
One example of the political firestorm that the CAC helped fuel was its effort to spend millions of dollars through a Leadership Development Initiative to recruit and train candidates for the LSCs. This proposal from the CAC Collaborative, co-chaired by Bill Ayers, was sent to the Board of Directors, chaired by Barack Obama, where it ran into objections from Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and a representative from the business community.
At about this same time, Mayor Daley was leading the charge to gut the entire LSC structure that Ayers, Obama, Mike Klonsky* and others had fought to create and build. The CAC was seen by Ayers as a way to protect and sustain the LSCs against the attempt to re-centralize power over the troubled schools in the hands of the Mayor.
In fact, at one point Mayor Daley attempted to lobby Walter Annenberg directly to take the $49.2 million away from Obama and Ayers and give it to the city. According to Ken Rolling the former Woods Fund program officer hired by the CAC to be its Executive Director:
"There were two or three attempts from them [Chicago city officials] to just “get the money.” Even the mayor got into at one point. The mayor asked the ambassador [Annenberg, ed.] to come into Chicago and he wanted to tell him, “You are wasting your money. You should give it to me.” The ambassador never responded to him and never agreed to a meeting. But Vallas tried it, his staff worked on how to wrest that money away from us."
Obama led the effort on behalf of the CAC board to reach an accomodation with the Ayers-led CAC Collaborative to shape the Leadership Development Initiative. After Obama's intervention, Weber's objections ceased (as far as I can tell from the records I have been provided) and the proposal went forward.
*Mike Klonsky was a former SDS comrade of Ayers and later helped found a maoist party in the United States, travelling to meet with Chinese leaders in 1977 for their endorsement of his effort here. Klonsky's Small Schools Workshop received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CAC headed by Obama and Ayers.
Better???
The Obama Ayers Alliance: Inside the $160 Million Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Here is a second group of records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ("CAC"), the education reform project founded by Bill Ayers and which he led with Barack Obama from 1995 until 2001. The Challenge spent some $160 million in the Chicago Public School system during that time period with the explicit goal of improving educational outcomes for students. The Challenge failed in that attempt.
These documents were provided to me by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. They include the original grant application submitted by Bill Ayers and Anne Hallett to Brown which hosted the national Annenberg Challenge.
In addition these documents include the program reports and annual and semi-annual reports prepared on a regular basis by the Executive Director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Ken Rolling. Rolling had been recruited to head the CAC from a position at the Woods Fund where he had been active in support for the controversial 1988 reform of Chicago schools. Obama's Developing Communities Project received more than $27,000 from the Woods Fund during that period.
I have posted the documents in the precise form that they were provided to me. There are some missing pages. Within the annual reports are included financial statements and minutes of the Board of Directors, which was chaired by Obama.
My analysis of the history of the CAC can be found here. The key to understanding the CAC is its political context. The CAC was established to shore up support for the Local School Councils established in 1988. The LSCs were a new power center set up to watchdog teachers, principals and school administrators. While Ayers celebrates it as a form of battling "bureaucracies" and as a democratic reform, in fact it has disturbing authoritarian overtones and was the source of resistance by union teachers and professional administrators and was not actively supported by major black organizations like Operation Push.
One example of the political firestorm that the CAC helped fuel was its effort to spend millions of dollars through a Leadership Development Initiative to recruit and train candidates for the LSCs. This proposal from the CAC Collaborative, co-chaired by Bill Ayers, was sent to the Board of Directors, chaired by Barack Obama, where it ran into objections from Arnold Weber, former President of Northwestern University and a representative from the business community.
At about this same time, Mayor Daley was leading the charge to gut the entire LSC structure that Ayers, Obama, Mike Klonsky* and others had fought to create and build. The CAC was seen by Ayers as a way to protect and sustain the LSCs against the attempt to re-centralize power over the troubled schools in the hands of the Mayor.
In fact, at one point Mayor Daley attempted to lobby Walter Annenberg directly to take the $49.2 million away from Obama and Ayers and give it to the city. According to Ken Rolling the former Woods Fund program officer hired by the CAC to be its Executive Director:
"There were two or three attempts from them [Chicago city officials] to just “get the money.” Even the mayor got into at one point. The mayor asked the ambassador [Annenberg, ed.] to come into Chicago and he wanted to tell him, “You are wasting your money. You should give it to me.” The ambassador never responded to him and never agreed to a meeting. But Vallas tried it, his staff worked on how to wrest that money away from us."
Obama led the effort on behalf of the CAC board to reach an accomodation with the Ayers-led CAC Collaborative to shape the Leadership Development Initiative. After Obama's intervention, Weber's objections ceased (as far as I can tell from the records I have been provided) and the proposal went forward.
*Mike Klonsky was a former SDS comrade of Ayers and later helped found a maoist party in the United States, travelling to meet with Chinese leaders in 1977 for their endorsement of his effort here. Klonsky's Small Schools Workshop received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CAC headed by Obama and Ayers.
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/08/inside-obama-ayers-chicago-annenberg.html
Enjoy...
The Obama-Ayers Top Ten: Highlights of the 20 year Obama-Ayers Connection
If you take the Obama campaign at its word, the contention that there is a relationship between Bill Ayers and Barack Obama is “phony,” “tenuous,” a “stretch.” In Obama's own words, Ayers was "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood," certainly not a long time close political ally.
But a review of just the publicly known highlights of the Ayers-Obama relationship suggests a twenty year pattern of connections between the two.
At the heart of this "Top Ten" list is the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Ayers founded and Obama and Ayers co-chaired for five years, raising and spending at least $110 million in an effort to bolster a "radical" (Ayers' word) reform program in the Chicago Public Schools from 1994 to 2001.
1) Out of the Woods:
The Woods Fund financed the hiring of Obama in 1985 by the Developing Communities Project.
According to The Nation: “The Woods Fund, in many ways, is responsible for helping start Obama as an organizer and shaping his political identity. In 1985 the foundation gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project (aka the "DCP"), which hired Obama, at 24, as an organizer on Chicago's economically depressed South Side.”
The Woods Fund was founded by the Woods family which owned the Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier of coal from its mines to major Illinois power companies. Commonwealth Edison, the giant Chicago-based electric power company was headed by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers.
Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund from 1993 until 2002. Bill Ayers joined the board of the Fund in 1999 and continues to serve on the board today. He chaired the board for two years during that time.
2) Know your ABCs:
Obama's DCP supported radical school reform project together with Bill Ayers.
In 1987 in the wake of a controversial strike by the Chicago Teachers' Union, the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs, was formed to lobby for a new Illinois law that would mandate the establishment of a new power center in Chicago public schools. Local school councils would be established to watchdog union teachers and their principals and they would have the power to fire principals at will.
Bill Ayers helped organize the ABCs group, was its contact person and later its chair. Barack Obama worked on school reform efforts for the DCP at that time, the DCP played a leading role in the school reform effort and the DCP was a member of the ABCs. Chicago United, a business group established by Tom Ayers, Bill's father, was also a member of the ABCs.
The Woods Fund also provided additional financial support to the DCP in 1988 to support its school reform efforts. A program officer of the Woods Fund at the time was Ken Rolling who would later be hired by Bill Ayers and Barack Obama as Executive Director of the $110 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
3) Putting on the White Shoe:
Obama and Dohrn worked for elite law firm Sidley and Austin
After surfacing from the Weather Underground in 1980 Bernardine Dohrn, wife of Bill Ayers, pled guilty to criminal charges related to the violent Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969 and received three years probation. She later refused to testify in front of a grand jury convened to investigate a bank robbery carried out by former comrades of Dohrn's from the Weather Underground. Currently a clinical faculty member at Northwestern University School of Law, she told the New York Times that she thought grand juries were "illegal" and "coercive." She served seven months in jail.
Because of the criminal convictions Dohrn, who received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967, was refused admission to the New York bar. Nonetheless, she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984. Howard Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers. Tom Ayers' firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for many years. She later worked in their Chicago office when she and Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987. She left Sidley in 1988.
Barack Obama left Chicago in the fall of 1988 to attend Harvard Law School. In the summer after his first year at Harvard he became an associate in the Chicago office of Sidley and Austin.
4) A hard rock miner:
Chicago lefty lawyer and Dohrn classmate Judson Miner hires Barack Obama out of Harvard.
Barack Obama returned to Harvard after his summer at Sidley and Austin in the fall of 1989. That academic year he was elected the president of the Harvard Law Review, the first black person to hold the position. Although Obama could have returned to Sidley or perhaps clerked for the United States Supreme Court, a natural step for Law Review officers, he chose instead to work for Judson Miner, a partner in a small civil rights law firm in Chicago. Miner had been counsel to Chicago's late black mayor, Harold Washington. Miner was also classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago law school in 1967 where they were both were involved in anti-war activity.
5) Rising to the Challenge:
Ayers is named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge founded by Bill Ayers
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.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge paid for a team headquartered at the University of Chicago to assess the impact of the more than $100 million they spent in Chicago public schools over that six year period,1995-2001. Their conclusion in a 250 page 2003 report was that the money had no impact at all: test scores in schools that received money from Annenberg went up, but at the same rate as all other schools in Chicago. There was, in the words of the report, “no Annenberg effect."
6) In the Palmer of his hand:
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn host Obama's state senate kick-off in their Hyde Park home
In the fall of 1995 Barack Obama began his first electoral campaign to replace State Senator Alice Palmer who was attempting to run for Congress. Palmer accompanied Obama to the Hyde Park home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn for an introduction of Obama to the Hyde Park left. Unnamed Obama campaign aides told the New York Times that this was the first time that Obama met Ayers and Dohrn, part of the campaign's effort to minimize the relationship between their candidate and the two authoritarian leftists. Of course that was wrong, as clearly Obama and Ayers had already met well before this "meet and greet."
7) The "lost years": Ayers and Obama to the rescue of troubled youth
In 1997 Bill Ayers published a book that criticized the treatment of juvenile defendants in the criminal justice system including the practice in some states of trying these individuals as adults. Barack Obama praised the book as a "searing and timely account" in the Chicago Tribune.
In late 1997 and 1998 a bill to impose "blended" sentencing on certain juvenile offenders was proposed in the Illinois legislature where Obama was now a state senator, representing the south side Chicago district that included Ayers and Dohrn's Hyde Park neighborhood. The bill would have allowed parallel juvenile and adult sentences with the adult sentence held as a threat to be imposed if serious offenders violated terms of their juvenile conviction.
Obama, Dohrn and Ayers opposed the bill. Michelle Obama, now working at the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, organized a panel discussion there in late 1997 as the new bill was gaining momentum, to discuss Ayers' book. Barack Obama and Ayers were on the panel and Obama was described in the event's press release as "working to block proposed legislation that would throw more juvenile offenders into the adult system."
8) The "R" word:
Obama advisor promotes a reparations approach to education reform; Ayers endorses it
In 2006 Professor Gloria Ladson-Billings of the University of Wisconsin, the then president of the American Education Research Association (AERA), the nation's leading School of Education professional association, proposed a new policy to tackle the problems of America's public schools: the repayment of centuries of "education debt" that allegedly is owed to people of color as a result of slavery and discrimination. She rooted the concept in the literature supporting reparations for slavery.
In 2007 Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent and respected professor at the Stanford University School of Education, endorsed the same idea in an article in The Nation. In late 2007 Darling-Hammond was named an education advisor to the Obama campaign. In February 2008 Darling-Hammond issued a blueprint for education reform by the next President that set as its #1 priority the repayment of the "education debt," as proposed originally by Ladson-Billings.
Bill Ayers has endorsed the idea of repayment of the "education debt." Ayers is now a Vice President-elect (Division B: Curriculum Studies) of the AERA.
A chapter called "Education for Democracy" by Darling-Hammond appeared in a volume co-edited by Ayers called A Light in Dark Times. A chapter co-authored by Ladson-Billings on "racing justice" appeared in a book co-edited by Ayers called Teaching for Social Justice: A Democracy and Education Reader. Ladson-Billings wrote the foreword to Ayers' book, To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. Ayers and Ladson-Billings are co-editors of City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row just published. Ladson-Billings contributed a chapter in a book edited by Bill Ayers, Rick Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Jesse L. Jackson called Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment published in 2001.
More fundamentally, Bill Ayers introduced the concept of "white supremacy" as America's original sin within the new left group SDS as part of his effort, together with his future wife Bernardine Dohrn, to hijack the student-led antiwar movement for his still-to-come terrorist actions as a leader of the Weather Underground.
Ayers argues that the fundamental issue in American life is "white skin privilege" - that white Americans benefit from being white at the expense of blacks.
Ayers himself wrote on his website in a January 19, 2008 essay on school reform:
"The dominant narrative in contemporary school reform is once again focused on exclusion and disadvantage, race and class, black and white. 'Across the US,' the National Governor’s Association declared in 2005, 'a gap in academic achievement persists between minority and disadvantaged students and their white counterparts.' This is the commonly referenced and popularly understood 'racial achievement gap,' and it drives education policy at every level. Interestingly, whether heartfelt or self-satisfied, the narrative never mentions the monster in the room: white supremacy....Gloria Ladson-Billings upends all of this with an elegant reversal: there is no achievement gap, she argues, but actually a glancing reflection of something deeper and more profound—America has a profound education debt. The educational inequities that began with the annihilation of native peoples and the enslavement of Africans, the conquest of the continent and the importation of both free labor and serfs, transformed into apartheid education, something anemic, inferior, inadequate, and oppressive. Over decades and centuries the debt has accumulated and is passed from generation to generation, and it continues to grow and pile up."
Several times during the campaign Obama has suggested that the kind of reparations he supports is increased spending on education.
9) A toast to the maoist:
Bill Ayers long time comrade Mike Klonsky blogs for Obama
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 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 was recruited by his old friend Bill Ayers to head up a new project called the Small Schools Workshop in 1991. Its 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.
10) The Great Debate: George v. Barack
There is little publicly available information on the precise relationship between Obama and Ayers today. I have been told by Linda Darling-Hammond that Ayers does not have any role in the campaign, although I do wonder how Ayers' buddy Mike Klonsky could blog on the Obama website unless Ayers had a hand in it. Obama himself did not exactly eliminate any doubts on this score when asked about his relationship with Ayers during a debate with Hilary Clinton by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.
Obama said that Ayers was a professor of English (not Education) and was just a guy who lives in his neighborhood. Well, clearly not "just," as we now know. But then Obama said that he does not exchange ideas with Ayers "on a regular basis." Whatever that is supposed to mean (they debate the future of the world on an "irregular basis"?) it certainly fails to put the issue to rest.
http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/08/obama-ayers-top-ten-10-highlights-of-20.html
I was actually...
going to sit this one out (election)...
Not anymore.
"the word "hypocrites" comes to mind"
Tell ya what...go fetch me some articles/voice your mind...maybe I will respond...