Originally posted by Shakka
We're ed. There are no good options. Why didn't he pick Romney??
I'm sure you're not the only one wondering that right now. Romney would have been an ideal guy to have on the ticket in this economic climate. You could see the rationale for picking Palin at the time, but did they honestly not think that her complete lack of political nous was just not going to become an issue during the campaign? Did they hope that they could just put her up on the stage next to McCain, completely deny the media any unscripted access to her, and just hope that women and evangelicals were stupid enough to fall for it? Man, would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that decision-making process...
St_Andrew
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
Would you just get over your racism and vote for Obama.
I can see many valid points for not voting Obama, such as some of his populist economic policies (although McCain got his fair share of dumb ideas as well..).
So yeah, just because you think McCain has completely lost all the judgment he once had, that doesn't mean you want to vote Obama. And that you don't want to vote Obama, doesn't at all mean that you are a racist. That is such a bs statement from you.
josh4
quote:
Originally posted by Renegade
I'm sure you're not the only one wondering that right now. Romney would have been an ideal guy to have on the ticket in this economic climate. You could see the rationale for picking Palin at the time, but did they honestly not think that her complete lack of political nous was just not going to become an issue during the campaign? Did they hope that they could just put her up on the stage next to McCain, completely deny the media any unscripted access to her, and just hope that women and evangelicals were stupid enough to fall for it? Man, would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during that decision-making process...
haha What decision making process? What about McCain's behavior then or now makes you believe selecting her was a calculated decision? We already know they hadn't fully met nor had she been vetted until after the fact. He was having a rough time in the polls, the DNC was going ahead full steam, he made a gut reaction. Because McCain prefers to listen to his GUT, he doesn't care for facts.
quote:
Originally posted by St_Andrew
That is such a bs statement from you.
Oh comeon we all know Shakka is a KKK nigga hating racist. I'm just saying what we're all thinking.
Shakka
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
Would you just get over your racism and vote for Obama.
Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
[Obama and Ayers] AP
Bill Ayers.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
I may have to write in Ron Paul for reals.
josh4
quote:
Originally posted by Shakka
Eat a dick. It's his ears that really bug me.;)
Originally posted by josh4
I was half expecting you to quote a spam email.
That wasn't spam.
josh4
quote:
Originally posted by Shakka
That wasn't spam.
Yes I know, it was a WSJ article op-ed by a "slimy character assassin". I was alluding to your previous habits of basing arguments off what you get in your spam box. Don't make me find the thread.
Shakka
quote:
Originally posted by josh4
Yes I know, it was a WSJ article op-ed by a "slimy character assassin". I was alluding to your previous habits of basing arguments off what you get in your spam box. Don't make me find the thread.
Wait...since Obama's campaign characterizes him as a..let me try to find an extra large font for extra truthiness (nah, that's just gay)..."character assassin," it must therefore be true. Obama has not satisfactorily convinced me that his associations with Ayers and others are as innocent as he would have us believe. Jesus.
At best, this Obama piece is hypocritical for it engages in character assassination in order to somehow attempt to prove that someone else is a character assassin, despite that the original author has actually done qualitative research on the subject that in the very least, opens the door to many questions that still need better answers.
quote:
Obama camp blasts National Review writer as "slimy character assassin"
Barack Obama's campaign hasn't advertised this a great deal this week, but the campaign's "Action Wire" has been waging large-scale campaigns against critics. That includes tens of thousands of e-mails to television stations running Harold Simmons' Bill Ayers ad, and to their advertisers — including a list of major automobile and telecommunications companies.
And tonight, the campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.
The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station's telephone number and the show's extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he's a conservative, which isn't in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia. (yeah, let's make a diversion! Who's smearing who??)
"Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse," says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.
"It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves. At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz's lies," it continues.
The campaign mentions, and objects to, one specific claim of Kurtz's, for which I've never seen hard evidence:
Just last night on Fox News, Kurtz drastically exaggerated Barack's connection with Ayers by claiming Ayers had recruited Barack to the board of the Annenberg Challenge. That is completely false and has been disproved in numerous press accounts.
There is absolutely nothing qualitative in that article that refutes an ounce of what Kurtz claims from his own research except that Obama says it isn't so. I've heard Obama say a lot of stuff "isn't so" only to find out later that it is. Based on what you've shared here, which isn't much, I don't see anything that supports your claim that the guy is a slimy smear merchant, no matter how large you make the font.
Clovis
This lady is unbelievably stupid.
There are several people on this forum who have a better grasp of basic issues than she does.
Renegade
Holy , this part of the interview is actually worse:
I think I'm almost starting to feel sorry for her... almost.
LazFX
quote:
Originally posted by Shakka
It's his ears that really bug me.;)
The dude could jump off a building and glide like ing Dumbo with those ears!! lol
St_Andrew
quote:
Originally posted by Renegade
Holy , this part of the interview is actually worse:
I think I'm almost starting to feel sorry for her... almost.
I get associations with those "Miss universe" kinda competitions, where obviously stupid people try to answer in a, what they think, smart way to questions.
