How many people are aware that
Senator Obama has ties to
Factcheck.org, the “non-partisan” political “fact checking” site, vis-a-vis the
Annenberg Foundation? Or that the controversies surrounding Obama, such as his ties to
Bill Ayers, a former member of the violent Vietnam War era
Weather Underground
terrorist group, and the veracity of Obama’s “birth certificate” are
both linked to Factcheck and Annenberg.
There’s also news about the
ongoing federal lawsuit involving Obama’s birth certificate: how a
U.S District Judge has thrown out Obama’s attorney’s Motion to Dismiss and ordered them to “pony up” the certificate “post haste”.
From
Google Search:
FactCheck.org – Annenberg Political Fact CheckMonitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major US political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.
The Annenberg Foundation is at the center of the ongoing Obama-Bill
Ayers controversy. Ayers was a former member of the homegrown terrorist
group, the Weather Underground, which took credit for bombing the
Pentagon, the Capital Building, and the
New York City Metro Police Department plus 30+ other bombings during the Vietman War era.
The Weathermen, a small band of extreme leftists who got
their name from lines in a Bob Dylan song – “You don’t need a
weatherman to know which way the wind blows†– conducted a bombing
campaign against targets such as police headquarters, prisons and
courthouses for three years to “bring the [Viet-nam] war homeâ€.
Two police officers were killed in 1981, when members of the
Weathermen and Black Liberation Army stole $1m from an armoured car. It
was their last action.
–Times Online
Charges against Ayers were dropped after the FBI was accused of using illegal wiretaps. Ayers wrote in his 2001 “memoir”,
Fugitive Days,
that he regretted that his group “didn’t do enough” back then in
regards to the almost 30 plus bombings his group took credit for. Ayers
later became a professor in Chicago and the founder of the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an offshoot of the Annenberg Foundation.
Here’s one “literary”
review of Ayer’s “memoir”
Fugitive Days:
From Library Journal
“Memory is a motherfucker,” writes Ayers (A Kind and Just Parent). In
the 1970s, he was a head of the radical Weathermen and one of America’s
Ten Most Wanted, along with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, but he is now a
distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois in
Chicago.
His memoir is a breath of fresh air in this self-absorbed age.
Ayers discusses his reservations about the use of violence to achieve an
end to violence (reservations he held then as well), but he is
unrepentant in believing that America was the aggressor against North
Vietnam and that right-minded people have an obligation to resist unjust
wars.
The book is uneven in tone, alternating fluffy passages about the
passage of time with straightforward narration of Ayers’s more than ten
years on the lam. The sentiments expressed in the book still seem
noble, however, regardless of one’s opinions of the means used by
Ayers’s comrades. There are many lessons still to be learned from such
narratives. Recommended. David Keymer, California State Univ.,
Stanislaus
Stanley Kurtz of the National Review has been closely following Obama’s ties to
Ayers as well as his association to
ACORN .
While both the AP and the New York Times are reporting that there is
no “truth” to the claims that Obama had “ties” to Ayers, Kurtz has
uncovered a long standing association between the two men, one that leads straight to the Annenberg Foundation:
Ayers was a “key founder” of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. In 1995 Obama was appointed Board Chairman and President of the
Annenberg Chicago Challenge, a “branch of the Annenberg Foundation”.
(VN: I believe that is what they did to shore up Obama's lack of exposure and familiarity within the progressive wing of the Dem party)
Ayers co-chaired the Chicago Annenberg “Collaborative”, which set education policy for the “Challenge”.
Obama was “authorized to delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs”.
Obama had to “obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals.”
Obama had to “seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.â€
Ayers sat on the same board as Obama as an “ex officio member”.
Obama and Ayers sat together on the board’s Governance Committee.
Ayers and Obama were “part of a group of four instructed to draft the bylaws that would govern CAC”.
As
Board Chair, Obama authorized the funding for Ayers educational projects, as well as projects of Ayers’ “radical” friends.
Obama and Ayers “guided” monies to ACORN (
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).
Kurtz also points out Obama’s tenure as Board Chair of the Chicago
Annenberg Challenge in regards to the one and only
“executive
experience” of Obama which was rated as a bust:
“The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most
important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a
largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons
for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation
over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with
insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises
entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his
alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s
continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama.
Above all,
by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his
political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material
support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist
history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly
legitimate issue in this campaign.”
Factcheck.org is part and parcel of the Annenberg Foundation.
Factcheck was also chosen by the Obama campaign as the arbitrar of
whether Obama’s birth certificate, which purportedly proves he’s a
citizen of the United States, is authentic.
We were mostly uninterested in the birth certificate controversy until a recent court case in Philadelphia caught our attention.
On August 24, a prominent Democrat and attorney in Pennslyvania,
Philip J. Berg, filed a
lawsuit in
U.S. District Court against Obama and the DNC. Berg’s suit claimed that
Obama is not a natural born citizen of the United States is therefore
uneligible to run for President. On September 24, rather than show up
with a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, attorneys for Obama and the
DNC filed a
motion to dismiss.
On September 29, Judge Barclay Surrick denied the motion to dismiss
and ordered three separate items to be delivered to the judge in three
days:
* A certified copy of Obama’s birth certificate
* A certified copy of Obama’s Certification of Citizenship
* A certified copy of Obama’s Oath of Allegiance
Clarification – It was inaccurate to say the judge has demanded the
documents: the judge in Berg v Obama has not ruled on various motions
yet. It is more accurate to say that Phillip Berg, in his court filing
asked for the three documents in question.
60. Plaintiff has asked for a simple resolution. Plaintiff has asked
that Obama supply a genuine certified copy of his original long version
“vault†Birth Certificate, A Certification of Citizenship and a
certified copy of his Oath of Allegiance. If in fact Obama can prove his
“natural born†citizenship status, which he cannot, then he has not
been prejudiced in anyway, but instead Plaintiff has been protected and
his civil rights secured. However, if Obama is unable to supply said
documentation, then he needs to withdraw his candidacy, again which will
eliminate Plaintiff’s deprivations and instill Plaintiff’s
constitutionally protected safeguards and rights.
We found it interesting that the Obama campaign saw fit to “release”
Obama’s birth certificate to FactCheck.org but not to the U.S. District
Judge supervising the Berg lawsuit against Obama.
Factcheck.org “verified” the Obama birth certificate yet intrepid bloggers
Atlas Shrugs as well as
Yid With A Lid have found several inconsistencies which call into question whether the certificate is “authentic”.
Again, regardless of whether the certificate is authentic or not,
DBKP finds the fact that Obama’s attorney chose to file a motion to
dismiss rather than just handing over a certified copy of the birth
certificate to the judge puzzling. Everyday ordinary citizens have to
prove citizenship by providing a certified copy of their birth
certificate in order to obtain a driver’s license or an ID card. We
cannot fathom why the Obama camp chose the motion to dismiss instead of
complying with a Federal judge’s order to provide a certified copy of
Obama’s birth certificate. The Obama campaign handed over a copy to
Factcheck.org, why the “stall” with handing a copy over to the Federal
Judge handling the Berg lawsuit?
If the Obama birth certificate is on the “up and up” then releasing
it to a Federal Judge should be a “priority” of the Obama campaign
instead of filing “motions to dismiss”. After all, the rest of us
ordinary Average Joe’s have to fork over a copy of our birth
certificates every now and then to prove we’re citizens in order to get a
something as mundane as a driver’s license. We imagine most citizens
would comply with a judge’s order to supply a copy of our birth
certificate without too much fuss. Obama, an attorney himself, must
surely realize the consequences of disobeying a judge’s order.
DBKP is keeping a close eye on the Berg case in Philadelphia. The
judge ordered on September 29 for the three documents to be presented by
Obama within 3 days. Rumors have circulated across the web that the
judge “dismissed” the case. Those rumors are untrue. The Obama camp has
yet to supply the documents to the judge.
Blogger Steve Diamond of the blog, Global Labor, has more
info on the connections between Obama and Ayers:
*The Woods Fund
* The connection between Obama and Ayers’ wife, Bernadette Dohrn, another ex-Weather Underground grad.
* Obama’s first fundraiser for Illinois Senate hosted by Ayers and Dohrn
* The link between Michelle Obama and Ayers visa-a-vis a panel to discuss a book written by Ayers
* A longtime radical friend of Ayers who blogs for Obama
As far as Obama’s past association with Ayers, Obama claims that
Ayers was “one of thousands” of people he knew. We’re not sure how many
boards Obama has sat on as Chairman and President but one would think
he’d remember the “founder” who was once a famous member of a notorious
far left terrorist group that bombed the Pentagon and the Capital
Building. In fact, in 2001, Bill Ayers was written about in the
New York Times,
when Obama was still Chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The
article in the Times was published the same day that hijackers boarded
four planes and ended up murdering over 3,000 innocent citizens. Bill
Ayers was pictured standing on the American flag. The timing was a
coincidence, the subject, Ayers’ memoir, Fugitive Days:
”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel
we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970′s as a fugitive in
the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big
turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of
Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he
wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the
rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking
responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient,
ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people,
that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.
According to the Obama campaign, he and Ayers had a “tangential”
relationship which seems to revolve around the Annenberg Foundation. In
2001, Obama and Ayers were still members of the Chicago Annenberg
Foundation, Obama was Chairman while Ayers was touting his memoir,
Fugitive Days, about his days spent “bombing” in the name of “change”.
By LBG
Image –
Red Planet Cartoon
Barry Soetoro, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, & Michelle Soetoro.
