Obama and Acorn

Community organizers, phony voters, and your tax dollars.



At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been "community organizers" -- like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at Acorn, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country.

Acorn -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We've written about them for years, but Acorn is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and Acorn's ties to Mr. Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government.

Acorn uses various affiliated groups to agitate for "a living wage," for "affordable housing," for "tax justice" and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting "strikes" against banks so they'd lower credit standards.

But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), Acorn has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, Acorn's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the Acorn Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to Acorn.

All this money gives Acorn the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. Acorn is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real.

The Michigan Secretary of State told the press in September that Acorn had submitted "a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications." Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller requested a raid on Acorn's offices, following complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada's Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000 applications Acorn submitted weekly.

Officials in Ohio are investigating voter fraud connected with Acorn, and Florida's Seminole County is withholding Acorn registrations that appear fraudulent. New Mexico, North Carolina and Missouri are looking into hundreds of dubious Acorn registrations. Wisconsin is investigating Acorn employees for, according to an election official, "making people up or registering people that were still in prison."

Then there's Lake County, Indiana, which has already found more than 2,100 bogus applications among the 5,000 Acorn dumped right before the deadline. "All the signatures looked exactly the same," said Ruthann Hoagland, of the county election board. Bridgeport, Connecticut estimates about 20% of Acorn's registrations were faulty. As of July, the city of Houston had rejected or put on hold about 40% of the 27,000 registration cards submitted by Acorn.

That's just this year. In 2004, four Acorn employees were indicted in Ohio for submitting false voter registrations. In 2005, two Colorado Acorn workers were found to have submitted false registrations. Four Acorn Missouri employees were indicted in 2006; five were found guilty in Washington state in 2007 for filling out registration forms with names from a phone book.

Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago "community organizer" at Acorn's side. In 1992 he led voter registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included Acorn. This past November, he lauded Acorn's leaders for being "smack dab in the middle" of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for Acorn in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.

During his tenure on the board of Chicago's Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to Acorn. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an Acorn affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for "staging, sound, lighting." It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.

The Obama campaign is now distancing itself from Acorn, claiming Mr. Obama never organized with it and has nothing to do with illegal voter registration. Yet it's disingenuous to channel cash into an operation with a history of fraud and then claim you're shocked to discover reports of fraud. As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers, Mr. Obama was happy to associate with Acorn when it suited his purposes. But now that he's on the brink of the Presidency, he wants to disavow his ties.

The Justice Department needs to treat these fraud reports as something larger than a few local violators. The question is whether Acorn is systematically subverting U.S. election law -- on the taxpayer's dime.

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Obama fraud: He didn't write 'Dreams from My Father'

The emergence of a previously unseen writing sample proves all but conclusively that Barack Obama did not in any meaningful way write "Dreams from My Father," the book Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The emergence of a second writing sample, this one by a legitimate author, provides convincing evidence as to who did.

In 1990, the University of Illinois at Springfield published a collection of essays called "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois." Obama contributed a chapter, titled: "Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City." The year 1990, by the way, was when Obama, the newly elected president of the Harvard Law Review, received a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster to write what would become "Dreams from My Father."

The publishers must not have read "Why Organize?" Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in "Dreams" and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication or promise. Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian and wonkish - a B- paper in a freshman comp class. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range, or lack thereof:

Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda. But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.

These cliche-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas."

In "Why Organize?" Obama makes use of the fully recreated conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in "Dreams." Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:

"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer." "Why's that?" "'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."

Obama asks us to believe that five years later, without any additional training, he was capable of writing passages like the following from "Dreams":

Winter came and the city turned monochrome-black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.

To read "Why Organize?" in its entirety is to understand the fraud that is Obama, the literary genius. As the reader will see, one does not need forensic software to sense the limits of Obama's skills.

Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself in a few short years from an awkward amateur into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." There is an element of speculation in this reconstruction, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive. One clue comes from an unexpected source: Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, "Resurrecting Empire," Khalidi pays tribute to his own literary muse, the man who has made "unrepentant" a household word, Bill Ayers. Writes Khalidi, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.

Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center was the charismatic Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long, slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.

I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought his sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help." With all due respect to Sarah Palin, Obama likely saw Ayers and Dohrn less as "pals" and more as parents. Dohrn and Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, were born the same year, 1942. In fact, as young women, the two looked enough alike that I had to double check before disproving that a photo floating around the Internet of Dohrn with Ayers was not a photo of Dunham with Ayers.

As to Ayers, envision him as the seafaring Odysseus to Obama's father-hungry Telemachus. By Obama's own admission, "Dreams" would become "a record of a personal, interior journey - a boy's search for his father."

The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then-obscure Obama. Before Obama's ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout and the street cred. Ayers could also write, and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had several books published. My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and he chose to mold it. The calculation in "Dreams" is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. And if "Dreams" were beautifully written, it could launch a career.

As I have documented earlier, one thread that ties Ayers to "Dreams" is the repeated use of maritime metaphors throughout both books, a testament to Ayers' anxious year as a merchant seaman. There is, however, a deeper thread, namely a shared postmodernist perspective. A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.

In true postmodernist fashion, Ayers rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys with "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others. Thus, "Fugitive Days" is laced with repeated reference to what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." So, curiously, is "Dreams.": "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."

The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize?" into the sophisticated postmodernist of "Dreams," and he did so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text. Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." The Obama quotes come from "Dreams":

Ayers:
"The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. . But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency."

Obama:
"And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged . "

Ayers:
"Narrative begins with something to say - content precedes form."

Obama:
"I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative ."

Ayers:
"Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this."

Obama:
"Truth is usually the best corrective."

Ayers:
"The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page."

Obama:
"Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that - on the surface, at least - contradict the world I now occupy."

Ayers:
The reader must actually see the struggle. It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim.

Obama:
"But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary."

Ayers:
"Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant."

Obama:
"I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."

Ayers:
"But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification."

Obama:
"At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap."

Although I cite one example for each, "Dreams" offers many more. There are 10 "trap" references alone and nearly as many for "narrative," "struggle" and "journey."

To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers. There are fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors, and fewer still who write as poetically about the sea as Obama seems to do.

Of course, too, no one but Ayers got Obama named chair of the multi-million Chicago Annenberg Challenge months before his book was published, and no one else hosted his political debut months afterward, all in the magic year of 1995.

Two years later, in his 1997 book, "A Kind and Just Parent," Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the celebrities therein. These include Muhammad Ali, "Minister" Louis Farrakhan, the "poet" Gwendolyn Brooks and "writer" Barack Obama.

The "writer" identification seems as forced as the listing of Obama among the notables. It is almost as Ayers were constructing his own narrative, one designed to climax in the White House, one that he may have the will and power to impose on America, truth be damned. Life is all "a lie" anyhow.

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McCain: Ayers will come up in debate

John McCain said Tuesday that Barack Obama is "probably ensured" that his association with 1960s radical William Ayers will come up in Wednesday's debate. "I was astonished to hear him say that he was surprised that I didn't have the guts" to bring up Ayers, McCain said on KMOX, a St. Louis radio station. "I think he is probably ensured that it will come up this time."

McCain was responding to Obama's charge last week that the Arizona senator was willing to make attacks on the campaign trail that he would not say in person.

"I am surprised that, you know, we've been seeing some pretty over-the-top attacks coming out of the McCain campaign over the last several days, that he wasn't willing to say it to my face," Obama said. "But I guess we've got one last debate. So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate."

Obama has also accused McCain of trying to score "cheap political points" by bringing up Ayers.

Despite challenging Obama on the association, McCain insisted that he does not care about the "old washed-up terrorist" but said that the Illinois Democrat is not "being truthful" about the relationship.

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Wright 101: Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright's anti-Americanism

By Stanley Kurtz

It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright's sermons, Obama gave legitimacy - and a whole lot of money - to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Reverend Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago. All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s.

John McCain, take note. Obama's tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man's choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright's anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.

African Village

In the winter of 1996, the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago's] South Shore (CIESS) announced that it had received a $200,000 grant from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. That made CIESS an "external partner," i.e. a community organization linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system. This network, named the "South Shore African Village Collaborative" was thoroughly "Afrocentric" in orientation. CIESS's job was to use a combination of teacher-training, curriculum advice, and community involvement to improve academic performance in the schools it worked with. CIESS would continue to receive large Annenberg grants throughout the 1990s.

The South Shore African Village Collaborative (SSAVC) was very much a part of the Afrocentric "rites of passage movement," a fringe education crusade of the 1990s. SSAVC schools featured "African-Centered" curricula built around "rites of passage" ceremonies inspired by the puberty rites found in many African societies. In and of themselves, these ceremonies were harmless. Yet the philosophy that accompanied them was not. On the contrary, it was a carbon-copy of Jeremiah Wright's worldview.

Rites of Passage

To learn what the rites of passage movement was all about, we can turn to a sympathetic 1992 study published in the Journal of Negro Education by Nsenga Warfield-Coppock. In that article, Warfield-Coppock bemoans the fact that public education in the United States is shaped by "capitalism, competitiveness, racism, sexism and oppression." According to Warfield-Coppock, these American values "have confused African American people and oriented them toward American definitions of achievement and success and away from traditional African values." American socialization has "proven to be dysfuntional and genocidal to the African American community," Warfield-Coppock tells us. The answer is the adolescent rites of passage movement, designed "to provide African American youth with the cultural information and values they would need to counter the potentially detrimental effects of a Eurocentrically oriented society."

The adolescent rites of passage movement that flowered in the 1990s grew out of the "cultural nationalist" or "Pan-African" thinking popular in radical black circles of the 1960s and 1970s. The attempt to create a virtually separate and intensely anti-American black social world began to take hold in the mid-1980s in small private schools, which carefully guarded the contents of their controversial curricula. Gradually, through external partners like CIESS, the movement spread to a few public schools. Supporters view these programs as "a social and cultural `inoculation' process that facilitates healthy, African-centered development among African American youth and protects them against the ravages of a racist, sexist, capitalist, and oppressive society."

We know that SSAVC was part of this movement, not only because their Annenberg proposals were filled with Afrocentric themes and references to "rites of passage," but also because SSAVC's faculty set up its African-centered curriculum in consultation with some of the most prominent leaders of the "rites of passage movement." For example, a CIESS teacher conference sponsored a presentation on African-centered curricula by Jacob Carruthers, a particularly controversial Afrocentrist.

Jacob Carruthers

Like other leaders of the rites of passage movement, Carruthers teaches that the true birthplace of world civilization was ancient "Kemet" (Egypt), from which Kemetic philosophy supposedly spread to Africa as a whole. Carruthers and his colleagues believe that the values of Kemetic civilization are far superior to the isolating and oppressive, ancient Greek-based values of European and American civilization. Although academic Egyptologists and anthropologists strongly reject these historical claims, Carruthers dismisses critics as part of a white supremacist conspiracy to hide the truth of African superiority.

Carruthers's key writings are collected in his book, Intellectual Warfare. Reading it is a wild, anti-American ride. In his book, we learn that Carruthers and his like-minded colleagues have formed an organization called the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC), which takes as its mission the need to "dismantle the European intellectual campaign to commit historicide against African peoples." Carruthers includes "African-Americans" within a group he would define as simply "African." When forced to describe a black person as "American," Carruthers uses quotation marks, thus indicating that no black person can be American in any authentic sense. According to Carruthers, "The submission to Western civilization and its most outstanding offspring, American civilization, is, in reality, surrender to white supremacy."

Carruthers's goal is to use African-centered education to recreate a separatist universe within America, a kind of state-within-a-state. The rites of passage movement is central to the plan. Carruthers sees enemies on every part of the political spectrum, from conservatives, to liberals, to academic leftists, all of whom reject advocates of Kemetic civilization, like himself, as dangerous and academically irresponsible extremists. Carruthers sees all these groups as deluded captives of white supremacist Eurocentric culture. Therefore the only safe place for Africans living in the United States (i.e. American blacks) is outside the mental boundaries of our ineradicably racist Eurocentric civilization. As Carruthers puts it: "...some of us have chosen to reject the culture of our oppressors and recover our disrupted ancestral culture." The rites of passage movement is a way to teach young Africans in the United States how to reject America and recover their authentic African heritage.

America as Rape

Carruthers admits that Africans living in America have already been shaped by Western culture, yet compares this Americanization process to rape: "We may not be able to get our virginity back after the rape, but we do not have to marry the rapist...." In other words, American blacks (i.e. Africans) may have been forcibly exposed to American culture, but that doesn't mean they need to accept it. The better option, says Carruthers, is to separate out and relearn the wisdom of Africa's original Kemetic culture, embodied in the teachings of the ancient wise man, Ptahhotep (an historical figure traditionally identified as the author of a Fifth Dynasty wisdom book). Anything less than re-Africanization threatens the mental, and even physical, genocide of Africans living in an ineradicably white supremacist United States.

Carruthers is a defender of Leonard Jeffries, professor in the department of black studies at City College in Harlem, infamous for his black supremacist and anti-Semitic views. Jeffries sees whites as oppressive and violent "ice people," in contrast to peaceful and mutually supportive black "sun people." The divergence says Jeffries, is attributable to differing levels of melanin in the skin. Jeffries also blames Jews for financing the slave trade. Carruthers defends Jeffries and excoriates the prestigious black academics Carruthers views as traitorous for denouncing their African brother, Jeffries. Carruthers's vision of the superior and peaceful Kemetic philosophy of Ptahhotep triumphing over Greco-Euro-American-white culture obviously parallels Jeffries' opposition between ice people and sun people.

More of Carruthers's education philosophy can be found in his newsletter, The Kemetic Voice. In 1997, for example, at the same time Carruthers was advising SSAVC on how to set up an African-centered curriculum, he praised the decision of New Orleans' School Board to remove the name of George Washington from an elementary school. Apparently, some officials in New Orleans had decided that nobody who held slaves should have a school named after him. Carruthers touted the name-change as proof that his African-centered perspective was finally having an effect on public policy. At the demise of George Washington School, Carruthers crowed: "These events remind us of how vast the gulf is that separates the Defenders of Western Civilization from the Champions of African Civilization."

According to Chicago Annenberg Challenge records, Carruthers's training session on African-centered curricula for SSAVC teachers was a huge hit: "As a consciousness raising session, it received rave reviews, and has prepared the way for the curriculum readiness survey...." These teacher-training workshops were directly funded by the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Another sure sign of the ideological cast of SSAVC's curriculum can be found in Annenberg documents noting that SSAVC students are taught the wisdom of Ptahhotep. Carruthers's concerns about "menticide" and "genocide" at the hand of America's white supremacist system seem to be echoed in an SSAVC document that says: "Our children need to understand the historical context of our struggles for liberation from those forces that seek to destroy us."

When Jeremiah Wright turned toward African-centered thinking in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the period when, attracted by Wright's African themes, Barack Obama first became a church member), many prominent thinkers from Carruthers's Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations were invited to speak at Trinity United Church of Christ, Carruthers himself included. We hear echoes of Carruthers's work in Wright's distinction between "right brained" Africans and "left brained" Europeans, in Wright's fears of U.S. government-sponsored genocide against American blacks, and in Wright's embittered attacks on America's indelibly white-supremacist history. In Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine, as in Carruthers's own writings, blacks are often referred to as "Africans living in the diaspora" rather than as Americans.

Asa Hilliard

Chicago Annenberg Challenge records also indicate that SSAVC educators invited Asa Hilliard, a pioneer of African-centered curricula and a close colleague of Carruthers, to offer a keynote address at yet another Annenberg-funded teacher training session. Hilliard's ties to Wright run still deeper than Carruthers's. A close Wright mentor and friend, Hilliard died in 2007 while on a trip to Kemet (Egypt) with Wright and members of Wright's congregation. Hillard was scheduled to deliver several lectures to the congregants, and to speak at a meeting of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization, which he co-founded with Carruthers and other "African-centered" scholars. On that last trip, Hilliard accepted an appointment to the board of Wright's new elementary school, Kwame Nkrumah Academy. Speaking of the need for such a school, Wright had earlier said, "We need to educate our children to the reality of white supremacy." (For more on Wright's Afrocentric school, see "Jeremiah Wright's `Trumpet.'")

Wright delivered the eulogy at Hilliard's memorial service, with prominent members of ASCAC in the audience. To commemorate Hilliard, a special, two-cover double issue of Wright's Trumpet Newsmagazine was published, with a picture of Hilliard on one side, and a picture of Louis Farrakhan on the other (in celebration of a 2007 award Farrakhan received from Wright). In short, the ties between Wright and Hilliard could hardly have been closer. Clearly, then, Wright's own educational philosophy was mirrored at the Annenberg-funded SSAVC, which sought out Hilliard's and Carruthers's counsel to construct its curriculum.

Perhaps inadvertently, Wright's eulogy for Hilliard actually established the fringe nature of his favorite African-centered scholars. In his tribute, Wright stressed how intensely "white Egyptologists recoiled at the very notion of everything Asa taught." As Wright himself made plain, it seems virtually impossible to find respectable scholars of any political stripe who approve of the extremist anti-American version of Afrocentrism promoted by Hilliard and Carruthers.

Ayers's Pals

An important exception to the rule is Bill Ayers himself, who not only worked with Obama to fund groups like this at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, but who is still "palling around" with the same folks. Discretely waiting until after the election, Bill Ayers and his wife, and fellow former terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn plan to release a book in 2009 entitled Race Course Against White Supremacy. The book will be published by Third World Press, a press set up by Carruthers and other members of the ASCAC. Representatives of that press were prominently present for Wright's eulogy at Asa Hilliard's memorial service. Less than a decade ago, therefore, when it came to education issues, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright were pretty much on the same page.

Obama's Knowledge

Given the precedent of his earlier responses on Ayers and Wright, Obama might be inclined to deny personal knowledge of the educational philosophy he was so generously funding. Such a denial would not be convincing. For one thing, we have evidence that in 1995, the same year Obama assumed control of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he publicly rejected "the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation," a stance that clearly resonates with both Wright and Carruthers. (See "No Liberation.")

And as noted, Wright had invited Carruthers, Hilliard, and like-minded thinkers to address his Trinity congregants. Wright likes to tick off his connections to these prominent Afrocentrists in sermons, and Obama would surely have heard of them. Reading over SSAVC's Annenberg proposals, Obama could hardly be ignorant of what they were about. And if by some chance Obama overlooked Hilliard's or Carruthers's names, SSAVC's proposals are filled with references to "rites of passage" and "Ptahhotep," dead giveaways for the anti-American and separatist ideological concoction favored by SSAVC.

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed "Collaborative" to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as "awful." (See "The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years," p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.

As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn't warning enough, their proposals consistently misspelled "rites of passage" as "rights of passage," hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve children's reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge's own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg's "external partners" had little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill, and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It's time for McCain to say so.

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Obama's Message Has Roots in Soviet Influence

In the 1920s, Vladimir Lenin charged a select group of communist espionage officers with a long-term covert influence project: undermine the culture, society, and economy of the United States.

Their goal was to weaken America in preparation for a socialist revolution. The communists targeted the three transmission belts of American culture: academia, the media, and Hollywood. Recent research reveals the unbelievable extent of their success.

Just how far have they come? Today we see the results in Obama's campaign talking points, the media's assistance, and Hollywood and academia's slavish toeing of the party line.

The operators were convinced that political evolution had reached its high point in Russia. The revolution would spread across the globe. From leader to leader, the covert influence ops remained active from 1920 to the fall of Russian communism in 1980. However, not even the most optimistic KGB minion dared dream their operations would echo into the 21st century.

The payload and methodology was best summarized by a communist agent working against Hollywood, quoted by Stephen Koch in "Double Lives: "You claim to be an independent-minded idealist. You don't really understand politics, but you think the little guy is getting a lousy break. You believe in open-mindedness.

"You are shocked, frightened by what is going on right here in our own country. You're frightened by the racism, by the oppression of the workingman. You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment, and you hope it works. You believe in peace. You yearn for international understanding. You hate fascism. You think the capitalist system is corrupt. You say it over and over and over again."

One of the first, and certainly most effective, recruitments for the covert influence program was The New York Times' Walter Duranty. Recently completed analysis of Duranty's lifestyle, access, and reporting reveals that he was, almost without doubt, a paid espionage agent. Duranty, America's man in Moscow for more than a decade, supplied the U.S. media with a steady stream of communist-fed information.

The implied subtext of Duranty's message was that communism works, and that it is inevitable. KGB operators now admit that they were tasked to continue delivering such messages up until the fall of the USSR.

The media accepted Duranty's covert influence messages as gospel. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. The KGB must have gloated over their unbelievable success.

Duranty, and The New York Times, set the template for America's press to be manipulated by the KGB. He was "the doyenne of left-leaning Westerners who believe that what happened inside Soviet Russia held the key to the future for the rest of the world," according to author S.J. Taylor in "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow."

The Soviet-trained intelligence service of North Vietnam infiltrated the American press corps in Saigon, another covert influence coup. Pham Xuan An, a communist espionage agent, worked for Time magazine for almost 30 years.

Beginning as a translator, he ended his career as the last Time correspondent in Saigon, filing stories for publication in the U.S. after the North Vietnamese victory. All the while, An was a communist espionage agent. Morley Safer, in his book "Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam" upon An's death in 2006, evidently without irony, called him one of the "best-connected journalists in the country."

In 1934, the operation against America's Education system bore fruit at the Teachers College of Columbia University. A group of intellectuals began their contribution to the communist project to destroy traditional American society, calling themselves, "Reconstructionists." Their message planned for every classroom, called for educators to be "less frightened of imposition and indoctrination."

My analysis reveals that the leader of this group, George Counts, was likely a covert influence agent. His multiple trips to the USSR, from the late 1920s to the early `30s, place him squarely in the sights of the KGB's covert influence operators.

During his travels across the communist country, he would have been squired by intelligence officers, who would develop him for eventual recruitment. The success of this covert influence recruitment is reflected in Counts' books, published in 1931, "The New Russian Primer," and "The Soviet Challenge to America."

The first was a direct translation of a communist indoctrination text for Soviet children, extolling the virtues of the first five year plan. His co-author was a Soviet "translator," most likely supplied by the KGB.

According to a Sept. 23, 2008, Wall Sreet Journal article, after the '60s, Bill Ayers and Obama's foundation in Chicago pushed for school reform. Ayers said, "'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.'" The covert operation bears fruit decades later.

Willi Munzenberg, Lenin's chief covert influence operator was determined to instill the mindset in Americans that, as Koch says, "to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and marked by an uplifting refinement of sensibility."

This is as close as we can come to a definition of PC today. Simply substitute "Soviet" with "Democrat," or "liberal," and there you have it. Keith Olbermann could not express the PC point of view any more clearly.

Munzenberg's operations, run from Vienna and Paris, dispatched communist espionage officers into Hollywood. There they built solid operations, recruiting screenwriters, producers, actors, directors, and hangers-on.

Their success against the film industry was notable and unparalleled. Underground, and overt communist organizations flourished there. In Ronald and Allis Radosh's book, "Red Star over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance with the Left," one communist recruit explained how the party made him comfortable: "I would be spared the agony of thinking my way through difficult issues: all the thinking would be done for me by an elite core of trained cerebrators . . . "

The Hollywood strategy was wildly successful over the long term. The elite corps of today, Michael Moore, Barbra Streisand, Matt Damon, Oliver Stone, et al, save the PC multitudes from doing any heavy thinking. The elites provide emotionally satisfying, politically correct views on any and all issues, packaged for the consumption of the PC proletariat.

When Obama recently decried the bitterness of Midwesterners clinging to their guns, their religion and their anti-immigrant sentiments, he was echoing the Leninist/Stalinist covert payload of decades ago. When Obama's preacher, Mr. Wright, accused the U.S. government of inflicting AIDS on "people of color," as a means of genocide, he parroted a KGB covert influence operational payload, first inserted in an Indian paper in 1984, according to Christopher Andrew in "The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World."

When progressives today chant, "Bush lied, people died," they parrot the KGB's messages. In the run-up to World War II, the communists characterized President Roosevelt as a war-mongering imperialist, and American foreign policy as somehow evil, and definitely naive. Reading the comments on virtually any Daily Kos posting today reveals the astounding success of the KGB's influence op.

The goals of PC, which began to emerge after the 1970s, up until today, are nearly identical to the goals of the Communist International in 1920: Destroy the society in which capitalism thrives. Bring the capitalists to their knees, so that the elite vanguard can install a dictatorship of the proletariat, for the good of all mankind. The proletariat is too gullible and easily swayed by logic and reality.

The Leninist elite vanguard of the proletariat in 1920 is today's elite vanguard of progressives, with Obama as the public face. They know better than you. They are oh-so-smart, oh-so-cosmopolitan, oh-so-loved in Vienna and Paris. They plan to give the rubes and hayseeds of fly-over country what's best for them, like it or not, made palatable by oratory and lies, and spoon-fed by their friends in the media, Hollywood, and academia. The only difference between then and now is now we know better. Don't be fooled again.

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Obama to Plumber: My Plan Will 'Spread the Wealth Around'

Which is the essence of Marxism

Barack Obama tells a plumber in Ohio he wants to "spread the wealth around," eliciting criticism that his economic recovery plan is socialist in nature.

Barack Obama told a tax-burdened plumber over the weekend that his economic philosophy is to "spread the wealth around" -- a comment that may only draw fire from riled-up John McCain supporters who have taken to calling Obama a "socialist" at the Republican's rallies.

Obama made the remark, caught on camera, after fielding some tough questions from the plumber Sunday in Ohio, where the Democratic candidate canvassed neighborhoods and encouraged residents to vote early. "Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too," Obama responded. "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Obama's remarks drew fresh criticism on the blogosphere that the Illinois senator favors a breed of wealth redistribution -- as well as a rebuke from the McCain campaign. "If Barack Obama's goal as President is to 'spread the wealth around,' perhaps his unconditional meetings with Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, and Kim Jong-Il aren't so crazy -- if nothing else they can advise an Obama administration on economic policy," McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a written statement to FOXNews.com. "In contrast, John McCain's goal as president will be to let the American people prosper unburdened by government and ever higher taxes."

Obama frequently rails against what he calls a Republican concept that tax breaks for the wealthy will somehow "trickle down" to middle-class Americans. Obama says he will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. However, McCain's aides and supporters argue that Obama wrongly wants to raise taxes on businesses in a time of economic distress.

Both candidates spent Monday discussing how they would resurrect the ailing economy. McCain again pointed to his plan to buy up cumbersome mortgages from homeowners and renegotiate them. Obama unveiled what he called an economic rescue plan for the middle class, which included a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures.

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