Obama Campaign Donation System Found Corrupt - Illegal

Does anyone care that Obama is taking in money from anyone and from anywhere no matter what the circumstances. This article points out just far from the rules the Obama campaign has strayed to get money. No cares! Does the general public just expect the liberal Democrat to engage in criminal activity? Maybe the public doesn't know the liberals are criminal? - nah

Of course, not a word of this appears in the main stream media - nothing! They don't care - oh, if this were McCain - whoa - the heads lines in the media would be on fire. This is what is called formally biased reporting, misinformation, managed news and or just conscious deception of the truth to support a fabricated alternative to the actual truth. It certainly isn't journalism by any stretch of the imagination.

Finding criminal intent in not high on the agenda of the liberal left news media or any liberal for that matter. Just remember who is responsible for the financial disaster - all are liberal Democrats including Barack Obama.

Keep the faith - think things through - weigh alternatives - use common sense - ask yourself the question, 'does this make sense?' - do not believe anything you read or hear from the lettered television stations as being the truth -Fox does the best here, but even then sometimes you have to read between lines to get the real story.

*DUBIOUS DONATIONS *
By SCOTT W. JOHNSON

// --http://www.nypost.com/news/p/obama_barack/obama_barack.htm

October 27, 2008

Barack Obama has proved the greatest fund-raiser of all time by a long shot. His campaign has raised more than $600 million - $150 million in September alone. But the campaign has also failed to adopt standard protections against fraudulent giving. The average contribution to Obama in September was just under $86. And federal law only requires the disclosure of identifying information for contributions in excess of $200. Campaigns must keep running totals for each donor and report them once they exceed $200.

The Federal Election Commission says the Obama campaign has reported well over $200 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only a small portion of that sum is attributable to donors the Obama campaign has disclosed. No presidential campaign has ever before received such a gargantuan sum of money from unidentified contributors.

The campaign's records reveal big contributors with names like "Doodad Pro" (employer: "Loving," profession: "You") and "Good Will" (same employer and profession). Both donated via credit card. Other reports have suggested that some donations come from overseas - raising the question of whether Obama is accepting donations from foreigners, another violation of federal law. All of which prompted an enterprising citizen to test the controls put in place to enforce compliance with federal campaign law by the Obama and McCain campaigns.

Last Thursday, he decided to conduct an experiment. He went to the Obama campaign Web site and made a donation under the name "John Galt" (the hero of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"). He provided the equally fictitious address "1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999." He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed. He then tried the same experiment on the McCain site, which rejected the transaction. He returned to the Obama site and made three more donations using the names Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses but the same credit card. The transactions all went through. By Saturday, he'd reported that the transactions had all posted to his credit-card account.

Others repeated "John Galt's" experiment last week, giving to Obama under such fictitious names as Della Ware, Joe Plumber, Idiot Savant, Ima BadDonation (with a Canadian bank card) and Fake Donor.

What accounts for the Obama campaign's acceptance of these fraudulent donations? Most merchants selling goods and services use the basic Address Verification System that screens credit-card charges for matching names and addresses. (It can also screen cards issued by foreign banks.) The McCain campaign uses AVS and provides a searchable database of all donors, including those who fall below the $200 threshold.

The Obama campaign apparently has chosen not to use the AVS system to screen donations."Della Ware" contacted The New York Times to report her experience contributing under a fictitious name and address ("12345 No Way") to the Obama campaign, while her contribution was rejected by the McCain campaign. Times reporter Michael Luo verified "Della Ware's" account and reported it online at the Times' campaign blog. But Luo missed the story's point."To be fair to the Obama campaign," he wrote, its "officials have said much of their checking for fraud occurs after the transactions have already occurred. When they find something wrong, they then refund the amount."

But the Obama campaign is running a system that complicates the discovery of "something wrong." It has chosen to operate an online contribution system that /facilitates illegal falsely sourced contributions, illegal foreign contributions and the evasion of contribution limits/.Obama backers making such contributions may not be worried that "something wrong" will be detected if they have no intention of complaining about it.

According to journalist Kenneth Timmerman, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship until just recently - in contrast not just with McCain but also with Hillary Clinton http://www.nypost.com/news/p/clinton_hillary/clinton_hillary.htm.

Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign required US citizens living abroad to fax copies of their passports before it would accept donations. By contrast, foreign donors to Obama can just use credit cards and false addresses.

Why has the Obama campaign chosen to operate without the basic automated credit-card controls that would prevent or hamper fraud and illegal contributions? Has it made a conscious decision to assist the evasion of federal campaign law or worry about it after it has had the use of the money?

It's hard to see any other motive.

Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the blog Power Line (power/ /lineblog.com)./

The Obamas : Rich But Not Too Rich

Isn't it nice when you can order what ever you want when ever you want it - the cost is not a problem when you are one of the elite.

What we need now is someone to light a fire under the press to bring some of this crap to the public.

Somethings just need a little heat to make them go down easier. But then somethings are just too hard to choke down no matter how much heat you add -

This is one of things that is hard to swallow. What's good for goose is not necessarily good for the gander. Take for those that have and give to me. hmmmm

Obama to Raise 4.3 Trillion in New Revenue? How?

If you ever wondered how we will survive a Obama presidency, wonder no more - we won't! The man has no clue - maybe he is just trying to cover all of the bases for his base and when he becomes president, if he becomes president, will he then face reality and do what is necessary to build the American economy back to where we all have opportunities for a bright future, or will he, as he has promised, take from the 'productive' and give to the 'unproductive' to make everyone equal, make life in America more fair, that is, redistribution of wealth.

This is Marxist socialism. You decide what is possible and what is criminal. You decide if Obama has the best interests of Americans at heart, or does he have dreams of a new America that doesn't include the will of the people.

Keep the faith - vote common sense next Tuesday!

How's Obama Going to Raise $4.3 Trillion?
The Democrat's tax and spending plans deserve closer examination.
By ALAN REYNOLDS http://online.wsj.com/search/search_center.html?KEYWORDS=ALAN+REYNOLDS&ARTICLESEARCHQUERY_PARSER=bylineAND

The most troublesome tax increases in Barack Obama's plan are not those we can already see but those sure to be announced later, after the election is over and budget realities rear their ugly head.[Commentary]M.E. Cohen

The new president, whoever he is, will start out facing a budget deficit of at least $1 trillion, possibly much more. Sen. Obama has nonetheless promised to devote another $1.32 trillion over the next 10 years to several new or expanded refundable tax credits and a special exemption for seniors, according to the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution's Tax Policy Center (TPC).

He calls this a "middle-class tax cut," while suggesting the middle class includes 95% of those who work.

Mr. Obama's proposed income-based health-insurance subsidies, tax credits for tiny businesses, and expanded Medicaid eligibility would cost another $1.63 trillion, according to the TPC. Thus his tax rebates and health insurance subsidies alone would lift the undisclosed bill to future taxpayers by $2.95 trillion -- roughly $295 billion a year by 2012.

But that's not all. Mr. Obama has also promised to spend more on 176 other programs, according to an 85-page list of campaign promises (actual quotations) compiled by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

The NTUF was able to produce cost estimates for only 77 of the 176, so its estimate is low. Excluding the Obama health plan, the NTUF estimates that Mr. Obama would raise spending by $611.5 billion over the next five years; the 10-year total (aside from health) would surely exceed $1.4 trillion, because spending typically grows at least as quickly as nominal GDP. A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Altogether, Mr. Obama is promising at least $4.3 trillion of increased spending and reduced tax revenue from 2009 to 2018 -- roughly an extra $430 billion a year by 2012-2013.How is he going to pay for it?

Raising the tax rates on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $200,000-$250,000, and phasing out their exemptions and deductions, can raise only a small fraction of the amount. Even if we have a strong economy, Mr. Obama's proposed tax hikes on the dwindling ranks of high earners would be unlikely to raise much more than $30 billion-$35 billion a year by 2012. Besides, Mr. Obama does not claim he can finance his ambitious plans for tax credits, health insurance, etc. by taxing the rich. On the contrary, he has an even less likely revenue source in mind.

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on Aug. 28, Mr. Obama said, "I've laid out how I'll pay for every dime -- by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens." That comment refers to $924.1 billion over 10 years from what the TPC wisely labels "unverifiable revenue raisers." To put that huge figure in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office optimistically expects a total of $3.7 trillion from corporate taxes over that period. In other words, Mr. Obama is counting on increasing corporate tax collections by more than 25% simply by closing "loopholes" and complaining about foreign "tax havens."

Nobody, including the Tax Policy Center, believes that is remotely feasible. And Mr. Obama's dream of squeezing more revenue out of corporate profits, dividends and capital gains looks increasingly unbelievable now that profits are falling, banks have cut or eliminated dividends, and only a few short-sellers have any capital gains left to tax.

When it comes to direct spending -- as opposed to handing out "refund" checks through the tax code -- Mr. Obama claims he won't need more revenue because there will be no more spending. He even claims to be proposing to cut more spending ending up with a "net spending cut." That was Mr. Obama's most direct answer to Bob Schieffer, the moderator of the last debate, right after Mr. Schieffer said "The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CFARB) ran the numbers" and found otherwise.When CFARB "ran the numbers," they relied almost entirely on unverifiable numbers eagerly provided to them by the Obama campaign. That explains why their list of Mr. Obama's new spending plans is so much shorter than the National Taxpayers Union fully documented list.

But nothing quite explains why even the vaguest promises to save money are recorded by CFARB as if they had substance. Mr. Obama is thus credited with saving $50 billion in a single year (2013) by reducing "wasteful spending" and unnamed "obsolete programs." He is said to save Medicare $43 billion a year by importing foreign drugs and negotiating bargains from drug companies. Yet even proponents of that approach such as the Lewin Group find that cannot save more than $6 billion a year. So the remaining $37 billion turns out to depend on what the Obama campaign refers to as undertaking "additional measures as necessary" (more taxes?).

The number of U.S. troops in Iraq will decline, regardless of who the next president is. Yet the CFARB credits John McCain's budget with only a $5 billion savings from troop reduction in Iraq, while Mr. Obama gets an extra $55 billion.

Straining to add credibility to Mr. Obama's fantasy about discovering $75 billion in 2013 from "closing corporate loopholes and tax havens," CFARB assures us that "the campaign has said that an Obama administration would look for other sources of revenue." Indeed they would.

In one respect, CFARB is more candid than the Obama campaign. Mr. Obama favors a relatively draconian cap-and-trade scheme in which the government would sell rights to emit carbon dioxide. The effect on U.S. families and firms would be like a steep tax on electricity, gasoline and energy-intensive products such as paper, plastic and aluminum. Whenever Mr. Obama claims he has not (yet) proposed any tax increase on couples earning less than $250,000, he forgets to mention his de facto $100 billion annual tax on energy. (The McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade plan is more gradual and much less costly.)

CFARB assumes Mr. Obama's cap-and-trade tax would raise $100 billion in 2013 alone, but the actual revenue raised would be much lower. Like every other steep surge in energy costs, the Obama cap-and-trade tax would crush the economy, reducing tax receipts from profits and personal income.

The Joint Tax Committee reports that the bottom 60% of taxpayers with incomes below $50,000 paid less than 1% of the federal income tax in 2006, while the 3.3% with incomes above $200,000 paid more than 58%. Most of Mr. Obama's tax rebates go to the bottom 60%. They can't possibly be financed by shifting an even larger share of the tax burden to the top 3.3%.

Mr. Obama has offered no clue as to how he intends to pay for his health-insurance plans, or doubling foreign aid, or any of the other 175 programs he's promised to expand. Although he may hope to collect an even larger share of loot from the top of the heap, the harsh reality is that this Democrat's quest for hundreds of billions more revenue each year would have to reach deep into the pockets of the people much lower on the economic ladder. Even then he'd come up short.

*Mr. Reynolds is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute. This was adapted from a paper for Hillsdale College's Free Market Forum (www.hillsdale.edu/seminars/offcampus/freemarketforum/speeches/2008.asp http://www.hillsdale.edu/seminars/offcampus/freemarketforum/speeches/2008.asp).*

Republican Work Philosophy

With all of the misinformation that the liberals are putting out these days, I think it's time to bring some truth to the news - !

Journalism IS Dead in America : Agenda Over The Truth

What a great article on the death of journalism in America, and really, world wide. It is impossible to believe anything that is printed or televised in this country - bias and the left's agenda take president over the truth. The facts are not important when it comes to getting and keeping power.

Everything and everyone is a tool to be used and abused in this endeavor.

Keep the faith - use common sense and a clear head when making decisions on politics.

*Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?*
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism./

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America: I remember reading /All the President's Men// /and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely /not// /to be able to repay. The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people /did// /foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here?

Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com ] ): "

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable.

The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout! What? It's not the liar, but the /victims// /of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae. And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was. But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign /had// /sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an /official// /adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican. If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, /you// /created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct /that// /false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate. Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences.

That's what honesty /means// /. That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing. Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's /own/ adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means? Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for? You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away /their// /integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore?

We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles. That's where you are right now. It's not too late.

You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in// /The Rhinoceros Times /of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission./

Reasons to Vote Democrat in November

Want some insight on how to vote Democrat in November - these people will help make that all important decesion.

Colombo Has Questions for Obama : Ah - Who Are You?

Come on people, get a grip here - use some common sense and just take a minute to think this through before November 2nd - time is running out for us - aren't we in enough trouble already without 'putting the fox in the hen house to guard the chickens'?

This little story is a take-off on Colombo the detective series that was on TV some years ago - but it really doesn't take a detective to see that Barack Obama is not what he say he is or what he say he is going to do for this country. The man is hiding his true intent as well as his back ground. We are finding more and more of material on him but he stills insists on hiding where he he's been and what he did before he decided he wanted to take control of Ameria.

What we DO know about Obama is scary enough to not elect him as the leader of the free world, but the stuff that we DON"T know about Obama could destroy the free world as we know it. I know, some will think that is over the top, but remember, and I have posted on this many times, what did the German people think about their leader in the early 1930's or the Russians after the first world war, or the Chinese or the Japanese?

I know, it's hard to come to grips with this concept that it could happen to us - not in America you say - but why not here? Remember also half of the voting public already is ready, and willing, to surrender their hard won freedoms to others, Marxist socialists, because they believe socialists can control their personal lives better than they can themselves. Even the most hard noses liberal Democrats can remember how successful the Soviet Union was with Marxist socialism and the consequences of that socialism on the average citizen. Tens of Millions were murdered and enslaved. Socialism always fails - always - yet millions in this country are more than willing to give it a try. Unbelievable - Unacceptable!

This a very telling story of a man hiding what he knows will be his demise if enough voters have the chance to see and understand his true character.

Keep the faith - never give up the fight!

'Sorry to bother you Mr. Obama, Sir Excuse me Mr. Obama, I mean Senator Obama, sir. Um . .know you are busy and important and stuff. I mean running for president is very important and . . . ah . . . I hate to bother you. I will only take a minute ok, sir? See, I have these missing pieces that are holding me up, and I was wondering sir, if you could take time out of your busy schedule and help me out.

You know, no big deal, just some loose ends and things. I can't seem to get some information I need to wrap this up. These things seem to either be 'locked' or 'not available'. I'm sure it's just some oversight or glitch or something, so if you could you tell me where these things are . . . I . . I . . . have them written down here somewhere . . . oh wait. Sorry about the smears. It was raining out. I'll just read it to you. Could you help me please find these things, sir?

1. Occidental College records -- Not released

2. Columbia College records -- Not released

3. Columbia Thesis paper -- not available, locked down by faculty

4. Harvard College records -- Not released, locked down by faculty

5. Selective Service Registration -- Not released

6. Medical records -- Not released

7. Illinois State Senate schedule --'not available'8. Law practice client list -- Not released

9. Certified Copy of original Birth certificate - - Not released

10. Embossed, signed paper Certification of Live Birth -- Not released

11. Harvard Law Review articles published -- None

12. University of Chicago scholarly articles -- None

13. Your Record of baptism-- Not released or 'not available'.

14.Your Illinois State Senate records--'not available'

You couldn't get a job at McDonalds and become district manager after 143 days of experience. You couldn't become chief of surgery after 143 days of experience of being a surgeon.
You couldn't get a job as a teacher and be the superintendent after 143 days of experience.
You couldn't join the military and become a colonel after 143 days of experience.
You couldn't get a job as a reporter and become the nightly news anchor after 143 days of experience.

BUT.... 'From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United State Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate. That's how many days the Senate was actually in session and working.

After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World .... 143 days.

We all have to start somewhere. The senate is a good start, but after 143 days, that's all it is - a start. AND, strangely, a large sector of the American public is okay with this and campaigning for him.

We wouldn't accept this in our own line of work, yet some are okay with this for the President of the United States of America ? Come on folks, we are not voting for the next American Idol!

How the Stock Market Really Works

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: 'Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys.
They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of monkeys!

Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market really works

Mainline Churches' Socialist Leaning Loses Flock

Little wonder the mainline churches have a hard time expanding their numbers when they continue to use their positions as church leaders to promote agendas that are not seen as acceptable to the congregation.

Even though most of those in the pew say nothing, it isn't lost on them that they are being used to further a social agenda that, in the end, will mean hard times for them or even their demise.

The social agenda that is supported by these churches reflects the political views of the far left and has been this way for decades. Only now has the push become a shove by church leaders as they see a huge percentage of the general public ready to elect a Marxist to the White House. History has no president in this country for this movement to the left in such large numbers. The far left, and the communists, have always been part of the political spectrum in American but not until Obama has it taken hold to such a degree that even our religious houses of God have become havens of political intimidation.

What is the answer? I do know we must keep a clear head and decide what is important to you next Tuesday - Freedom and Democracy or generations of enslavement to a socialist agenda that we may not ever escape. It has happened in other countries and it can happen here. All it will take is enough of us to stand back and allow it to happen.

Keep the faith! Stand up and vote freedom and Democracy!!


The Rise of the Religious Left *
October 16, 2007*
By Steven Malanga*

Everyone knows the potent force of the Christian right in American politics. But since the mid-1990s, an increasingly influential religious movement has arisen on the left, mostly escaping the national press's notice. This new religious left does not expend its political energies on the cultural concerns that primarily motivate conservative evangelicals. Instead, working mostly at the state and local level, and often in lockstep with unions, its ministers, priests, rabbis, and laity exert a major, sometimes decisive, influence in campaigns to enforce a "living wage," to help unions organize, and to block the expansion of nonunionized businesses like Wal-Mart.

The new religious left is in one sense not new at all. It draws its inspiration in part from the Protestant "social gospel" movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially Baptist Minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who believed that the best way to uplift the downtrodden was to redistribute wealth and forge an egalitarian society. Rauschenbusch called for the creation of a kingdom of heaven here on earth—just as presidential candidate Barack Obama did last week at a church in South Carolina.

The popular Catholic writer John Ryan also advocated that government enact pro-union legislation, steep taxes on wealth, and more stringent business regulation. When FDR adopted several of Ryan's ideas, the priest was given the sobriquet "the Right Reverend New Dealer." His popularity reflected the tightening alliance between America's mainstream churches and organized labor.

That alliance disintegrated during the 1960s, when clerics like the notorious rebel priests the Berrigan brothers began to agitate for a wider range of radical causes—above all, a swift end to the Vietnam War. The more culturally conservative blue-collar workers who formed the union movement's core wanted no part of this.

The alliance has been revitalized thanks in large part to savvy labor bosses such as John Sweeney, who grew up in a prototypical Catholic pro-union household. When Mr. Sweeney took over the AFL-CIO in 1996, union membership was shrinking—from 24% of the work force 30 years ago to 14.5% in 1996 (and just 12% today). He told church leaders that "unions need aggressive participation by the Church in our organizing campaigns.

"The AFL-CIO launched "Labor in the Pulpits," a program that encouraged churches and synagogues to invite union leaders to preach the virtues of organized labor and tout its political agenda. Nearly 1,000 congregations in 100 cities nationwide now take part annually. Mr. Sweeney himself has preached from the pulpit of Washington, D.C.'s National Cathedral, urging congregants to join anti-globalization protests in the capital.

Under the auspices of Labor in the Pulpits, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian clerics have composed guidelines for union-friendly sermons and litanies, as well as inserts for church bulletins that promote union legislation. One insert asked congregants to pray for a federal minimum-wage hike and also—if the prayers didn't work, presumably—to contact their congressional representatives. Another urged congregants to lobby Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—controversial legislation that would let unions organize firms merely by getting workers to sign authorizing cards, rather than by conducting secret ballots, as is currently required.

The Chicago-based, union-supported Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) arranges for seminarians to spend the summer months working with union locals. Some 200 seminarians have helped unionize Mississippi poultry workers, aided the Service Employees International Union in organizing Georgia public-sector employees, and bolstered campaigns for living-wage legislation in California municipalities.

Working with IWJ, the labor movement has spawned some 60 new religious left groups, ranging from the Massachusetts Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice to the Chicago Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues to the Los Angeles-based Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (Clue). In Los Angeles, Clue clergy helped crush several 2005 statewide ballot initiatives that unions opposed, including one that gave union workers the option of not paying dues that would fund union political activities.

In Memphis, clergy fought relentlessly—via newspaper op-eds, public fasts, and preaching—for the passage of living-wage bills that since 2004 have forced local businesses to hike wages well above the federal minimum. Labor-religious coalitions have worked spectacularly well: Some 125 municipalities have passed living-wage laws. More than 100 religious organizations support IWJ financially, including the National Council of Churches of the USA (NCC), an umbrella organization of nearly 40 mainstream Christian denominations. The Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Episcopal Church are particularly active.

The alliance between labor and the religious left also enjoys the powerful backing of the Catholic Church, whose American hierarchy, though often conservative on social issues, is firmly left-wing in its economic views.

Despite decades of economic progress that have reduced unemployment levels to record lows and made America a magnet for opportunity-seeking immigrants, leading clergy of the religious left depict the free market as a vast exploitative force, controlled by a small group of godless power brokers. Clergy describe Wal-Mart, for example, in terms that its thousands of suppliers, millions of employees, and tens of millions of customers would hardly recognize.

The Reverend Jarvis Johnson, an IWJ board member, has urged congregants to invite the "hurting, blind and crippled" to a metaphorical banquet. Who are these poor, abused souls? "They are Wal-Mart associates who have to wait six months to a year to qualify for a health-care plan," Mr. Johnson explained. Religious left leaders blindly refuse to acknowledge the considerable academic research showing that mandated wage hikes often eliminate the jobs of low-skilled workers—the very people whom it seeks to help.

David Neumark, for example— a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley's Institute of Business and Economics Research and one of the world's foremost authorities on wage laws—has found that while living-wage laws do boost the income of some low-wage workers, they also have "strong negative employment effects." That is, they vaporize jobs. In one study, Mr. Neumark noted that a 50% boost in the living wage produced a decline in employment for the lowest-skilled workers of between 6% and 8%.

Religious left clerics also ignore the evidence that much poverty in prosperous, opportunity-rich America results from dysfunctional—dare one call it "sinful"?—behavior. Around two-thirds of poor families today are single-parent households, largely dependent on government subsidies and headed by women with little education. The entry-level, low-wage work for which these mothers are qualified makes it hard to support large families. And the time they must devote to raising their kids makes it hard to climb the economic ladder.

Poverty is increasingly about the irresponsible decision to have children out of wedlock. In many inner city communities where poverty is entrenched, 75% of all children are now born out of wedlock.
In any event, the religious left's sympathies do not seem to be those of churchgoers. While the NCC and its member churches pursue a variety of left-wing causes—even partnering with the activist organization MoveOn.org and featuring speakers like Michael Moore at events—a Pew poll found that 54% of white, mainline Protestants and 50% of Catholics voted Republican in the 2004 presidential elections. Those who attended church regularly voted Republican even more heavily—at nearly the same rate as evangelical Christians, in fact.

For four decades, as the leadership of America's mainline churches has moved steadily leftward, those churches' memberships declined as a percentage of the U.S. population while the number of Christian evangelicals exploded. Left-wing clerics may be buying greater political influence with their alliance through organized labor, but the price may be further alienating their shrinking flock.

Steve Malanga is senior editor at the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, from whose autumn issue this is adapted.©2007 The Wall Street Journal

John McCain and Barack Have A 'Dance Off' - COOL

This is really fun - enjoy


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzyT9-9lUyE

Obama Will Abandend Democracy for Social Justice and World Expediency

As usual, Ralph Peters comes right to the point in this article on what we can expect from Obama in foreign policy given that he is a Marxist socialist.

Barack Obama has no intention of defending the American destiny of providing a chance for freedom and Democracy for everyone under the boot of oppression. What Obama wants is to be wearing that boot and have it firmly planted on the neck of anyone that won't conform to his socialist agenda. His entire history points to this as his reason for existence.

As more information comes to light about who Barack Obama is, we get a clearer picture of his Chicago activities from the very beginning which shaped his rise to power. Stark among the new findings is he sought out Bill Ayres, the terrorist, and not Bill Ayers going to Obama. His intentions all along, from the get-go, were purely socialist, if not completely Marxist.

Obama sought out Ayers to get a foot hold in the radical community that he knew he would need to advance his agenda of socialism. Obama read Saul Alinsky's book on terrorism.

Obama used ACORN for the same reasons - he knew they were corrupt but he knew as well that this would work for him to as a community organizer in urban Chicago, an area ripe for 'change' - this man is no fool.

Obama used ACORN to intimidate banks and then congress to allow low risk home loans to individuals without jobs and or even illegals without jobs and no social security numbers. This was completely supported by all of the Democrats in congress and they went so far as to make it illegal NOT to make loans to risky individuals. When banks complained they would lose money, the Democrats ordered Fannie and Freddie, that is tax payer money, to back these bad high risk loans. This all started in the late 90's with Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, Jammie Gorlick Chirs Dodd, Barine Frank, Schumer and other Democrats.

As it wound up, the disaster that we have now, investigators found that over 50% of the loan documents that are held by Fannie and Freddie were high risk. It was also found that over 5 million of these loans are individuals that do not have jobs and no social security numbers or false social security numbers on the applications.

When Fannie and Freddie came under fire and were fined for fraud in their booking keeping, bigger bonuses for Raines and Gorlick, Franklin Reines, Democrat, was fired, Fannie and Freddie fined Billions but nobody made any effort to change the way things were done except the Republicans.

The Democrats to the man and woman, Gorlick, defended the two institutions as being sound. They screamed the Republicans were trying to deny the poor the same rights as the rich. This oversight was saugh by the Bush Administration in 2003, 2005, John McCain and Bush, 2006, 2007 and 2008. In all the Republicans tried 17 times to bring 'oversight' to these financial monsters. No luck! Why? Democrats!

Barack Obama will attack foreign policy in the same manner as Peters points out in this article - Obama has no intention of standing up against aggression from oppressive nations that want to gain new territory, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, really any communist socialist tyrant as this is an Obama quest for himself, or those nations that want to take back lost countries - lost to freedom and Democracy, Russia. Jimmy Carter just loves these guys.

I believe Obama will do nothing to defend Israel or any other country that faces attack from a Muslin dominated countries. He will not defend Iraq. The Democrats abandoned the Vietnamese. Remember, Obama is not about helping the oppressed, i.e. the Palestinians, he is about joining the oppressors.

Keep the faith, the struggle goes on!

AMERICA THE WEAK
By RALPH PETERS
/October 20, 2008/ --

http://www.nypost.com/news/p/obama_barack/obama_barack.htm

IF Sen. Barack Obama is elected president, our republic will survive, but our international strategy and some of our allies may not. His first year in office would conjure globe-spanning challenges as our enemies piled on to exploit his weakness. Add in Sen. Joe Biden - with his track record of calling every major foreign-policy crisis wrong for 35 years - as vice president and /de facto/ secretary of State, and we'd face a formula for strategic disaster.

Where would the avalanche of confrontations come from?*

Al Qaeda

Pandering to his extreme base, Obama has projected an image of being soft on terror. Toss in his promise to abandon Iraq, and you can be sure that al Qaeda will pull out all the stops to kill as many Americans as possible - in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if they can, here at home - hoping that America will throw away the victories our troops bought with their blood.*

Pakistan

As this nuclear-armed country of 170 million anti-American Muslims grows more fragile by the day, the save-the-Taliban elements in the Pakistani intelligence services and body politic will avoid taking serious action against "their" terrorists (while theatrically annoying Taliban elements they can't control). The Pakistanis think Obama would lose Afghanistan - and they believe they can reap the subsequent whirlwind.*

Iran

Got nukes? If the Iranians are as far along with their nuclear program as some reports insist, expect a mushroom cloud above an Iranian test range next year. Even without nukes, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would try the new administration's temper in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.*

Israel

In the Middle East, Obama's election would be read as the /end/ of staunch US support for Israel. Backed by Syria and Iran, Hezbollah would provoke another, far-bloodier war with Israel. Lebanon would disintegrate.*

Saudi Arabia

Post-9/11 attention to poisonous Saudi proselytizing forced the kingdom to be more discreet in fomenting terrorism and religious hatred abroad. Convinced that Obama will be more "tolerant" toward militant Islam, the Saudis would redouble their funding of bigotry and butchery-for-Allah - in the US, too.*

Russia

Got Ukraine? Not for long, /slabiye Amerikantsi/. Russia's new czar, Vladimir Putin, intends to gobble Ukraine next year, assured that NATO will be divided and the US can be derided. Aided by the treasonous Kiev politico Yulia Timoshenko - a patriot when it suited her ambition, but now a Russian collaborator - the Kremlin is set to reclaim the most important state it still regards as its property. Overall, 2009 may see the starkest repression of freedom since Stalin seized Eastern Europe.*

Georgia

Our Georgian allies should dust off their Russian dictionaries.*

Venezuela

Hugo Chavez will intensify the rape of his country's hemorrhaging democracy and, despite any drop in oil revenue, he'll do all he can to export his megalomaniacal version of gun-barrel socialism. He'll seek a hug-for-the-cameras meet with President Obama as early as possible.*

Bolivia

Chavez client President Evo Morales could order his military to seize control of his country's dissident eastern provinces, whose citizens resist his repression, extortion and semi-literate Leninism. President Obama would do nothing as yet another democracy toppled and bled.*

North Korea

North Korea will expect a much more generous deal from the West for annulling its pursuit of nuclear weapons. And it will regard an Obama administration as a green light to cheat.

NATO

The brave young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe will be gravely discouraged, while the appeasers in Western Europe will again have the upper hand. Putin will be allowed to do what he wants.*

The Kurds

An Obama administration will abandon our only true allies between Tel Aviv and Tokyo.*

Democracy activists

Around the world, regressive regimes will intensify their suppression - and outright murder - of dissidents who risk their lives for freedom and justice. An Obama administration will say all the right things, but do nothing.*

Women's rights

If you can't vote in US elections, sister, you're screwed. Being stoned to death or buried alive is just a cultural thing.*

Journalists

American journalists who've done everything they can to elect Barack Obama can watch as regimes around the world imprison, torture and murder their foreign colleagues, confident that the US has entered an era of impotence. The crocodile tears in newsrooms will provide drought relief to the entire southeastern US.

Sen. John McCain's campaign has allowed a great man to be maligned as a mere successor to George W. Bush. The truth is that an Obama administration would be a second Carter presidency - only far worse.Think Bush weakened America? Just wait.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World."Home

Irish Wisdom For The United States

How come the Irish can see things so clearly while, we here in the States, twist and turn in the wind?

It's clear to me what course to take in this election but many of my countrymen and women don't have a clue - Did you ever wonder how the German people felt in the mid 1930's or the Russian people after the first world war or the Chinese in the 60's or the Japanese leading up to the second world war?

Did they ever consider what their future might be given what their leaders were telling them or maybe they just didn't care. Maybe it just wasn't important enough at the time to consider the consequences?

Well, chill out - the Irish will take care of us - wisdom born from generations of conflict.

(Author unknown)
Leave it to the Irish to cut through the crap and make the whole issue crystal clear... Thoughts from across the pond.

An email from Ireland to the brethren in the States... a point to ponder despite your political affiliation: "We, in Ireland , can't figure out why people are even bothering to hold an election in the United States this year.

On one side, a lawyer who states he is 'black' when it is documented that he is only 12% 'black', who goes to the wrong church, who has stated that he wants his countrymen to learn to speak Spanish rather than English,who refuses to put his hand over his heart and say the pledge of allegiance or wear the flag of the country he wants to run, who can't remember if there are 50 or 57 states in his own country, who is married to yet another lawyer who doesn't even like the country her husband wants to run. Now...

On the other side, you have a nice old war hero whose name starts with the appropriate 'Mc' terminology married to a good looking younger woman who owns a beer distributorship.

What in Lord's name are ye lads thinking over there in the colonies?"

Still More Damning Proof : ACORN Tied Directly To Obama

Does it matter that we might elect a person to the highest office in our country that takes pride in having a hand in nearly destroying the entire countries financial system?

Does it matter at all that millions of people refuse to hear what is being said about this 'community organizer', backed up by hard evidence that he willing sought out these socialist organizations like ACORN, that he willing made friends with a known terrorist, Bill Ayers, that he used his skills as an attorney to help socialist organizations attack our financial institution to force them into actions, along with Democrats in congress, that was destructive to the entire financial market and our country?

Does it matter - is it important? What does matter? What is important? How can so many people, in so many different walks of life, be so blind as to not want to see who this man is? Who are these people?

Be forewarned - he will be our worst night mare.

Read this article and believe that having this man in the White House will be a disaster!!

SPREADING THE VIRUS
By STANLEY KURTZ

October 13, 2008

TO discover the roots of to day's economic crisis, consider a tale from 1995.That March, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was scheduled to address a meeting of county commissioners at the Washington Hilton. But, first, some 500 protesters from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) poured into the ballroom from both the kitchen and the main entrance. Hotel staffers who tried to block them were quickly overwhelmed by demonstrators chanting, "Nuke Newt!" and "We want Newt!" Jamming the aisles, carrying bullhorns and taunting the assembled county commissioners, demonstrators swiftly took over the head table and commandeered the microphone, sending two members of Congress scurrying.

The demonstrators' target, Gingrich, hadn't yet arrived - and his speech was cancelled. When the cancellation was announced, ACORN's foot soldiers cheered.

Editorial writers from Little Rock to Buffalo condemned ACORN's action as an affront to both civility and freedom of speech. Editorialists also pointed out that the "spending cuts" the protesters railed against were imaginary - Gingrich proposed merely to slow the growth in some welfare programs and turn control back to the states.Yet ACORN had only just begun.

Two days later, 50 to 100 of the same protesters hit their main target - a House Banking subcommittee considering changes to the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that allows groups like ACORN to force banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers.The CRA's ostensible purpose is to prevent banks from discriminating against minorities. But Rep. Marge Roukema (R-NJ), who chaired the subcommittee, was worried that charges of discrimination had become an excuse for lowering credit standards. She warned that new, Democrat-proposed CRA regulations could amount to an illegal quota system.

FOR years, ACORN had combined manipulation of the CRA with intimidation-protest tactics to force banks to lower credit standards. Its crusade, with help from Democrats in Congress, to push these high-risk "subprime" loans on banks is at the root of today's economic meltdown.

When the role of ACORN and congressional Democrats in the mortgage crisis is pointed out, Democrats reply that banks subject to the CRA represent only about a quarter of the loans that led to our current troubles. In fact, the problem goes way beyond the CRA.

As ACORN ran its campaigns against local banks, it quickly hit a roadblock. Banks would tell ACORN they could afford to reduce their credit standards by only a little - since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage giants, refused to buy up those risky loans for sale on the "secondary market."That is, the CRA wasn't enough. Unless Fannie and Freddie were willing to relax their credit standards as well, local banks would never make home loans to customers with bad credit histories or with too little money for a downpayment.

So ACORN's Democratic friends in Congress moved to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dispense with normal credit standards. Throughout the early '90s, they imposed ever-increasing subprime-lending quotas on Fannie and Freddie.

But then the Republicans won control of Congress - and Rep. Roukema scheduled her hearing. ACORN went into action to protect its golden goose. IT struck as Roukema aired her concerns at that hearing. Pro testers, led by ACORN President Maud Hurd, stood up and began chanting, "CRA has got to stay!" and "Banks for greed, not for need!" The protesters then demanded the microphone.With the hearing interrupted and the demonstrators refusing to leave, Roukema called the Capital Police, who arrested Hurd and four others for "disorderly conduct in a Capital building" - a charge carrying a penalty of a $500 fine, six months in prison or both.

As the police arrived, two of the protesters menacingly approached Roukema's desk, still demanding the hearing microphone. Requests to the Capital Police to release the activists from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass,) failed. Then Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) showed up at the jail and refused to leave until the protesters were released; the Capital Police relented.

Meanwhile, instead of repudiating ACORN's intimidation tactics, Rep. Kennedy berated Roukema for arresting one of his constituents and accused the Republicans of preparing for "an all-out attack on CRA." He also promised to introduce legislation to expand the CRA's coverage to mortgage bankers and large credit unions.THIS little slice of political life from 1995 had a variety of ripple effects.

Above all, ACORN's intimidation tactics, and its alliance with Democrats in Congress, triumphed. Despite their 1994 takeover of Congress, Republicans' attempts to pare back the CRA were stymied. Instead, Democrats like Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Reps. Kennedy and Waters allied with the Clinton administration to /broaden/ the acceptability of risky subprime loans throughout the financial system, thus precipitating our current crisis.

ACORN had come to Congress not only to protect the CRA from GOP reforms but also to expand the reach of quota-based lending to Fannie, Freddie and beyond. By steamrolling the GOP that March, it had crushed the last potential barrier to "change."Three months later, the Clinton administration announced a comprehensive strategy to push homeownership in America to new heights - regardless of the compromise in credit standards that the task would require.

Fannie and Freddie were assigned massive subprime lending quotas, which would rise to about half of their total business by the end of the decade.

WHEN the ACORN-Democrat alliance finally succeeded in blocking Republicans from restoring fiscal sanity in 1995, the way was open to virtually unlimited lending quotas - and to a whole new way of thinking about credit standards.Urged on by ACORN, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration helped push tolerance for high-risk loans through every sector of the banking system - far beyond the sort of banks originally subject to the CRA.

So it was the efforts of ACORN and its Democratic allies that first spread the subprime virus from the CRA to Fannie and Freddie and thence to the entire financial system.

Soon, Democratic politicians and regulators actually began to take pride in lowered credit standards as a sign of "fairness" - and the contagion spread. And when financial institutions across the board saw that they could make money by trading what would once have been considered junk loans, the profit motive kicked in. But the bad seed that started it all was ACORN.

http://www.nypost.com/news/p/obama_barack/obama_barack.htm

HOW does Barack Obama fit into all of this? Obama has been a key ally of Chicago ACORN going back to his days as a community organizer. Later, as a young lawyer, he offered leadership training to the activists who were forcing Chicago banks into high-risk subprime loans. And when he made it on to the boards of Chicago's Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he channeled money ACORN's way.

Obama was perfectly aware of ACORN's intimidation tactics - indeed, he oversaw a Woods Fund report that /boasted/ of managing to fund the radical group despite its shocking behavior. And as a lawmaker, in Illinois and in Washington, he has continued to back ACORN's leglislative agenda.

ACORN's high-pressure tactics live on. And congressional Democrats are still covering for ACORN, funneling it money and doing its legislative bidding. ACORN also continues its shady ways, using a vast network of technically separate but in fact quite interconnected organizations to evade federal laws on the politicized use of government money.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, the Obama campaign appears to have little more regard for freedom of speech than Reps. Kennedy or Waters did when they backed up ACORN's thugs in 1995. The campaign actually practices ACORN-style tactics, sending out "action wires" that call on supporters to block Obama critics from radio appearances (a tactic once applied to me) and demanding legal actions against unfriendly political advertisers.

As a presidential candidate, Obama promises a massive national-service program closely allied with the nonprofit sector. He wants to remove "barriers for smaller nonprofits to participate in government programs."In other words, he plans a massive effort to funnel America's youth into volunteer work alongside the likes of ACORN. So Obama's favorite community organizers may soon be training your child.

ACORN's alliance with the Democratic Party is at the root of the current financial meltdown. And Barack Obama has stayed true to ACORN's ways. Pretty soon, the folks who poured into the Washington Hilton to shut down Speaker Gingrich in 1995 may no longer need to take over the microphone. They'll be in charge of it./

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.



/

George Bush Proved Correct in Iraq : Yellow Cake Found in 2003

I always knew he was right given that the main stream press always said he was lying. It is a sure bet that if it's in the 'drive-by media' it's almost always a lie when they have "facts" about Bush.

Check this article out and you decide - I remember when this was news in the blogs but no one cared in the media as it didn't fit the agenda of the Marxist liberals in the press and congress. I don't believe it will gain much traction now either but at least we can keep passing it on until we can get enough people to make it common knowledge.

Keep the faith - I believe there are more good people in this country than there are liberals Democrats.


Well, folks, are you not surprised that we haven't read about this in the paper or heard it on NBC? This needs to be forwarded on; that's the only way most people will ever hear about it. From the Associated Press. Please, Follow to the bottom of the article for the ‘Truth or Fiction’ analysis of it and it’s authenticity/verification.



Secret U.S. Mission Hauls Uranium From Iraq On July 5, 2008, the Associated Press (AP) released a story titled: Secret U.S. mission hauls uranium from Iraq .

The opening paragraph is as follows: The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program – a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium – reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans. See anything wrong with this picture?

We have been hearing from the far-left for more than five years how, "Bush lied." Somehow, that slogan loses its credibility now that 550 metric tons of Saddam's yellowcake, used for nuclear weapon enrichment, has been discovered and shipped to Canada for its new use as nuclear energy. It appears that American troops found the 550 metric tons of uranium in 2003 after invading Iraq .



They had to sit on this information and the uranium itself, for fear of terrorists attempting to steal it. It was guarded and kept safe by our military in a 23,000-acre site with large sand beams surrounding the site. This is vindication for the Bush administration, having been attacked mercilessly by the liberal media and the far-left pundits on the blogosphere. Now that it is proven that President Bush did not lie about Saddam's nuclear ambitions, one would think the mainstream media would report the story?

Once the AP released the story, the mainstream media should have picked it up and broadcast it worldwide. This never happened, due in large part I believe, to the fact that the mainstream media would have to admit they were wrong about Bush's war motives all along. Thankfully, the AP got it right when it said, "The removal of 550 metric tons of 'yellowcake'" – the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment – was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy." Closing the book on Saddam's nuclear legacy? Did Saddam have a nuclear legacy after all? I thought Bush lied?

As it turns out, the people who lied were Joe Wilson and his wife. Valerie Plame engaged in a clear case of nepotism and convinced the CIA to send her husband on a fact finding mission in February 2002, seeking to determine if Saddam Hussein attempted to buy yellowcake from Niger . The CIA and British intelligence believed Saddam contacted Niger20 for that purpose but needed proof. During his trip to Niger, Wilson actually interviewed the former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki.

Mayaki told Wilson that in June of 1999, an Iraqi delegation expressed interest in "expanding commercial relations" for the purposes of purchasing yellowcake. Wilson chose to overlook Mayaki's remarks and reported to the CIA that there was no evidence of Hussein wanting to purchase yellowcake from Niger . However, with British intelligence insisting the claim was true,

President Bush used that same claim in his State of the Union address in January of 2003.

Outraged by Bush's insistence that the claim was true, Wilson wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in the summer of 2003 slamming Bush. Wilson did this in spite of the fact that Mayaki said Saddam did try to buy the yellowcake from Niger . The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disagreed with Wilson and supported Mayaki's claim. This meant nothing to Wilson who was opposed to the Iraq war and thus had ulterior motives in covering up the prime minister's statements. It was a simple tactic really. If the far-left and their friends in the media could prove Bush lied about Hussein wanting to purchase yellowcake from Niger, it would undermine President Bush's credibility and give them more cause for asking what other "lies" he may have told.

Yet, the real lie came from Wilson, who interpreted his own meaning from the prime minister's statements and concluded all by himself that the claim of Saddam attempting to purchase yellowcake was "unequivocally wrong." Curiously, the CIA sat on this information and did not inform the CIA Director, who sided with Bush on the yellowcake claim. This was made public in a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report in July 2004. Valerie Plame also engaged in her own lie campaign by spreading the notion that the Bush administration "outed" her as a CIA agent. Never mind that it was

Richard Armitage -- no friend of the Bush administration -- who leaked Plame's identity to the press. Never mind that Plame had not been in the field as a CIA agent in=20 some six years. The truth is, due to their opposition to the war, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, the mainstream media and their left-wing friends on the blogosphere engaged in a propaganda campaign to undermine the Bush administration.

Now that Saddam's uranium has been made public and is no longer a threat to the world, do you think these aforementioned parties will apologize and admit they were wrong? Don't count on it. The rest of the American people should hear the truth about Saddam's uranium. It is up to you and me to inform them every chance we get. As far as the anti-war crowd is concerned, the next time they say that, "Bush lied," we should tell them to, "Have the yellowcake and eat it too."

This story was verified, if you want to check it for yourself, click on the link below. Read this link, the article and its substance: http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/u/uraniumyellowcake.htm http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334

Alaskan Explains Black Conservatism - A Video

What a great video from the perspective of a black conservative. This guy, in the words of Joe Biden, " is clean and articulate".

Enjoy!


http://forum.gon.com/showpost.php?p=2603061&postcount=1

Obama's Books Explain His Character

I believe this has been posted before but I think it is very telling of Barack Obama's character and to run it again at this time is to reawaken some us to what is in store if Obama is elected.

Given all of the fraud that is being uncovered all over the country, it sure looks like he will be the next president by hook or crook. Does it matter that all of this voter registration fraud can be tied to Obama through ACORN? nah - He's a Democrat - we all expect him to be associated with criminals and terrorists. Just look at the congress of the United States where he comes from, all 143 days worth, and ask yourself, is he fit to govern the greatest country on earth?

Keep the faith -


Why is all of this going unnoticed by the media???? They send 1000 reporters to Alaska to dig up something on Sarah Palin and they have this politically incorrect crap right in front of their eyes!

This from Obama's two books - one of these is reportly written by someone else. The suspect is Bill Ayers.

From Dreams of My Father:' I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.'

From Dreams of My Father : 'I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race.'


From Dreams of My Father:'There was something about him that made me wary, a little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.'

From Dreams of My Father: 'It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out andname names.'


From Dreams of My Father: 'I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn't speak to my own. It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa , that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself , the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.'

And FINALLY the Most Damning one of ALL of them!!!

From Audacity of Hope: 'I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.'

Amazingly, a democrat set this to me.

More Financial Meltdown Research Points to Democrats

Here is another great article that clearly lays out the root causes of the financial problems that have caused all us a near future disaster. Never let it be forgotten that those that are responsible for this mess are still in power and on the Obama team of advises.

A vote for Obama will only make this mess a catastrophe for us and out offspring - not just decades, but generations.

Remember Enron? That was a 'fart in a hurricane' compared to the Fannie May and Freddie Mac disaster but no one has gone to jail that I know of - all of the executives of Enron are in prison.

Oh, I know why nothing is being done to bring all the bad guys to justice - they are all Democrats - and not just Raines and Johnson - the whole Democratic party voted to protect their own. Now Pelosi and Reid are doing everything they can to bury this until the election in hopes of Obama winning the White House and they have a majority in both houses. If that happens, those responsible for this mess will have free rein to create an even bigger hole for the American taxpayer to fall into.

Keep the faith - prepare to dig in for the long haul.


Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess
By CHARLES W. CALOMIRIS and PETER J. WALLISON

Many monumental errors and misjudgments contributed to the acute financial turmoil in which we now find ourselves. Nevertheless, the vast accumulation of toxic mortgage debt that poisoned the global financial system was driven by the aggressive buying of subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and mortgage-backed securities, by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The poor choices of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) -- and their sponsors in Washington -- are largely to blame for our current mess.


How did we get here? Let's review: In order to curry congressional support after their accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac committed to increased financing of "affordable housing." They became the largest buyers of subprime and Alt-A mortgages between 2004 and 2007, with total GSE exposure eventually exceeding $1 trillion. In doing so, they stimulated the growth of the subpar mortgage market and substantially magnified the costs of its collapse.

It is important to understand that, as GSEs, Fannie and Freddie were viewed in the capital markets as government-backed buyers (a belief that has now been reduced to fact). Thus they were able to borrow as much as they wanted for the purpose of buying mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. Their buying patterns and interests were followed closely in the markets. If Fannie and Freddie wanted subprime or Alt-A loans, the mortgage markets would produce them. By late 2004, Fannie and Freddie very much wanted subprime and Alt-A loans.

Their accounting had just been revealed as fraudulent, and they were under pressure from Congress to demonstrate that they deserved their considerable privileges. Among other problems, economists at the Federal Reserve and Congressional Budget Office had begun to study them in detail, and found that -- despite their subsidized borrowing rates -- they did not significantly reduce mortgage interest rates. In the wake of Freddie's 2003 accounting scandal, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan became a powerful opponent, and began to call for stricter regulation of the GSEs and limitations on the growth of their highly profitable, but risky, retained portfolios.


If they were not making mortgages cheaper and were creating risks for the taxpayers and the economy, what value were they providing? The answer was their affordable-housing mission. So it was that, beginning in 2004, their portfolios of subprime and Alt-A loans and securities began to grow. Subprime and Alt-A originations in the U.S. rose from less than 8% of all mortgages in 2003 to over 20% in 2006.

During this period the quality of subprime loans also declined, going from fixed rate, long-term amortizing loans to loans with low down payments and low (but adjustable) initial rates, indicating that originators were scraping the bottom of the barrel to find product for buyers like the GSEs.


The strategy of presenting themselves to Congress as the champions of affordable housing appears to have worked. Fannie and Freddie retained the support of many in Congress, particularly Democrats, and they were allowed to continue unrestrained.

Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass), for example, now the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, openly described the "arrangement" with the GSEs at a committee hearing on GSE reform in 2003: "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have played a very useful role in helping to make housing more affordable . . . a mission that this Congress has given them in return for some of the arrangements which are of some benefit to them to focus on affordable housing."

The hint to Fannie and Freddie was obvious: Concentrate on affordable housing and, despite your problems, your congressional support is secure.

In light of the collapse of Fannie and Freddie, both John McCain and Barack Obama now criticize the risk-tolerant regulatory regime that produced the current crisis. But Sen. McCain's criticisms are at least credible, since he has been pointing to systemic risks in the mortgage market and trying to do something about them for years.

In contrast, Sen. Obama's conversion as a financial reformer marks a reversal from his actions in previous years, when he did nothing to disturb the status quo. The first head of Mr. Obama's vice-presidential search committee, Jim Johnson, a former chairman of Fannie Mae, was the one who announced Fannie's original affordable-housing program in 1991 -- just as Congress was taking up the first GSE regulatory legislation.


In 2005, the Senate Banking Committee, then under Republican control, adopted a strong reform bill, introduced by Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and Chuck Hagel, and supported by then chairman Richard Shelby. The bill prohibited the GSEs from holding portfolios, and gave their regulator prudential authority (such as setting capital requirements) roughly equivalent to a bank regulator. In light of the current financial crisis, this bill was probably the most important piece of financial regulation before Congress in 2005 and 2006.

All the Republicans on the Committee supported the bill, and all the Democrats voted against it. Mr. McCain endorsed the legislation in a speech on the Senate floor. Mr. Obama, like all other Democrats, remained silent.


Now the Democrats are blaming the financial crisis on "deregulation." This is a canard. There has indeed been deregulation in our economy -- in long-distance telephone rates, airline fares, securities brokerage and trucking, to name just a few -- and this has produced much innovation and lower consumer prices. But the primary "deregulation" in the financial world in the last 30 years permitted banks to diversify their risks geographically and across different products, which is one of the things that has kept banks relatively stable in this storm.

As a result, U.S. commercial banks have been able to attract more than $100 billion of new capital in the past year to replace most of their subprime-related write-downs. Deregulation of branching restrictions and limitations on bank product offerings also made possible bank acquisition of Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, saving billions in likely resolution costs for taxpayers.


If the Democrats had let the 2005 legislation come to a vote, the huge growth in the subprime and Alt-A loan portfolios of Fannie and Freddie could not have occurred, and the scale of the financial meltdown would have been substantially less. The same politicians who today decry the lack of intervention to stop excess risk taking in 2005-2006 were the ones who blocked the only legislative effort that could have stopped it.

Mr. Calomiris is a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was general counsel of the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.
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Obama Funded Anti-Americanism Directing Chicago Annenberg Challenge

More proof that Barack Obama was, and maybe still is, directly involved with the Annenberg Challenge that sponsored and funded anti-Americanism by collaboration with individuals that find America a hateful place for black people and with more than 150 million dollars.

This article is a little long but well worth the time as it lays out Obama's direct involvement with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Rev. Wright and William Ayers, among others. This isn't speculation any longer but hard evidence showing is complicity in teaching children to hate America as well has his duplicity in denying he knew nothing about these people or the Annenberg Challenge.

Time to take a stand - make a decision - decide what is fact and what is fiction. Is this the real Barack Obama? Hard evidence peals away layers of media bias and political rhetoric.

The light of facts reveals a different Obama that has been lurking in the darkness of deception and deliberate misinformation.

Keep the faith -

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.’ http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/082ktdyi.asp?pg=1”)

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 http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDkyZTNiZDdkMTNiNzViZTYxNDU0MTY4MzMzMzNmZDU.”)

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./ —

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center . /