Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum. Trying to Make Collectivism and Marxism the Agenda of American Schools?

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From Accuracy in Media:

Terrorist Professor Bill Ayers and Obama’s Federal School Curriculum

by Mary Grabar

September 21, 2012

Three years after the Department of Education announced a contest called Race-to-the-Top for $4.35 billion in stimulus funds, some parents, teachers, governors, and citizen and public policy groups are coming to an awful realization about the likely outcomes:

• A national curriculum called Common Core
• Regionalism, or the replacement of local governments by federally appointed bureaucrats
• A leveling of all schools to one, low national standard, and a redistribution of education funds among school districts
• An effective federal tracking of all students
• The loss of the option of avoiding the national curriculum and tests through private school and home school

Working behind the scenes, implementing these policies and writing the standards are associates from President Obama’s community organizing days. In de facto control of the education component is Linda Darling-Hammond, a radical left-wing educator and close colleague of William “Bill” Ayers, the former leader of the communist terrorist Weather Underground who became a professor of education and friend of Obama’s.

When these dangerous initiatives are implemented, there will be no escaping bad schools and a radical curriculum by moving to a good suburb, or by home schooling, or by enrolling your children in private schools.

How was it that 48 governors entered Race-to-the-Top without knowing outcomes?

It was one of the many “crises” exploited by the Obama administration. While the public was focused on a series of radical moves coming in rapid-fire succession, like the health care bill and proposed trials and imprisonment of 9/11 terrorists on domestic soil, governors, worried about keeping school doors open, signed on. Many politicians and pundits praised Obama on this singular issue, repeating the official rhetoric about raising standards.

It stands to reason, though, that education policies would be consistent with Obama’s agenda. After all, one of his most controversial associations, highlighted during the 2008 presidential campaign, was with an education professor, Bill Ayers. As a terrorist, he and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, had dedicated their Prairie Fire Manifesto to Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. It was for this reason that Kennedy’s son, Christopher Kennedy, chairman of the University of Illinois board of trustees, voted against bestowing “professor emeritus” status on Ayers after he retired. “I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father, Robert F. Kennedy,” he said.

THE OBAMA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION: WHERE DID BILL AYERS GO?

Back then, the former bomber and co-founder of the communist terrorist Weather Underground organization was Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two had worked together closely from the year Ayers hosted a political launch party for Obama, in 1995, to 2002. At the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, “the brainchild of Bill Ayers,” they funneled more that $100 million to radical groups like ACORN and Gamaliel, which used the funds to promote radical education.[i] This initiative was also promoted by Arne Duncan, now Secretary of Education. Also as board members of the Woods Fund, Ayers and Obama channeled money to ACORN and the Midwest Academy.[ii]

When initial White House visitor logs were released in 2009, the administration quickly dismissed speculations about visits by “William Ayers.” That was a different William Ayers Americans were told. The Obama administration is appealing an August 17 order to release the other visitor logs in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch and others.[iii]

It appears, however, that “the” Obama-friendly Bill Ayers has been visiting Washington, D.C. for education-related matters.

In October 2009, the year before he retired, Ayers had an encounter with the “Backyard Conservative” blogger at Reagan National Airport. At that time, there was speculation about Ayers being the real author of Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father.Ayers teased that he was indeed the real author.

Blogger and law professor, Stephen Diamond, noted that no one asked why Ayers would even be in Washington, D.C. It turns out that Ayers was one of three keynote speakers at a conference sponsored by the Renaissance Group, which, according to Diamond, was dedicated to problems of poverty, diversity, and multiculturalism—and the inability of white teachers to deal with them. The other two speakers were Secretary of Education Duncan and U.S. Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter.

It is not clear what Ayers spoke about at this particular conference. But my analysis of his courses and methods at the University of Illinois determined that his purpose is to radicalize future teachers—and by extension their students—for the purpose of sparking a revolution and overthrowing capitalism.

It is shocking that Obama Education Department officials would appear at a conference that also featured someone like Ayers. On the other hand, their boss, President Obama, worked with Ayers in Chicago, and this kind of collaboration is not entirely surprising. We are left, however, wondering about the precise nature of the role that Ayers is playing in the development of this federal education plan. But his participation in this conference clearly suggests he is playing a role of some kind.

At this three-day conference, Mr. Nevin Brown of Achieve, Inc., made a presentation on the “Common Core State Standards” Initiative. A recipient of the largesse of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Achieve would become a key player in revamping education under Common Core. Hence, Ayers was a major speaker at a conference that was involved in developing a new national curriculum. If Achieve has ever disavowed Ayers or his teaching methods, we could find no evidence of this on the public record.

The notion of a “Common Core” seems to recall E.D. Hirsch’s traditionalist Common Knowledge curriculum, which emphasizes the need for students to understand America’s cultural and national heritage. But Common Core is not that at all. Many have been fooled, and an estimated 80% of the public does not even know about Common Core.

Common Core is part of an effort to implement regionalism, the replacement of local governments by regional boards of federally appointed bureaucrats, who in turn are beholden to international bodies. Regionalism will eliminate the freedom parents now have in choosing neighborhoods with good schools because tax funds will be distributed equally. There will be no escape in home schooling or private schools either, because the curriculum will follow national tests. Students will be tracked through mandatory state records that will then be accessible to Washington bureaucrats. Ultimately, all students will be subject to education mandates implemented by Obama’s radical cronies.

NOT LETTING A CRISIS GO TO WASTE

“Race to the Top” required that states commit to yet-to-be-written Common Core standards in math and English/Language Arts (ELA). Today, Common Core has the support of Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and was included in the platform of the Democratic National Convention. It was embraced by former Republican Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, much to the consternation of Tea Party groups, who see this as an unconstitutional federal takeover of education. The Republican Party is divided.

Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins, in their white paper “Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America,” describe the pressure and sleight-of-hand that led governors to sign onto a commitment that was then changed before the ink had fully dried. They reveal that rather than being a state-led reform initiative, as touted, the new standards were written by a few well-connected, but non-qualified, education entrepreneurs. The history goes back decades, but in the most recent phase, the vision for Common Core was set in 2007, by the Washington-based contractor, Achieve, Inc., in a document entitledBenchmarking for Success.

The question is: Why was Bill Ayers keynoting a conference attended by the two highest officials in the Education Department and by Achieve, essentially the project manager of the nationalized education curriculum? It may be years before we know how often Ayers visited the White House, but the Ayers educational brand or philosophy is all over Common Core.

Some states are waking up. Virginia pulled out when Governor Bob McDonnell was elected. Georgia, Indiana, Utah, South Carolina, and others have begun the effort to extricate themselves.

When South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said she would support a state legislative effort to block Common Core, which her predecessor had instituted, Education Secretary Arne Duncan dismissed her concerns about nationally imposed standards as “a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy.”

But it doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to realize that Common Core will ultimately dictate the curriculum. Two consortia of states (SBAC and PARCC)[iv] have been given $360 million in federal funds to create national Common Core-aligned tests and “curriculum models.” Well-connected companies, such as Educational Testing Service (ETS) and the multinational textbook company Pearson, are in competition to design the test. David Coleman, a chief architect of the Common Core standards for English/Language Arts, recently was named President of the College Board, which administers tests, including those designed by ETS, like the SAT.

The Education Department on August 12, 2012, announced another competition for $400 million in Race-to-the-Top funds for local districts to “personalize learning, close achievement gaps and take full advantage of 21^st century tools.” Such a competition cleverly bypasses recalcitrant states and lures individual districts into the federal web.

The feds’ announcement echoes Common Core’s emphasis on personalized learning and leveling of achievement through technology and collaboration (the “21^st century skills”). Common Core emphasizes “in-depth” reading of short passages, rather than long fictional or historical narratives. The Publisher’s Criteria reveal that a focus on short texts will equalize outcomes. Text selection guide B mandates that “all students (including those who are behind) have extensive opportunities to encounter grade-level complex text” through “supplementary opportunities.” The strategy of gathering students into groups to collaborate on short passages ensures that no one advances beyond others.[v]

In the tradition of John Dewey, multiple “perspectives” and “critical thinking” are emphasized over the accumulation of “facts.” Common Core advertises itself as promoting “skills,” rather than content. The skills, though, do not promise to make students more knowledgeable about literature or history, but to make them “critical thinkers” in the tradition of the radical curriculum writers who are selectively critical of the U.S. and the West.

BILL AYERS IN THE CLASSROOM

In 2008, attention was focused on Bill Ayers’ past as a terrorist; this, Stephen Diamond maintains, missed the real damage, which was political. Diamond, a social democrat, calls Ayers a “neo-Stalinist,” in line with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, whose country Ayers visited to make speeches about education being the “motor force of revolution.” According to Diamond, Neo-Stalinism is an “authoritarian form of politics which attempts to control and build social institutions to impose state control of the economy, politics and culture on the general population.” Ayers and his allies used the “critical policy area” of education, and through four aims: “local school councils,” small schools, social justice teaching, and payment of reparations through education spending.

Local school councils and “small schools” are efforts to escape modern schools that, in Ayers’ estimation, “are all about sorting and punishing, grading and ranking and certifying” and demanding “obedience and conformity.”[vi] Ayers’ numerous, supposedly scholarly, books and articles are filled with such hyperbole that depicts demands of the regular school day, like objective tests and class periods, as evidence of a police state.

Former Senior Policy Advisor to the Department of Education and member of the California Mathematics Framework Committee, Ze’ev Wurman, testified that the Common Core overlooks basic skills, lowers college readiness standards, and offers “verbose and imprecise guidance,”[vii] while dictating that geometry be taught by an experimental method that was tested on Soviet math prodigies in the 1950s—and failed.

In English classes, teachers will reduce the amount of time spent teaching their subject of literature to only 50 percent, and then to 30 percent in high school, a move criticized by education reform professor Sandra Stotsky. Replacing literature will be “informational texts” like  nonfiction books, computer manuals, IRS forms, and original documents, like court decisions and the Declaration of Independence. Documents, like the Declaration, however, are taught in a manner that downplays their significance. Overall, students will be losing a sense of a national and cultural heritage that is acquired through a systematic reading of classical literature and study of history.

Although the official rhetoric promoting these standards is more muted, the approach parallels Bill Ayers’ pedagogy. The replacement of traditional mathematics with “conceptual categories” lends itself to advancing a social justice agenda, as Ayers colleague Eric Gutstein does through his math education classes. The Common Core emphasis on having students simply explore original texts parallels the John Dewey-inspired approach that Ayers favors, of having students “discover” and “construct” knowledge. Not wanting to be beholden to outside, objective measurements of students’ knowledge, such teachers promote other more subjective measures, like displays of “deep” understanding, “higher-order” thinking, and ability to collaborate. By all indications, the testing being developed now will use such criteria.

THE ROLE OF BILL AYERS “PAL” LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND

Stanley Kurtz, in his latest book, Spreading the Wealth, maintains that a nationalized curriculum is part of an effort to replace local governments with regional boards, who would disburse local tax dollars equally among school districts. Once all schools are the same—with the same curriculum and the same funding—people will no longer have the incentive to move to good suburbs. While Obama’s community organizing mentor, Mike Kruglik, implements the regionalism advocated by the Gamaliel Foundation through Building One America, Ayers’ close associate, Linda Darling-Hammond, exercises “de facto control”[viii] through education.

Both Ayers and Darling-Hammond were leaders in the small schools movement. She has published in a collection edited by Ayers. Both have been advocates of ending funding disparities between urban and suburban schools, ending standardized testing, and attacking “white privilege.” She has been a board member of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), a group housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, that provides studies of, and services for, Emotional Intelligence in schools—but really emotional manipulation aimed at making students global citizens.

Both also failed to improve schools or test scores. Ayers’ Annenberg Challenge failed miserably. The school created by Darling-Hammond, Stanford New Schools, which targeted low-income Hispanic and black students, had the distinction of making California’s list of the lowest-achieving five percent. Much of the reason may be her “five-dimensional grading rubric” of personal responsibility, social responsibility, communication skills, application of knowledge, and critical and creative thinking. Yet, Darling-Hammond served as education director on Obama’s transition team. In a January 2, 2009, Huffington Postcolumn, Ayers argued for her nomination as Education Secretary. That summer, Darling-Hammond pushed Common Core in the Harvard Educational Review.

Darling-Hammond is in charge of content specifications at the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), which received $176 million of federal Race-to-the-Top money to develop Common Core testing. She appears frequently as a speaker and board member of other affiliated organizations. For example, she sits on the Governing Board of the Alliance for Excellent Education, Inc., recipient of a $500,000 Gates grant “to advocate for high school reform at the federal level in order to educate federal policy members about Common Core standards. . .”

In the August 2009 Harvard Educational Review, Darling-Hammond gave a preview of new standards as she argued for “deep understanding” and advancing beyond “the narrow views of the last eight years” by “developing creativity, critical thinking skills, and the capacity to innovate.” New assessments would use “multiple measures of learning and performance.” These would presumably emulate “high-achieving nations” that emphasize “essay questions and open-ended responses as well as research and scientific investigations, complex real-world problems, and extensive use of technology.”

In an April 28, 2010, Education Week article, “Developing an Internationally Comparable Balanced Assessment System,” Darling-Hammond claimed that the new assessment system is “designed to go beyond recall of facts and show students’ abilities to evaluate evidence, problem solve and understand context.” Bill Ayers, throughout his writings, likens the testing for “facts” to a factory or prison system, and agrees with Darling-Hammond’s emphasis on criteria like “student growth along multiple dimensions.” Such buzzwords thinly disguise an agenda of replacing the objective measurement of knowledge and skills with teachers’ subjective appraisals of students’ attitudes and behavior.

Former testing foes, like Columbia Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, now advance Common Core standards. Although long an incubator of anti-testing advocates, Columbia has produced the authors of the popular Pathways to the Common Core (2012), one of them Calkins.

Pathways is maddening in its lack of specificity. Repeatedly, the authors inveigh against “skill-and-drill” and favor “deep reading” and “higher-level thinking;” but they fail to say how this will be done or even what it means. They discuss “read[ing] within the four corners of the text” and having readers get “their mental arms around a text,”[ix] but offer no specific, much less tested, strategies for improving reading comprehension. They contradict themselves when they cite studies that show that students who read fiction improve reading levels and then promote nonfiction. When examples of informational texts are given, they are most often from left-leaning publications, often on trivial subjects.

Common Core thus promises to eliminate the idea of a common core of knowledge—through the privileging of leftist “informational texts” and material presented in a scattershot manner. The national and cultural identity that is conveyed through a wide and interconnected exposure to literary works from Mother Goose to Shakespeare will be undermined.

Keep reading here………

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Vetting Obama 2012: Obama and the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

Excerpt:

Mike Klonsky

Mike Klonsky is a former leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, the pro China October League and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).

In 1994 Mike Klonsky, Chicago, was listed on a “Membership, Subscription and Mailing List” for the Chicago Committees of Correspondence.^[10]

Mike Klonsky is a long time friends with Carl Davidson and Bill Ayers and was involved with some of the educational project which Ayers and Obama worked together on.

Until June 2008 Mike Klonsky ran a Blog on Barack Obama‘s campaign website.

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Michael Klonsky is a Chicago activist and Director of the Small Schools Workshop, author of Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story, and a researcher and educator in Chicago, Illinois.

He is the son of former Communist Party USA leader Robert Klonsky, husband of Susan Klonsky and brother of Fred Klonsky.

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Re: Small Schools Workshop (Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky)

In 1991 Klonsky and Ayers co-founded a project known as the “Small Schools Workshop” (SSW), premised on the notion that if high schools were to limit their enrollment to no more than 400 students, the learning atmosphere on campus would be improved. Klonsky has served as SSW’s director since 1993.

Apart from lowering the size of classes, a central objective of SSW is to teach students that American capitalism is a racist, materialistic doctrine that has done incalculable harm to societies all over the world. Klonsky himself has confirmed that SSW seeks to convey anti-American themes within the context of academic lessons:

“An English teacher can explore misogyny or materialism in American culture through the lens of hip-hop lyrics. Or … a math teacher can run probability simulations using real data to understand the dynamics behind income inequality or racial profiling….’”

One of the more infamous students to attend an SSW school (Mountain View High School in Arizona) was Jared Lee Loughner, the gunman who — on January 8, 2011 in Tucson — shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head, leaving her in critical condition. Loughner also sprayed gunfire at others in the vicinity, wounding thirteen and killing six.

For additional information on Klonsky and SSW, click here.

SOURCE

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Valerie Jarrett’s 1996 Speech on Collectivism

LInk to video

The never before seen video was just uploaded to YouTube today. “In 1996, Valerie Jarrett addressed the National Association for the Education of Young Children where she said it does take a village to raise a child but asked, what happens when the village is in chaos. Remarks come full circle with attacks on Michael Jordan. Source: South Carolina Educational Television Network,” states the description of the video on YouTube.

In the speech Jarrett describes an America with some kids growing up in “war-like conditions.” She says, “And yet, these kids are expected to compete with my daughter and with each of yours,” mentioned an uneven “playing field.”

For Jarrett, the blame does not rest with the parents, the kids, the teachers, the educational apparatus, and so on. “In my mind,” says Jarrett, “it is the responsibility of the whole community.”

Jarrett asks, “What do we do when the village is in chaos?”

“We all have a role to play in making our villages healthy,” says Jarrett. She encourages her audience to go out and make a difference.

SOURCE

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RELATED LINK: Read by clicking on blue lettered link below

Obama Calls for democracy with a small “d”, Societal Collectivism and the “Common Good”. That IS Communism Folks!

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RELATED LINKS:

Does Bill Ayers Still Have Influence on the Obamas? The “Social” Web of Connections

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Bill Ayers and Valerie Jarrett’s mother are friends.

Valerie Jarrett’s mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded the Erickson Institute in Chicago and still serves on its Board of Trustees. Tom Ayers, the father of Bill Ayers, was a one-time fellow trustee of the Institute.  According to WorldNet Daily’s Brad O’Leary, the Erickson board also included Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn. For his part, Bill Ayers called Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama.”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printindividualProfile.asp?indid=2418

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Barack Obama did a review for Ayers’ 1997 book, “A Kind and Just Parent,” writing, “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair” — here it is — these two were as thick as thieves.

LINK

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As an Aside re: Valerie Jarrett, but just as important relevant to her speech on Collectivism

Link to video

The same goes for Valerie Jarrett, the slum lord extraordinaire in then-Senator Obama’s district. While championing “social justice” with Obama, and living in the lap of luxury on the taxpayers’ dime, the conditions at Chicago’s Grove Parc Plaza, the government subsidized housing managed by Jarrett’s Habitat Co. (she was the CEO from 2001-2008), were appalling: rampant mice, roaches, broken windows. Looking at the conditions, listening to the tenants talk to reporters in 2008, makes one cringe. But more so makes one wonder if the mainstream media can go fifty years into the past to dig up some non-existent Romney bullying incident, why couldn’t they have driven a few miles from Senator Obama’s campaign headquarters to see the abhorrent conditions at Grove Parc Plaza?

Of course we know it was because the mainstream media protected Obama then, and protects him to this day.

Slum lords that foist these types of conditions on their tenants generally go to jail. But apparently in the United States, they become chief advisors to the President.

Valerie Jarrett should be served with a warrant today and jailed. Then we can get to the business of finding out what high crimes and misdemeanors her boss has committed.

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RE: FEDERAL DEPARTMENT of EDUCATION:

In 1979, President Carter advocated for creating a cabinet-level Department of Education.^[5] Carter’s plan was to transfer most of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s education-related functions to the Department of Education. ^[5] Carter also planned to transfer the education-related functions of the departments of Defense, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, and Agriculture, as well as a few other federal entities. ^[5] Among the federal education-related programs that were not proposed to be transferred included Headstart, the Department of Agriculture’s school lunch and nutrition programs, the Department of the Interior’s Indian education programs, and the Department of Labor’s education and training programs.^[5]

Upgrading Education to cabinet level status in 1979 was opposed by many in the Republican Party, who saw the department as unconstitutional, arguing that the Constitution doesn’t mention education, and deemed it an unnecessary and illegal federal bureaucratic intrusion into local affairs. However many Liberals  and Democrats see the department as constitutional under the Commerce Clause, and that the funding role of the Department is constitutional under the Taxing and Spending Clause. The National Education Association supported the bill, while the American Federation of Teachers opposed it.^[6]

SOURCE

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Teachers Union Bigshot Not About Kids, It’s About Power

LINK TO VIDEO

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AMERICA:

THIS is why Obama and his ilk are AGAINST Private schools and Charter Schools……

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Is Obama Practicing Stealth Taqiyya American Style? Are Progressives Abetting Obama’s Ruse? Obama the Story Teller; Marshall Ganz Style.

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Read at link below to understand the principles of Taqiyya. Is Obama employing these tactics?

Note here:  The following is about the TACTICS; not the religion

Understanding Taqiyya ― Islamic Principle of Lying for the Sake of Allah

Excerpt:

Lying and cheating in the Arab world is not really a moral matter but a method of safeguarding honor and status, avoiding shame, and at all times exploiting possibilities, for those with the wits for it, deftly and expeditiously to convert shame into honor on their own account and vice versa for their opponents. If honor so demands, lies and cheating may become absolute imperatives.” [David Pryce-Jones, “The Closed Circle” An interpretation of the Arabs, p4]

“No dishonor attaches to such primary transactions as selling short weight, deceiving anyone about quality, quantity or kind of goods, cheating at gambling, and bearing false witness. The doer of these things is merely quicker off the mark than the next fellow; owing him nothing, he is not to be blamed for taking what he can.” [David Pryce-Jones, “The Closed Circle”, p38]

Falsehoods told to prevent the denigration of Islam, to protect oneself, or to promote the cause of Islam are sanctioned in the Qur’an and Sunna, including lying under oath in testimony before a court, deceiving by making distorted statements to the media such as the claim that Islam is a “religion of peace”. A Muslim is even permitted to deny or denounce his faith if, in so doing, he protects or furthers the interests of Islam, so long as he remains faithful to Islam in his heart. (See endnotes)

Outwitting:

Islamic spokesmen commonly use taqiyya as a form of ‘outwitting’. The skilled taqiyya-tactician doesn’t want the matter at hand to be debated or discussed; so his opponent must be outwitted or preemptively outflanked by the use of taqiyya. The objective is to divert attention away from the subject through duplicity and obfuscation.

Role playing as the victim:

When placed under scrutiny or criminal investigation, (even when there is overwhelming, irrefutable evidence of guilt or complicity), the taqiyya-tactician will quickly attempt to counter the allegation by resorting to the claim that it is, in fact, the accused who are the ‘the victims’. Victims of Islamophobia, racism, religious discrimination and intolerance. Currently, this is the most commonly encountered form of distraction and ‘outwitting’….. Defence by offence.

Read more here………

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Now if I may, consider what Obama has manipulated, said, done in the past three years.

How does any American know the background, ideology and tactics of Obama? Why are all of Obama’s records secreted at Perkins Coie?  WHY are millions of $$’s paid each year to insure this?

Now, read the following and think about Obama utilizing Taqiyya against any and all references to him and Marxists/Radicals/Islam.  The Progressives call him “shrewd”.

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Obama’s Chicago: A Pre-NATO Summit Primer

Why the president’s decision to ‘come home in Chicago’ nearly 30 years ago was so shrewd.

BY LAURA S. WASHINGTON

May 14, 2012

He was the nobody that nobody sent.

Barack Obama’s choice of Chicago as his political and psychic home seems brilliant in retrospect. Yet in many ways, it was an unlikely launching pad for America’s first black president.

Brought up in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama was a stranger to Chicago powers large and small. The big city in the nation’s heartland has always played second string to the glittering coasts. Until Obama, it was best known as the home of mobsters, racial warfare, and hardball politics. The regular Democratic Party ran the show, with a bruising and often wayward iron fist. It is said to be America’s most corrupt city.

In the mid-1980s, Obama arrived in Chicago, testing the famous tale from his eventual political mentor, Abner Mikva, a longtime congressman from Hyde Park and the city’s North Shore.

In a 2008 New Yorker interview, Mikva recalled his first attempt to volunteer for the Democratic Party. At the party headquarters, Mikva recalled, a “ward boss came in and pulled the cigar out of his mouth and said, ‘Who sent you?’ And I said, ‘Nobody sent me.’ He put the cigar back in his mouth and said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.’ “

In 2012, Barack Obama is no longer a nobody. This week, he will return home to his old stomping grounds to host the NATO summit (and probably stop by his re-election campaign headquarters). As Chicago takes the world stage, here are some insights about the city that molded him.

Chicago’s historic trilogy

Obama’s choice of Chicago was not accidental, but shrewd. He once told his neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald: “I came home in Chicago.” “Home” represented a rare but robust combination of progressive activism, sustaining black power and old fashioned, Democratic Party clout.

The president’s coming of age in Chicago completed the city’s historic black trilogy: DuSable, Washington and Obama. Around 1779, a French-Haitian fur trader, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, encamped at the southern tip of Lake Michigan, becoming Chicago’s “founding father.” In 1983, Harold Washington won a hard-fought election to become the city’s first African American mayor. His victory blasted the Democratic Machine with a brand of progressive politics that brought together a progressive coalition of blacks, Latinos, liberal whites, women and gays.

Before Washington, party regulars co-opted minority politicians and voters and kept them in line with patronage jobs and contracts, but gave them little authentic power. Timuel Black, the esteemed professor emeritus and dean of black progressives, dubbed it “Plantation Politics.”

In 1985 Obama was drawn to Chicago by Washington’s progressive politics. Like Washington, Obama assiduously worked on coalition building, and eventually brought longtime Mayor and Chicago “boss’ Richard M. Daley, other Democratic Party regulars, and even Republicans into his fold.

But first, the freshly minted graduate of Columbia University would dig into grassroots community organizing.

A careful ascension

In the 1930s, Saul Alinsky, the author of the organizing bible, Rules for Radicals, was a gritty populist-intellectual who built a lasting brand of power out of Back of the Yards, a gritty, working class enclave on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

Obama learned the Alinsky way. He was the first executive director of the Developing Communities Project, which mobilizes citizens for change through local churches and community based organizations. In the 1980s the group was working on environmental justice and other causes out of a Chicago bungalow in Roseland on the far South Side.

Obama spent only three years honing his organizing chops, but the experience lent abundant street cred for his presidential campaign mantra of “Change.”

Obama and other community advocates fought for the removal of asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, a depressed public housing project on the far Southeast Side. One resident of the ironically named “Gardens” was Hazel Johnson, a determined mother and activist who founded People for Community Recovery, a pioneer in the environmental justice movement.

Today, the Developing Communities Project is spearheading a campaign to extend a major rail line through Roseland and other neglected neighborhoods.

Altgeld Gardens was symbolic of the decline of public housing. The massive, racially and economically segregated “projects” has become ugly symbols of pernicious poverty, dysfunction and crime. The city’s Plan for Transformation, the city’s closely-watched $1.6 billion rehabilitation program launched in 2000, promised to change that. Touted as a national model for remaking federally funded housing for the poor, the plan has been controversial. In February 2012 Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced plans for a major “recalibration” of the effort.

After his organizing stint, Obama was off to Harvard Law School, where he excelled and established his academic pedigree. In 1991 he returned to Chicago and settled in Hyde Park. While Chicago remains one of America’s most segregated cities, Hyde Park was the integrated oasis for progressive intellectuals, activists and professionals.

The neighborhood has been the hallowed stomping ground of myriad movers and shakers, among them boxing champion Muhammad Ali; the University of Chicago and academic icons like Enrico Fermi and Saul Bellow; Gospel songbird Mahalia Jackson; Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; Bill Veeck, the wily White Sox owner; and Hugh Hefner, the ultimate Playboy.

Obama was a lecturer at the university’s law school, wife Michelle a top executive at its medical center, and his children attended its Lab School. Obama’s early political career was plotted at kitchen tables throughout the neighborhood.

In 1992, Obama ran Project Vote, a voter registration campaign that helped elect President Bill Clinton and elevate Carol Moseley Braun as the first African-American woman elected to the U.S. Senate. The political work connected him to the city’s political elites, wealthy donors and political gurus like Mikva and David Axelrod.

Chicago is the nation’s capital of the black middle class. Michelle Obama, whom he met while they worked together at a law firm, helped him maneuver that world. She worked in government and community circles, ran the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps youth service program, and was an attorney in the city’s Law Department.

The South Side native and Harvard Law graduate connected her husband to prominent black professionals like Valerie Jarrett, now his closest White House confidante; Martin Nesbitt, a best friend who runs an airport parking business; and John Rogers Jr., an Obama basketball buddy and CEO of an investment company. Such relationships helped the future president plumb a lucrative fundraising and support network.

The church is the black community’s strongest institution. Obama tapped into its allure when he joined Trinity United Church of Christ, a prominent congregation on West 95th Street. Its formidable pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preached a black liberation Christian theology that promoted social justice and activism. Wright and other Obama allies like the Catholic priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, and longtime civil rights champion Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., would become flashpoints in the 2008 presidential campaign. But the social justice institutions they molded, like the Faith Community of St. Sabina and Rainbow PUSH, remain influential forces. In January, Trinity kicked off plans for Imani Village, a 27-acre community-based conglomerate of sustainable housing, urban farming, retail stores, health centers and a sports complex.

[...]

South Side pride, and power

In 2002, his bond with the city’s white progressives brought Obama to a rally at the Federal Plaza downtown. At the protest, mounted by Chicagoans Against the War in Iraq, Obama delivered a speech that sealed his anti-war credentials, and another crucial plank in his presidential campaign.

Obama’s Hawaiian genes may have helped Obama surf the treacherous waters of regular, black and independent politics. His allies included his “political Godfather,” now-retired State Senate President Emil Jones, a Machine stalwart; to progressive white and black independents like Mikva and Obama’s former alderman and now Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle; to black nationalists like Louis Farrakhan.

[...]

Nestled between Hyde Park and McCormick Place sits Bronzeville, the historic heart of black Chicago. Once known as the “Black Belt,” it was the port of entry for the Great Back Migration from the South in the first half of the 20th Century. Once a segregated but vibrant haven for black Chicago, the area declined, but is reemerging as a symbol of black progress and tourist destination.

Obama co-founded Bronzeville’s Lugenia Burns Hope Center, a leadership development and organizing institute. A current Hope Center project is Housing Bronzeville, which works to protect affordable housing in the midst of the ongoing foreclosure epidemic.

Bronzeville boosters are pushing the area as a potential location for a future Obama Presidential Library; they’ll get plenty of competition from the University of Chicago. (In 2013, presidential advisor David Axelrod will launch an Institute of Politics at the U of C).

Obama cultivated the city’s multitudinous ethnic groups. According to a new director from Chicago Area Ethnic Resources, the region boasts 245 ethnic organizations spanning 57 ethnicities, and 68 ethnic media outlets. Black and ethnic media outlets who have chronicled Obama’s Chicago include Johnson Publications’ Ebony and Jet, run by former White House Social Director Desiree Rogers, the 106-year-old Chicago Defender, and LaRaza.

But Obama’s Chicago morphed into Rahm’s Chicago. In February 2011, Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor in Chicago after a 21-year Daley reign. Emanuel, Obama’s former White House chief of staff, got a lot of help from his old friend.

LINK

**Emphasis added**

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RELATED LINK

Uncovering MORE of Obama’s Radical Past (Stanley Kurtz). **Plus Marxism Invasion of our Churches**

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The “nobody nobody sent”?

Do you actually believe that?  Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist in Hawaii with connections to Obama through his grandfather Stanley Dunham.  From Hawaii off to Occidental College in California (no family there); did he meet up with Tom Hayden of SDS fame?  Then from California to Columbia College (no family there) around the time Bill Ayers was there.

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• Like a typical recent grad in his early 20s, Obama was dissatisfied with his first jobs.

He started as a researcher at an organization based in Midtown Manhattan called Business International, which aimed “to advance profitable corporate and economic growth in socially desirable ways.” Unhappy with the work, he quit a year later and got a job for little more than half the salary organizing for a nonprofit called the New York Public Interest Research Group. He found that job “depressing, which captured his mood much of that winter and early spring of 1985,” Maraniss wrote. It wasn’t until he left New York for Chicago to be a community organizer did he feel like he found his calling.

LINK

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Obama went to Harvard Law School; did he meet up with and study with Marshall Ganz?

Obama’s stories: taught by Marshall Ganz?  Read at link below.

Storytelling “Words” of Obama. Marshall Ganz and Why “Stories Matter”

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Van Jones and Obama on board of Demos.

DEMOS

• Lobbies federal and state policymakers to “addres[s] the economic insecurity and inequality that characterize American society today”

• Promotes “ideas for reducing gaps in wealth, income and political influence”

• Favors tax hikes for the wealthy

• Supports “Motor Voter” legislation

• Works to end “felon disfranchisement”

• Contributions and grants received in 2008: $5,714,538

• Net assets at end of 2008: $3,451,626

  
  

To advance the foregoing ideas and policy recommendations, Demos publishes books, reports, and briefing papers; works at both the national and state levels with advocates and policymakers to enact reforms; promotes a coterie of Fellows and staff in print, broadcast, and Internet venues; and hosts public events that “showcase new ideas and leading progressive voices.”

The president of Demos is Miles Rapoport, who belonged to the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Rapoport has longstanding ties to the Institute for Policy Studies and the Democratic Socialists of America; served as director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group from 1979-1984; helped establish the Campaign for America’s Future in 1996; is a defender of ACORN; strongly supports Barack Obama‘s political agendas; and sits on The American Prospect‘s board of directors.

The Demos board of trustees features such luminaries as Van Jones and Gina Glantz, along with high-ranking officials from the 
Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the
 National Council of La Raza, and several other left-wing organizations.

One of Demos’s founding board members in 2000 was then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama.

Demos has received financial support from a number of major donors, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. (George Soros)

LINK

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Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)

• Established in 1940 by Saul Alinsky
• Trains community organizers in the tactics of revolutionary social change that its founder outlined
• Favors the constant growth of federal welfare spending
• Supports the advancement of a “living-wage” movement

Established in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a Chicago-based community-organizing network consisting of 59 affiliate groups located in 21 U.S. states as well as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

IAF’s mission is to “build organizations whose primary purpose is power — the ability to act — and whose chief product is social change.” Toward that end, an IAF training institute — which Saul Alinsky himself launched in 1969 as a “school for professional radicals” — trains community organizers in the tactics of revolutionary social change that its founder outlined. The institute has been headed by ex-seminarian Edward Chambers ever since Alinsky’s death in 1972. Its leadership-training programs consist of intensive 10-day sessions that are held two to three times each year. IAF also offers a 90-day internship program for aspiring organizers.

IAF is not a grassroots network; its local affiliates are created as the result of careful planning by its national leadership.According to the Rev. Johnny Youngblood, a former leader of the New York IAF local known as East Brooklyn Churches: “We are not a grassroots organization. Grass roots are shallow roots. Grass roots are fragile roots. Our roots are deep roots.”

IAF describes itself as “non-ideological and strictly non-partisan, but proudly, publicly, and persistently political.” As onetime IAF organizer Arnold Graf has stated:

“In places like San Antonio and Baltimore, we are as close to being a political party as anybody is. We go around organizing people, getting them to agree on an agenda, registering them to vote, interviewing candidates on whether they support our agenda. We’re not a political party, but that’s what political parties do.”

Similarly, Arizona’s IAF local – known as the Pima County Interfaith Council – is officially a Political Action Committee whose mission is “the collection and exercise of political power and influence.”

In its quest to bring about social change, IAF targets specific communities and seeks to “buil[d] a political base within … the sector of voluntary institutions that includes religious congregations, labor locals, homeowner groups, recovery groups, parents associations, settlement houses, immigrant societies, schools, seminaries, orders of men and women religious, and others.” Once it has gained a foothold inside any of those entities, IAF sets out to “identify, recruit, train, and develop leaders in every corner of every community” where it has a presence.

IAF strives most aggressively to bring religious institutions into its fold, on the theory that church affiliations will help inject the network not only with access to large amounts of cash, but also with perceived moral credibility. As the IAF handbook states:

“… [O]ne of the largest reservoirs of untapped power is the institution of the parish and congregation. Religious institutions form the center of the organization. They have the people, the values, and the money.”

Continue reading here……..

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The questions raised should be?

WHO groomed Obama?

Did the Progressive Left “Groom” Obama for the Presidency (Ganz and Peter Drier)?  Is Obama only the spokesman for the Uber Left?

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Remember the tactics of Taqiyya discussed in the first portion of this blog:

Outwitting:

Islamic spokesmen commonly use taqiyya as a form of ‘outwitting’. The skilled taqiyya-tactician doesn’t want the matter at hand to be debated or discussed; so his opponent must be outwitted or preemptively outflanked by the use of taqiyya. The objective is to divert attention away from the subject through duplicity and obfuscation.

Role playing as the victim:

When placed under scrutiny or criminal investigation, (even when there is overwhelming, irrefutable evidence of guilt or complicity), the taqiyya-tactician will quickly attempt to counter the allegation by resorting to the claim that it is, in fact, the accused who are the ‘the victims’. Victims of Islamophobia, racism, religious discrimination and intolerance. Currently, this is the most commonly encountered form of distraction and ‘outwitting’….. Defence by offence.

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RELATED LINK:

Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say

October 30, 2007<<<<NOTE DATE

by  JANNY SCOTT

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

“He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”

Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report.

“It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”

Mr. Obama arrived in New York in August 1981, at age 20, from Occidental College in Los Angeles. According to his memoir, he passed his first night in an alley near 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, unable to get into his apartment. The next morning, he bathed at a hydrant alongside a homeless man.

Like other transfer students, Mr. Obama lived off campus and bounced from one apartment to another. For a while, he said, he lived with a Pakistani whom he calls Sadik. He recalls that when he lived in a walk-up on East 94th Street, he would chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about the Knicks or the sound of gunfire at night.

He writes that “it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well,” where the graffiti was both racist and anti-Semitic.

In a long profile of Mr. Obama in a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, in which his Columbia years occupied just two paragraphs, he called that time “an intense period of study.”

“I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he was quoted as saying.

He said he was somewhat involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities, though, in recent interviews, several prominent student leaders said they did not remember his playing a role.

One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr. Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A in the course.

Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.

Michael J. Wolf, who took the seminar with him and went on to become president of MTV Networks, said: “He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant. I think he was truly distinctive from the other people in that class. He stood out.”

Mr. Obama graduated in 1983. In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found “more conventional work for a year” to pay off his student loans.

“Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors — see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand — and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Cathy Lazere, his supervisor at Business International, described him as self-assured and bright. “He was very mature and more worldly than other people — on the surface kind of laid back, but kind of in control,” she said. “He had a good sense of himself, which I think a lot of kids at that age don’t.”

After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.

Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.

Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”

Source: New York Times

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WHO sent Obama from New York to Chicago?

The BIGGEST question NO MSM has asked Obama:  WHERE did he live when he first came to Chicago prior to meeting Michelle?

With Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn?

At the Midwest Academy with Heather and Paul Booth (connected to SDS)

The VETTING of Obama will continue……

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#Vet Obama 2012

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Vetting Obama 2012; Facts vs. Fiction. Must Watch Video

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A MUST WATCH VIDEO: 55 min.

The entire one-hour special report on Obama is available below.

http://web.gbtv.com//shared/flash/video/share/ObjectEmbedFrame.swf?width=400&height=254&content_id=21456027&property=gbtv

We really only know what the President and press leads one to believe.

This is part of a well crafted image of the President of the United States.

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“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true…You are what the media define you to be.” (Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Watson).

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On May 10th, Glenn Beck aired the first in what will be a series of powerful exposés detailing the numerous inconsistencies, contradictions and “manufactured lies” perpetrated by President Barack Obama throughout various stages of his political career. In fact, so impactful was the information detailed in this special, that The Blaze‘s two part special report profiling the fact and fiction versions of Obama’s life became one of the most highly trafficked stories on The Blaze to date.

You can read Part I here and Part II here.

Until now, The Blaze and GBTV have only been able to provide brief clips of the Beck’s exposé. Due to its significance, however, he is now making the entire special available via GBTV free of charge so that viewers can share the invaluable information it provides with ease.

LINK

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Trouble viewing video?  Click Here.

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White House under fire for adding Obama policy plugs to past presidents’ bios

May 16, 2012

The Obama White House is drawing ridicule for appending the official online biographies of nearly every president over the last century in order to link President Obama’s accomplishments to the former commanders in chief.

The Obama team went into the pages of U.S. presidents dating back to Calvin Coolidge to add friendly looking “Did you know?” fact boxes to the end of their bios. Those additions were used to plug a host of Obama administration initiatives, ranging from the health care overhaul to the so-called “Buffett Rule” to his green-energy policies.

For instance, the following line was added to the official bio of the late President Ronald Reagan: “In a June 28, 1985, speech, Reagan called for a fairer tax code, one where a multimillionaire did not have a lower tax rate than his secretary. Today, President Obama is calling for the same with the Buffett Rule.”

The White House is coming under heavy criticism from conservatives for the changes, and not just to Reagan’s page.

Late Tuesday, the White House defended itself, claiming the staff was merely adding links to other pages.

“No biographies have been altered,” a White House official told Fox News. “We simply added links at the bottom of each page to related whitehouse.gov content, which is a commonly used best practice to encourage people to browse more pages on a site.”

The additions do include links, but they’re more than that. Each one finds a way to tout an Obama administration policy or practice in the process.

There’s this at the bottom of the Franklin D. Roosevelt biography, for instance:

“On August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act. Today the Obama administration continues to protect seniors and ensure Social Security will be there for future generations.”

And this, at the end of President Lyndon Johnson’s, drawing a link between his signing of Medicare and Obama’s signing of the health care overhaul:

“President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965 — providing millions of elderly health care stability. President Obama’s historic health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, strengthens Medicare, offers eligible seniors a range of preventive services with no cost-sharing, and provides discounts on drugs when in the coverage gap known as the ‘donut hole.’”

The changes also link Harry Truman’s call for civil rights to the Obama administration’s push to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” And they link Jimmy Carter’s creation of the Department of Energy to Obama’s push for an “all of the above” energy approach today.

The Obama accomplishments cited range from the significant to the mundane.

Keep reading……….

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RELATED LINKS:

Doing the Job the Failed MSM Lapdogs Won’t Do: Vetting Obama 2012

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Doing the Job the Failed MSM Lapdogs Won’t Do: Vetting Obama 2012

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White Noise Polluting American voters. It doesn’t Matter What is True; it only Matters What People Believe is True….

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Obama Lies AGAIN about Ohio Bridges; Media Lap Dogs Ignore Falsehoods

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To the Lapdog MSM’s for Obama: Can you explain WHY you didn’t report this?

Read by clicking on link below

The Communist Slogan “Forward” now Adopted by Obama

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OR THIS?

Communist Party USA Endorses Obama For 2012

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Doing the Job the Failed MSM Lapdogs Won’t Do: Vetting Obama 2012

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The media lapdogs seem to like to “Wag the Dog” for Obama in 2008 and now in 2012.

Some like Brian Williams of NBC seem to “bow” to Obama:

Fluff pieces from Chris Matthews (tingles up the leg), Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC (father is Zbignew Brzezinski, who worked with the Mujahideen of Afghanistan), George Stephanopoulos of ABC (Weekend with George Stephanopoulos produced by Ian Cameron who is married to Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN) and is great friends with Rahm Emanuel, Paul Begala and James Carville.

And so on……

Do the Major MSM’s fear Obama or are close friends with him?

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Obama has secreted all information relating to his past, therefore researchers and inquisitive people are doing the work the failed MSM’s won’t/can’t do:

First this:

**Written by Hack Wilson; ALL CREDIT TO HIM FOR THIS POST***

March 11, 2012

Marxist Influences: Barack Obama’s childhood and adolescence.

In this post I will cover the manner in which Barack “Barry” Obama was raised from childhood on. I understand the ignorant liberal, or indifferent everyday American, may view this information as pointless. To that I would say, grow up a little bit more. I am not going to waste my breath drawing crayon pictures for you explaining the principle behind the idiom“the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Who were some of the central figures in Barack Obama’s youth?

Stanley Ann Dunham (MOTHER)-

Barack Obama said of his mother, “She was the dominant figure in my formative years … The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.” Interesting stuff. It isn’t surprising though, how Ann Dunham’s worldview rubbed off on her son Barack. Ann’s first radical progressive influences came in late junior high at Mercer Island High School in Washington state. There she adopted the principles taught by teachers Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman who pushed an anti-authoritarian, anti-religion, progressive worldview on their young students. (the hallway between the two classrooms was dubbed ‘anarchist alley’.) The teachers regularly caused protest from parents, by forcing students to read the Communist Manifesto and HL Mencken, Karl Marx and the pro homosexual writings of Margaret Mead. Ann blossomed. Former classmates remember Dunham as“ahead of her time, in an off center way” and “the original feminist.” Barack Obama’s mother held deep convictions about religion and politics throughout her whole life. She was adamantly opposed to religion, even being described by Obama himself as “a lonely witness for secular humanism.“ Former classmate Maxine Box said of young Ann, “She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she’d read about and could argue.” While in college, Ann met Obama Sr. in a “Russian language” class. Interesting. Her dissertation was a Marxist interpretation of peasant workers in Indonesia. She routinely questioned Capitalism and Democracy and would ask, “What’s so bad about Communism?” Needless to say, Stanley Ann Dunham was an extreme far leftist with a sweet tooth for Communist philosophy, and an utter disdain for religion.

Barack Obama Sr. (FATHER)-

Raised a Muslim, Barack Obama Sr. regarded himself an atheist before ever meeting Ann Dunham in Hawaii. He had 3 other wives and seven other children aside from Ann and Barack Jr. He didn’t tell her he was still married to a woman in Kenya when they married in Hawaii in 1961. 2 years prior, he wrote an article in Kenya called“The Problems Facing Our Socialism”, which one could argue exhibit a certain degree of Communism, if not far left leanings. Barack Obama Sr. studied economics at Harvard. He continued his education while Ann raised Barack Jr., not seeing him until 1971, when he visited Ann and Barack in Hawaii for a month. Barack Obama Sr. was bright, though a womanizer, non existent father, and eventual alcoholic.

Stanley Dunham (MATERNAL GRANDFATHER)-

Described as boisterous, outgoing, and sometimes out of touch, Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, with whom he lived much of his childhood in Hawaii, was also a Communist sympathizer. During the late 1950s, while living in Mercer Island, Washington, The Dunhams attended East Shore Unitarian Church. Also known as “The Little Red Church on the Hill”, it taught a liberal theology and embraced Communism. After the family moved to Hawaii, Stanley befriended one Frank Marshall Davis, known Communist, anti-Christian poet. A friendship developed between the two which eventually led to Davis being introduced to the young Barack Obama. Obama later writes in ‘Dreams from my Father’ about a man named “Frank” (he never mentioned his last name) who would come to the house, read poetry, drink whiskey, and smoke marijuana with Stanley Dunham. Barack would often sit in and listen. In 1997, the FBI destroyed their file on Stanley Dunham, indicating he posed at least some risk to national security in years past.

Frank Marshall Davis (FRIEND AND MENTOR)-

In Dreams from My Father Barack Obama describes his  relationship with Davis during the 1970s while living in Hawaii. He describes him as a “mentor”, and one he could always look to for answers. Obama’s half sister Maya Soetoro-Ng also speaks how her grandfather, Stanley Dunham viewed Davis as a “point of connection” for Barack. Davis was an active member of CPUSA (Communist Party of the USA). CPUSA contributing editor Gerald Thorne says, “Davis was a decisive influence in helping Obama to find his present identity”. Davis was a poet whose themes included anti-American rhetoric, pro-Soviet Union rhetoric, black nationalism, and insults against Jesus and Christians. One poem called “Christ is a Dixie Nigger” describes Jesus as another “new white hope.” Another praises the Soviet Red Army. Davis was also the author of a book called Sex Rebel, where he details his sexual exploits in the most pornographic of terms, including bisexuality, sado-masochism, orgies, and encounters with 13 year old girls. Davis, the mentor of the young Barack Obama, was a staunch Communist, hater of Christians, drug dealer, and a complete pervert.

Evie/Turdi (NANNY IN INDONESIA)-

Just recently information has been discovered of a man/woman who cared for Barack Obama during is early childhood in Indonesia. Between the ages of 6 and 10, Barack Obama was put in the care of “Evie”, a transgender, who was born a man and is now a “woman”. Evie recalls making Barack laugh when he would put on his mother’s lipstick, but always trying to “appear manly” in front of Barack, and not wear any women’s clothes. Evie now works as a prostitute in Jakarta.

Is it any wonder why Barack Obama blossomed into the confused, Marxist that he is? Born and raised into the ideologies of Communism from day one, there is no doubt that these tendencies translated into early adulthood and on. Like prerequisites to more advanced classes, the indoctrination by his mother, grandfather, and Frank Marshall Davis in his early years planted a deep seed inside Barack Obama from a young age that would cultivate and stimulate his yearning for higher degrees of radicalism. Jeremiah Wright. Bill Ayers. Bernardene Dohrn. Derrick Bell. Rashid Khalidi.

Maybe one day the majority of the American public, Democrat and Republican, Liberal and Conservative, Atheist, Christian, Gay, Straight, will finally understand just who Barack Hussein Obama really is.

LINK

**Sourced to Hack Wilson for the above piece**

**Emphasis added**

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ADD THIS:

From The Blaze:

PART ONE — THE FICTION AND NON-FICTION OF OBAMA

May 12, 2012

By   Tiffany Gabbay

It could be argued that if then-presidential candidate John McCain had truly assailed his rival Barack Obama over his exhaustive collection of dubious dealings and less-than-scrupulous friends (think: Davis, Khalidi, Pflager, Wright, Ayers, Rezko, Said, etc.), he just might have taken the election. Instead, McCain chose to “keep above the fray” — although few are clear as to why bringing up substantive and valid concerns over the first-term senator’s past constitutedotherwise to the Maverick-camp. Now, President Obama is three years into his first term as president, and his campaign for reelection has officially kicked off with a record-setting $15 million celebrity-fundraiser hosted by devotee George Clooney.

If the president’s true history continues to be replaced by the alternate narrative he has constructed for himself; if his fact, rather than fiction-based life is swept under the carpet again, hewill likely retake the Oval Office.

With this in mind, Glenn Beck dedicated his Thursday evening broadcast to reviewing the staggering array of inconsistencies, embellishments and “manufactured lies” perpetuated by the president over the course of his political career.

“His life is complete fiction,” Beck said. Let’s review the non-fiction version before we go any further:

In Part II of this report, we will briefly profile some of the president’s more questionable deeds, but in order to provide proper context, consider the following cast of characters who helped to shape Obama’s life and mindset.

Dreams from an anti-colonialist father

It is difficult to understand what truly moves the president without understanding who his father was.

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In his book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” Dinesh D’Souza described in painstaking detail, an unsavory character who womanized, abused, drank excessively (killing a man in one drunk-driving incident, losing both of his legs in another, and later killing himself in yet another), abandoned his eight children at various points in their lives, married thrice without ever divorcing his previous wives, and advocated taxing income at a 100% rate. Unbelievably, the man described is not a work of fiction. He was President Barack Obama’s father.

Barak Obama Sr. (spelled without the “c”) was a Harvard economics graduate student from Kenya and despite the president’s insistance that his paternal lineage comprised humble stock, Barak Sr. was actually from a prominent and wealthy farming family. His father, Hussein Onyango Obama, was also an observant Muslim who chose the Arabic name “Barak” because it means “blessed.”

In an article written for the East Africa Journal in 1965, “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” Barak Sr. explained that in the wake of colonialism, socialism was necessary to ensure national autonomy for Kenya. “The question,” he wrote, “is how are we going to remove the disparities in our country, such as the concentration of economic power in Asian and European hands . . .?” [emphasis added].

“We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.”

Sound familiar?

Obama Sr. went on to insist that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

D’Souza explains the significance:

Absurd as it seems, the idea of 100 percent taxation has its peculiar logic. It is based on the anti-colonial assumption that the rich have become rich by exploiting and plundering the poor; therefore, whatever the rich have is undeserved and may be legitimately seized.

Recall now that the president’s book is titled Dreams From My Father, not Dreams Of My Father. In the memoir, Obama described longing to emulate his senior, writing, “it was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself.”

D’Souza also noted those close to Obama Jr., including his grandmother Sarah Obama, agreed with the passage. She told Newsweek, “I look at him and I see all the same things — he has taken everything from his father . . . this son is realizing everything the father wanted.”

While some might argue that it is implausible to think the president would seek to live-out the dreams of a deeply flawed man who callously abandoned him, human nature and psychology dictates otherwise. Even into adulthood, we often seek the approval of our parents — sometimes even the ones that withhold love — because theirs is the affection we most desire gaining. True, one cannot hold the president responsible for the sins of his father, but that does not mean he doesn’t still seek his approval.

All the while, Obama dimisses the influence his father had on him. Yes, it is possible that the president is so repulsed by his father’s life that he would reject everything the man ever stood for, but then why would his own memoir read as a tribute to the dreams his father never had the opportunity to realize?

“We’re not in Kansas anymore”: Stanley Ann Dunham 

Not a tremendous amount his known about the woman with an unusual first name who married Barak Obama Sr., some say, to spite her racist father. But what we can glean from various accounts provides relevant insight into Obama’s upbringing and influences.

After moving several times as a child, Stanley Ann Dunham eventually settled in progressive Mercer Island, just outside Seattle. She attended Mercer Island High School, a place that distinguished itself by having a former Communist Party member serve as chairman of the island’s school board. But that is not where the leftist connections ended.

According to the American Thinker, Dunham attended her high school’s ”anarchy alley,” where philosophy courses on Karl Marx were offered. The academics leading the effort were Val Foubert and Jim Wichterman, both reportedly of the Marxist “Frankfurt School“ and who taught ”critical theory” to students that included curriculum on the rejection of societal norms, and attacks on Christianity and the traditional family. Dunham’s peers considered her an “inquiring mind” and it is said that she grew to become part of the left’s intelligentsia.

After her family moved to Hawaii, Dunham attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa where she studied anthropology. It was in her Russian language class that she met the future president’s father, who would later leave Dunham and their new child, Barack Jr. to attend Harvard. Eventually the two divorced (though some claim they were never married in the first place) and she went on to marry Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, who worked as a government relations executive for an Oil company. While Soetoro was a Muslim, accounts differ as to the level of his observance. In 1967 the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia. Obama’s memoir paints Soetoro as an even-tempered man who became increasingly interested in Western culture while Dunham became increasingly interested in Indonesian and other world-cultures. Inevitably a rift was formed.

According to Dr. Rich Swier, Dunham moved between Indonesia and Hawaii twice more before traveling the world to “pursue a career in rural development that took her to her Ghana, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and Bangladesh.” She also traveled to China and Pakistan and by 1992 earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii. Her 1000-plus page dissertation, according to Swier was titled: “Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds.”

What perhaps bears mention is that President Obama has portrayed his mother as a simple girl from Kansas when she was in fact anything but. He has also credited her with providing him with his political world view.

Keep reading……MORE HERE INCLUDING VIDEO. (Including Frank Marshall Davis, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn)

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A MUST READ!

The Communist Slogan “Forward” now Adopted by Obama

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The Fundamental Transformation of America

Posted by izoneguy

July 17, 2010

When Obama wrote a book and said he was mentored as a youth by Frank, (Frank Marshall Davis) an avowed Communist,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When it was discovered that his grandparents, were strong socialists, sent Obama’s mother to a socialist school, introduced Frank Marshall Davis to young Obama,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When people found out that he was enrolled as a Muslim child in school and his father and step father were both Muslims,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he wrote in another book he authored he will stand with them (Muslims) should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he admittedly, in his book, he chose Marxist friends and professors in college.

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he traveled to Pakistan , after college on an unknown national passport.

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he sought the endorsement of the Marxist party in 1996 as he ran for the Illinois Senate.

Many people said it doesn’t matter.

When he sat in a Chicago Church for twenty years and listened to a preacher spew hatred for America and preach black liberation theology,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When an independent Washington organization, that tracks senate voting records, gave him the distinctive title as the “most liberal senator”,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When the Palestinians in Gaza , set up a fund raising telethon to raise money for Obama’s 2008 election campaign,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When his voting record supported gun control,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he refused to disclose who donated money to his election campaign, as other candidates had done,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he received endorsements from people like Louis Farrakhan, Mummar Kadaffi and Hugo Chavez,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When it was pointed out that he was a total, newcomer and had absolutely no experience at anything except community organizing,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he chose friends and acquaintances such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were revolutionary radicals,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When his voting record in the Illinois senate and in the U.S. Senate came into question,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he refused to wear a flag, lapel pin and did so only after a public outcry,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When people started treating him as a Messiah and children in schools were taught to sing his praises,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he stood with his hands over his groin area for the playing of the National Anthem,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he surrounded himself in the White house with advisors who were pro gun control, pro abortion, pro homosexual marriage and wanting to curtail freedom of speech to silence the opposition

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he aired his views on abortion, homosexuality and a host of other issues,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he said he favors sex education in Kindergarten, including homosexual indoctrination,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When his background was either scrubbed or hidden and nothing could be found about him,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he had an association in Chicago with Tony Rezco, a man of questionable character, who is now in prison and had helped Obama to a sweet deal on the purchase of his home,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When it became known that George Soros, a multi-billionaire Marxist, spent a ton of money to get him elected,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he started appointing czars that were radicals, revolutionaries, and even avowed Marxist/Communist’s,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he stood before the nation and told us that his intentions were to “fundamentally transform this nation” into something else,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When it became known that he had trained ACORN workers in Chicago and served as an attorney for ACORN,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed cabinet members and several advisors who were tax cheats and socialist’s,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed a science czar, John Holdren, who believes in forced abortions, mass sterilizations and seizing babies from teen mothers,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Cass Sunstein as regulatory czar and he believes in “Explicit Consent”, harvesting human organs without family consent, and to allow animals to be represented in court, while banning all hunting,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Kevin Jennings, a homosexual, and organizer of a group called gay, lesbian, straight, Education network, as safe school czar and it became known that he had a history of bad advice to teenagers,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Mark Lloyd as diversity czar and he believed in curtailing free speech, taking from one and giving to another to spread the wealth and admires Hugo Chavez,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When Valerie Jarrett was selected as Obama’s senior White House advisor and she is an avowed Socialist,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When Anita Dunn, White House Communications director said Mao Tse Tung was her favorite philosopher and the person she turned to most for inspiration,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Carol Browner as global warming czar, and she is a well known socialist working on Cap and trade as the nations largest tax,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he appointed Van Jones, an ex-con and avowed Communist as green energy czar, who since had to resign when this was made known,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he recess appointed Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, whose prolific writings, suggest a radical view of labor law that flies in the face of established precedent and case law

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he recess appointed Donald Berwick as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) who has repeatedly made claims and statements that raise numerous questions about his suitability for this critical position,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When as president of the United States, he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he traveled around the world criticizing America and never once talking of her greatness,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When his actions concerning the middle-east seemed to support the Palestinians over Israel, our long time friend,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he upset the Europeans by removing plans for a missile defense system against the Russians,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he started spending us into a debt that was so big we could not pay it off,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he took a huge spending bill under the guise of stimulus and used it to pay off organizations, unions and individuals that got him elected,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he signed into law ObamaCare, which took over 1/6 of the nation’s economy,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he took away student loans from the banks and put it through the government by adding it into the 2700 page ObamaCare bill,

Many people said it didn’t matter.

When he set into motion a plan to take over the control of all energy in the United States through Cap and Trade,

Many people say it doesn’t matter.

When he finally completed his transformation of America into a Socialist State,

People finally woke up…….. but it was too late.

Any one of these things, in and of themselves may not really matter. But…. when you add them up one by one you get a phenomenal score that points to the fact that Obama is determined to make over America into a Marxist/Socialist society. All of the items in the preceding paragraphs have been put into place. All can be documented very easily. The last paragraph alone is not yet cast in stone. You and I will write that paragraph. Will it read as above or will it be a more happy ending for most of America ?

Continue reading here……

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ADDITIONAL LINKS:

Obama Lies AGAIN about Ohio Bridges; Media Lap Dogs Ignore Falsehoods

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American Journalism is Dead: Communist Style Left Wing Propaganda Continues…

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Media Favors And Fears Obama

Is Allen West Right?

Black Conservative Allen West To Media: Stand Up to Obama

Trouble viewing video?  Click Here.

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Pay Attention America! Are We on the Road to State Owned Communications?

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Obama Circle “Shaking with Laughter” Over Hilary Rosen Distraction. Will Research Lead to American Bridge 21st Century to Perkins Coie and Eventually to White House?

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If it Doesn’t Fit the Progressive Propaganda Machine: Black Teen Run Off the Liberal Plantation

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A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

 Lenin
Russian Communist politician & revolutionary (1870 – 1924)

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“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Joseph Goebbels   (Propagandist for Adolph Hilter)

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“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true…You are what the media define you to be.” (Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Watson).

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#Vet Obama 2012

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Ayers 2012: “I Get Up Every Morning and Think I’m Going to end Capitalism. Obama 2008: Ayers is Just a Guy From My Neighborhood. Vetting Obama 2012…..

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From The Blaze:

By   Madeleine Morgenstern

April 1, 2012

Radical left-wing activist Bill Ayers apparently stopped by Occupy Union Square in New York City on Friday and shared a little bit of what gets him going each day: Ending capitalism.

“I get up every morning and think, today I’m going to make a difference,” Ayers said in a video clip posted online. “Today I’m going to end capitalism. Today I’m going to make a revolution. I go to bed every night disappointed but I’m back to work tomorrow, and that’s the only way you can do it.”

(h/t Weasel Zippers)

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**A MUST WATCH VIDEO**

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Doyle at Occupy Union Square

Trouble viewing video?  Click Here.

**Listen carefully about Bernadine Dohrn talk about NATO.  An invitation is sent out to the Occupiers to come to Chicago when NATO is there.***

“America is a declining empire” ~~Bernadine Dohrn

**Listen to Bill Ayers speak badly about our uniformed military boarding planes first and thanking them for their service**  from 6:00 to 6:35

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Vetting Obama 2012:

From THE OBAMA FILE:

As part of her transition out of power, Alice Palmer introduced her successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of left-wing terrorists,  William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn – long-time friends of the Obamas.

As noted by David Horowitz:

On the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera.  The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, “No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives.”  The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s’ Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult.  One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.

While Ayers and Dohrn, who, in July, 1969, traveled to Cuba and met with representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments, may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.  These two domestic terrorists have written and spoken at length about their pasts — their bombings and robberies — and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

William (Bill) Ayers went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators’ bomb accidentally exploded on March 6, 1970, destroying a Greenwich Village townhouse and killing three members of the Weather Underground (Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, who was Ayers’ girlfriend at the time).  He and his colleagues invented identities and traveled continuously.  They avoided the police and FBI, while bombing high-profile government buildings including; the United States Capitol, The Pentagon, and the Harry S. Truman Building housing the State Department.  Living underground, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised two children, Zayd and Malik, (Muslim names) before turning themselves in in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of what Ayers described as “extreme governmental misconduct” during the long search for the fugitives.

Dohrn served seven months in a NYC federal jail in 1983 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery of 1981, in which two policemen and a security guard were killed.

Dohrn worked in a baby boutique in 1979 where stolen customer ID’s were used to rent trucks used in the series of robberies culminating in the 1981 slaughter in which 9 kids lost their fathers, the youngest of which was six-months.

Because of the criminal convictions Dohrn, who received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967, was refused admission to the New York bar.

Nonetheless, she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984.  Howard Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers.  Tom Ayers’ firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for many years.  She later worked in their Chicago office when she and Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987.  She left Sidley in 1988.

Update: In 1989, Obama was a summer intern at Michelle Obama’s law firm.  One of Michelle’s co-workers was Bernadine Dohrn.  So the relationship between the Obamas and Ayers has spanned twenty years.

One of the best known contacts between Obama and Ayers was when the couple hosted a “meet and greet” for Obama at Ayers house in Hyde Park -– an upper middle class neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, where Obama now lives as a neighbor of Louis Farrakhan.

“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”

A Chicago-based blogger named Maria Warren — whose writing suggested she was to the left of Obama — recalled watching the candidate give a “standard, innocuous little talk” in 1995, in the Ayers’ living room when Obama was running for the state Senate.

“They were launching him,” Warren wrote, “introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread.”

Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters who propelled Barack Obama’s early political career.  The woman who touted Obama at the Ayers meeting, Alice Palmer, was herself a far left activist who was into community organizing like Obama.

Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation.  It is a fact that in 1989, Bernadine Dohrn and Michelle Obama were associates at the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, when Obama joined the firm as a summer intern.

Barack also was essentially an employee of Bill Ayers for eight years, starting in  1995, the year the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help reform the Chicago public schools.  One of the architects of the Challenge was none other than Professor Bill Ayers.  Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal and proudly lists himself on his own website as the co-founder of the Challenge.

And who did William Ayers, co-creator of the Challenge, help select as the new director of the board for this program?  Why, Barack Obama, of course.  Obama was the first Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in 2003.  Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over this same time period, raising and spending at least $110 million in an effort to bolster a “radical” (Ayers’ word) reform program in the Chicago Public Schools from 1994 to 2001.

In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled “Should a child ever be called a ‘super predator?’” to debate “the merits of the juvenile justice system.”

In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled “Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?” sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago.  Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the “Intellectuals in Times of Crisis” panel.  Here is the agenda.

“I know they are friends,” said Dr. Young of Obama and Ayers.

Ayers is the Board Chairman of the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago and Obama was a Board member.  Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund’s website.

The Woods Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty.  The Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the redistribution of wealth via taxes.

Obama always describes his relationship with Ayers as casual, but a close, working relationship spanning eight years is hardly casual — especially an employer-employee relationship.

Beyond that, it was Ayers who brought Obama to Chicago.

According to The Nation: “The Woods Fund, in many ways, is responsible for helping start Obama as an organizer and shaping his political identity.  In 1985 the foundation gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project (aka the “DCP”), which hired Obama, at 24, as an organizer on Chicago’s economically depressed South Side.”

The Woods Fund was founded by the Woods family which owned the Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier of coal from its mines to major Illinois power companies. Commonwealth Edison, the giant Chicago-based electric power company was headed by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers.

The problem of Barack Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away.  Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse.

Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon.  Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past.  Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place “makes me want to puke.”

Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.”  For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.

The phony Obama “Fight the Smears“ website says that they “have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood.”

Wrong.  The two men shared an office and Obama knew very well who he was associating with:

• Obama knew who was paying him to serve on two boards,
• Obama knew who he was directing thousands of dollars of donations to,
• Obama knew whose living room he was in when he kicked off his political career,
• Obama knew who was sitting with him on panels,
• Obama knew who was on his floor at the University of Chicago,
• Obama knew whose book he was writing a blurb on, etc., etc. etc.

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Ayers Brings Obama to Chicago

The Chicago Period began in 1985, when some leftists were looking for someone who could recruit in a black neighborhood in the south side of Chicago and Obama applied for the position as a community organizer for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago.  The “Project” was funded with a $25,000 grant by Bill Ayers‘ Woods Fund.  Here is an account from the Gamaliel Foundation, another community organizing group.

Obama was 24 years old, unmarried, and according to his memoir, searching for a genuine African-American community.

Stories have varied wildly. Jerry Kellman, who hired him and is now a strong supporter, says it was “$10,000 a year and a $2,000 car allowance”.  Obama himself has given different numbers; his memoir says $10,000 (as well as the car), in his “Wesleyan speech, he gave it as “$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car”, and when he announced his candidacy for president, it was “a group of churches had offered me a job as a community organizer for $13,000 a year”.

However, Ryan Lizza, then at The New Republic, reported that “Jean Rudd of the Woods Fund…had provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama”. . Ari Berman reported in The Nation that the “[Woods Fund] gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project, which hired Obama CBS2 in Chicago ran a story with a document showing that Obama’s planned 1987 salary was $25,000, a number that the Obama campaign confirmed whilst insisting that his original salary was $13,000.

So accounts, to put it mildly, vary.  This isn’t just a minor discrepancy; Obama’s entire campaign narrative begins with his tremendous self-sacrifice in taking on what at the time was a reasonable salary for a young college graduate.  Either Obama has lied about his starting salary or he has neglected to mention that his salary nearly doubled within 18 months.

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Aaron Klein says A scholar and charity head appointed to Obama’s White House Fellowships Commission served as a point man in granting $49.2 million in startup capital to an education-reform project founded by Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers and chaired by Obama.

Documentation shows the White House fellow, Vartan Gregorian, was central in Ayers’ recruitment of Obama to serve as the first chairman of the project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge – a job in which Obama worked closely on a regular basis with Ayers.

Obama also later touted his job at the project as qualifying him to run for public office.

Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corp. charitable foundation, was appointed by Obama last year as a White House fellow.  Born in Tabriz, Iran, Gregorian served for eight years as president of the New York Public Library and was also president of Brown University.

In his role as Brown president, Gregorian served on the selection committee of the Annenberg Foundation, which funded Ayers’ Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $49.2 million, 2-to-1 matching challenge grant over five years.  Ayers was one of five founding members of the Challenge who wrote to the Annenberg Foundation for the initial funding.

Steve Diamond, a political-science and law professor and a blogger who has posted on Obama, previously posted a letter from Nov. 18, 1994, in which Gregorian, serving as the point man on Annenberg’s selection committee, asked Ayers to “compose the governing board” of the Challenge’s collaborative project with “people who reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of Chicago.”

Ayers and other founding Challenge members then recruited Obama to serve as the project chairman.

Obama and Ayers used the project grant money to fund organizations run by radicals tied to Ayers, including Mike Klonsky, a former top communist activist who was a senior leader in the Students for a Democratic Society group, a major leftist student organization in the 1960s, from which the Weathermen terror group later splintered.

More here on the vetting of Obama…….

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RELATED LINKS:

Does Bill Ayers Still Have Influence on the Obamas? The “Social” Web of Connections

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Bill Ayers and Valerie Jarrett’s mother are friends.

Valerie Jarrett’s mother, Barbara Taylor Bowman, co-founded the Erickson Institute in Chicago and still serves on its Board of Trustees. Tom Ayers, the father of Bill Ayers, was a one-time fellow trustee of the Institute.  According to WorldNet Daily’s Brad O’Leary, the Erickson board also included Bill Ayers’ wife, Bernadine Dohrn. For his part, Bill Ayers called Bowman “a neighbor and friend” in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and “writer Barack Obama.”

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/printindividualProfile.asp?indid=2418

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Barack Obama did a review for Ayers’ 1997 book, “A Kind and Just Parent,” writing, “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair” — here it is — these two were as thick as thieves.

LINK

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Known Associations:

1.  Bernadine Dohrn worked at Sidley Austin where Michelle Obama worked and Barack Obama was a summer intern.

2.  Bill Ayers is friends with Valerie Jarrett’s (Obama’s other brain half) mother Barbara Bowman.

3.  Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn launched Obama’s political career from their home.

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Do YOU still believe Obama’s own words about Ayers; that he was “just a guy in his neighborhood”?

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Another LINK to Obama one should study:

Demos, one of the nations premier leftist “think tanks” has close ties to Democratic Socialists of America, and, until the organization morphed into a vast array of semi-disguised clones, ACORN.

Interestingly Demos’ founding 1999-2000 Board of Trustees, included an obscure Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama.

A few years later an equally obscure San Francisco communist radical named Van Jones would also join the Demos Board. Small world isn’t it?

Demos 2009 report “Flying blind”, page 3

LINK

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Vetting Obama 2012

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#IAmAndrewBreitbart

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Uncovering MORE of Obama’s Radical Past (Stanley Kurtz). **Plus Marxism Invasion of our Churches**

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THIS TIME Obama needs to be vetted BEFORE the November 2012 elections!

Andrew Breitbart, Stanley Kurtz and Trevor Loudon have done EXTENSIVE investigating and have Truthful documentation of Obama’s radical past and the people Obama surrounds himself with on a continual basis.

***Seek the Truth and Verify**

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[Below is a talk given by Stanley Kurtz at the Wednesday Morning Club on January 5, 2011.]

David Horowitz: It’s been 20 years with the Center trying to tell conservatives that these people are not liberals, that they are leftists and if their dreams are fulfilled they will destroy the United States, and very, very dangerous people.  And while conservatives have given me support and given our Center support, they never quite got into their system what I think is the appropriate view of our opponents in these battles.  Conservatives, as you’ve probably heard me say, are far too decent and civilized.  They give people the benefit of the doubt.  They think of them as having good intentions and being mistaken about this or that.

And I see my mission as a former radical, as teaching conservatives some bad manners.  But until the last year or so it really hasn’t taken and I can’t take credit for this.  I think Barack Obama is the teacher of conservatives.  Of course, it’s very important when a moment like this occurs that the information be out there so people can understand what’s happening to them.  And I, almost 20 years ago, after Peter Collier and I wrote a book called Destructive Generation, we met with Jeremiah Denton.  You may remember he was the POW in the Hanoi Hilton who telegraphed with his eyelids in Morse code “torture,” which is how we knew our troops were being tortured.  And he read our book Destructive Generation and he said to us, if I had known about Congressman Ron Dellums what I know now, I wouldn’t have been so nice to him.  That’s what he said.  And Ron Dellums is an American traitor, a Berkley leftist who had murder in his heart for this country, yet the Democrats allowed him to become first the Chair of the Subcommittee on Military Installations worldwide, and then the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, total access to our intelligence secrets.

And that’s why I felt in the mid-’80s that we were going to lose the Cold War.  Fortunately, Marx was such a crackpot economist that the Soviet Union collapsed before they could defeat us.  But I understood how infiltrated our government was and our institutions were by leftists.  And I have therefore been frustrated over 20 years in trying to alert conservatives to how bad this situation is.

Now, low and behold–in this era of this great awakening comes our speaker today, Stanley Kurtz, who has written an indispensable book called Radical-in-Chief, which shows in great detail, and precisely because Stanley was not a leftist, and therefore, it’s like the discovery of a new world kind of.  I mean, he has got to pinch himself every time he comes across something and then it drives him further, and it’s also incredibly well documented.  If I had to do a book on Barack Obama, I mean, I would jump right to the conclusion from some of the early data that Stanley produces.

But what Stanley has shown is that Barack Obama not only does he come from the left that I came out of, the radical America-despising left, but the worst part of it.  He had a 20-year relationship with a leftist whom I despised when I thought of myself as a Marxist revolutionary, which is Billy Ayers–despised him because he was so shallow and destructive.  But this was–as Stanley has shown and Stanley alone has shown. There’s a large literature now on Obama. Leftist books like David Remnick’s book, David Remnick being the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker, who did write quite a good book called Lenin’s Tomb, but his book on Barack Obama is, as most of these books are, a cover up, or an attempt to just discount, which is the same thing, whatever evidence they came across. And other books, which are written by conservatives, are written without having done the enormous amount of research that Stanley did over, I guess, it’s a two-year period.

He went into the libraries like the Wisconsin Historical Society or the Tamiment Library you’ve probably never heard of.  The Tamiment Library is run by Communists.  I mean, old fashioned Stalinist Communists.  But these are the archives where leftists feel confident I guess of depositing their papers in these libraries because they were run by other Marxist radicals.  And what Stanley has shown is just what I said, that Barack Obama was raised as a leftist and starting right out of college was part of the Marxist Socialist, what I call Neocommunist left, the people that continued the battles that Peter Collier and I abandoned when we realized that this was a destructive enterprise.

So I am both privileged and pleased to be able to bring you Stanley Kurtz to talk about his book.

Stanley Kurtz: Thank you so much, David, for those very kind words.  I am laboring under a bit of a disadvantage today in that I’m addressing the Wednesday morning group on Thursday morning.  That kind of shoots my credibility from the beginning.  But I want you to believe me when I say that I am not speaking as a conservative, but as a post-partisan pragmatist.

Radical-in-Chief – Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.  That is the title of the book, and as David said, it literally does argue that Barack Obama is a Socialist.  Now, I actually didn’t want to find out that Barack Obama was a Socialist.  I was afraid to find out that Barack Obama was a Socialist, because frankly, among respectable conservatives, this is not a safe argument to make.  And during the 2008 presidential campaign, I was not shy about calling Barack Obama a radical.  Actually, it was the research I did in 2008 that helped inject the Bill Ayers and the ACORN issues into the campaign.  So it’s not as though I wasn’t willing to energetically criticize Barack Obama, to reveal all sorts of nasty things about his past that he didn’t want to have come out.  But Socialist, I thought that was a bridge too far.

And how do you even explain what Socialism is?  I mean, people argue about the definition.  As I eventually discovered, Socialists themselves argue about what Socialism is.  If you define Socialism classically as the complete nationalization of the means of production, Barack Obama as a candidate in 2008 wasn’t proposing anything like that.  And for that reason, the whole idea that Obama was a Socialist was scoffed at by the left, of course, by the liberals, by the mainstream media.  The problem is, as I began this archival research just trying to fill out the research that I did during the 2008 campaign, I kept running into evidence of real Socialism, people who thought of themselves as Socialists, Marxists, hardcore.  And a variety of Socialism and Socialists that I hadn’t known about that I think you could still call it hardcore, but it was a revised form of Socialism that took over the movement after the 1960s and that most Americans know absolutely nothing about.

I started overturning the rocks and finding underneath them a kind of unknown history of Socialism since the 1960s in the United States.  And I was amazed by all this.  And at first, as I say, I didn’t really even want to follow the trail.  But here I was having accepted a contract and an advance to write a book about Barack Obama’s past, and low and behold, I kept running into Socialism everywhere.

So I plunged in.  I educated myself in–as best I could in what Socialism in the post-’60s era was.  And I began to fill out the picture on my own with this original research.  But I’ll say even here at the outset that this is a continual problem for me and for almost everyone who grapples with the book in some way.  There are a lot of conservatives even now who really aren’t comfortable with an argument that says Barack Obama is a Socialist.  It sounds like Joe McCarthy, it sounds like the John Birch Society, it sounds like you are some kind of crazy nut.  That’s on the one side.  And of course, not only conservatives, but everyone on the left treats the book and the argument that way whenever they get a chance to.

And then, on the other hand, there’s David’s group.  That’s why I’m here.  And when I was down at the Breakers talking about this, the questions were, what is this Socialism thing you’re talking about?  Come on, Mr. Kurtz. The gap in reactions that I get is really amazing.  And people who read the book and who like it and who agree with it often describe this barrier that they pass through.  And they say, you know, we avoided this whole Socialism issue.  But this book is interesting.  This book is not crazy.  This book is not fire-breathing in some irrational way.  It makes sense and you’re telling us something new here.

What I would stress about the book, therefore, is the subtitle, Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.  There is an untold story here.  Even knowledgeable ex-leftists don’t have full awareness of the Socialism I discuss in this book because it comes from a group of community organizers who represented one particular faction within contemporary American Socialism and they were secretive.  They were secretive even with other Socialists.  And fortunately, they made the mistake of putting a lot of their early records in a public archive.  I managed to get into that archive.

So I’m telling something new in this book even to many people who are knowledgeable about the left, and of course, to people who don’t know much about the left or who only have in their mind Joe McCarthy or the John Birch Society.  They are also quite surprised.  So I would ask that people approach the book with an open mind, even if you are already convinced that Barack Obama is a Socialist and you think you’re going to get all your ideas confirmed.  Well, you are going to get all your ideas confirmed, but it’s going to happen in a way that you might not quite have expected.

All right.  So let me begin where I begin in the book, and that’s with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985.  Now, when I was doing research, I started turning up a sign-up sheet with Barack Obama’s name on it for one of these conferences.  And in his own book he had given a quick hint of the fact that he might have been at these conferences.  But as his usualmodus operandi, he doesn’t give you quite enough detail to figure out exactly what conference he’s talking about.  A lot of my work was piecing all of that together.

And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career.  It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career.  Now, what do I mean?  Well, for one thing, these Socialist conferences touted community organizing as the key to the future for American Socialism.

And this gets back to what I mentioned at the beginning, the classic definition of Socialism as full government control of the means of production, full nationalization of the economy.  Now, in the mid-’80s, American Socialists realized that that plan was just not going to fly.  They had waited for 10 or 15 years for there to be a literal violent Socialist revolution, and it never came.  And what was worse from the Socialist point of view, Ronald Reagan was now President of the United States, and a very popular one at that.  So it didn’t seem as though you were going to get anywhere by advocating nationalization.

So here is where another strategy took hold.  It’s not as though community organizing or local organizing had never been considered by Socialists, but it became newly important in the 1980s when Socialists decided, hey, we’re going to get control of the economy not be formal nationalization from above, but through a kind of de facto public ownership from below.  Now, what do I mean by that?  Well, let’s take the example of the notorious community organization, ACORN.  What did ACORN do?  ACORN actually gained a kind of control over the banking industry in the United States.  They would flood into the lobbies of banks or they would besiege the home of an officer of a bank, and basically intimidate the bank into giving them a pot of money to give loans on behalf of the bank to customers with risky credit histories, the kind of customer who would never have gotten a loan under ordinary circumstances.  And of course, this was the beginning of the subprime mortgage crisis that ironically brought Barack Obama into the presidency.

In addition to talking about Obama, I actually give a lot of detail on how ACORN and community organization is linked to the roots of the subprime crisis.  Because as I was poring through the archives looking for Obama’s hidden relationship with ACORN, low and behold, I was finding all of this material about ACORN’s work with the Clinton Administration behind the scenes in pushing subprime lending.  So what we’re really talking about here, again, is an example of how you can have a de facto nationalization from below.  And this is the strategy that entranced American Socialists in the mid-’80s.

This is the strategy that brought Barack Obama into community organizing.  And one of the things I do in the book almost in the manner of a detective story is go into this dramatic moment Obama describes in Dreams From My Father, his memoir, about how he became a community organizer and how he learned what community organizing was.  And I show that when you follow out the detail of it, it had to be at these Socialist conferences that he came upon this transfiguration.

So he ran into organizations, like ACORN and Project Vote, at these Socialist conferences.  They were considered the future of Socialism.  And there was another theme at these conferences and that was that rainbow coalitions led by minority political leaders, particularly African Americans, were the key to the future of Socialism in the United States.  And the model of all of this was Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago.  In fact, at the very first Socialist conference that Obama attended, the one that brought him into community organizing, that conference was held at almost exactly the moment when Harold Washington’s first electoral triumph in Chicago took place.  And of course, we know from Dreams From My Father, that Mayor Harold Washington was Obama’s idol.  In fact, Jeremiah Wright was deeply involved in Harold Washington’s various electoral campaigns and that’s part of what drew Obama to write.

Harold Washington was also the model for American Socialists.  Now, that might sound strange because Harold Washington didn’t stand up and say, hey, I’m a Socialist, guys.  So why should Socialists care about Harold Washington?  Well, there are an awful lot of Socialist community organizers in Chicago.  And those Socialist community organizers were really the key to Harold Washington’s success.  They helped to bring in enough of a percentage of the white vote, which was necessary for Harold Washington even though he had a huge percentage of the black vote to tip him into a victory.  And it was the Socialist leaders of these various community organizations who partnered with Harold Washington.  And Harold Washington worked openly with the Socialists of Chicago and that was very unusual.

The Democratic Socialists of America, which was the group we’re talking about, was not used to being able to work out in the open with politicians.  But here, Harold Washington, who was very left-leaning himself–you could maybe call him a fellow traveler of these Democratic Socialists–Harold Washington himself was willing to work openly with these Socialists.  So the Socialist world was thrilled by this and at these conferences that Obama attended this was considered the model, and it was linked to the community organizing theme.

So the idea is this – you create a kind of quasi-Populist anti-business movement of the left stirred up by these community organizations.  Some of them are led by African Americans and some of those community organizing leaders, especially African Americans, emerge and become politicians themselves and they lead this large coalition, which is energized by these community groups on behalf of an economic, anti-business Populist movement, which in fact is controlled by Socialists from behind.  The idea is you don’t actually say, hey, we’re Socialists.  We have a movement for Socialism here.  No.  You call yourself Populist, you call yourself Communitarian, or you use Alinskyite terms like, let’s democratize power.  But when you look at what’s really going on, it comes down to Socialism and the Socialists who ran these organizations knew it.

So Obama has been following a version of this strategy really through his entire political career, as I argue in the book.  And this is exactly the strategy, the life plan, in effect that these Socialist conferences laid down for Obama.

And here’s another connection, and this turns out to be the thing that first drew me into the whole Socialism theme, as I told you, against my own desires.  Reverend Wright.  It turns out that at these Socialist conferences in the mid-’80s, there had been a newly formed alliance struck between the Democratic Socialists of America, which was the organization putting on these conferences, and black liberation theology, which is the theology that is adhered to by Reverend Wright.  The founder of black liberation theology, James Cone, spoke at one of these conferences, one where we know from a sign-up sheet that Obama attended.  And a prominent follower of James Cone also spoke at these conferences talking all about black liberation theology.

Now, this really amazed me.  I looked down at the sheet and I saw the name of James Cone and I knew that James Cone was Jeremiah Wright’s mentor.  In fact, Jeremiah Wright defended himself to Sean Hannity in 2008 by saying, I’m not some kind of extremist, because James Cone is my mentor and James Cone teaches at very prominent American universities.  Well, having been at those universities, I immediately became alarmed when I heard that James Cone taught at those universities, because I knew that the divinity schools at those universities were actually the most extremist and leftist places around.  And that’s actually one of the things that drew me into this research.

At any rate, it became clear to me when I saw the programs for these conferences that Obama almost certainly would have known about black liberation theology well before he moved to Chicago and met Reverend Wright.  In fact, the same black liberation theologians who were presenting at these Socialist conferences after the ’84 conference decamped down to Cuba and had meetings that were essentially arranged by Cuban intelligence, which was controlled by the KGB at that time.  Reverend Wright was one of the contact men.  This was all condemned in The Wall Street Journal.  The way the Journal talked about it at the time was that these black preachers were being exploited by Cuban intelligence.

But I found that Journal article in the files of the black theology project.  They knew that they had been accused of having the wool pulled over their eyes by Cuban and Soviet intelligence, and yet two years later Reverend Wright led another delegation of the black theology project to Cuba where they praised Fidel Castro and the Cuban system.  So it was obvious that rather than being manipulated they were very intentionally supportive and there is more evidence you can find in the book for how supportive Reverend Wright and the other members of the black theology project were of the Cuban system as an alternative to the United States.

And so, it became obvious to me that when Obama met Reverend Wright – and again, there is more evidence for all this in the book – they would have immediately made these connections and realized they were part of this whole circle of cooperation between black liberation theology and American Socialism.  And that in particular is when I knew I simply had to follow the clues and I couldn’t ignore them anymore.

All right.  Now, let’s move to Chicago, because that’s exactly what Barack Obama did.  And a lot of what I say in the book covers a remarkable community organizer training institute in Chicago that very few people have heard of.  It’s called the Midwest Academy.  The Midwest Academy – remember that name.  I hope someday that will become a famous name and phrase.  If it does, the moment everyone knows what the Midwest Academy is, is the moment that Barack Obama is in some serious trouble.

And the Midwest Academy folks, maybe they’re kicking themselves right now – I hope they are – for putting their files on record.  And when I finally dug up these files, I truly was amazed because what we really had here was a living, breathing, Socialist front group as if it had been taken from the 1930s and transported into the ’80s and the ’90s and beyond in the United States.

The Midwest Academy was run by community organizers who were not only Socialist.  They were really some of the most prominent and influential Socialists in the United States in the post-’60s era.  And they really were the originators in many ways of the theories that were touted at those Socialist conferences in New York.  In many ways, the theories of community organizing and Socialism that were touted in those conferences in New York were really talking about these organizers in Chicago from the Midwest Academy.  It was a direct connection.

And who by coincidence did Obama end up working with after he left those conferences in New York but the community organizers in Chicago who really were the leaders and creators or contemporary Socialist strategy.  Now, the most important element of their strategy was keep quiet, don’t talk about your Socialism.  I’ve really already gone over this a bit, but I want to emphasize how important stealth was to the leaders of the Midwest Academy.  They believe that you should not tell the people you are organizing about your Socialism.  Just use it for your own private strategic purposes.  Instead, as I said earlier, call yourself a Populist, call yourself a Communitarian, use Alinskyite language and say that you’re democratizing power.  But when you read their memos to each other and their letters, it’s Marx, it’s Lenin, it’s Mao, the whole deal.

So I was going through the files of Midwest Academy and I started hitting on names that I was familiar with from my earlier research, names like Alice Palmer.  Alice Palmer was the Illinois State Senator whom Barack Obama replaced.  She anointed Obama as her successor at that infamous party at the home of Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn.  And I was amazed when I found that Alice Palmer had been a high official in the Midwest Academy network and that she had worked directly with another fellow named Ken Rawling.   Ken Rawling is the fellow who during the campaign of 2008 that tried to keep me out of the files, the archives of the Bill Ayers Foundation.  And Ken Rawling worked running that foundation with Bill Ayers and Barack Obama for years and years, and in other ways had been in charge of the funding of Barack Obama and the training of Barack Obama.

So Alice Palmer, the woman who selected Obama as her political successor, may have known him directly.  But at a minimum, she had access to years of knowledge from her partner, Ken Rawling, about who Obama was and what he believed.  And the book spins out the connections even further.  I’m just giving you a taste of the fact that the people who trained Obama, who funded Obama and who sponsored Obama’s political career right through the Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate, and frankly they’re working with him today in ways I can talk about, if we have time, these people were all the Socialists–the stealth Socialist leaders of the Midwest Academy who very deliberately decided that you don’t talk about your Socialism out loud.

Now, I’m sure all of you have heard about a little something called the Public Option.  The Public Option.  Well, in a way, the Public Option was first created by the Midwest Academy.  This was back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but the issue was not healthcare.  The issue at that time was energy.  And this was a kind of first major run through of the fundamental strategy of the Midwest Academy.  The idea was to create a coalition, which again, you would call Populist, but which was led by Socialists.  And they had a very specific coalition.  It was called the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, and they fought all sorts of battles in Congress and at the grassroots over energy issues.

And one of their core ideas was let’s have a U.S. government energy corporation to “compete” with private energy companies.  Now, of course, the whole idea of competition in that context is utter nonsense, because a government energy corporation has the power of regulation, it has the power of taxation.  It’s not going to compete with these private companies.  It’s going to drive them out of business.  And the leaders of the Midwest Academy who were running the Citizen Labor Energy Coalition understood all of this perfectly well.  In fact, they had a theory about it.  They drew on a French Marxist theorist named Andre Gorz. And he had an idea of what he called non-reformist reforms.

Non-reformist reforms.  Now, what does that mean?  It means that you propose a reform to the capitalist system, which you advertise as just a little bit of a tweak to the system.  It’s going to make things a little more fair, a little more efficient.  But you know in your own mind that you planned that to undermine capitalism and to put the country on an irreversible path towards Socialism, a kind of stealth Socialism.  And by the way, one of the things you can see in the files of the Midwest Academy is how they entertained each other.  When one of the leaders of the Midwest Academy, one of the few open Socialists–his name was Steve Max, a very important figure in the history of American Socialism– was going away to New York for a while, and so they gave a little party for him.  And they all started singing songs.  And they made up a song to the tune of The Internationale, – the Communist anthem, The Internationale - but they put new words to it.  And the words were basically saying, I’m sorry, I can’t sing The Internationale and I probably wouldn’t even if I could, but the song is basically saying, let’s all fight for anti-capitalist structural reform.  They sang songs to each other about Andre Gorz’s theory of non-reformist reforms.

This is important actually to the argument of the book because, as I’ll say in a moment as I’m saying now, Barack and Michelle Obama were very, very closely tied to the Midwest Academy.  And you really had to trust someone if you were going to bring them into the inner circle of the Midwest Academy.  They were very secretive and you can see why, because they sing songs to each other about Marx’s theory.  You can’t just bring anyone into that context.

Keep reading here……….

***From Page 2**

So the Democratic Party has been in this transformation to a leftist party for 30 or 40 years.  That’s how to answer the question of how Barack Obama got in there.  The Progressive Caucus, so this was a Marxist Caucus in the party, where there’s 160 members of the congressional–of the House, that’s the vast majority.

Nancy Pelosi gave a speech on the floor to honor her personal hero, Harry Bridges, who was a member of the Central Committee of the American Communist Party and a Soviet Agent.  So that’s how bad it is, and that’s why when I met with Jeremiah then, I said, oh, my God, this country is in trouble and for 20-odd years that’s what the Center has been doing is trying to educate people.  And then we, by putting up Discover the Networks and things we’ve done, we’ve allowed people who are now beginning to realize that access to the networks and the dots and the agendas.

And these people are professional liars.  To be on the left, you have to be a liar.  You are always for peace, justice, of course, because you know if you tell people what you are for, at best they’re not going to listen to you, at worst they could get really angry.  I had this experience–I will close with this. Cardinal Menzenti was a hero because he refused–he was the Cardinal in Budapest.  And when the Russians and the Communists took over the country, instead of leaving the country, he stayed in the American Embassy and led–he was the symbol of the anti-Communist struggle.

And when I had my second thoughts and started to speak on the conservative circuit, one of the first invitations was to the Cardinal Menzenti Foundation in St. Louis where I was introduced by my host as a former civil rights worker and peace activist.  In truth, I was a bloody Marxist revolutionary.  And that applies to all these people.  And if you read Stanley’s book, I mean, Jan Schakowsky, they’re all part of this Midwest Academy out there and they know who they are and they know each other and they understand the dangers, the third rail of foreign policy and things like that.

***Emphasis added***

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RELATED LINKS:

Obama’s Cunning Tactics Against America….

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The Midwest Academy (Heather and Paul Booth)

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Marxist Theology Infiltrating Christian Churches: James Cone, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Rev. Jim Wallis

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Disgrace! Churches of Christ Leader Shills for Cuban Communists. **PLUS** Faith based Marxism taught through Religious Community Organizing

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Obama’s “Faith Adviser” Jim Wallis Mixes With Socialists, Radicals and “Truthers”

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Barbara Lee in Cuba: A look back

By Josh Richman
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 2:28.

Rep. Barbara Lee’s office sent over a few photos of her meeting with President Raul Castro during this past week’s congressional delegation trip to Cuba:

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In February 2005 Rangel proclaimed that it was inappropriate for Americans to characterize groups like Hezbollah as “Islamic terrorists.” “To call it Islamic terror is discriminating, it’s bigoted, it is not the right thing to say,” Rangel stated.

Rangel is an avowed admirer of the former Cuban President Fidel Castro. In April 1993, the congressman introduced legislation to repeal the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, which ended U.S. assistance to the Castro government, and to lift the American embargo against Cuba. When Castro toured Harlem in October of 1995, Rangel greeted him with a bear hug at an event in a local church, where the congressman joined in a prolonged standing ovation for the visiting dictator.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2085

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