Chris Kennedy - Prometheus on the Carpathian Rock

Zeus Preckwinkle is out of town, but might have made the call on Chris Kennedy. 

Chris Kennedy is a good guy and as I said yesterday, a good guy has no business hanging around a Progressive Democrat (Prog Dem).

Prog Dems are not liberals; they are Stalinists with East Bank Club memberships and Brooks Brothers Gold Cards.

Chris Kennedy, the scion of Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK - the American Gracchi,  grew up in the shadows of history and myth making;   he became a solid, honest and sincere man who is willing to quietly fight poverty and lift people up.

Prog Dems never do that.

I have witnessed Chris Kennedy lend a pair of hands to Catholic Charities (1120 W 79th St, Chicago, IL 60620) humping boxes of food and warm clothing that he bought for distribution - without ever saying, " Do you know who I am?"  He never had a squad of Sun Times ink-slingers at his beck and call like the Nordic Jesus who Popes-up the neighborhood.

Chris Kennedy is among the oligarchs of Chicago but he is not with them.  He Kennedy is a great name to appoint to a Blue Ribbon panel or a directorship, but he is too honest to drawn into the circle of Prog favor.  Chris Kennedy kept terrorist comic-strip academic Bil Ayers from getting Emeritus status with University of Illinois.  Ayers remains a player in the cook County oligarchy.  Ayers helped make Venezuela what it is today and hopes to see Metro Chicago do the same.

The Kennedys are welcome to the Prog Dem banquet, but assigned a table near the men's room exit.

Note this observation from Joel Kotkin fro 2008, when Bloomberg and Schumer checked Caroline Kennedy from folowing Hillary Clinton into the Senate:

. . . the current gentry liberals increasingly reflect the biases of their own social class. The upper echelons of Wall Street, academe and the media have been moving toward what passes for the "left" for over a generation. Ironically, this movement became most evident in the early 1960s in the elite support that gathered around Caroline's father, John, who brought with him into office "the best and brightest."
As historian Fred Siegel has noted, the Kennedy phenomena differed greatly – in both style and substance – from the "lunch pail" liberalism epitomized by President Harry Truman and, to an extent, that of both Lyndon Johnson and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Their Democratic party was sustained by appealing to the economic interests of working and middle-class Americans.
As opposed to gentry politics, whose bastions lay in fashionable urban districts and college towns, Truman-style democracy reached into the vast suburban dreamscape – even into small towns and rural areas.
Over recent years this version of the party, with its more geographically diverse middle-class base, has lost influence. It's been a process of both addition and subtraction.
A series of strong Republican politicians since Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan lured many middle-income voters out of the Democratic Party by appealing to their patriotism, economic self-interest and, in some cases, prejudices.
At the same time, the core of the elite liberal constituency – academics, high-tech businesspeople and media figures – has been growing steadily in wealth and influence. By marrying this constituency to poor minority voters, gentry liberals have turned our core urban areas into a collection of electoral "ditto heads," with so-called "progressives" winning as much as 70 or 80% of the vote in presidential elections.
This year's thrilling primary battle between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama represented a clash of these two tendencies. Although Clinton herself enjoyed strong ties to some gentry liberals, she campaigned, particularly toward the end of the marathon, as Harry Truman in a bright pantsuit. Obama, for his part, sallied forth from a solid base of academics and well-educated professionals, as well as African Americans.  (emphases my own)

Caroline Kennedy became Ambasador to Japan as a participant trophy and America got another harpy in place of Hillary - Kirsten Gillbrand 
The Prog Dems have rewired the Democratic Party so that it is set to blow -up rather than divert the charted course.

Chris Kennedy found this out last week when he called out the conspiracy to kick people out of the city - his only mistake was in pointing only to the black people.  The Prog Dems want all middle class helots gone - White, Black, Brown and Rainbow.  If you refer to your Zipcode as a neighborhood, you gotta go.   If have a wife and kids - out you go.  You have the wrong attitude for a Smart-sized, secular, bike friendly urban paradise with plenty of green open space free of kids for community members with oodles of disposable cash, income and especially inherited wealth.

Chris Kennedy brought a torch into the cave created by the Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, WGN, WTTW, WBEZ, The Reader and the good folks at Disney where news is displayed with a pen-light. For that transgression he will have his liver eaten by Eric Zorn, Neil Steinberg, Mary Mitchell, Carol Marin and Mark Brown for weeks to come.

JB Pritzker is the Prog Dem's porkier Kirsten Gillibrand.  Chris Kennedy is a nice guy, but no Caroline Kennedy and Rahm and  Fred Eychaner are not about to appoint Mr. Kennedy Ambassador to Japan.

A great man wrote Nothings on the Square.

Chris Kennedy should take copy of it with him to read while the vultures gnaw on his liver.

Really, Really Hate America? Read This, Unless It Has Been Banned by Your Local Public Library of School District

           

           educere Latin - to lead away (from ignorance)

education- give intellectual, moral, and social instruction to (someone, especially a child), typically at a school or university. Merriam Webster 2016

"I want beginning teachers to resist, to rebel against all of it, to reject these clichés, to stand on their own feet, and to make their way toward the moral heart of teaching at its best." - Bill Ayers, Terrorist and Retired College of Education Professor.

Colin Kaepernick and other foolish youngsters who do bloodless, inconsequential and juvenile demonstrations accepted by the script writers for Social Justice Warriors should be forgiven.  They do not know any better.

Kneeling during the National Anthem, stomping, burning and desecrating the American flag, yelling, or spray painting obscenities about police, the President Elect, Jews, Israel, white neighbors, black neighbors, Mexican Americans, or Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are just ignorant and spoiled people acting out.

Reacting to such actions with anything but a raised eyebrow, must be reserved to Veterans.

Me, I'm as yellow as a duck's foot and drew a magic Draft lottery that allowed me to finish college and become an English teacher.  Most guys my age (64), were as lucky.  The guys a few years older, went to Vietnam and many did not come home; many more came home without limbs, attached to colostomy bags, in wheel chairs and all with more horror than Joseph Conrad novel.

Kids no longer are introduced to Joseph Conrad, William Thackeray, Walter Scott, Owen Wister, or Edward E. Hale*, because Marxists like William Ayers dominated American Colleges of Education since the 1980's.  Literature has been denied its common humanity, by disciples of idiotic critical theorists and semiotic totalitarians like Noam Chomsky.

Had high teachers been trained in rigorous mastery of their disciplines (math, science, literature & composition, history and government) rather than John Dewey inspired radical theories and social engineering nonsense,  more informed intellects would be voting.

Saturday, the Chicago Bears will play the San Francisco 49-ers and their daffy QB Colin Kapernick.

Kaepernick's PR guru seems to have given the bad advice, just like Bill Ayers poisoned legions of current public school teachers in his time at UICC.

Education means the condition of having been led away from ignorance.  The evidence points to a condition contrary to it its purpose.

Colin Kaepernick, a child of the bi-racial union of an African American father, who abandoned the union before the child was born and a young white woman who could not care for the child. Colin Kaepernick was adopted by a white family in Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin and moved with them to California, where the boy displayed great athletic talents in baseball ( Colin was drafted by the CUBS in 2009) and football ( he decided to QB for the University of Nevada Wolves.  He took a degree in business and was drafted into the NFL.

Things seem to indicate to me that Colin Kaepernick might never have been assigned much less read Edward Everrett Hale's very long short story - The Man Without a Country.

I suggest that contemporaries of Colin Kaepernick are wholly unfamiliar with this work of American Literature - deemed to be an artifact of dead white men and a document of Imperialism, by too many American colleges.

Here is an assignment.

Read this story linked here

Tomorrow - let's talk about it.

Do you think that if Colin Kaepernick and thousands of young people and far too many older folks, behaving like him, would act better, had they been educated by a competent teacher about the truths made evident in the Man Without a Country? 

* for my lazy lads:

 On trial for supporting Aaron Burr, U.S. Army lieutenant Philip Nolan denounces the U.S. and says that he never wants to hear about his country again. Exiled to U.S. Naval warships, Philip moves from ship to ship, never returning to or hearing about America.
At first he is unrepentant, but over time he becomes desperate for news of his country. He asks a young sailor for news of America and urges him to never speak ill of America. "Stand by her, boy, as you would stand by your mother, " he says, referring to America as "her," which he does each time he talks about the United States. While at a ship party, he asks a woman with whom he dances for news of America, but she refuses and walks away.
Years after his sentence, he realizes he is dying. He shows an officer named Danforth a shrine he built to America. The shrine includes a portrait of George Washington, a painted bald eagle and an outdated map. This map, he says, is proof that he has a country. He asks again for news, and Danforth gives in, sharing all of the major events that occurred since his trial except the Civil War.
After he dies, an epitaph he wrote is discovered. He describes himself as loving his country like no other man loves her but acknowledges that he deserved nothing from her.

Why Are 'Useful Idiots" Always Millionaires? From Bill Ayers to Jamie Foxx

No Charmin for using, much less squeezing in Caracass, there Jamie!



Three-year-old Ashley Pacheco cries while receiving an injection as her mother Oriana watches at the University Hospital in Caracas, Venezuela in late August. Two weeks after Ashley scraped her knee, she was screaming in a hospital, fighting for her life as her family scoured Caracas for scarce antibiotics. Venezuela is running short on 85 per cent of basic medicines. As the health care system collapses, the tiniest slips, like a little girl?s tumble while chasing her brother, are turning into life-or-death crises. (Photo: AP)

 “At this challenging time of President Hugo Chavez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law, and respect for human rights.” President Obama 2013

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Actor Jamie Foxx has met with President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.
Foxx, who won the Oscar Award for "Ray" in 2004, visited Maduro in the presidential palace in Caracas. State media said Foxx was there to support the country's socialist revolution and attend the signing of an agreement between Venezuela and its allies for the construction of houses for the poor.
Foxx posed for photos with the deeply-unpopular president of the economically embattled South American country.
In a national address Tuesday, Maduro praised Foxx's work. Foxx hasn't commented publicly on what motivated his visit.
Several U.S. celebrities have visited Venezuela to support the country's socialist revolution over the years, including actors Sean Penn and Danny Glover.

In 2013, Hugo Chavez kicked the bucket and his apprentice Jefe Maduro took over Venezuela and in three years cork-screwed the population into the ground with miracle of socialism. For three years, the land of Chicago White Sox Hall of Famers Louis Aparicio and Oswaldo José "Ozzie" Guillén Barrios has been plagued with riots, toilet paper shortages empty food shelves and government elimination of human rights.

A three year old girl scrapped her knee and two weeks later, because of the Single Payer Health Care System of Hugo Care, the child was at death's door.  National Socialized Health Care - Compasinos!

This is because, ". . .President Chavez used oil money and foreign debt to fuel consumption and went on a campaign of nationalising private companies — more than 1,000 we are told — that his Government regarded as not working in the interest of the Venezuelan public.
But President Maduro, blinkered by his loyalty to Mr Chavez, has added to the problem, and his policies have taken Venezuela to the sad place it is today.
Surely, the people of this great country, which has the largest oil reserves in the world, deserve much better than this.
The question is: Do they have the will and stamina to continue opposing the Government and the State institutions that support it?"

Nah.

President Obama has not uttered word one about this tragedy on-going daily in South America.

Bill Ayers, a trust fund baby Terrorist of '60's turned "distinguished scholar of education" at University of Illinois Chicago Campus ( Cement City), cut his Marxist baby teeth on Cuban  sugar cane, on money his Daddy squeezed out of Commonwealth Edison users in Chicago.   I imagine the University of Michigan hemp toker had a swell time as Fidel's guest during this halcyon harvest of youth.  I rode the "L" to Loyola, until Jim Molloy offered rides from the south side, while he was in the Police Academy in senior year.

James " Molly" Molloy, like Dan "Sarah" Burns were two Leo High School bad asses given girl's names by  sisters who did not want baby brothers.  Molly became Chicago Police Department Deputy Superintendent under Superintendent Terry Hillard, Dan Burns became a real estate cartographer and engineer and Bill Ayers became a domestic terrorist all around the same time.  I became a high school teacher.

We all did pretty well.  Three of us worked at it and Bill Ayers was handed his and became a leading 'useful idiot.' America has always had useful idiots and almost to a person they were children of privilege - front of the liners, wealthy and not well-to-do.

John Reed
Roger Nash Baldwin
Lincoln Steffens
Armand Hammer
John Dewey
Jane Addams

Bill Ayers' Dad had clout aplenty and he needed his boy Bill's past laundered.  I believe Bill Ayers was laundered by Abner Mikva, Dr. Quentin Young, Richie Daley, Stan Ikenberry, Amalgamated Bank and many others.  In 2008, Bill Ayers' apprentice, Senator Barack Obama ran for and won the Office of President of the United States.  The grey whiskered cane-cutter of the 1960's, was snug on the Board of Directors of the Woods Fund. a Distinguished Scholar at Cement City and a frequent visitor of Bolivarista nations in South America, especially Dictator Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Gee, I think that just might be enough links.

Now, I read that Oscar winning actor, comic and TV ad Pitchman Jamie Foxx went down to Caracas to aid President Maduro in his time need and understanding." Foxx posed for photos with the deeply-unpopular president of the economically embattled South American country.In a national address Tuesday, Maduro praised Foxx's work. Foxx hasn't commented publicly on what motivated his visit."

That gives the guy a little wiggle room.  Just visiting a nation without any Charmin to use, let alone squeeze, I guess,

Rather, like the Hollywood clowns who preach about " The More You Know" on TV and shove political, cultural, religious and life-style opinions up the noses of the Americans who made them wealthy people, Jamie Foxx is tending to the 'the right side of history's" knitting.  No doubt for a fee.

The most strident voices for 'social transformation' never walk the walk.

Bill Ayers stayed in capitalist America.

Lenny DiCaprio jets to Global Worming screeds.

They are all pretty much useful idiots for whomever, whatever, or wherever what counts as genuine, historically accurate and true about America a bad thing.

They wear the Armani, drink the Clicquot, drive the Ferrari Sergio and fight the people who maintain all that is true, good and helpful to others.

The useful idiots from Roger Baldwin, to Bill Ayers, to Jamie Foxx will always be around, but they are never with us.

Rahm "The Business Magnet" Mayor Waves Bye, Bye to Oprah?????

Did I miss something . . . again? Oprah and Stedm . . .Gail?  , , , are blowing town?  For keeps?

Rahm, my mail box stuffings told me was the reason Chicago has such a swell Moody's Rating and why big businesses love to soak their toes in the pot-holes on west Washington and Randolph street and drive.  He's the business magnet, the oozing sack of honey sugar spilled out on the concrete and clay crumbling 'neath* our feets.

Yet, yet . . .I learn that Oprah is being quit of Chicago . . . altogether!  Our iconic Steve Dahl with a tan and chick wardrobe will be as gone as the knocked out cats at a Pitchfork Musis Fest?

Oprah Winfrey and her collection of shows are settling in Hollywood.

By year’s end, Winfrey’s Chicago-based Harpo Studios will close its doors, with the 26-year-old company's productions transitioning to OWN headquarters in Los Angeles. The news, which Winfrey delivered in person to her Harpo staff on Tuesday morning, comes two months after her burgeoning cable network moved into a new space in West Hollywood. Though the Chicago lease continues through April 2016, Winfrey and her key executives intend to stop the back-and-forth routine they've been balancing for nearly half a decade sooner than that.
In a phone interview from the Harpo offices in Chicago, Winfrey acknowledges a mix of excitement and nostalgia. "[Chicago has] been everything for me. I've spent more hours in this building than I have any other building on Earth. ... We were here when there was nothing but hoes and rats on the street, and now it's one of the hottest neighborhoods [in Chicago]," she says, noting that OWN will stop shooting shows there as of Tuesday. "The time had come to downsize this part of the business and to move forward. It will be sad to say goodbye, but I look ahead with such a knowing that what the future holds is even more than I can see."

Well, I'll be dipped and rolled!!  Oprah is down-sizing her operations . . .and that is exactly what Rahm Emanuel is doing to Chicago!

I will not miss the tubby she- scold anymore than I will miss dialing into WLS AM!  Oprah did nothing for the poor black kids that I help go onto the colleges and trades and vocations of the American Middle Class.
Oprah's charity watch dog was no other than the CPS itchy-palm king Rufus Williams. Rufus, a nasty littleman, told me, 'Send no more Leo proposals for grants.'  As if.

Oprah, like Pfleger, Jesse Jackson and Bill Ayers, are "chicago people" that lemmings always defend with a solemn -"They do alot of good."   To which I invariably reply, " For example?"  AND the crickets chirp, while tie two legged lemmings ooze away from me.


"Alpha Mike Foxtrot, Oprah" , to quote the late Vietnam hero and Chicago homice detective Martin J. Tully,  take it with you; you didn't leave much here.

Maybe ex- Harpo Studio could be a Star Wars Museum and CPD blacksite, or a Presidential Mobile Library. 

Now, let's see if Mayor Rahm gets asked about Oprah's Exodus? Gee, Mr. Rahm, if a 1%er leaves your Chicagoland what about all the 99%ers?  Is that reall 'smart sizing?'  Shouldn't we, after all really be Oprah-Sizing?

Strike that rock, Moses! 


* I dunno, I just like it

President Obama Pays Back Bill Ayers for All of His Kindnesses - Cuba is Just Folks, Again

"The 400-page report, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times, revealed that Cuban intelligence officers in the General Directorate of Intelligence (known by its initials in Spanish as the DGI, Cuba’s equivalent of the CIA) set up the Venceremos Brigades in which WUO members participated." New York Times

“The ultimate objective of the DGI’s participation in the setting up of the Venceremos Brigades was “the recruitment of individuals who are politically oriented and who someday may obtain a position, elective or appointive, somewhere in the U.S. Government, which would provide the Cuban Government with access to political, economic and military intelligence.”  

For those of you who have been paying attention, President Obama does exactly what he became President to do - Pay it back.

Bill Ayers, IUC retiree, Weatherman Alumnus, Cuban Sugar Cane Cutter and Barack H. Obama's Chicago "Chinaman" hired the bi-racially attractive affirmative action graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law to serve as President of The Woods Family Fund and the Annenberg Challenge.

Ayers had his past laundered by his Dad's Com Ed loot and landed a sinecure in education department of University of Illinois Chicago, seats on several 501(c) 3 boards as well as a job for his odious Old Lady at Northwestern University School of Law.  History erased is history forgotten.

Ayers  fundamentally transformed Chicago Public Schools from hopelessly inept places of learning into the Marxist coated billion-dollar disasters they remain to this day.  Bill Ayers is an energetic globe trotting ideological gremlin - Ayers carbon foot-prints can be found in Boliva, Venezuela, Mother Cuba, El Salvador, Peru, Columbia and on the Mexican border in our Hemisphere, but also on the streets of Cairo, Moscow, and all over Gaza.   He most recently did the bidding of Presidential puppeteer Valerie Jarrett for the Shiite mullahs in Tehran.  Interestingly, the very words that come out of Bill Ayers' tireless yap can be heard on the panels of MSNBC, CNN, NBC and Public Television.

President Obama has two years to make nice with Iran, betray the Kurds and turn Kim Jong Un into the Winston Churchill of the Pacific Rim. He'll also do his level best to make sure that America splinters into factions of very angry slogan chanters.

Yesterday, Obama paid the debt to Bill Ayers and saved Cuba from economic implosion - you see Putin's Petro muscle and Venezuela's Bolivarista 40-weight ain't worth much any more.  They are fracking screwed, blued and tatooed.

President Obama bowed to the Old Sugar Cane Cutter Bill - Cuba has been laundered.

Samantha Power, Islamist Terror's Best Shield, Appointed by Obama to Combat Global Genocide?

Benghazi, more than the IRS/James Rosen/AP Scandals, will be the final veil removed from Obama's daffy diplomacy and defense deconstruction.  Samantha Power's name will of necessity surface, as she has been the Obama's puppetrix and Third World sponsored dominatrix in all matters Islam from Cairo Giveaways, to Hamas Flotilla regattae, to Pan Libyan adventureisms.

On Memorial Day 2013 President Obama spoke at the National Holocaust Museum - most fitting.  President Obama sullied the day with his announcement that Samantha Power is out of the White House and appointed to a new executive fiat creation -

WASHINGTON---The Obama White House issued new measures on Friday to prevent genocides and mass atrocities, creating an "Atrocities Prevention Board" in the wake of the failure of the "Never Again" vow taken following the German Holocaust to stop the murders of entire populations. . . . The Obama White House efforts to address genocide is headed by Samantha Power, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Power won a Pulitizer Prize for her book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide"and worked briefly for President Obama when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois.

Professor Power belongs to the OxFam breed of antisemites - college degree'd Brits and Irish poser - OXFAM wannabees who support Pan- Palestinian (read HAMAS) Victimhood no matter what the evidence proves otherwise and a fashionably Left ( read CPI) point view calling for the anihilation of the only Democracy in the Middle East - Israel.  Israelis are Zionists and Zionist are Nazis and Nazis created the Holocaust, doncha neeewww. Quite.

American Progressives ( read mildly educated elites) are mad to take contemptuous slaps and condescension for such OXFAM worthies as Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, Archbishop Tutu the most reliable old Red in purple, and of course the lads of Coldplay.  OXFAM and Amnesty International were hijacked at about the same time in 1970's. Both demand a global. . .International . . .acceptance of principles and purposes -lock step.

OXFam's Purpise # 2. gives me the willies -"The purpose of Oxfam is to help create lasting solutions. . . ( Final Solution, n'est pas?). 

Professor Power is a bold critic of American history, policy, defense and culture.  Professor Power is Bill Ayers on Zoloft.

If you are OK with the White House and State Department's handling of the Benghazi slaughter, Samantha Power makes sense as the Obama Genocide Czarina.

 How about Louis Farrakhan as national spokesman for America's Other White Meat?

Stephen Hawking and Some Other Public Intellectual Dumb-assesI

 "If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good."--- Ezra Pound

Sometimes both are true, Mr. Pound.  Love your poetry, but I would take a pass on a pub crawl with you.
I have a weird social code.

If I get on someones nerves, I try avoid social contact with them; why put the poor suffering SOB with time spent with me?  Likewise, if I find another person to repellent, phony, self-absorbed, mean-spirited, or just bone-stupid, I tend to decline invitations to share thoughts.

I love a good debate and like to have my opinions challenged with spirited, thoughtful and good natured vigor. I learn from people that way.   There is so much that I do not know, that I can not allow my inclinations and prejudices to get in the way.  If more people thought the way I do . . . we'd eat pretty damn good.

Ignorance is no crime, but stupid is a life sentence.

I have know off-charts IQs who happened to be the most petty, cheap-tipping, half-baked, bigoted arrogant dumb asses this side of a Columbia University faculty May Day picnic.

Stupid people do not share anything, unless it is forcibly pried out of the pink digits.  Want to measure the worth of a Mensa Member, or Phi Beta Kappan Rhodes Scholar?  Watch her tip a bartender, or him a waitress.  Stupid people delight in taking any wildly contrarian point of view in order to clutch the attention of one all gathered - ' America and Third Reich planned to impose Christianity on the free-thinking indigenous Unitarians of New Guinea by introducing 'cargo cultism' during WWII and conducting genocide on the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Activists of Port Morseby, Weewak and Owen Stanley Mountain folk."

Thank you Oliver Stone; now go load up that pipe of yours and get back to us on ShoTime.

Today, another beauty surfaced.

Stephen Hawking boycotted a conference in Israel to 'protest' Jews demanding that Palestinian fascists stop blowing up pizza parlors full of kids, showering rockets on neighborhoods and calling for a New Holocaust.

Hawking is the much afflicted physicist who operates from a wheel chair command center and who knows the exact quants in quantum mechanics.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - British cosmologist Stephen Hawking has pulled out of an Israeli conference, joining an academic boycott of Israel to protest against its occupation of Palestinian lands, Cambridge University said on Wednesday.
The wheelchair-bound Hawking, who has won international recognition for his work on black holes, had been due to speak at a prestigious conference in June organized by Israeli President Shimon Peres that draws hundreds of leading world figures.
However, his name was quietly dropped from the list of participants earlier this week, giving a major boost to supporters of pro-Palestinian groups that want to isolate Israel on the international stage over the continued occupation.
"This is his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there," the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine said on its website.

Hawking has joined the company of other public intellectuals and artists who proved to be absolute dumb-asses in world events, politics and living within the columns that make up history's personal pagination - Poets Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats were tickled by fascism's trinkets -soaring rhetoric and mythopoeic imagery.  Pound became radio traitor for Mussolini and Yeats formed his own Celto-fascist political party.

Semiotic totalitarian Noam Chomsky leads the pack as a dumb-ass, with all of hate of a Bill Ayers and all of gravity of MSNBC.  The old clown is pathetic and no more of a public prophet than the now forgotten mope Ward Churchill.

First, Chomsky is an absolutely shameless liar. A master of the argument in bad faith. He will say anything in order to get people to believe him. Even worse, he will say anything in order to shut people up who disagree with him. And I’m not necessarily talking about his public critics. If you've ever seen how he acts with ordinary students who question what he says, it's quite horrifying. He simply abuses them in a manner I can only describe as sadistic. That is, he clearly enjoys doing it. I don't think anyone ought to be allowed to get away with that kind of behavior.
Second, Chomsky is immensely important to the radical left. When it comes to American foreign policy he isn't just influential, he's basically all they have. Almost any argument made about foreign affairs by the radical left can be traced back to him. That wasn't the case when he started out back in the late '60s, but it is now.
Third, he is essentially the last totalitarian. Despite his claims otherwise, he's more or less the last survivor of a group of intellectuals who thought systemic political violence and totalitarian control were essentially good things. He babbles about human rights all the time, but when you look at the regimes and groups he's supported, it’s a very bloody list indeed.
Communism and fascism are obviously dead as the proverbial doornail, but I doubt the totalitarian temptation will ever go away. The desire for unity and a kind of beautiful tyranny seems to spring from somewhere deep in the human psyche.
Fourth—and this may be most important—he makes people stupid. In this sense, he's more like a cult leader or a New Age guru than an intellectual. He allows people to be comfortable with their prejudices and their hatreds, and he undercuts their ability to think in a critical manner. To an extent, this has to do with his use of emotional and moral blackmail. Since he portrays everyone who disagrees with him as evil, if you do agree with him you must be on the side of good and right. This is essentially a kind of secular puritanism, and it's very appealing to many people, for obvious reasons, I think. We all want to think well of ourselves, whether we deserve it or not.There is an intellectual side to this, as well. You see it clearly in his famous debate with Michel Foucault. Chomsky says at one point that there is a moral and ethical order that is hardwired into human beings. And Foucault basically asks him, why? How do you know this hardwired morality exists? And even if it exists, how can we know that it is, in fact, moral in the first place? We may feel it to be moral, but that doesn't make it true.Chomsky's answer is essentially: Because I believe it to be so. Now, whatever that is, it isn't thinking. In fact, it's an excuse for not thinking. Ironically, Chomsky later said that Foucault was the most amoral man he ever met, whereas I would argue that Foucault was simply pointing out that Chomsky's “morality” is in fact a form of nihilism. (emphases my own)

I have read this clown.  There are people who do important work in linguistics, like Northwestern University's Tolstoy scholar Gary Saul Morson, there work makes sense to people who want to present texts to their students in manner that will broaden conversation, not diminish talk.  Noam don't play that way; hence his appeal to loud mouths and phonies.

Chicago - 3; Cleveland - 5: Chris Matthews Nothing: MSNBC Scores Again!

Without regard for the bleeding, the mourning, or the shocked following the terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon.  MSNBC's Idiot Supreme Chris Matthews uttered his fatuous snake oil

"Normally, domestic terrorists, people tend to be on the far right, well that’s not a good category, just extremists, let’s call them that."   Chris Matthews MSNBC

Roll the tape all way back to last Spring:

Chicago (NATO) Three:

The AP reports the arrests were made Wednesday in a nighttime raid after police discovered a plot to attack a number of targets, including the aforementioned campaign headquarters and the Mayor’s home. They report further that the defense is planning on arguing that the plot was actually a creation of undercover police officers, and not the men arrested:

Defense attorneys alleged that the arrests were an effort to scare the thousands of people expected to protest at the meeting of world leaders. They told a judge that undercover police were the ones who brought the Molotov cocktails.

“This is just propaganda to create a climate of fear,” defense attorney Michael Duetsch said.

Later, outside the courtroom, Duetsch said two undercover police officers or informants who called themselves “Mo” and “Gloves” were also arrested during the Wednesday raid, and defense attorneys said they later lost track of the two.

“We believe this is all a setup and entrapment to the highest degree,” Duets said.

The men have been identified as Brian Church, Jared Chase, and Brent Vincent Betterly– 20, 24, and 24 respectively.

Cleveland Five


According to the FBI, Wright, Baxter and Hayne are self-proclaimed anarchists who formed into a small group and considered a series of evolving plots over several months
.- Douglas Wright, 26 
- Brandon Baxter, 20 
- Anthony Hayne, 35 
- Connor Stevens, 20 
- Joshua Stafford, 23


Chris Mattews - Nothing.

  

Then of course there is this old chestnut -




Matthews is an intellectual dwarf with the personality of dial tone; yet, he is somehow a voice in journalism.



Note to Tingles - American born domestic terrorists are either blown to smithereens, or get do-nothing jobs at blue-chip universities . . .and go on MSNBC.

April Fools: Rahm's Mag Mile and Forrest Claypool's CTA: Nobody to Help Stop Well-Accessoried Teens

"There was nobody to help. There was no time, really. We were surrounded it happened in one stop, and then they got off the next stop, at Lake,'' she said. 27 year old woman victimized on Forrest Claypool's CTA

Was it a 'melee' as the Sun Times reports?  An altercation over smoker's rights?  A 'wilding'? 'Flash Mob?  

No, this was behavior rooted in the sad, secular, systemic mess we call public education.  This was not a storming of the Bastille, or Bolivarista Peoples Revolution that is so much a part of 'elementary education expert' Bill Ayer's doctrine.

The kids were well-clothed, nutritionally robust, energetic, focused and more than moderately accoutered with the latest Apple or Microsoft entertainment and communication applications and devices that would make Jobs and Gates glow with appreciation.  Both techno Edisons are icons of public education.

More so, from most accounts, these kids who look like the cast of a Disney series availed themselves of public transportation - the CTA.

The Sun Times feature leads off with the word melee, an innocuous sounding term for 'beating the supreme shit' out of another human being for no earthly good reason.

At least the Chicago Tribune account presented the facts of the attack as provided by the victim.

Now, a melee is a combat between two willing opponents - it is a term that arose from Middle Ages when knights and other men-at-arms squared off according to the rules of combat - most Catholic school kids know that.

The attack of a woman on the west side L smacks not of a melee -

A 27-year-old woman said she was returning home with her mother Saturday night on the Red Line after a dim sum dinner when a group of girls got on the train at the Monroe station and appeared to want to pick a fight.
"This girl started blowing smoke in my face, and she flicked her cigarette ashes at me,'' said the woman, who asked not to be identified. "I said: 'You need to put that out,' and the next thing I know there's all these girls that jumped on top of us.''
They began punching her face and then went for her hair. She believes their attackers had knives or box cutters and padlocks possibly placed inside socks."I put my head down between my legs so they would stop beating me in the face, but they were trying to pull my face up and hit me more,'' she said. "They ripped out chunks of my hair, and I've got a black eye and bruises on my face, and all over my back and shoulder.''
The 11 teenagers arrested in that incident at the CTA's State/Lake station in the Loop about 6:35 p.m. were among a total of 28 people arrested downtown Saturday night for disturbances that ranged from bumping into passers-by on sidewalks to the attack on the CTA train, authorities said.

The attackers were teenage girls, who have been taught under an educational rubric of entitlement.  I believe that these confused kids act out because they believe that they are entitled act out - after all they were encouraged to cheer on Occupy  idiots, NATO bomb-makers and their teachers who abandoned them last summer.  These kids have been taught, not the etymology and application of a word like melee, that personal empowerment is entitlement - what are they supposed to do?

What are you supposed to do?  Move.  Move out of Chicago.  It is all about real estate, Neighbors.  Real estate to be developed for green spaces, cultural entertainment and dining venues, fitness centers, and certainly no homes, apartments, or dwellings beyond the planned Urban Center Chicago  Urban Center Chicago is not for Stash, Wanda, Tony, Maria, Nacho, Teresa, Paddy, Nora, Clifton and Carmesha and their damn kids. It is for Aprile, Dak, E. Morton and Misty Salt, Spencer and Seth.

When public safety has lost all meaning; when basic city services are denied, or diminished by executive fiat, when schools become training grounds for thugs, it might be time to move.

That is why public safety has been purchased at the hands of the G. Flint Taylors, Jon Loevys, Locke Bowmans and the GDS, Vice Lords, Four Corner Hustlers, Mikey Cobras, and Latin Kings, as well as a grant or two for Ceasefire, while any and all public confidence in Chicago Police has been eroded.

That is why more people are alright with Privatizing Sanitation with the Garbage Grid. Seth and Spencer want those over-paid snoring louts fired. Seth and Spencer would be perfectly happy if the Fire Department were hired out and those tubby Mc911 heroes would leave for Romeoville.

That is why an otherwise unemployable good like Forrest Claypool keeps popping up and handed the wheel and throttle of public transportation - he is about Bombardier purchases, Red Line contracts and Ventra Cards and not the safety of a young lady and her mother who foolishly believe that riding the L should be violence free.

Don't think for minute that Forrest Claypool* gives a fat rat's ass about CTA riders, otherwise the CTA would  have addressed thuggery on public transportation long ago. Smart guy like Forrest could do just about anything to reform anything, if he really wanted to; at least that is what the news media always says.

That is why Mayor Rahm Emanuel can sleep nights after putting the bite on President Obama for a loan of $100 million buckeens to gussy up the Riverwalk, rather than hire more cops, improve their working conditions and really do something about melees by the kids.

He might even really try to improve public schools by demanding Vouchers.

Nope.  It is easier to wait for the frustrated, the frightened and the families to move the hell away, while his cheerleaders in the media wring-hands.


*

Happy Easter, Christ Has Risen! Now, Let's Roll Back the Big Stone Keeping Schools in a Cave

Kids believe only what is taught to them.  Last night 28 kids, most under the age of 18, were arrested on Chicago's Mag Mile for intimidating people and another bunch were arrested following an assault on a woman who asked that the kids put out their cigarettes. I do not believe that the youngsters were engaged in civil disobedience demanding that CPS keep failing schools open, nor were they concerned with the plight of LGBTQ citizens.

From this same edition of the paper, the Opinion section of the Chicago Tribune was thick with opinions on both issues as being fundamental to life on our planet.  The school closings?  I see them them as part of the overall Rahm Plan to shrink the City of Chicago ( services) down to an Urban Center.  Likewise, the abhorrent incivility tolerated on Chicago Transportation systems by the Mayor and CTA Boss Forrest Claypool is a component in this plan.  Why else would a Mayor not do his utmost to light a fire under his appointee to interdict such behavior and provide the necessary police officers at his disposal to correct the situation?  Answer.  It is not part of the Plan.

The Plan includes a $ 100 million dollar loan to gussy up the River Walk, but not seek a loan to hire more cops.

Back to the schools. The closed schools, the largest school closing in American history, are  real estate.

Take a look at who is protesting the school closings ( CTU's Karen Lewis & Jesse Sharkey)  - they worked with Mayor Emanuel to engineer the closings.  Their Red-shirted Dragon Dance through the Loop last week provided Bill Ayers and opportunity to be described as an "elementary school expert' in the Chicago media, as well as swell venue for SEIU to play civil disobedience for cameras without the possibility of arrest.  Tickets were issued.

For the last thirty years Bill Ayers* and the well-camouflaged Mike Klonsky have trained a generation of radicals who now control Chicago Teachers Union through CORE.  Chicago Public Schools have nose-dived deeper into the tax-dollars from the moment the Annenberg Challenge was boarded and looted by Bolsheviks and took command of the Education Department at University of Illinois at Chicago.  Here's a challenge.  How many UICC disciples of Billy Ayers are CPS teachers?

The idea of schools has been entombed in a cave behind the boulder rolled by Ayers and Klonsky.

Schools should reflect the neighborhoods they serve.  Catholic schools most certainly do just that and graduates of Catholic schools, black, brown and white manage to avoid massive arrests on Mag Mile and intimidate passengers on the CTA.

Ayers and Klonsky made small schools (cadres) wholesome to lazy and not very bright editorial boards and columnists.   Schools fail, because they are supposed to do just that.

Chicago is a Catholic city.  No matter how much Eric Zorn, Mary Schmich, Neil Steinberg, Carol Marin, Clarence Page, Dawn Turner Trice, or WTTW try to obscure that fact, Catholics rub up against Baptists, Unitarians, AME, Lutheran, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Dutch Reformed and atheist neighbors.  Schools should reflect that fact, but they are not allowed to do that.

Christ died on Friday, busted Hell's prisoners out on Saturday, and triumphed over death today, when he rolled back the big rock.

The big rock blocking real schools and the idea of a school is still wedged in pretty deep.   Kids are taught what to fear and given no means to conquer fear.  Behavior reflects what people are all about.


*"Elementary education expert and professor Bill Ayers — who has sparked controversy on the national political scene with his ties to President Obama — was in the crowd in support of teachers.
" 'The assault on public education and abandonment of these communities has to be resisted,' Ayers said." Chicago Sun Times

Thundering Dick Simpson Demands More . . . of The Same Only More!

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is on the phone.

“Hi, Lisa. How are you?” asks Dick Simpson, head of the UIC Department of Political Science, as he sits in his book-lined office in the Behavioral Sciences Building. UICC - Street Cred of Thundering Dick Simpson

The Progressive way  to rid a home of raccoons, horse flies, tics, bed bugs, Norway rats and the odd timber wolf would be to tap a few reporters armed with studies from UICC, demand time on WTTW, make tour of the Dane Placko, Mike Flannery gas-and-nod shows, demand a tax-payer funded home inspector and a blue ribbon panel consisting of Dr. Quentin Young, Deb Mell, Deb Shore, Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon ( 5-String Banjo), Boss Terry Cosgrove, Forrest " Ho Gauge Rail" Claypool, NU(a)TO Andy Thayer, Ralph Martire, Dawn Clark Netsch, Slim Coleman and of course the ubiquitous Chris Kennedy to confab and vigorously  note that the home owner should 

• close doors
• fix screens
• toss food waste in plastic bags and place them in the black plastic gondolas provided by Waste Management or the Ward Office
• Be Sure to Re-cycle cardboard, plastics and metal and place them in the Blue Re-cycle bins
• Prepare to move once home ownership is lost, due to failure to meet the basic mortgage obligations
• Apply for Affordable Housing

Yep, Thundering Dick Simpson is setting the table for Progressive Knit-Hat, Gender Ambiguous, Childless and generally disagreeable candidates to flourish in our suburbs. How about small towns too?  Think Custer Park, Diamond, Eileen, Reddick and Papineau Illinois Machine Politics and Mossback Graft -" Clel, I'll vote for you, if'n I get two jars a stink bait." Done and done.

With the full push of Chicago's media, Thundering Dick is getting full cooperation to the very same thing to suburban government as the City of Chicago and the mythical homeowner above with his latest UICC paper written by a bunch of kids at Cement City University and under the supervision of Thundering Dick, his own bad self.

Thundering Dick earned his Progressive spurs from Abner Mikva and went on to a long and inconsequential career as an office-holder - Alderman - before becoming a 40 Watt academic at Stanley ( Terrorist Bill Ayers' career laundering Rabbi)Ikennberry's Circle. Thundering Dick's Green Grass and Greed: Corruption in the Suburbs is a wow-read for folks who do not read very much.  Thundering Dick leads with his jowls on this one -

The obvious and potentially most effective method for dealing with corrupt officeholders
would be to elect new public officials dedicated to ethical behavior and governmental reform. Such candidates, if elected, can help change the culture of corruption in these suburbs. Voters should support candidates committed to fighting corruption.

Thundering Dick-King Maker

Well, I'll be dipped and rolled!!!!!!!  Ain't that a wonderment!!!!!!! Vote for new folks!  Well, that must mean a whole new line of folks trotted out by old Thundering Dick, his own bad self!

The Study is a Cliff's Notes of old news stories and attendant graphs about incidents of corruption in the suburbs - some going back to the 1970's when Thundering Dick brought the Democratic Machine under Old Man Daley to its knees . . . with laughter. That was then and this is now.


Back then, when everyone and everything still worked,  folks like Thundering Dick were laughed out of the room; these days, we elect the likes of Blago, Burris, Joe Moore, Sheila Simon, Pat Quinn, Mike Quigley, Jan Schakowsky, Toni Preckwikle and other ninnies and grifters.

I am sure that Thundering Dick has a rapt audience for his summary.  Folks just don't take the time to read, connect dots to dimwits, and are much too kind and polite to tell Progressives to go pound sand.  Some folks, anyway.

http://www.uiaa.org/uic/news/uicalumni/0911a.html

http://www.uic.edu/depts/pols/ChicagoPolitics/SuburbanCorruption.pdf
http://www.uic.edu/depts/paff/clips/06-26-2012.pdf

Readers Digest Condensed Version of " Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father"

NEW READERS DIGEST CONDENSED VERSION - Available here for the 1st time!

Foreword by Bill Ayers, Weather Underground (ret.) & Distinguished Professor of Education Not Granted Emeritus Status -University of Illinois at Chicago.

Introduction and Foreword -All Hail El Jefes Hugo and Barack of Whom I am Well Pleased and Our The Glorious Soviet Peoples Choice Award Winning Victory!!!!!

President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers Moncada and Isturiz, invited guests,comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle—I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane. Thank you, Luis, for everything you’ve done.I also thank my youngest son, Chesa Boudin, who is interpreting my talk this morning and whose book on the Bolivarian revolution has played an important part in countering the barrage of lies spread by the U.S. State Department and the corrupted Northamerican media.On my last trip to Caracas I spoke of traveling to a literacy class—Mission Robinson— in the hills above the city along a long and winding road. As we made our way higher and higher, the talk turned to politics as it inevitably does here, and someone noted that the wealthy—here and everywhere, here and in the US surely—have certain received opinions, a kind of absolute judgment about poor and working people, and yet they have never traveled this road, nor any road like it. They have never boarded this bus up into these hills, and not just the oligarchy or the wealthy—this lack of first-hand knowledge, of open investigation, of generous regard is also a condition of the everyday liberals, and even many of the radicals and armchair intellectuals whose formulations sit lifeless and stifling in a crypt of mythology about poor people. Everyone should come and travel these roads into the hills, we agreed then—and not just once, but again and again and again – if they will ever learn anything of the real conditions of life here, surely, but more important than that, if they will ever encounter the wisdom and experience and insight that lives here as well.We arrived at eight o’clock to a literacy circle already underway being conducted in a small, poorly-lit classroom. And here in an odd and dark space, a sun was shining: ten people had pulled their chairs close together—a young woman maybe 19, a grandmother maybe 65, two men in their 40s—each struggling to read. And I thought of a poem called A Poor Woman Learns to Write by Margaret Atwood about a woman working laboriously to print her name in the dirt. She never thought she could do it, the poet notes, not her– this writing business was for others. But she does it, prints her name, her first word so far, and she looks up and smiles— for she did it right.The woman in the poem—just like the students in Mission Robinson—is living out a universal dialectic that embodies education at its very best: she wrote her name, she changed herself, and she altered the conditions of her life. As she wrote the word, she changed the world, and another world became—suddenly and surprisingly—possible.I began teaching when I was 20 years old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I’d been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I’ve thought of myself as a teacher, but I’ve also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!I taught at first in something like a Simoncito—called Head Start—and eventually taught at every level in barrios and prisons and insurgent projects across the United States. I learned then that education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space – what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom? At bottom, it involves a struggle over the essential questions: what does it mean to be a human being living in a human society?Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and militarism – turning people into consumers, not citizens. Participatory democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily as equals who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life.Education contributes to human liberation to the extent that people reflect on their lives, and, becoming more conscious, insert themselves as subjects in history. To be a good teacher means above all to have faith in the people, to believe in the possibility that people can create and change things. Education is not preparation for life, but rather education is life itself ,an active process in which everyone— students and teachers– participates as co-learners.Despite being under constant attack from within and from abroad, the Bolivarian revolution has made astonishing strides in a brief period: from the Mission Simoncito to the Mission Robinson to the Mission Ribas to the Mission Sucre, to the Bolivarian schools and the UBV, Venezuelans have shown the world that with full participation, full inclusion, and popular empowerment, the failings of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome. Venezuela is a beacon to the world in its accomplishment of eliminating illiteracy in record time, and engaging virtually the entire population in the ongoing project of education.The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a poem to his fellow writers called “The Poet’s Obligation” in which he instructed them in their core responsibility: you must, he said, become aware of your sisters and brothers who are trapped in subjugation and meaninglessness, imprisoned in ignorance and despair. You must move in and out of windows carrying a vision of the vast oceans just beyond the bars of the prison– a message of hope and possibility. Neruda ends with this: it is through me that freedom and the sea will call in answer to the shrouded heart.Let those of us who are gathered here today read this poem as “The Teacher’s Obligation.” We, too, must move in and out of windows, we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education– a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation. This World Education Forum provides us a unique opportunity to develop and share the lessons and challenges of this profound educational project that is the Bolivarian Revolution.Viva Mission Sucre!Viva Presidente Chavez!Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama?* -Originally published: New York : Times Books, c1995 around the time BHO was working at the Woods Fund/Anneberg Foundation with his old Chicago Political Chinaman Billy Ayers

My pappy was a pistol and I'm a Sonofa gun!

THE END
Barack H. Obama, 1995. Hyde Park- Chicago. IL
Footnotes:
 http://billayers.wordpress.com/2006/1
* Source: NewsCore
WASHINGTON -- A new biography of Barack Obama disputes the US president's understanding that his grandfather was tortured at the hands of British troops in a fight for Kenyan independence. 

David Maraniss' book "Barack Obama: The Story" includes the accounts of five associates of Hussein Onyango Obama who all doubt he was jailed or brutalized, The (London) Daily Telegraph reported. 

Obama's memoir "Dreams From My Father" included his understanding that his grandfather was detained by British troops for being subversive "to the white man." The third wife of Onyango told stories of how he bore scars from the torture he endured in the late 1940s. 

"Five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain it did not happen," Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, said. 

Dick Opar, a former senior Kenyan police official, was quoted in Maraniss' biography saying he "would have known" if Onyango had been detained and adding, "People make up stories." 

"If you get arrested, you say it was the fight for independence, but they are arrested for another thing," Opar told Maraniss. 

It is understood that Onyango was a Muslim convert who worked for the British army in Burma during World War II and was accused of sympathizing with the Kenyan pro-independence movement that became the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952. He died in 1979. 

Obama's family tale of torture is said to underpin his coolness towards Britain, according to the Telegraph, and has been used to explain why the president decided to return a statue of Winston Churchill's bust that was previously put on display by George W. Bush in the White House. 

The new biography delves into the discrepancies between Obama's memoir accounts and the author's own research -- however Maraniss has also defended the president, by disputing widespread "mythologies" about the US leader used by detractors. 

"The other mythology of the right-wing birthers is equally preposterous," Maraniss told Piers Morgan on his CNN show Monday. 

"The fact that he was born in Honolulu on August 4th 1961 is indisputable by the facts that any historian would look at."

Read More: New Obama biography claims family tale of British brutality probably untrue

Read more: http://www.myfoxny.com/story/18820628/new-obama-biography-claims-family-tale-of-british-brutality-probably-untrue#ixzz1yLT1ef6A