Monday, October 20, 2008

Joe Epstein - Progressive Feminist Screamers -The Loathing of Sarah Palin


My career in teaching high school English is a lunch-bucket version of academics. Real teachers rarely become community activists, much less political polemicists. They are far too busy.

They get shuffled off to 'workshops' by the very people who could not hack it in the classroom and became Administrators with degrees in Education from the community college at best or mail-in diploma mills in order to hear Academics from the Colleges of Education who never once set foot in a classroom.

Teachers toss the hand outs and get in forty-winks, or grade papers while some tweedy jerk struts the stage and lights up the video.

Real teachers teach English, History, Business, Physical Education, Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Languages. They are Jim the Physics Teacher; Donna the Volleyball Coach.

Seth the Fourth Vice Principal for Curriculum Development sets up Workshops and is paid seven times what real teachers make per year.

A Real Teacher from Northwestern University, Joe Epstein*, has recently scaled down his teaching load and written another book - this one on Fred Astair The Hoofer!

Today, Joe the Writer, presents an essay on the great shout-down: Joe The Plumber is being assaulted by the American Media, because he asked a question of Sen. Barack Obama and managed to pin Obama to the mat on his Redistribution of Wealth Agenda.

Joe Epstein concentrates on the Progressive pile-on by Progressive Feminist of Sarah Palin. The Progressive Feminists loath Sarah Palin, because the Governor of Alaska is a happy person. She is beautiful, successful, active, healthy, married, centered and powerful. Most of all they hate her because Sarah Palin is very happy. Most Americans are happy- beset by troubles, heartbreak, worry to be sure, but essentially happy. Progressive Feminists like Salon's Joan Walsh demand their Female Icons be as battle-damaged as she herself seems to be, but Sarah Palin, Doggoneit, is too happy!

Here is the nub of the rub from Joe the Writer:


Strongly liberal women get most agitated over the issue--though of course to them it is no issue but a long since resolved matter--of abortion. Abortion, to be sure, is the great third-rail subject in American politics. But when a male politician is against abortion, these women can write that off as the ignorance of a standard politician, if not himself a Christian fundamentalist, then another Republican cynically going after the fundamentalist vote. A woman not in favor of abortion is something quite different.

And it is all the more strikingly different when the same woman not only holds this opinion on abortion but acts on it and knowingly bears a child with Down syndrome, a child that most liberal women would have thought reason required aborting. What else, after all, is abortion for?

A few months ago Vanity Fair ran an article about the discovery that the playwright Arthur Miller, with his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, 40 or so years ago had a Down syndrome son. Miller promptly clapped the boy into an institution--according to the article, not a first class one either--and never saw the child again. Most people would have taken this for a heartless act, one should have thought, especially on the part of a man known for excoriating the putative cruelties of capitalism and the endless barbarities of his own country's governments, whether Democratic or Republican. Yet, so far as one can tell, Arthur Miller's treatment of his own child has not put the least dent in his reputation, while Sarah Palin's having, keeping, and loving her Down syndrome child is somehow, by the standard of the liberal woman of our day, not so secretly thought the act of an obviously backward and ignorant woman, an affront to womanhood. "Her greatest hypocrisy," proclaimed Wendy Doniger, one of the leading feminist lights at the University of Chicago, "is her pretense that she is a woman."


*Joseph Epstein (born January 9, 1937) is a Chicagoan essayist, short story writer, and editor, best known as a former editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's The American Scholar magazine and for his recent essay collection, Snobbery: The American Version. He was also a lecturer at Northwestern University from 1974 - 2002. He is a Contributing Editor at The Weekly Standard and a long-time contributor of essays and short stories to The New Criterion and Commentary. The late William F. Buckley, Jr. in his review of Snobbery called Epstein the wittiest writer alive.
Essay collections and books
Divorced in America: Marriage in an age of possibility (1974)
Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life (1979)
Ambition: The Secret Passion (1980)
Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays (1983)
Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing (1985)
Once More Around the Block: Familiar Essays (1987)
Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives (1988)
A Line Out for a Walk: Familiar Essays (1991)
Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life (1993)
With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays (1995)
Life Sentences: Literary Essays (1997)
Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays (1999, paperback 2007)
Snobbery: The American Version (2002)
Envy (2003)
Friendship: An Exposé (2006)
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide (2006)
In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage (2007)
Fred Astaire (2008)

[edit] Short story collections
The Goldin Boys: Stories (1991)
Fabulous Small Jews (2003)

[edit] Short Stories
My Brother Eli appearing in The Best American Short Stories 2007 pp. 85-112.

[edit] External links
"The Culture of Celebrity: Let us now praise famous airheads" in The Weekly Standard
"Friends Aren't What They Used to Be: The New Ethos of Intimacy" a review of Friendship: An Exposé, in Slate
"Kid Turns 70: And Nobody Cares" in The Weekly Standard
"Golden Juggler" a review of In a Cardboard Belt! by Joseph Tartakovsky, in the Claremont Review of Books

From the Good Folks at Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Epstein_(writer)

Friday, October 17, 2008

Chicago Genius Tom Roeser Skewers and Broils Chicago Media Morons!








Thomas Roeser, Chicago's answer to 18th Century genius Dr. Samuel Johnson, skewers huge chunks of the meat heads who pass themselves off as journalists in Chicago.

Roeser, whose resume is longer than a Studs Terkle story, helps John Powers, local philanthropist and businessman, run Chicago's only balanced and authentic news and opinion organ Chicago Daily Observer.

It is so nicely balanced, that my south side musings appear along side those of Progressive genius, journalist, historian and political analyst Don Rose, who sent more brain cells down the drain of the gents at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap than I'd ever hope to have.

Roeser deconstructs the Chicago Media icono-sphere with all of the glee of Smash McKenna ( Pipe Coverer Extraordinaire!) in doing similar justice to a bust-out who grabbed Nualla's tip money at Keegan's Pub - more gore than Titus Andronicus and much more hilarious!


We start with Carol Marin the political columnist of the “Sun-Times.” She made her mark as a smooth TV anchor and feature reporter where her views were not readily known. Then came her rebellion at Channel 5 when management wanted to include Jerry Springer as a commentator. She left with a tsunami of favorable publicity but what wasn’t realized at the time was that her renegotiation was up for grabs and she might not have been retained anyway. But it worked. She has a smooth TV style--but as soon as she went over to the “Sun-Times” her mood 1960s Mother Superior attitude…literally…conveyed her true beliefs, that of a morally superior dilettante in politics who wants to enable true social justice on earth. Social justice means the welfare state…and which party better represents this goal than the Dems. All tied up in her sense of religious self-rectitude -which betrays, of course, a sense of vacuous non-theology.
Her first column was to celebrate that 14-carat phony with a self-embroidered history of radical activism from yesteryear, Studs Terkel, 96, a self-promoting agnostic windbag who named one of his kids after declared Communist stage actor and singer Paul Robson and , to hear Terkel tell it in his rasping voice which thrills his listeners since they fathom the real man of the street is talking… marched with the Wobblies, braved assaults from the club-wielding goons in the Armour strike, endured beatings with Walter Reuther in the Detroit sit-down strikes of the 1930, fought the white racists who opposed blacks swimming off a South Side pier in the 1920s, was black-listed because of his opposition to that hideous Joe McCarthy…all the stories inflating in coloration by the year-some invented out of whole cloth--while Ms. Marin beamed expressively and accepted his supposed man-in-the-street lingo as true genre.

As the late Steve Neal, no conservative, pointed out in a column Terkel never did anything of note for the “working class,” is in reality a b.s’ing blatherer of tales who would long since have been thrown out of a neighborhood bar for inculcating terminal boredom, since he has lived far longer than most and has license to exaggerate scandalously without fact-checking. Aside from a brief acting career on early TV, Terkel’s has done nothing noteworthy except to snap on a tape recorder and capture stories from first-hand participants for which, as a canny capitalist, he paid nothing but from which he made a fortune for himself-beginning with “Division Street America.” A self-proclaimed man of the people, he deliberately never learned to drive and rides a bus, taking care to sit by the window where he, festooned in his red-checked shirt, can be quickly glimpsed. I debated him once at Bughouse Square. A coward when confronted, this giant puff ball self-inflated turned into a clawless pussy cat. I actually went easy on him after he caved. It was the first time he was ever called on any of his stories because his recollections were at variance with history. Marin the dilettante swallows it all.
The late John McDermott a once squishy soft liberal but always a truly authenticist Catholic (who changed to a Reagan voter because of the pro-life issue,…and who was for years an office mate of mine)…once embarked on a self-designated campaign to encourage Marin, either a fallen away or fallen away wanna-be to re-embrace the faith. According to McDermott her conditions involved the whole swath of feminism: contraception, abortion rights, keep-your-hands-off-my-womb, women priests, women bishops, gay rights. Oh, said I, sarcastically, by all means let us immediately reformulate 2000 years of theology so Carol will go back to the church! He never gave up on her and remembered her in his prayers every day. I said: save your breath.
So Democratic party cross-eyed is she that when she interviewed Henry Hyde for her paper she had to put in the piece that she told him she came from a family where the women never voted Republican-as if anyone cares…but it was her way of squaring herself to write about him at all. Her way of getting an insight into how the presidential campaign is going is to sit down with David Axelrod whom (ith her little girl naivete) he thinks will give it to her straight. So cross-eyed is she that she actually believes this stuff.


Always a treat to see Tom tune-up the fatuous loudmouth Studs Terkle. Avail yourselves Citizens! Avail Yourselves!


Skewered and Grilled! Get some more with Tom Roeser!

McCain Blew the Last Debate -Race Cards Will Shower Down From Obama Until It's Over


















McCain blew the last debate. John McCain failed to follow-up on every lifeless jab at Obama's puff-pastry thin resume, association, dodge and the agenda that underlies his entire political ascent - the deconstruction of the middle class and redistribution of wealth imperative.

Andy Stern's conglomerate of PACs and SEIU are in the vanguard of Democratic National Committee's agenda to make advocacy political, one payer ( Government) health care, and monolithic American work force the Obama Magic Carpet.

McCain had Obama's hands on his forehead while his long arms kept the tiny fists from connecting anywhere. Never once did John McCain touch a rib, much less bloody Obama's nose.

It seemed that McCain's corner men had him train for a pygmy when in fact he was in the ring with Goliath.

Obama could have knocked McCain out but did not - he did not need to do so:Nothing about Franklin Raines and Fannie Mae, No Rezko, No Wright, No Real Ayers, NO SEIU, no nothing. Most of all, McCain had Obama pushed to ropes on on the John Lewis Race Baiting nonsense and McCain let him go . . .without question or consequence! You had Obama on Race and now he has McCain set up for an endless shower of Race-baiting charges. Anyone who votes for McCain is a racist and any objection to Obama is racist.

For the next 18 days, MSNBC cheerleaders and CNN sycophants will shower down charges of racial coding and subtext that will all but maintain McCain Camp's position in the corner.

McCain's fight was fixed from the start. He was going down. He did not fight Obama; he fought George Soros and those who see an opportunity to lard their fortunes by his lead; he fought SEIU and never once challenged their important part in this enterprise to deconstruct American Labor; he fought the corporate media NBC,ABC,CBS,the news papers, as well as the cartoonish 24 hour news cable circus; McCain fought eight years of Bush/Cheney; he fought Islamist Terror and their stooges in American Academia.

Now, the American voter is the last man standing.

Charles Krauthammer details the endless shower of Race Cards:

In the name of racial rectitude, McCain has denied himself the use of that perfectly legitimate issue. It is simply Orwellian for him to be now so widely vilified as a stoker of racism. What makes it doubly Orwellian is that these charges are being made on behalf of the one presidential candidate who has repeatedly, and indeed quite brilliantly, deployed the race card.

How brilliantly? The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African-Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can.

And Obama has shown no hesitation in doing so to McCain. Just weeks ago, in Springfield, Mo., and elsewhere, he warned darkly that George Bush and John McCain were going to try to frighten you by saying that, among other scary things, Obama has "a funny name" and "doesn't look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills."

McCain has never said that, nor anything like that. When asked at the time to produce one instance of McCain deploying race, the Obama campaign could not. Yet here was Obama firing a pre-emptive charge of racism against a man who had not indulged in it. An extraordinary rhetorical feat, and a dishonorable one.

What makes this all the more dismaying is that it comes from Barack Obama, who has consistently presented himself as a healer, a man of a new generation above and beyond race, the man who would turn the page on the guilt-tripping grievance politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.



Vote! I Voted for McCain/Palin. Even if a fight is fixed - Keep swinging.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Joe the Plumber -I Too Hope It Ain't So, Joe - The Vanishing Middle Class
















Joe - I am with you! I am as proudly partisan a hack as they can get - when I am for people I admire in Life and also in the cartoonish world that is politics, I stick with my friends. Generally,in politics, they tend to be hard working and honest elected officials at the local level, but with John McCain I see one of us. A genuine Middle Class Man! McCain is the real deal and no talking points or nuanced parsing changes that fact.

However, John McCain needed to give Senator Obama a real trimming and he did not. It was a debate, I know, but McCain really needed to land some serious punches and never seemed to get close.

Senator Obama was the Quill! Sadly, this media driven putsch on the White House is going the way of the people who are no friends of you, or me.

The Media decided long ago not to look into anything that would possibly keep Barack Obama from becoming the first black American President - in their infinite and unlimited gall - The Country Needs This More Than Anything. More than good schools. good teachers, a sound economy, a robust national defense, and a secure American middle class.

Ayers is a punk - with a well-heeled and well-connected cadre of cheerleaders.

Should President Obama take the oath of office the radicals who disrupted the 1968 Democratic Convention and their media stooges get their victory. Fair enough.

SEIU will dismantle the American Labor Movement.

The Fairness Doctrine will slide through and kill Free Speech.

Public Schools (Charter & Normal) will continue to make education an international laughing stock.

Abortion Industry will flourish.

America will lose the war on terror.

Hugo Chavez will keep an American President cooling his heels, until El Jefe deigns to see him.

The American Dream by 2010 will not fill a single REM cycle.

Chris Matthews's legs will tingle, because his race-baiting BS is far from done.

I already voted for John McCain here in Chicago. I hope that more people do the same. It looks bad, but I have Faith in Americans.

2012 is very long way off and I hope that you can hang onto your business. My youngest will be graduating from high school and about the only jobs an American Kid can look forward to will be working for a Community Activist or stooging for ACORN. The building trades will disappear.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Chris Buckley Explains What HE Meant by His Snub of McCain and Rub up on Obama































Heavens, Houlihan! How in the name of Hyrcania did House . . . Oh, hello. Dabbling in Geopolitical gamesmanship with estimable film maker Mike Houlihan - whose production of Tapioca premieres at the Gene Siskel Theatre on November 20th, 2008. Click my Post Title, Do! Oh, Do so attend. We were discussing the defection of dandified dabbler Christopher Buckley to the Redistribution of Wealth Syndicate of Camp Obama. Most dyspeptic over this. Salts, Please, Willingham! Now where was I, this certainly not Kansas - Ah yes Illinois -Bold Blue. Buckley, yes.

I could not get Chris Buckley to explain himself per his recent endorsement of Senator Barack Obama, as I did not try.

He is as top-hole a writer, wit, gad-about and nuanced parser as Kid Hope could ever dream of finding in his Redistribution of Wealth library - or as Sarah Palin might say - along with so many of us helots -Lie Barry. Hmmmmm.

Damme! I tried to recall, as best I could, exactly whom Chris Buckley most sounds like - there is a shiney new dime for whoever guesses the literary source for my imaginary journalism ( an homage to Huffington Post):

Chris Buckley, Poison Squirrels! Let's have it!

Hickey -'Mr. Buckley why did you eschew McCain for Obama?'

"You will agree with me that he is not everybody's money."

"There may be something in what you say, sir."
"Cleopatra wouldn't have liked him."
"Possibly not, sir."


You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower.
Scarcely had I entered the sitting-room when I found ... what appeared at first sight to be the Devil, A closer scrutiny informed me that it was Gussie Fink-Nottle, dressed as Mephistopheles.
We do not tell old friends beneath our roof-tree that they are an offence to the eyesight.
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
The female in question was a sloppy pest
There is enough sadness in life without having fellows like Gussie Fink-Nottle going about in sea boots.
A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point.
I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile. It won't work. Not a chance.
And a moment later there was a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and the relative had crossed the threshold at fifty m.p.h. under her own steam.



My Aunt Agatha, the curse of the Home Counties and a menace to one and all.
she cried in a voice that hit me between the eyebrows and went out at the back of my head.
"Have you ever heard of Market Snodsbury Grammar School?"

"Never."
"It's a grammar school at Market Snodsbury."
I told her a little frigidly that I had divined as much.

I goggled. Her words did not appear to make sense. They seemed the mere aimless vapouring of an aunt who has been sitting out in the sun without a hat.
"You're pulling my leg."

"I am not pulling your leg. Nothing would induce me to touch your beastly leg."

"But why do you want me? I mean, what am I? Ask yourself that."

"I often have."
"I'm hopeless at a game like that. Ask Jeeves about the time I got lugged in to address a girls' school. I made the most colossal ass of myself."
"And I confidently anticipate that you will make an equally colossal ass of yourself on the thirty-first of this month. That's why I want you. The way I look at it is that, as the thing is bound to be a frost, anyway,one may as well get a hearty laugh out of it."

He had been looking like a dead fish. He now looked like a deader fish, one of last year's, cast up on some lonely beach and left there at the mercy of the wind and tides.
It's only about once in a lifetime that anything sensational ever happens to one, and when it does, you don't want people taking all the colour out of it. I remember at school having to read that stuff where that chap, Othello, tells the girl what a hell of a time he'd been having among the cannibals and what not. Well, imagine his feelings if, after he had described some particularly sticky passage with a cannibal chief and was waiting for the awestruck "Oh-h! Not really?", she had said that the whole thing had no doubt been greatly exaggerated and that the man had probably really been a prominent local vegetarian.
"It's the sort of thing you would do."
"My scheme is far more subtle. Let me outline it for you."
"No, thanks."
"I say to myself----"
"But not to me."
"Do listen for a second."
"I won't."
"Right ho, then. I am dumb."
"And have been from a child."

"And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned. "
In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog, and his aspect now was that of one of these fine animals who has just been refused a slice of cake.
The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.
"I don't want to seem always to be criticizing your methods of voice production, Jeeves," I said, "but I must inform you that that 'Well, sir' of yours is in many respects fully as unpleasant as your 'Indeed, sir?' Like the latter, it seems to be tinged with a definite scepticism. It suggests a lack of faith in my vision. The impression I retain after hearing you shoot it at me a couple of times is that you consider me to be talking through the back of my neck, and that only a feudal sense of what is fitting restrains you from substituting for it the words 'Says you!'"
"Oh? I didn't know that."
"There isn't much you do know."

"Tut!" I said.
"What did you say?"
"I said 'Tut!'"
"Say it once again, and I'll biff you where you stand. I've enough to endure without being tutted at."
"Quite."
"Any tutting that's required, I'll attend to myself. And the same applies to clicking the tongue, if you were thinking of doing that."
"Far from it."
"Good."

And as for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming him on sight.
I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something--a sculptor he would have been, no doubt--who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course.
"Oh, look," she said. She was a confirmed Oh-looker. I had noticed this at Cannes, where she had drawn my attention in this manner on various occasions to such diverse objects as a French actress, a Provençal filling station, the sunset over the Estorels, Michael Arlen, a man selling coloured spectacles, the deep velvet blue of the Mediterranean, and the late mayor of New York in a striped one-piece bathing suit.
When I was a child, I used to think that rabbits were gnomes, and that if I held my breath and stayed quite still, I should see the fairy queen.". Indicating with a reserved gesture that this was just the sort of loony thing I should have expected her to think as a child, I returned to the point.
Though never for an instant faltering in my opinion that Augustus Fink-Nottle was Nature's final word in cloth-headed guffins, I liked the man, wished him well.
Then he rose and began to pace the room in an overwrought sort of way, like a zoo lion who has heard the dinner-gong go and is hoping the keeper won't forget him in the general distribution.
Contenting myself, accordingly, with a gesture of loving sympathy, I left the room. Whether she did or did not throw a handsomely bound volume of the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, at me, I am not in a position to say. I had seen it lying on the table beside her, and as I closed the door I remember receiving the impression that some blunt instrument had crashed against the woodwork, but I was feeling too pre-occupied to note and observe.
"Goodbye, Bertie," he said, rising.
I seemed to spot an error.
"You mean 'Hullo,' don't you?"
"No, I don't. I mean goodbye. I'm off."
"Off where?"
"To the kitchen garden. To drown myself."
"Don't be an ass."
"I'm not an ass.... Am I an ass, Jeeves?"
"Possibly a little injudicious, sir."
"Drowning myself, you mean?"
"Yes, sir."
"You think, on the whole, not drown myself?"
"I should not advocate it, sir."
"Very well, Jeeves. I accept your ruling. After all, it would be unpleasant for Mrs. Travers to find a swollen body floating in her pond."


"Jeeves," I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated like a lamb drawing itself to the attention of the parent sheep, "what the dickens is all this?"
I wouldn't have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours.
If you can visualize a bulldog which has just been kicked in the ribs and had its dinner sneaked by the cat, you will have Hildebrand Glossop as he now stood before me.
"I've been through hell, Bertie."
"Through where?"
"Hell."
"Oh, hell? And what took you there?"

"Beginning with a _critique_ of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus with such acerbity that by the time she had finished the best you could say of Bertram was that, so far as was known, he had never actually committed murder or set fire to an orphan asylum."
"The boy is the father of the man."
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about this Glossop."
"I thought you said something about somebody's father."
"I said the boy was the father of the man."
"What boy?"
"The boy Glossop."
"He hasn't got a father."
"I never said he had. I said he was the father of the boy--or, rather, of the man."
"What man?"

Besides, isn't there something in the book of rules about a man may not marry his cousin? Or am I thinking of grandmothers?

"My dear Tuppy, does one bandy a woman's name?"
"One does if one doesn't want one's ruddy head pulled off."
I saw that it was a special case.

I was reading in the paper the other day about those birds who are trying to split the atom, the nub being that they haven't the foggiest as to what will happen if they do. It may be all right. On the other hand, it may not be all right. And pretty silly a chap would feel, no doubt, if, having split the atom, he suddenly found the house going up in smoke and himself torn limb from limb.
He expressed the opinion that the world was in a deplorable state. I said, 'Don't talk rot, old Tom Travers.' 'I am not accustomed to talk rot,' he said. 'Then, for a beginner,' I said, 'you do it dashed well.' And I think you will admit, boys and ladies and gentlemen, that that was telling him."
"The fellow with a face rather like a walnut."
Nature, when planning this sterling fellow, shoved in a lot more lower jaw than was absolutely necessary and made the eyes a bit too keen and piercing for one who was neither an Empire builder nor a traffic policeman.
"She loves this newt-nuzzling blister."


Newt Nuzzling,Sir? Why I never . . .well, rarely. Dear Old Pup, now, what Wode he say? Tah!

John McCain, Bring Up the Ohio Plumber




McCain will blow up Obama, like Billy Ayers with a Home Depot full of C-4, if he snakes the pipes of Kid Hope's Redistribution of Wealth Imperative!

Make the Plumber's Help keep a plunging down on the Obama's Pie Hole until the Marxist slug rushes up out of the Old P-Trap!

Here is Jake Tapper's Great report from Oct. 12, 2008 when the Plumber plunged into the Campaign and brought up the burping pipes of Obamanomics!

In Working-Class Ohio, Obama Meets Amorous Dogs, Skeptical Plumber
October 12, 2008 5:58 PM

OREGON, OHIO -- On Shrewsbury Street in the working-class Lincoln Green section of Holland, Ohio, Sunday afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., knocked on some doors to chat with voters in this battleground state where polls have him and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., neck and neck.

Sue Sekel, a 43-year old health care worker wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt with the words "Las Vegas" written in a Tommy Hilfiger-like pattern, told Obama she'd voted early.

She also said Sunday was “the one day I come home to clean ceiling fans and look like crap, and then this happens.”

Clutching cameras, three teenage girls raced to him from across the street, with no shoes on.

“Where are your shoes?” Obama asked them.

He took photos with them, and others, shaking hands, talking about the economy.

The mother of one of the girls, Shelly Kretz, stood on the periphery of the group while snapshots were being taken.

“Mom, you look good. C’mon,” Obama said to her.

Kretz, a 38-year-old employee of Proctor & Gamble, reluctantly joined the group for a photo. Later, she told reporters that she'd been on the fence, but she liked Obama's answers to her neighbors' questions.

“It’s really awesome that he takes the time to talk to the middle class and answer questions,” she said. Kretz said her brothers were also there, and had also been converted by Obama’s appearance this afternoon.

Obama approached another house but was warned by one neighbor about two amorous dogs.

“Oh, is that right?" Obama asked. "So I don’t want to get too close, huh? They might start, they might start."

The dogs began canoodling with one another.

"Yeah, they seem like they enjoy themselves," Obama said. He then told the dogs, "Alright, don’t do anything in front of the cameras that would be inappropriate."

He reached down to pet them, scratching a small black dog behind its ears.

“Do you believe in the American dream?” a local plumber asked.

Obama said he did.

"I'm being taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” the man said, in comments interpreted by reporters as a reference to the Democrat's proposal to increase income taxes on those making $200,000 or more a year.

Obama recited his now-familiar talking points about 95 percent of the American people would get a tax cut under his plan.

The plumber did not seem convinced.

As Obama left the man, he said, "I've got to go prepare for this debate, but that was pretty good practice."


As the old Marxist dodger Andre Malraux would say, "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets."

Sometimes we need a great plumber!

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Eric Zorn is a 6th Grader -Ayers is a Terrorist and McCain is an Adulterer.


If Ayers is a terrorist, then McCain is an adulterer and I am a 6th grader.

Perhaps history will one day judge harshly all of those who participated in educational reform efforts or other civic projects in which Ayers was involved. This will include former University of Illinois and Northwestern University presidents; top honchos at Ameritech, Continental Bank and the Field Museum; and even the former publisher of the Tribune
Eric Zorn's Change of Subject



Yep. McCain committed adultery. I hate adultery. I never once even considered cheating on my late wife who struggled like a Champ through brain cancer and to her return to Christ. I don't forgive adultery. However, I have voted for many adulterers for public office - Bubba is World Class Tom Cat-er and I voted for Clinton twice. Billy Ayers is a terrorist and will always be one. McCain cheated on his wife and she forgave him. Bubba cheated on Hillary and they are still together. Billy Ayers would blow up anything to do with the integrity of American Life with dynamite or pedagogy and that I do not forget or forgive, but as long as Ayers obeys the law may he live peacefully in the ignominy he so well deserves.

Eric Zorn is busy doing nuanced parsing about Obama/Ayers - Obama made his bones with Billy Ayers.

Eric Zorn is a 6th Grader. McCain is an Adulterer; Eric a 6th Grader; and Billy Ayers an unrepentant domestic terrorist. Now that we have that settled. . .Eric. . .here is your curriculum Get Busy, Big Boy!

REQUIRED COURSES


COMMUNICATON ARTS
The sixth grade Communication Arts class is a required full year course. The class will focus on the total writing process and center on grammar, mechanics, and spelling. Writing will include effective sentences, paragraphs, compositions, and reports. The class will include at least one oral presentation.


SOCIAL STUDIES
Sixth grade Social Studies is the study of geographic regions of the world. Students study the social, political, economic and physical aspects of world geography. The study of world geography helps the student gain a greater understanding of countries' locations, cultures, developments, relationships and interdependence.


SCIENCE
Sixth grade General Science is a course which builds upon elementary science. The course includes integrated units of study on life, earth and physical science in preparation for specific courses in grades 7-12. Experimentation will be an integral part of science instruction and process skills will be stressed. Students will be prompted to question, investigate, explore and hypothesize. Activities may include the construction of models and/or the use of manipulative, interactive and physical materials.


MATHEMATICS
Sixth grade Mathematics, a survey of mathematics, will review and extend the mathematical concepts of whole numbers and fraction arithmetic, statistics, and geometry.


READING
Sixth grade Reading is a required course that meets daily throughout the school year. Students will use a wide variety of reading materials and genres appropriate to their reading and interest levels. Previously learned reading skills will continue to be reinforced while new comprehension, vocabulary and study skills are introduced. Students will participate in silent reading during regularly scheduled blocks of time.


PHYSICAL EDUCATION (ALTERNATE DAYS)
Sixth grade Physical Education is a progressively planned co-educational program in lifetime sports. Content will include large and small group games, skill drills, individual sports activities, and related lifetime sports.




EXPLORATORY COURSES
PROGRAM 1
Art (Alternate Days) - Sixth grade Exploratory Art will involve the student in the basics of two-dimensional drawing, painting, printmaking and design as well as three-dimensional forms. A variety of methods and media will be stressed with hands-on activities.
Music (Alternate Days) - Sixth grade General Music is a semester class required of all students who are not enrolled in Beginning Band or Orchestra. Classes meet every other day, alternating with Physical Education. Two main areas of study include music reading fundamentals and music literature. Reading fundamentals will be developed primarily through the study of vocal music. The music literature component will consist of an historical overview of the western art music tradition.
PROGRAM 2


Beginning Band - Beginning Band is a year-long course designed to offer students an opportunity to learn to play a band instrument. Students will be divided into like instrument groups. Emphasis will be placed on learning basic instrumental skills and technique, care of the instrument and music terminology.


PROGRAM 3
Beginning Strings - The Beginning String program includes students in grades five, six, and seven. At this level students are encouraged to work for musical performance by producing a good tone, playing in tune, and developing correct technical skills. At the end of the first year of study, students are given the opportunity to perform in an all district orchestra.
Junior Orchestra (Alternate Days) - Junior Orchestra is a year-long class for sixth grade students who have completed Beginning Strings. Emphasis will be on note reading and ensemble playing. Some performances are required.

John McCain/Sarah Palin Get My Vote - Today!




In 1972, Democratic nominee George McGovern threw Daley out of the Democratic National Convention (replacing his delegation with one led by Jesse Jackson). This event arguably marked a downturn in Daley's power and influence within the Democratic Party but, given his public standing, McGovern later made amends by putting Daley loyalist (and Kennedy in-law) Sargent Shriver on his ticket.
from Wikipedia

The radicals who distrupted the 1968 Democratic Convention succeeded in intimidating the spineless in the Democratic Party in 1972 and now control the DNC.

My first vote cast as an American citizen, a 21 year old college student volunteer for the 18th Ward Regular Democratic Organization in 1972 went to Richard M. Nixon.

In August 1974, after graduating from Loyola of Chicago. I watched Richard M. Nixon resign in disgrace.

From that time on, I voted for every Democratic candidate in every election local, State and Federal. In 1977, I was honored to run for the office of Kankakee City Clerk after being asked to do so by Milton Shapiro. The Democratic ticket got creamed.

My first vote was a protest. A protest to the idiotic and totalitarian treatment of the Chicago Delegation by the Democratic National Convention. The DNC is continues to be idiotic, but now it is positively dangerous. The DNC is an has been controlled by the Abortion industry, Advocacy fascists and redistribution of wealth Leftists.

I am voting for John McCain/Sarah Palin at the 22nd Chicago Police District in my neighborhood. I am voting for McCain/Palin -Today. The balance of ballot is my business. I am voting early and unlike Obama's cadres of ACORN and community organizers -Just Once.

Vote.

Obama and the Plumber - The Issue: The Plumbers Lose!





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

Obama made the remark, caught on camera, after fielding some tough questions from the plumber Sunday in Ohio, where the Democratic candidate canvassed neighborhoods and encouraged residents to vote early.

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

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

It's good for George Soros

It's good for MSNBC, NBC, CNN

It's good for the Radicals of SEIU

It's good for Billy Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN

It's good for everyone but plumbers, cops, firefighters, nurses, teachers, carpenters, pipe fitters, stationary engineers, roofers, laborers, and small business owners.

It's good for Obama - Yep, That's Everbody!

Monday, October 13, 2008

Ruth Ann Dailey of Pittsburgh Post Gazette Has Obama's and DNC's Number - Watch Out Now!


The Race Card was shuffled and dealt months ago by the Obama Camp - The former King and Queen of Hearts, Bill and Hillary Clinton were trumped hard in the Primaries. When questioned about Rev. Wright back in February, Obama decided to lecture America on Race, without ever explaining his twenty years at the feet of the now disgraced and Obama Bus Thumped Gamaliel ( he was the dude who taught St. Paul to be a Community Activist and name picked by Saul Alinsky for the subsequent parsing of the term) - Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

CNN's resident nut-job Jack Cafferty tossed out the Race Card during the waning days of summer, when Kid Hope was slumping. MSNBC has David Schuster fountain-mouth his 'say-it-don't spray it' musings with the regularity of a tornado warning on Missouri Cable Channels.

From battleground Pennsylvania - Pittsburgh to be exact comes one of the best articulation of the Hope or Die agenda by Obama that warns of race riots and other 'makes my heart hurt' dire prognostications to one and all.

The Democrats' perversion of the race issue has gotten so brazen that someone who merely points out the undeniably true -- like Mr. Obama's controversial ties to radicals or felons of any race or nationality -- is accused of racism. Left-wing politicos have opined that racism motivates even Democratic voters who don't support Mr. Obama (as if ideas don't matter), while James Carville, the Dems' talking head from the House of Slytherin, fears rioting if Mr. Obama loses.

And the Republican Party elders, to the chagrin of us younger conservatives, have accepted the Democrats' rules of engagement. Apparently, racial absolution will have to wait another decade.

For demographers, a generation may span two decades, but in culture and politics, generational characteristics seem to move in 10-year cycles. I belong to the group born at the tail end of the baby boom, the group who came of age just in time to vote for Ronald Reagan.

We burned the Iranian flag, not the American one, on the steps to our peaceful, already integrated schools. We who grew up in the homes of Eisenhower Republicans didn't hear racist language or thought and have no cause for shame.

But we watched the kids eight or 10 years ahead of us don their ratty denim uniforms of non-conformity and jump on the tail end of a historical movement they'd paid no price to further, noisily congratulating themselves for being superior to their narrow-minded parents.

We watched the party of segregation now pushing social policies soon demonstrated to be destructive and enslaving to a new generation of blacks.

And as adults we've watched blacks who dared to be conservatives get symbolically lynched by the likes of Teddy Kennedy and Joe Biden (who, like their media counterparts, have finally found a black man they can respect!).

Perhaps older Republicans and their political operatives are silent in the face of the left's racial exploitation because they were present for and complicit with the racially divisive "Southern strategy."

Not so for us younger folk. There's a whole generation of us who have clear consciences and cheerfully defiant attitudes. For us, this presidential campaign is not a traveling revival tent, nor the ballot box an altar at which we expunge our alleged sins. It's just politics. It always was.


Nicely stated Ms. Dailey.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Obama/Ayers in Medias Res by John Kass Today!


The incomparable John Kass, the only wide-awake journalist at Chicago Tribune, does a great job of explaining the Obama/Ayers symbiotic relationship - I used symbiotic for all you fans of Lefty neologisms ( which translates to real people as 'snotty BS').

Ayers and Obama are as tight as teenagers with a powerful crush and their parents on a mutual weekend in Vegas. 'We trust them alone together; they've gone to Great Schools!'

However, the Greek Mencken of Chicago still needs to get to the root (radical) act of this relationship - Who Hired Ayers at University of Illinois Chicago and who sent the domestic terrorist with his plenary indulgence for past and future acts?

Read John Kass:


But the reason Ayers is not a big deal in Chicago has to do with the Chicago Way, and the left fork of that road that has been bought and paid for by the Daley machine, subsidized by taxpayers who foot the bill for public relations contracts from City Hall.

The new Daley machine is much more sophisticated than his father's. And the stereotype of knuckle-draggers and wiseguys—they're still around, and there are jobs on the city payroll for those who work the precincts.

Yet what's often ignored is that their university-educated cousins get city contracts to spin the news and shape the symbolism and tell out-of-town reporters that Ayers is no big deal. They won't bite the hand that feeds them. For an examination of the Daley spin machine—and its cost to taxpayers—please see Tribune reporter Dan Mihalopoulos' story in the Sunday editions.

One friend of Obama and Ayers is former '60s radical Marilyn Katz, now an Obama fundraiser, strategist and public relations maven. She's often a go-to quote for reporters to knock down the Ayers-Obama story.

"What Bill Ayers and [former Black Panther, now U.S. Rep.] Bobby Rush . . . did 40 years ago has nothing to do with [the presidential campaign]," Katz was quoted as saying in the Chicago Sun-Times in April. "[Ayers] has a national reputation. He lectures at Harvard [University] and Vassar [College]."

What that story and many other pro-Obama articles gloss over is that during the violent protests of the 1968 Democratic National Convention here, Katz was the security chief for the radical Students for a Democratic Society. She once advocated throwing studded nails in front of police cars, back in the SDS days when the group was alleged to have thrown cellophane bags full of human excrement at cops and cans of urine and golf balls impaled with nails.

How things change.

Under this Daley, her firm, MK Communications, has many city deals, and one involves public relations for the Chicago Police Department's community policing program. From nails to contracts, the Chicago Way. Apparently, irony was not a '60s thing.

Now, as Daley prepares to lay off more than 1,000 city workers, he's given Katz and other public relations firms five-year contracts that could pay them as much as $5 million each for consulting, advertising and promotion.

Getting in good with Daley hasn't been bad for business. She also lists as her clients Daley's Chicago Housing Authority, Daley's City Colleges, Daley's city Law Department, and Daley's Departments of Aviation, Environment, Housing, Human Services, Planning and Development, Public Health, Public Works, Streets and Sanitation, Intergovernmental Affairs, Special Events—the list goes on.

Clearly, if she wasn't a good soldier for Shortshanks her list of clients would be quite small. Katz is often aggravating, but she's also funny and smart, so I called her to submit my theory: That by buying off the political left—through PR contracts to Katz, through his own support for Ayers—Daley maintains control over message and symbolism.

"I don't see it that way," said Katz. "As kids, our issues were schools, the environment, housing—and these things are the same things that the mayor cares about. So we have this in common. The agendas that drove us pulled us together. It's about respect for each other's point of view, not what we did when we were 19."

On Ayers and Obama, Katz still insists it isn't a story.

"Bill and I were in different parts of SDS. We disagreed on tactics. Bill has spent his entire life contributing to the betterment of society. That's all I can say about Bill," she said.

Happily, I beg to differ. Ayers is a terrorist—the narcissistic son of privilege and clout—whose father, Thomas, was the boss of Commonwealth Edison and a friend of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. As a leader of the ultraviolent Weather Underground, Ayers admitted to helping bomb the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon in the 1970s. He should have been sent to prison. Instead, Chicago political clout allowed him and his wife, fellow radical Bernardine Dohrn, to magically join the payrolls of universities here.

Obama says he was 8 years old when the bombs went off. But he was a grown man when he sought Ayers' political blessing, and when they worked on the same education projects.

"They're friends. So what?" Mayor Daley said in August.

He's the boss and the master spinner. So it must not be a story.

jskass@tribune.com

Friday, October 10, 2008

Billy Ayers Bolshevik Barney Google!




Billy Ayers - The Barney Google of Bolshevism and Barack Buddy!

"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon."

"I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Not the Bill Ayers Obama Knew . . .er, Knows . . .er, Let Him be perfectly . . .hmmmmmm.

Obama & Iraq - Lies as Policy: Washington Times Outs Obama




Hat Tip to John Rubery at Marathon Pundit!

Obama ( New York Post story in September) tried to get the Iraqis to undermine American Foreign Policy in time of War. This is disgraceful. What is more disgraceful is the attempt to bury the story by the Media.

Obama makes Lies a force in his Foreign Policy as well as Domestic Agenda. Obama might be more than the goof I took him for - he might actually be dangerous.


Iraqi leaders purported to The Times that Mr. Obama urged Baghdad to delay an agreement with Mr. Bush until next year when a new president will be in office - a charge the Democratic campaign denies.


Washington Times

Let's See Some Real McCain Raised in Anger!


Do take the gloves off Senator McCain. Load the gloves with 1/2" ball bearing and give Obama some well-placed slaps in the puss.

Speak from your heart and toss punches from a wind-up that Mark Buehrle could only dream of.

It is time for America to see the real John McCain.

Treat the MSM with all of the contempt that they deserve.

Treat insult with forgiveness and Christian Charity, while Keith Olbermann picks up his bloody Chicklets from the side walk.

Give Milky Matthews a reason to blanch to a new shade of whiteness.

Most of all Give The New Messiah a full understanding of not only Gethsemane by a real taste of Calvary as well.

While you are at them, tell MSNBC Balloon Dancer Andrea Mitchell to find some gainful employment with a Gary Indiana Gentleman's Club.

I fully agree with Jon Swift:

Americans don’t want a President like Obama who is calm and cool in a crisis and never seems to break a sweat. They want a President who is as angry as they are, someone who will lash out unpredictably at our enemies. They want a President who thinks with his gut instead of his brain. They want a man who will pick up the phone at 3 a.m. and tell the person on the other end what he can do with himself before slamming the receiver down. Do you think anyone will dare to mess with America when a man like John McCain has his finger on the button?

If only Americans could see the real John McCain, instead of the one who calls everyone “my friends” when he doesn’t really mean it and hides his contempt behind a smile of gritted teeth. And let’s see how calm Obama is when McCain gets in his face and shoves him off his stool. So in the next debate let McCain be McCain and let the chips fall where they may. At this point it may be his only chance to win.


Put Country First! Put your foot squarely up the metaphorical cavities of your enemies and leave your shoes there to remind them of what all real President is all about!

Obama's Clout Trail Weaves Ayers/Dohrn & Sidley & Austin


Professor Steve Diamond has made the case for Obama's disembling concerning his biggest distraction Ayers/Dorhn/ACORN Progressive Chicago Clout.

The Chicago newspapers and the Daley Administration are busy trying to find dirt on garbage truck crews, but could care less about the millions of dangerous dollars tossed into the hands of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and buttoned out to ACORN and other real estate scam artists from Chicago Foundations. It's all good.

Read this in Full:

Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Who "sent" Obama?
See June 19, 2008 post: That "guy who lives in my neighborhood" for more detail on Ayers-Obama relationship.Updated May 24, 2008: former Sidley managing partner tells Chicago Tribune he hired Bernardine Dohrn as favor to Bill Ayers' father Thomas Ayers.Updated May 18, 2008 with information from Nell Minow, daughter of Obama mentor Newton Minow and sister of Obama's Harvard professor, Martha Minow.Updated May 3, 2008: Ken Rolling, first Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge, had been a program officer of the Woods Fund; Republican activist claims Ayers is "advisor" to Barack Obama. In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who "sent" you? The classic phrase is "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" - from an anecdote of Abner Mikva's, the former White House Counsel (Pres. Clinton) and now retired federal judge. (And someone I campaigned for while in high school when he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in the early 70s.) As a young student, Mikva wanted to help out the his local Democratic Party machine on the south side of Chicago. In 1948, he walked into the local committeeman's office to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and was immediately asked: "Who sent you?" Mikva replied, "nobody sent me." And the retort came back from the cigar chomping pol: "Well, we don't want nobody that nobody sent."


So it is reasonable to ask, who "sent" Barack Obama? In other words, how can his meteoric rise to political prominence be explained? And, of course, in an answer to that question might lie a better understanding of his essential world view. When I started looking at this question a few weeks ago I quickly grew more concerned about the kinds of people that seem to have been very important in Obama's ascendancy in Chicago area politics. It is the connection of some of these people to authoritarian politics that has me particularly concerned. And a key concern of this blog has been the rise of authoritarian tendencies in the global labor movement.


The people linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization. In fact, at the time, some far more constructive activists had a hard time comprehending groups like the Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the left thought that government or right wing elements helped create them. There is some evidence, in fact, that that was true (for example, the Cointelpro effort of the federal government.)


Today, however, many of these individuals continue to hold political views that hardened in that period. Many of them have joined up with other wings of the late 60s and 70s movements, in particular the pro-China maoists elements of that era and are now playing a role in the labor movement and elsewhere. And yet this question of Obama's links to people from this milieu has not been thoroughly explored by any of the many thousands of journalists, bloggers and political operatives looking so closely at Obama.


The most recent effort was by Jonathan Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal who argued that a critical connection for Obama was his links to some in the wealthy and prominent Jewish community in Chicago. This article contains some important insights and is well worth reading. But, I think Kaufman gets it wrong.


So, who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his ties not to well connected uber lawyer Newton Minow, as Kaufman suggests, but more likely to the family of (in)famous former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers – not just Bill Ayers, but also Bill’s father Tom Ayers and his brother John as well. Obama was a community organizer from about 1985 to 1988, when he left Chicago for Harvard Law School. During that time a critical issue in Chicago politics was the ongoing crisis in the public schools. A movement was underway from two angles: below in black, latino and other communities for more local control of schools and from above by business interests who wanted to cut costs. (For a fascinating account and analysis see Dorothy Shipps, The Invisible Hand: Big Business and Chicago School Reform, Teachers College Record, Vol. 99, #1, Fall 1997, pp. 73-116 or her later excellent book on the subject: School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880-2000 (Kansas 2006.))


A 1987 teachers’ strike brought those two sides together to push for a reform act passed by the Illinois legislature in 1988 that created "Local School Councils" (LSC) to be elected by residents in a particular school area. According to Shipps, the strike "enrag[ed] parents and provid[ed] the catalyst for a coalition between community groups and Chicago United [the business lobby] that was forged in the ensuing year." (The full story of this complicated process is provided by Shipps in her book.)


The LSC’s were to be made up by a majority of parents and have the power to hire and fire principals thus creating a new power center in the school system against what both reform groups viewed as the bureaucratic and expensive school board, on the one hand, and, on the other, the teachers union. In my view these types of councils are reminiscent of the manipulative "community" bodies set up in regimes like those of Hugo Chavez and the Sandinistas - used to control genuine democratic movements such as trade unions. Dorothy Shipps argues, as I will suggest below, that there is an alternative approach that is genuinely democratic and possibly more effective in improving outcomes for students.

Active in the local control from below, on the "community" side of this effort, was Bill Ayers who had returned to Chicago in 1987 as an assistant professor of education at the University of Illinois' Chicago Circle campus, after surfacing from the underground and earning his Ph.D. at Columbia. Another ally in this battle at the same time was Barack Obama’s Developing Communities Project (DCP), as Obama notes briefly in his Dreams From My Father. (See also, "Meeting on School Reform Halted," Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1988 at 3; and "Black Parents" A letter to the Chi. Trib. on Aug. 23, 1988 from a DCP member defending the 1988 local control reform bill) The DCP had its origins in the "radical" movement started by Saul Alinsky. (It should be remembered Alinsky's world view was one that is and was often in tension with many in the trade union movement - for example, Alinksy was an almost uncritical admirer and biographer of trade union bureaucrat par excellence John L. Lewis. For one independent approach that urges re-examination of the Alinsky view of unions today in light of rise to power of SEIU's Andy Stern, see Staughton Lynd, Commentary: Another World is Possible, Working America, March 2008).


Ayers, of course, had long held what the left once knew, broadly, as “maoist” politics – a view of the world that was opposed to Russian style bureaucratic communism from above, instead advocates of this approach supported sending revolutionary cadre to “swim among the masses like fish in the sea” or attempting to establish guerilla foco as romantically theorized by Regis Debray and carried out with disastrous results by Che Guevara.


Today one of the approaches used by these types is the "long march" through the (presumably "bourgeois") institutions. (See this discussion of it by "Progressives for Obama" supporter, Fidelista and former SDS leader Carl Davidson.) Of course, the "long march" referred to is that taken by Mao and the Red Army in 1934. Now, Davidson et. al apply the concept to the tactics of the "left" inside various "reform movements" such as the anti-war movement. Davidson was one of the organizers of the 2002 anti war rally at which Obama first spoke out against the war.


Here is how Ayers in 2006 described his approach to "electoral politics" in an interview with the left wing Chicago magazine, In These Times:



"ITT: [A]ren’t progressives putting high hopes in November? Even leading Republicans admit that the Dems are likely to recapture at least one house of Congress.



"So what? That’s not the point, Ayers says. Electoral politics is a tool to connect causes, like gay rights, disability rights, voting rights, human rights. 'That’s how you use electoral politics. Not as an end in itself, but as an organizing mechanism. Our deepest belief, I think, is that we need to connect all these good projects and build the movement. …we should always be positioning ourselves, thinking, okay, if I’m involved in this next election, how am I positioned to help contribute to building a movement, raising consciousness, making the connections, and that’s a real tricky business.'"


Bill Ayers appears to be attempting to lead a similar "long march" in the education world. Ayers is a vigorous advocate of local control along with a related concept called “small schools,” most likely because he believes it gives him the potential to build a political base from which to operate. He has discussed these ideas in speeches and writings on his blog. As he said in a speech he gave in front of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in late 2006: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!"


Bill raised money to start the Small Schools Workshop in the early 90s and eventually hired another former maoist from the 60s (and actually someone who was a bitter opponent of Ayers as SDS disintegrated) named Mike Klonsky to head it up. [Bill's brother John later got in on the small schools approach also, raising money in part from the Annenberg Challenge program started by Bill and chaired by Obama (see School Leadership in Times of Urban Reform edited by Bizar and Barr).]

A leading figure in the Chicago business groups that were lobbying for cost cutting and "efficiency" in the Chicago schools in the 1980's was Bill Ayers' father, Thomas Ayers. Tom Ayers, of course, was a very prominent Chicago business man, a retired head of Commonwealth Edison, a lifelong liberal, and a supporter of open housing campaigns (in which my parents participated when I grew up in Chicago in the 60s) as well as Martin Luther King. According to Dorothy Shipps, Tom Ayers co-authored a report of a joint public-private task force on school reform and was later nominated to head up Chicago United, a business backed school reform group that Ayers helped found, by Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, but was opposed successfully by black community activists.


When the 1988 Reform Act was passed a group called Leadership for Quality Education (LQE) was formed, according to Shipps, by the elite business lobby that was in part behind the new reforms, to train the newly elected local school council members. Some 6000 LSC members were elected. And they became a huge thorn in the side of school administration in Chicago.


Interestingly, one LSC member was John Ayers, son of Tom and brother of Bill. In 1993, John was made head of the LQE - which, by then, according to Shipps, was caught in the middle of the battle emerging to re-centralize control of the schools in the hands of the mayor.

In the fall of 1988, however, Obama left the city to go off to law school. My best guess, though, is that it was in that 86-88 time frame that Obama likely met up with the Ayers family. I will explain why I believe that in a minute. Interestingly, after his first year in law school Obama returned in the summer of 1989 to work as a summer associate at the prestigious Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin. This in and of itself is a bit unusual. Very few top tier law students work for big law firms during their first summer. The big law firms discourage it because if you work for them in the first summer you are likely to work for a second firm the following year and then the firms have to compete to get you.


So, why or how did Obama - at that point not yet the prominent first black president of the Harvard Law Review (that would happen the following year) - end up at Sidley?


Sidley had been long time outside counsel to Commonwealth Edison. The senior Sidley partner who was Comm Ed's key outside counsel, Howard Trienens, was a member of the board of trustees of Northwestern alongside Tom Ayers (and Sidley partner Newton Minow, too). It turns out, Bernardine Dohrn worked at Sidley also. She was hired there in the late 80s, because of the intervention of her father-in-law Tom Ayers, even though she was (and is) not a member of any state bar.


Dohrn was not admitted in either NY or Illinois because of her past jail time for refusing to testify about the murderous 1981 Brinks robbery in which her former Weather Underground (now recast as the "Revolutionary Armed Task Force") "comrades," including Kathy Boudin (biological mother of Chesa Boudin, who was raised by Ayers and Dohrn) participated. She was finally paroled after serving 22 years of a plea bargained single 20-to-life sentence for her role in the robbery where a guard was shot and killed and two police officers were killed. The father of Chesa Boudin, David Gilbert, was sentenced to 75-to-life, with no chance of parole, after a trial in which he refused to participate. Chesa is the co-author of a recent apologia for the regime of Venezuelan "left" strong man, Hugo Chavez.


Trienens recently explained his unusual decision to hire Dohrn, who had never practice law and had graduated from law school (before going on her bombing spree) 17 years before in 1967) to The Chicago Tribune saying, "[W]e sometimes hire friends."



I can only speculate, but it is possible that Tom Ayers introduced Obama to Sidley. That might have happened if Obama had met up with Bill and Tom and John Ayers prior to attending law school when Obama's DCP group was supporting the reform act passed in 1988. Or it might have been Dohrn who introduced Obama to the law firm. Dohrn's CV indicates that she left Sidley sometime in 1988 for public interest work prior to starting a position at Northwestern (again, hired there by some accounts because of the influence of Tom Ayers and his Sidley counsel Howard Trienens). Obama and Dohrn would likely not have been at the firm at the same time, although if Obama and Dohrn met before Obama left to attend Harvard Law School, she might have discussed the firm with him and introduced him to lawyers there.


My best guess, though, is that it would have been Tom Ayers who introduced Obama to Sidley and that would have helped him get the attention of someone like Newton Minow. And that would have come in very handy later in Obama's career as Kaufman suggests.


(Recently I heard from Nell Minow, daughter of Newton Minow, who tells me her sister Martha, a Harvard law professor, had Obama as a student at HLS and that she called her father to tell him about Obama. While Nell contends on the basis of this anecdote that her family met and supported Obama before he met Bill Ayers, she was unable to provide me any evidence of when in fact Obama met Ayers, either Bill or Tom.)

In any case the summer of 1989 was eventful for Obama as he did meet his future wife, Michelle, there, already a lawyer and working as a Sidley associate. Michelle was Obama's first supervisor or mentor there. Obama went back to Harvard in the fall of 1989 where, of course, he became president of the law review in the spring of 1990. After graduation in 1991 he went back to Chicago to run a voter registration campaign (which would turn out to be an important step in his career).


Then Obama joined a tiny, little known (outside Chicago, at least) public interest law firm called Davis Miner Barnhill. The partner who hired him was Judson Miner. Miner was a well known left wing lawyer in Chicago who had been counsel to the progressive black mayor in the 80s, Harold Washington. But Miner possibly also had ties to the Ayers family. He was law school classmates with Bernardine Dohrn at the University of Chicago (both Class of 1967). He formed a lawyers group against the war after graduation and organized a left wing alternative to the local Chicago bar association.

Then, in late 1994 or early 1995, Obama made what I think was probably the key move in his early career. He was named Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a $50 million grant program to funnel money into reform efforts at Chicago schools. It turns out that the architect of the Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers, who designed the grant proposal and sheparded it to success. The purpose of the program was to defend the controversial and troubled local schools council effort that had been put in place back in 1988. The first Executive Director of the Challenge was Ken Rolling, who came there from the much discussed Woods Fund (where he had been a program officer). The Woods Fund had provided grants to Obama's DCP in the late 80's and Rolling was a part of the school reform effort in which both Bill Ayers and Obama participated. Obama joined the board of the Woods Fund in 1993 in 1999 he would be joined on the board by Bill Ayers.


A report authored by Dorothy Shipps on the first three years of the Annenberg Challenge program, when Obama was its Board chair, concluded: "The Challenge sought to build on the momentum of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act which had radically decentralized governance of the Chicago Public Schools."


While apparently several hundred school principals had been fired by the LSC’s, kids were still doing poorly in schools and there was chaos of a sorts in the system. (See Shipps, Invisible Hand, for a summary of the problems.) Interestingly, Shipps concludes that the local control movement in Chicago, though backed by radicals like Ayers, gave "business the clearest voice in systemwide reform." She argues that a district level democracy effort such as an "Education Assembly" is required rather than the parochial local control approach:


"A large districtwide elected group intended to serve as a legislative body, such an assembly would have both the staff and structure of one. This alternative vision of democracy rests on citizenship and stewardship even as it builds on the private interests and knowledge of concerned parents and neighbors. As an example of a different form of democratic governance, it serves to remind ordinary Chicagoans that they now have no systemwide forum through which to debate broad issues of equity, standards, and accountability."


This represents a very different vision than that of Ayers & co. (not to mention of the charter school business group approach now in vogue). In fact, in retrospect the Ayers/Ayers (business from above, local activism from below) joint campaign against both the Chicago School District bureaucracy and the Teachers Union is reminiscent of the kinds of alliances one finds in neo-stalinist regimes like that of Cuba, China or Sandinista-run Nicaragua. In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, for example, Mao appealed to local activists to attack the party bureaucracy. These authoritarian movements often try to build their power against democratic institutions like unions. Well-intentioned liberals even from the business community are often willing to support such efforts because they view the traditional labor movement as even more of a threat than the neo-stalinist authoritarians like Castro, Chavez or Ortega. While many on the left try to portray such movements as a new form of democracy, they are anything but.


One educational policy analyst called the early 90s Chicago school system "dysfunctional." The former business allies of Bill Ayers and the local control advocates broke away from their support of the LSC's in favor of recentralization of power in the hands of Chicago's new Mayor Daley. According to Shipps,


"for six years, LQE [led by John Ayers until he later joined up with the charter school movement] remained a strong advocate of the 1988 reform. But in 1993 Club [ Commercial Club of Chicago ] members decided the LQE's support for community organizing and voter turnout campaigns was not producing better schools, resurfacing their initial skepticism about political decentralization as a reform strategy. Moreover, they determined that the role of outside agitator might suit community groups, but was ill suited to corporate leadership. It was creating a rift between Club leaders and the central administrators whom they hoped to influence. Club leaders were increasingly convinced that central office accountability was a necessary component of results. As the fundamental divisions between the business view of administrative decentralization and the political version held by community activists reemerged, activists felt betrayed. They protested the 'pull-back' loudly, but succeeded only in becoming less central actors in future reform efforts."


Now the business groups backed re-centralization through a 1995 bill that gutted the power of the LSC’s.


But the Annenberg Challenge money came through anyway due to the efforts of Bill Ayers, among others. It had to be matched 2 to 1 by corporate and foundation money (in fact, they raised an additional $60 mn by 1999), so the Board Chairmanship would have allowed Obama to be in touch with the powerful money interests in Chicago, including possibly the Pritzker Family and others that Kaufman mentions in his story. Penny Pritzker would join the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund which received its startup funding from the Annenberg Challenge as the Challenge wound down in 2001 - the Challenge, in effect, handed the baton of support for school reform to the CPEF. Penny Pritzker is now a key Obama campaign insider in charge of fund raising.

Thus, we have one possible answer to the question: Who "sent" Obama? It was the Ayers family, including Tom, John, Bill and Bernardine Dohrn.


It is highly unlikely that a 30-something second year lawyer would have been plucked from relative obscurity out of a left wing law firm to head up something as visible and important in Chicago as the Annenberg Challenge by Bill Ayers if Ayers had not already known Obama very well. One possibility is that Obama proved himself to the Ayers's in the battle for local school control when he was at the DCP in the 80s.


One guess as to why Obama does not play up his educational experience more thoroughly now – it certainly could be of use to him one would think in beefing up his “I have the experience to be President” argument – is that it would lead to a renewed discussion of the Ayers connection, which is clearly toxic for Obama. And it turns out the impact of the Annenberg Challenge on actual students in Chicago schools is considered mixed at best, although Bill Ayers deemed it a success on political grounds. Indeed the 1995 and 1999 legislative attempts to recentralize power over the schools in the hands of the mayor did not quite succeed in wresting control completely away from the LSC's, instead it helped, in the words of Alexander Russo, "keep the flame alive for decentralized, community-based school reform - even as the system was moving in a very different direction."


This likely explains why Obama tried a kind of head fake when asked about Ayers by George Stephanopoulos in the TV debate with Clinton prior to the Pennsylvania primary. Obama said Ayers was a "professor of english." Yet, Obama chaired the Annenberg Challenge for three years and served on its board for another three years, working closely with Ayers on grants to Chicago schools. And he did not know that Ayers was a professor of education? That strains credulity.


Perhaps this would be of just historical interest if it could be firmly established that Bill Ayers no longer has any role in the Obama campaign. But that is not something we know for sure yet. In a recent television interview with Greta Van Susteren (granted, it was on Fox), John Murtagh, a Republican town council member from Yonkers, New York, said that Ayers is currently an "advisor" to Obama. Murtagh has a particular and understandable sensitivity to the Ayers-Obama connection besides his Republican politics: his father was a New York Supreme Court (in NY the Supreme Court is a trial court) judge who presided over a trial of the "Black Panther 21" in 1970-71.


Murtagh was 9 years old at the time. During the trial Murtagh's home was fire bombed and Murtagh claims the Weather Underground was responsible for that bombing along with several others in "solidarity" with the Panthers. He charges, specifically, that Bill Ayers' wife Bernardine Dohrn later took credit (apparently on behalf of the entire WU group) for the bombing. Accounts sympathetic to the Panthers confirm the role of the Weather Underground. (See David Barber, "Leading the Vanguard: White New Leftists School the Panthers on Black Revolution" in In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement, edited by Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (Duke 2006).) The Panther 21 were acquitted of the bombing-related charges made against them, after a lengthy trial.


Certainly Ayers' politics remain unapologetically authoritarian. He recently traveled to Venezuela - only the most recent of several such trips - and delivered a speech in front of Hugo Chavez in which he spoke of education as the "motor force of revolution" and his interest in "overcom[ing] the failings of capitalist education" and said he thought Chavez was creating "something truly new and deeply humane." He closed his speech by mouthing typical slogans of the authoritarian left: "Viva Mission Sucre! Viva Presidente Chavez! Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta La Victoria Siempre!"


As it turns out, there are other ex-SDS types around the Obama campaign as well, including Marilyn Katz, a public relations professional, who was head of security for the SDS during the disaster in the streets of Chicago in 1968. She is close (politically) to Carl Davidson, a former vice president of SDS and longtime Fidelista, who is webmaster for a group called Progressives for Obama, that is headlined by other former 60s radicals like Tom Hayden and the maoist Bill Fletcher. Davidson and Katz were key organizers of the 2002 anti-war demonstration where Obama made public his opposition to the Iraq war that has been so critical to his successful presidential campaign. Davidson apparently moved into the maoist movements of the 70s after the disintegration of SDS.


Now that we have some idea of who "sent" Obama, the left and labor movement deserve to know more about how the exhausted ideas of the authoritarian side of 60's politics may still be influencing the thinking of a potential U.S. president. Maybe Andy Stern's endorsement of Obama makes more sense, now.


In any case, imho, if either Hillary or Obama wins they will keep our troops in Iraq for at least three years and possibly longer....makes you want to run into the arms of Ralph!
Posted by Steve Diamond at 8:59 PM

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Chicago Daily Observer's Tom Roeser Takes the Ayers out of Obama


Billy Ayers has hidden like the cockroach that he is under the dollars of his family fortune and his dear departed Daddy's influence.

Politics makes strange bed bugs. Witness all the University Dons who could not find a Chinaman on 22nd Street, giving direction and advocacy advice to Progressive Tax-Trough Hogs.

Ayers understands this fact. Compromise is the mother's milk of politics , or is it free T-Shirts for the children? Compromise and the quick-fix gets more votes; thus, Daley,pere et fils, will make nice with stern, sober and humorless advocates of everything in order to shut up opposition or weasel some easy votes. Hence a Gay High School where Dads and Dads and Moms and Moms can watch their sons and daughters enjoy a Prom of their choosing as well as watch videos of Great Homosexuals in History, Entertainment, Sports, Business, and in their community. What about the Gaylesbian/Bisexual omnivore, Asthmatic, Benthamite, Neo-Prussian Wiccan student who wants to concentrate on the novels of Anne Rice and study Vampires? Chilling, how this systemic racism works on the voiceless.

Today, Tom Roeser chases the cockroach Ayers into the light of day, as well as Obama's smarmy distractions:

What sort of man is it who sits in a church for 20 years while his pastor…his good friend…god damns the United States of America? And who then throws his pastor under the bus when it gets hot?

Answer: The same. A craven, rudderless, opportunistic trimmer with no fixed principles who has always placed his own career ahead of anything else including his once firm friends whom he later saw as impediments to his political career which he placed ahead of any other factor.

What sort of man is it who buddies with an undisguised, unrepentant terrorist (who never apologized for bombing the Pentagon) and who used this association in the early days to advance himself by gaining a foundation chairmanship and other benefits-throwing Billy Ayres under the bus when it became advantageous…Axelrod, the Artful Dodger, declaring that Obama never knew of Ayres’ connection because Obama was 3 years old when Ayres bombed the Pentagon?

Answer: A craven, rudderless, opportunistic trimmer with no fixed principles who has always placed his political career ahead of anything else including his once firm friends whom he later saw as impediments to his political career which he placed ahead of any other factor-including love of country.

A bit of history. There was never a time when Bill Ayres allowed his radical history to dissolve into the mists of time. He traded on it. I met him in the 1980s when he and Bernardine Dohrn lived in a Hyde Park carriage house adjunct to the house John McDermott owned. McDermott was his landlord. This was about the time Obama came to town. Ayres has always boasted of his hatred of the United States and always…to me particularly…said how he regretted not doing more damaged to the United States. In fact given this culturally deprived society we are living in, Ayres and his wife benefited from their terrorist associations…she landing a job in the law firm where Michelle Obama worked…he become a celebrity in the fey, decadent lefty society that comprised the Hyde Park of the time.

Axelrod gets away with the fiction that Obama didn’t know Ayres’ background because he trades on the lefty nature of the pro-Obama, supine media of Chicago…imagine a prominent TV “political reporter” on CBS-TV asked him to allow a photo taken with his family when he gets to the White House and to send him a Christmas tree ornament. That’s the objective nature of this local media beast with no teeth but gummy patronization where Obama is concerned. Why did it take a local blogger, Fran Eaton (kudos to her) to unveil the truth about Jeremiah Wright? Why did it then take a national ABC TV correspondent to make it national? Where was the supine Chicago media cross-eyedly Democratic ? Hoping to get THEIR kids to be photographed with the next president.

These are the questions that can make the difference-if. If McCain is willing to risk