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OBAMANATION CHRONICLES
CAMPAIGN ISSUES -- UNRESOLVED
Obama Records Sealed (Oct 2008)
Sen. Barack Obama's campaign says his campaign will bring a "new level of honesty and transparency" to the White House. Obama proudly touts that he and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, passed a law requiring more transparency via a public database of all federal spending. But when it comes to offering the public documents about his own public and private activities, Obama's record for openness gets an "F" grade. During the heated Democratic primary, Obama complained of the Bush White House being "one of the most secretive administrations in our history" and chided Sen. Hillary Clinton for not releasing her White House schedules.
Medical records: Barack Obama has refused to release his medical records. Instead, the public will have to make do with an undated letter signed by a doctor which assured the press and the American public that Obama was "in excellent health". Supposedly Obama had a physical in Jan 2007. (SITE NOTE: Fair is fair. ABC News' Kate Snow reports: With three days left until the election, the John McCain
campaign still has not, despite frequent requests, released any information about vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's medical history, prompting some well-warranted skepticism." Governor Palin said she would be "fine" with releasing her records. The article went on to say that she is the only one of the presidential or vice presidential candidates who has not released any health information about herself. (Source: ABC News.) Wrong...Obama has NOT released his records and only released that he had a checkup in Jan 2007.
On 3 Nov 2008, Palin released her records that stated from her family doctor that she was in fine health after checkups after the birth of her most recent child Trig. Specialized tests were not done because her family history does not show a need for such. She also has a regular fitness program. (Source: Washington Post.))
After McCain released nearly 1200 pages of medical records–the Arizona Senator not only had war-related injuries, but also bouts with skin cancer–the Mainstream Media complained that reporters were not given enough time to go through McCain’s records: they were given three hours to look through them. Three hours is far less time than it would take those same reporters to go through Barack Obama’s medical records that have been released. Because there are none.
(Image is Photoshopped) "I've never been a heavy smoker," Obama told the Chicago Tribune. "I've quit periodically over the last several years. I've got an ironclad demand from my wife that in the stresses of the campaign I don't succumb. I've been chewing Nicorette strenuously." Obama aides say that the main reason Michelle Obama has been pushing so hard for her husband to quit the demon weed is for health reasons, but of course for any public figure, one also has to factor in the image of the habit -- either out of concerns he would be setting a bad example, or that he may turn off some voters. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that his penchant for butts makes the Democrat "intriguingly imperfect," while Fox News Channel's John Gibson has called it "Obama's dirty little secret" and argued that it makes him wonder "what else do we not know about Barack Obama?" Clearly mindful of the image issues smoking may cause, Obama has been careful to keep images of him with what health advocates call "cancer sticks" out of the newspapers. Unlike Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, members of the media have been unable to find photographic images of Obama even a cigar or pipe. The political gossip Web site Wonkette.com has even offered reward money for anyone who can produce a picture of Obama smoking. Other rumored present or past smokers in political life -- first lady Laura Bush, former Vice President Al Gore -- have assiduously kept any signs of the habit away from any prying shutterbugs.(Source: ABC News, Feb 2007.)
Incidentally, even after elected to office, he continued to double-talk his way through the issue. When asked by Tom Brokaw on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether or not he has indeed quit, Obama gave a clinic on how to dodge even the simplest of "yes-no" questions.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" program, interviewer Tom Brokaw told Obama he had ducked answering the question during an interview last month with ABC's Barbara Walters.
Noting that the White House was a no-smoking zone, Brokaw asked Obama, "Have you stopped smoking?"
"I have," Obama replied, smiling broadly. "What I said was that there are times where I have fallen off the wagon."
"Wait a minute," Brokaw interjected, "that means you haven't stopped."
"Fair enough," Obama said. "What I would say is that I have done a terrific job under the circumstances of making myself much healthier. You will not see any violations of these rules in the White House." (Source: Yahoo News.)
The Obama campaign has stated that no medical records will be released. Instead, a one-page undated letter from a doctor will have to satisfy reporters on that issue. The Mainstream Media’s curiosity has been satisfied: there have been no calls for Barack Obama to release medical records The New York Times on Barack Obama in May:
The letter is the first publicly released information about Mr. Obama’s medical history or current condition. The six-paragraph, one-page statement summarized the senator’s health for the last 21 years and was signed by Dr. David L. Scheiner, who said he has been Mr. Obama’s primary care physician since March 23, 1987. The undated letter was released less than a week after Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, released his medical records. A spokesman for Mr. Obama said his campaign would not make Dr. Scheiner available for a telephone interview.” –New York Times, May 8 2008, “Obama’s Doctor, Praising His Health, Sees No Obstacles to Service”
Legion were the stories written assuring readers that “Barack Obama is in excellent health”. That’s great, then why not release the records? Other presidential candidates have assured the MSM that they were in “excellent health”, too.
It depends where your starting point is. I would say, yes, if you’re looking at the history of say, presidential candidates or candidates for high office. In the past, White House physicians have been known to lie; candidates for president or nominees have been known to evade the truth, distort the facts, or lie. You’ve got Woodrow Wilson with a stroke and his wife allegedly running the affairs of the country; you’ve got Franklin Roosevelt who may or may not have been told how deathly ill he was in his last term, and certainly nothing was told to the country about it; you’ve got Kennedy every which way not acknowledging that he had Addison’s disease; you had [Thomas] Eagleton who had to leave the [Democratic] ticket in ‘72 because he didn’t tell [George] McGovern about his past history of electric-shock therapy and depression; and there was [Paul] Tsongas in the mid-1990s and the fact that he had a recurrence after they had maintained that he was cured of cancer.
–Lawrence Altman, Covering Candidates’ Medical Records
Barack Obama stands alone in the last three elections as the only candidate to not release medical records to the public.
What other candidates released their records in the last three elections? What possibly might be in the unreleased medical records?
Barack Obama stands alone in the last three elections as the only candidate to not release medical records to the public.
Gore did it in 1999: Gore’s Health ‘Outstanding,’ Doctors Say. Bush released medical and service records in 2000 and again in 2004: Bush releases his Vietnam-era military files. Though there were some questions, Kerry released records in 2004: Kerry allows Navy release of military, medical records. The MSM interest in George Bush’s records was so intense in 2004, it lead CBS News and Dan Rather to report on forged records–though they weren’t identified as such until the blogosphere pointed out the forgery.
What is in those medical records? DBKP does not pretend to know–most likely nothing of interest. But we can’t report that: we don’t know. No one but the Obama campaign knows and they’re not saying. The medical records join Obama’s college and university records as parts of the candidate’s past that is off-limits. We won’t address the senator’s birth records: that’s another subject. The refusal to release the medical records–as well as other information that Joe Sixpack has to provide–only leads to suspicions that only the Obama campaign can quiet. The refusal of the Obama campaign to release records any American has to provide to secure employment is a puzzler: Obama promises “change” and “hope” and transparency. The Obama campaign can demonstrate its commitment to transparency by releasing those records most American have to pony up every time they are interviewed for a job. (Source: 1000 papercuts: Mondo Frazier.)
Birth Certificate: Obama has refused to release the bank vault copy of his certificate. Republican Governor Lingle has sealed all records -- hospital and Department of Health -- dealing with Obama's birth on 27 Sep 2008. (See Birth Certificate for details.)
What Obama Provided
The problem for the critics is getting others to understand -- or at least force to admit -- that the COLB does NOT prove that Obama was born in Hawaii.
What the Plaintiffs Wanted that shows the hospitals -- to show he was born in Hawaii
COLB show by FactCheck.org with raised seal
The main crux for the demand for the vault copy of the birth certificate is to (1) verify that Obama was actually born in a hospital in Hawaii; and (2) to verify the date of his legal name change. The first is to prove or disprove rumor of being born in Kenya. The second is to prove or disprove that Obama entered college as an Indonesian.
There is one who published his findings on the web in mid-November over whether the COLBs on the internet were forgeries. However, this too was immediately attacked by the liberal blogs as being a fraud as well. It was by Ron Polarik, PhD, at Free Republic: Polarik's final report: Obama's 'Born' Conspiracy Forged images, phony photos, and felony fraud. He admits that the other fraudulent individuals who proved to be fakes would reflect on his results -- and that his report would be viewed with suspicion. The report is very lengthy and detailed. It is highly recommended that one check it out for yourself and make up your own mind. However, until a certified authority on forged documents makes a statement about the items being a forgery, all of this is inadmissable as evidence in a court. Polarik claims he is an expert with a PhD in Instructional Media and expertise in computer graphics and peripherals and has provided a sworn affidavit to this fact. He is being used by Philip Berg as his "expert" in his suit's claims that the document is a forgery. He also claims he has received threats from Obama supporters.
The Summary: The Certification of Live Birth documents posted on Mr. Obama's website www.fightthesmears.com, Daily Kos (a pro-Obama blog) and factcheck.org, (a pro-Obama political research group), were found to be altered and forged. (Source: WND.) (SITE NOTE: "Fight the Smears" (http://fightthesmears.com) was removed from the internet on July 2009 along with the copy of the disputed COLB. It is thought to be in reaction to the nationwide billboard campaign in May 2009 by World Net Daily asking "Wheres the Birth Certificate?")
The problem of the pixels: When you have a green patterned document such as this, there should be a lot of green pixels from the background showing up between the letters that appear on the certification. But in this case, instead of green pixels, there are white and grey pixels between the letters, which result when you replace existing text with other text.
There is no second fold line. The pictures show two folds – necessary to fit any COLB into an envelope for mailing, but the document itself shows only one fold. This is another indication of document alteration.
There's a blurred border. The border has a lower resolution than the rest of the document, which is another indication that it has been altered.
The border is one that is used in 2007 COLBs. As a security measure, Hawaii changes their borders every year. This is when the Obama campaign claims the certificate was obtained. That is fine except for the problem that …
The seal and signature stamp are from a 2008 COLB. As revealed by a process called edging, the Hawaiian seal and signature stamp on the back of the document are revealed to be from the wrong year!
Selective Service Registration: Released under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The following expose is from Debbie Schlussel in Nov 2008. She alleges that there is fraud indicated in the documents -- coupled with forgery. The importance of this discovery is that from the Selective Service Website it states: "Employment in the Executive branch (and Post Office) is barred to any male who did not register between the ages of 18-25". If this an actual forgery or altered document, Obama may be ineligible for the office of President -- regardless of the citizenship questions. However, others contend that this regulation only applies to "employment."
Did President-elect Barack Hussein Obama commit a federal crime in September of this year? Or did he never actually register and, instead, did friends of his in the Chicago federal records center, which maintains the official copy of his alleged Selective Service registration commit the crime for him?
It's either one or the other, as indicated by the release of Barack Obama's official Selective Service registration for the draft. A friend of mine, who is a retired federal agent, spent almost a year trying to obtain this document through a Freedom of Information Act request, and, after much stonewalling, finally received it and released it to me.
But the release of Obama's draft registration and an accompanying document, posted below, raises more questions than it answers. And it shows many signs of fraud, not to mention putting the lie to Obama's claim that he registered for the draft in June 1979, before it was required by law.
The official campaign for President may be over. But Barack Obama's Selective Service registration card and accompanying documents show that questions about him are not only NOT over, but if the signature on the document is in fact his, our next Commander-in-Chief may have committed a federal crime in 2008, well within the statute of limitations on the matter. If it is not his, then it's proof positive that our next Commander-in-Chief never registered with the Selective Service as required by law. By law, he was required to register and was legally able to do so until the age of 26.
But the Selective Service System registration ("SSS Form 1") and accompanying computer print-out ("SSS Print-out), below, released by the Selective Service show the following oddities and irregularities, all of which indicate the document was created in 2008 and backdated:
* Document Location Number Indicates Obama Selective Service Form was Created in 2008
First, there is the Document Location Number (DLN) on the form. In the upper right hand corner of the Selective Service form SSS Form 1, there is the standard Bates-stamped DLN, in this case "0897080632," which I've labeled as "A" on both the SSS Form and the computer printout document. On the form, it reflects a 2008 creation, but on the printout, an extra eight was added in front of the number to make it look like it is from 1980, when it was actually created in 2008.
As the retired federal agent notes:
Having worked for the Federal Government for several decades, I know that the standardization of DLNs have the first two digits of the DLN representing the year of issue. That would mean that this DLN was issued in 2008. The DLN on the computer screen printout is the exact same number, except an 8 has been added to make it look like it is from 1980 and give it a 1980 DLN number. And 1980 is the year Senator/President Elect Obama is said to have timely registered. So, why does the machine-stamped DLN reflect this year (2008) and the DLN in the database (which was manually input) reflect a "corrected" DLN year of 1980? Were all the DLNs issued in 1980 erroneously marked with a 2008 DLN year or does the Selective Service use a different DLN system then the rest of the Federal Government? Or was the SSS Form 1 actually processed in 2008 and not 1980?
It's quite a "coincidence" . . . that is, if you believe in coincidences, especially in this case.
Far more likely is that someone made up a fake Selective Service registration to cover Obama's lack of having done so, and that the person stamping the form forgot (or was unable to) change the year to "80" instead of the current "08". They either forgot to fake the DLN number or couldn't do so.
And guess where the Selective Service registrations are marked and recorded? Lucky for Obama, it's his native Chicago. From an article entitled, "Post Office Registration Process", on the Selective Service website:
When a young man reaches 18 he can go to any of the 35,000 post offices nationwide to register with Selective Service. There he completes a simple registration card and mails it to the Selective Service System. This begins a multi-step process which results in the man's registration.
Each week approximately 6,000 completed registration cards are sent to the Selective Service System's Data Management System (DMC) near Chicago, Ill. At the DMC these cards are grouped into manageable quantities. Each card is then microfilmed and stamped with a sequential document locator number. The processed microfilm is reviewed to account for all documents and to ensure that the film quality is within strict standards. After microfilming, the cards are keyed and then verified by a different data transcriber.
The Document Locator Number (DLN) is an automatic function (Selective Service record-keeping, specifically the DLN is described on pages 7-8 of this Federal Register document), with the first two digits comprising the year, and it was not changed to "08" in error. So if the form was filed and processed in 1980, how did it get a 2008 DLN?!
Comparison of signature on Selective Service document to the following: (left) October 12, 1998; (center) June 30, 2004 (right) Wikipedia (SITE NOTE: Only a signature expert can give a qualified opinion, but the "Barack" is definitely different.)
* Obama's Selective Service Registration Form is Apparently 1990 Form Altered to Appear Like 1980 Form
On the SSS Form 1, in the lower left hand corner is the form number (SSS Form 1) and the month and year version of the form, labeled as "B". On this particular Form 1, it clearly shows the month as "FEB" (February), and the year is either "80" or "90". The retired federal agent investigated further:
Magnification of the form both physically (with a 10x glass) or with different image software does not reflect a clear cut result of either a "80" or a "90".
But, checking the history of SSS Form 1 (see http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewICR?ref_nbr=198002-3240-001#), it's apparent that in February 1980, the Selective Service agency withdrew a "Request for a new OMB control number" for SSS Form 1 (see also, here)--meaning the agency canceled its previous request for a new form, and one was never issued in "FEB 1980".
Since under the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, Pub. L. No. 96-511, 94 Stat. 2812 (Dec. 11, 1980), codified in part at Subchapter I of Chapter 35 of Title 44 a federal agency can not use a form not approved by OMB (Office of Management and Budget), it's nearly impossible for Senator/President-Elect Obama's SSS Form 1 to be dated "Feb 1980." And since that makes it almost certainly dated "Feb 1990," then how could Barack Obama sign it and the postal clerk stamp it almost ten (10) years before its issue?! Simply not possible.
The lower right hand corner reflects that the Obama SSS form 1 was approved by OMB with an approval number of 19??0002, labeled as "C". The double question marks (??) reflect digits that are not completely clear.
* Barack Obama's Signature is Dated After Postal Stamp Certifying His Signature
Barack H. Obama signed the SSS Form 1's "Today's date" as July 30, 1980, labeled "D". But the Postal Stamp reflects the PREVIOUS day's date of July 29, 1980, labeled "E". Yes, Obama could have mistakenly written the wrong date, but it is rare and much more unlikely for someone to put a future date than a past date. (Also note how Barry made such a "cute" peace sign with the "b" inside the "O" of his signature. Touching.)
* Postal Stamp is Incorrect, Discontinued in 1970
Then, there is the question as to whether the Postal Stamp is real. The "postmark" stamp--labeled "E"--is hard to read, but it is clear that at the bottom is "USPO" which stands typically for United States Post Office. However, current "postmark" validator, registry, or round dater stamps (item 570 per the Postal Operations Manual) shows "USPS" for United States Postal Service. The change from Post Office to Postal Service occurred on August 12, 1970, when President Nixon signed into law the most comprehensive postal legislation since the founding of the Republic--Public Law 91-375. The new Postal Service officially began operations on July 1, 1971.
Why was an old, obsolete postmark round dater stamp used almost ten (10) years after the fact to validate a legal document . . . that just happened to be Barack Obama's suspicious Selective Service registration form?
* Form Shows Barack Obama didn't have ID
The SSS Form 1 states "NO ID", labeled "F". Since that's the case, then how did the Hawaiian postal clerk know that the submitter was really Barack H. Obama, who may have been on summer break from attending Occidental College in California. How would they determine whether the registrant was truly registering and not a relative, friend, or other imposter?
* The Selective Service Data Mgt. Center Stonewalled for Almost a Year on Obama Registration, Until Right Before the Election.
The retired federal agent who FOIA'd Barack Obama's Selective Service Registration Form notes:
Early this year, when I first started questioning whether Obama registered I was told:
Sir: There may be an error in his file or many other reasons why his registration cannot be confirmed on-line. However, I did confirm with our Data Management Center that he is, indeed, registered with the Selective Service System, in compliance with Federal law.
Sincerely,
Janice L. Hughes/SSS
Then, they suddenly found the record on September 9, 2008 (prior to my October 13, 2008 request), and stated that his record was filed on September 4, 1980. Did they temporarily change the date on the computer database?
On the previous FOIA response, they stated that it was filed on September 4, 1980. In my second request I mentioned that Obama could not have filed it in Hawaii on September 4, 1980 as he was attending Occidental College in California, the classes of which commenced August 24, 1980.
* Other Questions: Missing Selective Service Number, FOIA Response Dated Prior to FOIA Request, Missing Printout Page
Where is Obama's Selective Service number (61-1125539-1) on the card?
And the retired federal agent notes that the Selective Service Data Management Center prepared its response to his FOIA request prior to the request having been made:
The last transaction date is 09/04/80 [DS: labeled "G"], but the date of the printout is 09/09/08 [DS: labeled "H"]. My FOIA was dated October 13 so why did they prepare the printout BEFORE I submitted my FOIA? I gave them no "heads up" that I was sending it. In fact it was not mailed until late October--around the 25th.
Also, notice the printout was page 1 of 2 [DS: labeled "I"].
Hmmm . . . where is the other page, and what's on it?
A lot of questions here. And a lot of huge hints that this government-released, official Barack Obama Selective Service registration was faked. Either he signed the fake backdated document, or someone else faked his signature and he never registered for the draft (and lied about it).
Which is it?
It's incredible that our impending Commander-in-Chief either didn't register for the draft or did so belatedly and fraudulently.
The documents indicate it's one or the other.
*** UPDATE: Here's another irregularity that points to fraud, as spotted by reader Joyce:
My husband printed the information provided on your web site regarding Barack Obama's Selective Service registration discrepancies. I noticed that the DLN number in upper right corner (labeled "A") has only ten (10) digits with the first two being 08 , but the DLN number shown on the computer screen printout has eleven (11) digits with the first two being 80. It clearly indicates that the "8" was added at the beginning of the DLN number, in order to appear that it was issued in 1980 and wasn't simply a reversal of the first two digits as the retired federal agent noted. This in itself appears questionable. I would think there is a standard number of digits in all DLN numbers.
**** UPDATE #2, 11/14/08: Retired Federal Agent Source Reveals Himself:
The recently retired federal agent has requested that I disclose his identity so that there is no question as to the source of the information.
His name is Stephen Coffman. He retired last year from the position of the Resident Agent in Charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Galveston, Texas office. He has over 32 years of government service and has held a Secret or higher security clearance for the majority of those years.
He filed the FOIA with Selective Service and has the original letter and the attachments. He first notified the Selective Service of his findings and they ignored the questions.
The Mystery of Multiple Obama Social Security Numbers --- As a result, there is a lot of confusion as to what is true or false about the Social Security Number issue. If SSN 042-68-4424 is the only SSN Obama has used, how in the world did he obtain that number as when it was issued he was living in Hawaii? He had to have had a SSN to work part-time at the ice cream shop in Hawaii -- so his SSN should begin with the prefix 576. If he is CURRENTLY using a SSN beginning with 042, it means that he has an assumed identity. DOES OBAMA HAVE A HAWAII SSN? NO ONE HAS MENTIONED IT SO FAR. THIS REALLY NEEDS TO BE SORTED OUT!
Susan Daniels, a second investigator filed an affidavit, with true and correct copies here, in the Barnett v. Obama case. Susan Daniels is a private investigator, licensed by the State of Ohio.
In her affidavit, Daniels states that she has located Barack Obama's Social Security Number. She states it was issued between 1977 and 1979 in the State of Connecticut. She states that it is the only Social Security Number Barack Obama ever used. (SSN 042-68-4424) (SITE NOTE: Getting back to a SSN from Hawaii, if Obama has been using one from Connecticut, there is something definitely out of whack...something so obvious that it just does not compute.)
The number assigned to Barack Obama "appears to be associated with someone born in the year 1890."
Using "SSN Verifier Plus" Daniels traced SSN 042-68-4424. She came up with matches for:
Thomas Woods: State Issued: Connecticutt // Born -- 1962-07-15 // Died -- 1981-07-00 // Zip Last Residence: 06111
Barack Obama: State Issued: Connecticutt // Years issued: 1977-1979 // SSN Not found in death index // Name associated with SSN: Barack Obama -- Barack Hussein Obama // Date of birth association with SSN: 1890; 08/04/1961; 04/08/1961
Garofalo, Michael: State Issued: Connecticutt // Years issued: 1977-1979 // SSN Not found in death index // Name associated with SSN: Michael Garofalo -- Michael Matt Garofalo // Date of birth association with SSN: 10/1971; 10/30/1971
'
SSN prefixes for Connecticut are from 040 through 049. SSN prefixes for Hawaii are 575 and 576. (Source: MRFA.) WHAT SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS OBAMA USING?
Of all these marvels, the latest mystery and probably most perplexing is that of Obama’s social security number. It appears that Obama has multiple identities in term of possessing numerous social security numbers. Orly Taitz, an attorney who has filed numerous suits against Obama regarding his eligibility to serve as president, appears to be the first to discover this. In her suit, representing a number of military officers who are refusing to serve under an ineligible commander in chief, she hired private investigator Neil Sankey to conduct research on Obama’s prior addresses and Social Society numbers. Using Intelius, Lexis Nexis, Choice Point and other public records, Sankey found around 25 Social Security numbers connected with Obama’s name.
However, it may not be as many as 25, since Sankey also searched using closely related names such as: “Barak Obama,” “Batock Obama,” “Barok Obama,” and “Barrack Obama.” There may very well be some Kenyans living in America with the same last name and a similar first name. In any case, I (Steve Baldwin) will exclude these records for the purpose of this research and focus only on names spelled exactly like his name. Moreover, we can verify many of the Social Security numbers as valid since they’re connected to addresses at which we know Obama resided. Needless to say, there are also a slew of address and social security numbers connected to addresses in states that Obama has no known connection to.
In Obama’s home state, Illinois, Sankey tracked down 16 different addresses for a Barack Obama or a Barack H. Obama, of which all are addresses he was known to have lived at. Two Social Security numbers appear for these addresses, one beginning with 042 and one starting 364.
In California, where Obama attended Occidental College, there are six addresses listed for him, all within easy driving distance of the college. However, there are three Social Security numbers connected to these addresses, 537 and two others, each beginning with 999.
There are no addresses listed in New York where he attended Columbia University, but there is one listed for him in nearby Jackson, NJ, with a Social Security number beginning with 485.
In Massachusetts – where Obama attended Harvard Law School – we find three addresses, all using the 042 Social Security number. After Obama was elected to the United States Senate in 2005, he moved into an apartment at 300 Massachusetts Ave NW; the Social Security number attached to that address is the 042 one. Yet, three years later, Obama used a different Social Security number for an address listed as: 713 Hart Senate Office Building. This was the address of his United States Senate office. This Social Security number began with 282 and was verified by the government in 2008.
This mystery grows even stranger as other addresses and Social Security numbers for Barack Obama appear in a dozen other states not known to be connected to him. Again, I am excluding those records names not spelled exactly like his name.
Tennessee, one address with a Social Security number beginning with 427
Colorado, one address, with a Social Security number beginning with 456.
Utah, two addresses, with two Social Security numbers beginning with 901 and 799.
Missouri has one address and one Social Security number beginning with 999.
Florida has two addresses listed for his him, three if you count one listed as “Barry Obama.” One is connected to a Social Security number beginning with 762.
In Georgia there are three addresses listed for him, all with different Social Security numbers: 579, 420, and 423.
In Texas there are four different addresses listed for him, one is connected to Social Security number 675.
There are two addresses listed for Barack Obama in Oregon and one address listed for him in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
All told, there are 49 addresses and 16 different Social Security numbers listed for a person whose name is spelled “Barack Obama.” In some cases, the middle initial “H” is listed. If you were to expand the search to include closely related names such as: “Barac,” “Barak,” and “Barrack” Obama, you would find more than a dozen additional addresses and Social Security numbers.
Finally, the one Social Security number Obama most frequently used, the one beginning with 042, is a number issued in Connecticut sometime during 1976-1977, yet there is no record of Obama ever living or working in Connecticut. Indeed, during this time period Obama would have been 15-16 years old and living in Hawaii at the time. (Source: Western Journalism Steve Baldwin
.) (SITE NOTE: We find this incredible as Obama MUST HAVE HAD A SSN ASSOCIATED WITH HAWAII since he was employed part-time by his own admission in an ice cream shop as a teenager. A SSN had to have been issued with a prefix of 575 or 576 (Hawaii), but none of the numbers above include such a number. We wonder why the stories do not point out such an obvious fact.)
Obama/Dunham marriage license -- Not released
Soetoro/Dunham marriage license -- Not released
Soetoro adoption records -- Not released
Besuki School application -- Released. (Photo of a school registration form taken by Tatan Syuflana, an Indonesian AP reporter and photographer. There was an AP story story in Jan. 2007, but it did not include this photo. (Source: Smith Files Blog.) Obama (Barry Soetoro) registered as Indonesian citizen and as a Muslim. Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father, married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. Attended Franciscus Primary School (1967-1969) for two years and the Besuki State Elementary School Menteng 01 in Jakarta, Indonesia (1969-1971) until age 10, in 1971. At the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, the documents showed Obama enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The document required that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant. (See Besuki Enrollment and associated articles for more information.)
The AP caption reads: "This registration document, made available on Jan. 24, 2007, by the Fransiskus Assisi school in Jakarta, Indonesia, shows the registration of Barack Obama under the name Barry Soetoro into the Catholic school made by his step-father, Lolo Soetoro. The document lists Barry Soetoro as a Indonesian citizen, born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, and shows his Muslim step-father listed the boy's religion as Islam. (AP Photo/ Tatan Syuflana)"
The upload timeframe would have been around February 14, 2007 about 2 or so weeks after the document was released that states that the document was made available on January 24, 2007. The date of January 24, 2007 was about the time that FOX news incorrectly reported that the Fransiskus Assisi school in Jakarta was a madrassa. The school itself is NOT in question. What IS in question is Barack Obama's identity, whether or not his name is legally 'Barry Soetero'; whether or not if he was adopted by Lolo Soetero, whether or not if he retains Indonesian citizenship,
That the application states "Islam" as his religion is disregarded by Obama supporters. "But the story according to Obama's books and extra information supplied by his political adviser David Axelrod, is that Obama lived in Jakarta from age 6 to age 10 with his mother and stepfather, neither of whom were particularly religious. For two years he attended a Catholic school and for two years he attended the Besuki School - "where students were predominately Muslim but where they had only one hour a week of comparative religious studies," Axelrod, his campaign manager, said." (Source: Chicago Tribune.) Obama's campaign attempted to treat any question of whether Obama was educated in the Muslim faith as a conservative "wingnut" witchhunt. However, there is truth in that Obama WAS educated as a Muslim in the secular Besuki school.
The "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" blog reports that Obama's Indonesian schooling began when he was entered into the Roman Catholic, Franciscus Assisi Primary School on January 1, 1968 and sat in class 1B. He was registered under the name Barry Soetoro, serial number 203. School documents listed Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen and his religion was listed as Islam. He will spend three years at Franciscus. Catholic schools accepted non-Catholics worldwide. Non-Catholic students are typically excused from religious instruction and ceremony. In 1971, Obama's family moved from H Ramir Street to Dempo Street and Obama enters the 4th grade at the Besuki Primary School, a government school. He was enrolled as Barry Soetoro, Muslim. All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school and a young Barry Soetoro, being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam. In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama mentions studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school."
According to Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers and the principal from 1971 through 1989, Barry actively took part in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school. His teacher was named Maimunah and she lived in the Puncak area, the Cianjur Regency. "I remembered that he had studied "mengaji" (recitation of the Quran)" Tine said. Obama himself recalls, "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies." A blogger in Jakarta wrote: "The actual usage of the word 'mengaji' in Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Quran in the Arabic language rather than the native tongue. "Mengagi" is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, 'mengaji classes' are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to. To put this in a Christian context, this is something above and beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes." "The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet." "As I've stated before, the evidence seems to quite clearly show that both Ann Dunham and her husband Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo were in fact devout Muslims themselves and they raised their son as such."
(Source: Answers Yahoo.com.)
Indonesian Passport (Visit to Pakistan) -- Not released. According to the Obama campaign, in 1981 -- the year Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University -- Obama visited his mother and sister Maya in Indonesia. After that visit, Obama traveled to Pakistan with a friend from college whose family was from there. The Obama campaign says Obama was in Pakistan for about three weeks, staying with his friend's family in Karachi and also visiting Hyderabad in Southern India. (Source: ABC News.) (SITE NOTE: The visit to India is mistaken -- and never corrected. Obama only went to Pakistan and Indonesia on this trip. Instead we contend he visited (with his friend Wahid Hamid) Hyderabad, Sindh -- the second largest city in PAKISTAN -- which at the time was involved in racial conflicts resulting in travel warnings from the US. It should be noted that Wahid and Chandoo remained close friends and attended Obama's wedding.)
However, there is no physical proof that Obama has ever used an Indonesian passport -- and Obama will neither confirm nor deny this item -- though Philip Berg has claimed this in his suit. The World Net Daily claims that Obama had NO US passport that can be found prior to becoming a US Senator in 2004. If this is so, how did he travel to Indonesia, then Pakistan and India in 1980? But this is still only circumstantial evidence.
World Net Daily columnist Janet Porter, wrote in her column on 26 Nov 2008 that there are too many questions to ignore. "There's the matter that Obama traveled to Indonesia, Pakistan, Southern India and Kenya in 1981. He said he went to Indonesia to see his mother. This seemed plausible, except for the fact that his mother returned to Hawaii in August of 1980 to file for a divorce from her second husband, Lolo Soetoro. Unless she went back to pal around with the man she divorced, she wasn't there at the time of Obama's visit," Porter wrote. "There's another problem. No record of Obama holding an American passport prior to the one he received once becoming a U.S. senator has been found. If he traveled to Pakistan with an American passport, he wouldn't have been allowed in – since Pakistan was in turmoil in 1981 and under martial law. It was also on the State Department's travel ban list for U.S. citizens," she wrote. "If he couldn't get into Pakistan with a U.S. passport, perhaps he went there with an Indonesian passport. But the only way you can get one of those is if you are an Indonesian citizen," she wrote. (Source: WND.)
There are unsubstantiated allegations that Obama used an Indonesian passport to fly to Pakistan when he was 20 years old in 1981 because Americans on American passports were forbidden travel to Pakistan at the time. If he traveled to Pakistan with an American passport, he wouldn't have been allowed in – since Pakistan was in turmoil in 1981 and under martial law. It was also on the State Department's travel ban list for U.S. citizens. The only way he could have entered was if he had an Indonesian passport. No record of Obama holding an American passport prior to the one he received once becoming a U.S. senator has been found.
However, if he had an Indonesian passport, this also means that he did not take the allegiance oath when he was 18 to renounce the Indonesian citizenship when he reached the age of majority -- and remained an Indonesian citizen.
Philip Berg's suit states: "Investigation further showed in 1981, Obama traveled to Pakistan using his Indonesian
passport. At the time of travels to Indonesia, Obama was twenty (20) years old. He was
well aware he maintained his Indonesia citizenship, and failed to regain his United States
citizenship. Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship. Had Obama regained his United
States citizenship, he would have been traveling on a United States Passport." (Source: Court Document: para. 33.)
The Obama supporters claim that the 1952 Immigration & Nationality Act, Title III, Chapter 3, Sections 349 and 355, which was in effect in the late 1960s when Obama went to Indonesia, and which stated that a minor does not lose his US citizenship upon the naturalization of his parents (or any other actions of his parents), so long as the minor returns to the US and establishes permanent US residency before the age of 21. This Obama did when he returned in 1970 to Hawaii for schooling. (Source: Tesibria.) In addition, it is logical to assume that Stanley Ann Dunham was an expatriate in Indonesia, as was her minor-age son, Barry Soetero. Although Obama was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, Obama's status as a US citizen was not affected as US courts have stated that minors are not responsible for the acts of their parents/guardians with respect to citizenship. To his supporters, Obama was NOT an Indonesian citizen as he let his citizenship default. Under this assumption, if Obama had his old Indonesian passport that he used to enter Hawaii, it was one that was issued when he was a minor and does not prove that he renounced his US citizenship.
However, even if he didn't officially renounce his Indonesian citizenship, by retaining and using the passport was a formal act of recognizing his Indonesian citizenship. Officially swearing an allegiance to America is an irrelevant fact. The problem is that he traveled on an the alleged INDONESIAN PASSPORT in 1980 when he was 20. This means he did NOT reject his Indonesian citizenship -- and instead ACCEPTED HIS INDONESIAN CITIZENSHIP. According to a Department of Justice survey of Law of Expatriation (Jun 2002), "Expatriating a U.S. citizen subject to the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment on the ground that, after reaching the age of 18, the person has obtained foreign citizenship or declared allegiance to a foreign state generally will not be possible absent substantial evidence, apart from the act itself, that the individual specifically intended to relinquish U.S. citizenship. An express statement of renunciation of U.S. citizenship would suffice. An intent to renounce citizenship can be inferred from the act of serving in the armed forces of a foreign state engaged in hostilities against the United States." Obama does not fit into any of these categories. However, under federal law, a U.S. citizen can lose his nationality if he voluntarily "obtain[s] naturalization in a foreign state . . . after having attained the age of eighteen years." 8 U.S.C. § 1481(a)(1). Likewise, a citizen of the United States could be expatriated if he voluntarily "tak[es] an oath or mak[es] an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof, after having attained the age of eighteen years." 8 U.S.C. § 1481(a)(2). In either case, however, no loss of citizenship may result unless the citizen acts "with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality." 8 U.S.C. § 1481(a). (Source: Department of Justice.)
More damning is his trip to Kenya in 1987. Remember that no record of Obama holding an American passport prior to the one he received once becoming a U.S. senator has been found. If true, this is a smoking gun as Obama made a trip to Kenya in 1987 -- at age 27 -- well above the age of majority on a passport that was other than a US passport. If he had traveled there on an Indonesian passport, he had accepted Indonesian citizenship -- and more importantly, by accepting and using the passport, he in effect RENOUNCED American citizenship. Thus, if Obama actively kept his Indonesian citizenship alive by not relinquishing his Indonesian passport, his US citizenship could be challenged.
(1) Voting in a foreign election, serving in a foreign army, or (2) swearing allegiance to a foreign government used to be automatic grounds for losing U.S. citizenship. But a 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 made it all but impossible for someone to lose U.S. citizenship unless he or she wants to give it up. But no one is challenging Obama's US citizenship. It is only challenging him as a "natural born citizen" -- one who owes no allegiance to a foreign power. It only means that he lost his right to be President when he accepted the citizenship of Indonesia by accepting the Indonesian passport.) (SEE Is Obama an Indonesian?.)
Janet Porter's commentary on World Net Daily (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=81943) stated: "There's another problem. No record of Obama holding an American passport prior to the one he received once becoming a U.S. senator has been found. ..."
She was talking about his Indonesia, Pakistan, India trip -- but she didn't mention the smoking gun from her statement. If Obama didn't have a US passport until he became a US Senator in 2003, then how did he travel to Kenya in 1987? This was no longer a case of being a minor -- under the law Obama lost his Indonesian citizenship when he was 21 by allegedly doing nothing. However, if he had a Indonesian when he was 27 in 1987 -- that was long past the age of majority.
My questions: (1) Is she sure of her facts? (2) Is she really sure of her facts? (3) Is she really really sure of her facts? (We do know that supposed contract workers broke into Clinton, McCain and Obama passport files during the campaign. Could the Obama folks claim Porter's info was in error based this?)
The question is: What country's passport was it, if it wasn't a US passport? If it is true, who cares about the birth certificate. The passport issue will prove he was a foreign citizen when he was an ADULT -- not a dual citizen as a minor. CAN ANYONE CONFIRM JANET PORTER'S STATEMENT?
Who was Senator Obama’s host in Pakistan? The Friday Times broke this story in early March 2008 and revealed the host to be none other than Mian Muhammadian Soomro, the caretaker prime minister. This is the quote from the Such Gup section (not available online): "Presidential hopeful Barack Hussein Obama is no stranger to Pakistan, we hear. For one, he shared a dorm with various Pakistanis as an undergraduate at Columbia university in New York and was close friends with at least two Karachi-ites from famous Sindhi families. For another, he traveled to Sindh on a hunting expedition and went on shikar in Jacobabad. He was a guest, it is said, of the current caretaker prime minister and the latter claims that he is still in touch with him. Obama came to Pakistan when he was merely a state senator more than a decade ago and not a full blown senator in the US Senate. So, can we expect him to look kindly upon us?" (Source: Cyrilameida.com.)
While in Karachi, Obama had stayed at the residence of his college friend, Hassan Chandio. In Jacobabad, he was the guest of Soomro family. Muhammadmian Soomro confirmed this information and said it was his first meeting with Obama. "Yes, he had been our guest and spent three days in Jacobabad," he told The News. Soomro, presently in the US, his second home, said an American friend had told his father, Ahmadmian Soomro, about Obama's arrival in Pakistan and asked him to look after the American. Soomro's father was the deputy speaker of West Pakistan Assembly and had also later served in the Senate. Ahmadmian Soomro had also served in banking industry and was considered a pioneer in cooperative banking. By the time Soomro's father had hosted Obama, he was only a college student who went to Pakistan on his way from Indonesia where his mother was working with the Ford Foundation's micro credit finance project. Also Obama's mother was a frequent traveller to Pakistan and according to Time Magazine, she had a little bit proficiency in speaking Urdu. (Source: Free Republic.)
Punahou School Records: Not released. At this point he was going by the name of Barry Soetoro and it is uncertain when he changed his name to Barry Obama -- and later Barack Hussein Obama. We believe he returned in Autumn 1970 and was considered for enrollment in Punahou at the request of Madelyn Dunham -- by then a VP at the Bank of Hawaii -- for her Indonesian grandson. He was entered into Punahou initially as Barry Dunham -- we believe his mother's maiden name -- and in Dec 1971, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. returned to Hawaii and Obama had his birth certificate changed to Barack Hussein Obama II. At that point he was officially entered into the Punahou School records as Barack Obama. However, we also believe he qualified as a foreign student using his Indonesian citizenship as Barry Soetoro with Punahou believing he was a dual citizen -- but in actuality Barry Soetoro and Barack Obama were two separate entities with different citizenships. This cannot be proved without the Punahou School records.
Occidental College Records: Not released. Occidental College records sealed. Attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. The only trace of Barack Obama at Occidental College that the public is allowed to see is a few poems that may be ordered on the college's website. What aroused suspicion was that Obama did not originally list Occidental on his political resume initially -- even though he spent two years there on full scholarship. (See Occidental years for more information.)
Critics claim Obama is hiding his school records because they MAY reveal he applied for student loans/grants as a foreign student as it is alleged that he still had a VALID INDONESIAN PASSPORT on which he allegedly traveled to Pakistan at age 20 in 1981. However, there is no proof that he used an Indonesian passport -- and Obama will neither confirm nor deny this. The records were subpoena'ed by Dr. Orly Taitz (plaintiff: Alan Keyes) but the Occidental College was now represented by the Obama lawyers and in Feb 2009, they were attempting to quash the subpoena for the producing of the records. (See Indonesian Passport for details.)
There are also questions on this period on his Selective Service registration filed on September 4, 1980 in Hawaii. Obama could not have filed it in Hawaii on September 4, 1980 as he was attending Occidental College in California, the classes of which commenced August 24, 1980. (See Selective Service Registration for details.)
Columbia University Records: Not released. Columbia University records sealed.Transferred to Columbia University, New York City, where he graduated in 1983 with a B.A. in political science, specializing in international relations. The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript, despite an academic career that led him to Harvard Law School and, later, to a lecturing position at the University of Chicago. The shroud surrounding his experience at Columbia contrasts with that of other major party nominees since 2000, all whom have eventually released information about their college performance or seen it leaked to the public. His Columbia senior thesis is sealed. (SITE NOTE: Worked for Business International Corporation and New York Public Interest Research Group for one year after graduation. Moved to Chicago, in 1985, to work as a community organizer for the Altgeld Housing Project on the city's South Side.)
Columbia thesis -- Not released. He doesn’t have and can’t release any copies of the thesis-length paper he wrote 25 years ago while a senior at Columbia University. “We do not have a copy of the course paper you requested and neither does Columbia University,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told NBC News. “A thesis entitled Soviet Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations),” David Bossie, the former congressional investigator and “right-wing hit man,” wrote in an e-mail to NBC News.
So what does the missing paper say, and could it be politically damaging to Obama? The Obama campaign won’t offer any guidance since it says it doesn’t have a copy. Spokesman Ben LaBolt wouldn’t even say whether Sen. Obama threw out his copy or lost it. In 1983, as a senior at Columbia in New York, Barack Obama enrolled in an intense, eight-student honors seminar called American Foreign Policy. His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. He had saved Obama’s senior paper for years, and even hunted for it again this month in some boxes. But he said his search was fruitless, and he now thinks he tossed it out eight years ago during a move.
Baron described the paper as a “thesis” or “senior thesis” in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union. “My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Baron said in an e-mail. “At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other … For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A.”
Baron said that, even if he could find a copy of the paper, it would likely disappoint Obama’s critics. “The course was not a polemical course, it was a course in decision making and how decisions got made,” he said. “None of the papers in the class were controversial.” So would it provide any political ammunition today? “I don’t think it would at all,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a position paper; it was an analysis of decision-making.”
Columbia University can’t help solve the mystery, either. The university says that it never had a copy of the paper in its archives, and doesn’t today. A spokesman said that no student technically could have written a thesis in 1983, since the university didn’t even have a thesis requirement for undergraduates then.
(Source: Deepbackground.)
Harvard College Records Not released. Harvard records sealed. Entered Harvard Law School, 1988. Summer associate (three months) of Sidley Austin, a Chicago law firm, June, 1989, working under the supervision of associate Michelle Robinson, whom he began dating in the summer of 1989. Interested in seeing how he was financed in his studies. If he was enrolled using preferential treatment as an Indonesian foreign student or if he received any student loans in the name of Barry Soetoro. Also interested in whether he was financed by a Middle-east connection that was raising funds for this obscure Columbia graduate. Obama did NOT graduate with any honors from Columbia and was a consistently "B" student from high school throughout his college years UNTIL he entered Harvard where he graduated Magna Cum Laude. His Harvard years are clouded in secrecy like Columbia years.
Harvard Law Review articles -- None (There may be one unsigned article.) Voted first black president, Harvard Law Review, 1990. Though President of Harvard Law Review, no articles that he published can be found.
Baptism certificate -- None. Though he went from an agnostic to a "practicing Christian" in Chicago and married at the United Trinity Church -- there is no baptism certificate.
Illinois State Senate records: -- His state legislative records are missing and may have been thrown out. Obama claimed he did not maintain any records, including his Illinois State Senate schedule.
All information on Obama culled from Senate voting records or published committee meetings. Obama has refused to release anything citing that everything is on public record. Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said Nov 2008 that "Obama has a track record of leading the way on reform and disclosure," adding that "correspondence with state agencies and records of requests Obama made to them on behalf of his constituents are available to the public and have been accessed by our opponents and members of the news media." Unfortunately, his private records are not included in the "transparency" on what is released for scrutiny.
"I don't have - I don't maintain - a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn't have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records," he said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. He said he wasn't sure where any cache of records might have gone, adding, "It could have been thrown out. I haven't been in the state Senate now for quite some time."
Obama's statement that he has no papers from his time in the Illinois statehouse - he left in 2004 - stands in stark contrast to the massive Clinton file stored at the National Archives: an estimated 78 million pages of documents, plus 20 million e-mail messages, packed into 36,000 boxes. While any file from Obama's time in the state Senate would be far smaller, the idea that no papers exist at all is questioned by one historian.
"Most of those guys do keep this stuff, especially the favorable stuff. They've all got egos," said Taylor Pensoneau, a historian who has written about Illinois legislators and governors and worked with them as a lobbyist for the coal industry. "It goes in scrapbooks or maybe boxes. I don't think it's normal practice to say it's all discarded." (Source: Pantagraph.com.)
Law practice client list Refuses to release. Obama and his former law firm say Obama only did a few hours of work for nonprofit firms connected to convicted donor Tony Rezko, but no records have been released to confirm that.
Obama's refusal to specify who he worked for during his time in private practice with the firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Gallard (now known by only the last three names). In all of his statements of economic interests filed with the Illinois State government during his years as a state legislator, Obama listed every client of the firm. The result was a "disclosure" of hundreds of clients each year – from 247 in his 1997 filing to 448 in his 2002 filing – when he was only working for a handful of those.
Obama's old boss, Judson Miner, said there were 30 cases to which Obama contributed in some way during his time there, full time for three years and seven years "of counsel." How many clients could he have represented in those 30 cases over 10 years? (Source: Sun Times.)
When the Chicago Sun-Times asked for a specific list of his clients in 2007, Robert Gibbs, communications director for the senator's presidential campaign, responded, "The rules of professional responsibility binding on the firm precludes its public dissemination of client-confidential information, including the fact of representation. If there are specific questions about specific representations, we will attempt to answer them with the assistance of the firm." That sounds very authoritative, but it's also wrong. Attorney-client privilege covers the fact of representation only in extremely rare cases.
(Source: Campaign spot.) (SITE NOTE: Blog comments from attorneys state that Gibbs statements were incorrect and no such professional non-disclosure rule exists.)
On 17 Nov 2008, the LA Times finally got the information. Dan Morain of the L.A. Times has just discovered that Barack Obama has a pretty thin resume prior to being elevated to the presidency.
In his books, speeches and campaign commercials, Sen. Barack Obama has harked back to his days as a civil-rights attorney. It is fundamental to his autobiography and was displayed on his campaign Web site and woven into his appeals for votes. In one of his television ads leading up to the South Carolina primary, Obama recalled "working as a civil-rights attorney to make sure that everybody's vote counted."
Between 1993 and '96, Obama, the much-ballyhooed "Constitutional scholar," had only an unusually low 3,723 billable hours of legal work accrued over a four-year stint with his law firm employer Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard. Further, he seems to have worked on but few cases and made little impact commensurate with his reputation.
The Morain piece begins by recounting how Obama has so often made a big deal out of his days as a "civil-rights attorney" claiming it a key ingredient of his early, formative community development years. Yet, Morain finds that there isn't much record proving that Obama did a whole heck-of-a-lot back in those days.
Senior attorneys at the small firm where he worked say he was a strong writer and researcher, but was involved in relatively few cases before entering politics.
Here's how Morain sums up Obama's paper trail:
30: The approximate number of legal cases Obama was involved in:
4: The number of years Obama was a full-time lawyer
70%: The amount of time Obama spent on voting rights, civil rights and employment, generally as a junior associate. (The rest of his time was spent on matters related to real-estate transactions, filing incorporation papers and defending clients against minor lawsuits.)
3,723: The number of billable hours Obama accrued while working at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard.
Obama wrote in his first memoir, Dreams From my Father, "I work mostly with churches and community groups, men and women who quietly build grocery stores and health clinics in the inner city, and housing for the poor." What is strange is that the article states the Obama wrote Dreams From my Father BEFORE he joined the firm. The article stated:
That accomplishment generated press accounts and prompted Judson Miner, head of the firm that bears his name, to recruit Obama. Obama took time to complete Dreams From My Father, then joined the 13-attorney firm. "He was doing the work that any first-year or second-year associate would do," Miner says. "In litigation, he was doing basic research and writing memos. . . . . In the first couple years he would play a very minor role. He wouldn't know [much], so he would take the lead from whoever was supervising his work."
Obama took what Miner called the "laboring oar" on some cases. He took the lead arguing a 1994 case before the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of a securities trader who had been improperly fired. The court ruled for his client.
Morain states, "Obama arrived in Chicago in 1993 with a degree from Harvard Law School and was hired as a junior lawyer at a firm then known as Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Gallard. He helped represent clients in civil- and voting-rights matters and wrongful firings, argued a case before a federal appellate court, and took the lead in writing a suit to expand voter registration." In one, Obama filed a 995 suit that forced Illinois to enforce the 1993 federal Motor Voter law, which sought to make it easier for people to register to vote. However, he also cites three more-mundane cases in which Obama was involved. (SITE NOTE: It should be noted that none of the "few hours" that Obama worked on the Rezko cases are included in this list.)
The case of the man who slipped In one instance, Obama defended a nonprofit corporation that owns low-income housing projects against a lawsuit in which a man alleged that he slipped and fell because of poor maintenance. Obama got the suit dismissed.
The case of the shortchanged baby sitter. Obama appeared on behalf of a nonprofit corporation that provided health care for poor people. A woman who claimed income of less than $8,000 a year had sued Obama's client to obtain a $336 payment for baby-sitting services; Obama's client paid up, and the case was settled.
The case of the chilly tenants. In 1994, Obama appeared in Cook County court on behalf of Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., defending it against a suit by the city, which alleged that the company failed to provide heat for low-income tenants on the South Side during the winter.
So, it appears Obama has less billable hours during those four years than most young lawyers are expected to accrue (which is up to 2,000 hours a year according to some estimates), worked on but few cases, and only on one notable one. On top of that, he was rarely more than a "junior associate" the whole time. (Source: Newsbusters blog and LA Times.)
University of Chicago scholarly articles -- None. This can be explained as he was a part-time teacher at the University of Chicago -- not a tenured professor. Professors are expected to publish professional articles or scholarly works as part of their positions. However, the University of Chicago fudges on the issue stating he was "considered" or "regarded as" a "professor" -- seeking to bask in the limelight as having had a President teaching at their institution.
The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as "Senior Lecturer."
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined. (Source: University of Chicago Law School.)
MAINSTREAM MEDIA'S LOVE AFFAIR WITH OBAMA
Throughout the presidential campaign, conservatives have been yelling -- if not screaming -- that the mainstream media was giving Obama a free ride. They picked on Palin's wardrobe, but said nothing about Obama's spending on wardrobe by the DNC. There was a double standard. Yes, there were mistakes like the Courric-Palin interview, but one starts to think that Palin was set up by her own staff. How else could a prank call come in directly to Palin -- for radio broadcast?
Now that the election is over, people are starting to ask questions. A lot of people are starting to wake up. Conservatives have been demanding the records -- but they have all been sealed. The really enticing question is how does anyone really know about Obama? Now some people are saying the FBI/CIA should have records already about Obama -- but why won't President Bush release them. Is it because the fear of the mass destruction of American society by enraged blacks going on a rampage? Why won't Obama just provide his records if his claims of "transparency" are real? BUT the biggest question is why is the London Times and Italian Vanity Fair finding Obama's lost relatives -- while the mainstream media does no real investigative reporting. Why was there no pressure from the media although campaign funding discrepancies were discovered repeated -- and documented by press members? Was this part of the reason the FEC says there most likely will not be an audit of Obama's funding?
The reaction from the Obama-loving mainstream press following their Messiah's election has been fascinating. All of a sudden, we're seeing people like Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw admitting that they don't know much about the president-elect or his worldview.
ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.
BROKAW: No, I don't either.
ROSE: I don't know how he really sees where China is.
BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
BROKAW: You know that's an interesting question.
ROSE: He is principally known through his autobiography and through very aspirational (sic) speeches, two of them.
BROKAW: I don't know what books he's read.
ROSE: What do we know about the heroes of Barack Obama?
BROKAW: There's a lot about him we don't know.
Newsweek's Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham shared a bizarre Obama love-fest session with Charlie Rose on the PBS host's program on Wednesday. Meacham stated that he was "very struck watching the stagecraft" of Obama and pointed out how Obama gave his victory speech by himself: "...[H]ave you ever seen a victory speech where there was no one else on stage? No adoring wife, no cute kid -- he is the message." Thomas went one step further in this vein: "There is a slightly creepy cult of personality about all of this." Rose confronted him on his use of this phrase, and he explained that it made him "a little uneasy that he's so singular. He's clearly managing his own spectacle. He knows how to do it. He's a -- I think, a deeply manipulative guy..." Later, all three marveled about how it was "amazing" that Obama "watches us watching him."
Obama's honeymoon may be brief.
Then there was the Washington Post article by Barbara Howell that actually acknowledges that the coverage in the paper was biased.
The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts.
My assistant, Jean Hwang, and I have been examining Post coverage since Nov. 11 of last year on issues, voters, fundraising, the candidates' backgrounds and horse-race stories on tactics, strategy and consultants. We also have looked at photos and Page 1 stories since Obama captured the nomination June 4.
The count was lopsided, with 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories. The Post was deficient in stories that reported more than the two candidates trading jabs; readers needed articles, going back to the primaries, comparing their positions with outside experts' views. There were no broad stories on energy or science policy, and there were few on religion issues.
Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics, said, "There are a lot of things I wish we'd been able to do in covering this campaign, but we had to make choices about what we felt we were uniquely able to provide our audiences both in Washington and on the Web. I don't at all discount the importance of issues, but we had a larger purpose, to convey and explain a campaign that our own David Broder described as the most exciting he has ever covered, a narrative that unfolded until the very end. I think our staff rose to the occasion."
The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.
Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic. Journalists love the new; McCain, 25 years older than Obama, was already well known and had more scars from his longer career in politics.
The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that.
McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his. From June 4 to Election Day, the tally was Obama, 626 stories, and McCain, 584. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain, 144 times; 41 stories featured both.
Our survey results are comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It found that from June 9, when Clinton dropped out of the race, until Nov. 2, 66 percent of the campaign stories were about Obama compared with 53 percent for McCain; some stories featured both. The project also calculated that in that time, 57 percent of the stories were about the horse race and 13 percent were about issues. (SITE NOTE: This has consistently been our biggest complaint that the press never covered the issues.)
Counting from June 4, Obama was in 311 Post photos and McCain in 282. Obama led in most categories. Obama led 133 to 121 in pictures more than three columns wide, 178 to 161 in smaller pictures, and 164 to 133 in color photos. In black and white photos, the nominees were about even, with McCain at 149 and Obama at 147. On Page 1, they were even at 26 each. Post photo and news editors were surprised by my first count on Aug. 3, which showed a much wider disparity, and made a more conscious effort at balance afterward.
Some readers complain that coverage is too poll-driven. They're right, but it's not going to change. The Post's polling was on the mark, and in some cases ahead of the curve, in focusing on independent voters, racial attitudes, low-wage voters, the shift of African Americans' support from Clinton to Obama and the rising importance of economic issues. The Post and its polling partner ABC News include 50 to 60 issues questions in every survey instead of just horse-race questions, so public attitudes were plumbed as well.
The Post had a hard-working team on the campaign. Special praise goes to Dan Balz, the best, most level-headed, incisive political reporter and analyst in newspapers. His stories and "Dan Balz's Take" on washingtonpost.com were fair, penetrating and on the mark. His mentor, David S. Broder, was as sharp as ever.
Michael Dobbs, the Fact Checker, also deserves praise for parsing campaign rhetoric for the overblown or just flat wrong. Howard Kurtz's Ad Watch was a sharp reality check.
The Post's biographical pieces, especially the first ones -- McCain by Michael Leahy and Obama by David Maraniss -- were compelling. Maraniss demystified Obama's growing-up years; the piece on his mother and grandparents was a great read. Leahy's first piece on McCain's father and grandfather, both admirals, told me where McCain got his maverick ways as a kid -- right from the two old men. (Source: Washington Post: David Maraniss)
But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager.
The Post had good coverage of voters, mainly by Krissah Williams Thompson and Kevin Merida. Anne Hull's stories from Florida, Michigan and Liberty University, and Wil Haygood's story from central Montana brought readers into voters' lives. Jose Antonio Vargas's pieces about campaigns and the Internet were standouts.
One gaping hole in coverage involved Joe Biden, Obama's running mate. When Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated for vice president, reporters were booking the next flight to Alaska. Some readers thought The Post went over Palin with a fine-tooth comb and neglected Biden. They are right; it was a serious omission. However, I do not agree with those readers who thought The Post did only hatchet jobs on her. There were several good stories on her, the best on page 1 by Sally Jenkins on how Palin grew up in Alaska.
In early coverage, I wasn't a big fan of the long-running series called "The Gurus" on consultants and important people in the campaigns. The Post has always prided itself on its political coverage, and profiles of the top dogs were probably well read by political junkies. But I thought the series was of no practical use to readers. While there were some interesting pieces in The Frontrunners series, none of them told me anything about where the candidates stood on any issue.
(Source: Washington Post.)
Teflon-coated Obama
Salon.com's Camille Paglia continued on the aftermath feeling of being duped by the election glitter:
In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.
But Obama could have ended the entire matter months ago by publicly requesting Hawaii to issue a fresh, long-form, stamped certificate and inviting a few high-profile reporters in to examine the document and photograph it. (The campaign did make the "short-form" certificate available to Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. See Annenberg Political Fact Check: Birth Certificate.) And why has Obama not made his university records or thesis work widely available? The passivity of the press toward Bush administration propaganda about weapons of mass destruction led the nation into the costly blunder of the Iraq war. We don't need another presidency that finds it all too easy to rely on evasion or stonewalling. I deeply admire Obama, but as a voter I don't like feeling gamed or played.
Another issue that I initially dismissed was the flap over William Ayers, the Chicago-based former member of the violent Weather Underground. Conservative radio host Sean Hannity began the drumbeat about Ayers' association with Obama a year ago -- a theme that most of the mainstream media refused to investigate or even report until this summer. I had never heard of Ayers and couldn't have cared less. I was irritated by Hillary Clinton's aggressive flagging of Ayers in a debate, and I accepted Obama's curt dismissal of the issue.
Hence my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been "pallin' around" with Ayers, in Sarah Palin's memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. Blame for the failure of this issue to take hold must also accrue to the conservative talk shows, which use the scare term "radical" with simplistic sensationalism, blanketing everyone under the sun from scraggly ex-hippies to lipstick-chic Nancy Pelosi. (Source: Salon.com.)
But on the opposite end of the spectrum Fox Network's Shepard Smith sharply retorted the contention of comedian Nick DiPaolo that the media was "in the tank" for Barack Obama.
"Oh, please...the mainstream media reflected what was happening in this nation. It did not drive it. The blogs didn't drive this movement. The media didn't drive this movement. Barack Obama did not lose this election. It was his to lose, it was not John McCain's to win. The Republicans had no shot unless the Democrats gave it to them, and they didn't. And to blame the media is a cop out and ridiculous. We are always here to be blamed by people like you who enjoy that activity. We always will be. When the Democrats lost last time, it was our fault. When the Republicans lost this time, it was our fault. It's not."
(Source: Huffington Post.)
OBAMA IS A MUSLIM???
This is the massive scare tactic that has come out from McCain and Clinton supporters. Besides the fact that Obama (Barry Soetoro) attended a school in Indonesia and was listed as a Muslim, there is little evidence to substantiate this claim. When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro -- a Muslim -- moving to Jakarta with Obama when he was six years old. Within six months he had learned to speak the Indonesian language. Obama spent "two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school" in Jakarta.
(SITE NOTE: BUT WAIT...In Jun 2009, Obama started making overtures to the Middle Eastern states as well as Iran and Pakistan -- and lo and behold, Obama became a Muslim (or sort of). Obama said America is not a Christian nation.
Now, in an interview with the French newspaper "Le Monde," Obama said, "...I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam," and claimed, "If you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world".
Naturally, the White House transcript of the interview omits this remark.
During a conference call in preparation for Obama’s trip to Cairo, Egypt, where he will address the Muslim world, deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Denis McDonough said, "the President himself experienced Islam on three continents before he was able to -- or before he’s been able to visit, really, the heart of the Islamic world -- you know, growing up in Indonesia, having a Muslim father -- obviously Muslim Americans (are) a key part of Illinois and Chicago." Interesting choice of words -- "experienced"
In his April 6 address to the Turkish Parliament, Obama said "Americans have Muslims in their families or have lived in a Muslim majority country. I know, because I am one of them." Al-Jazeera reported that Obama said he was a Muslim.
Then, in Strasbourg, Obama said, "I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, al-Qaeda is still a threat and that we cannot pretend somehow that because Barack Hussein Obama got elected as president, suddenly everything's going to be OK," he said.
These comments never would have been uttered during the primaries or general election campaign, when Americans were labeled bigots and racists even for mentioning Hussein's middle name. The candidate was even offended when referred to by his initials "BHO," because he considered the use of his middle name, "Hussein," an attempt to frighten voters.
Well, now it looks like Obama is finally coming out of the closet. Obama says it loud and says it proud. The middle name that no one dared to speak during the election campaign is now front and centre in Obama's attempt to suck up to the Muslim world. This doesn't surprise us in the least. He is a machiavellian politician who will make any promise, make any deal, and stab you in the back to get what he wants. Now he wants something from the Arabs.
Obama said, "My father was from Kenya, and a lot of people in his village were Muslim. He didn't practice Islam. Truth is he wasn't very religious. He met my mother. My mother was a Christian from Kansas, and they married and then divorced. I was raised by my mother. So, I've always been a Christian. The only connection I've had to Islam is that my grandfather on my father's side came from that country. But I've never practiced Islam. … For a while, I lived in Indonesia because my mother was teaching there. And that's a Muslim country. And I went to school. But I didn't practice. But what I do think it does is it gives me insight into how these folks think, and part of how I think we can create a better relationship with the Middle East and that would help make us safer is if we can understand how they think about issues."
Obama repeatedly has denied he is a Muslim. Obama maintains he was raised by his Christian mother and repeatedly has labeled as "smears" several reports attempting to paint him as a Muslim. "Let's make clear what the facts are: I am a Christian. I have been sworn in with a Bible. I pledge allegiance [to the American flag] and lead the Pledge of Allegiance sometimes in the United States Senate when I'm presiding," he told the Times of London earlier this year. (SITE NOTE: The New Yorker Magazine interviewed his mentor in Chicago Politics, Alderman Toni Preckwinkle. On issue after issue, Preckwinkle presented Obama as someone who thrived in the world of Chicago politics. She suggested that Obama join Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ for political reasons. "It's a church that would provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners," she said. "It's a good place for a politician to be a member." Obama states he was an agnostic who became a Christian after working with the churches in the area. However, Preckwinkle gives a more plausible reason for his "conversion." It was for politics. (Source: New Yorker.))
His presidential campaign website contained the statement, "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised as a Muslim, and is a committed Christian." But as WND has reported, public records in Indonesia listed Obama as a Muslim during his early years, and a number of childhood friends claimed to the media Obama was once a mosque-attending Muslim. Obama's campaign had several times wavered in response to reporters queries regarding the senator's childhood faith. Commenting on a Los Angeles Times report quoting a childhood friend stating Obama prayed in a mosque "something the presidential candidate said he never did," Obama's campaign released a statement explaining the senator "has never been a practicing Muslim." (Source: WND.)
In Indonesia, Obama relates that his religious training was not stringent. He said The Audacity of Hope, "During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin's call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables."
Widely distributed reports have noted that in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta's Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro. He was listed as an Indonesian citizen whose stepfather, listed on school documents as "L Soetoro Ma," worked for the topography department of the Indonesian Army. Catholic schools in Indonesia routinely accept non-Catholic students but exempt them from studying religion.
The Los Angeles Times looked into the matter further and learned more about his Indonesian interlude: "His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama's grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended. That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class. The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. "We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played," said Zulfin Adi. … Obama's younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only "for big communal events," not every Friday." (SITE NOTE: But the campaign changed its tune when it issued a "practicing Muslim" clarification to the Los Angeles Times. An article in March by the Chicago Tribune apparently disputes Adi's statements to the L.A. paper. The Tribune caught up with Obama's declared childhood friend, who now describes himself as only knowing Obama for a few months in 1970 when his family moved to the neighborhood. Adi said he was unsure about his recollections of Obama. (Source: WND.)
Reports indicate that Obama as a child was an "irregularly practicing Muslim." "Interviews with dozens of former classmates, teachers, neighbors and friends show that Obama was not a regular practicing Muslim when he was in Indonesia" – implying he was an irregularly practicing Muslim. "Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers, a few neighbors said" – confirming that he did pray in the mosque. "Obama's 3rd-grade teacher at the Catholic school, who lived near the family [said that] ‘Rarely, Barry went to the mosque with Lolo'" – confirming that Obama attended mosque services. (Source: Chicago Tribune.)
Obama (Barry Soetoro) registered as Indonesian citizen and as a Muslim. Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father, married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. At first, Obama attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The document required that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.
After attending the Assisi Primary School, Obama was enrolled "also as a Muslim, according to documents" in the Besuki Primary School, a public school in Jakarta. Laotze blog, run by an American expatriate in Southeast Asia who visited the Besuki school, noted: "All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school, and a young 'Barry Soetoro,' being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam." Indeed, in Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," he acknowledged studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school." "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Quranic studies," wrote Obama.
The Indonesian media have been flooded with accounts of Obama's childhood Islamic studies, some describing him as a religious Muslim. Speaking to the country's Kaltim Post, Tine Hahiyary, who was principal of Obama's school while he was enrolled there, said she recalls he studied the Quran in Arabic.
"At that time, I was not Barry's teacher, but he is still in my memory" claimed Tine, who is 80 years old. The Kaltim Post said Obama's teacher, named Hendri, died. "I remember that he studied mengaji (recitation of the Quran)," Tine said, according to an English translation by Loatze. Mengaji, or the act of reading the Quran with its correct Arabic punctuation, is usually taught to more religious pupils and is not known as a secular study. Also, Loatze documented the Indonesian daily Banjarmasin Post interviewed Rony Amir, an Obama classmate and Muslim, who described Obama as "previously quite religious in Islam."
"We previously often asked him to the prayer room close to the house," Amir said. "If he was wearing a sarong (waist fabric worn for religious or casual occasions) he looked funny." The Los Angeles Times, which sent a reporter to Jakarta, quoted Zulfin Adi, who identified himself as among Obama's closest childhood friends, stating the presidential candidate prayed in a mosque, something Obama's campaign claimed he never did. "We prayed, but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque," said Adi. "But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played." But the Tribune caught up with Obama's declared childhood friend, Adi, who now describes himself as only knowing Obama for a few months in 1970 when his family moved to the neighborhood. Adi said he was unsure about his recollections of Obama. (Source: WND.)
Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father. At some point, he converted to Christianity. It appears false to state, as Obama does, "I've always been a Christian" and "I've never practiced Islam." The campaign appears to be either ignorant or fabricating when it states that "Obama never prayed in a mosque." Obama's conversion to another faith, in short, makes him a murtadd -- a convert to Christianity. (Source: Daniel Pipes.)
The "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" blog reports that Obama's Indonesian schooling began when he was entered into the Roman Catholic, Franciscus Assisi Primary School on January 1, 1968 and sat in class 1B. He was registered under the name Barry Soetoro, serial number 203. School documents listed Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen and his religion was listed as Islam. He will spend three years at Franciscus. Catholic schools accepted non-Catholics worldwide. Non-Catholic students are typically excused from religious instruction and ceremony. In 1971, Obama's family moved from H Ramir Street to Dempo Street and Obama enters the 4th grade at the Besuki Primary School, a government school. He was enrolled as Barry Soetoro, Muslim. All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school and a young Barry Soetoro, being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school. He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam. In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama mentions studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school."
According to Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers and the principal from 1971 through 1989, Barry actively took part in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school. His teacher was named Maimunah and she lived in the Puncak area, the Cianjur Regency. "I remembered that he had studied "mengaji" (recitation of the Quran)" Tine said. Obama himself recalls, "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies." A blogger in Jakarta wrote: "The actual usage of the word 'mengaji' in Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Quran in the Arabic language rather than the native tongue. "Mengagi" is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, 'mengaji classes' are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to. To put this in a Christian context, this is something above and beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes." "The fact that Obama had attended mengaji classes is well known in Indonesia and has left many there wondering just when Obama is going to come out of the closet." "As I've stated before, the evidence seems to quite clearly show that both Ann Dunham and her husband Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo were in fact devout Muslims themselves and they raised their son as such."
(Source: Answers Yahoo.com.)
There are idiosyncracies. It was reported by People Magazine in Jun 2008 that Obama and wife did not give Christmas presents nor birthday presents to their children. We wondered if perhaps they celebrated Kwanza instead of Christmas because of the African influence. However, the birthday presents give away the clue that Christmas and birthdays have become too commercial. That was simply a parental choice -- in the same way, they didn't have a dog or pet. Many black ministers claimed perhaps he wasn't Christian -- and conservatives jumped on this that it was because he was Muslim. We think it is most likely a protest against the commercialism of Christmas -- and they probably celebrate the birthday with a family gathering instead of a present.
Both sides continue to bandy about denials of Obama ever being a Muslim or not. In our opinion, it is an irrelevant fact -- and worries that his status as a murtadd impacting on his foreign relations with Middle East countries is ridiculous.
However, people have started to try to tie the questionable Obama funding as coming from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states -- stating that there is some sort of conspiracy between Obama and the Muslims sworn to destroy America. This is blatantly racist -- and based on fear tactics. Though McCain and Palin have not explicitly stated the Muslim factor -- their supporters have done so at length and the McCain campaign has not reined them in. Even in late Oct, Palin was attempting to insinuate that Obama had PLO ties dealing with alleged former PLO spokesman Khaldi.
This campaign is what drove Collin Powell and other conservatives away from the McCain camp as being a Muslim has nothing to do with anything. Most reasonable people do not believe that these Muslim rumors have any weight and are simply scare tactics to sway the voters. (See Snopes.com.)
We personally believe that Obama WAS a Muslim when in Indonesia and followed the practices of his peers in attending the Mosque -- but not regularly. However, once he returned to Hawaii in 1970, he simply forgot the religion and again adopted the path of his non-religious friends. We believe he only adopted the mantle of a Christian when it was politically expedient in Chicago. Thus we do NOT believe that Obama is a Muslim practioner at this time -- but by the same token, we don't really believe he's a true Christian either. Though we tend to believe that Michelle Obama and his children are true Christians, we have to say it is none of our business to question his faith -- only that we question his deceptive statements. The bottomline is we don't think this religion issue is any of our business -- nor any one else's as well.
OBAMA'S 'WEATHERMAN' CONNECTION???
There has been a sudden spate of blog items and newspaper articles, mainly in the British press, linking Barack Obama to a former member of the radical Weather Underground Organization that claimed responsibility for a dozen bombings between 1970 and 1974. The former Weatherman, William Ayers, now holds the position of distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Although never convicted of any crime, he told the New York Times in September 2001, "I don't regret setting bombs...I feel we didn't do enough." (SITE NOTE: Ayers was not convicted -- not because of lack of evidence -- but because the case against him was built up through the use of the illegal wiretaps of the US Attorney General. See Bill Ayers for background on Bill Ayers.)
Salon.com's Camille Paglia commented on the aftermath feeling of being duped by the election glitter:
"... Another issue that I initially dismissed was the flap over William Ayers, the Chicago-based former member of the violent Weather Underground. Conservative radio host Sean Hannity began the drumbeat about Ayers' association with Obama a year ago -- a theme that most of the mainstream media refused to investigate or even report until this summer. I had never heard of Ayers and couldn't have cared less. I was irritated by Hillary Clinton's aggressive flagging of Ayers in a debate, and I accepted Obama's curt dismissal of the issue.
Hence my concern about Ayers has been very slow in developing. The mainstream media should have fully explored the subject early this year and not allowed it to simmer and boil until it flared up ferociously in the last month of the campaign. Obama may not in recent years have been "pallin' around" with Ayers, in Sarah Palin's memorable line, but his past connections with Ayers do seem to have been more frequent and substantive than he has claimed. Blame for the failure of this issue to take hold must also accrue to the conservative talk shows, which use the scare term "radical" with simplistic sensationalism, blanketing everyone under the sun from scraggly ex-hippies to lipstick-chic Nancy Pelosi." (Source: Salon.com.)
Despite Obama's attempt to portray their relationship as a distant one, Ayers, in a new afterward to his book "Fugitive Days," describes Obama as a "neighbor and family friend." Ayers claims he was not a terrorist because he only bombed buildings -- regardless of the fact that there were people inside the buildings. He remains unrepentant for his anti-war acts claiming that the US government was murdering people and "he wished he had done more." This feeling also extends to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the present -- and reflects Obama's feelings as well. There is many similarities between Ayers and Obama opinions -- just couched in different words.
Unfortunately Obama's statement that he was a baby when the Weathermen were active does not wash. The point is that he has associations with these people of the NOW generation -- not the past. We believe, they are not "terrorists" -- at least not in the sense that they bomb buildings -- but they remain radical activists who have NOT given up their view of changing society from the far left. After his election, Obama will be beholden to these far-left radical thinkers -- but at the same time he will be forced to govern from the center. This will create a conflict. This is the problem for Obama who may have sold his soul to the devil -- and now will be forced to bring these elements into government to set policy to bring about the changes they have wanted to make for over forty years.
The Obama-Ayers connection dates back years -- not some nodding acquaintance. The "coincidence" of the Obama-Ayers connections starts in 1988 through Ayers wife, Bernadine Dohrn. Dohrn was at Sidley Austin a law firm in Chicago from 1984 to 1988. Dohrn was admittedly hired because of the connections with Bill Ayers father. Coincidentally, Michelle Obama was at Sidley Austin as an associate lawyer at the same time. In 1988, Obama worked for a summer at Sidley Austin and that was where he met Michelle Obama. Obama worked under the supervision of Michelle. As Sidley Austin was not one of the monster Chicago law firms, but a small firm. To say that Michelle and Obama had a nodding acquaintance with the Ayers-Dohrn duo is very disingenuous.
Dohrn was hired by Howard Trienens, the head of the firm at that time, who knew Thomas G. Ayers, the father of Dohrn's husband. "We often hire friends," Trienens told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. However, Dohrn has not been admitted to the New York or Illinois bar. She passed the New York bar exam but has not submitted an application to the New York Supreme Court's Committee on Character and Fitness. She also passed the Illinois bar, but was turned down by the Illinois ethics committee because of her criminal record. Trienen said of the Illinois rejection, "Dohrn didn't get a [law] license because she's stubborn. She wouldn't say she's sorry." (Source: Wikipedia and Grossman, Ron. Family ties proved Ayers' point, Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2008.)
Obama doesn't mention that Obama and Ayers appeared together on a panel about juvenile justice organized by Michelle Obama on November 20, 1997: Children who kill are called "super predators," "people with no conscience," "feral pre-social beings" — and "adults." William Ayers, author of A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press, 1997), says "We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn't suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?" Ayers, who spent a year observing the Cook County Temporary Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago, is one of four panelists who will speak on juvenile justice at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in the C-Shop. The panel, which marks the 100th anniversary of the juvenile justice system in the United States, is part of the Community Service Center's monthly discussion series on issues affecting the city of Chicago. The event is free and open to the public. Ayers will be joined by Sen. Barack Obama, Senior Lecturer in the Law School, who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system; Randolph Stone, Director of the Mandel Legal Aid Clinic; Alex Correa, a reformed juvenile offender who spent seven years in Cook County Temporary Detention Center; Frank Tobin, a former priest and teacher at the Detention Center who helped Correa; and Willy Baldwin, who grew up in public housing and is currently a teacher at the Detention Center. (Source: Zombie Times.)
Just weeks after the panel meeting, Obama wrote a short review in the Chicago Tribune on December 21, 1997of William Ayers' book "A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court", which had recently been published. Obama's review of Ayers' book says, "A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair." This seemed more a reciprocal endorsement of Ayer's book. There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Chicago's Hyde Park. In that same book, perhaps with a self-congratulatory wink, Ayers cites the "writer" Barack Obama as one among the celebrities in his neighborhood. (SITE NOTE: This starts to bring up the suspicion that Ayers may have helped Obama write portions of his "Dreams of my Father" memoir in 1993 -- that was stalled in 1992-1994 causing the publisher to cancel his advance.)
Obama and Ayers have had other connections. The two men have also served on boards together, including the Woods Fund of Chicago and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Both Obama and Ayers were members of the board of an anti-poverty group, the Woods Fund of Chicago, between 1999 and 2002. In addition, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate in April 2001, as reported here. They lived within a few blocks of each other in the trendy Hyde Park section of Chicago, and moved in the same liberal-progressive circles.
In addition, Ayers contributed $200 to Obama's re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate in April 2001. They lived within a few blocks of each other in the trendy Hyde Park section of Chicago, and moved in the same liberal-progressive circles. (Source: Washington Post.)
It is an uncontested fact that Ayers held a meet-and-greet political event for Obama early in Obama's political ascent in Illinois, and the two served on an educational board at the behest of Ronald Reagan friend Walter Annenberg. Today Ayers is a respected Chicago educator who has been praised by Chicago mayor Richard Daley, and "independent" www.factcheck.org (of the Annenberg Fund) has deemed the McCain camp's claims about Ayers and Obama to be "groundless, false, [and] dubious."
Yet the McCain camp persisted in the campaign where Hillary Clinton left off. This included hitting this point repeatedly of Obama's "terrorist" associations in interviews with NBC News. Why? One partisan article stated: "Because they were hoping that voters would come to see Obama as a dangerous dark-skinned man not far removed from another man whose name rhymes with Obama. It's a rhetorical strategy of implied linkage, in which the goal is to forge a connection in people's minds, through repetition, of the ideas of "terrorist," "Obama," and "radical." It's a communication approach that follows in the footsteps of the one used - to strategic perfection - by the Bush administration to tie together Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein, even though U.S. government agencies declared there was no connection. In politics, the implied is powerful. It also is false in this case."
During the campaign, McCain looked the other way while his running mate Sarah Palin, acting as his "pit bull" with lipstick, consistently characterized Obama as someone who doesn't see America the same way that most Americans do. There are two ticking implications in such rhetoric. The first is the unstated assumption that everyone sees the United States as moral and upright, and that Obama does not. In Palin's words at a fundraiser in Colorado: "This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism." The "we" is presented as a taken-for-granted position: of course all we good people think this way. (Source: Seattle Times.)
It appears in the American mind, Ayers and Dohrn had become simply old hippies who now were part of the establishment -- respected teachers involved in community service and education. The word "weatherman" resonates with the old generation of people from the Woodstock generation, but has no relevance in the present. The entire affair was treated by the voters as Clinton mud-slinging (and later McCain) based on very flimsy and circumstantial evidence.
Ayers made a point of remaining silent during the presidential race, but his proximity to Obama was highlighted on Election Day when the two men nearly ran into each other in the same polling place. As recently as 12 Nov 2008, Palin was still raising the Ayers' issue, telling NBC that she was still concerned about Obama's relationship to the former radical. Palin was the fiercest critic of the Obama-Ayers tie, accusing Obama of "palling around with" a domestic terrorist. (Source: ABC News.)
Who is Bill Ayers? The Washington Post in Feb 2008 ran an article that stated: "His bio claims that William Ayers is a of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, and he is the author of many books on education, including Teaching the Personal and Political, On the Side of the Child, To Teach, A Simple Justice, and A Kind and Just Parent."
A prolific writer, if one only reviews his works on Education, one will immediately see that he is an educator BUT ALSO a militant activist for social justice -- and unrepentant for his militant activism in the 1960s. However, in the afterword of his book Fugitive Days: A Memoir (2001), Bill Ayers refers to Barack Obama as a "neighbor and family friend." The review states:
"Bill Ayers was born into privilege and is today a highly respected educator and community activist. For ten years, he lived on the run as a fugitive, stealing explosives, planting bombs, hiding from the law, and practicing "tradecraft" out of a John Le Carre novel. This portrait of a young pacifist who became a founder of one of the most militant political organizations in U.S. history is drawn with amazing candor and immediacy.
"Ayers begins with his education as a rebel, his increasing sense of horror at the American involvement in Viet Nam, and his growing love for his comrade Diana Oughton. He takes us to the streets of Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, inside the Days of Rage, SDS, the Black Panthers, and deep into the Weather Underground. At the center of the book is a terrible explosion-an apparent accident-in which Diana and two other comrades are killed. The organization is fragmented, and Ayers is shattered. Slowly he begins to rebuild his life, as a fugitive, with the help of Bernardine Dohrn, whose likeness hangs in every post office in America on the Ten Most Wanted list. Bill and Bernardine become Joe and Rose, working to disarm splinter groups, helping break Timothy Leary out of jail, creating elaborate false identities, and carrying out strategic, bloodless bombings, including one actually inside the Pentagon. Ayers and his comrades become America's other Viet Nam vets.
Chicago Police photos of William Ayers in 1968
"This is the story of one boy's journey into life-his complicated love for his parents and the society that raised him, his coming of age into a world in flames, falling deeper and deeper into a single-minded way of thinking and the loss that all that represented. Ayers writes openly about his regrets, and what he continues to believe was right. Fugitive Days is about a young dreamer, troubled by what he saw, struggling to find a way to make the world a better place, and now grappling with his own story, crafting narrative from memory's elusiveness. The result is a creative yet profoundly honest account of an incendiary chapter in our history.
The first article in the mainstream press linking Obama to Ayers appeared in the London Daily Mail on February 2. It was written by Peter Hitchens, the right-wing brother of the left-wing firebrand turned Iraq war supporter, Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens cited the Ayers connection to bolster his argument that Obama is "far more radical than he would like us to know."
The Hitchens piece was followed by a Bloomberg article pointing to the Ayers connection as support for Hillary Clinton's contention that Obama might not be able to withstand the "Republican attack machine." Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA and the State Department, predicted that the Republicans would seize on the Ayers case, and other Chicago relationships, to "bludgeon Obama's presidential aspirations into the dust."
The London Sunday Times joined the chorus by reporting that Republicans were "out to crush Barack by painting him as a leftwinger with dubious support".
The only hard facts that have come out so far are the $200 contribution by Ayers to the Obama re-election fund, and their joint membership of the eight-person Woods Fund Board. Ayers did not respond to e-mails and telephone calls requesting clarification of the relationship. Obama spokesman Bill Burton noted in a statement that Ayers was a professor of education at the University of Illinois and a former aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley, and continued:
Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost forty years ago is ridiculous.
In the short term, the person who had the most to gain by speculation about Obama's acquaintance with a former terrorist was Hillary Clinton. The former First Lady liked to present herself as "tested and vetted" after years of exposure to Republican attacks, in contrast to Obama, a relative newcomer to hardscrabble presidential politics.
But the Obama-Ayers link is a tenuous one. As Newsday pointed out, Clinton has her own, also tenuous, Weatherman connection. Her husband commuted the sentences of a couple of convicted Weather Underground members, Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, shortly before leaving office in January 2001. Which is worse: pardoning a convicted terrorist or accepting a campaign contribution from a former Weatherman who was never convicted? (SITE NOTE: Note that this is part of the MSM bias towards Obama. It automatically assumes that there is NO connection between Obama and Ayers without doing their job of investigative reporting. It should be pointed out that Ayers was not convicted because the case was thrown out because of the illegal wiretaps by the US Attorney General's office. Not because there was a lack of guilt. In 1973, the federal government requested the dismissal of the charges against the couple in the interest of national security following accusations of government misconduct," but state charges against Dohrn remained. Dohrn was still reluctant to turn herself in to authorities until 1980.)
Whatever his past, Ayers is now a respected member of the Chicago intelligentsia, and still a member of the Woods Fund Board. The president of the Woods Fund, Deborah Harrington, said he had been selected for the board because of his solid academic credentials and "passion for social justice." "This whole connection is a stretch," Harrington said. "Barack was very well known in Chicago, and a highly respected legislator. It would be difficult to find people round here who never volunteered or contributed money to one of his campaigns."
The Washington Post stated: "The question is not whether a connection can be established between Barack Obama and a former member of the Weathermen, but whether it has any significance for the 2008 presidential campaign. Could Bill Ayers become a political embarrassment for Obama?"
(Source: Washington Post.)
They needn't have worried. In the campaign, this accusation simply slid off of Teflon-coated Obama like all the rest of the muck heaped at him. The truth was the MSM and minorities -- along with the youth vote -- had fallen blindly in love with Obama.
The problem with this attack is that the old radicals have now become respectable. For example, Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover are the founders of Progressives for Obama. "We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country." But look at the folks, Tom Hayden is author of Ending the War in Iraq, a five-time Democratic convention delegate, former state senator, and board member of the Progressive Democrats of America. Tom Hayden is also famous as being part of the radical "Chicago Seven" during the 1969-1970 conspiracy trials. (Source: Wikipedia.) Bill Fletcher, a former Maoist who originated the call for founding "Progressives for Obama", is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal; Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of Dancing in the Streets [2007] and other popular works and, with Hayden, a member of The Nation's editorial board. Danny Glover is the respected actor, activist, and chairman of the board of TransAfrica. (Source: Huffington Post.)
However, these four also have links to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which Obama is alleged to belong to its New Party, then one begins to wonder about the connection to radical intellectuals and activists who have been waiting for their "star child" -- someone like Obama -- to appear. From what we have seen, the activists and intellectuals have all rallied around Obama -- and in this group are a large number of reformed radical activists of the 1960s-1970s. All have grown older and received respectability with age -- but their ideas haven't changed that much. Like Ayers, their far-left activism has not waned.
Ayers Surfaces AFTER Election What was strange was how immediately following Obama's election, Ayers surfaced on national television to tell his side of the story. He played the old Vietnam War was "morally wrong" song and how he was NOT a terrorist -- even though he admitted to bombing government buildings with people in them and being unrepentant for his acts. What people wonder is what Obama will do when he gets into office. In Sep 2008, he voiced an educational policy that reflected the Republican stance. Obama promised to double funding for charter schools, pay teachers based on performance and replace those who aren't up to the job, embracing education proposals normally more popular with Republican candidates. Obama proposed to give parents more options, too — but not with a federal voucher program to pay for private schools that McCain had supported. Instead, Obama seeks to create an array of new public schools.
However, on ABC News, William Ayers said on 14 Nov 2008 that the Republicans unfairly "demonized" him in an attempt to damage the campaign of President-elect Barack Obama. The former '60s radical says the extent of their association was exploited.
Ayers remained militant in his defense of his bomb-throwing past and repeated a statement that has infuriated his critics: "I don't think we did enough." The college professor also argued to "Good Morning America's" Chis Cuomo that the bombing campaign by the group he helped found, the Weather Underground, was not terrorism. The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the New York City Police Department to protest the Vietnam War. "It's not terrorism because it doesn't target people, to kill or injure," Ayers insisted.
In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends…
I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. (Source: Ayers: NY Times Op Ed.)
"Wrong!" proclaims University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner explaining in The Volokh Conspiracy.
There is no doubt, however, that at least under current law, he would be considered a terrorist. Here is a definition of terrorism in U.S. law (22 USC 2656f(d)f(2)) (there are others as well but similar):
the term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents
The Weather Underground was a subnational group; exploding bombs is an act of violence; government offices are non-combatant targets (the Weather Underground also bombed banks); and the use of violence had the political goal of ending the Vietnam War. "Screaming response" or no, this was terrorism.
Under current law, Ayers was a terrorist. This definition is not idiosyncratic; similar definitions can be found in the laws of foreign countries and in international treaties. Ayers seems to think he ought to be excused for violence because his motives were good, but that is the excuse that terrorists always offer—that their political goals justify their use of violence—and naturally the legal definition could not permit such a defense without subverting itself, or turning every terrorism trial into a debate about whether the political ends of the defendants are "good" or "bad" from a moral or political perspective.
According to a former member of the Weather Underground, Ayers has been "disingenuous" in his statements of the Weather Underground.
Former Weather Underground member Howard Machtinger argues in an "In These Times" essay that Bill Ayers "glosses over" the violence of the organization's actions in a recent New York Times editorial. As a former member of the Weather Underground, I feel compelled to add my voice to the recently re-heated discussion of the group's legacy. ...
We in the WU argued that militant nonviolence had been found wanting in stopping the war; we felt something more was urgently needed. However, there is no evidence that armed propaganda succeeded where militant nonviolence fell short. The WU argument only makes sense if its long-term aim was to set the stage for an armed overthrow of the state - a wildly wrong reading of the times. ...
One need not equate the relentless, pounding violence of the American war on Vietnam or against the Black Freedom movement with the small-time violent actions of the WU in order to be critical of the direction we set. While we in the WU did not, by some grace, become terrorists, we were wrong and destructive. We did lose our way. We were not demons, but we did succumb to our own fantasy of revolutionary pride. (Source: Briefing Room and Huffington Post.)
Ayers became a bogeyman for Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin, who demanded to know more about Obama's relationship with his Chicago neighbor. Palin accused Obama of "palling around ... with a terrorist." (SITE NOTE: Jeez, he's not a terrorist because he bombs buildings and not the people that are inside the buildings. Right...)
Ayers on Good Morning America (14 Nov 2008)
Breaking his silence, Ayers told Cuomo that the GOP attack was a "dishonest narrative...to demonize me." He added, "I don't buy the idea that guilt by association should have any part of our politics," he said. Ayers scoffed at the Republican effort to make his ties to Obama appear suspicious. "This idea that we need to know more, like there's some dark, hidden secret, some secret link," Ayers said. "It's a myth thrown up by people who want to exploit the politics of fear."
But he was unapologetic about his militant actions during the Vietnam War. "What you call the violent past, that was a time when thousands of people were being murdered every month by our own government... We were on the right side," he told "GMA." The co-founder of the Weather Underground was, as McCain has claimed, unrepentant about the the bombings his group committed during the 1960s. "The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our goverment... I never hurt or killed anyone," Ayers said.
"Frankly, I dont think we did enough, just as today I dont' think we've done enough to stop these wars," he said.
Ayers did soften his stand on violence during the "GMA" interview.
"We knew it was wrong. We knew it was illegal. We knew it was immoral," he said, but they felt they "had to do more" to stop the Vietnam war. He urged people today "to participate in resistance, in nonviolent,direct action" to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ayers, 63, currently a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, became a political piñata for McCain, R-Ariz., and Palin during the presidential campaign.
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose regarding Ayers' contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama. Obama's contacts with Ayers had been public knowledge in Chicago for years. After being raised by the British press the connection was picked up by blogs and newspapers in the United States. The matter was raised in a debate by Hillary Rodham Clinton in February 2008 after it had been suggested by Sean Hannity and other hosts on conservative talk radio programs. It later became an issue for the John McCain presidential campaign. Investigations by the New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations concluded that Obama does NOT have a close relationship with Ayers.
However, despite Obama's attempt to portray their relationship as a distant one, Ayers, in a new afterward to his book "Fugitive Days," describes Obama as a "neighbor and family friend."
On "GMA," Ayers again downplayed any close ties to Obama despite the reference to"family friend." "I'm talking there about the fact that I became an issue, unwillingly and unwittingly," he said. "It was a profoundly dishonest narrative... I'm describing there how the blogosphere characterized the relationship."
"I would say, really, that we knew each other in a professional way on the same level of, say, thousands of other people," he said. He added, echoing a phrase that Obama used to describe Ayers, "I am a guy around the neighborhood." Ayers acknowledged that he held a reception in his home when Obama began his political run for state office. "He was probably in 20 homes that day," Ayers said.
Ayers has got a book to sell and n a Dec. 6 New York Times op-ed -- headlined "The Real Bill Ayers" -- Ayers cast himself as the victim of a "profoundly dishonest drama" in which he was branded an "unrepentant terrorist." He insisted that he never killed or hurt anyone and never intended to. His Weather Underground committed "symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed against monuments to war and racism" -- not terrorism. Its bombings were surgical strikes "meant to respect human life." This is NOT what really happened -- as opposed to Ayers's selective version.
lAyers omits the 1969 "Days of Rage" riot in Chicago, spearheaded by his Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society. He kicked it off by helping to blow up a downtown police monument the night of Oct. 6, 1969; the blast showered rubble on a nearby expressway and shattered more than 100 windows.
If a warning to the public preceded this strike, Ayers doesn't mention it in his 2001 memoir, "Fugitive Days" -- nor does contemporaneous media coverage. In fact, a bus driver told police that his vehicle stalled near the statue a half-hour before the blast; he would have been a sitting duck 30 minutes later. Days afterward, Ayers and other club-wielding leftists fought and injured police officers and smashed storefronts and cars. A government attorney tried to tackle one of them and wound up paralyzed.
In his Times column, Ayers's chronology focuses on 1970, the year he co-founded the Weather Underground "after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village." But this wasn't some especially radicalizing furnace mishap. On March 6, 1970, three members of a Weatherman cell died when a bomb they were making blew up in their faces. Packed with nails for maximum lethality, it had been intended for a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J.
Only then did the Weatherman faction mutate into the Weather Underground -- and begin issuing pre-detonation warnings. Even so, it was still a matter of luck that there were no casualties. As Todd Gitlin, a former '60s leftist and a historian of the period, put it: "They planned on being terrorists. Then their bomb blew up and killed several of them and they thought better of it. They were failed terrorists."
Ayers told me this week that he did not know about the nail bomb in advance -- and condemned it afterward. I take him at his word. So why obfuscate in the Times? Editors cut the article, he protested -- before conceding that his original version left it out, too. His refutation of the "terrorist" charge relies, ironically, on the U.S. government's definition: "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." "We did not do that," Ayers insisted.
To some, the U.S. Capitol, a Weather Underground target, might qualify as "non-combatant." But Ayers said it was fair game: The U.S. invasion of Laos and Cambodia made it "a symbol of empire." Ayers has been singing this tune for years. In a 1976 tract, he called for "revolutionary violence," as long as it was "humane." By then the war was over, and his goal was "to build communist organization toward the stage where armed struggle becomes a mass phenomenon led by a Marxist-Leninist party: a revolutionary stage." His crazy means were dictating even crazier ends.
Hardly the worst crimes of that turbulent era, the Weather Underground's deeds were nevertheless immoral. They put innocents at risk and sowed fear. Ultimately, they achieved nothing except to undermine the peaceful antiwar movement. Bill Ayers should cut the sophistry and admit it.
(Source: Washington Post.)
On 19 Jan 2009, Bill Ayers was turned back at the Canadian border by border guards. He had been scheduled to speak at the Centre for Urban Schooling at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The engagement was cancelled. People immediately speculated that perhaps it had something to do with the Obama inauguration on the 20th of Jan.
Did Ayers Ghostwrite Obama's book, Audacity to Hope? Others think there is also more that meets the eye when Ayers and Obama's writing styles are compared. Jack Cashill, author of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. wrote an article on World Net Daily, Study: Ayers Was Ghostwriter On Obama "Dreams" Book on 2 Nov 2008 that states the (1) the writers of Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope were written by DIFFERENT writers; and (2) Obama's The Audacity of Hope and Bill Ayer's Fugitive Days bear striking similarities. Cashill then makes the conclusion that Bill Ayers was the ghost-writer of Obama's Dreams of My Father. The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed Obama from the struggling literalist of 1994 into the sophisticated postmodernist of 1995, and he did so not by tutoring, but by rewriting, including the very Introduction and Preface.
In other words, Jack Cashill hypothesizes that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams of My Father in most of its entirety. Cashill is convinced that Obama is crappy writer -- but Bill Ayers has the ability to make a best seller out of Dreams of My Father. However, in his second book Audacity of Hope, Obama was trying to distance himself from Ayers. Cashill maintains that Dreams of My Father and Audacity of Hope are written by different writers -- neither of them Obama. Cashill believes that Ayers wrote the prologue to the book Audacity of Hope, but Obama's chief speech writer Jon Favreau wrote the rest of the book, trying to "mimic" Obama's "style" in Dreams of My Father.
SITE NOTE: Jack Cashill is an independent writer and producer and, on a contractual basis, the Executive Editor of Ingram’s Magazine, Kansas City’s premier business magazine. In addition to his work with Ingram’s, Jack has written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, and regularly for WorldNetDaily. He has had one collection of essays published—Snake Handling in Mid-America and one novel—2006: The Chautauqua Rising. Within the last five years Jack has written five books of non-fiction — First Strike, Ron Brown’s Body, Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, Sucker Punch: The Left Hook that Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream and his latest, What's the Matter with California. Three of them have cracked Amazon’s top ten list. Jack has produced at least a dozen documentaries for regional PBS and national cable channels, including the Emmy Award-winning, The Royal Years. Jack has also produced an audio book, Understanding America: the great speeches, sermons, documents and narratives of the American experience. In addition, Jack hosted daily talk radio shows for five years—four of those with KMBZ, Kansas City’s foremost AM station, and one year with Catholic Family Radio’s national network. Jack has a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American studies, has taught media and literature at Purdue and at Kansas City area universities, and served as a Fulbright professor in France. Jack's latest book, What's the Matter with California (Simon & Schuster), came out in paperback in August 2008. (Source: Cashill.com.)
However, the developer of the Signature software used in one of the tests, Peter Millican, an Oxford scholar, stated: "The author of the analysis describes some of his results as "striking", but this looks very exaggerated to me. Without any comparable statistics involving other texts, we have no way of assessing their true significance. So his claim to have made "a strong case for the likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghostwrote Dreams from My Father" is completely unsubstantiated."
The following is Jack Cashill's article on attempting to prove Ayer's ghostwrote Obama's book:
"In early October (2008), a friend of Chris Yavelow's forwarded him a copy of my article, "Who Wrote Obama's Dreams From My Father." In the article, I make the case that erstwhile terrorist Bill Ayers had a substantial and easily detectable hand in the writing of Obama's lyrical masterwork, one that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
(SITE NOTE: Yavelow is a sort of renaissance man who by his own resume -- "...the 70s were Chris Yavelow's performance years; he founded, co-founded, directed, or co-directed many performance organizations in New England, at least one of which, The Annex Players, still exists (renamed Dinosaur-Annex). The 80s and early 90s were his computer-music years during which he was active on the board of NEWCOMP (The New England Computer Arts Association), worked for Kurzweil during the crucial years when MIDI was established, and helped bring Macs to the entertainment industry in Hollywood where he was, for several years, the director of MEGA (the Macintosh Entertainment Guild of America), a joint venture of Apple Computer and Paramount, and also founded FUGUE (the first Finale Users Group) while he was one of the directors of the LAMG (Los Angeles Macintosh Group). The 90s saw his gradual shift to multimedia development and expert systems. At the turn of the century, Chris Yavelow began applying his talents to writing novels under a nom de plume and soon became interested in distance education for music (currently teaching at the University of Maryland University College). An avid geocacher, he continues to compose music, write nonfiction, and develop software. In 2008 he began preparing to bicycle from D.C. to L.A. in the summer of 2010. (Source: Chris Yavelow.)
The friend knew that Yavelow, an award-winning composer and author, had worked for years developing what he believes is the most comprehensive linguistics tool for authorship detection, a software product trademarked as FictionFixer. Yavelow contacted me and I sent him some relevant materials. When he ran the two books nominally by Barack Obama, the 1995 Dreams From My Father and the 2006 Audacity of Hope, through FictionFixer, he concluded, "They were written by different people."
Yavelow cites a score of other characteristics that change too conspicuously from one Obama book to the next, among them the Flesch Reading Ease score, the use of gender words, sentence starters, adverbs, discouraged words, sensory triggers, and more. When, however, Yavelow compared Obama's Dreams with Bill Ayers' memoir, Fugitive Days, he found the similarity of the two books "striking." He then quickly corrects himself: "'Striking' is an understatement for the relationship FictionFixer uncovered between Fugitive Days and Dreams From My Father." For instance, Dreams averages 17.61 words and 26.48 syllables for non-dialogue sentences. Fugitive Days averages 17.62 words and 26.27 syllables. Another example is what Yavelow calls "attributions"—e.g., he "asked," she "said," they "wondered." Some authors use as few as three. Many use fewer than twenty. Dreams, however, uses 36; Fugitive Days 34, and with only four exceptions—three of these used only once—the two books use the very same attributions.
Yavelow compares the two books on any number of other characteristics and concludes, "There is a strong likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recorded or notes). Alternatively, another scenario could be possible: Ayers might have served as a 'book doctor'."
By the standards of this profession, it is remarkably easy for the layman to follow.
Unbeknownst to Yavelow, three other individuals or teams had volunteered to run analyses of the books using off-the-shelf software, which allows for easier testability.
Andrew Longman, a consulting instrumentation scientist presently working in test engineering, observes: "The Ayers-Obama matching shows a measurable and substantial effect. It is easily and objectively distinguishable from comparison to a third document."
Longman adds a useful bit of advice: "These results achieved through good methodology should readily stimulate scientists skilled in the particular relevant fields to construct their own tests, place objective metrics on the correlation between the Ayers-Obama documents, and publish results. We strongly think this bears immediate investigation by the academic community at large as the initial data presented is highly suggestive that these two documents share large portions of authorship." (SITE NOTE: Notice that Longman does NOT definitively state that the books were written by the same author, but states that other researchers need to be involved because it is "highly suggestive" that "large portions" share a common author.)
Systems engineer Ed Gold, with twenty years experience in pattern recognition and classifier design, ran tests of his own. His conclusion: "The statistical style analysis performed by our research team suggests that the writing style of Dreams From My Father is significantly more similar to the style observed in Fugitive Days than to the style found in other works by Barack Obama such as Audacity of Hope. "
Gold continues, "Even more interesting, when we extract those sections of Dreams From My Father that Dr. Cashill believes to be Ayers' writing and treat this as a unique document, the style analysis software identifies a stronger correlation between this sample and Ayers' Fugitive Days than we see between this same sample and the remainder of Dreams From My Father! Thus we have reason to believe that Dreams From My Father had at least two authors, and one author's measured style features more closely match those of Ayers than they match those of the other author(s)."
A team based at a large state university, who have chosen to remain anonymous to keep their jobs, came to the same conclusion Gold did. "Under the Q-value statistic," they contend, "segments of Dreams consistently compared as well with Fugitive segments as it did with other segments of Dreams itself. In contrast, Dreams compared poorly with other documents."
"Using the chi-square statistic," they add, "Obama's and Ayers's books were indistinguishable while Obama's book was easily distinguishable from books by other authors."
In an earlier correspondence I had with Patrick Juola of Duquesne, one of the nation's leading authorities on literary forensics, he cautioned that "the accuracy simply isn't there."
(SITE NOTE: Patrick Juola is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. (Source: Patrick Juola and Patrick Juola webpage.) and author of Authorship Attribution (2008). Authorship attribution, the science of inferring characteristics of the author from the characteristics of documents written by that author, is a problem with a long history and a wide range of application. It is an important problem not only in information retrieval but in many other disciplines as well, from technology to teaching and from finance to forensics. The idea that authors have a statistical "fingerprint'' that can be detected by computers is a compelling one that has received a lot of research attention. Authorship Attribution surveys the history and present state of the discipline, presenting some comparative results where available. It also provides a theoretical and empirically-tested basis for further work. Many modern techniques are described and evaluated, along with some insights for application for novices and experts alike. Authorship Attribution will be of particular interest to information retrieval researchers and students who want to keep up with the latest techniques and their applications. It is also a useful resource for people in other disciplines, be it the teacher interested in plagiarism detection or the historian interested in who wrote a particular document. (Source: Amazon.com.))
As he explained, the best-performing methods range between 50 and 90 percent in accuracy and for high stakes issues like this one, "The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction)."
Juola added, "A better approach is simply to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work."
That much said, the media have insisted on the confirmation of science, however imprecise. They assuredly hoped that I would not get it. Now that I have, and from four sets of independent researchers, I am sure they will find some new reason to ignore the most consequential literary fraud of our time.
As I document in my book Hoodwinked, literary fraud is surprisingly easy to get away with if the presumed writer is advancing a cause that the literary gatekeepers wants to see advanced. Although there are obvious exceptions, the people who guard the cultural gates tend to be liberal on sexual and social issues, socialist on economic ones, internationalist in their worldview, and Democratic in their voting preferences.
Can one even imagine, for instance, the frenzy of investigation that would follow a Sarah Palin release of a book as stylish as Dreams, especially if she claimed it as her own?
Parallel stories
One need not be a forensic linguist to see Ayers' hand prints on Obama's Dreams. Indeed, my single best source to date has been a 39 year-old father of three who, when not running a small Midwest construction business, has been combing through the books of Ayers and Obama.
Joe the Builder—given Joe the Plumber's fate he prefers to remain anonymous–spotted at least two of the stories that bleed from the 1993 Ayers' book To Teach into the 1995 Obama book Dreams From My Father. They bear repetition.
In To Teach, Ayers lays out the difference between "education" on the one hand and "training" on the other. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," Ayers writes.
"Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers."
In Obama's Dreams, these thoughts find colloquial expression in the person of "Frank," the real life poet, pornographer and Stalinist, Frank Marshall Davis. "Understand something, boy," Frank tells the college-bound Obama. "You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained."
Frank shares Ayers' distaste for training. "They'll train you to forget what it is that you already know," Frank tells Obama. "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit."
Frank also tells Obama that "leaving your race at the door" is an essential part of the university's training mission. Ayers makes the same case about training in reference to Indian schools, which insist, according to Ayers, that students be "stripped of everything Indian and taught to be like whites."
In the same 1993 book, To Teach, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who takes her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city.
As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one student says, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student answers, "No, it has to flow south-down."
Upon further research, the teacher discovers "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Obama shares a stunningly similar story from his own brief New York sojourn. As Obama tells it, he takes an unlikely detour to the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing tide meets the south-flowing river.
There, improbably, a young black boy approaches this strange man and asks, "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" Obama tells the boy it "had to do with the tides."
In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight.
The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who tries to distance himself from Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.
"Can you believe that guy?" Clints tells a white student. "He's like a pig or something. Makes me sick." Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed. Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."
In Dreams, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.
When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone. Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama, like Clint, understands that he "had been tested and found wanting." These are three such parallel stories that have been found. I suspect that there are more.
Style parallels
A few days ago I received an email from a Boston-area writer and composer, Jay Spencer, who suggested some additional parallels between Obama's Dreams and Ayers' books that had evaded me. Even the casual reader cannot help but acknowledge them.
Remember that the young Ayers served as a merchant seaman, and although he has tried to put his ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go.
"I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
Although there are no literal sea experiences in Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky. This is not coincidence. This is fraud.
Indeed, landlubber Obama knowingly manages to use "ballast" as a metaphor. Who knows from Ballast? I don't.
Despite the fact that I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean, the only two of the above words to appear in my own semi-memoir on race, Sucker Punch, are "current" and "tide."
Not surprisingly, two of the more conspicuous parallel structures that Spencer discovered involve the flow of elements that intrigue Ayers—water and language.
Writes Ayers in Fugitive Days: "The debates swam above and around and through us . . . . The confrontation in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders."
Writes Obama in Dreams: "I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story."
I would bet my house against Obama's mailbox that the gifted writer Ayers wrote both these passages. Now, note the rhythm, cadence, and layered structure of the following two excerpts, both dealing with waves.
Writes Ayers in A Kind And Just Parent: "The hard ground is frozen through, the wintry waves upswept–all white and frosty–transposed in midcrash from furious motion to arctic glass. A fading, fragile sun offers no heat and precious little light to our dark smudge of a city nestled between Lake Michigan and the vast, flat plains stretching westward."
Writes Obama in Dreams: "The trembling blue plane of the Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sounds of invisible birds. The North Shore's thunderous waves, crumbling as if in a slow-motion reel. The shadows off Pali's peaks; the sultry scented air."
No one who has seen Obama's earlier writing or paid heed to his casual speech could make a serious case that Obama was capable of writing either of these two cited passages from Dreams.
The early Obama
Before 1995 all that Barack Obama had managed to publish was some bad undergraduate poetry, a wonkish tract on community organizing, and a leaden case comment on abortion law.
Despite being named president of the Harvard Law Review—more of a popularity than a literary contest—Obama has, most unusually, written nothing under his own name for the HLR or any other legal journal.
The Obama camp has refused all inquiries on grades, SAT scores, LSAT scores, student theses, or any other documents that would flesh out what Politico calls Obama's "scant paper trail."
Sometime between 1992 and 1994 Simon & Schuster cancelled the advance that it had offered Obama. Obama had not been able to finish the commissioned book on his own. Ayers could help. He provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood.
(SITE NOTE: This seems to be corroborated during the period in which Obama was an Associate Attorney but the firm claims that Obama wrote the novel BEFORE he came to work for them. That accomplishment generated press accounts and prompted Judson Miner, head of the firm that bears his name, to recruit Obama. Obama took time to complete Dreams From My Father, then joined the 13-attorney firm.)
Fellow radical Rashid Khalidi—he of the LA Times tapes controversy–attests to this in the very first sentence of the acknowledgements in his book, Resurrecting Empire. "There are many people without whose support and assistance I could not have written this book, or written it in the way that it was written," he writes. "First, chronologically, and in other ways, comes Bill Ayers."
There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Chicago's Hyde Park. Obama, for instance, wrote a short and glowing review of Ayers' 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, for the Chicago Tribune. In that same book, perhaps with a self-congratulatory wink, Ayers cites the "writer" Barack Obama as one among the celebrities in his neighborhood.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama get appointed chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, launched Obama's political career with a fundraiser in his Chicago home. In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place, and the ability to burnish Obama's literary star.
Postmodern themes
Jay Spencer noticed another characteristic obvious in both Dreams and Fugitive Days, "the notion popular in leftist academic circles . . . that we understand our lives in terms of a personal story or narrative." Spencer adds, "These stories exist as part of a larger social narrative, and an unquestioned narrative denies the reality of other stories and perspectives."
Spencer had apparently not seen the work I had done on this same postmodern theme, but he does add still more useful parallels. Here are two. There are a score more. The first is from Dreams on the subject of a clueless relative:
"I know how strongly Gramps believed in his fictions. . . . I suspect that black people became a part of these fictions of his, the narrative that worked its way through his dreams."
This one from Fugitive Days on the subject of a clueless relative:
"Mom's script was already written as a simple smiley face, but I wanted more than that relentlessly sunny atmosphere, the enveloping gleam of an untroubled narrative."
This one is from Dreams on the merging narratives of ordinary people:
". . . the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities, economies would have to be built. . . . The stories . . . formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person."
This one is from Ayers on the merging narratives of ordinary people:
"It's important not only to know that there are various perspectives, but to acknowledge that in any community or school or family, I am one person, that many stories are being lived and enacted."
In assessing the postmodern diffidence of the 1995 Introduction and the 2004 Preface to Dreams, Ohio State classics professor, Bruce Heiden makes a fascinating claim: Obama takes no credit for the actual writing process beyond the curiously passive, "What has found its way onto these pages is a record of a personal, interior journey." Adds Heiden with a smile:
As Obama tells it, his authorship of Dreams was miraculous, because although he lacked the writing skill to be the author of anything, and he didn't want to be the author of a memoir in particular, and he resisted becoming the author of a memoir, and he tried in vain to become the author of a different kind of book . . . Dreams from My Father, nevertheless somehow it 'found its way' onto the page with Barack Obama's name under the title as the author.
The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed Obama from the struggling literalist of 1994 into the sophisticated postmodernist of 1995, and he did so not by tutoring, but by rewriting, including the very Introduction and Preface.
To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, maybe even in Hyde Park, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers and fewer still who make their services available to would-be authors of a leftist bent.
The media and the evidence
The following passage, one of the very few in the major media to condescend to the question of Barack Obama's altogether likely literary fraud, nicely captures their willful blindness on the subject.
"The bizarre accusation Jack Cashill made . . . that Obama didn't write "Dreams From My Father" (and that Bill Ayers did) has caught fire in the blogosphere and on talk radio."
So writes the proudly clueless Kirsten Powers in the only half-blind New York Post. Into this breach steps the London Times. What has attracted the paper to the story, however late in the day, was the failure of some supportive fundraisers to muster enough cash up front to liberate a study of the Ayers-Obama connection by Oxford professor, Peter Millican. The intellectual property guardians at Oxford apparently won't take a down payment and an IOU.
What might just keep the London Times in this story is the transparency and consequence of the deception. As Joe the Builder has shown, one does not have to be an Oxford Don to find it.
CHANGE Jack Cashill: Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama's 'Dreams' (Jun 2009) Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition.
Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries and any number of states and have integrated many of their observations into my ongoing narrative, summarized here. If you are unfamiliar with this research, please read this before going forward.
About a week ago, however, I heard from a new contributor. I will refer to him as "Mr. West." Like most contributors, he prefers to remain anonymous. The media punishment that Joe the Plumber received has much to do with this nearly universal reticence.
A week before that, I heard from another excellent contributor, Mr. Midwest. Their collective contribution should dispel the doubts of all but the willfully blind that Ayers played a substantial role, likely the primary role, in the writing of Dreams.
As a reminder, there is no reliable computer science for determining authorship. In assessing the value of the existing science, think polygraph, not DNA. Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer's Night Dream, but not for Dreams From My Father. Too much is at stake for the latter.
The experts in the field have told me to stick with old-fashioned literary detective work, and I have done just that. Mr, Midwest has helped. His most recent contribution is a good example of keen-eyed detection.
Going forward, I will be referring to five books. These include Ayers' 1993 To Teach, his 1997 A Kind and Just Parent (shorthand: Parent), his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, and Obama's 1995 Dreams From My Father (Dreams). Casual critics of this research have repeated the canard that I attributed both Obama books, Dreams and the 2006 Audacity of Hope (Audacity), to Ayers. I never have. From the beginning, I have asserted that the two books appear to have two different authors, and so I will leave Audacity out of the equation until the end.
What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in Parent and Obama in Dreams make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case. Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In fact, each misspells "Frantz" as "Franz."
Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago." From Dreams:
He poured himself more hot water. "What do you know about Chicago anyway?"
I thought a moment. "Hog butcher to the world," I said finally.
From Parent:
"At the turn of the century, Chicago had a population of a million people and was a young and muscular city - hub of commerce and industry, the first skyscraper city, home of the famous world exposition, "hog butcher to the world" - bursting with energy."
This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way. The poem actually opens, "Hog butcher for the world."
Last week, the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box "759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers' works." This claim seemed so outsized I did not take it seriously. When I was unable to open the documents, I emailed Mr. West back, asked him to reformat, and then forgot about the email. He resent his documents a few days later.
This time I was able to open them and was promptly blown away. Mr. West's analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity. I had been gathering many of them in my own reserve waiting for a book-length opportunity to make my case. Mr. West had done the heavy lifting. He even indexed his matches. This represented months of works. As I learned, he had been patiently gathering material since November when he first began building on my own research.
I read through all 759 matches and culled out those that I would consider B-Level or above. There were 180 of these. As a control, I tested them against my own 2006 book Sucker Punch, like Dreams and Fugitive Days a memoir that deals extensively with race. In that I am closer to Ayers in age, race, education, family and cultural background than Obama is, our styles should have had more chance of matching. They don't. Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly speaking, on six. Even by the most generous standard, we matched on only sixteen.
Let me just cite a few matches between Ayers' work and Dreams that I found intriguing. Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man." Many of the stories involving these characters in Dreams seem as contrived as their names.
In one instance, Obama reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only other black student in the class.
When the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves Coretta and insists that she leave him alone. Although "his act of betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."
Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent. He tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by black author Reginald McKnight. The passage in question deals with the travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in the school. Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed. Ashamed for not defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."
As Mr. Midwest pointed out in a recent missive, Ayers' interest in education bleeds into Dreams. The tip-off once again is the contrived name, in this case "Asante Moran," likely an homage to the Afro-centric educator, Molefi Kete Asante. Moran lectures Obama and his pal "Johnny" on the nature of public education.
"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period."
"Social control" is an Ayers' bugaboo. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."
In Dreams, "Moran" elaborates on the fate of the black student, "From day one, what's he learning about? Someone else's history. Someone else's culture. Not only that, this culture he's supposed to learn is the same culture that's systematically rejected him, denied his humanity."
If this character were real, and Obama had actually met him, there would be no reason to phony up his name. In fact, however, Moran is spouting exactly the same educational philosophy that Ayers does in To Teach.
"Underneath it all," Ayers says of standard school textbooks, "the social studies and literature texts reflected and promoted white supremacy. There were no pictures or photographs of African Americans . . . there was throughout an assumed superiority and smug celebration of the status quo."
Both authors, by the way, use the phrase "beneath the surface" repeatedly. And what they find beneath the surface, of course, is the disturbing truth about power disparities in the real America, which each refers to as an "imperial culture." Speaking of which, both insist that "knowledge" is "power" and seem consumed by the uses or misuses of power. Ayers, in fact, evokes the word "power" and its derivatives 75 times in Fugitive Days, Obama 83 times in Dreams.
More exotically, both authors evoke images of a "boy" riding on the backs of a "water buffalo" and prodding the beast not just with sticks, but with "bamboo sticks." Ayers places his boy in Vietnam. Obama puts his in Indonesia.
Both authors link Indonesia with Vietnam. In each case, clueless officials - plural -- with the "State Department" try to explain how the march of communism through "Indochina" will specifically imperil "Indonesia." The Ayers account, however, at least sounds vaguely real. The Obama account sounds like an Ayers' memory imposed on Obama's mother. She allegedly discussed these geo-political strategy sessions in Indonesia with her pre-teen son.
Ayers and his radical friends were obsessed with Vietnam. It defined them and still does. To reflect their superior insight into that country, they have shown a tendency to use "Mekong Delta" as synecdoche, the part that indicates the whole.
In Fugitive Days, for instance, Ayers envisions "a patrol in the Mekong Delta" when he conjures up an image of Vietnam. Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, pontificated about "a hamlet called My Lai" in a 1998 interview, but to flash her radical chops, she located it "in the middle of the Mekong Delta," which is in reality several hundred miles from My Lai.
Given Obama's age, "Mekong Delta" was not likely a part of his vocabulary, but that does not stop him from writing about "the angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta." Ayers, of course, would also have had a much deeper connection than Obama to "Detroit," whose historic riot took place shortly before Obama's sixth birthday. Ayers worked in Detroit the year after those same riots.
Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl."
In Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams. Ayers places his "birds of paradise" in Guatemala. He places his ducks and dogs together in a Vietnamese village being swept by merciless Americans. In Parent, he talks specifically about a "yellow dog." And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm." I had to look it up.
Ayers is fixated with faces, especially eyes. He writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, eyes "like ice," and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."
As it happens, Obama is also fixated with faces, especially eyes. He also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." Obama adds "smoldering eyes," "smoldering" being a word that he and Ayers inject repeatedly. Obama also uses the highly distinctive phrase "like ice," in his case to describe the glinting of the stars.
If Ayers is fixated on eyes, about eyebrows he is positively fetishistic. There are six references to "eyebrows" in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones and, stunningly, seven references in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. It is the rare memoirist who talks about eyebrows at all.
On three occasions in Dreams, Obama speaks of people with "round" faces. On four occasions in Fugitive Days, Ayers does the same. Both speak of "grim-faced" people, people with "soft" faces, and, most unusually, people with "tight" faces.
Both Ayers and Obama describe acquaintances who smile like a "Cheshire cat." Some of their characters have a countenance -- grin, squint, or scowl -- that is "perpetual." Others are "suppressing" their smiles or their grins.
To this point, I have just skimmed the 759 items in the bill of particulars in my case against Obama's literary genius. Not familiar with the term "bill of particulars?" Uncertain myself, I looked that one up too. It means a list of written statements made by a party to a court proceeding. Ayers and Obama each refer knowingly to a "bill of particulars." Doesn't everyone?
The answer, of course, is no. In Audacity of Hope, Obama does not use this phrase or most of the distinctive words or combinations of words in Dreams. In Audacity, for instance, there are virtually no descriptions of faces or eyes, and the few that the author does use are flat and clichéd -- like "brave face" or "sharp-eyed." In Dreams, seven different people "frown," twelve "grin," and six "squint." In Audacity, no more than one person makes any of these gestures.
Mr. West independently came to the same conclusion that I did, namely that Ayers was not meaningfully involved in Audacity. These two Obama books almost assuredly had different primary authors. What should be transparent to any literary critic is that the author of Audacity lacked the style and skill of the author of Dreams. There are a few pockets in Audacity that evoke the spirit of Dreams but without the same grace.
A likely suspect for these imitative passages, perhaps the whole of Audacity, is Obama's young speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Favreau joined the Obama team in 2005, time enough to play that role. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can "conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished impersonator." If so, in Audacity he played the classic role of the ghostwriter -- one who absorbs his client's thoughts and relates them in a refined version of his client's voice.
Bill Ayers was no one's ghostwriter. The now overwhelming evidence strongly suggests that he used the frame of Obama's life and finished it off with his own ideas, his own biases, his own experiences, his own passions, his own friends, even his own romances, all of this toned down just enough to keep Obama viable as a potential candidate.
I would argue that Ayers played Cyrano to Obama's Christian. His personal history was too ugly for him to woo Roxane/America himself. But Obama -- "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," as Joe Biden reminded us -- could and did make America's heart melt.(Source: American Thinker: Jack Cashill.)
Who Wrote Audacity of Hope? (Jul 2009) In previous articles on the subject of President Obama's writing skills, I have focused on his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, not his 2006 book, Audacity of Hope for one reason: Dreams, according to esteemed British author Jonathan Raban and others, captures Obama's "authentic voice."
On the strength of Dreams, Raban called Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln." Raban is in good company. "I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase," said Nobel prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of Dreams. "I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography.''
Although Audacity has received respectful reviews, it has not gotten the raves Dreams has. The New York Times describes Audacity "as much more of a political document. Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech."
Still, despite the book's "flabby platitudes," the Times assures its readers that "enough of the narrative voice in this volume is recognizably similar to the one in Dreams From My Father." Without intending to, the Times likely captured the thinking behind the creation of Audacity.
If portions of Audacity sound like outtakes from stump speeches, it is because they are outtakes from stump speeches. This can be proved. What cannot be proved, but what seems likely, is that Obama included just "enough of the narrative voice" from Dreams to maintain continuity between the two books.
The question remains -- who provided that narrative voice? In the criticism of my last two American Thinker articles, only the Washington Post addressed the central issue, and it did so facetiously: "The book [Dreams] is beautifully written and yet, in Cashill's opinion, Obama is - and always was - a crappy (his word, not mine) writer."
Critics, please forget for a minute the parallel styles, words, phrases, images, and anecdotes shared by Dreams and Bill Ayers' books. Forget for a minute Bill Ayers. The three existing samples of Obama's prose before Dreams -- the 1983 article "Breaking the War Mentality," the 1988 article "Why Organize," and his unsigned 1990 Harvard Law Review case note -- are proof enough that Barack Obama is, in fact, a crappy writer.
Consider the following sentence from "Breaking The War Mentality," an article the 21 year-old Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, in March 1983:
The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive.
The noun, "belief," and the verb, "keep," don't agree -- one of an appalling five such noun-verb mismatches in the essay -- and the punctuation is fully random. More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the "the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country."
In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are "moribund" -- that is "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is apparently left to the reader's imagination.
Obama is no untutored ghetto kid. He wrote this after eight years at Hawaii's best prep school and after four years at two good universities.
In my 25-year career in advertising and publishing I have had to review the portfolios of at least a thousand professional writers. I can tell within three paragraphs whether a writer deserves a second look. Based on any of his pre-Dreams samples, Obama would not have made the first cut. I never would have hired him. No one would have. He is simply a crappy writer.
I have also taught writing at enough levels and under enough different circumstances to know that even the best teacher cannot transform a crappy writer into a great writer. The best that the teacher can hope for is a semi-crappy writer who does not make too many grammatical errors.
Between Harvard and Dreams, Obama had no extra training. In a 2006 article, written while he was still seething, liberal publisher Peter Osnos tells the story of what did happen during those lost years.
According to Osnos, the New York Times did a profile of Obama when elected the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review. The article prompted literary agent Jane Dystel to have Obama submit a book proposal to an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The publisher liked the proposal and advanced him about $125,000. "Several years passed," Osnos writes, "and Obama was too busy finishing law school and embarking on his career to get the book done." Simon & Schuster then canceled the contract, and Obama likely had to pay at least some of it back.
Dystel then approached Times Book at Random House where Osnos was publisher, and he advanced Obama $40,000 more. The newly inspired Obama promptly turned in what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." Osnos believes Obama wrote the book himself, but he was in no position to know that. My publisher has to accept on faith that I am writing my own books. Even my agent does.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. In January of that same magical year, Ayers had chosen Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, to chair the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grants. In the fall of 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, launched Obama's ascent to political stardom with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
Dreams sold modestly in 1995, and the rights to it eventually reverted to Random House's Crown Books Division, which made a killing on the book after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.
After being elected senator in November 2004, Obama replaced the now "furious" Dystel and her 15 percent cut with a powerful D.C. attorney who charged only by the hour. Some time before his swearing in as senator, Obama signed a two-book deal with Crown for somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. Although an Obama fan, Osnos was dismayed by Obama's "ruthlessness" and his "questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."
In October 2006, Audacity debuted to kind reviews and huge sales. Despite Obama's "unforgiving Senate schedule and periodic bouts of writer's block," he had been able to write a 216-page book without any acknowledged writing help in what was likely an 18-month window. This was the same writer who blew a $125,000 advance because he was unable to produce a book during "several" much less hectic years, the same writer who between his 1995 masterpiece and Audacity had written nothing deeper than a column for a community newsletter.
How did Obama do it? "I usually wrote at night after my Senate day was over, and after my family was asleep -- from 9:30 p.m. or so until 1 a.m," he told interviewer Daphne Durham of Amazon. "I would work off an outline -- certain themes or stories that I wanted to tell -- and get them down in longhand on a yellow pad. Then I'd edit while typing in what I'd written."
In fact, the legitimacy of this interview is as dubious as the legitimacy of the book. Obama's answer to Durham's question. "What inspires you", shows up word-for-word (70 words) in the promotional blurb for Audacity. The explanation was legitimate enough, however, for Time Magazine.
"His best writing time comes late at night when he's all alone, scribbling on yellow legal pads," wrote Jay Newton-Small two months before the November 2008 election. "This is how he wrote both of his two best selling books -- Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope -- staying up after Michelle and his two young daughters had long gone to bed, reveling in the late night quiet."
Little of this rings true. Obama's oldest daughter was born in 1998, three years after Dreams was published. The late night story line was likely contrived to explain how he could have written Audacity despite the "unforgiving" schedule of a new senator.
One of my more diligent correspondents, whom I call Mr. West, has been doing some intriguing analysis of Audacity. He had earlier sent me an indexed compendium of "759" distinctive words and phrases that appear in both Dreams and Bill Ayers' books.
Mr. West has since compared Dreams and Audacity. By a generous count, Audacity matches Dreams in only 140 of the 759 word selections. "Many of these were words were just used one time in Audacity and in a different context," writes Mr. West. He was surprised too by the words and phrases that he expected to find in Audacity but did not. His conclusion, "Ayers was absolutely not involved in Audacity."
Mr. West noted also that when Dreams-like words appear in Audacity, they suddenly emerge in clusters. In the passage that follows, words and phrases that appear in both Dreams and Audacity are in bold italics:
Slowly, the senior senator rose from his seat, a slender man with a still-thick snowy mane, watery blue eyes, and a sharp, prominent nose. For a moment he stood in silence, steadying himself with his cane, his head turned upward, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then he began to speak, in somber, measured tones, a hint of the Appalachians like a knotty grain of wood beneath polished veneer. I don't recall the specifics of his speech, but I remember the broad themes, cascading out from the well of the Old Senate Chamber in a rising, Shakespearean rhythm
This is the kind of stretch that the Times rightly describes as "recognizably similar" to the "narrative voice" of Dreams. To my ear, however, it sounds forced and a little stilted and reads not so much like a passage from Dreams as an imitation of such a passage.
Mr. West also compared Audacity to various stump speeches made by Obama during the time Audacity was being written. The plagiarism here is inarguable. Mr. West lists 38 passages that appear virtually word for word in Obama speeches given in 2005 or 2006 and in Audacity.
The first example comes from a speech Obama gave on October 25, 2005, the second from Audacity.
. . . those who work in the field know what reforms really work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills. Longer hours and more days to give kids the time and attention they need to learn.
And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science, and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn.
By 2006, Obama appears to have been reading speeches that have been lifted in full from the text of Audacity. The first example comes from a June 28, 2006 speech, the second from Audacity.
Indeed, the single biggest "gap" in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called Red States and those who reside in Blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.
The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is not between men and women, or between those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue states, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don't.'
Of course, all that this proves is that whoever wrote Obama's speeches wrote large sections of Audacity, perhaps all of it, and this is only an issue if someone other than Obama wrote his speeches.
As we are seeing, though, falsehoods have a way of compounding themselves. When Rachel Klayman of Crown pulled Dreams from the vaults and put it back in circulation, she unknowingly set in motion a series of fabrications, beginning with the foundational myth that Obama is a literary genius. To sustain that myth, Obama's enablers have to make us believe that he also wrote Audacity by himself as well as most of his speeches, staying up unto 1 A.M. each night to do so.
The emergence of Jon Favreau, whom Time Magazine calls a "wunderkind wordsmith," complicates this scenario. After a February 2009 speech to Congress, the Washington Post ran a photo of Obama holding the speech, on the first page of which was clearly printed, "Draft 2/24/09 12pm...Favreau/Rhodes." It even included Favreau's phone number.
According to Wikipedia, "Favreau was hired as Obama's speechwriter shortly after Obama's election to the United States Senate. Obama and Favreau grew close, and Obama has referred to him as his ‘mind reader.'" Obama thought highly enough of Favreau to make him his chief speechwriter for the presidential campaign. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can "conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished impersonator."
Of the thirty-eight speeches during Favreau's tenure that found their way into Audacity are we to believe that he wrote none of them? It is much more likely that he wrote all of them. Yes, Obama may have written his thoughts down in longhand, but why would he not have given those notes to his gifted young speechwriter to polish?
Here is what I believe happened. Obama knew he had a problem on his hands when Dreams was republished in 2004. He recruited Ayers to write the (post-modernist) preface to the 2004 edition, but once he was elected to the Senate they both knew that Ayers was poison. To achieve continuity, Ayers, I believe, wrote the prologue to Audacity. It is the best-written part of the book. From here, Favreau took over. An "accomplished impersonator," he labored to make extended passages of Audacity sound like Dreams. It was a good effort, but he simply does not write as well as Ayers does.
hose who think Ayers cannot write either have not read him or do not have the wherewithal to judge him. In a recent critique of us "Internet zanies," Republican bigwig Ken Blackwell (why the attacks from the right?) observes, "Bill Ayers' thoughts have all the leaden quality of most deadening Marxist screeds. Ayers' writing you can't pick up; Obama's you can't put down." No, Ken, Ayers writes very well indeed. Fugitive Days is a better book than Dreams.
To be sure, Obama does not mention Ayers in the acknowledgments section of Dreams. In a similar spirit he slights Favreau in Audacity. He merely thanks a number of his Senate staff, "including Pete Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, and especially Robert Gibbs and Chris Lu" for reading the manuscript, but of course, "on their own time."
I imagine that Favreau made his contribution on his own time as well. (Source: American Thinker: Jack Cashill.)
Peter Millican, an Oxford scholar who developed the Signature system that was used in part of the analysis, does not share Jack Cashill's view.
In Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: The Story of an Unlikely Hypothesis (and a Fine Book), Millican does a breakdown of his refutation of Cashill's hypothesis. He stated, "To sum up, I have found no evidence for Cashill's ghostwriting hypothesis, and rather strong (albeit limited) evidence against. Note, moreover, that the discussion above is all fought on his own chosen ground - analyses and literary patterns that he himself has cited as likely to tell in his favour. It is impossible to know without searching carefully what other evidence against his hypothesis might turn up if one were to look for it. But at least we must judge it as extremely unlikely, and indeed so far unsubstantiated. Moreover given its small initial probability (as a story that was always intrinsically unlikely - it would be very surprising if true), and the evidence already seen, I cannot imagine how the hypothesis could be rendered credible by further examination of the texts. Of course that doesn't mean it's impossible (for example if systematic comparative studies using Yavelow's system were to yield genuinely exceptional results), but I don't currently believe that anything short of documentary proof of Ayers's involvement will take the case further."
He stated in the Sunday Times online :
Last Sunday I received an urgent call from Bob, a man close to a Republican congressman in the American west. He wanted to enlist my services to prove a scandalous allegation against Barack Obama, which would surely affect his prospects in the forthcoming election. Namely, that his famous 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, on which so much of his reputation was built, was in fact written largely by Bill Ayers, a Vietnam-era domestic terrorist.
Many Republican attacks, in the mainstream media, websites and blogs, have focused on this connection, described by Sarah Palin as Obama's "palling around with terrorists". The new scandal held the promise not only of proving that Obama was a pal of Ayers, but even that he was, in a sense, Ayers's creation, groomed for high office by his mentor's ghost-writing hand.
Viewed from Britain all this seems like fantasy, but in some US circles it is taken very seriously indeed. If the charge against Obama could be made to stick, with objective evidence of Ayers's involvement in his famous book, then perhaps it could sway significant numbers of voters back to the Republican side.
So where do I come in, an Oxford philosopher and 18th-century scholar? Well, until three years ago I taught at Leeds University in a job that combined philosophy with computing. While there I wrote several software systems (available online) designed to make the study of computing more attractive and relevant for students in the humanities.
Since October 2005, I have been Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford. Previously I was at the University of Leeds for 20 years, employed both in Philosophy and Computing. I retain a keen interest in Computing, which I see as closely related to Philosophy in many ways. The website www.philocomp.net collects together various software systems and other materials that I have developed to emphasise these links, which embrace huge areas of philosophical interest such as Logic, Linguistics, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophy of Science, as well as others (e.g. historical and textual research) in which the computer can provide an invaluable research tool.
My philosophical interests are broad, though my recent research has tended to focus on David Hume, with much of it collected on the website www.davidhume.org together with various bibliographic materials that I hope to build up in due course. I am currently Co-Editor of the journal Hume Studies, and recently produced a new edition of Hume's..., in which I try to put Hume's aims in context with those of his various predecessors (Descartes, Hobbes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley etc.) and to explain the fundamental importance of his thought, which I believe to be of abiding significance in today's world. (Source: Peter Millican.)
(2003-), The Signature Stylometric System, developed to enable non-specialists to explore stylometric concepts (e.g. to assist with questions of disputed authorship). The package documentation is limited at present to a PowerPoint presentation, but a comprehensive on-line help file is planned in due course. (Source: Oxford: Peter Millican.)
One of these, called Signature, performs "stylometric" analysis for literary detection. The idea is that by analysing different texts one can try to identify the distinctive authorial fingerprint or stylistic "signature" of each writer and thus decide questions of disputed authorship. Did St Paul write the Epistle to the Hebrews? Did Shakespeare write Edward III? Who wrote various anonymous political works, such as the Federalist Papers of 1787 or the 1996 novel Primary Colors?
Investigators have hoped to answer all of these questions – and many others – by such means and have sometimes been very successful (although more often wildly overoptimistic and naively uncritical).
My Signature system acquired some publicity this year through its involvement in a heated debate about Coleridge's alleged authorship of a translation of Goethe's Faust. So some Republicans were keen to make use of my expertise to help them in their quest to unmask Ayers as the hidden puppet master behind the Obama of 1995.
The person who came up with this strange theory is Jack Cashill, an American author who claimed to find striking similarities between Dreams from My Father and Ayers's 2001 memoir Fugitive Days.
The trouble with these sorts of claims is that they are far too easy to make: take any two substantial memoirs from the same era and you are likely to be able to pick out a fair number of passages that have some similarities. Unless the similarities are really close (and they weren't), just listing them makes no case at all, even if it might be enough to persuade some readers. Cashill and friends – who were convinced but aware that more evidence would be needed to convince others – enlisted teams of analysts to try to give the theory a solid statistical basis. All of these analyses supposedly delivered positive results, but they seem badly flawed.
One pair of university engineers tested frequencies of words in the two books against a "random control"; but the book chosen for this role was a 1919 road novel which just happened to be easily available on the web. Hardly surprising, then, that the two contemporary memoirs came out relatively similar: they were always likely to be closer to each other than to a novel written 80 years before.
Another "team" – consisting of a private engineering consultant – used my own Signature software but didn't get beyond the first primitive test for word-length frequencies (proportions of one-letter, two-letter, three-letter words, etc). Although he did rigorous statistics with more appropriate "controls", his results were rather weak. But even if they had been stronger, using such limited data is like trying to argue that two houses were constructed by the same builder purely on the basis that they contain roughly similar proportions of different bricks.
Finally, the third analysis that I have seen used far more sophisticated measures, built into a proprietary software system for helping aspiring writers to develop their style. But it records no "control" measurements at all, so the results produced are impossible to assess.
The author of the analysis describes some of his results as "striking", but this looks very exaggerated to me. Without any comparable statistics involving other texts, we have no way of assessing their true significance. So his claim to have made "a strong case for the likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghostwrote Dreams from My Father" is completely unsubstantiated.
Bob – the man who brought me into all this – seemed sincerely interested in getting to the truth about Cashill's dramatic allegation. He supplied me with the relevant texts and a number of appropriate "controls".
Some preliminary tests, using various data measures and a range of powerful statistical facilities that were recently added to Signature, indicated nothing that would give Obama any cause for concern. So I felt that any analysis I did would be far more likely to put an end to the story than to substantiate it, by providing objective data against what looked like partisan allegations.
The Republicans were apparently keen to press for a full-scale investigation, which would take a good deal of my time but for which they were prepared to pay through Oxford University Consulting's personal consultancy arrangements.
Oxford University Consulting, on my behalf, insisted quite properly that any such arrangement would have to be agreed before the results were known: there could be no question of carrying out an analysis that would be paid for only if the results came out in their favour. And I insisted that the analysis, once produced, would have to be in the public domain and thus made available to the Democrats also.
Having got to this stage, with texts and controls carefully prepared and special facilities added to Signature for the purpose, my little adventure into US politics ended. I was left with the impression that payment for propaganda was fine; but payment for objective research was quite a different matter.
Maybe one day I'll go back and do the analysis in detail, but I doubt it. I would rather spend my time on serious research questions than on improbable theories proposed with negligible support. (Source: Sunday Times online.)
CHANGE: Who really wrote Obama's book? Author Christopher Anderson's book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage, confirms Bill Ayers helped Obama write Dreams of My Father (Sep 2009) Confirming the literary detective work of WND columnist Jack Cashill prior to the 2008 election, author Christopher Andersen says in a newly released book that former domestic terrorist William Ayers helped Barack Obama write the president's highly acclaimed memoir "Dreams from My Father." Obama's 1995 book won the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album and drew praise from Time magazine, which called it "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." (SITE NOTE: However, Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media makes an excellent point: "Most reviewers, and readers, will probably read this in passing and go on. As far as I know, no reviewers to date seemed to have noticed this. All they seem to have noticed is the one quote from Michelle Obama to her husband when he was considering whether to put Hillary Clinton on the ticket: "Do you really want Bill and Hillary just down the hall from you in the White House?" And since the reviews of the book have not been particularly good, it might disappear from the public's notice fairly soon. Now Andersen gives no sources or names; the Obamas did not cooperate with him. Skeptics will argue that we have no way of knowing whether his claims can be verified, and we have no way of knowing the veracity of those he interviewed. Who, for example, was the Hyde Park neighbor he spoke with? Some might even argue that he reached his conclusion after reading Cashill's original blog, without citing it. Andersen faces the same credibility problem Bob Woodward faces, since he is often charged with making outrageous charges in some of his books without offering any proof that conversations he could not have been privy to took place. But Woodward's use of such a technique never has hurt his reputation. After all, he is Bob Woodward. Reviewers of Andersen's book have had no compunction in labeling much of what he writes as pure "gossip.")
But since July 2008, Cashill has unveiled in nearly two dozen columns, summarized here, his compelling evidence that the unrepentant co-founder of the radical Weather Underground group – dismissed by Obama during the campaign as "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood" – shaped and refined the book with his exceptional writing skill and radical ideas. Cashill, who acquired a copy of Andersen's new book today, told WND the author "lays out the scenario just as I envisioned it."
Andersen, in "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage," writes that Obama was faced with a deadline with the Time Books division of Random House to submit his manuscript after already having canceled a contract with Simon & Schuster. Confronted with the threat of a second failure, his wife, Michelle, suggested he seek the help of "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
Obama had taped interviews with relatives to flesh out his family history, and those "oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers," writes Andersen. The author quotes a neighbor in the Hyde Park area of Chicago where Obama and Ayers lived, who says of the two, "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together." "It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both," the neighbor said, according to Andersen.
Andersen also has written "marriage portraits" of George and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and John and Jackie Kennedy. Among his other books are "Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve," "Barbra: The Way She Is," "Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot" and "After Diana: William, Harry, Charles, and the Royal House of Windsor."
Andersen writes:
In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's "Dreams from My Father" would be significant – so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing.
Andersen concludes, "Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books."
Andersen relied on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama, to describe how "Dreams" was published, Cashill says. Andersen cites Cashill as a source, but Cashill points out in a fresh WND column today (23 Sep) that Andersen "clearly has access to inside information that I did not have." "His level of detail on the mechanics of the transmission goes beyond anything that I could have discovered on my own," Cashill writes.
Cashill pointed out in a column last year that in contrast to "Dreams," the Obama writing samples unearthed before 1995 "are pedestrian and uninspired."
"There is no precedent for this kind of literary transformation," Cashill wrote. "It is as if a high 90s golfer suddenly showed up with his PGA card – with no known practice rounds in between."
The evidence Cashill had gathered to that point, he said, "severely tests Obama's claim of a superficial relationship with the self-declared 'communist' Ayers. This appears to be a conscious and consequential deception."
'That's a myth'
Cashill noted in a column in May this year that Ayers was confronted at a Baltimore book-signing by a Washington Times online editor with the question of his alleged role in Obama's book.
In the encounter, which was captured on video, the Times' Kerry Picket asked Ayers if he had received any feedback from Obama on Ayers' latest book, "Race Course: Against White Supremacy."
Ayers asked rhetorically, "Why would I?"
Picket then asked, "Considering that you may have had a collaboration with 'Dreams of My Father.'"
Ayers' body language changed abruptly. Turning away from Picket, he replied curtly, "I never had a collaboration, no."
"No?" she persisted.
"That's a myth," said Ayers, ending the conversation.
Literary cabal
In an interview last night with the Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity (23 Sep), Andersen was asked to comment on his assertion that Ayers helped Obama write "Dreams." Hannity pointed to Andersen's observation that "the literary devices and themes" of the book "bear a jarring similarity to Ayers own writings." "They were good friends," Andersen affirmed, recalling that during the campaign Obama denied that fact. "There was a literary cabal there in Chicago," Andersen continued. "They were all giving each other quotes, blurbs to promote their respective books." Hannity concluded rhetorically: "So (Obama) lied to the American people." Andersen appeared hesitant to concur, but conceded, "Well, you know, I think, well, let's face it, during that campaign I think he was doing some backpedaling, I'll be honest. And I think that, you know, Michelle probably recommended that he not emphasize the relationship with Ayers."
Forensic evidence
Last fall, Cashill commissioned an independent scientific comparative analysis of writings by Obama and Ayers to determine whether Ayers had a significant role in the writing of "Dreams." Cashill reported at least four different stylometric analysts supported his extensive forensic evidence. His experts included university professors from the U.S. and England in the statistical analysis of authorship, systems engineers, writers and Ph.D. literary analysts. Most, particularly professors at public universities, asked that their names not be revealed.One analyst said it was possible Ayers served as a "book doctor," drastically rewriting work Obama already had done.
Game changer
Cashill conjectures that the apparent revelation of Ayers part in Obama's book would have changed the outcome of the 2008 election. He recalls that Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball, mocked the Republicans' 2008 vice presidential candidate, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for needing a collaborator for her book, because "she can't write." Cashill comments in his column today that as "the Obama-as-Milli Vanilli story unfolds, Matthews and those willfully blind souls like him are in for a shock." "To admit that Obama needed a collaborator would have undercut his campaign for president," Cashill says, "and to reveal the name of that collaborator would have ended it." (Source: WND.) (SITE NOTE: A White House senior adviser (Axelrod) was scheduled to appear on CNN's "American Morning", but the White House rescinded the offer after the network booked author Christopher Andersen. Andersen's new book "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage". Andersen appeared on CBS' "Early Show", but it's not clear if any booking offers to CBS were rescinded. During her interview with Anderson this morning, CNN's Kiran Chetry said, "We reached out to the White House for a response to the book. They declined comment and made it known that they weren't happy. (Source: Meida Bistro.) Anderson later said the White House simply needed time to review the book, but others state they still aren't happy with it. Anderson wants to paint the book as a portrait of the Obamas strong marriage -- versus the dysfunctional Clintons. It appears that he views this todo with Cashill a distraction in his book promotion.)
HOWEVER, David Weigel disagrees with Cashill that Christopher Anderson's book verifies his claims. Though he does not dispute that Anderson does show that Obama and Ayers were closer than Obama wants to publicize, he tries to destroy Anderson's claim -- without disputing that Anderson did say it. Though Cashill has had experts trying to analyze the books by word and phraseology similiarities, Weigel simply says he read "Dreams From My Father" and Ayers' "Fugitive Days" and states Obama is a better writer.
For more than a year, conservative journalist Jack Cashill has argued that a textual analysis of "Dreams From My Father" reveals that it was ghostwritten for Barack Obama by former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Because Cashill's analyses depended on comparisons of similar cliches and reading grade levels, they never got far out of WorldNetDaily. But Cashill is back, arguing that anecdotes in a new book by quick-turnaround author Christopher Andersen prove the Ayers-as-Obama-mastermind case. (SITE NOTE: Notice how Anderson who is described as a "bestselling author" is denigrated into "tabloid" writer and "quick-turnaround" author. Later David Freddoso is called a "bestselling author" to give him credibility. Cashill used the same technique to enhance Anderson's reputation in his column: "In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so." In reality, the reviews of Anderson's book were not so spectacular, but Wikipedia does state he is in fact a best-selling author. As to Freddoso, he is a right-wing writer for the National Review, but he is hardly a "bestselling author." His book The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate was called a "badly-written hatchet job.")
The punchline? Andersen, who has written dozens of tabloid-style books, cites someone else for the Ayers research. He cites Jack Cashill. According to Cashill, Andersen's contribution to the Ayers storyline is the recollection of "a Hyde Park neighbor" who claims that Obama, struggling with the book, gave "oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes" to Ayers and asked for advice. Any author or anyone who knows an author is probably chuckling at this point — passing unfinished portions to colleagues with some time and experience is pretty standard.
If you take Andersen on his word, it's true that this anecdote portrays Ayers and Obama as closer friends than they let on during the campaign. But it's a big leap from there to Cashill's characterization of "the Obama-as-Milli Vanilli story." Indeed, Andersen doesn't even report that story out. He writes that "Ayers' contribution to Barack's 'Dreams From My Father' would be significant – so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing." For that analysis he cites Cashill, whose previous analyses of "Dreams" been along these lines:
[W]hen the young Obama pontificates about "angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta," one hears the voice of someone much edgier and more aware than Obama. This reference reflects Ayers' worldview of America as a "marauding monster," one that terrorizes its own citizens of color just as it does those in the Third World.
Ayers does not define himself as being part of this monster but rather sees himself and his colleagues as saboteurs "behind enemy lines."
Curiously, Obama used the exact same phrase – "behind enemy lines" – to describe his own status while working in corporate America.
(SITE NOTE: A better quote is cited by Scott Kaufmann: "In the end, Ayers's contribution of Barack's Dreams from My Father would be significant -- so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similiarity to Ayers's own writings. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an "approximation" of reality, resembles Ayers's defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreword to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and "impressions."
"There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park," said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, "provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood."
Cashill refutes that he ever collaborated with Anderson on his book and never even read the book before the controversy. He maintains that Anderson got his information on Ayers writing the book from other sources -- not him. However, this comes back full circle as Anderson does not cite names nor sources for his remarks.)
I think it's telling that when asked to expand on this in an interview with Sean Hannity, Andersen moved on. The most potentially explosive section of his book and he doesn't want to talk about it? Would he do that if his research consisted of more than citing the obsessive Cashill?
VIDEO: Fox News Hannity interview with Anderson
VIDEO: Breithbart TV (State of the Nation) interview with Anderson
I've read both "Dreams From My Father" and Ayers's memoir "Fugitive Days," which was published six years after "Dreams." Ayers's book is worse. He uses a William Faulkner trope and eschews quotation marks; Obama liberally reconstructs conversations with friends, even creating some composite characters to speak with. And Ayers's book is stuffed with howlers like "The Fourth of July bombs were all good bombs, except sometimes" and "I felt now at the epicenter of a resistance so wide and so deep that it would quickly disrupt the cotton wool of consciousness afflicting the country." The irony of the Ayers conspiracy is that Obama is a better writer than Ayers, whose pretentiousness oozes off the pages.
Cashill's column on the whole mess basically argues that the Ayers theory should wreck Obama's credibility, because "the left has been at pains to depict Republicans – George Bush and Sarah Palin most recently – as dunces because they were unable to write their own books." Of course, Obama wrote a second book, "The Audacity of Hope," 10 years after "Dreams," and so far no literary analysts have tried to prove it was ghosted by Jeremiah Wright. So it's really not clear to me what this conspiracy theory is supposed to prove. Might Ayers have programmed Obama by making suggestive references to the Mekong Delta in the den of a Hyde Park mansion 14 years ago? (SITE NOTE: Others -- NOT CASHILL -- state that "Dreams from My Father" and "Audacity of Hope" were written by two DIFFERENT authors because of dissimilar writing styles. A Obama speechwriter has been suggested as a candidate for one of the books. However, no one will commit to who wrote what. However, the biggest fault is that Anderson's book does NOT cite sources nor names -- and the Obamas did not cooperate with him so they were not the source. The book lacks credibility unless Anderson can come up with some documentation. Anderson states his documentation and names are right in the book. When "grilled" by liberal news shows, Anderson stated he had been doing journalism for 40 years and had written 29 books -- warning the interviewers that their "implications" were NOT going unnoticed nor unchallenged. Ron Radosh at Pajamas Media wrote: In this case, Barack Obama did not pull a Klein, especially since, as Cashill wrote, "no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing." That left him, a rather unknown figure, isolated in trying to make the case. And as he also acknowledged, his arguments, although many found them compelling, could not be proved to everyone's satisfaction. As he put it: "Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.")
I'll quote David Freddoso, the author of the bestselling "The Case Against Barack Obama," whom I asked about this theory.
Cashill's stuff on this was a lot of crap, all conjecture and no concrete evidence.
(Source: Washington Independent.) (SITE NOTE: This is the typical diatribe that other Obama supporters immediately jumped on to discredit Cashill and Anderson. The main theme of Heigel's article is that it illustrates the Obama supporter technique of immediately going for character assasination rather than any PROOF. This article did NOT disprove anything -- nor did it try -- it only tries to obfuscate and spread a smoke screen. On the blogsphere, almost all progressive blogs posted almost identical articles.)
AIM Report: Did Bill Ayers Write Obama’s Book?
Those who praised Obama’s work may have some rethinking to do now.
Given all the blogosphere speculation about Bill Ayers ghostwriting for Obama, one major development at the end of September threatened to break the story wide open. Veteran journalist and bestselling author of 33 books Christopher Andersen has just published a fascinating new book: Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. It is largely a sympathetic look at the dynamics within America's first family.
But sorting through the more than 200 interviews Andersen says it took to create this book, he came to a startling conclusion: After Obama had to give up on a $150,000 Simon & Schuster contract because he couldn't complete the manuscript, his sources were telling him Obama finally had to bring in a ghostwriter to put together his highly praised Dreams From My Father for Times Books. He had a million pieces of tape, pictures, memos, notes, and no manuscript.
And he was running out of time to deliver the book.
Nothing wrong so far. Few politicians can string a paragraph together without a ghostwriter.
Unfortunately for Obama, he was caught at a July 10, 2008, meeting in Fairfax, Virginia proudly saying the following:
Also unfortunately for Obama, Andersen's sources - all of whom were sympathetic and appear to be at least neighbors to Obama - came to other conclusions. Andersen wrote:
These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers. "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together," another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. "It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both." In the end, Ayers' contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant - so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers' own writing. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an "approximation" of reality, resembles Ayers' defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreword to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and "impressions." ... Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books.
On Sean Hannity's show, Andersen explained why:
During that campaign I think he was doing some backpedaling, I'll be honest. And I think that Michelle probably recommended that he not emphasize their relationship with Ayers.
Andersen is a celebrity journalist who has worked at Time and People. He knows what kind of lawsuits are occasioned by careless reporting and so far, after many years, he has never had a source or one of his notoriously touchy celebrity subjects complain about the accuracy of his reporting. And the last thing Andersen wanted was to follow this line of questioning as one can see watching him slide out of it on the Hannity clip.
Repeatedly grilled on numerous occasions about how close he was with the notorious 1960s Weatherman radical Bill Ayers, Obama stated Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis."
During the 2008 presidential campaign, The Washington Post "Fact Checker" backed up that Obama statement in attacking a McCain campaign ad that claimed Obama lied about his relationship with Ayers. The Post's Pinocchio Test concluded: "The McCain campaign is distorting the Obama-Ayers relationship, and exaggerating their closeness. There is no evidence that Obama has "lied" about his dealings with Ayers." McCain was so cowed by the award of "two Pinocchios" that he wouldn't let his ticketmate Sarah Palin raise the issue again.
Thanks to Christopher Andersen's hard work there is now credible sourced evidence that Obama did lie about his dealing with Ayers. And thanks to the literary sleuthing of Jack Cashill, whom Andersen credits for finding the textual comparisons between Obama's Dreams and Ayers' writing, there is an abundance of internal evidence.
Cashill has written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, and holds a Ph.D. in American Studies. He has also produced documentaries for PBS and other stations, one of which won an Emmy. But once he began to dig into stories that examined the similarities between Obama's Dreams and the writing of Bill Ayers, he found himself restricted to blogs like World Net Daily.
Fortunately in an age in which many formerly authoritative news outlets have deserted the interests of their readers and viewers in favor of giving each other journalism prizes for stories few in their evaporating market care about, Americans are being taught to get their news where they can find it.
As a former adman, publisher, and a teacher of writing who has published a work on literary fraud, Cashill brought rare qualifications to the task. "In September 2008 I picked up a copy of Ayers' Fugitive Days and it hit me," he told me. "From comparing Obama's Dreams From My Father to his earlier works it was already clear to me some one had helped him with it. And they did a damned good job."
"But I'll admit Bill Ayers as Obama's ghost writer had never occurred to me before then."
Those who praised Obama's work may have some rethinking to do now.
"I've read Obama's books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine." Now Christopher Buckley may learn he has an even more vivid imagination than he thought. After all, his admiration for Dreams was an integral part of his explanation as to why he resigned from the National Review his father had founded and voted for Obama.
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison had called the book" ... unique. It's his. There are no other ones like that." Well, she is partially right. At least there are no "ones" that may have been ghostwritten for an American president by a terrorist that anyone can remember.
Joe Klein at Time knows more about ghostwriting than most authors, having ghostwritten his own book under the pseudonym of pseudonyms: "Anonymous." His authorship of Primary Colors was outed by another textual effort not dissimilar from Cashill's. Klein has the only quote that stands up in the light of the new information. He said: Dreams "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
"Produced" may definitely be the operative word.
In January this year, the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani called it "The most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president." Oh well, who knew?
As a former publishing executive and the founder of Times Books - which originally published Dreams - I can accept that these kinds of frauds occasionally happen. And without a direct admission of guilt, the evidence will always be unsatisfying with conflicting opinions battling back and forth.
A publisher can get gulled by a skillful con. And once outed it can be a major catastrophe. One has only to recall the James Frey controversy over his Random House best-seller, which, like Obama's "truckload of notes," was another A Million Little Pieces. Once Frey was revealed by a careful scan of his police records by SmokingGun.com as a liar whose "memoir" was largely fiction, Random House did the only honorable thing it could. It explained that all future printings of the book would be delayed until it had notes from both the publisher and the author on the lies in the text as well as notations on the cover and posted to the website. Random House also sent out inserts for the books already in the stores. Later Random House set aside several million dollars to compensate readers who felt they may have been defrauded in buying the book.
But at least no one accused James Frey of not writing it.
And the evidence keeps piling up around Ayers.
Around 9:00 a.m. on October 5th, 2009, Anne Leary was sitting at the Starbucks by the United Airlines gate at Reagan Airport for flights to and from Chicago. She was drinking a cup of coffee before getting on her flight home. She looked up and recognized Bill Ayers with his backpack waiting in line for a cup of coffee. She walked past him, turned and took his picture. She asked what he was doing in Washington. He told her he was giving a speech to a Renaissance Group in Arlington on education.
"That's what I do, education - you shouldn't believe everything you hear about me, you know nothing about me," Ayers said to her.
"I know plenty - I'm from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I'll post this."
Then, unprompted he said - "I wrote Dreams From My Father." I said, "Oh, so you admit it." He said "Michelle asked me to." I looked at him. He seemed eager. He's about my height, short. He went on to say: "And if you can prove it, we can split the royalties." So I said, "Stop pulling my leg." (Horrible thought.) But he came again: "I really wrote it, the wording was similar." I said, "I believe you probably heavily edited it." He said "I wrote it." I said, "Why would I believe you, you're a liar."
He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.
What will Random House do as this kind of clear evidence accumulates that the sitting president of the United States lied to them and the American people about having written his memoir by himself? Obama may have lied about having it ghostwritten by a man infamous to many Americans for his unrepentant attitude towards his deep involvement in the terrorist Weathermen in the 1960s. "I don't regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers said in an interview with the New York Times that appeared the morning the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed by al-Qaeda. "I feel we didn't do enough."
A good publisher first looks for a commercial opportunity. This doesn't have to be bad news. Ayers may be lousy at being a terrorist, but he is a damned fine writer. Random House can always relaunch the book as a co-authored product, sending out corrective inserts to the books in the stores and sending Ayers on the road on a publicity tour. With this kind of publicity, they can't miss.
I have called Markus Dohle, the CEO of Random House, and Stuart Applebaum, the wily director of Communications at Random House who helped weather the Frey fray so well. Do they have a lower standard for an American president who may be defrauding them and their American and international readers than for a James Frey? Are they looking into this?
We will soon see. I am waiting to hear.
In the meantime, remembering the publicity firestorm that raged for months over the Frey book, complete with hot and cold running Oprah shows, where is the press? A president of the United States caught in the glare of accusations like this? A real newsman like Ben Hecht would have been in heaven and gotten 10 extra editions out of it already. But the white rabbits and white mice that make up the increasingly reader and viewer deprived press today are just doing what they always do in the face of a good story these days - hiding until the news value goes away.
After the Anne Leary blog appeared on October 5, there were three interesting developments. The New York Times Kate Phillips wrote a snarky dismissive piece establishing that for the "newspaper of record" Ayers was enjoying yanking chains of gullible reporters by claiming he had ghosted Obama and would share the royalties with anyone who could prove it.
And NRO carried a piece by conservative Jonah Goldberg establishing that that made sense to him, because the National Journal had carried a similar story by their reporter, Will England, on October 3.
And TheDailyBeast.com's Ben Sarlin called up Ayers who gave him the non-denial denial quote: "You've all lost your minds," he wrote. "Best of luck in the twilight zone." Sarlin was careful not to call a non-denial a denial, but the sense of his piece was like Kate Phillips-lite - this is wingnut material, you have to be crazy to look into things like this.
I disagree. Here's why.
The timing of these two "teasing" incidents right after the Andersen statement may be more than a coincidence. Andersen told a tale out of school on Hannity - on September 24, take a look at the tape above - and Ayers/Obama had to walk it back. So far they are doing fine.
The various speculations by "wingnuts" in the blogosphere were no danger to Ayers/Obama. MSM reporter Andersen blowing it in a surprise question by an interviewer who actually had read his book (a rarity in itself) was a nightmare. Andersen is a superb celebrity journalist from Time and People. He has never been sued through more than 30 books and hundreds of articles. He says he has two sources. And his book was a kissy face look at the Obamas meant to sell as a love fest - he had interviewed the first family. He was anything but hostile. And he claims he has two sources in Hyde Park.
There are only two chain-yanking incidents I can find. The first was alluded to by Will England on Oct 3rd in the National Journal. It refers to an "over the weekend" questioning of Bill Ayers at a book festival. "This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: 'Yes, I wrote Dreams From My Father. I ghostwrote the whole thing. I met with the president three or four times, and then I wrote the entire book.'" He released National Journal's arm, and beamed in Marxist triumph: "And now I would like the royalties."
That weekend might most likely have been the same weekend the National Journal piece appeared, October 3 and 4, or the week earlier. England is unlikely to have run a news item that was older than that.
The Hannity mistake by Andersen was more than a week earlier on September 24. Anne Leary's piece recounted an incident on October 5. When I read it and interviewed Anne Leary, I was struck by how hard Ayers worked to make sure this self-proclaimed conservative blogger ("Thank you, God!" Ayers must have thought) stopped flaming him long enough to get his story across ... and turned back and did it again to make sure. It never occurred to Anne it was a setup. She was enjoying telling him what a creep he was. He had to interrupt her twice to make his "confession."
No one has yet posted any Ayers' chain-yanking about his ghostmanship prior to the Hannity show. And both these incidents were volunteered by Ayers. Neither England nor Leary had asked Ayers about his possible ghosting. Ayers clearly pushed this story at them.
I have been watching this story evolve for over a year. I did nothing until Christopher Andersen blathered on Hannity. And I saw the stricken look on his face and I have had three very revealing calls with his consultant, who is a pro. Andersen is terrified of talking about this. He won't speak to me. Ayers hasn't called back either.
For now the clever "I was joking" story is working fine ... except for the timing. Unless someone can show me another "I was joking" incident prior to the Hannity incident, I think the evidence leads to Andersen outing Ayers by mistake, and the chain-yanking being a ploy. Andersen never should have gone on Hannity. His book sales come from nice middle-aged ladies who don't watch Hannity.
Now they are worried this disclosure will make the book look (horrors!) anti-Obama, which it isn't. And if so, that will slow his sales. And they are right. "Authoritative" denials are always worth a little shoe leather, particularly when the denied story, if true, could cause major problems to the denier.
During his campaign for the presidency, John Kerry told everyone he wasn't present at the 1971 Kansas City meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War which discussed assassinating U.S. senators who favored the Vietnam War. That would have been a problem for Kerry because at the time he had been the national spokesperson for the VVAW. He also denied it to Douglas Brinkley who included it in his campaign biography Tour of Duty. I found witnesses to his presence, and details started coming out of my sources. like an FBI report that made it clear that he was. He had to admit he was there. That kicked off the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth campaign which led to the end of his presidential hopes forever.
As of now, Ayers has not denied being the ghost. Andersen has said he was, and he has sources and a fine reputation in the MSM. It is just lazy reporting to ignore the implications and claim anyone who continues to look into it is some kind of wingnut. The ultimate Ayers joke would be telling the truth and having the media think he was just yanking chains. You can tell the truth and yank chains at least as effectively as you can tell a lie.
Thomas Lipscomb is the Founder of Times Books and a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future.
The case is still open on Ayers and any responsible news organization should press on.Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
(Source; AIM.)
Obama Distanced Himself from Ayers Senator Obama's campaign managers stated that Obama strongly condemned the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence. During the campaign, Obama tried to defuse the Ayers issue by condemning Ayers' past actions as "detestable." "The notion that ... me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense," Obama argued. This combined with the fact that Ayers is a respected educator at the University of Chicago as well as a noted community activist, has caused many people to discount the McCain-Palin attacks.
However, as we mentioned before, Obama's words do not fly. Remember that Obama claims in his campaign that he was only "acquainted" with Ayers and Dohrn, but evidence points out that there was a long continuing relationship between the two. Despite Obama's attempt to portray their relationship as a distant one, Ayers, in a new afterward to his book "Fugitive Days," describes Obama as a "neighbor and family friend." Ayers claims he was not a terrorist because he only bombed buildings -- regardless that there were people inside the buildings. He remains unrepentant for his anti-war acts claiming that the US government was murdering people and "he wished he had done more." This feeling also extends to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of the present. (See: William Ayers background and Wikipedia.)
Though there is no direct links in the present time that can be proven, one does have suspicions because of the philosophical roots that both seem to share for a href=http://www.pjtv.com/ activism -- and the common denominator of shared friends and acquaintances. Ayers is a proud leftist revolutionary. His driving idea, in this phase of his career, is that the classroom is the frontline of the revolution. And when he was given the opportunity of a lifetime, a $150 million fund to be doled out as seed money for the kind of programs he thought would advance the cause, the guy brought in to run it was Barack Obama — with whom he worked closely on "change" in the schools for five years. Obama, of course, denies this. The jury is out -- though Palin's remarks that Obama "pals around with" terrorist friends seems essentially true -- the correct term should have been "former terrorist." Ayers is NOT a terrorist now -- though he does espouse some radical educational ideas.
But what we are REALLY waiting for is whether Obama as President comes out with the Ayers' educational philosophy of "social justice" where white America "owes" minorities improved educational benefits to make up for the years of neglect. In essence, white America and the rich are expected to pay substantial amounts to redress alleged past wrongs of society. A commitment to promoting "social justice" -- a polite word for socialism -- is practically a prerequisite in most of the nation's education schools today. (See BillAyers.org.) With Obama as President, there is a great fear that "social justice" and a social welfare state may be in the offing. On the campaign circuit in November, Obama voiced opinions on education very close to the Republican platform -- with some variations. However, we believe that Obama either shares or sympathizes with Ayers's views on education, society, and "social justice." The test will be what we see when Obama sets the education policies of his Presidency. Until then our opinion is suspended. (SITE NOTE: In Mar 2009, the GIVE Act (HR1388) was passed by the House containing a FEMA scheme that would be the basis for a National Service Reserve Corps -- something that people feared was the name for Obama's Civilian Security Defense Force. In the massive package for volunteerism in America was aimed at education for minorities -- the exact thing the Bill Ayers espoused.)
Allegations that Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn involved in 1970 San Francisco bombing (Mar 2009) Leaders of San Francisco's police officers union have accused Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, of taking part in the 1970 bombing of a city police station that killed a sergeant. On Feb. 16, 1970, a bomb placed on a window ledge of Park Station killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell and injured eight other officers, the Chronicle reported. The union said it had not been in contact with investigators nor did it have new evidence, but it cited Larry Grathwohl, who works with the conservative organization America’s Survival of Maryland and claims that he infiltrated Weather Underground as an FBI informant and heard Ayers confess, the Chronicle reported. “There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn … are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station,” the Feb. 24 letter reads, according to the Chronicle.
The union leveled the charge in a letter to a conservative organization lobbying for arrests in the case, but said it had not been in contact with investigators and had no new evidence related to the bombing, which killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell. Instead, the union cited information from a former Bay Area resident, Larry Grathwohl, who is working with the conservative group, America's Survival Inc. of Maryland. Grathwohl asserts that he infiltrated the Weather Underground as an FBI informant and heard Ayers confess to a role in the bombing. Ayers has denied any involvement in the bombing and, in January, called Grathwohl a "paid dishonest person" in an interview with The Chronicle. (Source: Marathon Pundit.)
Allegations that presidential pal Bill Ayers was involved in the murder of a San Francisco policeman appear to be running into something of a gag order from at the Department of Justice. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Justice Department and the San Francisco Police Department have contacted the San Francisco Police Officers Association and told them not to talk about the Ayers case.
Cliff Kincaid's March 12 National Press Club press conference apparently hit a nerve. As mentioned in the AT article of Wednesday, March 18, the Police Association had sent out a letter of support to Kincaid and his Campaign for Justice for Victims of Weather Underground Terrorism, observing:
There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, members of the terrorist group 'Weather Underground', are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station and other police stations throughout the United States during their 'tour of terror' in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And asking that:
...every possible effort be made to bring all evidence concerning this crime and all other crimes of urban terrorism perpetrated by the ‘Weather Underground' against the police officers of our great country to the forefront in a court of law.
According to the Chronicle:
Police Officers Association President Gary Delagnes confirmed that his union got a call from federal investigators telling them they had an "active investigation and should not be commenting on the case."
Delagnes said the letter was meant only to show support for the family of the slain officer, Sgt. Brian McDonnell, and to help them "bring closure to the case."
Right. And what is the matter with that? So why on earth would the Justice Department want them to keep their mouths shut? Exactly what did they say that would damage an "active investigation?" Are they claiming that no one knows the book is still open on that case? Are the statements above likely to compromise an "active investigation" if indeed it is truly active?
Mr. Holder, as Shakespeare said: "me thinks thou dost protest too much." So out with it! What, or who are you really trying to protect? Why didn't the Justice Department contact Kincaid's group? After all, they have said this same exact thing. The Justice Department probably doesn't want them to get any more attention than they already have. Besides, the Obama Administration certainly doesn't try to muzzle free speech, do they?
So instead they attack the Police Officers Association, who bring solid, non-partisan credibility to this effort. And all the Association wants is to see this case solved. Friends of the President or not, Mr. Holder, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are two career criminal psychopaths, who have cheerfully left a lifetime path of destruction in their wake. You need to step up to the plate, Mr. Holder. All these Weather Underground cases, and the park station bombing especially, need to be solved. If the heat is too much, either get out of the fire or help solve the case. (Source: American Thinker.)
PLO CONNECTIONS OF OBAMA???
On 29 Oct Gov. Sarah Palin said Sen. Barack Obama had ties to a Columbia University professor who she said is "a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization." The Obama campaign said on its Web site that "ugly insinuations about Barack Obama's relationship with a former neighbor and university colleague ... are completely false." The professor has denied he was a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, which the U.S. and Israel consider a terrorist organization. Palin said her assertion "is not negative campaigning to call someone out on their record." "It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years," Palin said at an event in Bowling Green, Ohio. "This is important because his associate, Rashid Khalidi ... in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama, he's a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization." (SITE NOTE: According to CNN, the allegations appear to be false. However, this is a distraction of Obama's other ties to Muslim individuals -- including the endorsement from Louis Farakhan of the Nation of Islam.)
Sen. John McCain's campaign repeatedly had sought to tie Obama to former 1960s radical William Ayers, who co-founded the Weather Underground. Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois. Khalidi is a leading scholar of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, and he was a contemporary of Obama's while on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Khalidi has been a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and has accused the country of "occupying" Palestinian territories. But he has denied acting as a PLO spokesman during a seven-year period in the 1970s and 1980s. Khalidi said on 29 Oct 2008, "I am not speaking to the media at this time, and certainly not until this idiot wind passes." The Obama campaign called Palin's remarks "another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters' attention from John McCain's lockstep support for George Bush's economic policies."
McCain ties Obama to Hamas (Apr 2008)
John McCain sought again today to tie Barack Obama to the terrorist group Hamas. In a conversation with conservative bloggers, McCain said, "I think it's very clear who Hamas wants to be the next president of the United States. I think that people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare....If Senator Obama is favored by Hamas, I think people can make judgments accordingly." McCain is referring to Hamas political adviser Ahmed Yousef, who said in an interview with WABC Radio this month that the terrorist group supports Obama's foreign policy vision.
The presumptive Republican nominee also used the comment/association in a fund-raising letter last week, telling potential donors, "Barack Obama's foreign policy plans have even won him praise from Hamas leaders." Obama's campaign criticized McCain, calling his comments personal attacks not in keeping with his pledge to run a respectful campaign. It also pointed out that Obama has denounced Hamas as a terrorist group that targets civilians.
Obama distanced himself from former President Jimmy Carter, who has hinted he supports Obama and who met with Hamas leaders last week, over the objections of the Bush administration and Israeli government. Obama said he wouldn't talk to Hamas until it recognized Israel's right to exist.
Obama has said he is willing to meet with foreign leaders, even those with objectionable views, to improve the US standing in the world. But he distinguishes between governments, like Iran, and groups, like Hamas.
UPDATE: McCain spokesman Brian Rogers responded to the Obama campaign's criticism: “This is a legitimate issue for the American people to think about. The reason for Hamas’ praise of Senator Obama’s foreign policy is his commitment to meet unconditionally with Iran -- a nation whose president denies the Holocaust, threatens to wipe Israel off the map, funds terrorists and sends weapons to Iraq to kill American soldiers. Senator Obama’s positions present a radical departure from the longstanding bipartisan consensus for isolating rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea." (Source: Boston Globe.)
In April, the Los Angeles Times published an article about a going-away dinner for Khalidi that Obama attended in Chicago, Illinois, in 2003. Khalidi was leaving to become a professor at Columbia. The paper reported that a young Palestinian-American woman recited a poem at the farewell party that accused the Israeli government of terrorism for its treatment of Palestinians and was highly critical of U.S. support of Israel. The McCain campaign accused the Los Angeles paper of "intentionally suppressing" a videotape it obtained from that dinner and demanded that it release the footage. The Times said it wouldn't release the footage because a reporter promised a source that the video would not be made public.
Asked why the McCain campaign was bringing the matter up six months after the article appeared, an aide replied, "Because we are one week away from potentially electing Barack Obama." At an event on 29 Oct 2008 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama said McCain has spent the last few days calling him "every name in the book." "I don't know what's next. By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich," Obama said. (Source: CNN.com.)
However, some watch Obama with dismay and hint at a conspiracy theory of Muslims taking control of the White House:
One watches with dismay as Democratic candidate Barack Obama manages to hide the truth on his longstanding, if indirect ties to two institutions: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), listed by the US government in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding trial; and the Nation of Islam (NoI), condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for its "consistent record of racism and anti-Semitism."
FIRST, Obama's ties to Islamists:
• The Khalid al-Mansour connection: According to former Manhattan Borough president Percy Sutton, Mansour "was raising money for" Obama's expenses at Harvard Law School. Mansour, a black American (né Don Warden), became adviser to Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal, CAIR's largest individual donor. Mansour holds standard Islamist views: He absolves the Islamist government in Sudan of sponsoring slavery, he denies a Jewish tie to Jerusalem and he wrote a booklet titled "Americans Beware! The Zionist Plot Against S. Arabia." (Both Obama and Mansour deny Sutton's account.)
• The Kenny Gamble (also known as Luqman Abdul-Haqq) connection: Gamble, a once-prominent pop music producer, cut the ribbon to the Obama campaign headquarters housed in a South Philadelphia building he owns. Gamble is an Islamist who buys large swaths of real estate in Philadelphia to create a Muslim-only residential area. Also, as the self-styled "amir" of the United Muslim Movement, he has many links to Islamist organizations, including CAIR and the Muslim Alliance in North America. (MANA's "amir" is Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.)
• The Mazen Asbahi connection: The Obama campaign's first Muslim outreach coordinator resigned after it came to light that he had served on the board of a subsidiary of the Saudi-sponsored North American Islamic Trust, with Jamal Said, another unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Hamas funding trial. Asbahi has ties to CAIR's Chicago and Detroit offices, to the Islamic Society of North America, yet another unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas funding trial, and to other Islamist organizations.
• The Minha Husaini connection: The campaign's second Muslim outreach coordinator has an Islamist background, having served as an intern in the Muslim Public Service Network. Immediately upon her appointment by Obama, she met with a group of about 30 Muslims including such notorious figures as CAIR's Nihad Awad; the Muslim American Society's Mahdi Bray, who has publicly supported Hamas and Hizbullah; and Johari Abdul Malik of the Dar al-Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, who has advised American Muslims: "You can blow up bridges, but you cannot kill people who are innocent on their way to work."
SECOND, Obama's ties to the Nation of Islam:
Obama's long-time donor and ally Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a naturalized US citizen from Syria, partnered for nearly three decades with Jabir Herbert Muhammad, a son of NoI leader Elijah Muhammad, and says he gave Jabir and his family "millions of dollars over the years." Rezko also served as executive director of the Muhammad Ali Foundation, a rogue organization that, without Ali's permission, exploited the name of this CAIR awardee.
Jeremiah Wright, Obama's esteemed pastor for 20 years, came out of a Nation background. Recently he accepted protection from an NoI security detail, and has praised Louis Farrakhan, the NoI's leader, as one of the "giants of the African American religious experience." Wright's church celebrated Farrakhan for his having "truly epitomized greatness."
Louis Farrakhan himself endorsed Obama, calling him "the hope of the entire world," "one who can lift America from her fall," and even "the messiah." (SITE NOTE: On 10 Nov 2008 after months of silence about his support for Barack Obama, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan said in an address on 9 Nov that the new president-elect has a God-given capacity to handle any burdens he'll face as the nation's leader. Farrakhan added that Obama will be able to make positive changes only with help from "God and people of goodwill," and he urged followers of the Chicago-based black nationalist movement to do their part. "President-elect Obama has energized all segments of the depressed, downtrodden, rejected and despised," he said in a 90-minute speech at Mosque Maryam on the city's South Side. "Now it is up to us to take the new energy that he has given us ... and channel that energy into making ourselves better." Dressed in intricately decorated red and gold robes and a matching fez, the once-ailing 75-year-old leader spoke to more than 1,000 followers in an address called "America's New Beginning: President-elect Barack Obama." (Source: ABC News.)
That Obama's biography touches so frequently on such unsavory organizations as CAIR and the Nation of Islam should give pause. How many of politicians have a single tie to either group, much less seven of them? (Source: Daniel Pipes.)
In the end, most voters believed that this was simply scare tactics -- much in the same way as the Muslim accusations were. However, even after the elections were over, the commentary of Obama's PLO connections were still circulating -- especially after the State Department announced that a peace settlement with Hamas would not be possible until after Dec 2008.
UPDATE: 22 Jan 2009 United States President Barack Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and three other Middle East leaders that he is determined to stop Hamas from smuggling arms into Gaza. According to a statement from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, the new president placed phone calls on Wednesday morning to Olmert, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and King Adullah of Jordan.
The statement said that Obama "emphasised his determination to work to help consolidate the ceasefire by establishing an effective anti-smuggling regime to prevent Hamas from rearming, and facilitating in partnership with the Palestinian Authority a major reconstruction effort for Palestinians in Gaza." Obama in the statement pledged that the United States, working with the international community, "would do its part to make these efforts successful". He also communicated to the four leaders "his commitment to active engagement in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace from the beginning of his term" and "his hope for their continued cooperation and leadership".
Olmert told Obama that he hoped the anti-smuggling efforts would work because it would "stabilise the ceasefire and advance the diplomatic process" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, according to a statement from Olmert's office. Olmert also told the US president that Israel "would invest effort in supplying the humanitarian needs" of the Palestinians in Gaza and work to improve the Palestinian economic situation in the West Bank.
Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters that "Obama reiterated that he and his administration will work in full partnership with President Abbas to achieve peace in the region". (Source: AJN.)
(SITE NOTE: However, the rabid anti-Obama faction showed it as "proof" that the first phone call by Obama was to Palestinian President Abbas -- disregarding the other phone calls to leaders in the region and the crisis with the Hamas rocketing Israel and Israel's subsequent invasion of Gaza. Others acknowledged the other calls but stated that Obama called Abbas FIRST. (NOTE: The spokesman for President Abbas revealed that Mr Obama had told the Palestinian leader that their conversation was his first with a foreign statesman since taking office. Mr Obama also spoke to President Mubarak of Egypt, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, and King Abdullah of Jordan. (Source: London Times.))
UPDATE: Feb 2009 By executive order, President Barack Obama has ordered the expenditure of $20.3 million in migration assistance to the Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza. The "presidential determination" which allows hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with ties to Hamas to resettle in the United States was signed on January 27, 2009 and appeared in the Federal Register on February 4, 2009. President Obama's decision, according to the Register, was necessitated by "the urgent refugee and migration needs" of the "victims."
Few on Capitol Hill took note that the order provides a free ticket replete with housing and food allowances to individuals who have displayed their overwhelming support of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the parliamentary election of January 2006. The charter for Hamas calls for the replacement of the nation of Israel with a Palestinian Islamic state.
Since its formation in 1994, Hamas has been responsible for hundreds of terrorist attacks, including the 2002 Passover suicide bombing. The leaders of the movement signed the World Islamic Statement of 1998 – a document, penned by Osama bin Laden, which declared war on America and Israel.
President Obama's executive order is expected to bring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many with ties to radical Islam, to our shores, furthering a process that was inaugurated in 1995 by Senator Ted Kennedy and the Cedar-Hart bill. (Source: Free Republic.)
(Aug 2007)
CAIR -- Civil rights advocates or radical Islamists?
CAIR presses Fox TV on Muslim terrorists (Jan 2005) Fox television bucked current media convention by portraying terrorists as Muslims in its drama series "24," but a controversial Islamic lobby group that complained about the show now says it is "encouraged" after meeting with network officials and winning concessions and assurances. Fox spokesman Scott Grogin told WorldNetDaily today the network has agreed to the Council on American-Islamic Relations' request to distribute a CAIR public service announcement to network affiliates.
But when asked to comment on CAIR's claim that network officials assured the Muslim group they had already removed some aspects of existing episodes that could potentially be viewed as stereotypical," Grogin refused to comment. Grogin, who was at the meeting, said he had nothing to say aside from stating, "We met with representatives from CAIR on Wednesday and had a very informative and productive meeting, and we look forward to working with them in the future." However, he corrected CAIR's statement that Fox agreed to ask affiliates that the PSA "be aired in proximity to '24.'"
Grogin said Fox only agreed to distribute the PSA to affiliates and will make no request as to when, "or even if," it is to air. CAIR said it called for the meeting Wednesday -- which included representatives from CAIR's Southern California office and from the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council -- to "address the depiction of a 'Muslim' family that is at the heart of a terror plot in the popular program."
The Washington, D.C.-based group said it was concerned that the portrayal of the family as a terrorist "sleeper cell" may "cast a shadow of suspicion over ordinary American Muslims and could increase Islamophobic stereotyping and bias." CAIR's statement today said that in addition to distribution of the PSAs, "FOX also gave meeting participants assurances that the program will be balanced in its portrayal of Muslims. Network representatives said that they had already reviewed existing episodes and removed some aspects that could potentially be viewed as stereotypical." "We thank Fox for the opportunity to address the Muslim community's concerns and for the willingness of network officials to take those concerns seriously in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation," said CAIR Communications Coordinator Rabiah Ahmed.
The show, which has a story line that runs the entire season, is based on 24 hours at a counter-terrorism unit. In its fourth season, this year's story centers on a terrorist sleeper cell planning an attack on the United States.
CAIR is a spin-off of the Islamic Association For Palestine, a group identified by two former FBI counter-terrorism chiefs as a U.S. front group for the terrorist group Hamas. Since 9-11, CAIR has seen three of its former employees indicted on federal terrorism charges.
Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges he trained in Virginia for holy war against the United States and sent several members to Pakistan to join Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri terrorist group with reported ties to al-Qaida. In a plea bargain, Royer claimed he never intended to hurt anyone but admitted he organized the holy warriors after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. After his arrest, Royer sought legal counsel from Hamas lawyer Stanley Cohen, who said after 9-11 he would consider serving as a defense lawyer for Osama bin Laden if the al-Qaida leader were captured.
Another CAIR figure, Bassem Khafagi, was arrested in January 2003 while serving as the group's director of community relations. The previous December, Ghassan Elashi, the founder of CAIR's Texas chapter, was indicted for financial ties to Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook. Current CAIR leaders also have made statements in support of Hamas and the domination of the U.S. by Islam.
As WorldNetDaily reported, CAIR's chairman of the board, Omar Ahmad, was cited by a California newspaper in 1998 declaring the Quran should be America's highest authority. He also was reported to have said Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion but to be dominant. (Source: WND.)
A controversial Islamic lobby group says it consulted with Fox television on the text of a disclaimer that accompanied an episode of the series "24," which breaks current entertainment-media convention by depicting terrorists as Muslims. The Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations – which has seen three of its former employees indicted on federal terrorism charges – sent representatives to meet Jan. 12 with network officials because it was concerned that the series' portrayal of a Muslims family as a terrorist "sleeper cell" may "cast a shadow of suspicion over ordinary American Muslims and could increase Islamophobic stereotyping and bias." WND.)
Kiefer Sutherland, who stars as counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer, read the disclaimer Monday night. [View via dial-up or broadband.]
"Hi. My name is Kiefer Sutherland. And I play counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer on Fox's 24. I would like to take a moment to talk to you about something that I think is very important. Now while terrorism is obviously one of the most critical challenges facing our nation and the world, it is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism. So in watching 24, please, bear that in mind."
Last month, Fox spokesman Scott Grogin told WND that as a result of the January meeting, the network agreed to distribute a CAIR-produced public service announcement to affiliates. (Source: WND.)
Doubts grow over Muslim lawmaker's loyalty -- Keith Ellison tied to group that holds Quran as highest legal authority (Dec 2006) The first Muslim member of Congress is linked to a radical Islamic school of thought that requires loyalty to the Quran over the U.S. Constitution, WND has learned. Rep.-elect Keith (Hakim-Mohammed) Ellison, D-Minn., has drawn fire for asking to take the constitutional oath on the Quran rather than the Bible at a swearing-in ceremony next month.
The Constitution specifies that members of Congress shall be bound by an oath to support the constitutional law of the land. In the oath, Ellison will be required to swear to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic ... without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion." Critics argue he has conflicting loyalties, while Ellison insists he's a patriot. But within days of being elected, Ellison held a workshop on politics for a group closely affiliated with a radical Islamic school that preaches no Muslim can pledge loyalty to the Constitution or make laws outside the laws of the Quran, which the school's leaders assert is the "supreme law" of the land, trumping all man-made laws including the U.S. Constitution.
A black convert to orthodox Sunni Islam, Ellison spoke to the North American Imams Federation, or NAIF, at the group's Nov. 19 conference in Minneapolis. His talk flowed into a breakout session listed on the agenda simply as "American Open University," according to the conference program. It turns out the university is a "distance-learning" center based in Alexandria, Va., and known to local law enforcement as "Wahhabi Online."
Later that day, Ellison met with NAIF's president, Omar Ahmad Shahin, who lectures at the same American Open University. (He also met at the time with New York imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.) The radical Islamic school trains many of NAIF's more than 150 members, who control mosques across America. American Open University supports Sharia, or Islamic law. And its founder and chairman, Jaafar Sheikh Idris, has denounced the U.S system of democracy as "the antithesis of Islam" and argued no man has the right to make laws outside Allah's laws expressed in the Quran. "There is a basic difference between Islam and this form of democracy," he says. "The basic difference is that in Islam it is [Allah's] law as expressed in the Quran and the Sunna that is the supreme law within the limits of which people have the right to legislate. "No one can be a Muslim who makes or freely accepts or believes that anyone has the right to make or accept legislation that is contrary to that divine law," Idris adds. "Examples of such violations include the legalization of alcoholic drinks, gambling, homosexuality, usury or interest, and even adoption."
Conversely, laws prohibiting polygamy and domestic violence also violate the Quran. Further, he maintains that no Muslim elected to Congress or the White House can swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution and still be a Muslim. "No Muslim could become president in a secular regime, for in order to pledge loyalty to the constitution, a Muslim would have to abandon part of his belief and embrace the belief of secularism – which is practically another religion. For Muslims, the word 'religion' does not only refer to a collection of beliefs and rituals, it refers to a way of life which includes all values, behaviors and details of living," Idris says. "Separation of religion and state is not an option for Muslims because it requires us to abandon [Allah's] decree for that of a man."
He further explains: "Islam cannot be separated from the state because it guides Muslims through every detail of running the state and their lives. Muslims have no choice but to reject secularism for it excludes the laws of [Allah]." Also, he asserts that "there is absolutely no compromise: Any belief that contradicts Islam is false."
Backed by CAIR
Ellison's campaign was backed by the Washington-based lobby group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a partner organization to American Open University-affiliated NAIF. CAIR held fundraisers for Ellison, a civil-rights lawyer and one-time acolyte of Louis Farrakhan who admits to making anti-Semitic remarks in the past (under various alias including Keith Hakim, Keith Ellison-Muhammad and Keith X Ellison). CAIR's founder has argued the Quran should replace the Constitution as the highest authority in the land. The group's director of communications, moreover, has expressed his desire to see the U.S. become an Islamic state. CAIR is an offshoot of the Islamic Association for Palestine, a suspected front for the terrorist group Hamas.
Pundit Dennis Prager and other critics have demanded Ellison take the constitutional oath on the Bible, arguing the constitution derives its authority from the Bible, not the Quran. If Ellison puts his hand on the Quran, Prager says he would be in effect nullifying his oath and undermining "American civilization."
"He should not be allowed to do so," he asserted in a recent column. Another critic, Glenn Beck of CNN, questioned Ellison's loyalties. "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies," he asked Ellison on a recent show. "There's no one who is more patriotic than I am," Ellison replied. "And so, you know, I don't need to prove my patriotic stripes."
Others point out Ellison has shown a pattern of disrespect for U.S. laws, raising the question whether he's qualified to make law. Failure to pay his taxes resulted in liens on his home. Failure to pay more than 40 parking and traffic tickets has twice led to suspension of his Minnesota license. He's also racked up hefty fines from campaign finance violations and defended the leader of a cop-killing gang.
Red flags
In addition to CAIR, the NAIF-affiliated American Open University, however, has raised a number of red flags at the FBI, including the fact that:
It's founder and chairman, Jaafar Idris, is a Sudanese radical on the Saudi payroll who was recently deported for visa fraud and spreading extremism in America. Idris, like NAIF's Shahin, studied Islam in Saudi Arabia and Sudan and says he has "great respect" for the father of the purist Wahhabi movement followed by Osama bin Laden – Saudi theologian Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.
A co-founder of the school, Salah As-Sawi, is a professor at Al-Azhar in Egypt, a bastion of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood, which gave rise to Hamas and al-Qaida. In fact, American Open University is a fully accredited satellite campus of Al-Azhar. As-Sawi worked with Idris at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Sciences in Washington, a propaganda center set up by the Saudi Embassy to spread Wahhabism in America. It was raided after 9/11 and is still under surveillance by federal authorities.
Alumni of the "university" include convicted members of the Virginia Jihad Network, who trained to kill American troops overseas.
The school has received funding from a suspected al-Qaida front that has expressly advocated suicide attacks and using airliners as weapons. The Islamic Assembly of North America, or IANA, is bankrolled by the Saudi religious minister who stayed at the same Washington-area hotel as the hijackers the night before they attacked the Pentagon. (He feigned a heart attack when FBI agents tried to question him and was subsequently evacuated with other Saudi officials on White House-approved escape flights after 9/11.)
A former CAIR official, Bassem Khafagi, headed IANA. He pleaded guilty to terror-related charges and was deported after 9/11.
Last month's NAIF conference program outlining Ellison's session, titled "Imams and Politics," says Muslim involvement in Western politics is a "sensitive" issue. "Imams must be able to provide Muslims with the proper guidance and educate them on the etiquettes [sic] of any political involvement within the Islamic context," the program says. "Questions also arise on whether imams and Islamic centers should be involved in politics at all and what the extent of this involvement should be."
Transcripts of his talk and the subsequent breakout session on American Open University were not made available to the public. (Source: WND.)
CAIR: Civil rights advocates or radical Islamists? -- Muslim lobby group has troubling record of terror arrests (Dec 2007) The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, says its aim is "to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding."
Maybe so, but federal prosecutors have also named the group an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a plot to fund the terrorist group Hamas, several of CAIR's leaders have been convicted on terror charges since 9/11, and one of its founders has reportedly declared that America should be governed by Islamic sharia law.
Adding to the controversy over the high-profile lobby group, CAIR is now being sued by radio talk show host Michael Savage over CAIR's attacks on him and what he says constitute illegal use of his broadcasts.
The lawsuit alleges CAIR is a "political vehicle of international terrorism" that seeks to do "material harm to those voices who speak against the violent agenda of CAIR's clients." Filed in U.S. District Court in California, the suit seeks damages equal to the ongoing donations from CAIR supporters "who expect CAIR to act in this manner in exchange for continuing financial support" as well as "actual damages according to proof."
The focal point of the lawsuit is a series of audio clips CAIR has been using in its promotions and fundraisings. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for CAIR, told WND the group would not comment on the action until the document had been reviewed. Although the news media generally have portrayed CAIR as a legitimate civil rights group, the organization has had a hard time maintaining its squeaky clean image. For instance, as WND has reported, Ghassan Elashi, a board member of CAIR's Texas chapter, was convicted in 2005 of channeling funds to a high-ranking official of Hamas – which the U.S. government officially designates a terrorist organization.
As WND reported in October 2006, Elashi was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison for financial ties to a high-ranking Hamas terrorist and for making illegal computer exports to countries that back terrorism. Other CAIR figures convicted since 9-11 are Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer, a former communications specialist and civil rights coordinator, and Bassem Khafagi, former director of community relations. Royer was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges he trained in Virginia for holy war against the United States and sent several members to Pakistan to join Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri terrorist group with reported ties to al-Qaida. In a plea bargain, Royer claimed he never intended to hurt anyone but admitted he organized the holy warriors after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.After his arrest, Royer sought legal counsel from Hamas lawyer Stanley Cohen, who said after 9-11 he would consider serving as a defense lawyer for Osama bin Laden if the al-Qaida leader were captured.
Khafagi was arrested in January 2003 while serving with CAIR and convicted on fraud and terrorism charges. Current CAIR leaders also have made statements in support of Hamas and the domination of the U.S. by Islam. As WorldNetDaily reported, CAIR's chairman of the board, Omar Ahmad, was cited by a California newspaper in 1998 declaring the Quran should be America's highest authority. He also was reported to have said Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion but to be dominant.
Just this past June, CAIR itself was named, along with two other prominent U.S. Islamic groups, as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a plot to fund Hamas. Federal prosecutors also cited the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust as participants in a plot with five officials of the defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. CAIR is a spinoff of the defunct Islamic Association for Palestine, launched by Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook and former university professor Sami al-Arian, who pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to provide services to Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Last March, the House Republican Conference urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to cancel an event hosted on Capitol Hill by CAIR, calling the group "terrorist apologists." And the group's regular meetings with the Justice Department and FBI have prompted complaints from case agents, who say the bureau rarely can make a move in the Muslim community without first consulting with CAIR, which sits on its advisory board.
CAIR has even conducted "sensitivity" and cultural training with federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and with the military. In June of last year, a senior Department of Homeland Security official from Washington guided CAIR officials on a behind-the-scenes tour of Customs screening operations at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in response to CAIR complaints that Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed as they entered the U.S. from abroad.
Last year, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., withdrew an award she gave to a local CAIR official, saying she was concerned about some statements by CAIR leaders. Savage's lawsuit follows a CAIR campaign to influence advertisers to abandon the popular talker's program. CAIR's recent announcement said OfficeMax, a leading office products retailer, had joined "a growing list of companies" withdrawing advertising from Savage's program because of his opinions regarding Islam.
That prompted the group ACT for America to launch an alert suggesting people call OfficeMax to encourage the company to reverse its decision. "Call the OfficeMax office headquarters … and when you get an operator, in a polite but firm manner, tell the operator you have heard about the company's decision to stop advertising on the Michael Savage program because of the pressure from CAIR. Tell them you will no longer shop at OfficeMax until OfficeMax reverses this ill-advised decision," the advisory said. "If CAIR can succeed in this effort to silence Michael Savage, consider the chilling effect this will have on every talk radio host in America," wrote American Congress for Truth founder Brigitte Gabriel in the alert. (Source: WND.)
Twin Cities Somalis protest against … CAIR? (Jun 2009)When a young Somali man disappeared from the Twin Cities and committed a suicide bombing in his home country — and when several of his fellow Muslims from the same mosque disappeared as well — the local Somali community wanted answers. They wanted to get those answers from the FBI, but as they soon discovered, another force didn't want those answers at all. The Somalis took to the streets yesterday in opposition to the kibbitzers:
Relatives, friends and neighbors of a Minneapolis teen killed in Somalia pressed their argument Thursday that a Muslim civil rights group is hampering a federal investigation into the disappearances of dozens of Twin Cities Somali men.
At a protest outside the Brian Coyle Community Center in Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, Abdirizak Bihi, the uncle of Burhan Hassan, who relatives say was killed last week in Mogadishu by a terrorist group, accused the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Minnesota chapter of discouraging local Somalis from cooperating with the FBI.
"We don't want anyone to come into our community and tell us to shut up," Bihi said. "Law enforcement will not be able to do anything without information from the community."
About 50 people attended the rally, waving signs and hollering, "CAIR out! Doublespeak out!" (Source: Star Tribune.)
Have CAIR officials interfered with an FBI investigation and tampered with witnesses? Both would be federal crimes, as would obstruction of justice. Any coordinated effort to do any of the three would add conspiracy charges. The FBI should take note of the protest and find out why their investigation may not be going as smoothly as they hoped.
Besides, why is CAIR so interested in shutting up Muslims who want to cooperate to find their sons before they might commit suicide as well? An organization that wanted to serve American Muslims should be more interested in finding the missing young men than in silencing their families. Unless, of course, CAIR has a completely different agenda.
Even without the speculation, clearly CAIR has angered the community it purports to represent.
Update: Just to make clear, the suicide bomber and the disappearances were long before the murder of Burkhan Hassan, whose death in Mogadishu just got confirmed. Hassan disappeared at the same time as the others from the Abubakar Mosque, last November. (Source: Hot Air.)
'Now we have proof' jihadis infiltrating D.C. (Oct 2009) In the wake of the sensational ACORN video sting operation by two young investigators, an even more daring and devastating undercover investigation – this one infiltrating the nation's most aggressive Muslim "civil rights" organization for six months – has produced stunning revelations about the supposedly "moderate" group, backed up by 12,000 pages of documents and 300 hours of covert video obtained during the secret op.
As revealed in a new book detailing the operation and its findings, the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, is not the beneficent Muslim civil-rights group it claims to be. Indisputable evidence now shows CAIR and other "mainstream" Islamic groups are acting as fronts for a well-funded conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood – the parent of al-Qaida and Hamas – to infiltrate and destroy the American system.
"Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," a WND Books publication by counter-terrorism investigator P. David Gaubatz and "Infiltration" author Paul Sperry, documents CAIR's ultimate purpose to transform the United States into an Islamic nation under the authority of the Quran. The book already has prompted action on Capitol Hill. With evidence from "Muslim Mafia" in hand, U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., co-founder of the Congressional Anti-Terror Caucus, and other members of Congress – including Reps. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., and Paul Broun, R-Ga. – plan to hold a press conference today in Washington calling for an investigation and an end to political lobbying by front groups such as CAIR. "Now we have proof – from the secret documents that this investigative team has uncovered, coupled with the ones recently declassified by the FBI – that [radical Islamists] agents living among us have a plan in place, and they are successfully carrying out that subversive plan," Myrick writes in the foreword to "Muslim Mafia."
Noting that CAIR has tried to hide its strategy, finances, membership, internal disputes and much more from public view since its founding in 1994, Islam expert Daniel Pipes lauded "Muslim Mafia" for definitively exposing the "tawdry and often illegal inner workings of radical Islam's most aggressive organization in North America." "The revelations in this book should both put CAIR out of business and permanently discredit the Islamist cause," Pipes said.
Undercover
The book begins as a real-life, heart-pounding thriller, with Chris Gaubatz, the son of co-author David Gaubatz, preparing to go underground as an intern for CAIR at its Herndon, Va., office.
Astoundingly, the younger Gaubatz, posing as a bearded Muslim convert, ends up with a position at CAIR's national office in Washington, just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol building, working alongside top leaders Ibrahim Hooper, Nihad Awad and Corey Saylor. Along with declassified government documents, the book unveils thousands of e-mails, faxes and internal memos that were never meant for public viewing.
The new evidence shows that CAIR – already designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-financing case in U.S. history – is part of an organized crime network in America made up of more than 100 other Muslim front groups that collectively comprise the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. "Muslim Mafia" also exposes the inner workings of the mob-like Brotherhood and explains its broader conspiracy of infiltrating the American government and "destroying Western civilization from within." "The evidence found in the investigation is incontrovertible," said co-author Sperry, noting that the book has more than 40 pages of footnotes and an appendix with more than 50 pages of exclusive confidential documents.
The Brotherhood is known within Islamist circles as the "Ikhwan mafia" because of its highly organized structure, centralized control and covert operations. CAIR, reveals "Muslim Mafia," is one part of the network of front groups, cut-outs and shell companies that shield the Brotherhood's criminal activities from authorities. "These guys talk about jihad and murdering Jews like the mob talked about killing – totally casual, like they were ordering pizza," said one FBI official in Washington quoted in the book. Some key smoking-gun revelations detailed in "Muslim Mafia" include:
New evidence that CAIR was launched to support the Hamas terrorist group, and has transferred tens of thousands of dollars to a group recently convicted as Hamas' top fundraising arm in the U.S. – money that ended up aiding terrorist attacks on Israelis and Americans;
Internal documents showing CAIR, despite claims of cooperating with law enforcement, actively works behind the scenes to mislead and deceive the FBI on behalf of terrorism suspects – and has even cultivated Muslim moles inside law enforcement who have tipped off FBI terror targets;
CAIR is more closely tied to al-Qaida than previously reported;
CAIR claims to represent all Muslim Americans, however, it has victimized some 100 indigent Muslims in a massive fraud and threatened them when they tried to go to the media; and internally, personnel complaints reveal CAIR discriminates against Shiite Muslims and Muslim women within its own headquarters;
CAIR and its sister fronts are funded by foreign Muslim Brotherhood sources;
CAIR leaders share the Muslim Brotherhood's ultimate goal to replace the U.S. Constitution with Shariah law:
The Muslim Brotherhood investment in corporate America will be used to pressure U.S. companies into compliance with Islamic principles.
The book also shows radical Muslims in the U.S. are working to support Palestinian terrorists, destroy Israel, gut U.S. anti-terrorism laws, loosen U.S. Muslim immigration policies and convert Americans to Islam. The authors explain they targeted CAIR because it helps control the "religious crime syndicate from its power base in Washington, the capitol of the same government it wishes to overthrow."
While the FBI has cut formal ties to CAIR in the wake of its designation as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the group has virtually unfettered access to Capitol Hill and continues to wield influence in the White House.
CAIR, the book reveals, regularly reserves meeting rooms and prays Fridays alongside Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and a growing number of Muslim staffers. The first Muslim elected to Congress and a de facto CAIR board member, Ellison predicted in one CAIR power breakfast he soon would be flanked by 15 other Muslim congressmen, "Muslim Mafia" notes. Chris Gaubatz, in fact, once found himself praying elbow-to-elbow with Ellison during a Friday prayer gathering attended by CAIR inside the U.S. Capitol. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the book says, is totally in the dark about the threat, and so is the White House.
In fact, reveals "Muslim Mafia," in the White House President Obama is hiring Muslims – including an adviser who advocates compliance with Shariah law – based on resumes solicited from Muslim Brotherhood fronts. Meanwhile, the FBI is in conflict internally about how to deal with the Brotherhood, with some top officials in favor of maintaining outreach, while counter-terror case agents in the field strongly object, pointing to evidence the network is a factory for homegrown terror and is secretly carrying out activities hostile to the U.S. "They've achieved outrageous penetration at senior levels of our government," veteran FBI special agent John Guandolo warns in the book. Until recently, the FBI engaged in outreach activities with CAIR, including forcing rookie agents to take cultural field trips to area mosques. The "Muslim Mafia" authors obtained notes revealing the FBI even has offered to sponsor Muslim youth camps with the Boys Clubs of America.
A shortage of Arab linguists and dozens of discrimination suits by Arab and Muslim employees has prompted the FBI to recruit from Brotherhood-related groups, such as the Islamic Society of North America A Muslim agent who drew national attention when he refused to tape-record a fellow Muslim during a terrorism investigation was promoted and now recruits other Muslims to become agents and linguists.
'Hit sheets'
The book also presents evidence CAIR has prepared "hit sheets" on its critics in the news media in an effort to intimidate them into silence. Internal memos show, for example, top officials privately met with CNN executives in Atlanta to press them to cancel Glenn Beck's program on its Headline News network. Beck now has a highly rated afternoon show on the Fox News Channel. CAIR's campaign to boycott leading nationally syndicated radio talk-show host Michael Savage's advertisers cost more than $160,000, the book reveals. The authors recount how CAIR ran out of money before it could crack Savage's most loyal sponsors.
The book also includes new revelations about CAIR's role in the "flying imams" case in 2006 in which six Muslim leaders were removed from an airline flight in Minneapolis after passengers and crew members reported what they believed to be suspicious behavior. "Muslim Mafia" also exposes CAIR's secret agenda to criminalize anti-terror profiling by police and private entities.
Gaubatz is a veteran federal investigator and counter-terrorism specialist who served for more than a decade as a special agent in the U.S. Air Force's elite Office of Special Investigations. He held the U.S. government's highest security clearances, including Top Secret/SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information), and was briefed in many so-called black projects. Gaubatz also is a State Department-trained Arabic linguist with more than two decades of experience in the Middle East, including tours in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq. In 2003, he led a 15-man team to rescue the family members of the Iraqi lawyer credited with saving Army Private First Class Jessica Lynch.
Sperry, a media fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is former Washington bureau chief for Investor's Business Daily and former Washington bureau chief of WorldNetDaily.com.
His bestseller "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," is being used by the U.S. military and top law enforcement departments nationwide. Many of the numerous stories he has broken on national security and counter-terrorism have been cited by the Washington Post, USA Today, UPI and the Associated Press, among others. His columns have appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Houston Chronicle, American Spectator and Reason.
One FBI official quoted in "Muslim Mafia" says CAIR and the other Muslim Brotherhood front groups differ from al-Qaida in that, while all share the same goals, they use different methods to achieve them "The only difference between the guys in the suits and the guys with the AK-47s is timing and tactics," the official explained. (Source: WND.)
House Republicans accuse CAIR Muslim group of trying to plant spies (Oct 2009) Four House Republicans are accusing a Muslim advocacy group of trying to plant spies. Republican members of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus say the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), tried to plant “spies” within key national security committees to shape legislative policy in its favor.
Reps. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), Paul Broun (R-Ga.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), citing the recently released book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that's Conspiring to Islamize America, called for the House sergeant at arms to investigate whether CAIR had been successful in placing interns on key committees. The lawmakers are specifically focused on the House Homeland Security Committee, Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee. “If an organization is connected to or supports terrorists [and] is running influence operations or planting spies in key national security-related offices I think this needs to be made known,” Broun said. “So I join my colleagues here today in calling for action.”
The book, which was written by P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry with a forward by Myrick, is scheduled to be released Thursday. A representative of CAIR called the accusations unfounded and worried that they would tarnish the improving relations between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans. “God forbid American Muslims take part in the political process and exercise their rights,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a CAIR spokesman, in a telephone interview. “I suppose they’re going to investigate the Muslim Staffers Association next. “If these people weren’t so hate-filled, it would be laughable, but unfortunately they have an audience and given their positions, it’s going to get picked up by the hate blogs.” (Source: The Hill.)
Hill terror front group investigated by FBI (Oct 2009) The Washington field office of the FBI is actively investigating the founding chairman and acting executive director of the nation's premier Islamic-rights group in Washington, based on evidence that emerged from the largest terror-financing case in U.S. history, a blockbuster new book alleges.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, along with its founding chairman Omar M. Ahmad, were named by the U.S. Justice Department as unindicted co-conspirators in a criminal conspiracy led by the Holy Land Foundation charity to underwrite Palestinian terrorism. "CAIR has been identified by the government at trial as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization – a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew," federal prosecutors wrote in September 2007, according to court documents.
Following the blacklisting, the FBI severed ties with CAIR, a move that sent shock waves throughout the American Muslim establishment. "Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and Hamas," explained assistant FBI director Richard C. Powers, "the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner."
The 15-year-old nonprofit organization's top executives for years had enjoyed virtually unfettered access to the corridors of power in the capital, even meeting with presidents and rubbing elbows with congressional leaders. Now Ahmad and CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad have come under active investigation for their roles in the criminal conspiracy to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas terrorists, according to "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America." The officials could not be reached for comment. And CAIR declined comment. Neither official has been charged with a crime. However, the book quotes Awad privately saying he thought the Holy Land defendants, who were found guilty on all 108 felony counts, should be "exonerated" and suggested "Jewish organizations" framed them. Both Omar, aka Omar Yehia, and Awad, who uses the alias Nehad Hammad, are Palestinian refugees who together founded CAIR in 1994 after operating the Hamas front Islamic Association for Palestine.
Specifically, the book alleges, investigators are focusing on the CAIR co-founders' ties to Hamas's top leader in the U.S. – Shukri Abu Baker – who earlier this year was sentenced to what in effect will be a life term in prison for his role in the Holy Land conspiracy. They say Abu Baker last decade coordinated a secret meeting with Ahmad in a Philadelphia hotel, where Hamas leaders hatched a scheme to disguise payments to Palestinian suicide bombers and their families as charity. Investigators say the two arranged the meeting in a Dallas phone conversation.
The FBI wiretaps of the meeting also identify the presence of CAIR chief Awad, who gave a presentation regarding plans to conceal the true nature of the front groups involved in the plot through media propaganda efforts. Room invoices from the Courtyard by Marriott hotel meeting are presented in the book.
Investigators also are looking at a trail of money between Baker and CAIR and between Baker and Hamas. As previously reported, Baker had signed a check for at least $5,000 to CAIR as it was starting up operations.
But "Muslim Mafia" – based in part on some 12,000 pages of documents collected from inside CAIR's national headquarters during a private undercover operation – presents for the first time evidence that CAIR gave at least $40,000 to Baker's front group in Dallas. Just a few months later that group turned around and gave exactly $40,000 to Hamas suicide bombers in Gaza, documents show. The transaction was made after the Clinton administration designated Hamas a terrorist entity and outlawed transfer of money to Hamas through charitable donations from U.S. groups and citizens.
The CAIR "investment" (as its internal financial records refer to it) – which represented more than half its assets at the time – ostensibly was funneled through the Islamic Relief Committee, a known charitable front for Hamas in the Palestinian territories, the book alleges. Islamic Relief at the time had requested more money to finance "weapons to carry out the jihad operations" against Israel and its allies, according to one hand-written missive. "You do not know how happy people become when they watch those mujahideen," it added referring to Hamas terrorists, "and how proud they feel when they parade in their uniforms and weapons – and the extent of their honor when they carry out their jihadist operations against the Jews and their tentacles."
Just months before the Philadelphia hotel meeting, Islamic Relief Committee had solicited money from a secret Hamas subsidiary in the U.S. investigators believe was headed by Baker and Ahmad called the "Palestine Committee." The FBI says the committee was controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which founded Hamas.
In a letter faxed to a Brotherhood underboss in the U.S., who lives outside Washington, Islamic Relief asked Baker's and Ahmad's special committee for more American money to finance terrorism operations, complaining its "financial needs" were not being met. "Provide us with what helps us of funds and weapons," it pleaded in one letter from the Gaza Strip. "Weapons, weapons, our brothers." "Jihad in Palestine is different from any jihad," the letter continued. "The meaning of killing a Jew for the liberation of Palestine cannot be compared to any jihad on earth."
Evidence presented in Muslim Mafia shows the name of CAIR's current chief Awad appears with Baker's and Ahmad's on a list of "important phone and fax numbers" for the Palestine Committee in America. At the time, Awad lived in Minneapolis where he worked with Ibrahim Hooper, now CAIR's national communications director. Moreover, Muslim Mafia presents evidence that now-convicted terrorist Baker has met with CAIR officials at its headquarters located just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol, according to visitor registration logs obtained in the covert investigation.
The 48-year-old Awad has publicly supported Hamas in the past. "I am in support of the Hamas movement," he declared the year CAIR was founded.
Like Ahmad, Awad, who has turned down congressional invitations to answer questions under oath, remains under FBI scrutiny. "He's a bad guy – one of Hamas's senior guys in the United States," the book quotes a veteran special agent with the FBI's Washington field office saying. Ahmad, for his part, abruptly resigned from CAIR's board after his unindicted terrorist co-conspirator designation. The longtime CAIR chairman, 49, is on record telling a Muslim audience in California that the Quran should supersede the U.S. Constitution as the highest authority in the land.
FBI agents and federal prosecutors "are very actively working to indict" CAIR's national leaders, confirms a U.S. official familiar with the ongoing investigation in connection with the Holy Land case. He says "fresh evidence" emerged from the case, triggering a closer look at both of CAIR's founders and their connections to Hamas. The FBI's Washington field office is working in coordination with the bureau's Dallas field office on the ongoing investigation. Dallas FBI Special Agent Lara Burns has testified, unequivocally, that CAIR is a front group for the Hamas terrorist group. (Source: WND.)
'Muslim Mafia' lawsuit response: Legally, CAIR doesn't even exist --
Father, son defend undercover investigation producing evidence of group's links to terror (Dec 2009) In an intriguing twist to a lawsuit with national security implications, lawyers defending a father and son who carried out a six-month undercover investigation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations have filed a reply claiming the D.C.-based Muslim-rights group has no claim because it does not legally exist. Just two weeks after CAIR was named by the Justice Department in May 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist finance case in U.S. history, the organization changed its name to the Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network, explains attorney Daniel Horowitz in a motion to dismiss the case filed in federal court in the nation's capital. "CAIR is not a valid entity and even if it were, the exposure of its inner workings is part of the price it pays for being a controversial group in a hotly contested arena," Horowitz declares in his reply to CAIR's lawsuit.
Horowitz says that if the group responds to his brief by filing an amendment to change its registered name back to Council on American Islamic-Relations, he will seek an evidentiary hearing "to establish whether there is a genuine corporate entity that is 'CAIR' or whether 'CAIR' is a moniker used to represent the activities of a ruling group that oversees (in some way) the operations of other CAIR related groups." As WND reported, CAIR alleges P. David Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, who served as an unpaid volunteer for CAIR last year, obtained access to the Muslim group's property under false pretenses, removed internal documents and made recordings of officials and employees "without any consent or authorization and in violation of his contractual, fiduciary and other legal obligations to CAIR." The reply to CAIR also contends the Gaubatzes' actions to expose the group are protected by the First Amendment.
A federal judge in Washington issued a restraining order Nov. 3 barring the Gaubtazes from further use or publication of the material – 12,000 pages of documents along with audio and video recordings – and demanding that they return it to the Muslim group's lawyers. But the FBI also has shown interest in the material, stepping in with a warrant Nov. 23 to examine the papers and recordings, apparently as part of its concern about CAIR and its terrorist links to Hamas. The FBI cut off ties to CAIR in January after the group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case in Texas. Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York and other senators have called for a government-wide ban on CAIR.
The material is featured in the book "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America," published by WND Books. The book, co-authored by David Gaubatz and "Infiltration" author Paul Sperry, asserts CAIR is acting as a front for a conspiracy of the Muslim Brotherhood – the parent of al-Qaida and Hamas – to infiltrate the U.S. and help pave the way for Saudi-style Islamic law to rule the nation.
'No results'
An exhibit filed by Horowitz with his reply to CAIR shows a search on the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs website for the name Council on American-Islamic Relations produced no results. Further, a search for "name availability" on the same site shows Council on American-Islamic Relations is available while the names Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network and Council on American-Islamic Relations Foundation are not. Both of the latter names turn up in a search for incorporated names. "CAIR is not a valid entity and even if it were, the exposure of its inner workings is part of the price it pays for being a controversial group in a hotly contested arena," Horowitz says in the brief's conclusion. "If the press or publishers had to prove the purity of their sources before publishing we would never hear about the various romances of Tiger Woods (which might be a relief) but we also never have heard of the Pentagon Papers."
In the well-known case brought by the New York Times against the federal government, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the press to the Pentagon Papers – the top-secret Defense Department history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam – because they related to "matters of great public concern," Horowitz argues. The lawyer who represented Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, famed New York City lawyer Martin Garbus, also is defending the Gaubatzes. Another high-profile advocate, Bernard Grimm of Washington, D.C., is a third member of the legal team.
Horowitz, a frequent TV legal analyst based in the San Francisco Bay area, represented talk-radio host Michael Savage in his lawsuit against CAIR.CAIR is seeking punitive damages for trespass, breach of contract, conversion – the unlawful use of someone else's property – and breach of fiduciary duty. In the lawsuit, however, CAIR, a self-described Muslim civil-rights group, does not defend itself against the book's claims. Horowitz argues that CAIR's declaration shows the use of Council on American-Islamic Relations Action Network is not just a convenient shortening of the name. He points out that in CAIR's case against Savage, CAIR's own attorneys appeared separately for CAIR and for CAIR Action Network, or CAIR-AN. Under the D.C. code, Horowitz explains, when a nonprofit corporation's articles of incorporation are revoked for failure to comply with certain reporting rules, "then all powers conferred on it are inoperative and it must cease all business activities … except for those activities necessary for winding up its affairs."
CAIR claims the Gaubatzes used CAIR property and personal information of CAIR's employees and donors to cast the group in a "negative, inaccurate light." The group claims it had an expectation of confidentiality that was breached, causing injury to the organization and causing it and its officials and employees "to suffer unwarranted harassment up to and including threats of violence."
But Horowitz argues CAIR's pleading does not make it clear that the documents taken from CAIR were consigned to the shredder. "Muslim Mafia," he points out, describes Chris Gaubatz's internship at CAIR as "a six-month counterintelligence operation" during which he "routinely load[ed] the trunk of his car with boxes of sensitive documents and deliver[ed] them into the custody of investigative project leader P. David Gaubatz who in turn stockpiled them at his office in Richmond, Virginia."
Public debate
The Gaubatzes' legal reply to CAIR argues the damages claimed are not specific and, in any case, are related to conduct protected by the First Amendment. The reply says CAIR, which contends it is simply a civil rights group, is trying to bring a debate into the courtroom that actually belongs in the public arena. In contrast to CAIR's description of itself, Horowitz notes, the authors of "Muslim Mafia" describe CAIR as "a full-service terror support group." "CAIR's lawsuit tries to bring the debate into the courtroom by confusing its version of how the material was obtained with a claim for damages due to the effects of publication," the brief states.
Horowitz calls CAIR's action "an impermissible end run around First Amendment protections." He notes that ironically, in CAIR's case against Savage, the group "decried this same tactic, alleging that 'fair use' protected CAIR's right to use six minutes of a radio talk show and post it on CAIR's website to illustrate a point." "The fact that 'CAIR' is upset or that members may have been threatened does not weaken the First Amendment protections," Horowitz argues.
Regarding CAIR's claim of suffering threats, Horowitz says, "Obviously, any thinking person would be alarmed and even outraged if it were true that threats arose in response to ... 'Muslim Mafia.' But the book itself does not directly or indirectly seek this. There are no claims that 'Muslim Mafia' sought to generate physical harm, only that it cast CAIR in a 'negative light." CAIR's claim of breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract is based on its allegation that Chris Gaubatz signed a confidentiality agreement when he began the internship. But CAIR has not been able to produce evidence any agreement was signed, and Horowitz says that even if signed, "this document would have been signed between a non-existent corporate entity and Chris Gaubatz. There need to be two parties to a contract."
CAIR's claim of trespass also is invalid, Horowitz contends, because the group has not even insisted in its pleading that its premises were private or not open to the public.
"There cannot be trespass to a place open to the public without fee," he argues. CAIR claims its e-mails are protected by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, but Horowitz asserts the law does not apply to office computers at CAIR. Rather, he says, it "protects users whose electronic communications are in electronic storage with an [Internet service provider] or other electronic communications facility." (Source: WND.)
CAIR admitted fundraising for convicted terror group -- Lawsuit exposes D.C.-based Muslim organization's radical connections (Dec 2009) While the Council on American-Islamic Relations has contended its designation by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-finance case is unjustified, the group has admitted in a legal brief it solicited donations in the wake of the 9/11 attacks for the Holy Land Foundation, the convicted American fundraising arm for the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
The admission – a previously unnoticed declaration in talk-radio host Michael Savage's lawsuit against CAIR – was attached to a brief filed this week in the Muslim group's suit against a father and son who carried out a six-month undercover investigation in which they obtained 12,000 pages of incriminating documents and made secret audio and video recordings. Lawyers for P. David Gaubatz and Chris Gaubatz filed a motion to dismiss the case this week that contends CAIR has no claim because it does not legally exist.
Gaubatz lawyer Daniel Horowitz, who also represented Savage, attached a copy of CAIR's admission with the filing of his motion this week.
In the Savage case, Horowitz asserted CAIR "exploited 9/11 as it put on its website a picture of the World Trade Center in flames and below it a call for donations that was linked to the Holy Land Foundation website."
CAIR's Northern California branch, while denying the organization "exploited" 9/11, admitted on page 15 of its reply that its national office "offered a link to websites for Muslim and non-Muslim organizations collecting donations for 9/11 survivors, including Holy Land Foundation's website."
In May 2007, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation. In the case, federal prosecutors also listed CAIR as a member of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt that birthed al-Qaida and Hamas and other terrorist groups and seeks to establish Islamic law in America. "In the height of cynicism, (CAIR) basically knew the money they were collecting in the name of terrorist victims was going to create more terrorist victims," said "Muslim Mafia" co-author Paul Sperry. In the book, the authors write, "After 9/11, as rescue workers were still pulling bodies from Ground Zero, CAIR tricked visitors to its Web site into contributing to the charitable front by telling them their donations would benefit World Trade Center victims – including New York firefighters"
Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism revealed the Holy Land Foundation provided at least $5,000 in revenues to CAIR as it was starting up its operations. CAIR, in turn, solicited funds for the foundation.
Check from Holy Land Foundation to help launch CAIR
As "Muslim Mafia" recounts, FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. At that time, Awad was public relations director for a group created by the Muslim Brotherhood called the Islamic Association for Palestine, the IAP. At the Philadelphia meeting, IAP and Holy Land Foundation officials developed a scheme to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists and their families as charity. The creation of CAIR can be traced back to the meeting, when IAP and Holy Land officials, according to a transcript, discussed the need to give their agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowing institutionalizing Islamic law at home a "media twinkle."
CAIR was first mentioned by name in Muslim Brotherhood documents as part of the July 30, 1994, agenda of a meeting of the Brotherhood's Palestine Committee. The minutes reveal the purpose of the meeting was to discuss "suggestions to develop [the] work of CAIR" and its "coordination" with the IAP, Holy Land Foundation -- which shared its Texas offices with the IAP -- and the Washington, D.C.-based United Association for Studies and Research, or UASR. Along with IAP, UASR was co-founded by the deputy chief of Hamas' political operations, Mousa Abu Marzook. Marzook led the Brotherhood's Palestine Committee in the America before he was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist. He and other participants at the July 1994 meeting discussed satisfying the "need for trained resources in the media and political fields" to "exert more efforts in the advancement of the Palestine Cause from the Islamic aspect."
CAIR was incorporated less than two months later.
CAIR's suit against the Gaubatzes claims they stole sensitive material from the group's Washington office under false pretenses. A federal judge in Washington issued a restraining order Nov. 3 barring the Gaubtazes from further use or publication of the material and demanding that they return it to the Muslim group's lawyers. But the FBI stepped into the case Nov. 23 with a warrant to examine the papers and recordings, apparently as part of its concern about CAIR and its terrorist links to Hamas. The bureau cut off ties to CAIR in response to the Islamic group's role in the Holy Land Foundation case.
(Source: WND.)
OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST???
As the election looked more and more like a landslide all types of radical accusations were raised. McCain himself said he did not believe Obama is a socialist but that he had been "in the far left of American politics." McCain and Palin accused Obama of supporting socialistic tax policies that would redistribute the nation's wealth.
On the surface, the accusation seems frivilous. However, when on sees the doctrine of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and compare it to Barack Obama's programs one begins to wonder. Then one gets concerned when the DSA Statement on the 2008 Election which points out the need for progressive Senator/Representatives to promote its agenda. It then goes on to say "DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda."
Next when one looks at the circle that Obama worked, socialized and surrounded himself with one starts to get a feeling that he was comfortable with the academia crowd -- the intelligensia and social activists. These are the core of the DSA -- and then one starts to wonder. As far as we see, there is NO proof -- only guilt by association. His policies seem on the surface seem very similar to the DSA "four pillars" of its progressive policy agenda -- universal health care, progressive taxation (Obama plan to tax the rich and ease tax on middle class), labor support (auto industry is the backbone of US busines), and U.S. foreign policy that promotes global institutions that advance labor, environmental, and human rights and regulate transnational corporations (NAFTA, KORUS FTA, etc. and his GREEN policies).
Even when one sees the 1992 articles associating Obama with the New Party, an offshoot of the DSA, one still would be hesitant to condemn him. Of course the Obama campaign denied such accusations, but the thought lingers that the aims of the DSA seem very close to the programs that Obama has articulated. Supposedly evidence has emerged that Sen. Barack Obama belonged to a socialist political party that sought to elect members to public office with the aim of moving the Democratic Party far leftward to ultimately form a new political party with a socialist agenda. Several blogs, including Powerline, previously documented that while running for the Illinois state Senate in 1996 as a Democrat, Obama actively sought and received the endorsement of the socialist-oriented New Party, with some blogs claiming Obama was a member of the controversial party.
The New Party, formed by members of the Democratic Socialists for America (DSA) and leaders of an offshoot of the Community Party USA (CPUSA), was an electoral alliance that worked alongside the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The New Party's aim was to help elect politicians to office who espouse its policies.
Beyond a reasonable doubt -- Obama is a socialist -- at best!
In 1995, Obama, as part of his first run for the Illinois State Senate, began seeking the endorsement of the New Party. The New Party's objective was to push forth the socialist principles of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), that claimed Obama as a member, by focusing on winnable elections at a local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards.
Obama had been running in a four way primary against his former boss, Senator Alice Palmer, an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a communist front group, and an affiliate of the World Peace Council, a Soviet front group.
The New Party required candidates who received the endorsement sign a pledge of support for the party. Obama signed that pledge, choosing to support a party that was, in effect, a front group for communists. The July issue of the New Ground noted that 15% of the New Party consisted of DSA members and a good number of members of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a democratic socialist group in the United States which originated in 1991 as the Committees of Correspondence, a moderate, dissenting wing of the Communist Party USA.
When allegations surfaced early this summer of the New Party's endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was never a member of either organization. The DSA and New Party then systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA's New Party.
On Tuesday, John Hinderaker of the PowerLine blog discovered a web page that had been scrubbed from the New Party's website. The web page which was published in October 1996, was an internet newsletter update on that years congressional races. Although the web page was deleted from the New Party's website, the non-profit Internet Archive Organization had archived the page.
So the New Party claimed Obama as a member as of 1996. Progressive Populist magazine agreed in this editorial:
New Party members and supported candidates won 16 of 23 races, including an at-large race for the Little Rock, Ark., City Council, a seat on the county board for Little Rock and the school board for Prince George's County, Md. Chicago is sending the first New Party member to Congress, as Danny Davis, who ran as a Democrat, won an overwhelming 85% victory. New Party member Barack Obama was uncontested for a State Senate seat from Chicago.
Barack Obama chose to affiliate himself with this band of quasi-communists. As the nation moves closer to the election, it is clear that Obama chose to affiliate with assorted anti-American radicals. Machiavelli once noted that we can know a leader by the people he surrounds himself with. What does it say about Barack Obama, that he chooses to surround himself with people committed to overthrowing the United States and capitalism? (Source: Obama File.)
According to US writer David Farah, DSA is quite cynical about using the Democratic Party as a cover for their socialist activism. He quotes from a DSA youth organising document. "Stress our Democratic Party strategy and electoral work... "The Democratic Party is something the public understands, and association with it takes the edge off. Stressing our Democratic Party work will establish some distance from the radical subculture and help integrate you to the milieu of the young liberals."
As of August 2005, DSA had 5,000-6,000 members, in 24 chartered "locals". Many are influential and well known, including literary critic Irving Howe, feminist activist and journalist Gloria Steinem, actor Ed Asner, author Barbara Ehrenreich, 1997 New York City mayoral candidate Ruth Messinger, United Auto Workers co-founder Victor Reuther, leading African-American Studies professor Cornel West, linguist Noam Chomsky, political scientist Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, political columnist Harold Meyerson and AFL-CIO president, John Sweeney. It also has more than 60 US Congressmen and Senators "in its pocket."
(SITE NOTE: The 2008 DSA Leadership is: National Political Committee (Theresa Alt, Virginia Franco, David Green, Michael Hirsch, David Knuttunen, Simone Morgen, Michele Rossi, Joseph Schwartz, Timothy Sears, Herbert Shore, John Strauss, Corey Walker) //
Honorary Chairs (Bogdan Denitch, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Eliseo Medina, Eugene "Gus" Newport, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West) // Vice-Chairs (Ed Clark, Dorothy Healey, Jose LaLuz, Hilda Mason, Steve Max, Harold Meyerson, Maxine Phillips, Christine Riddiough, Rosemary Ruether, Motl Zelmanowicz) (Source: DSA Organization.) If you notice, amongst these names are some very high profile academians and activists representing labor and minorities.)
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the principal US affiliate of the Socialist International, a federation of socialist, social democratic and labour parties. "We are socialists," says the organization "because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.... To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed. ... Formed in 1983, DSA brought together what it calls "former Socialists and Communists, former old leftists and new leftists, and many who had never been leftists at all." (Source: Wikipedia.)
It is inaccurate to describe DSA as primarily working within the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party.” The 1993 DSA convention in fact resolved “that the imperative task for the democratic Left is to build anti-corporate social movements which are capable of winning reforms which empower people. In so far as such social movements and coalitions wish to influence state policy they will, at times, intervene in electoral politics. The fundamental question for DSA is not what form that electoral intervention takes, whether it be through Democratic primary races, non-partisan local elections, or third party efforts. Rather, our electoral work aims at building majoritarian coalitions capable of not only electing public officials, but capable of holding them accountable after they are elected.”
DSA’s main task is to build grassroots, multi-racial, progressive coalitions. There is no short-cut to doing so other than the hard work of “education, agitation, and organizing.” Neither flying the flag of a third party which lacks a mass social base, or placing uncritical faith in isolated progressive Democratic politicians will build a powerful Left. A successful third party would have to command sufficient strength in mass constituencies that it could split one of the two major parties.
DSA is no more loyal to the Democratic Party – which barely exists as a grassroots institution – than are individuals or social movements which upon occasion use its ballot line or vote for its candidates. The peculiar nature of the American constitution renders third party politics difficult at both the national and state level. Myriad structural factors mitigate against viable third parties, and various constitutional blockages are exceedingly difficult to amend: executive-based federalism makes parliamentary-style coalition-governments impossible, winner-take all districts, absence of proportional representation, open primaries in which party membership is regulated states not parties themselves — allowing both Klansmen and Communists to be members of the Democratic Party, In the GOP, white libertarian upper-middle-class suburbanites contend with white working-class fundamentalists for influence in that party. Veterans of the left will remember that the 1968 Peace and Freedom Party and the 1980 Citizens Party arose at moments of greater left-wing strength and did not significantly alter the national electoral landscape. Nor has, unfortunately, the New Party, which many DSAers work with in states where “fusion” of third party and major party votes is possible (such as the DSA co-sponsored Working Families Party in N.Y. State).
DSA recognizes that some insurgent politicians representing labor, environmentalists, gays and lesbians, and communities of color may choose to run under Democratic auspices, as in the 1988 Jesse Jackson campaign, or operate as Democrats like Senator Paul Wellstone, and the 59 Democratic members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, one-half of whom are Black and Latino and all of whom possess strong labor backing and operative social democratic politics.
Electoral tactics are only a means for DSA; the building of a powerful anti-corporate and ultimately socialist movement is the end. Where third party or non-partisan candidates represent significant social movements DSA locals have and will continue to build such organizations and support such candidates. DSA honored independent socialist Congressperson Bernie Sanders of Vermont at our last convention banquet, and we have always raised significant funds nationally for his electoral campaigns. At the same time, we were pleased to have Democratic Congressperson and Progressive Caucus member Bob Filner of San Diego introduce Sanders at the convention, and note that Progressive Caucus member Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) will be honored at our annual Debs-Thomas-Harrington dinner this Spring in Chicago.
DSA is a modest, sometimes effective organization, whose members have greatest influence in community-level electoral politics. DSA is not an electoral organization, but rather a democratic socialist political organization which aims to bring socialism into the mainstream of American politics. We endeavor to do so through a two-pronged strategy of education and organizing. Much of our work is cultural and ideological: forums, debates, publications. But our voice can only be heard if we simultaneously play a central, activist role within struggles relevant to working people, communities of color, women, gays and lesbians and other oppressed constituencies. We operate within progressive coalitions as an open socialist presence and bring to these movements an analysis and strategy which recognizes the fundamental need to democratize global corporate power. We do not see ourselves as a vanguard speaking for the masses nor do we romantically believe that a small socialist organization can unilaterally transform the U.S. electoral map.
DSA strives to be a crucial socialist leaven within a mass movement for social justice. In the 2000 elections, most electorally-active, progressive constituencies will endeavor to elect progressives to Congress and to the state legislatures. These state legislatures will engage in the post-census redistricting which will influence electoral politics throughout the coming decade. For better or worse, it is unlikely that presidential politics in the year 2000 will structurally transform the landscape of American politics, however important the outcome.
DSA will continue to be a voice inside — and outside — the electoral process, to argue against panaceas of ‘fixed’ markets, and for a bottom-up democratic, decentralized and environmentally sane economy. (Source: 2000 DSA Election Statement.)
DSA has long recognized that the corporate, neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party is not an
ally for radical democratic change. Its support for NAFTA, similar destructive trade legislation,
and cuts in government aid to low-income citizens in the face of growing poverty and income
inequality; its fronting for corporate power and “free market” ideology; its resistance to allowing
the party to make a systemic critique of the war in Iraq, the “war on terror,” or the corporate
stranglehold on civil society put it on the other side of a widening political divide. While
Obama’s largest funders come from this wing of the party, the social forces fueling his campaign
– people of color, union activists, and anti-war Democrats – have long opposed the neoliberal
stranglehold on the Democratic Party.
Thus, DSA has no illusion that a Democratic presidential victory, combined with bulked-up
Democratic majorities in both houses of the Congress, will in itself bring about significant
democratic reform. We do believe that such a political landscape would provide the most
favorable terrain upon which mobilized, assertive social movements can pressure the government
to appoint decent federal judges and agency administrators and enact desperately needed
universal health care legislation, labor law reform, and a federally funded Marshall Plan to
develop green technologies and green jobs.
Had the U.S. a genuine multiparty system, neoliberal positions would be held by a centrist party,
and DSA would be organizing as part of a left electoral force against it. Given the U.S.’s
restrictive election laws, the only electoral fight possible against corporate domination has to
happen in and around the Democratic Party, on the federal, state, and (allowing for the rare
exception) county and city levels.
An Obama presidency will not on its own force legislation facilitating single-payer health care
(at least at the federal level) or truly progressive taxation and major cuts in wasteful and
unneeded defense spending. But if DSA and other democratic forces can work in the fall
elections to increase the ranks of the Congressional Progressive and Black and Latino caucuses,
progressive legislation (backed by strong social movement mobilization) might well pass the
next Congress.
Senator Barack Obama has attracted considerable support as a presidential candidate who
promises to end “politics as usual.” He has invigorated a significant youthful, multiracial cadre
of supporters, as well as gained considerable support from liberal activists. The massive
outpouring of small contributions in support of his campaign signals the potential power of his
message, and his recent call for a windfall profits tax on the oil companies is encouraging.
Yet his campaign has centered more around gestures and symbols than on concrete policy
alternatives; and where he has been concrete, as in health care, his plan falls short of universal
coverage. And he often employs pro-market rhetoric to defend his programs and their failure to
cover everyone.
While recognizing the critical limitations of the Obama candidacy and the American political
system, DSA believes that the possible election of Senator Obama to the presidency in
November represents a potential opening for social and labor movements to generate the critical
political momentum necessary to implement a progressive political agenda. We know that a
proactive and progressive government can come only on the heels of a broad coalition for social
justice united against a reactionary Republicanism as well as a Democratic neoliberalism. Such a
movement will also have to fight for a public finance system that can limit the power of
corporate fundraising and lobbyists over both major political parties.
Thus, DSA offers its Economic Justice Agenda and its “four pillars” as a framework for such a
progressive policy agenda. This program calls for:
1. Restoring progressive taxation to the levels before the Reagan administration and
enacting massive cuts in wasteful defense spending;
2. Enacting single-payer universal health insurance and expanding public initiatives in child
care, elder care and pension security;
3. Passing the Employee Free Choice Act as part of a broader effort to rebuild a powerful
labor movement capable of achieving equity in the labor market; and
4. Implementing a U.S. foreign policy that promotes global institutions that advance labor,
environmental, and human rights and regulate transnational corporations.
True democracy is not about one woman or man promising change for the American public. That
takes consistent pressure from below. Who holds the presidency does matter, if only as a more
accessible target for pressure. A Democratic presidency and Congress would also create popular
expectations that rising inequality and injustice will be curbed. If the Democrats frustrate those
hopes (as they did in the early 1960s), mass mobilization is likely to grow rather than subside.
Nor should the Left be so involved in the national presidential campaign that it ignores the fall
primaries and general election races for the U.S. House and Senate. We need more progressives
in Congress as well as increased Democratic majorities.
The November election can’t be the end of a fight, but its beginning, and connections made on a
local and national level leading up to November can position the Left to play a role in struggles
to come. (Source: DSA Statement on the 2008 Presidential Election)
The New Zeal blog is New Zealand based by Trevor Loudon. He states "I'm a libertarian activist and political researcher from Christchurch New Zealand." There appears to be no partisan incentive to publish this article and the writer encouraged others to disseminate the photos to the US press BEFORE the election. Besides it being picked up by the World Net Daily, no mainstream media picked up on this article. The reason why is easy to see -- the names listed in this blog are the "who's-who" of academics. Running with this article would unleash a torrent of invective -- and be suicide for any media outlet that even thought about pursuing this. It was treated as a nut case -- but there may be a kernel of truth somewhere in this article -- even if it is Obama is a political opportunist.
Below are scans from New Party News Spring 1996.
They prove that Barack Obama was a member of the Illinois New Party and was endorsed by them in his 1996 Illinois State Senate race. Front page-scanned from a photocopy
Front page close up-scanned from a photocopy
Front page ultra close up-scanned from a photocopy
Note that the text refers to Barack Obama as a New Party member, while Willie Delgado is only "NP endorsed". The New Party clearly drew a distinction. Obama was on on the wrong side of the dividing line.
Page 2, scanned from a photocopy.
Page 2 closeup-scanned from the original.
The New Party was the creation of the quasi-Marxist Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the radical community organisation ACORN. The Communist Party splinter group Committees of Correspondence (CoC) was also involved. I quote from Chicago DSA's New Ground of September/October 1995:
The political entourage included Alderman Michael Chandler, William Delgado, chief of staff for State Rep Miguel del Valle, and spokespersons for State Sen. Alice Palmer, Sonya Sanchez, chief of staff for State Sen. Jesse Garcia, who is running for State Rep in Garcia's District; and Barack Obama, chief of staff for State Sen. Alice Palmer. Obama is running for Palmer's vacant seat...Although ACORN and SEIU Local 880 were the harbingers of the NP there was a strong presence of CoC and DSA (15% DSA)... Four political candidates were "there" seeking NP support."
Here is part of an undated New Party document probably from 1995. Scanned from a photocopy.
It lists approximately one hundred"community leaders, organizers, unionists, retirees, scholars, artists, parents, students, doctors, writers and other activists who are building the NP."
Those listed include;
Elaine Bernard-A Labour academic and prominent DSA member. (SITE NOTE: Elaine Bernard is the executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. Her writings often focus on women and the traditionally female jobs, to which she brings a feminist (some might say quasi-Marxist, or at least highly class-conscious) theoretical perspective. (Source: Wikipedia.)
Noam Chomsky-Linguist and activist, member of both DSA and CoC. (SITE NOTE: Noam Chomsky American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as the father of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual. (Source: Wikipedia.)
Barbara Ehrenreich-Author, activist and DSA leader. Early this year Ehrenreich was one of the four founders of Progressives for Obama (SITE NOTE: American feminist, socialist and political activist. She is a widely read columnist and essayist, and the author of nearly 20 books. In February 2008, Ehrenreich expressed support for Senator Barack Obama in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, writing in her blog: There's no mystery about the direction in which Obama might take us: He's written a breathtakingly honest autobiography; he has a long legislative history, and now, a meaty economic program. // We, perhaps white people especially, look to him for atonement and redemption. All of us, of whatever race, want a fresh start. That's what "change" means right now: Get us out of here! (Source: Wikipedia.)
Bill Fletcher-Former Maoist, a labour activist and leading DSA member. Early this year Fletcher was one of the four founders of Progressives for Obama
Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Danny Glover are the founders of Progressives for Obama. "We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country." TOM HAYDEN is author of Ending the War in Iraq, a five-time Democratic convention delegate, former state senator, and board member of the Progressive Democrats of America. Tom Hayden is also famous as being part of the radical "Chicago Seven" during the 1969-1970. (Source: Wikipedia.) BILL FLETCHER, who originated the call for founding "Progressives for Obama", is the executive editor of Black Commentator, and founder of the Center for Labor Renewal; BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of Dancing in the Streets[2007] and other popular works and, with Hayden, a member of The Nation's editorial board. DANNY GLOVER is the respected actor, activist, and chairman of the board of TransAfrica.
(Source: Huffington Post.)
Maude Hurd-Longtime ACORN president. Awarded for her work by Boston DSA. ACORN is heavily involved in the Obama campaign. (SITE NOTE: "ACORN’s Political Action Committee announced that it endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for President. ACORN PAC’s representatives went through an extensive process of interviewing each of the major Democratic candidates. ACORN is a national anti-poverty organization which has hundreds of thousands of members in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in 104 cities. “Last night, Sen. Obama received the more than necessary two-thirds of the majority needed from our elected national leadership to secure the endorsement,” said Maude Hurd, ACORN’s National President. (Source: BarackObama.com.)
Manning Marable-A founder of DSA and a leader of CoC. Regarded as a driving force within the New Party. Now an Obama supporter. (SITE NOTE: American political scholar. He holds the position of Professor of Public Affairs, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University, where he founded and directs the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He has published widely, and is politically active in a variety of progressive causes. His current project is a biography of the black rights activist Malcolm X ., entitled ' '. Marable was recently elected Chair of Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), the incorporated non-profit arm of Students for a Democratic Society . He sits on the Board of Directors for the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), a non-profit coalition of prominent public figures dedicated to utilizing hip hop as an agent for social change. In a January 2008 column entitled, "Barack Obama's Problem – And Ours", Marable endorsed Senator Barack Obama's bid for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. (Souce: Wikipedia.)
Frances Fox Piven-A senior DSA member. Regarded as the brains behind ACORN. Piven is now an endorser of the Progressives for Obama website. (SITE NOTE: Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1962. In 2006-2007 she served as the President of the American Sociological Association. She was married to her long-time collaborator, Richard Cloward, who died in 2001. Throughout her career, Piven has combined academic work with activism. One example: In 1983, she was cofounder of Human SERVE, an organization dedicated to getting people to register to vote. The group's proposition was that people should be asked to register to vote when applying for social services or using the services of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Since it is particularly the poor who often fail to register to vote—Piven knew this from her research—they tended to be disenfranchised . Human SERVE's initiative was taken up by the Clinton administration and made it into the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, colloquially called the "motor voter bill" (Ehrenreich 2006). (Source: Wikipedia.)
Raphael Pizzaro-New York labour activist and former CPUSA member. An official of both CoC and DSA. (SITE NOTE: Allegedly New York Labor activist and former Communist Party of USA (CPUSA) member. "...Rafael Pizzaro from Local 1199 Hospital Workers Union in New York, Co-Chair of the Committees of Correspondence and DSA, related his experience as a member of a DSA/NOC joint youth observer delegation to the Mexican elections." (Source: Chicago DSA)
Gloria Steinem-Author and senior DSA member. An Obama supporter and volunteer. (SITE NOTE: (Source: American feminist icon, journalist, and social and political activist. Rising to national prominence in the 1970s, she became a leading political leader of the decade, and one of the most important heads of the second-wave of the women's rights movement. She is the founder and original publisher of Ms. magazine, the founder of the pro-choice organization Choice USA, co-founder of the Women's Media Center, and was an influential co-convener of the National Women's Political Caucus. .)
Cornel West-Academic and prominent DSA member. West now serves as an advisor to the Obama campaign. (SITE NOTE: Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is a scholar, public intellectual, philosopher, critic, pastor, and civil rights activist. West currently serves as the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Center for African American Studies and in the department of Religion. West is known for his combination of political and moral insight and criticism, and his contribution to the post-1960s civil rights movement. The bulk of his work focuses upon the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their “radical conditionedness”. West draws intellectual contributions from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, pragmatism and transcendentalism. He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from Princeton, where he was influenced by Richard Rorty's pragmatism. He later published his dissertation (completed in 1980) as The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. West remains a widely cited scholar in the popular press, in African-American studies, and in studies of black theology, although his work as an academic philosopher has been almost completely ignored (with the exception of his early history of American pragmatism, The American Evasion of Philosophy). Cornel West publicly supports 2008 Democratic Presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama. He spoke to over 1,000 of his supporters at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC on November 29, 2007. (Source: Wikipeda.)
Quentin Young-Chicago doctor, prominent DSA member. Quentin Young is a neighbour, friend and supporter of Barack Obama. he attended the famous 1995 meeting in the home of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn where Barack Obama was introduced by Alice Palmer as the chosen successor to her Illinois State Senate seat.
Carl Davidson, former Chicago CoC National Committee member, New Party activist, associate of Barack Obama and friend of Bill Ayers, now serves as Progressives for Obama webmaster. (SITE NOTE: In the mid '90s Davidson played a key role in the Chicago branch of the New Party. This was a Marxist led poltical coalition designed to endorse and elect leftist public officials. The bulk of its members came from CoC, the equally radical Democratic Socialists of America and the US's largest militant left grass-roots organisation, ACORN. (Source: ZTruth.)
The originals of these documents are held in the Washington DC area. I personally viewed them when I visited Washington in May 2008. (Source: New Zeal blog (23 Oct 2008).)
Obama's campaign has responded to the allegations, denying the presidential candidate was ever a member of the New Party. But the New Zeal blog dug up print copies of the New Party News, the party's official newspaper, which show Obama posing with New Party leaders, list him as a New Party member and include quotes from him. (Source: World Net Daily.)
Barack Obama's "Fight the Smear" page had nothing on the New Party -- then on 27 Oct 2008, the Obama team added a denial and then attacked the messenger but never explained the archived page listing his name as a member of the New Party and its supposed ties to ACORN or that Marxist Carl Davidson said he met Obama through this party. (Source: ZTruth.))
The jury is still out whether Obama is a member of the elitist academia-activist group that founded the New Party to further its progressive goals through political action. However, Obama is a man who attracts talent -- and the people listed as DSA are certainly amongst the most talented category. Obama also looks for a background in community activism -- and all of these people qualify as well. In addition, Obama is looking for "people of color" -- and many of these activists fall into that category as well. (SITE NOTE: As of Mar 2009, the vote was in -- Obama is a Socialist who has been passing himself off as a liberal. Many people were disillusioned with Obama -- and the mainstream media had the audacity to even ask the question of whether Obama was a socialist to his face.)
Barack Obama's Stealth Socialism Investors Business Daily editorial comment on 28 Jul 2008 speaks about Obama's use of the term "economic justice." "Economic justice" simply means punishing the successful and redistributing their wealth by government fiat. It's a euphemism for socialism.
In his latest memoir he shares that he'd like to "recast" the welfare net that FDR and LBJ cast while rolling back what he derisively calls the "winner-take-all" market economy that Ronald Reagan reignited (with record gains in living standards for all). Obama also talks about "restoring fairness to the economy," code for soaking the "rich" — a segment of society he fails to understand that includes mom-and-pop businesses filing individual tax returns. It's clear from a close reading of his two books that he's a firm believer in class envy. He assumes the economy is a fixed pie, whereby the successful only get rich at the expense of the poor. Following this discredited Marxist model, he believes government must step in and redistribute pieces of the pie. That requires massive transfers of wealth through government taxing and spending, a return to the entitlement days of old.
Of course, Obama is too smart to try to smuggle such hoary collectivist garbage through the front door. He's disguising the wealth transfers as "investments" — "to make America more competitive," he says, or "that give us a fighting chance," whatever that means. Among his proposed "investments":
"Universal," "guaranteed" health care.
"Free" college tuition.
"Universal national service" (a la Havana).
"Universal 401(k)s" (in which the government would match contributions made by "low- and moderate-income families").
"Free" job training (even for criminals).
"Wage insurance" (to supplement dislocated union workers' old income levels).
"Free" child care and "universal" preschool.
More subsidized public housing.
A fatter earned income tax credit for "working poor."
And even a Global Poverty Act that amounts to a Marshall Plan for the Third World, first and foremost Africa.
His new New Deal also guarantees a "living wage," with a $10 minimum wage indexed to inflation; and "fair trade" and "fair labor practices," with breaks for "patriot employers" who cow-tow to unions, and sticks for "nonpatriot" companies that don't. That's just for starters — first-term stuff. Obama doesn't stop with socialized health care. He wants to socialize your entire human resources department — from payrolls to pensions. His social-microengineering even extends to mandating all employers provide seven paid sick days per year to salary and hourly workers alike. (Source: Investors Business Daily.)
The article then went on to show that in Hawaii, he was mentored by Frank Marshall Davis, a marxist poet and webt on to "pal around with" Marxist professors. It even continues on about the leftist-leaning relatives in Kenya as support.
A careful reading of Obama's first memoir, "Dreams From My Father," reveals that his childhood mentor up to age 18 — a man he cryptically refers to as "Frank" — was none other than the late communist Frank Marshall Davis, who fled Chicago after the FBI and Congress opened investigations into his "subversive," "un-American activities." As Obama was preparing to head off to college, he sat at Davis' feet in his Waikiki bungalow for nightly bull sessions. Davis plied his impressionable guest with liberal doses of whiskey and advice, including: Never trust the white establishment. "They'll train you so good," he said, "you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that sh**."
After college, where he palled around with Marxist professors and took in socialist conferences "for inspiration," Obama followed in Davis' footsteps, becoming a "community organizer" in Chicago. His boss there was Gerald Kellman, whose identity Obama also tries to hide in his book. Turns out Kellman's a disciple of the late Saul "The Red" Alinsky, a hard-boiled Chicago socialist who wrote the "Rules for Radicals" and agitated for social revolution in America. The Chicago-based Woods Fund provided Kellman with his original $25,000 to hire Obama. In turn, Obama would later serve on the Woods board with terrorist Bill Ayers of the Weather Underground. Ayers was one of Obama's early political supporters.
After three years agitating with marginal success for more welfare programs in South Side Chicago, Obama decided he would need to study law to "bring about real change" — on a large scale. While at Harvard Law School, he still found time to hone his organizing skills. For example, he spent eight days in Los Angeles taking a national training course taught by Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. With his newly minted law degree, he returned to Chicago to reapply — as well as teach — Alinsky's "agitation" tactics. (Source: Investors Business Daily.)
The Dream Begins: How Hawai'i Shaped Barack Obama is the first book to explore President-elect Barack Obama's friendship with Chicago union organizer-poet Frank Marshall Davis. In 1948, Davis, an African American, and his wife, a white Chicago socialite named Helen Canfield Davis, visited Hawaii on a tip from Paul Robeson. They stayed the rest of their lives. Davis had been an editor with the Associated Negro Press in Chicago and wrote for the Gary (Ind.) American. In Hawaii, he became a champion of ethnic union workers while living in "The Waikiki Jungle" -- a cluster of dense housing near the Diamond Head end of Waikiki. "Barry's grandfather brought him here to see Davis," author Stu Glauberman says during a drive through the neighborhood. Davis was an ally of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that was organizing Hawaii's plantations and docks. (Source: Sun Times.)
Obama economic adviser David Bonior was socialist party member? The man recently appointed to President-elect Barack Obama's economic transition team was a bona fide member of a major U.S. socialist organization, according to literature from the group. Former Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., reportedly being considered for the Labor secretary position in the incoming Obama administration, has had a longstanding close relationship with the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, an organization dedicated to transforming America into a socialist society.
Now WND has learned the DSA's official newsletter in 2007 identified Bonior as a DSA member at the organization's Boston branch. Neither the DSA in Boston nor Bonior returned repeated WND calls seeking comment. Obama's transition team did not return a phone call or e-mail inquiry. Earlier this month, the Detroit chapter of the DSA honored Bonior and his wife, Judy, at its annual dinner. Bonior has been honored at several DSA functions the past six years, including in 2003, when he was the keynote speaker at the U.S. socialist organization's national convention in Detroit.
At the 2003 convention, Bonior laid out his plan for a North American Parliamentary Union, according to a DSA transcript of the event. Bonior was a longtime critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, a trilateral trade bloc created by the U.S., Canadian and Mexican governments. But he argued that as long as NAFTA was in effect, a joint parliament should be formed to oversee the agreement.
Bonior has other ties to the DSA. The socialist group reportedly campaigned for him in 2002 after he left Congress and ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan. The New Zeal blog discovered a 2002 DSA newsletter that reports the organization's work "focused on Rep. David Bonior's gubernatorial campaign." "The local endorsed Rep. Bonior almost 18 months ago. DSA helped with the early fundraising for his campaign, collecting signatures for his nominating petitions, distributing literature at Detroit churches, and walking door to door in Macomb County on his behalf on the weekend before the primary," stated the DSA newsletter.
In 2006, the socialist group formed a political action committee to which only DSA members in good standing are allowed to contribute, according to FEC guidelines. The DSA states the committee, which seeks to support federal political candidates supported by the socialist group, is careful about who contributes to the fund. "Because the law is so specific, all contributions are carefully screened to make sure that they are from (DSA) members," states a 2006 DSA newsletter. New Zeal found that on June 19, 2006, Bonior contributed $1,000 to the DSA's committee.
First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976, Bonior served from 1991 to 2002 as Democratic whip, the second-ranking party position in the House. He was known as a supporter of labor unions, later chairing the board of the pro-union American Rights at Work, whose board members include the American Union Movement AFL-CIO's president, John Sweeney, a DSA member.
Bonior was a champion of the Employee Free Choice Act. The measure seeks to make the creation of unions more lenient than current requirements, such as lowering the percentage of employees that must join. It would require an employer to begin bargaining with a new union 10 days after the union is certified as the exclusive bargaining representative. If the union and employer cannot agree upon the terms of a bargaining contract within 90 days, either party can request federal mediation, which could lead to binding arbitration.
In 2002, WND reported former FBI officials charged that Bonior, while in Congress, had hampered efforts to investigate terrorist suspects in Detroit. (Source: WND.)
After Obama was elected, the facade he erected during his presidential campaign started to flake away. In Feb 2009, his Stimulus Package made it VERY apparent that Obama intended to reshape the US in the Socialist mold. He moved to place the Census Bureau directly under his control -- funded by $1 billion in supplementary funding in his Stimulus Package. He disguised his National Health Care plan -- ala Tom Daschle -- in the Stimulus Package and shoved it down the throats of America. Then the talk started of nationalizing the banks. With this in mind, it is time to relook at an Oct 2008 article by Fred Hutchinson entitled "Obama a "socialist"?"
Is Barack Obama a socialist? Well, yes and no. If you mean by that what Americans used to call "creeping socialism" and the Brits called Fabian socialism, yes, Obama is definitely that. Creeping socialism and Fabian socialism is a movement towards socialism by gradual democratic means.
The pace of the creep towards socialism which Obama will call for as president will be determined by 1) how far to the left he actually is on the political spectrum — a secret known only to God, 2) how much cooperation he gets from the liberal-Democratic Congress, 3) the public popularity he enjoys, and 4) the political winds of the day. We can say with confidence that Obama is very sensitive to the prevailing political winds. No doubt a future political biographer will tell the Obama story as a sailor skillfully steering according to the shifting winds.
SITE NOTE: In passing his Stimulus Package in Feb 2009, he showed he was a Machiavellian politician who did NOT enjoy any bipartisan support and (1) he was on the far left of the political spectrum with his National Health Care plan disguised in the bill; (2) he appealed to the Democrats greed for their share of the pie and received full support; (3) he maintained a 60 percent approval rating for his first two weeks in office -- though it was slipping; (4) the political winds were based upon the real world financial crisis -- though conservative economists say his Pork Stimulus Package will do nothing -- and even will hurt in the long run -- the American economy.
The Earmarks of creeping socialism are increasing government regulation of business, an increasingly graduated income tax, rapidly increasing government spending, and an increasing number of government social engineering projects. Obama's record and public utterances show that he supports all these things — except when the shifting political winds of are blowing contrary to these purposes.
Newsweek Magazine (9 Feb 2009)
What is socialism?
Tidy-minded political political philosophers define socialism as government ownership and management of business and the means of production. Government regulation of business is not full socialism, but regulation can be a serious step in the direction of full socialism.
In the present crisis, the government has bought preferred stock in banks, acquired huge blocks of bad mortgages from Fanny Mae, and taken over the management of AIG, a gigantic insurance company. If the government gives up these acquisitions when the crisis has passed, it is not socialism. If the government greedily hangs on to these treasures, it is socialism.
Is Obama another Clement Attlee?
Clement Attlee, British Prime Minister (1945-1951) nationalized the steel industry, and mines, railways, canals, cable, wireless, electricity, and gas. He also nationalized medicine and insurance and rationed food. By 1951, 20% of the British economy was in government hands. Attlee was a socialist.
Obama said — or seemed to say — that the socialization of medicine would be the first thing he would do as president, but because his positions are reinterpreted or revised every other week, he may yet renege on this policy. Socializing medicine in America will require political courage, and it is not clear from his record that Obama has it.
(SITE NOTE: He shoved it down America's throat -- without debate or committee discussion -- in his Stimulus Package passed in Feb 2009. He implemented his goals via deceit with the aid of the Democratic congress playing upon their greed in getting a cut of the pork barrel monies.)
Apart from medicine, what else might Obama be tempted to nationalize? Since AIG, America's largest insurance company, is now in government hands, Obama might be tempted to nationalize insurance. He might establish permanent government ownership of Fannie May and other parts of the mortgage industry.
(SITE NOTE: The TARP did NOT get involved in the "toxic assets" (mortgages) under Bush though Paulson was given a Democratic mandate to do so. In Feb 2009, Obama took aim on the Mortgage industry with his plans to attack the "toxic assets" problem.)
Obama might also restore the "Fairness Doctrine" of the FCC which had been used to silence the conservative voice. Since President Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1985, conservative talk radio and Fox News have been a thorn in the side of liberal Democrats and a thorn in the side of Barack Obama — in contrast to the uncritical praise of Obama by the mainstream media, which was not much affected by the fairness doctrine.
(SITE NOTE: In Feb 2009, Obama reversed himself on his pledge to NOT support the Fairness Doctrine. Democrats were lining up to support the Fairness Doctrine -- but there was also a lot of heated debate over "freedom of speech." Though the Huffington Post claims the ado is over a purely imaginary fuss, 124 Republicans from pushing legislation that would prevent the Federal Communications Commission from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine, a policy that has been dead for 20 years.)
Is Obama like Attlee in foreign policy?
Atlee closed down the British Empire very rapidly, even for the colonies which were not ready for independence. After the partition of India, millions died. Atlee betrayed the new state of Israel by pulling out British troops and handing Israel over to the safekeeping of the United Nations, which proved to be Israel's least reliable friend.
Is Obama likely to adopt policies like this? Yes.
One of the few policies that he has consistently stated that he will pull our troops out of Iraq according to a rigid time table, whether or not Iraq is ready to defend itself and maintain social stability.
Will Obama protect Israel? He says he will, but as old Scotsmen like to say, "I hae me doots" (I have my doubts).
(SITE NOTE: After Obama lifted restrictions on Syria in Feb 2009, the Israelis have VERY serious doubts about Obama's foreign policy. His overtures to Iran and support for the PLO and Hamas viewpoint -- at least the appearance of it -- has caused many Israeli supporters in the US to question Obama's motives. His actions to close GITMO and dismiss all the cases of the terrorists "without prejudice" was smooth-talked over, but the mainstream media did not cover the story that Obama was flat wrong in his statements -- and one of the attendees called him on it. The press simply ignored it.)
During the primaries, Obama said he wants to personally talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, without preconditions. He has, of course, changed his position on this many times as he sails according to the prevailing winds. However, considering that Ahmadinejad has frequently promised to destroy Israel, the fact that Obama would at any time consider giving Ahmadinejad the honor and legitimacy of a personal presidential visit suggests that Obama is less than zealous about defending Israel.
Does the fact that Obama's father was partly Arab and a Muslim influence Obama's attitude towards Israel? I don't know. But perhaps Obama's friend, the pro-terrorist professor Rashid Khalidi, knows the answer. Rashid's organization "mourns the establishment of Israel as a catastrophe." Obama sat on a board that gave a grant to Rashid's organization. Rashid was a fundraiser for Obama's political organization. A cozy arrangement indeed. These men are friends.
(SITE NOTE: This is a very cloudy area. Obama's entrance into Harvard seems to be directly linked to Khaldi's support -- and there may have been other links. However, Obama has refused to allow his school records to be opened. Subpoenas have been served by Orly Taitz (in a suit on behalf of Alan Keyes) to Occidental as a start -- and Obama's lawyers are now representing the school to quash the subpoenas.)
Now then, is Obama going to fight terrorists and defend Israel? I hae me doots.
Is Obama a Marxist?
We only know three things on this subject: (1) As a youth and a young man, Obama had two mentors, both of whom were Marxists — Frank Marshall Davis, and The Reverend Wright. (2) As a young man, Obama was influenced by the writings of the Marxist Saul Alinski. (3) Obama periodically makes comments that, to my ears, have a faintly Marxist ring such as "economic justice," "coalitions for redistributive change," "spread the wealth," and a comparison of the unsegregated fifties America with Nazi Germany.
(SITE NOTE: The election is past, but as President Obama still continues to allude to "spreading" images -- health care, security, etc. He has not given up on his "spread the wealth" images as his Stimulus Package has his AMT tax provisions that penalize the rich to give to the poor. Unfortunately, it is a flawed plan that economists feel will cripple America...but Obama is riding the winds of Democratic power and is doing anything he damn well pleases.)
There are many kinds of socialism, and Marxism is one. Therefore, Marxist ideas might well play a part in the development of a young socialist such as the young Obama plausibly might have been. (Source: Renew America: Fred Hutchinson.)
New York Times: 'Some Conservatives Have Implied' Obama's a Socialist (Mar 2009) In The New York Times today appears "The President Is on the Line to Follow Up on Socialism," by Jeff Zeleny. The article's first three paragraphs:
Less than 90 minutes after Air Force One landed, the telephone rang. President Obama was on the line, wanting to add one more point to a response he gave during an interview with The New York Times.
On a flight from Ohio to Washington on Friday, Mr. Obama was asked whether his domestic policies suggested that he was a socialist, as some conservatives have implied.
“The answer would be no,” he said, laughing for a moment before defending his administration for “making some very tough choices” on the budget.
President Obama was so concerned that he had appeared to dismiss a question from New York Times reporters about whether he was a socialist that he called the newspaper from the Oval Office to clarify his policies. "It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question," he told reporters, who had interviewed the president aboard Air Force One on Friday.
Opening the unusual presidential call to reporters by saying that there was "just one thing I was thinking about as I was getting on the copter," he said it wasn't he who started the federal government's intervention into the nation's financial system. "I did think it might be useful to point out that it wasn't under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn't on my watch. And it wasn't on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement -– the prescription drug plan -- without a source of funding. And so I think it's important just to note when you start hearing folks throw these words around that we've actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word 'socialist' around can't say the same."
The New York Times asked, "So whose watch are we talking about here?" but Obama wouldn't name names. "Well, I just think it's clear by the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system. And the thing I constantly try to emphasize to people if that coming in, the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we've had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis." He concluded the brief call by saying, "I think that covers it."
The phone call came after the president was asked aboard his plane: "Are you a socialist as some people have suggested?" He was clear in his first answer: "You know, let's take a look at the budget – the answer would be no." "Is there anything wrong with saying, 'Yes'?" a Times reporter pressed. "Let's just take a look at what we've done," Obama said, ticking off efforts his administration has made to stabilize the economy. But he acknowledged that, as he told Joe the Plumber, he plans to try to spread the wealth around. "If you look on the revenue side what we're proposing, what we're looking at is essentially to go back to the tax rates that existed during the 1990s when, as I recall, rich people were doing very well. In fact everybody was doing very well. . . . We said that we'd give a tax cut to 95 percent of working Americans. That's exactly what we have done." (Source: Washington Times.)
Obama's protestation aside, the article should have been balanced with an acknowledgment that implications the new president is a socialist are hardly limited to some conservatives.
Less than a decade ago, for example, the Chicago affiliate of the Democratic Socialists of America endorsed Obama for the state senate. They admiringly quoted him: "Few are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities."
At the beginning of last year's primary season, the Communist People's Weekly World printed a letter celebrating an early Obama win:
Happy New Year and congratulations on a job well done. These have been trying times when the hyenas of war have again been turned loose on humanity by a greedy ruling class.
Now, beyond all the optimism I was capable of mustering, Mr. Obama won Iowa!. . .
Obama’s victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. .
In August, the same publication carried an editorial written by Sam Webb, chairman of the Communist Party USA. Webb used the opportunity to give his comrades their marching orders:
In order to advance one iota of a pro-people’s agenda, the people’s movement has to elect Obama and to enlarge the Democratic Party majorities in Congress. Without that everything else is wishful thinking.
Days after the inauguration, Webb addressed a People's Weekly World event held in Cleveland and began:
I was standing on the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day, alongside nearly two million other people on Inauguration Day, and proudly watched the first African American take the oath of office in our nation’s history. That alone made the day deeply memorable, joyful, and historic. But I couldn’t help but think – and I’m sure that millions of others had the same thought – that the transfer of power from Bush to President Obama not only tore down a barrier that once was thought near impenetrable, but also signified the fading away of one era and the beginning of another.
It was hard not to think on that cold day in our nation’s capital that the worst of the past 30 years of right wing extremist rule is behind us and that an era of progressive change is within reach, no longer an idle dream.
Later in his address, Webb observed:
We now have not simply a friend, but a people's advocate in the White House.
Joelle Fishman is the chair of the political action committee of the Communist Party USA. On the party's Web site she analyzed the election results. The article started:
Congratulations on an extraordinary history making election!
We can think back with pride to decades of hard work toward our strategic goal of a big enough, broad enough and united enough labor and all-people’s movement that could overcome the ultra-right blockage to all progress. That all people’s movement has come to life, it is dynamic and it has the potential to keep growing.
The election of Barack Obama and a strengthened Congress creates new conditions in our country. There is now the possibility to shift gears and move forward. This new day requires us to further develop our tactics in order to continue to deepen and broaden labor and people’s unity. . .
The tears of joy we all shared as crowds gathered to watch the election results here and throughout the world dramatize the new moment we are in.
Socialists and Communists may argue that Obama isn't radical enough, that he's much too conservative to be deemed a socialist. Yet their enthusiastic support and words belie that contention. Not just "some conservatives" have implied Obama is a socialist. People on the far left have given some might big hints. (Source: Newsbusters: NY TIMES.)
CAMPAIGN FUNDING: MAKE A KILLING WITH FRAUDULENT GIVING
“Barack Obama was the only major presidential candidate this year to completely reject contributions from The Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs that have dominated our politics for years,” the Obama site says of the persistent online criticisms of its fundraising. “Instead, this campaign has been owned by the more than 3.1 million everyday Americans who have donated in small amounts.”
Not so, according to campaign finance records. Nearly half of the $600 million raised by Obama to date has come from wealthy donors and special interests. Obama's allies months ago dropped their ad linking Republican rival “Exxon John” McCain to Big Oil after it came to light that Obama had taken far more money from Exxon-Mobil than McCain.
“The Obama campaign has complied fully with federal election law,” claims the Obama site, “including donor eligibility and contribution disclosure requirements.”
However, one giant loophole the politicians wrote into the law allows contributions in amounts of $200 or less with no donor identification. Obama claims that $300 million in campaign funds was given by these small donors, and he won’t release their names and addresses. McCain has released his whole donor database, including those who have contributed less than $200. Critics argue that the other half of Obama’s campaign haul — the part not raised from big corporate donors and special interests — came in a small flood of anonymous donations that might be foreign or corrupt, or both. (Source: NewsMax.com.)
Barack Obama has proved the greatest fund-raiser of all time by a long shot. His campaign has raised more than $600 million - $150 million in September alone. But the campaign has also failed to adopt standard protections against fraudulent giving. The average contribution to Obama in September was just under $86. And federal law only requires the disclosure of identifying information for contributions in excess of $200. Campaigns must keep running totals for each donor and report them once they exceed $200. The Federal Election Commission says the Obama campaign has reported well over $200 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only a small portion of that sum is attributable to donors the Obama campaign has disclosed.
No presidential campaign has ever before received such a gargantuan sum of money from unidentified contributors. The campaign's records reveal big contributors with names like "Doodad Pro" (employer: "Loving," profession: "You") and "Good Will" (same employer and profession). Both donated via credit card. Other reports have suggested that some donations come from overseas - raising the question of whether Obama is accepting donations from foreigners, another violation of federal law. All of which prompted an enterprising citizen to test the controls put in place to enforce compliance with federal campaign law by the Obama and McCain campaigns. Last Thursday, he decided to conduct an experiment. He went to the Obama campaign Web site and made a donation under the name "John Galt" (the hero of Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"). He provided the equally fictitious address "1957 Ayn Rand Lane, Galts Gulch, CO 99999." He checked the box next to $15 and entered his actual credit-card number and expiration date. He was then taken to the next page and notified that his donation had been processed. He then tried the same experiment on the McCain site, which rejected the transaction. He returned to the Obama site and made three more donations using the names Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bill Ayers, all with different addresses but the same credit card. The transactions all went through. By Saturday, he'd reported that the transactions had all posted to his credit-card account.
Others repeated "John Galt's" experiment last week, giving to Obama under such fictitious names as Della Ware, Joe Plumber, Idiot Savant, Ima BadDonation (with a Canadian bank card) and Fake Donor.
What accounts for the Obama campaign's acceptance of these fraudulent donations? Most merchants selling goods and services use the basic Address Verification System that screens credit-card charges for matching names and addresses. (It can also screen cards issued by foreign banks.) The McCain campaign uses AVS and provides a searchable database of all donors, including those who fall below the $200 threshold. The Obama campaign apparently has chosen not to use the AVS system to screen donations. "Della Ware" contacted The New York Times to report her experience contributing under a fictitious name and address ("12345 No Way") to the Obama campaign, while her contribution was rejected by the McCain campaign. Times reporter Michael Luo verified "Della Ware's" account and reported it online at the Times' campaign blog. But Luo missed the story's point. "To be fair to the Obama campaign," he wrote, its "officials have said much of their checking for fraud occurs after the transactions have already occurred. When they find something wrong, they then refund the amount."
But the Obama campaign is running a system that complicates the discovery of "something wrong." It has chosen to operate an online contribution system that facilitates illegal falsely sourced contributions, illegal foreign contributions and the evasion of contribution limits. Obama backers making such contributions may not be worried that "something wrong" will be detected if they have no intention of complaining about it. According to journalist Kenneth Timmerman, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship until just recently - in contrast not just with McCain but also with Hillary Clinton. Sen. Clinton's presidential campaign required US citizens living abroad to fax copies of their passports before it would accept donations. By contrast, foreign donors to Obama can just use credit cards and false addresses.
Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod said people are suspicious about stories that surface so close to an election. Obama said he did not know his aunt was living in the United States illegally and believes that laws covering the situation should be followed. The campaign said it was returning $260 that Onyango had contributed in small increments to Obama's presidential bid over several months. She used the Boston Housing Authority office as her address. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from making political donations. Onyango listed her employer as the Boston Housing Authority and last gave $5 on Sept. 19. (Source: ABC News.) The Obama campaign stated that all the funds was returned.
Why has the Obama campaign chosen to operate without the basic automated credit-card controls that would prevent or hamper fraud and illegal contributions? Has it made a conscious decision to assist the evasion of federal campaign law or worry about it after it has had the use of the money? It's hard to see any other motive. (Source: Obama WTF: NY Post.)
Funny Money (Nov 2008) According to News Max, the FEC already had questioned the Obama campaign about curious donations and suspiciously large, overseas purchases of pro-Obama merchandise as far back as April. With this latest bland request for explanation, FEC officials pulled another thread in the messy fabric of Obama's massive fundraising apparatus. A clear picture was emerging. The Democrat had every intention of amassing more campaign cash than any candidate in history in an unapologetic effort to buy victory on Election Day. As part of that pursuit, the campaign would ignore, and occasionally encourage, obvious attempts to circumvent campaign finance laws by masking identities, dollar amounts, and countries of origin for an estimated 2.5 million donors.
The Obama Campaign Funding has some very strange contributors.
The first signs of trouble were buried deep within gigantic electronic files stored far from the bright lights and bustle of the presidential campaign. In a freshly repainted government office on E Street in downtown Washington, a sharp-eyed analyst at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) noticed something was wrong among the tens of thousands of electronic pages of the latest campaign finance report submitted by Barack Obama's campaign. Someone named Good Will from Austin, Texas, had donated to the Obama campaign hundreds of times. Most of the donations were for just $25. But in total, they amounted to more than $17,000, far exceeding the $4,600 limit for individual contributors. Moreover, Mr. Good Will listed his employer as "Loving" and his profession as "You." Clearly, Good Will wasn't real. (Source: News Max.)
The cost of the White House? Just shy of $670 million in cash solicited by any means possible. Obama spent $613 million of that before Election Day to help capture 63.7 million votes, or around $10 per voter.
The way Barack Obama managed the finances of his campaign remains the subject of controversy and investigation. The conservative Heritage Foundation has taken the first step in what could be an in-depth investigation of Obama's fundraising efforts, demanding that the FEC audit the Obama campaign. The foundation issued a release the day after the election: "No doubt there is great cause to be concerned about Obama's fundraising effort." The foundation also pointed to a test by the independent National Journal to determine the veracity of allegations that Obama's online fundraising system was designed to facilitate fraud. (Source: NewsMax.)
Death of Public Financing (Nov 2008) Obama's fundraising "revolutionized the way presidential campaigns are financed and may kill the Watergate-era system of providing public money for the general election," Bloomberg observed. All told, Obama's estimated $668 million is more than twice what Democrat John Kerry raised in 2004, and more than twice what George W. Bush and Al Gore combined brought in during the 2000 presidential campaign. Obama's fundraising engine was in high gear from the very start, bringing in $24.8 million for the primary during the first three months of 2007, compared with $19.1 million for Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. The Obama campaign invested more than $2 million in Internet infrastructure in early 2007, choosing top-of-the-line hardware and software. Some of Obama's New Media leaders, such as Joe Rospars, came from Howard Dean's campaign. By the end of 2007, Obama had raised $102 million. He won the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, 2008, and raised another $36 million that month. Almost half of Obama's money came from people donating $200 or less, compared with 34 percent for McCain, Bloomberg reported.
On two occasions, Obama promised to work with McCain on an agreement to accept public financing. McCain did accept public financing, limiting his ability to raise private donations, but Obama reneged in June, enabling him to raise unlimited amounts from donors. The press by and large did not hold Obama accountable. But McCain criticized him sharply, saying: "Twice he looked the American people in the eye and said he would sit down with me before he abandoned public financing. He didn't mean a word of it." Free to raise unlimited funds, Obama's campaign brought in at least $210 million in September and October, more than doubling the amount available to McCain.
Obama's huge edge in finances enabled him to devote nearly three times as much as McCain to advertising, with the Democrat spending $21.5 million to McCain's $7.5 million from Oct. 21 to Oct. 28 as Election Day neared. On the day before the election, Obama ran 3,410 ads in seven competitive states, while McCain ran only 1,900. Obama also far outspent McCain on staff salaries, helping him to open field offices and fund a get-out-the-vote effort. The impact is obvious now. Obama beat McCain handily in a strategic battle for electoral votes, the kind of win that has all of the hallmarks of targeted advertising and expensive, high-touch voter outreach efforts in places such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It happened largely because the Internet had disrupted the way political campaigns are funded the same way the Web uprooted many traditional businesses. Except to acknowledge this new paradigm, that might be where the story ends, if not for the lingering questions about exactly how Obama managed to raise so much cash and whether he broke the law to do it. (Source: NewsMax.)
Foreign Funding (Nov 2008) In addition to concerns that donors were defrauding the system to donate more than allowed, there were indications that millions of dollars also were coming from outside the U.S., another violation of campaign finance law. There may be gray areas in the law regarding identifying and tracking donations from American political supporters, but the rules are very clear when it comes to foreigners. No contributions allowed, other than from permanent residents holding green cards.
Still, the Obama funding machine decided to skirt the requirements here as well. So massive was the problem of non-Americans contributing to the Obama campaign the FEC built a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations. By the time the election rolled around, more than 16,500 contributions totaling $5.25 million made the FEC watch list.
More than 720 listed their “state” as “IR,” which the FEC often uses as an abbreviation for “information requested.” Another 74 listed their states as “UK,” for the United Kingdom. Almost 2,150 of the 16,500 overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who listed an APO address. Their total contributions came to just $302,131. But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah, Florence, Italy, and a wide selection of towns and cities in France.
The Obama Web site allowed a contributor to select the country where he resided from the entire membership of the United Nations, including such places as North Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike McCain’s online donation page, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship. With such lax vetting of foreign contributions, the Obama campaign may have indirectly contributed to questionable fundraising by foreigners.
Just as Internet-based credit-card donations made it easier to perpetrate identity fraud domestically, they also greased the skids for foreign nationals to donate to American campaigns, especially if they claim their donation is less than $200. When Newsmax pored over the campaign finance records, more than 65,000 Obama donations appeared to be conversions of foreign currency. According to our analysis of the Obama campaign data, foreign currency donations could range anywhere from $12.8 million to a stunning $63 million.
In all, Newsmax found an astonishing 37,265 unique donors to the Obama campaign whose contributions were not rounded up to dollar amounts. That’s more than 10 percent of the total number of unique donors whose names the Obama campaign has disclosed. Of those, 44,410 contributions came in unrounded amounts of less than $100. Another 15,269 contributions gave in unrounded amounts between $101 and $999, while 704 of the unrounded contributions were in amounts of more than $1,000. Campaign finance experts find the frequent appearance of unrounded contributions suspicious, since contributors almost invariably give in whole dollar amounts.
LaBolt attributed the uneven amounts to online Obama merchandise sales. “Contributions made to the Obama store often produce totals that are not exact dollar amounts,” he said. But the campaign has never produced any accounting for proceeds from its online store. (Source: NewsMax.)
Massive Untraceable Amounts under $200 (Nov 2008) Federal law does not require campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them when they go beyond the $200 mark. The first red flag was the enormous number of Obama donors who never broke the $200 threshold. “Contributions that come under $200 aggregated per person are not listed,” said Bob Biersack, a spokesman for the FEC. “They don’t appear anywhere, so there’s no way of knowing who they are.”
By Sept. 29, 2008 the FEC breakdown of the Obama campaign identified a staggering $222.7 million as coming from contributions of $200 or less. Only $39.6 million of that amount came from donors the Obama campaign has identified. That made it the largest pool of unidentified money that ever has flooded into the U.S. election system, before or after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reforms of 2002. Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics, tells Newsmax that there was skepticism about all the unreported money, especially in the Obama campaign coffers. “We and seven other watchdog groups asked both campaigns for more information on small donors,” he says. “The Obama campaign never responded,” whereas the McCain campaign “makes all its donor information, including the small donors, available online.” The rise of the Internet as a campaign funding tool raised new questions about the adequacy of FEC requirements on disclosure. In pre-Internet fundraising, almost all political donations, even small ones, were made by bank check, leaving a paper trail and limiting the amount of fraud. But credit cards used to make donations on the Internet have allowed far more abuse
“While FEC practice is to do a post-election review of all presidential campaigns, given their sluggish metabolism, results can take three or four years,” says Ken Boehm, the chairman of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C. When FEC auditors questioned the authenticity of Good Will from Austin, Texas, they also issued a request to the Obama campaign to “re-designate” contributions in excess of the finance limits.
Under campaign finance laws, an individual can donate $2,300 to a candidate for federal office in both the primary and the general election, for a total of $4,600. If a donor has topped the limit in the primary, the campaign can re-designate additional contributions to the general election on its books. But if the candidate accepts public financing — as McCain did — then he is barred from accepting donations for the general election, so that individual donors are limited to just $2,300 each. Busting this limit gave Obama a distinct advantage in the money race.
In response to the FEC request in July, campaign records that Newsmax reviewed show that 330 contributions from Mr. Good Will were credited back to a credit card. But by Sept. 20, 2008 Good Will’s contributions stood at $8,950 — still well over the $4,600 limit. The Obama campaign no doubt noticed these contributions, since its Sept. 20 report specified that Good Will’s total contributions had reached $9,375, in clear violation of the law. Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt told Newsmax that the campaign would return the donations but could not guarantee a refund would be made before Election Day.
Much like Good Will, a donor identified as “Pro, Doodad,” from “Nando, NY,” gave $19,500 in 786 separate donations, most of them for $25. For most of these donations, Mr. Doodad Pro creatively listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You,” just as Good Will had done. The FEC also noticed Doodad Pro and issued another request to the Obama camp to clear up the discrepancy. The records indicate that Doodad Pro engaged in a flurry of giving, including 14 separate donations of $25 each on July 7. Obama officials claim that they refunded $8,425 to the credit card listed with the Doodad Pro donations. That still left a net total of $11,075 from the obviously fake donor.
LaBolt again pledged that the questionable contributions would be returned but gave no date. And the bogus contributions continued to roll in. Bart Simpson, Family Guy, Daffy Duck, King Kong: All contributed to Obama in September and October with no attempt to screen them out.
The fake donors could have been caught. Even rudimentary online merchant security procedures would have stopped donors from using a name or address that didn’t match the credit-card account. The Obama campaign had turned off most of those safety features on its Web site, industry analysts and a confidential informant told Newsmax.
That facilitated scenarios like the one on Oct. 14, when an individual using the name “O.J. Simpson” participated in an Obama small-donor fundraising drive, and made a $5 donation through the Web site. Giving a Los Angeles address, he listed his employer as the “State of Nevada” and his occupation as “convict.” The donor used a disposable “gift” card to make the donation. The Obama campaign sent O.J. a thank-you note confirming his contribution. (Source: NewsMax.)
Five major companies process the bulk of all credit-card transactions in the United States, industry insiders tell Newsmax. The Obama campaign paid one of them, Chase Paymentech, just over $2 million to process its online transactions. The Obama campaign paid Synetech Group Inc. of Charlottesville, Va., close to $2 million to compile all of the campaign contribution data from online contributors, bundlers, telemarketers, campaign events, and direct-mail campaigns, and process it for submission to the FEC. The sheer scope of the Obama fundraising juggernaut was “never contemplated by the FEC,” a company official told Newsmax, asking not to be quoted by name. “It’s a lot of data. You’re talking 7 million contributions,” he said.
The campaign itself is responsible for screening out fraudulent donors, not Synetech, he said. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and this is as well-managed as any [campaign]. It’s just huge. When it’s this big, any little thing becomes something more than it is.” One of the biggest problems the campaign faces is fraud, he said. “It’s a colossal problem. They’re paying the campaign with other people’s money.” Individuals such as “Doodad Pro” and “Good Will” who made hundreds of contributions to the campaign in excess of the legal limits were not working for the campaign, but for themselves, he insisted.
The Republican National Committee filed a complaint against the Obama campaign for “accepting prohibited contributions from foreign nationals and excessive contributions from individuals.” The complaint incorporated reporting from Newsmax and other news organizations. “Their responses to FEC inquiries have often been inadequate and late,” RNC chief counsel Sean Cairncross says. (Source: NewsMax.)
Obama Likely to Escape Campaign Audit (Nov 2008) The Federal Election Commission is unlikely to conduct a potentially embarrassing audit of how Barack Obama raised and spent his presidential campaign’s record-shattering windfall, despite allegations of questionable donations and accounting that had the McCain campaign crying foul. Adding insult to injury for Republicans: The FEC is obligated to complete a rigorous audit of McCain’s campaign coffers, which will take months, if not years, and cost McCain millions of dollars to defend.
Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.
McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent. Through the end of September, McCain had socked away $9.4 million in a special fund to pay for the audit.
The Obama campaign does not expect to be audited, but spokesman Ben LaBolt said it would be ready in the event it is. "We have had a first rate compliance operation for an unprecedented national grassroots fundraising effort," LaBolt said. “Nobody wants to go through an audit,” said former FEC chairman Michael Toner. As the top lawyer for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, which accepted public financing, Toner prepared for that campaign’s mandatory audit, before he was appointed by Bush to a seat on the FEC.
Agency investigators fan out across the nation interviewing campaign staffers and vendors to account for even the most seemingly trivial expenses. The resulting audits have dinged publicly financed presidential campaigns for billing the press for port-a-potties accessible to supporters at events (Bob Dole in 1996) and using the wrong formula to divide the cost of outfitting campaign planes between primary and general accounts (John Kerry in 2004).
Obama – the first presidential candidate to decline public funding in the general election – certainly would provide fodder for the green eye-shades at the FEC’s E Street offices. Obama’s campaign admitted it initially mis-categorized the purpose of an $832,598 payment for get-out-the-vote efforts to a consulting firm affiliated with ACORN, the community organizing group that became a top target for Republicans alleging voter fraud. And FEC analysts over the course of the campaign have written more than a dozen letters to Obama singling out hundreds of contributors for whom the campaign either didn’t supply adequate information or from whom he accepted donations exceeding the $4,600 limit. Spokesman LaBolt said the campaign has corrected errors as it was made aware of them. It's not at all unusual for the FEC to send many such letters – “requests for additional information” in agency parlance – to big-money campaigns. McCain’s campaign received at least a dozen, for instance.
But the media – first conservative outlets then mainstream publications – seized on the FEC letters to Obama, singling out donations from apparently fictitious donors as well as from foreign addresses - which are permitted as long as the donors are U.S. citizens. Allegations that the Obama campaign was willfully allowing foreign donations and excessive donations blossomed in the conservative blogosphere and prompted the Republican National Committee to file an FEC complaint.
Seizing on Obama’s reversal on a pledge to accept public financing if his Republican opponent agreed to do the same, as well as his campaign’s refusal to voluntarily release the names, addresses and employers of donors who gave less than $200 each – a group that accounted for about half of the more than $600 million that the campaign had raised through the end of September – the RNC asked the FEC “to immediately conduct a full audit” of all of Obama’s contributions.
It’s very rare for a complaint to trigger an audit, campaign finance insiders say. And ironically, the historic volume of Obama’s small contributions, which may have made it tough for the campaign to weed out problem donations, may also help spare Obama an audit. That’s because the byzantine formula the FEC staff uses to determine whether a campaign has engaged in “substantial” violations of federal election rules – the trigger to recommend an audit to commissioners – takes into account the size of the campaign’s coffers, according to David Mason, who served as a Republican appointee to the FEC until this year.
“So if a House campaign makes a $100,000 error, that’s huge and they’re likely to get audited,” he said. “If a campaign the size of the Obama campaign has a $100,000 error, then maybe not. It would depend on what the error is, obviously,” he said, explaining that mere accounting snafus are unlikely to prompt an audit. More serious and systemic problems, such as illegal contributions, result in campaigns getting tagged with more “audit points,” Mason explained. “If you get enough audit points, you get audited,” he said, adding “nobody outside the commission would know how many audit points the Obama campaign has.”
Mary Brandenberger, an FEC spokeswoman, declined to comment on the likelihood of an Obama audit. But she explained that if campaigns adequately answer the agency’s requests for information, it’s less likely they’ll be recommended for an audit. Even if Obama’s campaign reached the audit recommendation trigger point, it’d be tough to muster the majority commission vote necessary to initiate the audit. That’s because the FEC is comprised of three Democratic commissioners and three Republicans and, as such, is prone to deadlock on partisan issues. (Source: The Politico.)
Conventional wisdom (fanned by Obama supporters in the press) says that Barack Obama's record haul of campaign contributions came from ordinary Americans giving small amounts of money to the cause. That turns out to be a load of horse manure.
Everybody knows how President-elect Barack Obama's amazing campaign money machine was dominated by several million regular folks sending in hard-earned amounts under $200, a real sign of his broadbased grassroots support.
Except, it turns out, that's not really true.
In fact, Obama's base of small donors was almost exactly the same percent as George W. Bush's in 2004 -- Obama had 26% and the great Republican satan 25%. Obviously, this is unacceptable to current popular thinking.
But the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute just issued a detailed study of Obama's donor base and its giving. And that's what the Institute found, to its own surprise.
"The myth is that money from small donors dominated Barack Obama's finances," said CFI's executive director Michael Malbin, admitting that his organization also was fooled. "The reality of Obama's fundraising was impressive, but the reality does not match the myth."
Adding up the total contributions from the same small individuals (in terms of dollar amounts, not their height), the Institute discovered that rather than the 50+% commonly....
...reported throughout the campaign, only 26% of Obama's contributions through last August and only 24% through Oct. 15 came from people whose total donations added up to less than $200.
The reality is that Obama raised 80% more in large donations that George Bush in 2004.
CFI also reported:
After a more thorough analysis of data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC)," the CFI study says, "it has become clear that repeaters and large donors were even more important for Obama than we or other analysts had fully appreciated."
The press couldn't be bothered during the campaign with looking at these numbers - there for anyone with any curiosity at all to see. As with everything else about Obama, they simply accepted the candidate's word on it.
The key word there being "total." It comes down to which definition of "small donor" you accept: Someone who donated to the Obama campaign by scraping together $199, period. Or someone who donated $199 to the Obama campaign several times, perhaps totaling close to the $4,600 legal limit for the primary and general elections. In aggregate, that would vault him/her out of the small donor category that was so useful to the political campaign's public relations campaign portraying the donor base as about two times as broad as it really was.
The reported numbers show that Obama actually received 80% more money from large donors (those giving $1,000 or more total) than from small donors. Through the Democratic National Convention, the Institute estimates, Obama received $119 million from genuine small donors, an impressive sum, to be sure. But not as impressive as the $210 million he'd raised by then from bundlers and large donors.
CHANGE: Obama allowed by FEC to pay off his legal bills from campaign funds (SITE NOTE: What is infuriating is that Obama has turned around and is using the campaign funds to pay for legal expenses "during the campaign" to firms to the tune of approximately $950,000. This was reported by the World Net Daily in May 2009. However, it just so happens that the firms are the same ones that are defending him on his CURRENT fight to keep his records from examination. In addition, the law firm that Joe Biden's son was affiliated with is also listed for payments. But heck, it is not going to get audited -- and the President will squash anyone one at the FEC who tries -- so it is all safe. Maybe... but if the expenses are not political expenses, then the expenditure is illegal.)
EPILOGUE Answer to Obama-style Fund Raising: The Supreme Court Gets Ready To Turn on the Corporate Fundraising Spigot (Jun 2009) The case about the anti-Hillary ad got pushed back till September—and got bigger. If Republicans were wondering how their 2012 presidential candidate is going to compete against President Obama's $600 million fundraising juggernaut, the Supreme Court seems poised to provide an answer: unlimited corporate spending supporting the Republican candidate, or attacking Obama.
In a Supreme Court term that has had its share of surprises, the court saved one of the biggest for last. Rather than publish an opinion at the end of the term as expected in an obscure campaign finance case, Citizens United v. FEC, the court issued a rare order for reargument of the case in September (before the usual start of the term). At that point, the court will consider whether to overrule its two previous decisions that in 1990 and 2003 upheld limits on corporate spending in federal elections.
Given the dynamics of the court, there is a great chance the justices will use the opportunity to overrule limits on how much money corporations can spend supporting candidates—whether or not Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed in time to hear the case in September. In the Voting Rights Act case the court considered last week, the court ducked the constitutional question in favor of narrow statutory interpretation. In contrast, in Citizens United, the court is likely to address the constitutional questions head-on, and the outcome likely will not be good for supporters of reasonable campaign-finance regulation.
First, a bit of background: Citizens United produced an anti-Hillary Clinton documentary. The group wanted to air the documentary during the 2008 presidential primary season through a cable television "video on demand" service and to advertise for it on television. In exchange for a $1.2 million fee, a cable television operator consortium would have made the documentary available to cable subscribers to download free "on demand," as part of an "Election '08" series. Citizens United is an ideological group (like the NRA or Planned Parenthood), but it takes for-profit corporate funding. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law passed in 2002 bars certain corporate-funded television broadcasts, such as this documentary, in the period before an election. And the law requires disclosure by the funders of election-related broadcast advertising, such as these ads. Citizens United argued against the corporate-spending ban. (It also attacked the disclosure provisions, but they're probably not really in trouble.)
Citizens United made a series of alternate arguments as well, from narrow statutory ones to the broad argument that the court should overrule its 1990 case Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which upheld limits on corporate spending in candidate elections. Before argument, I expected the court to decide this case narrowly, by reading McCain-Feingold's statutory rules barring corporate-funded television broadcasts as not applying to video-on-demand broadcasts. That would be in line with the Roberts court: The chief justice has tended to prefer a chipping away at existing precedent rather than dramatic decisions to move the law in his direction. But, as Dahlia Lithwick explained, at oral argument the government's lawyer got into some trouble in suggesting that the government would have the constitutional power to ban corporate-published books just before the election. That made it seem like the court could well be poised to overrule Austin.
Though three Justices (Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas) have voted repeatedly for Austin to be overruled, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito thus far have moved more cautiously. In each of the campaign-finance cases decided by the Roberts court, these justices have sided with those challenging the law, but in an incremental way. If Roberts or Alito were ready to go the narrow route again in Citizens United, however, there would have been no reason to set the case for reargument explicitly asking the parties to brief the constitutional question, and certainly no reason to rush the case to September so it can be decided before the 2010 election season goes into full swing.
And there's a tantalizing hint of where the court will go in another obscure campaign-finance case decided last year, FEC v. Davis. That case involved a different provision of McCain-Feingold, one involving raising contribution limits for candidates facing wealthy opponents. Justice Alito used the case to attack the underlying reasoning of Austin, which upheld the spending limits on grounds that corporate wealth "distorts" the political process and allows spending by corporations "disproportionate" to the views of those in society. In Davis, Justice Alito, for the five conservatives on the court, attacked this equality rationale and said it is "dangerous business" for Congress to try to influence voter choices through "leveling" electoral opportunities. He pointedly cited with approval Justice Kennedy's Austin dissent.
If Roberts and Justice Alito were ready to overrule Austin, why not do it now? I can think of two possible reasons. They may not have wanted to take the plunge on Justice Souter's last day on the court. He has been an ardent defender of these laws. Perhaps more to the point, Justice Alito, in two campaign-finance cases, has said that he would not consider revisiting old campaign-finance precedent until the issue was squarely before the court and briefed. In other words, Alito wants a full airing of the issues before taking such a momentous step.
Now he will get that. And then what? If after reargument in September, corporate limits fall—and limits on the money labor unions can spend on campaigns, with them—we may well look back on the 2008 election as a quaint time when the amounts spent on elections were relatively modest. Expect the floodgates to open, and the money to flow freely, as early as next year. (Source: Slate.com.)
HOAXES AND ACCUSATIONS ABOUT OBAMA:
NUT ON THE LOOSE: Larry Sinclair an Embarassing Pain-in-the-tush -- But Why the Persecution by Democrats??? (Nov 2008)
This is the most ludicrous one around. The whole story is so incredulous and why the media even paid any attention to this is ridiculous. Larry Sinclair contacted the Obama Campaign and David Axelrod in Sep 2007. After multiple attempts, Sinclair got no response.
When it still was ignored, Sinclair said, he filled a lawsuit in Minnesota District Court, alleging threats and intimidation by Obama's staff -- but this has not be verified. In January 2008, Larry Sinclair presented a YouTube video to tell his story.
The saga starts with Larry Sinclair in a YouTube video on 18 Jan 2008 alleging a drug and sex encounter with Obama in November 1999. The video portrays an rather "earnest" Larry Sinclair who just wanted everyone to know how "Senator Obama" had lied about his previous drug use. Sinclair’s original accusations were that in 1999, Larry’s limo driver -- whom Larry had rented for the evening -- introduced Larry to then State Representative Barack Obama. That Obama allegedly procured cocaine for their use while the two participated in gay sex, one night in the limo, another in an “upscale” Choice motel in Gurnee, Illinois. Sinclair alleged that he performed fellatio on Obama while he was smoking crack cocaine in the rear of a limosine. Sinclair claims he has "proof" which confirms the drug and gay sex allegations that he and Obama met at a lounge in Chicago in 1999, via "credit card" receipts and a summary from Choice Hotels showing a stay at a motel in Gurnee, Illinois. (Source: Sinclair YouTube.)
I flew out of Colorado Springs, Colorado to Chicago on November 2, 1999, arriving in O’Hare early in the morning of November 3, 1999. I went to the Chicago area to attend the graduation of my god son (my best friend’s son) from basic training from the Great Lakes Navy Training Center. I made reservations at the Comfort Inn and Suites in Gurnee, IL based on location to the Navy Training center. On November 5, 1999, I hired the services of Five Star Limo. I had hired them for both November 5 and November 6. On November 6, 1999, I asked the limo driver – whose name I now reveal for the first time – Paramjit Multani, if he knew anyone who would like to socialize and show me Chicago. Paramjit Multani understood that I was not looking for someone who knew Chicago and would enjoy socializing. Paramjit Multani said he knew someone who was a friend of his.
On November 6, 1999 after picking me up at the Hotel in Gurnee– and this is significant – Paramjit Multani used his cellphone to make a call. That call was made to then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama to set up an introduction between me and Senator Obama. Upon arriving at the bar and exiting the Limo, Senator Obama was standing next to Paramjit Multani and I was introduced to Senator Obama. Later that evening at a bar which I believe was called Alibis, I mention I could use a line or two to wake up. Senator Obama asked me if I was referring to “coke” and after stating I was, Obama stated he could purchase cocaine for me and then made a telephone call – and this too is significant — from his cellphone to a presently unknown individual during which Senator Obama arranged the cocaine purchase.
Senator Obama and I then departed the bar in my limousine and proceeded to an unknown location where Senator Obama exited the limousine with two hundred fifty dollars ($250) I had given him and returned a short while later with an “eightball” of cocaine which he gave to me. I did ingest a couple of lines of cocaine, and shortly thereafter Senator Obama produced a glass cylinder pipe and packet of crack cocaine from his pants pocket and Obama smoked the crack cocaine. I performed fellatio on Senator Obama in the limousine during the time Senator Obama was smoking crack cocaine, after which I had the driver take me to the my hotel, The Comfort Suits, Gurnee, Illinois.
The following day, November 7, 1999, Senator Obama appeared at my hotel room where we again ingested cocaine and I again performed fellatio on Senator Obama. Significantly, both the driver’s telephone call to Senator Obama and his call to the drug dealer should appear on the driver’s and Senator Obama’s cellphone billing statements.
In February 2008, Larry Sinclair set up a blog to tell his story and to answer questions. The personal attacks escalated and led to multiple
death threats. Some claim that Sinclair solicited money on his blog to stay in Illinois, but the site does not appear to be a for-profit operation. (Source: Citizen Wells and Puma Facts.) However, it does appear that Sinclair did profit from his celebrity as when offered money to take a lie-detector test or his book deal. The personal attacks on his blog began attempting to discredit Sinclair. The first attacks centered on homophobic disgust ridiculing his sexual preference.
Critics started to immediately pick away at his claims:
Sinclair claims: "I was in the Chicago area from November 3, 1999 thru November 8, 1999 to attend the graduation of my God son from the Great Lakes Navy Training Center outside Chicago." This graduation was for Basic Training as Sinclair admitted in his press conference in Jun 2008. Critics stated the graduation was on Oct 17-19 so he could not be correct. However, graduations are just about every weekend because of the size of the amount of trainees at the facility. BUT on the flip side, Obama was not present for the Illinois Senate on November 4, 1999. Obama has been extremely evasive and uncooperative when asked to supply official or personal records to prove his activities and whereabouts. Thus this point of either parties whereabouts on the alleged dates cannot be substantiated or disproved either way.
To Sinclair's benefit supporting graduations every weekend, Great Lakes Naval Recruit Training Command (RTC) in Illinois is the central processing location for Naval recruits. Approximately 50,000 recruits pass through Great Lakes RTC annually with an estimated 15,000 recruits onboard the installation at any time and is the third largest base in the Navy. Great Lakes Service School Command (SSC) is the central training location for Naval enlisted students. Students at SSC either arrive directly from RTC or are returning from the fleet for further training. While new recruits are onboard RTC approximately nine weeks for basic training, SSC students will be onboard SSC from two weeks to 14 months, depending on the curriculum. (Source: GlobalSecurity.org.)
Critics claim that Sinclair claims to have receipts to "prove" his allegations. However, on the video, he is very vague about the date that this supposedly happened "between November 3rd and November 8". As far as we know, no one has publicly seen the "proof" offered by Sinclair -- though Sinclair stated that it was on his site.
Some stated that Larry Sinclair was a patient confined to a mental Hospital on the dates that he claims to have had sex with Barack Obama in Illinois. Larry was suffering from severe psychosis due to Schizophrenia. He currently resides in a government subsidized home for the mentally ill and disabled. Larry Sinclair also suffers from Delusional Misidentification that is caused by a brain tumor that Larry Sinclair has. This needs verification -- Sinclair's official address is 600 W Superior St. #604. Duluth MN. This needs verification.
Globe article stated "Sinclair also says he's been diagnosed with a brain tumor and has about a year to live." However, Larry Sinclair stated: "Yes, I have been diagnosed with a Brain Tumor. NO, I am not on my death bed. In fact I never stated to the Globe or anyone else that I had less than a year to live. The funny thing about all these claims of my impending demise is that no one can make such a claim, not even me. The reason being is simple, when I was diagnosed I made the decision not to treat and to allow nature to take its course. I believe we all are going to die, and when it is our time there is nothing any of us or any Dr. can do. So my decision was mine and I have not allowed any Dr. to tell me what they believe is my expiration date."
Some question his record as a criminal makes him an unreliable witness against Obama. However, he admitted his crimes that occurred over twenty years ago for credit card theft and check forgery between 1980-1986 and he had paid for them by being imprisoned for those crimes. Others create the expand on his being a drug dealer and user to create further discredit him. During his time in Mexico, critics claim he acked as a "coyote" smuggling illegal aliens into the U.S. for pay. He stated in his Jun 2008 press conference at the National Press Club:
I am 46 years old and I currently reside in Duluth, MN. I am a US Citizen, and I have made mistakes in my lifetime. I have been convicted and served prison sentences for writing bad checks, forging checks, using stolen credit card numbers in Arizona, Florida and Colorado. These event’s occurred over twenty (20) years ago between 1980 thru 1986. After going public on the internet with these claims against Senator Obama earlier this year, I became aware of a warrant out of Florida from 1986 which I have resolved and it has now been dismissed. I also have an active “Colorado Only” warrant for alleged “Theft and Forgery”. I am not ignoring this warrant but am addressing it with the Court in Colorado as well as with the DA’s office. I have a pending motion to dismiss this warrant which I am waiting to have calendared by the Colorado Court.
I have lived and worked under three different names. My birth name is Lawrence W. Sinclair. Later on, I had my name legally changed first to La-Rye A. Silvas, and then La-Rye Vizcarra Avila. The last two were legal name changes granted by the court in Penal County Superior Court, Florence Arizona. I legally returned to my birth name in the Fremont County District court, Canon City, Colorado in 1997. (Source: Citizen Wells.)
Critics question why he didn't come forward before 2007? Sinclair responded in his Jun 2008 press conference that in 1999, he could have cared less about Illinois state senator because he wasn't a resident of Illinois. He claimed he was residing in Mexico up until 2006 and simply didn't care about events in America. What brought the issue forward was Obama's lies about not using drugs since his college days which Sinclair knew was untrue.
(SITE NOTE: Sinclair claims the original complaint in Sep 2007 was only about Obama's drug use -- NOT the sex. The sex angle was only revealed in 2008.)
Critics question whether he was making money from the pursuit of the story and if so, was any of it related to the Republican Party. Sinclair stated in his Jun 2008 news conference that his efforts were funded by donations as small as "$12.31 to $100." He stated that his supporters were mainly Independents and he himself was an Independent not affiliated with any party. In his petition to have the arrest warrant in Colorado expunged, he stated that his "sole support has been Social Security benefits." However, he has profited from the lie detector test and admitted on his blog that he was waiting to cash the check to pay for his hotel expenses. On his blog, he solicited money to continue this "fight for the truth." His current book project is also one that is for money -- soliciting advance book sales.
Sinclair, who said he was willing to submit to a polygraph test to validate his claims, got his chance – thanks to a website offering $10,000 for the right to record it and $100,000 to Sinclair if he passes. In Feb 2008, Whitehouse.com used the services of highly respected polygraph expert, Dr. Ed Gelb. Sinclair passed a drug test before taking the tests, both administered on Friday. On the first test, questions were administered about Sinclair's claims that he and Obama had sex. The second test focused on Sinclair's claims that he and Obama did drugs. Dr.Gelb found "deception was indicated" in both tests. To date, Sinclair has yet to take another lie detector test, even though the two original tests remain shrouded in mystery. Whitehouse.com has refused to release the results and has washed its hands of any and all contact with Larry Sinclair. (Source: 1000 Papercuts Blog.)
Citizen Wells Blog tells a different story. Sinclair stated in Jun 2008, "In what I now realize was a naive and un-counseled decision, I posted in January 2008 a video on YouTube.com where I related the above information regarding my liaisons with Senator Obama in 1999. The response was overwhelming and I quickly became the recipient of what in hindsight appears to have been a coordinated attack on my character with ever increasing falsehoods circulating on the internet.
In response I agreed to take a polygraph test from Whitehouse.com. The results of that test have been partially revealed to the end of labeling me a liar and taken as gospel by all. I would like to make the following comments about that polygraph test.
First, I have been subsequently advised that Whitehouse.com was a website dedicated to anti-Clinton pornography until earlier this year. Second, I have now come to understand that lie detectors are junk science at best which is why courts of law refuse to use them. Third, a review of the results by George W. Maschke, Ph.D. of AntiPolygraph.org raises serious questions about the legitimacy of the examination. Indeed, overlooked by almost everyone is that hitehouse.com's own examiner, Dr. Gordon Barland, observed that on the drug question regarding Senator Obama that the computerized score found that there was less than a 1% probability of deception by me." (Source: Citizen Wells and Puma Facts.)
In February 2008, Internet pornographer Dan Parisi, who runs the website WhiteHouse.com, made a polygraph challenge to Sinclair.
(SITE NOTE: It is true that Dan Parisi has operated a pornographic site at whitehouse.com. It is also true that he has made a lot of money at it. whitehouse.com WAS an adult and political entertainment website that first came online in 1997. According to a statement on the web, it was originally created by Ransom Scott as a place where uncensored discussion of government policies could occur before adult content was added to make it more profitable. More recently, the adult content has been eradicated. ... In 2004 Parisi decided to sell the domain, mainly because of his son who would be in kindergarten the next year. At this point he was making US$1 million annually from the site alone. Parisi had said he did not want to sell the domain name to anyone in the adult entertainment industry, and even claimed to have turned down what was essentially a blank check from a buyer hiding his identity behind his broker.
In November 2005, the domain appeared to be used for a real estate site. In December 2005 it contained only Google ads, with a notice that a site for investigating people by checking their public records would be coming. In March 2006, whitehouse.com called itself "America's Free Speech Forum". It advertised a cartoon contest and presented links to Associated Press political news stories. In July 2006, the site was a real estate site again, and forwarded to www.house.com. As of November 2006, was a search engine for people, which searched over 90 million White Pages listings and 14 million Yellow Pages listings. As of June-October 2007, the site has once again changed and now claims to be "your source for up-to-date information to help you keep track of the major party candidates for President." (Source: wikipedia.)
To date, he's amassed NYTimessucks.com, Giulianisucks.com, Pepsisucks.com, TacoBellsucks.com, Nikesucks.com, NBAsucks.com, AceHardwaresucks.com, OprahWinfreysucks.com, HomeDepotsucks.com, RalstonPurinasucks.com and more than 600 others. Parisi has spent $100,000 on his Sucks.com sites, and a little less than that defending them. (Source: Salon.com.))
Polygraph tests are inherently unreliable. (SITE NOTE: This is a given and is why it is not admissable in a court of law.)
Larry Sinclair volunteered to take the polygraph test.
The computer readings showed that Larry Sinclair passed the test.
Edward I. Gelb, who has a phony PHD, claimed that Sinclair failed the test.
(SITE NOTE: It does appear that Gelb may have received a paper-mill PhD, but this does not detract from his other accomplishments.
Since 1969, after completing training at the Backster School of Lie Detection in San Diego, Gelb claims to have conducted in excess of 30,000 polygraph examinations. Along with attorney F. Lee Bailey, Gelb appeared on a nationally syndicated television program called "Lie Detector." Gelb has been interviewed about polygraph matters on such national television programs as "Entertainment Tonight," "Geraldo Rivera Live," "CNN Newstand," and CNN's "Larry King Live" show. His high profile clients include O.J. Simpson and John and Patsy Ramsey (parents of JonBenet Ramsey, whose murder remains unsolved). Gelb is a past president, executive director, and chairman of the board of the American Polygraph Association and in 1998 earned the association's Leonarde Keeler Award "for long and distinguished service to the polygraph profession."
Gelb has publicly claimed to hold a Ph.D. degree in psychology since at least 1996. In 1997, he represented himself as a Ph.D. to the highest court in the land -- the United States Supreme Court -- as a co-signer of the Committee of Concerned Social Scientists' amicus brief in U.S. v. Scheffer, where he is listed as "Ed Gelb, Ph.D." ... No, the "LaSalle University" that awarded Gelb his "doctorate" turns out to be a defunct, unaccredited diploma mill in Mandeville, Louisiana that was owned and operated by one Thomas James Kirk, A.K.A. Thomas McPherson. In 1996, LaSalle was raided by the FBI, and in 1997 Kirk pled guilty to federal fraud charges. Antipolygraph.))
Dan Parisi, in violation of the contract with Sinclair, set up a news conference at the NPC, on June 18, 2008.
(SITE NOTE: Sinclair stated in Jun 2008, "Finally, in February 2008 I was told anonymously that Dan Parisi of Whitehouse.com received $750,000 from the Obama campaign through AKR Media to organize an effort to publically discredit me. When I confronted Dan Parisi with this allegation, he did not deny it but instead withdrew the second exonerating polygraph report of Dr. Gordon Barland, failed to post the video of my polygraph as he and Whitehouse.com promised they would do, and even removed posts from their web site altogether, claiming that they had “had enough of the attacks by Sinclair’s supporters and Sinclair himself.” (Source: Citizen Wells and Puma Facts.) We should also add that it appears that Sinclair did receive the payment as promised by Parisi for taking the polygraph tests as verified by Sinclair's emails on his blog. Parisi paid Larry $20,000 to take the test, pass or fail.
Dan Parisi canceled his news conference for alleged technical problems. A "reliable source" indicates Parisi canceled his news conference after notification of Sinclair’s arrest. (Source: Citizen Wells.)
To make Larry Sinclair appear less than credible, the Globe published that Sinclair served time in more than one prison, that Sinclair was not only a drug smuggler but also a coyote, a person who brought illegals across the border, always at a price, and that Sinclair was convicted of fraud. However, Sinclair has admitted to check cashing fraud and theft but that these events took place over twenty years ago -- and supposedly as of Jan 2008, there were no outstanding warrants for him. His work as a coyote is unsubstantiated -- though he has stated that in the past he helped illegal aliens. While Sinclair has sued three anonymous posters on the site, Democratic Underground and Senator Obama and David Axelroad, Sinclair has NOT filed a slander suit against the Globe nor denied their story about his past.
Sinclair claims three commenters on 1000papercuts.comhad no right to post comments that in their opinion Sinclair is lying about Senator Obama and is suing the posters for $3 million. Sinclair filed another suit against Senator Obama and David Axelrod claiming they had attempted to silence Sinclair, a violation of the First Amendment and Free Speech. Evidently, according to Larry, the three posters at DU do not have the same rights in regards to Free Speech as Larry. Sinclair sued the three posters for 3 million bucks, a very large amount for damages, even though Sinclair has, through his own website, posted a copy of a motion to dismiss a warrant from the state of Colorado for theft, that Sinclair: suffers from nerve and spine damage, is terminally ill, and whose sole support has been Social Security benefits. (Source: 1000papercuts.com.)
The following is excerpted from the Sinclair suit to sue "Tubesock" in Washington, DC.
This case involves bloggers who criticized Larry Sinclair, a Minnesota resident who has been
trying to secure press coverage for a sensational claim about Presidential candidate Barack Obama
– that in 1999, when Obama was a member of the Illinois Legislature, Obama bought him cocaine,
after which he performed fellatio on Obama. Although broadly publicized in the blogosphere, a
tabloid newspaper, and right-wing radio shows, Sinclair has expressed frustration that the
"mainstream media" has ignored him. Now that his suit alleging that Obama violated his First
Amendment rights by getting the media to suppress his story has been thrown out of court, Sinclair
has brought his quest for 15 minutes of fame to this Court, suing three bloggers who said his story
about Obama is a lie, and has subpoenaed identifying information, for the supposed purpose of
pursing litigation against them in a court which is, not coincidentally, located in a major media
market. In fact, Sinclair's own blog openly acknowledges that he plans to use this lawsuit to "get
this in the open and show that Mr. Obama did do as I said he did," and that he and his attorney are
trying to use this case to take Obama's deposition about Sinclair's claims: "The aim of the
Sinclair-Sibley legal strategy is eventually to discover Barack Obama on oath."
There is no reason to allow plaintiff and his counsel to create the circus that they desire.
Apart from their improper purpose, both the lawsuit and the motion to compel are frivolous. Under
well-established law, courts do not order the identification of anonymous Internet speakers, even
when those speakers are named as defendants in a lawsuit, unless the plaintiff can show that there
is good reason to believe that the suit has a reasonable probability of success, and thus that the need
for disclosure outweighs the First Amendment right to speak anonymously. The Court should deny
the motion to compel. Indeed, we show in the course of our argument on the subpoena that the Court
lacks subject matter jurisdiction.
Case 1:08-cv-00434-HHK Document 12 Filed 04/30/2008 Page 11 of 55
(Source: DC vs Sinclair Memo.)
Larry Sinclair in Apr 2008 added new allegations, of “other gay lovers” and murder -- that Obama was lovers with Donald Young, the murdered gay choir master at the Senator’s church. He claims he tried to turn info over to the Chicago Police pertaining to the murder of Donald Young and that Young and Obama were lovers. Sinclair claims he had had discussions with Young before the choir master’s murder back December of 2007. Sinclair never mentioned Donald Young and Obama in his original video on Youtube back in Jan 2008 -- and everyone is expected to believe he just sat on this information. (Source: Video Larry Sinclair on Puerto Rico TV show, SuperXclusivo and )
In September 2007 I contacted the Presidential Campaign of Barack H. Obama, to request solely that Senator Obama publicly correct his stated drug use record to reflect his use of crack cocaine with me in November 1999. When I made that first contact I left with the Presidential Campaign of Senator Barack H. Obama a telephone number for the campaign to return my call. The first number I provided was a Texas cell phone number. From the period of Labor day weekend 2007 through November 18, 2007 I did provide a total of four (4) different call back numbers to the Obama campaign, as I had moved and had changed the numbers to reflect locally my place of residence at the time. In late September to early October 2007, I received a call from a male who identified himself as a “Mr. Young” stating he was calling in regards to calls I had made to the Obama campaign. This first call was in fact an attempt by “Mr. Young” to obtained from me the identities of anyone I had contacted concerning my 1999 allegations against Senator Obama. This first called shocked me in that this “Mr. Young” asked me why I had not asked Senator Obama to disclose the sexual encounters I had with Mr. Obama in 1999. I was shocked as I had never mentioned to the campaign or anyone working for the campaign any sexual encounters as my call was prompted by drug allegations only. The call ended with “Mr. Young” stating I would hear from someone in a few days.
In mid to late October 2007, I received a second call from this “Mr. Young” at which time I clearly became aware that this individual was personally involved with Senator Obama rather than just an employee of his campaign. The tone of the conversation had a sexual nature. “Mr. Young” did not once advise me how he obtained my phone number which by this time had now changed to a Delaware number.
In late October 2007, I received a text message from the gentleman identified as “Mr. Young” in which he stated he was intimately involved with Senator Obama and that Obama was discussing with him and his pastor how to publicly acknowledge Senator Obama’s drug use in 1999 and that Obama wanted to be sure I had not discussed the sexual encounters or drug incidents with any media at that time.
In mid to late November 2007, in another text message from “Mr. Young” , he advised me that Senator Obama will publicly correct his statement as to he last time he used drugs and I did not need to concern myself with publicly disclosing it myself. The last contact I had with “Mr. Young” was in early December 2007 when he made it clear to me that Senator Obama had no intentions of publicly acknowledging his 1999 use of crack cocaine and that “Mr. Young” was in fact doing nothing more than milking information from me for Senator Obama’s use.
I later learned that a Donald Young was the choir director of Reverend Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ – Obama’s now-former church — and was openly a homosexual. I also learned that he was murdered on December 23, 2007. I have cooperated with the Chicago Police Department in this matter by providing them the telephone numbers I was using during the fall of 2007 and I release them now publically in the hope that someone may be able to connect the dots between these telephone numbers and Mr. Young. Those numbers are: 954-758-1105 (sic: typo 956-758-1105); 956-758-1885; 956-758-8002; 302-685-7175; 612-466-1043. (Source: Citizen Wells and Puma Facts.)
Why did Sinclair come up with this connection at such a late date? The Obama side hypothesizes that Young was murdered in December 2007 and Sinclair surfaced it in Apr 2008 and surfaced from an idea provided by a blogger. M Pand G S Blog in May 2008 states that Larry received an email from "Sally Jones" on March 10, 2008 at 7:40 pm that said: "...Larry, take care of yourself! I just heard today that the gay choir director of Obama’s church was murdered at Christmas. Some have suggested that he might have been going to say something about Obama." A few short hours later, Larry Sinclair appeared on Jeff Rense's broadcast to claim that he’d been in contact with Donald Young in the autumn of 2007. Curiously, Sinclair had never mentioned Young previously, but he now claimed to have had numerous telephone conversations with Young in the months prior to his death, and that Senator Obama directed Young's murder in order to keep him quiet. No sooner did Sinclair allege that he’d been in communication with Donald Young in the autumn then others began adding names to the list. (Source: M Pand G S Blog.)
Because of Sinclair's constant introductions of new twists, this case will not go away -- and it is the type of juicy scandal the tabloids love whether factual or not. It was surfaced that the murder of Donald Young, a 47-year-old choir master at former Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ—the same congregation that Obama has attended for the past 20 years. Two other young black men that attended the same church—Larry Bland and Nate Spencer—were also murdered execution style with bullets to the backs of their heads—all within 40 days of each other, beginning in November 2007. Sinclair claims that Obama was friendly with at least two of these deceased parishioners, and that choir director Donald had contacted him shortly before being murdered from multiple gunshot wounds on December 23, 2007. All three were openly homosexual. How many churches do you know where THREE men are murdered within ONE MONTH? This again causes the questions to be asked.
(SITE NOTE: The three victims are from Trinity United Church. They all died within 40 days of each other starting in November 2007. Shortly before their his death Young allegedly contacted Larry Sinclair by e-mail and cell phone. According to Sinclair, they discussed their sexual relationships with Obama. The three dead men were all shot execution style in the back of the head.
Young's death on December 23, 2007 has been ruled a homicide. His body was discovered Sunday morning inside his South Side home at 2320 E. 69th St. Donald Young was the fourth of eight siblings. He was, according to those who loved him, the type of person who didn't take life for granted. He lived every day to the fullest. So whether it was in the South Side classroom where he taught, or at church conducting the choir every Sunday, Young made an impression on those who met him. "He was one of those success stories, the average person would look at and say he doesn't have a chance," said Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ. "He came to our church when he was 12 years old. And he wasn't brought because of his mother and father. He just came because of the other kids and became active in the church," Wright said. The church became Young's extended family. When news of his killing came during Sunday morning services, Reverend Wright said many parishioners got up and went straight to Young's home. The third floor apartment in the 2300-block of East 69th Street is where Young was found shot to death by his roommate. Young was also a fifth grade teacher at Guggenheim Elementary. Family spokesperson Dennis Cole told ABC7 Young had just finished a double masters in early child education and math. His ambition was to become a school principal. (ABC local: Donald Young Murder.)
He was also a faithful attendee at the conferences of the Gospel Music Workshop of America. The details about why and exactly how he died remain unclear; there is, however, one story that emerges with some semblance of clarity: a longtime choir member and a sometime visito
