Obama and Osawatomie, the Weather Underground Newspaper

Zomblog managed to obtain a copy of the very first issue of Osawatomie newspaper that was published by the Weather Underground Organization of Bill Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn in 1975. This is the cover of the paper:



There's a lot of striking catchwords and rhetoric that the WUO used then and what Barack Obama uses now.

From Zomblog:

Zomblog has obtained an extremely rare copy of the first issue of Osawatomie, a newspaper published by the Weather Underground in 1975. Noteworthy passages are reproduced below, along with exact transcriptions. The full pages, with each passage in context in high resolution, are found at the bottom of this post.

Much of Osawatomie, which was written at a time when the Dohrn-Ayers wing of the Weather Underground was transitioning from terrorism to “working from the inside” for revolution, concerns itself with the need to encourage “organizers” who will work in “communities” and use “audacity” to bring about “socialism” in America.

Sound familiar?

It is thought that the Obama logo is similar to the logo of the Weather Underground logo. Here's a side-by-side comparison:



Several pages of Osawatomie have been posted at the Zomblog page.

To read the full article, go here.

Obama: Questions of Character

Charles Krauthammer nails Barack Obama again. These are the opening paragraphs of his latest article on Obama:

Questions of Character
Obama's radical pals shed light on his cynicism, his ruthlessness, and his tolerance for the obscene.

By Charles Krauthammer

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.



But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque, and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

To read the full article, go here.

Associated Press Playing Race Card For Obama

Douglass K. Daniel, an Associated Press writer wrote this on the attacks by Sarah Palin on Obama's associations with Bill Ayres:

Her reference to Obama's relationship with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground, was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were "pals" or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.

Bullplop! Obama and Ayres sat on boards together, attended retreats and had a close working relationship that stretched over years. Additionally, Obama launched his political career at Ayres's home! How much closer does Obama need to be with Ayres? (Unless Bernardine Dohrn has Obama over for sleepovers.)

Daniel also writes:

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

Most troubling, however, is how allowing racism to creep into the discussion serves McCain's purpose so well. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

Racism?! Daniel is obviously seeing more into the attack than what was actually there. Those of us who are politically astute have noticed the injection of opinion into AP's stories. This is yet another example. There's no racism here, real or imagined. Daniel is either mistaken or making up false stories.

Sounds to me that he's become another media shill for the Obama campaign, who has tried to play the race card more than once during this campaign.

NY Times Obama-Ayres Story A Whitewash

Finally, after all these months, the New York Times publishes an article on the Barack Obama-Bill Ayres connection.

The sad part about it is that it's a whitewash. It is getting more attention now that Gov. Sarah Palin said today that Obama is guilty of "palling around with terrorists."

Scott Shane in the Times wrote:

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close.

Bullplop!

About a month ago, I did my own digging and found that Obama's ties to Bill Ayres was more extensive than what Obama admitted during an interview on ABC's This Week.

Go to: Obama and the Weather Underground

Stanley Kurtz responded to the Times story in National Review Online:

There is nothing "sporadic" about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here, one that does not depend on the quality of personal friendship or number of hours spent in the same room together (although the article greatly underestimates that as well).

Tomorrow night, Sean Hannity's America on Fox will have an in-depth report on the relationship between Obama and Ayres. That is one program you should not miss!

Obama and the Weather Underground Terrorists

In April, Sen. Barack Obama said this when questioned about his associations with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayres:

"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George."

New information has surfaced that exposed the lie that Obama told above. His associations and connections to William Ayres and Ayres's wife Bernardine Dohrn were more extensive than what Obama admitted to.



While it is true that Obama was a mere child when the Weather Underground set off bombs at police stations, banks, The Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, Obama was in his thirties when the association began. (I was in my teens at the time of the bombings and I remember them well.) But why did Obama associate himself with radical terrorists? Any decent person with a bit of common sense wouldn't. That is like associating with Timothy McVeigh (of Oklahoma City Bombing fame). Obama can't claim ignorance about knowledge of Ayres's past history.

Rick Moran at The American Thinker writes:

As we wait for the press and others to go through the thousands of documents related to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge where Barack Obama served as President of the Board and terrorist William Ayers headed up the operations arm, we can say for certain that Obama is a liar of the first magnitude.

Reviews of the Annenberg Challenge records show this so far:

The UIC records show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together as the education program got under way. The two continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 operation of the program, records show.

In 1970, a nail bomb intending to kill U.S. soldiers, and designed by Ayres, accidentally exploded in a townhouse. The explosion killed three WU operatives, including Ayres's then-girlfriend Diana Oughton.

The bomb was intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."

Michael Barone wrote on August 22 in U.S. News & World Report:

In my U.S. News column this week, I make a brief reference to the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist bomber William Ayers and his connections to Barack Obama. They were closer than Obama implied when George Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers in the April 16 debate—the last debate Obama allowed during the primary season. To get an idea of how close they were, check out Tom Maguire's Just One Minute blog and Steve Diamond's Global Labor and Politics. The Obama-Ayers relationship is also mentioned in David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate.

Ayers was one of the original grantees of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform organization in the 1990s, and was cochairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one the two operational arms of the CAC. Obama, then not yet a state senator, became chairman of the CAC in 1995. Later in that year, the first organizing meeting for Obama's state Senate campaign was held in Ayers's apartment. Ayers later wrote a memoir, and an article about him appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. "I don't regret setting bombs," Ayers is quoted as saying. "I feel we didn't do enough."

Ayers was a terrorist in the late 1960s and 1970s whose radical group set bombs at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

You might wonder what Obama was doing working with a character like this. And you might wonder how an unrepentant terrorist got a huge grant and cooperation from the Chicago public school system. You might wonder—if you don't know Chicago. For this is a city with a civic culture in which politicians, in the words of a story often told by former congressman, federal judge, and Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva, "don't want nobody nobody sent." That's what Mikva remembers being told when he went to a Democratic ward headquarters to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, and it rings true. And it's a civic culture in which there's nobody better to send you than your parents.

That's how William Ayers got where he was. When he came out of hiding because the federal government was unable to prosecute him (because of government misconduct), he got a degree in education from Columbia and then moved to Chicago and got a job on the education faculty of the University of Illinois-Chicago Circle. How did he get that job? Well, it can't have hurt that his father, Thomas Ayers, was chairman of Commonwealth Edison (now Exelon) and a charter member of the Chicago establishment. As Mayor Richard M. Daley said recently, in arguing that the Ayers association should not be held against Obama, "His father was a great friend of my father."

For Obama, the outsider who gained the trust of the insiders, the position is different. He was willing to use Ayers and ally with him despite his terrorist past and lack of repentance. An unrepentant terrorist, who bragged of bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, was a fit associate. Ayers evidently helped Obama gain insider status in Chicago civic life and politics—how much, we can't be sure unless the Richard J. Daley Library opens the CAC archive. But most American politicians would not have chosen to associate with a man with Ayers's past or of Ayers's beliefs. It's something voters might reasonably want to take into account.

One of the few of the MSM, Jake Tapper, Senior Washington Correspondent of ABC News wrote:

They served on a board together when Obama was a state senator. Ayres donated $200 to Obama's campaign in 2001. They sat on a panel together in 2002 called "Intellectuals in Times of Crisis." Obama went to Ayres and Dohrn's home in 1995 to be introduced to some of the more influential liberals in the area by the state senator he was preparing to succeed, Alice Palmer.

Last month, when the ad by The American Issues Project targeted Obama's association with Ayres was run in 150 cities in battleground states, the Obama campaign tried to prevent the ad from being shown and tried to sic the Justice Department on the organization. Obviously, Obama does not want his association with Ayres to be known by the electorate. Fortunately, the move by the Obama campaign only drew more attention to the ad.

At the time, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, "The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could."

When Ayres had the charges against him dismissed (due to FBI misconduct), he boasted, "Guilty as hell, but free as a bird!"

The association of Barack Obama and William Ayres and Bernardine Dohrn should be enough to disqualify Obama for the presidency or even a State Department or Defense Department security clearance.

The MSM has pretty much ignored this story, with few exceptions. They only picked up on it when the American Issues Project ad ran and the Obama campaign screamed bloody murder.

It is now obvious that Chicago is the hotbed for radicalism, and Obama was right in the thick of it. His associations call to question the fitness and judgment of Barack Obama to be elected president.