Funding extremists
“It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg,” Stanley Kurtz writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).
“Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright’s sermons, Obama gave legitimacy - and a whole lot of money - to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Rev. Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago.
“All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s,” Mr. Kurtz said.
“John McCain, take note. Obama’s tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man’s choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright’s anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign.”
Obama and ACORN
“At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America’s Founders had been ’community organizers’ - like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren’t like that any more. Mr. Obama’s kind of organizers work at ACORN, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country,” the Wall Street Journal said Tuesday in an editorial.
“ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We’ve written about them for years, but ACORN is now getting more attention as John McCain’s campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and ACORN’s ties to Mr. Obama. It’s about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government,” the newspaper said.
“ACORN uses various affiliated groups to agitate for ’a living wage,’ for ’affordable housing,’ for ’tax justice’ and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting ’strikes’ against banks so they’d lower credit standards.
“But the organization’s real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), ACORN has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, ACORN’s American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100 percent of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the ACORN Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an ’affordable housing’ provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to ACORN.
“All this money gives ACORN the ability to pursue its other great hobby: electing liberals. ACORN is spending $16 million this year to register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these registrations are real. …
“Which brings us to Mr. Obama, who got his start as a Chicago ’community organizer’ at ACORN’s side. In 1992 he led voter-registration efforts as the director of Project Vote, which included ACORN. This past November, he lauded ACORN’s leaders for being ’smack dab in the middle’ of that effort. Mr. Obama also served as a lawyer for ACORN in 1995, in a case against Illinois to increase access to the polls.
“During his tenure on the board of Chicago’s Woods Fund, that body funneled more than $200,000 to ACORN. More recently, the Obama campaign paid $832,000 to an ACORN affiliate. The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money was for ’staging, sound, lighting.’ It later admitted the cash was to get out the vote.”
Dowd vs. Palin
“Matthew Dowd, a prominent political consultant and chief strategist for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign eviscerated John McCain on Tuesday for his choice of Sarah Palin as vice president,” Sam Stein writes at www.huffingtonpost.com.
“Dowd proclaimed that, in his heart of hearts, McCain knew he put the country at risk with his VP choice and that he would ’have to live’ with that fact for the rest of his career.
” ’They didn’t let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP,’ Dowd declared during the Time Warner Summit panel. ’When Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman, which I fundamentally believed would have given John McCain the best opportunity in this race … as soon as he picked Palin, that whole ready versus not ready argument was not credible.’
“Saying that Palin was a ’net negative’ on the ticket, he went on: ’[Mr. McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with. … He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that.’ ”
Media myth
A look back at the original language used by Sarah Palin at a recent rally where a man shouted “Kill him!” makes it “nearly impossible for the exclamation to be misunderstood as an attack on Obama unless you happen to be a [mainstream media] member just dying to think the worst of the Right,” Mary Katharine Ham writes in a blog at www.weeklystandard.com.
The writer, citing the original account from The Washington Post of the Florida rally by Dana Milbank, notes that Mrs. Palin was talking about former domestic terrorist William Ayers when the man shouted the two words.
“The subject of Palin’s sentence is never in doubt,” the writer said, after quoting from Mr. Milbank’s article. “It’s William Ayers, not Barack Obama. Predictably, the story of the man who allegedly yelled ’kill him’ about Barack Obama has found its way into an [Associated Press] story, and then found its way into a thousand iterations of the story of the McCain-Palin rage McCain and Palin are allegedly inciting.”
Those ’Zionists’
“Prepare for a new America: That’s the message that the Rev. Jesse Jackson conveyed to participants in the first World Policy Forum, held [in Evian, France] last week,” New York Post columnist Amir Taheri writes.
“He promised ’fundamental changes’ in U.S. foreign policy - saying America must ’heal wounds’ it has caused to other nations, revive its alliances and apologize for the ’arrogance of the Bush administration.’
“The most important change would occur in the Middle East, where ’decades of putting Israel’s interests first’ would end.
“Jackson believes that, although ’Zionists who have controlled American policy for decades’ remain strong, they’ll lose a great deal of their clout when Barack Obama enters the White House.”
Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.