A Lesson in Political Rhetoric

 

Barack Obama said in his speech that John McCain has voted with George Bush 90% of the time.

1. George Bush does not vote in the Senate.

2. Most of the votes in the Senate are unanimous. Perhaps over 80%. They are votes such as honoring Albert Einstein, honoring the student who wins the national spelling bee, commemorating Plymouth Rock, or unanimous resolutions etc etc. So by that regard Barack Obama has voted with John McCain over 80% of the time.

3. But on policy votes, those are the votes where there is a difference in policy, Obama is listed as the most partisan and ideologically left of all in the Senate. The bi-partisanship he talks about has never been reflected in his record.

Obama says that he will debate John McCain anywhere anytime or words to that immediate effect. Yet McCain has offered to appear with Obama in debates and a series of townhall meetings and the Obama campaign refused. Obama also refused to appear in front of McCain in front of military vets.

Obama talks of getting rid of government programs that don’t work. Great. Would someone please show me a bill he proposed to eliminate a redundant or failing government program.

Campaign speeches may be stirring, but it is wise to keep mindful about them inspite of the emotionalism they often contain.

Class

I have never been a McCainiac, but I must say I found this rather refreshing.

More Proof: Obama Lied About His Work with Marxist Revolutionary Terrorist Professor Ayers

Stanley Kurtz, who is featured in the previous post below, worked to get these papers released and they show that once again Obama just didn’t tell us the truth during the campaign. Investors Business Daily tells of what they have learned from these new documents so far:

When Obama’s association with William Ayers was raised at a Democratic debate this year, Obama replied: “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood. . . . He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.”

Tuesday’s release of papers from a Chicago school reform project known as the Annenberg Challenge shows once again Barack Obama has a problem with the truth.

The long-sought records that were kept under wraps at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference as the education project got under way. The records also show the two continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 operation of the program.

Clearly the relationship between Ayers and Obama is much deeper and longer than Obama admits. They in fact were partners in various entities and regularly exchanged ideas, including on how to turn Chicago schools into re-education camps to create a generation of social revolutionaries.

Tuesday’s release of the papers of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were sought by the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz, who had met a stone wall erected by Obama’s UIC friends. UIC temporarily closed the supposedly public archives after Kurtz inquired. Ayers, who has long taught there, may have had a hand in suppressing the documents showing Obama to be a liar.

The UIC records show that in the 1990s, Ayers was instrumental in starting the Annenberg Challenge, securing a $50 million grant to reform the Chicago Public Schools, part of a national initiative funded by Ambassador Walter Annenberg, who died in 2002.

Obama was given the Annenberg board chairmanship only months before his first run for office. He ran the fiscal arm that distributed grants to schools and raised matching funds. Ayers participated in a second entity known as the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operational arm that worked with grant recipients. They met and talked often.

When Obama first ran for office, articles in the Chicago Defender and the local Hyde Park Herald mentioned his Annenberg chairmanship among his qualifications.

During Obama’s tenure as Annenberg chairman, Ayers’ own education projects received substantial funding. As we’ve noted in our series, “The Audacity of Socialism,” Ayers, now a tenured distinguished professor of education at UIC, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

One of Ayer’s descriptions for a course called “Improving Learning Environments” says prospective K-12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.”

The Annenberg papers are quite extensive – 132 boxes containing 947 file folders with 70 linear feet of material. They undoubtedly contain more surprises regarding Obama’s relationship with Ayers, one of many relationships Obama has sought to hide.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304729375940845

Limbaugh – this new information discovered in the “Chicago Papers” and the thuggery used to attack Stanley Kurtz (see previous post below) “is a window as to how Obama would govern.”

I don’t always agree with Limbaugh, but when I ponder the incredible number of incidents of Stalinist behavior by far leftist academics that have been documented on this site as well as on FIRE’s and ADF’s sites, and I compare it to what Obama and Ayres tried to accomplish with millions of dollars in funding in order to undermine academic standards and turn schools into indoctrination centers, it shows that Limbaugh’s concerns are not without merit.

If Obama were able to nominate people to the court with views shown in the “Chicago Papers” the threat to student freedom, civil rights and academic freedom would be difficult to understate.

Related Post HERE.

Obama Campaign Smearing Media Critics

From the Chicago’s Tribune’s Washington Politics Blog:

by John McCormick and Steve Schmadeke, updated

DENVER — Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign organized its supporters Wednesday night to confront Tribune-owned WGN-AM in Chicago for having a critic of the Illinois Democrat on its air.

“WGN radio is giving right-wing hatchet man Stanley Kurtz a forum to air his baseless, fear-mongering terrorist smears,” Obama’s campaign wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “He’s currently scheduled to spend a solid two-hour block from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. pushing lies, distortions, and manipulations about Barack and University of Illinois professor William Ayers.”

Kurtz, a conservative writer, recently wrote an article for the National Review that looked at Obama’s ties to Ayers, a former 1960s radical who later emerged as a school reform advocate in Chicago.

The magazine had been blocked in its initial attempts to obtain records from the University of Illinois at Chicago regarding a school reform initiative called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama chaired and Ayers co-founded.

Obama critics were quick to suggest that political clout could be involved in seeking to protect Obama from embarrassment. The school later reserved its position and made the records available Tuesday.

On Wednesday evening, Obama’s campaign urged supporters to call the radio station to complain.

“Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse,” the note said.

“It is absolutely unacceptable that WGN would give a slimy character assassin like Kurtz time for his divisive, destructive ranting on our public airwaves,” the note continued. “At the very least, they should offer sane, honest rebuttal to every one of Kurtz’s lies.”

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/08/obama_campaign_confronts_wgn_r.html

Of course the biggest problem the Obama campaign has, is that Kurtz’s statements about Obama’s early political supporters are not lies or distortions at all. This information has been reported since Obama ran for state office years ago and is very well documented.

The Obama campaign says that his long term partnership with Ayers, a Marxist terrorist who planted bombs to overthrow the US Government, is unfair to criticize because Ayers did these crimes when Obama was eight years old. However Obama was not eight years old when Ayers wrote on September 11, 2001 that not only did he not regret setting those bombs, he wished he could have done more. Obama was not eight years old when Ayers sponsored meet the candidate nights at his home for Obama.  He was not eight years old when they worked to give money they raised to antisemitic groups.

The list of seedy characters that Obama used to launch his political career is very long and goes way beyond casual associations with a few people who later turned out to be a little nutty. I wrote an extensive article about this last May. Take a read and you will have a better idea of what Kurtz is talking about.

Says one of Kurtz’s radio show producers:

“And, if at all possible, we wanted to get the Obama campaign, to get their side of the story,” Christenson said. “That’s why the uproar is kind of amazing, because we wanted the Obama campaign’s take as well.”

By the way Stanley Kurtz is not just a radio show host. Here is a part of his BIO from National review:

He received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University and later taught at Harvard, winning several teaching awards for his work in a “Great Books” program. Kurtz was also Dewey Prize Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Chicago. Kurtz has published extensively on family life, child rearing, religion, and psychology in various parts of the world – particularly India, where he did his field research.

Related Post HERE.

Introducing Cinnamon Stillwell

Today the Vision is adding Cinnamon Stillwell to our blog roll. Here is an example of her work:

When Speech Becomes a Crime

by Cinnamon Stillwell

June 28, 2006

San Francisco Chronicle

• Roman Catholic Robert Smith is fired from an appointment on the Washington Metro transit authority board by Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich for the crime of saying that he doesn’t approve of homosexuality.
• Journalist and author Oriana Fallaci cannot visit her native country of Italy for fear of being thrown in prison because of a lawsuit brought against her by the Italian Muslim Union for the crime of “defaming Islam.”
• British neo-Nazi David Irving is sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for a 1989 speech in which he committed the crime of Holocaust denial.
• College Republican Steve Hinkle is found guilty by California Polytechnic State University (San Luis Obispo) for “disruption” for the crime of putting up a flyer advertising a black conservative speaker.

What do the above examples have in common? They are the logical outgrowth of a dangerous trend sweeping the Western world: the criminalization and censorship of speech.

Outright censorship and draconian speech codes have long been a staple of Third World authoritarian regimes. But Western democracies and in particular the United States (where the First Amendment is supposed to reign supreme) have always prided themselves on protecting free speech. Yet because of the creeping reach of political correctness, one can now be put in prison, lose a job, be kicked out of school or be otherwise censored simply for uttering an unpopular opinion.

It’s called hate speech. If there ever were a more Orwellian concept, it would be difficult to find. For much like the concept of “thought crimes” in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” hate crimes and hate speech suppose intent on the part of the “perpetrator” that may or may not have any basis in reality. What is often mere criticism or disapproval is labeled “hatred” and thus made worthy of punishment. Such a perspective demands that one think only nice thoughts about others. But when it did it become law that we have to like everyone?

http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/7125.html

Cinnamon has been a champion of free speech rights and has also been a champion at exposing the flavor of antisemitism known as anti-Israelism. Anti-Israelism is often used by antisemitic activists, academics and propagandists to cloak their antisemitism in bogus scholarship. It is more than just being against Israel or opposing their policies. It is the systematic use of bad scholarship, one sided and exaggerated claims and other clearly deceptive propaganda techniques in order to demonize Jews. The US Commission on Civil Rights has recognized this flavor of antisemitism for what it is.

There are some academics on our campus who have engaged in this behavior from time to time. I am not saying that such people should be censored. This activity should be exposed when it does take place. Sometimes this version of antisemitism crosses the line into unlawful discrimination and unlawful harassment. Hopefully we will see none of that in IUSB’s future.

Cinnamon is the Northern California Representative for Campus Watch, an organization that monitors and combats antisemitism on campus. Here is Cinnamon’s blog site!

St. Joe County Republican Women Chapter Holding Charity Food Drive

Getting back to some more local news. The St. Joe County Republican Women are holding a charity food drive. Here is their web site! This is a very active group as you can see by their calendar for August and September. For any ladies looking to plug into the local community or who wish to learn more about politics and community events in a fun social environment, groups like this are hard to beat.

UPDATE: St Joe County GOP has two open internship opportunities, a part time political director and a part time administrator. Both postions require 10-15 hours a week. If interested please call Chris Riley at 299-1388.