playblu on August 21, 2008 at 10:25 AM

acat on August 21, 2008 at 10:37 AM

Brothers from other Mothers, I-80 and I-57 in southern Crook County, down the street from my fun new neighbor, Jeremiah “G-d D-mn America!” Wright.

You’re killing me. Eff this God-forsaken place, this Illinois.

And what kind of guy approaching geezerhood would pose for this kind of picture?

Certainly not someone who has left behind the days of his youthful disrespect for this country, someone who figures throwing bombs was a mistake as Dimwit Daley says. No, I think we have a true believer here, who is ready to rub anyone’s nose into their inferior ideas.

And who are the people who can be friends with such a little man? People who agree with him. People who don’t agree with him are going to get the “I stand on your stupid flag, dipstick” treatment. He has the personal wealth to insulate his lifestyle from being a jerk and hating anyone not like him.

A friend of such a man should not be President of this country, and that is why those records are playing hide and seek…

Move on people! So he bombed government institutions, it was a mistake for crying out loud.

carbon_footprint on August 21, 2008 at 9:20 AM

I think you mean blockheaded. Or inartful.

Society should have scraped our feet of these sneering low lifes long ago (..”in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan”).

I can’t imagine anything that hurt Sr. Daley’s reputation anymore than those days. I’m hopeful that the perfidy shown at this time by Jr. will finally have Chicago sick of the Daley’s, forevermore.

And, you all have got to see the documentary “Weather Underground”. Amazing stuff, at least.

Unrepentant is the word, is the word…

Shivas Irons on August 21, 2008 at 11:39 AM

In Chicago politics power and money trump anything, including family. After all, history can be conveniently rewritten later if one has the aforementioned tools.

A recent New York Times profile of Obama’s days on the South Side of Chicago contends that, according to unnamed “aides” to Obama, Obama first met Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn at the Hyde Park home of the couple. This meeting occurred apparently in November, 1995 according to an anonymous blogger who claims to have been there, as Obama was launching his campaign for the state senate of Illinois.

If the Ayers/Dohrn-Obama meet and greet took place in November, 1995, it cannot have been the first time that Obama met Ayers. By that time Obama was already Chairman of the Board of the $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge Grant program that was designed by Ayers. Ayers began the grant proposal design process in December 1993 and the grant was formally announced in January, 1995. Barack Obama was identified as the Chair in press reports in June of 1995.

So, unless Ayers helped pick a board chair he had never met and would never meet until the “meet and greet,” Obama, in fact, met Ayers well before the launching of his state senate campaign. Of course, it is very likely that there would have had to have been a very close working relationship between Ayers, as the lead architect of the Annenberg proposal, and the first board chairman. They would have had to have agreed on basic educational policy issues. And Obama would have been crucial in leading fund raising efforts since the $50 million grant was conditioned on a 2-1 match from other donors (and something they were quite successful at – raising an additional $60 million by 1999).

As I have written here before, my hypothesis is that Ayers and Obama had an older relationship and a deeper political affinity than has been made clear until now. The attempts by so many around Obama, and by Obama himself, to portray this as an arms length relationship simply do not fit the facts that are available.

For example, the Annenberg Challenge grant money was aimed at solidifying the school reforms put in place in Chicago in 1988 when a campaign for “local control” emerged in the wake of a teachers’ strike that galvanized business and community opposition to the power of teachers’ union and the Chicago school bureaucracy.

Both Obama and Ayers were active in that reform post-strike campaign. Ayers helped organize a major force in the lobbying for that 1988 campaign, the Alliance For Better Chicago Schools, or ABCs. The Developing Communities Project which Obama headed at that time was a member of the ABCs, apparently one of the few members of the ABCs that worked with the black community. Many in the black community knew that teaching, the unions and school administration were one avenue to the middle class for blacks and thus were wary of the reform effort.

Certainly support for “local control” would have been a pre-requisite to allowing Obama to chair, at such a young and untested age, the Annenberg Challenge. Thus, I think we can safely date the beginning of the Obama-Ayers relationship to at least 1988 when the ABCs effort was underway in Chicago schools. That was also when Ayers and Obama would have met up with the future Executive Director of the Annenberg Challenge, who would have been hired by Ayers and Obama, Ken Rolling. Rolling in 1988 was on the staff of the Woods Fund which provided several grants to the school reform effort and to Obama’s Developing Communities Project at that time. Of course, a decade later, in 1999, as is already widely known, Ayers would join Obama on the board of the Woods Fund itself.
Posted by Steve Diamond at 7:32 PM

I can’t imagine anything that hurt Sr. Daley’s reputation anymore than those days. I’m hopeful that the perfidy shown at this time by Jr. will finally have Chicago sick of the Daley’s, forevermore.

And, you all have got to see the documentary “Weather Underground”. Amazing stuff, at least.

Unrepentant is the word, is the word…

The Obama Cabinet will make the Clinton Cabinet look like normal people.

I can’t imagine what kind of freak show this guy would appoint with a rubber stamp Congress.

Bill Ayers might end up being the Secretary of Defense.

Mistakes? So what?

Daley on the one hand is dismissing the association but on the other hand admits it was a “mistake” and blocks access to the truth.

That’s Chicago for ya.

/sarc?

Well, most Americans don’t have friends who plotted to bomb the Pentagon, or assisted radicals in robberies that resulted in murder. Not only did Barack Obama make these people his friends

As many here have pointed out, the story as first told wasn’t that they were friends. As first told, it was kind of hinted that Alice Palmer had chosen Ayers’s house to introduce Obama to the neighborhood, and there was ‘no evidence’ they had any other association. Then Axelrod himself said they knew each other because their kids go to school together (just not in the same decade).
They’ve covered up the association, and there has to be a reason for that.

Unfortunately for these guys, especially these days with the Feds watching their every move, when a Chicago Machine Politician is watching the back of another Chicago Machine Politician, they are also looking for a good place to stick the knife in.

You must be new here . . .

http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/05/when-did-barack-obama-meet-bill-ayers.html

http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/05/obamaayers-update-didnt-mayor-daley.html

http://globallabor.blogspot.com/2008/04/who-sent-obama.html

great reading, some are a little long

“People keep trying to align himself with Barack Obama,” Daley said. “It’s really unfortunate. They’re friends. So what? People do make mistakes in the past. You move on. This is a new century, a new time. He reflects back and he’s been making a strong contribution to our community.”

.
Is ‘reflects back’ a way to imply apology without saying it (since it is obviously untrue)?

You left out the good parts.

Like how all of Cook County (locally pronounced “Crook County”) outside Chicago is allegedly Republican but actually Kleptocrat – as corrupt as the city just with different stickers…

Like how this makes any working Illinois Republican Party impossible – how do you have, on the one hand, a bunch of crooks claiming to be Republicans and expect ‘em to get along with the Religious Right from DuPage, and the farmers who just want to be left alone south of I-80?

Oh wait, you’re right. There *are* no good parts!

Condolences.

(For reference, a cat lives somewhere west of 294)