Palin Says She Would Help Obama

I just want to say: Ick. What she needs to do is get her loons in line, the ones she incited to bad behavior and violence. That would be a good start.

CNN: The Alaska governor said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer that if Obama asked her for help on some of the issues she highlighted during this year's campaign, such as energy or services for special-needs children, "it would be my honor to assist and support our new president and the new administration."

"And I speak for other Republicans and Republican governors, also," said Palin, whom Sen. John McCain chose as his running mate in August. "They would be willing also to seize this opportunity that we have to progress this nation together, in a united front."

But asked moments later about some of the tough rhetoric she hurled from the stump, she said she was "still concerned" about Obama's ties to former Weather Underground member-turned-Chicago college professor William Ayers.

"If anybody still wants to talk about it, I will," she said. "Because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol.
"That's an association that still bothers me, and I think it's fair to still talk about it," she continued. "However, the campaign is over. That chapter is closed. Now is the time to move on and make sure all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation."

PolitiFact: McCain's Pants Are on Fire

This is for the people who are still confused on the Ayers issue, we'll start with PolitiFact's conclusion:

This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism. That's Pants on Fire wrong.

Some more meat:

Politifact: Ayers, who received his doctorate in education from Columbia University in 1987 and is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was active in getting the foundation up and running. He and two other activists led the effort to secure the grant from Annenberg, and he worked without pay in the early months of 1995, prior to the board's hiring of an executive director, to help the foundation get incorporated and formulate its bylaws, said Ken Rolling, who was the foundation's only executive director. Ayers went on to become a member of the "collaborative," an advisory group that advised the board of directors and the staff.

However, Ayers "was never on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge," and he "never made a decision programmatically or had a vote," Rolling said.

"He (Ayers) was at board meetings — which, by the way, were open — as a guest," Rolling said. "That is not anything near Bill Ayers and Barack Obama running the Chicago Annenberg Challenge."

Now, was the foundation radical?

The McCain campaign cited several pieces of evidence for that allegation, including a 1995 invitation from the foundation for applications from schools "that want to make radical changes in the way teachers teach and students learn." The campaign appears to have confused two different definitions of the word "radical." Clearly the invitation referred to "a considerable departure from the usual or traditional," rather than "advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs."

The campaign also cited two projects the foundation funded, one having to do with a United Nations-themed Peace School and another that focused on African-American studies.

"That is radical in the eye of this campaign and we imagine in the eyes of most Americans," said Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for McCain. "It is a subjective thing, and there are going to be people in Berkeley and Chicago who think that is totally legitimate."

Teaching about the United Nations and African-American studies may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's hardly "radical" in the same way Ayers' Vietnam-era activities were. Moreover, most of the projects the foundation funded (more on that below) were not remotely controversial.
....
"The whole idea of it being radical when it was this tie of blue-chip, white-collar, CEOs and civic leaders is just ridiculous," said the foundation's former development director, Marianne Philbin.

The foundation gave money to groups of public schools – usually three to 10 – who partnered with some sort of outside organization to improve their students' achievement.
....
In his opinion piece, Kurtz puts a sinister spin on this: "Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with 'external partners,' which actually got the money...CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN)."

Rollings said the foundation tried to fund the schools directly, but doing so proved to be a "bureaucratic nightmare." But any external group that received money had to have created a program in partnership with a network of public schools.
Read the rest

McCain Camp Branding Obama a Terrorist

I received this image in an email today. The email comes via Humanevents.com and is from the group, Our Country Deserves Better, the pac that is pushing the DVD that says Obama is a terrorist. McCain has to know about this and if he was as patriotic as he says he is, he could put an end to this nonsense and I'd feel a whole lot better if he was elected president. But we can't have a president who inspires hate. 

Frank Rich: By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

McCain Renews Ayers Attack

I thought for a minute that McCain was going to take the high road since he called off his pit bull yesterday, after days of innuendo that Obama is a radical terrorist Muslim. Seems Palin was inciting too much hatred at her rallies. Her supporters are into that theme. Palin is so inspiring.  But McCain, eyes closed, has gone full bore down the dirty road. And we'll see about Palin because she'll be out on her own again today.

Politico:
McCAIN LAUNCHESAYERS WEB VIDEO – Politico's Andy Barr: 'John McCain's campaign released a new 90-second web [video] Thursday on Barack Obama's relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers. ... 'Barack Obama and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. Friends. They've worked together for years. But Obama tries to hide it. Why? Obama's friendship with terrorist Ayers isn't the issue. The issue is Barack Obama's judgment and candor. When Obama just says, 'This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood.' Americans say, 'Where's the truth, Barack?' Barack Obama. Too risky for America.'

EXCLUSIVE: A TV AD IS PLANNED.

McCAIN CAMPAIGN SENIOR ADVISER NICOLLE WALLACE, during round of morning shows, SAYS OBAMA 'LIED.'

Nicolle, to ABC's Robin Roberts on 'Good Morning America': 'Nobody in America sitting around the kitchen table ... cares about a washed-up terrorist like Mr. Ayers, which he is. It's about telling the truth about your record. And if we can't trust Barack Obama to tell the truth about the guys in his neighborhood, who also happen to be domestic terrorists, who also happen to be people who have held events for him, how can we trust him to tell the truth about what he could do as president?'

Obama's Robert Gibbs: 'You heard a crazy answer right there from Nicolle. Let me address some of the things that Nicolle knowingly misstated, in another desperate and dishonest attack from the McCain campaign.'

WALLACE: 'Do I look desperate?'

WALLACE, on NBC's 'Today': 'The point is he lied when he first talked about his association.'

Obama's Bill BURTON, on Fox: 'Even after all these reports, at the end of the day, their paths crossed a couple times. Did he know about his past when he went over to his house? No. When he found out about the terrible past, did he say the actions were detestable and deplorable? Absolutely.'

Here's exactly why the McCain camp is taking the low road and McCain knows it, but lacks the wisdom or the integrity to do anything about it:

GRAND RAPIDS -- Following an unpopular president, supporting a costly war, and now facing a financial crisis at home, Sen. John McCain's race for the presidency should be in worse shape.

"What makes John McCain plausible is Barack Obama," news anchor Ray Suarez told a local crowd Wednesday.

The "pseudo controversies" about Obama's background are symbols for a "racial calculus" hard at work in U.S. politics.

Opinions about Obama's inexperience, his childhood in Indonesia, and the persistent but untrue rumors of him being Muslim are stand-ins for something his detractors cannot admit, Suarez said.

Particularly, "religion has become a proxy for race," he said.

Characterizing Obama as Muslim "is a way to confer otherness on him for those people who are uncomfortable saying they're against him because he's black."

Suarez spoke at Fountain Street Church as part of the Diversity lecture series. He is the senior correspondent for PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and former host of NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program.

That's why Campbell Brown is wrong on this one. So is Glenn Beck.
More on this:

NYT: McCain may feel compelled to go back to his guilt-by-association theme. And this has me feeling very guilty about my associates.

The McCain folks have been obsessed with William Ayers, a neighbor of Obama’s who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Back in the 1960s, Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were leaders of the Weather Underground, an antiwar group whose penchant for violence was exceeded only by its haplessness. Ayers has since become an education expert and was named Chicago’s Citizen of the Year in 1997. He gave Obama a house party when Obama was running for the State Senate.

In my experience, most State Senate hopefuls are so thrilled at any sign of interest that they would happily attend a reception given by a homeless couple in their cardboard box. But even though Obama was 8 years old at the time the Weathermen were in the news, that house party puts all their misdeeds on his platter. Sarah Palin has been telling her increasingly scary rallies that he is somebody “who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists.”

Fox News, in a one-hour special on Obama’s associates hosted by Sean Hannity, came up with an “Internet journalist” named Andy Martin who has spent his life running bizarre political campaigns with occasional detours into the clink and filing lawsuits laced with paranoia and anti-Semitism. Based on this expertise, Martin deduced that Ayers was the puppet master of Obama’s rise in politics and that Obama’s community-organizer gig was actually training for “a radical overthrow of the government.”

To me, this Ayers line of attack seems like just preaching to the choir. It seems people inclined to think Obama is a terrorist Muslim will bite the bait. But really, how many stupid people are there in America? That's a scary question.

McCain Supporter's Violent Ties

Okay. 

This is out of hand. But McCain pulled a sneaky one. He called off his pit bull at the rally today, who didn't mention Ayers or suggest Obama was a terrorist in any way. But McCain sent out a memo on the sly to the media. Turns out the dude in the memo has some violent ties of his own. This is what McCain gets for tapping into the wingnut information system.

WSJ: The McCain campaign, in a continuing effort to link Barack Obama to domestic terrorism, released a statement Wednesday from a New York supporter, recounting how his family home was firebombed by the radical 1960s group founded by Obama supporter William Ayers.

But the McCain supporter, John M. Murtagh, has his own ties to radical protesters: He served as a lawyer for a Catholic priest who led protests at an abortion clinic that turned violent.

Mr. Murtagh embarked on a media campaign in the spring to publicize the 1970 firebombing of his family home by the Weather Underground, the group that Mr. Ayers helped to found. His account of that incident, posted on the Web, has been linked to by right-leaning bloggers. Mr. Murtagh, a lawyer and a member of the Yonkers, N.Y., city council, gave a television interview last May to Fox News's Greta Van Susteren, and recently appeared on the Fox News show hosted by Sean Hannity. Mr. Murtagh said he was nine years old at the time his family was targeted because his father, a judge, had presided over a trial of members of the radical Black Panther party.

Why McCain's Ayers Attack is Weak

It's not only weak. It's flat out disgraceful.

CNN: Now, if someone was seen as an acceptable figure by business, political and education figures, many of whom support both Democrats and Republicans, should Obama be faulted for sitting on a board with the guy?

So, let's use that same logic and apply it to McCain.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Democrat from Chicago who serves as one of the national co-chairs for Obama, told me on The Tom Joyner Morning Show that if we are to use the association tag as evidence of a candidate being unfit for president, what about McCain serving and working alongside people with virulent bigoted pasts like Sens. Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd?

Do we have evidence that these individuals committed specific acts against African-Americans during Jim Crow? No. But we do know that their hateful words, and willingness to uphold laws that were absolutely anti-American, did not represent the best of this nation.

Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 with a platform of maintaining segregation. Based on Helms' policies, he didn't see blacks as full Americans.

Bombing the Pentagon is horrible and indefensible. But declaring yourself a patriot while you speak such hateful and venomous words against your own countrymen, who just happen to be black, and then trying to oppress them, is just as indefensible.

So, did McCain work with them? Did he not speak with them? Should McCain have declared that he would not work alongside these men because of their past? Should the self-described maverick who believes in integrity and character have taken the honorable stance of resigning from the Senate to protest these hateful characters serving in the U.S. Senate?

No. And this is why this association argument is so weak and impotent.

For goodness' sakes, Byrd was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terrorist organization!

Now, if Ayers was involved in these despicable acts today -- or Byrd and his late Senate colleagues -- then it is fair game.

But no candidate should have to be held responsible for the actions of someone else that took place years ago.

For some of us this makes sense but McCain has adopted the wingnut mode of attack -- that Obama is a secret radical Muslim terrorist. We don't know if McCain truly believes that or if he's just exploiting that smear in an attempt to win an election.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck Smears Obama

Barbara Walters says let's move on from attacks.

Whoopi explains Bill Ayers pretty well, putting his actions in context with what was going on with the nation during that time, but not well enough for Hasselbeck or other conservatives who are out to smear Obama.

Hasselbeck, a mouthpiece for wingnuts, totally brainwashed, a little loony for daytime TV, says accusing Obama of being a terrorist is not a smear. She also has attacked Michelle Obama.

Watch a good fight:

Obama Fights the ACORN and Ayers Smears

Wingnuts gone wild! This is their last best hope to help elect their man McCain.

Fox and the republicans have stepped up its attacks, trying to tie Obama to a group called ACORN. And the Internet is rife with rumors about Obama and former weatherman William Ayers.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a host on The View, is also in on this smear, mentioning it whenever she gets the chance. She also smeared Michelle Obama when Michelle wasn't looking. 

A DVD that tries to tie Obama to terrorists is also making the rounds. 
I got a lovely note just today from Gary Kreep, executive director of the Republican Majority Campaign PAC, who's asking for donations.

P.S. Thanks to our campaign to expose the TRUTH about Mr. Obama and his radical terrorist friend and mentor, THE WORD IS SPREADING. The mainstream media is being forced to finally report on this relationship, because the grassroots across America are demanding it. Clips like this one on YouTube are being uploaded and viewed by hundreds of thousands of people online -- but we MUST get the word out even more in the mainstream media to be able to IMPACT this election!

I like their use of CAPS. 

Obama camp fights back. 

From Fight the Smears:
Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995. (For more about Barack’s career, check out our Obama bio.)

Ken Blackwell is best known today for disenfranchising Democratic voters in his dual role as Ohio Secretary of State and chair of George Bush’s Ohio campaign in 2004. To see him shed crocodile tears for the integrity of the vote while making accusations about Barack and ACORN with absolutely no basis in fact is disturbing.

Blackwell’s attacks against ACORN and community organizers continue a vile Republican pattern of mockery and viciousness against this noble profession. Community organizers are the very individuals Republicans should be celebrating for helping people to help themselves rather than depending on the government.

Next up:

In 2004, Harold Simmons was the biggest funder of the manipulative smear group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In 2008, Simmons is the sole donor funding a vicious attack ad in some battleground states that uses tortured logic and clumsy innuendo to invent a tie between Barack Obama and terrorism.

The ad goes completely beyond the pale by cynically exploiting the tragedy of 9/11 in an unfounded connection with Chicago academic William Ayers. Then it claims that Ayers somehow “launched” Barack Obama’s career — an assertion so outlandish that not even Simmons’ fellow discredited Swift Boater Jerome Corsi included it in his smear book.

The ad may even be a criminal violation of campaign finance laws. Simmons has previously been fined tens of thousands of dollars for campaign finance violations – including forging the signatures of his own daughters to make political contributions from trust funds.

Here's who Ayers is today:

NYT: Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform.

“He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview this week, explaining that he has long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues. Mr. Daley, whose father was Chicago’s mayor during the street violence accompanying the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the so-called Days of Rage the following year, said he saw the bombings of that time in the context of a polarized and turbulent era.

“This is 2008,” Mr. Daley said. “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.”

Here's the silly video that Gary the Kreep linked to in his email as evidence. Wingnuts must think people are as dumb as they are. Sometimes I wonder if they really believe this stuff themselves or if they're just desperate to win an election. I mean, where are the critical thinking skills?

Plot Against Obama in General Election

they're out there practicing the dark arts of politics, putting together the clips of obama and the weatherman, getting ready to paint a dark, dark picture of obama. the obama camp says it won't be swiftboated. it will respond quickly to republican attack ads.

newsweek: Operatives such as David Bossie, whose Citizens United group made the Willie Horton ad that helped sink Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential bid, are sharpening knives as expectations mount that Obama will be their target in the fall. Bossie says he is assembling material for TV spots about Obama's ties with Ayers, a Chicago professor and unrepentant former member of the Weather Underground, a group that bombed several government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. The Ayers issue bounced around right-wing media for months, but it received broad exposure at last week's debate on ABC, when Obama was asked a question about their relationship. Obama, who lives near Ayers in Chicago's Hyde Park, attended an event at Ayers's house when Obama ran for the state Senate in 1995—and served on the board of a nonprofit with him for several years. "Obama is aware of the acts Ayers committed when he was 8 years old and has called them 'detestable'," says spokesman Ben LaBolt, adding that Obama occasionally bumps into Ayers in his neighborhood "but has not seen him for months." At a recent dinner party, according to one guest who asked not to be identified discussing a private gathering, Ayers "ridiculed" the notion that Obama shared his left-wing views: "He thought the idea that there was a political connection between them was absurd." (Ayers declined to comment.)

these people are seething, powerful and ignorant and have no desire to meet on any middle ground. believe it or not, the following comes from a religious theologian:

human events: Your old paradigms are outdated, Mr. Obama. If you want to represent yourself as the leader of a new -- color neutral -- world order, you ought to look at the world which my family represents.

On the other hand, African American youth in the US drop out of high school at alarming rates. They have chosen to become a permanent underclass. They do not have hope-filled immigrant grandparents, nor apparently the right mentors. My Maternal Grandmother -- who arrived in America in 1910 from what is now Slovakia -- could barely speak English, but her 13 children and their kids and their kids... all respect the values we were taught. We were expected to get to the library faithfully as soon as we could walk there on our own. Bill Cosby got it right.

under the bush administration they've flourished.

robert novack, one of these radical types, says rev wright will be back in the general election again and again.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) appears to be weathering the furor over his radical pastor and his remarks about bitter small town residents as far as the race with Clinton is concerned, but the general election will be a different story. Independent Republican attacks will return to those items repeatedly.

novack will be hosting a political forum (fundraiser, it costs $600) on thursday--closed doors, no reporters--and john mccain will be the special guest.

To keep the interaction intimate and meaningful, attendance is strictly limited to just 70 people. Each guest speaks briefly about key issues of the day, then opens the floor to questions -- any question. The answers are frank and open because there are no reporters.