Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speech (1 viewing) (1) Guests
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TOPIC: Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speech
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Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speech 5 Months, 1 Week ago
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Karma: 8
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SilentReader wrote:Remember Betty Ford? She was addicted to prescription drugs as well and established the Betty Ford Center for the many other Americans who suffer from the same addiction.Hmmm. I wonder if Scooter Libby will establish a Scooter Libby Center for Neo-Conservative Perjury. Bush could give the final lecture. It would be on Presidential commutations and pardons for those who get caught and convicted. 
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Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speechflawed at core 5 Months, 1 Week ago
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Karma: -86
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Along with Hillary Clinton's recent Bosnia embellishment the Messianic Obama has an embellishment of his own. Gosh, now where was the Liberal media when this surfaced?
Obama Overstates Kennedys' Role in Helping His Father
By Michael Dobbs
Sunday, March 30, 2008; Page A01
Addressing civil rights activists in Selma, Ala., a year ago, Sen. Barack Obama traced his "very existence" to the generosity of the Kennedy family, which he said paid for his Kenyan father to travel to America on a student scholarship and thus meet his Kansan mother.
The Camelot connection has become part of the mythology surrounding Obama's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. After Caroline Kennedy endorsed his candidacy in January, Newsweek commentator Jonathan Alter reported that she had been struck by the extraordinary way in which "history replays itself" and by how "two generations of two families -- separated by distance, culture and wealth -- can intersect in strange and wonderful ways."
It is a touching story -- but the key details are either untrue or grossly oversimplified.
Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton acknowledged yesterday that the senator from Illinois had erred in crediting the Kennedy family with a role in his father's arrival in the United States. He said the Kennedy involvement in the Kenya student program apparently "started 48 years ago, not 49 years ago as Obama has mistakenly suggested in the past."
The real story of Barack Obama Sr.'s arrival in the United States and the subsequent Kennedy involvement in the airlifts of African students sheds light on the highly competitive presidential election of 1960 and Africa's struggle to free itself from colonialism, as well as the huge strides made by the Obama family, which has gone in two generations from herding goats in the hills of western Kenya to the doors of the White House.
In his speech commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the Selma civil rights march, Sen. Obama linked his father's arrival in the United States with the turmoil of the civil rights movement. Although the airlift occurred before John F. Kennedy became president, Obama said that "folks in the White House" around President Kennedy were looking for ways to counter charges of hypocrisy and "win hearts and minds all across the world" at a time when America was "battling communism."
"So the Kennedys decided 'we're going to do an airlift,' " Obama continued. " 'We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.' This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great-great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves. . . . So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born."
A more accurate version of the story would begin not with the Kennedys but with a Kenyan nationalist leader named Tom Mboya, who traveled to the United States in 1959 and 1960 to persuade thousands of Americans to support his efforts to educate a new African elite. Mboya did not approach the Kennedys for financial support until Obama Sr. was already studying in Hawaii.
Mboya, a charismatic politician, was assassinated in 1969. His daughter Susan, now living in Ohio, said the mass airlifts of Kenyan students to the United States had a "huge" impact on the young African nation, which gained its independence from Britain in 1963. She cited a University of Nairobi study that showed that 70 percent of top Kenyan officials after independence, including Obama Sr., were products of the American program.
In the late 1950s, there was no university in Kenya, and educational opportunities for Africans were limited. The British colonial government opposed Mboya's efforts to send talented young Kenyans to the United States for an education, arguing that there was a perfectly good university, Makerere College, in neighboring Uganda. The U.S. State Department supported the British and turned down Mboya's requests for assistance.
During his 1959 trip to the United States, the 29-year-old Mboya raised enough money for scholarships for 81 young Kenyans, including Obama Sr., with the help of the African-American Students Foundation. Records show that almost 8,000 individuals contributed. Early supporters included baseball star Jackie Robinson, who gave $4,000, and actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.
There was enormous excitement when the Britannia aircraft took off for New York with the future Kenyan elite on board. After a few weeks of orientation, the students were dispatched to universities across the United States to study subjects that would help them govern Kenya after the departure of the British. Obama Sr. was interested in economics and was sent to Hawaii, where he met, and later married, a Kansas native named Ann Dunham. Barack Jr. was born in August 1961.
Among the other students on the first airlift was Philip Ochieng, who went on to become a prominent Kenyan journalist. In a 2004 article for the Nation, Kenya's leading newspaper, Ochieng remembered Obama Sr. as "charming, generous and extraordinarily clever," but also "imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and his wealth." Obama Jr. paints a similar portrait in his best-selling 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," describing his father as exceptionally gifted but also "wild," "boastful" and "stubborn."
After the success of the first student airlift, Mboya decided to expand the program in 1960 and to include students from neighboring African countries. This time, he raised $250,000 for 256 students. Universities and colleges promised scholarships worth $1,600,000, but Mboya still needed money for the airlift itself. His American friends suggested that he approach Sen. John F. Kennedy, who had just launched his presidential campaign. In addition to chairing a Senate subcommittee on Africa, Kennedy controlled the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, named after his older brother who was killed in World War II.
The two men met at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass., on July 26, 1960. Kennedy later said that the family was initially "reluctant" to support the program because of other commitments but eventually agreed to provide $100,000 because it was impossible to raise the funds elsewhere.
Stephen Plotkin, an archivist at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, said a search of the records did not turn up any evidence that the Kennedy family supported the 1959 airlift.
Vice President Richard M. Nixon, determined not to be outdone by his Democratic rival for the White House, persuaded the State Department to drop its long-standing refusal to fund the program. The head of the Nixon campaign "truth squad," Sen. Hugh Scott, accused Kennedy of attempting to "outbid the U.S. government" in a "misuse of tax-exempt foundation money for blatant political purposes." Kennedy responded by accusing the Nixon campaign of "the most unfair, distorted and malignant attack that I have heard in 14 years in politics."
The former executive director of the African-American Students Foundation, Cora Weiss, said some of the money provided by the Kennedys was used to pay off old debts and subsidize student stipends. Even though Obama Sr. arrived the previous year, he and other members of the 1959 cohort benefited indirectly from Kennedy family support.
According to a letter on file in the Mboya papers at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, "most" of Obama Sr.'s early expenses in the United States were covered by an international literacy expert named Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, who had traveled widely in Kenya. Kirk wrote to Mboya in May 1962 to request additional funds to "sponsor Barack Obama for graduate study, preferably at Harvard." She said she would "like to do more" to assist the young man but had two stepchildren ready for college.
Susan Mboya credits the student airlifts with helping to make Kenya "an island of stability in a region rocked by turmoil" until very recently. "We were fortunate in having a lot of highly educated people who were able to come back and take over the government after the British left," she said. Products of the airlift project included Africa's first female Nobel Peace Prize winner, the environmentalist Wangari Maathai.
Obama's Selma speech offers a very confused chronology of both the Kenya student program and the civil rights movement. Relating the story of how his parents met, Obama said: "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Junior was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama."
After bloggers pointed out that the Selma bridge protest occurred four years after Obama's birth, a spokesman explained that the senator was referring to the civil rights movement in general, rather than any one event.
Obama Sr. never quite lived up to his enormous potential. He achieved his dream of studying at Harvard after graduating from the University of Hawaii. He divorced Dunham in 1963 and married another woman.
He returned to Kenya and became a close aide to Mboya, a fellow Luo tribesman, at the Ministry of Economic Development. According to his old "drinking buddy" Ochieng, he antagonized other officials with his "boasting," was "excessively fond of Scotch" and ended up in poverty "without a job." He got into frequent car accidents, one of which led to the amputation of both his legs. He was killed in another car accident, in 1982, at the age of 46.
Special correspondent Michael Zielenziger in Stanford, Calif., contributed to this report.
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Last Edit: 2008/03/30 16:15 By SilentReader.
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Wren (User)
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Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speechflawed at core 5 Months, 1 Week ago
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Karma: -3
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Nobody is reading the drivel that you are posting here.
Your creditibility went out the window about four years ago.
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Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speechflawed at core 5 Months, 1 Week ago
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Karma: -86
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Rockstar and Messianic Obama is receiving some much needed scrutiny under Rezkowatch which illustrate that his business dealings and close associations further demonstrates Obama's immense lack of judgment at the very least.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
One-degree of separation: Weatherman Bill Ayers (Repost; 3 Updates)
This is a repost of the original article published February 11, 2008, with updated information.
Recently, two RezkoWatchers commented on the possibility that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had received a campaign contribution from William Ayers, a member of The Weathermen, a terrorist group from the 60s. Peter Hitchens wrote in his February 2, 2008, Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday (UK) article The Black Kennedy: But does anyone know the real Barack Obama?
It [Rezko] suggests very bad judgment, as do strong, persistent suggestions that Obama also accepted quite small contributions from extreme Left-wing veterans of the terrorist Weather Underground now living in Chicago.
His list of contributions shows one for $200 from a certain William Ayers. Can this possibly be the same William Ayers, now a Chicago professor, who used to plant bombs in the Seventies and has said: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough"? His partner, Bernardine Dohrn, once "declared war" on the US government.
Encounters
Dr. William Ayers, the former leader of a 1960s-era political terrorist group called The Weather Underground, is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC). His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, is with the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School. Obama is a former Senior Lecturer in the University of Chicago Law School. Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation. It is a fact that they have. Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama have appeared together at a number of gatherings and academic events.
In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled Should a child ever be called a "super predator?" to debate "the merits of the juvenile justice system".
In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled "Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?" sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the "Intellectuals in Times of Crisis" panel.
Ayers, "who in the 1960s was a member of the terrorist group Weatherman and a wanted fugitive for over a decade as a result of the group's bombing campaign," is currently the Board Chairman of the Woods Fund of Chicago and Obama is a former Board member.
It has also been suggested by blogger red rabbit at Musings & Migraines that in 1995 Obama engaged in campaign fundraising at the Ayers-Dohrn home (emphasis added):
Alice Palmer was a popular and effective legislator, and would have retained her seat had Obama not challenged her nominating petitions. Most accounts of what took place claim that Palmer lost a special election for an open congressional seat and then changed her mind about running for reelection to the state senate. The fact is the special election was held December 12, 1995 and Alice Palmer had already announced to the Illinois Public Action Convention that she would run for reelection for her senate seat. The fact is the Hyde Parkers whom Obama was courting at the time would've remained loyal to Palmer and many told him as much at the home of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in late November of 1995.
Another event occurred in February 2005 that included Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, a fairwell dinner for Arab American Action Network (AAAN) founder Rashid Khalidi (emphasis added):
Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor whose recent book argues that Yasser Arafat was right to reject the best peace deal he had ever been offered, opening the way to four years of bloodshed, presented a tendentious argument for a one-state solution that strained to stay within the bounds of reasoned discourse.
-- snip --
Khalidi's wife, Mona, who also served in Beirut as chief editor of the English section of the WAFA press agency, was hired as dean of foreign students at Columbia's SIPA, working under Dean Anderson. In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.)
UPDATE 1: The $200 campaign contribution cited by Hitchens is listed with the Illinois State Board of Elections campaign disclosure details for "Friends of Barack Obama" (D-2 Semiannual Report 1/1/2001 to 6/30/2001). $200 was reported for April 2, 2001. However, Ayers' name does not appear on any other Obama PAC reports—Obama for Illinois, Obama for Congress 2000, Obama 2010, or Obama for America—filed with the Federal Election Commission.
This September 24, 2007, research paper provides more information on Obama's relationship with Khalidi. This March 8, 2007, article in The Jewish Week provides more details.
UPDATE 2: "Bill Burton, Obama's spokesman, said Ayers 'does not have a role on the campaign.' Ayers said he had no comment on his relationship with Obama," Timothy J. Burger reported February 15, 2008, for Bloomberg News.
UPDATE 3: Former intelligence officer Larry Johnson commented February 15, 2008:
At a minimun this reminds us that there is a pattern of bad judgment by Obama. He goes in on a land deal with Tony Rezko even though he knows Rezko is a target of a Federal investigation. And his explanation? A mistake in judgment. Now this. Anyone thinking of running for President should know they cannot take money from a terrorist and they cannot serve on a board with a terrorist. Period. But this simple lesson apparently escapes the brilliant constitutional law professor.
This much we do know. Obama does not deny having a relationship with William Ayers. Obama has never repudiated the terrorism of William Ayers. If you think this is a record Obama can run on in the fall and survive you are living in an alternate universe. It is time to get some clear answers to tough questions before the Democrats sell their soul to someone whose lapses in judgment will come back to haunt them in the fall.
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Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speechflawed at core 5 Months, 1 Week ago
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Karma: -86
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Wren wrote:
Nobody is reading the drivel that you are posting here.
Your creditibility [sic] went out the window about four years ago.
Wren and credibility is an oxymoron. Just as Wren and free speech is.
Wow. No mention of Rush or neo-con? You must be slipping.
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Re:RICH LOWRY: Obama's speechflawed at core 5 Months, 1 Week ago
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Karma: 9
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Time to go do the dishes, StupidReaderette.
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A Whiner Voting For Obama!
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