PrairiePundit

Michael Ramirez may want to save that shirt for future drawings of Clinton and Edwards with the arrow pointing down. Click on the image for a larger view.

Chicago Tribune: In a new afterword to his memoir, 1960s radical William Ayers describes himself as a "family friend" of President-elect Barack Obama and writes that the campaign controversy over their relationship was an effort by Obama's political enemies to "deepen a dishonest narrative" about the candidate. ... During the campaign, Ayers' friendship with Obama was a favorite subject of conservative bloggers and talk show hosts who insisted the two were closer than the candidate was admitting. Ayers' new description of the relationship seems to contradict Obama's statements. Obama had dismissed Ayers as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" and "somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know." ... He'll appear Friday on "Good Morning America" to promote the re-issue of his book this week. The Tribune obtained a copy of the updated material. In it, Ayers -- who did not respond to requests for comment...

Stanley Kurtz: ... Obama’s troubling associations are more than isolated friendships or instances of bad judgment. His ties to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Pfleger, James Meeks, ACORN, the New Party, and the Gamaliel Foundation all reflect Obama’s sympathy with radical-left ideas and causes — wealth redistribution prominent among them. At both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for example, Obama and Ayers channeled money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN, a militant group pursuing economic redistribution, succeeded in undermining credit standards throughout the banking system, thereby modeling the New Party’s plans to tame capitalism itself. So the association with Ayers is not an outlier issue, but part and parcel of a network of radical ties through which Obama’s supported “major redistributive change.” Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized? Similarly, Obama’s “assoc...

Stuart Taylor: When John McCain and many other Republicans ask, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" there is an implication that maybe he is somehow sinister or extremist. I don't believe that. But I do think that there are two very different Obamas. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, serene under pressure, and driven by an admirable social conscience -- albeit as willing to deploy deception as the next politician. But while the first Obama would be a well-meaning failure, the second could become a great president. An ultraliberal in moderate garb? The first Obama has sometimes seemed eager to engineer what he called "redistribution of wealth" in a 2001 radio interview, along with the more conventional protectionism, job preferences, and other liberal Democratic dogmas featured in his campaign. I worry that he might go beyond judiciously regulating our free enterprise system's all-too-apparent excesses and stifle it under the dead hand of government bure...

NY Times: Alleging media bias in favor of Democrats, Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin seized Wednesday on The Los Angeles Times’s refusal to release a five-year-old videotape of Barack Obama at a dinner honoring a Palestinian rights advocate. The video shows a gathering in Chicago for Rashid Khalidi, a teacher, writer and Obama friend who is critical of Israel . Mr. Obama spoke at the dinner, where other speakers likened Israel and Israelis to terrorists. The McCain campaign said the tape could show how Mr. Obama reacted to anti-Israel remarks. Mr. Khalidi, now a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University , opposes Israel’s occupation of territory it seized in the 1967 war and has defended Palestinian resistance to the occupation. He advised a Palestinian delegation at a 1991 peace conference and has written several books on the Middle East. The Los Angeles Times said it had been given the video on the condition that it not be shown to anyone else. In an article publi...

The muting of Bill Ayers has to be the grandest accomplishment of the Chicago gang. This has to be the quietest he has been since he was on the lam.

It is not a good idea to mess with Megan Kelly.

Ann Coulter: The media are acting as if they completely and fully vetted Obama during the Democratic primaries and that's why they are entitled to send teams of researchers into Alaska to analyze Sarah Palin's every expense report. In fact, the mainstream media did no vetting. They seem to have all agreed, "OK, none of us will get into this business with Jeremiah Wright, 'Tony' Rezko, Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayers and everyone's impression of an angry Michelle Obama on 'The Jerry Springer Show.'" During one of the Democratic primary debates, Hillary Clinton was hissed for mentioning Syrian national Rezko, and during another, ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos nearly lost his career for asking Obama one question about William Ayers. In the past week, TV anchors have taken to claiming that Obama "refuted" John McCain's statement that Obama launched his political career at the home of former Weather Underground leader Ayers. No, Obam...

Victor Davis Hanson: ... The country is in two unpopular wars -- amid the worst financial panic of the last 80 years. Not since prophet of change and newcomer Jimmy Carter ran against Gerald Ford (post Watergate and the lost Vietnam war) have voters been so eager for a shake-up. Why then is the charismatic Barack Obama not quite yet a shoo-in? Easy. Voters apparently still don't know who Obama is, or what he wants to do -- and so are still not altogether sure that Obama is the proper antidote to George Bush. After more than a year of campaigning, he still remains an enigma. Obama promised to be the post-racial candidate who would bring us together. But when asked in March 2004 whether he attended regularly Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama boasted, "Yep. Every week. 11 o'clock service." The healer Obama further characterized the racist Wright as "certainly someone who I have an enormous amount of respect for." And Obama ...

Hat tip Confederate Yankee. If 60 percent of the people think these things don't matter, they are not paying attention.

The Hill: Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Sunday said “polling numbers have closed dramatically in the last few days” and that he senses “that things are headed our way.” “We’re very happy with the way the campaign is going,” the Arizona senator said on “Fox News Sunday.” McCain discussed the race as polls in battleground states appear to give Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) a strong edge. ... “I started turning it around the other night when we challenged Sen. Obama’s words” at the final presidential debate, he said. McCain also touted the impact of “Joe the Plumber,” an Ohio man who has become a figurehead for the McCain’s criticism of Obama’s tax plan. It was the Illinois senator’s response to a question from him that caused McCain to attack Obama on his plans to redistribute wealth. “That’s one of the tenets of socialism,” McCain said. The Republican also defended his use of robo calls saying that Obama “worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ay...

Jeff Jacoby: EARLY in his 1980 campaign for president, Ronald Reagan spoke at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss., a town infamous for the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. In the course of remarks dealing mostly with economics and education, he said: "I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level." Reagan should have known better than to use a phrase like "states' rights," however innocuously, in a place like Mississippi. His campaign appearance wasn't a veiled appeal to segregationists - Reagan was no racist - but for more than a quarter-century, that is how his detractors on the left have spun it. Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times last year that Reagan went to Mississippi "to assure the bigots that he was with them." It's an ugly calumny - and a good example of guilt by association at its most poisonous. A more recent example occurre...

Kathleen Parker: ... Love her or hate her, Palin has done for media ratings what she did for the Republican base. Her debate with Joe Biden was the most-watched cable TV show for viewers ages 18 to 34, according to Jonathan Klein, president of CNN/U.S. Obama has had a similar effect. Jim VandeHei, executive editor of Politico, reported that traffic on politico.com is "exponentially higher" for Palin- and Obama-related stories. Whereas the mainstream media (MSM) are widely viewed as being pro-Obama, the same MSM are viewed as being hostile toward Palin. It is possible to be critical of Palin's lack of qualifications and experience without conveying contempt, but that hasn't always been the case. Early attacks on Palin's personal life and family values were perceived as unfair by those who already viewed the media skeptically. To those folks, it is laughable when the media ask themselves, "Are we too elitist?" The answer seems to be implicit in t...

Stanley Kurtz: I t looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg. 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 Reverend 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. 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. ... Kurtz exposes...

Thomas Sowell: One of the oldest phenomena of American elections-- criticism of one's opponent-- has in recent times been stigmatized by much of the media as "negative advertising." Is this because the criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal? You might think so, if you were totally ignorant of history, as so many of the graduates of even our elite universities are. Although Grover Cleveland was elected President twice, he had to overcome a major scandal that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, which was considered more of a disgrace then than today. Even giants like Lincoln and Jefferson were called names that neither McCain nor Obama has been called. Why then is "negative advertising" such a big deal these days? The dirty little secret is this: Liberal candidates have needed to escape their past and pretend that they are not liberals, because so many voters have had it with liberals. In 1988, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts c...

Times: Three decades after abandoning his life as a fugitive, Bill Ayers has gone underground again. The co-founder of the Weathermen, the anti-Vietnam War group that bombed the Pentagon and US Capitol in the 1970s, has vanished as John McCain seeks to make his links to Barack Obama a central issue in the last weeks of the presidential campaign. There was no one home when The Times visited Mr Ayers' house in a quiet street three blocks from Mr Obama's mansion in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The Education Department of the University of Illinois, where Mr Ayers works, said that he had gone on sabbatical. In response to an e-mail he stated: “I'm not available right now. Perhaps in the future. Best, Bill.” What The Times did find in Chicago, however, was widespread bemusement that Mr McCain should be putting so much emphasis on Mr Obama's tenuous links with Mr Ayers to revive his campaign. Mr Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, another Weathermen leader, emerg...

This issue is not going away. By participating in Ayers' radical education agenda, Obama needs to answer where he really stands on something besides sex education for kindergarten.

Jack Kelly: ... The relationship may have begun sooner and been closer. Mr. Ayers was in graduate school at Columbia University when Barack Obama was an undergraduate there in the early 1980s. Did they meet then? A few years later, Michelle Obama and Mr. Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, also a former terrorist, worked at the same time for the Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. Investigative reporter Jack Cashill has noted some intriguing coincidences between Sen. Obama's 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," and Mr. Ayers' 2001 book, "Fugitive Days," for which Sen. Obama wrote a dust-jacket blurb. Both books have the same lyrical style and are filled with nautical imagery, which would come naturally to Mr. Ayers, who spent a year as a merchant seaman, but which appear nowhere else in Mr. Obama's writing. Excerpts from "Fugitive Days" and from "Dreams From My Father" both scored 54 on reading ease and a 12th-grade reading leve...

Andrew McCarthy: You can draw plenty of rational inferences from Stanley's rich work. But for a clear statement of Ayers's frightening vision, I submit that his November 2006 speech at the World Education Forum should be required reading. As Cornerites know, I've been arguing that our emphasis on Ayers's prior terrorism, while highly relevant, is not the essential point. The real issue is Ayers's revolutionary leftism (at around the time Ayers and Obama began working on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, by the way, Ayers described himself as " a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist”). Obama is clearly lying when he claims ignorance about Ayers's terrorism, but even if you wanted to pretend otherwise, it is impossible that he was in the dark about Ayers's revolutionary leftism: Ayers has never made a secret of it and can't seem to help himself from mentioning it about every 30 seconds. Obama not only knew about Ayers's views in this rega...

John Kass: Turn on the TV news when John McCain is picking up undecided voters by invoking Barack Obama 's relationship with unrepentant American terrorist William Ayers and, invariably, some liberal talking head will sniff in disgust and say Ayers is no big deal where Obama comes from. Unfortunately, that's true. Ayers is a terrorist. But this is Chicago. Obama and Ayers are neighbors and they worked together on school issues with the same foundation. Obama's political coming-out party was held in Ayers' living room when Obama was running for his first political office. And the boss of Chicago is Mayor Richard Daley . Mayor Shortshanks has thrown his protective embrace around both men. These are facts. But the reason Ayers is not a big deal in Chicago has to do with the Chicago Way, and the left fork of that road that has been bought and paid for by the Daley machine, subsidized by taxpayers who foot the bill for public relations contracts from City Hall. The new Dale...