Obama, Ayers, & The Annenberg Foundation

[WhiskeyGirl]

Obama-Run Foundation Gave Millions to Liberal Groups, Including One Run by Bill Ayers

Monday, October 13, 2008
By Fred Lucas, Staff Writer

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama (AP)(CNSNews.com) –

William Ayers, a one-time leader of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group that in the 1970s took credit for bombing the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, became the founder of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois-Chicago in 1992 and was the group’s co-director through 2002.

During those years, the Smalls Schools Workshop received at least $800,000 from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge--an organization that Ayers also helped found and that Barack Obama chaired starting in 1995. 

Ayers’s group, promoting public schools with themes such as peace studies, multiculturalism and environmentalism, was one of several liberal organizations that tapped into the Annenberg dollars. Others included a left-leaning legal group and an organization with a significant focus on voter registration. The organization gave out a total of $49.2 million over five years as a means of leveraging matching grants from public and private sources for education initiatives.
 
Grassroots reform

The stated mission of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) was to improve the public schools in Chicago, by disbursing millions to 94 different projects consisting of schools partnering with non-profit groups.
 
Many of the non-profits identified in publicly available Internal Revenue Service 990 documents filed by CAC from 1998 to 2002 had decidedly left-leaning agendas. (CNSNews.com obtained the 990 forms for CAC directly from the IRS for the years 2000-2003, and from Guide Star, a Web site that tracks non-profit information, for 1998-1999.)
 
The Chicago version of the Challenge began in June 1995, using $49.2 million to leverage 2-1 matching funds from private and public sources to disburse a total of $147 million to Chicago schools and partner organizations.  In other words, the CAC would provide one-third of a total grant to a network of schools and the other two-thirds would be provided by a separate organization.

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The relationship between Obama and Ayers has been an issue in the presidential campaign because Ayers admitted to being involved in the Weathermen, who bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol in the 1970s.  According to the New York Times, “federal riot and bombing conspiracy charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of illegal wiretaps and other prosecutorial misconduct.” He remains unrepentant about the bombings, however.  “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he told the New York Times in 2001. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

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http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=37441

There is a review of the schools that were helped.

[WhiskeyGirl]

Wright 101
Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism

By Stanley Kurtz

It 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.

(snip)

We know that Obama did read the proposals. Annenberg documents show him commenting on proposal quality. And especially after 1995, when concerns over self-dealing and conflicts of interest forced the Ayers-headed “Collaborative” to distance itself from monetary issues, all funding decisions fell to Obama and the board. Significantly, there was dissent within the board. One business leader and experienced grant-smith characterized the quality of most Annenberg proposals as “awful.” (See “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” p. 19.) Yet Obama and his very small and divided board kept the money flowing to ideologically extremist groups like the South Shore African Village Collaborative, instead of organizations focused on traditional educational achievement.

As if the content of SSAVC documents wasn’t warning enough, their proposals consistently misspelled “rites of passage” as “rights of passage,” hardly an encouraging sign from a group meant to improve children’s reading skills. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge’s own evaluators acknowledged that Annenberg-aided schools showed no improvement in achievement scores. Evaluators attributed that failure, in part, to the fact that many of Annenberg’s “external partners” had little educational expertise. A group that puts its efforts into Kwanzaa celebrations and half-baked history certainly fits that bill, and goes a long way toward explaining how Ayers and Obama managed to waste upwards of $150 million without improving student achievement.

However he may seek to deny it, all evidence points to the fact that, from his position as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright. The Wright affair was no fluke. It’s time for McCain to say so.

 — Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

 

The rest of this long winded article may be found here -
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTQ0YjhlOGVhYjQ0OWRhZjI2MmM4NTQ4NGM5Mjg0MzU=