Obama/Ayers Timeline

Pallin’ around:

1987-1988:

After Chicago’s schools are called “worst in America” by Education Secretary Bill Bennett,  a city-wide push for public school reform is called.

A number of different civic-minded coalitions emerged to promote their reform agendas. Barack Obama’s Developing Communities project allied with the ABCs Coalition, a group apparently coordinated by (your patience is about to be rewarded) former Weatherman Bill Ayers [No Quarter link].  Other groups in the ABCs coalition were Chicago United and the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, both of which are linked to businessman and philanthropist Thomas Ayers, Bill Ayers father.

1988 and 1989:

Michelle Robinson (the future Michelle Obama) in 1988 and Barack Obama in 1989 serve  at prominent Chicago law firm, Sidley Austin, where Ayer’s wife Bernardine Dohrn also works.

A little pertinent background on Dohrn:

At a 1969 “War Council” in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most memorable and notorious speech to her followers. Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman “fork salute,” she said of the bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”  The “War Council” ended with a formal declaration of war against “AmeriKKKa,” always spelled with three K’s to signify the United States’ allegedly ineradicable white racism.

Huh. “AmeriKKKa”. Remind you of anyone?

1993-2002:

Obama serves on the board of The Woods Fund, which funneled money to far left causes. Ayers served on the Woods board for three years of Obama’s tenure and remained on the board after Obama departed. From 2000-2002, when Obama and Ayers served together, the board met twelve times.

… Obama served along side Ayers as a board member on an organization happy to pass out funds to radical left wing and anti-Israel groups. Moreover, the monies doled out through the Woods Fund to these groups, including Ayers own Annenberg Challenge, helped cement Obama’s political relationships and bond with key players in Chicago. None of this matches his current self-portrait of a politically moderate reformer. But like so much of Obama, that was then and this is now.

January 1995:

Between 1995 and 1999, Obama led the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was founded by Ayers, and remained on the board until 2001.

“One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation?” Kurtz writes. “In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s ‘recruitment’ to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.”

The CAC’s agenda flowed from Ayers’s educational philosophy, says Kurtz, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism.

“CAC translated Mr. Ayers’s radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with ‘external partners,’ which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).”

1995:

Ayers held a “Meet the candidate” event for Obama in his home, at some point in 1995.

Nov. 6, 1997:

Obama and Ayers served on a panel of four discussing juvenile justice.

December 1997:

In 1997, Obama Reviewed Ayers’ Book, A Kind And Just Parent: The Children Of Juvenile Court, In The Chicago Tribune, Calling It “A Searing And Timely Account Of The Juvenile Court System.” (Chicago Tribune, 12/21/97)

April 2001:

Ayers contributed $200 to Obama’s re-election fund to the Illinois State Senate.

April 19-20, 2002:

Obama and Ayers appear on  panel of six at Intellectuals, Who Needs Them? conference. Bernadine Dohrn also spoke at conference.

And, oh yeah:

“Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school,” he (Axlerod) said. “They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together.”

This is what the left calls a “tenuous at best” relationship.

UPDATE:

This is what conservatives think about all this, in case you still don’t get it:

Democrats and their friends in the press are moose-hunting angry this morning over Sarah Palin’s recent comment that Senator Obama “pals around with terrorists” which she made in reference to his being pals with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. The big line of defense we hear against this charge is “guilt by association”. Their argument is absolutely true, if the charge is terrorism. You can’t call Obama guilty of terrorism merely for associating with terrorists.

Of course, it’s a straw man position. He isn’t being accused of any guilt which ought to be Ayers’ burden. He’s being accused of precisely what he is guilty of: associating with terrorists. That’s not guilty by association. It’s guilty OF association … association with information, I might add, because there’s no way he didn’t know about Ayers. Even if he didn’t know about the terrorism, a loudmouth radical like Ayers doesn’t keep his loudmouth radicalism under wraps. It was on account of his leftism that he and Obama made such frequent and successful allies.

What’s more, it is not an isolated argument from the right. The question is more than one of Ayers. The question is, rather, why are so many of Obama’s friends such low-lifes, and why doesn’t anyone care?

Read on for a partial list of more unsavory friends of Obama.