Fausta's blog

In theory, this would be achieved by imposing emission ceilings on electric power, transportation fuels, commercial business and industries. If a company produced less carbon than it was allowed under the cap, it could sell -- i.e., trade – its extra allowances to other businesses. Under the McCain plan, permits would be given away to industries, at least initially. Mr. Obama prefers to "auction" the permits, meaning businesses would be taxed at the outset. So Mr. McCain's plan would help mitigate the transition costs of putting "the age of fossil fuels behind us."

The problem is that once government creates an artificial scarcity of carbon, how the credits are allocated creates a huge new venue for political rent-seeking and more subsidies for favored industries. Some businesses will benefit more than others, in proportion to their lobbying influence and how well they're able to game the Beltway. Congress itself will probably take the largest revenue grab, offering itself a few more bites out of the economy and soaking politically unpopular businesses.

Then there's the question of whether any of this will even reduce greenhouse gasses. The McCain plan would allow businesses unlimited use of domestic and international offsets to comply with the carbon cap. So a chemical manufacturer, say, would pay an industry not covered by the program – most notably, agriculture – to reduce its emissions. Or it could pay a coal plant in China for plucking low-hanging efficiency fruit, like installing smokestack scrubbers. In other words, U.S. consumers would be paying higher prices for energy in return for making Chinese industries more efficient and competitive. Europe is in the midst of that experience now under the Kyoto Protocol, and most of its reductions so far have been illusory.

The compliance bookkeeping for this new "market" is vastly complex, and a McCain Administration would create a public-private "Climate Change Credit Corporation" to oversee it all. This new regulatory body is likely to morph over time into an "Energy Fed," similar to the one Warner-Lieberman would create. Such an agency would set the price of energy indirectly by fiddling with carbon levies, which will undoubtedly lead to economy-wide distortions.

• Increases the cost of doing business by increasing taxes
• creates an artificial scarcity of carbon
• increases the opprotunities for corruption since it "creates a huge new venue for political rent-seeking and more subsidies for favored industries", as Congress "takes the largest revenue grab"
• Makes Americans pay for making China more competitive
• Creates yet another bureacracy

Labels: Election2008, Global Warming, John McCain, Republicans

But it is a mistake to conflate his African identity with his Muslim heritage. Senator Obama is half African by birth and Africans can understandably identify with him. In Islam, however, there is no such thing as a half-Muslim. Like all monotheistic religions, Islam is an exclusive faith.

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother's Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is "irtidad" or "ridda," usually translated from the Arabic as "apostasy," but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim's family may choose to forgive).

Obama's Indonesian family: His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was also a Muslim. In fact, as Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng explained to Jodi Kantor of the New York Times: "My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim." An Indonesian publication, the Banjarmasin Post reports a former classmate, Rony Amir, recalling that "All the relatives of Barry's father were very devout Muslims."

The Catholic school: Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that "documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim" while at a Catholic school during first through third grades. Kim Barker of the Chicago Tribune confirms that Obama was "listed as a Muslim on the registration form for the Catholic school." A blogger who goes by "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" found that "Barack Hussein Obama was registered under the name 'Barry Soetoro' serial number 203 and entered the Franciscan Asisi Primary School on 1 January 1968 and sat in class 1B. ...Barry's religion was listed as Islam."

The public school: Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times learned from Indonesians familiar with Obama when he lived in Jakarta that he "was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended." Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star visited the Jakarta public school Obama attended and found that "Three of his teachers have said he was enrolled as a Muslim." Although Siddiqui cautions that "With the school records missing, eaten by bugs, one has to rely on people's shifting memories," he cites only one retired teacher, Tine Hahiyari, retracting her earlier certainty about Obama's being registered as a Muslim.

Koran class: In his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, Obama relates how he got into trouble for making faces during Koranic studies, thereby revealing he was a Muslim, for Indonesian students in his day attended religious classes according to their faith. Indeed, Obama still retains knowledge from that class: Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, reports that Obama "recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them [to Kristof] with a first-rate accent."

Mosque attendance: Obama's half-sister recalled that the family attended the mosque "for big communal events." Watson learned from childhood friends that "Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque." Barker found that "Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers." One Indonesia friend, Zulfin Adi, states that Obama "was Muslim. He went to the mosque. I remember him wearing a sarong" (a garment associated with Muslims).

Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama's conversion to Christianity once it became widely known - as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House. This would compromise the ability of governments in Muslim nations to cooperate with the United States in the fight against terrorism, as well as American efforts to export democracy and human rights abroad.

There are security issues as well as the idea for many that America is run by a Muslim apostate. It doesn't matter if they are wrong, perception is reality.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008, Islam, politics

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008, John McCain, Patrick Stewart, politics, Republicans

Labels: Blog Talk Radio, Democrats, Election2008, Hillary Clinton

The "black" Barack would get what the white Barry couldn't: a sense of uniqueness, the benefits of affirmative action, the embrace of the "multiculturalists" in academia, and later the path to personal power and riches he sought in the overwhelmingly black wards of Chicago.

But simply calling himself "Barack" would not be enough to win him admittance to and support from the leftists in the universities where he first taught and then amongst the power brokers in the political movements whom he’d need to underwrite his thirst for power. To win their trust, allegiance, and support, Barack needed to do more than call himself "black" - after all, people like Condoleezza Rice and Bill Cosby call themselves black - he'd have to prove he was "authentically" black (i.e., held radical leftist positions).

Barry, always quick on the uptake, realized there could be no better way to prove his "true" identity as a black man than by joining the Afrocentric, anti-white, anti-Jewish church of Jeremiah Wright. In fact, he would, as always, go one step further; he’d become Wright's protege. Similarly, Barry knew there was no better way to prove his leftist credentials to the folks in academia than to sidle up to terrorists - both foreign and domestic.

Soon he would become friends and colleagues with William Ayers - whose group had murdered Americans in the 1960s and, as recently as just a few years ago, in the wake on 9/11, proclaimed that the only regret he had is that it didn't succeed in murdering more of his fellow citizens. And, just in case his resume wasn't strong enough, he'd cozy up to Edward Said, the Islamist/Arab apologist who sought to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

It's not that Barry necessarily believed in any of these causes — it's hard to know if Barry believes in anything other than Barry — it's that these are the kinds of things you did if you wanted money, power, and fame. And Barry wanted money, power, and fame.

Whatever doubts Barry — now insisting on only being called by his father's African name, "Barack" - may have had about kicking in with hate-mongers, racists, and terrorists were quickly assuaged as the benefits began to roll in. In what seemed like no time Barry was teaching law, and then they made him a state senator and then a U.S. senator! His wife was given a cushy job at the university and the couple's income rose to nearly half-a-million a year while they slept comfortably each night in a mansion purchased only with the "help" of Chicago mobster Tony Rezko.

And Barry’s friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators invested wisely. The young, handsome, articulate “black” man was good to his mentor at the church of hate, making sure to “kick back” a taste — nearly twenty-thousand dollars (virtually every penny the “caring” Obamas gave to charity) in 2007 alone. The university’s kindness to Ms. Obama was repaid by her husband’s advancing their radical agenda first in the state legislature and then in the United States Congress, where Barry would soon become the single most leftist of all U.S. senators. The terrorists, who would hold fundraisers for Barack, would be repaid by Barry in droves, with him not only supporting their agenda as a legislator, but using his first major national exposure — the nationally televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention — to spread the canard of an evil and bigoted America picking on the innocent Muslims, a standard tactic of the terrorists to dissuade legitimate investigation into their plots.

Yes, Barry’s arrangements were working out well for all.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008

John McCain wants Hispanic America to remember that he's not from the "I hate you and blame you for all the country's problems" wing of the GOP.

Labels: Election2008, John McCain

One of the most inviting is the near certainty that the Obama campaign would agree to pay back the $11.4 million she has loaned her own bid, along with an estimated $10 million to $15 million in unpaid campaign expenses.

If Al Gore is the model, Hillary can stay in past the convention, demand a recount, and wait until the Supreme Court tells her it’s over. Which, come to think of it, might be exactly her plan.

Labels: Democrats, Election2008, Hillary Clinton

With a decisive loss in North Carolina and just a narrow win in Indiana, I don't see how Clinton can even make a straight-faced argument to the superdelegates that she should be the real winner in this nomination fight.

Is this the end of the line for Hillary Clinton? The consensus among the talking heads on cable appears to be coalescing around the idea that she should wind her campaign down and get out of Obama’s way. No doubt it will be an extremely difficult and emotional decision. She has fought as hard as any candidate I have ever seen for the nomination. But the votes aren’t there, the money’s not available, and time has run out.

Hillary's decision will probably hinge on whether she can afford to give up now, having gone so far. In the early days of aviation, pilots who attempted to cross oceanic distances would calculate a "point of no return" beyond which it made no sense to turn back. Hillary crossed that line long ago. Against the uncertainties of going on against Obama is the equally bleak prospect of returning to a diminished political future -- sans reputation, sans friends, and sans the protection of the Oval Office.

"The man I met in Pennsylvania who lost his job but can't even afford the gas to drive around and look for a new one. He can't afford four more years of an energy policy written by the oil companies and for the oil companies; a policy that is not only keeping gas at record prices but funding both sides of the war on terror and destroying our planet... He needs us to take a permanent holiday from our addiction for oil by making automakers raise their fuel standards, corporations pay for their pollution and oil companies invest their record profits in a clean energy future. That's the change we need."

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008, Hillary Clinton

The Clintons' tax returns show that Bill Clinton earned nearly $51 million from 2004 through 2006. His wife informed the Senate of about $27 million of it, consisting almost entirely of fees from his globe-trotting speaking tours, from which he has fetched as much as $400,000 for a single appearance.

Reporting rules for senators and presidential candidates allowed Hillary Clinton to describe the amounts of her husband's other income sources as ``over $1,000." These included his more than $10 million in advances and royalties from two book deals, as much as $11.5 million from offshore partnerships that invested in a Chinese media company and more than $2 million from a Nebraska firm whose chairman reportedly spent $900,000 flying the Clintons aboard corporate jets for personal, business and campaign trips.

The sketchy disclosures on Clinton's statements might help explain why many Americans were surprised to learn, upon release of the couple's tax returns and a summary of their 2007 income, that they earned $109 million over the last eight years after leaving the White House buried in debt in 2001.

Labels: Democrats, Election2008, Hillary Clinton

With good friends like Jeremiah Wright, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, dinner at the Obama household must be a rockin' event on any given night...

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008

The DNC's message portrays McCain as bent on fighting an "endless" war in Iraq.

DNC: We can't afford four more years with a President who fights an endless war in Iraq. ... On the war, McCain scoffed at Bush's call to leave troops in Iraq for 50 years, saying "Make it a hundred!"

That of course is a serious distortion of what McCain actually said to a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire back on Jan. 3. His actual words are posted in a video on YouTube. Far from advocating "endless war," he said the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq would be "fine with me" provided that they're not being killed or wounded. Here's the full quote:

McCain, Jan. 3: Make it a hundred. ... We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as American, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintained a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.

It should be noted that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, despite their frequent talk of withdrawing from Iraq, have said repeatedly that they would maintain at least some troops in a combat role in Iraq for some time, possibly their entire term of office.

There's little doubt that McCain is less eager than either Clinton or Obama to bring troops home without further suppression of insurgent attacks. But it's a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage "endless war" based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.

Labels: Barack Obama, Election2008, John McCain

On the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centre, in February 2002: "I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought: 'This is a really strange art project.' It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone's head...I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me."

As for Mr. Obama's friends, the Weathercouple: By all accounts, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers are unfathomably charming, brilliant and comely people, absolutely irresistible. Everybody who meets them is taken and forgets what they should know.

Mr. Obama expects us all to understand this, because we understand everything else. He is doing something most unusual: He's acting as if the American people are thinking with their brains. He's giving all of us a lot of credit. Could it be that we deserve it?

Larry Johnson notes that Obama has been less than honest about his relationship with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. We already knew that Ayers held the first fundraiser at his home to help launch Obama's state senate campaign in 1995, and that they served together on the board of the Woods Fund for years, giving grants to people like former PLO flack Rashid Khalidi. What we did not know is that Obama was the director of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge – a school reform organization co-founded by Ayers. He also links to a piece by Steve Diamond, law professor on the faculty of Santa Clara University School of Law, providing further background as to why this suggests Obama and Ayers may go back as far as the late 1980s. Granted, Johnson is famous for downplaying the threat of Islamic terrorism in the summer of 2001, but he has backup material this time.

So we should all just forget about Obama's very bad judgement in befriending the likes of Rezko and Auchi, Odinga, Ayers, The New Black Panther Party, La Raza, Farrakhan, Mr. Wright, and the homophobe Rev. James T. Meeks.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008

What year did you join Trinity Church?

How often did you attend services there? (This requires follow-up after the inevitable ambiguous answer. Wwas it quarterly, monthly, weekly? Did you belong to any of the church's many organizations, like a men's fellowship? These aren't trick questions. Any church member knows exactly how often they go to church, and the patterns don't change much after they are set.)

When you attended the Million Man March, did you go with a group of men from Trinity? Did you see Pastor Wright on that trip?

How often would you see Pastor Wright in a setting away from church.

Did you go out to dinner together? Socialize together? Travel together?

it’s not surprising how much of a battle the Democratic primary has become. What is surprising is that the news media blogs are responding like citizen blogs. One guy with a laptop breaks stories as they happen and sometimes has to take them down with an explanation. Other bloggers read the stories and follow up.

Labels: Barack Obama, Election2008

Chelsea Clinton just bagged a superdelegate for her mother. The youngest Clinton is campaigning today in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A few moments ago, at the Universidad del Sagrado Corazon, Luisette Cabanas, an unpledged superdelegate, announced her support for Clinton, giving the campaign the majority of automatic** delegates on the island.

Chelsea and her entourage are being hosted by superdelegates Fransisco Domenech and Senate President Kenneth Mclintock.

a. Puerto Rico has only 8 superdelegates and 55 delegates.
b. Puerto Ricans living in the island do not vote in the US Presidential elections. Puerto Ricans living in the fifty states do.

So here we have the Democrat party candidate for President possibly being decided by people who aren't voting for him/her.

Labels: Democrats, Election2008, Puerto Rico

Which, put another way, means that Obama's decision to join Trinity was probably the opposite of cynical. Trinity was the place where, despite the potential pitfalls--and he must have noticed them early on--Obama felt most true to himself.

Labels: Barack Obama, Election2008

If there was any lingering doubt over which branch of the Democratic Party will drive message in the General Election campaign - it has been removed.

Labels: Democrats, Election2008, politics

Labels: Election2008, John McCain, Republicans

"We're going to need to see who is going to be the strongest candidate against Senator McCain. And I believe that is Senator Obama with his emphasis on change and bringing people together, a fresh voice internationally, somebody that is able, in my judgment..to bring... at least I just got back from Latin America, from Venezuela, where he has enormous support, where people really want to see a change in American foreign policy and they see Obama as that agent of change."

In other words, Richardson just delivered the Hugo Chavez endorsement.

Obama needs not just to distance himself from Wright's views; he needs to disown him at this point. Wright himself, it seems to me, has become part of what Obama is fighting against: the boomer, Vietnam era's obsession with its red-blue, white-black, pro and anti-America fixations. That is not what this election needs to be about; and Wright's massive, racially divisive and, yes, bitter provocation requires a proportionate response.

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008, politics

Yes, as many have pointed out, Martin Luther King Jr. gave some angry, angry sermons--especially about the obscenity of the war in Vietnam--but for Wright to say the attacks on him are an attack on the black church is to offer a straitened and solipsistic view of that grand institution. Black liberation theology is not the black church.

No matter how much he "denounces" etc. it will never be enough for his detractors on the right and it won't matter for his supporters, so why bother?

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, Election2008

"Mike is twittering: You know what you call someone who digs up dirt on John McCain? An archeologist."

The problem, of course, is the hideous identity war going on within the Democrats. With each of the Obama and Clinton campaigns applying the unnatural standards of corporate diversity training to the other while spinning furiously to induce people to vote on the basis of the color of their skin or the contours of the genitalia, any joke that can be contorted into grounds for outrage has been. The Democrats have become even more anti-humor than they are anti-war, which tells you what we are in for if they capture the White House. If you think our "national conversation" is stilted and hyper-sensitive now, just wait until the donks control every branch.

Labels: Barack Obama, Election2008, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, politics

to address the details of his association with Ayers/Dohrn, and what obligations the media had to push for that explanation.

McCain responded by again blasting Obama's comparison of Ayers and Coburn, and said an apology from Obama was necessary as Coburn actually works to save lives and Ayers had worked to take them. He repeatedly referred to Ayers as an unrepentant terrorist, and expressed surprise that there hasn't been more discussion about the comparison, or about what an unrepentant terrorist which is what Ayers is. McCain said that Obama had to repudiate Ayers and apologize for ever having had anything to do with an unrepentant terroist. McCain noted that Ayers brags about his organization and is unrepentant about his past, so that Obama can try and persuade the American people or perhaps he can make a case that Mr. Ayers made some contribution, but it was a terrorist organization, and that the media ought to be discussing it.

"It's just not the tenor of the kind of campaign I want to run. I understand the discussion of Rev. Wright, and he has brought this up by doing media appearances, but there are differences that are mad... There are many differences between our parties and differences between myself and Senator Obama, and I want this race to be about those differences.

McCain mentions Cunningham, and how that too wasn't in keeping with the kind of campaign he wants to run.

Q: Competing hard in California? Strategy for that?

"I intend to compete in California. I'm a western senator. I understand the issues in a state like that - land, water, the environment. I'm going to travel the state extensively. It cannot be written off again. Gov. Schwarzenegger has proven that as a Republican, even if you have different views, you can win that state."

Q: Your thoughts on Maliki's operations in Basra.

McCain notes that Maliki went down there himself. "They had setbacks and had desertions, and we had to provide support. But in last several days, with limited American support, the Iraqi army has taken over whole city of Basra. [Maliki's] actions seem to have united the government more... The entire Iraqi government said that any group that bears arms against government - and that's basically Sadr and his army — will not be allowed to partake in next elections... I'm rather pleased. This incident exposed some weaknesses, but they sent a new general and established government control."

I asked a follow-up on the North Carolina ad, asking the senator whether his position was that voters could take Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright into account in their voting decision, but that he didn’t feel it was an appropriate issue to run ads on.

McCain: Voters can take into account any issue they feel Is relevant to themselves; I certainly have no control over that. But I have my agenda, and I think this ad is offensive to some and I would like it taken down. I want the best kind of campaign and most positive kind of campaign.

McCain reiterated that he can’t control the N.C. GOP, but he can ask them to take it down.

I asked about Hamas’s endorsement of Barack Obama. McCain bluntly responded, "It's clear who Hamas wants to be the next President of the United States." He continued “" will be Hamas' worst nightmare" and said that he "ever expects" to hear a Hamas official say they want him as President. On the subject of Bill Ayers, McCain displayed none of the hesitancy he has shown about discussing Reverend Wright. He said he was "a bit surprised" the media had not made more of Obama's association with "an unrepentant terrorist" and Obama's equation of his relationship with Ayers to his friendship with Senator Tom Coburn. McCain said he was "offended" by the latter and that a "repudiation and apology" are due from Obama to the American people.

Obama withdrew from a debate in North Carolina. Would he be willing to have a "conversation" with Hillary instead? McCain says it's inappropriate until the Dems have a nominee.

Labels: Election2008, John McCain, politics, Republicans

It turns out that we don't have to go back as far as 2001 to find that Obama's friends are as unrepentant as ever. Just last year, Ayers and Dohrn attended a reunion--no kidding--of what must have been the tiny remnant of SDS members who still haven't figured out that they were wrong about everything. Listen to what Bill Ayers, who hosted Barack Obama's first fundraiser, has to say about the United States.

Barack Obama complains that he's been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation's schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today.
...
Chicago's liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers's case, and Obama can't be blamed for that.

What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers's politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America's future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to "be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation." Ayers's texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers's major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.
...
Ayers's influence on what is taught in the nation's public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation's largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.

AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization's national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation's classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read.

Think of the problems that we have today in teaching literacy and basic math skills. Would any of those problems be ameliorated by teaching "social justice and liberation?"

The issue, though, isn't what Ayers thought then; it's what he thinks now.

Read Ayers' memoir, Fugitive Days, which was published — in actual horrific irony — on Sept. 10, 2001. Though I have to admit it's pretty well written, it's filled with more paternalism ("A squad of cops in Cleveland had dragged Black men from a motel and shot them down in cold blood, and now we would, I thought, even the score.") and romanticism of what were ultimately terrorist acts. Ayers was also quoted in 2001 saying that he has no regrets for his past actions, but rather he feels that "we didn't do enough." Take a gander at his Web site and see if you find contrition or self-aggrandizement.

What someone did 40 years ago — within reason — should not damn that person forever. But that's assuming offending individuals pay their debt to society and repent. Ayers has done neither.

I genuinely hope Obama's got as much distance as humanly possible between himself and Ayers, and that Ayers is just, as Obama said in the debate, "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."

Labels: Barack Obama, Democrats, education, Election2008, politics, terrorism

"I don't want to just end the war, I want to end the mindset that got us into war. I want to initiate diplomacy. [President Richard] Nixon understood" the importance of diplomacy, Mr. Obama said, as did Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, he asserted.

Labels: Barack Obama, Election2008

John McCain is so old that when he was born, Obama's neighbor and donor William Ayers hadn't tried to kill anyone with a bomb yet.

When John McCain was born, Hamas hadn't yet been founded, nor praised Barack Obama.

John McCain was born in those long ago days when if you went into church, you could count on the pastor saying "God bless America!"

John McCain is older than politicized CIA agents distorting a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program because they don't like the President's (i.e., their boss') policies.

My friends, Americans change things. We always have. We don't hide from problems or mistakes or history. We change things and we make history. Hope in America is not based in delusion, but in the faith that everything is possible in America. The time for pandering and false promises is over. It is time for action. It is time for change; the right kind of change; change that trusts in the strength of free people and free markets; change that doesn't return to policies that empower government to make our choices for us, but that works to ensure we have choices to make for ourselves. For we have always trusted Americans to build from the choices they make for themselves, a safer, stronger and more prosperous country than the one they inherited.

Labels: Election2008, John McCain, politics, Republicans