When I first heard the unrepentant 60-70's Weather Underground terrorists William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (Ayer's wife) were friends with Barack Obama, it wasn't the Obama connection that bothered me as much as the fact that William Ayers is now a Distinguished Professor Of Education at the University Of Illinois, Chicago, and Dohrn is one the American Bar Association’s governing elite, as well as the director of Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center. Exactly how do you go from being a Marxist nihilist revolutionary bomber of the Pentagon, Capitol, and other government sites, attempt to murder american soldiers, aid and abet robbery and the murder of state troopers, praise the Manson family murderers, advocate for children to kill their parents, have a stated goal to destroy America…and then end up in charge of shaping the minds of our younger generation ??? Please tell me this is all some kind of joke. Please. I mean, what's next ? Too bad we killed Timothy McVeigh, or we could have made him the junior Senator from Oklahoma. Hell, let's free Charles Manson and have him do guest stints on the Dr. Phil show offering psychological advice. Welcome to your nightmare, 'Amerikkka' (that is how Ayers, Dohrn, and another Obama buddy, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, refer to our country. It's tres chic Leftspeak in Hyde Park, where Wright, Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn all live).

On September 11, 2001, the same day Islamic terrorists were crashing airliners into buildings and killing thousands of innocent U.S. citizens ('chickens coming home to roost' in Leftspeak), the New York Times ran an article about Ayers and Dohrn called "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives." As David Horowitz reports for Frontpagemag, days after 9/11:

…I opened its pages [the New York Times] to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera…The couple pictured were Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former leaders of the 1960s’ Weather Underground, America’s first terrorist cult. One of their bombing targets, as it happened, was the Pentagon.

"I don’t regret setting bombs," Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times profile; "I feel we didn’t do enough." In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a "War Council" in Flint Michigan, whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World revolutionaries conquer and destroy it. Taking charge of the podium, dressed in a high-heeled boots and a leather mini-skirt – her signature uniform – Dorhn incited the assembled radicals to join the war against "Amerikkka" and create chaos and destruction in the "belly of the beast." Her voice rising to a fevered pitch, Dohrn raised three fingers in a "fork salute" to mass murderer Charles Manson whom she proposed as a symbol to her troops. Referring to the helpless victims of the Manson Family as the "Tate Eight" (the most famous was actress Sharon Tate) Dohrn shouted:

Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!

Embarrassed today by this memory, but unable to expunge it from the record and unwilling to repudiate her terrorist deeds, Dorhn resorts to the lie direct. "It was a joke," she told the sympathetic Times reporter, Dinitia Smith; she was actually protesting America’s crimes. "We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer." In 1980, I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership. Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious. Outrageous nihilism was the Weatherman political style. As soon as her tribute to Manson was completed, Dohrn was followed to the Flint platform by another Weather leader who ranted, "We’re against everything that’s ‘good and decent’ in honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mothers’ nightmares."

Sweet, isn't it ? Near the end of the frontpagemag article, Horowitz talks a little about the 10 hours of interviews he did with Ayers:

I interviewed Ayers ten years ago, in a kindergarten classroom in uptown Manhattan where he was employed to shape the minds of inner city children [Gag]. Dressed in bib overalls with golden curls rolling below his ears, Ayers reviewed his activities as a terrorist for my tape recorder. When he was done, he broke into a broad, Jack Horner grin and summed up his experience: "Guilty as hell. Free as a bird. America is a great country."

As you can see, Ayers is a puke stain. Ditto for Dohrn. These two spoiled rich white leftist dipsticks never had to pay much for their crimes (Ayers got off on a technicality and Dohrn served only 7 months for contempt), and today, they are still spoiled rich white leftist dipsticks, only now they are referred to as 'activists' in polite liberal society.

When Barack Obama ran for the Illinois Senate in 1995, he held a fundraiser at the home of Ayers and Dohrn. It was Obama's coming out party, his introduction into rich white leftist dipstick Chicago society circles. Obama fit right in, being a former Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizer and civil rights lawyer. Obama and Ayers became friendly, later serving on the Woods Fund together.

Obviously, Barack Obama isn't accountable for the terrorist crimes of Ayers and Dohrn. I'd be interested to know the extent of the relationship however, because Ayers politics haven't changed, and somehow he has acquired influence in liberal educational circles (that's a story for another day). Here's Sol Stern of City Journal:

He [Ayers] 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.

I'd like to know Obama's opinion of Ayers teaching methods. Ayers is a radical, and he seems to have found a comfortable home in the university environment. That doesn't speak well of our universities. The above Ayers quote about social justice sounds like it could have been taken from an Obama speech. I'd like to hear this brought up in a debate (assuming the Timidity Of Hope agrees to any more debates after his last debacle). It's time America gets to know exactly what Barack Obama stands for. I don't think we should wait until he's already in the Oval Office to find out.

Parents "do not have a constitutional right to home school their children," wrote California appellate Justice Walter Croskey.

The hell they don't, judge Croskey. Have you read the U.S. Constitution ? Apparently not. Makes me wonder how you got to be a judge in the first place. Or maybe you should stay away from those west coast medical marijuana stores.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A California court ruled this month that parents cannot "home school" their children without government certification. No teaching credential, no teaching…The 166,000 families in the state that now choose to educate their children at home must be stunned.

No doubt. But look who's HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY about this act of judicial communism !

"We're happy," the California Teachers Association's Lloyd Porter told the San Francisco Chronicle. He says the union believes all students should be taught only by "credentialed" teachers, who will in due course belong to unions.

That's just great, Lloyd ! Think of all those brand new union dues ! Never mind the fact that home schooled kids perform way better than their public school counterparts.

For some parents, the motive for home schooling is religious; others want to protect their kids from gangs and drugs. But the most-cited reason is to ensure a good education. Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of subject. They perform well on tests like the SAT — and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.

Hmmm. That's an inconvenient fact for Big Brother. Sounds like they'll have to come up with some sort of phony excuse to impose the will of the Politburo here….

The case was initiated by the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services after a home-schooled child reportedly complained of physical abuse by his father. A lawyer assigned to two of the family's eight children invoked the truancy law to get the children enrolled in a public school and away from their parents. So a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids.

I fail to see the justification for banning home schooling due to one case of child abuse. That's like banning automobiles because of one car crash.

This isn't the first time this was attempted. Congress made the effort back in the 90's.

In 1994, a federal attempt to require certification of parent-teachers went down in flames as hundreds of thousands of calls lit up phone banks on Capitol Hill. The movement has since only grown larger and better organized, now conservatively estimated at well over a million nationwide. But what they can't accomplish legislatively, unions are now trying to achieve by diktat from the courts.

Here we go again. This California judge isn't following the Constitution, he's attempting an end run around it. I'd love to hear the opinions of our three remaining presidential contenders on this issue. Let's see if any of the three still understand what liberty means. California has made all of the home-schooled children truants, and all of their parents criminals. At a time like this, I wish I didn't have an anti-profanity rule on this blog. I'll have to resort to cartoon profanity:

*&!!^$$!!* those *##!!%%%#ers !!!

If you go to virtually any poverty-ridden inner city hellhole in america, you will find it is run by Democrats. If you go to virtually any inner city school board in america, you will find it is also run by Democrats, and has been for 50 years. Democrats pretty much have a stranglehold on our system of socialized public education. Teacher's unions are part of the Democratic base, and among the Dems largest campaign contributors. As a result of all this Democratic expertise, design, and control, we have inner city public schools where half the students don't graduate, and the half that do barely learn a damned thing. We have schools that are nothing more than day-care warehouses for the next generation of poor folk in america. It's a national disgrace, but Democrats try as hard as they can to maintain the status quo. They resist school vouchers, charter schools, and merit raises for teachers. They make it nearly impossible to remove bad teachers, they coddle bad students, they dumb down the curriculum, and there is precious little discipline. The Democrats keep calling for more money and more money for our schools, even though americans already pay more for education that any other country in the world. That money goes to the adults in our school system, to the unions and the bureaucracy, but it doesn't ever seem to improve the educational process for the students. Our national inner city public school system is an unqualified failure, and is just as responsible as the welfare state for keeping poor people poor. The next time you hear some fool talk in favor of socialized medicine, tell him to look at how socialized education has gone.

Since a large number of inner city folk are people of color, the tragic failures and wrongs of Democratic policy have fallen most heavily on them. Yet somehow, about 90% of black people continue to support the Democratic party. I wish I could explain this for you (propaganda, affirmative racism), but I really can't. The loyalty of minorities to the Democratic party is akin to Patty Hearst becoming a member of the extremist SLA group who kidnapped her. How in the hell can you be loyal to the people who implement the very systems that lead to your downfall ?

By any honest measure, private schools outperform public schools across the board. If anybody tells you differently, they aren't telling you the truth, they are presenting you with an agenda. Almost all the Democratic politicians who sing the false praises of public education send their own kids to private schools. They know the truth. They just think you are so stupid that you won't know.

There is an important vote coming up in Utah on school vouchers, and the largest teacher's union, the National Education Association (NEA) is waging a multi-million dollar campaign to get the Utah voters to reject school vouchers. Why ? Because school vouchers would allow families to get between $500 and $3,000 depending on income to send their kids to private schools, where the kids would have a chance at a better education. Why would the NEA be against children getting a better education ? Because the NEA's primary care isn't children's education, that's why. The NEA cares about the NEA and the NEA's members, and the Democrats genuflect in front of the NEA every chance they get. The NEA knows if they can win in Utah, a heavy Republican state, then they have a really good chance to destroy children's education defeat school vouchers all across the country. This must be another example of Democrats being 'for the children'.