Pundita

Not long after posting the following entry I heard an interview with Newt Gingrich on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, a syndicated radio show aimed at the 'black community.' Newt described bipartisan efforts to improve America's schools and had high praise for Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama's Secretary of Education.

I've stated before on this blog that it's my firm belief that if not for Steve Diamond sounding the alarm last year there would have been a very different education secretary, one whose views reflected those of William Ayers's.

Although Steve's warnings were suppressed by the mainstream media during the presidential campaign, he is a well known figure in labor union circles. He is also well known to Obama's circle, and particularly known for his tenacity.

So while Arne Duncan is not perfect, next to what could have been in charge of American public education reform he is a fortunate pick.

But now to turn back the clock, to before Barack Obama came to the White House --

Introduction

From Who "sent" Obama? by Stephen Diamond, originally published April 22, 2008:

In Chicago politics a key question has always been, who “sent” you? The classic phrase is “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent” -- from an anecdote of Abner Mikva’s, the former White House Counsel (President Clinton) and now retired federal judge. (And someone I campaigned for while in high school when he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress in the early 70s.)

As a young student, Mikva wanted to help out his local Democratic Party machine on the south side of Chicago. In 1948, he walked into the local committeeman’s office to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson and Paul Douglas and was immediately asked: “Who sent you?”

Mikva replied, “Nobody sent me.”

And the retort came back from the cigar chomping pol: “Well, we don’t want nobody that nobody sent.”

So it is reasonable to ask, who “sent” Barack Obama? In other words, how can his meteoric rise to political prominence be explained? And, of course, in an answer to that question might lie a better understanding of his essential world view. When I started looking at this question a few weeks ago I quickly grew more concerned about the kinds of people that seem to have been very important in Obama’s ascendancy in Chicago area politics. It is the connection of some of these people to authoritarian politics that has me particularly concerned. And a key concern of this blog has been the rise of authoritarian tendencies in the global labor movement.

The people linked to Senator Obama grew to political maturity in the extreme wings of the late 60s student and antiwar movements. They adopted some of the worst forms of sectarian and authoritarian politics. They helped undermine the emergence of a healthy relationship between students and others in American society who were becoming interested in alternative views of social, political and economic organization. In fact, at the time, some far more constructive activists had a hard time comprehending groups like the Weather Underground. Their tactics were so damaging that some on the left thought that government or right wing elements helped create them. There is some evidence, in fact, that that was true (for example, the Cointelpro effort of the federal government.)

Today, however, many of these individuals continue to hold political views that hardened in that period. Many of them have joined up with other wings of the late 60s and 70s movements, in particular the pro-China maoist elements of that era and are now playing a role in the labor movement and elsewhere. And yet this question of Obama’s links to people from this milieu has not been thoroughly explored by any of the many thousands of journalists, bloggers and political operatives looking so closely at Obama.

The most recent effort was by Jonathan Kaufman in the Wall Street Journal, who argued that a critical connection for Obama was his links to some in the wealthy and prominent Jewish community in Chicago. This article contains some important insights and is well worth reading. But, I think Kaufman gets it wrong.

So, who did “send” Obama? The key I think is his ties not to well connected uber lawyer Newton Minow, as Kaufman suggests, but more likely to the family of (in)famous former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers – not just Bill Ayers, but also Bill’s father Tom Ayers and his brother John as well. [...]

***********************
On Friday Stephen Diamond sent me his latest post on his King Harvest blog, which detailed his interview with a retired postman, Alan Hulton. Mr Hulton claimed to have had a conversation with Barack Obama outside the home of William Ayers's parents that Steve judged must have taken place in the mid-1980s.

Hulton's account contains a startling claim that if true might place Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers much further back than he's admitted to the press, and which at the least suggests Obama had more than a casual relationship with the Ayers family.

As I have mentioned many times on this blog, Steve Diamond's professional credentials are impeccable. And his life-long involvement with Democratic and Leftist politics, and his native-born Chicagoan background, give tremendous weight to his analyses of Barack Obama, his Leftist associations, and the Chicago political mileu in which Obama moved.

What follows is my exchange with Steve after he asked what I thought of his post about Hulton.

"Steve:
I think Hulton's account has merit; I doubt he'd have any reason to lie and he seems a credible witness. So, in light of all I know about the Ayers-Obama relationship, I am willing to give the account the benefit of the doubt.

Yet the account could be challenged by asking why Hulton's memory wasn't jogged earlier. Hadn't he seen a photograph of Obama when he became a U.S. senator from Hulton's home state and then became a national political figure even before the presidential run?

There are plausible answers to the question and equally plausible ones about why Hulton couldn't remember the month or even make a good estimate as to the year during which he had the conversation with Obama. Plenty of people can remember conversations in great detail from decades earlier without being able to remember the year in which the conversation took place.

On the other hand, plenty of people can't remember the exact details of a conversation they heard only 15 minutes before. And people can also unconsciously 're-do' what they remember, if the recollection makes better sense to them rephrased, or to bring their recollection in line with other information.

That's why police immediately separate eyewitnesses when arriving on the scene of an accident or crime and question them individually out of earshot of the other witnesses. They know a witness who sounds very assured in his recollection of the event can influence the other witnesses' recollections.

So it is open to question as to whether Hulton's recollection of the conversation is accurate in all details. Yet the more one knows about the Obama-Ayers relationship, which includes the speculation that they knew each other as far back as Obama's days at Columbia University, the more one is willing to consider Hulton's account, which I assume is your viewpoint.

However, if we exclude those who suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome, I think the general reader coming to the Obama-Ayers subject for the first time would want considerable background before appreciating the key part of Hulton's account, which is that Obama was at the Ayers home to thank the family for supporting his education.

So I was on the fence about posting your interview without first writing a lengthy introduction, which frankly I haven't had time or inclination to do.

The big question is whether Hulton's account, even if perfectly accurate in all details, has importance beyond a footnote to the history of the 2008 political campaign.

Given that Bill Ayers's father was a pillar of the Chicago business community and that Bill was a respectable member of the academic establishment by the time of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge project, I'd never understood why Obama went to such lengths to hide his working relationship with Bill Ayers.

Hulton's account suggests that the real reason Obama created a smokescreen had less to do with Bill Ayers's past as a terrorist and more to do with the Ayers family mentoring his entire professional career. If that were true it would overturn the narrative Obama created about how he rose in politics.

And it would mean you were on the money last year when you answered your own question about who "sent" Obama by suggesting it was the Ayers family.

After I read Hulton's account I re-read your Who "sent" Obama? post and Jonathan Kaufman's April 21, 2008 profile of Barack Obama for the Wall Street Journal, which your post was meant to answer.

After reading Kaufman's piece at this distance from the presidential election campaign, for the first time it struck me how influential his profile of Obama must have been during the campaign.

Steve, Kaufman sold Obama to Democratic Jewish voters as the kind of gentile who was practically Jewish -- the kind they would be happy to invite to Shabbat lunch. And by emphasizing Obama's connections with wealthy, influential Jews in Chicago, Kaufman not only tamped down concerns that Obama was a radical who didn't like Israel, he also positioned him to the entire American business community as a capitalism-friendly centrist.

The kicker is that Jonathan Kaufman, who had been a business writer with The Wall Street Journal for 15 years, is now the Education Editor at Bloomberg News. I learned that when I visited his website after re-reading his piece on Obama. Yet if you look at Kaufman's resume you'll see there is nothing in his career or educational background that would suit him to write on education issues.

I don't know when Kaufman got the new job or the circumstances under which this happened. What I do know is that the mainstream media preferred to entertain Kaufman's portrayal of Barack Obama rather than the disturbing questions you raised.

Even Fox News Channel, which during the presidential campaign harped on Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers and Ayers's terrorist past, didn't drill down to the complex questions about the American education establishment that Obama's relationship with William Ayers represented, and which Sol Stern and you brought out in April 2008.

By the time FNC turned their attention to Obama's involvement with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, it was far too late in the presidential campaign for them to do the education angle justice, even if they'd had the inclination. Or perhaps they didn't want to overturn a rock that hid just as much about Republican complicity with Ayers's educational ideas as the Democratic support.

I dunno, Steve. The truth was out there on the blogosphere as early as April 2008 about Ayer's educational ideas and Obama's support of them. And you certainly made the mainstream press cognizant of the issues. But people believe what they want to believe. The reality is that many American voters wanted to believe in the narrative Obama presented about himself.

On that grim note, and after looking over what I've just written, I think I'll get off the fence by publishing this letter as an introduction to your interview with Hulton.

One question: Can you give any background on how and when you came in contact with Hulton? Did he approach you after reading one of your pieces, or did you hear about him?

Pundita"

"Pundita:
Very thoughtful analysis and thanks for the background on Kaufman.

Alan Hulton posted a comment last week on a conservative blog (something like the 347th comment) saying he had met Obama. It mentioned he was a mailman and I thought it sounded real so I emailed him and he responded. We set up a phone call and I spoke with him for close to two hours taking careful notes.

Steve"
***********************
Barack Obama’s Visit to the Other Ayers’ House
By Stephen Diamond, September 25, 2009

Barack Obama visited the house of Tom and Mary Ayers, parents of former Weather Underground activist turned education professor Bill Ayers, in the mid-1980s to thank the Ayers’ for their support of his “education,” according to Alan Hulton, the letter carrier who delivered mail to the Ayers’ Glen Ellyn home at that time. Glen Ellyn is a suburb of Chicago, southwest of the city.

Hulton spoke to King Harvest at length about his experience.

It is acknowledged widely now that Bill Ayers and Obama had a close and longstanding relationship because of the role that Ayers played in promoting Obama’s career including, for example, Ayers’ appointment of Obama as Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the $150 million education reform effort that Ayers founded in 1994. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn held a campaign event in their Hyde Park home for Barack Obama in late 1995.

This blog has also suggested, however, that Obama may have had a relationship with Tom Ayers in light of the importance of the senior Ayers in Chicago politics and his role in the same educational issues as Obama. In 1988 Obama’s Developing Communities Project (the “DCP”) joined the Alliance for Better Chicago Schools (“ABC’s”), a lobbying alliance, to push for the reform of Chicago schools through the creation of so-called “Local School Councils” (“LSC’s”) that would watchdog teachers and administrators.

The proposal was very controversial and groups like Operation PUSH headed by Jesse Jackson did not support it because many teachers were black –- it was one of the first stable middle class careers a black person, and black women in particular, could aspire to in Chicago. Tom Ayers and Bill Ayers were strong supporters of the LSC’s, however, and Chicago United, a group founded by Tom Ayers, joined ABCs too. Bill Ayers became chair of ABCs.

In addition, a senior Democratic party activist who was involved in the Obama campaign including direct contact with Obama confirmed that the relationship between Obama and Bill Ayers went back to the 1980s, the time period of Hulton’s encounter outside the home of Tom Ayers.

The Obama Presidential campaign denied any close ties between Obama and Bill Ayers and said initially they only met in late 1995 when Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn hosted the event in support of Obama’s campaign for the Illinois State Senate. They later admitted the two had to have met earlier in light of the role both played at the Annenberg Challenge.

As President, Obama has not yet been asked about the Ayers relationship and has, as far as one can tell, never been asked about his relationship with Tom Ayers. Most recently, credible evidence has emerged that Bill Ayers ghostwrote the Obama memoir Dreams from My Father, which was published in 1995. [1]

The statement by Hulton is the first eyewitness account of a possible relationship between Obama and Tom Ayers and the first that dates his relationship with the Ayers family to the mid-1980s.

At the time of their encounter, Hulton recalls, Obama “looked about 19 years old” but was probably in his early 20s. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983 and moved to Chicago in 1985 at age 24 or 25 to head up the DCP, a fledgling community organization modeled after similar groups started by Saul Alinsky, on the south side of Chicago. The DCP had secured a grant from the Woods Fund, endowed by the Woods family, to finance the hiring of Obama.

The Woods family owned Sahara Coal Company, which supplied coal to utility companies in the Midwest possibly including Commonwealth Edison. Tom Ayers was Chairman and CEO of Commonwealth Edison from 1973 until 1980. Ayers died in June of 2007 at the age of 92 in Hyde Park where he had been living with his son Bill and Dohrn.

“Mrs. Ayers told me that her family had been helping out a brilliant young black man,” Hulton said and whom he believes she said was from Kenya. Hulton said that over the period of six to ten years that he delivered mail to the Ayers home he had numerous conversations with Mrs. Ayers, one conversation with Thomas Ayers and several brief encounters with Bernardine Dohrn who he said lived at the home for several months at one point in time. He never met or saw Bill Ayers at the home.

Hulton explained that he knew Tim Ayers, the son of Tom and brother of Bill, when they were both students at Glenbard High School, which draws students from the towns of Glen Ellyn and Lombard, Illinois. Over time the Ayers’ parents became aware of the connection to their son Tim and that led to a friendlier relationship between Hulton and Tom and Mary Ayers.

“They tipped me generously at Christmastime,” Hulton recalled.

One day Hulton found himself on the sidewalk outside the Ayers home at 199 N. Montclair Avenue near the corner of Revere Road just after he had delivered the mail. The house was “very nice and attractive and more expensive than some in Glen Ellyn because it was closer to downtown, but it did not stand out among the houses on that block.” He said the largest and most expensive homes were actually on Revere, around the corner from the Ayers’ home.

As Hulton was on the sidewalk walking away from the Ayers house a tall and thin young black man was coming up the same sidewalk towards the Ayers house.

Hulton recalls that Obama said hello and introduced himself and stopped to chat with him in front of the Ayers house. “I recall that his ears stuck out a little bit. He was more gaunt then than he appears now. His name was an unusual one and when I saw his photo during the campaign it brought back my memory of the event,” Hulton said.

Mr. Obama explained that he had taken the train out from Chicago to visit the Ayers’ in order to thank them for their help with his “education.” At this time, Mr. Obama had recently graduated from Columbia and would soon enter Harvard Law School. Hulton and Obama “spoke for a few minutes, first chatting about the Ayers family,” Hulton said. Hulton said he did not learn whether the help Obama received from the Ayers’ was financial or in some other form.

Hulton said it was an exceptional event to encounter a black man on his route and that Obama may have felt it prudent to introduce himself to the letter carrier before approaching the Ayers house. Hulton usually delivered mail on Montclair at mid-day, “sometimes as early as 11:30 in the morning or as late as 12:30 or 1:00 PM.”

Hulton says he recalls when the very first black family moved into the upper middle class white suburb in the 1960s. Hulton says at the time, after he had come out of military service, he was a supporter of Martin Luther King who had pressed for fair housing in the Chicago area. “I took some flak about my support for civil rights from my fellow workers at the time,” he said.

Mr. Hulton recalls that he probably asked what Mr. Obama was studying in school and at one point Mr. Obama said that he intended to become President of the United States. Mr. Hulton said he was “taken aback” by the statement but recalls that he did not think Mr. Obama was “arrogant, but just self assured and a person with a lot of self confidence.” “It was not said with hubris,” Hulton recalled, “but with an air of self-assuredness.”

“I told him there was no reason why he couldn’t become president,” Hulton recalled. Obama was dressed “nicely but casually, a slacks and shirt, not jeans and a t-shirt, but definitely not a coat or tie,” he said. After the brief conversation Hulton continued on his route and did not turn back to see whether the Ayers’ were at home or whether Obama entered their house.

Hulton delivered mail in Glen Ellyn for 39 years with two years off to serve in the U.S. military. He retired in 2001 and is now 66 years old. King Harvest confirmed his employment as a letter carrier with Ray Wasz, Finance Supervisor of the Glen Ellyn Post Office.

Hulton said he encountered Tim Ayers at a high school reunion recently where Tim spoke in a “wide eyed way” of Bernardine Dohrn’s career as a law professor. “She is a star and her students love her,” Hulton recalls Ayers saying.

Dohrn is a member of the law school faculty at Northwestern although she was prevented from becoming a member of the New York bar because of her criminal record and background in the Weather Underground. Hulton said that Mrs. Ayers told him that her husband Tom was trying to help Dohrn become a member of the bar.

Dohrn and Ayers surfaced from the underground and turned themselves into the authorities in the early 1980s. Charges against Ayers were dropped and Dohrn entered into a plea bargain that allowed her to avoid jail time.

But later she was jailed for six months for her refusal to testify in front of a grand jury about her possible role in providing false identity cards to several former Weather Underground comrades who participated in a bank robbery where two police officers and a security guard were killed.

Mrs. Ayers told Hulton that she and her husband had been in contact with their son Bill and Bernardine while they were underground using “code” to communicate. “They had ‘ways to communicate’ she told me,” Hulton said. Hulton encountered Dohrn three or four times during his time as the Ayers’ letter carrier because he had to confirm that she lived there and secure her signature for certified mail deliveries to her at the Glen Ellyn home. Hulton said Dohrn was never friendly with him but rather “was a sourpuss, she never smiled.”

Hulton had one encounter with Tom Ayers who politely asked Hulton about his work. Hulton said he told Ayers that he thought there were problems with the senior management of the Post Office and that he wasn’t always happy about the work habits of some of his fellow workers.

“You know, ordinary gripes about work,” Hulton recalls. “I couldn’t believe how he responded. He started to talk about workers having to struggle to survive and about peasants and the proletariat. It made me think later that he might be a Marxist!”

1) See also Steve Diamond's September 28, 2009 post, Did Bill Ayers Really Write Obama’s Memoir "Dreams from My Father?"

June 19, 2009, from a New York Times report:

"When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used his speech at Friday Prayer in Tehran to denounce Britain as “the most evil” of Iran’s enemies, he was striking a chord with a deep resonance in the psyche of Iranians, the legacy of a long history of British imperial intrusions into their country’s affairs."

June 22, 2009, from a Christopher Hitchens essay titled Persian Paranoia: Iranian leaders will always believe Anglo-Saxons are plotting against them.

One of the signs of Iran's underdevelopment is the culture of rumor and paranoia that attributes all ills to the manipulation of various demons and satans. And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion. But you have no idea how deep is the primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons -- more than the CIA, more even than the Jews -- who are the puppet masters of everything that happens in Iran.

September 25, 2009, from Times Online reporting at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh:

British intelligence played 'big part' in Iranian nuclear discovery

Britain played a key role in gathering intelligence to expose Iran’s secret nuclear facility, according to Western diplomatic sources.

Officials in Pittsburgh said today that the British intelligence services played a “big part” in the hunt for concealed uranium enrichment capacity in Iran.

French and US intelligence agencies were also involved in the operation that led to exposure of the secret underground plant. Israel was among a number of other countries aware of what was being built.

If Glenn Beck hadn't handed a fake frog to former Ambassador John Bolton, if the Letterman show hadn't plastered their own translation over a portion of Gaddafi's ravings at the U.N. (Gaddafi complains that the wording of a Chinese restaurant takeout menu cheated him of his egg rolls), I might have been able to hold it together after seeing the Times Online headline and write an analysis worthy of the seriousness of the topic. But I'm sorry I'm laughing too hard to continue.

Here -- here's a New York Times link to the fast-moving story and reaction from a parade of officials, more of which will be plastered all over the evening news.

All else I can manage at this moment is to gasp out a warning between peals of laughter:

I had to suffer through eight years of dealing with Bush Derangement Syndrome, which prevented otherwise reasonable people from counting to ten before they made accusations against Bush that were based on faulty or incomplete information. I don't want to suffer through a replay named Obama Derangement Syndrome.

There are things going on above the security clearances of the talking heads, including John Bolton, who've called President Obama stupid and worse for scrapping the missile defense shield project in Eastern Europe.

Calm down, eh? Count to ten. Remember John Batchelor's dictum that the first three reports in war are always wrong. And take two doses of Glenn Beck's shrewd zaniness and call me in the morning.

"That real story is the ball the [New York] Times must hide because it leads inevitably to the conclusion that the fundamental political world view of Ayers, not his tactical foray into bombings for a few years, is influencing the Obama candidacy."
-- Stephen Diamond, October 2008

I doubt that anyone has written with greater knowledge than Dr Stephen Diamond about the relationship between William Ayers and Barack Obama. Yet despite Steve's strenuous efforts to inform the public and the professional reporters who contacted him last year, most Americans remain unaware of the true nature of the relationship and its most important implications.

So running alongside the Ayers-Obama story is another one -- a news media story that in some respects is even more unsettling than Ayers's educational and political ideas and their influence on Barack Obama.

It was not only The New York Times that obscured the truth during the political campaign; Fox News Channel, for all their eagerness to point out William Ayers's past as a terrorist and connect Obama with him, completely missed the real story until late in the presidential campaign -- and even then did a very incomplete job of explaining it to their audience. Other news organizations did no better when they caught up with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge story.

The truth is that the Democratic-leaning mainstream news media spent decades suppressing information about the American Left, and the Republican-leaning media were only interested in the most superficial critiques of the Left.

The upshot is that when Steve Diamond arose to explain to the general public the complexities of the relationship between William Ayers and Barack Obama, the circles they moved in, and the implications for American education and an Obama presidency, he might as well have been speaking Greek.

Even the news outlets that wanted to deal with the story during the election campaign simply didn't have the time and ability to undertake the massive background reporting that would have brought the public up to speed.

So it wasn't surprising that many voters complained they didn't understand what Barack Obama meant by hope and change. He always spoke with great clarity about what he meant -- provided one understood the American Left and its referents.

That Americans outside the Left are slowly getting an idea of what he meant, as his presidency unfolds -- this is a hard way to wise up.

Below is Steve Diamond's latest essay at his King Harvest blog about the Ayers-Obama relationship, published here with his permission. For background I suggest you read the two 2008 essays he links to in the writing.

Peeling the Obama/Ayers Onion
By Stephen Diamond
September 24, 2009

A layer at a time, the truth about the decades' old relationship between Barack Obama and former Weather Underground terrorist turned 'educator' Bill Ayers is becoming clear.

The latest revelation is a report by Christopher Andersen in his new biography of the Obamas that, according to a neighbor and supporter of Ayers and Obama, Ayers ghost wrote Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father.

Author Jack Cashill had first suggested that this was the case in a series of blog posts pointing out the striking rhetorical similarities in books by Ayers, a prolific writer, and the Obama tome.

As loyal readers of King Harvest and its predecessor Global Labor know, back in April 2008 I first surmised that Obama had a longstanding relationship with Ayers and probably also with Ayers’ father, Tom, the prominent Chicagoan dating back to the 1980s.

One relevant fact among many from that time period: Obama led his Developing Communities Project in support of a controversial education reform effort that Bill and Tom Ayers also supported even though mainstream black organizations like Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH were opposed to it.

Despite the risk to Obama politically Obama’s DCP was the only black organization in the lobbying alliance pushing the creation of Local School Councils in Chicago. Mainstream black groups like Operation PUSH understood the Councils would create a watchdog group over the shoulder of teachers and administrators, many of them black, and so refused to support the reform.

Presumably Obama made a calculation that backing the Ayers family effort was worth it -- of course, he likely also supported the teacher-hostile reform itself. Later in 1995 Bill Ayers would return that favor and appoint Obama as Chairman of Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. One of the central activities of the CAC was to funnel money into support for that very same Local School Council structure, then under political attack from Mayor Daley.

(Interestingly, this issue -- watchdogging teachers and administrators -- is one reason why it is hard to accept the idea of the right that Ayers and Obama are traditional left wing radicals. In fact, as I have explained elsewhere on the blog, Ayers and Dorhn are really neo-stalinists -- a type of anti-capitalist that thinks there are bureaucratic and authoritarian solutions to problems created by capitalism. No doubt, for a period of time at least, Obama found common cause in this set of ideas.)

A senior Democratic Party activist in the Obama campaign who had direct contact with the candidate confirmed the longstanding ties between Bill Ayers and Obama. This individual was concerned, in fact, that Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were exercising an unhealthy influence on the candidate including proposing appointments for the campaign and new administration.

A second source with personal knowledge of visitors to the Chicago area home of Tom Ayers in the 1980s has stated that Obama was friends with the entire Ayers family including Bill and Tom.

And Ayers himself wrote that the Obamas were “family friends” -- in an epilogue to his own memoirs that only appeared in a new post-election edition late last year that was then conveniently ignored by the mainstream media such as The New York Times.

The Times interviewed me 5 separate times using 3 different reporters and despite the clear evidence of the deep relationship between Obama and Ayers, accepted at face value statements by the Obama campaign that the two only met in either early or late 1995 (The Times changed its story on this) and did not really have much contact at all. I dissected this dissembling act on Global Labor here.

Of course, neither Dorhn nor Ayers have done much to distance themselves from their authoritarian late 60s politics. They have stopped throwing bombs but express no regrets for their violent tactics. Ayers himself has only gone so far as to say that violence is “probably” not the answer today. They are strong supporters of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez as they were once, at least, of Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Daniel Ortega.

The appointment of avowed maoist and reverse racist Van Jones as Green Jobs czar was likely the kind of individual the Democratic Party activist in the campaign was concerned about. Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett, whose family is also friends with Ayers and Dohrn (Jarett’s mother appointed Tom Ayers to the board of her foundation, the Erikson Institute), was responsible for appointing Jones and allowing him to avoid the ordinary vetting process.

Jarrett claimed publicly just a few weeks before Jones resigned that the Obama team had been watching Jones for many years. Of course this would have included the period when Jones was active in STORM, a maoist sect in the bay area.

Many on the Democratic left -- such as the teachers’ union official Leo Casey -- have dismissed the claims of links to Ayers in the narrow interest of electing a Democrat, any Democrat, to rescue organized labor.

Some on the Democratic left argue that it does not matter because Obama would just jettison the Ayers types around the candidate once in office and become a mainstream politician. The Van Jones appointment suggests that has not been the case. At a minimum it suggests there is some dishonesty at work.

More likely it suggests some basic disconnect between the core Obama team, the inner circle that not only has connections with Ayers and Dohrn but is not actually embarrassed by them, and political reality.

That should concern everyone across the political spectrum.

It's now clear that the Obama administration and their media toadies want to tamp down Glenn Beck's influence. They're making fools of themselves in the process, which only provides material for the next Glenn Beck TV show.

Case in point: this howler from TIME magazine's September 17 cover story, which asks, Is Glenn Beck bad for America?

Beck mines the timeless theme of the corrupt Them thwarting a virtuous Us. This flexible narrative often contains genuinely uncomfortable truths. [...] But he also spins yarns of less substance. He tells his viewers that Obama's volunteerism efforts are really an attempt to create a "civilian national-security force that is just as strong, just as powerful as the military."

So then Glenn aired a video clip of Barack Obama saying he wanted a civilian national-security force "that is just as strong, just as powerful as the military."

The funniest part is that although Glenn mentioned the TIME article he didn't point out it had wrongly attributed an Obama quote to him. Why should he bother? He knew that anyone who saw his show that day and read the article would spot the gaffe.

(The clip was part of a montage that Glenn titled, "Obama in his own words." We'll see more of the montage on today's show.)

Was it really a gaffe, or did the author, David Von Drehle, deliberately misrepresent? The Obama quote about the civilian national-security force is well known on the blogosphere, at least the portion which keeps a close eye on Obama, and to Fox News Channel viewers. I doubt that David, who's been in the reporting business a long time, would risk his reputation over a quote that's so easily traceable to its correct source. So I'd guess he honestly didn't know that the words he attributed to Glenn were actually Obama's.

How could a reporter who's been in the business a long time fall down so spectacularly on his fact checking? (And how could the TIME fact checker do the same?) It happens easily when your goal drifts from informing the public to pressing your point of view.

It's clear from the article that David Von Drehle is not terribly interested in talking about Glenn Beck; he provides just enough information about Beck to set up the point of his writing, which is that America's polarized politics have generated an industry -- an industry that's highly profitable to its standard bearers.

That's exactly how David, and TIME, got into hot water with the American Left.

Jamison Foser nearly had an aneurysm over the TIME article because it blurted out that Media Matters has a multi-million dollar budget and, horror of horrors, named Media Matters as an opposite to the right-wing pole of the industry, which David assumes Glenn Beck represents.

To give you some idea of the melee, Jamison's salvo, which he fired off from his perch at Media Matters, is titled, How Time magazine enables Glenn Beck's lies. According to the Washington Post's Joel Auerbach, Foser isn't the only lefty who's furious with TIME; he mentions that Greg Mitchell at the Huffington Post makes the same point as Jamison. "And no doubt you can find similar pieces all over blogworld."

No doubt.

As to how Joel got involved, David is a friend of his and a reporter he admires. So then it was war. Jamison counter-attacked in another piece he titled, WaPo reporter and "close friend" of Von Drehle defends Beck profile; attacks me

Then Joel counter-counter attacked -- again, from his perch at The Washington Post. Then Jamison sputtered in an update to his own counter-counter attack:

And in his response, Achenbach accuses me of "false equivalence." Which is really kind of cute, given that that's one of the basic problems with his friend David Von Drehle's profile of Beck. Von Drehle draws false equivalence between crowd size estimates of 70,000 and a million; draws false equivalence between paranoia on right and left; between Beck and Olbermann. If only Achenbach could recognize false equivalence when it comes from his "close friend," we could have avoided this whole discussion.

There's another way the melee might have been avoided; that's if TIME had stuck with the advertised subject of their cover article: Glenn Beck. But no, they wanted to make a point. So without Glenn's permission -- he refused to be interviewed for the article -- they manipulated the public's interest in him to convey an editorial opinion to a captive audience.

Then TIME editors, and editors of other news outlets who think the public lives to pay to hear their opinions, complain that their rags are having a hard time staying in business. Then Barack Obama offers them his shoulder to cry on:

(The Hill - September 20) The president said he is "happy to look at" bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

"I haven't seen detailed proposals yet, but I'll be happy to look at them," Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called "Newspaper Revitalization Act," that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin's Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had played down the possibility of government assistance for news organizations, which have been hit by an economic downturn and dwindling ad revenue.

In early May, Gibbs said that while he hadn't asked the president specifically about bailout options for newspapers, "I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it."

Obama said that good journalism is "critical to the health of our democracy," but expressed concern toward growing tends in reporting -- especially on political blogs, from which a groundswell of support for his campaign emerged during the presidential election.

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding," he said.

By gum our President nails what's wrong with the TIME piece on Glenn Beck! Oh but that's right I forgot -- TIME isn't a blog.

David Von Drehle's piece for TIME reflects the most striking aspect of what's bad about America's news media. He was so intent on getting his own points across that he made only the most superficial pass at learning about Glenn Beck's points. Yet instead of editing David's ruminations and sending him back into the field to scare up more data, TIME published his opinion piece as an in-depth news report.

The upshot is that TIME is way off the beam when they lump Glenn with conservatives and with any political party.

Yet he can't be characterized as an Independent in the Lou Dobbs mold. The Americans who've closely observed Glenn Beck already know this. The last ones to know what he represents, and to understand the implications, will be the MLM (money losing media) and the Obama administration.

Suddenly it's cool to be Fox News Channel. Craig Unger doesn't get it, when he tells John Batchelor that Glenn Beck doesn't deserve a seat at the White House table. This is not about Beck, or even really about Fox. It's just that Fox caught the wave.

What's the wave? If you have to ask you aren't cool but for Craig: it's many Americans suddenly remembering there is no table in the American democracy. The lord of the manor belongs to another time and place, and leavings from his table are for serfs.

I listened to President Obama's address to Congress about health care and caught some comments about it at Fox Cable News and NBC network news after the speech ended.

From all that I wonder how much Mr Obama and his advisors understand the sea change that's been building in this country for many years. I noted in a 2005 essay, which I titled How do you run a government when the voters are smarter than you? that America is moving into not so much a post-partisan but a post-political phase:

... for the first time in recorded history the pyramid of society is turned upside down. Except for a very few pockets around the world, the government does not represent the smartest and best-informed people in the society.

It's not as if Democratic and Republican party leaders are unaware of the situation but they seem to have no idea how to respond -- beyond trying to make themselves seem 'with it.'

President Obama's science advisor told David Letterman a few nights ago that "Obama gets it" -- "it" meaning the science and technology issues of this era.

Everything I've heard from this president suggests he "gets it" to the extent he's mastered the speech patterns and attitudes of any group of constituents he wants to appeal to. He reminds me of a description I once heard of a book editor in New York, "Who could talk with anyone about anything for 15 minutes."

Mr Obama's ability to do the same served him well during his rise as a politician but it's of limited help at the level of problem solving. Yet I'm not certain any other U.S. politician could do better at this stage.

There are some bright legislators who're well-informed on particular topics, such as health care and finance. But I think an increasing number of Americans are realizing that many problems government is traditionally tasked to manage are now so unwieldy they can't be managed; they have to be solved. The question is how you do this within the legislative framework, which in a democracy is necessarily grounded in compromise.

The compromise approach to problem-solving has led to the kind of entrenched problems in the USA that beset 'developing' countries -- particularly during the era when international development banks set out to modernize the countries. I mocked the approach in a 2005 essay titled, "Half a bridge is better than none."

If that sounds insane to you -- it was first-world international development policy for decades, and governments in developing countries went along with it; the approach is still in play to some extent, even today.

If it still makes no sense: Hey, if the banana republic couldn't afford modern bridge-building technologies and materials, well then, the development bank could loan them enough to build a 1950s bridge.

The problem, too often, was that 1950s bridge technology wasn't sufficient to accept the traffic loads in the modern era. So there were additional loans to patch the bridges. And when you totted it all up, it came out to more than if you'd originally built a whole bridge.

Of course the thinking didn't only apply to bridges. You could notice that, every time you saw half a city collapse in a earthquake in various 'developing' parts of the world.

Madness. Absolute madness. Yet by the end of 2005, which had seen residents of a U.S. city standing on their rooftops and begging to be rescued from floodwaters, it was clear that many regions in the USA could be looked at as a third-world country.

An unsettling thought, given that the United States is supposed to be the most advanced nation in the world.

One commentator noted after Mr Obama's address last night that the shouts and booing punctuating some of his comments were more reminiscent of the British Parliament than the U.S. Congress. Outwardly, perhaps, there was a similarity but I think what bubbled up last night in the Congress was frustration rather than a tradition of adding editorial comment.

Many Americans have lost patience with sitting through a politician's recitation of data that they know can be challenged; this frustration surfaced again and again at the August town hall meetings on healthcare. It's also surfaced at certain stockholder meetings during the past decade, and particularly during the past couple years at financial institutions.

I think what fuels the frustration is that many Americans know they'd be fired from their job if their performance was as poor as that turned in by certain CEOs, legislators and political leaders.

Whenever I raise these observations I'm asked what post-political thinking might translate to in America, and then various scenarios are posited:

One-party rule? (That is very attractive to several Americans who term themselves leftist but actually believe that authoritarian government is the best kind.)

Abandoning representative democracy in favor of referendum democracy?

Adopting the parliamentarian system of government and promoting a multi-party political process?

Such scenarios reflect that Americans have a tendency to get caught up in the Idée Fixe: The old Promised Land turned out to be full of frogs and hailstones but the new Promised Land is milk and honey.

This tendency was sent up, with affection, in the musical play "The Music Man." The one thing River City needed to solve all its problems was a marching band.

Virtually all societies are susceptible to the Idée Fixe, but I suspect the American version crystallized during the generations door-to-door salesmen wedged their foot in the door: If the vacuum cleaner I sold you last year ruined your rug don't set the dogs on me; this new model will make the rug look better than new and I'll throw in a five-speed eggbeater for free.

Yet the idea that there is one way, one sweeping grand plan, to fix America's most vexing problems today or its antiquated political system is as silly as the residents of River City. (Which is not saying anything against the value of marching bands.)

We first need to recognize that we've been trying to apply the legislative approach to situations it was never designed to handle.

The requirements of governing in this era suggest that the majority of Congress members should think and act like forensic accountants with credentials to match. In this era the ideas for best practices to deal with the various problems Americans face can, and should, be coming from individual citizens and the private sector.

So then the primary task for legislators is how to pay for the best practices and make the disbursements fair; for that we need more accounting brains in Congress and to transit to fungible budgets.

But what do we do instead? Spend millions to form PACs, turn out our pockets even more to support politicians who promise us a new Promised Land, and divert God Knows how many hours to hopping up and down in street demonstrations and attending political conventions.

Then we cluck our tongues at suicidal practices we come across in primitive tribes. Well at one time many of those practices represented pragmatic responses to challenges of the day. But then conditions changed and the tribal practices didn't.

If you look at Americans as a tribe you'll see uncomfortable parallels with the saddest situations found among many of today's most distressed tribes in the poorest countries. Our political tradition is no longer an intelligent response to the challenges we face. And yet Americans still insist that this is democracy in action. No it isn't; it's billions of dollars being thrown down the drain and a tragic waste of Americans' time and ingenuity.

The political system we need for this era, which I suspect rests more with greater regionalism than with any radical redesign of the U.S. political system, will evolve over time. But the task immediately before us is to disentangle our thinking from the Idée Fixe, if we want to deal with the most pressing problems, such as modernizing America's healthcare system.

Ditch the grand plans and the next Sure Thing leading to the new improved Promised Land. Instead, gather best practices and deploy them, on a lottery basis, in one region of the country. See how it goes after a year; take regional differences into account then refine for use in the next region. If it goes surprisingly well within less than a year, think about moving up the timetable.

Where is the quantum mechanics in this?

And please do not write and tell me that we can't afford to wait for such experiments because Americans are dying without better health care.

You want to stop thousands of Americans from dying next year from illness and save millions of dollars in the process? Fine; ring up the FDA and ask them what's taking them so long to get Filligent's BioFriend™ material cleared for use in the USA -- the one country that doesn't allow its sale.

I've talked quite a deal about Filligent's products but just be clear, the BioFriend material that goes into Fillgent's BioMask™ is not limited to the face mask. The material represents a biotech breakthrough that zaps viruses within 30 seconds and most bacteria in under a minute. The nontoxic, non-irritating material can be made into hospital sheets, towels, uniforms, O.R. gowns. It can be wrapped around door handles.

Now go to Wikipedia and bone up on nosocomial infections.

If you're suddenly slapping your forehead -- yes of course: the rate of nosocomial infections would plummet if hospitals and medical clinics used the BioFriend material.

And realize that hospital staff and patients can simply wipe their hands on the BioFriend material on linens or clothing to sanitize their hands! Thirty seconds! Bam! Viruses neutralized. A minute! Bam! Bacteria gone!

Do you have any idea, can your mind encompass, what I've just told you? I think not, unless you've studied the BioFriend technology and nosocomial infections. But the implications are staggering.

Many nosocomial infections are spread by hospital staff who go from patient to patient, ward to ward, and who run outside to the corner deli while they're wearing their scrubs and other uniforms. Then they track the germs they pick up throughout the hospital.

That would be a thing of the past if they wore uniforms made of BioFriend material.

Granted, the BioFriend product is little more than two years old. Yet at the rate things happen in America's public health regime it might be a decade before they get around to suggesting to hospitals that they use the BioFriend material.

And I don't want to hear a complaint from the service unions. First things first. If disposable linens greatly reduce the need for hospital laundry staff, let them sit around and drink coffee all day if they can't think of another way to make themselves useful. Then when there's time, develop programs to retrain them.

But first get that material made into hospital linens and uniforms. And this is not just for wiping out epidemics of hospital-generated infections, which make hospitals a place where you take your life in your hands if you're an inpatient or even an outpatient.

Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Marion was standing on the floor of the Egyptian tomb, poking at the poisonous snakes with a sputtering torch in the attempt to keep them at bay, then suddenly yelling in terror, "Indy, the light is going out!"

That's the way things are for us since we've been abusing antibiotics in a desperate attempt to halt infection epidemics. We've seen the rise of super-bugs that are immune to antibiotics. It is now a constant battle, a battle we're not winning, between technology and the bugs, as antibiotic after antibiotic is found to be useless.

The hospitals are recklessly deploying antibiotics in the attempt to tamp down nosocomial infections. Better to stop the outbreaks, which can be done by more hygienic practices.

You want to save a few thousand more American lives next year? Get on the horn with the CDC and ask them why seasonal U.S. flu vaccines aren't distributed in the United States until the flu season is already underway.

It takes two months for the flu vaccine to become fully effective, yet distribution centers are still giving flu shots in November, December and January -- as the flu season is nearing its end in the USA!

In the name of sanity, why plug uncounted billions into flu vaccine, decade after decade, when it's not distributed in enough time to ward off flu epidemics?

Then Americans say, 'I took that vaccine and it didn't work for me.'

Well of course it doesn't work if you don't know it can't do to the impossible for you..

Granted, if the vaccine is a good match to the virus that infected you, you'll get some help from the vaccine before two months -- but that help is only after you're infected. So whether you spend a week or three days in bed, that's still time you've lost work -- and the 20 bucks you forked over for nostrums to help you get through your agony.

If you ask the CDC why they do something so counterproductive, they have their excuse; they'll tell you it has to do with the time it takes pharmaceutical companies to make the vaccine. But that excuse no longer flies in this era -- and actually it shouldn't have flown a decade ago.

If you're really in a mood to tear out your hair, go around to flu vaccine clinics this year and observe how long between the time the person's arm is swabbed with alcohol and the vaccine needle is injected.

If they don't wait 30 seconds for the alcohol to sanitize the area before plunging in that needle, and many don't, might as well not swab at all, and many don't wait that long.

(I'm speaking of ethyl alcohol, which neutralizes 99.9% of viruses and bacteria within 30 seconds; I haven't researched whether isopropyl alcohol works as well.)

Then many Americans say, 'Oh I got so sick from taking that flu vaccine.'

It's a miracle they're still alive in many cases. Think of kids, picking their nose, playing in dirt, then rubbing their hands on their arm -- then two seconds of the alcohol swab, then in goes the vaccination needle. I tell you this world is littered with miracles, positively littered, if you know where to look.

Americans came to place so much faith in pharmacological interventions, such as vaccine and antibiotics, that we've become a dirty people, ignoring basic hygiene practices that even many of the most primitive tribes observe. And we've done this at a time in our history when we can least afford the lack of attention to public hygiene.

As I observed in a recent post:

I remember talking more than 30 years ago in Nepal with a Nepalese doctor, Western trained, who told me, "There are diseases in this part of the world that the West has never heard of."

That's right, but the first-world governments could not encompass the implications; they didn't confront what would happen if diseases they'd never heard of began jetting in overnight. That wasn't a concern in those days, when most air travel was between first-world countries.

The harbinger was AIDS. The index AIDS patient was a Haitian working in the Congo. How did a Haitian end up working in the Congo? It's a question we don't bother to ask today because globalization of the work force is so much a part of modern life.

After I started writing about swine flu I received a letter from an American who earnestly claimed that every "new" viral disease since AIDS had been a creation of military laboratories. The reader was blind to the fact that the "laboratory" is international airports perched in countries that have few paved roads.

China's government, which made every mistake in the book in their response to AIDS, SARS, and H5N1, learned the hard way how the era of fully globalized work forces and international air travel intersected with infectious disease transmission. Their battle plan against the 2009 swine flu virus reflects lessons learned -- lessons that the rest of the world's governments have yet to absorb.

Today, American school administrators, under fire from 2009 swine flu, are scrambling to learn and deploy practices to limit the spread of germs in schools. Thus, the epidemic has a silver lining. The practices, some as simple as placing hand sanitizer dispensers in school halls, will add up to healthier Americans.

Yet all the above is just for starters. There are many best practices that can be deployed quickly and relatively cheaply to reduce the costs of U.S. health care and that quickly save many lives.

We have the intelligence in this country among the citizen pool and the will to make the changes. It's just that we're trying to force a political system that was never designed to solve such complex problems to make the changes for us.

The system could totter on in the last century but now it's reached a dead end. Instead of acknowledging this we keep sitting under the big tent, watching a political circus that's wasting our precious time and money and getting us no closer to solutions.

Law professor and labor union expert Dr Stephen Diamond, whose writings in 2008 detailed the true connection between William Ayers and Barack Obama, demonstrates once again that not all Leftists have cheese tostitos for brains. Today Steve writes at his King Harvest blog about his former Yale classmate and provides insights about Van Jones that right-wing critics and the mainstream media have missed:

The rise and fall of Van “the Man” Jones

This weekend’s unsurprising resignation of White House official Van Jones brought back memories of my days at Yale Law School. Back then we knew him as Van “the Man” Jones who strode around the law school with more attitude than substance. But some people are really into attitude these days and when one looks back at the rocket like ascension of Jones it is hard to know how else to explain his success in reaching the inner circle of the White House.

Certainly there is little content - from a genuine democratic left perspective - in the mantra of “Green Jobs.” Why exactly will it be better for workers to hammer out hybrids than combustion engine cars? Will they be paid better? Will auto jobs return to the US? Will they recover the lost middle class life of the 1950s and 1960s? Will their union recover its lost place at the seat of power in American life?

Very unlikely. Does that mean that there is not a serious environmental problem? Of course not. But how many inner city residents are willing to go off and live in Oklahoma or Nebraska or wherever it is these wind farms are going to be built? I bet the largely white laid-off oil workers beat them to the punch.

Jones’ “genius” was that he placed himself at the crossroads of the emerging so-called Blue-Green Alliance: advocating training for unemployed workers in largely poor urban areas in newly emerging industries. But the number of such jobs actually created and secured is likely in the dozens or hundreds at most, at least in the Bay Area where Jones was based before decamping for D.C. Even the well-funded and popular Tesla auto assembly plant is having trouble getting a plant opened anywhere near Silicon Valley.

In any case, the building trades and electrical power industry unions have well established training programs that will generate the workforce - unionized - that is needed when or if such an industry actually gets off the ground. Of course, Jones was a self-styled “r-r-revolutionary” so working inside the labor movement did not appeal to him (though to its credit the Baker Center now does have some relationship to organized labor).

To think that Jones’ motive was to be a real environmentalist is to ignore his decade of street activism including his membership in a sect called STORM - Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, some kind of a weird reincarnation of late 60s third worldist maoism, as far as I can figure out. Far from dropping his “communist” politics (and I use the term reluctantly since I am fairly sure Jones has not the slightest clue about communism) he made it clear that he moved into environmentalism as a new base of operations for his “revolutionary” politics.

And there of course he likely met other like minded souls - such as Carl Davidson and Jeff Jones, 60s generation neo-stalinist comrades of people like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky. Jeff Jones and Davidson are also active members in the so-called Blue-Green Alliance - Jones through the Apollo Alliance (of which the Baker Center founded by Van Jones was a part) and Davidson through his Solidarity Economy group. Perhaps Davidson or Jeff Jones introduced Van Jones to the Obama circle that included, of course, Ayers and Dohrn. As I reported during the campaign on Global Labor, Ayers and Dohrn were directly in contact with Michelle and Barack Obama on a regular basis and were discussing with them possible appointments to the new Administration. Michelle publicly praised Van Jones when he joined the Administration.

To understand Jones, in fact, one need look no further than someone like Bill Ayers - who left behind his days as a violent pseudo-left wing thug and became, of all things, a professor of education. But that did not stop him from publicly advocating the politics of other violent pseudo-left wing thugs, like Hugo Chavez.

That Barack Obama could view a relationship with Ayers and Jones as somehow the way to move forward in American political life is surely one of the continuing puzzles of the current era. But that is really just parlor talk.

The real problem for the genuine democratic left is to comprehend how in the late 60s it let people like Ayers highjack a healthy vibrant civil rights and antiwar movement through SDS and now once again is allowing maoists like Jones to portray themselves as representing a new generation of activism on important issues such as war, the economy and the environment. To solve that problem requires substance not attitude.

The next Pundita post will be Tuesday morning, September 8 at around 7 AM EDT.

Best regards to all,
Pundita