I have some sense when it comes to reading a person’s dignity and honesty when I see that person. In 2000 election, during the debate of Bush and Gore, I favor Gore even if lots of people told me he’s boring, and not charismatic. Why is charms so outweighed than dignity, honesty and compassion in this country?

Same thing in 2004, lots of people don’t like Kerry because of his stiffness and no charisma.

Ok, for those people vote for charms, watch out, charms will suck you right in like a black hole, and you’ll never get to see the end of it.

Shall we say, actually the whole Bush administration are SMART FOR THEIR OWN GOOD!

What have they gotten to lose by so “POORLY MANAGING” this country. NOTHING! Bush is going to retire from his presidency without any loss, he has nothing to lose since he doesn’t give a SH** about the majority of the people in this country. Is he poorer than 8 years ago? NO, only he has BANKRUPT this country. So by no means he is stupid.

Let’s be honest, Republican are very very calculated party. They have great THINK TANK to come up with framing and strategy. That’s why when they are asked other questions and being put on the spot, they stay the course, that’s why they are almost robotic and very formulated. They almost don’t have compassion, that’s why they WIN. At least it’s the strategy of NEO-CON.

But I have problems with Robot running our country!

Palin’s husband Todd was a as a member of the Alaskan Independence Party from 1995 to 2002 he was registered to vote in that state.

This party wants to secede from the Union. How’s that for radical.

This is such a load of BS and I notice how the public cares about Ayers.

Ayers was a radical and did some dangerous such as blow up a statue. He has publicly apologized for and is extremely remorseful. He is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the honor of Distinguished Professor.

That he is left wing progressive is no surprise to me.
Calling him a terrorist and a person who hates America is absurd.

If Palin wants to play this game then by her definition is her husband not also anti-American and a ‘hater’ as she likes to call people who don’t agree with her.

Obama’s Challenge
The campaign speaks to “Radicalism.”

By Stanley Kurtz
Today, in a piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools,” I offer a report on my research into the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), an education foundation once headed by Barack Obama. As I explained in “Chicago Annenberg Challenge Shutdown?” the Richard J. Daley Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago first agreed to grant, then abruptly denied me, access to the files of this foundation. Subsequently, the Daley Library again reversed their decision and made the CAC files available. As I note in today’s Journal piece, I’ve conveyed the gist of my Annenberg findings to the Obama campaign and offered them a chance to respond. In reply, the Obama campaign has sent me an extended “on the record” statement about Obama’s role at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and about the nature of his relationship with Bill Ayers. I present that statement in its entirety here:The Annenberg Challenge records only serve to establish clearly that while Barack Obama and Ayers had occasional contact during Obama’s 6 years of service on the bipartisan board, they did not work closely together to exchange and develop policy ideas. In fact, as these records show, Ayers attended a total 6 meetings of the Board during the 6 years of Obama’s Board service. And, as these same records also demonstrate, the advisory committee that Ayers co-chaired played no operational role whatsoever once the Challenge hired its Executive Director at the end of its first year.Ayers had nothing to do with Obama’s recruitment to the Board. Barack Obama was encouraged to run for Chair by Deborah Leff, with whom he served on another board, recommended by Pat Graham, and elected by the bipartisan founding board members: Susan Crown, Pat Graham, Stanley Ikenberry, Ray Romero, Arnold Weber, and Wanda White. Barack Obama months ago confirmed that he had contact with Ayers during the course of his foundation work, and he pointed out that “We served on a board together that had Republicans, bankers, lawyers, focused on education”. Senator Obama also said earlier this year that Ayers was “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis”, a fact that is not in any way contradicted by their contact through the Annenberg Challenge which ended 12 years ago, or by any of the Challenge records.The suggestion that Ayers somehow dominated the policy or direction of the bipartisan Challenge Board, imprinting it with radical views, is absurd. The Annenberg Challenge was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend Walter Annenberg. Republican Governor Jim Edgar, who wrote to Walter Annenberg to encourage the creation of the Challenge, joined Mayor Daley to announce the formation of the Challenge and his administration continued to work closely on education reform with the Board. John McCain has praised an initiative funded by the Challenge. The Challenge’s work is still carried on today through to the bipartisan Chicago Public Education Fund, which coordinates closely Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley to improve teacher performance and has included such board members as Illinois Republican Party Chair Andrew McKenna. The Challenge was established to allocate grants targeted to improve student performance and promote teacher training and leadership development in the Chicago Public Schools. One objective of the Challenge was to improve education for the bottom quartile of students attending Chicago Public Schools — whose reading, math, and basic skills scores improved markedly during the years in which the Challenge invested in city schools. Due to the work of the Challenge and the Fund, the number of board certified teachers in Chicago Public Schools has increased by the hundreds.As is well known, by the time Barack Obama met him, Ayers was a faculty member at the University of Illinois, and he has held the title of ‘distinguished scholar’ the University of South Carolina for many years — Ayers held both positions at universities while Republican Governors served on their Boards of Trustees. The detestable acts that Ayers committed decades before occurred when Senator Obama was 8 years old and the Senator has condemned them in no uncertain terms.While I’ve addressed this statement in the “Radicalism” piece, I’ll extend my response here.Let’s first review CAC’s initial setup. In the first year, 1995, Obama headed the board, which made fiscal decisions, and Ayers co-chaired the Collaborative, which set education policy. During that first year, Obama’s formal responsibilities mandated close cooperation and coordination with the Collaborative. As board chair and president of the CAC corporation, Obama was authorized to “delegate to the Collaborative the development of collaborative projects and programs . . . to obtain assistance of the Collaborative in the development of requests for proposals . . . and to seek advice from the Collaborative regarding the programmatic aspects of grant proposals.” All this clearly involves significant consultation between the board, headed by Obama, and the Collaborative, co-chaired by Ayers.During this initial year of 1995, Ayers also sat as an ex officio member of the board. The Obama campaign is trying to minimize his cooperation with Ayers by counting the number of board meetings where both sat together. That will not do. For one thing, as long as we’re counting occasions on which Obama and Ayers were together, the Obama campaign omits Obama’s appearances before the Collaborative, when it was co-chaired by Ayers. In 1995, Obama and Ayers also sat together on the board’s Governance Committee, with at least one independently scheduled meeting, and who knows how many others. Ayers and Obama were also part of a group of four instructed to draft the bylaws that would govern CAC. Surely that endeavor would have involved significant interaction between them. Then there’s the question of unrecorded meetings of both the board and the Collaborative. For example, the archives contain an intriguing note indicating that, although a CAC board meeting took place on July 25, 1995, “No minutes were recorded.” Were Ayers and Obama both present at that meeting? More important, what took place there?The partnership between Ayers and Obama is about much more than the number of occasions on which the two were recorded together in the same room. As CAC board chair, Obama was essentially authorizing the funding of Ayers’s own educational projects, and the projects of Ayers’s radical allies. And especially in CAC’s first year, Ayers was largely in charge of the process. One of CAC’s own evaluations notes that during 1995, CAC was a “Founder-Led Foundation.” That is, Ayers was not merely an ex officio board member that year, but as the key founder and guiding spirit of CAC, he was effectively running the show.This is consistent with what I found in the documents, which, for example, show Ayers not only speaking for the Collaborative before the board, but speaking in place of absent board members when they couldn’t be present to make a report. In general, in 1995, Ayers seems to be deeply involved in the work of every important body and committee at CAC. Of the three CAC founders, Ayers, Anne Hallett, an urban school advocate, and Warren Chapman, a state school reformer, only two, Ayers and Hallett, were Collaborative co-chairs and ex officio members of the board. And in a letter, Hallett describes herself as “joined at the hip” with Ayers. Clearly Ayers was the senior partner of the pair, given his prominence as an author, and as a national spokesman for educators consciously committed to politicizing their classrooms. Ayers is not only an activist, but a sort of father-figure to radical educators, authoring not only books of his own, but editing collections of like-minded authors, and putting together coalitions of educators, as he did at CAC. Hallett and Ayers may have co-chaired the Collaborative and together been ex-officio on the board, but this was largely Ayers’s show.So when CAC’s own evaluators call 1995 the period of the “Founder-Led Foundation,” they are essentially saying that, in 1995, Ayers was the most powerful individual at CAC. The Obama campaign treats that suggestion as “absurd,” yet it is effectively made by CAC’s own evaluators. This needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama campaign’s minimization of the Ayers-Obama connection that year. Ayers’s outsized role at CAC also needs to be kept in mind when considering the Obama camp’s claim that Deborah Leff and Patricia Graham first suggested Obama’s name as board chair. Given the degree of Ayers’s power at this early stage, it’s hard to believe that the ultimate decision on Obama’s elevation to the board was not made by Ayers himself. After all, Ayers and his immediate ally, Michael Klonsky, would end up seeking major financial support from CAC for their own “Small Schools” network. Ayers could not have been indifferent to the choice of board chair, since his own funding, and that of his many allies, would depend on it.This brings us to the ethical concerns that led to a restructuring of the relationship between the CAC board and the Collaborative after 1995. The Obama camp points to this shift as if it quiets questions about the Obama-Ayers relationship. In fact, the post-1995 restructuring of CAC more urgently raises such questions. Precisely because Collaborative members like Ayers were themselves up for CAC grants, stronger barriers had to be created between the board and the Collaborative. So after 1995, Ayers appears to have lost his ex officio status on the board, and the Collaborative lost its theretofore prominent role in advising the board on grant applications.I found little explicit discussion, in either board or Collaborative minutes, about the need for this major structural change. Could the unrecorded July 25, 1995, board meeting have addressed the issue? That meeting would have taken place just as the responses to the initial “Request for Proposals” were coming in. At that point, it would have been evident that many Collaborative members were seeking money from CAC itself. This was at the high point of Collaborative’s power, before CAC had an executive director in place. Perhaps discussion of the “self-dealing” issue, and the need to make structural changes, began at that meeting. The specific question of what happened at the unrecorded July 25, 1995 meeting is only speculation, of course. But we do know, from internal and external evaluations of CAC, that ethical concerns did in fact lead to a formal demotion of the Collaborative’s power after 1995.While the appearance of self-dealing receded after CAC’s first year, the reality may still have been in place. Evaluators, both internal and external, have criticized CAC for over-committing its funds in 1995, and also for doing far too little to demand accountability from grant recipients, very much including the initial batch. Many of the initial grantees continued to receive funds for years. Evaluators consistently note the lack of flexibility in grants, and complain that the huge 1995 commitments, with relatively few changes in follow-on years, significantly undercut CAC’s impact and effectiveness.So although Ayers may have lost his formal position on the board after 1995, and while the Collaborative he co-chaired may have surrendered its formal influence over the grant-making process, grant decisions Ayers put in place when he was effectively running CAC were respected for years by the board. And according to internal and external evaluations, this appears to have been greatly to the detriment of CAC. Why, then, did the board, chaired by Obama, adhere so assiduously to the funding decisions and strategies put in place by Ayers in 1995, even after CAC’s formal structure changed?I’ll have more to say about that issue down the road, but you can read the key evaluations for yourself. (See Dorothy Shipps et al.,”The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: The First Three Years,” here; Alexander Russo, “From Frontline Leader to Rearguard Action: The Chicago Annenberg Challenge,” here; and Mark A. Smylie et al., “The Chicago Annenberg Challenge: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for the Future, Part ,1 here and especially Part 2, here.) The Obama camp denies CAC’s radicalism by pointing to the fact that this foundation was funded by Nixon Ambassador and Reagan friend, Walter Annenberg. Moderates and Republicans often support Annenberg activities, it’s true. Yet the story of modern philanthropy is largely the story of moderate and conservative donors finding their funds “captured” by far more liberal, often radical, beneficiaries. CAC’s story is a classic of the genre. Ayers and Obama guided CAC money to community organizers, like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and the Developing Communities Project (Part of the Gamaliel Foundation network), groups self-consciously working in the radical tradition of Saul Alinsky. Walter Annenberg’s personal politics don’t change that one iota.The fact that Ayers and other tenured radicals hold power at our universities is in no way negated by the presence of Republican appointees on university boards of trustees. Ayers’s radicalism is undeniable. He remains unapologetic for his bombings of the 1960s. Even now, he refuses to rule out violence as a resort. His education writings are deeply politicized and filled with exhortations to “resist” America’s racist and oppressive social system. In 2006 — along with his wife and fellow former-terrorist, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones — Ayers released, Sing A Battle Song, a collection of intensely radical writings from the Weather Underground. Ayers makes it clear in that book that, while he is embarrassed by some of the Weather Underground’s rhetoric, he still adheres to the same ideas. Beyond its strictly historical interest, Ayers and his co-editors make a point of hoping that their old writings would be “of use to new generations of militant activists and organizers.” By directing CAC funds to groups like ACORN and the Developing Communities Project of the Gamaliel Foundation, Ayers was supporting just such militant activists and organizers.The Obama campaign notes that during the CAC years, achievement test scores improved markedly in the Chicago public schools. That’s true, but deeply misleading. The real source of improvement was the leadership of accountability-oriented Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, who began to reform CPS in 1995, the year of CAC’s founding. Vallas established clear standards, began high-stakes testing, ended social promotion, forced thousands of students to attend summer school to advance a grade, and put failing schools on probation. That’s what pushed up Chicago test scores. CAC’s own final evaluation carefully compared students at schools with Annenberg projects and schools without. According to CAC’s own report: “There were no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools. This indicates that there was no Annenberg effect on achievement.” It also indicates that Annenberg failed, not because it’s altogether impossible to improve urban schools, but because CAC’s heavily politicized community-organizer partners weren’t any good at doing so.The Chicago Annenberg Challenge stands as Barack Obama’s most important executive experience to date. By its own account, CAC was a largely a failure. And a series of critical evaluations point to reasons for that failure, including a poor strategy, to which the foundation over-committed in 1995, and over-reliance on community organizers with insufficient education expertise. The failure of CAC thus raises entirely legitimate questions, both about Obama’s competence, his alliances with radical community organizers, and about Ayers’s continuing influence over CAC and its board, headed by Obama. Above all, by continuing to fund Ayers’s personal projects, and those of his political-educational allies, Obama was lending moral and material support to Ayers’s profoundly radical efforts. Ayers’s terrorist history aside, that makes the Ayers-Obama relationship a perfectly legitimate issue in this campaign.— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

When are the liberals going to get over their hang-up about how “stupid” a candidate is?

Intellectual deficits have nothing to do with the matter at hand, which is the election. For the last two terms the left and the Democrats and the coastal opinion makers have amused themselves about how “stupid” George Bush is – about his verbal gaffes, his reading ability, his grasp of basic geography, the way he says “nuke-you-ler” etc.

But he won the White House – TWICE – the second time by the biggest vote-count in history, and last week he showed he could still get Congress to do his bidding even as a lame duck. The Democrats would kill to have someone that “stupid”.

As I’ve already pointed out here, winning elections and performing well in office are completely unrelated – they do not require the same skills and attributes. Just get over it – you can’t change human nature.

We weren’t going to vote for him, but we liked him.

Who is this guy running now? He’s nasty, sarcastic, and looks completely out of control. He’s also compromised his honor. The racist insinuations about Gwen Ifill, the implication that Obama has sympathy for terrorism.

It’s time to just call these people what they are: bad, desperate, dishonest losers.

Palin’s not qualified for high office because of her obvious intellectual deficit. Can we for once just be honest? She’s really stupid.

McCain is rash, reckless, and weirdly locked in the world of the eighties — or maybe nineties.

Sweet God, let us be rid, of these people.

Then I’ll listen to Ms Noonan talk about the need for politiness and calm all she wants.

This is the person some of you want to be in the White House.

She also today accused Obama of supporting terrorism (for when he worked together in a school improvement project with the founder of the Weather Underground).

One might count these things as desperation moves by a McCain camp that sees its chances of winning the election evaporating like a snowman in a spring thaw. But on the other hand you could say the same thing about the Swift Boat campaign, and that WORKED for the GOP.

As I’ve said before, it’s about winning the election, not about qualifications to hold office. If making outrageous or incomprehensible statements helps the GOP win the election then that’s what counts. Remember, we live in a country where only 40% of the population believe in evolution (”Public Acceptance of Evolution”
Miller, Scott, et al, Science 11 August 2006, Vol 313). When Palin says things which sound crazy to us, she’s not talking to us.

quote Sarah Palin.

This is the person some of you want to be in the White House.

This woman can not put together a real sentence or a rhetorical statement.
I defy anyone to make sense of this statement.

What the hell happened to the idea of being a statesman or woman?

I agree with people above who like hearing from Tony Blankley. I always enjoy hearing him on Diane Rehm’s show, and I think he’d be great to have on more often here. I’m a little surprised to find him so supportive of Palin. I certainly understand his support of McCain, but he seems to think it’s acceptable to have a candidate so close to the presidency who is so clearly intellectually unprepared for the position.

This is NPR, and we like to keep things civil. I’m doing my best. I think Tom handled the issue of Palin’s intellectual abilities well by insisting some attention be paid that even in the debate Palin was speaking in meaningless circles.

For the good of the country we need to keep her seeming inability to ask interesting questions or form meaningful sentences a part of the conversation.

It does matter. It does indicate her capacity to handle such a huge and complicated responsibility. It does even speak to things (in my opinion) like her apparent deficit of empathy. She doesn’t seem eager to learn about the world and about how other people think about the world: why should she care if other people suffer?

I think her inarticulate performance in these interviews and in the debate also demonstrates a kind of contempt for many people in her audience that she would govern. It’s the same sort of contempt for professionalism that has made Bush such an embarrassment (think Monica Goodling; think Brownie).

We forgive a multitude of sins, or in this case, glaring inadequacies, in those that are endowed as such. If Palin were 20 years older and less telegenic is there any chance that she’d be on the ticket? C’mon. It reminds me of the way in which JFK and his wife held the nation in thrall for similar reasons. At least, in this case, there was substance behind the exterior.

to TOM ASHBROOK–

I object to your interjecting all these media sound bite audio clips from mass media into the commentary on your friday roundtable. I just heard a clip from i guess it was saturday night live. This is so very irritating, as are all the audio clips. I don’t tune in to hear this TV stuff. It doesn’t fit with your show. I want more commentary/analysis –and not rushed, either. I’ve already gotten the main news elsewhere. Your guest’s analysis is being pushed to smaller amounts of time, as the clips multiply. You have the clips ready and cue them up to caller’s points.

I don’t want to hear clips from NBC Today Show Ann Curry interview with politicians. I avoid that by going to pbs. Your commentators need time to not just throw out assertions, but tell us their reasoning for their opinions. Then we listener’s LEARN something.

A lot of these politician’s media clips are self serving and superficial –the mainstay of commercial TV which I’m absolutely sick of.

Your guest commentators could easily summarize various political opinions on an issue, and give their pros and cons. This is how pbs radio used to be until recently, and suddenly, you feel you must imitate commercial media.

MY QUESTION: is this change an order from on high? Can’t you challenge this, so we will keep listening? Are your corporate sponsors, whose commercials you break for more often than in the past, telling you to be more like commercial media not pbs? Thus they get more listeners, thus customers, thus profits.

Is this how corporate sponsors are being allowed by you to change pbs away from its main purpose? First it was more interruptions for commercials, and lately it’s more and more audio clips breaking into the show. Do you think the clips add give more drama to the show? We don’t need that as we’re not teens–is this what your sponsors want–more teens!

Tony Blankley was just talking about the ironic mix of right wing and left wing attitudes re the bailout. Here’s this caller –Dan, i think–saying it’s brutal extortion what wall st is doing to us, He doesn’t see the interconnection of business/government. Dan says we don’t need profits to save people from hurricanes. You objected saying profit pays salaries and brings resources to projects. Dan answered 1000 people died because Greyhound couldn’t make a profit evacuating people from Katrina,and also public housing is being torn down for private businesses, while people still can’t return home to New Orleans.

You responded only with a cued up media clip of the that superb public servant, GOP Congressman Roy Blunt saying the plan is ok. Big Deal! How enlightening!

Let Blankley and Beatty, who are sitting there with nothing to do while you answer the caller and play clips, each analyze Dan’s statement with all it’s important issues of public/private help for distress. This public/private issue is the basic controversy of our time. But all your listener’s heard was your hackneyed cliché about business pays salaries, and then the politician with a meaningless soundbite that added nothing.

With the next caller asking about valuation of the bad debts, you ignored tony blankley, so he said” can i jump in here” when margaret talev couldn’t explain it too well –and blankley gave the best, clearest basic summarythat I’ve heard of how this bailout will work. And i am no fan of blankley.

if you absolutely must use a clip, what about one from npr? Or are they too long and boring, thus you can’t imitate commercial media, thus attracting younger listeners? Is that the whole purpose?

I’d like to have an answer to this question. Did this new policy of sound clips come from a particular sponsor’s explicit request to have them? Or did someone at pbs think up this as a gimmick that might please them? Or what? Thanks for letting me ventilate my irritation.
Thank you.

Simple. To replace the clowns who bombed so badly after eight years.

Obama has 264 of the electoral votes, you need 270 to win.

Republicans if Obama is so awful why is he gaining?

A lot of the issues we face are not being dealt with honesty by both parties. Whoever gets in will have to raise taxes to deal with the deficit. They will have no choice.

Jack and Archie B it’s noble and so sentimental, trying to hold up your dieing ideology.

Personally I think both parties are broken, but the Republican party has made a bigger mess of it.

You guys are like horses with blinders with tunnel vision.

If Palin was a Democrat I bet we would hear no end of it.

Palin was OK in the debates because she crammed her phony populist rhetoric down the peoples throats.
She’s kind of like a rotten candy apple, all sweet and shinny on the outside, but rotten and vile as you get to the core.

I don’t even think that’s necessary. The news is inherently dramatic! The loss of fortunes, the death of great companies – icons of the financial world, the anxieties of parents seeing their children sent off to war, the destruction of cities and provinces by natural dasasters, and photographs sent to earth by space probes resting on the shores of methane oceans on distant moons are all so intrinsically filled with amazement, drama, and existential and human dimensions that there is no need for breathless announcers, sound effects, or music. The drama in daily events is self-evident; you don’t need someone to point it out. To paraphrase William Randolph Hearst, journalism should provide the facts and I’ll provide the drama.

I don’t watch TV, myself – except maybe the occasional football game or nature documentary, but at my company they have a big TV going with CNN in a public area and it’s nauseating! I call CNN the “Celebrity News Network”.

We all knew she’d do a great job.

However, I am still infuriated that for two days people attacked her and even demanded her resignation. True, this was mostly from idiots on Fox News (Hannity, Susteren, Malkin) but even the New York Times carried this controversy as though it were legitimate, and McCain echoed these concerns.

Where’s the accountability?

For a year (and a decade) that has seen so many low points in our national discourse, I thought this particularly episode of “blame the media first” was especially stupid — and that’s not even going near the ugly racism that lurked in the so-called controversy.