Free Republic

Leonore Annenberg, U.S. chief of protocol under President Reagan, widow of former publisher and U.S. Ambassador to Britain Walter H. Annenberg, and steward of the couple's massive philanthropy, died today at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Remember when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accused journalist Katie Couric of "exploiting" their disastrous exchange — the one in which Palin couldn’t name some of running mate John McCain’s policies? Couric’s work obviously paid off, because the 52-year-old today received the prestigious Walter Cronkite Award for the exchange. The Baltimore Sun elaborates: "Couric, who weathered one of network TV’s most criticized anchor-desk launches when she took over from interim anchor Bob Schieffer, was named winner of the University of Southern California’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in TV Political Journalism for her focused and illuminating interviews with Republican vice-presidential candidate...

Hundreds of students have allegedly been beaten by teachers, coaches and staff at Chicago Public Schools. 2 Investigator Dave Savini continues his ongoing investigation involving the illegal use corporal punishment. SNIP An exclusive CBS 2 investigation discovered Treveon Martin is one of at least 818 Chicago Public School students, since 2003, to allege being battered by a teacher or an aide, coach, security guard, or even a principal. In most of those cases - 568 of them - Chicago Public School investigators determined the children were telling the truth. SNIP The 2 Investigators found reports of students beaten with broomsticks,...

http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=RZ9b975MmIA&feature=email

January 21, 2009 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Almost from its inception, the Weather Underground [WU] was viewed with great concern by the FBI. As a result, the decision was made to place a high level informant within the group to help keeps tabs on its members' activities. That person was Larry Grathwohl, a Vietnam veteran and the only publicly identified FBI informant who succeeded in penetrating the Weather Underground, serving in that capacity from August 1969 until April 1970. Prior to his service in the FBI, he was a member of the Cincinnati Police force. PipeLineNews.org contacted...

MORAGA — The much-anticipated speech Wednesday by militant-turned-college-professor Bill Ayers at Saint Mary's College attracted nearly 600 people, many of them very clearly in diametrically opposite political camps. That figure does not count the roughly 200 people who loudly protested Ayers' appearance outside the packed Soda Center auditorium in an unparalleled level of interest in an academic lecture at this rural, private Catholic college. Inside, Ayers' 90-minute presentation drew jeers, boos and an emotional outburst from a woman who swore at him and left. He also received plenty of laughs and claps and even a few standing ovations from the...

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted public competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General. That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general's 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted. In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators...

America wanted change and we sure got it. We elected a politician who looked and sounded fresh and new and different (and don't forget "clean" as Senator Biden once remarked), and promised that magic word "change." Aren't we lucky? It appears that the change we got is that we've moved Chicago machine-style politics into the White House. We found out on Tuesday what that business model consists of- the good Governor of Illinois was arrested for allegedly trying to sell Barack Obama's United States Senate seat. Yes, I said sell Obama's seat to the highest bidder. It's nice to know...

<p>President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, refused to take questions from reporters this morning about whether he was the Obama “advisor” named in the criminal complaint against Gov. Rod Blagojevich.</p> <p>The complaint states Blagojevich wanted a promise of a high-level appointment or some other reward for Blagojevich in exchange for Blagojevich naming Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett to replace him in the U.S. Senate.</p>

It couldn't have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama's best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday's New York Times op-ed page, he announced that "it's finally time to tell my true story." Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , "The Real Bill Ayers" is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left. "I never killed or injured anyone, "Ayers writes. "In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an...

<p>A source said today that Gov. Rod Blagojevich was taken into federal custody at his North Side home this morning. The U.S. attorney's office would not confirm the information, and a spokesman for the governor did not immediately return a phone call for comment.</p>

Born in the U.S.A. August 21, 2008 Updated: November 1, 2008 The truth about Obama's birth certificate. Summary In June, the Obama campaign released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate to quell speculative charges that he might not be a natural-born citizen. But the image prompted more blog-based skepticism about the document's authenticity. And recently, author Jerome Corsi, whose book attacks Obama, said in a TV interview that the birth certificate the campaign has is "fake." We beg to differ. FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets...

Just look at this pompous ass sitting there declaring how he's going to intervene in our lives for our own good. Emanuel's ominous proclaimations bode ill for freedom and well for everyone of Zero's draconian measures to be rammed through Congress.

Dazed and confused. A week after the election of Barack Obama, millions of American news junkies are in serious cold turkey, the big bump of withdrawal from two years of addiction to the dizzying ups and downs of a campaign that threatened never to end. Eat dirt, you sour Clintons, who said Obama was "unelectable." Obama's 8 million vote margin over his Republican opponent -- miraculously sparing us endless litigation and chad counting -- was an exhilarating testimony to his personal gifts and power of persuasion. And the formidable Michelle Obama, with her electric combo of brains and style, is...

When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, he will do so in the 30th anniversary year of the founding of the so-called Religious Right. Born in 1979 and midwifed by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Religious Right was a reincarnation of previous religious-social movements that sought moral improvement through legislation and court rulings. Those earlier movements—from abolition (successful) to Prohibition (unsuccessful)—had mixed results. Social movements that relied mainly on political power to enforce a conservative moral code weren't anywhere near as successful as those that focused on changing hearts. The four religious revivals, from...

A new story by Brooks Jackson on the FactCheck.org website once again shows that FactCheck cherry-picks “facts” to suit its anti-NRA, anti-gun, anti-self-defense agenda—an agenda that the American people do not share. The story claims an NRA advertisement on Barack Obama’s votes against a pro-self-defense bill is misleading because (Jackson claims) Obama did not vote for a “general repeal of the right of self defense.” Of course, that’s not what the ad said. The ad referred to a case where Wilmette, Ill., homeowner Hale DeMar was prosecuted for owning a handgun—a fact that was only discovered after he used the...

Now that It's becoming obvious based on Obama's own words that the guy is a communist, there's this talking point/narrative emerging out there that the reagans and annenberg were communists. You should know a few things about the annenberg challenge, if you don't already know. It was not Ayres by himself, his lonesome. He was not just a single terrorist who decided to ask for money. Ayres had help from two other people. Anne Hallet and Warren Chapman co authored the proposal. And Ayres had the backing of 70+ other groups and professors. Add in that Ayres had the backing...

The mainstream press steadfastly refuses to delve into Barack Obama’s radicalism, his Leftist revolutionary collaboration with self-identified communists from Frank Marshall Davis to Bill Ayers. The McCain campaign, moreover, has contributed mightily to the whitewash by ineptly seizing on the issue’s least important aspect: Obama’s abject dishonesty about the depth of his relationships with committed Leftists — e.g., the portrayal of Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” (Petrified of being smeared as a racist, McCain has never mentioned Davis, whom Obama identifies only as “Frank” in his memoir. And, of course, utterance of Jeremiah Wright’s name...

Chicago's former schools chief has flunked the education foundation headed by Barack Obama and founded by 1960s terrorist Bill Ayers - saying it failed to monitor projects and funded school "reform" groups that campaigned against boosting academic standards. "There was a total lack of accountability. If you went back and asked, you'd be hard-pressed to find out how the money was spent," said Paul Vallas, the city's school superintendent when Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Foundation from 1995 to 1999.

Obama-Ayers link involved Annenberg grantBy Rita Giordano Inquirer Staff Writer Posted on Sat, Oct. 18, 2008 The Chicago education project that has linked the names of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and William Ayers, a former 1960s and 1970s radical turned college professor and education activist, was part of a $500 million initiative by Philadelphia publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to aid schools around the country. The half-billion-dollar "gift," as it was described by President Bill Clinton at a 1993 White House ceremony, would go on to provide 2-to-1 matching-fund grants to 18 school districts around the nation. **SNIP** The...