Revisiting The Chicago Annenberg Challenge

In researching the debate over the health care reform bill, and trying to discern truth from distortion, I came across an Associated Press article about Sarah Palin's recent FaceBook posting. In her posting, she calls Obama's plan "downright evil" and claims it would create a "death panel", saying:

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."

The AP article then quickly points out that FactCheck.org rates the "rumor" as false, something Barack Obama keeps insisting, as well. But something caught my eye in the way the AP presented the case. Look closely at the sentence in the article:

"The nonpartisan group FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania says the claim is false."

When I read "Annenberg Public Policy Center", a bell went off in my head. While the AP refers to the organization as "nonpartisan" - which might be true - I think they may still have a place in their hearts for the president, who used to Chair the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for four years...working closely with William Ayers.

That made me wonder what other significance may be attached to this connection, and I found my answer from a year-old article in American Thinker. The significance is two-fold, for it details both the outright lies and secrecy of the new president and his allies, and reveals the only executive experience Obama has ever had. While I and most people I know were astonished that the American people would elect such an inexperienced neophyte to the highest office in the land, we also forgot that he did have some experience running something after all.

Here are the first two paragraphs from the American Thinker article:

The cloak of media invisibility is slowly beginning to lift from Barack Obama's most important administrative leadership experience, helming an expensive educational reform effort in Chicago that failed to produce any measurable academic gains, according to the project's own final report.


Add in the fact that former Weatherman and admitted terrorist William Ayers (whom Obama described in the Philadelphia debate as merely a "neighbor") was head of the operating arm of the CAC, working with Obama on distributing scores of millions of dollars to grantees in the wards of the city, and you have a topic that the Obama campaign wishes to avoid at all costs.

So the only real experience Obama has is the squandering of "scores of millions of dollars". And now he's going to wreak the same havoc but on a much larger scale.

While the article was mistaken in its opening assessment - the media cloak never did lift - it does highlight the extreme protectionism surrounding Obama's past. Stanley Kurtz, of National Review Online, asked the University of Illinois of Chicago for access to the files and was granted it, only to have the permission rescinded shortly thereafter, something that is very unusual, considering that the library is publicly funded.

Now I have been informed by a friend that Sean Hannity is going to run an in-depth documentary tomorrow night at 9:00pm/Eastern time on the Fox News Channel. I urge everyone to watch the show. It is never too late to discover the truth.

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