Its amazing how many people are in our President’s present and past who have such “greatest hits” collections. You start to get alarmed when General Custer doesn’t seem to know that there’s something moving out there, and it’s not just the Bushes (pun fully intended!)

Actually, the concern is national, with at least one suburban school district even here in Washington cancelling it. The speech itself will be innocuous, everyone is sure, but some of the “study guide” materials put out for the speech from underlings in the Department of Education seem to range from partisan to “creepy”.

You have to understand a little of the context. During the Viet Nam era, there was a leftist domestic terrorism organization, the Weather Underground, that carried out acts of violence in which a number of people were killed. For example, a policeman’s home was fire-bombed while a nine-year old boy was inside. The organizations’ founders included William Ayers, who openly acknowledges his involvement in the violence today, and remains a committed radical.

Ayers had a rich father, well connected to the political establishment that has ruled Chicago under both Democratic and Republican administrations since the days of Al Capone. After the legal proceedings are over, Ayers’ father reintroduces Ayers into the establishment, where Ayers becomes a player first in Chicago and later on the national scene in regard to using the educational system to instill “social consciousness” into students at all levels.

Remember, Ayers does not mean by social consciousness what a Western European means by the term. He remains open about his radical goals; he’s just adopted better tactics than in the 1960’s. I first realized Ayers was, in fact, the Weather Underground leader when my daughter started showing me materials being presented at her college in the social sciences several years ago, and I looked up the authors of this “theory of the role of the social sciences in raising social consciousness”.

The study guides accompanmying the Obama speech seem to contain several elements of a grade-school version of this same “social-consciousness” raising, and many of the employees in the Federal Department of Education were never taught any other way of doing teaching.

Because Obama and Ayers were linked during the campaign (Obama had effective control over one of Ayers’ major foundation funding sources for community education activities) and the announcement came on the same week that Obama’s “green jobs czar” was shown to have signed a petition supporting the idea that the CIA carried out the 9/11 attacks, Obama doesn’t need any more connections to ANYTHING that smells radical.

On Tuesday, Pres Obama is giving a speech to school children about the importance of education. Some really right-wingnuts (in Utah and other states like Texas) don’t want the children to listen to Obama. Wright mentions in passing that the Socialist Part quote between about the 5-10 minute mark, I’d say. (You can skip the first 0-5 minutes–it gives the news along with some commercials, but you may find that interesting since you’re not from around here.)

He also talks about an LDS church leader (“ecclesiastical source”) who also rants against the right-wing nutjobs. Since you’re more political than me, you may want to write up a post on it. I think he talks about immigration policy as well.

It’s found at http://pandora.bonnint.net/audio/doug.rss

Go to Sept 3, the 1st hour to hear it. I listened to about the first 20 minutes, but then I had to go to work, so I couldn’t hear the whole thing.