Meeting the challenge of finding out more about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge

Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker once again hits one out of the park regarding Barack Obama and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge cover-up.

Despite the legally questionable embargo of the CAC archives, most of its tax returns and official evaluations of the CAC have already been made public. In the hands of intrepid bloggers such as Steve Diamond, Tom Maguire and Dan Riehl, there is already proof of Obama's extensive involvement with Ayers over the course of his chairmanship, and an emerging picture of Obama's indecisiveness and absence when serious problems needed leadership.

Barack Obama joined the CAC shortly after William Ayers and Anne C. Hallett received news that their letter of November 8, 1994 submitting a grant proposal to The Annenberg Challenge had been approved. They were to get as much as $49 million from Anennberg, plus tens of millions more dollars from other foundations. Obama's involvement predates by months the actual incorporation of the CAC and his appointment as founding chairman of the board. He came on board almlost as soon as the proposal was approved.

How on earth did a relatively unknown associate at a politically-connected but small Chicago law firm come to be entrusted with the heady task of handing out tens of millions of dollars of other people's money?

And when did Ayers, an unrepentant ex-terrorist, and Obama, get to know each other? How closely did they work together? On that last one, an answer can be found in the archived files of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, with the University of Illinois-Chicago, where Ayers is a professor. UIC refuses to release those records, claiming a donor, which it refuses to name, hasn't given permission for that to occur. Or was it much earlier? Michelle Obama was an attorney at Sidley & Austin in the early 1990s. Obama interned there--that's where they met. Ayers' equally unrepentant wife, Bernardine Dorhn, worked there at Sidley & Austin as well--which is one of Chicago's biggest law firms.

Lifson recalls Obama's comments about Ayers in an April debate with Hillary Clinton:

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English (correction, it's education) in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George (Stephanopoulos). [....]

So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow -- somehow their ideas could be attributed to me -- I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't."

Ayers, in Obamaspeak, was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."

After Hillary Clinton brought up Tony Rezko's name in a January debate, the mainstream media were forced to take notice. That's when we found out his longtime friend and political financier was just "somebody I knew."

That stunned Mark Brown, a Chicago Sun-Times columnist:

My relationship is he was somebody who I knew and had been a supporter for many years," Obama said on CBS in response to Hillary Clinton's "slumlord" attack from earlier this week. "He was somebody who had supported a wide range of candidates all throughout Illinois. Nobody had an inkling that he was involved in any problems."

Somebody who I knew? Wow.

That's such an understatement that it borders on a falsehood.

This is somebody who spotted Obama's raw talent and offered him a job while he was still in law school, somebody who gave him one of his very first campaign donations for his first political race. This is somebody for whom Obama and his law firm performed legal work, not a great deal of it by Obama personally perhaps, but enough to know how the man made his money and that he was one of the major developers of low-income housing in his state legislative district.

But Obama later admitted that he became aware of Rezko's problems even before the bizarre and still-not completely explained real estate deal with Rezko's wife that allowed the Obamas to buy their Kenwood mansion.

There's a pattern here, folks.

Rezko, "Somebody I knew." Ayers, "A guy who lives in my neighborhood."

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