Linda Lenz’s Catalyst Chicago, mentioned below, looks like a Democrat front organization. Consider this from a January ‘08 posting (a “web extra” about “electing an education president”), which embodies its implied hostility to major conservative issues.
Like McCain and Romney, Huckabee is a big supporter of school choice, charter schools and homeschooling. Also like his chief competitors, Huckabee’s Web site is short of details about how much his proposal would cost or how he would pay for them after abolishing personal, corporate, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare and self-employment taxes and replacing them with a national sales tax—a key campaign promise.
The publication apparently buys into the major Obama misconception about tax cuts, that they take from tax revenues. This apart from the basically statist, teacher-union (hence Dem party) philosophy here contained.
One of this item’s readers took exception:
You didn’t mention vouchers. John McCain is a big voucher supporter. Also, why no mention of candidates’ positions on NCLB and related testing issues?
He is Mike Klonsky, who is named as a major Chicago Annenberg Challenge beneficiary, he and William Ayers picking up a bundle — $175,000 –– for “small school workshops.”
This is from a blog called Global Labor and Politics by Steve Diamond, a law professor and political scientist at Santa Clara U., in California. He cites Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, by Max Elbaum, whom Diamond describes as “a first hand participant whose sympathy for the maoism of the period does not get in the way of an excellent account of these idiot savants of the left.”
One of the idiot savants was Klonsky, writes Diamond,
one of the most destructive hardline maoists in the SDS in the late 60’s who emerged from SDS to form a pro-Chinese sect called the October League that later became the Beijing-recognized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).
As chairman of the party, Klonsky travelled to Beijing itself in 1977 and, literally, toasted the Chinese stalinist leadership who, in turn, “hailed the formation of the CP(ML) as ‘reflecting the aspirations of the proletariat and working people,’ effectively recognizing the group as the all-but-official US Maoist party.” (Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 228).
Klonsky was a “red-diaper baby,” son of a Communist Party USA founder, writes Elbaum (p. 102). He’s a type, in other words, one who ate and drank Marxism but in later years, being no dummy, saw that there was no future in communism, so turned to radicalism — as in public school systems, the bigger the better. In Chicago, if not sooner, he found Ayers, who found Obama, who at best has been a useful idiot.
Obama also knows there no future in explicit radicalism, but instead games the system. At this time he does all he can to douse the connection with Ayers. It will be bad for us all if he gets away with it.
Later, from Dick Cutler:
Most of these rants on “Education” can be traced back to the Teachers’ Union(s). All of them reflect a consistent Union view — urging the input of more money, showing total hostility to Private Schools, criticizing any plan for standards (especially for teacher competence) and being pro-tax and pro-government programming straight down the line. Any opportunity to criticize many of their points of view should be qickly seized.
I will be sifting through Catalyst to verify to what extent what Dick says is the case.
