GraniteGrok

• Obama believes that American wealth, in the form of our taxes, should be used as charity and a redistribution of wealth big time with his Global Poverty Act at $840 Billion.
  

• Was hired ACORN to do their training (you know, that group that is constantly under indictment for illegal voter registration tactics and information - current in being brought to justice in Nevada, Connecticut, Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New Mexico, Indiana, Missouri, et al) and they turned out voters for Obama.
  

• More on Ayers that makes it absolutely plain that Ayers does not have the best interest of the American way of living at heart:
  

An idea of what Ayers has in mind for America's schools was provided in his own words not 40 years ago when Obama was eight years old, but less than two years ago in November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez.

With Chavez at his side, Ayers voiced his support for "the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how . . . all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane."

Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion." It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America.

Ayers, now a tenured Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

During Obama's tenure as Annenberg board chairman, Ayers' own education projects received substantial funding.

As Stern points out, "Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children in the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive."

Biting the hand that feeds it.  So Putney, ask yourself these questions and then tell me that he believes in the traditional American values system?

If Obama was a radical, it was because of his extremist positions.  So I think it's a fair question:  If you accept the premise that he was a radical, how has he changed such that he should no longer be considered a radical?  Obviously, he is very smooth and he presents himself as a reasonable, moderate fellow.  But that doesn't affect substance.  (After all, he also poses as a uniter when his record is uninterrupted, hard-ball partisan.  The question has to be what he does, not what he says and how he packages himself.)  Have you seen some of this stuff he funded at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge?  His position on infanticide was a fringe position — as was the position he took on surveillance reform only a few months ago.  And his Global Poverty Act proposal is about as way out as it gets....

Another observation and concern:

One is that he has quietly ditched his former radicalism for a more mainstream left-liberalism. Another is that he remains as radical as he was years ago but is concealing his basic orientation for political reasons.