On August 24,, 2008, I posted a piece which I disected a piece that appears in Mike Klonsky’s blog that was intended to overview the actual philosophy and efforts of Klonsky’s Small School’s Workshop. I titled it, “Marxist Indoctrination was Funded by Ayers/Obama for Mike Klonsky’s Small School’s Workshops.”While I indeed was critical of Klonsky’s work, the scope of my words were for the most part was limited to his educational efforts. At one time, my post was linked on Klonsky’s blog. It no longer is, but I did receive one interesting response from a commentor who listed himself as Intelligencia:

September 10th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
You are nothing but a bunch of terrorists who are trying to destroy this country with your ignorance and mendacity(that means lies). You are worst than the terrorists who attacked us in 9/11 because you work from the inside. You may well be my co-worker and pretend to be patriotic in my presence. At least, I know that the terrorists are foreigners, but you, your kind is more dangerous. Obama will be your President, no matter your deluded sense of reality! Your propaganda will fail you miserably!

Intelligencia said nothing of my review of the Workshop’s efforts. Admittedly my asstertions are provocative, but I find the Workshop’s efforts to be disturbing.

At any rate, Klonsky has responded in his own blog, SmallTalk, to a question about Obama’s influence in the Annenberg Challenge. In a post, Klonsky had defended Obama and wrote:

Along with trying to frighten undecided swing-state voters, the wing-nuts have also targeted school reform efforts and the old Annenberg Challenge in Chicago, which they claim were all part of the Ayers-Obama socialist conspiracy from hell. Their lies include: 1) Obama was the chair of the Annenberg Challenge Board and directed its funding; 2) that Ayers was on the board; 3) that Obama gave thousands of dollars to Ayers. Not a word of any of this is true.

When he was caught with the facts, Klonsky bactracked and said this:

Of course Obama was Chairman of the Board for a time. My point was (forgive me for not stating it more clearly in this post) was, it was a lie that he (as board chair) directed its funding or was in a position to give Annenberg money to any individuals or groups, outside the foundation’s transparent funding process.

While invoking an obligatory Karl Rove reference in his misleading rant, he accussed the person who questioned him as being Professor Steve Diamond who along with Stanley Kurtz has done the most probing work on the problems with the Annenberg Challenge. Says Klonsky in response to a commentor’s quip that the questioner was Diamnond:

Of course I knew. This guy is my favorite stalker. He writes me all the time under different names. This time I finally let him post so I could have an excuse lay out some facts about the Obama/Ayers/Annenberg swift-boating campaign. I knew Dennis (Diamond) would pick it up on his own wing-nut blog, and he sure did.

If the commentor was indeed Diamond and Knlonsky knew that it was, why on earth was Klonsky biting?

I asked Diamond to comment on Klonsky’s September 10 comments in the comments section at Just One Minute. He said the following:

At least Klonsky now admits what he denied on the blog of the Teachers Union (Edwize): that in fact he did receive funding (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars) from Annenberg.

It is disingenuous to imply that the Workshop received the money and not Klonsky. Who paid his salary? The Workshop. Did they just hand the CAC money to someone else?

Also, we do not really know how fair the process [of the CAC board awarding grants] was since Klonsky’s mentor, Ayers, was a key player and so was Ayers’ protege, Obama.

If those two were not available to Klonsky, would the board’s transparent process have funded the SSW (which was founded by Ayers)? Who is to say.

It would be interesting to know, for example, if any project that Ayers objected to got funded. Or if any project that one board member other than Obama objected to but Ayers supported did not get funded.

I do know that Arnold Weber, the former president of Northwestern, who sat on the board as a representative of the pro-business Civic Committee, opposed the millions of dollars Ayers and Obama wanted to spend to support the Local School Councils as anti-union watchdogs over teachers and principals.

Diamond has been the go-to guy on the issue. And if he is indeed correct that the Obama-Ayers-Klonsky efforts to support community groups who attempted to circumvent both teachers and school’s, one wonders if the support that Obama enjoys of the NEA will continue.

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