The Annenberg Challenge Papers

Are about as boring as most non-profit records apparently:

The UIC records show that Obama and Ayers attended board meetings, retreats and at least one news conference together as the education program got under way. The two continued to attend meetings together during the 1995-2001 operation of the program, records show.

At a Democratic debate this year when the association between Obama and Ayers was raised, Obama said: “This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood. . . . He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Obama called Ayers’ past radical acts detestable.

But critics note that Obama visited Ayers’ home for a meeting at the start of his first state Senate bid in the mid-’90s.

The UIC records showed that Ayers was instrumental in securing the $50 million education grant to reform Chicago Public Schools, part of a national initiative funded by the late Ambassador Walter Annenberg. . After Chicago was awarded the money, Obama served as president of the Challenge’s board of directors, the fiscal arm that disbursed the grants to schools and raised private matching funds. Ayers participated in a second entity known as the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, the operational arm that worked with the grant recipients.

It’s fully reasonable and appropriate that the press got the records, but that a professor at UIC which the professor largely put together a grant was active on the grant is hardly exciting news and it certainly doesn’t help the conspiracy theorists that Barack Obama was actually a 60s radical at age 8.

But for boomers–it’s always and will always be 1968.  The rest of us don’t give a damn.

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