No news is good news?Caveat: I do not necessarily endorse every single article on the media listed by APFN, but most of these reports are credible enough. - AC
Friday, October 17, 2008
Everything You've ever Wanted to Know about Opeation Mockingbird
No news is good news?Caveat: I do not necessarily endorse every single article on the media listed by APFN, but most of these reports are credible enough. - AC
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Lawmakers: Bush Stymied Plame Probe
Panel "Puzzled" by Use of Executive Privilege to Shield Documents
By JUSTIN ROOD
ABC News Internet Ventures
October 14, 2008
President Bush sidetracked a congressional probe by wrongly invoking executive privilege, according to a draft bipartisan congressional report released today.
This June, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee served a subpoena to the Justice Department for reports of interviews between FBI agents and Bush and Cheney.
The interviews had been conducted for former Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of former CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, which concluded last year. The House panel was conducting its own inquiry into the matter.
The White House objected to the committee's subpoenas, and the panel dropped its efforts to obtain the Bush transcript, the draft report said. But the committee said it reiterated its request for the Cheney report, even threatening a contempt citation for Attorney General Michael Mukasey if the document was not produced.
In response, the White House asserted its executive privilege to withhold the document, according to the panel's draft report. The White House's argument, crafted by Mukasey, asserted among other things that the report "summarize[d] deliberations" among top aides preparing advice for Bush himself, and therefore is protected by the executive privilege, the report related. The power is meant to ensure presidents can receive confidential advice.
The panel disagreed, calling the move "legally unprecedented" and "inappropriate."
"There is no precedent holding that summaries of presidential conversations given to third parties as opposed to the original conversations themselves are subject to claims of executive privilege," it wrote in its report. The document, considered a draft because it had not been voted on by the full committee, was nevertheless approved by the panel's ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis, Va.
The panel also said it was "puzzled" by the White House's use of executive privilege to shield documents relating to Cheney, since the vice president himself had earlier argued he was not a member of the executive branch.
Former Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald wrapped up his investigation without indicting Cheney. He won a conviction against Cheney's senior aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for obstructing justice.
"There is a cloud over the vice president," Fitzgerald said in his closing argument in that trial. "And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice."
A year later, Cheney's role in the Plame affair is still obscured, the report said -- this time due to Bush, whose executive privilege claim "prevented the Committee from learning the extent of the Vice President's role in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity," the panel wrote.
In a separate draft report released today, the committee concluded that Bush abused his authority when he used executive privilege to justify withholding 2,000 pages of documents relating to the EPA's compliance with the Clean Air Act. Without those documents, the panel said, it was unable to fully answer questions relating to the EPA's decision to bar California from regulating greenhouse gases.
"Rather than releasing a politically-motivated draft report attacking the President just three weeks before Election Day, Democratic leaders in Congress should focus on addressing the important economic and security needs of our nation," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6031574&page=1
By JUSTIN ROOD
ABC News Internet Ventures
October 14, 2008
President Bush sidetracked a congressional probe by wrongly invoking executive privilege, according to a draft bipartisan congressional report released today.
This June, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee served a subpoena to the Justice Department for reports of interviews between FBI agents and Bush and Cheney.
The interviews had been conducted for former Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of former CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, which concluded last year. The House panel was conducting its own inquiry into the matter.
The White House objected to the committee's subpoenas, and the panel dropped its efforts to obtain the Bush transcript, the draft report said. But the committee said it reiterated its request for the Cheney report, even threatening a contempt citation for Attorney General Michael Mukasey if the document was not produced.
In response, the White House asserted its executive privilege to withhold the document, according to the panel's draft report. The White House's argument, crafted by Mukasey, asserted among other things that the report "summarize[d] deliberations" among top aides preparing advice for Bush himself, and therefore is protected by the executive privilege, the report related. The power is meant to ensure presidents can receive confidential advice.
The panel disagreed, calling the move "legally unprecedented" and "inappropriate."
"There is no precedent holding that summaries of presidential conversations given to third parties as opposed to the original conversations themselves are subject to claims of executive privilege," it wrote in its report. The document, considered a draft because it had not been voted on by the full committee, was nevertheless approved by the panel's ranking Republican, Rep. Tom Davis, Va.
The panel also said it was "puzzled" by the White House's use of executive privilege to shield documents relating to Cheney, since the vice president himself had earlier argued he was not a member of the executive branch.
Former Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald wrapped up his investigation without indicting Cheney. He won a conviction against Cheney's senior aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for obstructing justice.
"There is a cloud over the vice president," Fitzgerald said in his closing argument in that trial. "And that cloud remains because this defendant obstructed justice."
A year later, Cheney's role in the Plame affair is still obscured, the report said -- this time due to Bush, whose executive privilege claim "prevented the Committee from learning the extent of the Vice President's role in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity," the panel wrote.
In a separate draft report released today, the committee concluded that Bush abused his authority when he used executive privilege to justify withholding 2,000 pages of documents relating to the EPA's compliance with the Clean Air Act. Without those documents, the panel said, it was unable to fully answer questions relating to the EPA's decision to bar California from regulating greenhouse gases.
"Rather than releasing a politically-motivated draft report attacking the President just three weeks before Election Day, Democratic leaders in Congress should focus on addressing the important economic and security needs of our nation," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6031574&page=1
Monday, October 13, 2008
Re "Alex Constantine Returns"
By Alex Constantine (Revised)
The Conservative Voice, a mine of ringing right-wing propaganda, is taking me to task for debunking the "Islamo-fascism" red herring.
Paul Krugman is correct: "There isn’t actually any such thing as Islamo-fascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination."
http://neveryetmelted.com/index.php/no-islamofascism/
Neocons parroting Bush, badly in need of a dictionary, promote the "islamo-fascism" line, eg. Raymond Ibrahim, editor of the Al Qaeda Reader, a scary omelet of texts written by Islamic extremists; it compares the words of Al Qaeda to Mein Kampf.
Ibrahim performs this service at David Horowitz's FrontPage site.
It's fairly well-known, of course, that Horowitz receives generous funding from Richard Mellon Scaife - a CIA propagandist since the early days of the cold war. (The intelligence connection runs in the family: "During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington."
- http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html)
Scaife supports a phalanx of organizations that, like the FrontPage site, circulate fascist propaganda. They all have ties to the CIA:
American Enterprise Institute
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Federalist Society
Foundation for Economic Education
Free Congress Foundation (headed by Paul Weyrich)
Freedom House
GOPAC (headed by Newt Gingrich)
Independent Women's Forum
Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which operates the Collegiate Network)
Judicial Watch
Landmark Legal Foundation
Media Research Center (headed by Brent Bozell)
Pacific Legal Foundation
Pittsburgh World Affairs Council
Reason Foundation
http://www.answers.com/topic/richard-scaife
Most of these CIA-subsidized propaganda machines are towing the "Islamo-Fascism" clunker. Krugman: " ... a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did. ... "
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/29/krugman-no-such-thing-as-islamofascism/
Blogger Steve Benen comments, "The politics of fear might be more effective if it were grounded in reality."
Why point the finger at the Middle East, when actual fascism is corporate and would probably not exist without the capitalistic impetus that flows internationally from the United States?
Fascism is unbridled corporate control of government, military and propaganda functions - conceived in the west. Its propaganda only influences minds in the east, as it does everywhere else. It is an everyday feature of American life. It elevates thugs and criminals to positions of power. It is inherently conspiratorial and engages in acts of destruction to advance itself. It scapegoats "Islamo-fascists" - when American corporations in league with their corallaries in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc., make fascism possible and feed the geo-genocidal beast. The Middle East may have known Nazi collaborators, as did America itself, but make no mistake about it, the U.S. is the beating heart of it all.
• IBM counted the Jews at Auschwitz - not shieks from Araby.
• GM mechanized the Blitzkrieg - not desert camel drivers.
• Standard Oil had a secret pact with the Reich - not fig sellers in Palestine.
• Coca-Cola had Nazi contracts - not the oasis dweller.
• BTW, what kind of sneakers do the Good Germans wear at Conservative Voice? What is a "limo liberal" compared to a "BMW conservative?" What music do they listen to?
Nazis often describe themselves as "conservative," too.
Fascism is all-American - all-capitalist, all-corporate, all-degenerative. The yahoos who prattle about "Islamo-fascism" echo G.W. Bush, who hails from a family with reasonably well-known Nazi financial connections.
The great brainwashed, willfully ignorant finger-pointers are turned the wrong direction. America's ruling elite are the fascists, and they are bringing the country to its knees.
My detractor, "Benyamin Solomon," is programmed by the CIA-"Mockingbird" media:
August 19, 2008
" ... Liberals have blindly hated president Bush so much that they cross the line into anti-Americanism while dressing it up as criticism of America or criticism of President Bush. They even have the nerve to compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler and president Bush's America to Adolf Hitler's Germany. ... "
Liberals (anyone who finds "conservative principles" to be morally nauseating) have the "nerve" because we have the goods on Bush. Some 80 percent of those polled have gleaned insights in the past eight years into the fascist agenda that Solomon celebrates in his column at Conservative Voice, a cesspool of right-wing delusions dressed up as a liberty bell for the weak-minded, pathologically inane yahoos of Murdoch Nation.
Suffer the rats.
The Conservative Voice, a mine of ringing right-wing propaganda, is taking me to task for debunking the "Islamo-fascism" red herring.Paul Krugman is correct: "There isn’t actually any such thing as Islamo-fascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination."
http://neveryetmelted.com/index.php/no-islamofascism/
Neocons parroting Bush, badly in need of a dictionary, promote the "islamo-fascism" line, eg. Raymond Ibrahim, editor of the Al Qaeda Reader, a scary omelet of texts written by Islamic extremists; it compares the words of Al Qaeda to Mein Kampf.
Ibrahim performs this service at David Horowitz's FrontPage site.
It's fairly well-known, of course, that Horowitz receives generous funding from Richard Mellon Scaife - a CIA propagandist since the early days of the cold war. (The intelligence connection runs in the family: "During World War II, while Richard and Cordelia's father, Alan Scaife, served in Europe in the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, the Scaife family lived in Washington."
- http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/07news.html)
Scaife supports a phalanx of organizations that, like the FrontPage site, circulate fascist propaganda. They all have ties to the CIA:
American Enterprise Institute
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
David Horowitz Freedom Center
Federalist Society
Foundation for Economic Education
Free Congress Foundation (headed by Paul Weyrich)
Freedom House
GOPAC (headed by Newt Gingrich)
Independent Women's Forum
Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which operates the Collegiate Network)
Judicial Watch
Landmark Legal Foundation
Media Research Center (headed by Brent Bozell)
Pacific Legal Foundation
Pittsburgh World Affairs Council
Reason Foundation
http://www.answers.com/topic/richard-scaife
Most of these CIA-subsidized propaganda machines are towing the "Islamo-Fascism" clunker. Krugman: " ... a bunch of lightly armed terrorists and a fourth-rate military power — which aren’t even allies — pose a greater danger than Hitler’s panzers or the Soviet nuclear arsenal ever did. ... "
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/10/29/krugman-no-such-thing-as-islamofascism/
Blogger Steve Benen comments, "The politics of fear might be more effective if it were grounded in reality."
Why point the finger at the Middle East, when actual fascism is corporate and would probably not exist without the capitalistic impetus that flows internationally from the United States?
Fascism is unbridled corporate control of government, military and propaganda functions - conceived in the west. Its propaganda only influences minds in the east, as it does everywhere else. It is an everyday feature of American life. It elevates thugs and criminals to positions of power. It is inherently conspiratorial and engages in acts of destruction to advance itself. It scapegoats "Islamo-fascists" - when American corporations in league with their corallaries in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc., make fascism possible and feed the geo-genocidal beast. The Middle East may have known Nazi collaborators, as did America itself, but make no mistake about it, the U.S. is the beating heart of it all.
• IBM counted the Jews at Auschwitz - not shieks from Araby.
• GM mechanized the Blitzkrieg - not desert camel drivers.
• Standard Oil had a secret pact with the Reich - not fig sellers in Palestine.
• Coca-Cola had Nazi contracts - not the oasis dweller.
• BTW, what kind of sneakers do the Good Germans wear at Conservative Voice? What is a "limo liberal" compared to a "BMW conservative?" What music do they listen to?
Nazis often describe themselves as "conservative," too.
Fascism is all-American - all-capitalist, all-corporate, all-degenerative. The yahoos who prattle about "Islamo-fascism" echo G.W. Bush, who hails from a family with reasonably well-known Nazi financial connections.
The great brainwashed, willfully ignorant finger-pointers are turned the wrong direction. America's ruling elite are the fascists, and they are bringing the country to its knees.
My detractor, "Benyamin Solomon," is programmed by the CIA-"Mockingbird" media:
August 19, 2008
" ... Liberals have blindly hated president Bush so much that they cross the line into anti-Americanism while dressing it up as criticism of America or criticism of President Bush. They even have the nerve to compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler and president Bush's America to Adolf Hitler's Germany. ... "
Liberals (anyone who finds "conservative principles" to be morally nauseating) have the "nerve" because we have the goods on Bush. Some 80 percent of those polled have gleaned insights in the past eight years into the fascist agenda that Solomon celebrates in his column at Conservative Voice, a cesspool of right-wing delusions dressed up as a liberty bell for the weak-minded, pathologically inane yahoos of Murdoch Nation.
Suffer the rats.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
How Advertisers Control and Silence Voices
by Brenda Norrell
October 11, 2008
For the media and organizations, compliance is bought and sold
In case you noticed the alarming, large advertisements by the CIA Clandestine Services on the front web page of a national American Indian newspaper this week, or the ad by the FBI as one of the main sponsors of the upcoming National Congress of American Indians annual convention in Phoenix, it is good to remember how advertisers and funders control the media and organizations.
First, for newspapers, there is the outpouring of dollars for large ad spaces in prime sites. For Indian organizations, there is financial backing for events or programs.
When the newspaper, or Indian organization, does something the funder doesn't like, they often threaten to halt the advertising dollars. "We can't go along with that," they say, or "We can't support you if you do this ..."
If it means losing a large sum of money, the publisher or Indian organization is likely to concede to the demands. This may mean refusing to publish an article, firing a staff member, dropping a columnist or speaker, or halting the spread of certain ideas and issues. This is one reason that the media in the United States is heavily censored now, as advertising dollars dry up and sales decline.
Sometimes, the funder doesn't have to say anything, by accepting the dollars, compliance is bought and sold.
Along the US/Mexico border, the threat of the loss of US dollars in appropriations often means that elected Native American officials will not voice the truth about Homeland Security and the construction of the US border wall. The issues of Indian sovereignty, desecration of burial places and the violation of federal environmental laws are silenced.
During NCAI's convention in Phoenix in October, will those border issues be presented? Will the truth be told about the worldwide carbon scam, which offers fictional carbon credits to enrich the World Bank?
Will the assassinations of Indigenous Peoples by mining corporations in the Americas be exposed, or the diseases resulting from mining, power plants, drilling and pollution in Indian country in the US and Canada be addressed?
Will the casino rich tribes in southern Arizona, with the crowds pouring into their casinos, explain why so many of their own members are still living in poverty?
Years ago, one of the Hopi elders, Dan Evehema, sitting on a couch at his home on the Hopi mesa, warned: "Don't take grant funding, they will control you." Urging Hopi to resist the formation of the US puppet tribal council, Evehema was among the Hopi Sinom that warned if coal mining was carried out on Black Mesa, and Navajos were relocated to make way for the mining, calamities would occur in the world, including natural disasters.
Meanwhile, watch the advertisements for sponsors and financial backers, these will tell you a great deal about who is really in control and why you are reading, hearing and seeing, what is in front of you.
As always, follow the money and resist.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2008/10/how-advertisers-control-and-silence-voices
October 11, 2008
For the media and organizations, compliance is bought and sold
In case you noticed the alarming, large advertisements by the CIA Clandestine Services on the front web page of a national American Indian newspaper this week, or the ad by the FBI as one of the main sponsors of the upcoming National Congress of American Indians annual convention in Phoenix, it is good to remember how advertisers and funders control the media and organizations.
First, for newspapers, there is the outpouring of dollars for large ad spaces in prime sites. For Indian organizations, there is financial backing for events or programs.
When the newspaper, or Indian organization, does something the funder doesn't like, they often threaten to halt the advertising dollars. "We can't go along with that," they say, or "We can't support you if you do this ..."
If it means losing a large sum of money, the publisher or Indian organization is likely to concede to the demands. This may mean refusing to publish an article, firing a staff member, dropping a columnist or speaker, or halting the spread of certain ideas and issues. This is one reason that the media in the United States is heavily censored now, as advertising dollars dry up and sales decline.
Sometimes, the funder doesn't have to say anything, by accepting the dollars, compliance is bought and sold.
Along the US/Mexico border, the threat of the loss of US dollars in appropriations often means that elected Native American officials will not voice the truth about Homeland Security and the construction of the US border wall. The issues of Indian sovereignty, desecration of burial places and the violation of federal environmental laws are silenced.
During NCAI's convention in Phoenix in October, will those border issues be presented? Will the truth be told about the worldwide carbon scam, which offers fictional carbon credits to enrich the World Bank?
Will the assassinations of Indigenous Peoples by mining corporations in the Americas be exposed, or the diseases resulting from mining, power plants, drilling and pollution in Indian country in the US and Canada be addressed?
Will the casino rich tribes in southern Arizona, with the crowds pouring into their casinos, explain why so many of their own members are still living in poverty?
Years ago, one of the Hopi elders, Dan Evehema, sitting on a couch at his home on the Hopi mesa, warned: "Don't take grant funding, they will control you." Urging Hopi to resist the formation of the US puppet tribal council, Evehema was among the Hopi Sinom that warned if coal mining was carried out on Black Mesa, and Navajos were relocated to make way for the mining, calamities would occur in the world, including natural disasters.
Meanwhile, watch the advertisements for sponsors and financial backers, these will tell you a great deal about who is really in control and why you are reading, hearing and seeing, what is in front of you.
As always, follow the money and resist.
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2008/10/how-advertisers-control-and-silence-voices
Friday, October 10, 2008
STREAMING AUDIO: Program Looks at Crackdown on Journalists at Last Month's RNC
By Dave Astor
October 08, 2008
NEW YORK An audio piece called Journalism Under Siege at the RNC has been released.
The piece -- co-produced by the Media Minutes team of Stevie Converse and Candace Clement for Pacifica Radio's Sprouts: Radio from the Grassroot program -- looks at the arrests and detentions of journalists covering protests outside last month's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
Among the many arrested were Democracy Now! host/King Features Syndicate columnist Amy Goodman and Associated Press staffers.
Promo copy for the program reads:
This program features interviews with Ben Garvin of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute, Nancy Doyle-Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, Lambert Rochfort of Pepperspray Productions, Jason Barnett of The UpTake, and Theresa Nelson of the Minnesota ACLU.
Journalism Under Siege at the RNC can be heard here.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/syndicates/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872336
October 08, 2008
NEW YORK An audio piece called Journalism Under Siege at the RNC has been released.
The piece -- co-produced by the Media Minutes team of Stevie Converse and Candace Clement for Pacifica Radio's Sprouts: Radio from the Grassroot program -- looks at the arrests and detentions of journalists covering protests outside last month's Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.
Among the many arrested were Democracy Now! host/King Features Syndicate columnist Amy Goodman and Associated Press staffers.
Promo copy for the program reads:
"American national political conventions have long been known for wacky party hats, a multitude of political buttons, showers of confetti, and long-winded speeches -- inside the convention centers.
"Outside those walls, in the streets of the host cities, both the Democratic and Republican national conventions are symbols of political unrest and police crackdowns -- and increasingly, a militarized system of silencing voices of demonstrators and journalists covering the stories that happen in those streets.
"What are the rights of journalists covering stories in public places? Who can be called journalists? And why is journalism still important?"
This program features interviews with Ben Garvin of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute, Nancy Doyle-Brown of the Twin Cities Media Alliance, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media, Lambert Rochfort of Pepperspray Productions, Jason Barnett of The UpTake, and Theresa Nelson of the Minnesota ACLU.
Journalism Under Siege at the RNC can be heard here.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/syndicates/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003872336
Editorial Endorsement Tally: Obama and McCain Split (So Far)
By Greg Mitchell and Dexter Hill
E&P
October 10, 2008
... So far, the Obama-Biden ticket leads with 11 editorial endorsements, but the McCain-Palin ticket is close behind, picking up nine endorsements.
Taking a look at the newspapers’ daily circulations, though, McCain has the edge with 1,138,889 readers to Obama’s 901,011. ...
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003873050
E&P
October 10, 2008
... So far, the Obama-Biden ticket leads with 11 editorial endorsements, but the McCain-Palin ticket is close behind, picking up nine endorsements.
Taking a look at the newspapers’ daily circulations, though, McCain has the edge with 1,138,889 readers to Obama’s 901,011. ...
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003873050
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Hurricane McCain's Hot Air Campaign & the Weatherman
In Concert With The McCain Campaign, FOX News And Hannity Help Ratchet Up The Hatred Against Obama
Reported by Ellen
Newshounds
October 9, 2008
FOX News overtly helped the McCain/Palin campaign boost anti-Obama sentiments during last night's (10/8/08) Hannity & Colmes infomercial. According to FNC's own reporting, more and more McCain/Palin campaign rallies have turned vicious against Obama, promoting cries of “traitor, criminal and even terrorist.” At one Palin rally, a man shouted “Kill him!" in response to her rabble rousing about Obama's alleged ties to former 60's radical William Ayers. But in a time when our country is facing serious crises, the news network that claims “We like America” deliberately added fuel to the partisan divide for the sake of Republican political gain. With video.
In Part 3 of their 4 part interview in which “mavericks” John McCain and Sarah Palin ducked any tough questions from Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity went through his now-familiar smears of linking “unrepentant terrorist” William Ayers to Barack Obama while Palin's lip curled in schoolmarm disdain at the presidential nominee. Never mind that non-partisan fact checkers have found that the Ayers/Obama link is false. “The we report. You decide” network left that out of this lengthy interview. Also not reported is that Ayers long ago gave up his radical life, is now a university professor and has been an upstanding member of the community during the time Obama has known him.
On the other hand, "patriotic" Hannity and Palin have their own radical associations to account for but which were not discussed in the "fair and balanced" segment. For example, there is the unrepentant Neo-Nazi/white supremacist who spouted bigoted rants on Hannity's radio show for several years.
Unlike the tenuous Ayers/Obama connection, one could say that Palin has been sleeping with a traitor. She is linked to the unrepentant Alaskan secessionist, the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party, who has stated he has "no use for America". Palin's husband was a member of AIP for about seven years. There is also Palin's recent association with a witchhunter.
None of those radical associations were discussed. ...
STORY CONTINUES
http://www.newshounds.us/2008/10/09/in_concert_with_the_mccain_campaign_fox_news_and_hannity_help_ratchet_up_the_hatred_against_obama.php
•••••••
The Problems With the Ayers Attack
By Chris Cillizza
voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix
October 9, 2008
John McCain's campaign released a nearly-two minute Web video this morning detailing the connections between Barack Obama and former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the latest sign that the campaign is creeping toward using the attack as part of a broader television campaign. ...
There have been few serious revelations about the relationship between [Ayers and McCain] that move the story forward in a significant way. (The New York Times published a piece on the relationship last week [see below] that concluded: "A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close.")
Without a smoking gun to link Ayers and Obama, it's much more difficult for the McCain campaign to simply point out the association between the two and assume that voters will instinctively be turned off from voting for the Illinois senator.
Recognizing that difficulty, the McCain campaign -- in their new web video and in a series of recent statements -- is focused not on the Obama-Ayers relationship per se but rather on Obama's unwillingness to acknowledge the depth of that relationship. It's the old "cover up is worse than the crime" strategy.
In the Web video, the narrator offers these crucial lines: "But Obama's friendship with terrorist Ayers isn't the issue. The issue is Barack Obama's judgment and candor."
Those words echoed what McCain told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity during a recent sitdown when the subject of Ayers came up. "I don't care much about an old terrorist and his wife who are still unrepentant," said McCain. "It's not about them, it's about Senator Obama being candid and straightforward about their relationship."
McCain's campaign knows full well that it cannot win this election by simply running ads that make note of the fact that Obama and Ayers had a relationship -- the depth of which remains disputed. To make Ayers stick, it has to be part of a broader attack on Obama's judgment, candor and truthfulness. It may be part of the answer when trying to determine how McCain can come back but it is not the only answer.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/10/the_problem_with_the_ayers_att.html
•••••••
Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths
By SCOTT SHANE
NY TIMES
October 4, 2008
CHICAGO — At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.
Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.
Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement that was broadcast on Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama’s face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings.
In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”
More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”
A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
Obama campaign aides said the Ayers relationship had been greatly exaggerated by opponents to smear the candidate.
“The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.
In the stark presentation of a 30-second advertisement or a television clip, Mr. Obama’s connections with a man who once bombed buildings and who is unapologetic about it may seem puzzling. But in Chicago, Mr. Ayers has largely been rehabilitated.
Federal riot and bombing conspiracy charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of illegal wiretaps and other prosecutorial misconduct, and he was welcomed back after years in hiding by his large and prominent family. His father, Thomas G. Ayers, had served as chief executive of Commonwealth Edison, the local power company.
Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform.
“He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview this week, explaining that he has long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues. Mr. Daley, whose father was Chicago’s mayor during the street violence accompanying the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the so-called Days of Rage the following year, said he saw the bombings of that time in the context of a polarized and turbulent era.
“This is 2008,” Mr. Daley said. “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.”
That attitude is widely shared in Chicago, but it is not universal. Steve Chapman, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, defended Mr. Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his longtime pastor, whose black liberation theology and “God damn America” sermon became notorious last spring. But he denounced Mr. Obama for associating with Mr. Ayers, whom he said the University of Illinois should never have hired.
“I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Mr. Chapman said in an interview, speaking not of the law but of political and moral implications.
“If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,’ ” Mr. Chapman said. “If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.’ ”
Mr. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University Law School who was also a Weather Underground founder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Schools Project
The Ayers-Obama connection first came to public attention last spring, when both Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s Democratic primary rival, and Mr. McCain brought it up. It became the subject of a television advertisement in August by the anti-Obama American Issues Project and drew new attention recently on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page and elsewhere as the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge at the University of Illinois were opened to researchers.
That project was part of a national school reform effort financed with $500 million from Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Many cities applied for the Annenberg money, and Mr. Ayers joined two other local education activists to lead a broad, citywide effort that won nearly $50 million for Chicago.
In March 1995, Mr. Obama became chairman of the six-member board that oversaw the distribution of grants in Chicago. Some bloggers have recently speculated that Mr. Ayers had engineered that post for him.
In fact, according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment. Instead, it was suggested by Deborah Leff, then president of the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based group whose board Mr. Obama, a young lawyer, had joined the previous year. At a lunch with two other foundation heads, Patricia A. Graham of the Spencer Foundation and Adele Simmons of the MacArthur Foundation, Ms. Leff suggested that Mr. Obama would make a good board chairman, she said in an interview. Mr. Ayers was not present and had not suggested Mr. Obama, she said.
Ms. Graham said she invited Mr. Obama to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Chicago and was impressed.
“At the end of the dinner I said, ‘I really want you to be chairman.’ He said, ‘I’ll do it if you’ll be vice chairman,’ ” Ms. Graham recalled, and she agreed.
Archives of the Chicago Annenberg project, which funneled the money to networks of schools from 1995 to 2000, show both men attended six board meetings early in the project — Mr. Obama as chairman, Mr. Ayers to brief members on school issues.
It was later in 1995 that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted the gathering, in their town house three blocks from Mr. Obama’s home, at which State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced Mr. Obama to a few Democratic friends as her chosen successor. That was one of several such neighborhood events as Mr. Obama prepared to run, said A. J. Wolf, the 84-year-old emeritus rabbi of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, across the street from Mr. Obama’s current house.
“If you ask my wife, we had the first coffee for Barack,” Rabbi Wolf said. He said he had known Mr. Ayers for decades but added, “Bill’s mad at me because I told a reporter he’s a toothless ex-radical.”
“It was kind of a nasty shot,” Mr. Wolf said. “But it’s true. For God’s sake, he’s a professor.”
Other Connections
In 1997, after Mr. Obama took office, the new state senator was asked what he was reading by The Chicago Tribune. He praised a book by Mr. Ayers, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, which Mr. Obama called “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system.” In 2001, Mr. Ayers donated $200 to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign.
In addition, from 2000 to 2002, the two men also overlapped on the seven-member board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charity that had supported Mr. Obama’s first work as a community organizer in the 1980s. Officials there said the board met about a dozen times during those three years but declined to make public the minutes, saying they wanted members to be candid in assessing people and organizations applying for grants.
A board member at the time, R. Eden Martin, a corporate lawyer and president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, described both men as conscientious in examining proposed community projects but could recall nothing remarkable about their dealings with each other. “You had people who were liberal and some who were pretty conservative, but we usually reached a consensus,” Mr. Martin said of the panel.
Since 2002, there is little public evidence of their relationship.
If by then the ambitious politician was trying to keep his distance, it would not be a surprise. In an article that by chance was published on Sept. 11, 2001, The New York Times wrote about Mr. Ayers and his just-published memoir, Fugitive Days, opening with a quotation from the author: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Three days after the Qaeda attacks, Mr. Ayers wrote a reply posted on his Web site to clarify his quoted remarks, saying the meaning had been distorted.
“My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy,” he wrote. But he added that the Weathermen had “showed remarkable restraint” given the nature of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam that they were trying to stop.
Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.
In his memoir, Mr. Ayers was evasive as to which bombings he had a hand in, writing that “some details cannot be told.” By the time of the Brinks robbery, he and Ms. Dohrn had emerged from underground to raise their two children, then Chesa Boudin, whose parents were imprisoned for their role in the heist.
Little Influence Seen
Mr. Obama’s friends said that history was utterly irrelevant to judging the candidate, because Mr. Ayers was never a significant influence on him. Even some conservatives who know Mr. Obama said that if he was drawn to Ayers-style radicalism, he hid it well.
“I saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert, when we were together at Harvard Law School,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Mr. Obama and who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush. Mr. Berenson, who is backing Mr. McCain, described his fellow student as “a pragmatic liberal” whose moderation frustrated others at the law review whose views were much farther to the left.
Some 15 years later, left-leaning backers of Mr. Obama have the same complaint. “We’re fully for Obama, but we disagree with some of his stands,” said Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist and former California legislator, who helped organize Progressives for Obama. His group opposes the candidate’s call for sending more troops to Afghanistan, for instance, “because we think it’s a quagmire just like Iraq,” he said. “A lot of our work is trying to win over progressives who think Obama is too conservative.”
Mr. Hayden, 68, said he has known Mr. Ayers for 45 years and was on the other side of the split in the radical antiwar movement that led Mr. Ayers and others to form the Weathermen. But Mr. Hayden said he saw attempts to link Mr. Obama with bombings and radicalism as “typical campaign shenanigans.”
“If Barack Obama says he’s willing to talk to foreign leaders without preconditions,” Mr. Hayden said, “I can imagine he’d be willing to talk to Bill Ayers about schools. But I think that’s about as far as their relationship goes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin
Reported by Ellen
Newshounds
October 9, 2008
FOX News overtly helped the McCain/Palin campaign boost anti-Obama sentiments during last night's (10/8/08) Hannity & Colmes infomercial. According to FNC's own reporting, more and more McCain/Palin campaign rallies have turned vicious against Obama, promoting cries of “traitor, criminal and even terrorist.” At one Palin rally, a man shouted “Kill him!" in response to her rabble rousing about Obama's alleged ties to former 60's radical William Ayers. But in a time when our country is facing serious crises, the news network that claims “We like America” deliberately added fuel to the partisan divide for the sake of Republican political gain. With video.In Part 3 of their 4 part interview in which “mavericks” John McCain and Sarah Palin ducked any tough questions from Alan Colmes, Sean Hannity went through his now-familiar smears of linking “unrepentant terrorist” William Ayers to Barack Obama while Palin's lip curled in schoolmarm disdain at the presidential nominee. Never mind that non-partisan fact checkers have found that the Ayers/Obama link is false. “The we report. You decide” network left that out of this lengthy interview. Also not reported is that Ayers long ago gave up his radical life, is now a university professor and has been an upstanding member of the community during the time Obama has known him.
On the other hand, "patriotic" Hannity and Palin have their own radical associations to account for but which were not discussed in the "fair and balanced" segment. For example, there is the unrepentant Neo-Nazi/white supremacist who spouted bigoted rants on Hannity's radio show for several years.
Unlike the tenuous Ayers/Obama connection, one could say that Palin has been sleeping with a traitor. She is linked to the unrepentant Alaskan secessionist, the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party, who has stated he has "no use for America". Palin's husband was a member of AIP for about seven years. There is also Palin's recent association with a witchhunter.
None of those radical associations were discussed. ...
STORY CONTINUES
http://www.newshounds.us/2008/10/09/in_concert_with_the_mccain_campaign_fox_news_and_hannity_help_ratchet_up_the_hatred_against_obama.php
•••••••
The Problems With the Ayers Attack
By Chris Cillizza
voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix
October 9, 2008
John McCain's campaign released a nearly-two minute Web video this morning detailing the connections between Barack Obama and former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, the latest sign that the campaign is creeping toward using the attack as part of a broader television campaign. ...
There have been few serious revelations about the relationship between [Ayers and McCain] that move the story forward in a significant way. (The New York Times published a piece on the relationship last week [see below] that concluded: "A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close.")
Without a smoking gun to link Ayers and Obama, it's much more difficult for the McCain campaign to simply point out the association between the two and assume that voters will instinctively be turned off from voting for the Illinois senator.
Recognizing that difficulty, the McCain campaign -- in their new web video and in a series of recent statements -- is focused not on the Obama-Ayers relationship per se but rather on Obama's unwillingness to acknowledge the depth of that relationship. It's the old "cover up is worse than the crime" strategy.
In the Web video, the narrator offers these crucial lines: "But Obama's friendship with terrorist Ayers isn't the issue. The issue is Barack Obama's judgment and candor."
Those words echoed what McCain told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity during a recent sitdown when the subject of Ayers came up. "I don't care much about an old terrorist and his wife who are still unrepentant," said McCain. "It's not about them, it's about Senator Obama being candid and straightforward about their relationship."
McCain's campaign knows full well that it cannot win this election by simply running ads that make note of the fact that Obama and Ayers had a relationship -- the depth of which remains disputed. To make Ayers stick, it has to be part of a broader attack on Obama's judgment, candor and truthfulness. It may be part of the answer when trying to determine how McCain can come back but it is not the only answer.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/10/the_problem_with_the_ayers_att.html
•••••••
Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths
By SCOTT SHANE
NY TIMES
October 4, 2008
CHICAGO — At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.
Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama’s first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.
Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement that was broadcast on Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama’s face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings.
In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s Republican rival, asked, “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”
More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”
A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
Obama campaign aides said the Ayers relationship had been greatly exaggerated by opponents to smear the candidate.
“The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. Mr. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood. He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Mr. Obama began serving in the United States Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on the street in Hyde Park.
In the stark presentation of a 30-second advertisement or a television clip, Mr. Obama’s connections with a man who once bombed buildings and who is unapologetic about it may seem puzzling. But in Chicago, Mr. Ayers has largely been rehabilitated.
Federal riot and bombing conspiracy charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of illegal wiretaps and other prosecutorial misconduct, and he was welcomed back after years in hiding by his large and prominent family. His father, Thomas G. Ayers, had served as chief executive of Commonwealth Edison, the local power company.
Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform.
“He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview this week, explaining that he has long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues. Mr. Daley, whose father was Chicago’s mayor during the street violence accompanying the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the so-called Days of Rage the following year, said he saw the bombings of that time in the context of a polarized and turbulent era.
“This is 2008,” Mr. Daley said. “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.”
That attitude is widely shared in Chicago, but it is not universal. Steve Chapman, a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, defended Mr. Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., his longtime pastor, whose black liberation theology and “God damn America” sermon became notorious last spring. But he denounced Mr. Obama for associating with Mr. Ayers, whom he said the University of Illinois should never have hired.
“I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations on terrorist bombings,” Mr. Chapman said in an interview, speaking not of the law but of political and moral implications.
“If you’re in public life, you ought to say, ‘I don’t want to be associated with this guy,’ ” Mr. Chapman said. “If John McCain had a long association with a guy who’d bombed abortion clinics, I don’t think people would say, ‘That’s ancient history.’ ”
Mr. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University Law School who was also a Weather Underground founder, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Schools Project
The Ayers-Obama connection first came to public attention last spring, when both Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s Democratic primary rival, and Mr. McCain brought it up. It became the subject of a television advertisement in August by the anti-Obama American Issues Project and drew new attention recently on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page and elsewhere as the archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge at the University of Illinois were opened to researchers.
That project was part of a national school reform effort financed with $500 million from Walter H. Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and philanthropist and President Richard M. Nixon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. Many cities applied for the Annenberg money, and Mr. Ayers joined two other local education activists to lead a broad, citywide effort that won nearly $50 million for Chicago.
In March 1995, Mr. Obama became chairman of the six-member board that oversaw the distribution of grants in Chicago. Some bloggers have recently speculated that Mr. Ayers had engineered that post for him.
In fact, according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment. Instead, it was suggested by Deborah Leff, then president of the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based group whose board Mr. Obama, a young lawyer, had joined the previous year. At a lunch with two other foundation heads, Patricia A. Graham of the Spencer Foundation and Adele Simmons of the MacArthur Foundation, Ms. Leff suggested that Mr. Obama would make a good board chairman, she said in an interview. Mr. Ayers was not present and had not suggested Mr. Obama, she said.
Ms. Graham said she invited Mr. Obama to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Chicago and was impressed.
“At the end of the dinner I said, ‘I really want you to be chairman.’ He said, ‘I’ll do it if you’ll be vice chairman,’ ” Ms. Graham recalled, and she agreed.
Archives of the Chicago Annenberg project, which funneled the money to networks of schools from 1995 to 2000, show both men attended six board meetings early in the project — Mr. Obama as chairman, Mr. Ayers to brief members on school issues.
It was later in 1995 that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted the gathering, in their town house three blocks from Mr. Obama’s home, at which State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced Mr. Obama to a few Democratic friends as her chosen successor. That was one of several such neighborhood events as Mr. Obama prepared to run, said A. J. Wolf, the 84-year-old emeritus rabbi of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, across the street from Mr. Obama’s current house.
“If you ask my wife, we had the first coffee for Barack,” Rabbi Wolf said. He said he had known Mr. Ayers for decades but added, “Bill’s mad at me because I told a reporter he’s a toothless ex-radical.”
“It was kind of a nasty shot,” Mr. Wolf said. “But it’s true. For God’s sake, he’s a professor.”
Other Connections
In 1997, after Mr. Obama took office, the new state senator was asked what he was reading by The Chicago Tribune. He praised a book by Mr. Ayers, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, which Mr. Obama called “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system.” In 2001, Mr. Ayers donated $200 to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign.
In addition, from 2000 to 2002, the two men also overlapped on the seven-member board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago charity that had supported Mr. Obama’s first work as a community organizer in the 1980s. Officials there said the board met about a dozen times during those three years but declined to make public the minutes, saying they wanted members to be candid in assessing people and organizations applying for grants.
A board member at the time, R. Eden Martin, a corporate lawyer and president of the Commercial Club of Chicago, described both men as conscientious in examining proposed community projects but could recall nothing remarkable about their dealings with each other. “You had people who were liberal and some who were pretty conservative, but we usually reached a consensus,” Mr. Martin said of the panel.
Since 2002, there is little public evidence of their relationship.
If by then the ambitious politician was trying to keep his distance, it would not be a surprise. In an article that by chance was published on Sept. 11, 2001, The New York Times wrote about Mr. Ayers and his just-published memoir, Fugitive Days, opening with a quotation from the author: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Three days after the Qaeda attacks, Mr. Ayers wrote a reply posted on his Web site to clarify his quoted remarks, saying the meaning had been distorted.
“My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy,” he wrote. But he added that the Weathermen had “showed remarkable restraint” given the nature of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam that they were trying to stop.
Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.
In his memoir, Mr. Ayers was evasive as to which bombings he had a hand in, writing that “some details cannot be told.” By the time of the Brinks robbery, he and Ms. Dohrn had emerged from underground to raise their two children, then Chesa Boudin, whose parents were imprisoned for their role in the heist.
Little Influence Seen
Mr. Obama’s friends said that history was utterly irrelevant to judging the candidate, because Mr. Ayers was never a significant influence on him. Even some conservatives who know Mr. Obama said that if he was drawn to Ayers-style radicalism, he hid it well.
“I saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert, when we were together at Harvard Law School,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who worked on the Harvard Law Review with Mr. Obama and who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush. Mr. Berenson, who is backing Mr. McCain, described his fellow student as “a pragmatic liberal” whose moderation frustrated others at the law review whose views were much farther to the left.
Some 15 years later, left-leaning backers of Mr. Obama have the same complaint. “We’re fully for Obama, but we disagree with some of his stands,” said Tom Hayden, the 1960s activist and former California legislator, who helped organize Progressives for Obama. His group opposes the candidate’s call for sending more troops to Afghanistan, for instance, “because we think it’s a quagmire just like Iraq,” he said. “A lot of our work is trying to win over progressives who think Obama is too conservative.”
Mr. Hayden, 68, said he has known Mr. Ayers for 45 years and was on the other side of the split in the radical antiwar movement that led Mr. Ayers and others to form the Weathermen. But Mr. Hayden said he saw attempts to link Mr. Obama with bombings and radicalism as “typical campaign shenanigans.”
“If Barack Obama says he’s willing to talk to foreign leaders without preconditions,” Mr. Hayden said, “I can imagine he’d be willing to talk to Bill Ayers about schools. But I think that’s about as far as their relationship goes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/04/us/politics/04ayers.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin
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