Obama and ‘60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths

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.”

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Palin says cause of global warming “doesn’t matter”

In an interview with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric that aired Tuesday, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said that it “kinda doesn’t matter at this point” if human activity is responsible for climate change.
You can see a video of the interview.



The topic of global warming comes up about four and a half minutes in:

Couric: What’s your position on global warming? Do you believe it’s manmade or not?
Palin: Well, we’re the only Arctic state, of course, Alaska. So we feel the impacts more than any other state, up there, with the changes in climates. And, and certainly it is apparent. We have erosion issues, and we have melting sea ice, of course. So, what I’ve done up there is form a sub-cabinet to focus solely on climate change. Understanding that it is real, and …
Couric: Is it man-made, though in your view?
Palin: You know there are – there are man’s activities that can be contributed [sic] to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts. I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate. Because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical. And over history we have seen changes there. But it kinda doesn’t matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is: it’s real; we need to do something about it.

Gov. Palin’s response is similar to the one she gave last month when ABC News’s Charlie Gibson asked her the same question. Mr. Gibson pressed the issue harder than Ms. Couric did. Here’s how that exchange went:

Palin: I believe that man’s activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change. Here in Alaska, the only Arctic state in our Union, of course, we see the effects of climate change more so than any other area, with ice pack melting. Regardless, though, of the reason for climate change – whether it’s entirely, wholly caused by man’s activities or is part of the cyclical nature of our planet, the warming and the cooling trends – regardless of that, John McCain and I agree that we got to do something about it, and we have to make sure that we’re doing all we can to cut down on pollution.
Gibson: But it’s a critical point, as to whether this is manmade. He says it is. You have said in the past it’s not.
Palin: The debate on that even really has evolved into, “OK, here’s where we are now: Scientists do show us that there are changes in climate. Things are getting warmer. Now, what do we do about it?” John McCain and I are going to be working on what we do.
Gibson: Yes, but isn’t it critical as to whether or not it’s manmade? Because what you do about it depends on whether it’s manmade.
Palin: That’s why I’m attributing some of man’s activities to potentially causing some of the changes in the climate right now.

Gibson’s point – that humanity’s response to global warming should be informed by its cause – is a valid one. If greenhouse gas emissions are changing the earth’s climate, then efforts to protect ourselves from the effects of climate change should include curbing these emissions. If global warming is caused only by natural cycles, then curbing emissions will do nothing and humanity should focus on adaptation.
Alaska’s Climate Change Sub-Cabinet, which Palin established in September 2007, does take up issues of mitigation, but most of its focus is on adaptation – such as how to help remote Inuit communities deal with coastal erosiion.
A story last week in the Washington Post indicates that the Alaska governor is well aware of global warming’s effects on her state, but has dodged the question of its causes:

Palin does not minimize the consequences. When she established her climate sub-cabinet last September, she said in a news release that Alaskans “are already seeing the effects” of warming: “Coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice and record forest fires affect our communities and our infrastructure.”

But when environmentalists urged the governor to include language attributing global warming to humans and suggested that the state set a target for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, Palin hedged. Instead, she issued an executive order saying the state needed to develop a strategy that would “guide its efforts in evaluating and addressing known or suspected causes of climate change. Alaska’s climate change strategy must be built on sound science and the best available facts and must recognize Alaska’s interest in economic growth and the development of its resources.”

Before being selected as John McCain’s running mate, Palin took a stronger stance against the notion that humans are to blame for global warming. When Newsmax asked for the Alaska governor’s “take on global warming” this summer, she said, “A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being manmade.”
According to the Associated Press, in December 2007, Palin said to the Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, “I’m not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity.”
Palin’s current position, that the causes of climate change are unimportant but that we should take action to protect ourselves from it, is somewhat undercut by the Climate Change Sub-Cabinet’s website. The section called “What Is Alaska Already Doing,” has only two words: “coming soon.”

Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat

ORMOC, Philippines -- Ferdinand Marcos, the despot who ruled here for 21 years, is remembered mainly for the staggering quantity of his wife's shoes. But there is another Marcos legacy, and it is drawing new attention at a time of high oil prices, global warming and urgent questions about the role of government in alternative energy development.
Reacting to the early 1970s oil shock, Marcos created a major government program to find, develop and generate electricity from hot rocks deep in the ground. Since then, the Philippine government has championed this form of energy.
Geothermal power now accounts for about 28 percent of the electricity generated in the Philippines. With 90 million people, about 40 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day, this country has become the world's largest consumer of electricity from geothermal sources. Billions of dollars have been saved here because of reduced need for imported oil and coal.
"Goes to show that things aren't always the way we might expect," said Roland N. Horne, a Stanford University expert on geothermal power who has visited this country more than 20 times. "The Philippines would be in hugely worse shape without geothermal as an indigenous energy source."
In installed geothermal power capacity, the country ranks No. 2 in the world, narrowly trailing the United States, which has far more geothermal potential, far more engineering talent and far greater demand for clean sustainable power.
But unlike in the Philippines, government policy in the United States has been inconsistent. In 2006, the Bush administration cut most geothermal spending -- federal programs that received as much as $100 million a year in the 1980s shrank to $5 million. Research projects were dismantled. Scientists in the field had to find other jobs.

"Most of the federal infrastructure, the laboratories and the researchers are now gone," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association in Washington.

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Parliament further marginalizes Iraqi minorities

The parliament passed a law giving provincial elections the go ahead, but scrapped a clause guaranteeing seats for minority sects.

A new decision by the Iraqi parliament leaves Iraqi minorities with no representation in the country's provincial councils as well as the legislature.
By an overwhelming majority, the parliament early this week revoked paragraph 50 from the constitution, under which Iraqi minorities were assigned a set of seats in legislative and municipal councils.
The revocation has sparked mass demonstrations in areas where these minorities live, particularly in the northern Province of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital.
Not only non-Muslim minorities are affected. The Shebeks, who are Muslim Shiites, have lost this privilege as well as the Yazidis who still pursue their secretive and traditional faith.
The decision has been a blow to the minorities who make up at least 10 per cent of the Iraqi population.
Neglected and persecuted under former leader Saddam Hussein, they hoped the new U.S.-occupied Iraq would bring good news.
On the contrary. They have borne the brunt of the upsurge in violence and insecurity that has become a characteristic of post-Saddam Iraq.
With paragraph 50 of the constitution revoked, these minorities will have no means left to air their voice.
Christians, Yazidis, and Sabeans have almost lost the religious freedom they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein in most parts of the country.
Today, these minorities make up a disproportionately high percentage of Iraqi refugees fleeing their country.
It is almost impossible for the Yazidis for example to live outside their traditional areas. And even there they are target of attacks and pressure by both Arabs and Kurds.
Certain cities like Mosul, which traditionally used to be centers of Christianity in the country, are being emptied of their Christian population.

Cleaning up of Jewish cemetery in Basra
Municipal authorities in the southern city of Basra have mounted a campaign to clean up the Jewish cemetery there.
The cemetery is seen as one of Basra’s ‘cultural landmarks’ and the authorities want to keep it clean and tidy, said Ahmad al-Yasseri who heads the cleaning-up campaign.
There are no Jews left in the city which used to house a sizeable Jewish community of tens of thousands before the creation of Israel in 1948.
They were the finest goldsmiths and the most adventurous traders of Basra, known as the Venice of the Middle East.
The lived in one of the city’s smartest quarters with spacious villas adorned with palm trees and oranges.
Yasseri said in the tumultuous post-Saddam period, 62 houses were built on the cemetery grounds illegally.
“This cemetery is one of the cultural landmarks of Basra and we are determined to remove the illegal dwellings,” he said.

Militiamen attack returning refugees in Baaquba
Many refugees who ventured to return home following reports of relative quiet in the country were forced to flee once again.
The restive Province of Diyala of which Baaquba is the capital has seen most of the violence directed at returning refugees.
Azzaman correspondent in the city says factional militias are active in the city and their attacks have even forced the heavily armed pro-U.S. Sunni militiamen to flee.
Some semblance of normalcy had returned to Diyala when Sunni tribesmen joined U.S.-financed groups of Sunni militias known as Sahwa or Awakening.
But U.S. protection of these groups is waning as Washington intends to transfer their file to the Shiite-dominated government.
Our correspondent says there has been a marked deterioration in security in Diyala, a province northeast of Baghdad extending as far as the Iranian borders.
The agricultural province is mainly Arab (93%) with a very small Kurdish minority (7%). But the Kurds are reported to be in control of about 27% of the province’s area of 17,685 square kilometers.
Tensions between Arabs and the government on the one hand and Kurdish militias on the other have been rising recently. The Arabs dislike the increasing Kurdish presence in their areas.
But the Arabs themselves are divided along sectarian lines into Sunnis and Shiites.
A senior parliamentary Arab deputy harshly criticized the military campaigns by U.S. and Iraqi troops to subdue the province.
Mohammed al-Dayni said the military forays “have practically achieved nothing”.
He said most of those detained during these operations were innocent people while those fuelling and committing violence were at large.

USA’s criticism of Iraqi government is cynical
One is bewildered by U.S. insistence that the Iraqi government should spend more of its stashed oil revenues on reconstruction.
It is absurd and cynical to see U.S. criticism of the government getting harsher and harsher at a time the government itself cannot function and survive without U.S. protection.
No one can deny that without U.S. blessings the government would not continue for long.
If the U.S. is serious it should force the government to be as transparent as possible about its revenues, budget and expenditures and at the same time compel it to publicly declare its reconstruction plans.
Six years after the implosion of the country at the hand of the U.S. occupiers and their lackey governments, Iraqis still lack basic public amenities.
Iraqis are still waiting for the prosperity U.S. President George W. Bush promised them.
When will Iraqis have efficient public transport? When will they have functioning health services? When will they have running water and continuous power supply?
It is now rare to find two Iraqis possessing the same passport and it is so difficult for other countries to know which one is authentic. Issuing passports has turned into one of the biggest scandals in U.S.-occupied Iraq and a sign of how rampant corruption is in government ranks.
Iraqis have been told that their 2009 budget may hit $80 billion and they cannot understand why so many of them are unemployed.
And security remains the biggest problem. Lack of security has made it almost impossible for some ethnic or sectarian groups of the Iraqi society to move from one city to another.
The issue today seems to be revolving around the security accords the U.S. and the Iraqi government are negotiating and the hurdles preventing the sides from coming to an agreement.
Do they really need a third party to bring them together?

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Bush Illegally Turns Army Inwards

Gitmo
What would you do if you learned that President Bush was preparing - in violation of federal law - to use the U.S. military to maintain order within our borders? I hope you would at least take one minute to help us raise awareness about the situation.

For more than 200 years, federal laws have protected the American people against the use of military forces on our own soil. Strengthened in 1878 by the Posse Comitatus Act, these laws have guaranteed that the federal government could not use the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.*

Without such protection, the federal government could use the might of our army to violate state and individual rights. Moreover, minor incursions by the military into domestic law enforcement activity could lay the foundation for the imposition of martial law at a moment's notice. This is one slippery slope we don't want to start sliding down.
That is why we should all be deeply disturbed by the news that President Bush has assigned the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team to be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army component of Northern Command (NorthCom). According to an article in Army Times, the soldiers could be called upon for a variety of tasks, including quelling "civil unrest." They are apparently engaged in training with shields and batons, beanbag bullets, and Tasers.
We need to raise awareness about this threat to our liberty immediately. The American Freedom Campaign believes the best method available at the moment is to send an email to the moderators of the next two presidential debates, urging them to ask the candidates whether they would fully enforce the Posse Comitatus Act.

Please join us in the effort by clicking on this link:

In just one minute, you can share your feelings with both Tom Brokaw at NBC and Bob Schieffer at CBS. After you do so, please spread the word by forwarding this alert widely to friends and family or by using the Tell-A-Friend option that will appear on our site after you send your email.

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