In response to a private discussion:

From The Atlantic

Obama, Ayers, and Guilt By Association
by Matthew Yglesias

With John McCain’s poll numbers tanking as fast as the Dow, it’s no surprise that his campaign has decided to dust off some of the inflammatory character attacks that Hillary Clinton’s campaign debuted back during the primaries. The latest is this: designated attack dog Sarah Palin’s reworked stump speech now accuses Obama of “palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

One might note at the outset that Obama has had dealings with just one domestic terrorist—former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers—and that “palling around” is hardly a good description of this passing acquaintanceship. Obama and Ayers were both politically active members of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and both were affiliated with the neighborhood’s University of Chicago. But the very New York Times article that Palin cited as a source concluded that “the two men do not appear to have been close.”

So Palin’s “palling around” accusation is no more true than her boast that she “told congress ‘Thanks, but no thanks’” on the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan. But it seems to me that pointing out factual errors gives this line of argument too much credit: guilt by association, even when the association happens to be real, is a silly charge.

In 1995 Obama and Ayers really were both involved with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge—part of a national school reform effort financed by the publisher Walter Annenberg—along with various others, including the state’s Republican governor. As it happens, Ayers’s and Obama’s relationship in this endeavor was no more than incidental. But suppose it had been more than that? Suppose Obama, a state legislator interested in urban problems, and Ayers, an education professor, had collaborated intensively on some local education project. What difference would it make?

The very same Times article observes that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has “long consulted Mr. Ayers on school issues” and quotes him as saying that Ayers has “done a lot of good in this city and nationally.” Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing should, surely, be determined by the quality of Ayers’ advice about education policy rather than his views on whether or not a domestic bombing campaign was a morally acceptable response to the United States’ wrongheaded prosecution of the Vietnam War. (For the record: it wasn’t.)

If there were reason to believe that Obama harbored intentions of appointing Ayers to a national security post, or of using the powers of the presidency to orchestrate a bombing of the Pentagon, then there would be important questions to raise during a political campaign. But the idea that merely knowing somebody who has radical opinions ought to constitute a devastating objection to someone’s political career is both wrongheaded and dangerous.

It’s wrongheaded because merely pointing out an association is lazy: it doesn’t do the harder work of establishing a connection between the relationship and Obama’s ability to govern. The McCain campaign has failed to do that.

And it’s dangerous because guilt by association can apply to just about anyone, and heading down that slippery slope would have perverse consequences. I have no idea what the vast majority of my friends think about the Weather Underground. I hope they have sound views, but if I found out otherwise I’d hate to have to stop hanging out with them. And, indeed, it seems to me that it would be a bit perverse to do so—so perverse that I trust nobody has any intention of actually trying to apply a guilt-by-association doctrine in any rigorous way.

Ayers is an extreme figure. But then again so is G. Gordon Liddy, the former White House “plumber” and Watergate burglar. On behalf of the Nixon administration he masterminded a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and managed a 20-year prison sentence only because his most far-fetched schemes (including kidnapping anti-war protestors and bombing the Brookings Institution) never came to fruition. Liddy’s sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter, and since that time he’s built a career as a radio host. McCain has appeared on Liddy’s show and congratulated him for his “continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.” Are we supposed to hold McCain accountable for this association?

The truth is that the Vietnam era was a time of political extremism in the United States. And part of the way that era was brought to a close was by turning away from efforts to banish the extremists from public life. Segregationist politicians went on chairing their congressional committees. Black Panthers ran for congress and won. Liddy got a radio show and Ayers became a professor.

In retrospect, it might have been better to undertake something like a truth and reconciliation commission to establish standards for rehabilitation and public expressions of contrition. But we didn’t go down that path, and it’s far too late now. And now we have these annoyingly nostalgic attacks. Some day, enough of the people who find rehashes of the sixties and seventies compelling will be dead that these tactics will cease to be effective. Until then, those of us who find the whole business annoying can only gripe.

Th following is in response to a private discussion:

October 4, 2008
From th NYTimes

Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths
By SCOTT SHANE

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.”

If you live in our house then October 1 means Halloween is right around the corner. So, the first weekend of the month means pulling out all the stuff and setting up in the front yard. We’ve added Dead Donna to our repertoire – weather permitting, we think we can pull it off (that is, scare the bejeebees out of our trick or treaters).

Courtesy of adennak:

It is with sadness that I report the death of a neighborhood squirrel. At approximately 7:30am EST, “Nuts” expired after suffering trauma related injuries. The perp is a 2 year old Florida brown dog named Peanut. Peanut is currently under house arrest and supervision. Her punishment will be meted out this weekend when her collar will be fitted with a bell – the length of this punishment is yet to be determined but is expected to last many years.

Every year the UF Music school has a brazilian music week where musical artists come to give master classes and to perform in concert at the end of the week. Mir and I have attended the concerts from two of the last three years – they’ve been exceptional. Here is Ulisses Rocha who came this year, along with another artist. The concert they gave was wonderful. Ulisses played this song at the concert – it’s beautiful. When I need to chill, I’ll play it – on my iPod – not on a guitar. Enjoy.

Andrew Halcro is a former Republican legislator who ran for governor in 2006 as an Independent. He participated in debates with Sarah Palin and another candidate. His commentary is very interesting. It was published in the Anchorage Daily News. Here’s an excerpt:

On April 18, 2006, Palin and I sat together in a hotel coffee shop comparing campaign trail notes. As we talked about the debates, Palin made a comment that highlights the phenomenon that Biden is up against.

“Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers and yet when asked questions you spout off facts, figures and policies and I’m amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, ‘Does any of this really matter?’ ” Palin said.

While public policy wonks might cringe, the fact was that Sarah Palin was simply vocalizing her biggest campaign strength without realizing it. During the campaign, from January to November, Palin’s message on important public policy issues never evolved — because it didn’t have to. Her ability to fill the debate halls with her presence and her gift of the glittering generality made it possible for her to rely on populism instead of policy.

In one debate, a moderator asked the candidates to name a bill the Legislature had recently passed that we didn’t like. I named one. Democratic candidate Tony Knowles named one. But Palin used her allotted time to criticize the unpopular incumbent governor, Frank Murkowski. Asked to name a bill we did like, the same pattern emerged: Palin didn’t name a bill.

And when she does answer the actual question asked, she has the canny ability to connect with the audience on a personal level. For example, asked to name a major issue that had been ignored during the campaign, I mentioned the health of Alaska communities, Mr. Knowles talked about affordable health care, and Palin talked about the need to protect hunting and fishing rights.

We’ll see how she does – I’m hoping she’ll give Tina Fey some ideas for her next skit on SNL.

From The AnonymousLiberal’s blog:

Honestly, though, I don’t expect Palin will be as bad as she was with Couric. What made the Couric interviews so devastating was Couric’s tendency (which is actually rare among reporters) to ask follow up questions when she got a non-responsive answer. When Palin would filibuster, Couric would repeat the question or press her for specifics. That’s what elicited her most embarrassing responses.

But the format of the debate won’t allow for those kind of follow up questions. Palin can be as non-responsive as she pleases. Moreover, on at least half the questions, Biden will have to answer first, which will give Palin time to think about her answer and allow her to build off whatever Biden says. And finally, the questions aren’t likely to be out of left field. There’s a lot of ground to cover and not much time to do it, so it’s very likely that all of the questions she’ll be asked will have been anticipated by her coaches and she’ll have set answers ready.

In other words, unless she completely psyches herself out and blanks out up there, she’s likely to turn in at least a mediocre performance.