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ou’ve probably heard by now all about the unfortunate adventures of Bill Ayres as he tried to attack the pliable minds of the Great Frozen North with this revolution-building teaching techniques.  If not:

An American education professor, one of the founders of a radical 1960s group known as the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings in the United States in the early 1970s, was turned back at the Canadian border last night.

Dr. William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a leader in educational reform, was scheduled to speak at the Centre for Urban Schooling at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. But that appearance has now been temporarily cancelled.

“I don’t know why I was turned back,” Ayers said in an interview this morning from Chicago. “I got off the plane like everyone else and I was asked to come over to the other side. The border guards reviewed some stuff and said I wasn’t going to be allowed into Canada. To me it seems quite bureaucratic and not at all interesting … If it were me I would have let me in. I couldn’t possibly be a threat to Canada.” (source)

You have to give him a point for guffaw-making with that “If it were me I would have let me in” line.  If it had been up to Mohammed al-Qahtani, he would have let himself into the U.S. so he could join in the 9/11 mayhem, too.

As for the threat he poses Canada … well, yeah, no threat at all.  Unless you consider poisoning the minds of a generation of teachers so they can poison the minds of several generations of school children a threat.

And never mind if it’s not a wee bit rational to think, “Once a guy who’s intent on blowing things up and killing people, always a guy who’s intent on blowing things up and killing people.”  It’s not like Ayres has apologized or anything.

But the best laughs come from what Ayres’ would-be host has to say:

Jeffrey Kugler, executive director of the Centre for Urban Schooling, is deeply disappointed in the turn of events. For him it’s a question of academic freedom. “It’s kind of ironic the day before Barack Obama is going to become president this is what the Canadian border security has done,” said Kugler.

Yes, it is juicily ironic, but Kugler misses the irony entirely.  What’s ironic is that the day before Barack Obama is going to become president, someone in authority finally saw Ayres for what he is – something that never happened during the campaign.

A hat-tip to Michelle Malkin, who adds:

I’m thinking [the Canadian border guards] should moonlight as security guards at the Obama inaugural prayer service. They’d make sure jihadi apologists don’t penetrate the premises.

Next, they should freelance as security guards at American campuses — and start protecting the free speech rights of those who wish to criticize Ayers.

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n the excellent and thorough LA Times obit of W. Mark Felt, who told Vanity Fair in 2005 that he was, in fact, the source “Deep Throat” that helped to bring down the Nixon administration, we are reminded that this FBI man – really the personification of America’s image of an FBI agent – did his own dirty tricks, and for good cause:

Felt and Edward S. Miller, another former FBI official, were indicted on charges of authorizing illegal break-ins in pursuit of members of the Weather Underground, a radical left-wing group that advocated violence in overthrowing the government. On the witness stand, Felt wept as he acknowledged that he had approved 13 secret break-ins by FBI agents between May 1972 and May 1973, roughly the same time he was talking to Woodward about Watergate.

He and Miller were convicted and fined in November 1980 of conspiring to violate the civil rights of relatives of the Weather Underground, whose homes had been burglarized.

President-elect Reagan pardoned them, and their indictments were later overturned.

Do you think it a bit odd that Felt felt justified carrying out his own illegal break-ins in order to protect the country, but was so offended by the Nixon administration’s handling of an unapproved break-in by overzealous underlings that he felt compelled to bring down a president?

Yeah, me too.

Oh, on that line above – “really the personification of America’s image of an FBI agent” – it also comes from the LAT obit:

If not for the Watergate years, Felt would likely be remembered not as Holbrook depicted him in the movie but as the character Efrem Zimbalist Jr. portrayed in the television show “The FBI.” On the air from 1965 to 1974, the show glamorized the bureau. An unpaid consultant to the show, which had Hoover’s blessings, Felt came to personify the model FBI agent — buttoned-down, handsome, discreet, all business.

One of Felt’s legacies is a generation of journalists weaned on the sour mother’s milk of All The President’s Men, and that’s not something that has been good for America. I was in j-school at Indiana University as Watergate broke and was fired up about my career choice as I watched Woodward & Bernstein peck apart the presidency. There are thousands of others who had a similar experience, going into journalism with an over-grand opinion of the field and a highly biased view of politics, particularly Republican politics.

Under their watch, journalism has degenerated from its role as a check on government into a sordid, biased swamp that is more interested in influencing government than watching it.

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ou decide – were the failed terrorists who planted dynamite in a Parisian department store followers of the Religion of Peace … or followers of the professor of education?  Here’s the news, from the Int’l Herald Trib:

French police found a package of explosives at the Printemps department store complex in central Paris on Tuesday, a spokeswoman at Paris police headquarters said. …

The French news channel LCI reported that the explosives, planted at the height of the Christmas shopping season, had been discovered in a rest room on the third floor of the Printemps men’s store, one of three Printemps buildings in the complex. All three stores were evacuated by the police and the area around them, on the elegant Boulevard Haussmann, was cordoned off.

LCI said a group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front claimed in a statement to AFP that it had planted the explosives. The statement said the group was demanding the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan, LCI said. France has about 3,000 troops deployed with the NATO-led force in Afghanistan. French news reports said that the French intelligence services had no previous knowledge of the group.

AP reported that “sticks of ‘relatively old’ dynamite tied together but without a detonator” were found in the store.

Let’s analyze.  The target was at least somewhat symbolic of the Christian faith, as the target was Christmas shoppers.  Score one for the Islamists.

But the bombers were inept, not good at making bombs, had lousy equipment and called themselves revolutionaries, not mujahedin.  Score four for the Weather Underground.

So all in all, I’d say these weren’t Islamists, but rather spoiled white kids who don’t have a clue how valuable a society that honors freedom is, and are stupid enough to kill to make their pathetic point.  Ayresians.

But there’s this:  They called first.  That makes them moderately less disgusting than either the jihadists or Bill Ayres … at least for now … and opens the door to the possibility that they’re homegrown jihadists not schooled in the element of blood and gore surprise.  Let’s pray they get caught before taking it to the next level.

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n Good Morning America this morning a still unrepentant Bill Ayres came very close to calling for violent action against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – so close that any crazy could easily have heard in his words an endorsement of a new round of bombings.

Here’s the passage, from ABC’s write-up of the interview:

“What you call the violent past, that was a time when thousands of people were being murdered every month by our own government… We were on the right side,” he told “GMA.”

The co-founder of the Weather Underground was, as McCain has claimed, unrepentant about the the bombings his group committed during the 1960s.

“The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our goverment [sic]… I never hurt or killed anyone,” Ayers said.

“Frankly, I dont [sic] think we did enough, just as today I dont’ [sic] think we’ve done enough to stop these wars,” he said. (emphasis added)

In the context of previous interviews, “not enough” meant Ayres and the wife of Frankenstein felt there should have been more bombings, enough bombings to bring the American government to its knees. If that wasn’t enough then, then his words, “just as today I don’t thing we’ve done enough to stop these wars” is a lament that there has not been enough violent – and terrorist – actions against the wars.

I’m comfortable using “terrorist” to describe Ayres despite his denials, because he and his group were planning a terrorist act – complete with bombs stuffed with nails, nuts and bolts – to be used at at dance at a military base. Part of his regrets, I’ve always felt, is that he and Dohrn didn’t get a chance to glory in the human carnage they would have caused from that bomb.

Later in the interview, perhaps aware that he had brushed up pretty close to a charge of inciting to violence, Ayres moderated his comment:

“We knew it was wrong. We knew it was illegal. We knew it was immoral,” he said, but the group’s members felt they “had to do more” to stop the Vietnam War.

He urged people today “to participate in resistance, in nonviolent, direct action” to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which is it? Do more of the stuff the Weather Underground did, or just be a nonviolent protester? In my book, the first statement is the true statement, and the follow-up is the cover-up.

It’s not surprising that Ayres hasn’t taken measure of his actions. He still thinks his side won in Vietnam, and refuses to measure the deaths caused by the US during the war – which he incorrectly refers to as murders – against the actions of the Communist Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army, nor does he measure it against the nightmare of murders, imprisonment, denial of freedoms, poverty and death that followed our departure and the fall of South Vietnam.

This is because, as I said, his side won. Capitalists were forced to become socialists; all spoke with one voice, the voice of “the people.” This is the vision Obama’s “family friend” still holds for our country, and he’s dedicating his life to brainwashing educating the next generation to make it happen.

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outh Side Barack slapped a lot of condescending smiles on his face whenever someone brought up Bill Ayres, decrying as sensational Palin’s “palling around” claims. But Bill Ayres disagrees.

In a new afterward to his memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayres writes that he and his unrepentant spouse were “family friends,” AP reports tonight.

Don’t know about you, but I pal around with my family friends. We see each other pretty often, enjoy each other’s company and see each other as, well, family.

Could it be that Obama slicked over an association with snappy patter and sappy smiles? Or put another way, that he lied and misled the American people? I’m not even going to pretend shock.

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Zombieland is at it again, this time with a speculative but fascinating reconstruction of Barack Obama’s “mystery days” in New York – a reconstruction that shows it’s likely, or at least possible, that Obama knew Bill Ayres as early as 1981.

He begins with a piece of math we all – MSM included – should have done long ago:

Barack Obama would have you believe that the bombings by the radical domestic terrorists known as The Weather Underground were something that happened “when I was eight years old” and with which he had absolutely no connection. And while it is true that their bombings started when Obama was eight years old, they actually continued until he was twenty years old.

And that means they continued until Obama’s mysterious New York years – and that he was in New York when Ayres & Co. set off one of their last bombs!

And, incredibly, the life of Barack Obama and the terror campaign of the Weather Underground nearly intersected on the evening of September 26, 1981 at an anti-Apartheid protest which turned violent at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

I’m tempted to say they may have intersected, rather than just “nearly.” But I don’t know for sure.

What I do know is that Obama had the same political interests as the final remnants of the Weather Underground at the exact same time in the exact same place. That as an adult he was living in the same city where and when they conducted their second-to-last terror attack, which was a protest against the Apartheid polices of South Africa — the very topic to which Obama has said he was devoted at that time. So because of all this, Obama must have known about the Weather Underground and their tactics while he was still in college. So when he met Weather Underground founder William Ayers 13 years later, Obama certainly had to have known exactly who Ayers was and what he had done.

Especially if he (Obama) is as bright as he wants us to believe he is.

Zombieland’s piece is an investigative tour de force, complete with analyses of phone books, various radical student organizations, and what is known of Obama’s life and interests while he was at Occidental, then Columbia.  It also digs into what Ayres and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were up to at the time, and concludes:

They were in the same city as each other, at the same time.
They lived near each other.
The went to school near each other.
They had the same political interests.
Their circles of friends and associates intersected.

By sheer coincidence, a decade later in Chicago, they were in the same city as each other, at the same time; they lived near each other; they had the same political interests; their circles of friends and associates intersected.

Or was it not a coincidence at all?

It’s the sort of work the New York Times should have done, but its analysis of Obama’s NY years was basically a quick shrug and a “Dunno.”  If the NYT had done this research and had hounded Obama like its hounded Palin, we might know for a fact that Obama and Ayres have known each other for 17 years, and that they met as fellow radicals waaaay back when.

But they didn’t, so we don’t.

hat-tip:  Okie on the Lam

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ill Zombietime join Joe the Plumber as an unexpected and powerful player in the final days of the election? It’s possible because Zombietime has uncovered the “Rev. Wright” tapes for Bill Ayres – Prairie Fire, the Political Manifesto of the Weather Underground, co-authored by “Billy Ayres.”

First, let’s dispense with the “just a guy in the neighborhood” Obama-spin with “Billy’s” own list of his group’s bombings, pdf’d by Zombietimes directly from the book:

This is not just a guy who was against the war; this is a guy who wanted to start an armed Communist revolution in America because he was for the other guys in the war. He wanted our soldiers to die in Vietnam, and our people to die in the streets of America.

As promised above, this is the Rev. Wright tape for Ayres. Here’s what he (and Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones and Celia Sojourn) wrote in Prairie Fire:

Our final goal is the destruction of imperialism, the seizure of power, and the creation of socialism. Our strategy for this stage of the struggle is to organize the oppressed people of the imperial nation itself to join with the colonies in the attack on imperialism. This process of attacking and weakening imperialism involves the defeat of all kinds of national chauvinism and arrogance; this is a precondition to our fight for socialism.

Socialism is the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the eradication of the social system based on profit. Socialism means control of the productive forces for the good of the whole community instead of the few who live on hilltops and in mansions.

We need to battle for a correct ideology and win people over. In this way we create the conditions for the development of a successful revolutionary movement and party. We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society.

PRAIRIE FIRE is based on a belief that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution. This is not an abstraction. It means that revolutionaries must make a profound commitment to the future of humanity, apply our limited knowledge and experience to understand an ever-changing situation, organize the masses of people and build the fight. It means that struggle and risk and hard work and adversity will become our way of life, that the only certainty will be constant change, that the only possibilities are victory or death.

And for use particularly in Florida and New York:

We have to ask ourselves, though: Most of us were nuts once, too. Maybe not th is nuts, but still nuts. So couldn’t Ayres change like we changed? Yes he could have, but no, he didn’t.

And there’s much more evidence than that, and evidence that Ayres has dedicated his life to raising a new generation of revolutionaries through school curricula, and that Obama furthered that effort through his work with Ayres not just on one foundation board – as is the excuse of the day from the Obama camp – but two.

Did Obama know this? If he’s as bright and worthy of our trust as he says he is, of course he did. Did he use his relationship with Ayres to try to bring Ayres around to more socially acceptable thought? If he did, he’s never mentioned it.

Did he ever hear Ayres talk like this? How dumb do you think we are?

Did he ever talk like this to Ayres? Ah, that’s an interesting question!

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hat’s what MSNBC – yes, MSNBC! – asked about Douglass Daniels’ scandalous AP piece that included this gem of race-baiting:

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists” and doesn’t see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

Granted, it was Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, the only decent program in the MSNBC offering.  Here’s the clip:

When even MSNBC piles on, you know what you have a pile of.

I agree with Pat Buchanan’s advice to McCain on the clip:  It’s time to peel the hide of Barack Obama’s sham personna and let America see what lies beneath.  The media won’t like it.  They’ll do everything they can to create a backlash, but who cares?  They’ve shown who they’re betting on and the deserve no quarter.

hat-tip:  Jim

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his is getting around, I think, but maybe you haven’t seen it yet.  I found it on Patriot Room, who hat-tipped Public Secrets via Hot Air.  It’s quite impressive, using old footage from the 70s – both news reports and real, honest-to-God Weather Underground members talking to the camera – and news reports from the present era, after Barack Obama befriended Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dorn.

The takeaway is unavoidable:  These are bad people, unrepentant people, friends of Barack people.

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r. New Politics has a bright, shiny new way to deal with political speech and the free discourse of ideas, and he’s borrowed it from Li’l Kim Jong Il and the Burmese junta:

And tonight, the [Obama] campaign launched a more specific campaign: an effort to disrupt the appearance by a writer for National Review, Stanley Kurtz, on a Chicago radio program. Kurtz has been writing about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers, and has suggested that papers housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago would reveal new details of that relationship.

The campaign e-mailed Chicago supporters who had signed up for the Obama Action Wire with detailed instructions including the station’s telephone number and the show’s extension, as well as a research file on Kurtz, which seems to prove that he’s a conservative, which isn’t in dispute. The file cites a couple of his more controversial pieces, notably his much-maligned claim that same-sex unions have undermined marriage in Scandinavia.

Read the rest of Ben Smith’s piece at Politico here.

When the Obama campaign’s earlier effort to force the DOJ to launch a criminal investigation into the backers and funders of The American Issues Project over its Bill Ayres ad at least has a leg to stand on, albeit one ugly and whithered leg, since it questioned compliance with campaign funding laws. But here’s their argument this time:

“Tell WGN that by providing Kurtz with airtime, they are legitimizing baseless attacks from a smear-merchant and lowering the standards of political discourse,” says the email, which picks up a form of pressure on the press pioneered by conservative talk radio hosts and activists in the 1990s, and since adopted by Media Matters and other liberal groups.

Where’s the crime there? This effort doesn’t even enjoy the paper-thin cover of the DOJ romp: It is an all-out attack on a journalist’s right to report news, and a news program’s right to do the same. Neither Kurtz nor WGN are accused by Obama of any illegal act; they only are reporting on a story Obama would rather not see publicized. Worse, they’re doing it in Chicago, where the Ayres/Obama relationship happened – whatever it was – so it is a legitimate local story, not just a national story with no local roots.

The norm for this sort of occasion is for the campaign to let its supporters know the time and call-in number of the show so the host’s call-in lines will be swamped with people who have been provided talking points to rebut the points made by the campaign’s critic. Or, they could be asked to call the producer and request (politely) that an Obama spokesperson be put on the show, too, to rebut Kurtz.

Not so this time. This is an effort to, in effect, pull the newspaper off the press, or pull the plug on the broadcaster. Hugo Chavez, take note: Obama’s guys are reading from your playbook. Heck, they’re even going farther. According to the ChiTrib, the campaign’s freezing out the station:

Christenson [the WGN show's producer] said the Obama campaign was asked to have someone appear on the show and the headquarters declined the request.

“He got into the files just yesterday, so we wanted to have him on to find out what he found and, if at all possible, we wanted to get the Obama campaign to get their side of the story,” Christenson said. “That’s why the uproar is kind of amazing, because we wanted the Obama campaign’s take as well to kind of balance it out.”

Why wouldn’t they send a spokesperson? The excuses are many – busy with the convention, short notice – but the truth is this: that Obama and Ayres had a relationship is undeniable; that Ayres is unrepentant about his terrorist past is undeniable; that Obama has mischaracterized their relationship is undeniable.

When faced with this reality, the all-image, no-substance Obama campaign did what it saw was its only option: Send in the brown-shirted thugs to beat up the skeptics.

Chicago is a big, blue-collar, working class Dem city, and this story is playing huge there – top of the page this a.m. on the ChiTrib web site, for example. I don’t think it’s a story that will appeal much to Chicago’s blue-collar, working class Dems, who tend to side with the little guy, not the bully.

OK, enough of the set-up.  How did the show go?  NRO should be a good source, eh?

Evidently, much of Obama nation is comprised of obedient and persistent sheep. They jammed all five studio lines for nearly the entire show while firing off dozens of angry emails. Many vowed to kick their grievances up the food chain to station management. After 90 minutes of alleged smear peddling, Milt Rosenberg (a well-respected host whose long-form interview show has aired in Chicago for decades) opened the phone lines, and blind ignorance soon began to crackle across the AM airwaves. The overwhelming message was clear: The interview must be put to an end immediately, and the station management should prevent similar discussions from taking place.

One female caller, when pressed about what precisely she objected to, simply replied, “We just want it to stop!” Another angry caller was asked what “lies” Kurtz had told in any of his reporting on Barack Obama. The thoughtful response? “Everything he said is dishonest.” The same caller later refused to get into “specifics.” Another gentleman called Kurtz “the most un-American person” he’d ever heard. Several of the callers did not even know Stanley’s name, most had obviously never read a sentence of his meticulous research, and more than simply read verbatim from the Obama talking points.

As Rosenberg repeatedly pointed out that Team Obama had been offered the opporunity to take part in the conversation, the agitated masses adopted their argument to suggest it was outrageous to request an interview from the Obama campaign in the thick of the DNC. Delivering the line of the night, Rosenberg countered, “The Obama national headquarters is just down the street from here. They obviously have the time to send out these angry emails, but they can’t walk a few blocks to our studios?”

OK, that was the show.  What was the take-away?

The experience was surreal, amusing, and chilling. In a matter of hours, a major national campaign had called on its legions to bully a radio show out of airing an interview with a legitimate scholar asking legitimate political questions. Coupled with the Obama campaign’s recent attempts to sic the DOJ on the creators of a truthful political advertisement —which also happened to feature Obama’s relationship with an unrepentant terrorist— last night’s call to action represents an emerging pattern. Any criticism of Obama’s unknown past is to be immediately denounced as a “smear,” and the messenger is to be shut down at all costs.

Read the whole piece here.

The NY Times, keeper that it is of the torch for journalistic freedom, should be editorializing on this matter any minute now, right?  We’ll keep our eyes open.  Meanwhile, this nice little piece of art I found this a.m. pretty much sums up Obama’s thoughts on the matter:

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