• During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.
  
  In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.
  
  I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I remember my mother’s pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames below. We didn’t leave our burning house for fear of who might be waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight, the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE PIGS.
  
  For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.
  
  Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family’s life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers’s wife, promised more bombings.
  
  As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on September 11, 2001, of all days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We meant to kill that judge and his family, not just damage the porch.” When asked by the Times if he would do it all again, Ayers responded: “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”
  
  Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.
  
  At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his upbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.”
  
  Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.

• Senator Obama served on a board with Mr. Ayers for a period of time, the Woods Foundation, which was a paid directorship position.
  
  And, if I'm not mistaken, that relationship with Mr. Ayers on this board continued after 9/11 and after his reported comments, which were deeply hurtful to people in New York and, I would hope, to every American, because they were published on 9/11, and he said that he was just sorry they hadn't done more.
  
  And what they did was set bombs. And in some instances, people died. So it is -- I think it is, again, an issue that people will be asking about.

• While Barack Obama’s friends and supporters in the news media downplay his friendship and business relationship with former terrorist and Marxist university professor Willam Ayers, one aspect of the Ayers terrorism saga that’s totally ignored is his reputation as a cop-killer.
  
  For instance, in Nyack, New York, Ayers’ terrorist group the Weather Underground launched an armored-car robbery that left two Nyack, NY police officers—Officer Waverly Brown and Sergeant Ed O’Grady—mortally wounded. In addition, the Brinks armored-car driver, Peter Paige was also shot to death by the Weathermen.
  
  Quite simply, Ayers’ group of killers left five children without fathers as a result of the brutal and vicious armored car robbery.
  
  Progressives for Obama signatories include Weathermen Howard Machtinger, Jeff Jones, Steve Tappis and Mark Rudd. Machtinger helped author the the mission statement of the Weathermen that called for revolutionaries within the United States to wage a ‘people’s war’ and attack from within. The government would fall and ‘world communism’ eventually would be instituted.
  
  In addition to the New York police officers killed, a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco set by the group killed another police officer and critically wounded yet another cop. When given the opportunity to serve on boards and appear at press conferences with Ayers, an up-and-coming politician named Barack Obama jumped at the chance.

• John M. Murtagh is a practicing attorney, an adjunct professor of public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies, and a member of the city council in Yonkers, New York, where he resides with his wife and two sons.

• Bill Ayers stepping on a US flag in 2001.
  
  I believe it's from Chicago Magazine, and it accompanied an article in which Ayers was peddling his terrorist memoir, Fugitive Days.
  
  At the time this photograph was taken, Obama and Ayers were serving together on the board of the Woods Fund. It was in 2001 when Ayers donated $200 to Obama's State Senate campaign fund.
  
  "Guilty as sin, free as a bird, it's a great country" is one of the Ayers quotes in the top clipping.

• William Ayers and his wife were terrorists.
  
  Ayers group, the Weathermen, bombed and killed people. They even attacked a nine year old kid's family.
  
  William Ayers has indicated his continued support for his past actions.
  
  Ayers and Obama have a long history of, not just knowing each other, but working closely together.
  
  Obama began his political career in Ayers' home.
  
  Ayers' wife and Michelle Obama also worked together.
  
  Obama's denials/minimalizations of his associations with Ayers have been found to be less than candid.

• William Charles "Bill" Ayers (born 26 December 1944)[1] is an American elementary education theorist and former leading 1960s anti-war activist. He is known for the radical nature of his activism in the 1960s and 1970s as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction. In 1969 he cofounded the radical left organization the Weather Underground, which conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s. He is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the title of Distinguished Professor.

• One of the first acts of the Weathermen after splitting from SDS was to announce they would hold the "Days of Rage" that autumn. This was advertised to "Bring the war home!" Hoping to cause sufficient chaos to "wake" the American public out of what they saw as complacency toward the role of the US in the Vietnam War, the Weathermen meant it to be the largest protest of the decade. They had been told by their regional cadre to expect thousands to attend; however, when they arrived they found only a few hundred people. According to Bill Ayers, "The Days of Rage was an attempt to break from the norms of kind of acceptable theatre of 'here are the anti-war people: containable, marginal, predictable, and here's the little path they're going to march down, and here's where they can make their little statement.' We wanted to say, "No, what we're going to do is whatever we had to do to stop the violence in Vietnam.'"[2]
  
  Shortly before the demonstrations, they blew up a statue in Chicago built to commemorate police casualties incurred in the 1886 Haymarket Riot.[8] The blast broke nearly 100 windows and scattered pieces of the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway below.[9] The statue was rebuilt and unveiled on May 4, 1970, only to be blown up by the Weathermen a second time on October 6, 1970.[10][9] The statue was rebuilt once again and Mayor Richard J. Daley posted a 24-hour police guard to protect it.[9]
  
  Though the October 8, 1969 rally in Chicago had failed to draw as many as the Weathermen had anticipated, the two or three hundred who did attend shocked police by rioting through the affluent Gold Coast neighborhood. They smashed the windows of a bank and those of many cars. The crowd ran four blocks before encountering police barricades. They charged the police but broke into small groups; more than 1,000 police counter-attacked. Many protesters were wearing motorcycle or football helmets, but the police were well trained and armed. Large amounts of tear gas were used, and at least twice police ran squad cars into the mob. The rioting lasted approximately half an hour, during which 28 policemen were injured (none seriously). Six Weathermen were shot by the police and an unknown number injured; 68 rioters were arrested.

• He served on two nonprofit boards with Barack Obama. Both Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a meet-and-greet for Obama at their home in 1995,[2] where Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor in the Illinois State Senate.[3] However, investigations by journalists concluded that Obama does not have a close relationship with Ayers.

• Both Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a meet-and-greet for Obama at their home in 1995,[2] where Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor in the Illinois State Senate.

• If you compare responses to the Depression in the 1930s, you can see how a rather frightening rhetoric took hold. In his inauguration address in 1933, Roosevelt declared that "the moneychangers have fled from the high seats in the temples of our civilisation". This was not so different in tone from Nazi talk about Jewish bankers.
  
  Hitler and FDR came to power in the same year, and not with very different economic policies. They talked about youth and the harnessing of the will. They used government programmes of public works to restore employment.
  
  The difference lay not only in the characters of Hitler and FDR, but in the systems in which they operated. In a proper democracy, strong leadership can coexist with constraints. By the end of the 1930s, there were no important robust democracies in the Western world, except for Britain and America. Reaction to the slump had favoured dictators. What the Nazis had called their "war for work" had turned out, because it included rearmament, to be work for war.
  
  We cannot yet see the future dictators, but we can certainly see the weakness that gives them their chance.

Is he an unrepentant terrorist? Yes:

"I've been quoted again and again as saying, 'I don't regret it,' and saying, 'I don't think we did enough.' And I don't think we did enough," Ayers said.

Did Barack Obama pal around with him? Yes:

"I was asked by the state senator to have a coffee for Barack Obama when he first ran for office," Ayers said. "We had him in our home, and I think he was probably in 20 homes that day."

So... Barack Obama palled around with an unrepentant terrorist! Straight from the horse's mouth.

But Ayers defends his guy, of course:

"This idea that we need to know more, like there's some dark hidden secret, some secret link, is just a myth, and it's a myth thrown up by people that wanted to exploit the politics of fear," Ayers said.

Bill Ayers hates people who exploit fear for political gain. He can't stand it when people hint at shady associations for political gain, and he's not afraid to call them out on TV for the despicable fear-mongerers they are. So you can only imagine the towering righteous anger boiling in his breast for the kind of Rovian masters of fear who would -- and I'm just picking examples at random here -- set off explosives in the Pentagon or the Capitol for political purposes.

But nooooooo, there is no reason to be alarmed at our incoming president's associations with this character.

• 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

• A San Francisco police union has accused former domestic terrorist William Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground, and his wife in a 1970 bombing that killed one sergeant, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
  
  The union, in a letter to a conservative organization lobbying for arrests in the case, accused Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn of bombing a city police station.
  
  On Feb. 16, 1970, a bomb placed on a window ledge of Park Station killed Sgt. Brian McDonnell and injured eight other officers, the Chronicle reported.
  
  The union said it had not been in contact with investigators nor did it have new evidence, but it cited Larry Grathwohl, who works with the conservative organization America's Survival of Maryland and claims that he infiltrated Weather Underground as an FBI informant and heard Ayers confess, the Chronicle reported.
  
  "There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn ... are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station," the Feb. 24 letter reads, according to the Chronicle.