update (8-22)Stomp on This? See Bill Ayers in action

UPDATE 8-22-08 FROM FAUSTASBLOG .  She has video of Ayers and other links, as well.

Re the Video of Ayers (From Ed Morrissey)”… this 2006 interview with Venezuelan socialist Luis Bonilla-Molina, founder of the Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM). …Ayers speaks about how the Vietnam War forced an escalation of tactics to violence and notes the terrorist Weather Underground as a “great teaching moment” — a telling description for this professor of education”

Stomp on This?

Barack Obama may have been eight years old when William “Billy” Ayers was planting bombs at the State Department and the U.S. Capitol, but the Senator was a grown man working in the employ of Mr. Ayers when this picture below appeared in August 2001.

Bill Ayers was busy promoting his book and this was one of the promotional photos.

Two of the money quotes from a book published in 2003, Family Circle:

“The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left”: (by Susan Braudy on p. 352) states:

” my second proudest achievement was living underground for ten years without getting arrested.” and “guilty as hell, free as a bird, it’s a great country”.

And then a month later told a New York Times reporter :

his only regret was that he did not plant more bombs.

So what does this have to do with Barack Obama? Plenty!
Barack was the Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge Foundation.

Bill Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist with wealthy family connections, had co-founded the Chicago Foundation and named Obama as the Chairman of said entity. So by 2001 Barack and Ayers had worked closely together on an effort to reform Chicago public schools. I am all in favor of school reform. But if you are involved with politics you ought to understand that if you hang with, work with, and politic with a guy who is an unrepentant terrorist that it might reflect badly on you.

In fact, you should put some distance between yourself and said terrorist. Barack did not.

What is curious is that Barack despite facing criticism about his lack of experience, is closed mouthed when it comes to discussing his stint running a $50 million dollar foundation. What is he hiding? That is a question that will be answered before the November presidential election. The only doubt is whether the Democrats will insist on finding out the truth first or will let the Republicans serve them a steaming pile of crap come the fall. And while the image of Bill Ayers gleefully stomping the American flag makes the rounds, Obama’s vain attempt to portray himself as a new kind of non-politician will be stomped into oblivion.

No Regrets

From our August 2001 issue: “Kill your parents!” urged sixties leftist Bill Ayers, whose father was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison here. In Ayers’s new memoir, Fugitive Days, he reconciles his militant past with his present identity: father of three, esteemed professor at UIC—and unabashed patron of the great bourgeois coffee chain, Starbucks

By Marcia Froelke Coburn

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/index.php?cp=3&si=2#artanc

Now, Ayers is a respected name in the field of education; his books, including To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and A Good Preschool Teacher, are hailed by some as groundbreaking and thoughtful approaches to learning. Certainly they are reactions against the popular theories of the 1950s, which held that students were empty vessels to be filled with knowledge.

“Essentially, you must see the student before you as a locus of energy,” he says. “He already has a heart, a soul, a mind, interests, and dreams. You need to help him shape those interests, pursue those dreams.” Ayers is distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where two years ago the university named him Senior University Scholar, an award given to outstanding faculty members. He also directs the Center for Youth and Society, an organization that brings an interdisciplinary approach to working with youth—from art education to after-school programs. One of the center’s recent efforts was a symposium inspired by the book Racism Explained to My Daughter, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. “We brought together people to discuss how to address racism with kids,” says Therese Quinn, associate director of the center. What strikes Quinn about Ayers is “his enthusiasm and optimism,” she says. “He is just overwhelmingly generous and supportive.”

“Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice,” he says. “I’ve never considered it a neutral or passive profession.”

For two radicals once living underground, Ayers and Dohrn have raised three accomplished children: Zayd (named for a fallen Black Liberation soldier and colleague), 24, graduated from Brown University and has an M.F.A. degree in writing from Boston University, where he now teaches; Malik (for Malcolm X), 21, is attending the University of California at San Diego; and Chesa, 20, their adopted son, just finished his sophomore year at Yale University.

Recently, Ayers himself has returned to school as a student for the first time since he earned his Ph.D. in education at Columbia University—thanks to the monetary award he received from UIC as senior university scholar. He periodically commutes to Bennington College for the school’s low-residency M.F.A. program in writing, in which he is concentrating on nonfiction. So far, he has studied with essayist Philip Lopate and novelist/memoirist Susan Cheever. “It’s exciting and scary and all those good things,” he says. “They have been wonderful in helping me find my own voice.”

That is not something you would have thought Ayers needed help with. It is a different time, though, and he is a different man. But not completely changed. Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. “I think there will be another mass political movement,” he predicts, “because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night.”