Sarah Palin blamed by the US Secret Service for provoking death threats against Barack Obama

[Sofiyya 1,687]

you shouldn't have to tell people how smart you are.. it should just come through in your posts..

and I don't go around saying how poor I am every chance I get..

yeah it is fine if someone has money, I have no problems with that... I just don't think it needs to be mentioned all the time...

a person's worth is not determined by how much education they have had or by how much or little money they have...

I relate relevant experience, education and options where relevant. I don't bore it in, but it is often brought up by others. I remember one time on a thread about personal earnings, I mentioned that I'm a trust fund baby, You would have thought I said I was standing over a dead body with a smoking gun. There was all this talk about how improper it is to discuss money (even on a thread about personal money). I still get blowback from people who read that 2 years ago when discussing Obama's tax rhetoric. Money and class are American taboos, we are extremely adverse to the fact that there are inequalities, but I simply don't suffer from the ambiguity about them in the way that alot of of us do.

[Peikko 1,575]

Oh, here we go more "I know, but I will not tell you what I know because by doing so I can point out how ill informed you are and make myself out to look smart"

Bullshit Ms VW. Utter #######. You know nothing, that is patently obvious. Hey, but carry on pretending you know something and you keep it all to yourself until the 'time is right' for the Lone Voice of Reason to crow. Honestly, this is just too pathetic.

I understand why you don't know; you couldn't vote, so this is just an interesting interlude for you. But, for those who could vote, there was no excuse.

I grew up during the 1960's and remember the Weather Underground, other domestic terrorist groups and their acts vividly. I do know more than you do because I was around and paying attention. What's pathetic is that others choose to forget or not to know.

I will consider posting more about Ayers, but the fact is, I already have posted plenty, but it seems you missed it. I can't think of a single time that it helped, was appreciated or didn't serve as merely an opportunity to generate more personal attacks. Post evidence, don't post evidence. Either way, it doesn't matter; the die is cast.

Is your answer that he is a terrorist because he was a terrorist in the 60's? Or, do you have some knowledge of terrorist activities that he has been involved in, or involved in the planning of in the last 30 years? The question is a very simple one.

You may not believe that it is possible to be a 'reformed' terrorist and you have a right to that view. However, and here is the important part from a legal and more important a relevance point of view, if that is your position, you have to be able to point to something factual that has occurred that leads you to conclude that what went on between Ayers and Obama had/has 'terrorist' connotations; that Ayers has some terrorist agenda that he wishes Obama to carry out for there to even be a point in this at all. If not, we are left with the fact that you conclude that Ayers is 'unsavoury' so that anyone who has anything to do with him is 'unsavoury' by extension. That VW is simply empty rhetoric.

[Sofiyya 1,687]

September 11, 2001

NYT

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen

By DINITIA SMITH

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.

Now he has written a book, ''Fugitive Days'' (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.

''Is this, then, the truth?,'' he writes. ''Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.''

But why would someone want to read a memoir parts of which are admittedly not true? Mr. Ayers was asked.

''Obviously, the point is it's a reflection on memory,'' he answered. ''It's true as I remember it.''

Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at,'' is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ''it's been quoted so many times I'm beginning to think I did,'' he said. ''It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.''

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her ''the most dangerous woman in America'' and ''la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.'' Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a ''whirlpool of violence.''

''Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,'' he writes. But then comes a disclaimer: ''Even though I didn't actually bomb the Pentagon -- we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it.'' He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.

Today, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic's Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest syndrome. Their son, Malik, 21, is at the University of California, San Diego; Zayd, 24, teaches at Boston University. They have also brought up Chesa Boudin, 21, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who are serving prison terms for a 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, N.Y., that left four people dead. Last month, Ms. Boudin's application for parole was rejected.

So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ''I don't want to discount the possibility,'' he said.

''I don't think you can understand a single thing we did without understanding the violence of the Vietnam War,'' he said, and the fact that ''the enduring scar of racism was fully in flower.'' Mr. Ayers pointed to Bob Kerrey, former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, who has admitted leading a raid in 1969 in which Vietnamese women and children were killed. ''He committed an act of terrorism,'' Mr. Ayers said. ''I didn't kill innocent people.''

Mr. Ayers has always been known as a ''rich kid radical.'' His father, Thomas, now 86, was chairman and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, chairman of Northwestern University and of the Chicago Symphony. When someone mentions his father's prominence, Mr. Ayers is quick to say that his father did not become wealthy until the son was a teenager. He says that he got some of his interest in social activism from his father. He notes that his father promoted racial equality in Chicago and was acceptable as a mediator to Mayor Richard Daley and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966 when King marched in Cicero, Ill., to protest housing segregation.

All in all, Mr. Ayers had ''a golden childhood,'' he said, though he did have a love affair with explosives. On July 4, he writes, ''my brothers and I loved everything about the wild displays of noise and color, the flares, the surprising candle bombs, but we trembled mostly for the Big Ones, the loud concussions.''

The love affair seems to have continued into adulthood. Even today, he finds ''a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,'' he writes.

He attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then the University of Michigan but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ''Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim's stomach.''

In Chicago recently, Ms. Dohrn said of her remarks: ''It was a joke. We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.''

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight -- antiwar militants accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that for ''conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.'' Those charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand over a century.

He also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried to ''smash monogamy.'' The Weathermen were ''an army of lovers,'' he says, and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male friend.

''Fugitive Days'' does have moments of self-mockery, for instance when Mr. Ayers describes watching ''Underground,'' Emile De Antonio's 1976 documentary about the Weathermen. He was ''embarrassed by the arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew the way,'' he writes. ''The rigidity and the narcissism.''

In the mid-1970's the Weathermen began quarreling. One faction, including Ms. Boudin, wanted to join the Black Liberation Army. Others, including Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers, favored surrendering. Ms. Boudin and Ms. Dohrn had had an intense friendship but broke apart. Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn were purged from the group.

Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers had a son, Zayd, in 1977. After the birth of Malik, in 1980, they decided to surface. Ms. Dohrn pleaded guilty to the original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined $1,500. The Federal charges against Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn had already been dropped.

Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn tried to persuade Ms. Boudin to surrender because she was pregnant. But she refused, and went on to participate in the Brink's robbery. When she was arrested, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers volunteered to care for Chesa, then 14 months old, and became his legal guardians.

A few months later Ms. Dohrn was called to testify about the robbery. Ms. Dohrn had not seen Ms. Boudin for a year, she said, and knew nothing of it. Ms. Dohrn was asked to give a handwriting sample, and refused, she said, because the F.B.I. already had one in its possession. ''I felt grand juries were illegal and coercive,'' she said. For refusing to testify, she was jailed for seven months, and she and Mr. Ayers married during a furlough.

Once again, Chesa was without a mother. ''It was one of the hardest things I did,'' said Ms. Dohrn of going to jail.

In the interview, Mr. Ayers called Chesa ''a very damaged kid.'' ''He had real serious emotional problems,'' he said. But after extensive therapy, ''became a brilliant and wonderful human being.'' .

After the couple surfaced, Ms. Dohrn tried to practice law, taking the bar exam in New York. But she was turned down by the Bar Association's character committee because of her political activities.

Ms. Dohrn said she was aware of the contradictions between her radical past and the comforts of her present existence. ''This is where we raised our kids and are taking care of our aging parents,'' she said. ''We could live much more simply, and well we might.''

And as for settling into marriage after efforts to smash monogamy, Ms. Dohrn said, ''You're always trying to balance your understanding of who you are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom.''

''Happily for me, Billy keeps me laughing, he keeps me growing,'' she said.

Mr. Ayers said he had some of the same conflicts about marriage. ''We have to learn how to be committed,'' he said, ''and hold out the possibility of endless reinventions.''

As Mr. Ayers mellows into middle age, he finds himself thinking about truth and reconciliation, he said. He would like to see a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about Vietnam, he said, like South Africa's. He can imagine Mr. Kerrey and Ms. Boudin taking part.

And if there were another Vietnam, he is asked, would he participate again in the Weathermen bombings?

By way of an answer, Mr. Ayers quoted from ''The Cure at Troy,'' Seamus Heaney's retelling of Sophocles' ''Philoctetes:'' '' 'Human beings suffer,/ They torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.' ''

He continued to recite:

History says, Don't hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up

And hope and history rhyme.

Thinking back on his life , Mr. Ayers said, ''I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed.''

[Mags 112]

Okay, I've removed the offending posts.

I kindly request that ALL of you keep posts respectful and insult free (including snide remarks). Any more of that will result in a lock.

Thank you, all.

[Niels Bohr 72]

VW, let me begin answering your question.

Obama is inspiring because of his acomplishments in the face of adversity. Growing up black has its problems. Common stereotype are a common place in the streets when most or many of black population are always viewed to be evil. To you, you probably have not notice it. Obama knows the prejudices he face, the profiling he face, as well as the difficulties in blending with the white community.

I remembered in the late 80s when my family or rather, the asian community here was the minority. The asian community was viewed as un-educated people, low-class, eat grass, and are gang members. This was the prejudices I faced when Asian was uncommon here in the 80s-90s. However, time has changed and the Asian population here is thriving quite well.

With Obama, he grew up in the 60-70s. It was still a time in infancy with the liberation of segration. There were still a large amount of groups that still viewed blacks as outsiders. He overcame it! Instead of going negative such as joining gangs to strengthen the black community because that is why the Asians started gangs, he went to school!

That is what is inspiring!

Now, back to my question. Will you not answer the question?

[Peikko 1,575]

So, Ayers is still a terrorist because he suggests that it's quite likely that he would repeat the same mistakes had he to go back and do it all again? Well, that's one point of view, but again, what has the idea that he would probably do the same things again if he were transported back to the 60's have to do with what his views are about the political scene today? Where in that article is there any suggestion that he has some 'terrorist' ambitions up his sleeve? Where in that article is there some suggestion that he does not believe in democracy and that there are 'things' he needs to achieve via the terrorist route and more importantly, that he has 'recruited' Obama into his 'terrorist' organization?

We are still back with your empty rhetoric. You believe this guy is "unsavoury" so that anyone who has any contact with him, but for some reason especially Obama is tainted simply by the fact that you think he is unsavoury. VW, that is one flimsy straw you are clutching.

[S and S 12]

So, Ayers is still a terrorist because he suggests that it's quite likely that he would repeat the same mistakes had he to go back and do it all again? Well, that's one point of view, but again, what has the idea that he would probably do the same things again if he were transported back to the 60's have to do with what his views are about the political scene today? Where in that article is there any suggestion that he has some 'terrorist' ambitions up his sleeve? Where in that article is there some suggestion that he does not believe in democracy and that there are 'things' he needs to achieve via the terrorist route and more importantly, that he has 'recruited' Obama into his 'terrorist' organization?

We are still back with your empty rhetoric. You believe this guy is "unsavoury" so that anyone who has any contact with him, but for some reason especially Obama is tainted simply by the fact that you think he is unsavoury. VW, that is one flimsy straw you are clutching.

Do you think if Osama Bin Laden reforms himself after a few years that he will be no problem either?

[Peikko 1,575]

Do you think Ayers and Bin Laden are comparable?

[Peikko 1,575]

Oh, I have a question for S and S. What led you to this absurd conclusion that people who voted for Obama can't see any flaws in either his personality or policy proposals? I know it's convenient to think that, because that means you can run with the Obamabotsheep line of hilarity. However, the fact is that I don't know anyone who believes that he is anything more than a politician doing what politicians do best. I don't know anyone who thinks he is going to 'save' them. I don't know anyone who believes that he's 'magic' and will solve not only the all the domestic problems of the US, but those of the world as well. Where does this idea that people buy into any politician as their 'ticket' to savlation come from? It's a new one on me, that's for sure and I think it's absolutely absurd.

[S and S 12]

Oh, I have a question for S and S. What led you to this absurd conclusion that people who voted for Obama can't see any flaws in either his personality or policy proposals? I know it's convenient to think that, because that means you can run with the Obamabotsheep line of hilarity. However, the fact is that I don't know anyone who believes that he is anything more than a politician doing what politicians do best. I don't know anyone who thinks he is going to 'save' them. I don't know anyone who believes that he's 'magic' and will solve not only the all the domestic problems of the US, but those of the world as well. Where does this idea that people buy into any politician as their 'ticket' to savlation come from? It's a new one on me, that's for sure and I think it's absolutely absurd.

Where do I get that idea? By reading these forums and talking to people at work and watching them on TV. I don't know how you have missed it.

Does it make you feel better to use the word "absurd" with me? I didn't insult your questions, I just asked you a simple one. No need to talk down to me.

[Peikko 1,575]

I have missed it because I don't see what you see. Where you see a mass of kool aid drinkers, I see a lot of people thinking critically about the direction they would like the US to go over the next four years.

I don't feel better or worse for using the word absurd. It's simply appropriate to the idea that people are walking around in some cloud cuckoo land of 'hope'. It's great for the media, but it doesn't sit with real people in the real world.

[S and S 12]

I have missed it because I don't see what you see. Where you see a mass of kool aid drinkers, I see a lot of people thinking critically about the direction they would like the US to go over the next four years.

I don't feel better or worse for using the word absurd. It's simply appropriate to the idea that people are walking around in some cloud cuckoo land of 'hope'. It's great for the media, but it doesn't sit with real people in the real world.

You could have simply answered my question with your view. That is all I wanted. I didn't need you to speak for the entire population of Obama supporters as I would prefer they speak for themselves. It may seem a stupid or absurd question to you, but that doesn't take away from my right to ask it.

[rocks 494]

Do you think Ayers and Bin Laden are comparable?

i'm tired of people complaining about ayers! he's a reputable professor and in the senior staff at a university. also, did he threaten the world?

[Peikko 1,575]

I think you are confused as to what I believe to be absurd. I believe it's absurd to label everyone who voted for Obama as blinded by his personality, as unable to see what is I believe patentely obvious. He is a politician, he does what politicians do no more, no less.

[Peikko 1,575]

Do you think Ayers and Bin Laden are comparable?

i'm tired of people complaining about ayers! he's a reputable professor and in the senior staff at a university. also, did he threaten the world?

That's the point though, the VW's of this world seem to be able to paint Ayers with the same kind of brush that they use for Bin Laden et al, when clearly, had he been even half as bad as they would like to paint him he would have been locked away and the key thrown away. The fact is this guy made some bad decisions when he was in his early 20's. Since then he has made seemingly excellent choices and proceeded to make a decent life not only for himself, but for his wife and family. For 30 years he has had no terrorist ambitions, not even some politicaly dubious ones and yet, somehow he's persona non grata and a freaky 'skeleton' in the Obama closet.