drops by Fox News to pwn Alan Colmes:

I'm still confused as to why people are confused about the VP having a role in the Senate: the VP has always been the head of the Senate, and some have handled that in an active way, whereas others have treated it as a "tie-breaker-only" position. But the VP of the U.S. absolutely "presides" over the U.S. Senate.

And this is not the only position in the U.S. government that straddles two branches: who is in line to be President of the U.S., if the POTIS and VP are both taken out? The Speaker of the House. (Now Pelosi may have taken this a bit far lately, in making the Speaker position into a mini-Presidency, but she is at this moment the third in the line of succession to be POTUS, and in that way has responsibilities—real and potential—to both branches.)

And, let's see: where is it that Supreme Court Justices come from?--Oh, yes. Appointed by the President, and approved by the legislature.

There is nothing wrong with Palin acting as a liaison between the White House and the Senate, and presiding herself, rather than delegating that duty. Who knows?—the two branches might start working together, instead of against each other. Anything's possible.

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There's a nice address here from FDT that spells up what the risks are, should Obama win the election—with a focus on the economy.

It's ten or fifteen minutes long; you might want to pour yourself another cup of coffee, or a fresh drink.

'S good stuff.

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So if the government takes our money and saves it for us, we'll be better off . . . right?

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This is from the same series of ads that is testing so well in terms of explaining issues to people in ways that they can understand, and respond to immediately. They need to be getting more play.

Let's take 'em viral!

Via Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, who says he hasn't seen these ads before, though I know it was Hot Air that turned me on to 'em (presumably, that was an AllahPundit post). They are often shown alongside the response numbers that they provoke in test groups, with the graph numbers superimposed by the people who work with communications expert Frank Luntz.

Naturally, I prefer 'em straight, without the graph lines. I trust Luntz that they are testing well.

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This will buy me a salad and/or a sandwich; when I'm on the road I try to have one actual meal each day. (The rest of the time it's protein bars and "Tiny Twist" pretzels. I won't eat the ones that are shaped like little sticks, because I am old-school: pretzels should be pretzel-shaped. Period.)

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Because this really pisses me off.

Teachers' unions have done a lot to destroy young people's lives, and to keep teachers who are particularly talented and inspiring from getting paid any more than those who are simply glorified babysitters.

They are evil—like AARP, which purports to help retirees, but uses the money instead on gun control.

I shall try not to behave reflexively, but some of these groups—especially unions—that take people's hard-earned pay and then use the money to advance agendas that have nothing to do with their supposed missions—make me truly livid.

My mom was a teacher for years. And except in some arenas (she's a landlord who vigorously opposes rent control, because she sees up-close the damage it causes), she's pretty far to the left.

I'd be shocked if she did not vote for Obama in November.

But even my mom would prefer to choose her causes, rather than having others choose them for her.

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Sure; Dave may be late in recognizing this great man's contributions to American culture, but this panegyric makes up for it:

Editorial note: my previous "I AM JOE" post seems to have struck a chord, and possibly a nerve or two. As one new fan writes:

I think it's hilarious you wingnuts want to embrace this wifebeating tax cheat non-plumber as your new populist poster boy. Funny I didn't see your concern when the Murdoch media was trying to destroy Bill Ayers' life.

You make an excellent point, T.S.! Why should us flag-humping reactionaries get all the good flesh-and-blood lumpenproles to rally behind? So, in preemptive compliance with the coming Fairness Doctrine, please allow me to ladle up another helping of righteous populist indignation on behalf of another lovable everyman who's gotten the shaft from the media for daring to speak up. Bumper stickers coming soon.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hear me now: when you mess with Bill Ayers, you're messing with me.

Because I AM BILL.

I AM BILL. I am the everyday forgotten little guy in your neighborhood, the quiet anarcho-syndicalist family man who gets up early and punches the clock at the local state university, writing the manifestos and polemics and grant proposals that keep America humming. I'm just doing my job, and all I ask in return is a little respect. And tenure. And Chicago Citizen of the Year awards. And two graduate assistants to grade exams for Practicum in Imperialist Racist Hegemony 311, because I'm teaching two sections this semester. Also, a sabbatical to Italy next summer would be nice.

I AM BILL. I grew up in a simple little gated community just like yours, with white picket fences and where all the aux pairs and gardeners know your name. When my dad came home from a hard day's work as a CEO, he was never too tired to help me with my homework or tousle my hair for winning the Lake Forest Academy essay contest on Hegelian Dialectics. Yes, he was a simpleminded bourgeois technocrat of the capitalist war machine, but he made sure I got the tuition and tutors and sailing lessons and allowance I needed to make it on my own. I wish he was still alive so I could tell him how much I really planned to kill him last.

I AM BILL. I work with my hands, grizzled and calloused from years on a non-ergonomic keyboard. Maybe I don't know pipe wrenches, but I know pipe bombs, and I've built them right there in my communal kitchen and I've watched with pride as they've offed a couple of pigs. Sure, maybe I've made a few mistakes with wiring or detonator timing and it ends up killing a couple of comrades. But you know what? I get up, dust myself off, and get right back to the drawing board. Because when it comes to international Maoist revolution, quitters never win and winners never quit.

One of the Hawkster's best; read the whole thing.

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It looks like it contributed. Via PJ Media:

Ours is a petroleum-based economic system, and the high prices for oil and natural gas drove the cost of most things up. The subprime borrowers were scrimping to get by and the increase in food prices, in fuel prices, and in the prices of most items due to higher transportation costs pushed many subprime borrowers into default. This crisis was decades in the making — with the Community Reinvestment Act and demands by government that lenders make these subprime loans — but came to a head at this juncture because of spiraling energy costs.

And Russia invaded Georgia.

During the first presidential debate, the subject of this invasion came up and Obama hemmed and hawed with the standard “we must use our allies to pressure” fare. John McCain had the perfect opportunity, but let it pass, sounding strikingly similar to Senator Government in his analysis of the situation. He has since repeatedly missed the opportunity; the answer was “drill here, drill now.”

Russia is resurgent because of energy, and the invasion of Georgia was largely over the natural gas pipeline built to supply Europe and bypassing both Russia and Iran. The Russians tried to destroy it with air raids in the opening days of the war. Vladimir PutinÂ’s strategy for a return to superpower status for Russia is built on oil and gas money; the increase in worldwide demand has made Russia rich, and Putin and his oligarchy own a piece of most oil and gas companies operating there. Their power is based on their control of this wealth and the stability of the Russian government hinges on the stability of these commodities. A drop in the price of fossil fuels is destabilizing to the princes of Muscovy.

And the financial crisis in America is, indeed, hurting them. Russian oil companies have been forced to cut prices, leading investors to withdraw $33 billion from the Russian economy. Russia already has serious problems finding people to work the Central Asian oil fields, and depopulation problems have driven them to offering free land to American farmers if they would become Russians. (Perhaps we should settle illegal immigrants there; many have a working knowledge of U.S. farm practices, work hard, and want a better life for themselves.) Economics is a tyrant, especially where a nation is ruled by plutocrats and not by laws. Putin cannot afford the slow bleed of petroleum wealth.

His war in Georgia was costly. The current hemorrhage in oil prices makes military adventurism just too expensive.

That is why John McCain should have called for “drill here, drill now” in the debates, and it is why he should harp on this issue. McCain is positioned to take advantage of the drop in oil prices, since it was the threat of new U.S. drilling, led by his own party, that brought those prices down.

This is a winner: good for the economy; a foreign policy success, if unintentional; and a clear difference between himself and Barack Obama, who has employed the audacity of soap to scrub his connections with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Tony Rezko, William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, communist Frank Marshall Davis, Raila Odinga, ACORN, the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America, etc., from under his fingernails. McCain should remind everyone, and continuously, that four-bucks-a-gallon gas is only the beginning if Obama strolls down the Potomac to the White House.

The stock market crash in 1929 became the Great Depression because taxes were raised at a time when the market needed liquidity—and Smoot-Hawley placed tariffs (taxes) on imported goods at a time when free trade was needed most. Obama proposes raising taxes and rethinking NAFTA, while wanting higher gas prices. Anyone can do the math, if it is laid out for them. The Obama plan makes economic collapse likely. Oil is the lifeblood of our economy and McCain has already promised to remove ethanol subsidies. This is a winner for him, and he should trumpet this to the heavens.

If heÂ’ll only listen.

That's what 527s are for, Boys and Girls. And Vice-Presidential candidates.

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Via Hot Air.

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I'm wondering what our overseas overlords have in mind for us. By that I mean Saudi Arabia, of course, in consultation with Iran and with a tip of the fedora to Russia.

Please build more electric/hybrid cars, continue researching renewables such as wind and solar, exploit clean coal, utilize natural gas, and build us some French-style, super-clean nuclear-power plants.

Oh, and . . . what was that other thing? Right: drill, Baby. Drill. Especially here in SoCal. We gots us the building permits, the pipelines, and everything. Just create a ruckus so the enviro-extremists aren't looking for a year or two, and we'll have your petrol right here. Hangin'.

A commenter at Gail's post informs me that electric cars are expensive. Maybe—but they are getting less so. Meanwhile, there are plenty of gas-sipping alternatives, including a lot of cute offerings from Toyota, Nissan, and Honda—as well as the bitchin' Mini, and the kinky, fabulous Smart Car, which is shockingly inexpensive and downright adorable.

These aren't hybrids, but they get gas mileage that is as good as or better than my old VW bug did. (With better safety, superior handling, more power, etc.)

And if you really do need hauling space or the comfort of a sedan, there are plenty of hybrid SUVs and sedans (e.g., the Camry).

Of course, now that I live in a condo development, all the plug-in cars are a lot less sexy to me: I'd either need a huge extension cord that would go down three stories, or I'd need to cut a deal with the HOA and charge directly from their garage—paying an additional electric bill based on their estimate of how much extra electricity we were using. Sounds a bit icky, at least from the perspective of a possible pioneer: I'd rather deal with a hybrid that had a battery.

Or (my favorite) a flex-fuel vehicle.

Or (my other favorite) one of those Mercedes that runs on biodiesel, or French-fry oil. Free fuel might well be worth living with a car that smells like a fast-food joint.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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When he was young, John McCain used to smoke!

That's it; I'm voting for Obama.

h/t: James, Outside the Beltway.

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The whole thing is a bit . . . overt. Not subtle-like. Bordering on indiscreet.

Ace:

I say again: Try entering false addresses when ordering a $10 DVD from Amazon. You will get rejected.

And yet Barack Obama has overridden this basic security feature in order to allow the world to donate to him, and to rack up millions and millions in illegal over-the-limit donations.

Where.

Is.

The Fucking.

Cocksucking.

Media.

The hell with the media; where is the fucking Attorney General?

Where indeed?

I'm starting to think that it's just an embarrassment of riches with the "tanning-bed media": they cannot decide whether to report on voter fraud in Ohio and other swing states, or credit card fraud in Obama's online fundraising efforts.

You see how that goes? You argue and argue all day over which story is more important—and then you look up and the day is over, and you haven't gotten around to covering either one.

So you go home; what else is there to do?

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty:

The press has been telling us about Obama's amazing online donations for more than a year now. There is absolutely no excuse for not digging into this story.

What about a bad case of ennui? Low blood sugar? Iron-deficiency anemia? You're a heartless bastard, Jim.

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. . . speculates on possible "October surprises" from the Democrats:

—An independent congressional watchdog whistleblowing reform taxpayer's association has stumbled upon shocking evidence that "Senator Clean," John McCain, has allowed taxpayer money to be diverted into his own pocket for half a century. This diversion of funds went unchecked even after he was elected to the Senate. Do we need four more long years of the Republican culture of corruption?

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

— Many of those closest to hunter-killer Sarah Palin have noticed a frightening instability in the would-be vice president's emotional health. This instability manifests nearly every month; its symptoms include the inability to fully control her emotions, sudden anger with little provocation, distracted attention, inexplicable pain, and sudden bleeding from unknown lacerations, possibly self inflicted. Doctors have expressed grave concerns whether Mrs. Palin is medically fit to serve, given her condition. We feel sorry for anyone with such an infirmity -- but America needs a president who is healthy, emotionally stable, and mentally balanced.

Yeah. Elizabeth R was like that, too, but she did okay.

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Yes; he does.

Hat tip to AllahP at Hot Air, who remarks

Irresistible, partly because the inane “rhetorical flourish” spin richly deserves to be mocked but partly too because of how she pauses and savors those laugh lines. There’s no other politician in America I can think of, McCain included, who’s not only willing to hit The One but to savor it.

(AllahP also notes that CNN is trying to claim that Biden never claimed Obama couldn't handle a crisis, so he has video to disprove that. I didn't look at it, since Biden has said it several different times, in several different ways.)

Me? I like the polar bear pin on her jacket.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:45 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Admits that he's a criminal, but that it's okay: all the rest of the American citizenry is as well.

Sounds like projection to me:

Finding the crease in the zone, where both inclusion and integrity reign at the American voting precinct, is probably impossible. If you care enough to see your candidate win, you probably care enough to cheat outright or, if not cheat outright, then bend the rules and rewrite them to your party's unfair advantage. Not even Solomon could satisfy everybody if he were in charge.

So there is no honor among (election) thieves, and Jack Shafer is one of the self-professed thieves.

After all, anything that happened during the Colonial era, or under Jim Crow laws must be legit. That is, apparently, the standard of the Democratic Party. (I almost wrote "new standard," but since the Dems are the party of slavery and Jim Crow laws, it's nothing new at all.)

Via Insty, who writes, "Old spin: Fraud is a myth! New spin: What's wrong with fraud? As I've said before, if the NRA were registering Mickey Mouse to vote, the press would be a lot more upset about it than it is about ACORN."

Indeed.

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As Eric Scheie points out, that is the key question. The Obama-Ayers connections are strong and deep, but even if it were a question of "serving on a board" or two with "a guy from my neighborhood," or being the beneficiary of a "political coffee" at that same man's house, Obama's actions in Illinois contributed to the respectability of a guy who made detailed plans to kill people (most of these plans were, thankfully, unsuccessful) and planned to kill (if he could only get the power) 25 million more.

He is, by his own admission, "guilty" of cop-killing and large-scale attempted murder, and his own writings espoused an American holocaust.

Eric:

I should quote the exact words from the video above [of an FBI informant from Ayers' group—Eric's got it in his post]:

"They estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people, in these reeducation centers. And when I say eliminate I mean kill. Twenty-five million people."

That would have been about 10% of the United States population of the time.

While it might seem like an incredible figure, it's not surprising.

In terms of history, killing ten percent of the population is standard Communist fare.

It's unspeakably awful, but it's no more suprising than the fact that Nazis killed millions of Jews.

But at least Nazis aren't considered respectable.

That's one of the pivotal issues, here: not so much "what did Ayers do for Obama's career?" (a lot, it seems), but "what did Obama do for the rehabilitation of a would-be mass murderer, who has never repudiated his crimes, nor his murderous philosophy?"

Please read the whole thing: Eric has really done his homework, and he goes in-depth on how Ayers himself felt about the lives of innocent people—including those of African-American patrons of a restaurant next door to one site of an attempted bombing.

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Ed strikes the correct tone, here. We don't want to blame an entire campaign for the act of one lunatic.

(Even though, of course, the media tried to do exactly that with the fictitious case of the "kill him" yell at a Palin rally. Sigh.)

I do think this particular contest is the ugliest one in my lifetime, or at least the ugliest one I can recall. Wait: I take it back. I do have a vague memory of the RFK assassination. So, second-ugliest.

There are moments that I just want it to stop. Moments I don't even care who wins. I just want it to be over with.

But I also believe that Obama's economic policies (and possibly his foreign-policy approach) will do the country damage that may well be permanent. And, yes: I believe that we are still suffering from mistakes made during the Carter era (and continued during the Reagan era to some degree, though Reagan was busy enough winning the Cold War that his failure to pay attention to Islamo-Fascism in its toddlerhood is at least forgiveable).

So on I fight.

A friend of my husband's is as deeply in the closet as he is (they both work in entertainment). But he feels strongly about this election, and eventually put up a McCain-Palin yard sign in front of his suburban West Valley home. A neighbor confronted him about it: "what are you trying to do with that? Are you trying to piss people off?"

"No," our friend replied. "But there's an election coming up, and I thought I had a right to support my candidate."

Needless to say, the next day the sign was missing. He told my husband he intended to replace it. This led to a discussion between A the H and me about what the best substance would be to coat the back of the sign with. We discussed tar, that sticky substance used to keep birds off of fences, scrapings from rat traps, and a homemade concoction of crushed charcoal with shortening from the pantry (I decided that something with a powdery component would be good, since that would leave a trail that could be followed early the next morning, and might lead to the perp's door.)

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I don't understand this. If we (Classical liberals / libertarians / conservatives / Republicans) were as racist as the lefties claim we are, couldn't we just use "black" as a code word for "black"? It would save everyone a lot of trouble: less time and effort encoding everything we say and write, and less time decoding on their end. We'd save a lot of time for arguing about . . . the electoral college or something.

Jeff:

Again and again IÂ’ve highlighted the end game for speech codes, and for the slippery slope that is inherent in the post-structuralist movement to un-tether language from intent.

Here, it is now being alleged that socialism is being used as a code word that signals a distrust of blacks. To believe this, however, we must willingly bracket from history all of the whites who have also been accused of communist or socialist / radicalist / Maoist sympathies (including, quite recently, Ayers, Dohrne, and several white members of the New Party, among whom one counts the inarguably pasty faces of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Barbara Ehrlenreich).

Such attacks serve no other purpose than to put the accused on the defensive — and so in a very real way speak to a supreme irony evidently lost on “intellectuals” like Mr Diuguid: they have become the new McCarthyites, even as they pretend to be fighting against a kind of neo-McCarthyism of their own creation.

Up is down. Black is White. Josie is the Pussycats.

When I use a word, it means just what the leftist kooks around me choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

But my quarrel with Jeff is that I now have the theme song for Josie and the Pussycats going through my head—and I fear that it might stay there for a good, long time.

There's nothing for it, then: I must spread the earbug around; everyone's better off that way:

At least, that's what I've been told.

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We've already reviewed Iowahawk's entry—at least [looking over my glasses] those of you who have been keeping up with your homework have.

Next up, Treacher's got a scorchingly funny take on Joe-the-Senator when he gets all . . . Bideney:

Biden's statement to the press:

"Ya know, I kinda put my foot in my mouth the other day... [chuckle] You folks know how I can get, with the words and the talking and the babbling and the yammering and so forth. But I just wanted to clarify those remarks. I know I speak for Obama when I say that we are ready to lead. Come what may, we are gonna be out there in front.

"Because I gotta tell ya, when this great man, this fantastic young African-American kid who I'm proud to call my closest friend, when he becomes president, the American people need to know that you are all gonna be grabbin' your ankles every April 15 for the rest of your probably-shortened lives.

"I mean, the taxes, they're gonna be unbelievable. Holy f***. So we'll need your help with that. You're gonna have to pay 'em. There's no way we can repel a full-scale nationwide tax revolt without resorting to nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, at least in the scenarios they've shown me, so we're countin' on you to do the right thing.

"And I'd say to America, this land that I love: You've all seen what an agent of change Barack Obama is. He's brought together people from all walks of life. He's inspired every single person in this country, no matter who you are or what you look like or even if you're into, y'know, the funny stuff. [chuckle] Which is gonna be a great comfort when the Obama administration strangles the U.S. economy and sets off a long, terrifying race war.

Read the whole thing, of course. It's the stuff, for sure.

But I'm afraid I shall have to give the Joe Biden Parody Prize to . . . Biden himself. He's just . . . . he's wonderful. Self-satirizing. Smarter than anyone else on earth, or at least ready to tell us so. Prepared to negate, in a few small sound bites, Obama's five-to-one financial advantage over McCain-Palin.

Ready to encourage us once more to disregard those obviously rigged poll results, and vote. Joe: you've brought this one home for the team. Thank you.

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Zombie Time has William Ayers' Weather Underground manifesto, Prairie Fire. He has passages, excerpts, commentary, and scanned pages from Ayers' book.

William Ayers is a communist. But don't take my word for it. He said so himself . . . . And not some nicey-nice peace-and-love kind of communist. Through his group the Weather Underground, Ayers was planning to "seize power" in a violent communist takeover of the United States.

[scanned passage from the Ayers book]

The quotes above were scanned directly from a now long-forgotten book entitled Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, which was written and published in 1974 by William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other members of the Weather Underground. In this slim volume, which functioned as the Weather Underground's ideological manifesto, Ayers declares himself to be a communist, and announces that his group's bombing campaign was intended to start a violent revolution to overthrow the American government.

After a long search, I was lucky enough to finally get my hands on a copy of the original edition of Prairie Fire, which is now extremely rare and hard to find. It was written in secret while Ayers and his fellow Weather Underground members were still in hiding and on the run, and still actively engaging in bombings and other violent acts.

This essay features many high-resolution scans of quotes and entire pages taken directly from Prairie Fire, which journalists, bloggers and other media members are free to copy and re-post.

If you're interested only in viewing or downloading the scans taken from Prairie Fire, scroll down this page to see a large selection of shocking quotations which you can use as you see fit. My introductory explanation below simply provides context and elucidates why the text of Prairie Fire is so significant at this very moment in history.

So far in 2008, there has been almost no mention of this manifesto and its insurrectionary goals. It seems as if the media, William Ayers, Barack Obama and his supporters don't want you to know about Prairie Fire. Which is exactly why you need to see it.

How Is This Relevant to the 2008 Presidential Campaign?

There's nothing illegal about being a communist. People in this country are free to hold whatever political beliefs they so choose. I don't know William Ayers, I've never met him (that I'm aware of), and I have nothing against him personally.

This essay only exists to correct and unequivocably debunk claims routinely made by the mainstream media over the last few weeks about William Ayers, his beliefs, and the purpose behind his bombing campaign during the 1970s.

Specifically, when questions arose during the 2008 presidential race about Barack Obama's past associations with William Ayers, many media reports and articles blandly described Ayers as a "Vietnam-era radical" and the Weather Underground as a group that set bombs "to protest against the Vietnam War." Both of these characterizations are demonstrably inaccurate.

Furthermore: Obama and his supporters at first claimed he barely knew who Ayers was, but when public awareness of the connections between Obama and Ayers became too numerous and too strong to deny, Obama's supporters have now begun resorting to a fallback position: that William Ayers wasn't such a bad guy after all, and that it is no shame to be associated with him. The now-standard talking points are:

• Ayers was simply protesting against the Vietnam War, and a lot of people protested against the Vietnam War back then, so there's no shame in that.

• Ayers was never actually convicted of setting any bombs or killing anyone, so there's no real proof that he ever did anything wrong.

• Ayers is now a respected, mainstream, mild-mannered and popular professor, so obviously his political views couldn't have been that extreme.

This essay disproves all of these claims. The text that William Ayers authored in Prairie Fire, and the additional documentary links provided below, prove that:

• Ayers was not simply protesting "against" the Vietnam War. Firstly, he wasn't against war in principle, he was agitating for the victory of the communist forces in Vietnam. In other words: He wasn't against the war, he was against our side in the war. This is spelled out in great detail in Prairie Fire. Secondly, and more significantly, the Vietnam War was only one of many issues cited by the Weather Undergound as the justifications for their violent acts. As you will see below, in various quotes from Prairie Fire and in their own list of their violent actions (and in additional impartial documentary links), Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings -- their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist "dictatorship of the proletariat," in Ayers' own words.

• Ayers and his co-authors freely brag about their bombings and other violent and illegal acts, and even provide a detailed list, most likely typed up by Ayers himself, of the crimes they had committed up to that point. Ayers' list, scanned directly from Prairie Fire, is shown below. He may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers described himself as "guilty as hell, free as a bird."

• Just because Ayers tries to appear respectable now doesn't mean that he wasn't a violent revolutionary in the past. In fact, as the text of Prairie Fire shows, Ayers was one of the most extreme extremists in American political history. And as the links given as the end of this essay will prove, Ayers is just as politically radical now as he was back then. He has never renounced the political views he professed in the 1960s and 1970s. The only difference is that now he no longer commits violence to achieve his goals. After his stint as the leader of the Weather Underground, he shifted to a different tactic: to spread his ideology under the aegis of academia. But the goal remains the same: to turn America into a communist nation. Ayers' contemporary writings contain many of the same ideas (and even the same phrases) found in Prairie Fire, just toned down to make them more palatable in polite society.

But Where Is the Obama Connection?

This essay is only about William Ayers' past and present political views. It is not about the connection between Barack Obama and William Ayers. That issue has been covered (and continues to be covered) elsewhere in innumerable news reports and blog postings. Yet as evidence mounts of the extensive and long-standing connection between Obama and Ayers, making their association more and more difficult to deny, Obama's campaign and supporters have started shifting their strategy; Sure, they say, Obama may have had a connection with Ayers, but why is that so bad? Look at William Ayers now: He's a completely respectable man. What -- he protested against the Vietnam War? So did everyone. He's no extremist.

I see these arguments made in countless blog posts, comment sections, and even news articles. This essay exists to stop that political escape route. There's no getting around it: William Ayers was a violent communist revolutionary bent on overthrowing the government and "seizing power" in the United States. The proof is on this page. And the only difference between the 1970s William Ayers and the William Ayers whom Barack Obama associated with is a change in rhetorical style; a re-wording of his radical philosophy to make it seem more mainstream. But the underlying political thesis (i.e. communism) remains the same.

Authorship of Prairie Fire

How do we know that William Ayers himself co-authored Prairie Fire? Doesn't the cover say it's by The Weather Underground as a group, and doesn't mention him specifically?

Well, it's simple enough to prove. Because in the introduction, the four actual authors sign their names -- Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, Billy Ayers, and Celia Sojourn.

My emphasis, mostly.

Via Mikal.

Bloggers, do your duty.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 08:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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