but now the McCain campaign is asking for their contents to be made public:
“…if Barack Obama wants to have a discussion about truly questionable associations, let’s start with his relationship with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, at whose home Obama’s political career was reportedly launched. Mr. Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground, a terrorist group responsible for countless bombings against targets including the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and numerous police stations, courthouses and banks. In recent years, Mr. Ayers has stated, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs … I feel we didn’t do enough.’
“The question now is, will Barack Obama immediately call on the University of Illinois to release all of the records they are currently withholding to shed further light on Senator Obama’s relationship with this unrepentant terrorist?” —McCain spokesman Brian Rogers
Steve Diamond has been looking at what’s behind the Obama-Ayers relationship and its left-wing politics. He was more here, updating his information with the documents he’s been able to obtain.
Just One Minute is on this Chicago story like rice on white. Doug Ross gets the picture.
Chicago mayor Richard Daley thinks Ayers moved on, but as Hugh Hewitt points out
This won’t fly because as recently as last fall Ayers was filmed ranting about the fascist America of today. Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist, and Obama’s friendship with him calls the nominee’s judgment into question, no matter what “contribution” the terrorist has made to his community.
Hewitt has the video of Ayers speaking at SDS last fall about how cool it is to be an anarchist:
Why do Obama’s lost Annenberg years matter?
The four plus years (1995-1999) Barack Obama spent as founding chairman of the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) represent his track record as reformer, as someone who reached out in a public-private collaboration and had the audacity to believe his effort would make things better. At the time he became leader of this ambitious project to remake the public schools of Chicago, he was 33 years old and a third year associate at a small Chicago law firm, Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
This was a big test for him, his chance to cut his teeth on bringing hope and change to the mostly minority inner city school children trapped in Chicago schools. And he flopped big time, squandering lots of money and the time of many public employees in the process.
Given Senator Obama’s lack of any other posts as leader of an organization, someone unschooled in the ways of the American media might expect that for months reporters have been poring over the records of the project to get an idea of how it managed to fail so badly. Examining the track record of the guy who wants to lead the federal government would seem to be part of the campaign beat for media organizations.
It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.
UPDATE
Via Ed, Ayers gets the Chavista seal of approval:
I absolutely do not trust any aging hipster that wears a baseball cap indoors, a stupid slogan t-shirt or sits in his chair like Mr. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life! It never ceases to amaze me how the desparate to be cool have always managed to either kill or maim with a veneer of intellectualism.
Obama’s Annenberg years will give us a fascinating look into his association with a radical terrorist. But more importantly we’ll get to see the complete and utter failure of the radical socialist ideas that Obama and Ayers tried to implement at great cost. If we want to avoid more expensive failures in the areas of education, energy production, foreign policy, healthcare, and taxation, we must tear away the veil surrounding Obama.