William (Bill) Ayers went underground with several comrades after their co-conspirators' bomb accidentally exploded on March 6, 1970, destroying a Greenwich Village townhouse and killing three members of the Weather Underground (Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton, who was Ayers' girlfriend at the time).  He and his colleagues invented identities and traveled continuously.  They avoided the police and FBI, while bombing high-profile government buildings including; the United States Capitol, The Pentagon, and the Harry S. Truman Building housing the State Department.  Living underground, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn raised two children, Zayd and Malik, (Muslim names) before turning themselves in in 1981, when most charges were dropped because of what Ayers described as "extreme governmental misconduct" during the long search for the fugitives.

Dohrn served seven months in a NYC federal jail in 1983 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the Brinks robbery of 1981, in which two policemen and a security guard were killed.

Dohrn worked in a baby boutique in 1979 where stolen customer ID's were used to rent trucks used in the series of robberies culminating in the 1981 slaughter in which 9 kids lost their fathers, the youngest of which was six-months.

Because of the criminal convictions Dohrn, who received a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967, was refused admission to the New York bar.

Nonetheless, she was hired as a legal clerk by Sidley and Austin, a major Chicago law firm, in their New York office in 1984.  Howard Trienens, then managing partner of the firm, recently told the Chicago Tribune that he arranged the hiring of Dohrn as a favor to his fellow Northwestern University trustee and classmate, Tom Ayers.  Tom Ayers' firm, Commonwealth Edison, has used Sidley as outside counsel for many years.  She later worked in their Chicago office when she and Bill Ayers moved back to Chicago in 1987.  She left Sidley in 1988.

One of the best known contacts between Obama and Ayers was when the couple hosted a "meet and greet" for Obama at Ayers house in Hyde Park -– an upper middle class neighborhood on Chicago's south side, where Obama now lives as a neighbor of Louis Farrakhan.

Update: In 1989, Obama was a summer intern at Michelle Obama's law firm.  One of Michelle's co-workers was Bernadine Dohrn.  So the relationship between the Obamas and Ayers has spanned twenty years.

"I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers' house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress," said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. "[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor."

A Chicago-based blogger named Maria Warren -- whose writing suggested she was to the left of Obama -- recalled watching the candidate give a "standard, innocuous little talk" in 1995, in the Ayers' living room when Obama was running for the state Senate.

"They were launching him," Warren wrote, "introducing him to the Hyde Park community as the best thing since sliced bread."

Ayers and Dohrn are simply the most visible of the far left supporters who propelled Barack Obama's early political career.  The woman who touted Obama at the Ayers meeting, Alice Palmer, was herself a far left activist who was into community organizing like Obama.

Wondering whether the three may have crossed paths is not speculation.  It is a fact that in 1989, Bernadine Dohrn and Michelle Obama were associates at the Chicago law firm of Sidley & Austin, when Obama joined the firm as a summer intern.

Barack also was essentially an employee of Bill Ayers for eight years, starting in  1995, the year the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to raise funds to help reform the Chicago public schools.  One of the architects of the Challenge was none other than Professor Bill Ayers.  Ayers co-wrote the initial grant proposal and proudly lists himself on his own website as the co-founder of the Challenge.

And who did William Ayers, co-creator of the Challenge, help select as the new director of the board for this program?  Why, Barack Obama, of course.  Obama was the first Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Obama served on the board for eight years until the Challenge ended in 2003.  Bill Ayers was intimately involved in the Challenge over this same time period, raising and spending at least $110 million in an effort to bolster a "radical" (Ayers' word) reform program in the Chicago Public Schools from 1994 to 2001.

In November 1997, Ayers and Obama participated in a panel at the University of Chicago entitled "Should a child ever be called a 'super predator?'" to debate "the merits of the juvenile justice system."

In April 2002, Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama, then an Illinois State Senator, participated together at a conference entitled "Intellectuals: Who Needs Them?" sponsored by The Center for Public Intellectuals and the University of Illinois-Chicago.  Ayers and Obama were two of the six members of the "Intellectuals in Times of Crisis" panel.  Here is the agenda.

"I know they are friends," said Dr. Young of Obama and Ayers.

Ayers is the Board Chairman of the nonprofit Woods Fund of Chicago and Obama was a Board member.  Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website.

The Woods Fund focused on welfare reform, affordable housing, the quality of public schools, race and class disparities in the juvenile justice system, and tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty.  The Fund supported the concept of an expanding welfare state allocating ever-increasing amounts of money to the public school system, and the redistribution of wealth via taxes.

Obama always describes his relationship with Ayers as casual, but a close, working relationship spanning eight years is hardly casual -- especially an employer-employee relationship. 

Beyond that, it was Ayers who brought Obama to Chicago.

According to The Nation: "The Woods Fund, in many ways, is responsible for helping start Obama as an organizer and shaping his political identity.  In 1985 the foundation gave a $25,000 grant to the Developing Communities Project (aka the "DCP"), which hired Obama, at 24, as an organizer on Chicago's economically depressed South Side."

The Woods Fund was founded by the Woods family which owned the Illinois-based Sahara Coal Company, a major supplier of coal from its mines to major Illinois power companies. Commonwealth Edison, the giant Chicago-based electric power company was headed by Thomas Ayers, father of Bill Ayers.

The problem of Barack Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers will not go away.  Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn were terrorists for the notorious Weather Underground during the turbulent 1960s, turning fugitive when a bomb -- designed to kill army officers in New Jersey -- accidentally exploded in a New York townhouse.

Prior to that, Ayers and his cohorts succeeded in bombing the Pentagon.  Ayers and Dohrn remain unrepentant for their terrorist past.  Ayers was pictured in a 2001 article for Chicago magazine, stomping on an American flag, and told the New York Times just before 9/11 that the notion of the United States as a just and fair and decent place "makes me want to puke."

Although Obama actually launched his political career at an event at Ayers's and Dohrn's home, Obama has dismissed Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis."  For his part, Ayers refuses to discuss his relationship with Obama.
 

The phony Obama "Fight the Smears" website says that they "have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood."

Wrong.  The two men shared an office and Obama knew very well who he was associating with:

• Obama knew who was paying him to serve on two boards,
• Obama knew who he was directing thousands of dollars of donations to,
• Obama knew whose living room he was in when he kicked off his political career,
• Obama knew who was sitting with him on panels,
• Obama knew who was on his floor at the University of Chicago,
• Obama knew whose book he was writing a blurb on, etc., etc. etc.

In his book, which is extremely difficult to obtain, Ayers calls for socialism in America and stopping aid to Israel.  It's full title is, "Prairie Fire:  The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism." (The page at the link is outstanding and shocking.)

In his manifesto, Ayers writes, "We are a guerilla organization.  We are communist men and women, underground in the United States for more than four years" and "We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society" and "Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside."

Ayers manifesto is dedicated to 100 radicals, among them is Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert Kennedy.

Why would Barack Obama associate so closely with a man who supports Robert F. Kennedy's murderer, seeing him as a mere "political prisoner".  That's a view so far out into fringe territory that it could give a Berkeley radical pause.

Obama supporters need to ask themselves how they can give that support to someone who spent 20 years in the company of a self-described communist, and an admirer of Sirhan Sirhan?

A blogger named Grizzly managed to find a copy of a book authored by "Billy" Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn titled "Prairie Fire".  He has included a copy of passages transcribed, verbatim, into a word doc.

He also just picked up a copy of a book published in 2006 titled "Sing a Battle Song".  The book reprints copies of Prairie Fire and two other Weather Underground "classics" with comments by Ayers and Dorhn.

While he have not gotten through much of "Sing a Battle Song", he was in interested to see whether the forwards written by Ayers and Dorhn expressed any regret or remorse for their activities in the sixties.  They did not.  As a matter of fact, aside from expressing remorse only on the "bombast" contained in the earlier books, they reiterate their communist beliefs and add a new hero of the revolution to their repertoire -- Rashid Khalidi.

Grizzly's extracts are here. . .

In sworn testimony that goes back to the 1970s, former FBI informant Larry Grathwohl had implicated Ayers and Dohrn in the knowledge and/or planning of the bombing murder of San Francisco Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell. Metal staples from the powerful bomb ripped through his body, killing him after several agonizing days in the hospital.

The new evidence in the case developed by Jamison adds to the solid information already available and raises the question of when, if ever, the bombers will be prosecuted. There are other witnesses to the bombing plot.

He reports, "Now, speaking publicly for the first time about the investigation, former FBI agents have told Village Voice Media the basis for their belief that the Weather Underground was behind McDonnell's murder. The agents have revealed that two credible eyewitnesses-both former left-wing radicals tied to the Weathermen-gave detailed statements to investigators in the 1970s alleging that Dohrn and Howard Machtinger, another member of the group, were personally involved in organizing the deadly attack. Both witnesses claimed to have participated in meetings where the bombing was planned, and one confessed to having cased the police station for the Weathermen prior to the explosion."

Jamison discloses that Dohrn, Machtinger, and Ayers were targets of a secret federal grand jury investigation in 2003 into McDonnell's killing. He quotes a left-wing lawyer as saying "it was clear they were the targets. They weren't called-other people were called about them. The Weather Underground was the target of Park Station [investigators]."

Jamison adds, "The case against the Weathermen is far from complete. Still, given the multiple witnesses tying the group's former members to the killing of a police officer, some investigators say they are troubled by the impunity with which Ayers and Dohrn have peddled a version of the past wiped clean of bloodshed."