William Charles "bill" Ayers

Sean Hannity has been pounding the Obam Ayers connection for months and now Sara Palin has joined the chorus aswe get into the real mud-slining days of the presidential campaign. Sarah Palin on Saturday accused Democrat Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists" because of his association with a former 1960s radical, stepping up the campaign's effort to portray Obama as unacceptable to American voters. 

So who is this terrorist Ayers and is he in jail somewhere?

actually, Ayers is an American elementary education theorist. Say what?  He was a former leading 1960s militant. Millions were! Tens of millions hated and protested the Viet Nam war. Ayers is known for the radical nature of his activism in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.

In 1969 he cofounded the violent radical left organization Weatherman, which was active during the 1960s and 1970s. He is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the honor of Distinguished Professor. Distinguished professor and a terrorist?

Palin's reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground is meant to tie Obama's Muslim sounding name to radical anything. Members of the Weatherman took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the tumultuous Vietnam War era four decades ago. Obama, who was a child when the group was active, served on a charity board with Ayers several years ago and has denounced his radical views and activities.

"How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?" Ayers later wrote in his memoir, Fugitive Days, that his reaction was: "You could not be a moral person with the means to act, and stand still. To stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral" So, in 1965, Ayers joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor, Michigan, pizzeria for refusing to seat African Americans. His first arrest came for a sit-in at a local draft board, resulting in 10 days in jail.

Ayers currently lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, the same neighborhood that Barack Obama lives in and from there one can draw all sorts of conclusions, will, and have. But this I know, almost all of us have done crazy things in our life, especially our youth, that we wished we had not. Life is not so much of where we started or the journey and route we took, but the place to which we now stand.

Distinguished professor isn't all that bad in my book.