A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8.”
[snip]
In fact, according to several people involved, Mr. Ayers played no role in Mr. Obama’s appointment [to be Chair of the Chicago Annenberg Project]. Instead, it was suggested by Deborah Leff, then president of the Joyce Foundation, a Chicago-based group whose board Mr. Obama, a young lawyer, had joined the previous year.
[snip]
It was later in 1995 that Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn hosted the gathering, in their town house three blocks from Mr. Obama’s home, at which State Senator Alice J. Palmer, who planned to run for Congress, introduced Mr. Obama to a few Democratic friends as her chosen successor. That was one of several such neighborhood events as Mr. Obama prepared to run, said A. J. Wolf, the 84-year-old emeritus rabbi of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, across the street from Mr. Obama’s current house.
“If you ask my wife, we had the first coffee for Barack,” Rabbi Wolf said. [my emphasis]
There’s been a lot of interest in what I read lately. I was reading today a copy of The New York Times. And I was really interested to read in there about Barack Obama’s friends from Chicago. Turns out one of his earliest supporters is a man who, according to The New York Times, was a domestic terrorist, that, quote, ‘launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and the United States Capitol’.
Several news agencies have looked into the relationship and concluded the men are not close.
Palin said she doesn’t believe it.
"Wait a minute there," she said. "You mean to tell me he doesn’t know he launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist?"
I guess she’s "reading" the NYT. It’s just that her definition of "reading" is a little different from most peoples’ definition of reading.