Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorist-turned university professor whose ties to Barack Obama were under scrutiny over the last month or so, has broken his silence.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Ayers scoffed at the notion that he and Obama, now the nation's president-elect, are chummy. As Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin put it, Obama was "palling around with terrorists."

"Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?," he said in the Post. " I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better."

Ayers is now an education professor in Chicago whose scholarly work has been lauded. As criticism mounted, he won some support among academicians.  

Some communications professors from universities across the nation are taking issue with the way the McCain/Palin camp is putting out information.

As I write this, 138 professors, including a handful from the communications departments at N.C. State and UNC Chapel Hill, have signed an online statement criticizing the Republican presidential candidate's campaign for what it claims are distortions. Among other issues, the statement criticizes McCain's linking Democratic nominee Barack Obama to Bill Ayers, a 1960s domestic terrorist-turned-university professor. You may recall that Ayers is himself the subject of an online petition this campaign season and is enjoying the support of many of his academic colleagues.

The communications statement also charges the McCain camp with stoking "the fires of racism" for some controversial comments made by local Republican groups.

The statement does include a vague admonition to Obama's camp but does not mention specifics. It says in part:

"Both major campaigns have been criticized by fact-checking organizations for prevarications. We call on both campaigns to halt blatant misrepresentations of their opponent's positions.

It would be misleading, however, to imply that since "both sides do it," there is no qualitative difference worth noting. In recent weeks, the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin has engaged in such incendiary mendacity that we must speak out. The purposeful dissemination of messages that a communicator knows to be false and inflammatory is unethical. It is that simple."

In South Carolina, a lawmaker is angry that a public university there spent money to bring Bill Ayers, the domestic terrorist-turned-university-professor, to campus to speak.

State Sen. Chip Campsen, a Republican from Charleston, wants to take more than $6,000 away from the University of South Carolina and use it to teach the U.S. Constitution.

Said Campsen:

"I believe it's very important we do something about this and send a message to USC that we don't want terrorists who have bombed the state capitol, bombed the New York Police Department, bombed the Pentagon to educate future teachers and students about education philosophy in this state."

Ayers is the 1960s radical whose ties to Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama have been under scrutiny. The News & Observer wrote last week about an online petition through which professors across the country have expressed support for Ayers and his scholarly work. 

Also, an Ayers appearance at the University of Nebraska has been cancelled over security concerns. 

 
For the record:

In this story and in this blog post, I quoted UNC Chapel Hill professor Lawrence Grossberg as saying that the controversial 1960s radical-turned-college professor Bill Ayers "did break the law, and he was punished and he moved on."

Grossberg checked in with me today not to dispute the comment but to say he misspoke.

"Just for the record, I misspoke in my comments regarding Bill Ayers," Grossberg wrote in an e-mail. "And when I used the word 'punished', I meant to say 'arrested.' "

Ayers, whose Weather Underground radical group was responsible for a series of bombings of U.S. landmarks and other sites back during the Vietnam War era, was charged in 1970 with inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb public buildings, but the charges were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct.

Bill Ayers, the controversial radical militant-turned-university professor whose ties to Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama are under scrutiny, is getting some support from the American professoriate.

An online petition in support of Ayers has more than 3,200 signatures from faculty members across the country. More than a dozen signatories are from local universities here in the Triangle.

One is Lawrence Grossberg, a communications studies professor at UNC Chapel Hill. He said he signed the petition because he believers Ayers should not be demonized for his actions 40 years ago, and he respects the work Ayers does now as an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Ayers is a school reform advocate who has edited or written 15 books.