Putting on Ayers

Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.

A YouTube video of the smug, self-righteous Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, provides a crystal window into left-wing theory.

As the loving terrorist couple lectured the faithful at Occupy Union Square in New York City, Ayers unburdened himself of a great truth on the "biggest obstacle" to revolution.

He said, "We spend way too much time looking at the power we don't have access to – the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon. … We spend too little time looking at the power we do have absolute access to, and that's the power of the street, the classroom, the university, the workplace. That's where we have to build."

Just focus on the words "the classroom" and "the university." The left has had "absolute access" to the classroom and the university for a couple of generations, and in the Occupy participants you see where this has gotten us.

What is important to learn from the video, which Ayers would call a "pedagogical moment," is that Bill and Bernadine – both university professors – remain revolutionary zealots, just as they were when they launched Barack Obama's first political campaign.

You can't be a friend to left-wing zealots without being yourself a left-wing zealot. These two were not merely folks who lived in the Obamas' neighborhood; they were the Obamas' like-minded friends. Do you wish proof? Ask – again – why the president's academic writings remain under lock and key.

The video does have its light moments. At one point, the aging bomb tossers shared the camera with a fellow who reported that his gig was channeling Jesus Christ and the goddess Isis. He was out of his element. Neither Christ nor Isis was a bomb thrower.

Ninth Circuit upholds 209: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals may be the most-reversed appeals court in the land, but it continues to get it right on California's Proposition 209. The court just upheld the affirmative-action ban, as it did after voters passed it resoundingly in 1996.

But affirmative-action proponents keep trying, this time arguing that, since the ban, diversity has suffered at public universities. This assertion clearly is in error, as a stroll through any campus will confirm. What is lacking in the classroom is diversity of thought. (See Bill Ayers, above.)

Can't afford it? So what? The runaway costs of federally controlled health care may not stop California from instituting its own species of the law if the Supreme Court quashes the national variety. According to the Los Angeles Times, a state version already is in the legislative hopper.

What passes for clear thinking in Sacramento is epitomized by state Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones. He told the Times, "We require everyone to have auto insurance in California, and the world hasn't stopped spinning on its axis. All this political tumult generated by the far right is really ignoring the reality in California and elsewhere."

Ignoring reality is a left-wing specialty. (See Bill Ayers, above.)

Our ethical world: Gannett officials were chagrined to discover many of their Wisconsin journalists had signed petitions calling for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker.

Gannett said, "… we are informing readers today that 25 Gannett Wisconsin media journalists … signed the recall petition. It was wrong, and those who signed the petition were in breach of Gannett's principles of ethical conduct."

Then we learn that NBC's "Today Show" edited the transcript of George Zimmerman's 9-1-1 call about Trayvon Martin. "Today" made it seem Zimmerman had volunteered that Martin was black, when in fact the 9-1-1 dispatcher asked the youth's race.

You may trace the source of these lapses to journalism school, where students – already taught to esteem their own opinions – are instructed that objectivity is impossible. Thus, they don't even try for that golden ideal.

As normal as you are: LGBT Compassion fights "oppression and discrimination for all," and that includes goats. The organization is protesting the San Francisco Gay Rodeo, which features "goat dressing."

According to LGBT Compassion, "animals are restrained and have their hind legs roughly and quickly jerked up to have panties forced onto them."

Good, clean fun? You decide.