Ayers, Dohrn hosted August 1996 Democratic Party fund-raiser (Updated)

^{From Canada Free Press}
Okay. Certainly we have your attention. Be patient.

Except for those so blind as will not see, we know that at least one (can there be more?) political launch party for Obama’s first political campaign was held late in 1995 in the busy home of Hyde Park’s resident unrepentant Communists/terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Why do we say busy? Well, for one thing, any number of folks have informed us that Bill Ayers made his dining room table available for writers, the living room or parlor has obviously been available for any number of teas, coffees, cocktail hours, committee meetings or student conflabs, and now we have yet one more political event to report.

Are you ready for this one? RBO wasn’t and, honestly, we are at a loss to explain it.

Through the magic of Google 2001 — and the oversight of those busy little Google webscrubbers — we have an August 19, 1996, listserv announcement about the launch of a new online political website.

Context is everything, so bear with us.

The message was issued by Dave Farber (left), who noted: “Disclaimer, I am on the Advisory Board for this and thus have some non financial interest in it.”

Who is Farber, you ask? Let’s just take a look of Professor Emeritus David J. Farber’s profile:

Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University holding secondary appointments in the Heinz School of Public Policy and the Engineering Public Policy Group. …

In January 17, 2000, he was appointed to be Chief Technologist at the US Federal Communications Commission while on leave from UPenn for one year ending in early June 2001. While at UPenn, he co-directed The Penn Initiative on Markets, Technology and Policy. He was also Director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory – DSL where he managed leading edge research in Ultra High Speed Networking. …

He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1956 and then started a eleven year career at Bell Laboratories where he helped design the first electronic switching system – the ESS as well as co-designer of the programming language SNOBOL. He then went west to The Rand Corporation and to Scientific Data Systems prior to joining academia. At both Bell Labs and Rand, he had the privilege, at a young age, of working with and learning from giants in our field. …

Prior to his appointment to the FCC, he served on the US Presidential Advisory Board on Information Technology and currently is a Member of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council. This year he was appointed to the Advisory Council or the CISE Directorate of the National Science Foundation.

Read the rest if you want to know more. The bottom line is that this guy is THE computer/internet guy.

So what was Farber so excited about? A new independent political committee called Democrats Online for the Democratic Party, headquartered at www.democrats.com, set to launch August 27, 1996 with simultaneous fund-raising events in San Francisco and Chicago.

The group’s purpose is to build a stronger Democratic community on the Internet by hosting active dialogue and discussion. … Democrats Online aims at being the most highly interactive partisan political site built to date. Drawing from the Clinton Administration and the Democratic Party’s records of achievement, visitors to the site will be able to create a unique endorsement page that proclaims either why they are are a Democrat or why they support Clinton/Gore. Once they have built this “virtual lawn sign” declaring their support, visitors are invited to call a 900 number and record a testimonial that is attached to their page. Other visitors may review the endorsements and listen to the recorded testimonials.

One of the two fund-raisers was held in Chicago at the home of Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

You can read this clearly in the excerpt screensaved from Farber’s announcement below.

Update: Another 1996 document from the Wayback Machine provides some more information about the invitation to the fund-raiser:

“THE PROGRESSIVE WING of the Democratic Party hasn’t gone underground,” read the invitation to the fundraiser for Democrats Online. “. . . We’re on the Internet!” The organization launched itself during the Democratic convention in Chicago. They were hosted at the Hyde Park home of Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, William Ayers. Dohrn was a founder and leader of the Weather Underground, a Soviet-sponsored group that claimed responsibility for dozens of bombings in the late ’60s and early ’70s. [Internet Political Report]

Here’s the screenshot:

The August 29, 1996, Wall Street Journal reported:

William Ayers shrugs his shoulders good-naturedly at this observation, made by one of his neighbors, as he surveys the changes wrought to his home by the launch party for a new Democratic Web site.

“I don’t know,” he says, waving his arm toward the living room, where a handful of guests munch salty snacks while gathered around a computer projecting a Web page on the wall. “That’s the —-ing Democrats Online .” Mr. Ayers has little to say about the new, activist partisan Web site. “I don’t know a thing about it,” he says, calling the event “an accident of history.”

Friends describe Mr. Ayers as “a technophobe” — he calls the battered bike lashed to the front porch “my car.” So he is perhaps an unlikely host for the celebration of a high-tech political Web site.

Mr. Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were both formerly members of the Weathermen, the radical antiwar group that in 1969 ignited a four-day outburst of mob violence in the streets of Chicago known as the “Days of Rage.” The pair spent years underground before resurfacing in 1980 and have long since returned to normal, productive lives, he as a professor at the University of Illinois, she as the director of a Northwestern University legal-aid project.

But journalists in a “where are they now” frame of mind periodically seek such people out, especially this week, as the Democrats convene in Chicago. Retrospective looks at the violence around the ‘68 Chicago convention saturate coverage of this year’s conclave, though for now protesters can’t even seem to get arrested in this town. [...]

“I was just kind of amazed that this Chicago ‘68 stuff had this resonance in the press,” says Mr. Lytel of the reaction to his flyers. An article in the New York Times made it sound as if the couple is sponsoring the site. Mr. Lytel says the party was only held here because he was stuck for a Chicago site and a friend bailed him out by arranging for the use of the couple’s home.

When Bernardine Dohrn arrives, the guests in the living room are quietly watching the convention on TV, though the Web page still flickers on the opposite wall. “Nineteen years without a television, and now … ” she says. “I’m against television.”

As one person commented, this puts the lie to Ayers’ “role within the Democratic party in Chicago. How is a possible that Obama did NOT know about Ayer’s past….according to this article it was well known and accepted in Chicago.”

Any questions? Well, we’ve still got a lot (even after updating this).

What about the guest list? Were Barack and Michelle there? Pfleger? Wright? Farrakhan? Any former SDSers? Weatherman? Who was there?

Answers, please.