NP: Coldplay, "In My Place"

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has a pretty good take on how the William Ayers story willfully ignores every bit of context about the many other than his Weather Underground involvement, while the Huffington Post quotes Greg Hinz in Crain's Chicago Business with the legitimate issue that you might be able to make of that association:

The story of the Ayers affair isn't that the radical Vietnam-era protester was embraced by Mr. Obama. The story is that a wide swath of Chicago's establishment, rightly or wrongly, gave Mr. Ayers a second chance -- and that Mr. Obama, not one to challenge Chicago's power structure, raised no objections.

That seems like a pretty fair assessment to me, and it also speaks to my earlier claim that Obama isn't the machine candidate from Chicago as much as he recognized early on that you have to play nice with elements of that machine. And of course, he's going to have that machine behind him in a general election, simply because it's a Democratic machine.