But the relationship between Obama and Ayers went deeper, ran longer and was more political than Obama -- and his surrogates -- have revealed, documents and interviews show.

Also, it re-reports, Ayers was't involved in choosing Obama to chair the fund.

"One fact of civic life in Chicago, say city residents, is the prominence of the Ayers family.

Thomas G. Ayers, the father of William and John Ayers, was the chief executive officer of the Commonwealth Edison Co., the region’s major electric utility. He died in 2007.

Mr. Obama had significant contact with Thomas Ayers toward the end of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, when they worked to establish the Chicago Public Education Fund. The fund received more than $2 million in startup money from the CAC."

“You can’t work in school reform in this community without coming across Bill Ayers. He’s been involved in every area of Chicago reform going back 20 years now,” said Michael Klonsky, who has known Mr. Ayers since their days in the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s. Mr. Klonsky later founded the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois at Chicago with him.

“Senator Obama would have to be a magician to not have ran into, or met, or sat in a meeting with Bill Ayers,” Mr. Klonsky said.

“The Annenberg Challenge provides an unprecedented opportunity to concentrate the energy of this reform into an educational renaissance in the classroom.”

The proposal was backed by letters of support to the Annenberg Foundation from Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, a Republican, local education school deans, the superintendent of the Chicago public schools, and the heads of local foundations."

"Mr. Obama, then 33, was an associate at the law firm Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland and a member of the board of the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation. He also served, as Mr. Ayers later did with him, on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, which had financed the Developing Communities Project, a South Side community-organizing project that Mr. Obama ran from 1985 to 1988 before leaving to attend Harvard Law School.

He brought that organizing perspective with him to the new education project, telling the Chicago Tribune in a June 1995 article about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge: “If we’re really going to change things in this city, it’s going to start at the grassroots level and with our children.”"

A legislative panel has scheduled a meeting for 9 a.m. Friday to receive Branchflower's report on Monegan's firing and whether Palin or members of her administration abused their powers in pushing for the dismissal of a state trooper involved in a child-custody fight with the governor's sister.

the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we've got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.

"Obama claimed that the government had invented the computer in order to encourage scientists to communicate. He probably meant the Internet."

"Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. The MARK series of computers began with the Mark I in 1944. Imagine a giant roomful of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The 5-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. Used by the US Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations, the Mark I was in operation until 1959."

"The cover of Life magazine of April 23, 1971, shows David Ifshin, aged 22, at a war rally, wearing a collegiate goatee. He's standing directly behind Jane Fonda, who has her fist raised." from The New Republic.

McCain met with Ifshin and they found common ground. "I said to him, Look, I accept your apology. We'll be friends. But more importantly I want you to forget it. Go on with your life. You cannot look back.'

"Palin's debate style is simple: She's a master, not of facts, figures or insightful policy recommendations, but at the fine art of the non-answer, the glittering generality. Against such charms there is little Sen. Biden or anyone can do."

"Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It's got to flow into our domestic markets first."

"Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers and yet when asked questions you spout off facts, figures and policies and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, 'Does any of this really matter?' " Palin said.

While public policy wonks might cringe, the fact was that Sarah Palin was simply vocalizing her biggest campaign strength without realizing it. During the campaign, from January to November, Palin's message on important public policy issues never evolved -- because it didn't have to. Her ability to fill the debate halls with her presence and her gift of the glittering generality made it possible for her to rely on populism instead of policy."

   "In one debate, a moderator asked the candidates to name a bill the Legislature had recently passed that we didn't like. I named one. Democratic candidate Tony Knowles named one. But Palin used her allotted time to criticize the unpopular incumbent governor, Frank Murkowski. Asked to name a bill we did like, the same pattern emerged: Palin didn't name a bill.

    And when she does answer the actual question asked, she has the canny ability to connect with the audience on a personal level."

    "It may serve to enhance those credentials or make people understand that I've been to Waziristan, I know Musharraf, I can pick up the phone and call him. I knew Benazir Bhutto. I know the area. But I hate for anything like this to be the cause of any political gain for anybody," he said.

    I've been to Waziristan. I can see how tough that terrain is. It's ruled by a handful of tribes.

    ...so far no senior al-Qaeda or Taleban figure has been caught in this semi-autonomous area where the Pakistani army beefed up its presence after the US intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan in October, 2001.

    There is no record of John McCain having been to Waziristan. No newspaper reports about it since 1982, when McCain got to Congress. I'm not talking about just the national papers, but through Newsbank, the world and national newspaper archive of a few thousand newspapers, newswires, magazines and other sources. Checked it all. No record of McCain in Waziristan before 2001, certainly no record of him there since. How could there be? North and South Waziristan are controlled by al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The last time Americans wandered in there, which was last week in a couple of helicopters that dropped special forces in South Waziristan, they were repulsed after a firefight. The last time an unmanned American Predator drone went in there--last Tuesday, near Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, the same day that Bush was flattering Zardari face to face about "Pakistan's sovereign right and sovereign duty to protect your country," the Pakistani military shot it down. The next day, Pakistani troops fired at two U.S. helicopters violating Pakistani air space.

    Rovito wasn't finished. "Waziristan is blowing up!," he said.

    "Yeah it is," Palin said, "and the economy there is blowing up too."

    Waziristan is America’s new front line in the war against the Taliban. The last British officer to have served there, now 81, tells it cannot be tamed by force alone

    Overlooking the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, from the Paktika province of eastern Afghanistan. The outpost, only 800 meters from the border, is frequently attacked by Taliban forces, many of whom cross over from the South Waziristan tribal area of Pakistan

    PESHAWAR: Ten more people were reported dead and scores of others were injured in renewed fighting between the warring sides, as the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe on Monday gave a call to all the tribesmen to go after the foreign militants and their local supporters to purge the area from outsiders.

    The foreign militants, locals informed, also publicly executed Juma Khan alias Haji Jimak in Azam Warsak area of South Waziristan Agency to punish the family of a tribal journalist, Din Muhammad, accused of leaking information about the fighting to media from the troubled tribal region.

    O'REILLY: One of the questions that Hillary Clinton had difficulty with last week with me was Afghanistan and Pakistan.
    MCCAIN: Yes.
    O'REILLY: I asked her and I'm going to ask you: Do you know where command and control is for the Taliban right now?
    MCCAIN: Oh yes. In a place called Waziristan.
    O'REILLY: OK. But it's a little further south in Quetta. Quetta is not up in the northwest provinces.
    MCCAIN: Could I just say that there are areas of Waziristan that you know that the Pakistani government, Musharraf, made a "bargain" with.
    O'REILLY: But Quetta, you can get them, and the Pakistani government won't. How are you going to make them?
    MCCAIN: I think that our relations with Pakistan are in a very dicey situation today with a new government. I know that our relations with Pakistan are vital.
    O'REILLY: As long as the Taliban can hide and have those safe harbors, Afghanistan will never be stable.
    MCCAIN: And I agree with you about Quetta, but I also will tell you that Waziristan is hard to govern.
    O'REILLY: The Pakistani government has got to help us. That's the key to that.
    MCCAIN: They have to help us.

    McCain and Salter wrote "Worth the Fighting For" (the title is taken from a line of Robert Jordan's in the Hemingway novel ), which gave McCain an opportunity to confess his shortcomings:

    "I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."

"When I am no longer busy with politics, and with my own ambitions, I hope to have more time to examine what I have done and failed to do with my career, and why."

"That time was absolutely the best and worst of Rudy,” said Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the city’s former corporation counsel under Mayor Edward I. Koch. “Rudy stood up strong and rallied us. But that confidence created the very dangerous idea that we couldn’t survive without him.”

Still, the difficulty in trying to assess this election was evident in the voice of David Axelrod, Mr. Ferrer's media consultant...

That time was absolutely the best and worst of Rudy,” said Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the city’s former corporation counsel under Mayor Edward I. Koch. “Rudy stood up strong and rallied us. But that confidence created the very dangerous idea that we couldn’t survive without him.”

 Still, the difficulty in trying to assess this election was evident in the voice of David Axelrod, Mr. Ferrer's media consultant...

"Q: But do you go on line for yourself?

Mr. McCain: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need — including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.

Q: Do you use a Blackberry or e-mail?

Mr. McCain: No.

Mark Salter: He uses a BlackBerry, just ours.

Mr. McCain: I use the Blackberry, but I don’t e-mail, I’ve never felt the particular need to e-mail. I read e-mails all the time, but the communications that I have with my friends and staff are oral and done with my cell phone. I have the luxury of being in contact with them literally all the time. We now have a phone on the plane that is usable on the plane, so I just never really felt a need to do it."