Meet Obama's new Bill Ayers associate

By Aaron Klein

Mike Klonsky

JERUSALEM – The official campaign website of Sen. Barack Obama has completely scrubbed a series of user-generated blog postings on the candidate's site by a former top communist activist who is an associate of former Weathermen terrorist leader William Ayers.

The move has raised questions regarding Obama's relationship with the deleted blogger, Mike Klonsky, who runs an education organization that was founded by Ayers and that received a substantial grant from a group directed by Obama.

Obama's official site allows registered users to form groups and post content in online "community" blogs. The site boasts tens of thousands of such community blogs. Obama's spokesmen previously have stated the campaign does not monitor all content posted on the blogs, but it promptly removes any content brought to its attention that is deemed inappropriate or hateful.

Klonsky posted several blog pieces on Obama's site on education policy that did not contain what can be described as hateful material, but his postings were entirely deleted in June after several independent bloggers noted Klonsky's connections to Obama and Ayers.

Klonsky is director of the Small Schools Workshop, an outreach program founded in 1991 by Ayers with the stated goal of providing support for teachers who want to create smaller learning environments. Ayers reportedly recruited Klonsky to head the Workshop.

The Small School Workshop was originally associated with the University of Illinois in Chicago, where Klonsky previously taught in the education department alongside Ayers. The group was headquartered for a time inside the university's department of education building.

In 1995, with Obama as its chairman, the newly formed Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC, a school reform organization, gave the Workshop a grant of $175,000. The CAC provided another $482,662 to the Workshop over the next few years.

Ayers was one of the original grantees of the CAC and was co-chairman of the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, one of the two operational arms of the CAC. ....