So, it's Friday, thank all the squabbling gods, every vagrant gluon and each little chittering creature (yes, this means you) and due to spending every waking minute (and one or two I'm not sure about) at work, I appear to have missed some stuff.

F'rinstance: apparently Senators Obama and Clinton know this guy who used to be a terrorist

Forty years ago Bill Ayers was a leader of a Leninist group called the Weather Underground that carried out bombings of the Pentagon, the Capitol and the New York City police headquarters.

On Wednesday night in Philadelphia, Ayers became the latest celebrity in the spectacle of the 2008 presidential campaign. During the debate between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his association with Ayers.

What didn’t come up in the debate is that Bill Clinton, too, had a connection to Ayers, albeit an indirect one. David Lytel, who worked in the White House for President Clinton from 1993 to 1996 as the White House “Web master” and helped create the Whitehouse.gov web site, left in April 1996 and formed Democrats Online, one of the earliest political advocacy sites.

During the 1996 Democratic convention in Chicago, Ayers and his wife, Weather Underground alumna Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a fundraiser at their Chicago home for Democrats Online. Lytel said Friday that no one from the Clinton White House showed up for the 1996 event.

He added, “I’m a Clinton supporter, but I think it’s the absolute height of stupidity” and “preposterous” for her to try to use the Ayers connection as a weapon against Obama. “This is an insane way for her to try to define her opponent. I have no reason to think that Ayers is anything other than smart, skeptical American,” Lytel said. “He’s like anyone else who has activities in his past that might be embarrassing to them as a middle-aged person.”

OK. With all due respect to Mr. Lytel, I think I need to stop and call bullshit here.

This is the Paddington House

It's called that because the people who own it have a Paddington Bear doll up in the window that they dress every day for the weather.

It was built on the site of the brownstone that was blown up when the Weathermen got sloppy in the bomb factory they were running in it (yes, this was terrorism in someone's mom's basement).

I take this sort of personally, because I don't think symbolic violence is a valid form of protest, and because I was going to elementary school across the street at the time.

Ayers' explanation, which I also feel I have to weigh against the whole blowing shit up thing, is here.

Now. That said, Mr. Ayers (and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn) have moved on to academic careers (they would have gone to prison after they turned themselves in, but the government had broken so many laws going after them that the prosecutors were kinda stymied) and have, apparently, in the thirtysomething years since, done yeoman work on school reform. Offhand, I'd say that's a fair balance for someone the candidates barely know.

Let's see who the president knows.

His name may sound like that of a character from a Mel Brooks musical but Otto Reich is real enough. He has just been appointed by President Bush as assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs - and both the manner of his appointment and the role he will now play have profound implications for a part of the world often disregarded since September 11.

Over the last year President Bush has attempted to bring back into office people who were discredited during the US interventions in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. One such appointment was that of Elliott Abrams, who had two convictions in 1991 for misleading Congress about the so-called Iran-contra affair. He was pardoned by President Bush's father in 1992 and now enjoys the title of head of the "office of democracy and human rights". Another was John Negroponte, the former US ambassador to Honduras, who was accused by his predecessor of turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed there against leftists because it was felt necessary to remain on good terms with the Honduran government. Negroponte was quietly confirmed as US ambassador to the UN shortly after September 11. But the third appointment is by far the most controversial and potentially divisive.

Otto Reich is a rightwing Cuban American whose key policy objective is the overthrow of Fidel Castro's regime and whose support base is the Cuban-American community in Florida. President Bush's brother, Jeb, is depending on this community's votes and backing as he runs for re-election as governor of the state later this year.

Otto Reich came to prominence during the Reagan administration when he was appointed head of the office of public diplomacy within the state department. According to the national security archives, Reich used this role to pursue his own agenda to such an extent that in 1987 the Comptroller-General of the US, a Republican appointee, found that some of the efforts of his office were "prohibited, covert propaganda activities ... beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities". A letter of September 30 1987 concluded that Reich's office had violated "a restriction on the state department's annual appropriations prohibiting the use of federal funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorised by Congress".

but wait, there's more!

Reich also served as US ambassador to Venezuela and was alleged to have used his influence to try and get a US visa for a convicted terrorist, Orlando Bosch, jailed in Venezuela in 1976 for the bombing of a Cubana airliner with 73 people on board. Bosch had already been convicted of a terrorist attack in Miami on a Polish merchant vessel bound for Cuba and jailed in the US.

According to US justice department records: "the files of the FBI and other government agencies contain a large quantity of documentary information which reflects that, beginning in the early 1960s, Bosch held leadership positions in various anti-Castro terrorist organisations ... Bosch has personally advocated, encouraged, organised and participated in acts of terrorist violence in this country as well as various other countries."

Amazingly, Bosch was granted a pardon by George Bush senior in 1990 and is now in Florida, apparently untroubled by the current president's commitment to rooting out terrorism in all its forms. Although many countries seek Bosch's extradition he remains free, protected by the same government that warns other countries that they are either for or against terrorism.

The Democrats on the Senate foreign relations committee had already made it clear that they would oppose Reich's appointment, not least because of the Bosch factor. So President Bush made a "recess appointment" at the beginning of January, which meant that he could side-step the Senate confirmation and avoid the damaging questions which Reich would be asked.

Tsk. Smuggling a terrorist alien into the country. Not nice.

He later distinguished himself by trying to orchestrate a coup in Venezuela on behalf of the Bush administration.

Well, at least he never pushed any nuns out of helicopters

Thirty-two women had fled the death squads of El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 to take refuge in Honduras. One of them had been Romero's secretary. Some months after their arrival, these women were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared. Our delegation was in Honduras to find out what had happened to these women.

John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. There had been eyewitnesses to the capture, and we were well read on the documentation that previous delegations had gathered.

Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US Embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government and it would be to our advantage to discuss the matter with the latter.

Facts, however, revealed quite the contrary.

During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.

John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country.

The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16.

In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfield in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.

In 1994, the Honduran Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents. It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations. Yet, back in his office that day in 1982, John Negroponte assured us that he had no idea what had happened to the women we were looking for.

I had to wait 13 years to find out. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in 1996 Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor as US ambassador in Honduras, told how a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women we had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981 and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, before being placed in helicopters of the Salvadoran military. After take off from the airport in Tegucigalpa, the victims were thrown out of the helicopters.

Binns told the Baltimore Sun that the North American authorities were well aware of what had happened and that it was a grave violation of human rights. But it was seen as part of Ronald Reagan's counterinsurgency policy.

FYI, we didn't just sit still for what happened in Honduras. We didn't just pay for it. We trained the people who carried it out.

Anyway, that would be Mr. Negroponte, who Mr. Bush (with the compliance of the Republican congress and a singular lack of opprobrium from, say, noted terror opponent ABC - did you hear they had a debate?) named UN Ambassador and Director of National Intelligence.

But his past was less important than sending a message

Sandra Coliver, executive director of the Center for Justice and Accountability, a human rights law center in San Francisco that has aided Honduran torture victims, said the nomination would hurt the United States' image in Central America.

"In Central America," Ms. Coliver said, "Negroponte is indelibly remembered for his role in increasing the amount of U.S. aid to the Honduran military at the very time that the military's role in supporting brutal death squads was becoming abundantly clear. What kind of a message will this appointment send to the people of Central America? That the U.S. is willing to overlook massive human rights atrocities in the name of collecting intelligence in pursuit of U.S. national interests."

Mr. Negroponte, 65, now ambassador to Iraq, is a career diplomat who has worked all over the world in his 40-year career. He has faced repeated scrutiny for his work as envoy to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, when Honduran military units, some trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, carried out kidnappings, torture and killings.

As the first director of national intelligence, Mr. Negroponte would oversee the C.I.A. and the other 14 agencies that are part of the nation's estimated $40 billion spying enterprise. The post is the centerpiece of intelligence reorganization undertaken chiefly because of the failure to warn of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Do you recall this stuff getting the kind of coverage that, say, John Kerry's windsurfing or John Edwards' hair or freaking greasy cheesesteaks got last cycle? In debates? Where this kind of judgment question is, I'm told, real important?

Me neither. Sorry, no sale.

Otherwise briefly noted:

I wanted an excuse to link to Roy's Village Voice wingnut taxonomy, and I thought I had it when Megan McArdle (who has been having the vapors for days over being called heteronormative) called Obama's manliness into question. Sadly for me, Roy beat me to it.

Danny Federici (of the E Street Band) RIP

We've spent 10 billion in Pakistan. We don't have a plan yet

US charities are running out of resources

Also? The cherry tree in the back yard tells me it's spring

and about time too, may I add.

Happy Friday.