Barack Obama is not a socialist, because Barack Obama says so:

“I don’t know what’s next,” Obama, the presidential candidate, said at an outdoor rally. “By the end of the week, he’ll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

This is not a duck.

But… um…

It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.

Although the media’s revealed the dark secret that Joe Wurzelbacher is not a licensed plumber, the fact remains that Joe got Obama to drop the mask in a more succinct fashion than he has throughout the general election campaign. Even without this quote, what would you call Obama’s healthcare plan? Or his frequent attacks on a reduced capital gains tax as “billions of dollars for big oil,” or his promises to give “tax cuts” to people who don’t pay income taxes, or his demonization of deregulation?

so · cial · ism

–noun
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

Barack Obama, global diplomacy dilettante, is too big to limit himself to canoodling and cooperating with domestic extremists. Can a presidential candidate campaigning for Change We Can Believe In spend twenty years as a member of a racist, America-hating church? While funding Chicago groups tied to ACORN and a Weather Underground nut? And still, amidst all the hustle and bustle, travel to Africa in support of a socialist loon in his father’s native Kenya?

Yes, he can!

Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama’s six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki.

On what important topic has Barack Obama been right? He’s hobnobbed with crazies overseas, while vocally opposing leaders friendly to America. He’s supported Bill Ayers in his efforts to further transform education into anti-capitalist, anti-American indoctrination. He’s supported ACORN as they’ve helped cripple mortgage lending and defraud the electoral system.

Shouldn’t the public be more familiar with these facts, given the far leftism of Obama’s record? Obama wants to play Robin Hood with tax policy, further penalizing success in a stuttering economy. He continues to oppose the wildly successful troop surge in Iraq, claiming he’s got a plan to exit the country without harming our interests. His moral standards for going to war might seem like something other than a shell game if he’d acknowledge that Iraq pre-invasion was something other than a Middle Eastern Switzerland. He’s so far out there on abortion it makes Planned Parenthood seem moderate.

There’s a reason all of the links in the preceding paragraphs are from outspokenly conservative National Review: few “balanced” news outlets can be troubled to criticize Obama’s checkered past or far-left positions as anything but an aside. Are conservatives a broken record in this regard? Sure, but there are lots of grooves in the Barack and The Extremists LP, and an apparent shortage of turntables at the big city papers and national TV networks.

I truly believe Barack Obama and John McCain’s respective records speak for themselves. Look up the two senators on Project Vote Smart or in WaPo’s Congressional database, and it’s clear that one candidate is a centrist and the other is a leftist. It’s the unfortunate reality that voting records and quoted positions are often peripheral details in the jab-parry-dodge of TV debates and national campaigns. It doesn’t help that Obama’s selling FDR-quality Big Government socialist fare to a public easily convinced of the horrors of a free market. But let’s face it: clumsy as McCain has been during the debates and overall race, the facts about Obama’s relationship with William Ayers should bury him.

The Associated Press would rather the facts themselves be buried:

McCain’s reference to Ayers reprised campaign commercials he has run to try and raise doubts about Obama’s fitness to serve.

Ayers, who was a member of the violent Weather Underground in the 1960s, hosted a meet-the-candidate event for Obama in an Illinois race many years later.

That’s the extent of it. Right? It must be all we need to know about the Ayers-Obama connection - some little one-off event from a campaign years ago. The truth of the matter is that “meet-the-candidate event” was not only hosted in Ayers’s home, it launched Obama’s first campaign. Yet in addition to downplaying this, the AP story makes no mention of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, whose board Obama chaired. The CAC was directed largely by Ayers, and handed millions of dollars to organizations pushing Ayers’s agenda. This went on for several years, serves as Obama’s only notable executive experience, and is a stark example of the uses Obama finds for money that isn’t his.

William Ayers remains unrepentant about his history of domestic terrorism, and as recently as the late 90s Barack Obama was funding the man’s still-radical agenda. The Obama campaign would like nothing better than for this issue to go away. It’s genuinely shameful that so many elements of the media feel the same.

At some point I got myself on the email list for the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions here in Columbus. I skim the weekly updates, and while the amount of mail they send sometimes gets annoying I take enough interest in what they write to refrain from unsubscribing. Today they highlighted the fact that they’ve filed a civil suit in Warren County against the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), a heavily left-leaning group with branches throughout the country and a shady history.

One of the many (many) things that torpedoed Ken Blackwell in 2006 was a fuss about a mutual fund he owned containing holdings in Diebold, who manufactured electronic voting machines used here in 2004. Yet for all the conspiracy theories and complaints about Blackwell rigging machines for Bush, ACORN and their fellow travelers have worked closely with Jennifer Brunner, the current (Democrat) Secretary of State. The complaint serves as a fairly comprehensive list of illegal ACORN activities in Ohio and elsewhere, and demands that ACORN be dissolved pursuant to ORC 2923.34. The Attorney General has to take up the case in order for that to happen… unfortunately for the Buckeye Institute, our Attorney General is also a Democrat. Thanks again, Bob Taft.

The federal court in Cincinnati decided this evening that Ohio’s voter registrations must be verified against some external source, which makes good sense. Secretary Brunner pointed out that setting up a method for this by Friday would be impossible. It might be feasible, or at least approaching feasible, if groups like ACORN weren’t running around registering dead people, re-registering live people, and conjuring people up. But when all’s said and done, I don’t expect 08CV72630 in the Warren County Court of Common Pleas to amount to much other than a bullet point on buckeyeinstitute.org. On the topic of bullet points, some late disclosure: horrible non-Obama supporting racist that I am, I voted for Blackwell in 2006. Blackwell is one of the big names at the Buckeye Institute. Let the conspiracy theories resume!

[Update: Fixed a lame typo in the second sentence.]

USF, the nation’s #10 college football team, lost last night to unranked Pitt.  Just another wrench thrown into this season which I susupect will be interesting throughout.  Great year to be a college football fan!