The Obama campaign's response to the question appears to be to raise John McCain's connection to the Keating Five scandal. It is by no means out of bounds to raise the issue. McCain received campaign funds from Keating, his wife's company had been involved in investment ventures with him, and he once met with federal regulators about Keating's bank - though the Senate Ethics Committee found that unlike three other senators involved in the scandal, "Senator McCain's actions were not improper." The committee said only that he had exercised bad judgment by being involved with Keating at all and not seeing what others were doing. In fact, Bob Bennett, who was the Democratic lawyer selected by the committee to investigate the Keating Five, says in his book that he recommended that McCain's name be dropped from the investigation because there was no evidence against him but, for political reasons (the other Senators were all Democrats), McCain's name was left on the list.

McCain's response to that scandal should certainly be compared with Obama's Ayers explanations. McCain has spoken and written about every detail of the Keating mess, has expressed open contrition for allowing himself to be drawn into it even tangentially, and devoted years of his career to combating corruption as a result. He even badly overreacted and pushed for vastly excessive regulation of campaign financing. He has said (in a book in which he details his and others' actions in the matter) that merely the appearance of impropriety involved makes his involvement with Keating "the worst mistake of my life."

"Today, they're saying for the first time that Barack Obama didn't know back then about Ayers's radical background," Palin told a rowdy crowd of 8,800 people at the Germain Arena. "But it was only a few months ago that Barack was saying that Ayers was just a 'guy in my neighborhood.'"

Palin said she found it unbelievable that Obama "didn't know a few months ago that he had launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist."

"So what's next?" she said. "Claiming their ticket doesn't define higher taxes as patriotic? Or claiming he's just learned that tax increases on small business kill jobs? Claiming he's just learned that American soldiers don't actually target and kill civilians in Afghanistan? Or claiming he's surprised that the surge and the war on terrorism is a success? Oh wait, he's already done that."

To hear him talk now, you'd think he'd always opposed the dangerous practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his record to suggest he did. He was surely familiar with the people who were creating this problem. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised him, and he has taken their money for his campaign. He has received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee overseeing them.

Did he ever talk to the executives at Fannie and Freddie about these reckless loans? Did he ever discuss with them the stronger oversight I proposed? If Senator Obama is such a champion of financial regulation, why didn't he support these regulations that could have prevented this crisis in the first place? He won't tell you, but you deserve an answer.

Democrats and their friends in the press are moose-hunting angry this morning over Sarah Palin's recent comment that Senator Obama "pals around with terrorists" which she made in reference to his being pals with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. The big line of defense we hear against this charge is "guilt by association". Their argument is absolutely true, if the charge is terrorism. You can't call Obama guilty of terrorism merely for associating with terrorists.

Of course, it's a straw man position. He isn't being accused of any guilt which ought to be Ayers' burden. He's being accused of precisely what he is guilty of: associating with terrorists. That's not guilty by association. It's guilty OF association ... association with information, I might add, because there's no way he didn't know about Ayers. Even if he didn't know about the terrorism, a loudmouth radical like Ayers doesn't keep his loudmouth radicalism under wraps. It was on account of his leftism that he and Obama made such frequent and successful allies.

What's more, it is not an isolated argument from the right. The question is more than one of Ayers. The question is, rather, why are so many of Obama's friends such low-lifes, and why doesn't anyone care?

Take, for example, this article in the New York Post. According to their sources, here is a man with whom Obama launched a charity project, funded by 100,000 grand in pork barrel tax money he obtained via his relationship with Barack Obama. Eight years later, Kenny Smith still hasn't built the promised south Chicago botanical gardens. The Illinois Attorney General is investigating Smith, and the project that he and Obama promised to Chicago.

Proving October is the month of negative attack ads, Barack Obama's less-than-hopeful campaign unleashed a 13 minute campaign web spot titled "Keating Economics."