Joe Biden and the Obama campaign refuse to release a list of Biden’s earmarks. How is this remotely acceptable?

The next time Barack Obama accuses George W. Bush and John McCain of wanting to “deregulate everything,” maybe someone should ask what specifically he has in mind that relates to the current crisis. Sarbanes-Oxley is the most relevant and Bush signed that one. Not only did McCain vote for that one–he voted for lots of other measures that bothered fiscal conservatives. The MSM seems unconcerned with fact checking that whole topic.

There is good reason for Obama to “downplay” his payments to ACORN for voter registration — that organization has, to put it mildly, “a real serious quality control issue.” When you have ten applications to register the same person I think the word is “fraud.”

Obama tries out the latest excuse: he thought Bill Ayers was “rehabilitated.” For someone running for president he seems dangerously unaware of the political views and opinions of those closest to him. And if Ayers was such a laudatory figure why didn’t Obama make his work on the Annenberg Challenge a central argument for his executive and educational credentials?

Fox news notices that Obama was a member of the New Party, a local branch of the Socialist Party. I’m sure it was just a group of friends in the neighborhood. By the way — doesn’t his choice of neighborhood say something about his interests and associations?

This raises an interesting point: “The unanswered questions are not about crimes, but about his judgment. Just as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have never repented for terrorism against their country, the senator has never expressed repentance for his association with them.” It used to be George W. Bush was the one who could never admit error.

This ad from the McCain camp has a couple themes going on — judgment/Ayers and Democrats/Freddie-Fannie — which may confuse some voters when lumped together, but the overarching point is a good one: be wary of self-enriching politicians.

The Union Leader sums up: “Barack Obama is not a Republican. And therefore his ties to fringe elements in his party are ignored and discounted by a fawning media that would leave no stone unturned were the candidate with radical associations named John McCain.”

Lots of people are still mulling why the debate wasn’t better — meaning more interesting. It is hard to quibble with this take: “The debate was bad in ways that debates are often bad. The ultra-badness comes from being bad now.”

Ross Douthat asks who the fool is. I think at bottom presidential elections are about trust so for now I’m going with Steve Schmidt and Andy McCarthy that Ayers et al. and lying about it matters. That said it doesn’t help McCain to have a disjointed and poorly articulated economic message.

Somewhere this has gotten lost in the shuffle: “I have never seen Obama tell people what they’ll have to give up. . . .For his part, Obama never addressed where he would challenge his party, because he never does. According to Congressional Quarterly, Obama votes with his party 96 percent of the time. ” At some point McCain is going to need to make clear that the trio of Harry-Nancy-Barack is what we’re facing. (“It would be nice to know if Obama has the resolve to curb his party’s excesses. To go by his Nashville performance, he does not.”)

Should we have been tipped off to the denial pathology when Obama said he never heard all that vile stuff from Reverend Wright and the MSM bought it? Hard to argue with this: “It was at that precise moment I knew we were living in a media-constructed lunatic asylum.” After all if you buy the Wright excuse, you’ll buy that Obama didn’t know Ayers was a terrorist, never associated with ACORN and didn’t share the far Left agenda of Ayers’s Annenberg Challenge or the Woods Fund.

Oh, and it is good to remember that there is fairly obvious evidence — in his book — that Obama heard and was in fact inspired by the race-baiting message from Reverend Wright. It would have been hard to miss, after all.

If almost three-quarters of CEO’s think Obama would be a disaster, will the stock market be getting worse not better as we draw closer to the election?

I always like funny ads but I’m not sure running against Chuck Schumer works — in Kentucky.

Maybe Senator Dodd, on the other hand, should be in a lot of GOP ads.