"I chose my friends carefully.  The more politically active black students.  The foreign students.  The Chicanos.  The Marxist professors and structural feminists." -- Barack Obama

Everyone on this list has only one-degree of separation from Obama.  They're close.

William Charles Ayers (born December 26, 1944) is an American elementary education theorist and former leader in the anti-war movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.  He is known for the radical nature of his activism, which began within the anti-war movement of the 1960s.  In 1969 he co-founded the violent radical left organization the Weather Underground, which conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s.  He is now a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.

Bernardine Rae Dohrn (née Ohrnstein, born January 12, 1942) is an American former leader of the Anti-Vietnam War radical organization Weather Underground.  She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center.

 David Axelrod also has connections that that stretch back to post-War Chicago communism.

While a New Yorker by birth, David Axelrod studied political science at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s.  Later, while a start-out journalist with the Hyde-Park Herald, Axelrod was mentored by two older journalists cum political activists, Don Rose and David S. Canter.

Graham-Felsen ran the Obama campaign's blog.  He spent time in France taking part in labor riots, has written for a socialist magazine, hung a communist flag in his home, and was a fan of Marx while at Harvard.

A former Jesuit priest and executive director of the Gamaliel Foundation, Galluzzo was interview by New Republic's Ryan Lizza and showed him the training manual he uses with new organizers. Galluzzo told Lizza that many new trainees have an aversion to Saul Alinsky's gritty approach because they come to organizing as idealists rather than realists. Galluzzo, along with fellow trainer Mike Kruglik, schooled Obama in Alinsky tactics. The Developing Communities Project, Obama's first employer in Chicago, was part of the Gamaliel network of organizations.

In June 2009 Patrick Gaspard, a Brooklyn-based, 41-year-old Democratic operative, became White House director of the Office of Political Affairs.

Jeff Jones is a co-author of Obama's Stimulus Bill. He used to be a terrorist. Jones was a national officer in Students for a Democratic Society, a founding member of Weatherman, and a leader of the Weather Underground.

Jones is part of the Apollo Group, which was founded by Van Jones -- Obama's "Green Czar."  The Apollo Group, under Jeff and Van Jones’ direction, basically wrote Barack Obama’s stimulus bill.

During World War II, Jones' father was a pacifist and conscientious objector who was assigned for the duration of the war, to a civilian work camp in the Sierra Mountains of California.  Ironic, a pacifist breading a terrorist.

"I met all these young radical people of color -- I mean really radical: communists and anarchists.  And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next 10 years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary," he said.

Marilyn Katz is a Chicago public relations consultant and political operative, who has known David Axelrod for 30 years.   Katz claims it was she who introduced Obama to the "activist network" in Chicago.

Rashid Khalidi, an apologist and spokesman for the Palestinian Libertion Organization (PLO), is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and Director of the Middle East Institute (MEI) at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs.  In his role as MEI Director, Khalidi presides over a $300,000 annual grant from the federal government.  He ranks among the most prominent members of the Middle Eastern studies community in the United States.  His books are among the most frequently assigned works on the Middle East in American college syllabi. Arab and American media outlets alike seek him out regularly as a leading authority on the Middle East.  In the 1990s, Obama and his wife were regular dinner guests at Khalidi's Chicago home.  During the 2000 election cycle, Mr. and Mrs. Khalidi organized a fundraiser for Barack Obama's unsuccessful congressional bid.

Klonsky is an unabashed communist whose current mission is to spread Marxist ideology in the American classroom.  Obama funded him to the tune of nearly $2 million.  Obama, moreover, gave Klonsky a broad platform to broadcast his ideas: a "social justice" blog on the official Obama campaign website.

Taught Barack Obama in the Alinsky method.

Khalid al-Mansour is the "mystery man" that former Manhattan Borough Chairman Percy Sutton named as having aided Barack Obama financially at Harvard Law School. He also mentored Black Panthers’ founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in the early 1960s -- video.

He met and befriended Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the world’s 19-thealthiest person, when the prince was studying at Menlo College in California in the late 1970s.

Signs of al-Mansour’s work exists in Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and spans four decades in the United States,

Former Weatherman Rathke is the founder of Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN).  The group has had its federal funding cut within the last several days over charges of widespread corruption among many of its affiliate offices across the country. The organization was captured on video advising a pair of undercover journalists from Big Government.com on how to evade taxes and set up a brothel featuring underage child sex slaves.  Rathke and brother, Dale, have left ACORN after a nearly-$1 million embezzlement scandal. He then founded–surprise–ACORN International.

Madeleine Talbot was a leader at Chicago Acorn.  Talbot was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.

Talbot turns out to have been a key leader of that attempt by Acorn to storm the Chicago City Council (during a living-wage debate).  In a deliberate bit of what radicals call “direct action,” orchestrated by Acorn’s Madeleine Talbot.  As Talbot was led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct, she explicitly justified her actions in storming the meeting.  This was the woman who first drew Obama into his alliance with Acorn, and whose staff Obama helped train.