For some time now, I've been pointing out that President Barack Obama's mother and father had more links to CIA (and affiliated American organizations of influence, such as the Ford Foundation) than, in all likelihood, your mom and dad had.* Obama's parents were exactly the kind of leftist — but not Communist — cosmopolitans and exotics whom CIA cultivated.

Now, conspiracy blogger Wayne Madsen exhaustively tallies up the Obama family links and possible connections to CIA, adding in his stepfather Lolo Soetoro and grandmother Madeleine Dunham, whose Honolulu bank supposedly handled the accounts of a CIA front company. (Not even Madsen, however, can come up with a world-historical role for the President's feckless furniture salesman grandfather Stan.) Here's his article on Obama's father's Kenyan CIA connections and here's his article on his mother's Asian CIA connections.

Madsen comes up with no smoking guns, and some of it's over the top and other parts are extremely tangential, but, all in all, it does make a decent case that Obama's parents traveled in CIA-related circles. Obama himself made clear in Dreams from My Father that his mother knew CIA agents when she worked at the US Embassy in Jakarta.

The notion of Obama as CIA's Manchurian Candidate is excessive. But if you conceive of CIA less as the Master Puppeteer and more as a well-funded part of the Global Favor Bank, then otherwise odd bits of the President's biography like his being a "spy behind enemy lines" at Business International, a firm that had admittedly provided cover as business journalists for four CIA agents, make more sense.

* By the way, when I first started thinking about the Obama family's CIA connections, I thought, "Wow, his mom and dad had a lot more CIA connections than, say, my mom and dad did." But, then I got to thinking. Back in the 1940s, my mom became dear friends with another secretary at Lockheed, who went on to marry an engineer named Henry Combs. Henry became one of the chief designers of the CIA's U2 spy plane (still in service) and was the head structural designer of the CIA's legendary SR-71 superplane. We used to go out to the Combs' ranch in Santa Clarita and I would play hide-and-go-seek with their six kids.

I also have in-laws based in the Virginia suburbs of D.C. who get assigned to odd, but strategically important, locations around the world, and you're not supposed to ask them what they do on the job.

In other words, the American intelligence apparatus is quite large, and lots of people have lots of connections of varying degrees with it.