There's My Two Cents: Cracking The Obamessiah's Nut: ACORN

Okay, I've been sorely remiss in passing along all the details on this shady organization to you, but now that it's crunch time, you need to understand this so-called community organization group and its connection to Barack the Obamessiah. Here are the basics.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is "a busy hive of left-wing agitation and 'direct action' that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn't get tenure at universities wound up." In the name of 'community organizing', they "agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform, try to unionize welfare workers (that is, those welfare recipients who are obliged to work in exchange for benefits) and organize voter registration efforts (always for Democrats, of course). Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren't especially fastidious about their methods."

The short version: they use minorities to bully businesses and politicians into social justice.

ACORN is one of the most criminal organizations you'll ever find. With a long history of voter fraud all over the country, this election cycle alone has seen admissions, indictments, and convictions of more voter fraud in Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Colorado, and Washington. And that's just in the past year...! This group is bad news. Here are their typical tactics:

The ACORN Group, the same group that was telling Missourians to vote for Claire McCaskill while registering them to vote, is now in trouble for turning in 1,492 fraudulent voter cards of dead people and teens.
"Some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications...including forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team."
In one case, a Cleveland resident was registered to vote three times in a single day, listing two different addresses…The man’s registration was submitted to the Board of Elections by ACORN. The board discussed several other cases of multiple registrations at their meeting. ACORN was involved in each case
The Seattle Times adds that the announcement of criminal charges came after the King County Canvassing Board revoked 1,762 allegedly fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN employees.

You get the point. And make no mistake - they're very effective. As you can see, in state after state, they have successfully planted thousands of fraudulent votes. In Indianapolis, they were so successful that they signed up 105% of the registered voters! In Ohio recently, they conducted a week-long drive to register homeless people and have them cast ballots on the same day, a clear violation of election law. Many of these were suspected duplicates since the homeless people often ranged between multiple locations.

For those of us in Kansas City, we have this gem:

Officials in Missouri, a hard-fought jewel in the presidential race, are sifting through possibly hundreds of questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by an advocacy group that has been accused of election fraud in other states.

Charlene Davis, co-director of the election board in Jackson County, where Kansas City is, said the fraudulent registration forms came from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. She said they were bogging down work Wednesday, the final day Missourians could register to vote.

"I don't even know the entire scope of it because registrations are coming in so heavy," Davis said. "We have identified about 100 duplicates, and probably 280 addresses that don't exist, people who have driver's license numbers that won't verify or Social Security numbers that won't verify. Some have no address at all."

The nonpartisan group works to recruit low-income voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Most polls show Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an edge in bellwether Missouri, but Democrat Barack Obama continues to put up a strong fight.

And from the other side of the state:

St. Louis Election Board officials say they've discovered at least 1,492 "potentially fraudulent" voter registration cards - including three from dead people and one from a 16-year-old - among the thousands pouring in before today's voter registration deadline for the Nov. 7 election.

City Republican elections director Scott Leiendecker said the board's staff expects to find even more bogus voter-registration applications among the thousands remaining to be processed. The board plans to turn all the questionable cards over to city Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce for investigation and possible prosecution, said board chairman Kimberley Mathis.

The board says all the questionable cards were turned in by one group - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, commonly known as ACORN.

St. Louis ACORN workers have admitted that everyone trained by them is being told to register and vote Democrat. Hmmm...

Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill has also been videotaped helpfully assisting seniors fill out their voter cards...for her, of course, through the Democrats' Missouri campaign plan called Project Vote. Federal authorities are investigating the situation across Missouri, as well as the McCaskill campaign. Should be fun to watch.

Now, one of the big problems with ACORN is that they are largely funded by your taxpayer dollars:

ACORN, which receives 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers to pursue an aggressive welfare-state agenda, has already helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. The rest of their funding comes from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.

They've struck it rich with the recent bailout:

House Republicans removed one pro-ACORN measure from the rescue bill - torpedoeing a provision devoting 20 percent of all profits from the bailout to a housing slush fund - which would’ve funneled money to ACORN and similar groups.

In its place, however, ACORN’s favorite lawmakers - led by Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Barney Frank (D-Mass.) - got ACORN-championed “foreclosure-mitigation” provisions into the rescue.

This will radically expand the federal role in meddling with mortgage loans. The key sections mandate that the Treasury “consent” to rewriting loans to prevent foreclosures - not only by reducing interest, but also by cutting loan principal.

Stuck with a $300,000 mortgage you can’t pay? Get the government to wave its magic wand and cut your debt to $150,000.

The deal is only for those who have fallen behind on their mortgages, of course - not for all you chumps who’ve been paying on time.

And it’s a good bet that ACORN mortgage counselors will “help” decide which distressed borrowers benefit, and how.

The group’s housing arm, the Acorn Housing Corp., is already funded with millions of taxpayer dollars to renegotiate loans for low-income people who should have never received them in the first place. Loan modification is ACORN’s bread and butter.

But they don't stick solely to election fraud:

ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has reported, ACORN proudly touted "affirmative action" lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of "dragging banks kicking and screaming" into dubious loans.

So, we have a fraudulent group of left-wing hacks that actively try to throw elections for the Democrats who were granted many millions of dollars of taxpayer money through this latest socialist bailout of our financial industry...which they helped cause! That's ACORN.

Now, how are they connected to Barack the Obamessiah?

Pay attention, because this is where things get interesting:

In 1992, [Sandy] Newman hired Obama to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The Illinois drive’s motto: “It’s a Power Thing.”

As previously noted in this column (”The ACORN Obama Knows,” June 25, 2008), Obama also trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN’s PAC endorsed his primary bid with full backing and muscle.

Despite his adamant denials of any association with the group (his Fight the Smears website now claims “Barack Obama never organized with ACORN”), Obama’s political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.

The Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, running parallel to ACORN/Project Vote, is an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision. “Our volume,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, “will be enormous.”

Quantity over quality. It’s the ACORN way.

Here are some more details:

ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff -- the very people who would later descend on Chicago's banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, ditto. Obama was not just sympathetic -- he was an ACORN fellow traveler.

So, Barack Obama got his political start in ACORN. He worked with ACORN, he was trained by ACORN, he went back to train others in ACORN, he directed ACORN money to Left-wing causes, and he received loads of money from ACORN throughout his political career.

Now, perhaps the biggest confirmation of all, Obama is trying to deny this long history of Obama and ACORN:

Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

This is an easily proven lie, revealed here by Stanley Kurtz:

These claims are contradicted by several sources, a number of which I linked to in my piece, "Inside Obama’s Acorn." In that piece, you’ll find a link to a Los Angeles Times piece in which Chicago Acorn leader Madeline Talbott is described as so impressed with Obama that "she invited him to help train her staff." You’ll also see a link to a statement by Obama himself, made in pursuit of Acorn’s endorsement. Obama says: "I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work." In my piece, "No Liberation," you’ll find a link to a 1995 profile of Obama which says: "Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side." My articles provide background, but the quotes and links I’ve presented here, and in the past, pretty conclusively contradict Obama’s current claims at "Fight the Smears."

There are others who have previously reported on Obama's iron-clad connections with ACORN, too. Check out the links if you want more details.

Finally, we have two incredible visuals to assist you in connecting the dots of the connections between ACORN and Barack Obama. First is this chart at justsaynodeal.com. It's too big to post here, but take a moment to look it over, and you'll see the numerous connections between ACORN and Obama, as well as other prominent Democrats. Then, for the coup de grace, we have this: