The title on the CNN screen says, for the full two minutes of this segment and probably much longer, “Special Investigations Unit/Registration Fraud Allegations/Hiring Homeless and Drug Addicts” and over that headline for most of the clip are pictures of Barack Obama.

This is CNN, folks, not Fox.  That means the people who are listening to this are not largely already in the McCain camp and will therefore be questioning the candidate of their choice, not getting more negative news about a candidate they don’t like.

The report itself is not groundbreaking, but it’s quite good.  Wolf Blitzer gives the reporter, Drew Griffen, an opportunity to cut the Obama campaign some slack, pawning off their involvement on “some third party that contracted with ACORN,” but he nixes that, quoting emails between CNN and the campaign that say, “Yes, we did use a subsidiary of ACORN.”

That is not what Obama told reporters today.  In a press briefing outside the Maumee Bay Resort and Conference Center in Oregon, OH, he said:

“There is an ACORN organization in Chicago. They have been active. As an elected official, I’ve had interactions with them. But they are not advising our campaign. We’ve got the best voter registration and turnout and volunteer operation in politics right now and we don’t need ACORN’s help.”

He does not mention that he taught community organizing to ACORN, nor does he mention that he paid $800,000 to an ACORN subsidiary in the primaries to register voters – who knows how crookedly – so he could knock off Hillary.  Instead he wiggles dishonestly, “… right now and we don’t need ACORN’s help.”  Yeah, but “back then” they did.

As for ACORN’s fraudulent operations, Obama sees it differently than the rest of us:

“So there’s been fraud perpetrated on probably ACORN if they paid these individuals and they actually didn’t do registrations.”

Oh.  It’s the poor voter registration workers, who are swamped by stacks of fraudulent ACORN voter registration forms dumped on them at the last minute, who are the bad guys.  Thanks for that, Barack.Really, really classy.

Here’s another, longer, CNN clip that doesn’t tie ACORN and Obama, but when put together with CNN reporting on the connection will be damning because Griffen shows a signed ACORN registration card for a voter who died last year.

It also includes an ACORN attorney, Brian Mellor, who says ACORN fires people who cheat, but can’t adequately answer whether they fired people in Lake County, IN, after massive ACORN voter fraud was uncovered there.  He then goes on, like Obama, to rag on election officials as the cause of the problem.

Mellor is, in a word, offensive, and all middle of the road (and right side of the road) Americans will see him as such, and will think his group’s association with Obama stinks to high heaven.

With CNN joining Fox and ABC, which have been  hitting hard on this story for days, we now have a significant part of the TV news-watching electorate getting this nasty story front and center, which is why McCain needs to hammer on Obama and ACORN tomorrow night, much more than the Obama and Ayres hammering.

By the way, CBS hasn’t run an ACORN story since last Friday.  NBC finally got around to running a story today (can you say “deliberately asleep at the wheel?”) positioning it as “a registration fraud story, not a voter fraud story.”  In the tape they play Obama’s excuses (referenced above) and say the McCain campaign is overstating the Obama-ACORN connection because there’s “no evidence of an ongoing close relationship with ACORN at this point.”

If any of you would like to send me $800,000 I guarantee we’ll have a close relationship.

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“B

ad judgment … blind ambition … too risky for America.” That’s the new tag line the McCain campaign is using and it should push a few buttons, even if we’re told by Obama-Americans that “risky” is code for black. Here’s the ad with that tag:

It does a decent job of nailing down the Obama-ACORN connection and the ACORN-market melt-down connection, but it could have been stronger. I would have like to see this Obama quote in it:

“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.”

The ad is 1:30 long, which means it’ll be an expensive TV placement. The McCain Web site makes it easy enough to email the ad to others and it’s up on YouTube, but it doesn’t provide a direct link to the ad, so posting it to the blog requires finding it on YouTube, picking up the url and posting it – they’ve got to get smarter than that. And they have to re-cut it at 30 and 60 seconds to increase its reach (which they’ve probably already done).

Connecting Obama to the melt-down is the McCain campaign’s last, best hope. Obama sued banks to force them to make risky mortgages, he had senior Fannie/Freddie execs in his circle, he took their money, he paid them for voter registration and – because he supports the radical idea of unjustifiable home loans to urban blacks – he did nothing to stop the mess.

That’s the one message that should be coming from the McCain camp, and this ad is a good enough start. Time to build on it.

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“We have no idea what the motive behind it is. It’s just overwhelming to us.” – Lake County IN Elections Board Official

T

he official – probably Dem. Sally Sota, but the CNN article is edited so badly we can’t tell for sure – was speaking of ACORN; specifically, the 2,000+ fraudulent voter registration forms found in the first 2,000+ ACORN-submitted forms.

To ACORN, free and fair elections are just a joke, as evidenced by the names they use on the forms – fast food restaurant names, sports team names – and the cavalier attitude they have about cheating Democracy:

“All the signatures looked exactly the same,” Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican on the board. “Everything on the card filled out looks exactly the same.”

Lake County includes Gary, which is 84% black. It’s not like the Obama campaign had to work overtime to dominate the vote in this county – one of the ones where the campaign is quite content that there’s racism, black racism, in America. Yet ACORN found it worthwhile to cheat the system. Why? So he could win 101% of the vote there?

ACORN of course refuses to admit blame; any criticism of its actions is just Big Brother in action:

“We believe their purpose is to attack ACORN and suppress votes,” [ACORN attorney Brian] Mellor said. “We believe that by attacking ACORN, they are going to discourage people that have registered to vote with ACORN from voting.”

The non-fictional ones, anyway.

Michelle Malkin reported last night that ACORN’s Dem hench-gal has been busted next door in the pivotal swing state of Ohio:

A federal district court judge has found Democrat Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner guilty of violating federal election laws. The ruling goes to the heart of the ACORN-centered voter fraud epidemic spreading across the country. This is the second judgment against Brunner.

Says the Ohio GOP:

“For some reason, Jennifer Brunner does not want these new registrations checked,” said Ohio Republican Party Deputy Chairman Kevin DeWine. “Her refusal to comply with federal law raises serious concerns about her ability to objectively oversee this election. It’s especially troubling in light of her connection to ACORN and that group’s stunning confession this week of fraudulent registration activity happening right here in Ohio.”

Brunner’s effort to fight the court order comes just two days after the Democrat activist group ACORN admitted to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that the group engages in fraudulent voter registration activity.

ACORN’s excuse for the fraud? You’ll love this:

Ohio ACORN officials “blamed the elections board for not scrutinizing ACORN’s suspicious cards,” claiming the group “can’t be expected to catch everything.”

“I Can’t Even Count How Many Registrations I’ve Filled Out”

Malkin’s story includes a film clip from Palestra.com, the college web-TV network, in which a young black woman says ACORN workers scrub the neighborhoods asking people again and again to register. “I can’t even count how many registrations I’ve filled out,” the woman says. She says she does it for her country – who taught her civics?

Here’s a YouTube copy of the Palestra clip, which I wasn’t able to post:

In addition to Indiana and Ohio, ACORN investigations are proceeding in, at a minimum, Nevada, Missouri, Connecticut and Wisconsin, plus North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Pennsylvania, and Washington. And that was just page one of the Google search.

Obama’s position? “I’ve never worked for ACORN.”

Sweetness & Light has the goods. He did work for Project Vote, which shares the same address in Washington DC and other cities with ACORN, shares the same job postings, and which multiple MSM outlets identified as an arm of ACORN. Not to mention the documentation provided by IRS tax forms.

Oh, and there are these words from his own mouth:

“So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.”

So he didn’t really work for ACORN, like he didn’t really listen to his pastor … but he did lawyer for ACORN. Media Circus has a page of a court settlement for a lawsuit brought by ACORN which includes the names of the settling attorneys:

T­he p­a­rt­ies vo­lunt­a­rily d­ism­issed­ t­he ca­se o­n M­a­y 12, 1998, p­ursua­nt­ t­o­ a­ set­t­lem­ent­ a­g­reem­ent­.
P­la­int­iff’s La­w­yers A­lexis, Hila­ry I. (Illino­is)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Child­ers, M­icha­el A­llen (Illino­is)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Cla­yt­o­n, Fa­y (Illino­is)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Cum­m­ing­s, Jeffrey Irvine (Illino­is)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-7501 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Lo­ve, Sa­ra­ No­rris (Virg­inia­)
FH-IL-0011-9000
M­iner, Jud­so­n Hirsch (Illino­is)
FH-IL-0011-7500 | FH-IL-0011-9000
Oba­m­­a­, Ba­r­a­ck H­. (Illinois­)
FH-I­L-0011-7500 | FH-I­L-0011-7501 | FH-I­L-0011-9000
Wi­ckert­, J­o­hn­ Hen­ry­ (I­lli­n­o­i­s)
FH-I­L-0011-9000

What was the lawsuit? Well, glad you asked. It was a Community Reinvestment Act lawsuit charging redlining by a bank, the classic ACORN strategy to force banks to make bad mortgage loans and the genesis of the financial meltdown that’s giving us all intense heebie-jeebies today.

Plus, of course, he shoveled buckets of cash ACORN’s way while running the Annenberg Chicago Challenge.

So, class, to refresh: A group tied to Barack Obama is caught trying to throw the election. He denies he ever worked for them, but he’s lying, lying, lying. And his lie also covers up his direct involvement in the mortgage shell game that’s brought our economy to its knees.

Yet he’s ahead in the polls. Go figger.

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M

any of us have come to believe that the current financial mess can, in large part, be traced back to 1977, when Jimmy Carter’s pen signed the Community Reinvestment Act into law, giving the proud profession of community organizer a new reason for being. (Of course, Wall Street is much at fault to, because of how it handled the highly speculative toxic mortgages that grew out of CRA.)

Following passage of CRA, people like Madeline Talbott – described today by Stanley Kurtz in the NY Post as “a key pioneer in ACORN’s subprime shake-down racket” – began organizing the community to act. As head of ACORN Chicago, she began sit-ins (scream-ins, really) in bank lobbies, demanding home loans for people whose finances were so awful no sane person would consider them. She kept up the pressure using a team of organizers who were trained by … Barack Obama. Writes Kurtz:

IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.

When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.

He returned to Chicago in the early ’90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.

In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.

More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. In 1995, the Woods Fund substantially expanded its funding of community organizers – and Obama chaired the committee that urged and managed the shift.

That committee’s report on strategies for funding groups like ACORN features all the key names in Obama’s organizer network. The report quotes Talbott more than any other figure; Sandra Maxwell, Talbott’s ACORN ally in the bank battle, was also among the organizers consulted.

MORE, the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report ac knowledges the problem of getting donors and foundations to contribute to radical groups like ACORN – whose confrontational tactics often scare off even liberal donors and foundations.

Indeed, the report brags about pulling the wool over the public’s eye. The Woods Fund’s claim to be “nonideological,” it says, has “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”

Hmm. Radicalism disguised by a claim to be postideological. Sound familiar?

Troublingly familiar.

There is a great danger to the nation that this deep and insidious scandal will never come to light because the media and Congressional Democrats will conspire to cover it up. The support (including financial) groups like ACORN received from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would not be addressed, nor would links between those pushing this scheme and proponents of the Cloward-Priven strategy of chaos manufactured to bring down the Country, nor would we see Obama’s radical background exposed … at least prior to Nov. 3.

There is so much low-hanging fruit for the McCain campaign to pick in this scandal, it’s a wonder that the GOP continues to be on the losing end of the financial crisis.  When will they get it and begin using the roots of this crisis to win the election?

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Cloward-Piven, Obama And The Fall Of America

J

ust drop everything and click on over to American Thinker and James Simpson’s Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis.

The article delves into the Cloward-Piven strategy, spawned in 1966 by two radical socialist professors from Columbia University, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy was promptly – and accurately – described in The Nation, a publication that would like to put an end to our nation:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

The strategy’s first big success came in 1975, when New York City was forced into bankruptcy by Cloward-Piven acolytes who stormed welfare offices demanding their “rights,” quickly overburdening the welfare system. Simpson makes the point that the current financial crisis appears to be a classic Cloward-Piven strategy, this time with the poor and underqualified demanding their “right” to homownership.

There are so many hard-left radicals linked in the article that at times it seems you’re reading more blue type than black – and all these names link ultimately to one Barack Hussein Obama:

As Simpson says:

The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who’s who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

Conspicuous in their absence are any connections at all with any other group, moderate, or even mildly leftist. They are all radicals, firmly bedded in the anti-American, communist, socialist, radical leftist mesh.

Remember “Obama, the empty suit?” This article shows that the suit Obama wears is not empty; rather, it is a Trojan horse, filled with the most vile ideas about – and plans for – America.

Don’t believe it? Well, what if we told you that the Dems want to set up the financial bailout so radical left wing groups like Acorn get any funds generated through bailout paybacks? It’s true.

hat-tip: Okie on the Lam Continue Reading »

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S

till confused about exactly how BHO’s experience as a community organizer gives him what he needs to be president? Well, the answer is about to become very, very clear:

Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.

Everyone says it’s going to be a tight election, so Obama’s deep support from ballot box-stuffing community organizers may come in very, very handy.

This report, in the Detroit Free Press, highlights the particularly nefarious (but all too routine) deeds of Acorn, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (aka “America’s largest radical group“), in Michigan:

ACORN’s Michigan branch, based in Detroit, has enrolled 200,000 voters statewide in recent months, mostly with the use of paid, part-time employees.

“There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications,” said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office. “And it appears to be widespread.”

ACORN was a recipient of BHO largess when The One was chairing the Annenberg Challenge grant with Bill Ayres in Chicago, and he’s still very much in cahoots today, says Michelle Malkin:

What we have here, essentially, is Obama using a non-profit group called Citizens Services Inc. as a front to funnel [$800,000 in ] payments to ACORN for campaign advance work. Obama officials say it’s no big deal. Nothing to see here. Move along. But where there’s left-wing laundering smoke, there’s fire. CSI has been the subject of a little-noticed complaint to the FEC by a Democrat who smelled something rotten going on between CSI, ACORN, and a left-wing 527, Communities Voting Together.

But first, the headline:

Obama to amend report on $800,000 in spending

For more (much more) on Obama and Acorn, see Stanley Kurtz’ Inside Obama’s Acorn.

hat-tip: Jim

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