Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign has been forced to revise statements about their candidate's work for the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, a liberally-leaning non-profit roiled in allegations of voter registration fraud.
Obama’s website “Fight the Smears,” designed to counteract misinformation about the candidate’s record, contained false information about Obama’s connections to ACORN.
Before news outlets reported Obama worked as an ACORN trainer in 1992, the website said, “Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.”
The website later revised their “fact” to say: “Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.”
The conservative leaning blog Gateway Pundit published archived screenshots of the Fight the Smears site showing the discrepancy.
As a presidential candidate Obama has extensive ties to the group currently being accused of voter registration fraud in 11 states. He is the first national candidate ever to hire ACORN for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s campaign paid $800,000 to a subsidiary of the liberally-leaning non-profit Association of Community Organizers for Reform called Citizens Services Incorporated campaign to increase voter turnout, but initially did not properly disclose this information on financial disclosure reports.
The Obama campaign said it hired CSI to do “polling, advance work and staging events” according to reports submitted to the FEC during the Democratic primary. The FEC later said the Obama campaign needed to disclose ACORN was engaging in get out the vote activities last August. At the time the Obama campaign called the mistake a “clerical error.”
Obama sought ACORN’s endorsement in the Democratic primary telling ACORN members, “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.” “Project Vote” is the name ACORN’s voter registration drives are called. Obama worked for Project Vote for a period of roughly seven months in 1992.
ACORN endorsed Obama for president in February 2008.
Before becoming a member of the Illinois State Senate, Obama represented ACORN in a lawsuit to help push for “Motor Voter” laws to make it easier for low-income persons to vote.
Later, as director of the Woods Fund and Chairman of the Board of Chicago Annenberg Challenge Obama helped steer funds to ACORN through various grants.
http://townhall.com/columnists/AmandaCarpenter/2008/10/13/obama_distorts_acorn_ties
ACORN's Rap Sheet
The Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now has compiled an irrefutable record of voter registration fraud in recent elections.
The non-profit is accused of submitting fraudulent voter registration applications in 13 states this election cycle. Seven of those states have already launched investigations into ACORN’s activities.
During the 2006 election cycle, ACORN submitted false applications to election officials in Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington.
Several of their organizers have already landed in jail. Seven ACORN workers were indicted for voter registration fraud in Washington last year for submitting nearly 3,400 fraudulent forms in King and Pierce County, which included applications for “Veronica Mars” and the deceased Army Ranger and NFL player Pat Tillman. Three of the workers eventually pled guilty and ACORN was ordered to pay a $25,000 settlement fee.
After the 2004 election, two former ACORN workers were convicted of perjury for submitting false voter registration forms in Denver, Colorado.
But ACORN continues to submit fraudulent voter applications.
A prosecutor in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County interviewed two witnesses who were harassed by ACORN officials on Monday. A 19-year old named Freddie Johnson said ACORN officials convinced him to register to vote 73 times. “They would come up with a sob story when they needed a signature,” Johnson told the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Monday.
Christopher Buckley, a Domino’s pizza delivery driver, also witnessed to the board. He said ACORN workers told him, “I could help them hold onto a job” by signing multiple registration forms.
State and federal authorities in Nevada announced they were launching a task force to investigate voter registration fraud in Clark County last week. Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax told the Las Vegas Review-Journal he believes ACORN has submitted somewhere between 2,000-3,000 fraudulent applications a week, some of which have included forms for the entire starting line-up of the Dallas Cowboys.
Officials in Bridgeport, Connecticut say ACORN has cost their county thousands of dollars in overtime because their workers have been forced to sift through ACORN’s false applications. ACORN fired a worker in Seminole County, Florida after the group admitted filing fraudulent registration forms.
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Article submission:
Palin’s Kind of Patriotism
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times
Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.
Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”
I can understand someone saying that the government has no business bailing out the financial system, but I can’t understand someone arguing that we should do that but not pay for it with taxes. I can understand someone saying we have no business in Iraq, but I can’t understand someone who advocates staying in Iraq until “victory” declaring that paying taxes to fund that is not patriotic.
How in the world can conservative commentators write with a straight face that this woman should be vice president of the United States? Do these people understand what serious trouble our country is in right now?
We are in the middle of an economic perfect storm, and we don’t know how much worse it’s going to get. People all over the world are hoarding cash, and no bank feels that it can fully trust anyone it is doing business with anywhere in the world. Did you notice that the government of Iceland just seized the country’s second-largest bank and today is begging Russia for a $5 billion loan to stave off “national bankruptcy.” What does that say? It tells you that financial globalization has gone so much farther and faster than regulatory institutions could govern it. Our crisis could bankrupt Iceland! Who knew?
And we have not yet even felt the full economic brunt here. I fear we may be at that moment just before the tsunami hits — when the birds take flight and the insects stop chirping because their acute senses can feel what is coming before humans can. At this moment, only good governance can save us. I am not sure that this crisis will end without every government in every major economy guaranteeing the creditworthiness of every financial institution it regulates. That may be the only way to get lending going again. Organizing something that big and complex will take some really smart governance and seasoned leadership.
Whether or not I agree with John McCain, he is of presidential timber. But putting the country in the position where a total novice like Sarah Palin could be asked to steer us through possibly the most serious economic crisis of our lives is flat out reckless. It is the opposite of conservative.
And please don’t tell me she will hire smart advisers. What happens when her two smartest advisers disagree?
And please also don’t tell me she is an “energy expert.” She is an energy expert exactly the same way the king of Saudi Arabia is an energy expert — by accident of residence. Palin happens to be governor of the Saudi Arabia of America — Alaska — and the only energy expertise she has is the same as the king of Saudi Arabia’s. It’s about how the windfall profits from the oil in their respective kingdoms should be divided between the oil companies and the people.
At least the king of Saudi Arabia, in advocating “drill baby drill,” is serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. My problem with Palin is that she is also serving his country’s interests — by prolonging America’s dependence on oil. That’s not patriotic. Patriotic is offering a plan to build our economy — not by tax cuts or punching more holes in the ground, but by empowering more Americans to work in productive and innovative jobs. If Palin has that kind of a plan, I haven’t heard it.
What's the big deal with ACORN?
They hire people by the hour to register people; some people make up phony cards out of laziness, and fake cards end up being turned in. They register hundreds of thousands of people, and there are bound to be lazy workers that phony up cards.
By law, even if they know cards are fake, they have to turn them in. Does anyone even know what percent of the cards they turn in are phony? Is it .01%?
Republicans are just setting the stage for the legal fight they're going to try if the election is close, but they needn't bother; they're going to get STOMPED this election!
Same old liberal BS. They disgrace the most basic of our rights with voter fraud. Just totally unbelievable!
ACORN is under indictment in 15 states for massive voter fraud! They have registered people multiple times in multiple states. They have registered the entire Dallas Cowboys football team in three states. In California they registered 3,245 homeless people, and 4,677 felons. In Iowa out of 3490 new registrations submitted in one community, 3482 were found to be false and illegal. They are taxpayer funded, and they are stealing your vote.
Obama, first said he had nothing to do with ACORN, he had never worked for ACORN, now that that has been proven false, he says he just defended them in one case, after being caught in that lie, he now says nothing about ACORN.
He was their lawyer, he was a trainer for them, he was an organizer for them, and just last month, his campaign paid ACORN $820,000 to get out the vote.
When questioned about the $820,000, he first said it was for staging and lighting, when caught in that lie, he said it was for "get out the vote efforts".
Well, ACORN gets out the vote illegally! And Obama is a liar.
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