This page is in mixed order -- there's some
chronological stuff and other items are in order of discovery.
Obama 's ACORN
ACORN will shape my agenda (02:36)
The
same ACORN that is continually in trouble for voter fraud, the same ACORN
that has pushed the subprime mortgage crisis that has destabilized our economy,
is, in the words of Barack Obama, going to shape our national agenda.
Stanley Kurtz
asks if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in
plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association
with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the
largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with
MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. ACORN is at
least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet
because ACORN works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national
profile is lower. ACORN likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack
Obama.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN),
describes itself as a community-based organization that advocates
for low and moderate income families by working on neighborhood safety,
health care and other social issues.
ACORN has over 350,000 members and more than 850 neighborhood chapters
in over 100 cities across the United States, as well as in Argentina,
Canada, Mexico, and Peru. ACORN was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke
and Gary Delgado. Maude Hurd has been National President of ACORN
since 1990.
ACORN agitates for better housing and wages for the poor, more community
development investment from banks and governments, and better public
schools. ACORN pursues these goals through intimidation,
demonstration, negotiation, legislation, and voter participation.
They do the Alinsky.
ACORN is made up of several legally distinct parts including local
non-profits, a national lobbying organization and the ACORN Housing
Corporation. ACORN lies when it says it is non-partisan, and
always aligned with the Democratic Party on policy.
ACORN is again up to its eyeballs if a formal program of voter
registration fraud in
their registration programs in a dozen battleground states, but in this
election cycle, to a degree never before seen. This year, its
voter registration efforts that have resulted in criminal investigations
in a dozen states.
ACORN's real
genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill.
According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI),
ACORN has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance,
ACORN's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax
money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American
Environmental Justice Project received 100% of its revenue from
government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the ACORN
Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars
from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff
an "affordable housing" provision into the $700 billion bank rescue
package that would have let politicians give even more to ACORN.
All this money gives ACORN the ability to pursue its other great hobby:
electing liberals. ACORN is spending $16 million this year to
register new Democrats and is already boasting it has put 1.3 million
new voters on the rolls. The big question is how many of these
registrations are real.
ACORN’s "Communist Manifesto"
As a public service here is a copy of ACORN’s so-called
People’s Platform, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
As is noted, this version was updated in 1990, which is just two years
before Mr. Obama began to work for them via Project Vote and as a
trainer for the "power" seminars.
The People’s Platform was conceived at ACORN’s 1978 Memphis Convention
and ratified at the 1979 St. Louis Convention. In 1990, in celebration
of ACORN’s twentieth anniversary, ACORN members around the country met
in order to revise and update the platform. The resulting document was
approved by the Executive Committee of the Association board and
ratified by acclamation at the 1990 Chicago Convention.
People’s Platform Preamble
We stand for a People’s Platform, as old as our country, and as young as
our dreams. We come before our nation, not to petition with hat in hand,
but to rise as one people and demand.
We have waited and watched. We have hoped and helped. We have sweated
and suffered. We have often believed. We have frequently followed.
But we have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our
labor. Our patience has been abused; our experience misused. Our silence
has been seen as support. Our struggle has been ignored.
Enough is enough. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s
door. We will not be meek, but mighty. We will not starve on past
promises, but feast on future dreams.
We are an uncommon people. We are the majority, forged from all
minorities. We are the masses of many, not the forces of few. We will
continue our fight until the American way is just one way, until we have
shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom.
This is not a simple vision, but a detailed plan.
Our plan is to build an American reality from the American rhetoric, to
deliver a piece of the present and the fruits of the future to every
man, to every woman, to every family.
We demand our birthright: the chance to be rich, the right to be free.
Obama in his own words clearly acknowledged his close
association with ACORN, his acceptance of ACORN's radical methodology
and his appreciation for the support of the organization in his run for
the presidency.
ACORN also played an instrumental role in urging
lenders to extend home mortgages to subprime borrowers, pushing charges
against banks in the 1980s that their home lending practices amounted to
"red-lining," in violation of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act,
according to a
report published by Stan
Liebowitz in the New York Post.
In 1994,
lawyer Obama, a graduate of
Harvard Law School then fresh from his Project Vote! experience,
represented ACORN in the
Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Federal Savings
Bank case, in which ACORN pressed for Citibank to make more loans to
marginally qualified African-American applicants "in a race neutral
way."
After obtaining a settlement in the Citibank
litigation, ACORN used its
subsidiary organization
ACORN Housing, a nationwide
organization with offices in more than 30 U.S. cities, to push the
group's radical agenda to get subprime home buyers mortgages under the
most favorable terms possible.
The meltdown in subprime home mortgages has been
widely regarded as a major contributing cause of the current recession
that officially began in December 2008 after two consecutive quarters of
negative growth in gross domestic product, or GDP.
During 2008, the Obama presidential campaign attempted
to distance the candidate from ACORN voter fraud by arguing that the
U.S. Department of Justice was on the same side of the Citibank case as
was lawyer Obama, reflecting the Clinton Administration's
determination to expand
homeownership among the poor.
"Barack Obama strongly condemns voter registration
fraud or any other breach of election law by any party or group," Ben
LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, said in a statement,. as
reported by the New York Times.
While the Obama administration's $787 economic
stimulus package did not funnel federal funds to ACORN by name, the bill
signed by the president
included some $2 billion for
non-profit "neighborhood stabilization" non-governmental organizations.
Some of those funds could be allocated to ACORN to buy abandoned or
foreclosed homes in impoverished
neighborhoods, with the intent
to
rehabilitate them for resale or
rental.
Votes
Pushed to meet
daily quotas and bullied by bosses if they didn't, Ohio ACORN
workers faked voter registrations, signed up people more than once, and
even paid off registrants to keep from being fired, its canvassers told
The Post.
"Every day, there was pressure on us. Every single day," said
Teshika Elder, a Cleveland single mom of three who worked for ACORN this
summer.
"We had meetings every morning where they'd go over your quota; they'd
yell at you if you were low," said Elder, 21. "They'd sit us down
and say if you didn't do better, they'd suspend you. They'd say,
'Try harder next time,' [and] if you didn't get it, you'd be fired."
Desperate canvassers sometimes resorted to trading cigarettes, cash and
food in exchange for registrations, according to Elder and two other
former ACORN workers, Jaymes Sanford, 18, and Selvin Cunningham, 23.
Some voters were signed up more than once, and said that worried -- or
lazy -- canvassers sometimes filled out bogus cards.
The three workers were all fired after they and a dozen other canvassers
were identified in a Cuyahoga County Election Board probe as having
turned in multiple registrations for the same voters.
The board, which estimates it got more than 8,700 suspect cards -- with
multiple registrations, bad addresses or phony information -- from ACORN
has turned the matter over to local prosecutors.
"It was just little stuff -- a dollar, a cigarette -- given to people so
that they'd register," said Sanford, a former team leader.
"People are scared of not making their quotas," he said. "I didn't
do it, but it's the way it worked."
Obama 's ACORN
ACORN voter fraud is so flagrant, that even ABC
News has to
report what Obama's old associates are up to, and when Obama denies
this relationship, or calls it a distraction, which he will, remember
this quote:
"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." -- Barack Obama, Speech to
ACORN, November 2007
Not only that, but Obama, who has publicly
endorsed ACORN,
paid them at least $800,000 for its voter registration efforts --
Obama paid for the voter registration fraud.
Obama's association with ACORN goes wayyy back. He was ACORN's
attorney in the "Motor Voter" case. He was also deeply
involved in organizing "Project VOTE" in
1992. All of these activities had a single purpose -- to destroy
the integrity of the voting system, and Obama has been at it for years,
and years.
Obama’s long relationship to ACORN has led many of its members to serve as
the volunteer shock troops of Obama’s political campaigns.
Obama 's ACORN
Investors Business Daily
asks what Obama knows about the epidemic of voter fraud in ACORN,
and it’s not an unfair question. Not only has he publicly endorsed
ACORN, Obama has paid them at least $800,000 for their voter fraud
services, an amount that he didn’t immediately disclose until
pressed.
Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president,
$800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to
accurately report. They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as
payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance
work."
The campaign initially told the Federal Election Commission this money
was for "staging, sound, lighting." It later admitted the cash was
to get out the vote. ACORN has responded in kind, with their
voter-registration efforts that have resulted in criminal investigations
in more than a dozen states.
Obama,
Ayers and
ACORN
ACORN 's Obama
Audacity of Hypocrisy
reports that while
Obama’s connection with the ACORN has not gone entirely unreported, it
has not been fully explained. Most media background pieces simply
note Obama’s involvement in a 1995 lawsuit on behalf of ACORN.
Obama’s own website, as well as most major media, fail to reveal the
full depth and extent of his relationship with the organization.
Attempts to hide evidence of Obama’s involvement with ACORN have
included wiping the web clean of potentially damaging articles that had
appeared, and were previously publicly accessible. Unfortunately,
those behind the attempted cover-up failed to realize that in today’s
day and age, nothing disappears forever. There also exists another
layer of the web, the hidden web, which is full of information included
in proprietary scholarly databases where these very same "missing"
articles can be easily uncovered.
Obama’s campaign website states:
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in
any other capacity.
Is that really a FACT, or just another lie? Let’s take a look at a
quote from a 2004 article -- Case Study: Chicago -- The Barack Obama
Campaign --
written Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN Leader, which was published in
the journal Social Policy. Did we mention that Social Policy
recently pulled this particular article from their website, while
leaving links to all articles up?
"Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the
Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to
run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it
possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year.
Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign
(ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).
Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to
run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly
developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office.
Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first
campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in
1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."
Not only does Foulkes boast of Obama’s ACORN leadership training, but
also makes it clear that Obama’s post-law school organizing of "Project
VOTE" in 1992 was undertaken in direct partnership with ACORN. The
tie between Project VOTE and ACORN is also something that Obama and
others have attempted to disprove in recent weeks as ACORN has come
under fire for allegations of voter registration fraud.
As recently as March 2008, the Los Angeles Times also made reference to
Barack Obama’s involvement with ACORN:
"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and
initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so
impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff."
(LA Times, March 2, 2008)
Here's another view of Obama conducting leadership
training seminars for the ACORN shakedown artists!
Project
Vote
Obama worked as executive director of ACORN’s
voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other
community organizers on Chicago’s South Side, Obama conducted the
voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the
Senate that year.
The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner
Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of
ACORN to implement the federal "Motor Voter" law, which the GOP governor
at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued,
presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.
Obama downplays his ties to ACORN, and his campaign denies coordinating
with ACORN to register voters.
For a man with a short track record, Barack Obama spends a lot of time
disassociating himself from political partners. He spent most of
the campaign misrepresenting his years-long working relationship with
William Ayers, the unrepentant domestic terrorist of the Weather
Underground and a man who still wants the overthrow of the capitalist
economic system in the US. Now he wants to hide his work over two
decades with an organization that should be looking at the business end
of a federal RICO prosecution.
ACORN admits
Project Vote is part of ACORN and Michelle Malkin
outlines the scope of their criminal behavior.
In 1992, Senator Obama
served
as Illinois Executive Director of PROJECT VOTE!, an effort that added
over 100,000 newly registered voters in Illinois. He later
received the 1995 Legal Eagle Award from IVI-IPO for his work in
bringing Illinois into compliance with the National Voter Registration
Act (Motor-Voter).
By 2001, Obama was on the board of several organizations including the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge, where he was chairman, the Joyce
Foundation, the Woods Fund of Chicago, the Center for Neighborhood
Technology, the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the
Law, and Public Allies.
Project Vote is the
voter-mobilization arm of
ACORN. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose professed
purpose is to carry out "non-partisan" voter registration drives; to
counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting
rights -- focusing on the
rights of the poor and the "disenfranchised."
Project Vote's major
program
areas include the following:
Voter Participation Program: "[Since its
inception], Project Vote has helped
more than 4 million Americans in low-income and minority neighborhoods
register to vote, including 1.1 million in 2003-04. In the same period,
Project Vote reached more than 2.3 million low-income and minority
voters to educate them about the importance of voting. Our
methodology is based on face-to-face contact between voters and trusted
community messengers, generally a representative of a local community
organization."
Election
Administration Program: "[This program]
encompasses every aspect of election implementation, from voter
registration application design to voting booth placement to vote
counting and everything in between. Working in neighborhoods
nationwide, Project Vote documents voting problems and works closely
with elections officials, secretaries of state, and state legislators to
enact proactive, pragmatic solutions. A central component of our
work is the inclusion of low-income and minority voters through the
involvement of our community partners."
NVRA Implementation Project: "[This]
partnership between Project Vote, ACORN and Demos aims to improve voter
registration services at public assistance agencies. Section 7 of the
National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to offer voter
registration to public assistance clients upon application,
recertification or renewal, and change of addresses. The Project
... offers technical assistance." The National Voting Rights Institute
and the Lawyers Committee
for Civil Rights Under Law have recently become co-administrators of
this initiative.
The stated purpose of Project Vote is to work within the system, using
conventional voter mobilization drives and litigation to secure the
rights of minority and low-income voters under the U.S. Constitution.
However, the organization's actions indicate that its true agenda is to
overwhelm, paralyze, and discredit the voting system through fraud,
protests, propaganda and vexatious litigation. In this respect,
Project Vote is following the so-called "crisis strategy" or
Cloward-Piven Strategy pioneered during the Sixties by
Columbia University political scientists Richard Cloward and Frances
Fox Piven.
As a follow-up to their effort to collapse the welfare system in the
1960s, in 1983 Cloward and Piven founded the Human Service Employee
Registration, Voting and Education campaign Fund (Human SERVE Fund).
Its objective, they said, was to increase voter turnout among the poor.
But unlike Project Vote, Human SERVE did not rely on conventional
door-to-door canvassing, or even on the more effective method of
registering people in food stamp and unemployment lines which Project
Vote had pioneered. Rather, Human SERVE lobbied government
officials directly to enact laws and regulations directing public
employees to offer to register citizens applying for services at
government agencies. This effort realized its grandest ambition on
May 20, 1993, when President
Clinton signed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 --
commonly called the "Motor-Voter Act." It ordered every state to
provide resources enabling people to register to vote at state agencies,
at the same time they applied for drivers' licenses, welfare, Medicaid
and disability benefits. In June 2000, Cloward and Piven dissolved
Human SERVE, leaving to ACORNand Project Vote the task of making the Motor Voter
"crisis strategy" work at the polls. It did, in fact,
fuel an explosion of fraudulent voters.
In 1996, Project Vote became involved in
Teamstergate -- a
criminal conspiracy to embezzle funds from the Teamster treasury,
launder them through outside organizations, and then siphon them back
into the re-election war chest of Teamsters President Ron Carey in 1996.
According to trial testimony, the operation was approved by high-level
White House and
Democratic Party officials.
A persistent pattern of lawlessness has followed ACORN/Project Vote
activists over the years. For example, one Project Vote contractor
-- a single mother of three -- forged 400 voter registration cards in
1998. "Some of the addresses listed on these applications were
traced to vacant lots, boarded-up buildings, abandoned buildings, and
nonexistent house numbers," notes a reportby the
Employment Policies Institute. Former Miami-Dade field director for
ACORN's 2004 voter mobilization Mac Stuart has testified that fraud is
standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers -- behavior that is
not only tolerated but encouraged by supervisors. "[T]he voter
registration project has been operating illegally since it started,"
Stuart told investigators.
In the 2004 election cycle, ACORN and Project Vote canvassers fanned out
by the thousands across battleground states, turning up repeatedly in
press reports and on police blotters in connection with fraudulent
petitioning and voter registration. Canvassers were caught or
accused of filing registrations in duplicate, filing them for deceased
or imaginary people or, in some cases, destroying large numbers of
Republican registrations.
Obama 's ACORN
This
video shows Obama at a December 2007 community organizer forum.
He says that he will invite ACORN to "shape the agenda" during the
transition period and he will allow them to be actively involved during
the first 100 days of his administration.
Got that?
The people who helped facilitate the mortgage mess and the people who
have been engaging in voter fraud for years will play a direct role in
an Obama Administration.
Stealing
CT
The State Elections Enforcement Commission has opened an
investigation into allegations that a community activist
organization submitted at least 10 false voter-registration cards in
Bridgeport.
One of the phony registrations was for a 7-year-old girl in the Marina
Village housing complex, whose age was listed as 27 on the voter card.
Another registration came from a man who later said he couldn’t have
completed the voter card purported to be his because he was in jail on
the date of the document.
Joseph J. Borges, the city’s Republican registrar of voters, filed the
complaint with state officials after months of local complaints on the
tactics that ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now, was regularly filing applications that were ruled
ineligible.
In response, a Bridgeport leader of ACORN on Tuesday night called the
charges "part of a concerted and coordinated campaign by conservatives
and the GOP to attack and discredit ACORN."
Elections board Director Sally LaSota said more than 12,000 voter
registration forms are waiting to be processed from recent days before
the county knows how many potential voters are ready to cast ballots in
the Nov. 4 general election.
"It may be a record," she said.
Porter County has processed at least 3,500 voter applications since the
spring primary in May, officials there said.
However, the large influx has brought new controversies.
LaSota said Monday representatives of ACORN, dropped off 2,000 new voter
applications last week in Lake County.
"About 1,100 are no good," she said.
This is one of those news
stories you can hardly believe. In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN
turned in 5,000 new registrations. The authorities there started
reviewing them, and quit after they found that the first 2,100 were
all fraudulent. The mind boggles: ACORN turns in thousands of
new registrations, and not a single one represents a legitimate voter. (video)
Stealing
MI
The Michigan Secretary of State
told the press in September that ACORN had submitted "a sizeable
number of duplicate and fraudulent applications."
Stealing
MO
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.
Jess Ordower, Midwest director of ACORN, said his group hasn’t done any
registrations in Kansas City since late August. He said he was told
three weeks ago by election officials that there were only about 135
questionable cards — 85 of them duplicates.
"They keep telling different people different things," he said. "They
gave us a list of 130, then told someone else it was 1,000."
FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton said the agency has been in contact with
elections officials about potential voter fraud and plans to
investigate.
Stealing
NV
Earlier this month, Nevada's Democratic Secretary of State Ross
Miller requested a raid on ACORN's offices, following
complaints of false names and fictional addresses (including the
starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys). Nevada's Clark County Registrar
of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw rampant fraud in 2,000 to 3,000
applications ACORN submitted weekly.
Stealing
OH
Teenager Freddie Johnson
said he was offered smokes and dollar bills to
fill out voter registration cards.
And now the Cuyahoga County Elections Board has 73
cards with Johnson's name on them.
Johnson and another prolific registrant were
subpoenaed to testify at a meeting Monday as the
Elections Board continued its look at possible fraud
by ACORN, a national organization that tries to get
low- and moderate-income people to register.
ACORN's methods have drawn interest in a number of
states this presidential election year.
Johnson, 19, said he mostly was trying to help ACORN
workers who begged him to sign up because they
needed to keep their jobs.
"They'd come up with a sob story why they needed the
signature," said Johnson, of Garfield Heights.
An initial
review found that about 200,000 newly registered
voters reported information that did not match
motor-vehicle or Social Security records.
Close to one in every three newly registered Ohio
voters will end up on court-ordered lists being sent
to county election boards because they have some
discrepancy in their records, an elections spokesman
said Wednesday.
ACORN leaders have acknowledged that workers paid by
the hour were given quotas to fill.
Stealing
PA
A retired Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice says that she is "not
confident we can get a fair election" in the state come November.
Justice Sandra Newman, accompanied by Dauphin County District Attorney
Edward Marsico and Pennsylvania Republican State Chairman Robert
Gleason, expressed her concerns at a Harrisburg press conference this
morning. A thick document replete with photo copies of phony
registrations and aerial shots of vacant lots used as "addresses" for
"voters" was handed out to journalists.
Gleason was even more explicit.
"Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN,
submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election
Board" with 57, 435 rejected for faulty information. "Most of
these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake
social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent
signatures, addresses that do not exist, and duplicate registrations. In
one case, a man was registered to vote more than 15 times since the
Primary election."
According to city
officials, close to 8,000 applications turned in by ACORN are
problematic, including the 1,500 already sent to the U.S. Attorney, and
officials expect the number to climb. Greg Voigt says so far his
office is catching them, making sure no bad registrations lead to bad
votes, but admits he has limited staff.
ACORN has said it is actually identifying these problematic
registrations in advance and trying to notify authorities. In
Philadelphia, ACORN said it flagged, I guess, 5,000 applications before
the officials found them.
Not according to the city officials, not true. Officials say that
ACORN came in with a bundle of 1,100 that they thought were suspect.
Actually, it turned out a couple of hundred of them were actually good
voter registration cards that they processed and sent voter cards out
to. So, there are a lot of disparities between the number that
ACORN is getting and what city officials checking the actual records are
getting, and that number is only going to grow as they continue to
process more of these for this election.
"Voter fraud is no longer just a Philadelphia problem," Gleason said,
with ACORN targeting key counties across the state. Counties
specifically cited included:
Milwaukee County prosecutors Tuesday
charged a convicted felon with illegally registering himself and
others to vote between his conviction and his sentencing.
The complaint accuses Adam Mucklin, 22, of registering to vote in June,
after he was convicted of battery in April, and after a judge told him
he couldn’t vote as a convicted felon. Later in June, Mucklin signed up
to work as a paid voter registrar for the Community Voters Project,
something else he couldn’t do as a convicted felon, the complaint says.
A recent opinion from the staff of the state Government Accountability
Board says no one convicted of a felony can ever serve as a registrar, a
stricter standard than the previous interpretation that registrars only
had to be eligible to vote.
Under Wisconsin law, felons can’t vote until after they have completed
their sentences and are off probation or parole. For Mucklin, that would
not be until Jan. 10, 2012, the complaint notes.
Obama’s
most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all
along?
Stanley Kurtz provides an in-depth report, showing Obama's intimate and
long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now (ACORN), the largest radical group in America.
If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d
know what I was talking about. ACORN is at least as radical as
these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because ACORN
works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile
is lower. ACORN likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does
Barack Obama.
To understand the nature and extent of ACORN’s radicalism, an excellent
place to begin is Sol Stern’s 2003 City Journal article, "ACORN’s
Nutty Regime for Cities" or for a shorter but helpful piece, try
Steven Malanga’s "ACORN
Squash."
Mortgage
Meltdown
TO
discoverthe roots of to day's economic crisis, consider a
tale from 1995.
That March, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was scheduled to address a
meeting of county commissioners at the Washington Hilton. But, first,
some 500 protesters from the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now (ACORN) poured into the ballroom from both the kitchen and
the main entrance.
Hotel staffers who tried to block them were quickly overwhelmed by
demonstrators chanting, "Nuke Newt!" and "We want Newt!" Jamming the
aisles, carrying bullhorns and taunting the assembled county
commissioners, demonstrators swiftly took over the head table and
commandeered the microphone, sending two members of Congress scurrying.
The demonstrators' target, Gingrich, hadn't yet arrived -- and his
speech was cancelled. When the cancellation was announced, ACORN's foot
soldiers cheered.
Editorial writers from Little Rock to Buffalo condemned ACORN's action
as an affront to both civility and freedom of speech. Editorialists also
pointed out that the "spending cuts" the protesters railed against were
imaginary - Gingrich proposed merely to slow the growth in some welfare
programs and turn control back to the states.
Yet ACORN had only just begun. Two days later, 50 to 100 of the same
protesters hit their main target - a House Banking subcommittee
considering changes to the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that allows
groups like ACORN to force banks into making high-risk loans to
low-credit customers.
The CRA's ostensible purpose is to prevent banks from discriminating
against minorities. But Rep. Marge Roukema (R-NJ), who chaired the
subcommittee, was worried that charges of discrimination had become an
excuse for lowering credit standards. She warned that new,
Democrat-proposed CRA regulations could amount to an illegal quota
system.
Sources point to Obama as a possible starting point
to the domino affect that lead to the housing crises we are now
facing. Check the provided links and judge for yourself.
"In a 1995 case known as
Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, Obama and his fellow attorneys
charged that
Citibank was making too few loans to black applicants and
won the case. As one commentator
noted in May 2008, legal "successes" such
as this were probably responsible for the sub-prime mortgage crisis
of 2007 AND 2008. That is, banks were not loaning to blacks whose
credit was poor. When the law forced them to lend money anyway, the
inevitable collapse occurred."
Obama had a part in the lawsuit that started the
government on a course of forcing lenders to give more loans to
those who had poor credit. Lending companies were forced to
come up with imaginative ways of fulfilling the quota that was
required. Sub-prime lending was born as a result. The
mortgage crises was forecast by many who were able to look beyond
the quota.
Mortgage
Meltdown
Social Engineering or Affirmative Action Lending, whichever, it
is/was the shovel that dug the hole we now find our selves in. (video)
Mortgage
Meltdown
The Mortgage Meltdown? Yup, ACORN has had a hand in that, too.
*The CCC had plenty to do with the subprime mortgage mess.
Here’s an article from the former general counsel of the CCC that
you all might find interesting!
Why Fannie and Freddie should get into subprime lending
The author of this article served as Assistant Secretary of HUD
under Andrew Cuomo and wrote the first "affordable housing goals"
for Fannie and Freddie that sowed the first seeds of the current
disaster. He worked for the CCC before and after he was at HUD.
And here is one example from an 'ACORN' search of the CCC web
site of the overlap of CCC and ACORN:
Monday, Mar 10, 2008
Former Women’s Union President Assumes New Managing Director
Position
Washington, DC- The Board and Staff of the Center for Community
Change is pleased to announce the appointment of Mary Lassen to the
new position of Managing Director of the organization. Ms. Lassen
has stepped down as the Board Chair of Center for Community Change
and assumed her new role March 10, 2008.
Ms. Lassen is an experienced community organizer working at
ACORN, where she served as Head Organizer in Missouri and Texas, and
at the Committee for Boston Public Housing. She also has significant
experience in local and state policy advocacy, partnership building,
and communications. For three decades, Ms. Lassen has had extensive
experience managing organizations, building teams, and developing
staff and leaders. She is the former President of The Women’s Union
in Boston and served as Senior Fellow at the Boston Foundation where
she worked on strategies to improve education and economic
opportunities in Massachusetts’ community colleges.
ACORN and Project Vote are being
investigated for
widespread electoral crimes in America’s closely contended states --
potentially millions of
fraudulent voter registrations and the
destruction of those of Republican voters. The door is open
for fraudulent votes and election theft.
They have driven intimidated citizens into early
voting,
telling them how to vote.
Obama has funneled
$800,000 to ACORN for their 2008 General Election operations and
then lied about it.
Obama
organized Project Vote activities in Chicago, in 1992 and has
trained ACORN operators.
Obama’s campaign in its Web site has tried to
deny these facts.
Obama as ACORN’s lawyer,
sued Illinois in 1993, to make voter registration laxer.
Obama as ACORN’s lawyer,
sued Citibank in 1994 (Buycks-Roberson case, above),
to force them into giving subprime loans to home buyers with poor credit
ratings, setting the stage for the mortgage meltdown.
Obama promised in 2007 to let ACORN and related groups
"help
us shape the agenda" of his presidency, by meeting with them after
the Nov. 4 election. What is their agenda? "Helping low
income people?" In some ways, at
least temporarily, but see below.
ACORN’s tactical plan is from
Rules for Radicals, by the Marxist,
Saul Alinsky. Synopsis: the ends justify the means --
ridicule, lie, cheat -- be disruptive, or use stealth to gain power.
Hold the virtuous to exaggerated and impossible standards, while not
playing by their rules. Sell "change."
And the result of that change is an enforced "egalitarian" (Marxist)
society.
OBAMA has
taught these "rules." He and Michelle Obama
use
Alinsky rhetoric.
ACORN founders’ strategy has been the
Cloward-Piven Strategy -- to overcommit government, growing it past
the point of sustainability by
causing crises. This, while developing an organized
proletariat of dependent classes and applying them to
disrupt society and revolt against American freedoms. All, to
ring in the new "egalitarian" (neo-Marxist)
state. That would be a big "change."
Cloward & Piven, plus ACORN’s leaders pushed to
greatly expand America’s welfare roles. But welfare reform in
the 1990's reversed that trend. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward-Piven
for an "economic
sabotage" that lead to the 1975
bankruptcy of New York City.
ACORN was a
driving force for the revised Community Reinvestment Act of 1995,
pushing subprime mortgages through a very
eager Fannie Mae. This allowed ACORN to
pressure mortgagors to grant bad loans to bad risk homebuyers in the
name of helping the poor. Many of the poor were
hurt further, while Fannie Mae prospered. Their personnel gave
Obama‘s campaign
$126,349. By contrast,
John McCain attempted reform, but leftist congressmen
shouted down reforms -- leftist congressmen now found in a cloud of
scandal.
ACORN is
funded in part by wealthy, anti-American radicals such as
George Soros -- and by
our tax dollars. Their Web site claims a membership of over
400,000.
From
Little
Acorns
The lines of evidence now converge: the founder of
ACORN was Wade Rathke, who, like William Ayers, was a member of the
Students for a Democratic Society. The Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), the student organization founded in 1960 as part of the
New Left, was the gateway drug to the Weather Underground. In the
early sixties, many in the SDS reluctantly supported Lyndon Johnson for
president in 1964, and grainy black-and-white pictures show clean-cut
men and women registering southern blacks to vote. Tom Hayden was
amongst this group. But that was then.
By 1969, their Great Society liberalism had been
co-opted by Marxists, Maoists, Spartacists, and other assorted
revolutionary groups. They were no longer interested in change,
but overthrowing the government. It was during this time that Wade
Rathke first came into contact with Bill Ayers.
Much has been made of Obama’s questionable judgment in
befriending and working closely with unrepentant terrorist William
Ayers. Regardless of what Obama says, his political career was
launched in Ayers’ home, Ayers served with him on Woods Fund, and
promoted him to head the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
The founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke, like Ayers, is a
disciple of Saul Alinsky. Working for ACORN was an important step
in Obama’s political career.
An article by Professor David Walls directly connects
Rathke’s ACORN to Alinsky, ACORN’s mission of pressuring banks to issue
risky mortgages, and the alliance between ACORN and unions:
ACORN began in 1970 as a spin-off from the National
Welfare Rights Organization, founded by George Wiley, who enlisted civil
rights workers and trained them in an Alinsky-influenced program at
Syracuse University. From a base in Arkansas, Wade Rathke and Gary
Delgado developed a replicable model of forming membership organizations
and developing leaders in low-income neighborhoods -- relying
substantially on young middle-class staff working for subsistence wages.
ACORN has established local housing corporations to rehabilitate homes,
and has successfully pressured banks to provide mortgages and home
improvement loans in low-income communities. ACORN has led "living
wage" campaigns in many cities, and has forged alliances with labor
unions.
But ACORN isn’t just Alinsky-inspired. It’s a
direct off-shoot of his revolutionary agenda:
Around 1970 several national networks began to
coalesce and develop systematic and distinctive approaches to community
organizing. These include the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF),
ACORN, Citizen Action, National People’s Action, PICO, DART, and the
Gamaliel Foundation. Each was indebted, in greater or lesser
degree, to Alinsky and his early organizing programs in Chicago through
IAF.
Citizen Action, mentioned above, is not "officially"
connected to ACORN. But Citizen Action, like Rathke’s ACORN and
Ayers’ radical education projects, was founded by another member of the
Alinsky-SDS milieu, Heather Booth. But it’s not just SDS and the
City of Chicago that binds this group. As the screen capture below
shows, Heather Booth’s husband was both a member of the SDS and
Alinski’s [sic] Industrial Areas Foundation.
The moderator of the second presidential debate, Tom Brokaw,
is involved with a George Soros-Funded Charity that funds ACORN.
Brokaw sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that,
according to its website, targets poverty in New York City by applying
"sound investment principles to philanthropy." The foundation
awarded ACORN a $456,000 grant in 2003 and a $365,000 grant in 2004.
The Soros Fund Charitable Foundation, as in George Soros, a major
bankroller of the left, gave the Robin Hood Foundation a $9,859,453
community development grant in 2000.
The Robin Hood board includes Marian Wright Edelman, president of one of
Hillary Clinton's favorite activist groups, the Children's Defense Fund.
Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and actress Gwyneth Paltrow are
also members of the board.
As of Dec. 31, 2006, the Robin Hood Foundation had assets of
$288,520,098 and income of $159,688,394 (source: guidestar.org).
Brokaw has given at least $75,000 to the foundation. (source: "The
Emperors of Benevolence," New York Magazine, November 5, 2007)
Tax Status
Georgia State Sen. Jeff Mullis, a Republican from Chickamauga, has
filed
legislation urging the IRS to revoke the tax exempt status from the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, more commonly
known as ACORN, after numerous reports that the organization falsified
voter records leading up to the 2008 elections.
"An organization
that chooses to undermine the integrity of our nation’s election process
should not be entitled to tax exemption benefits," said Sen. Mullis.
"The excessive amount of evidence against ACORN engaging in fraudulent
activity demands that the organization to be held accountable for taking
advantage of hardworking taxpayers, and I call on the IRS to ensure that
justice is executed in this case."
ACORN To Get $$$
On January 11th (below),
commenting on Obama stimulus plan, I sarcastically wrote, "I can
understand 549,00 'temporary programs' jobs. The ACORN people will need
work now that they're not busy corrupting the election process."
Yesterday, I read this:
Looks
like the infamous ACORN (Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now) that was caught up in voter
fraud in 2008 will be in the running to get some funding (pages 72-73 of
the report.) The bill provides for $10 million for the SHOP
program. The funding will provide competitively awarded grants to
national and regional nonprofit housing organizations to develop or
rehabilitate low-income housing.
There is plenty of more funding
that will no doubt find its way to ACORN coffers like the $1 billion for
Community Development Block Grants or the $4.1 billion for the
Neighborhood Stabilization Program.
ACORN is working hard for
their money, this "non-partisan" organization is already campaigning for
the stimulus:
For three weeks now, ACORN members have been
aggressively pursuing a campaign to pass a bold, progressive Economic
Recovery package in the new Congress. Working closely with allies
like US Action, AFSCME, and the larger Americans United for Change
coalition, ACORN members are taking a major role in building the
coalition to pass this recovery package, and to create the context for
it to be both stronger and more directly responsive to the situation
facing working families across this country.
ACORN and Obama: Together Again
Michelle Malkin
reports that Obama's old friends at the
ACORN are launching a new campaign of their own: the "Home Savers"
campaign. What a coinky-dinky, huh? As with most of the
bully tactics of the radical left-wing group, it ain't gonna be pretty.
They are the shock troops on the streets doing the dirty work while the
Community Organizer-in-Chief keeps his delicate hands clean.
Trumpets ACORN: "On Feb. 19, ACORN members will launch a new tactic in
fighting foreclosures: civil disobedience. Participants in the
ACORN Home Savers campaign nationwide will simply refuse to move out of
foreclosed homes, or in some cases, will move back in. ACORN
homesteaders intend to squat in their homes until a comprehensive,
federal solution for people facing foreclosure is put in place."
Right now, ACORN offices are training these teams of "Home Savers" --
described as "people ready and willing to mobilize on short notice to
defend the homesteaders against attempts to evict them." Yup,
ready, willing and able to mobilize on short notice because they are
either unemployed or employed full time as ACORN shakedown artists.
ACORN's foot soldiers, funded with your tax dollars,
will scream, pound their fists, chain themselves to buildings, padlock
the doors and engage in illegal behavior until they get what they want.
It's a recipe for anarchy. Threatens Baltimore ACORN's Louis
Beverly, who calls himself a "Foreclosure Fighter":
"After
you've used all your legal options, your last resort is civil
disobedience. We're talking about families who have been in their
homes 20 or 30 years. People who are assets in the community, who
look out for the elderly, who have community associations, and these are
the people being kicked out of the community."
Guess who's
encouraging them to defy the law. Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio,
who told them: "Stay in your homes. If the American people,
anybody out there is being foreclosed, don't leave." The housing
bullies will be assisted by left-wing propaganda documentarians at the
Brave New Foundation, headed up by Hollywood lib Robert Greenwald, who
will disseminate sob stories to crank up pressure while Obama pushes his
housing entitlement plan.
ACORN is targeting the following
cities: Tucson, Ariz.; Oakland, Calif.; Los Angeles, Calif.; Contra
Costa County, Calif.; Orlando, Fla.; Baltimore, Md.; New York, N.Y.;
Houston, Texas; San Mateo County, Calif.; Denver, Colo.; Bridgeport,
Conn.; Wilmington, Del.; Broward County, Fla.; Boston, Mass.; Flint,
Mich.; Detroit, Mich.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Raleigh, N.C.; Durham, N.C.;
Albany, N.Y.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Cleveland, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pa.; and
Dallas, Texas.
ACORN has waited three decades for this moment in
the sun. And as Obama promised ACORN members at a forum in
December 2007, "We're going to be calling all of you in to help us shape
the agenda. We're gonna be having meetings all across the country … so
that you have input into the agenda." The moment is nigh.
Prepare for lawlessness.
A
local TV crew was on hand for openly criminal activity by Obama's pals
at ACORN. (VIDEO)
More ACORN and Obama: Together Again
"ACORN and Obama: Together Again" was posted on On 2/20/09,
below. It described how Obama's friends and associates in ACORN
planned to illegally seize foreclosed properties and contained a video
showing ACORN members breaking into a home.
Yesterday, Police in
Baltimore
arrested an ACORN activist who now faces criminal charges for
breaking into a home in southeast Baltimore to protest the foreclosure
crisis sweeping the country.
"This is our house now," ACORN
member Louis Beverly reportedly said after cutting a lock on the front
door with bolt cutters.
Beverly will be charged with
fourth-degree burglary, according to Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for
the Baltimore Police. Attempts to reach his attorney, Justin
Brown, were not immediately successful.
Elsewhere, Pittsburgh
Police Spokeswoman Diane Richard said charges would be filed against any
individual found living in a foreclosed home, whether that individual
had previously lived at the residence or not.
"If someone is
court-ordered to vacate and they do not, it would be trespassing at that
point," Richard said. "What exactly would be charged depends on the
intensity of the violation. It could go all the way up to burglary,
which is a felony."
This
video shows Obama at a December 2007 community organizer forum. He
says that he will invite ACORN to "shape the agenda" during the
transition period and he will allow them to be actively involved during
the first 100 days of his administration.
Well, ACORN is now
involved -- and so are the cops.
And, check out this
video -- Stuart Varney -- chews up ACORN and spits it out.
You’ll recognize Bertha Lewis from her
"By Any Means Necessary" article this weekend at the Huffington
Post.
Obama's Crowd
Michell Malkin
comments on ACORN’s shakedown artists and thugs who occupied a public
school board meeting room to prevent government educators from cutting
costs, firing useless teachers, and dealing with financial realities.
This is now the second "civil
disobedience" campaign waged by the entitlement-mongers.
Our
Community Organizer-in-Chief, who spoke so voluminously yesterday about
education reform, was unavailable for comment…
A school board
meeting turned into a display of civil disobedience Tuesday as about 50
"educators" refused to leave, creating a brief standoff with
police, who refused to make any arrests in the presence of media.
The members of ACORN and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) -- all
wearing bright "red" shirts -- entered the Los Angeles Unified School
District Board of Education meeting on Tuesday afternoon, sat down and
began chanting. The fist represents union, as "many weak fingers
can come together to create a strong fist", and is also used to express
solidarity, generally with oppressed peoples.
Police said the protesters were staging an
illegal occupation of a public building. The district said no arrests
would occur as long as members of media were in building.
UTLA
President A.J. Duffy approached the speakers’ lectern and told the
board, "You know why we’re here. You know I’m not leaving this rostrum.
You know I’m going to keep talking."
As he spoke several teachers
sat on the floor in front of the board and held up signs saying
"Students lose when we lose teachers, No layoffs" as the crowd began
chanting.
Board President Monica Garcia repeatedly asked Duffy to
sit down, but he kept speaking. The microphone was turned off, but Duffy
continued to speak and the chanting continued. Garcia then announced
that the "disturbance has interrupted our meeting to the point where the
orderly conduct of this meeting is not feasible."
ACORN And The Census
The U.S. Census is
supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter
fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year's count, raising concerns
about the politicization of the decennial survey.
The Association
of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
signed on as a
national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist
with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go
door-to-door to count every person in the United States -- currently
believed to be more than 306 million people.
A U.S. Census "sell
sheet," an advertisement used to recruit national partners, says
partnerships with groups like ACORN "play an important role in making
the 2010 Census successful," including by "help[ing] recruit census
workers."
The bureau is currently employing help from more than
250 national partners, including TARGET and the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to assist in the hiring
effort.
But ACORN's partnership with the 2010 Census is worrisome
to lawmakers who say past allegations of fraud should raise concerns
about the organization.
And, remember, Rahm Emanuel is now
in charge of the Census.
We are soooooooo screwed!
ACORN Is A Bad Seed
RottenAcorn reminds us that
something’s rotten in the state of New Mexico, and Ohio, and Michigan,
and Pennsylvania, and Florida, and…
ACORN says it is a community
group, but it is really a multi-million-dollar, multinational
conglomerate. Its political agenda is driven by a relative handful
of anti-corporate activists. ACORN spends millions of dollars to
promote economic policies (like raising the minimum wage), but has
admitted that it doesn't always want to abide by them. ACORN
advocates for workers' rights and runs two unions, but has in the past
fought its own employees' efforts to form a union.
ACORN's
history makes for pretty interesting reading. The Clinton
Administration found that ACORN was misspending government grants
designed to help counsel the poor. Although it seeks minimum wage
increases in cities and states across the country -- ACORN sued the
state of California to get out of paying its own employees the state
minimum wage.
ACORN's practices have corrupted our political
process as well. It has engaged in questionable election
activities for years -- stretching back even to the organization's
founding years in Arkansas. In recent years, as its political
power has increased, so have instances of fraud.
In the past few
years, it has been investigated for election fraud in at least a dozen
states:
AR 1998 A contractor with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote
was arrested for falsifying about 400 voter registration cards.
CO 2005 Two ex-ACORN employees were convicted in Denver of perjury for
submitting false voter registrations.
2004 An ACORN employee
admitted to forging signatures and registering three of her friends to
vote 40 times.
CT 2008 The New York Post reported that ACORN
submitted a voter registration card for a 7-year-old Bridgeport girl.
Another 8,000 cards from the same city will be scrutinized for possible
fraud.
FL 2008 Election officials in Brevard County have given
prosecutors more than 23 suspect registrations from ACORN. The state's
Division of Elections is also investigating complaints in Orange and
Broward Counties.
2004 A Florida Department of Law Enforcement
spokesman said ACORN was “singled out” among suspected voter
registration groups for a 2004 wage initiative because it was “the
common thread” in the agency’s fraud investigations.
IN 2008
Election officials in Indiana have thrown out more than 4,000
ACORN-submitted voter registrations after finding they had identical
handwriting and included the names of many deceased Indianans, and even
the name of a fast food restaurant.
MI 2008 Clerks in Detroit
found a "sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent [voter]
applications" from the Michigan branch of ACORN. Those applications have
been turned over to the U.S. Attorney's office for investigation.
2004 The Detroit Free Press reported that “overzealous or
unscrupulous campaign workers in several Michigan counties are under
investigation for voter-registration fraud, suspected of attempting to
register nonexistent people or forging applications for
already-registered voters.” ACORN-affiliate Project Vote was one of two
groups suspected of turning in the documents.
MO 2008 Nearly 400
ACORN-submitted registrations in Kansas City have been rejected due to
duplication or fake information.
2007 Four ACORN employees were
indicted in Kansas City for charges including identity theft and filing
false registrations during the 2006 election.
2006 Eight ACORN
employees in St. Louis were indicted on federal election fraud charges.
Each of the eight faces up to five years in prison for forging
signatures and submitting false information.
2003 Of 5,379 voter
registration cards ACORN submitted in St. Louis, only 2,013 of those
appeared to be valid. At least 1,000 are believed to be attempts to
register voters illegally.
MN 2004 During a traffic stop, police
found more than 300 voter registration cards in the trunk of a former
ACORN employee, who had violated a legal requirements that registration
cards be submitted to the Secretary of State within 10 days of being
filled out and signed.
NC 2008 County elections officials have
sent suspicious voter registration applications to the state Board of
Elections. Many of the applications had similar or identical names, but
with different addresses or dates of birth.
2004 North Carolina
officials investigated ACORN for submitting fake voter registration
cards.
NM 2008 Prosecutors are investigating more than 1,100
ACORN-submitted voter registration cards after a county clerk found them
to be fraudulent. Many of the cards included duplicate names and
slightly altered personal information.
2005 Four ACORN employees
submitted as many as 3,000 potentially fraudulent signatures on the
group’s Albuquerque ballot initiative. A local sheriff added: “It’s safe
to say the forgery was widespread.”
2004 An ACORN employee
registered a 13-year-old boy to vote. Citing this and other examples,
New Mexico State Representative Joe Thompson stated that ACORN was
“manufacturing voters” throughout New Mexico.
NV 2008 Nevada
state authorities raided ACORN's Las Vegas headquarters as part of a
task force investigation of election fraud. Fraudulent registrations
included players from the Dallas Cowboys.
OH 2008 ACORN
activists gave Ohio residents cash and cigarettes in exchange for
filling out voter registration card, according to the New York Post.
Some voters claim to have registered dozens of times, and one man says
he signed up on 72 cards.
2007 A man in Reynoldsburg was
indicted on two felony counts of illegal voting and false registration,
after being registered by ACORN to vote in two separate counties. 2004 A
grand jury indicted a Columbus ACORN worker for submitting a false
signature and false voter registration form. In Franklin County, two
ACORN workers submitted what the director of the board of election
supervisors called “blatantly false” forms. In Cuyahoga County, ACORN
and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the
highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.
PA 2008
State election officials have thrown out 57,435 voter registrations, the
majority of which were submitted by ACORN. The registrations were thrown
out after officials found "clearly fraudulent" signatures, vacant lots
listed as addresses, and other signs of fraud.
2008 An ACORN
employee in West Reading, PA, was sentenced to up to 23 months in prison
for identity theft and tampering with records. A second ACORN worker
pleaded not guilty to the same charges and is free on $10,000 bail. 2004
Reading’s Director of Elections received calls from numerous individuals
complaining that ACORN employees deliberately put inaccurate information
on their voter registration forms. The Berks County director of
elections said voter fraud was “absolutely out of hand,” and added: “Not
only do we have unintentional duplication of voter registration but we
have blatant duplicate voter registrations.” The Berks County deputy
director of elections added that ACORN was under investigation by the
Department of Justice.
TX 2008 In Harris County, nearly 10,000
ACORN-submitted registrations were found to be invalid, including many
with clearly fraudulent addresses or other personal information. 2008
ACORN turned in the voter registration form of David Young, who told
reporters “The signature is not my signature. It’s not even close.” His
social security number and date of birth were also incorrect.
VA
2005 In 2005, the Virginia State Board of Elections admonished Project
Vote and ACORN for turning in a significant number of faulty voter
registrations. An audit revealed that 83% of sampled registrations that
were rejected for carrying false or questionable information were
submitted by Project Vote. Many of these registrations carried social
security numbers that exist for other people, listed non-existent or
commercial addresses, or were for convicted felons in violation of state
and federal election law.
In a letter to ACORN, the State Board
of Elections reported that 56% of the voter registration applications
ACORN turned in were ineligible. Further, a full 35% were not submitted
in a timely manner, as required by law. The State Board of Elections
also commented on what appeared to be evidence of intentional voter
fraud. "Additionally,” they wrote, “information appears to have been
altered on some applications where information given by the applicant in
one color ink has been scratched through and re-entered in another color
ink. Any alteration of a voter registration application is a Class 5
Felony in accordance with § 24.2-1009 of the Code of Virginia."
WA 2007 Three ACORN employees pleaded guilty, and four more were
charged, in the worst case of voter registration fraud in Washington
state history. More than 2,000 fraudulent voter registration cards were
submitted by the group during a voter registration drive.
WI
2008 At least 33,000 ACORN-submitted registrations in Milwaukee have
been called into question after it was found that the organizations had
been using felons as registration workers, in violation of state
election rules. Two people involved in the ongoing Wisconsin voter fraud
investigation have been charged with felonies.
2004 The district
attorney’s office investigated seven voter registration applications
Project Vote employees filed in the names of people who said the group
never contacted them. Former Project Vote employee Robert Marquise
Blakely told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had not met with any
of the people whose voter registration applications he signed, “an
apparent violation of state law,” according to the paper.
NY Times Spiked Obama-ACORN Story
A lawyer
involved with legal action against Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee
on March 19 The New York Times had
killed a story in October that would
have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama
campaign because it would have been a "a game changer."
Heather
Heidelbaugh, who represented the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee
in the lawsuit against the group, recounted for the committee what she
had been told by a former ACORN worker who had worked in the group’s
Washington, D.C. office. The former worker, Anita Moncrief, told Ms.
Heidelbaugh last October, during the state committee’s litigation
against ACORN, she had been a "confidential informant for several months
to The New York Times reporter, Stephanie Strom."
Ms. Moncrief
had been providing Ms. Strom with information about ACORN’s election
activities. Ms. Strom had written several stories based on information
Ms. Moncrief had given her.
During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh
said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when
she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out
donor list to ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office.
Ms. Moncrief told
Ms. Heidelbaugh the campaign had asked her and her boss to "reach out to
the maxed-out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the
Vote efforts to be run by ACORN."
Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the
congressional panel:
"Upon learning this information and
receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom reported
to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to
kill the story because, and I quote, "it was a game changer."
12,000,000 New Democrats
The acting director
of the U.S. Census Bureau, Thomas Mesenbourg, told CNSNews.com that the
bureau
intends to work with community organizations to make sure every
illegal alien in the United States is counted in the 2010 Census.
The Census is used to apportion the seats in the U.S. House of
Representatives. There are 435 House seats that are divided among the
states in proportion to their population, which is determined by the
decennial census. States with more people get more seats in the U.S.
House.
This means that a state harboring more illegal aliens can
gain more House seats as long as the Census Bureau finds the illegal
aliens and counts them. This also means that the illegal alien
population resident in the United States during a census year has the
potential to alter the regional and philosophical balance of power in
Congress.
When asked whether he intended to maximize the count of
illegal aliens in next year’s census, Mesenburg said: "Our job is to
count everyone that resides in the U.S. -- count them once. So,
certainly that’s our goal to count every individual, every resident
whether they’re documented, undocumented, whether they are citizens or
non-citizens."
He said local community organizations will play a
key role in making sure all illegal immigrants are counted.
"The
local communities are going to have a strong partnership program in each
of the local communities, and we’re going to focus on the hard to count
geographic areas. That typically has been areas with high numbers of
undocumented workers but it’s much more diverse than that," he said.
"So, what we’ll do is we’ll have Census Bureau folks out in those
neighborhoods recruiting community organizations, faith-based
organizations, and local media to get that message out that it’s safe,
it’s easy, and it’s important to file your 2010 Census form," said Mesenbourg.
Ruben Keoseyan, publisher of the newspaper
La Raza,
said the organizations at the press conference have partnered with the
Census Bureau to help undocumented immigrants "come out and register"
for the census.
"This is not just a partnership among the people
that you see here," said Keoseyan. "This is also a partnership
with the Census Bureau because we believe that we can aid in helping
those people come out and register and participate in the census.
It’s a much easier form. It’s going to be in Spanish."
Now you know why Obama moved the
Census to the White House and why Rahm Emanuel is in charge. It's
all part of the Progressive's coup d'état and consolidation of power.
And, if that isn't bad enough, check out this email Pamela Geller
has at
Atlas Shrugs:
From: Rashad al-Dabbagh
Subject: [ArabCalendar] Fw: Jobs with the Census Bureau To:
naap-oc@yahoogroups.com Cc: arabcalendar@yahoogroups.com
Earlier this year,
Obama announced that he was relieving the U.S. Commerce Department of
its responsibility for conducting the census and moving that
responsibility into the White House under the control of his Chief of
Staff, Rahm Emanuel, one of the most corrupt Chicago machine politicians
of all time. However, that decision proved so unpopular that Obama was
forced to reconsider. Instead, he has nominated Univ. of Michigan
professor Robert Groves as director of the census. Groves is a fervent
advocate of statistical sampling, a technique that uses "educated
guesses" to determine population instead of actually counting heads. It
is a technique that is easily manipulated and which often results in the
over-counting of Democratic constituencies.
But, undeterred by
suggestions of political manipulation, the Obama Administration and the
Democratic Party have pushed ahead with plans to open the 2010 census to
massive corruption. For example, news headlines across the country have
announced that the Democrats’ principal vote fraud auxiliary, ACORN,
will "partner" with the federal government to conduct the 2010 census.
Click here
to see what sort of shenanigans we find when Democrats team up with the
likes of ACORN to assist with voter registration and get-out-the-vote
drives?
ACORN is a 350,000-member Democratic Party
auxiliary that the Obama Administration is "partnering" with to count
the U.S. population in the 2010 national census. And lest anyone assume
that the relationship is either new or coincidental, it should be noted
that, during the 2008 campaign, Obama paid ACORN $832,598 to register
new voters, payments for "advance work" that the campaign fraudulently
reported to the Federal Election Commission as being made to a group
called Citizen Services, Inc. The board of directors of ACORN and the
board of directors of Citizen Services are one and the same.
During his years in Chicago as a
practicing lawyer, ACORN was one of Obama’s principal clients. More
recently, several ACORN executives in New Orleans were investigated for
covering up a $1 million embezzlement. They were represented by lawyers
from Michelle Obama's old Chicago law firm.
Speaking for the
Obama Administration, Census Bureau spokesman Scott Levenson has said,
"The Census (Bureau) is a non-political agency and we’re dedicated to an
accurate account (sic)... We have a lot of quality controls in
place to keep any kind of systemic error or fraudulent behavior to
affect (sic) the counts (wink, wink)."
During calendar year 2009 the Census
Bureau will be preparing for the 2010 census... locating and identifying
every residence in every city, town, village, and rural area in the
nation... and in 2010, census enumerators will be visiting every
household, gathering data from individuals who fail to voluntarily
complete and return the census forms that will be mailed to each
household.
Given ACORN’s record of political corruption in
support of the Democratic Party and its candidates, one wonders how many
vacant lots, piles of rubbish, and burned-out buildings will appear on
Census Bureau data bases as occupied residences, and how many fictitious
people will suddenly materialize in Census Bureau tallies as residing in
those places. One also wonders how many families will mysteriously grow
from three members to six or eight, with the names and ages of the "ghost" members being supplied by the ACORN enumerator.
If some
states gain an additional congressional seat, or if some
Republican-leaning suburbs are swallowed up by heavily Democratic urban
congressional districts in the 2011 congressional redistricting, we’ll
know why it happened and we’ll know who is responsible. We’ll know that
Barack Obama and his ACORN "community organizers" have been successful
in corrupting the heretofore incorruptible census system.
In an
April 7, 2009 report published by the Department of Homeland Security,
the Obama Administration has now branded all those who believe in the
sanctity of human life, those who believe that marriage should be
preserved as the union of one man and one woman, those who have served
their country in the armed forces, those who support the 2nd Amendment
right to keep and bear arms, those who oppose opening our borders to
illegal immigration, and those who oppose government policies that would
bury our children and grandchildren under a mountain of debt... as
racists and potential domestic terrorists. What we should all be asking
ourselves is this: "Would such an administration also take overt steps
to bring political benefits to itself and to the Democratic Party by
corrupting the 2010 national census? The answer is yes. We cannot assume
that any action... legal or illegal, ethical or unethical, moral or
immoral, violent or non-violent... is beyond the will and the capacity
of Barack Obama, ACORN, and the Democratic Party.
ACORN Joins With Union
Political activists
who masquerade as non-partisan community organizers have
joined with
organized labor to pressure elected officials into supporting left wing
causes, according to a top analyst with the Capital Research Center
(CRC).
Matthew Vadum, a senior editor and analyst with CRC has
determined that the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now
(ACORN) is best described as a "multi-headed hydra" with over 400,000
member families positioned in 110 cities fiercely opposed to the
capitalist system.
"ACORN claims to be non-partisan but there are
mountains of evidence that show it is flagrantly partisan," Vadum said.
"It celebrates the most left-wing politicians and endorses Democratic
Party candidates. Whenever ACORN is called out for activity that might
violate their tax status, the standard operating procedure is to deny
responsibility and to place the blame on rogue actors. Their network is
deliberately set up to avoid scrutiny and to create confusion."
While the organization’s complicated structure makes is difficult to
determine how many affiliates and subsidiaries are tied in with ACORN’s
vast apparatus, its connection with organized labor, especially the
Service Employees International Union, is well-established, Vadum
observed.
In 2008 SEIU spent over $42 million on independent
expenditures and communications, more than any other group aside from
the Republican and Democratic National Committees, according to
OpenSecrets.org. SEIU’s political action committee (PAC) also
contributed about $2.3 million to candidates in the 2007-2008 cycle,
with 94 percent of its donations going to Democrats.
"ACORN is
designed to keep the left in power and to exert pressure on the
Democratic party to remain as far left as possible," Vadum said. "Right
now President Obama and the congressional Democrats are getting a lot of
grief over card check as it loses support."
Marking Every Front Door In America
Well, now
we
know why ACORN got 5 Billion$ from the Stimulus Bill, and why the
White House took control of the US Census Bureau. A perfect excuse to
start tagging homes in America for the next Census scheduled for 2010,
though it directly violates Sec. 223, Title 13, U.S. Code, Chapter 7,
Subtitle 2 which provides the Fed NO authority to GPS paint your front
door. It is in direct violation of the Constitution and no one is doing
anything to stop it.
ACORN signed on as a national partner with
the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment
of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count
every person in the United States -- currently believed to be more than
306 million people. But the count doesn’t take place until 2010. This is
April 2009.
No imagination is required to think up a whole
laundry list of evil that could be done with a nationwide GPS grid of
coordinate’s markers painted on every private home across the country. But I was having trouble thinking up one good reason for it, even one
legitimate use that would justify what must be a very expensive
undertaking.
According to one of the Census workers, who
spoke
with me on condition of anonymity, they must GPS mark the coordinates "within 40 ft of every front door" in America and they are supposed to
complete that mission nation wide, within 90 days, by the end of July
2009.
The workers were not told why they were GPS marking every front
door. But a supervisor is sent out to follow them door-to-door, to make
certain that no door is left unmarked. Every door will be marked by one
employee, and then checked by a follow-up supervisor.
So, I had
to ask, why?
Why does the Obama administration need or want the
latitude and longitude coordinates for every home in America? Why the
rush to GPS paint every home in the next 90 days? Why must the marker be
within 40 ft of every front door? For what possible purpose does the Fed
need GPS coordinates for every home, and under what authority do they
have the right? Census workers, whom I asked, had the same holy-crap
look on their faces that I had by then.
Best I can tell, the Fed
has NO authority whatsoever, to paint the front door of every private
residence in America. Still, that is exactly what they are doing. Now,
the trillion dollar question is, why?"
Obama’s interest in an
ACORN controlled 2010 Census, for the purpose of redistricting to the
advantage of Democrats before the 2010 mid-term elections, comes as NO
shock from a regime known for their heavy handed Rules for Radicals
political strategies.
But what does this have to do with GPS marking
every home in the country?
ACORN Eligible For $8.5 Billion
After he
reviewed the Obama stimulus bill and the proposed fiscal 2010 budget for
the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Matthew Vadum told the Washington Examiner that ACORN and other left-wing
advocacy groups could have a shot at pocketing up to $8.5 billion this
year.
Here’s how he arrived at the $8.5 billion figure.
The $800 billion-plus stimulus bill, which is now formally known as the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 or Public Law 111-5,
originally set aside $5.2 billion that could flow directly or indirectly
into the coffers of ACORN and its liberal friends. It appears the $5.2
billion was chopped down to $3 billion in the version of the bill that
Obama signed into law on February 17. The $3 billion consists of $2
billion in funds set aside for the redevelopment of abandoned and
foreclosed homes and$1 billion in Community Development Block Grants
(CDBG).
CDBG is good old-fashioned graft. Local politicians of
both parties love CDBG because it is flexible. The program gives them
wide latitude when spending grant money and allows local leaders to use
federal dollars on local projects that they wouldn’t dream of spending
their own local tax dollars on. ACORN loves CDBG because it is adept at
lobbying for CDBG funds.
In addition to the $3 billion available
in the stimulus package, the proposed $47.5 billion HUD budget for the
fiscal year that begins October 1 provides $1 billion for an affordable
housing trust fund and $4.5 billion in CDBG funds that could be funneled
to ACORN indirectly.
Of course ACORN won’t get it all, and given
its history of electoral fraud and racketeering, it shouldn’t get a
penny of federal money.
According to a Washington Examiner
article, ACORN has taken in $53.6 million in federal funding since 1994.
Amazingly, ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson told reporter Kevin Mooney
that his group has "received no significant federal funding."
This is the same ACORN that is
continually in trouble for voter fraud. This is the same ACORN
that has pushed the subprime mortgage crisis that has destabilized our
economy. This is the same ACORN that, in the words of Barack
Obama, "is going to shape our national agenda." (video)
Follow The Money
Wade and Dale Rathke are the
founders of Citizens Consulting, Inc.
(CCI), and they are incredible
organizers. And it was Wade's vision that allowed ACORN to progress to
kind of where it is today. Recently, board members discovered that there
is a lot of money missing.
Now, what the board did at that point of time was that,
once the full board found out about it, they immediately moved to
terminate Wade and Dale, replace them with the two women that were interviewed
by Glen Beck -- Karen and Marcel -- in order to
try to set the record straight and get to the bottom of what happened to
the money.
CCI is the
financial nerve center for ACORN and all of its 250+ entities. If
you really want to try to follow the money, that's why we requested a
forensic examination and financial audit of CCI.
If you're in one
of these organizations and you apply for federal dollars or any kind of
dollars, the money goes there first.
If a a philanthropist wanted
to write a grant for a
local chapter of ACORN, the local ACORN chapter
couldn't get the grant. The grant would be funneled through its
web of organizations to CCI's New Orleans office -- located in an old
funeral home.
Monies are are dispersed from CCI.
CCI says
that they pay a small administrative fee, but the problem is, is without
an audit, no one knows if CCI gets 1 percent, 50 percent, 90
percent -- no one knows.
New York Times Spiked Obama ACORN Corruption Story
Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York
Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day
it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption
allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad.
But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff
reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination
between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a
snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor."
Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety
leveled against ACORN and the Obama campaign.
Flopping
Aces
says that if you are a friend of Obama you need have no
fear of a corruption probe! The congressional ACORN corruption probe has
been disbanded by the "Powers that Be."
Here’s another in what is
fast becoming a series of moves designed to further shield Obama allies
from any accountability before the law:
House Judiciary Committee
Chairman John Conyers Jr. has backed off his plan to investigate
purported wrongdoing by the liberal activist group ACORN, saying "powers
that be" put the kibosh on the idea.
Mr. Conyers, Michigan
Democrat, earlier bucked his party leaders by calling for hearings on
accusations the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now
(ACORN) has committed crimes ranging from voter fraud to a mob-style
"protection" racket.
"The powers that be decided against it,"
Mr. Conyers told The Washington Times as he left the House chambers
Wednesday.
The chairman declined to elaborate, shrugging off
questions about who told him how to run his committee and give the
Democrat-allied group a pass.
's
