ACORN Voter registration

CNN is actually looking into this? That's surprising...wonder how long they'll do so...

Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN

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

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

This came from Obama's own Fight The Smears website.

But I've found info all over the internet that seems to contradict that.

Amazing, isn't it? I just heard a mother interviewed on the news...whose 7 year old daughter was supposedly registered to vote by ACORN. Last night, they interviewed local college students who said they were approached by ACORN representatives to register, then when they said they were voting for McCain, they were cursed.

Lera, Acorn and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge were pretty tight when Obama was part of CAC, according to everything I've read.

Besides, this news video does say that THIS TIME Obama has not paid Acorn to register voters, but he has in the past. I found a figure online that says he paid them $800,000 to register voters in the past.

But I've found info all over the internet that seems to contradict that.

And we all know, if it's on the internet, it must be true.

Learn the facts.

I also read where some of these bogus registrations are getting through in Ohio and a ten year old boy was called for jury duty!

"And we all know, if it's on the internet, it must be true."
Princess Spanky Pants (The Real, Original, Heather T), Oct 13, 2008, 3:25pm EDT

I look and read a lot of different things from both sides and try to make an informed decision from there.

Where do you get your info, Spanky Pants?

I think they get federal funds too; our tax dollars? Why....?
I don't know, but it doesn't seem right that the people/states that have to accept these forms get dumped on at the last minute either?

And......

How is this a post. CNN investigates...

Okay what did they find out????

Was there supposed to be a link here or something??

Your commentors gave more info.

According to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 8/22/08

"U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat's campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports."

Sorry Jennifer
Most browsers highlight the link. I have made it more obvious.

YAWN

More static

It's the economy, stupid.

Go to www.factcheck.org and www.snopes.com

I saw the CNN Investigates report and it did say the Obama campaign paid one of the subsidiaries of ACORN $800,000 for registering voters during the primaries. I don't belittle Obama because he made such a decision in that ACORN does a lot more than register voters. I have worked with them on a number of issues and found them a fine organization. It seems that which ever "organization" is "hired" to get people registered runs into problems the same as ACORN does. They have had long term issues with potential voter fraud in the St Louis area. I had a neighbor who did some canvassing for them and found lots of people wanted to be registerd but refused to put pertinant data on the cards. She was being paid an hourly rate but had a daily number of registrations to get in. That might be part of the problem. Some just cannot deal with quotas. But then on the other hand one does not need to work for ACORN to turn in created or false voter registration cards. Within the last couple years or so some officilas in East St Louis went to prison for voter fraud as did some workers for another agency in St Louis.

I agree they should have better trained people and pay them fo each after has been validated or not pay...then we will have better results.

Carla
Could you be more specific? I am not sure what I should be looking for at Fact Check or Snopes.

I couldn't find anything on ACORN at either site (Fact Check or Snopes). Obama worked for Project Vote, which is a subsidiary group of ACORN. They share offices in 2 cities, including DC, but consider themselves a "separate" group. That's one tie, and I think there's another, more tenuous relationship, but it escapes me at the moment.

The Obama campaign has not hired ACORN or any outside group to support the general election field efforts. During the primaries the campaign hired a company called CSI for several weeks of get-out-the-vote work. The campaign has not hired CSI or ACORN for the general election

Sen. Obama has built an unprecedented 50-state campaign. We’re running an unprecedented ground operation that is contacting voters and putting new states in play. Working with the state Democratic Party organizations, we’re running a voter contact and registration program that has put a slew of traditionally red states in play. We’re investing enough resources to do so without the help of outside groups.

On allegations of an Obama working for ACORN in the past:

· Obama was never an employee of ACORN. The organization never hired him to be an organizer or a trainer.


· As an attorney, Senator Obama successfully challenged Governor Edgar to enforce the federal Motor Voter law, making sure Illinois residents could vote as required by law.


· There were many other plaintiffs in that case, including the Department of Justice, the League of Women Voters of Illinois, and LULAC.

Remember, Sandy, your Obama voted for the war and then thought he would vote against "funding" to make a political statement. Clear to me he plays both sides of the street - a true Politician.

His ties to terrorist groups is long and deep.

Here's "ACORN" and Obama's connection.

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/16130/

We have Stanley Kurtz on the phone. He writes regularly for publications like the National Review, Weekly Standard, has a Ph.D. from Harvard, also is in the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

But as I say, Glenn, I haven't been focused on that lawsuit as I have for Obama's general support for ACORN. And ACORN, of course, was not just in that particular suit but in general was running a campaign for years against Chicago area banks trying to intimidate them essentially into making high-risk loans to customer with poor credit.

...ACORN is a group of community organizers, probably the most militant group of community organizers. ACORN grew out of something called the National Welfare Rights League which was another militant group in the Sixties. They used to flood into welfare offices, kind of shut them down with protests and demand a great expansion of welfare coverage. And in recent decades that has morphed into ACORN.

And ACORN leaders see themselves as unreconstructed far leftist, unafraid to use radical and militant tactics. They follow Saul Alinsky's direct action, which is another name for these intimidation tactics.

...For example, if ACORN wants a bank to start making these high-risk loans, they might break into the office of a banker and flood it with protesters and basically scare the heck out of the guy trying to get him to change the bank's loan policy.

They will even go and protest at the homes of bankers, scare their families. They'll flood protesters into the lobby of a bank, scare the customers away and, of course, in that way intimidate the banks into doing what they want.

And so ACORN uses these Alinsky-ite intimidation tactics. Of course, those are tactics that were studied by Obama, and Obama has had a very close relationship with ACORN for many, many years.

...aul Alinsky, Glenn, was really the man who created this notion of being a community organizer. This was back in the Thirties and Forties, and he wrote a series of books in which he was very unashamed about saying, hey, I'm a radical.

One of the famous ones was called Rules for Radicals.

And Obama really became a student of Alinsky's work, an expert on it, learning his notions of power, his notions of organizing, and it was Alinsky who originated this idea of what he calls direct action, which was this use of intimidation tactics intentionally militant and scary, both to intimidate politicians and business leaders into doing what these radical groups wanted and also frankly as a kind of organizing tactic because going out and confronting and intimidating people is very exciting and gets a lot of members into your organization.

So Obama became a student of all this. And as I was saying earlier, after his initial stint of training the personal staff of this Madeline Talbott who was an expert in this direction action intimidation stuff, when he came back to Chicago from law school, Talbott had him doing leadership training seminars for ACORN.

Now, we don't know whether he was focusing on these direct action tactics, but he was certainly giving a lot of training to the up and coming leadership of ACORN and these were essentially, you could say the officers in the army that Madeline Talbott was setting out against these banks to try to force them to make these high-risk loans.

They were getting a lot of training from Barack Obama

Well, back in 1995 Bill Ayers who, of course, is notorious as one of the founders of the Weather Underground and himself a Weather Underground terrorist in the Sixties who helped to bomb the Pentagon and he and his comrades planned the bombing of the Capitol and other bombings again that were used to intimidate the families of federal prosecutors who were moving against groups like the Black Panthers and such.

So Bill Ayers, very notorious along with his wife Bernardine Dohrn who was another major leader of the Weather Underground terrorist organization. Bill Ayers, he went on the lamb after a decade or two and finally resurfaced and became a professor of education and people say that Bill Ayers reformed himself, but the truth is he never repudiated any of his bombings and he never repudiated his philosophy.

And actually if you read his education work, you'll see it's extremely radical. It's based on the idea that the United States is an intrinsically racist and oppressive country. Essentially it's a close cousin of Jeremiah Wright's philosophy. And Bill Ayers created an education philosophy that was centered around teaching students to resist America's racist and oppressive.

GLENN: Right. It explains why Barack Obama didn't hear this from his pastor because he's used to hearing it. He thinks that's normal. He hearsay this a lot. He's surrounded by poem who think this way. Agree?

KURTZ: That's absolutely right. And Barack Obama, we don't know how many, if any, education books by Ayers Obama read, but we know that he read and recommended publicly in the Chicago Tribune a book on juvenile justice by Bill Ayers which was very radical which embodied many of these ideas and which included a lot about education.

So Obama was very aware of this in reality, and Bill Ayers, when he heard in late 1994 that a very well-to-do Republican philanthropist named Walter Annenberg had decided to give $500 million to different groups around the country to improve education in America's cities, as soon as Bill Ayers heard that, he wrote a grant proposal and succeeded in winning $50 million from this conservative philanthropist.

Of course, this is a great example of how radical professors are often able to capture money from moderate or conservative donors without their realizing what's going on. And so he gets this $50 million to be used on a 2:1 basis to get matching funds. So in the end this foundation that Bill Ayers creates gets about $150 million.

And when Ayers gets this grant, they set up a foundation and someone has to be chosen as chairman of the board and lo and behold, who gets chosen but Barack Obama.

"Remember, Sandy, your Obama voted for the war and then thought he would vote against "funding" to make a political statement. Clear to me he plays both sides of the street - a true Politician."

Sorry, false on both counts. Obama NEVER voted for the war. That's his campaign speil - how could you have missed it? He voted once out of a ton of times against funding, but only because the real funding bill was vetoed by the President (yes, the President and John McCain voted against funding the troops, go figure). BTW, the one out of a ton bill that Obama voted against in protest was passed, so no funds were withheld. If it had been in danger of not passing he would have voted for it to ensure that our troops did receive the funding.

The rest of the stuff in your comment has already been refuted in depth elsewhere, so isn't worth any more effort. Needless to say the Republican talking points seem to be taken as fact by those who want to believe that somehow Obama is some terrorist type.

Thanks, David.

David, where was Obama when the first vote for the war took place?
I say, if he voted against it, that would have been my choice. We went there under false pretense, just like we did with the illegal "bailout" bill. Thousands of calls, over 92% against the bill. They added more pork and re-voted. they also added more intimidation and threats. Obama and McCain both voted for this, as well as FISA, Patriot Act, and on and on.

Their "bailout scheme" is NOT working, because all the other globalists are not falling in line.

Global Finance Made Simple
Saturday, 11 October, 2008 11:22 PM
Received from a friend.
**********
From Amandala, Belize 's leading newspaper
(Note: You must go offshore, if you want to know the facts as they are not being covered in the American media.)

The Prime Minister of Iceland, Geir Haarde, sent shivers through the global financial system when he asserted that Iceland can not, and will not pay the foreign liabilities of its banking sector and that the interests of Iceland will have first priority.

Yesterday, Haarde told a press conference:

"The point is this. The total indebtedness is such that there is no way that the Icelandic population can take responsibility for the debt these private companies have incurred.
It happens everyday in bankruptcies, that some are burnt."

British PM Gordon Brown calls Iceland 's behavior "totally
unacceptable" and warned of legal action to recover the US $ 1.74 billion loss in Iceland , especially after the Icelandic government this week passed this week emergency legislation to deal with the banking collapse.

Unlike the British or U.S. plans, this was not a bank "rescue" plan but legislation that gave the government the authority to seize any bank or financial company,=2
0put it through a bankruptcy or other procedure that would put the interests of the Icelandic nation over that of the banks.

Next door to us, Mexico 's peso lost 24% of its value against the US dollar, making its imports of wheat, corn, beans, milk, and rice 24% more expensive.

The Peasant Association reported yesterday that remittances for the month of September fell 29.6%, causing panic in Mexico . Remittances from the U.S. are Mexico 's second highest earner of foreign exchange.

On the other side of the world, the financial meltdown that started on Wall Street is now hurting farmers in Siberia , threatening a Russian agricultural revival that the United Nations says is needed to help avert a world food
shortage.

Cash-strapped Russian banks have cut funding to a sector already eeling from plummeting grain prices and soaring borrowing costs. The
collapse of the Russian stock market has closed off the other main money
source for Russian agricultural companies, which produce nine percent of the world's wheat.

The speculators are not fools. The efforts of US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his Plunge Protection Team are being overwhelmed, as the largest volume of financial bets in world history crushes their bailout efforts, which are unprecedented in scope, but are nevertheless puny in comparison to the "tumor" they are trying to save.

Driving all of this is the global "casino" known as the
derivatives markets, a market which dwarfs the world's mortgage, bond and stock markets -combined.

While mortgages, stocks and bonds are measured in the trillions of dollars, the derivatives market is measured in quadrillions, or thousands oftrillions of dollars.

Today the Derivative Association said that the size of the over-the-counter market is about $ 675 trillion. Putting a number to the size of the derivatives market is virtually impossible, but putting a numberto the value of the derivatives market is easy — zero!

Derivatives were the great financial innovation of the Greenspan era, in which casino-style bets on the price movements of currencies, bonds and stocks replaced the ownership of those items as a way to make money.

The bets thus placed soon far outstripped the levels of the markets upon which they were nominally based, as derivatives became the prime source of "profit" for the financial markets.

That these "profits" were entirely fictitious, a fancy form of casino-floor betting chips (securitization), was considered irrelevant as long as the market was growing and the "funny
money" was pouring in. Last year August, however, the global financial system died, sealing the doom of the derivatives game.

Today, the collapse of the derivatives market is crushing the international financial system, as the speculators fight to save the fictitious "profits" through 20th largest bail-out attempt in history.

According to the most recent data for June 30, 2008 released today by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the three largest American bank holding companies, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Citicorp, had current outstanding derivatives contracts totaling $179.4 trillion dollars.
The three banks combined have total assets of just under $5.6 trillion!

Now do you see why the bail-out is not working? And can not work — there isn't enough money in the world to cover all these virtual bets, and the efforts by the central banks to print that money, is fueling a hyperinflationary bomb which will wipe out not only the remnants of the global financial system, but also the governments, national economies and the means of existence for most of the world's population.

Hyperinflation will destroy the value of the US dollar itself, wiping out pensions, savings, bank accounts, stock portfolios, and all other monetary values, bankrupting households, businesses and governments, leaving all the nation-states
destroyed, and, effectively, no longer nation-states.

It is essential that the bailout of the derivatives bubble be stopped immediately. All derivatives trades should be declared null and void, and wiped off the books of the speculators. Any financial instrument containing a derivative should also be declared null and void, and wiped off the books.

This unregulated, insanely leveraged casino should be shut down, and all claims arising from derivatives bets nullified, as Iceland has done.

http://www.amandala.com.bz/index.php?id=7552

(Note: Regulation is not the problem in US financial markets it
is criminality, fraud and ENFORCEMENT of the law. Wall Streets
"policeman" have all been paid off or worse, warned off, while the most criminal actions are being completed.

There is no transparency or a willingness to open the books, it's all hide, obfuscate, lie, delay. It's corrupted to the core and how will anyone ever trust the place again?... they won't.)