A few days ago I highlighted the connections between Barack Obama and ACORN, the group infamously known for two things:
1. Lawsuits that blackmailed banks and other financial institutions into making untold amounts of bad loans, a practice that fed the cancer underpinning the current market crisis.
2. Massive voter fraud in key election battleground states.
Barack Obama used to work for ACORN, filed at least one lawsuit on behalf of ACORN, and gave $800,000 from his campaign to ACORN. Yeah, some skeptics say, but really how connected are they?
Compliments of Elmumfo – by way of Okie Campaigns – we are treated to further enlightening of what Obama thinks of ACORN:
In December of 2007, Obama told ACORN activists: “…but let me even say, before I get inaugurated, during the transition, we’re gonna be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We’re gonna be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America.”
And here’s the video:
Middle-of-the-road voters in this election are looking for the lesser of two evils. John McCain fits the bill.
You betcha that Osama will be the most anti-second amendment
president in US history.
Since Osama is a pathological liar, he will tell you one thing to
get your vote and then turn around and do the opposite.
Folks, this is a one shot deal. Ask yourself just how many times Osama lied to you?
He will surprise the masses and put anti-second amendment
judges and even get the democrats to pass stricker gun laws
that would make it impossible or too expensive to own one.
Watch, he will sign whatever treaty the UN has on guns and
gun ownership that will strip all guns from us and even void
our second amendment.
If that’s the chance you want to take with him, than don’t
complaint when they come after your guns.
You know as well as I do that Osama has a track record against the second amendment.
So you won’t be publishing my comments about ACORN and the long, unsuccessful history of Republican attempts to find wrong-doing where it doesn’t exist? So much for fair and balanced, eh? Stick with that “blame the poor folks” strategy, but don’t try and pretend the Republican party isn’t all about class warfare.
4th tries the charm?
Ben, you’re a young member of the vast right wing conspiracy, so let me help you out here by providing some – intentionally or not – missing institutional memory (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/223436.php ):
“The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don’t remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to.”
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re the confused in this case, and not the scammer.
There is fraud going on, but it’s not voter fraud:
“This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won’t count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there’s very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.”
Marshall goes on to remind us that all those US Attorney’s the Bush administration fired a few years back were working on trying to find any evidence of *actual* voter fraud , and their inability to find any actual evidence is what led to their firings.
I give up, your comment moderation tools win. They won’t allow a substantive discussion to occur.
(last try to get past your malfunctioning moderation tools)
So, I encourage you to ask McCain to ask these questions – for some reason, he hasn’t raised them in their previous meetings. If they’re the important issues his campaign seems to present them as when they’re safely cocooned in a friendly crowd, I’m sure he thinks they’re important enough to ask Obama face to face. If not, there’s only two possibilities – he doesn’t think they’re actual issues of concern and is just using them to whip up the haters left in the Republican coalition, or he’s a coward. Which is it?
Good work carrying water for your friends on the Left, Matt. Yes, all the investigations into fraud charges are part of a grand conspiracy. And chronically Lefty blogger Talking Points Memo proves it!
You might want to at least see what the investigations find first.
And 5 comments? Wow, you must be more than a little concerned.
And of course, CNN is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/10/021768.php
Ben, there were five comments because your comment moderation has some unspoken limit which I was only able to suss out by experimentation. It also sporadically decides it will or will not allow HTML or anything that looks like a URL. It has nothing to do with my degree of concern over the imaginary plague of voter fraud the Republican Party suddenly gets concerned about whenever it looks like they might lose a race.
“Yes, all the investigations into fraud charges are part of a grand conspiracy”
Please provide citations for actual successful prosecutions of voter fraud. Good luck – here’s a hint, the scandalously inappropriate firing of US Attorneys by the Bush administration back in 2006 was at least partially due to their inability to successfully prosecute such cases, inexorably targeted by the inappropriately political appointees within the DOJ at close races in which the Democratic candidate won. Until you can demonstrate that an actual crime occured, this is all an imaginary problem designed to disenfranchise (the long-running goal of ACORN criticism), and now scapegoat low-income minorities in order to fire up the conservative base angry about the Bush economy. It’s shameful.
“And of course, CNN is part of the vast right-wing conspiracy:”
Voter registration fraud is not voter fraud. That’s the key point that you’re hoping folks don’t understand. None of those bad registrations will result in votes being cast.
Moreover, ACORN is required by law in most states to submit all the voter registration forms they collect, no matter the content (in Colorado, for example, C.R.S. 1-2-703):
“(3) (a) A voter registration drive organizer that willfully fails to deliver a voter registration application to the proper county clerk and recorder within the time prescribed by section 1-2-702 (2)
shall be punished by a fine not to exceed fifty dollars for each business day of violation.
(b) A voter registration drive organizer that has been fined three times or more under paragraph (a) of this subsection (3) for failure to deliver a voter registration application to the proper county clerk and recorder in the manner and time prescribed by section 1-2-702 (2) shall be punished by an additional fine not to exceed one thousand dollars.
(c) A voter registration drive organizer that intentionally fails to deliver a voter registration application to the proper county clerk and recorder in the manner and time prescribed by section 1-2-702 (2) shall be punished by a fine not to exceed five thousand dollars. ”
ACORN has stated that they specifically flag those applications they think are fraudulent, and in some cases, these same applications have been in attacks against them.
It’s entirely bogus.
Oh, and while we’re discussing bogus things, Obama never worked for ACORN in any capacity other than as a lawyer working on a DOJ “Motor Voter” lawsuit against the state of Illinois.
Just keep throwing out random objections until one of them sticks. It wouldn’t take you long to find the truth and Obama’s ongoing attempts to cover the truth and rewrite history:
http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/7203
http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/7231
Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes was quoted as saying:
“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.”
But go ahead, keep your head in the sand, Matt. Imagine that CNN has joined a vast right-wing conspiracy and that Obama has little to do with ACORN. Perhaps you should start asking yourself what it means that Obama keeps getting caught in so many lies and having to rewrite history to cover up.
Project VOTE is not ACORN. They are completely separate organization who happen to work on many of the same issues – ensuring poor and minority citizens have a vote – and in several cases have worked together. Is it ACORN or poor minorities voting that you have an objection to?
And, as I’ve pointed out, ACORN has done nothing wrong – no voter fraud was committed, and the few cases of voter registration fraud that were prosecuted were done so with ACORN’s assistance and active cooperation – so what would it matter of Obama *had* worked for them? Do you just object to poor minorities being enfranchised? Desperate times call for desperate class war, eh?
Were you aware that McCain was the keynote speaker at an ACORN Immigration Reform rally in 2006? That’s a real double-whammy for you there, huh? He wanted to make *more* poor minorities citizens and even let them vote! As Michelle Malkin pointed out when apprised of this fact:
““I’ll rely on people to judge me by the company that I keep,†McCain said in February.
That’s not working out so well now, is it?”
Since you like to act as Michelle’s stenographer lately, I’ll expect a new post on this topic in the near future.
An interesting factoid on your alma mater that could shed some light on the discussion:
HIllsdale College Student Body Profile
Total Enrollment: 1,326
Female: 52.34%
Out of State: 59%
Native American: 0%
Asian: 0%
African-American: 0%
Hispanic: 0%
Caucasian: 0%
Funny how Hillsdale spends so much time on their website talking about how they started out as an anti-abolitionist school back in the 1800’s. It’s almost exactly like the Republican party trumpeting Abe Lincoln as one of their own, as they do everything they can 150 years later to ensure poor minorities have a hard time voting.
From Wikipedia’s entry on Hillsdale:
“Hillsdale College’s commitment to non-discrimination again came under fire in the 1970s following the enactment of affirmative action legislation. Because some of its students were receiving federal loans, the federal government declared it could require Hillsdale College to submit Assurance of Compliance forms mandated by Title IX as a condition of the continued receipt of federal financial assistance by two hundred Hillsdale students. Hillsdale refused compliance on the grounds that its own policies were less discriminatory than those the federal government would impose. Hillsdale also contended that it was not required to comply because it was a private school not receiving federal aid. However, the federal government argued that although the school was not funded directly, some students were receiving federal aid.”
Funny, if Hillsdale’s policies were less discriminatory, you’d think there might be some number larger than 0 reflected above.
Great work going way off topic to bring my alma mater into the discussion. You write:
“Funny, if Hillsdale’s policies were less discriminatory, you’d think there might be some number larger than 0 reflected above.”
What … that Hillsdale reports 0% Caucasians? Yeah, as I recall, there weren’t many of us white folks there … hmm. A real gem of a find you just made. Why not go visit the campus yourself?
The reason all the racial/ethnic categories are listed as 0% is because the school doesn’t ask for racial self-identification on application forms and doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race. So, thanks for bringing that up.
But maybe you could be more explicit about what point you are trying to insinuate? Because you aren’t going to shut me down by falsely smearing me with a racist brush.
Wake up, Matt, and consider that you just might be blinded by your narrow ideology.
(And if you want me to be an apologist for everything John McCain has done, try again. While I support him, I do so faute de mieux. But the fact that McCain spoke at an ACORN immigration rally hardly compares in degree to Obama’s ties to the group.)
And one more point I missed … Hillsdale started out as an abolitionist school, not as an “anti-abolitionist school” … I’m sure it was just another typographical mistake on your part.
“The reason all the racial/ethnic categories are listed as 0% is because the school doesn’t ask for racial self-identification on application forms and doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race. So, thanks for bringing that up.”
Well, apparently I missed that, apologies for not understanding how committed Hillsdale is to non-discrimination. So, as HIllsdale doesn’t report any of this data, perhaps you can share your anecdotal thoughts on the racial diversity of Hillsdale’s population?
We could also let folks judge the diversity of Hillsdale with their own eyes and draw their own conclusions.
The reason I bring all of this up is because I’m trying to understand how Republicans can repeatedly get so exercised about voter registration fraud flagged and reported by ACORN, and yet have no comment on deliberate Republican voter registration fraud – Arizonan Republican fixture Nathan Sproul is alleged to have screened out or torn up thousands of Democratic voter registrations fraudulently gathered by his organization in swing states, and was paid millions by the RNC and was even invited to the White House Christmas Party after the election. As ACORN primarily registers low income, largely minority voters, you have to wonder what the motivation for all this lopsided concern is.
Is it all just political posturing? Out of 2380 delegates to the RNC, only 36 were black. Clearly there is very little political downside for the Republican party in demonizing minority groups that aren’t going to vote for them. I just hope the Republican Party understands the fires it is stoking. I’m not sure what’s more disturbing in that video, the guy with the monkey, or the fact that the other folks in line seem to think it’s amusing.
It is liberals who tend to be pre-possessed with one’s racial identity. Way to go on the Hillsdale website and find what you could have found out by simply asking. Are you alleging discrimination based on race? What is it? Or do you merely count heads by the color of the skin to play some other sort of game?
As far as Nathan Sproul goes, the reason I don’t write about it is:
1) The story is 4 years old
2) It was an allegation that as far as I can tell has never been substantiated
3) Lefties harp on it enough themselves
Are you suggesting the RNC institute racial quotas? What are you insinuating about the 36 black delegates? You act as if it’s some kind of deep mystery that blacks overwhelmingly tend to vote Democrat. However, I somehow don’t think you are interested in a prolonged debate or discussion on the history of racial/ethnic voting patterns.
You are the one making this a racial issue as a way to excuse bad behavior. I don’t care if ACORN’s imaginary registrations are of white, black, brown, yellow, red, or whatever color people. Fraud is fraud.
Matt, you are really working hard to cut and paste together a bunch of things that just show how incoherent your defense of Barack Obama & his ties to ACORN is.
There is no bad behavior on the part of ACORN. I’ll repeat. There is no bad behavior on the part of ACORN. The Bush Department of Justice spent five years trying to find anything to charge them with and couldn’t – the end result being honest US Attorney’s fired by partisan appointees for not making up crimes that didn’t exist.
The voter fraud that has been committed independently by ACORN employees was reported to authorities *by* ACORN. They are legally obligated to turn in all registration forms, including those they think are fraudulent, which they flag as such.
Moreover, you’re either confused or misleading in pretending that voter registration fraud *is* voter fraud. They are two different things and have no relation whatsoever to each other. No matter how many times I register to vote under different names, I can only vote under a name I have ID for. If I use fake identities to vote under false voter registration, then I’ve committed a criminal act, not ACORN. I understand the Republican party thinks those inclined to listen to their arguments and looking for a socially acceptable excuse to vote against Obama will elide over this fact and seize on them as if they were the same. I’ll assume you’re smart enough to know the difference and are just attempting to mislead.
“2) It was an allegation that as far as I can tell has never been substantiated”
And of course, neither have any of the charges against ACORN.
“There is no bad behavior on the part of ACORN. I’ll repeat. There is no bad behavior on the part of ACORN.”
Keep repeating the mantra to make it true in your mind. First off, I find it hard to believe that you would cite the Bush administration’s incompetence as an excuse for bad behavior. Because I’m certain none of this evidence is real:
http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org/acorn.pdf
I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence, though. And that I’m a racist for bringing it up.
From now on, I will be more precise and use the term “voter registration fraud” – as if that makes the fraud more palatable. Whatever works in your world, I guess.
Anyone can file a lawsuit. You’ll excuse me if I take allegations from an organization that employs Ken Blackwell with a grain of salt the size of the state of Ohio.
I’ll give him this though, he is an expert on partisan voter disenfranchisement. Did you know he had 16 election-related lawsuits filed against him? By your logic here, that makes him 16 times guilty!
Let me know when they’re found guilty. I’ll not hold my breath.
Let me make an analogy for you so you can get it clear in your head.
Voter registration fraud is like someone buying a gun under false pretenses or without proper background checks. The act of buying the gun doesn’t kill anyone.
Voter fraud is if that person kills someone with the gun.
They are completely different crimes on completely different scales.
Curious, so is it OK to say that a potential security flaw in electronic voting machines is like someone buying a gun under false pretenses or without proper background checks? I mean, after all, it was never proven anyone exploited the potential security flaws to alter results.
The thing is, for Democrats, just the potential for fraud was good enough to charge the election was stolen. But now the shoe is on the other foot and now you’re demanding proof of actual voter fraud. Potential is no longer the standard of proof.
“Curious, so is it OK to say that a potential security flaw in electronic voting machines is like someone buying a gun under false pretenses or without proper background checks? I mean, after all, it was never proven anyone exploited the potential security flaws to alter results.”
No, that would be like a gun with a faulty safety. Cmon now, keep up. A voting machine that has the possibility of switching votes has the potential for voter fraud, the crime you all are accusing ACORN of. Voter registration fraud does not increase the chance of voter fraud in the slightest. And before you say it does, please lay out the scenario where it would.