(More Voter Fraud) ACORN Registers Mickey Mouse To Vote

Mickey Mouse tried to register to vote in Florida this summer.



Orange County elections officials rejected his application, which was stamped with the logo of the nonprofit group ACORN.

Tow truck driver Newton Bell did register to vote in Orange County this summer. In the hands of ACORN, his paperwork went through without a hitch.

Two cases, two outcomes, each with a connection to ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Nationwide, ACORN is a favorite GOP target for allegations of voter registration fraud this year.

That's not new. Similar complaints followed the 2004 elections. A criminal investigation in Florida found no evidence of fraud. ACORN even has a cameo role in the scandal over the 2006 firings of several U.S. attorneys by the Bush Justice Department.

Under attack again, ACORN leaders defend their work. Often, they say, things are as not simple as they're portrayed.

Take Mickey Mouse.

Yes, that's their logo. But they say their workers routinely scanned all suspicious applications.

"We don't think this card came through our system," said Brian Kettenring, ACORN's head organizer in Florida.

With more than 450,000 member families nationwide — 14,000 in Florida — ACORN is a grass roots advocacy group focused on health care, wages, affordable housing and foreclosure.

Bell, the truck driver, certainly, is more representative of ACORN's work in Florida than the cartoon mouse is.

This year, ACORN signed up 1.3-million voters nationwide and about 152,000 in Florida, mostly in Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. ACORN estimates it flagged 2 percent of its Florida registrations as problematic because they were incomplete, duplicates or just plain bogus.

That's enough to give headaches to election officials and to provide ammunition to Republican activists.

Brevard County elections officials have turned over 23 suspect registrations from ACORN to prosecutors. The state Division of Elections has received two ACORN-related complaints, in Orange and Broward counties.

ACORN wasn't active in the Tampa Bay area. Last week, however, Pinellas County elections officials gave local prosecutors 35 questionable registrations from another group, Work for Progress.

The GOP accuses ACORN of registration fraud all over the country. In Las Vegas, authorities said the group's petitions included the names of the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

"This is part of a widespread and systemic effort … to undermine the election process," says Republican National Committee chief counsel Sean Cairncross, who describes ACORN as a "quasicriminal organization."

No, Kettenring said, it's more like Wal-Mart.

"Some percentage of Wal-Mart workers try to get paid without doing their work or steal from their employer," he said.

Some ACORN workers, he said, have simply made up names.

Maybe, elections officials say, but it's still annoying.

"We did experience a significant amount of problems, enough that we did contact the group to express some of our frustration with their work," said Linda Tanko, Orange County's senior deputy supervisor for voter services.

ACORN's problems included applications with unreadable handwriting, missing information, signatures that didn't match those on file, altered dates of birth or Social Security numbers, applications for people already registered to vote and names that appeared repeatedly, often with different addresses.

ACORN said it terminates canvassers who forge applications. In Broward County, it fired one worker after he turned in applications with similar handwriting and brought the matter to the attention of the Supervisor of Elections Office.

Pay to gather registrations started at $8 an hour, and the goal was 20 signups per day. The organization did not pay by the signature or pay bonuses for volume. The organization also tried to follow up on each registration, calling the person listed to confirm that the form is accurate.

In most states, ACORN must turn in every form that is filled out. "We must turn in every voter registration card by Florida law, even Mickey Mouse," Kettenring said.



Well, not yet, said Jennifer Krell Davis, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of State.

Florida does have a law saying third-party voter registration groups must turn in every form without regard to things like party affiliation, race, ethnicity or gender. So far, however, the state has not written the rules to implement it.

In Florida, ACORN is best known for its 2004 effort to lead a petition drive to raise the minimum wage. The FDLE looked into voter fraud allegations then and found no laws were broken.

ACORN also played a role in the firing of one of nine U.S. attorneys dismissed in 2006.

In New Mexico, U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was fired "because of complaints by elected officials who had a political interest in the outcome" of, among other things, a Republican voter fraud complaint against ACORN, according to an internal Justice Department report last month.

This year, 39 members of the House of Representatives have asked Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate ACORN.

One of those, Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Oviedo, also has written to supervisor of elections offices in Central Florida seeking "all ACORN-related registration of voters within the last two years."

Republicans also accuse Sen. Barack Obama of trying to distance himself from ACORN, which he represented in a federal lawsuit in 1995.

ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Obama, but the group says its voter registration efforts are nonpartisan.

And the McCain campaign's complaints now are puzzling, ACORN says, because two years ago McCain was the keynote speaker at an immigration reform rally ACORN co-sponsored in Miami. "In 2006," Kettenring said, "we were working together."



Story Here

Ohio Catches Bogus ACORN registrant casting vote...


Multiple registrants tell Cuyahoga County Elections Board ACORN workers begged for signatures

Palin: Obama must ‘rein in’ ACORN

Obama Tries To Distance Himself From ACORN

ACORN
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OK ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! We need to PROTEST ACORN!! If anyone comes up and tries to register you to vote and tells you they are from ACORN, put them under Citizen's arrest till the cops get there! CALL YOUR SENATOR'S AND REPRESENTATIVES AND COMPLAIN ABOUT ACORN! These people are trying to steal our elections from us and it's time we do NOT take this anymore.

DEFUND: ACORN /John Boehner R-Ohio Declares War On ACORN

De-Fund ACORN, Republican Leader Insists

All federal funding to ACORN must be stopped,” House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on Thursday, amid a widening probe into voter registration fraud by the liberal group.

Questionable or duplicate voter-registration forms submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, have turned up in as many as nine states, including so-called swing states.



The “nonpartisan” community-organizer group works to recruit low-income, Democrat-leaning voters. Its national Web site says the group has registered 1.3 million people nationwide for the Nov. 4 election.

“The latest allegations of voter registration fraud by ACORN are further evidence that this group cannot be trusted with another dollar of the taxpayers’ money,” Boehner said in a news release.

Boehner is one of many people who believe the group has broken the law to promote its left-wing agenda. He says it happened, even as ACORN received “millions” of taxpayer dollars through various federal programs and third-party groups.

“House Republicans took a stand recently to cut off funding to an ACORN slush fund created by their Democratic allie but now more must be done,” Boehner said.



The congressman's Web site notes that in the recently passed financial bailout package, Republicans “stripped out special-interest earmarks for trial lawyers, labor bosses and thinly-veiled political organizations like ACORN that were included in the original deal struck between congressional Democrats and the Treasury Department."

“The ACORN slush fund must be disbanded,” Boehner said. “Sources of federal funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development or any other agency must be stopped. Contracting for services between candidates for federal office and ACORN, as Senator Obama has done, must end. Now that the taxpayers own Fannie Mae, any funding from Fannie Mae’s nonprofit foundation to ACORN must stop.”

On Tuesday, authorities in Nevada seized records from ACORN after finding fraudulent registration forms that included the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. Bertha Lewis, interim chief organizer for ACORN, was quoted as calling the raid “a stunt that serves no useful purpose.”

In April, eight ACORN workers in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said the group submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

The FBI plans to investigate the group. "It's a matter we take very seriously," FBI spokeswoman Bridget Patton told the Associated Press. "It is against the law to register someone to vote who does not fall within the parameters to vote, or to put someone on there falsely."

At a campaign stop in Bethlehem, Pa., on Wednesday, supporters of John McCain interrupted his remarks Wednesday by shouting, "No more ACORN."

Debbie Mesloh, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Missouri, told the Associated Press in an e-mailed statement that the campaign supports any investigation of possible fraud.

Complaints of voter registration fraud have cropped up in Missouri, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Nevada and battleground states like Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina.

“ACORN is proud of the work it does to help balance the American electorate and educate people from underrepresented communities to use their voting voices,” the group says on its Web site.



Ties to Obama

*While the Obama campaign is trying to downplay its ties to ACORN, the Republican National Committee has issued a “Fact Sheet” playing up those ties.

*In 1992 Obama worked for Project Vote, ACORN’s voter-registration arm, the RNC says on its Web site.

*The Associated Press reported that in 1995, Obama was among a team of attorneys who represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the State of Illinois. ACORN sued the state for failing implement a federal law designed to make it easier for the poor people to register as voters.

*In 2001 and 2002 -- a time when Obama served on the board of directors of the The Woods Fund -- the Chicago ACORN received thousands of dollars in grants from the Fund, the RNC says.

*And this year, ACORN’s political action committee endorsed Obama for president.

*According to an August 2008 report in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the Obama presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to Citizens Services Inc. -- a subsidiary of ACORN.

*The Obama campaign later amended Federal Election Commission reports to show that Citizens Services Inc. did get-out-the-vote projects, not activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as the campaign stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.



Story Here

Obama Campaign Paid $800,000.00 To ACORN Entity!

1 VOTER, 72 REGISTRATIONS
'ACORN PAID ME IN CASH & CIGS'

Obama Campaign Runs Afoul of Finance Rules

Obama Will Steal Election

ACORN
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Whoa! I didnt even know we the taxpayer's were funding this Liberal group! I'm not paying another dime for this! I'll write that on my income tax form also! I think they need to start explaining right on our tax forms what the hell our money is funding and have a check mark there so we can check NO if we dont want to pay for it. But Hey! If Boehner want's to quit funding ACORN right NOW, I'm all for it!

Obama, ACORN, Voter Fraud, Connections To Terrorist William Ayers

OBAMA AND ACORN: YOU CAN RUN, BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE

Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization.

ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare.

Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site —a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate.

The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize.

“So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization.

He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases.

Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN.

William Ayres-Terrorist


As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.”

Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics.

He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities.

Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006.

ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru.

William Ayres-Terrorist


To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago ACORN leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and ACORN were ‘old friends.’”

ACORN’s Radical Roots

ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado.

Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.)

ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale.

“We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.”

Unpatriotic Barack Obama


In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky.

“Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’”

The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.”

Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud

Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies.

Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes.

Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud.

The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.”

Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations.

Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new.

Barack Insane Obama


Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law.

Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote.

In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds.

Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well.

In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill.

Claire McCaskill


“A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.”

And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters.

In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.”

In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information.

In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.”

In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state.

Christine Gregoire


In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.”

ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior.

Intimidation Politics

Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session.

These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.”

Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials.

A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.”

Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration.

Money-Hungry ACORN

By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing.

“In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.”

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens.

Jimmy Peanut Brain Carter


A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing.

According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations.

After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law.

Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN.

By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds.

In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work.

Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year.

But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns.

ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis

President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods.

Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan.

Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival.

“The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.

Jesse Jackson & Al Sharpton


“The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus.

“The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.”

Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic.

With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk.

The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans.

Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million.

As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace.

Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government.

For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists.

And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN.

Greedy Lefists

The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities.

They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property.

One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.”

But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.”

Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.”

Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.”

ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers.

According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference.

But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants.

ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members.

When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using.

But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts.

Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments.

Yep You're Busted Obama


ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN.

“How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.”

“We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left.

WELCOME TO ACORN, THE ORGANIZATION THAT MADE BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WHAT HE IS TODAY, AND THAT MAY MAKE HIM PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

Story Here
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Oh Obama was a Community Organizer alright, FOR ACORN!!!! Somebody better start doing some investigating into these people and fast!! Obama is mixed up with more than just Domestic Terrorist's, and Whacked out Pastor's, But Voter Fraud Too? It's time to start putting the peices of this puzzle together. Now their dragging homeless people in to register to vote? This group is commiting Fraud and Obama is in this up to his neck! There is NO WAY we can let this man become President!

ACORN

Voter Fraud Haunt's Obama Campaign

Obama Overseas Money Could Total $3.3 Million

RNC Demands FEC Probe Obama's Donations

UPDATE:

ACORN Office Raided in Voter-Fraud Probe

LAS VEGAS — Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state's office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

Secretary of State spokesman Bob Walsh says ACORN is accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with false and duplicate names.

The raid comes two months after state and federal authorities formed a task force to pursue election-fraud allegations in Nevada.
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Wow! That was fast! Get 'em! Invetigate the hell out of ACORN.

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Supreme Court Says States Can Demand Photo ID For Voting

States can require voters to produce photo identification, the Supreme Court ruled Monday, upholding a Republican-inspired law that Democrats say will keep some poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots.

Twenty-five states require some form of ID, and the court's 6-3 decision rejecting a challenge to Indiana's strict voter ID law could encourage others to adopt their own measures. Oklahoma legislators said the decision should help them get a version approved.

The ruling means the ID requirement will be in effect for next week's presidential primary in Indiana, where a significant number of new voters are expected to turn out for the Democratic contest between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The results could say something about the effect of the law, either because a large number of voters will lack identification and be forced to cast provisional ballots or because the number turns out to be small.

Supporters of the law say it's all about preventing fraud.



Indiana has a "valid interest in protecting 'the integrity and reliability of the electoral process,'" said Justice John Paul Stevens in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Stevens said that Indiana's desire to prevent fraud and to inspire voter confidence in the election system are important even though there have been no reports of the kind of fraud the law was designed to combat. Evidence of voters being inconvenienced by the law's requirements also is scant. For the overwhelming majority of voters, an Indiana driver's license serves as the identification.

The law does not apply to absentee balloting, where election experts agree the threat of fraud is higher.

The Indiana law was passed in 2005. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed it as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage groups of voters who tend to prefer Democrats.

It was in effect during the 2006 elections when Democrats picked up three congressional seats in Indiana and won control of the state House of Representatives.

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome Monday, but wrote separately in favor of a broader defense of voter ID laws.

"The universally applicable requirements of Indiana's voter-identification law are eminently reasonable. The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not 'even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting,'" Scalia said.

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.

Indiana's voter ID law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting rights of tens of thousands of the state's citizens," Souter said.

The targets of the law, he said, are "voters who are poor and old."

Yet Stevens wrote that the law does not single out groups of voters for different treatment. "We cannot conclude that the statute imposes 'excessively burdensome requirements' on any class of voters," he said. That opinion suggested the outcome could be different in a state where voters could provide evidence that their rights had been impaired.

Indiana provides IDs free of charge to people without driver's licenses. It also allows voters who lack photo ID's to cast a provisional ballot and then show up within 10 days at their county courthouse to produce identification or otherwise attest to their identity.

Stevens said these provisions also help reduce the burden on people who lack driver's licenses.

Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, a Republican, praised the decision. "This says to the voter you can have confidence again in the elections because we're doing some of the things the guy at the video store does when you go and rent a video," Rokita said.

Ken Falk, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, said the court was willing to burden "tens of thousands of eligible voters who lack a government-issued identification while accepting at face value Indiana's unsubstantiated claim of voter fraud." The ACLU brought the case on behalf of Indiana voters.

The proliferation of voter ID laws followed the enactment in 2002 of the federal Help America Vote Act. The law was designed in response to the disputed 2000 presidential election. The law's voter ID provisions apply to first-time voters and do not mandate photo identification.

Many Democrats criticized the ruling Monday. It places "an unnecessary burden on elderly and low-income voters, not to mention other voters of disparate racial and ethnic backgrounds," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

Mary Wilson, president of the League of Women Voters, said her group has never found a problem with in-person voter fraud. "We'd be the first ones out there to prevent voter fraud, if there really was a problem," she said.

Several critics pointed to a footnote in Stevens' opinion to show how far back he went — 140 years — to describe the corrosive effects of widespread fraud at polling places, a reference to Boss Tweed's influence in New York's municipal elections in 1868.

Republicans, meanwhile, praised the decision for recognizing the threat of voter fraud. "Today's ruling rightfully allows states to safeguard against such destructive abuse," said House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio.

In Oklahoma, Republican legislators said the ruling should help them pass a less-stringent voter ID bill. The Oklahoma House has approved legislation to require voters to present some form of identification — including a utility bill or bank statement. The measure faces a final vote by the state Senate.

Monday's case was the court's first significant foray into election law since the Bush v. Gore dispute that sealed the 2000 election for George W. Bush. The voter ID ruling, with no majority opinion and four of the nine justices writing, lacked the conservative-liberal split that marked the 2000 case.

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WOW! So that means the Democrats cant register Dead People, Illegal Aliens, and Convicted Felons to vote like last time. I'm all for this. I've alway's had to show ID in Oklahoma to vote as it is. And most states hand out Identification Cards for free anyway. This wont prevent all voter fraud, but it will eleiminate a great portion of it :-)