.Acorn Who?
Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.
"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn't even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said.
Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group.
Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama's success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn's Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn's attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law's loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn's leaders prior to their political arm's endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: "I've been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."
But the Obama campaign didn't appear eager to discuss the candidate's ties to Acorn. Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been. The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as "staging, sound, lighting," only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.
Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama's protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group's latest scandal seem preposterous. Here's hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it.
WSJ
Can anyone believe this appalling lie. I thought I had seen it all, but this out right lie in your face is really something new for me.
"Frankly, it's not something I've followed closely," Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn't even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. "This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It's not something I'm paying a lot of attention to," he said.
Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group.
Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama's success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn's Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn's attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law's loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn's leaders prior to their political arm's endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: "I've been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work."
But the Obama campaign didn't appear eager to discuss the candidate's ties to Acorn. Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been. The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as "staging, sound, lighting," only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.
Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama's protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group's latest scandal seem preposterous. Here's hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it.
WSJ
Can anyone believe this appalling lie. I thought I had seen it all, but this out right lie in your face is really something new for me.
posted by madtom at 8:58 PM
4 Comments:
"I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
- Paul Weyrich, one of the ideological founders of the modern conservative movement.
You should have to pass some nominal test about American Civics and History when you vote. Of course the Democrat Party would wither and die if that happened.
As for the appalling lie--- I thought you paid more attention than that, MT. The man lies or comes close more often than he tells the truth. This is the same guy who attended a church led by a racist Marxist and didn't know it. If you believed that, why do you not believe he didn't know anything about ACORN even though he started our as a community activist himself and is tied up in so many ways with ACORN himself?
I just got through chatting with a former employee of mine who had some dealings with an Acorn group here in N TX. They were bringing in illegals (he is active in a big 'immigrant' church in FW) to fill out loan apps for mobile homes at inflated prices. Most of them didn't speak a word of English, but had 'papers'. They signed the loan applications, paid their 3 percent down and moved into a bunch of used mobile homes in a park outside of the city limits. Two years later the rates reset and most couldn't pay, and had no idea they even had a loan, they thought they were paying rent! He tried to intervene and get them some information and found out from a low level staffer at the ACORN office that the owner of the park was a big wheel in the state ACORN office. ACORN used some emergency government program to keep the people current on their mortgages just long enough to bring in more victims, except in some cases 'maintainance people' came in and stripped the joints before they kicked the residents out, then the bank took possesion-- sold the gutted units for pennies on the dollar to the ACORN official that owned the park-- and he rented them back, using gov't sec 8 funds. To top it off, sometimes he collected funds for several families living in the same unit! I'm writing the papers and state attorney general, but I don't think this guy is going to help cuz the reason he is an ex employee is due to the fact that his SS number came up wrong after working for me for 6 years--- he's illegal, too!
But at least he threw that guy under the bus, sort of opps. But this time there is not getting out of the way, that bus is on a collation course with destiny, and he just crossed the line of no return. I don't think he can pull out of this one, unless he's got some new trick up his sleeve, his presidency is going to crash and burn.
There is a down side you know, so I would not pop the corks just yet. What about the rest of us, if O goes down, we are all going down with him. Remember Carter? You see anyone on the horizon that can ring in a new day for America. Will it be Morning in America or the Dusk...
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