ACORN: 2008 Archives

There are still some researchers looking into what clearly appears to be criminal violations of campaign financing laws by the Obama campaign. New information is reported on by columnist Herb Denenberg of the Philadelphia Bulletin. Hundreds of millions poured in from unidentified sources, tens of millions from unidentified foreign donors who cannot contribute legally. Only the Philadelphia Bulletin among the mainstream media is covering this scandal.

Did Obama Buy The White House With Illegal Money?
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin, Philadelphia
Published:
Monday, December 8, 2008

There is now growing evidence that Sen. Barack Obama bought the White House by using illegal and fraudulent fundraising, but that's a story you won't read in the mainstream media. You will read about it here today. While that story of Obama election law violations is still developing, what is the mainstream media reporting on? The New York Times isn't interested in election fraud ... if committed by Sen. Obama and the Democrats. So it is using its resources to investigate the amount of money the McCain campaign spent on hair stylists for Gov. Sarah Palin. (New York Times, Dec. 6, 2008). They've already investigated the amount spent on her wardrobe. Yes, the bias and dishonesty of the New York Times no longer just oozes out, it floods out in epic proportions. The once great paper has become a sad joke, a puppet and propagandist for the Democratic Party that can hardly write an honest word on politics.

The mainstream media paid little attention to ACORN, the organization that is the headquarters for election fraud, and its long-time and close association with Sen. Obama. Nor would it spend time reporting on some of the strange expenditures of the Obama campaign, such as the one for 400,000 temporary Obama tattoos. Of course, the mainstream media doesn't question how Sen. Obama spent his campaign money. In the eyes of the mainstream media, the Messiah, the Savior, the Chosen One, a.k.a. Sen. Obama can do no wrong. But the Times and the mainstream media have endless resources for how the McCain campaign spent its money.

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 came on a quiet Sunday just like this one. Power Line's remembrance of how that day changed the world is here.

Evidence is mounting that Barack Obama was elected president BECAUSE he was black.

Pride of blacks resulted in at least a 95% vote for Obama.

But white guilt fanned by Obama himself, his campaign and the media probably played an even bigger part.

So far, much of the evidence is random and anecdotal, but the accusations by Obama supporters and the media that those not planning to vote for Obama were “racists” certainly had a powerful effect. Voters were anxious to prove they weren't, that they had "moved on" from that.

Obama himself played the race card againt Hillary Clinton in the primaries and against John McCain in the final, playing the victim and inviting a guilty white reaction.

Media glorification of Obama and their trashing of Palin (a threat since she added an exciting and appealing dimension to the McCain candidacy) made it still easier to assuage white guilt with an Obama vote.

There is still a liberation theology streak running through many Catholic operations. As ACORN's corrupt practices came into sharper view because of Obama's connection to the communist-founded organization, it was learned that Catholic money had been going to ACORN for years through the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. The Catholic Bishops, reacting to the widespread investigations of ACORN for voter registration fraud and the revelation of a hushed-up $1 million embezzlement by the brother of ACORN's founder, have ended all ACORN funding.

Hooray.

Catholic Bishops Cut Off ACORN Funding Tuesday, November 11, 2008 9:30 PM

BALTIMORE — A community grantmaking arm of the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops has cut off all funding for a group embroiled in controversy over claims of voter registration fraud and embezzlement, church leaders said Tuesday.

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which supports anti-poverty and social justice programs nationwide, will no longer make grants to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, said Auxiliary Bishop Robert Morin of New Orleans.

The decision was made following claims that nearly $1 million had been embezzled from ACORN by the brother of its founder.

Morin, who helps oversee the Catholic program, said forensic accountants hired by the church found that "our funds were not involved with those that had been embezzled."

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development, which has an annual budget of about $10 million, had planned to grant about $1 million to local groups across the country through ACORN this fiscal year, Morin said. None of that money will be distributed.

"There will be no funding relationships with ACORN groups in the future," Morin said, during the fall meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Steve Kekst, ACORN executive director, said Tuesday night that he had just learned of the decision and declined to comment until he could speak with church leaders.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke has defended allowing his brother to make restitution privately, saying that getting law enforcement involved could have risked ACORN's financial ruin.

New Orleans-based ACORN, which has chapters in 110 cities and 40 states, completed a massive registration drive in poor and working-class neighborhoods _ which tend to vote Democratic _ across 21 states, signing up more than 1 million new voters.

ACORN, which advocates for the underprivileged, has said the registration problems were isolated and that its own workers noticed the problems and alerted local election officials in every state that is now investigating.

The Catholic Campaign for Human Development gets most of its funds from parish collections the weekend before Thanksgiving, according to its annual report.

The collection this year is set for Nov. 22-23.

The Wall Street Journal interviews Obama's chief- of-staff-to-be Rahm Emanuel and seems to believe what he says, which is total nonsense and intended to mislead.

Obama is not pragmatic as Emanuel says; he's ideological. He has his agenda, which is totalitarian and socialist, and he plans to ram it through. His attitude towards elimination of life shows that. With all of the problems he will face as a new president, it is ghoulish that Emanuel says Obama wants one of his first acts to be pushing through federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that will result in the killing of untold numbers of human beings.

Why this fixation on abortion, which is what is involved in creating embryonic stem cells to kill them?

Obama in his campaign pledged to Planned Parenthood he wanted his first act as president to be the elimination of all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion, making taxpayers who don't support abortion to pay for it and forcing hospital and doctors who for reasons of conscience or religious belief to perform abortions.

While he says he want to see abortion numbers reduced, he favors eliminating funding for pregnancy crisis centers, which help pregnant young women make informed choices rather than assuming abortion is their only choice. His policy, if adopted, will lead to an explosive increase in abortions. Why this priority?

Obama told his significant supporter Planned Parenthood, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the abortion business, that he would do whatever he could in effect to build their business. Planned Parenthood wants more abortions, not fewer, and more revenues as a result.

Obama's callousness is breathtaking. Emanuel's prediction that Obama will lead off with federal funding of embryonic stem cell research shows where Obama's headed. No medical advances have been attributed to use of embryonic stem cells and none are expected for many years. Recent research has indicated that using stem cells other than embryonic stem cells is just as if not more promising and does not involve killing humans. Therefore, creating and killing human embryos is needless. Nonetheless, Obama ignores these scientific results and appears to be using the embryonic stem cell debate to condition the public to supporting unlimited abortion to the last day of gestation.

Why is he so fixated on eliminating all of the safeguards that states and the federal government have built up over 30 years to reduce the killing of human beings?

Emanuel was picked as chief of staff because he, like Obama, is a member in good standing in the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine that has elected Obama to every office he has sought, including the presidency, and has the same ruthless, moral relativist attitudes (no right or wrong; no truth, just whatever works) as Obama and his mentor Saul Alinsky. The understand each other and can work together.

Obama cut his communist Alinsky community organizer teeth working with and then training ACORN operatives in bullying bankers and registering voters. Just a few years later Emanuel himself became indoctrinated in the Alinsky methods during a tour of his own with ACORN.

Congress opened up for Emanuel when convicted felon Chicago pol Dan Rostenkowski went to prison for stealing from the federal government and the Chicago Daley machine anointed him to take the Rostenkowski seat (2002), just as the Daley machine had done for Obama for Illinois state senate (1996) and U.S. Senate (2004).

It's all about power; whatever it takes.

Obama is ideologically driven to make rich America pay for the the wrongs he perceives they visited upon the non-whites of America and the world. The first of the one-two punch is the "tax cut" bill that will take money from the productive who pay taxes and give it to those who don't pay any income tax. The second will be reinstituting the federal estate tax and raising taxes on dividends and capital gains, which actionss will represent a huge tax increase for everyone. When a questioner asked why raise the capital gains tax, because every study has shown doing so decreased government tax revenue, Obama replied, well, it's the fair thing to do. Even though the federal government will lose money by doing so. Therefore, it is more important to punish the productive and the savers than gain revenue for the federal government. What Obama thinks is fair is the test.

It is natural enough for Emanuel to deny Obama has an ideological agenda, because that might frighten voters. Alinsky taught to pursue the radical agenda incrementally, so as to not to alarm and awaken opposition. Obama starts with embryonic cell funding, since most people don't understand the issue and don't know about better alternatives.

Obama will speak calmly and soothingly and so will Emanuel when it is called for.

Hard-headed British columnist Melanie Phillips provides good advice to American conservatives in the wake of the Obama victory. She cites the disaster that has been building in Britain over recent decades -- and is still building -- hastened along greatly by the ascendency into high office by Labour's charismatic leader Tony Blair, whose arrival was hailed almost as messianically as Obama's. Similar, or worse, damage looms with Obama:

Obama has talked about remedying what he sees as the flaws in the U.S. Constitution which promotes only “negative liberties,” or freedom from something rather than positive rights to something. Well, through human-rights legislation Britain has exchanged its historic concept of “negative” liberty — everything is permitted unless it is actively prohibited — for the ‘positive’ European idea that only what is codified is to be permitted.

As a result, freedom has shrunk to what ideology permits. Equality legislation has cemented a “victim culture” under which the interests of all groups deemed to be powerless (black people, women, gays ) trump those deemed to be powerful (white people, men, Christians). Since this doctrine holds that the “powerless” can do no wrong while the “powerful” can do no right, injustice is thus institutionalized, and anyone who queries the preferential treatment afforded such groups is vilified as a racist or bigot.

Her warning should be read in full and printed out to post above the desk as a constant reminder.

Read it all:

Preventing National Suicide

By Melanie Phillips

Continue reading "A BRIT WARNS: DON'T LET OBAMA DESTROY AMERICAN VALUES"

Posted by Republican on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)
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No one has dug deeper and written more about the real Obama than Stanley Kurtz, the independent researcher at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center. On the day before the election he provides his overall conclusion based on what he has learned from his extensive investigation: Barack Obama is a Far Left radical deeply steeped in and following the principles and practices of his intellectual and spiritual guiding light the communist agitator Saul Alinksy, whose goal was to destroy America's capitalist society and replace it with a totalitarian socialist one.

Wealth redistribution, not wealth creation, is at the center of Obama's plan. He will build support for this socialist end by vastly expanding the ACORN-style community organizating movement by linking the massive youth corps that he has said he will create as president. As Kurtz points out, ACORN, funded by Obama and Ayers through foundations, was a prime agent in undermining the credit standards of the nation's banking system as Obama supported “major redistributive change. Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized?"

Obama's words will be soothing and moderate as always (Alinsky preached using vague words such as "hope" and "change" rather than the specifics of the socialist agenda), but a totalitarian socialist society will continue to be his ultimate goal.

Kurtz's brilliant exposés have been ignored by the nation's mainstream media when they could and whitewashed by them when they could not. The tragedy for America is that the vast majority of voters has never seen, heard or been able to discuss Kurtz's Obama disclosures. What Obama and the Obama campaign have chosen to hide from the general public largely remains hidden because of the media's corrupt complicity.

Kurtz deserves our heartfelt thanks. If this far left radical, so far out of and opposed to mainstream American values, is elected president, at least a core few will be armed, alert and ready to do battle to defeat his totalitarian socialist agenda.

Here's Kurtz's conclusion in its entirety. To read all his investigative pieces, click here.

November 3, 2008

What We Know About Obama

The illusion of pragmatism advances far-left goals, in baby steps.

By Stanley Kurtz

Reflecting on all that I’ve written about Barack Obama over these past six months, four inter-related points stand out: Obama’s radicalism, his stealthy incrementalism, his interest in funding and organization-building, and his willingness to use — or quietly support — Alinskyite intimidation tactics. Since we stand on the cusp of the election, I’ll lay out the bottom line. For those who want to know more, go back and read the detailed studies on which I base these conclusions.

Obama’s troubling associations are more than isolated friendships or instances of bad judgment. His ties to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Pfleger, James Meeks, ACORN, the New Party, and the Gamaliel Foundation all reflect Obama’s sympathy with radical-left ideas and causes — wealth redistribution prominent among them. At both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for example, Obama and Ayers channeled money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN, a militant group pursuing economic redistribution, succeeded in undermining credit standards throughout the banking system, thereby modeling the New Party’s plans to tame capitalism itself. So the association with Ayers is not an outlier issue, but part and parcel of a network of radical ties through which Obama’s supported “major redistributive change.” Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it’s generalized?

Similarly, Obama’s “association” with Wright was far more than a mere pastor-parishioner — or even mentor-protégé — relationship. Obama’s work with the Gamaliel Foundation required him to “organize” left-leaning churches into a larger political force. His real interest in Wright, Pfleger, and Meeks was to turn them into the nucleus of a far broader politicized coalition of radical black churches — as shown, for example, by his work with them on the Illinois racial-profiling bill. Again, we are not dealing with mere “associations,” but with intentional political partnerships.

Although media malfeasance is at the heart of our ignorance about these broader patterns, Obama’s absorption of Alinskyite strategies of stealthy incrementalism have helped to hide the truth. Following well-worn organizer strategies, Obama knows how to wrap ideological radicalism in the soothing rhetoric of “pragmatism” and classic American values. There is a kernel of truth to the pragmatism, however. Radical though his ultimate goals may be, Obama follows classic organizer strategy — pursuing his ends in tiny, incremental, and cumulative baby-steps. The municipal “living wage” campaigns supported by Obama, Wright, and groups like ACORN and the New Party were never designed, in themselves, to bring fundamental economic change. These ordinances actually applied to only a very small number of companies. The broader purpose of these battles was to build coalitions for deeper structural change on the national level, when the moment was right. Obama would likely hew to this incrementalism in power, with the same radical long-term goals in mind.

Obama was a master at channeling funding to his organizer allies. He was the key force turning the Woods Fund toward a major increase in support for community organizers, at a moment when other foundations shied away from funding the militant and confrontational tactics of groups like ACORN. In his now infamous 2001 radio remarks, Obama’s preferred strategy for promoting “major redistributive change” was through society-wide organizing from below. As president, Obama would connect his massive youth-volunteer program to his favorite community-organizer groups, thereby creating a political force for long-term restructuring of the American economy. This was the program of the New Party, and I believe it is still Obama’s long-term goal.

In pursuit of his goals, Obama has shown himself willing to quietly support, and sometimes to openly use, radical Alinskyite tactics. At the Woods Fund, Obama’s allies bragged about the way their “post-ideological” cover had allowed them to fund ACORN’s confrontational tactics, while escaping public criticism. Obama has shamelessly used Alinskyite “direct action” to silence and intimidate political foes during the current campaign (a matter well-known to conservatives, yet little noted by the mainstream press). Victory would only cement the conviction in Obama and his allies that these tactics had “won,” and therefore should be used again.

Has Obama changed? Was he merely using his radical Chicago allies to gain national renown, and thereby an opening for a more moderate political program? I find this view unconvincing. Obama has often claimed that his early community organizing, and his redistributive legislative work, were at the very core of his political identity. We’ve heard his radicalism on the radio in 2001. Does anyone really believe that he’s changed in 2008? Obama’s political radicalism consolidated his shaky personal identity. It formed him as an adult. He cannot abandon that inner stance without losing hold of an already precarious self. Obama chose to live in Hyde Park — chose that radical setting as the site of his adult self-creation. Hyde Park was never the place Obama needed to conquer in order to escape. On the contrary, it was the personally chosen home he now hopes to nationalize by spreading his organizing gospel to America’s youth.

Obama is clever and pragmatic, it’s true. But his pragmatism is deployed on behalf of radical goals. Obama’s heart is, and will remain, with the Far Left. Yet he will surely be cautious about grasping for more, at any given moment, than the political traffic will bear. That should not be mistaken for genuine moderation. It will merely be the beginning stages of a habitually incremental radicalism. In his heart and soul, Barack Obama was and remains a radical-stealthy, organizationally sophisticated, and — when necessary — tactically ruthless. The real Obama — the man beyond the feel-good symbol — is no mystery. He’s there for anyone willing to look. Sad to say, few are.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The media is now joining Obama is playing the race card. And here. Simply put, if you don't vote for Obama, you're racist. You have no legitimate reason not to.

1. That you're troubled by the elite media's attempt to force you to vote for Obama to prove you're not a racist, is no reason.

2. That you're troubled by Obama’s constant playing of the race card, first against Hillary Clinton, then against John McCain and now against anyone who raises a question or a criticism, is no reason.

3. That you're troubled by his fixation on black power and dislike of whites as revealed in his own books in which he approvingly refers to "white men's greed" as the cause of the world's problems, is no reason.

4. That you're troubled by his attraction to Marxist socialist principles that began in high school and continued through college where he “hung out” with black power advocates and Marxist socialists and distanced himself from whites, as he describes in his books, is no reason.

5. That you’re troubled that he put his Marxist socialist principles into practice by becoming a community organizer of blacks against the white establishment in Chicago working with communist/socialist ACORN and other community organizers, is no reason.

6. That you're troubled by his attraction to and absorption of the communist Alinsky method of community organizing (studied in Chicago and while at Harvard Law School) in which socialist purposes are carefully hidden by sticking to platitudes like "hope" and "change" to solve every human dissatisfaction, is no reason.

7. That you're troubled by his telling Joe the Plumber he was going to impose higher taxes on him to "spread the wealth," that is, to take money away from people who pay taxes to give to people who don't pay taxes, which is pure socialism, is no reason

8. That you're troubled by his long association (as trainer, lawyer, collaborator and employer) with the communist/socialist community organization ACORN that has been involved in vote registration fraud controversies, including convictions, across the country, including this year, is no reason.

9. That you're troubled that Obama hired ACORN this year to do voter registration, knowing as he did about its record of voter fraud registration accusations, investigations and convictions (investigations of ACORN fraud are under way right now in at least 12 states), paying $320,000 to ACORN and then covering up the payment, is no reason.

10, That you're troubled that every day there are new stories of fraud involving ACORN workers in states across the nation and all the Obama campaign can say is that such reports are "a distraction" from the real issues, is no reason.

11. That you're troubled that he was an early pioneer, working with ACORN, in showing how to intimidate banks and bankers into making uncreditworthy mortgage loans to minorities and low-income people who could not afford them, which pressure tactics spread and ultimately led to the housing bubble, its collapse and the present world financial crisis and loss of hundreds of billions for investors and tens of thousands of jobs, is no reason.

12. That you're troubled that Obama, having worked closely with the communist/socialist organization ACORN throughout his entire career, recently said his views are still pretty much the same as when he helped ACORN force banks to make risky mortgage loans they never should have made and ran a voter registration drive with ACORN, is no reason.

13. That you're troubled that Obama has vowed to the communist//socialist group ACORN and other such organizations will be called in to work with him, if he's elected president, even before inauguration to shape the agenda of his administration,, is no reason.

14. That you're troubled that in just a few months in the U.S. Senate Obama was able to become the second biggest recipient, some $126,000 -- over a 20-year period -- of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sources, is no reason.

15. That you’re troubled that when John McCain and others were proposing reforms in 2005 and 2006 to prevent a collapse of the out-of-control practices of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buying up far too many risky subprime mortgage loans, Obama instead sided with Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd in opposing reform, thus bringing on the present world financial crisis, indeed being quoted saying subprime loans were a good thing, is no reason.

16. That you're troubled by his association with people who hate America such as white hater Jeremiah Wright, unrepentant admitted terrorist bomber and self-described communist William Ayers (who said in 2001 the mention of America "makes him want to puke"), Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi and nutcase Father Michael Pfleger, is no reason.

17. That you're troubled that he was attracted in the first place to black power, white-America hater, anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah Wright and stayed with him for 20 years, knowing he was a follower of black liberation theology that preaches that any god that is not exclusively on the side of the blacks against whites must be killed, is no reason.

18. That you're troubled that he lied about never in 20 years hearing Jeremiah Wright make any of his anti-America and anti-white speeches, but then admitted he had when his campaign advisors realized the lie could be easily disproved, is no reason.

19. That you're troubled that he brought his young children to Jeremiah Wright's sermons Sunday after Sunday to listen to his bigoted tirades against whites and his hateful harangues against America, is no reason.

20. That you’re troubled that he helped Nation of Islam’s anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan organize the Million-Man March in Washington and that Farrakhan has called Obama the messiah for black Muslims, is no reason.

21. That you're troubled that, working for years jointly with unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers, who describes himself as a communist, Obama funneled $150 million to fund programs to turn Chicago teachers and students into socialist revolutionaries who hate America, is no reason.

22. That you're troubled that, working jointly with America hater William Ayers, Obama directed charitable funds to separatist Afrocentric, America-hating programs designed by allies of Jeremiah Wright, while denouncing “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation,” is no reason.

23. That you're troubled that, working jointly with America hater William Ayers, Obama, "to change America," directed charitable funds to the communist/socialist ACORN that was intimidating banks to make unsafe mortgage loans and engaging in voter registration fraud, as he well knew, is no reason.

24. That you're troubled that Obama continued his collaboration with Ayers after Ayers allowed himself to be photographed for the cover of Chicago magazine in 2001 standing on the American flag and telling an interviewer the thought of America made him "want to puke," is no reason.

25. That you're troubled that, working jointly with admitted terrorist bomber William Ayers, he steered charitable funds to an Arab-related organization that handed money over to a Palestinian terrorist organization, is no reason.

26. That you're troubled by Obama’s decision to go inside the Chicago Daley Democratic patronage and payoff political machine (often called by Chicago newspapers the “corrupt” Daley Democratic political machine) and become a go-along, loyal member of the machine, which is now running his campaign, is no reason.

27. That you're troubled that as an Illinois state senator Obama refused to support reformers against the Daley patronage and payoff machine, but supported the Chicago Democratic political machine at all times, is no reason.

28. That you’re troubled that in his first run for public office he was able to force all three Democratic opponents off the primary ballot to run unopposed, which if not unprecedented is so highly unusual as to raise questions about the objectivity of Democratic election officials beholden to the Daley political machine which Obama supports, is no reason.

29. That you're troubled by the fact that he is the most extreme advocate of abortion in public life, having pledged to Planned Parenthood as president he would like his first act as president to be signing a bill removing all restrictions on abortion, including partial birth abortion which 75% of all Americans oppose, is no reason.

30. That you're troubled by the fact that he engineered the defeat of a bill in the Illinois senate to protect babies who survive a failed abortion (and then lied about it), a bill that was identical to one that passed Congress unanimously, is no reason.

31. That you're troubled by his callous statement that, if either of his girls made a mistake, he wouldn't want them "punished with a baby," is no reason.

32. That you're troubled by his wife's statements that only now, for the first time in her adult life, she's proud of her country, is no reason.

33. That you're troubled by his wife's view of America as “just downright mean,” is no reason.

34. That you're troubled by his view of America as having done harm to the world for which he must apologize (in Berlin, to Germans no less), is no reason.

35. That you’re troubled that he so often seems ashamed of America, speaking ill of it, as in Berlin, is no reason.

36. That you're troubled that Obama didn't put hand to heart during the national anthem until his advisors told him to, is no reason.

37. That you're troubled that Obama left injured servicemen and women waiting at a military hospital in Germany when he canceled a scheduled visit to work out at a gym, is no reason.

38. That you're troubled that he is so naive that he can say tear down the walls between Muslims and Jews (as in Israel?) and there will be peace, is no reason.

39. That you're troubled by his statements in support of the Palestinian cause and his support by a former member of the terrorist-listed PLO Rashid Khalidi, who is now the director of the most rabid anti-Israel Middle East Studies department in the U.S, is no reason.

40. That you're troubled by his lukewarm and equivocal statements about Israel (for an undivided Jerusalem one day, opposed the next), is no reason.

41. That you're troubled by his vocal support by leaders of Hamas and the lack of support by a leading Israel statesman and author such as Natan Sharansky, is no reason.

42. That you're troubled that Obama's running mate Biden is reported to have told Israelis they had just better get used to the idea of a Iran with nuclear warheads on missiles that can destroy Israel, is no reason.

43. That you're troubled that Obama declined to appear at an anti-Iran rally sponsored by Jewish organizations and made sure that Sarah Palin was disinvited, is no reason.

44. That you're troubled that all Obama wants to do is talk and talk with the leader of our deadly enemy Iran and do nothing of consequence to stop their development of nuclear weapons, is no reason.

45. That you're troubled by his position well over a year ago to withdraw troops from Iraq on a fixed timetable regardless of conditions and to oppose the surge that was not only dangerous for our troops but would have resulted in al-Qaeda taking over Iraq as its new world headquarters, with riches like oil and gas that Afghanistan cannot even dream of, is no reason.

46. That you're troubled by his opposition to doing what is necessary to make America independent of hostile and unstable overseas energy suppliers by drilling for gas and oil domestically and by supporting nuclear power and clean coal along with all other alternatives, is no reason.

47. That you're troubled that Obama naively wants to cut defense spending in an increasingly dangerous world, and that Obama refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Islamic supremacist war against the non-Muslim world, is no reason.

48. That you're troubled that Obama actively and openly spoke in favor of his Muslim cousin Raila Odinga in his recent campaign for president of Kenya, during which he reportedly pledged to decree Islamic law for all Kenyans and ban Christian missionaries throughout the country, is no reason.

49. That you're troubled by his protectionist statements supporting unilaterally repealing NAFTA and opposing the free trade agreement with our hemishere's closest ally Colombia, and his lying about the facts to justify his opposition, is no reason.

50. That you're troubled that he wants to end secret ballots in union elections so as to increase the power of union intimidation, is no reason.

51. That you're troubled that he is so obsessed with himself, appears to be such a narcissist, that he can tell a campaign gathering that light will come down from above and convince them to vote for The Obama, is no reason.

52. That you're troubled that when you look at his record of accomplishment you only see that he has written two books about himself (partially fictionalized, possibly ghost written), graduated from college and law school, spent four years in socialist community organizing, and years in the Illinois senate (voting present 130 times) toeing the Democratic machine line -- and gave a nice speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, is no reason.

53. That you're troubled that he had for years as a major fundraiser (at least $250,000) Syrian-born political fixer and slumlord Tony Rezko, who has been convicted on 16 counts of political corruption, is no reason.

54. That you're troubled that while Rezko was being investigated on corruption charges and reportedly in debt for more than $10 million, Rezko's wife (said to have no assets of her own and income of only $37,000 as a city worker) somehow made it possible for him to buy his dream house in the upscale Hyde Park section of Chicago by buying an adjacent empty lot for full price ($625,000) while Obama purchased his house and lot for a $300,000 discount ($1.65 million) from the same seller on the same day, is no reason.

54. That you're troubled that Rezko's wife shortly thereafter sold a strip of land from the adjacent empty lot that Obama wanted for one-sixth her purchase price, paid for a fence Obama wanted between the properties, then sold off the lot to one of Rezko’s attorneys for an undisclosed price, is no reason.

55. That you're troubled by his plan to give $50 billion of American taxpayer money to the corrupt United Nations for a new anti-poverty program, is no reason.

56. That you’re troubled by his socialist “tax cut” plan to take more money from those who earn it – including imposing higher taxes on hundreds of thousands of small businesses -- and make welfare payments to the 44% (63 million) of American’s who pay no income tax, is no reason.

57. That you're troubled that Obama is hiding so much of his record, that he has refused to allow access to information or has blocked research about his past, such as his joint socialist programs with William Ayers in Chicago, the official State of Hawaii birth records, his Columbia College and Harvard Law School records and years and his ideological affiliations before joining Jeremiah Wright's church, is no reason.

58. That you’re troubled that his campaign has apparently raised tens of millions of dollars from sources outside the country in deliberately small sums (under $200) to avoid federal reporting requirements and the campaign has no controls to identify such sources, some of which are clearly fraudulent, whereas the McCain campaign can track every dollar, is no reason.

59. That you're troubled by what Michael Barone calls the thug tactics of the Obama campaign to silence all criticism with cries of “lies,” “discrimination,” racism,” including even discussion of Obama's socialist and machine partisan activities in Chicago, and that Barone fears an Obama Administration "thugocracy" stifling First Amendment rights, is no reason.

60. That you’re troubled that Obama’s socialism smacks of totalitarianism, as his campaign’s efforts to shut down free speech shows, is no reason.

61. That you’re troubled that Obama is rated the most far left senator in the U.S. Senate, a radical with a socialist agenda "to change" an America he is not proud of to something we will not like, and who is blind to the defense needs of the United States, is no reason.

62. That you're troubled that Obama is so "flexible" and evasive when it comes to telling the truth and just plain lies, is no reason.

63. That you're troubled that he could coldly dismiss the legitimate fears of the white grandmother who raised him as those of a "typical white person," is no reason.

64. That you're troubled that the Chicago Democratic machine that is running his campaign may be intending to take its patronage and payoff operations onto the national stage, at staggering cost to American taxpayers, is no reason.

65. That you're troubled by his elitist attitude towards simple working people, sniffing at them for clinging to their God and their guns, is no reason.

66. That you're troubled by the many, many times that Obama misstated historical facts to suit his own agenda, including misdescribing his past positions, and that the mainstream media did not challenge Obama’s statements, is no reason.

67. That you're troubled by the hypocrisy and double standard of the elite media that can proudly report that 95% of blacks now say they're voting for Obama, but can express horror that some white Americans might vote for McCain, which they assert can only be for racist reasons, is no reason.

68. That you're troubled that the elite media, which has decided it wants a Democratic black president now, whoever it is, qualified or not,, has deliberately avoided its obligations to the American public by refusing to do any detailed investigation into who Obama really is, his alliances, involvement in sleazy machine politics and his history, so that all that exists is the fictionalized narrative contrived by the Chicago Daley Democratic machine that is running his campaign, which leaves too many questions unanswered and voters still wondering "Who is Barack Obama?", is no reason.

69. That you're still troubled about who Obama really is though you are deeply troubled about what you know already and wonder what else he may be hiding, is no reason.

70. That you're troubled that Obama appears to be cleverly hiding who he is, presenting a false image to the world as postpartisan, moderate and a healer, when he is none of those, as his record shows, is no reason.

71. That you're troubled that Obama, if elected, may have a Democratic House and Senate, to implement his extreme socialist agenda of higher taxes, trade protectionism, stifling free enterprise, stifling free speech, enacting extreme pro-abortion policies such as reviving partial-birth abortion, relaxing our defense vigilance, cutting defense spending and increasing taxpayer funding to subversive organizations such as ACORN, is no reason.

72. That you're troubled that foreigners see things so much more clearly than our media and view the president candidate Obama as having a "nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters," is no reason.

73. That you're troubled that, as Professor Thomas Sowell notes, John McCain and Sarah Palin have not spent "decades working with people who hate America" and Obama has, is no reason.

74. That you're troubled that, as Professor Thomas Sowell also notes, the values of John McCain and Sarah Palin "are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question" and this cannot be said about Obama, is no reason.

75. That you're troubled by reports that as much as $63 million in campaign contributions to the Obama campaign in amounts smaller than the $200 required to be reported federally are from foreign sources, may be illegal, are not tracked by the Obama campaign though McCain tracks ALL his contributions, and more than 80% of all Obama contributions are not identified and may not be identifiable, is no reason.

76. That you're troubled that the Obama campaign had deliberately collected tens if not hundres of millions of illegal contributions by disabling all security settings on online credit card systems so as to facilitate fake and foreign contributions and contributions over the limit and have no controls for contributions under $200 though the McCain campaign has all such controls, obviously seeking to steal the election and disenfranchise American voters, is no reason.

77. That you're troubled by the Gestapo tactics against Obama critics like the attacks on Joe the Plumber and throwing reporters off the campaign plane whose organizations endorse McCain, is no reason.

That you're troubled that if you don't vote for McCain/Palin you will be doing a dangerous disservice to your country and generations of Americans is no reason, either.

Is Obama a socialist? Yes. How long has he been so? At least since 1995? Has he been hiding this? Yes.

Redistribution of your wealth to those Obama thinks "deserve it" has been on his mind since 1995. The resentment of white America that was fed weekly by Jeremiah Wright continues to this day even though Wright has been forced off stage for political reason, as even Reverend Wright said was happening. But the resentment, the message, the intent to transfer the wealth of the successful to those who have not earned it, the "oppressed," in the Reverend's words, is in Obama's plans.

Call it redistribution, socialism, it is not what the founders built into the Constitution. Obama seeks to change that and Stanley Kurtz has sounded the warning loud and clear.

Too few are listening.

Read the evidence that the invaluable Stanley Kurtz has accumulated. While the mainstream media has been failing in its job to vet a major candidate for president of the United States, Stanley Kurtz of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center has taken on the task and performed it admirably.

The tragedy is that the shocking story he had compiled about Obama's life, relationships and positions, which should disqualify him from the presidency, has not reached a large number of the American people because major news media have failed to pick it up and inform the public.

Americans are headed for a future that Obama has sought, mostly successfully, to hide from them. The public has been duped.

Alll will suffer th consequences if Obama is elected on November 4th. Obama wants to spread the pie and will ensure the pie does not grow bigger with his taxes and punitive regulation.

For all of Stanley Kurtz's work on Obama, click here.

Life of the New Party A redistributionist success story.

By Stanley Kurtz

A variety of evidence now indicates, with a high degree of likelihood, that Barack Obama was a member of the far-left New Party, which also endorsed him in his first run for the Illinois state senate in 1996. Obama’s New party ties graphically illustrate the connection between his troubling “associations” and the core economic issues of the presidential campaign. The New Party’s agenda was radically redistributionist. More important, the New Party’s specific strategy for achieving its economic goals precisely paralleled Obama’s now infamous 2001 radio remarks on “major redistributive change.” So let’s take a tour of New Party ideology, after which we can explore the ever-increasing evidence that Obama himself was in fact a New Party member.

Continue reading "PROOF OF OBAMA'S SOCIALIST PAST, PRESENT AND AMERICA'S FUTURE"

Posted by Republican on Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
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As a local group in Chatham, Massachusetts the Chatham Republican Town Committee runs this website and also from time to time places ads in our local weekly The Cape Cod Chronicle, which covers Chatham and the adjacent town of Harwich. The McCain campaign nationally and we locally are trying to get the word out to the American people about how radical and out of the mainstream of America Obama is.

This past week a few readers wrote to the Chronicle to say they did not like our ads about Barack Obama, but no one could challenge the facts, because they were true and accurate. However, the Chronicle’ editor in an editorial claimed Obama has been thoroughly vetted by the media, suggesting in effect that no other comment, particularly “negative” comment, was called for.

This is precisely the problem. Obama has been called the “most secretive” candidate for president in at least a century. The media is not fulfilling its obligations to the American public to find out and present the truth about Obama.

John McCain’s life is an open book. Obama hides in the pages of his own two memoirs and the fictionalized and incomplete biography carefully constructed by the Chicago political machine (often called the “corrupt Democratic machine” by Chicago newsmen) that nurtured his political career and is now running his campaign.

Most disturbing are his close and long relationships with people who hate America, the two most prominent of which are Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers. Not only did Obama spend 20 years listening to his “spiritual mentor” Wright’s bigoted message of hate of whites, Jews and America and about his war on the middle class, he gave thousands of his own dollars and tens of thousands from foundations he chaired for Wright’s causes.

Obama chaired a foundation (the Chicago Annenberg Challenge) established by William Ayers. Ayers describes himself as “far left, a radical, a small “c” communist." When Ayers concluded that bombing the Pentagon and the Capitol was counterproductive (forced him into hiding for ten years), he decided the best way to “change America” was through indoctrination of the young in early education. After collecting degrees in early education at Columbia, Obama’s college, Ayers collaborated with Obama over the better part of a decade in sending millions of dollars into subversive programs, many designed by Ayers, to teach Chicago’s mostly black schoolchildren hatred for America, that America was bad and could and should be brought down and changed through political revolution.

One who knew Ayers during his terrorist bombing days said this recently about Ayers' new line of work:

His hatred of America is as virulent as when he planted a bomb at the Pentagon. And this hatred informs his educational "reform" efforts....Mr. Ayers is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.

Obama, at about the time he took over the chairmanship of Ayers' foundation, said he rejected “the unrealistic politics of integrationist assimilation.” Obama had already immersed himself in the communist Saul Alinsky’s methods of surreptitiously remaking America as a community organizer working with other community organizers such as ACORN. (That's the same ACORN involved in more than a dozen current voter registration fraud investigations, the same ACORN which uses confrontation and intimidation to force public officials and bankers to do what they say.)

In some respects, the message of the Ayers-Obama partnership was much the same as that of Jeremiah Wright. The researcher who has done the most extensive investigation of the Ayers-Obama joint efforts in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is Stanley Kurtz of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center. Kurtz said this of one particular program aimed at black youths: Ayers’ accomplice “Barack Obama knowingly and persistently funded an educational project that shared the extremist and anti-American philosophy of Jeremiah Wright.” (Kurtz's research can be accessed by clicking here.) The media has ignored or suppressed all such information and certainly hasn’t been out looking for it or anything else that could be damaging to Obama.

Obama has been hiding his past and who he is and the media is complicit. Isn't it amazing that his birth records, his college records and his law school records are all sealed from public view?

Also, for example, have readers or viewers of the mainstream media been told that Obama is the most extreme public official in America on abortion, that he wants to legalize partial birth abortion (and at taxpayer expense), which 75% of the American public oppose and to eliminate the “conscience clause” for doctors and hospitals to force them to perform abortions? That he wants to weaken our military by dismantling and discontinuing national defense programs in order expand welfare programs? That Obama and Obama’s ACORN planted the seeds of today’s worldwide financial crisis by being among the first, in the early 1990s, to bully banks into making mortgage loans that never should have been made? That U.S. Senator Obama opposed legislation John McCain supported in 2005 and 2006 to rein in Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s packaging and selling off of unsound mortgage loans before it was too late; that, as late as September 2007 as the housing bubble was collapsing because of the weight of these unsound loans, Obama was still insisting that mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them is a “good idea?” It was Joe the Plumber not the media who forced Obama to admit his socialist plan to “spread the wealth” -- taking money from taxpayers to give to non-taxpayers.

The American people deserve to learn about the real Obama. And, in our small way, we are seeking to help do that. Even though there are still massive amounts of information about Obama still sealed from public view, based on what we know so far, we consider Obama unfit and unqualified to be president and a danger to the principles and safety of this nation.

Note: The Chatham Republican Town Committee has submitted a letter to the editor of the Chronicle on these matters, but since it's in his discretion to publish the letter or not, we have placed our extended reply here.

Update: The editor will not publish our letter in "our" local paper, so we have taken an ad in "our" local paper for a shortened version of this reply.

There is no question that ACORN, Obama's partner since 1991, is doing its best to steal the presidential election for Obama. It is being investigated for fraudulent voter registration activity in more than a dozen states. ACORN recently announced it had registered 1.3 million new voters; how many of those new voters are really ineligible or "repeats" or "dead"? So far, false registrations in the tens of thousands have been thrown out, but it's a safe bet that many, many more will slip through the screening process.

Obama in his early years as a lawyer actually trained ACORN workers in voter registration and ran a registration drive with ACORN himself. He also taught them how to browbeat banks and bankers into making mortgage loans they never should have -- the very beginning of the subprime loan disaster that has brought down the world's financial system and cost investors hundreds of billions of dollars.

What Obama thought was a great idea, beating up banks to make mortgage loans to uncreditworthy borrowers, mushroomed over the years with ACORN very much involved in pressuring banks, Congress and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The subprime loan boom created the housing bubble that ended in its inevitable collapse and the worst stock market fall since 1929 and a world credit freeze-up. Obama, in 2006, opposing legislation putting an end to Fannie and Freddie buying up these dangerously risky subprime loans, insisted the house of cards he helped create was "a good idea."

And guess who's been helping fund ACORN? The taxpayers. Taxpayers helped fund the disaster that has befallen them. Belatedly, there are now demands for investigations and an end to taxpayer assistance to this criminal enterprise.

Obama did not cause this catastrophe all by himself. In Congress, Democratic Senators Dodd and Reid worked to block legislation in 2005 and 2006 from getting a vote in the Senate after Senate Republicans voted S. 190 out of committee. Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts was prominent at hearings insisting that Fannie and Freddie were sound and in no trouble and didn't need a new regulator and didn't need to stop buying the subprime loans banks and mortgage lenders were more than happy to get rid of.

These Democratic economic policies have cost the nation, taxpayers and investors dearly.

Barack Obama's efforts in the 1990s to force banks to make unsafe mortgage loans was his early attempt to "spread the wealth." It ended in catastrophe.

Obama's new plan to "spread the wealth" which he inadvertently disclosed to Joe the Plumber will likewise lead to catastrophe for the American and world economies.

The sane vote is for a Republican Congress and McCain/Palin. But will Obama's ACORN deliver enough fraudulent votes to bring more grief to America?

October 23, 2008
Obama's Red Shirts
Voter Fraud: Republican leaders want to defund and criminally investigate ACORN. Why should taxpayer dollars fund a "nonpartisan" organization that proclaims "Obama needs ACORN, and we need Obama."

ACORN calls itself a "nonpartisan" group seeking to register minorities and the poor. But its political arm has endorsed Barack Obama, who both trained the group's staff and sued the state of Illinois on their behalf. And Obama's campaign has given ACORN affiliates $800,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive.

In fact, it's a get-out-the-vote for Obama drive as evidenced by a video recently aired by Fox News that showed just how "nonpartisan" the group is. It was taken at ACORN's national convention where Rep. Maxine Waters spoke to a sea of ACORN organizers wearing their uniform of red baseball caps and shirts.

Waters, to great applause and cheers, said: "This has been the worst presidency that this country has ever known. But that's all right. We're getting rid of his (President Bush's) ass. He's got to go."

The next speaker, an ACORN representative defined who "we" meant. She said: "We're getting Obama for president! Obama needs us, ACORN, but we need Obama. Don't we? Yeah!"

A list of government funding of ACORN released by Boehner reveals that some $31 million in taxpayer dollars have been given to the group since 1998. Using Federal Register records, Boehner found ACORN got the money through 54 individual grants in 11 different states.

They would have gotten much more if the original Democratic version of the federal rescue bill had passed. It gave to groups such as ACORN 20% of any profits from the future resale of acquired mortgages, a massive potential rip-off of taxpayers.

"House Republicans worked together to stop the majority from using taxpayer dollars to fill a slush fund created just for ACORN, but now we must go further to turn off the spigot of federal grants on which ACORN depends," Boehner said last week.

Cornyn notes that, due to the efforts of ACORN's red shirts in "Harris County, Texas, which includes the City of Houston, election officials either rejected or discovered serious deficiencies with nearly 40% of the 27,000 registration cards filed by ACORN from January through July of this year."

ACORN will say its voting activities are separate and not funded by the taxpayer. But money is fungible. Cornyn recently wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, arguing "that because the violations of federal voting laws by ACORN employees appear to be so widespread, ACORN and its affiliates should be investigated as a criminal enterprise."

We agree. Those orchestrating this attempt to steal the 2008 election should go to jail.

Andrew McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who sent the blind shiekh who masterminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to prison. He knows his stuff.

McCarthy has exposed in detail the close relationship Obama has had with ACORN for decades -- which Obama is now piously trying to deny -- and expresses amazement at the cynical propaganda ploy of the Obama campaign which is calling for a federal investigation of the McCain campaign for suggesting that ACORN is knowingly invovolved in voter registration fraud. Chutzpah, he says.

As detailed by Steve Gilbert at Sweetness & Light, Project Vote has long been ACORN’s “voter mobilization” arm. In 1992, it was directed in Chicago by a young “community organizer” named Barack Obama. The resulting registration of 150,000 new voters became the springboard for his political career. As observed about Obama’s efforts by top ACORN agitator Madeline Talbott (a staunch proponent of the lawlessness ACORN euphemistically calls “direct action”): “Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

ACORN is not just carrying out voter fraud in the here and now. Over the years, as Hoft recounts, several its operatives have been convicted for these activities. And how could it be otherwise? What voters need to understand is that ACORN is a revolutionary Leftist organization. It was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke, a former member of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) — the Communist organization from which Bill Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist group split off in the late Sixties. It is adherent to the radical principles of Saul Alinsky, of whom Obama is a disciple — in fact, he authored a chapter in an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

Under the aforementioned heading of “direct action,” ACORN has made fraud, extortion, harassment, and menacing core parts of its modus operandi. As a matter of principle, ACORN believes that the established bourgeois American order is racist, materialist, imperialist and illegitimate. ACORN no more cares about election laws than about other laws it decides must be circumvented in the service of the higher purpose it reveres: “Change.”

For nearly 20 years, Obama and ACORN have been attached at the hip.

They still are.

Read the McCarthy piece in its entirety. Click through the links he provides to get the full picture of the Obama/ACORN corruption of the electoral system.

ACORN’s White Horse

Whatever the shortcomings of John McCain and Sarah Palin, they are people whose values are the values of this nation, whose loyalty and dedication to this country’s fundamental institutions are beyond question because they have not spent decades working with people who hate America. Nor are they people whose judgments have been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway “experience.”

The person who has spent decades working with people who hate America is Barack Obama.

The person whose judgment has been proved wrong consistently during decades of Beltway "experience" is Biden.

Read all of Professor Sowell's analysis.

October 20, 2008.

Record Vs. Rhetoric
Obama vs. Palin.

By Thomas Sowell
National Review Online

Apparently there is something about Sarah Palin that causes some people to think of her as either the best of candidates or the worst of candidates. She draws enthusiastic crowds and provokes visceral hostility in the media.

The issue that is raised most often is her relative lack of experience and the fact that she would be “a heartbeat away from the presidency” if Sen. John McCain were elected. But Barack Obama has even less experience — none in an executive capacity — and his would itself be the heartbeat of the presidency if he were elected.

Sarah Palin’s record is on the record, while whole years of Barack Obama’s life are engulfed in fog, and he has had to explain away one after another of the astounding and vile people he has not merely “associated” with but has had political alliances with, and to whom he has directed the taxpayers’ money and other money.

We've presented a great deal of documentation on the illegal activties of the voter registration fraud experts ACORN and how Obama in his community organizing days trained their workers not only in voter registration but in how to intimidate bankers into making loans to minority and low income borrowers with inadequate credit. (Click in the right hand column on ACORN in the listing of Categories for some of them.) Of particular interest are three articles by Stanley Kurtz, here and here, which should not be missed.

Now the McCain campaign has produced an effective ad on Obama's long involvement in ACORN's unsavory business of forcing banks to make loans they should never have made and voter registration fraud. Subprime loans are at the root of our world financial crisis and registration fraud corrupts our electoral system.

Who are the fathers of today's world financial meltdown?

Who has cost investors hundreds of billions and workers hundreds of thousands of American jobs? Who has put the world on the edge of a Depression?

Three Democratic politicians who, not accidentally but deliberately, undermined the American financial system: Barack Obama, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

The following account is the story the mainstream media will not tell the American people because they fear it would jeopardize an Obama victory. Maybe after the election they will document the involvement of Obama and his Democratic colleagues, whose zeal to change America into a socialist state brought disaster to the world.

Power Line picked up this report of ACORN fraud in Philadelphia. Obama's ACORN deliberately hires those to get new voters who are desperate for money, such as drug addicts who get paid only if they get signatures.

Here's what John Hinderaker had to say:

ACORN continues to perpetrate voter registration fraud around the country; here is CNN's report on what is happening in Philadelphia:

Some excerpts:

CNN: According to city officials, close to 8,000 applications turned in by ACORN are problematic, including the 1,500 already sent to the U.S. Attorney, and officials expect the number to climb. Greg Voigt says so far his office is catching them, making sure no bad registrations lead to bad votes, but admits he has limited staff.

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER FRED VOIGT: Are there going to be bad votes? Sure, there are going to be bad votes. There are always bad votes. Am I concerned this is a close election? Of course, I'm concerned it's a close election. But, you have to weigh everything in terms of your capacity to find things out.

CNN: Voigt says the problem is ACORN hires people desperate for money, including drug addicts, homeless, recovering alcoholics, even recent parolees who only get paid if they get signatures. ...

If next month's election is one-sided, the potentially explosive issue of voter fraud may recede once again--until the next election, anyway. But even if the Presidential race isn't close, some races will be. And given the massive voter registration fraud that has been carried out on behalf of the Democratic Party, it will likely be impossible to tell whether that fraud influenced the composition of the House, the Senate, or the governorships in one or more states.

If the Presidential election does turn out to be a cliffhanger, the potential consequences are even worse. In that event, and if Obama wins, there is a real possibility that many millions of Americans will view him as an illegitimate President who was installed in the White House through fraud. That's a risk, though, that the Obama campaign is evidently willing to take.

Reports of voter registration fraud are pouring in from all over the country, but the media and the Obama campaign couldn't care less. Investor's Business Daily calls for action.

With widening evidence of massive voter fraud nationwide, we can't leave it to a biased media to investigate. ACORN's alleged voter fraud crosses all jurisdictions, and is now federal in scope.

So why hasn't the Justice Department launched a full-scale investigation? Or the Federal Election Commission?

And why isn't Congress up in arms over this attempt to steal our republic?

The editorial.

ACORN's Bad Seed
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY |Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Election '08: As a major voting fraud scandal explodes, the mainstream media seem intent on ignoring it. Given the seriousness of the charges, maybe a formal federal investigation is in order.

The charges involve ACORN — the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now — for which Barack Obama once served as a lawyer and as a trainer.

In recent months, a picture has emerged of ACORN as a group run amok — with ACORN accused of registering thousands of bogus voters using such names as Mickey Mouse, Veronica Mars and Pat Tillman, plus names from the Dallas Cowboys.

Why care? As documented by Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, Obama has ties to ACORN that are numerous, irrefutable and go back years. Initial denials by the Obama campaign of links to ACORN have been shown to be false.

Obama at various times during his 1990s career as a "community organizer" served ACORN in several roles, including as a major conduit of funds. And the ties continue. This year, Obama's campaign has delivered $800,000 to an ACORN affiliate. Obama has also vowed to give ACORN a big role in his administration.

ACORN's links to the Democratic Party are deep, extending back to its 1970 founding. By its own reckoning, ACORN this year has registered 1.32 million voters in 18 states — many in swing states that could have an outsized impact on the outcome of the election.

Nothing wrong with registering voters, except that ACORN has been accused of voter fraud activities across the country. At least 12 states have started investigations against ACORN.

ACORN also has been implicated in the subprime mortgage meltdown. But it still gets millions in taxpayers' dollars. Something is seriously wrong here.

Yet the media seem curiously incurious about it — just as they refuse to look deeply into Obama's longstanding ties to terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, or ACORN's own radical ties.

ACORN, as it turns out, was co-founded by Wade Rathke, a former member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The SDS spawned the terrorist Weathermen — of which Ayers and Dohrn were members.

The media show no interest. They're in the bag for Obama, big time. A study of the Big Three networks' election coverage released Tuesday by George Mason University's Center for Media & Public Affairs found that, from Aug. 23 to Sept. 30, 61% of their stories about the Democratic Party were positive; just 39% of the stories about Republicans were positive.

With widening evidence of massive voter fraud nationwide, we can't leave it to a biased media to investigate. ACORN's alleged voter fraud crosses all jurisdictions, and is now federal in scope.

So why hasn't the Justice Department launched a full-scale investigation? Or the Federal Election Commission?

And why isn't Congress up in arms over this attempt to steal our republic?

.

At last, somebody is demanding that the truth be told about about Barack Obama.

At this stage of the campaign, with the media refusing to do its job, it's John McCain's duty to tell the American people who Barack Obama really is. The nation deserves to know. As Tony Blankley so accurately says, "the only thing standing in the way of the American public making the most uninformed presidential decision since the invention of the telegraph" is John McCain.

Obama is a product of the corrupt Democratic Chicago political machine that cleared the field of candidates for all of his prior elections and is now running his campaign. His record is clearly that of a Marxist socialist who views this election as a way to change America from a free enterprise economy into one in which those in control of government -- Obama and the Chicago machine -- can dispense patronage and payoffs to their friends and distribute handouts and welfare to supporters at the expense of hard working Americans, thus buying their continuing political support to remain in power.

From his own statements, it is clear Obama will jeopardize the nation's defenses to free up taxpayers' money "to spread around" in a vastly expanded welfare system. He will allow our dependence on Middle East oil to continue to please his friends in the Muslim world. His Chicago political machine patrons don't mind his socialist agenda, indeed, it suits their ends, too.

Obama's close working alliances for decades with America haters Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers to stoke resentment and hate towards America in congregations and schools is clear evidence that the face he is now presenting to the American public is false. He is the opposite of a healer. He and the Chicago political machine will do anything to acquire power, as evidenced by their false cries of racism at every turn and the huge number of cases of fraudulent voter registration now being reported from all around the country, mostly attributable to Obama's long time ally ACORN. (Since ACORN registers Democrats, that suits the Chicago Democratic machine just fine.)

Obama spins his mantra of "hope' and "change," showing he has absorbed the central lesson of his communist "organizer" mentor Saul Alinsky very well, that in the pursuit of power truth is inconsequential.

In reality, Obama is full of anger anger at "white oppression" and is aching for power to strike back at, in his wife's words, the "just downright mean" country that has treated them so well. The only one left to unmask Obama is John McCain, since the media has refused to perform its duty to inform the public. But will the facts be listened to and make the difference?

John McCain's task:

John McCain has an unambiguous duty to the nation to force the public to at least be informed as to the nature and character of Sen. Obama. He needs to lay out all the accurate available information of Obama's prior alliances, affiliations and conduct both for the purpose of revealing Obama's character and Obama's radical policy disposition.

The Obama campaign has raised to a high art the technique of politically intimidating people from commenting honestly about Obama. They play the race card dishonestly, and almost the entire deck from which they deal is filled with race cards and threats of litigation. Real racism is appalling, but the act of falsely charging racism undercuts the very causes of equality and tolerance.

As courageous as John McCain's life has been to date, the next three weeks may be his most heroic. He must do his duty and alert the public despite the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that will be shot into his back as he does so. Once he has discharged that duty -- and arranged for sufficient lawyers to protect the ballot boxes from what is likely to be an unprecedented campaign of attempted voter fraud -- Sen. McCain may be confident that his honor will be intact. And he will be ready to serve as our 44th president.

Read it all -- and weep that this nation has reached this dangerous position because of the deliberate decisions of elites, themselves corrupt, to hide the truth from the American people.

October 15, 2008
McCain's Next Duty Call
By Tony Blankley
Creators Syndicate

The essence of this election season couldn't be simpler. The American public is so appalled at the condition of the country (which it unfairly, but not implausibly blames on the despised President Bush) that with fate casting John McCain in the role of Bush's surrogate, a majority actually is considering voting for Sen. Obama. And when an electorate is intent on doing something, the last thing it wants to hear about are the facts. Moreover, the public's lack of interest in the facts is facilitated by the major American media's refusal to report them.

For example, as Obama has portrayed his political career as one extended beau geste to the ideal of American democracy, a slightly curious media would have thought to report on how he ran his previous elections. And those prior elections, far from being models of honest elections honestly fought, are redolent of Chicago politics at their most suspect.

Obama's first election was described recently by Martin Fletcher, a foreign correspondent for NBC News, in the British newspaper The Times (not on NBC): "Mr Obama won a seat in the state senate in 1996 by the unorthodox means of having surrogates successfully challenge the hundreds of nomination signatures that candidates submit. His Democratic rivals, including Alice Palmer, the incumbent, were all disqualified." Hmm.

Obama's election to the U.S. Senate was even more curious, as described by Gerard Baker in the Irish Independent: "Two exquisitely timed divorces smoothed the way.

"In the Democratic primary, he was a long shot. But a month before the election, his main opponent, Blair Hull, a wealthy Chicago futures trader, was forced to publish divorce papers that revealed, among other charming details, his wife's claim that he had once threatened to kill her.

"In the general election, lightning struck again. His opponent, the engaging Jack Ryan, had run a campaign as a different sort of Republican. But a few months before the election, his divorce papers revealed that, while he might have been a different sort of Republican, he was from precisely the same stable of Obama political opponents. He had, it turned out, once tried to force his former wife to go with him to sex clubs in Paris."

Was Obama really the innocent beneficiary of these rare events? Anything is possible. But when a fellow deals himself two royal flushes in a row, the other players are entitled to be suspicious. Moreover, when a politician is suspected of hypocrisy, the Washington press corps usually is supercharged in its efforts to prove their suspicions. But despite the fact that these bare outlines of Obama's elections are pregnant with the implications that he has gained every office he has sought so far by underhanded and sordid means -- while posing as a Gary Cooper-like idealist in a corrupt political world -- the American media have let these extraordinary events simply pass without significant comment.

During the past few weeks, as I have been traveling extensively across the country, I have yet to find anyone (including a few reporters and producers at local news stations in Florida, California and New York) who has heard of these facts. The response when I recite the facts is always about the same. More or less: "Really? Wow!"

A few days ago, a senior McCain campaign aide was reported to have said that McCain would rather lose with dignity than win by questionable means. I hope that isn't Sen. McCain's view because the aide has it exactly backward. If the polls are reasonably accurate, three weeks of John McCain's campaigning is the only thing standing in the way of the American public making the most uninformed presidential decision since the invention of the telegraph.

John McCain has an unambiguous duty to the nation to force the public to at least be informed as to the nature and character of Sen. Obama. He needs to lay out all the accurate available information of Obama's prior alliances, affiliations and conduct both for the purpose of revealing Obama's character and Obama's radical policy disposition.

The Obama campaign has raised to a high art the technique of politically intimidating people from commenting honestly about Obama. They play the race card dishonestly, and almost the entire deck from which they deal is filled with race cards and threats of litigation. Real racism is appalling, but the act of falsely charging racism undercuts the very causes of equality and tolerance.

As courageous as John McCain's life has been to date, the next three weeks may be his most heroic. He must do his duty and alert the public despite the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that will be shot into his back as he does so. Once he has discharged that duty -- and arranged for sufficient lawyers to protect the ballot boxes from what is likely to be an unprecedented campaign of attempted voter fraud -- Sen. McCain may be confident that his honor will be intact. And he will be ready to serve as our 44th president.

ACORN is a communist/socialist organization whose mission is to "change America.,"

Barack Obama has been allied with ACORN since at least 1992 in its efforts to "change America." He has trained ACORN workers in how to intimidate banks and bankers into making mortgage loans they should not make and how to register voters. Obama ran a voter registration drive himself with ACORN in the early 1990s. Obama has represented ACORN in suing to "change America."

The kind of unsound loans that ACORN forced banks to make in its mission to "change America" are at the heart of the housing bubble, its collapse and the financial wreckage now destroying the savings of Americans and costing American jobs.

ACORN also has been working to "change America" by massive voter registration fraud to register Democratic voters. This year it claims it has registered 1.7 million new voters; one can guess the percentage of Democrats. Voter registration fraud investigations involving ACORN are ongoing in 12 states right now. Obama paid ACORN over $800,000 this year for voter registration despite its long and notorious involvement in voter registration fraud complaints, investigations and convictions. One recent report is of a young man bribed by ACORN with "cash and cigs" to sign up 72 times.

ACORN did not stop with intimidation of mortgage lenders to force them to make bad loans. Stanley Kurtz details how ACORN moved on to Congress to get Democratic support for throwing sane lending standards out the window and authorizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up these unsound loans from mortgage lenders. The present world financial crisis is the result. As Kurtz notes, "the bad seed that started it all was ACORN."

HOW does Barack Obama fit into all of this? Obama has been a key ally of Chicago ACORN going back to his days as a community organizer.

Later, as a young lawyer, he offered leadership training to the activists who were forcing Chicago banks into high-risk subprime loans. And when he made it on to the boards of Chicago's Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he channeled money ACORN's way.

Obama was perfectly aware of ACORN's intimidation tactics - indeed, he oversaw a Woods Fund report that boasted of managing to fund the radical group despite its shocking behavior.

And as a lawmaker, in Illinois and in Washington, he has continued to back ACORN's legislative agenda.

And allied with ACORN in Congress in pushing to loosen mortgage lending standards was none other than Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. And later, in 2005 and 2006, it was Barney Frank, Senators Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama who blocked efforts of the President and John McCain and other Republicans to stop Fannie's and Freddie's dangerous subprime mortgage purchase programs that brought on this world financial crisis.

The kind of change Obama's bad judgment has already brought to America has cost the nation dearly in dollars, lost jobs and the integrity of the voting system. Will voter fraud nonetheless win him the election?

Read the appalling story in its entirety.

ACORN's voter registration activities have provoked so much concern and so many investigations that the FBI has now stepped in. This IBD editorial recounts what's going on and what's at stake.

Is ACORN Stealing The Election?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, October 9, 2008

Election Fraud: A radical group Barack Obama used to work for is committing voter-registration fraud in several states, ahead of the election. What does Obama know about this scam?

It's a legitimate question to raise now that the FBI has raided the offices of the nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now in Nevada and North Carolina, two states where Obama and John McCain are running neck-and-neck. ACORN has registered bogus voters in both states.

The group's voter-registration fraud is rampant, and authorities plan a nationwide sweep of ACORN offices to collect records.

In Nevada, state officials say the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team, including quarterback Tony Romo.

"Romo is not registered to vote in the state of Nevada," Secretary of State Ross Miller said, "and anybody trying to pose as Terrell Owens won't be able to cast a ballot on Nov. 4."

While those names will be flagged on Election Day, felonious voters may have better luck using other cutouts. Nevada, along with several other key battleground states, requires no ID to vote.

In North Carolina, where Obama has been running nonstop ads, ACORN has registered a record number of new voters, many of them suspicious. Statewide, Democrats are doing better than the GOP in new converts — even in traditionally Republican counties.

There have been 218,749 newly registered Democrats in North Carolina since January — more than five times the 38,337 new Republicans, state records show.

The numbers show a startlingly close political battle even in Republican-dominated Union County, with 4,233 new voters registering as Democrats and 4,362 as Republicans. In previous election years, new Republicans have outnumbered Democrats 2-to-1 in the fast-growing Charlotte-area county.

In Missouri, one ACORN registrant named Monica Rays showed up on no less than eight forms, all bearing the same signature.

Suspicious election officials sent letters to some 5,000 ACORN registrants in St. Louis, asking the letter recipients to contact them.

Fewer than 40 reponded.

In Kansas City, 15,000 registrations have been questioned, and last year four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud.

In addition, ACORN officials have also been indicted in Wisconsin and Colorado. Investigations against others are active in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

ACORN has also been registering convicted felons — including inmates — in Florida and other battleground states. ACORN boasts registering a record 1.5 million new voters so far this election.

What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he'd be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?

For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for "advance work.")

What's more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN's voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago's South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.

The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal "Motor Voter" law, which the GOP governor at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued, presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.

Obama downplays his ties to ACORN, and his campaign denies coordinating with ACORN to register voters.

Meantime, New Orleans-based ACORN maintains that it has no control over volunteers who are falsifying application forms, that they're like employees who steal from the store.

But the fraud is widespread and not isolated. It also turns out that some ACORN execs allegedly are involved in a $1 million embezzlement cover-up at their headquarters. Representing them in the case is none other than Michelle Obama's old law firm in Chicago.

ACORN's corruption is not just out in the field, as they claim. There's a pattern of corruption from the top down.

McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest. He'd be crazy not to contest the results in light of these events.

First it was Obama saying that Reverend Wright of the "God Damn America" videos was not the Jeremiah Wright he knew over 20 years. That statement was quickly exposed as utter nonsense.

Then it was unrepentant terrorist bomber and self-described communist William Ayers Obama tried to pass off as just somebody from the neighborhood when in fact they worked together for several years dispensing over $150 million in an attempt to make socialists out of Chicago's teachers and students.

Now Obama is trying to disassociate himself from ACORN, the radical socialist organization in the forefront of intimidating banks and bankers to make subprime mortgage loans to low-income and minorities whose credit did not warrant the loans. ACORN also has a long history of voter registration fraud, not only in Chicago, but across the nation. ACORN, like most socialists, want to replace the free enterprise system with an authoritarian socialist state and all means to accomplish this end are allowable, including violent intimidation and, shall we say, careless and negligent voter registration efforts. Despite -- or because of -- this history the Obama campaign paid over $800,000 to an ACORN unit for voter registration work this year.

Obama first ran a voter registration project with ACORN in the early 1990s, so he has to be familiar with its long history of accusations, investigations and convictions involving fraudulent voter registration. Obama trained ACORN workers in the art of pressuring banks to make unsound loans. As a lawyer he even represented ACORN in a law suit to force the Clinton Administration to loosen mortgage loan standards even farther. In the last couple of years Obama said his views were still pretty much what they were during his ACORN days and this past November he was quoted as saying he had been fighting alongside ACORN" his entire career. ACORN's political arm has endorsed him for president and proudly announced it has registered 1.7 million this year; ACORN is being investigated by public officials in at least 12 states for registration fraud in this election cycle. (For voter fraud in 2006 ACORN workers went to jail in Washington State.) Again, Obama' denials are total nonsense, but the mainstream media is not calling him on them, but is giving him a pass as it has done for Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers.

Stanley Kurtz, an independent researcher from Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, sets the record straight on yet another of Obama's prevarications (ok, lies). Read "Inside Obama's ACORN" in National Review of May 29, 2008 and Kurtz's follow-up October 8th in the same publication. Also, see this IBD editorial.

We have covered ACORN's close relationship with Obama over several months. For example, click here and here.

Just as Obama learned from his first foray into community organizing it would be easier and more effective to get inside the system to effect socialist change, so too did ACORN. In his book Obama admits he went to Harvard Law School to learn how to game the system at the highest levels. ACORN followed the same route: It switched from holding city council protests to working the system. Rather than fight from outside, infiltrate the system with voter registration drives to elect your people and use the law courts to change such things as mortgage loan regulations to force more loans to be made to those with subpar credit. All along the way, Obama supported ACORN, using his position on charitable boards to pour money into ACORN's radical agenda.

McCain is now running ads detailing the Obama-ACORN connections and his preposterous denials as well as the long alliance with unrepentant terrorist and communist William Ayers in promoting socialist goals, which included, guess what, funding ACORN.

Despite all the mainstream media fawning over Obama and his massive outspending of McCain on television and voter registration, a strange thing is occurring. The polls are tightening.

The story about the real Obama is leaking out on the internet and in small circulation magazines. Is he a socialist? Yes. Did he really work with an admitted "small "c" communist (former but unrepentant terrorist bomber William Ayers)" to radicalize the Chicago schools? Yes. Did he stay in Jeremiah Wright's racist hate-America church for 20 years because he agreed with its message? Why else? And why has he been allied with ACORN, repeatedly accused, investigated and condemned for voter fraud, for more than 20 years? And was he really one of those who taught ACORN workers how to intimidate banks into making subprime loans they never should have made?

Things the mainstream media should have looked into many months ago but didn't are just now surfacing. Who knows? If the media had done it's job earlier, Hillary Clinton may well have been the Democratic nominee for president?

Karl Rove, former Bush strategist, believes the situation is still fluid, that with all the distractions and fear because of the economic crisis voters are just now looking for information about the candidates. They know who McCain is, but they are still asking, "Who is Barack Obama?"

Voters Haven't Decided Yet
Now it's up to the candidates to drive home their message.

By KARL ROVE
October 9, 2008
Wall Street Journal

Tuesday night's presidential debate was good entertainment. Both candidates were animated and loose throughout a wide-ranging discussion. Sen. Barack Obama did well in Sen. John McCain's favorite format. Mr. McCain was more focused and sharp than in the first debate, though the cameras above him made his balding pate more prominent.

APTom Brokaw was often a distraction: Did he really need over a hundred words -- including the name "Sherard Cowper-Coles" -- to ask about Afghanistan?
Mr. McCain's advocates were cheered by him advancing the theme that Mr. Obama lacks a record of accomplishment or bipartisanship in the Senate. Mr. McCain also described how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac constituted "the match that started this forest fire" that's engulfed our economy, and nailed Mr. Obama and Democrats for being AWOL on GSE reform.
Mr. McCain was most effective on taxes and spending. He argued now is not the time to raise taxes and hit Mr. Obama's proposal to hike small business taxes: three out of four filers in the top 5% report small-business income. Mr. McCain called for a spending freeze and attacked earmarks, including Mr. Obama's $3 million for a Chicago planetarium's "overhead projector." Mr. Obama weakly replied earmarks were only $18 billion.
Advocates of Mr. Obama, on the other hand, saw him scoring points on style and connecting with questioners. He patiently explained to one how the Wall Street rescue package would help him and his neighbors on Main Street. He had the night's emotional high point when he talked about his dying mother fighting her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition. He called for dramatic change and tied Mr. McCain to the Bush administration, though not too often to be obnoxious.
Mr. Obama also offered his villain responsible for the current crisis: "the deregulation of the financial system." Many voters will accept Mr. Obama's designation, despite it being both wrong and a slap at President Bill Clinton, who signed the 1999 deregulation legislation that Mr. Obama seems to object to, and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin and Undersecretary Larry Summers, who helped fashion it. What do these Obama advisers think of being blamed for the credit-market meltdown?
What about swing voters? There are probably more undecided and persuadable voters open to switching their choice than in any election since 1968.
About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.
Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.
Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
For those open to Mr. McCain, it is unclear how they will respond to his plan to order the Treasury secretary "to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes." It came across as both impulsive and badly explained. No experts were ready to defend it. No explanatory paper was flung at journalists. Nor were surrogates like Mitt Romney briefed. But the campaign did admit it borrowed the idea from Hillary Clinton.
While it was good Mr. McCain engaged on health-care reform, his explanations were not crisp or powerful. And he failed to defend his proposed corporate tax cut. Why not say America has the world's second-highest corporate tax rate, putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in creating jobs?
For those leaning to Mr. Obama, there was no evidence of bipartisanship. There was no talk of accomplishments. Did he really think it was smart to answer Mr. McCain on Fannie by dismissing the GSE reform bill and pointing to a letter he wrote? In the Senate, is the pen mightier than legislation? And Mr. Obama's say-one-thing, do-another approach was apparent. Blast Mr. McCain for talking up the economy, then say, "I am confident about the American economy." Blame Mr. McCain for the credit meltdown, and end the assault with "you're not interested in hearing politicians pointing fingers." Say "only a few percent of small businesses" will get taxed when 663,000 small enterprises are in the top 5%.
There were no knockouts. What matters now is how well the candidates prosecute the themes they have laid out in the election's remaining 26 days. Interest is high. People are paying more attention than usual.
Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.
Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.
But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

The mainstream media led by the Obama-supporting New York Times, CBS, MSNBC, NBC and ABC continues to ignore its duty to the American people in exposing the real Obama. There has been no digging into his history and no reporting of what independent researchers are finding.

Power Line blog reports on two major items:

When Barack Obama ran for state senate in Illinois he was listed as a member of the New Party, a political party dedicated to socialist principles. This had never been disclosed in the "official" Obama narrative, which had been carefully compiled by the Democratic Chicago machine (often called the "corrupt Chicago machine" by Chicago newspapers) that is running his campaign.

ACORN is now being investigated for voter registration fraud all across the United States. ACORN has just announced it has registered 1.7 million new voters. The radical socialist organization ACORN has a history with Obama going back to the 1990s when he taught ACORN workers how to register voters and intimidate banks and bankers into making risky mortgage loans to the low-income and minorities. The Obama campaign earlier this year paid more than $800,000 to ACORN for voter registration work. ACORN's political arm has endorsed Obama for president. Obama has said that his political views really haven't changed much from his ACORN days.

It isn't often that one can identify with precision the principal culprits who cause a disaster, but that is not the case with this financial crisis. We know who. It's Frank, Obama and Dodd.

At its heart is the housing bubble and its collapse largely due to the explosion of subprime loans to those who reality has proven couldn't afford them.

Democrats and community agitators like Barack Obama pushed -- intimidated and terrorized -- banks to make mortgage loans they would never make in their sound business judgment. Subprime loans rose from 2% of total loans to 30% in just four years -- 2002 to 2006. And Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought most of them, to the relief of the banks who made the loans under pressure from Clinton-era Community Reinvestment Act rules, urged on by Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

Barack Obama, fresh out of college, learned the practices of intimidation as a community organizer. He soon realized he could accomplish more working for his socialist goals inside the system rather than from the outside. So he went to law school to learn how to wield power on higher levels. During his time at law school, he learned even more about the Alinsky community organizing tactics of intimidation by moonlighting at the Industrial Areas Foundation. On his return to Chicago, Obama, working for ACORN, was a pioneer in forcing unsound loans to be made, training those who terrorized banks, bankers and public officials into making loans they shouldn't have. (He also ran a voter registration drive for ACORN, which has been implicated in voter registration fraud time and time again.)

Meanwhile, Frank and Dodd in the U.S. Congress were pushing Fannie and Freddie to buy up those shaky loans, stamp them with the U.S. guaranty and sell them to buyers around the world. As a consequence, subprime loans mushroomed.

Frank and Dodd blocked Bush and McCain efforts to restore sanity to Fannie and Freddie. When the Bush Administration together with Senate Republicans, including John McCain, tried to rein Fannie/Freddie in in 2003, 2005 and 2006, Democrats led by Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd blocked all those efforts, scoffing that there was no Fannie/Freddie crisis. Obama, who in earlier years had worked to force banks into subprime lending, of course did nothing and remained silent, while collecting over $100,000 in campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie. In fact, as a senator he was quoted as saying that a subprime loan was a good thing.

The inevitable collapse occurred. Fannie and Freddie had spread so much subprime debt around the world, panic resulted.

As Obama's Reverend Jeremiah Wright said in another context, the Democratic chickens have come home to roost, but these three haven't suffered, It's average Americans who have lost hundreds of billions in their savings because of the reckless policies of Frank, Obama and Dodd.

Socialist agitators such as Saul Alinsky, whose methods Obama studied and applied in his community organizing and lawyer days in Chicago, believed the best way to get to a Marxist socialist society is to create chaos and bring the free enterprise system down, while blaming it for all the problems his followers helped to create. Was financial chaos in the Obama vision as a prelude to a socialist society? If so, Marxist revolutionary change is at hand. That hundreds of millions have suffered in the process is just an unfortunate side effect of creating a more humane, more just socialist society. Obama made it clear that higher taxes will be the start of Obama's socialist program of wealth redistribution, taking what's yours to those who claim it should be theirs.

Those who could not afford their mortgages and now face foreclosure, the government will not only give them interest relief, it will reduce the mortgage principal (that is, the money borrowed in the first place) and stretch out payments for up to 50 years. If the house wasn't affordable before, it certainly will be now. (Section 110 of the bailout bill.) If you are struggling but making your payments to protect your home, you get no relief from section 110. Only the deadbeats benefit.

It may seem complicated, but it's really simple.

Subprime loans created the housing bubble. When the housing bubble broke, the crisis spread throughout the world since Fannie/Freddie obligations were held by central banks and commercial banks in all countries. They bought because the obligations were sold by government-sponsored agencies, so of course the U.S. government stood behind them. Rating agencies agreed and rated the paper AAA, triple-A, the highest and safest rating there is.

But those at Fannie/Freddie were working to please their Democratic sponsors in Congress and ignored the lack of creditworthiness that was increasing in the portfolios they were selling. The much maligned Wall Street firms relied on Fannie and Freddie to assemble creditworthy packages that protected the credit of the U.S,, which was their prime responsibility. Fannie and Feddie officials such as Raines and Johnson, both advisors to the Obama campaign, are the ones at Fannie who failed to protect the American people.

Now Barney Frank is trying to deflect criticism of his socialist profligacy by claiming that any criticism of the subprime loan explosion is a Republican slam at black borrowers. In other words, criticism of the disaster they created is racist.

How pathetic.

Investor's Business Daily does an excellent job of summarizing the sorry saga.

Barney Frank's Bankrupt Ideas
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY |Tuesday October 07, 2008

Financial Rescue: Democrats created the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them. Now Obama and Biden want bankruptcy judges to bail out the same deadbeat homeowners.

It's been said that history is a lie agreed upon. Democrats are trying to rewrite history by blaming the Bush administration for the current crisis and claiming that the rescue bill is necessary to save the economy from Republican mismanagement.

More blarney from Barney.

Last Thursday on Fox News, when Bill O'Reilly tried to suggest that both parties might share the blame, House Finance Committee Chairman Frank, in a not atypical meltdown, disowned any responsibility for his lack of oversight over the last two years and his complicity before that.

Frank also claimed: "The fact is, it was 1994 that we passed a bill to tell the Fed to stop the subprime lending. We tried to get them to do it." In other words, those rascally Republicans did it all when they took control of Congress that November.

More...

As Democrats aided by the media have been doing all they could to blame eight years of the Bush Administration for the financial panic now circling the globe, it was Congressional Democrats who allowed the housing bubble to get out of control, leading to the inevitable collapse that was so big it has shaken the entire financial system.

It started with local agitators across the country demanding banks make loans they never should have to people who couldn't afford them. In the forefront was ACORN, the national socialist organization, terrorizing and intimidating banks, bank and public officials into loosening lending standards. The ACORN chapter in Chicago was one of the national leaders in blackmailing banks; their people were trained in their intimidation tactics by none other than Barack Obama.

Then Democrats in Congress urged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up all these risky loans that banks were more than happy to get rid of; they didn't want to make them in the first place. Then Fannie and Freddie had Wall Street package the loans and sell them around the world. With the assumed guaranty of the U.S. government behind the securities of these public sponsored agencies everyone bought relying on the credit of the U.S.

Efforts to slow down and stop the incredible expansion of subprime loans made possible by Fannie and Freddie (from 2% of total loans in 2002 to 30% in 2006) were blocked by Democrats in Congress led by Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. John McCan was urging reform; Obama was not. Instead, Obama in just his very short time in the Senate became the second biggest recipient over 20 years of Fannie/Freddie campaign contributions (second only to Senator Dodd).

As a result of the Democrats' "do good' socialism, taxpayers will wind up paying hundreds of billions of dollars. Investors have already lost hundreds of billions of dollars and it could get worse if the bailout doesn't succeed. Warren Buffet thinks the $700 billion bailout may not be enough to stave off recession or worse.

Before the bailout bill to rescue the financial system from Democratic excess passed, Fox News presented an excellent short summary of how it all came about.

So put the blame where it belongs -- on Obama-type Marxist socialism pushed along by Democrats in Congress.