What Is This World Coming To?

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform now.  It claims on its website that is the nation’s largest community organization of low and moderate income families.

ACORN formed the bulk of Barack Obama’s resume as ‘community organizer’ when he served as that organization’s lawyer.   Now that he is president,  ACORN is a taxpayer-funded charitable group.

Here’s some of what ACORN does with those taxpayer dollars to help the poor and oppressed:

Who said the entire government was corrupt? The Census Bureau, in the wake of yet another ACORN scandal, has cut ties with the community organizer’s group.

The Census Bureau earlier this year signed up the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, one of the nation’s largest community groups, as a national partner for the decennial census, a role that entails helping to publicize the importance of the count and encouraging people to participate.

In a letter to Acorn President Maude Hurd, Census Director Robert Groves said Acorn had become a distraction.

Acorn’s deputy national director, Brian Kettenring, said the organization won’t stop promoting the 2010 Census. “We will continue to do what we’ve said we’ll do, which is encourage people in communities to participate fully in the census,” he said.

Acorn released a statement earlier Friday saying that the videos were made to “misinform the public about Acorn housing.”

“All Acorn housing staff members undergo rigorous training and are expected to comply with high standards for ethical behavior and compliance with the law,” said president of Acorn Housing Alton Bennett and Executive Director Mike Shea.

ACORN was probably astonished to discover that prostitution was illegal.

An Ohio judge ruled that counties must accept park benches as legal residences for voting purposes in the general election.   U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus also ruled that provisional ballots can’t be invalidated because of poll worker errors.

So if you vote in Pennsylvania, there’s still plenty of time to drive to Ohio, claim a stretch of sand along Lake Erie is home, and vote again.

In Mississippi, you don’t need identification to prove you are who you say you are.  So the fact that somebody stuffed the voter rolls with dead people means anybody can walk in and vote for them.  How bad is it?

Sue Sautermeister is working hard in the First District of Madison County to start a purging of the voter rolls as soon after the election as possible. She has file drawers full of names of people who haven’t voted in years and are known to be dead. “We have people who registered in 1965 who have never voted,” she says. “We have 486 people (registered who are) over 105.”

Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann notes that “190,000 new voters have registered for this election and he believes the turnout will be historic.”  Ya think?

Obama has inspired some very dedicated campaign workers, including a “Palestinian in a Gaza refugee camp is doing his part to get out the vote for Barack Obama. With a little help from the Internet, 24-year-old Ibrahim Abu Jayab is cold calling random American families from his parent’s home imploring them to vote Obama, according to the AP. “

Obama’s background, which until now has been studiously ignored by the mainstream media, is suddenly coming back to haunt him — and the timing couldn’t be worse.    The AP is reporting that former Obama crony Tony Rezko is getting ready to spill the beans on Chicago’s political machine . . .

Jailed political fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the Chicago real estate developer who helped launch Barack Obama on his political career, is whispering secrets to federal prosecutors about corruption in Illinois and the political fallout could be explosive.

Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, whose administration faces multiple federal investigations over how it handed out jobs and money with advice from Rezko, is considered the most vulnerable.

Rezko also was friendly with Obama — offering him a job when he finished law school, funding his earliest political campaigns and purchasing a lot next to his house.

Wow!  That doesn’t sound like the AP is in the tank for Obama so much anymore.   And the fact that Obama was once ACORN’s general counsel and trainer isn’t helping him either.   According to a report from Texas Watchdog, ACORN registered more than 4,000 dead people to vote in the Houston area:

Instances of dead voters’ names being used to cast ballots were most frequent in three elections, the November 2004 general election, the November 2006 general election and the March 2008 Democratic primary, the analysis found.

Guess what else it found?  Although they clearly downplayed it, they also found that all the fraudulent votes were for Democrats.   The New York Post reported:

A man at the center of a voter-registration scandal told The Post yesterday he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times, in apparent violation of Ohio laws.

ACORN is also deeply involved in the mortgage market collapse.  The weekend edition of MarketWatch bore this ponderous headline: “Government Money Used to Support ACORN Fraud - As Allegations Against ACORN Mount, So Does Pressure to Investigate, Cut Off Funds to Corrupt Organization”

It quotes James Terry, Chief Public Advocate with the Consumer Rights League testifying before Congress:

“The fact is, year after year, ACORN has consistently displayed contempt for the law and a willingness to accept rampant fraud as a simple cost of doing business. Unfortunately, voter registration is not the only area of ACORN’s operation to disregard the law. This organization has a long history of fraud, embezzlement and misuse of taxpayer funds. With an estimated $110 million annual budget, there is more than adequate resources to allow for proper oversight. But there seems to be a culture of corruption that pervades the organization that should be investigated not rewarded with millions more of taxpayer dollars.”

Watch this video from 2005 and hear the Democrats explain in their own words how they covered up the mortgage crisis scandal behind the Economic Collapse of 2008:

Then there’s this:

The Cleveland Leader reports this morning that Barack Obama is lying about his involvement with the group ACORN, which recently added Missouri to the list of states in which its activities are under investigation. While Obama’s site maintains that he never trained ACORN activists — whose training apparently encourages them to play fast and loose with election laws — Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes has thanked Obama for doing precisely that:

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”

Obama can’t argue that he has distanced himself from ACORN.   Obama’s campaign recently paid $800,000 to an ACORN subsdiary to ‘get out the vote’ (for him. ACORN doesn’t register Republican voters).  Obama sought ACORN’s endorsement in the Democratic primary telling ACORN members,

“Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Are these all smears?  William Ayers, the founder of the Weather Underground, an admittedly unrepentent domestic terror bomber?   Obama claims he barely knew him and knew nothing of his past, although they served together on the boards of both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.

Watch this video and see who it is that Obama admits gave him his political start and note also whom he calls ‘his friends.’

But is it a smear to report a fact, just because Obama denies it now?   Are Obama’s close ties to ACORN a ’smear’ now that ACORN is under investigation in fifteen states for voter fraud?

Then, there is ACORN’s involvement in the sub-prime mortgage market.  Is it a ’smear’ to report that Obama trained ACORN in how to apply pressure to banks in order to obtain them?