Obama, ACORN "Thug Thizzle"

Obama, ACORN Doin' the 'Thug Thizzle' Posted 2008-10-11

By Michelle Malkin

SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION of our election process continues. Barack Obama and his old friends at ACORN and Project Vote are leading the way. This radical revolution is taking place in your backyard. And as I’ve reported before, this voter-fraud racket is on your dime. On Monday, the two liberal groups announced the wrap-up of a 21-state voter registration drive targeting low-income people and minorities in battleground states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin. What’s wrong with that? For starters, these two groups are militant partisan outfits purporting to engage in nonpartisan civic activity. And their campaign comes amid an avalanche of fresh voter-fraud allegations involving ACORN in many of those same key states. On Tuesday, Nevada state officials raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names. ACORN, which receives 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers to pursue an aggressive welfare-state agenda, has helped register more than 1.27 million people nationwide. The rest of their funding comes from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance. Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, was founded by left-wing lawyer Sandy Newman to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution. The two groups are inextricably linked — and at their nexus is Barack Obama. In 1992, Newman hired Obama to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The Illinois drive’s motto: “It’s a Power Thing.” As previously noted in this column (“More Radicals For Obama: ACORN,” June 28), Obama also trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN’s PAC endorsed his primary bid with full backing and muscle. Despite his adamant denials of any association with the group (his Fight the Smears Web site now claims “Barack Obama never organized with ACORN”), Obama’s political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda. The Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, running parallel to ACORN/Project Vote, is an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision. “Our volume,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, “will be enormous.” Quantity over quality. It’s the ACORN way. In addition to the Las Vegas raid, fraud allegations keep piling up: ■ Election officials in Lake County, Ind., this month rejected a large portion of the 5,000 registration forms ACORN turned in after conducting registration drives in the area all summer. Some vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from telephone books and forged signatures. According to local reports, “large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style” and “apparently the organization’s canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid.” The fake registrants included dead people and underage kids. On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 voter applications were no good — tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen. ■ Last month, officials in Milwaukee, Wis., discovered at least seven felons employed as voter registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter registration cards. The state GOP accused ACORN of attempting to enroll dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN’s Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle. ■ In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple copycat forms for six separate voters during the summer. According to the Miami Herald, “One individual had 21 duplicate applications." Election officials had flagged ACORN’s negligent practices several months ago, but it may be too late: In Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, ACORN has signed up 135,000 new voters, nearly 60 percent of them registered as Democrats that constitute a fifth of all new voters in that region. ■ In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people received free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling prospects to the polls. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who told her ACORN “told her who to vote for if she wanted a ‘better life,’ and told her not to worry about jury duty (one of the reasons this homeless woman didn’t want to register) because the government probably wouldn’t be able to track her down. She was registering with a temporary address.” Holliday interviewed another homeless man targeted by the registration drive who exulted that he was voting for Obama because “I want him to do his thang. You know, do his thug thizzle.” “Thug thizzle” is street slang for performing your trademark move. Obama and ACORN have practiced their thug thizzle together for years: organizing an ever-expanding community of ineligible and marginal voters to expand the Democratic power base. Rules be damned.

ACORN = Voter Fraud In Connecticut

News OK.com

Voter fraud claims follow group
Registration Questions arise about applications

BY The Associated Press

Published: October 10, 2008

HARTFORD, Conn. — The Connecticut State Elections Enforcement Commission is looking into a complaint alleging that a community advocacy group submitted fraudulent voter registration cards in Bridgeport.

Joseph Borges (R), Bridgeport’s registrar of voters, filed the complaint. He said he has found problems with numerous voter registration cards submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which works to register low-income people.

In one instance, he said a card was filled out for a 7-year-old girl, whose age was listed as 27.

The group filed more than 8,000 cards in Bridgeport. The complaint involves 10, but Borges said there were problems with others.

The group works in low-income communities that trend Democratic. Republicans have used the reports of fraud to raise questions about the possibility of more widespread misdeeds and Election Day antics, such as using phony voter registrations to cast absentee ballots.

The group said the complaints are part of an effort by Republicans to discredit voter registration drives across the nation.

- lol, I must admit I love that excuse... it isn't ACORN that is doing it, it's those evil Republicans.
-red

ACORN = Voter Fraud and Worse, Much Worse

Folks... whether Obama wins or loses this election there is going to be hell to pay for this financial mess and the corruption in the Democrat party seems to have no end. It is coming out slowly but surely and the press can only ignore it for so long.

A fellow blogger sinister posted that he had worked for ACORN and found no problems there. I say.. wow really?

It was ACORN that was instrumental in people getting those loans we keep hearing about that people couldn't afford and Bacrack Obama received the second most money of anyone from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

You Democrats will absolutely blow this election by trying to steal it when you might be able to have won it fair and sqaure...

From Discover The Networks

ACORN

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is a grassroots political organization that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s and early 70s invaded welfare offices across the U.S. -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. In the late 1960s, ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke was a NWRO organizer and a protegé of Wiley. Rathke also organized draft resistance for the militant group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the same period.

In 1970 Rathke -- along with the aforementioned Wiley (best known for his effective use of the so-called "Cloward-Piven strategy," which called for swamping the welfare rolls with new applicants and thereby creating an economic crisis) and Gary Delgado (a lead organizer for Wiley's NWRO) -- formed a new entity called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The group's name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym ACORN remained. Instead of focusing only on welfare recipients, ACORN's mandate included all issues touching low-income and working-class people.

Rathke and his ACORN co-founders enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky's activist tactics.

Today ACORN claims 175,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 850 chapters in 70 U.S. cities in 38 states. (The organization is also active in Canada and Mexico). It owns two radio stations, a housing corporation, and a law office, and maintains affiliate relationships with a host of trade-union locals. ACORN also runs schools where children are trained in class consciousness; a network of "boot camps" for training street activists; and operations that extort contributions from banks and other businesses under threat of racial violence and trumped-up civil rights charges.

In 1998, ACORN founded the Working Families Party in New York, which endorses candidates for political office. It endorsed Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate race. Canvassers from ACORN and its sister groups launched a statewide voter-mobilization drive that proved influential in Clinton's victory. In November 2001, a coalition of radical politicians led by ACORN-sponsored candidates running on the Working Families Party ticket won a veto-proof majority on the New York City Council, giving ACORN de facto control of the New York City government.

With little opposition from Republicans or moderate Democrats, ACORN radicals pushed laws tightening their control over New York City government and stripping the Mayor of executive power. Their current platform calls for a rollback of welfare reforms; a crackdown on NYC police, including a ban on "racial and ethnic profiling"; and the appointment of a politicized Civilian Review Board newly empowered to prosecute police officers. ACORN also seeks to use its influence to raise corporate taxes, increase regulation, and empower unions with an array of new rights. ACORN seeks to prevent any corporation from being free to leave New York without an "exit visa" from the City Council.

On March 12, 2003, the ACORN-controlled City Council passed a resolution, by a 31-17 margin, condemning the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the 2004 election cycle, ACORN and its sister group Project Vote ran a nationwide voter mobilization drive that was marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams. ACORN's get-out-the-vote activists were implicated in schemes that included the falsification and destruction of thousands of voter registration forms, and the registering of convicted felons even in states where felons are ineligible to vote.

In 2006, approximately 20,000 questionable voter registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials in Missouri -- virtually all in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas, where ACORN purportedly sought to help empower the "disenfranchised" minorities living there. Similar allegations of ACORN voter fraud were made in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado. Between 2004 and 2006, ACORN employees were accused of submitting fraudulent voter registration cards and forging signatures on ballot initiatives in 12 states.

Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin writes:

"[In July 2007] ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State. Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter registration forms. According to case records, they flipped through phone books for names to use on the forms, including 'Leon Spinks,' 'Frekkie Magoal' and 'Fruto Boy Crispila.' Three ACORN election hoaxers pleaded guilty in October [2007]. A King County prosecutor called ACORN's criminal sabotage 'an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.'

"The group's vandalism on electoral integrity is systemic. ACORN has been implicated in similar voter fraud schemes in Missouri, Ohio and at least 12 other states. The Wall Street Journal noted: 'In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained ACORN's practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.'

"In March [2008], Philadelphia elections officials accused the nonprofit advocacy group of filing fraudulent voter registrations in advance of the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary. The charges [were] forwarded to the city district attorney's office."

ACORN makes a great deal of money from its "community organizing" campaigns, and shows little tolerance for rival leftist groups infringing on its turf.

For instance, when ACORN set up shop in San Francisco in May 2002, it discovered that many of its potential recruits - low-income blacks and Hispanics - were networked with the Outer Mission Resident's Association (OMRA). The San Francisco Examiner reports, "ACORN soon began a process of intimidation by busing in activists from Oakland to disrupt OMRA events. ACORN members then began showing up at some neighbors' homes, and in one case jabbed a person in the chest."

Since ACORN is a private corporation, it does not divulge its finances. Further complicating any effort to calculate ACORN's income is the fact that it operates an unknown number of front groups, many of which conceal their relationship to ACORN. But as of March 2006 ACORN claimed 175,000 member families on its website, each contributing at least $120 per year, which amounts to about $21 million in annual membership fees. ACORN's website states, "Membership dues and a host of grassroots and chapter-based fundraising programs pay for 70 to 75 percent of the entire organization's budget."

Since its inception in 1970, ACORN's overriding mission has been to enact "living wage" ordinances at the local, state and - ultimately - federal levels. It has succeeded in getting many such laws passed. ACORN's model legislation contains a clause that exempts unionized businesses from paying the minimum wage. As a result, those companies that stubbornly resist unionizing founder and, in many cases, go bankrupt. Those that unionize thrive, providing an ever-expanding membership base for union recruiting. This is the main reason that unions such as AFSCME and SEIU contribute so generously to ACORN.

Housing activism is another major focus for ACORN, which forms housing collectives in targeted areas. The collective applies pressure on local authorities to place it in charge of renovating and managing abandoned or dilapidated properties for poor tenants. Local authorities provide money for renovation -- much of which ends up in ACORN bank accounts. The poor tenants are compelled to "earn" their new homes by investing "sweat equity" -- that is, working without pay on renovating the properties. ACORN or its designated "housing collective" retains title to the land on which the building stands. If the tenants decide to move out, they are required to sell their property back to ACORN, at cost, no matter what the market value of the property.

In recent years, ACORN has received funding from many foundations, including but not limited to the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Minneapolis Foundation; the Open Society Institute; the Public Welfare Foundation; the Surdna Foundation; the Woods Fund of Chicago; the Scherman Foundation; and the Ben and Jerry's Foundation.

At the March 2008 "Take Back America" conference sponsored by Campaign for America's Future (CAF), ACORN joined CAF and five additional leftist organizations in announcing plans for "the most expensive [$350 million] mobilization in history this election season." The initiative focused on voter registration, education, and get-out-the-vote drives. Other members of the coalition included MoveOn.org, Rock the Vote, the National Council of La Raza, the Women's Voices Women Vote Action Fund, and the AFL-CIO.

On June 2, 2008, Wade Rathke stepped down from his role as ACORN's chief organizer.

Also in 2008, ACORN publicly acknowledged that Dale Rathke -- the brother of Wade Rathke -- had embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN and affiliated groups in 1999 and 2000. ACORN further admitted that for eight years its executives had kept this information secret from almost all of their organization's board members and from law-enforcement authorities. Wrote journalist Stephanie Strom in July 2008:

"Dale Rathke remained on Acorn's payroll until a month ago, when disclosure of his theft by foundations and other donors forced the organization to dismiss him. 'We thought it best at the time to protect the organization, as well as to get the funds back into the organization, to deal with it in-house,' said Maude Hurd, president of ACORN. 'It was a judgment call at the time, and looking back, people can agree or disagree with it, but we did what we thought was right.'"

According to Strom, Wade Rathke "said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a 'weapon' into the hands of enemies of ACORN, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to its often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers."

In September 2008 the Board of Elections in Cuyahoga County, Ohio accused ACORN's paid workers, who had been tasked with registering as many pro-Democrat voters as possible, of submitting fraudulent voter-registration cards. According to the Board, ACORN workers had commonly turned in separate cards with duplicate names but different addresses or different birth dates. Other cards listed people living at an address that was not a residence.

Also in 2008, there was evidence that ACORN corruption was rampant in Pennsylvania. For example, Philadelphia's City Commissioners voted unanimously to present to the U.S. Attorney hundreds of fraudulent voter-registration forms turned in by the organization. All told, at least 50,663 registrations were rejected, among which were 35,888 duplicates, 689 that were filled out by people too young to vote, some 2,108 with missing signatures, another 5,093 with invalid addresses, and 6,161 not eligible because they were missing a valid HAVA (Help America Vote Act) number. Similarly, ACORN workers submitted hundreds of fraudulent registrations to the Delaware County, Pennsylvania Voter Registration Office.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney's office in Michigan indicated that it might prosecute ACORN for similar voter-registration scams in that state. Registrars there had complained about duplicate registrations and fictitious names. "There appears to be a sizable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of State's office. "And it appears to be widespread."

For Obama/ACORN, All Roads Lead To Saul Alinsky

The Cherry Creek News (Colorado)
"For Obama, All Roads Lead To Saul Alinsky"

By Brad O’Leary

Following the DNC Convention, Saul Alinsky’s son, L.David Alinsky, wrote a letter to the Boston Globe. “Barack Obama’s training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing his effectiveness,” the son wrote. “I am proud to see that my father’s model for organizing is being applied successfully beyond local community organizing to affect the Democratic campaign in 2008. It’s a fine tribute to Saul Alinsky as we approach his 100th birthday.”

The great community organizing Obama did was through the radical Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN is notoriously known for its radical, and often illegal, practices and adherence to the radical philosophy of Saul Alinsky. According to the Washington Post, Alinsky’s “disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23 year old Columbia University graduate to organize black residents on the Southside, while learning and applying Alinsky’s philosophy of street level democracy.”

Alinsky wrote “the disruption of the present organization is the first step toward community organization. All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.” For Obama and ACORN, disrupting our institutions, free markets, and the rule of law is the first step toward the socialist society that Alinsky sought. Alinsky surely would be proud of Obama and the vehicle (ACORN) that has helped propel his cause. Something in Obama clearly clicked while studying Alinsky, particularly Alinsky’s comment: “The organizer is in a true sense the highest level for which man can reach – to create, to be a ‘great creator’, to play God.” Obama wanted to be the one.

-Complete article at The Cherry Creek News-

VOTER FRAUD: Where Is The Outrage From the Left?

I wonder why you never see the left leaning bloggers talk about ACORN and what everyone now knows...? It looks like at least 10 purple toss-up states are experiencing large numbers of fraudulent voter registrations, primarily from the notorious left leaning group that we remember from 2004 and even 2000.

September 15 2008- "ACORN is at the heart of one of the most massive voter fraud campaigns in American history.
ACORN is intimate with Barack Obama and is a major supporter of unions throughout the country and is doing its level best (and illegally at that) trying to assure that Obama wins this election."

Canada Free Press-
Voter Fraud: How ACORN/Obama Democrats plan to win the election
By Online Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Excerpt from a history professor’s letter to his local paper:

"Two years ago, I received a notice in the mail from the Delaware County voter registration office in Media, stating that my request to vote in the county was denied. The document accurately stated my name and my home residence.

Since I had not sent in such a request, and I had in fact been voting in the Commonwealth regularly since 1980, the notice took me by surprise. Instructed to call a number for further information, I soon learned that someone from an organization called Acorn (which I mistakenly assumed was an environmental group) was trying to deprive me of my right to vote, and place someone, presumably of the same name, in the voting booth in my hometown in my place.

I probed further and found out that a good number (at least several dozen) of my fellow Delaware Counteans had been subjected to the same experience..."

VOTER FRAUD- The Coming Disaster?
"“I do think there’s a real risk that in a state with a close election and a lot of provision ballots this could turn into the 2008 version of Bush-Gore. You could have a major fight over whether and how ballots should be counted, only this time it would be over provisional ballots rather than punch cards,”
So I challenge fellow Oklahoma and Colorado bloggers on the left to show a little balance for once in your life...