"I think it's just another reminder of how the left hates free speech," Coulter said. "It really is strange how they go after speakers like this. I mean, there is no campaign by conservatives to shutdown Keith Olbermann. In fact, I wish more Americans would listen to him - to see the face of the left, the only 57-year-old woman trapped in a man's body to host his own TV show."

Barack Obama is on a first name basis with a notorious, unrepentant terrorist and educational radical. That is an undeniable fact. And if Obama and the left want to disagree and say that Ayers is really a nice guy and "reformed," why did Obama go to such great lengths to hide his close association with Ayers and downplays the relationship to this day?

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

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

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

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

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

He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACORN’S Radical Roots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intimidation Politics

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

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

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

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

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

Money-Hungry ACORN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown

” — Go Here Now].

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

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

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

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

Greedy Lefists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OT Hill presents a convincing case on how Obama and his minions are socializing America, one "idiot" at a time .....

A critical read for all Americans -- especially the "minorities, GED's and drop out" voters whom Democrat activists label as "idiots."

And if this video doesn't convince you to read OT's post, visit these videos from Camp Obama -- his community activist training program.

 

My dictionary defines "moderator" as "the nonpartisan presiding officer of a town meeting." On Thursday, PBS anchor Gwen Ifill will serve as moderator for the first and only vice presidential debate. The stakes are high. The Commission on Presidential Debates, with the assent of the two campaigns, decided not to impose any guidelines on her duties or questions.

But there is nothing "moderate" about where Ifill stands on Barack Obama. She's so far in the tank for the Democratic presidential candidate, her oxygen delivery line is running out.

In an imaginary world where liberal journalists are held to the same standards as everyone else, Ifill would be required to make a full disclosure at the start of the debate.

She would be required to turn to the cameras and tell the national audience that she has a book coming out on Jan. 20, 2009 — a date that just happens to coincide with the inauguration of the next president of the United States. The title of Ifill's book? "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama."

Nonpartisan my foot.

Random House, her publisher, is already busy hyping the book with YouTube clips of Ifill heaping praise on her subjects, including Obama and Obama-endorsing Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick. The official promo for the book gushes:

"In 'The Breakthrough,' veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama's stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African-American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.

"Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Sen. Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the 'black enough' conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history."

Ifill and her publisher are banking on an Obama-Biden win to buoy her book sales. The moderator expected to treat both sides fairly has grandiosely declared this the "Age of Obama." Can you imagine a right-leaning journalist writing a book about the "stunning" McCain campaign and its "bold" path to reform timed for release on Inauguration Day — and then expecting a slot as a moderator for the nation's sole vice presidential debate?

Yeah, I just registered 6.4 on the Snicker Richter Scale too.

Despite the protestations of her colleagues that she will be fair, Ifill has appeared on numerous radio and TV talk shows over the past several months to cash in on her access to the Obama campaign.

She recently penned a fawning cover story on the Obamas for Essence magazine that earned much buzz. The title? "The Obamas: Portrait of an American Family."

A sample of Ifill's hard-hitting investigative journalism, illustrated with Kennedy-esque photos of the Obamas and children posing at home on the back porch and by the piano:

"Barack Obama is sitting in the back of his rented luxury campaign bus with its granite counters and two flat-screen TVs. The Illinois senator's arms are wrapped around his wife, Michelle, whom he doesn't get to see much these days. At this very moment he is, of all things, singing."

During the Democratic National Convention, Ifill offered her neutral analysis on NBC News before Michelle Obama's speech: "A lot of people have never seen anything that looks like a Michelle Obama before. She's educated, she's beautiful, she's tall, she tells you what she thinks and they hope that she can tell a story about Barack Obama and about herself."

During the Republican National Convention, the PBS ombudsman fielded numerous complaints about Ifill's coverage of Sarah Palin's speech. Wrote Brian Meyers of Granby, Conn.:

"I was appalled by Gwen Ifill's commentary directly following Gov. Sarah Palin's speech. Her attitude was dismissive, and the look on her face was one of disgust. Clearly, she was agitated by what most critics view as a well-delivered speech. It is quite obvious that Ms. Ifill supports Obama as she struggled to say anything redemptive about Gov. Palin's performance. I am disappointed in Ms. Ifill's complete disregard for journalistic objectivity."

Like Obama, Ifill, who is black, is quick to play the race card at the first sign of criticism. In an interview with the Washington Post a few weeks ago, she carped: "No one's ever assumed a white reporter can't cover a white candidate."

It's not the color of your skin, sweetie. It's the color of your politics. Perhaps Ifill will be able to conceal it this week. But if the "stunning" "Breakthrough" she's rooting for comes to pass on Jan. 20, 2009, nobody will be fooled.

James Lewis has it right:  To win this election, John McCain must let Sarah Palin unfurl the flag of REFORM in her debate vs Joe Biden on Friday night. 

Mr. Lewis is correct:

This crisis is not financial -- it is political.  It's not a market failure. It's a decades-long robbery by the Left, finally exposed for what it is.

 

The Democrats deserve the wrath of the voters this time.

The taxpayers are now on the hook for a trillion dollars, if you add the failed 300 billion dollar rescue package from two weeks ago to the 700 billion dollar Paulson package.   This is a trillion dollar scam, and all the politicians in Congress, the ACORN mafia, the people who played the market on unsecured mortgages, and the scam artists who were hired by Freddie and Fannie -- they all knew it.  In case you haven't been watching, that includes all of Barack Obama's "home mortgage advisors" -- Franklin Raines, Jim Johnson and Jamie Gorelick. It includes Senate Banking Committee members like Chris Dodd.  It includes House members like Barney Frank. Watch this video and you can see them strutting their stuff when the US watchdog agency criticized Fannie and Freddie in 2003.

They knew exactly what was going on.

 

It's time John McCain and Sarah Palin stood up and let taxpayers know this as well.

 

 

 

This vehicle has been engineered by the DC Chop Shop.   Depreciation will far exceed voter expectations:

Can't wait until they detail their Wall Street pick-up .... too bad we can't fire (the) birds -- rather, Americans might as well pony up and enjoy desotas while being impala'd, probe'd and ram'd by pintos (see Spanish meaning) who want tercel us a front-end load of merde ...

Meanwhile, back on the Range(r) --

democrat land-rovers continue their charade .... those larking stingers and cheetahs -- hosting fiestas to accord a prelude to scoupe-ing our democracy ....

Daim     
(ler).

Obama's 60's pessimism was depressingly obvious last night.

I know.  I was there.

His subtle anger, dissatisfaction, resentment toward America --- how despised and disrespected is his vision of America, both abroad and at home .... following the peregrine dreams of his father -- himself a product of the same "system" which his father had used ...  ahhhhhh, the dreams of his father -- coming to America -- not to seek freedom, but to obtain an education and return to Africa .... deserting his family, leaving behind a wake of women and children to be tended by "the system" while he pursued a distant and unfulfilled dream of socialism.

Obama's total perspective is that of the 60's activists with whom he has surrounded himself -- a young man identifying with the hate and displaced visions of his socialist mentors .... sacrificing himself to bear the visage of poverty and depression -- assuming the role of saviour to the downtrodden, immersing himself in the poor-me plague of despondency --- before mysteriously, even miraculously rising above the system to feed on it .... using the system to advance his quest for power, control, self-fulfillment:  just as his father had done.

There is much to be said about Obama and his identity with the social-activist mantle he bears -- almost as a cross -- a man self-appointed to save us from ourselves by turning us against ourselves.

Did democats actually propose giving ACORN a portion of the $700 million in the original bailout draft?  Yes.

This is -- by far -- (even more underhanded than Reid attempting to attach a no-drilling legislation and a multi-billion stimulus package to the bailout bill) an unethical and dastardly attempt by democrats to fund an anti-government organization which is currently embroiled in voter fraud cases throughout the nation.

From SadimTouch:  (note:  links to ACORN site may have been disabled or changed since this news broke last evening.  We are looking for screen shots of referenced pages.)

This money handout is obviously in response to ACORN's lobbying efforts this week. They have been begging for it. (ht to Excuse Me For Kickin)

If this is accurate, and not a misspoken error, the Democrats have dropped a bomb on themselves. This is a big mistake for them, because up until this point in the campaign they have managed to avoid the ACORN connection with, "voter fraud, embezzlement, and misuses of taxpayer funds, ACORN's pattern of fraud can no longer be dismissed as a series of 'unfortunate events.'" They didn't get the memo that there is an investigation going on, that looks ugly and smells ugly. For them to carve out this level of funding in this hastily cobbled together proposal is remarkable for showing that the Democrats exhibit enormous arrogance in thinking the public will not care, and secondly that they are totally unaware that there is a moral issue in inflating this bill unnecessarily at a time like this (or EVER!), never mind that it is going to an organization that has possible rampant corruption.

We have previously reported Obama's association with ACORN in these posts at Perish the Thought:

-- Father's Socialist Dreams
-- Foreign Policy: One World Order
-- Illinois Senate Years
-- U.S. Senate Days
-- Hidden Agenda(s)
-- Oblamanomics
-- Obama's Energy Plan(s)
-- Issues & Topics
-- Terrorism/Iraq
-- Questionable Associates
-- Obama's "Communities"

SadimTouch continues:

.... Obama was an attorney for ACORN… (read here also)

Barack Obama was once the Attorney for ACORN. While Obama was Chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the CAC provided funds for ACORN's Voter Registration Activities. Obama provided training to ACORN workers who are frequently misrepresented as "Volunteers" - ACORN pays for its Voter Registration Activities. ACORN, which receives partial taxpayer funding, uses those funds to conduct solicitations for contributions to Political Campaigns. In Philadelphia alone ACORN has raised over $800,000 Dollars for Barack Obama's Campaign.

More links:

Kill the bailout: More ACORN funding?!

Alert - Bailout Talks Include Funding Corrupt ACORN

What is ACORN? Why is ACORN Associated With Voter Fraud - Does Obama Have An ACORN Connection?

Report: Part of Democratic Bailout Diverts Our Money to ACORN « Pocket Change - Now Lint Free!

Republicans, ACORN feud over suspicious voter cards

ACORN and the Communist Party USA

ACORN WATCH : NO BAILOUT

And the bailout cash goes to… ACORN!

Bailout For……ACORN?????? , An Ol' Broad's Ramblings

Report: Part of Democratic Bailout Diverts Our Money to ACORN

Webloggin » Alert - Bailout Talks Include Funding to Corrupt ACORN

silent E speaks - Conservatively Speaking from Western Waukesha County » Taxpayer Bailout Means More For ACORN…..

John Fund Talks ACORN Vote Fraud - video

ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS FOR REFORM NOW (ACORN)

updates pending ....

 

If there is a mystery at the heart of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, one thing is not left a mystery, the fact that Barack Obama organized his life on the ideals given to him by his Kenyan father. 

Obama tells us, "All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I .. tried to take as my own." (p. 220)  

 

And what was that image?  It was "the father of my dreams, the man in

my mother's stories, full of high-blown ideals .." (p. 278) 

 

What is more, Obama tells us that, "It was into my father's image .. that

I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." 

 

And also that, "I did feel that there was something to prove .. to my father" in his efforts at political organizing. (p. 230)

Barack Obama's father, a Harvard trained economist, attacked the economic proposals of pro-Western 'third way" leader Tom Mboya from the socialist left, siding with communist-allied leader Oginga Odinga, in a paper Barack Obama's father worte for the East Africa Journal. 

 

As Odhiambo and Cohen write, "The debates [over economic policy] pitted .. Mboya against .. Oginga Odinga and radical economists Dharam Ghai and Barrack Obama, who critiqued the document for being neither African nor socialist enough."

1.  Obama advocated the communal ownership of land and the forced confiscation of privately controlled land, as part of a forced "development plan", an important element of his attack on the government's advocacy of private ownership, land titles, and property registration. (p. 29)

 

2.  Obama advocated the nationalization of "European" and "Asian" owned enterprises, including hotels, with the control of these operations handed over to the "indigenous" black population. (pp. 32 -33)

 

3.  Obama advocated dramatically increasing taxation on "the rich" even up to the 100% level, arguing that, "there is no limit to taxation if the benefits derived from public services by society measure up to the cost in taxation which they have to pay" (p. 30) and that, "Theoretically, there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed." (p. 31)

 

4.  Obama contrasted the ill-defined and weak-tea notion of "African Socialism" negatively with the well-defined ideology of "scientific socialism", i.e. communism.  Obama views "African Socialism" pioneers like Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Toure as having diverted only "a little" from the capitalist system. (p. 26)

 

5.  Obama advocated an "active" rather than a "passive" program to achieve a classless society through the removal of economic disparities between black Africans and Asian and Europeans. (p. 28)  "While we welcome the idea of a prevention [of class problems], we should try to cure what has slipped in .. we .. need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now .. so long as we maintain free enterprise one cannot deny that some will accumulate more than others .. "  (pp. 29-30)

 

6.  Obama advocated price controls on hotels and the tourist industry, so that the middle class and not only the rich can afford to come to Kenya as tourists.  (p. 33)

 

7.  Obama advocated government owned and operated "model farms" as a means of teaching modern farming techniques to farmers.  (p. 33)

 

8.  Obama strongly supported the governments assertion of a "non-aligned" status in the contest between Western nations and communist nations aligned with the Soviet Union and China.  (p. 26)

Zbigniew Brzezinski is an advocate of socialist world government, a goal he has promoted as a member of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and as a speaker at former Soviet Premier and Communist Mikhail Gorbachev's first World Forum. Brzezinski is an architect of creating regions of global governance from independent nations to achieve world government. At the World Forum Brzezenski described the global regions that are now being put into place under Condi Rice: Israel and the Palestinians (now MEFTA, Middle East Free Trade Association), Iran as part of a Central Asian region, and China as part of a Far Eastern region. As a member of CSIS Brzezinski has guided their efforts to publish the North American Integration Monitor (2002) that calls for the loss of US sovereignty to a North American Union (NAU) as one of the regional global government blocks.

The proposals for global taxes by Obama have come with the recommendations of Zbigniew Brzezinski to pay for globalization and world government. Obama has proposed a global poverty tax in a US Senate bill. The Climate Change Control Bill strongly supported by Obama calls for an international governing regime to monitor and regulate carbon dioxide and "carbon footprints" from discovery, to production, to consumption at a cost of $50 trillion globally and at a cost of $8 trillion for US taxpayers, all to be paid for by a global tax, whose monies will be used to establish a world government body.

To hear Obama describe his policy in a stump speech, it's difficult to realize that his economic and energy policies are little more than conduits to his view of "one world order" -- a socialistic governance similar to the EU .....

BUDGET & TAXES:

Voted to raise the minimum wage in Illinois from $5.15 an hour to $6.50 an hour over two years. (2003)

Helped pass a 5 percent earned-income tax credit for low-income working families in 2000; made the credit permanent in 2003.

Voted to end $300 million worth of tax breaks for businesses. (2004)

Voted against making permanent the repeal of the state's 5 percent sales tax on gasoline. (2000)

HEALTH CARE:

Voted for having Illinois endorse embryonic stem cell research. (2004)

Successfully sponsored the Health Care Justice Act, a study of ways to implement a universal health care system statewide. (2004)

Voted against restrictions on public funding of abortion. (2000)

Successfully co-sponsored a prescription drug discount buying club program for seniors and the disabled. (2003)

CRIME & GUN CONTROL:

Voted against letting people argue self-defense in court if charged with violating local weapons bans by using a gun in their home. (2004)

Voted to let retired police and military police carry concealed weapons. (2004)

Successfully sponsored requirement that law enforcement videotape interrogations of suspects in some serious crimes. (2003)

Successfully sponsored law enforcement study of the race of people pulled over for traffic tickets. (2003)

Helped pass an overhaul of the state's troubled death penalty system. (2003)

Unsuccessfully sponsored measure to expunge some criminal records and create an employment grant program for ex-criminals. (2002)

Unsuccessfully sponsored limit of one handgun purchase per month. (2000)

Voted against making gang members eligible for the death penalty if they kill someone to help their gang. (2001)

MISCELLANEOUS:

Unsuccessfully co-sponsored ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation. The measure became law after Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. (2003)

Successfully sponsored move to shield Illinois workers from federal rules that threatened overtime pay for some employees.

Successfully co-sponsored major ethics reform called the Gift Ban Act. (1998)

Voted against giving tax credits to parents who send their children to private school. (1999)

Voting Record

Ethics Bill: Obama didn't write it, introduce it, change it, or create it.   It took just 14 days from start to finish and was passed unanimously.

Obama's Nuclear Bill was rejected by his own party for its pandering and lack of all regulation - influenced by his Nuclear donor, Exelon, from which David Axelrod (his campaign manager) came.

Commission vs Advisory Council:  Today, Senator Obama said: "Senator McCain offered up the oldest Washington stunt in the book: you pass the buck to a commission to study the problem. But here's the thing: this isn't 9-11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out."

Apparently, then, we can dismiss Senator Obama's call for commissions on Social Security (11/2007), torture (9/2007), war crimes (8/2008), and financial oversight for Wall Street (4/2008) as "the oldest Washington stunt in the book."

During his Tuesday morning speech, I found it amusing that Obama called McCain to task for "using the oldest trick in the political book" in calling for a 'Commission' to examine the current economic crisis. No less than five minutes later Obama then called for an "Advisory Group" to meet with the president regarding the current economic scenario.

You say tomato, I say tomahto.

For those who do not know, "billionaire business mogul" Penny Pritzker was named in January 2007 as Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)'s national finance chairman. She was also on the finance committee for Obama's 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. In August 2001, Penny, Thomas, and Nicholas Pritzker were described as "struggling with a complicated legacy"—"a vast real estate and Hyatt hotel empire"—left to them by its founder, Jay Pritzker, the New York Times reported. In 2005, Forbes counted Penny Pritzer among The 100 Most Powerful Women, as well as a member of the Forbes 400.

The New York Times reported December 11, 2001, that the Pritzkers had agreed to pay a "record $460 million" spread out over 15 years to the federal government to avoid being punished" for Superior Bank's failure. It was "the largest settlement ever in the failure of a banking institution. The failure itself is one of the largest in the last decade, one that some estimate could cost the government up to $1 billion."

"Regulators said Superior had collapsed because of poor lending practices and sloppy bookkeeping," Time wrote. "The bank specialized in loans to people with poor credit histories, a practice called subprime lending."

Time also reported that the Pritzkers, who "have a long and troubled history in the S.& L. business" and "once battled the Internal Revenue Service over estate taxes, … also agreed to cede 90 percent of any money they might recover in separate litigation with the government."

If Mr. Obama is beholden to taxpayer-funded, government-designed highway and energy pork projects, he has gone hog wild over "refundable tax credits," which is the polite description of taxpayer-financed cash payments to people who pay no income taxes. Mr. Obama promises a $4,000 refundable tax credit to finance college tuition for students who spend 100 hours performing community service. There will be a refundable 10 percent mortgage-interest tax credit for married couples who take the $10,900 standard deduction because their itemizable deductions (including mortgage interest) fall below that level. Couples will also receive a refundable $1,000 tax credit to offset payroll taxes even if their refundable earned-income tax credit (EITC) has already eliminated their payroll-tax burden. Taxpayers will also finance a $500 refundable tax credit to augment a $1,000 savings-account deposit made by families earning up to $75,000.


Mr. Obama also promises to "triple the [EITC] benefit for minimum-wage workers." Let's do the math. For a married couple with two children working full-time and earning the minimum wage ($5.85 per hour, $24,336 per year), their refundable EITC would rise from $3,225 to $9,675. They already qualify for refundable child tax credits totaling about $1,850. Mr. Obama would increase their refundable child-care tax credit to $3,000. Don't forget his refundable $1,000 tax credit to partly offset their $1,500 Social Security taxes, which had already been more than offset by their nearly $10,000 refundable EITC. If they put that $1,000 in the bank, they would get another refundable tax credit of $500.

 

Oink Oink:  On the spending side of the ledger, Mr. Obama proposed a 10-year, $60 billion "National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank," which is a highfalutin name for a scheme to fund dubious pork-barrel projects that can't pass muster in our pork-addicted Congress. The $60 billion is just a down payment; it will be used to leverage "almost half a trillion of additional infrastructure spending." Guess who's going to pay for all that. Not to worry because the whole scheme will "generate nearly 2 million new jobs." Mr. Obama has also proposed a 10-year, $150 billion program "to establish a green energy sector that will create up to 5 million new jobs." His nearly universal health care plan, which he implausibly asserts will reduce the average family's insurance premium by $2,500 per year, is projected to cost between $50 billion and $65 billion per year.

You'll hear him talk about businesses, companies, and corporations. You'll hear him talk about how business must work smarter, and must reduce their emissions. What you won't hear him say is that the largest part of US greenhouse gas emissions come from you and me driving to and from work, and keeping our homes cool. Because if he said that, the whole 83% reduction thing would begin to strike too closely to home.

So he distracts us from it. He says he will take money from the corporations, then use some of it (15 billion) to advance energy policy ( more about that soon) and give the rest to us. The problem with that plan is twofold. First, any money he pulls from corporations will be replaced by money they pull from us. If you make it more expensive for a company to manufacture and provide a product, they will charge more for it. That's simple math. The second problem is that he wants to basically bribe us with our own money. It goes from us, through the corporations, to the Federal government through the emissions auction and back to us.

"... it's embarrassing to have a candidate for President (A) not understand a problem, (B) gloat over its arrival, and (C) not know how to fix it."  source

"...Obama's ads and stump speeches attack McCain and Republican policies for the current financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain, Senator Obama, was at the head of the line when the piggies lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks. Senator Barack Obama, number two on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just four short years in the Senate. Next time you see that ad, you might notice he fails to mention that part of the Fannie and Freddie problem."

"[T]he bill's intention was to mandate sex education, especially concerning contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, for children before the sixth grade and as early as kindergarten. Obama's defenders may howl, but the bill is what it is."

"The bottom line is this. If you've got a rifle, you've got a shotgun, you've got a gun in your house, I'm not taking it away. Alright? So they can keep on talking about it but this is just not true. And by the way, here's another thing you've got to understand. Even if I wanted to take it away, I couldn't get it done. I don't have the votes in Congress."

The idea that Second Amendment rights depend on Congressional inaction due to a lack of votes is the give-away here.  First Amendment rights cannot be curtailed by Congressional Action.  Fourth Amendment rights are not subject to majority vote.  Gun owners and and originalists wonder why Obama is conceding that majorities in House and Senate can take guns away.

Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, [a staff spokeswoman said.  In the face of resistance from Bush, the Democrat has long said that any such agreement must be reviewed by the US Congress as it would tie a future administration's hands on Iraq.  Source

In a Chicago speech after 9/11, he described the terrorists as "lacking empathy ... who came from a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair" .... Obama wqs wrong in this assessment: the terrorists came from wealthy, educated backgrounds -- similar to that of his American terrorist friend Bill Ayers.  

Another Obama associate, el Hadi (sp?), was stopped by the Federal Government from collecting and sending donations to the terrorist group Hamas ... he is currently raising money for Obama and lists Michelle Obama as a supporter.

Questionable Associates

There are several individuals in Obama's background he refuses to acknowledge or discuss ....

Questionable relationships: What do William Ayers, former Weather Underground, Frank Davis and Rashid Khalidi, the professor at Columbia University who arranged the Ahmedinejad visit and has direct ties to the PLO, and Barack Obama have in common?

 

 Khalid al-Mansour
Ayers' Documents

Kwame Kilpatrick

Community Organizer/Organizations

Obama says "thanks" to friends ... (video)

Beware O's Social Investment Fund Network ... See ACORN, George Soros and Moveon.org; also discussed under Taxes/Economics .....

Even more troubling is how the Democrat Party/Obama plan would siphon away untold millions or billions of public tax dollars into the Soros empire without taxpayer recourse. Obama promises "accountability" measures to ensure the money is spent wisely. But who would assess effectiveness of the spending? Why, experts in the social entrepreneurship community, of course. Fox, meet henhouse.

Soros has donated some $5 billion of his fortune to left-wing non-profit groups through the Open Society Institute — which is committed to Soros's militant ideology of toppling the "fascist" tyranny of the United States, which he says must undergo "de-Nazification" in favor of "justice." The mob at Obama-endorsing MoveOn, purveyors of the "General Betray Us" smear against Commanding General, MNF-I, David Petraeus, is the most notorious Soros-backed political arm. But scores of other activist non-profits have received Soros funding under the guise of doing non-partisan "community" or "social justice" work — and it is exactly such leftist activist groups that would be first in line for the Democrat Party/Obama's "social investment" seed money.

Point in case: ACORN. As I've reported before, Obama's old friends at the Chicago-based non-profit now take in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers. They have raked in tens of millions in federal anti-poverty grants while their operatives preside over massive voter fraud, corporate shakedowns, and mortgage scams across the country. Soros has donated at least $150,000 to the group, according to Investor's Business Daily, and "heads a secretive rich-man's club called 'Democracy Alliance' that has doled out $20 million to activist groups like ACORN."

The Annenburg Papers ... A trail of O's work with Ayers in distributing millions to activist organizations -- under the guise of "education"

 

Obama As ACORN Organizer/Trainer

updated regularly --