What's so intreguing about all of this is that it's all connected in a full circle way to both Barack Obama and the crisis on wall street.
While Obama was a community organizer, he worked very closely with ACORN, which is now making attempts at voter fraud on a massive scale in order to push up the numbers for Obama on Nov. 4th.
Obama and ACORN pushed heavily for the Community Reinvestment Act, which encouraged banks to give loans to low income folks who might not be able to pay them back. As we see now, many of them couldn't.
Here's one example of what ACORN has been up to recently:
1 VOTER, 72 REGISTRATIONS
'ACORN PAID ME IN CASH & CIGS'
By JEANE MacINTOSH Post Correspondent
PAWNS IN 'FRAUD': Freddie Johnson, yesterday in Cleveland, and Lateala Goins told of filling out voter registrations multiple times in the ACORN scandal revealed by The Post yesterday.
Last updated: 9:10 amOctober 10, 2008 Posted: 4:00 amOctober 10, 2008
CLEVELAND - 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.
"Sometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up," said Freddie Johnson, 19, who filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of the left-leaning Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.
"The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, 'You are?' I say, 'Yup,' and then they say, 'Can you just sign up again?' " he said.
Johnson used the same information on all of his registration cards, and officials say they usually catch and toss out duplicate registrations. But the practice sparks fear that some multiple registrants could provide different information and vote more than once by absentee ballot.
ACORN is under investigation in Ohio and at least eight other states - including Missouri, where the FBI said it's planning to look into potential voter fraud - for over-the-top efforts to get as many names as possible on the voter rolls regardless of whether a person is registered or eligible.
It's even under investigation in Bridgeport, Conn., for allegedly registering a 7-year-old girl to vote, according to the State Elections Enforcement Commission.
Meanwhile, a federal judge yesterday ordered Ohio's Secretary of State to verify the identity of newly registered voters by matching them with other government documents. The order was in response to a Republican lawsuit unrelated to the ACORN probe in Cuyahoga County, in which at least three people, including Johnson, have been subpoenaed.
Bribing citizens with gifts, property or anything of value is a fourth-degree felony in Ohio, punishable by up to 18 months in prison. And it's a fifth-degree felony - punishable by 12 months in jail - for a person to pay "compensation on a fee-per-registration" system when signing up someone to vote.
Johnson, who works at a cellphone kiosk in downtown Cleveland, said he was a sitting duck for the signature hunters, but was always happy to help them out in exchange for a smoke or a little scratch. He'd collected 10 to 20 cigarettes and anywhere from $10 to $15, he said.
The Cleveland voting probe, first reported by The Post yesterday, also focused on Lateala Goins, who said she put her name on multiple voter registrations. She guessed ACORN canvassers then put fake addresses on them. "You can tell them you're registered as many times as you want - they do not care," she said.
ACORN spokesman Kris Harsh said the group does not tolerate its workers paying people to sign the voter-registration cards.
ACORN's political wing has endorsed Barack Obama for president, but Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign in Ohio, said ACORN has no role in its get-out-the-vote drive.
During the primary season, however, the Obama camp paid another group, Citizen Service Inc., $832,598 for various political services, according to Federal Elections Commission filings. That group and ACORN share the same board of directors.
In Wisconsin yesterday, John McCain blasted ACORN.
"No one should be corrupting the most precious right we have, that is the right to vote," he said.
It's a right Johnson will exercise. "Yeah, I've registered enough - I might as well vote."
It's maddening that everyday, Barack Obama goes out there and ties the current crisis around the necks of Georg Bush and John McCain, when it's Barack Obama himself, and others of his ideology, who served as the catalyst for this entire mess in the first place.
But that's politics.
Let's hope the other side remembers this when they're complaining about hearing the names Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright repeatedly, over the next four weeks.
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4 comments:
A couple of IFs.
If ACORN is ever brought up on official charges that actually have some muscle and can stand and if they are convicted of committing actual voter fraud, that will be disappointing.
But as of now this is a speculative morass of conjecture and hearsay. The so-called scandal The NY Post (God bless that bastion of journalistic integrity) “broke” looks like nothing more than a pile of man-on-the-street interviews. I would hope that anyone interested in attempting to wade through the media shit storm of misinformation that blows over our heads during an election year would look at the Post’s article (is this what Palin meant when she said "the gotcha media?") with little more than curious skepticism. At the very least, those convinces there's a story here should demand that those behind the story dig deeper.
I’m well aware of the supposed controversies surrounding ACORN, but given their reach and their impact, controversies and allegations are inevitable.
Let me say again (Jesus, I feel like Joe Biden) -- If ACORN is ever brought up on official charges that actually have some muscle and can stand and if they are convicted of committing actual voter fraud, that will be disappointing.
To add another IF to that pile –
If it were to ever come out in some official manner that Obama personally encouraged or—hell, even just knew about said hypothetical voter fraud, that would indeed be disappointing. But I'm not talkign about "so and so knew so and so who worked with so and so who ate dinner at Obama's house once." I’m talking about hard evidence, bipartisan committees, legitimate testimonies... I’m talking about a YouTube video of Obama in a layer tweaking his moustache and saying, “Mwa-ha-ha, at last, my plan to register billions of fake voters is in motion, soon this entire nation will be one communist utopia under Allah!! MWA HA HA!!!”
But yeah. That would be disappointing. It would be like finding out your favorite baseball player has been hittin’ the juice.
From what I’ve gathered reading a few articles and scouring ACORN’s website, the issue seems to be with their canvassers. You can go there and read their write-up if you want. Most articles (except those found on conservative media sites) indicate that ACORN is more than happy to work with election boards and state officials, in fact – often, it seems, ACORN is the one who submits and flags the bogus forms to the election boards. I’ve even read some hearsay and conjecture indicating that GOP supporters have volunteered to canvas for ACORN for the weekend and then filled out a bunch of bogus forms in order to “frame” ACORN in an attempt to ruin their credibility and smear Obama (it’s all so exciting, isn’t it?). Again – Until actual charges are filed and stick, this attempt to villainize ACORN looks like Lame Smear Attempts when it comes from rags like The Post. And when it comes from guys like Alberto Gonzalez, it looks suspiciously like ornery voter suppression.
Because - for better of for worse - we have that whole innocent until provem guilty thing going on in this country.
As far as The Economy goes –
I’m actually confused here because –
1. Wasn’t the Community Reinvestment Act passed in 1977? How were Obama and ACORN “pushing for it?”
2. You just posted an article stating this: “This whole crisis was absolutely unnecessary. The list of villains is long and ugly. The housing bubble and the promiscuous issuance of exotic junk securities would never have reached the level they did had the Fed not been so recklessly loose in its monetary policy. Our central bank behaved like a bartender who continues to ply low- to no-cost booze to already inebriated customers. The White House and Treasury Department went along with the Fed's weak-dollar policy, which wrought havoc on the world by creating a commodity bubble and a catastrophic loosening of lending standards and investing prudence.”
That assertion, from the article you posted, seems to contradict the definitive nature of your own declaration that “Barack Obama himself, and others of his ideology, who served as the catalyst for this entire mess in the first place.”
With the economy doing what it’s doing, it’s natural and expected that everyone’s playing the blame game. On both sides. Because that’s politics. Yay.
Over on the left, a lot of writers and economists are flat-out absolving the CRA.
Ezra Klein: “CRA only governs a certain class of federally insured banks. Problem is, half of the subprime loans came from mortgage companies with no CRA involvement at all. Another 25%-30% came from companies with very little CRA exposure. For those who left their abacus at home, that's 80% of the loans which were fully or largely outside CRA jurisdiction. More than that, the non-CRA mortgage firms made subprime loans at twice the rate of CRA-covered firms.”
Robert Gordon: “In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by Harvard's Joint Center), that activity ‘largely came to an end by 2001.’ In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.”
At any rate.
...I wonder if either side could get away with avoiding the blame game. Do like Sarah Palin during the VP debate and say of Global Warming – “I don’t really wanna debate the causes.”
((Sorry for typing so much, Dan. It’s late. Can’t sleep.))
Rezko, Wright, Raines, Ayers … and now Acorn!!! This is over the top. Obama’s a fraud and should not be allowed anywhere near the White House.
Obama did not push for the initial CRA, but he fought very hard for its expansion when he served as a community organizer with ACORN. Democrats in congress did as well. While this does not make him as responsible as some others for the current crisis, it does show us that he subscribes to the same failed tenants of modern liberalism, which Jimmy Carter subscribed to. This fundamental misunderstanding of how economics and society works, leads the liberal thinker to beleive that the nation's poor are simply unlucky or pure victims of circumstance. Thus they conclude that if these folks are simply given the same monetary opportunities as everyone else, that the end result will be equally sucessful.
For the sake of this debate, I'm going to assume that Ezra Klien's numbers are valid. If this is the case, I would make the argument that 20% is a staggering number. Add in any part of the 25% to 30% of banks that were only partially regulated and that number would likely go way up. Even by Kliens own standards, he is admitting that expansion of the CRA is responisble for roughly one-fifth of our current economic troubles. I doubt that you could trace any of the other four- fifths of defaults, so directly to a government program or some specific deregulatory policy.
I never claimed that Obama was in any way responsible for any voter fraud. However, the fact that ACORN is now undergoing investigation in eight states, should give you an idea of what this group's members are attempting, at least on a small scale, and why it's leadership's failure to effectivly control it's members should raise great concern. ACORN has endorsed Barack Obama. Several major news organizations have confirmed the groups registration shennaigans in both this election cycle and in Ohio in 2004. Offical charges against he group are difficult to put together, becasue generally it's low level thugs who are registerring the nen-exsistant voters.
Many of their members have had charges filed against them.
ACORN is one of the vocal opponants of voter ID laws.
ACORN needs to be closely watched and they need to be called to task for pushing economic policies that simply don't work. John McCain has to denfend against 25 years of votes for all sorts of things, including his suppport for an unpopular president, elected before anyone even cared about what Barack Obama thought, in terms of economic policy or the War On Terror. Shouldn't Obama have to answer for bad policies for which he fought and the groups which he fought for as well?
I'm still waiting to hear, why being a community organizer, in one of the most politically corrupt democratic machine cities in the nation, is something to brag about, especially a community organizer who was closely associated with this particular group.
Somehow it doesn't mean anything if the left-wing illuminati have friends under investigation as they do, because the media continues to tell them job well done.
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