FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

Cicerone imposter and Cycloptichorn are master spinners. Their most flagrant spinning consists of repeated accusations that Foxfyre is doing what they themselves are doing.

Yes Cyclop does like to spin like crazy with little more than a hope and prayer to back him up.

Cicerone imposter, Cycloptichorn, and Debra Law are master spinners. Their most flagrant spinning consists of either repeated accusations that Foxfyre is doing what they themselves are doing, or repeated accusations that McCain and Palin are doing what they themselves are doing .

You know that home values of retirees continues to decline and people are no longer able to afford their mortgage payments. As president of the United States, Alan, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes -- at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those -- be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.

Is it expensive? Yes. But we all know, my friends, until we stabilize home values in America, we're never going to start turning around and creating jobs and fixing our economy. And we've got to give some trust and confidence back to America.

I know how the do that, my friends. And it's my proposal, it's not Sen. Obama's proposal, it's not President Bush's proposal. But I know how to get America working again, restore our economy and take care of working Americans. Thank you.

When did he pay this money and for what? It matters.

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's campaign distanced itself Thursday from its $800,000 payment linked to the liberal ACORN organization, which is under investigation in several states where it is suspected of filing fraudulent voter registrations.

Federal Election Commission reports show ACORN-affiliated Citizens Services Inc. got $832,598 from the Obama campaign for get-out-the-vote work during the primaries. But those payments stopped in May and the Obama campaign says they should not be an election issue.

"This is going to be an historic election with unprecedented voter participation, and we are committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process," Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said. "We support local officials in their efforts to investigate any fraudulent behavior and the full prosecution of any illegal activities."

Still, the contributions to Citizens Services draw the Obama campaign closer to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and the growing voter-fraud scandal that this week spread to the battleground state of Ohio.

The elections board in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, is reviewing about 65,000 voter cards submitted by ACORN after flagging 50 cards filled out for duplicate names, fictitious addresses, noncitizens and recycled names and addresses of currently registered voters, said board spokesman Mike West.

Similar probes reportedly are under way in other large Ohio counties.

Citizen Services is inextricably tied to ACORN. Along with nonprofit sister organization Project Vote, Citizens Services and ACORN share the same New Orleans address and the same executive staff while money flows freely between the three entities. In 1996, Project Vote's tax returns show it paid ACORN more than $4.6 million for campaign services and Citizens Services more than $779,000 for legal and administrative services.

The ACORN political action committee endorsed Mr. Obama for president.

Its national voter-registration drive - which is targeting low-income, minority and young voters who tend to vote Democrat and likely favor Mr. Obama at the polls - is implicated in investigations of bogus voter applications in a dozen states, many of them battlegrounds.

Voter registration is key to Mr. Obama's election strategy. First-time voters, especially students and minorities, helped fuel Mr. Obama's primary wins, and his campaign is looking for the same results to capture swing states such as Ohio on Nov. 4.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/10/obama-camp-downplays-payments-to-acorn/

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.

An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. " a subsidiary of ACORN " worked in “get-out-the-vote” projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.

FEC spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger said it is not unusual for campaigns to amend reports, even regarding large sums of money.

But, said Blair Latoff, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee: “Barack Obama’s failure to accurately report his campaign’s financial records is an incredibly suspicious situation that appears to be an attempt to hide his campaign’s interaction with a left-wing organization previously convicted of voter fraud. For a candidate who claims to be practicing ‘new’ politics, his FEC reports look an awful lot like the ‘old-style’ Chicago politics of yesterday.”
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/08/22/acorn-watch-pt-ii-obama-hid-800000-payment-to-acorn-through-citizen-services-inc/

Over the past four years, a dozen states have investigated complaints of fraudulent registrations filed by ACORN. On Tuesday, Nevada authorities raided an ACORN office in Las Vegas, Nevada, where workers are accused of registering members of the Dallas Cowboys football team. And the group has become the target of Republican attacks on voter fraud, a perennial GOP issue.

A subsidiary of the group was paid $800,000 by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign to register voters for the 2008 primaries, and ACORN's political wing endorsed Obama back in February. But Obama's campaign told CNN that it "is committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process," and said it has not worked with ACORN during the general election.

Brian Mellor, an ACORN attorney in Boston, said the group has its own quality-control process and has fired workers in the past -- including workers in Gary. But he said allegations that his organization committed fraud is a government attempt to keep people disenfranchised.

"We believe their purpose is to attack ACORN and suppress votes," Mellor said. "We believe that by attacking ACORN, they are going to discourage people that have registered to vote with ACORN from voting."
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/09/acorn.fraud.claims/index.html

You've heard of Moveon.org and Code Pink - two radical leftist groups seeking to elect out and out socialists to public office and who are fierce opponents of the capitalist sysetm.

But have you heard of ACORN?

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is mostly a city-based group that you may know from their illegal voter registration efforts in several states during the 2004 election.

But this group also is involved in schemes to impose drastic, left wing dogma on the rest of us through political action.

Obama's connection to this group has been shadowy - some work he did back in 1995 representing an effort by the group to get the courts to force Illinois to adopt the motor voter law. But Stanley Kurtz has uncovered even more ties that Obama has to this radical group:
The extent of Obama's ties to Acorn has not been recognized. We find some important details in an article in the journal Social Policy entitled, "Case Study: Chicago - The Barack Obama Campaign," by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago Acorn leader and a member of Acorn's National Association Board. The odd thing about this article is that Foulkes is forced to protect the technically "non-partisan" status of Acorn's get-out-the-vote campaigns, even as he does everything in his power to give Acorn credit for helping its favorite son win the critical 2004 primary that secured Obama the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate.

Before giving us a tour of Acorn's pro-Obama but somehow "non-partisan" election activities, Foulks treats us to a brief history of Obama's ties to Acorn. While most press accounts imply that Obama just happened to be at the sort of public-interest law firm that would take Acorn's "motor voter" case, Foulkes claims that Acorn specifically sought out Obama's representation in the motor voter case, remembering Obama from the days when he worked with Talbot. And while many reports speak of Obama's post-law school role organizing "Project VOTE" in 1992, Foulkes makes it clear that this project was undertaken in direct partnership with Acorn. Foulkes then stresses Obama's yearly service as a key figure in Acorn's leadership-training seminars.

At least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama's role in training Acorn's leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama's long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama's early political campaigns - his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000 (Foulkes confuses the dates of these two campaigns.) 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," says Foulkes.

Not surprisingly it turns out that Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger - two radical clergy closely associated with Obama - have extensive ties to ACORN . Their views fit nicely within the ACORN anti-capitalist agenda that they have been pushing for years.

More evidence, if any were needed, that Obama's past associations have defined him as a politician and that the more radicals that turn up in his background, the more we must question just what his beliefs truly are.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/05/obamas_ties_to_acorn_more_subs.html

Obama, if elected, will further reduce free enterprise while increasing government enterprise. As government enterprise is increased, corruption of America will increase.

McCain, if elected, will reduce government enterprise while increasing free enterprise. As free enterprise is increased, corruption of America will decrease.

When Mr Obama addressed the nation on the financial crisis the guys who understand English ran the Dow back t0 - 600 forthwith.

His speech had not one iota of content. But it was aimed at another audience I suppose. Let's hope he keeps his gob shut on that subject in future.

The mere fact that he thought his speech would boost confidence where it matters is profoundly insulting. But I hope his fans were duly inspired.

10.10.08 -- 2:58PM // link | recommend (3)
The Gist of the ACORN Story

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lays the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and new legal restrictions on voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So, inevitably someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations. These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phoney registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for more registering people then they eventually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated casing of actual instances of vote fraud.

To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News ...

Quote:

At least in hindsight, the center's line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.

But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.

Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.

The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.[/quote]

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

It's that simple.

--Josh Marshall

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/223436.php

It really is that simple. This smear comes up again and again, because it's a convenient way to get right-wing mouth breathers to whip up trouble right around elections; NOT because there have been significant issues of fraud uncovered in the past.

And look how quickly you morons have fallen for it. Pathetic. You know it's not going to win the election for you, but you can't help yourselves at this point, can you? Same with the Ayers distraction; but I've a lovely poll for you on that one, Fox, showing just how little it matters and what a fool you and others have been for focusing on it.

Cycloptichorn

Wow TPM spins almost as good as Cyclop. It doesn't offer anything to debunk any specific issue raised but just declares it bunk and therefore can be dismissed. But when that's the only argument you got, it's as good as any I guess.