Obama Campaign contributed 800 Thousand Dollars to ACORN, Caught!

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.

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.

While Barack Obama's connection with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has not gone entirely unreported, it has not been fully explained. Most media background pieces simply note Obama's involvement in a 1995 lawsuit on behalf of ACORN. Obama's own website, as well as most major media, fail to reveal the full depth and extent of his relationship with the organization.

Attempts to hide evidence of Obama's involvement with ACORN have included wiping the web clean of potentially damaging articles that had appeared, and were previously publicly accessible. Unfortunately, those behind the attempted cover-up failed to realize that in today's day and age, nothing disappears forever. There also exists another layer of the web, the hidden web, which is full of information included in proprietary scholarly databases where these very same "missing" articles can be easily uncovered.

Obama's campaign website states:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

Is that really a FACT, or just another lie? Let's take a look at a quote from a 2004 article - Case Study: Chicago- The Barack Obama Campaign - written by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN Leader, which was published in the journal Social Policy. Did we mention that Social Policy recently pulled this particular article from their website, while leaving links to all other articles up?

"Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).

Not only does Foulkes boast of Obama's ACORN leadership training, but also makes it clear that Obama's post-law school organizing of "Project VOTE" in 1992 was undertaken in direct partnership with ACORN. The tie between Project VOTE and ACORN is also something that Obama and others have attempted to disprove in recent weeks as ACORN has come under fire for allegations of voter registration fraud.

As recently as March 2008, the Los Angeles Times also made reference to Barack Obama's involvement with ACORN:

"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff." (LA Times, March 2, 2008)

All this information was easily pulled up with minimal time investment. It took less than thirty minutes to find, despite attempts by some to bury the truth. If I could find this with little effort, imagine what could be dug up with a serious, in-depth investigation. Scary, isn't it?

Nevertheless, Barack Obama's campaign website continues to lie and deny the truth about his involvement and association with ACORN. No matter how many times you say it, it does not make it true. The facts do not lie, Senator Obama. It's time to come clean and tell the truth, and it's time for the American people to demand it.

August 15, 2008 at 11:55 AM in Acorn, Barack Obama, Campaign Financing, Crime, Current Affairs, Federal Elections Commission, Fund raising, Legal Challenge, Louisiana, Missouri, Obama, Ohio, Voter Fraud, Washington state, corruption

Irrefutable evidence indicates that Obama’s campaign has been doing business with CSI, which appears to have been operating fraudulently in the State of Maryland and Ohio, and ACORN, which has been associated with a laundry list of fraudulent business practices. The full nature of the relationship between ACORN and Citizens Services Inc is not known but this much is clear: both share the same address in
New Orleans and officials with CSI refer folks to ACORN for questions about “political consulting” and “Get-Out-The-Vote” activities. These are questions that mainstream media should examine.

    The ACORN effort is part of a massive voter registration drive aimed at the fall presidential election, which is expected to pit Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois against Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Although voter registration and Get Out the Vote drives seem like noble activities, in fact, not all of ACORNs dealings have been legal, and once again ACORN is facing investigation for illegal voter registration:

NYPost’s Jeane MacIntosh is doing great work exposing ACORN’s standard operating procedures in Ohio.

The latest:

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.

Just doing the thug thizzle that ACORN and Obama know so well.

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More: New charges hanging over ACORN in Pennsylvania.

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.