Plumber Investigated More Than Presidential Candidate

This has REALLY bothered me ever since Joe the Plumber has asked Senator Obama his question. Joe was just an average guy, but once he inadvertently embarrassed the good Senator from Illinois, his fate was decided. Joe must be dealt with. Whether it was because the Obama campaign needed to distract the voters (so they wouldn't focus on the Senator's response) or it was merely meant as punishment, Joe's life was turned inside out for all of the world to see.

On the other hand, Senator Obama has several very troubling relationships that the voters are told we really don't need to know about. Issues like Williams Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., etc., etc. Naw, that's trivial stuff. What do you think he's doing? Running for the highest office in the country -- or in the world??? Naw, we don't need to know anything really.

Anyway. here is a piece by Pam Meister titled, "Joe the Plumber Vetted More Thoroughly Than Obama".

IBD: Obama's Red Shirts

Obama's Red Shirts, a piece in Investor's Business Daily, starts off as follows:

Republican leaders want to defund and criminally investigate ACORN. Why should taxpayer dollars fund a "nonpartisan" organization that proclaims "Obama needs ACORN, and we need Obama."

That the greatest attempt at voter fraud in the nation's history is being funded in large part at taxpayer's expense is more than a bit ironic. House Minority Leader John Boehner wants it stopped and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wants the group allegedly behind the fraud, ACORN, criminally investigated and prosecuted.

ACORN calls itself a "nonpartisan" group seeking to register minorities and the poor. But its political arm has endorsed Barack Obama, who both trained the group's staff and sued the state of Illinois on their behalf. And Obama's campaign has given ACORN affiliates $800,000 for a get-out-the-vote drive.

Read the rest of this piece | Listen to this piece

Project Vote, partisan antics, and illegality

Michelle Malkin writes:

Well, lookee here. The New York Times, of all places, reports on an internal assessment of ACORN’s shady relationships with its affiliates and its inextricable ties to Obama’s old employers at Project Vote. For months, ACORN watchers have laid out the incestuous ties between the two groups.

Read the rest of Michelle's post.

Remember. If Senator Obama and ACORN are so willing to deprive Americans of their vote, just think of what else they are going to deprive you of if it serves their purposes.

The Oak Grown from ACORN

Daniel J. Flynn writes:

Last week, well before news broke today of an FBI voter-fraud investigation of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (Acorn), Nevada authorities raided the group’s Las Vegas headquarters. The offices of Nevada’s secretary of state and attorney general, both Democrats, seized computers, voter-registration cards, and employee information after Acorn submitted numerous fraudulent names and addresses as part of its voter-registration drive. “Some of these [forms] were facially fraudulent; we basically had the starting lineup for the Dallas Cowboys,” Ross Miller, Nevada’s secretary of state, explained. “Tony Romo is not registered to vote in Nevada.” Acorn’s Project Vote alleges that the raid is part of a nationally orchestrated effort to suppress voter turnout. “Project Vote has been attacked all over the country because we registered at least 1.2 million voters,” theorizes Nevada Acorn’s Bonnie Smith-Greathouse. “That could sway an election.”

And that’s just the point, argues John Fund in the updated and timely reissue of his Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Fund contends that recent changes in election laws have made it easier to “sway an election,” as Smith-Greathouse puts it—through cheating. “The United States has a haphazard, fraud-prone election system befitting a developing nation rather than the globe’s leading democracy,” Fund asserts. At times, Fund’s subject seems more fitting for a magazine exposé than for a book—until one confronts the sheer volume of examples he has compiled. Like a portrait of corruption from a century prior, Lincoln Steffens’s Shame of the Cities, Fund’s Stealing Elections adopts a muckraking style and spotlights a national problem by illuminating it on a city-by-city basis.

Read the rest of Flynn's piece.

Unfortunately, I think John Fund has enough new examples if he wanted to do a multi-volume set just from this year's election alone.

ACORN's Bad Seed

Investor's Business Daily writes:

As a major voting fraud scandal explodes, the mainstream media seem intent on ignoring it. Given the seriousness of the charges, maybe a formal federal investigation is in order.

The charges involve ACORN — the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now — for which Barack Obama once served as a lawyer and as a trainer.

In recent months, a picture has emerged of ACORN as a group run amok — with ACORN accused of registering thousands of bogus voters using such names as Mickey Mouse, Veronica Mars and Pat Tillman, plus names from the Dallas Cowboys.

Why care?

Read the rest of the IBD piece.

ACORN Watch: RICO suit filed in Ohio

Michelle Malkin writes:

The Buckeye Institute has filed a RICO suit against ACORN in Ohio.

This should be done in every one of the states where ACORN “franchises” operate.

Details:

The Buckeye Institute, a Columbus-based think tank, today filed a state RICO action against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on behalf of two Warren County voters. The action filed in Warren County Court of Common Pleas alleges ACORN has engaged in a pattern of corrupt activity that amounts to organized crime. It seeks ACORN’s dissolution as a legal entity, the revocation of any licenses in Ohio, and an injunction against fraudulent voter registration and other illegal activities.

Read the rest of the story.

ACORN and Voter Fraud: The Saga Continues

Power Line writes:

This is one of those news stories you can hardly believe. In Lake County, Indiana, ACORN turned in 5,000 new registrations. The authorities there started reviewing them, and quit after they found that the first 2,100 were all fraudulent. The mind boggles: ACORN turns in thousands of new registrations, and not a single one represents a legitimate voter. Here is CNN's report:

Read the rest of the piece

Obama, ACORN & Their Starring Role in the Mortgage Crisis

In a piece from October 10th, Frank Salvato writes:

Barack Obama, congressional Democrats and Progressive-Left operatives – with the help of the mainstream media – have done a great job of spinning culpability for the mortgage crisis onto the Bush Administration, congressional Republicans and, in particular, John McCain. This is a notable moment in the history of political spin because as the facts present, Democrats and Progressive-Leftists – not Republicans –are the ones directly responsible for the current financial crisis in which our country is embroiled. At the center of this culpability are Barack Obama and ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

In order to understand how Barack Obama and ACORN are directly to blame for the mortgage meltdown, we first have to understand what ACORN is and how Barack Obama was affiliated with them...and make no mistake; Barack Obama was most definitely affiliated with ACORN.

Read the rest of what Salvato has written.

GOP Renews Complaints Over Voter Registrations

Evan Perez, writing in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, said:

As most states finalize voter rolls this week, Republican officials are reviving alarms about vote fraud.

One of the biggest instances of suspicious registrations is here in New Mexico, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened a preliminary investigation into 1,400 potentially fraudulent voter registrations in the state's most populous county.

It's far from clear that the number of suspicious registrations is enough to affect the outcome of the presidential vote, even in tight states, elections officials say.

This kind of thing ought to anger any American regardless of his or her political affiliation. What people who are responsible for voter fraud is essentially saying is that they simply don't believe in the American people choosing their own leaders. Our election laws, in their eyes, is something that restrains the Republican Party and is there for the Democratic Party to circumvent.

Read the rest of the WSJ piece.

NYP: 1 Voter, 72 Registrations 'Acorn Paid Me In Cash & Cigs'

In a piece in the New York Post, it says:

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.

Nobody is suggesting that all of these fraudulent votes would slip by. If they did, Ohio would go down as having the most Democratic voters of any state - even California. It's all about the quantity. This man registered 72 times. Even if people were to vote using his 72 registered named, odds are that 72 votes for Senator Obama wouldn't get by. However, the Democrats are banking on a few will. Maybe two or three will.

How would we even begin to try to correct this mess?

Planting Seeds of Disaster

Stanley Kurtz writes:

I’ve already told the story of Obama’s close ties to ACORN leader Madeline Talbott, who personally led Chicago ACORN’s campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers. Using provisions of a 1977 law called the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Chicago ACORN was able to delay and halt the efforts of banks to merge or expand until they had agreed to lower their credit standards — and to fill ACORN’s coffers to finance “counseling” operations like the one touted in that Sun-Times article. This much we’ve known. Yet these local, CRA-based pressure-campaigns fit into a broader, more disturbing, and still under-appreciated national picture. Far more than we’ve recognized, ACORN’s local, CRA-enabled pressure tactics served to entangle the financial system as a whole in the subprime mess. ACORN was no side-show. On the contrary, using CRA and ties to sympathetic congressional Democrats, ACORN succeeded in drawing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the very policies that led to the current disaster.

Read the rest of Kurtz's piece: Planting Seeds of Disaster: ACORN, Barack Obama, and the Democratic party.

IBD: Is ACORN Stealing The Election?

Investor's Business Daily has a piece demonstrating why ACORN's efforts are so dangerous to the electoral process. The trick is in sheer numbers. For every one instance of voter fraud that gets flagged, who knows how many slips through unnoticed.

Read the whole column.

NYP: "Nuts! How ACORN Got Me Into Vote Scam"

The New York Post tells the story of a man who says ACORN got him to register to vote 10-15 times.

Really, if a candidate is willing to tolerate this corruption to get him into office, is it completely unreasonable to believe he will tolerate other shady tactics to attain what he wants to accomplish while in office? Can you tell me that I am wrong?

Can you even say that they believe in democracy? in what it means for everyone to be able to vote and chose his or her leaders? Or is that merely for the folks who vote for them? Can you say I am wrong?

Read the story in the New York Post.

Obama Campaign Taking No Chances

Power Line says:

Barack Obama reportedly is outspending the McCain campaign by three to one on television; I heard a news report a little while ago that he is outspending McCain seven to one in North Carolina. Obama's ability to make the cash registers ring is his one unique contribution to American politics. But his campaign is taking nothing for granted: voter fraud is once again playing a role in the Democrats' strategy.

The main voter fraud organization is ACORN, with which Obama has a long relationship. Currently, at least seven states are investigating evidence of voter fraud perpetrated by ACORN. The latest is Missouri. . . .

Read the full story.

Voter fraud in Democratic politics? Gasp! ;-)

Michelle continues telling us about Obama and Acorn with regards to voter fraud.

Systemic corruption of our election process continues. Barack Obama and his old friends at ACORN and Project Vote are leading the way. This radical revolution is taking place in your backyard. And as I’ve reported before, this voter-fraud racket is on your dime. . . .

On Tuesday, Nevada state officials raided ACORN’s Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names.

Yep, Senator Obama's living in Chicago certainly helped him.

Read Michelle's other columns on ACORN Watch, Voter fraud.