Obama Camp Responds to Acorn

Here's what Obama's David Plouffe had to say

Swamp: Responding to Republican complaints about alleged voter registration fraud, Sen. Barack Obama's campaign today suggested such charges are an orchestrated effort to create "noise" and a "smokescreen" to discourage voting.

"It is a strategic and cynical ploy to in some ways denigrate all these people who have decided to participate in their democracy, to sew confusion out there in a deliberate attempt to try and decrease turnout," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said in an afternoon conference call with reporters.

Plouffe said he expects Republicans will engage in "unprecedented" levels of voter "suppression and intimidation."

The campaign manager also said Fox News has become "the 24-hour ACORN channel," a reference to coverage of complaints about widespread voter registration irregularities involving the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Meanwhile the McCain camp desperately tries to tie Obama and Acorn into a pretty bow. I have barely followed this because it's so wispy.
Problem is McCain is just preaching to the choir now. I think Americans realize what the McCain camp is up to.

WaPo: The McCain campaign also has sought to link ACORN to the financial crisis. One of the campaign's online ads says the Chicago chapter of the group was engaged in "bullying banks" to issue "risky" mortgages -- "the same type of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today," the ad's narrator says.

ACORN officials acknowledge that the group lobbied for passage of the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977, which required banks to try to increase lending to low-income home buyers. The group also urged banks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to loosen requirements on mortgages available to low-income applicants.

But ACORN officials, supported by several economists, say it is absurd to blame the crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act, which has been in place for decades. They also note that much of the subprime lending came from investment banks not under the act's jurisdiction. In fact, they say, they have been pressuring federal regulators since 1999 to crack down on many of the institutions that provided subprime loans.

PolitiFact: McCain's Pants Are on Fire

This is for the people who are still confused on the Ayers issue, we'll start with PolitiFact's conclusion:

This attack is false, but it's more than that – it's malicious. It unfairly tars not just Obama, but all the other prominent, well-respected Chicagoans who also volunteered their time to the foundation. They came from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, and there's ample evidence their mission was nothing more than improving ailing public schools in Chicago. Yet in the heat of a political campaign they have been accused of financing radicalism. That's Pants on Fire wrong.

Some more meat:

Politifact: Ayers, who received his doctorate in education from Columbia University in 1987 and is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was active in getting the foundation up and running. He and two other activists led the effort to secure the grant from Annenberg, and he worked without pay in the early months of 1995, prior to the board's hiring of an executive director, to help the foundation get incorporated and formulate its bylaws, said Ken Rolling, who was the foundation's only executive director. Ayers went on to become a member of the "collaborative," an advisory group that advised the board of directors and the staff.

However, Ayers "was never on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge," and he "never made a decision programmatically or had a vote," Rolling said.

"He (Ayers) was at board meetings — which, by the way, were open — as a guest," Rolling said. "That is not anything near Bill Ayers and Barack Obama running the Chicago Annenberg Challenge."

Now, was the foundation radical?

The McCain campaign cited several pieces of evidence for that allegation, including a 1995 invitation from the foundation for applications from schools "that want to make radical changes in the way teachers teach and students learn." The campaign appears to have confused two different definitions of the word "radical." Clearly the invitation referred to "a considerable departure from the usual or traditional," rather than "advocating extreme measures to retain or restore a political state of affairs."

The campaign also cited two projects the foundation funded, one having to do with a United Nations-themed Peace School and another that focused on African-American studies.

"That is radical in the eye of this campaign and we imagine in the eyes of most Americans," said Michael Goldfarb, a spokesman for McCain. "It is a subjective thing, and there are going to be people in Berkeley and Chicago who think that is totally legitimate."

Teaching about the United Nations and African-American studies may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's hardly "radical" in the same way Ayers' Vietnam-era activities were. Moreover, most of the projects the foundation funded (more on that below) were not remotely controversial.
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"The whole idea of it being radical when it was this tie of blue-chip, white-collar, CEOs and civic leaders is just ridiculous," said the foundation's former development director, Marianne Philbin.

The foundation gave money to groups of public schools – usually three to 10 – who partnered with some sort of outside organization to improve their students' achievement.
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In his opinion piece, Kurtz puts a sinister spin on this: "Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with 'external partners,' which actually got the money...CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN)."

Rollings said the foundation tried to fund the schools directly, but doing so proved to be a "bureaucratic nightmare." But any external group that received money had to have created a program in partnership with a network of public schools.
Read the rest

Palin Disguises Her Hate Speech

Starting this past weekend, Palin began to more carefully disguise her hate speech by talking about the differences between the "good guys" and the "bad guys." Her audience still got it as they yelled "Obama," when she mentioned terrorists.
McCain Palin have been as unpatriotic as it gets, smearing an entire group of people, Arab Americans, in order to smear Obama as a Muslim terrorist. This should not be tolerated.
The smear emails arriving in my inbox have increased. From one of them promoting a book by Floyd Brown:

But what he uncovered - especially two plots being hatched by George Soros and David Geffen to steal the White House for Obama - were the most damning things we've ever seen in politics.

There are several good books on Obama, and I applaud them all. But no other book reveals these two secret plots, plots which clearly explain how Obama rose to power so quickly and how dearly we'll all pay if he wins.

These plots could be as damaging to Obama as Deep Throat was to Nixon or Whitewater to Clinton. When these revelations hit the streets, they'll he hotter than a liberal hawking global warming.

Here's more:

Why Is Obama Afraid to Admit He Was Born and Raised Muslim?

Being a Black Muslim doesn't disqualify him for running for President, so why won't he be honest about it?

Maybe it's because of what Floyd dug up from Obama's distant and not-so-distant past...

What was Obama's father doing with communist organizers just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis?

What did Obama mean when he described the Muslim call to prayer as "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset"?

Does Obama's supposed conversion to Christianity make him an apostate "whose blood may be shed" by the devout nutcases in Islam?

This email full of lies comes straight from the McCain campaign:

The Obama-Biden Democrats and their liberal, allied interest groups are spending more than $1 billion to defeat our ticket in critical races across the country. They're flooding the airwaves and stuffing mailboxes with misleading information, and in some cases flat out lies about us.

The truth is that far-left groups in this country will do anything to help the Obama-Biden Democrats win the White House and maintain their majorities in Congress. And last week, we found out they're going even further to win.

The left-wing activist group, ACORN, is now under investigation for voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states. ACORN's political action committee has endorsed Barack Obama and Senator Obama himself has said, "I have been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career." The Obama Campaign even paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN affiliate for "get out the vote activity." And now we find out that ACORN is suspected of voter registration fraud.

But, the Obama-Biden Democrats would rather sweep these facts under the rug and use their mainstream media allies to bury this story. But we can't let that happen. We can't allow leftist groups like ACORN to steal this election.

That's why McCain-Palin Victory 2008 has set out to ensure a fair election and I'm asking you to join us today. Will you follow this link immediately to give $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000 or more to our effort?

McCain-Palin Victory 2008 helps fund our get-out-the-vote efforts in states across the country. We're working day and night to ensure this election is fair and we're working to elect the ticket that has a record of reform leadership.

Our team of reformers is ready to lead. We're ready to tackle issues affecting your family. But we'll get never get there without your support. Will you join our team in the final stretch before Election Day? With your help, I know we'll ensure this election is conducted in a fair manner. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Governor Sarah Palin

P.S. We've always known the Obama-Biden Democrats will do anything to win this November, but we didn't know how far their allies would go. The Obama-supported, far-left group, ACORN, has been accused of voter registration fraud in a number of battleground states. Our team, through McCain-Palin Victory 2008 is working to ensure that this election is conducted fairly. With your immediate financial support, we'll be successful. Please join our team for a fair election today. Thank you.

ACORN Hits McCain

McCain's campaign has turned quite thuggish, I have to say, depending on supporters to fan the flames of hate.

Embattled community group ACORN, which come under rising Republican attack, hit back hard late Friday over a new Web video released by the McCain campaign.
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ACORN denied the charges. "For more than a decade, ACORN members have held protests, released reports and advocated for regulations to protect homeowners from predatory lenders," ACORN president Maude Hurd said in a statement. "If John McCain thinks that community organizers caused the foreclosure crisis, he knows even less about the economy than previously thought."


At a Thursday campaign event, McCain personally called for an investigation of ACORN; the same day, prominent Republicans in Congress said any federal funds going to the organization should be cut off. On Friday, a small group of Republicans in the House of Representatives who had all administered election systems as Secretaries of States asked the Attorney General to conduct an investigation into allegations some of ACORN's extensive voter registration activities had veered into voter fraud.

Elizabeth Edwards $40 Million Healthcare Campaign

The NRA is spending $40 million to smear Obama. Elizabeth Edwards is putting $40 million to better use.

Politico: Next week, the group Health Care for America Now will unveil a $40 million effort, with the first ad buy being a $1.5 million in national print, online and broadcast advertising.

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards, is the headliner for the coalition, which includes a who's who list of liberal organizations such as MoveOn.org, the housing group ACORN, Americans United for Change, the Campaign for America’s Future, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the National Education Association, National Women’s Law Center, Planned Parenthood and the Service Employees International Union.