A lifelong Democrat who has held political office and been a committeeman, Philip Berg, has brought suit over the real questions raised by the absence of a valid Obama birth certificate. His narrative of the various questions Obama has refused to answer is devastating. Graphics and sound are well-deployed to avoid tedium as factual data is conveyed in a way that allows viewers to absorb it. When he contrasts Obama’s behavior when challenged (use perfectly valid legal technicalities to delay) with John McCain’s full disclosure of all documentary evidence under a similar challenge (remember the flap over his birth in the Panama Canal Zone? — who raised those questions, anyway?), there is no doubt in a viewer’s mind that there is something seriously wrong here.
This morning John Fund gave a most interesting speech at the Defending the American Dream summit. He talked about vote fraud and ACORN, which are the subject of his article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
The Las Vegas Sun reports that Acorn volunteer Frank Beaty immediately claimed the raid, which removed computers and files from the group’s offices, was a conspiracy designed to prevent the registration of new voters. Acorn’s national chief Bertha Lewis called the raid “a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than [to] discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible vote to the polls.”
Reverting to the rhetoric of the 1960s voting rights struggle in the South may be politically useful, but it bears precious little resemblance to the reality of Acorn today. The group has constantly faced charges it mistreats its employees and even broke up their internal efforts to unionize their workplace.
Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax told the Sun that Acorn has been registering voters in Las Vegas since January and “we started having problems with them almost immediately.” His staff met with Acorn and was offered promises that fraudulent registrations would no longer be turned in. “But those controls weren’t sufficient,” Mr. Lomax said.
Indeed, the more his office and that of Nevada’s Secretary of State looked into Acorn’s effort, the more worried they became. Jason Anderson rose to the rank of supervisor in Acorn even though he was a convicted felon. Other employees had served time for identity theft. Another former inmate who worked for Acorn told authorities his co-workers were “lazy crack heads.”
Acorn’s activities are under investigation or suspicion in a dozen states, with one of its workers indicted just last week in Wisconsin. Perhaps the Nevada raid will spur authorities elsewhere to dig down and conclude their investigations by Election Day — before Acorn can do even more damage to the integrity of the vote
This is happening right in front of our eyes in every state.
“Between March 23rd and October 1st, various groups, including ACORN, submitted over 252,595 registrations to the Philadelphia County Election Board” with 57, 435 rejected for faulty information. “Most of these registrations were submitted by ACORN, and rejected due to fake social security numbers, incorrect dates of birth, clearly fraudulent signatures, addresses that do not exist, and duplicate registrations. In one case, a man was registered to vote more than 15 times since the Primary election.
This morning I was talking to Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s state attorney general, who will be running for governor next year. My question was, what is the deciding issue this year, and what did he think of the bailout. Clearly the economy’s the deciding issue; the bailout is a bad idea because of the burden it imposes on all.
As state attoney, McDonnell, a fiscal conservative, has cut his office budget by $3.8 million, returned his official state car and cut his personal salary by 2%.
Dear Pup once said to me, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”
Well, Chris separated from the Right… indeed.
More later.
UPDATE
Richard Miniter dropped by bloggers’ row and I asked him what did he make of the Buckley statement?
Richard says that Christopher Buckley went ot Hampshire College, and despite the Buckley name doesn’t have the Buckley ideas, and he swims with the intellectual elite that is given to fads.
We then talked about how there’s been a shift in the quality of intellectual and political elites. For instance, C. Buckley and others are taking astrology seriously. In other times common sense and learning were a basis for rationality, and an education meant you had read a set of books; now an education is a piece of paper.
“I feel bad for McCain,” said Sam Rodriguez, the president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and a prominent supporter of George W. Bush in 2004, who is neutral this year. “We find ourselves between the proverbial rock and the hard place. We really like John McCain. We really don’t like the Republican Party.”
Perhaps.
However, this assumes a couple of things:
1. That “Hispanics” vote as a block.
2. That “Hispanics” are unaware of Obama’s position on entrepeneurship. abortion, born-alive legislation, and gay marriage.
The article makes a good point,
And [McCain]’s been unable or unwilling to attack Obama—who was once thought to have taken a lethally liberal stance by supporting granting drivers licenses to illegal immigrants—from the right.
House Republican leader John A. Boehner of Ohio escalated the war on ACORN today, calling for it to be cut off from all federal money and going so far as to call for a ban on ACORN contracting with candidates for federal office.
ACORN, a community organizing group allied with Democrats, has been blamed by the GOP for pushing housing policies that Republicans say contributed to the housing crisis. It has been the subject of investigations for voter registration fraud and its Nevada offices were recently raided.
Here’s Boehner’s statement:
“Election cycle after election cycle, this organization has been at the forefront of breaking the law in order to promote their left-wing agenda. All the while, they have been the recipients of millions of dollars of federal funding through various federal programs and third-party groups. House Republicans took at stand recently to cut off funding to an ACORN slush fund created by their allies in the House Majority, but now more must be done.
“All federal funding to ACORN must be stopped. The ACORN slush fund must be disbanded. Sources of federal funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development or any other agency must be stopped. Contracting for services between candidates for federal office and ACORN, as Senator Obama has done, must end. Now that the taxpayers own Fannie Mae, any funding from Fannie Mae’s nonprofit foundation to ACORN must stop.
“ACORN spent decades promoting the housing policies that brought America’s economy to the brink, and similarly over the years has committed fraud on our system of elections, making American voters question the fairness and accuracy of the exercise of their most fundamental right under the Constitution. Now it is time to cut off ACORN before it grows even more destructive.”
In North Carolina, where Obama has been running nonstop ads, ACORN has registered a record number of new voters, many of them suspicious. Statewide, Democrats are doing better than the GOP in new converts — even in traditionally Republican counties.
…
What does all this have to do with Obama, besides the fact that he’d be the beneficiary of most, if not all, of these new votes?
For starters, Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen Services Inc. for “advance work.”)
What’s more, Obama worked as executive director of ACORN’s voter-registration arm, Project Vote, in 1992. Joined by two other community organizers on Chicago’s South Side, Obama conducted the voter-registration drive that helped elect Carol Moseley-Braun to the Senate that year.
The next year, 1993, Obama joined the civil-rights law firm Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he sued the state of Illinois on behalf of ACORN to implement the federal “Motor Voter” law, which the GOP governor at the time refused to do. Then-Gov. Jim Edgar argued, presciently, that the Clinton law would invite voter fraud.
Ohio - ACORN tells Cuyahoga County’s election board that they can’t stop themselves from committing fraud.
Indiana - Over a thousand new applications from ACORN appear to investigators to be fraudulent, and that should be no surprise, since Indianapolis now has 105% of its population registered to vote.
