Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Rules be damned!



By MICHELLE MALKIN

October 8, 2008 --

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 Monday, the two groups announced the wrap-up of a 21-state voter-registration drive targeting low-income people and minorities in such battleground states as Ohio, Pennyslvania, Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

What's wrong with that? For starters, these two groups are militantly partisan outfits purporting to engage in nonpartisan activity. And their campaign comes amid an avalanche of fresh voter-fraud allegations involving ACORN in many of those same states.

ACORN has helped register over 1.27 million people nationwide. It gets 40 percent of its revenues from the taxpayers, with the rest coming from left-wing heavyweights like billionaire George Soros and the Democracy Alliance.

Lefty lawyer Sandy Newman founded Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization, to register voters in welfare offices and unemployment lines with the explicit goal of turning back the Reagan revolution.

The two groups are inextricably linked - and at their nexus is Barack Obama. Despite his denials of any association with the group, Obama's political DNA is encoded with the ACORN agenda.

As I've noted previously ("ACORN: O's Ugly Ally," June 26), Obama trained ACORN members in Chicago. In turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his Illinois campaigns and ACORN's PAC endorsed him in this year's Democratic primaries back in February.

And Newman hired Obama in 1992 to lead Project Vote efforts in Illinois. The effort's motto: "It's a Power Thing." Today, the Obama campaign's "Vote for Change" registration drive is running in parallel with ACORN/Project Vote, targetting the same sorts of people.

It's an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama's big-government vision. "Our volume," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe bragged of the voter-registration program, "is going to be enormous."

Quantity over quality. That's the ACORN way - and the fraud allegations keep piling up:

* Yesterday, Nevada officials raided ACORN's Las Vegas office after election authorities accused the group of submitting multiple voter registrations with fake and duplicate names. Among the bogus monikers: names of former Dallas Cowboys players.

* Lake County, Ind., election officials this month rejected thousands of registration forms ACORN had turned in from its drives this summer. On a conference call yesterday, GOP officials noted that up to 11,000 of the applications were no good - tying up election officials and jeopardizing the voting rights of untold victims whose identities may have been stolen.

In what seems to be ACORN's standard operating procedure, vote canvassers had pulled names and addresses from phone books and forged signatures. According to a local paper (the Northwest Indiana and Illionois Times), "Large numbers of voter registration forms bore signatures all in the same apparent handwriting style" and "apparently the organization's canvassers broke rules to meet ACORN-set voter registration quotas to get paid." The fake registrants include dead people and underage kids.

* Milwaukee, Wisc., officials last month discovered at least seven felons employed as voter-registration workers for ACORN and another affiliated group. (State law bans felons from such work.) They also uncovered a raft of problematic voter-registration cards. The state GOP accuses the group of trying to get dead, imprisoned or imaginary people on the voter rolls. Fraud has plagued ACORN's Milwaukee chapter since the last election cycle.

* In Florida, in Orange County alone, ACORN workers turned in multiple, copycat forms for six separate voters over the summer. The Miami Herald reports: "One individual had 21 duplicate applications."

Election officials had flagged ACORN's negligent practices months ago. But it may be too late: In Orange, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, ACORN has signed up 135,000 new voters, nearly 60 percent of them registered as Democrats - a fifth of all new voters in that region.

* In Ohio, large numbers of homeless people got free van and bus rides to register. Shelby Holliday, a reporter for Palestra.net, filmed ACORN shuttling in some prospects. She told me she spoke with one homeless woman who said ACORN "told her who to vote for if she wanted a 'better life,' and told her not to worry about jury duty (one of the reasons this homeless woman didn't want to register) because the government probably wouldn't be able to track her down. She was registering with a temporary address."

Holliday interviewed another homeless man targeted by the registration drive who exulted that he was voting for Obama because "I want him to do his thang. You know, do his thug thizzle."

"Thug thizzle" is street slang for performing your trademark move. Obama and ACORN have practiced their thug thizzle together for years: Organizing an ever-expanding community of ineligible and marginal voters to expand the Democrat power base. Rules be damned.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in — with McCain's fervent support — a massive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street's catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," relies on Gramm to guide him.

McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In 1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now denounces as "fat cats." The special interests with business before the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and fundraisers associated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain when he served as the chairman or ranking member.

What McCain glosses over is that accepting early release would have required him to make disloyal statements that would have violated the military's Code of Conduct. If he had done so, he could have risked court-martial and an ignominious end to his military career. "Many of us were given this offer," according to Butler, McCain's classmate who was also taken prisoner. "It meant speaking out against your country and lying about your treatment to the press. You had to 'admit' that the U.S. was criminal and that our treatment was 'lenient and humane.' So I, like numerous others, refused the offer."

"Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience," McCain writes, "I had, as they say in politics, a good story to sell."

In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they "cohabitated as husband and wife" for the first nine months of the affair.

Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona.

In the year before his Senate run, McCain had championed legislation that would have delayed new regulations of savings and loans. Grateful, Keating contributed $54,000 to McCain's Senate campaign. Now, when Keating tried to stack the federal regulatory bank board with cronies, McCain made a phone call seeking to push them through. In 1987, in an unprecedented display of political intimidation, McCain also attended two meetings convened by Keating to pressure federal regulators to back off. The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the history lesson, Cindy. Let's flesh it out a bit, OK? The 1999 legislation bearing Gramm's name did, as you note, allow the marriage of banks to other types of financial institutions mirroring the competition in Europe. It passed the Senate on a 90-8 vote and was signed into law by WJC at the urging of Democratic legend Robert Rubin, among others. I think that counts as a bi-partisan effort. As for McCain's grasp of economics, it's less than stellar but at least seems to be greater than BO's.

You didn't mention the meltdowns of Fannie and Freddie which are at the heart of our current woes. I don't think Phil Gramm had much to do those. In fact, weren't they staffed at high levels with former Clinton administration personnel and protected by Dems in Congress? And I believe Chris Dodd received some preferential treatment from Countrywide. Can you imagine the reaction if a Republican had done that?

As for McCain's marital situation, well, I'm also pretty rough on him also. But, as has been pointed out to me by others, no one really knows what transpired between McCain and his first wife. All in all, that's a minor issue as his current marriage isn't tabloid material. At least he isn't abusing subordinate employees and interns.

I'm not sure what you were getting at regarding McCain's POW experience so please expand on that.

McCain would never have been my choice for the GOP nomination but he's what we have and despite his shortcomings, he is still the far better man, if no other reason than he understands the threats facing our nation.

Unknown said...

VN8, there is a bright side to all of this. Thanks to their 2000 and 2004 shenanigans, ACORN is now on the radar screen and getting some long overdue attention.

VoteNovember2008 said...

Cindy, thanks for stopping by. I'm so glad you found my blog. Send all of your friends, come one, come all.

As Lee stated, thanks for the history lesson. Now that you have shared your opinion about the financial crisis, would you care to take on the topic of the "blog"?

Just curious who you think is the villain of the voter fraud. VN8

VoteNovember2008 said...

Lee, ACORN is being revealed for what they really are. I still think their logo looks like a ticking time bomb, how appropriate! VN8