Barack Obama’s Ties With ACORN Go Back 20 Years

You can learn all about the community organization ACORN via BigGovernment.com:

• Baltimore: Exclusive Story | Full Audio (MP3) | Full Transcript
• DC: Exclusive Story | Full Audio (MP3) | Full Transcript
• New York: Exclusive Story | Full Transcript
• San Bernadino: Exclusive Story | Full Transcript
• San Diego: Exclusive Story

On ABC’s “This Week” George Stephanopoulos was the only one of the five interviewers who bothered to bring up the massive ACORN scandal in which a pair of kids posing as a pimp and a prostitute showed the full degree of massive corruption and total depravity of a liberal/socialist organization that has received tens of millions of federal dollars and stood to qualify for BILLIONS under Obama’s stimulus.  In at least five cities, ACORN employees were willing to help the pimp and prostitute fraudulently file income taxes so they could purchase a home which they planned to use as a brothel with more than a dozen 13-15 year old illegal immigrant girls.

If that isn’t loathsome enough, we are also learning that ACORN has received federal funding to give sweetheart “low-interest” or “no-down-payment” home mortgage deals to illegal immigrants.

Here’s the Commander-in-Chief becoming the Weasel-in-Chief:

STEPHANOPOULOS: But if you’re – have some of your allies made it easier for — handed your opponents some ammunition, like ACORN, for example…

OBAMA: Well, look, the — you know, I think that — are there folks in the Democratic camp or on the left who haven’t — haven’t always operated ways that I’d appreciate?

Absolutely.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Congress has just cut off…

OBAMA: Is — is…

STEPHANOPOULOS: …all funding for ACORN.

OBAMA: It’s…

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you for that?

OBAMA: Is that true on the other side, as well?

Of course that’s true.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN?

OBAMA: You know, if — frankly, it’s not really something I’ve followed closely. I didn’t even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Both the Senate and the House have voted to cut it off.

OBAMA: You know, what I know is, is that what I saw on that video was certainly inappropriate and deserves to be investigated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re not committing to — to cut off the federal funding?

OBAMA: George, this is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to.

As Fund points out in his story, “ACORN Who?” “Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn.”

That doesn’t seem to be ACORN’s story regarding Obama.  They worked hard for Obama.  They helped Obama.  They say:

“Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”

John Fund has the story out on how Obama’s ties with ACORN go back over twenty years.

We find that:

– In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.

– He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences.

– In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.

– In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list).

– In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority.

– In 2007, in a speech to Acorn’s leaders prior to their political arm’s endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: “I’ve been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

– The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as “staging, sound, lighting,” only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.

-[T]he Obama campaign didn’t appear eager to discuss the candidate’s ties to Acorn.  Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been.

Fund goes on to conclude:

“Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama’s protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group’s latest scandal seem preposterous. Here’s hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it.”

I hope John Fund doesn’t hold his breath.  The same reporters who dug through Sarah Palin’s garbage and rummaged through Joe “the Plumber”Wurzelbacher’s private records never once bothered to look into Obama’s past.

Tags: acorn, Acorn subsidiary, Baltimore, Braun, Citizens Consulting, DC, illegal immigrants, lawyer, lighting, mortgage, Moter voter, New York, old friends, San Bernadino, San Diego, sound, staging, Stephanopoulos, supporters, This Week, trainer, training, voter ID, voter-registration