Obama's statement--"My only involvement I've had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs."--is a lie, not a fact.
Can Obama and ACORN keep a lid on the whole truth about ACORN's relationship with Obama and the Obama presidential campaign up to Election Day 2008?
Can The New York Times whitewash the Obama/ACORN relationship the way it did the Obama/Ayers relationship?
Is there a Whittaker Chambers-type out there today who has seen the light and decided to do what's right?
If so, will "Whittaker" be a white male this time?
Wikipedia: "Whittaker Chambers (April 1, 1901 – July 9, 1961)...was an American writer and editor. A Communist party member and Soviet spy, he renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent. He is best known for his testimony about the perjury and espionage of Alger Hiss."
Obama during the last of the three presidential debates:
"...with respect to ACORN, ACORN is a community organization. Apparently what they've done is they were paying people to go out and register folks, and apparently some of the people who were out there didn't really register people, they just filled out a bunch of names.
"It had nothing to do with us. We were not involved. The only involvement I've had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs.
"Now, the reason I think that it's important to just get these facts out is because the allegation that Senator McCain has continually made is that somehow my associations are troubling."
Obama is right...about the importance of facts.
McCain is right...about Obama having troubling associations. (More right than he knows.)
Obama's statement--"My only involvement I've had with ACORN was I represented them alongside the U.S. Justice Department in making Illinois implement a motor voter law that helped people get registered at DMVs."--is a lie, not a fact.
Yes, Obama represented ACORN in that lawsuit and the Clinton Justice Department predictably sided with ACORN.
But that was NOT Obama's only involvement with ACORN.
ACORN is the organization with which Obama has been associated throughout his adult life, as organizer, trainer, lawyer, funder and political beneficiary...and Obama's Achilles heel.
When voters learn how big a lie that was, the mysterious Obama will not be so much of a mysteriousand his presidential aspirations will be history.
Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a National Review Online contributing editor, has been researching and writing about ACORN, but the alphabet networks and other liberal media have not been reporting his findings.
Mr. Kurtz, in his latest article, "Planting Seeds of Disaster: ACORN, Barack Obama, and the Democratic party":
"[In 1995], as a director at Chicago’s Woods Fund, Obama was successfully pushing for a major expansion of assistance to ACORN, and sending still more money ACORN’s way from his post as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Through both funding and personal-leadership training, Obama supported ACORN. And ACORN, far more than we’ve recognized up to now, had a major role in precipitating the subprime crisis."
Mr. Kurtz traced Obama's ties to ACORN and the current financial crisis:
"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.... 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.
"In one of the first book-length scholarly studies of ACORN, Organizing Urban America, Rutgers University political scientist Heidi Swarts describes this group, so dear to Barack Obama, as 'oppositional outlaws.' Swarts, a strong supporter of ACORN, has no qualms about stating that its members think of themselves as 'militants unafraid to confront the powers that be.' 'This identity as a uniquely militant organization,' says Swarts, 'is reinforced by contentious action.' ACORN protesters will break into private offices, show up at a banker’s home to intimidate his family, or pour protesters into bank lobbies to scare away customers, all in an effort to force a lowering of credit standards for poor and minority customers. According to Swarts, long-term ACORN organizers 'tend to see the organization as a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization.'"
It would be the height of irony for Obama. "the Senator from ACORN," to benefit from the financial crisis that his kind of thinking created with his personal help as organizer, trainer. lawyer, funder and political supporter and win the Presidency.
The whole truth about Obama and ACORN should become public knowledge soon.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.