DebateGate

Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read "Vote Obama, I need the money." I laughed.

Once in the restaurant my server had on a "Obama 08" tie, again I laughed as he had given away his political preference -- just imagine the coincidence.

When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need -- the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.

I went outside, gave the homeless guy $10 and told him to thank the server inside as I've decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.

At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient needed money more.

I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application.

http://artpredator.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/not-funny-not-waving-but-drowning/

Outrage
 
Perhaps Obama can hire Mickey Mouse to act as his bodyguard. You are what you (ACORN) organized.


"If Barack Obama would apply for a job with the FBI or with the Secret Service, he would be disqualified because of his past association with William Ayers, a known terrorist. If he is elected President he would not qualify to be his own bodyguard!" - A Friend

Ex-FBI Agents Outraged at Obama-Ayers Ties

"They (Weather Underground) were a violent, violent, anti-government, domestic terrorist organization. Obama has not only associated with those people, he continued associating with racist people like his minister Jeremiah Wright over a period of 20 years. I don?t think that?s by happenstance. It?s just amazing to me. The American people are being led by the nose by people who say this isn?t important." - former FBI agent Max Noel, NewsMax

"Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright?s anti-Americanism" - Stanley Kurtz, NRO

http://theillustratedconservative.blogspot.com/2008/10/tru-dat.html

http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=64

I find it very hard - no, make that impossible - to believe that Barack Obama had "no idea" who William Ayers really was, or that he had a past as a notorious domestic terrorist (as Obama's campaign has claimed) while serving on panels with Ayers and simultaneously praising Ayers' book in a major newspaper. -Zomblog

Congressman's $121,000 Payoff to Alleged Mistress
Tim Mahoney Elected to Remove 'Ethical Cloud' of His Disgraced Predecessor, Mark Foley
By EMMA SCHWARTZ, RHONDA SCHWARTZ, and VIC WALTER

Oct. 13, 2008 

West Palm Beach Congressman Tim Mahoney (D-FL), whose predecessor resigned in the wake of a sex scandal, agreed to a $121,000 payment to a former mistress who worked on his staff and was threatening to sue him, according to current and former members of his staff who have been briefed on the settlement, which involved Mahoney and his campaign committee.

The affair between Congressman Tim Mahoney and Patricia Allen began, according to current and former staffers, in 2006 when Mahoney was campaigning for Congress against Foley, promising "a world that is safer, more moral."

Mahoney, who is married, also promised the woman, Patricia Allen, a $50,000 a year job for two years at the agency that handles his campaign advertising, the staffers said.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5997043&page=1

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In a fair world, this would dominate the national news for the next 21 days, just as Mark Foley did in the run up to the 2006 elections. Oh right, Mahoney has a (D) after his name, so that is not going to happen.

Rahm Emanual and other top Democrats knew about this scandal and covered it up, too. The culture of corruption continues in Washington.

ARLINGTON, VA ? Today, John M. Murtagh made the following statement on Barack Obama?s relationship with William Ayers:

?When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama?s friend William Ayers, firebombed my house. Barack Obama has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Ayers by noting that he was only a child when Ayers was planting bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. But Ayers has never apologized for his crimes, he has reveled in them, expressing regret only for the fact that he didn?t do more.

?While Barack Obama once downplayed his relationship with Ayers, today his campaign took that deceit one step further. Barack Obama now denies he was even aware of his friend?s violent past when, in 1995, Ayers hosted a party launching Obama?s political career. Given Ayers? celebrity status among the left, it?s difficult to believe. The question remains: what did Obama know, and when did he know it? When did Obama learn the truth about his friend? Barack Obama helped Ayers promote his book in 1997, served on charitable boards with him through 2002, and regularly exchanged emails and phone calls with him through 2005. At what point did Barack Obama discover that his friend was an unrepentant terrorist? And if he is so repulsed by the acts of terror committed by William Ayers, why did the relationship continue? Any honest accounting by Barack Obama will necessarily cast further doubt on his judgment and his fitness to serve as commander in chief.

?Barack Obama may have been a child when William Ayers was plotting attacks against U.S. targets ? but I was one of those targets. Barack Obama?s friend tried to kill my family.?

In February 1970 John Murtagh?s father was a New York State Supreme Court justice presiding over the trial of the so-called ?Panther 21,? members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at their home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. A few weeks after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. In late November that year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn, Ayers?s wife, promised more bombings.

http://thepage.time.com/mccain-release-on-ayers/

Don't bother asking Barack Obama. He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a "community organizer" and legal representative.

Plus, according to ACORN, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars for several years in the early '90s. And Obama sat on the boards of the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN's coffers.

Naturally, ACORN's political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/06262008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/acorn__os_ugly_ally_117189.htm

Obama camp made payments to ACORN

S.A. Miller (Contact)

Friday, October 10, 2008

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's campaign distanced itself Thursday from its $800,000 payment linked to the liberal ACORN organization, which is under investigation in several states where it is suspected of filing fraudulent voter registrations.

Federal Election Commission reports show ACORN-affiliated Citizens Services Inc. got $832,598 from the Obama campaign for get-out-the-vote work during the primaries. But those payments stopped in May and the Obama campaign says they should not be an election issue.

"This is going to be an historic election with unprecedented voter participation, and we are committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process," Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said. "We support local officials in their efforts to investigate any fraudulent behavior and the full prosecution of any illegal activities."

Still, the contributions to Citizens Services draw the Obama campaign closer to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and the growing voter-fraud scandal that this week spread to the battleground state of Ohio.

The elections board in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, is reviewing about 65,000 voter cards submitted by ACORN after flagging 50 cards filled out for duplicate names, fictitious addresses, noncitizens and recycled names and addresses of currently registered voters, said board spokesman Mike West.

Similar probes reportedly are under way in other large Ohio counties.

Citizen Services is inextricably tied to ACORN. Along with nonprofit sister organization Project Vote, Citizens Services and ACORN share the same New Orleans address and the same executive staff while money flows freely between the three entities. In 1996, Project Vote's tax returns show it paid ACORN more than $4.6 million for campaign services and Citizens Services more than $779,000 for legal and administrative services.

The ACORN political action committee endorsed Mr. Obama for president.

Its national voter-registration drive - which is targeting low-income, minority and young voters who tend to vote Democrat and likely favor Mr. Obama at the polls - is implicated in investigations of bogus voter applications in a dozen states, many of them battlegrounds.

Voter registration is key to Mr. Obama's election strategy. First-time voters, especially students and minorities, helped fuel Mr. Obama's primary wins, and his campaign is looking for the same results to capture swing states such as Ohio on Nov. 4.

In the swing state of Michigan, Oakland County election officials found more than 33,000 duplicate registrations, about two-thirds of new applications since August. In some cases, the same name was registered scores of times and in different jurisdictions, and ACORN canvassers submitted most of those applications.

"There would be as many as 10 applications from the same person ... and they have 10 different signatures," said Joe Rozell, elections director for Oakland County, part of the Detroit metropolitan area. "It seems like the majority of the questionable applications are coming from that organization," referring to ACORN.

New Mexico officials said they forwarded fraudulent voter registrations involving ACORN to the U.S. Department of Justice, which would neither confirm nor deny a voting rights investigation of the group.

In Pennsylvania, a must-win state for Mr. Obama, Philadelphia voter registration administrator Bob Lee said the state attorney general has been alerted to more than 800 applications with false addresses - all of them submitted by ACORN.

"ACORN has a real serious quality control issue," Mr. Lee said. "They also have supervision issues. They need to reform their hiring practices."

The group's voter-registration work is under investigation in Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin and Connecticut, where election officials in Bridgeport flagged about 2,000 fraudulent applications for fake addresses, fake people and even one misrepresenting a 7-year-old girl as being 27.

Brian Mellor, legal counsel for ACORN and Project Vote, said the Citizens Services was not involved in the voter-registration drive. He said Project Vote provided the funding and ACORN provided the local ground operation and ran day-to-day activities.

But James Terry, the chief political advocate for the nonpartisan Consumer Rights League who tracks ACORN issues, said Citizen Services and ACORN are one in the same.

"There is no way it is not coordinated," he said. "It is a multimillion-dollar coordinated effort."

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain's campaign said Mr. Obama's association with ACORN is part of a patter of questionable associations with characters such as William Ayers, co-founder of the radical 1960s group Weather Underground, and convicted Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko.

"Whether voters consider Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers, Tony Rezko or ACORN, he has a litany of concerning associations that should be fully examined," McCain campaign spokesman Ben Porritt said.

ACORN representatives said the group was being unfairly smeared for the wrongdoing of few errant employees.

They said ACORN staff worked closely with election officials to identify bad applications in its massive voter registration drive, which signed up 1.3 million new voters in 21 states for the presidential election.

They said canvassers, who are paid for each registration application, also defrauded ACORN by filing fraudulent applications.

"We worked with the election officials to root out employees that are ripping us off," said Brian Mellor, legal counsel for ACORN and Project Vote. "We did everything we could do and some election officials dropped the ball and now are blaming us."

Elections officials in Milwaukee credited ACORN with alerting them to suspicious voter registration, resulting in 26 ACORN workers facing criminal investigations.

"We have thousands and thousands of employees all over the country doing this," Mr. Mellor said. "Do you really expect every one of our employees to be perfect? Probably not. Sorry."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/10/obama-camp-downplays-payments-to-acorn/

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvROBLortBQ[/youtube]

Barack Obama said he barely knew William Ayers. CNN says, that is a lie.