Greenwatch  

It's good to hear again from the mendacious masochists at the Media Matters spinoff, ConWebBlog, who, like moths to a flame, have returned to the CRC Blog for another good beating. 

As Barack Obama's campaign does everything in its power to deny Obama's strong ties to ACORN (which his campaign paid around $800,000 to in the current election cycle) ConWebBlog says I have "accuracy issues" for pointing out that ACORN and ACORN's Project Vote are virtually indistinguishable now and were virtually indistinguishable in 1992 when Barack Obama worked for Project Vote.

ConWebBlog must be getting behind in its research because it relies on an Oct. 5 Huffington Post entry which I refuted in my reply Oct. 8.

An article by Toni Foulkes of ACORN dispels all doubt about the connection circa 1992 between ACORN and Project Vote and Obama. In the article, “Case Study: Chicago-The Barack Obama Campaign,” which appeared in Social Policy magazine in 2004, Foulkes makes it abundantly clear that ACORN and Project Vote were partners in the voter registration drive led by Obama. The article is available here as a PDF file.

In addition, ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg acknowledged in a New York Times article that Obama conducted unpaid leadership training sessions for ACORN.

Moreover, ACORN's organizational structure is opaque and fluid and deliberately designed to help the organization avoid outside scrutiny. When ACORN is accused of wrongdoing --which is often-- it simply shifts the blame to an affiliated group. This legal shell-game approach has served the group well.

As James Terry of the Consumers Rights League testified (PDF) Sept. 24 before the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and House Administration Subcommittee on Elections Joint Hearing on “Federal, State and Local efforts to Prepare for the General 2008 Election," ACORN's "practice of juggling funds and blame between entities has often created good deal of confusion as to which crimes are allegedly committed by ACORN and which activities are those of subsidiaries such as the 'non-partisan' 501(c)(3) Project Vote."

The argument is over. Obama worked for ACORN and Project Vote, training, lecturing, and getting out the vote. ACORN says so.