IcyPatriot

Barack Obama's Involvement with ACORN Unearthed, Missing Article Recovered | Cleveland Leader

any guesses as to what Fight the smears will say by the end of this coming week?

Patters

Personally, I think they should defend ACORN. After all, it's an organization that helps give voice to the poor, something you're apparently against. As ACORN itself says, of the thousands of people they hire, a few are rogue and submit false ballot applications to rip off ACORN, not to rip off the voters.

Even assuming the article is accurate, Obama may well have never been employed by ACORN and was never an organizer for them. But, I don't really know why Obama is shying away so much from them. They are easily defended, and many churches would come to their defense as well.

IcyPatriot

Something I am against ... as in why did I openly support John Edwards in this forum? Uhhh ... he was for working to abolish poverty if possible. That he felt more attention needed to be given to the poor perhaps? I can dig it all up if needed.. You miss again Patters ... I am against ACORN because they openly break the laws in this country because they feel what they are doing is above the laws ... that is my problem with them.

When all of their fraud is uncovered ... especially as in Chicago ... you will either be singing a different tune or ignore that you defended them.

Patters

I should have said 'apparently against,' and I'm sorry for my mistake. At any rate, I know you were for Edwards and Clinton, but your clear hatred of Obama and ACORN suggests to me that you've changed your tune. After all, Edwards has been extremely pro-ACORN (much more so than Obama), even spoke at one of their annual conventions. I think he was very proud of his work with ACORN.

PatsFanInVa

Ol' PFnV did 3 years as a community organizer in the 80s. I was pro-arms-control, not anti-poverty. Our turf (it's jargon, don't get too excited) went from working class to upper middle class, and yes, they kept us out of the worst zips in terms of crime stats when we went door-to-door.

ACORN was another of the groups that did door-to-door work (along with a variety of anti-nuke, environmentalist, peace, anti-poverty, etc. groups.)

As you did more and took more responsibility, like any job, you moved up. In my version of this job, you were an Amway rep for peace. You knocked on doors. You got a signature on a petition if they agreed. You qualified whether they hated you, loved you, or one of 5 steps in between. You gave them literature and if they really seemed supportive, you asked for money. Rinse, repeat.

"Oh no door to door beggars!" Yes and no. The idea was that you had X number of previous contributors. They made it possible for a low-paid grunt to knock on others' doors. After a couple of cycles, a neighborhood was self-sustaining, and could fund a foray into another neighborhood. Rinse, repeat.

What did the low-paid guy get? In the 80s, we are talking about a 40% commission. OH NO, THESE GUYS ARE TAKING 40% OF THE MONEY!!!! Yeah. Which means, on a decent night (a "C-note",) the door-knocker got 40 bucks. Or, four decent tips at a restaurant. We made well less than waiters... 40 a night worked out to maybe 800 bucks per month or 10K per year. A lot of group houses.

You moved up to running the crew (getting the guys their "turfs" marked out on realtors' maps, dropping them and picking them up in most cases,) which made you a field manager (or FM, which we also called a "fornication muscle," to sanitize the terminology.) Then you became a Senior Field Manager (SFM, or "savage fornication muscle.")

At this point you were often helping to set up house parties, arranging speakers at said events, etc. You ended up with activist volunteers, which were (in our case) run from the "Office" - a townhouse on capital hill. The "Office," mind you, was the closest thing to the national headquarters for a group with 200,000 dues-paying members. You'd remember the name if I said it but I won't. It's about the job, not which group is which.

Oh by the way, plenty of us read Rules for Radicals. I can guarantee you it's not Das Kapital.

Now then, let's talk about the perverse incentives. I'm going door-to-door. I get nothing for additional signatures, so nobody forges petition signatures in this scenario. I'm getting 40% at the end of the night, so I could develop a goal of money over education... which would somewhat short-circuit the purpose of the entire exercise. I'm also low-paid and unmonitored. I could obviously defeat the purpose by pocketing some cash.

I talked to a few very committed individuals who actually did that. Not a big surprise, if a little disappointing.

Let's talk about ACORN's voter registration drive. The people who were registering nonexistent voters were obviously not sophisticated. As stated, they were trying to "rip off ACORN, not the American people." This suggests to me that they were rewarded some amount per voter registered.

Now: What exactly is the threat, since nobody was signing up to vote under that name? (These registrations were often not even in different peoples' handwriting).

It shouldn't happen, full stop. But the usual suspects are lurching around now throwing out the acronym ACORN (and previously the phrase "Community Organizer") like they mean "CPUSA" or "Communist."

Don't get me wrong. ACORN's got egg on its face over the off-the-chain activists. But Patters is right. What we have here is a group with anti-poverty aims, getting embarassed by the activities of some members.

What we see from the right wing is "Awwwwww... Obama knows ACORN people... awwwwww..." (with the 8th grade accusatorial pronunciation of "awwwww".)

So it turns out Obama never worked for ACORN, BFD. ACORN does say they had interaction with Obama, and liked him. BFD. A witch-hunter in Kenya likes the Republical veep candidate. I'm sure if you poll the KKK they'd prefer McCain to Obama. More to the point, I'm also certain the NRA -- about the "mainstream spectrum" equivalent of ACORN -- supports McCain over Obama.

Once again, the Right develops an ability to feed on its own rhetoric and finger-pointing, without much need for a grounding in reality.

People are either more or less "on to them" depending on the times. Just now, I think the foolishness is falling on deaf ears.

PFnV

PatsFanInVa

Oh, speaking of the activist world, dunno how many of you heard about the MD state police's patriotic work protecting America from Americans...

Md. Police Put Activists' Names On Terror Lists

For a long time, I believed that politics was like a pendulum - it swings to the right, it swings to the left, etc. Then under Reagan and George I it seems like the pendulum just plain broke and went rolling off the map to the right; during the Clinton years it seemed like it didn't do a whole lot of righting itself. And we won't even talk about the last 8 years.

But ask yourself: Is this really where we want to be? Is dissent treason? I think it's patriotism. Is hating other Americans patriotic? I think it's treason.

Americans are what matters as the core of America. Not an ideology, not "who you are required to hate more and fall short of hating," not "you're bad because you want to help other Americans" or "you're bad because you don't want to bomb country X."

I think people are getting this again.

It's about time.

PFnV

IcyPatriot

So now how much more will the Obama campaign backpeddle?

Quote:

http://www.capitalresearch.org/blog/...a-campaign.pdf Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions lo run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many o( our newly developing leaders got tt) know him belore be ever ran tor office.