This Is Becoming An Alan Grayson FanBlog

Grayson schools No-Nothing Rethugs trying to defund ACORN. When you claim to be upholding the Constitution, you'd better know a little about the document. Or Alan Grayson will flay you like a deer in the north woods. Watch and enjoy.

Help Spread the Truth About ACORN

Forward this video by Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films far and wide.



Brave New Films:

Host a house party: http://acorn.bravenewtheaters.com

In recent weeks, the McCain campaign has been attacking ACORN, a widely respected voter registration organization, claiming ACORN knowingly participated in "voter fraud." In reality, this is just another calculated attempt by the McCain campaign and the RNC to suppress new and marginalized voters.

You can help spread the truth about ACORN by hosting a house party. Have your friends over and make new friends while watching ACORN's video and Brave New Films' REAL McCain series to keep the dialogue going about these issues.

CNN FactChecks ACORN Attacks

CNN reporter Drew Griffin correctly reports, “Our research is showing — this more looks like a fraud perpetrated on ACORN,” not by ACORN. The people who ACORN paid by the hour to register voters committed fraudulent acts against the organization.

Obama Lawyer Bob Bauer on Olbermann

Obama attorney Bob Bauer: Republicans are already under investigation for ginning up fake voter fraud claims (in the U.S. Attorney scandal); we're not going to let it happen again.

Miscellany

yahoo: A sculpture is photographed by a visitor at Sydney's Tamarama Beach in Australia Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2008. Sculpture by the Sea is Australia's largest annual outdoor exhibition of sculpture, free to the public. The 2008 exhibition will feature over 100 sculptures from seven different countries and will run for three weeks.
(AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Interview with one of my favorite authors, E. Annie Proulx, in the LATimes.

This dailykos diary has clips from the Bill Maher show from HBO last night.

Jere from A Red Sox Fan From Pinstripe Territory has many photos and videos from the Red Sox amazing Game 6 5 comeback win [Freudian slip, there].

While ACORN is being excoriated for voter registration fraud for having workers fill out bogus registration forms, then flagging them as bogus before sending them in to the states, Republicans hired a firm to deliberately defraud voters into changing their registration from Democrat to Republican. Read this LATimes article on the firm hired by the California Republican Party -- Young Political Majors, or YPM -- which has a long, documented history of voter registration fraud. In California, they duped people into changing their registration to Republican by telling them they were signing petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. That's fraud with intent to commit fraud.

Obama is racking up the endorsements.

The McCain campaign finally released a 2-page summary of Cindy McCain's tax returns (pdf file); she's clearly middle class as she makes only $4.2 million per year, not $5 mill.

Election Protection News

1. The big news is that the Supreme Court delivered a quick rebuke to the wingnutty 6th Circuit, overruling their decision to order the Ohio Secretary of State to have to "review" 600,000 new voter registrations against driver's license and social security databases. This prevents disenfranchisement by typo, whereby perfectly qualified voters are denied the right to vote because a letter in their name was entered incorrectly (that would have made Joe Sam the Plumber ineligible, as his name is Wurzelbacher, but the registrar has him listed as Worzelbacher).

[It must be noted that the decision, while good in protecting voting rights on the eve of this election, denies the GOP a private right of action to enforce the statute. That means that only government action can enforce that law. That is a bad principle in civil rights cases when you have a virulently anti-civil-rights administration like the Bush Administration, who allow civil rights violations to proliferate by not bringing such action. Good decision on this narrow case, made on a terrible basis for many future cases.]

2. David Iglesias, the New Mexico Assistant Attorney General who was fired for failing to bring bogus election fraud cases the Bush Administration was pushing in 2006, says the hysteria about ACORN being whipped up by the Republicans is equally bogus. [And whenever I mention David Igleasias, I have to mention that his actions in the JAG Corps were the basis for the Tom Cruise character in A Few Good Men. "You can't handle the truth!" indeed.]

David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election.

"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.

3. The AP (the AP!) factchecks the McCain campaign's allegations about ACORN and rejects them.

[I]n alleging voter fraud, McCain goes too far. To commit fraud, a person would have to show up on Election Day with identification bearing the fake name.

4. In perhaps the best news, the Obama campaign is aggressively tying the bogus ACORN investigation and the U.S. Attorney Scandal, including conducting a telephone conference with the media today:

The General Counsel of the Obama campaign is currently holding a media conference call to "Announce Major Action Taken Today To Address Illegal Conduct and Improprieties in the Sham "Anti-Fraud" Campaign Orchestrated By McCain-Palin and the RNC."

Check out this letter from the Obama campaign to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking for an investigation into ties between Bush's Justice Department and the McCain campaign's "systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud." I.e., don't try ginning up voter fraud prosecutions from the Justice Department in this election, my friends. This Democrat won't be caught napping.

Barack Obama is a fighting Democrat, and it's been a long time since we have seen a Democrat wage such a tough, disciplined fight.

Republicans Were for ACORN Before They Were Against It

John McCain attends ACORN-sponsored conference, March 2006

HuffPo: ACORN: McCain And GOP Used To Be Supporters

Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain, Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Texas Governor Rick Perry, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all have supported ACORN's work and appeared with members of the organization -- all in the past three years.

And now ACORN is the boogeyman, because Republicans don't have any issues to run on. Oh, and don't forget that many of the leaders of ACORN are black. Race-baiting, anyone?

Republican Zombie Lies Debunked - Part I

Obama, ACORN and "voter fraud" - dispelling the myths

Republican Zombie Lie #1: ACORN is going to steal the election through voter fraud.

Ridiculous. ACORN is an anti-poverty organization. They advocate for affordable housing (including a campaign against foreclosures by predatory lenders), better schools, a living wage, reform of immigration laws, health care, and paid sick days, among others. Here's a video that describes the work ACORN does. As part of their work they have launched a voter registration project along with Project Vote, another 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

States and the federal government all require that voter registration be non-partisan. In most states, it is required that if you register voters, BY LAW you must turn in every registration form. (That's to keep a group from registering voters and then only turning in the registration forms for people they think will vote for their candidate, or the way they want them to.)

ACORN pays people to do voter registration, often people who are unemployed and have a hard time getting jobs otherwise. (Again, that's part of their mission, ending poverty. One way to do that is to give an unemployed person a job.) And sometimes, not often but sometimes, those people cheat and turn in forms with the entire roster of the Dallas Cowboys on them, or some other fakery. By law ACORN is required to turn in those registration forms, even if it knows they are fake.

And that's the only fraud involved here, voter registration fraud. The Dallas Cowboys do not show up to vote. Poor people are not going to the polls and pretending to be Tony Romo and Terrell Owens. The fraud is perpetrated by the paid help who cheat ACORN. ACORN actually flags bogus registrations when they turn them in to the states to alert them that there is a problem. Therefore, as this Cincinnati Enquirer column points out, bogus registrations are a pain, not a problem.

There are almost no cases of actual voter fraud where a voter voted frauduently. The Bush Administrations's push to crack down on (nonexistant) voter fraud has only resulted in 120 prosecutions -- and only 86 convictions -- in the past five years. That's not .00001 percent of the voting electorate. Infinitesimally small.

And the current Republican obsession with ACORN? It's a made up issue. John McCain has supported ACORN over the years, including his appearance at an ACORN-sponsored event in March of 2006:

John McCain, in March of 2006, sitting beside Florida Rep. Kendrick Meek at an event ACORN co-sponsored in Florida.

That's right, John McCain was for ACORN before he was against it.

And here's John McCain extolling the virtues of ACORN in his address to the group. Remember, this is March of 2006, 2 1/2 years ago, John McCain was "telling immigration rights activists at a rally in Miami that they "are what makes America special."



Don't let the Republicans defraud you into believing that ACORN is going to steal the election, or that ACORN is a bad or scary group. They're just using this as an excuse to attack Obama, because they have no plan to fix the economy, and no other way to win the election other than lies and deception.