Obama to amend report on $800,000 in spending

A nice-sized payment from Obama to Citizens Services Inc., which is headquartered at the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans and shares it's Board of Directors with ACORN. Obama and his campaign would tell us, "Nothing to see here...Move along!"

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/22/acorn-%E2%80%93-csi-%E2%80%93-obama-someone-else-noticed/#more-4324

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/election/s_584284.html

Obama to amend report on $800,000 in spending

By David M. Brown
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Friday, August 22, 2008

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat's campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.

An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. -- a subsidiary of ACORN -- worked in "get-out-the-vote" projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.

FEC spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger said it is not unusual for campaigns to amend reports, even regarding large sums of money.

But, said Blair Latoff, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee: "Barack Obama's failure to accurately report his campaign's financial records is an incredibly suspicious situation that appears to be an attempt to hide his campaign's interaction with a left-wing organization previously convicted of voter fraud. For a candidate who claims to be practicing 'new' politics, his FEC reports look an awful lot like the 'old-style' Chicago politics of yesterday."

In response to the RNC's position, Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said in an e-mail: "The RNC can concoct all of the outlandish conspiracy theories they want, but when we saw that our FEC report didn't accurately reflect the field work CSI was hired to perform we corrected it. It's pretty bold for the RNC to attack us for a clerical error after John McCain's campaign was just forced to return $50,000 raised by a foreign national through a number of contributors who weren't even supporting McCain."

Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the campaign's error on FEC documents doesn't seem extraordinary, especially considering the huge amounts of money being spent.

"It's rare that people don't file any amended reports. If he has a pattern of lots and lots of amended reports, that would be more noteworthy than an occasional one," Sloan said.

Jim Terry, spokesman for a group that tracks ACORN, said Citizens Services Inc.'s involvement in the Obama campaign raises bigger questions.

"All of this just seems like an awful lot of money and time spent on political campaigning for an organization that purports to exist to help low-income consumers," said Terry, chief public advocate for Consumers Rights League, a Washington, D.C., advocacy outfit with a libertarian outlook.

"ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain," Terry claimed. "Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama's political gain."

Obama is the CSI's first national candidate, although the company has worked for several regional candidates in recent years, said Jeff Robinson, CSI's executive vice president.

"Our contracts were relatively small for Obama," he said, declining to specify amounts because of "proprietary" rights of CSI's clients. The largest project for Obama was during the Ohio primary, he said.

"That was a very short-term contract for one week of work. In Ohio, they asked us to do canvasses in five cities statewide," Robinson said.

The Ohio primary was March 4. According to FEC records, the Obama campaign paid Citizens Services Inc. $832,598.29, from Feb. 25 to May 17.

A Trib analysis of campaign finance reports showed Obama paid CSI for services that stood out as unusual. For example, CSI received payments of $63,000 and $75,000 for advance work. Excluding the large payments to CSI, the average amount the Obama campaign spent with other organizations was $558.82 per check on more than 1,200 entries classified as advance work.

Citizens Services Inc. is headquartered at the same address as ACORN's national headquarters in New Orleans. Citizens Services was established in December 2004 to "assist persons and organizations who advance the interests of low- and moderate-income people," according to paperwork filed in Louisiana. In a 2006 ACORN publication, Citizen Services Inc. is described as "ACORN's campaign services entity."

ACORN describes itself as the nation's largest grass-roots community organization of low- and moderate-income people, operating in 110 cities across the country, including Pittsburgh.

Founded in Arkansas in 1970, ACORN long has been considered a political ally of the Democratic Party. It has received praise from leading Democrats, such as Howard Dean and former President Bill Clinton, for its community activism, especially regarding efforts to increase housing for low-income people and restoration work after Hurricane Katrina.

Early in his career, Obama worked as an organizer for Project Vote, an ACORN offshoot, and represented ACORN in legal actions, according to various published reports, including Associated Press articles. ACORN's political action committee endorsed Obama in the primary.

The organization has sparked controversy.

Accusations of voter fraud have followed ACORN's canvassing projects in about a dozen states. ACORN has dismissed the charges as politically motivated allegations from conservative groups, yet cases are pending and, in other cases, ACORN workers have entered guilty pleas. For example, three ACORN workers pleaded guilty to submitting phony voter registration forms in Washington, and eight ACORN employees pleaded guilty to federal election fraud in Missouri.

ACORN is at the center of a scandal involving a $1 million embezzlement by Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. ACORN discovered the embezzlement in 2000 but did not alert law enforcement officials.

ACORN's management committee instead negotiated an agreement to have the Rathke family repay the stolen funds, according to a report in The New York Times. The Rathke brothers resigned from ACORN this summer after news reports disclosed the embezzlement. A donor agreed to repay the most of the money, the Times reported.

Sunday Alabi, an ACORN activist and spokesman in St. Paul, is one of CSI's three-person board of directors. Alabi described CSI as a nonprofit consulting firm related to ACORN.

"I do not know the day-to-day work of what they do. I'm on the board," Alabi said, referring other questions to Robinson, the executive vice president.

Robinson said CSI is a "not-for-profit political and campaign management firm, much like any political consulting firm."CSI is not tax-exempt under any IRS code, he said. Without tax-exempt status, the organization isn't bound by IRS restrictions for nonprofits on political activities.

"We have a wide range of clients. We provide political campaign management. We provide field services," Robinson said. "Our clients are typically considered liberal. Our clients are labor unions, liberal to progressive candidates, nonprofit organizations on the liberal side of the political spectrum."

In 2006, CSI collected all the signatures and managed successful statewide ballot measure campaigns in Missouri, Ohio, Colorado and Arizona to increase the minimum wage, he said. "We have a good reputation. We provide good services."

Regarding CSI's nonprofit status, Robinson said: "We are organized specifically not to make money, but we make money. There are no profits. We have a staff of 60 people around the country, and that eats up our entire profit. We're not a for-profit corporation, but we are not a group like a United Way."

CSI is a "separate organization entirely" from ACORN, he said.

"ACORN is a client of ours," Robinson said. "ACORN has a lot of different partner organizations. We are a partner, but we are separate."

Robinson is listed on several Web sites as national deputy political director for campaigns and elections at ACORN. He is also listed as political director at the nonprofit Communities Voting Together and as a consultant at Project Vote. He did not return phone calls or an e-mail request for a follow-up interview.

Money flows back and forth between ACORN, Citizens Services Inc., Project Vote and Communities Voting Together. ACORN posts job ads for Citizens Services and Project Vote. Communities Voting Together contributed $60,000 to Citizens Services Inc., for example, in November 2005, according to a posting on CampaignMoney.com. Project Vote has hired ACORN and CSI as its highest paid contractors, paying ACORN $4,649,037 in 2006 and CSI $779,016 in 2006, according to Terry of the Consumers Rights League.

David M. Brown can be reached at dbrown@tribweb.com or 412-380-5614.

ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) Info from Neal Boortz

http://boortz.com/nuze/200809/09302008.html

THE ANTICS OF ACORN

A listener, William, sent us a compellation of various times when ACORN has resorted to voter fraud, just to get their Messiah, Barack Obama, elected. Here's a synopsis of some of the different cases against ACORN, just in this election season alone. Are you starting to understand what is going on here, folks? These are not isolated incidents. Now as you read of these incidents remember, please, that during Obama's days as a community organizer he was deeply involved with ACORN. That ought to set of some alarm bells with the media ... ought to, but it won't.

Washington
July 26, 2007,Seattle Times
Felony charges filed against 7 in state's biggest case of voter-registration fraud. The defendants, who were paid employees and supervisors of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now

Michigan
September 14, 2008, Detroit Free Press
Several municipal clerks across the state are reporting fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications, most of them from a nationwide community activist group working to help low- and moderate-income families.The majority of the problem applications are coming from the group ACORN, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now ...

Florida
Oct. 13, 2007, PRNewswire
A Florida state attorney is investigating thousands of potentially fraudulent voter registrations associated with the leading organizer of Florida's Amendment 5 ballot initiative. But this is just the tip of an iceberg of illegalities, fraud and contradictions connected to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) ... Former ACORN Miami-Dade field director Mac Stuart has declared an intent to sue ACORN and has made charges of rampant voter fraud operations. Stuart was employed and specifically tasked by ACORN to generate 103,000 new voter registrations from Dade County. He reports that ACORN threw out Republican registrations while paying for Democratic ones. Stuart also charges that ACORN targeted ex-cons and that he personally set up registration tables outside the Miami police department and Dade County jail.

New Mexico
Sept. 18, 2008, Judicial Watch Blog
This week officials in New Mexico's most populous county (Bernalillo) notified federal authorities that more than 1,000 fraudulent voter registration cards were submitted to the clerk's office. ACORN, which pays workers for each registration, is the prime suspect since it has handled thousands of new voter registrations in New Mexico since January. County workers subsequently discovered that at least 1,100 new registrations list Social Security numbers for people already in the county's database of registered voters, names of registered voters with different birth dates and addresses that don't exist.

Wisconsin
Aug. 6, 2008, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Criminal investigations could be launched against at least six voter registration workers who tried to add dead, imprisoned or imaginary people to the voter rolls, according to the Milwaukee Election Commission and the organization that employed them. "One woman called us to complain because her husband has been dead for 10 years and a voter registration was submitted," Edman said. In about 12 cases, deputy registrars paid by ACORN were "making people up or registering people that were still in prison," said Carolyn Castore, ACORN's state political director. And in other cases, workers used the same address for numerous voters or used driver's license numbers that did not fit the voters' birth dates, Edman said. But most of the fraud involved submitting duplicate cards for voters who were already registered, and forging the voters' signatures, Castore said.

Ohio
August 27, 2008, The Plain Dealer
A national organization that conducts voter registration drives for low-income people has curtailed its push in Cuyahoga County after the Board of Elections accused its workers of submitting fraudulent registration cards. Board employees said ACORN workers often handed in the same name on a number of voter registration cards, but showing that person living at different addresses. Other times, cards had the same name listed, but a different date of birth. Still another sign of possible fraud showed a number of people living at an address that turned out to be a restaurant. ACORN has submitted about 75,000 voter registration cards to the Cuyahoga board this year.

Pennsylvania
Sept. 18, 2008, The Bulletin: Philadelphia's Family Newspaper
A community organization, with longstanding ties to Barack Obama, has, according to numerous reports, repeatedly run afoul of voter registration laws both locally and nationally. Philadelphia election officials recently accused ACORN, of filing multiple fraudulent voter registrations during the 2008 Pennsylvania primary. The case has been referred to the U.S. Attorney's office, according to Philadelphia Deputy Election Commissioner Fred Voight. Delaware County election officials have made similar allegations against the group, and criminal indictments are pending. This past July 24, Dauphin County detectives offered a $2,000 reward for information about the whereabouts of Luis R. Torres-Serrano, an ACORN worker, who was accused of submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registrations.

Nevada
July 7,2008, Las Vegas Review Journal
ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, claims to have collected 60,000 new voter registrations in Clark County since February ... Lomax said while he supports the goal of getting more people registered to vote, he sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.

SO WHAT DOES OBAMA HAVE TO DO WITH ACORN?

The answer is ... a lot. Stanley Kurtz has written another great piece about Barack Obama's days as a community organizer for ACORN. It is worth you taking the time to read. Unfortunately, I wouldn't expect any mainstream media outlets to mention this information, or put two and two together considering all of the stories just listed above.