Will Rhodes Portmanteau

Contrary to the lies you get from McCain.

You can either take the issues you believe in and tell people about them, or you can take any and all spin that you see on a news channel and try your hardest to paint you opponent with it. Obama is the former, McCain is the latter.

Hopefully tonight John McCain will look into Barack Obama’s eyes and say it how he sees it.

So, onto ACORN - what is all the fuss about?

Well - some ACORN ‘employees’ have been registering people who don’t exist. Patently obvious and stupid of those who have been doing this. They get paid for the people they register you see. If you can’t see the flaw in that - well you need to take a reality check.

But - as the Ayers ’scandal’ hasn’t stuck - the next trick of a former campaign comes out of the box to see if that will stick. So - and I am really getting tired of doing this - we must show those who believe this garbage the truth, and wait for them to believe the next thing that McCain can come up with. On a side note to that, though - if McCain can keep up these kind of lies trying to get into office, what else is he lying about now, and how much lies is he going to tell you once he is in office if that should happen?

You want a president who is going to deal with what is wrong - or one that will go on the cocktail circuit in Washington smiling at how he has beaten his father in the high-ranking job stakes? McCain wants to be better than his dad you see.

But anyway - read this

Now I know that Democrats who read this blog will know all that is contained in that story - as I also know that Republicans won’t even read it - I will make it easy on them by copy and pasting some of the content here.

ACORN President Maude Hurd released the following statement today in response to the McCain campaign’s new ad claiming that, among other things, ACORN is responsible for the mortgage crisis:

”For almost a decade, ACORN, a community organization of 400,000 families in neighborhoods across the country, has been fighting against the predatory lending practices that have robbed our members of their homes, destabilized neighborhoods, and roiled the global economy.”

“In his newest ad, John McCain’s campaign bizarrely claims, “ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, ACORN has worked successfully to help working class families get good home loans on fair terms from legitimate banks and has fought vigorously against predatory lenders who have ripped off families in our communities. These predatory loans caused the crisis.”

Key Facts:

1. In order to help 1.3 million people register to vote, we hired more than 13,000 registration assistance workers. As with any business or agency that operates at this scale, there are always some people who want to get paid without really doing the job, or who aim to defraud their employer. Any large department store will have some workers who shoplift.

2. Any large voter registration operation will have a small percentage of workers who turn in bogus registration forms, Their goal clearly is not to cast a fraudulent vote. It is simply to defraud their employer, ACORN, by getting a paycheck without earning it. ACORN is the victim of this fraud – not the perpetrator.

3. In nearly every case that has been reported, it was ACORN that discovered the bad forms, and called them to the attention of election authorities, putting the forms in a package that identified them in writing as suspicious, encouraging election officials to investigate, and offering to help with prosecutions. We are required by law to turn in all forms, but instead of just turning them in and figuring that it is the responsibility of the board of elections to figure out which are valid, we spend millions of dollars verifying that forms are valid, and then separate out those that are suspicious.

4. This has nothing to do with “voter fraud” – nothing at all to do with anyone trying to cast an extra vote. There has never been a single reported instance in which bogus registration forms have led to anyone voting improperly. To do that, they would have to show up at the polls, prove their identity as all first-time registrants must, and risk jail. The people who turned in these forms did so not because they wanted an extra vote, but because they didn’t care enough to make sure eligible people got to vote at all.

5. When a department store calls the police to report a shoplifting employee, no one says the department store is guilty of consumer fraud. But for some reason, when ACORN turns voter registration workers over to the authorities for filling out bogus forms, it gets accused of “voter fraud.” This is a classic case of blaming the victim; indeed, these charges are outrageous, libelous, and often politically motivated.

6. Similar attacks were launched against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. The bogus charges were at the heart of the U.S. Attorney-gate scandal that led to the resignations of Karl Rove, Attorney General Ablerto Gonzales and other top Justice Department Officials. It turned out that it was the charges that were fraudulent, and that they were part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression. Republican US Attorneys David Iglesias (NM), Todd Graves (MO), and John McKay (WA) all were fired primarily because they refused to prosecute similar bogus charges of “voter fraud.” Another US Attorney, Bradley Schlozman, who did politicize prosecutions against former ACORN canvassers, was forced to acknowledge under cross examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee that ACORN was the victim of fraud by its employees and ACORN had caught the employees and had identified them to law enforcement.

7. The goals of the people orchestrating these attacks are to distract ACORN from helping people vote and to justify massive voter suppression. That’s the real voter fraud; the noise about a small fraction of the forms ACORN has turned in is meant to get the press and public take their eyes off the real threat, while those hurling the charges are stealing people’s right to vote in broad daylight. They have already tried to prevent Ohio from registering voters at its early voting sites. In Michigan, they planned to use foreclosure notices to challenge thousands of voters. And if this year is like past years, they are preparing to use this so-called voter fraud to justify massive challenges to voters in minority precincts on Election Day.

The Details:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags in writing incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in. Unfortunately, some of these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards. In many cases, we can actually prove that these are the same cards we called to their attention.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No criminal charges related to voter registration have ever been brought against ACORN or partner organizations. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes — evidence which in most cases WE called to the attention of authorities

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people [Democrat and Republican and others] are registered.

So there you have it. This is what you won’t hear from McCain - a transparent truth. ACORN is BIPARTISAN - that means it registers voters, it does NOT ask the affiliation of the voter and then registers them. Barack Obama did give money to ACORN in the primary elections as far as I know, but NOT in the general election. Even if he did give, which he hasn’t, the money would go toward registering Republicans as well as Democrats - don’t think, as John McCain does, that working-class people are all for the Democrats - why do you think that Palin is all for ‘Joe “Six-Pack”‘? Joe isn’t your middle-class worker - so the Republicans are taking aim and their foot with a certain amount of glee - and shooting!

You can read much more about internet and other rumours here.

Click that link and get a little education before you waste your vote.