Friday, October 17, 2008

The Acorn Story - the facts

You've heard the hype from McCain and others.
Here are the basic facts:
Yes, there are some questionable registration forms. There always are no matter who is doing the registration (any company).
What McCain and others are not telling you is that Acorn is required by law in many states to turn in ALL collected ballots, those that appear to be valid and those that don't. In some states they are allowed to help the state by flagging the ones in question. In other states, they are required to just turn them all in and the state tries to figure out which are valid and which are not.
So clearly much ado about nothing (other than yet another distraction rather than discussing the issues voters care about).

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Monday, October 13, 2008

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

From The NY Times:

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama
By JIM RUTENBERG

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama's background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: "Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion."

That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama's background.

Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, "I have read about him," and "he's an Arab." Mr. McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."



Full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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