Internet Scofflaw

Don’t worry. No matter how often this happens, it’s always an isolated incident:

Richardson claimed she had submitted an absentee ballot, but was afraid her vote would not count so she also voted in person. She also said she voted in the name of her granddaughter and yet another person.

“There was absolutely no intent on my part to commit any voter fraud,” she insisted.

The culprit in this case, was a veteran poll worker. But don’t worry, I’m sure she kept her jobs as an election fraudster and as a poll worker separate.

The Democrats consistently defend election fraud against any kind of reform, like voter identification or purging ineligible persons from the voting rolls. Their reason for doing so is transparent, but they need to put forward a story for the gullible (a.k.a. the press). Their story is twofold: anti-fraud measures are racist, and there’s no fraud anyway.

The former argument is risible, but what about the latter? They keep telling us that there’s no fraud anywhere, and when fraud does pop up, it’s always passed off as an isolated incident. Is that plausible? With the government controlling so much today, the amount at stake is enormous. People spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the outcome of elections. Is it really plausible that no one would try to stuff the ballot box, especially when it is so laughably easy to do?

The truth is, we aren’t finding fraud because we aren’t looking. Democrats generally quash any effort for the government to look, but now private groups are picking up the slack. And yes, it turns out that if you look, you find fraud.

True the Vote looked at elections in New York and Florida and easily uncovered dozens of instances of fraud. Not enough to change the outcome of an election? Perhaps not, but this is just what a private organization with limited resources was able to uncover when it first started looking. Furthermore, they could only look for violations in one category (ineligible voters). For example, wrong-person voting becomes impossible to detect as soon as the fraudster walks away.

Moreover, there are major examples in which fraud did change the outcome of an election. In the 2004 Washington gubernatorial race, the Democrat won by 129 votes (after weeks of shady recounts), in which 1482 people voted illegally. Nearly all those of those were felons, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat. And then there’s the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, in which the Democrat won by 312 votes, with 1099 illegal votes from felons. That one is particularly notable, because it gave Democrats the 60th vote they needed to jam through Obamacare.

As Obamacare destroys our country over the next two decades (the CBO projects an economic collapse by 2035), remember that it only passed because the Democrats cheated.

A very cursory review of Florida election records found dozens of non-citizens on the voter rolls, some of whom appear to have voted. Naturally, Florida is putting a stop to the review.

The citizens’ group in Texas that uncovered a major election fraud operation is being sued by the Texas Democratic Party.

More developments in the election fraud scandal in Troy, New York:

Thirty-eight forged or fraudulent ballots have been thrown out — enough votes, an election official admits, to likely have tipped the city council and county elections in November to the Democrats. . .

A special prosecutor is investigating the case and criminal charges are possible. New York State Supreme Court Judge Michael Lynch ruled that there were “significant election law violations that have compromised the rights of numerous voters and the integrity of the election process.”

Note that the Working Families Party, the organization responsible for the fraud, is linked to ACORN.

Does Eric Holder’s Justice Department tell the truth about anything?

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.

According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.

In the long run, I think that the Democrats are making a big mistake by identifying the Justice Department with political chicanery. Some day the DOJ might need that reputation they’re ruining.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers is alleging that the SEIU engaged in illegal tactics — including intimidation and ballot tampering — in an election in which workers were choosing which of the two unions would represent them. If true, and the allegations seem solid, this shows that the SEIU will not only use illegal tactics against (evil capitalist) businesses, but also against other labor unions.

More here.

Although it moonlights as a facilitator for child prostitution and human trafficking rings, ACORN’s bread-and-butter is election fraud. Today we have two new ACORN election fraud scandals. One is in Las Vegas, where ACORN illegally paid cash incentives for voter registrations, and the other is in Troy, New York, where an ACORN subsidiary forged dozens of absentee ballots.

Three out-of-state Obama staffers pled guilty to voting illegally in Ohio.  One said it was all a misunderstanding, but they admitted to having received a letter from the county before election day that explained the law.

(Via Volokh.)

According to the Rendell administration, preventing voter fraud is racist:

The head of the [Luzerne] county bureau of elections hasn’t encountered any suspected voter registration fraud, but allegations in other parts of Pennsylvania have sparked a lawsuit and a verbal exchange between a state official and the Republican Party.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party filed a lawsuit to assure the vote count is accurate – a move that Gov. Ed Rendell’s press secretary described as a “Jim Crow attitude.”

Playing the race card is probably just his reflex response, but if we take him seriously, he seems to be saying that preventing voter fraud hurts blacks.  So isn’t he saying that blacks are likely to commit voter fraud?  Doesn’t that make him the racist? (Answer: Of course not, he’s a Democrat.)

(Via Hot Air.)

ACORN claimed to have registered 1.3 million voters this year, but it is now revealed that the real number is about a third of that:

On Oct. 6, the community organizing group Acorn and an affiliated charity called Project Vote announced with jubilation that they had registered 1.3 million new voters. But it turns out the claim was a wild exaggeration, and the real number of newly registered voters nationwide is closer to 450,000, Project Vote’s executive director, Michael Slater, said in an interview.

The remainder are registered voters who were changing their address and roughly 400,000 that were rejected by election officials for a variety of reasons, including duplicate registrations, incomplete forms and fraudulent submissions from low-paid field workers trying to please their supervisors, Mr. Slater acknowledged.

In registration drives, it is common for a percentage of newly registered voters to be disqualified for various reasons, although experts say the percentage is higher when groups pay workers to gather registrations. But the disclosure on Thursday that 30 percent of Acorn’s registrations were faulty was described by Republicans as further proof of what they said was Acorn’s effort to tilt the election unfairly.

One-third new registrations (as far as we know), one-third address changes, one-third fraud.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Democrat in charge of Ohio elections turns election monitors away from the polls.

BONUS: She also permits same-day registration, in violation of Ohio law, based on the theory that “casting your vote” does not constitute “voting.” I am not making this up.

(Via Instapundit.)

Terry McAuliffe, the ethically-challenged but never-yet-indicted Democrat just elected governor of Virginia, has named a criminal to his cabinet:

The name Levar Stoney may not ring a bell to many in Wisconsin, but the new Secretary of the Commonwealth of Virginia and former Deputy Campaign Manager for Governor-elect Terry McAuliffe has some scandalous history in Wisconsin.

In 2004, Levar Stoney was involved in covering up and lying for five Democratic campaign operatives who slashed the tires of 25 vans rented by the Republican Party for get out the vote efforts.

It’s interesting that, despite all the Democratic bleating about voter suppression (in particular, how any measure whatsoever to inhibit election fraud constitutes voter suppression), it’s the Democrats who actually practice it.

Hannah Giles is dancing on ACORN’s grave. I think she’s earned it.

I don’t doubt that this is just a tactical retreat, and they’re planning to re-emerge under a new name, one that’s not associated with election fraud, child prostitution, and human trafficking. Still, the good guys won this round.

ACORN’s criminal activities are branching out from election fraud to breaking and entering.  With a Baltimore TV news crew in attendance, they “reclaimed” a foreclosed home, which is to say that they broke into the home and put a new lock on it.  That home, as it turns out, had already been resold to someone else, who will be contacting the police.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: Arrested.

The infamous election fraud organization gets its first payoff in the stimulus package, with a share of $4.19 billion for “neighborhood stabilization activities.”

UPDATE: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Obama concedes that media bias matters, in a backwards sort of way:

“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls,” Obama told me. “If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?”

He could be right. If there were no Fox News, every major media outlet would be in the tank for Obama. That could well be worth 2-3 points. Of course, for Obama to complain about media bias is a little like Richard Daley (the elder) complaining about election fraud.

But just for fun, let’s take Obama’s estimate at face value and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. (Don’t take any of this too seriously!)

The Groseclose-Milyo media-bias study scored Fox News at 39.7, where higher is more liberal and the center (i.e., the average voter) is 50.06. Thus, each point of Fox News bias results in a quarter of a point in the polls (by Obama’s estimate).

So, let’s compute how much it benefits Obama to be favored by nearly every other media outlet. To do the calculation, we need to have estimates of the relative influence of the various outlets. Since this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let me make some very conservative assumptions (er, conservative in the sense of cautious; that is, assumptions unfavorable to my case) that also turn out to make the calculation easy.

First, let’s suppose that every outlet in the Groseclose-Milyo study other than Fox News has equal influence. This is a cautious assumption, since most would agree that the farthest left outlets (e.g., New York Times, CBS, Washington Post) are some of the most influential. The composite score of all non-Fox outlets is then simply the average, 63.9.

Second, let’s suppose that Fox News has one-quarter the influence of every other news outlet combined. (That is, assume that Fox News itself has about 20% of the influence of the entire mainstream media. In my dreams!) That means that each point of non-Fox bias is worth four times each point of Fox bias, which works out to about one point in the polls. Thus, 13.8 points of non-Fox bias translates to about 14 points in the polls.

That is pretty close to the 15-point estimate that Newsweek’s Evan Thomas gave for how much media bias was helping Kerry in 2004. If Obama is right that Fox News is costing him 2.5 points (a big if!), and if there exists a linear relationship between media bias and poll results, and if media bias hasn’t lessened since the study was conducted (unlikely!), then Thomas’s 15 points has to be an underestimate, given our cautious assumptions.

The latest RCP poll average has Obama up by 6.3 points.

This is what Trump should have said, back in November:

There is much about this past election and its reported results that is profoundly suspicious. We believe that fraud was a significant factor in the outcome and it likely changed the election’s result. However, suspicion is not proof. It is the nature of an anonymous election that it is very hard to validate its results after the fact. We have not been able to find proof that votes were fraudulently cast or fraudulently counted in sufficient quantity to change the result of the election. Therefore, unfortunately, Joe Biden has prevailed in this election, and he will be inaugurated on January 20.

I share your frustration and disappointment at this outcome. We came tantalizingly close. The polls projected that we would lose by a landslide, but in the end the election was decided by just 40 thousand votes in four states. But it is now over, and our primary concern now must be to ensure an orderly transition of power and continuity of government. We will not obstruct the transition process, nor will we take any steps to sabotage the incoming administration. Neither will I endorse any objection to the counting of electoral votes, as has been the opposing party’s practice in recent decades.

Moving forward, I call on Mr. Biden and the new Congress to enact legislation to create uniform nationwide standards to prevent fraud in federal elections. Future presidents deserve to come into office without the cloud of suspicion created by this past election.

May God bless America, etc.

We all would all be in a much better place had he gone this route, and indeed Trump himself would be in a better place. But I suppose the fable of the scorpion and the frog applies.

John Podesta — a senior Democratic party functionary who ran the Clinton administration and the Obama transition and was re-hired this month by the Obama White House — says that the Republican party is “a cult worthy of Jonestown” (and that’s why Obama should rule by executive fiat).

The unmitigated gall of this guy to liken the Republicans to Jim Jones’s death cult. Jim Jones was a Democratic party power broker.

He had close ties to the Democratic Party in San Francisco, committing voter fraud to help get George Moscone elected mayor and Harvey Milk elected supervisor. (Whether Jones’s fraud was decisive can’t be known, since the Democratic district attorney terminated the investigation without any charges against Jones’s people and destroyed the election records.) Moscone rewarded Jones by appointing him the chairman of the San Francisco housing convention. Jones did not give up the position until after moving to Guyana. (He resigned by shortwave radio.)

During the 1976 presidential campaign, Jones met personally with VP candidate Walter Mondale and First-lady-to-be Rosalynn Carter. Mondale later wrote, as Jones moved his movement to Guyana, that “Knowing of your congregation’s deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of our country is a great inspiration to me.”

At a dinner honoring Jones at his “People’s Temple”, Willie Brown — long-time Democratic speaker of the California Assembly — likened Jones to a combination of Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao Tse-Tung (two out of four ain’t bad!). Also in attendance at the dinner was California governor (then and again today) Jerry Brown, and lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally. Dianne Feinstein (current Senator from California) also accepted Jones’s hospitality.

Jones’s cult was a peculiar one, as it had nothing to do with religion. He preached that “those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism”. When he slaughtered his cult, he directed that all his assets (millions of dollars), be given to the Soviet Union:

Dear Comrade Timofeyev,
The following is a letter of instructions regarding all of our assets that we want to leave to the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Enclosed in this letter are letters which instruct the banks to send the cashiers checks to you. I am doing this on behalf of Peoples Temple because we, as communists, want our money to be of benefit for help to oppressed peoples all over the world, or in any way that your decision-making body sees fit.

Jones was a Democratic communist, and his work for the Democratic party still reverberates in California politics today. He was, in short, the exact opposite of a Republican. Podesta has apologized for the comparison, as he should. But the rest of us should take the opportunity to remember how the Democratic party embraced the monster.

There is a pernicious notion that the essential quality of the American system of government is democracy. This is a very basic misunderstanding, and one that seems to be ingrained early. In my case I picked it up as a child, so early than I’m not even sure when.

But it’s nonsense. Democracy, also sometimes called more forthrightly “majority rule”, is the idea that 51% of the people have the right to impose their will on the other 49%. We know instinctively that this is wrong.

ASIDE: I’m considering democracy under its narrow meaning here. It’s true that democracy (or “liberal democracy”) sometimes is used to refer to whole collection of ideas, not just majority rule. But in that case I am arguing that using “democracy” as an umbrella term is inapt.

The essence of the American system is liberty. Democracy is but a means to an end. As Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw put it (paraphrasing): democracy is a poor system; the only thing to be said in its favor is the other systems are worse. Since haven’t figured out a realistic way for society to survive without government, putting its management into as broad hands as possible impedes it becoming a tyranny.

Impedes, but does not prevent. Democracy is just one mechanism we use to protect our liberty; others are the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and a bill of rights. Democracy is probably the least important of these.

The most important is the rule of law. Friedrich Hayek explains it this way (in his brilliant sixth chapter of the Road to Serfdom):

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. . .

While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.

The rule of law says that people can live their lives, run their businesses, raise their families, in a system whose rules are known to them in advance. The government will not interfere capriciously.

In the American system of government, laws are made, interpreted, and carried out by three distinct branches. The laws are changed only with difficulty (by the legislature), they are interpreted consistently (by a judicial system bound by precedent), and they are “faithfully executed” (by the executive).

Alas, this system has gone off the rails. When the legislative and executive powers are in the same hands, the potential for capricious interference increases dramatically. Once the Constitution was interpreted under the nondelegation doctrine (which dates back at least to 1689), which provided that the legislative power could not be delegated. However, in 1928 the Supreme Court ruled in Hampton v. United States that legislative power could be delegated, provided the law provided an “intelligible principle” to guide the executive branch.

The intelligible principle needn’t be particularly detailed either. Laws have almost never been struck down due to unconstitutional delegation, and in 1989 the Supreme Court made the low standard explicit in Mistretta v. United States, stating:

Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives. Accordingly, this Court has deemed it “constitutionally sufficient” if Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority.

Today, Congress “delineates the general policy”, while executive-branch bureaucrats make all the rules that govern our lives. That it does so capriciously cannot be denied. For example, when the EPA decides that carbon dioxide is dangerous, it gains the power to shut down coal-fired power plants, and anyone who invested money under the old rules is simply out of luck. And the EPA did so on its own; there was no legislative action, indeed, Congress considered the question and chose not to act.

Very recently, however, the problem has gotten much worse. President Obama has now arrogated for himself the power to decline to carry out portions of the law he doesn’t want to carry out, even in the absence of any delegation of power to do so. This is in direct violation of the Constitution’s provision that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

He has done so by refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (justified by his claim that it was unconstitutional, which the Supreme Court later backed), refusing to enforce immigration law for certain classes of illegal immigrants (justified by prosecutorial discretion), and declining to carry out certain provisions of Obamacare (justified by nothing whatsoever).

To be clear: some or all of these may well be good policy. That is entirely beside the point; they are not the law. Under the rule of law, the government is “bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand,” regardless of how the executive might judge their wisdom from moment to moment.

Today we have democracy (mostly), but without the rule of law, democracy merely gives us an elected tyrant.

POSTSCRIPT: A number of people have written elegantly on the dangerous implications of Obama’s arrogation of the power to ignore the law: Michael McConnell, John Yoo, and George Will. Andrew Klavan has recently written about the problems with democracy in another context.

UPDATE: Another example, Obama is unilaterally changing drug laws. Again, I agree as a matter of policy, but that’s not the point. He should push for the law to be changed, but he won’t do that. Respecting the rule of law would require political effort.

My final prediction for today’s election: In the House, Republicans will win a lot of new seats and take control of the chamber. (I don’t follow the House enough to guess a specific number, but with a 12-point advantage on the generic ballot, it’s not going to be close.) In the Senate, Republicans will keep all their seats, and win Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, for a net gain of eight. Dino Rossi (the Republican) will lead narrowly in Washington on election night, but Washington’s Democratic fraud machine will ultimately carry Murray to victory.

UPDATE: Pretty close. The biggest surprises were Colorado (which I expected to win), Pennsylvania (which was closer than I expected), and Illinois (which I expected to be closer). In the House, we did indeed win big. Although I didn’t have the guts to say it, I was expected 60-65 pick-ups, and it appears as though that estimate was maybe a hair low.

Once the shenanigans begin, you know you’ve seen this movie before. Somehow, some way, the Minnesota Democrats are going to end up with the seat. The similarity to Washington 2004 is striking. “Found” ballots, improperly handled absentee ballots, and — of course — lots of Democratic precincts with more ballots than voters. Plus, Minnesota has invented a new trick, “missing” ballots that no one can produce at all, and are nevertheless counted. The Wall Street Journal goes though the latest embarrassment to our democratic system.

In Washington State, the state Supreme Court ruled, essentially, that it is impossible to overturn a corrupt election. Specifically, it ruled that it could not overturn the results of an election unless the plaintiff could produce specific individuals who had voted illegally. The mere fact that the election was clearly fraudulent (since many Democratic precincts had more ballots than voters) was not enough.

Plus, it’s worth remembering that Minnesota makes no effort to prevent illegal voting. ACORN submitted countless fraudulent voter registrations, and we are to believe that none of those, not even a few hundred, turned into fraudulent votes?

UPDATE: Power Line says the comparison to Washington 2004 is unfair.

It begins:

Hot off the press, the first apparent evidence of fraud. Last night at around 7:30, a precinct in Mountain Iron, St. Louis County, mysteriously updated its vote total to add 100 new votes–all 100 for Barack Obama and Al Franken.

Mountain Iron uses optical scanning, so the Coleman campaign asked for a copy of the tape documenting the ballots cast on election night. St. Louis County responded by providing a tape that includes the newly-added 100 votes, and is dated November 2–the Sunday before the election. St. Louis County reportedly denies being able to produce the genuine tape from election night, even though Minnesota law, as I understand it, requires that tape to be signed by the election judges and publicly displayed.

UPDATE: Power Line (the link above) now has a partial explanation for the Mountain Iron discrepancy, but it has yet to be verified, and the genuine tape still hasn’t been produced.  They need to produce the tape; it’s as simple as that.

The Obama campaign is starting to face some questions about why its website has disabled all the basic protections against fraud. It makes their website very friendly to illegal and fraudulent contributions. Setting aside credit card fraud and foreign contributions, its easy to break up large donations into many small ones and they’ll be accepted. When combined with his refusal to release the names of his donors, it makes it look deliberate.

Obama’s defense is “the other guy does it too.” That’s not much of a defense, especially when the other guy actually doesn’t do it too.

When you couple this with Obama’s record fundraising, raising more in a month than McCain is spending overall, you can’t help wondering how much his haul is illegal. That’s the sort of question the media would ordinarily be eager to investigate.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: The Washington Post reports:

Sen. Barack Obama’s record-breaking $150 million fundraising performance in September has for the first time prompted questions about whether presidential candidates should be permitted to collect huge sums of money through faceless credit card transactions over the Internet.

Lawyers for both the Republican and Democratic parties have asked the Federal Election Commission to examine the issue, pointing to dozens of examples of what they say are lax screening procedures by the presidential campaigns that permitted donors using false names or stolen credit cards to make contributions. . .

While the potentially fraudulent or excessive contributions represent about 1 percent of Obama’s staggering haul, the security challenge is one of several major campaign-finance-related questions raised by the Democrat’s fundraising juggernaut.

Concerns about anonymous donations seeping into the campaign began to surface last month, mainly on conservative blogs. Some bloggers described their own attempts to display the flaws in Obama’s fundraising program, donating under such obviously phony names as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and reported that the credit card transactions were permitted.

Obama officials said it should be obvious that it is as much in their campaign’s interest as it is in the public’s interest for fake contributions to be turned back, and said they have taken pains to establish a barrier to prevent them. Over the course of the campaign, they said, a number of additional safeguards have been added to bulk up the security of their system.

Perhaps a good “additional safeguard” would be to reactivate the standard precautions that they disabled.  And the 1% figure was provided by the Obama campaign, with no evidence (reported by the Post) to back up the figure.

(Via Instapundit.)

ACORN has been unseated as the champion facilitator of voter fraud. The new champion is Jennifer Brunner, the Ohio Secretary of State. Brunner, a Democrat, has been widely called the most partisan official in the State of Ohio. Recently Brunner has been fighting a court order forcing her to verify the information on new voter registrations, but the full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals has now ruled against her.

One thing we’ve now learned is how many new registrations with mismatched information her office has been sitting on: over 200 thousand. We have no way of knowing how many of these registrations are legitimate, but if even 10% are fraudulent (and the number is almost certain much higher than that) we’re talking about 20 thousand voter registrations that Brunner has been trying to shield from examination.

For reference, the 2004 election was decided in Ohio by 118,457 votes; quite a bit less than the number of potentially fraudulent registrations Brunner has been try to jam onto the rolls.

(Via the Corner.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Brunner, as one would expect, protests that this order will potentially disenfranchise many voters; forcing them to use provisional ballots if her office is unable to verify that they are legitimate voters.  But her concern over disenfranchisement is very selective.  Last month, Brunner threw out thousands of Republican absentee ballot requests on a technicality.  In that case, she was concerned that accepting the forms could lead to voter fraud.

While researching my last post, an interesting sponsored link popped up on Google:

Obama-ACORN Lies Debunked
Get the Facts Now. Barack Obama
Never Organized with ACORN.
Obama.FightTheSmears.com

Here’s what they say:

• Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
• Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.
• Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

Obviously, this contradicts a lot that’s been written in the conservative blogosphere. Who’s right? Well, “fact” one depends on your definition of “ACORN community organizer” so that’s hard to dispute. Regarding the other two, ABC News’s Jake Tapper has the story. After an earlier version was shown to be untrue, “fact” two was carefully phrased to be literally, but very narrowly, truthful:

As reports pile up of voter registration fraud connected to ACORN — the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, a group that advocates for low-income voters – the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has sought to downplay his past ties with the group.

But in their efforts to do, Obama campaign officials found themselves forced last week to correct an erroneous assertion made on the campaign’s “Fight the Smears” webpage that “Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.”

That wasn’t true.

In fact, ACORN spokesman Lewis Goldberg told the New York Times that Obama conducted two unpaid leadership training sessions for ACORN’s Chicago affiliate in the late 1990s.

The “Fight the Smears” website now asserts, “Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.”

Key word: hired.

Goldberg told the Times that Obama’s work for ACORN was unpaid.

So Obama did work for ACORN, but he worked for free. That hardly refutes the “smear” allegation that Obama has ties to ACORN. Tapper goes on to explain that “fact” three isn’t true either.

Moreover, it is undisputed that Obama and ACORN have close ties today. In this election cycle, the Obama campaign paid ACORN over $800,000 for its efforts on behalf of the campaign.

UPDATE: The Cleveland Leader has screen grabs.

Rasmussen reports:

Republican challenger Dino Rossi has pulled ahead of Governor Christine Gregoire for the first time since February in Washington’s gubernatorial election. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state finds Rossi leading the incumbent 52% to 46%.

(Via the Corner.)

Rossi will have to win handily to put his election out of reach of the King County fraud machine.

Another of Obama’s high principles is now shown as a fraud:

There’s been a spurt of 527 activity on behalf of Sen. John McCain, but Barack Obama campaign has suddenly gone silent on the subject.

That’s because, after a year of telling donors not to contribute to 527 groups, of encouraging strategists not to form them and of suggesting that outside messaging efforts would not be welcome in Obama’s Democratic Party, Obama’s strategists have changed their approach.

An Obama adviser privy to the campaign’s internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies — what another campaign aide termed “the cavalry” — will come to Obama’s aid.

The Obama campaign can’t ask donors to form outside groups; it can only communicate, through the public and the media, with body language, tells and hints.

The upshot: Obama’s campaign will no longer object to independent efforts that hammer John McCain, just as, in their mind, the McCain campaign has not objected to those efforts targeted at Obama. “I assume with their 527s stirring, some [Democratic] ones will as well,” another senior campaign official said.

(Via Hot Air.)

Is there anything left of Obama’s supposedly high principles?  His claim not to take money from lobbyists always was a fraud.  He’s reneged on his pledge to accept public financing.  Now he’s encouraging 527s to attack McCain.  Barack Obama is an ordinary politician, except with much less experience.

How to steal a state:

This November, voters in Michigan may be asked to consider a lengthy ballot initiative to revise the state’s constitution. Proposed by a group called Reform Michigan Government Now, the initiative’s ostensible purpose is to restore efficiency and accountability to Michigan government. A look at the fine print, and a recently disclosed strategy document, reveals something altogether different: A stealth campaign to restructure all three branches of government, including the state judiciary, for partisan advantage. . .

Buried in the text of the 19,500-word ballot initiative are provisions designed to shift partisan control of every branch of Michigan government, including the state courts. Among other things, the initiative would eliminate two seats on the Michigan supreme court and several more seats on the state Courts of Appeals. The constitutional revisions would also cut the size of the Michigan legislature, rewrite the standards for legislative districting, and adopt controversial election reforms, such as no-excuse absentee voting, which has the potential to increase voter fraud within the state. In all, the initiative would rewrite over two dozen provisions in the Michigan state constitution.

Proponents proclaim the ballot initiative is a bipartisan effort to improve Michigan government, but a recently disclosed strategy document revealed a more partisan agenda. According to a PowerPoint presentation drafted by political consultants working for initiative proponents, the ballot initiative’s primary virtue is its potential to hand control of Michigan government over to the Democratic party for at least a decade.

The presentation was delivered to a union leadership conference this past spring. A graduate student intern at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based free-market think tank, discovered the slides on the United Auto Workers Region 1-C website. This discovery revealed a breathtakingly cynical stealth campaign to rewrite the state constitution. As the title slide explains, the plan’s true purpose is “Changing the rules of politics in Michigan to help Democrats.”

Reform Michigan Government Now presents itself as a bipartisan good government initiative that seeks to make government more accountable and efficient. Yet according to the presentation, the real problem facing Michigan is not bloated or inefficient government, but the Democratic Party’s failure to control the state legislature and governor’s office.

In order to ensure pro-Democrat redistricting in 2011-12, the presentation explains, the Democratic party will need to control all three branches of government: the governor’s office, state legislature and the judiciary. According to one slide, control of the supreme court is the “most important,” as the court “can overturn redistricting” done by the political branches. It seems judicial oversight is a particular concern because the traditional state redistricting criteria, such as keeping communities together, are “systematically biased against Democrats.”

Most distressing, and revealing, is how the Reform Michigan Government Now plan “reforms” the state judiciary. Specifically, the ballot initiative selectively alters the composition of Michigan state courts at every level — trial courts, appellate courts, and the supreme court — each by a different standard. The only unifying theme is that each reform will increase the proportion of Democrat-appointed judges.

As in many states, Michigan’s supreme court justices are subject to re-election, giving court critics ample opportunity to seek change through traditional political means. But, the presentation explains, defeating incumbent justices would be costly and difficult. So, rather than promote candidates for the Court who would rubber stamp a pro-Democrat redistricting effort, and seek to have them elected fair and square, initiative proponents want to seize partisan control of the Court in one fell swoop by eliminating two seats and removing two Republican appointees from the Court. This is no accident, as the presentation makes clear when describing the relevant plank in the proposal: “Reduce the number of Supreme Court justices from seven to five; two GOP justices eliminated” (emphasis added).

(Via the Volokh Conspiracy.)