Fred Martinez's Monitor

Obama Website Altering Ties to ACORN as caught Lying

http://www.youdecide2008.com/2008/10/13/report-obama-website-altering-ties-to-acorn/

Report: Obama website altering ties to ACORN
October 13th, 2008Posted: 3:09 pm by Nate

The Cleveland Leader, which is an online part of the Plain Dealer newspaper, has been following the changes which have occurred during the past week at Sen. Barack Obama’s “Fight the Smears” website. The report contains screen captures and archived pages showing that the Obama campaign seems to be distancing itself from ACORN.

Report from the Cleveland Leader:

On Thursday we revealed the connection between Barack Obama and Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and uncovered a 2004 article that discussed his involvement with the organization which had recently been removed from the web. Today, the language on Obama’s fightthesmears.com website has been altered in order to make it look like he has been telling the truth about his ACORN associations all along.

Fortunately, we and many others online know how to do a screen capture and how to use a little something called Google Cache.

As of yesterday, Fightthesmears.com stated:

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.

Sometime on Friday, the website was altered, and the text was changed to state:

Fact: ACORN never hired Obama as a trainer, organizer, or any type of employee.

The original statement implied that he had no working connection with ACORN, whereas the new statement now insists that he has never been employed or hired by ACORN.

FightTheSmears.com as it was on October 9, 2008 (click to enlarge):


FightTheSmears.com as it shows in Google’s cache, last updated Oct. 6, 2008 (click to enlarge):


FightTheSmears.com as it now shows, effective Oct. 10, 2008 (click to enlarge):


The New York Times had also revealed that Obama has in fact worked with ACORN in the past, despite what his “Fight the Smears” website says:

Lewis Goldberg, a spokesman for Acorn, said Mr. Obama conducted two leadership training sessions of roughly an hour each for Acorn’s Chicago affiliate over a three-year period in the late 1990s. He was not paid for that work, Mr. Goldberg said.

Another report on the website changes from ABC News which emphasizes that ACORN never “hired” Obama, he worked in a volunteer position:

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.

Moreover, Obama also represented ACORN and other groups in the mid 1990s as an attorney suing the state of Illinois to uphold the federal Motor Voter law. The governor and other officials of the State of Illinois were refusing to comply with the law on the ground that it was unconstitutional.

There is so much misinformation out about this that’s difficult to decipher it all. The only thing certain is that Sen. Obama’s “Fight the Smears” website has changed the language surrounding Obama’s involvement with ACORN.

You tell me, does this matter?

More on this story as it develops, if it does..

posted by Fred Martinez @ 12:46 PM