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Jeff Goldstein points us to this article in the Investor’s Business Daily..

ACORN’s Senator

Election ‘08: Barack Obama wasn’t just the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contributions. He was also the senator from ACORN, the activist leader for risky “affirmative action” loans.

Despite efforts to blame the rescue bill’s failure on the GOP, it should be remembered that 95 Democrats — some 40% of the Democratic Caucus — withheld support. Obama himself also deserves blame — not only for the bill’s failure, but also for the crisis it was designed to solve.

As the New York Times reports, “Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure.” Is the reason the fact that the slush fund for ACORN in the original bill, siphoning off 20% of any future profits for such activist groups, was trimmed from the tree?

Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by the group to train its community organizers and staff in the methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers’ homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism.

In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago’s ACORN to run training sessions in “direct action.” That’s the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called “Ninja” loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn’t afford them.

CRA was designed to increase minority homeownership. Whenever a bank wanted to grow or expand, ACORN would file complaints that it was not sufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities in providing home loans. Agitators would then be unleashed.

Chicago’s ACORN used Alinsky’s tactics against institutions such as Bell Federal Savings and Loan and Avondale Federal Savings. In September 1992, the Chicago Tribune described the group’s agenda as “affirmative action lending.”

Obama also helped ACORN get funding. When he served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its activist agenda.

In 1995, Kurtz reports, Obama chaired the committee that increased funding of ACORN and other community organizers. The committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and governmental ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.”

The CRA empowered regulators to punish banks that failed to “meet the credit needs” of “low-income, minority and distressed neighborhoods.” It gave groups such as ACORN a license and a means to intimidate banks, claiming they were “redlining” poor and minority neighborhoods. ACORN employed its tactics in 1991 by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA.

As a former White House staff economist writes in the American Thinker, Obama represented ACORN in a 1994 suit against redlining. ACORN was also a driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton administration that greatly expanded the CRA and helped spawn the current financial crisis.

Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. Last November, he told the group, “I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.” Indeed he has. Obama was and is fully aware of what ACORN was doing with the money and expertise he provided. The voters should be aware on Nov. 4 of the roles of both in creating the current crisis.

And how much influence Saul Alinsky (read the original interview, reprinted here, given by Saul Alinsky to Playboy Magazine in 1972–just before he died–as a primer. If you don’t know who Saul Alinksy is, or haven’t read his “Rules for Radicals“) had on young vagabond Barack Obama…so much so that his first job as a community organizer was with Alinsky-modeled Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC) in Chicago. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is a pusher for CRA-based ‘entitlements’ (we see those entitlements as bad loans made to people who could never afford them) based on identity preferences. Blue Collar Muse has some good stuff on the ties that bind Democrats, ACORN, and Obama..

I’m reminded of the old saying about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. Obama’s association with ACORN and specifically with lawsuits involving CRA compliance in Chicago taint him sufficiently in my mind to disqualify him as a candidate to lead this nation. If his idea of proper tactics and procedures is embodied in this sort of activity, if this is organization he sees as beneficial for a community, he should not be trusted with an even larger community to organize.

We just can’t trust the country to a socialist who wants nothing more than to radicalize the population; in the words of Saul Alinsky..

America isn’t Russia in 1917 or China in 1946, and any violent head-on collision with the power structure will only ensure the mass suicide of the left and the probable triumph of domestic fascism. So you’re not going to get instant nirvana — or any nirvana, for that matter — and you’ve got to ask yourself, “Short of that, what the hell can I do?” The only answer is to build up local power bases that can merge into a national power movement that will ultimately realize your goals. That takes time and hard work and all the tedium connected with hard work, which turns off a lot of today’s rhetorical radicals

And his ultimate goal?

It’s the eternal problem, but it must be accepted with the understanding that all life is a series of revolutions, one following the other, each bringing society a little bit closer to the ultimate goal of real personal and social freedom.

Real personal and social freedom, huh? Exactly what is that? What society would give us that, with no worries, no needs, no responsibilities?

Alinsky was as vacuous as HOPE and CHANGE, and as promising as PROGRESSIVENESS.

Alinsky, now…

ALINSKY: Let’s say that if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.

And, what?

Organize a bus to Heaven?