Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Obama Taps Former ACORN Lobbyist To Head Obamacare Youth Video Contest…

U.S. Awaits Supreme Court Decision On Affordable Care Act

Nice Deb: Deepak Bhargava spent ten years working in various capacities for the community organization ACORN.

The Regime is launching an ObamaCare video contest designed to encourage low info drones to sign up for ObamaCare. The Dept of Health and Human Service is offering cash prizes to cultists who create the best propaganda videos.

The administration will partner with Young Invincibles, a non-profit youth issues organization, to run the contest, with the goal of reaching those younger Americans who are skeptical of the need for health coverage.

Participants will be encouraged to submit three different types of videos advertising the benefits of the exchanges: a song, an animated short, or a video designed to convince viewers that they aren’t invincible. Using funds from the Affordable Care Act’s education and outreach budget, HHS will award $3,000 each to the creators of the three most popular and persuasive videos, while second and third place winners will get $2,500 each.

Via Daily Mail:

A liberal organization tapped Monday to manage a new federal government-sponsored video contest aimed at encouraging young Americans to embrace Obamacare is run by ACORN’s former top lobbyist, MailOnline can reveal.

ACORN, the once-mighty Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, crumbled in 2010 just months after a video sting operation showed its employees advising activists posing as a pimp and prostitute on how to evade federal taxes and hide crimes including human trafficking and prostitution.

Congress voted officially to defund it shortly thereafter.

The far-left ACORN was also dogged for years by allegations – some proven, others not – that its street-level organizers engaged in widespread voter registration fraud.

In its heyday, ACORN’s legislative agenda was managed by Deepak Bhargava, an Indian-born community organizer. Bhargava left ACORN in 2002 after holding the top government affairs position there for 10 years. He is now executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Community Change.

In 2013 that organization sponsored a new youth outreach arm called Young Invincibles, which announced a partnership on Monday with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Bhargava’s group, Center for Community Change has partnered with the Obama administration to sponsor the video contest.

Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who was among the most vocal Republicans during the 2010 battle over ACORN’s federal funding, told MailOnline that the White House is risking a public backlash with its choice of partnerships.

‘The fact that the Obama administration is putting a senior staffer of the now defunct and notoriously corrupt ACORN in charge of giving away cash to bribe young Americans into accepting Obamacare is cause for grave concern,’ Gosar said.

‘This new effort goes to show that the Obama administration will go to questionable lengths to force the American people into government run healthcare.’

Let’s take a little trip down Memory Lane because it should be remembered that in 2008 the Obama Campaign paid ACORN over $800,000 for so-called “advance work.”

A specific, month by month account of money paid by the Obama campaign to the ACORN front organization, Citizens Services, Inc. for those fraudulent “advance service”, taken from FEC reports and totaling $832,598.29 since Feb, 2008, can be found here.

Barack Obama has a long and colorful history of denying his embarrassing, radical leftwing associations, until he can no longer maintain the façade. At which point, he jettisons whatever or whoever has caused the embarrassment and MovesOn.

Indeed, at his now defunct Fight the Smears site (the precursor to Obama’s creepyAuthoritarian “Attack-Watch” and “Truth Team”), Obama denied his embarrassing association with ACORN. (Fight the Smears was pure propaganda, by the way – it put out half truths and outright lies in order to provide his willing accomplices in the media a cover story to defend Obama with whenever his political opponents dug up damaging information about him – which happened a lot because there is just so much dirt in his background.)

Look how the campaign of the future president went after Ken Blackwell, a private citizen because he dared to bring to light the truth about Obama’s extensive dealings with the now disgraced ACORN.

Discredited Republican voter-suppression guru Ken Blackwell is attacking Barack Obama with naked lies about his supposed connection to ACORN.

Fact: Barack was never an ACORN community organizer.
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
Fact: ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992.

In his capacity as an attorney, Barack represented ACORN in a successful lawsuit alongside the U.S. Department of Justice against the state of Illinois to force state compliance with a federal voting access law. For his work helping enforce the law, called “Motor Voter,” Barack received the IVI-IPO Legal Eagle Award in 1995. (For more about Barack’s career, check out our Obama bio.)

Ken Blackwell is best known today for disenfranchising Democratic voters in his dual role as Ohio Secretary of State and chair of George Bush’s Ohio campaign in 2004. To see him shed crocodile tears for the integrity of the vote while making accusations about Barack and ACORN with absolutely no basis in fact is disturbing.

Blackwell’s attacks against ACORN and community organizers continue a vile Republican pattern of mockery and viciousness against this noble profession. Community organizers are the very individuals Republicans should be celebrating for helping people to help themselves rather than depending on the government.

•Fact: Everything the Obama campaign said back there was a lie.

For some reason – it never occurred to the MSM that this tendency of the Obama campaign to dish out dishonest propaganda and viciously attack Obama’s political enemies, was an unhealthy thing for the country that they should have been exposing. For some reason, they just went along with the lies – and most continue to run interference for him to this day.

*Fact: Yes, Barack was a community organizer with ACORN.

Stanley Kurtz, researched Obama’s ties to ACORN and pointed us to these news sources:

The LA Times:

Several community organizers and Altgeld Gardens tenants confirmed Johnson was working on asbestos but said Obama organized residents to act. “He got people to vote with their feet” on the issue, organizer Madeleine Talbot said. At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor. But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff.

Obama’s own website:

When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, “I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

And that ever fruitful Chicago Reader article about Obama from December 1995:

Another strong supporter of Obama’s work–as an organizer, as a lawyer, and now as a candidate–is Madeline Talbott, lead organizer of the feisty ACORN community organization, a group that’s a thorn in the side of most elected officials. “I can’t repeat what most ACORN members think and say about politicians. But Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side.

Was the Chicago Reader lying? Is the Chicago reader a racist organization?

Some more damning articles about Obama’s Acorn related activities have been scrubbed from the archives of the journal, Social Policy.

*Fact: Barack was an ACORN trainer who conducted ‘Leadership Classes’ - says ACORN:

Obama started building the base years before. For instance, ACORN noticed him when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. He was a very good organizer. When he returned from law school, we asked him to help us with a lawsuit to challenge the state of Illinois’ refusal to abide by the National Voting Rights Act, also known as motor voter. Allied only with the state of Mississippi, Illinois had been refusing to allow mass-based voter registration according to the new law. Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus, it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for State Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends. And along about early March, we started to see that the African-American community had made its move: when Sen. Obama’s name was mentioned at our Southside Summit meeting with 700 people in attendance from three southside communities, the crowd went crazy. With about a week to go before the election, it was very clear how the African-American community would vote. But would they vote in high enough numbers?

It seemed to us that what Obama needed in the March primary was what we always work to deliver anyway: increased turnout in our ACORN communities. ACORN is active on the south and west sides of Chicago, in the south suburbs and on the east side of Springfield, the state capital. Most of the turf where we organize in is African American, with a growing Latino presence in Chicago’s Little Village and the suburbs.

Fact: Project Vote was the voter registration arm of ACORN.

The ACORN “family of organizations” includes a “variety of other supports for direct organizing and issue campaigns”, such as Project Vote and the Living Wage Resource Center. ACORN Community Labor Organizing Center is also an affiliation of ACORN.

Stanley Kurtz asked in the Fall of 2008, ”how does Barack Obama explain his denials of a link to Acorn in light of the evidence? Shouldn’t the press be asking him about this?”

Five years later it must be asked how anyone – given Obama’s long history of lying to the American people – would believe any of the BS he’s peddling now to sell Obamacare? And shouldn’t the American media (instead of the British Daily Mail) be breaking stories like this one?

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