Inside Politics: Funding extremists

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By Greg Pierce

Funding extremists

"It looks like Jeremiah Wright was just the tip of the iceberg," Stanley Kurtz writes at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

"Not only did Barack Obama savor Wright's sermons, Obama gave legitimacy - and a whole lot of money - to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Rev. Wright. And guess what? Bill Ayers is still palling around with the same bitterly anti-American Afrocentric ideologues that he and Obama were promoting a decade ago.

"All this is revealed by a bit of digging, combined with a careful study of documents from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the education foundation Obama and Ayers jointly led in the late 1990s," Mr. Kurtz said.

"John McCain, take note. Obama's tie to Wright is no longer a purely personal question (if it ever was one) about one man's choice of his pastor. The fact that Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Wright's anti-Americanism means that this is now a matter of public policy, and therefore an entirely legitimate issue in this campaign."

Obama and ACORN

"At the recent Emmy Awards, historian Laura Linney averred that America's Founders had been 'community organizers' - like Barack Obama. Too bad they aren't like that any more. Mr. Obama's kind of organizers work at ACORN, the militant advocacy group that is turning up in reports about voter fraud across the country," the Wall Street Journal said Tuesday in an editorial.

"ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - has been around since 1970 and boasts 350,000 members. We've written about them for years, but ACORN is now getting more attention as John McCain's campaign makes an issue of the fraud reports and ACORN's ties to Mr. Obama. It's about time someone exposed this shady outfit that uses government dollars to lobby for larger government," the newspaper said.

"ACORN uses various affiliated groups to agitate for 'a living wage,' for 'affordable housing,' for 'tax justice' and union and environmental goals, as well as against school choice and welfare reform. It was a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting 'strikes' against banks so they'd lower credit standards.

"But the organization's real genius is getting American taxpayers to foot the bill. According to a 2006 report from the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), ACORN has been on the federal take since 1977. For instance, ACORN's American Institute for Social Justice claimed $240,000 in tax money between fiscal years 2002 and 2003. Its American Environmental Justice Project received 100 percent of its revenue from government grants in the same years. EPI estimates the ACORN Housing Corporation alone received some $16 million in federal dollars from 1997-2007. Only recently, Democrats tried and failed to stuff an 'affordable housing' provision into the $700 billion bank rescue package that would have let politicians give even more to ACORN.