We may and should distinguish between vote fraud and voter-registration fraud, or mistakes.  The phone registrants may not vote.  Then again, they may, and if there are a lot of them, as in Ohio this election, we should look for vote fraud.

Here’s John Fund on the issue in the 10/30/08 WSJ.com’s Political Diary:

[Karen] Gillette [ACORN’s Project Vote head fund-raiser] certainly deserves more scrutiny [in the matter of trolling for money among maxed-out Obama donors supplied by the Obama campaign]. In 2006, she was a campaign consultant for Jennifer Brunner, the Acorn-backed Democratic candidate for Ohio secretary of state. Since her election, Ms. Brunner has outraged Republicans and left many objective observers puzzled by her judgment calls.

Some 660,000 new voter registrations have been filed in Ohio this year by groups including Acorn, and more than 200,000 failed a “match up” test in which voter information was compared with driver’s license and Social Security databases. Despite these warning signs, Ms. Brunner refused to allow county officials access to information they needed to verify the newly registered voters.

Many of the new registrants cast ballots earlier this month in Ohio’s “Golden Week,” a seven-day period when state residents can register and immediately cast an absentee ballot. At least half a dozen cases have been documented of people illegally registering and casting ballots during “Golden Week.”

Republicans seeking to force Secretary Brunner to surrender the data have been stymied in court, but their hand may be strengthened by the latest revelation that Ms. Brunner’s campaign consultant has close ties with Acorn’s Project Vote and has been accused under oath of obtaining donor lists from the Obama campaign to drum up dollars for Acorn’s voter registration effort — including its large Ohio operation.

If Ohio goes for Obama by a slim margin, the courts may be busier than polling places have been, says Fund, here paraphrased.

Go here for a rousing talk by Arnold Schwarzenegger introducing McCain.  It’s a barn-burner.

He left Europe “because socialism had killed opportunities there.”

Only in America could he have done as well, ten times better than anywhere else.

He hits the anti-secret ballot legislation that Obama supports in union elections.

He hits Obama’s wealth-spreading: In this country “democracy is not for sale.”

He asks, which do you want in your leader, eloquence or courage?

As Power Line asks, where has he been for the last month or two on the campaign trail?

Yes.  He’s terrific, even referring to his own tax-raising (arguably not a good idea) as needed to meet government costs, vs. Obama’s ideological motivation, as in the importance of spreading wealth.

Bill Ayers, Bernardin Dohrn, and their Weather Underground comrades wrote and published Prairie Fire in 1974.  It’s their manifesto, now very hard to get.  Abebooks had one copy a few hours ago, at $199!  Just now I looked, and it’s been sold.  The blogger at Zombietime got a copy and quotes from it liberally, summarizing:

Ayers and the Weather Underground enumerated dozens of different grievances as the rationales for their bombings — their overarching goal being to inspire a violent mass uprising against the United States government in order to establish a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Ayers’ own words.

They wanted to overthrow the government violently.  He became Obama’s ally in distributing Annenberg wealth to radical causes.

In this book, Ayers and friends list their crimes proudly.  Ayers

may have escaped conviction due to a legal technicality (the prosecutors failed to get a warrant during some of their surveillance of the Weather Underground), but this in no way means that Ayers was factually innocent of the crimes. As has been widely reported, after the case against him was dropped, Ayers decribed himself as “guilty as hell, free as a bird.”

But Mayordaley II dismisses it all.  Obama knows better.  He has denied more than a passing acquaintance with Ayers and Dohrn, at first lying, then admitting a little — at all times given a pass by MainStream Media such as Georgie Anne Geyer, who once bearded Castro in his den, or at least once she was out of it, but seems now to have lost her curve ball.

====================

Later: Prairie Fire is available in .pdf at Little Green Footballs, but the site is unreachable at this point, 11 pm CDT Saturday.  Keep trying. 

Yesterday the Florida TV interviewer annoying Biden with tough questions and the campaign’s cancelling the wife’s interview and cutting off further appearances at this (Orlando) station.  Today more:

Obama’s Florida spokeswoman, Adrianne Marsh, also released a statement claiming the interview was “combative and woefully uninformed about simple facts.”

“There’s nothing wrong with tough questions, but reporters have the very important job of sharing the truth with the public – not misleading the American people with false information,” Marsh said.

Ah yes, and we the party will decide what’s true.  TV interviewers, butt out.

“Senator Biden handled the interview well. However, the anchor was completely unprofessional.”

Kelly McBride, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute – a resource group for journalists in Florida, which owns The Saint Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, told CNSNews.com that the interview was “a classic case of partisan journalism.”

Au contraire, it was classic hard-hitting, as I said, the way all candidates should be interviewed.

“I think it’s absolutely horrible journalism,” McBride said. “It’s an example of a loaded question where she is presuming the answer. She has no intention of exploring for the audience the positions of the candidate. It’s clearly partisan.”

Nope, and what prevented Biden from saying that, Ms. McBride?  Her Poynter Institute is a mainstream media lapdog anyhow, with a trade publication whose ambit is entirely determined by the trade’s dominant conventional wisdom, incapable of radical critique.  Do you expect The Hatter’s Journal to question hats?

The interviewer, Barbara West, had McCain at her disposal a few days later.

West’s interview with Biden on Thursday prompted McCain, who interviewed with her on Monday, to interrupt at the beginning of the segment and warn her not to be too tough on him.
 
“Now don’t say anything mean or I am going to be angry,” said McCain.
 
West opened the interview by asking McCain if he thought his running mate, Sarah Palin, was distancing herself from him because she thought their ticket would lose the election in November.
 
“Is that indicative that she believes her campaign is not going to win and she is positioning herself for the future?” asked West. 

See what I mean?  West’s clients are the public, not the candidate.

Power Line reports how a reader at National Review Online “Corner” had his clearly phony $5 Obama donation accepted, but rejected by the McCain campaign. PL concludes: 

Everyone knows that Barack Obama has created the biggest money-machine of any politician in American history. But it is becoming increasingly evident that Obama’s money-machine is largely fraudulent and therefore criminal.

He speculates about media coverage:

One can imagine a world in which newspaper reporters think it’s a serious matter when a Presidential candidate tries to buy an election with illegal and fraudulent contributions. That, of course, is not the world that we live in. Have you seen Sarah Palin’s shoes?

I know.  Page one NYTimes stuff if I ever saw one.

Newsweek offers more on the fund-raising point.

This Tribune fellow earns his spurs as a card-carrying NYT imitator with this page one piece about Indiana, in which he kisses Palin off with a paragraph or so.

Contrast it — Glory be! — with this p-1 blaster in Sun-Times that seems to do her justice.  To do the story justice, that is.  She’s still news, isn’t she?  Not for Chi Trib.

Pallasch and Byrne do it right, getting the other side’s position along the way, which is how it’s done among professionals, I have long understood. 

“ACORN is under investigation for rampant voter fraud in 13 states. ACORN received over $800,000 from the Obama campaign,” Palin said. All 13 are swing states like Indiana.

Then the opposite position:

Obama has said the $800,000 was for voter canvassing during the primary election, not for voter registration during the general election.

“We have not worked with ACORN at all in the general election,” Obama spokesman Ben Labolt said. “Rather than make these false, desperate attacks, . . .

. . . Blah, blah, blah.

But the $800,000 is fungible, is it not?  Nothing left over for ACORN in the general?  How do we know that?

Moreover, ACORN has severe internal-honesty problems of its own, having fired the founder’s brother for making off with a million of its hard-begged money.  The founder, a campus radical in the ‘60s, himself had to quit, though it’s doubtful he’s not still in their pitchin’ for ACORN and Obama.  Here he is:

Wade Rathke is seen in a Tuesday Feb. 26, 2002 file photo, in New Orleans. A lawsuit filed in August by two ACORN board members accuses ACORN founder and former chief organizer Wade Rathke of either concealing or failing to properly report that his brother Dale embezzled around $948,000 from New Orleans-based ACORN and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. (AP Photo/Bill Haber, File)

Some of the dirty, from AP yesterday:

Leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now are locked in a legal dispute stemming from allegations that the brother of the group’s founder misappropriated nearly $1 million of the nonprofit’s money several years ago.

The embezzlement case, a recent revelation to some board members, has spawned a lawsuit and set off a power struggle inside ACORN at a time when the liberal group’s voter registration practices are the subject of fraud investigations and fodder for presidential campaign attacks.

I know I should be spelling out the McCain health care package, not mooning over Reform Now in its more virulent aspects, but with money siphoned hand over fist by an insider, doesn’t ACORN look like an embarrassing support group for O., who lawyered for and trained them and gave them lots a bucks — also hard–begged, by the way?

Bertha Lewis, ACORN’s interim chief organizer, called the lawsuit “a distraction from us marshaling our forces to deal with the Republican right-wing attacks” over ACORN’s voter registration.

When in doubt, changed the subject.

is what more people want (48%) than want one-party rule (41%). This is a big, big issue. Dems will probably add to their majorities in both houses, even gain a supermajority in the senate, making their plans filibuster-proof. So McCain presents himself as “a buffer” between the people and the Reid-Pelosi combo. Congress limps along with 13% approval rating, vs. Bush’s 29%, and 23% like Pelosi, vs. 30% who like Bush.

So hang her around Obama’s neck:

“Were my opponent elected with a Democratic Congress in power, not only would there be no check on my opponent’s reckless economic policies, there would be considerable pressure on him to tax and spend even more,” [McCain] said earlier this week in Blue Bell, Pa.

Tell them about vote fraud too, if they haven’t heard. It’s spelled A-C-O-R-N this season.

“It remains our belief that American citizens should be guaranteed that their legitimate votes are not wiped away by illegally cast ballots,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement Friday.

Such a good point. Yowling Dems speak of disenfranchisement — of felons, etc. — as if that’s the issue. But every fraudulent vote for their man or woman negates a legal vote for the other. It’s like jobs for precinct door-knocking. They are jobs of which someone else is deprived.

And sometimes the piper has to be paid.