Every passing day brings another peek through the smokescreen covering Barack Obama's radical background.  Writing Sunday at www.americanthinker.com James Simpson, former White House economist and budget analyst, ties Obama tightly into web of radical left operations whose roots date back to the strife-torn '60s.  Simpson's piece, "Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis," is long but well worth downloading.  As an example, Simpson details Obama's intimate and extensive history with ACORN, the notorious "grassroots" organizing enterprise involved for decades with voter-registration fraud.

In the '90s, Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote in Chicago when he was a mere "community organizer."  He trained other agitators in ACORN's methods.  As a lawyer, he pursued ACORN objectives in court.  Quoting Simpson:  "Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind the l995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the [Community Reinvestment Act] and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront.  Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort." 

In the McCain-Obama debate Friday night, Obama took great pains to claim the he was in constant touch with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Democrat hacks working out the trillion dollar taxpayer bailout of the financial markets.  All day Sunday his surrogates were claiming Obama's input helped craft the Paulson-Democrat plan.  But here's a curious aspect.  The Paulson-Democrat plan included a surreptitious provision to award ACORN and other "community activist" organizations, like La Raza, 20 percent of the money the Treasury would recover from eventually selling the so-called "worthless" paper.  Republicans forced it out of the proposal.  But, ain't it curious that after all of Obama's input to the process, it turned out that ACORN would have been snatching up a bunch of free money?