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. -- Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007

ACORN's political arm endorsed Obama in February and has ramped up efforts to register voters across the country. Meanwhile, completely ignored by the mainstream commentariat and clean-election crusaders, the Obama campaign has admitted failing to report $800,000 in campaign payments to ACORN. They were disguised as payments to a front group called "Citizen Services, Inc." for "advance work."

Jim Terry, an official of the Consumer Rights League, a watchdog group that monitors ACORN, noted: "ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain. Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama's political gain."

... Obama spent many years cultivating ties with, working with - and even funding - the very folks who pushed for the risky lending that underlies the current mess.

That is, "community organizer" groups like ACORN.

ACORN is especially noteworthy, not only because of its prominence in the drive to relax mortgage requirements, but also because of its shady tactics.

And its links to Obama.

Various ACORN chapters across the country, led by folks like Chicago's Madeline Talbott, staged in-your-face protests in bank lobbies and filed complaints meant to hold up mergers sought by targeted banking firms.

Unless the banks agreed to ACORN's terms - which many (understandably) did.

Talbott & Co. generally wanted them to ease down-payment requirements and ignore weak credit histories. And their intimidating tactics often necessitated police action, as at a '97 protest at Pulaski Bank & Trust in Arkansas, where activists blocked drive-through lanes.

The movement's biggest victory, of course, came when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up the riskier loans - providing fresh incentive for banks to make even more of them.

No need to recount where all that led.

Meanwhile, Obama was right there by ACORN's side all along.

"I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career," he told the group last November.

Indeed, in the early '90s, Obama was recruited by Talbott herself to run training sessions for ACORN activists.

ACORN also got funding from two charities, the Woods Fund and the Joyce Foundation, when Obama served on their boards, and from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge - the radical "education reform" outfit Obama ran from '95 to '99.

Ironically, the group stood to be a key beneficiary of the goodies Democrats were loading into Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's rescue plan - including one demand that 20 percent of any profits the feds make from reselling mortgage securities go to fund groups like ACORN.

Obama claimed he has no ties to "a group he did some legal work for" back in 1995. Let's look into that claim.

* In 1995, Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar balked at implementing the federal motor voter law out of concern that letting people register via postcard and blocking the state from pruning voter rolls might invite vote fraud. A young lawyer named Barak Obama, a community organizer himself, sued on behalf of ACORN and won. ACORN later invited Obama to train its staff on voter registration drives.

* In 1996 Obama ran for Illinois State Senate and ACORN became his precinct organization, identifying and turning out the vote.

* When Obama served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago, the Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its agenda and voter registration activities.

* In 2004 ACORN operates as Obama's precinct organization in his run for the U.S. Senate.

* In 2007 ACORN's national political arm endorsed Obama for president, and its "nonpartisan" voter registration affiliate starts registering hundreds of thousands of voters for Obama.

* Obama claims he has no ties to "a group he once did some legal work for."

* In July 2008 the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, along with NoQuarter researchers, exposes the lie by uncovering $832,598.29 that the Obama campaign funneled through a front company called Citizens Services, Inc.

* ACORN, which receives partial taxpayer funding, used those funds to conduct solicitations for contributions to and raised over $800,000 for Obama in Philadelphia alone.