Obama and ACORN?

Ugh. Half-asleep last night I saw a report on cable news pointing to (a) some link between Obama and ACORN and (b) some at least prima facie convincing evidence that ACORN was associated with large numbers of bogus voter registrations.

So here was my reaction: No way! Um, right?

I want to keep an open mind, and not become a knee-jerk defender of Obama...but, as with Clinton, I'm getting so fed up with irrational wingnut smears that I'm having a really, really hard time remaining fairly objective.

At any rate, this is just a little reminder to myself and to everybody else: yes, the McCain camp is loathsome and irrational...but that's exactly why we shouldn't become like them.

One of the most patriotic things one can do under circumstances like these is: remain objective.

So now I'm off to google this ACORN business.

Links to any information appreciated.

[Update: There seems to be no link between Obama personally and ACORN, and the link b/w the Obama campaign and ACORN seems rather oblique. More importantly: ACORN itself claims to have flagged the bad registration forms:

"What's going on here is a fair amount of partisan behavior on the part of local election officials," said Kettenring of ACORN. Noting that ACORN had flagged problematic registration cards to local authorities, he added, "They're politicizing cards that we identified ourselves and marked as such."

The organization is working with law enforcement agencies in four states, and in five other states contacted law enforcement agencies with information about activities by specific ACORN employees, he said.

"These are former workers who defrauded us and we would like them brought to justice," Kettenring said

(That from the Boston Globe)]

[Update 2:
Kleiman has a good summary. It seems pretty obvious that ACORN is largely the victim here...though the way its system is set up, individual registrars have an incentive to cheat. It infuriates me that anyone would set up a system like this. It's moronic...it's a virtual guarantee that bad forms will be turned in.

Now, as anyone who's worked on registration drives knows, once the forms are filled out, they must be turned in. All ACORN can do is flag the bad ones, which they apparently did (though I'm sure they missed some).

Employing a system that encorages bad registrations is infuriating in and of itself. But, as Mark notes, it's also infuriating because it gives cover to the real problem here, which is GOP voter suppression efforts.]