Why Obama's Organizer Days Are A Big Joke

By MICHELLE MALKIN

Rudy Giuliani had me in stitches during his red-meat keynote address at the GOP convention. I laughed out loud when Giuliani laughed out loud while noting Barack Obama's deep experience as a "community organizer."

I laughed again when VP nominee and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin cracked: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities."

Team Obama was not amused. (Neither were the snarky left-wingers on cable TV who are now allergic to sarcasm.) They don't get why we snicker when Obama dons his Community Organizer cape.

Apparently, the jibes rendered Obama's advisers sleepless. In a crack-of-dawn e-mail to Obama's followers hours after Giuliani and Palin spoke, campaign manager David Plouffe attempted to gin up faux outrage (and, more importantly, donations) by claiming grave offense on the part of community organizers everywhere. Fumed Plouffe:

"Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed. Let's clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies."

Let me clarify something. Nobody is mocking community organizers in church basements and community centers across the country working to improve their neighbors' lives. What deserves ridicule is the notion that Obama's brief stint as a South Side rabble-rouser for tax-subsidized, partisan nonprofits qualifies as executive experience you can believe in.

What deserves derision is "community organizing" that relies on a community of homeless people and ex-cons to organize for the purpose of registering dead people to vote, shaking down corporations and using the race card as a bludgeon.

Obama's community organizing days involved training grievance-mongers from the far-left ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). The ACORN mob is infamous for its bully tactics (which they dub "direct actions"); Obama supporters have recounted his role in organizing an ambush on a government planning meeting about a landfill project opposed by Chicago's minority lobbies.

With benefactors like Obama in office, ACORN has milked nearly four decades of government subsidies to prop up chapters that promote the welfare state and undermine the free market, as well as some that have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and voter fraud.

The group continues to garner scrutiny from law enforcement.

Last week, Milwaukee's top election official announced plans to seek criminal investigations of 37 ACORN employees accused of offering gifts to sign up voters (including prepaid gas cards and restaurant cards) or falsifying driver's license numbers, Social Security numbers or other information on voter registration cards.

Last month, a New Mexico TV station reported on the child rapists, drug offenders and forgery convicts on ACORN's payroll. In July, Pennsylvania investigators asked the public for help in locating a fugitive named Luis R. Torres-Serrano, who is accused "of submitting more than 100 fraudulent voter registration forms he collected on behalf of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to county election officials." Also in July, a massive, nearly $1 million embezzlement scheme by top ACORN officials was exposed.

ACORN's political arm endorsed Obama in February and has ramped up efforts to register voters across the country. Meantime, completely ignored by the mainstream commentariat and clean-election crusaders, the Obama campaign 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 from 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." With a wave of his magic wand, Obama amended his Federal Election Commission forms to change the "advance work" to "get-out-the-vote" work.

Now, don't you dare challenge his commitment to following tax and election laws. And don't you even think of entertaining the possibility that The One exploited a nonprofit supposedly focused on helping low-income people for political gain. He was just "organizing" his "community." Guffaw.

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

Immigration and National Security

by Michelle Malkin
Syndicated Columnist
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

The following is excerpted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on May 20, 2008, in New York City.

Michelle Malkin, a columnist for Creators Syndicate since 1999, has also worked at the Los Angeles Daily News and the Seattle Times. A graduate of Oberlin College, she blogs on michellemalkin.com and is founder and co-editor of hotair.com. In 2002, she published Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.

WE ALL KNOW what happened on September 11, 2001. But how many of us recall what happened on February 26, 1993? That was the date of the first World Trade Center attack, the precursor to 9/11 carried out by a cell of Middle Eastern jihadists. Key members of that cell were illegal aliens.

Mahmud Abouhalima was an Egyptian illegal alien working as a cab driver in New York. He falsely claimed to be an agricultural worker under the 1986 illegal alien amnesty law and snagged a green card that allowed him to travel back and forth to Pakistan for al Qaeda training. Abouhalima said he was a strawberry picker, even though he had never been anywhere near a strawberry field. Overwhelmed INS workers—who are driven to reduce backlogs by simply shredding or rubber stamping applications—failed to vet his claims.

Mohammed Salameh, the operative who rented the truck used in the 1993 bombing, was denied amnesty after filing a bogus claim. But because the INS didn’t have the resources or the will to deport him, he was able to work and plot freely right under our noses.

The mastermind of the 1993 plot and of another foiled plot to bomb New York landmarks, Sheik Abdul Rahman, won asylum here based on a fraudulent claim and was allowed to remain thanks to a deadly combination of immigration and intelligence lapses. Seven people died and thousands were injured in the first World Trade Center bombing, which amounted to a trial run for the attack that would lead to the deaths of another 3,000 innocent men, women, and children eight years later.

All of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country with short-term visas issued by State Department consular offices abroad. Fifteen of the 19 came from Saudi Arabia, where a special program allowed them to get fast-track visas. The program, called Visa Express, was hatched by American bureaucrats who were concerned about wealthy Saudis waiting in long lines. So no one bothered to double-check the hijackers’ applications, which were so sloppy that they made no sense. To give you a couple of examples, one of them put “Washington hotel” as his address and another described his occupation as “Teeter.” Thus, despite obviously lying on their applications, they gained entry to plot mass murder on American soil.

Once in the U.S., several of the hijackers needed fake government documents. They hooked up with illegal alien day laborers who hung out at a Virginia convenience store near the Pentagon. After waiting around with a couple of $20 bills, an illegal alien from El Salvador was willing and able to give them the documents that they needed to board the planes they flew on 9/11. The local cops whom I interviewed admit knowing that those people hanging around the convenience store were here illegally, but they did nothing about it.

The lesson is this: Lax immigration enforcement enables enemy foreign agents to exploit a system that was intended to welcome those who want to make better lives for themselves on our terms. Before 9/11, our nation convinced itself that it could afford massive, systematic abuse and undermining of immigration laws. After 1993, in an age of Islamic terrorism and nuclear threat, we should have been permanently disabused of that notion. But we continued in our folly. And we continue in it still today.

Let’s look at some facts:

• There are now upwards of 20 million illegal aliens in the U.S.
• Roughly 1 million legal immigrants are admitted to the U.S. every year.
• Some 400,000 illegal aliens have been ordered to be deported, but are on the loose in the U.S. after being released by federal immigration courts.
• There are only 20,000 detention beds in the entire country to hold illegal aliens.
• There are only 2,000 federal agents employed by the Department of Homeland Security to track down the estimated 12-20 million illegal aliens who are living, working, going to school, getting driver’s licenses and, yes, committing crimes and plotting terrorist attacks in America as we speak.
• Border fences to our north and south are a joke, even while we’re sending money to Egypt and Mexico to help them build fences on their southern borders.
  

Despite the fact that Congress created the behemoth Department of Homeland Security, there is still no systematic tracking of criminal alien felons across the country; sanctuary for illegal aliens—that is, deliberate non-enforcement of the laws— remains the policy in almost every major metropolis; and “catch and release” remains standard operating procedure for untold thousands of illegal aliens who pass through the fingers of federal immigration authorities every day.

My book, Invasion, argued in great detail that our current immigration and entrance system is in shambles, partly by neglect and partly by design. From America’s negligent consular offices overseas, to our porous air, land, and sea points of entry, to our ineffective detention and deportation policies, our federal immigration authorities have failed at every level to protect our borders and preserve our sovereignty.

The argument of my book was simple: Immigration in a post-9/11 world must be treated as a national security issue. Enforcement of immigration laws must be clear and consistent. Lawbreakers must be punished, not rewarded. Illegal aliens must be deported, not naturalized. And the national interest, not special interests—whether Big Business or liberal multiculturalism—must drive immigration policy.

I agree with the late Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan—a liberal black Democrat and respected immigration authority—who said that credible immigration policy rests on three simple principles: “People who should get in, get in; people who should not enter are kept out; and people who are deportable should be required to leave.”

Contrary to the misguided claims of today’s open-borders lobby, the demand for a more discriminating immigration policy—one that welcomes American dreamers and bars American destroyers—does not stem from fear or hatred of foreigners, but from the idea of self-preservation and from love of country.

Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution states clearly: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” We are not a boarding house for the world. We are a sovereign nation. It’s time we started acting like one.