"we appreciate your work"

Is President Obama's honeymoon with the media over? Earlier this summer Charles Krauthammer didn't think so:

The hot sex is over, they're in the cigarette stage right now. You get a question or two that's slightly obstreperous, but the adulatory coverage is still all wall-to-wall.

This past weekend, Obama blitzed the alphabet media, appearing on the Sunday talk shows of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Univision to sell what was once called healthcare reform but has since been rebranded by the White House as "health insurance reform". It would have been a "full Ginsburg", except that FOX was pointedly excluded. Why? "Fox is an ideological outlet", insisted deputy press secretary Josh Earnest. Obama has taken issue with FOX before, but this time the White House has further hinted that only "outlets" inclined to treat the administration uncritically will be granted access, meaning FOX would be a news gatherer who should not expect "participation any time soon."

If the mainstream media has been taking a pass on critiquing the Obama administration, others have not. A New Zealand blogger uncovered the fact that Obama's "Green Jobs" czar, Van Jones, was a former member of a communist organization and a 9/11 Truther. And a 20 year old freelancer teamed up with a 25 year old to set in motion events that this month led to a Congressional vote to terminate funding of ACORN. Evidently taxpayer dollars cannot be spared to facilitate child prostitution and dispense advice on how to engage in tax evasion in these tough times!

I've noted the relationship between Obama and ACORN before, but given that investigative reporting of matters like this seems to have fallen on the blogging community, it is worth looking at again. In late 2007, after all, Obama promised that community organizing groups such as ACORN would "have input into the agenda for the next presidency of the United States of America."

On Obama's "myth busting" website, it was once claimed that
Fact: Barack was never an ACORN trainer and never worked for ACORN in any other capacity.
This was later scrubbed, when the truth proved otherwise.

Last year, I noted a number of facts that suggested that another purported "Fact", namely, that "ACORN was not part of Project Vote, the successful voter registration drive Barack ran in 1992" was an incomplete truth if true at all. I had attempted to edit Project Vote's Wikipedia article, but was ultimately blocked by Wikipedia's vigilant Obamaphiles (Joe Klein is right, Wikipedia IS "leftist"). A Project Vote person evidently came across the history of my Wiki edits in the months subsequent, since the links I found that Project Vote could have eliminated on its own initiative have been deleted (hence not all points below have weblinks). Lest I sound conspiratorial, consider the fact that the same deletion happened after a Washington Examiner story.

If Project Vote and ACORN are not a common entity, then why
- does this source say Project Vote "was created by the radical group ACORN"?
- did TIME magazine describe Project Vote as an "arm" of ACORN?
- did the New York Times also describe Project Vote as an "arm", not once but twice, and ACORN publish the full text of one of these articles on acorn.org?
- did Michael Slater, when deputy director of Project Vote, say "Project Vote provides support to ACORN's voter registration program" and then as executive director sign a 2005 report on the DEMOS website as

Mike Slater
Election Administration
Program Director
Project Vote/ACORN
- did this same Mike Slater say "GOP criticism of his group's ties to ACORN was fair"?
- was the only e-mail address provided as part of Project Vote's legal or official registration (under the name Voting for America, Inc.) an @acorn.org address?
- did the Beldon Fund describe a grant as going to "Project Vote/Voting for America for its ACORN Alumni Mobilization Project to reach out and re-connect former staff..."?
- did the Seattle Times describe an ACORN voter registration drive as "funded by Project Vote"?
- was Project Vote described by the Future5000 index of organizations as "Legal Name: ACORN"
- was an ACORN person listed as a Project Vote Director on Project Vote's tax filings for many years without this person knowing that Project Vote existed at all, never mind as a separate organization. This New York Times story also describes how an ACORN lawyer "found that the tight relationship between Project Vote and Acorn made it impossible to document that Project Vote’s money had been used in a strictly nonpartisan manner. Until the embezzlement scandal broke last summer, Project Vote’s board was made up entirely of Acorn staff members and Acorn members."
- did the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette state on June 2, 1987 that "[a person] of the nonprofit Project Vote organizations at Washington... came to Little Rock recently to help ACORN"
- did a former ACORN/Project Vote employee say "ACORN and Project Vote were one in the same."
- did Obama say last year that "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.”?