Jennifer Rubin has a carefully researched piece titled Obama and the Woods Fund ("Woods Hole" ought to be the outfit's name, but I guess that name's already taken). The whole piece is a must-read, I want to focus on a seemingly innocuous (and largely obscure) outfit with the gently nutty name of ACORN:

Another recipient of the Woods Fund largesse was the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an organization infamous for its left wing agenda. Stanley Kurtz who has researched ACORN's far-left agenda described its "in your face tactics":

Just think of Code Pink's well-known operations (threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you'll get the idea. Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers' dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor's home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.

During Obama's time on the Woods Funds ACORN received grants of $45,000 (2000), $30,000 (2001), $45,000 (2001), $30,000 (2002), and $40,000 (2002) from the Woods Fund. (Obama in the early 1990's helped train ACORN organizers and later served as counsel in 1995 for ACORN in a "motor voter" registration lawsuit.) And ACORN certainly appreciated whatever assistance Obama afforded the radical organization over the years.

If ACORN were merely another whiny left-wing group that never did anything, it might be something we could all laugh off as cute. But alas, ACORN is neither cute nor laughable; it is a very determined, very powerful outfit which believes in implementing socialism, and works hard to create the right conditions to make socialism inevitable, and ineradicable.

I've complained that the people who want socialism know the dirty little secret that socialism does not work. That this is a feature and not a bug. That problems created by socialism create a demand for socialist solutions, and so on.

ACORN, as it happens, spent many years working tirelessly to create the conditions that led to the current mortgage crisis. From "Thank ACORN (And Co) For Mortgage Crisis":

At the crisis' core are loans that were made with virtually nonexistent underwriting standards - no verification of income or assets; little consideration of the applicant's ability to make payments; no down payment.

Most people instinctively understand that such loans are likely to be unsound. But how did the heavily-regulated banking industry end up able to engage in such foolishness?

From the current hand-wringing, you'd think that the banks came up with the idea of looser underwriting standards on their own, with regulators just asleep on the job. In fact, it was the regulators who relaxed these standards - at the behest of community groups and "progressive" political forces.

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining" - claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications - but the overwhelming reason wasn't racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

Yet a "landmark" 1992 study from the Boston Fed concluded that mortgage-lending discrimination was systemic.

That study was tremendously flawed - a colleague and I later showed that the data it had used contained thousands of egregious typos, such as loans with negative interest rates. Our study found no evidence of discrimination.

Yet the political agenda triumphed - with the president of the Boston Fed saying no new studies were needed, and the US comptroller of the currency seconding the motion.

No sooner had the ink dried on its discrimination study than the Boston Fed, clearly speaking for the entire Fed, produced a manual for mortgage lenders stating that: "discrimination may be observed when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants."

Some of these "outdated" criteria included the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, credit history, savings history and income verification. Instead, the Boston Fed ruled that participation in a credit-counseling program should be taken as evidence of an applicant's ability to manage debt.

Sound crazy? You bet. Those "outdated" standards existed to limit defaults.

In light of my background as a Berkeley Police Review Commisioner, it's not difficult for me why they caved so quickly to the community activists. FEAR.

It's a very simple concept. People do not like being intimidated. Nor do they want their work and lives disrupted. If demonstrators show up where they work, they usually cave. And if that doesn't work, there's always the tried-and-true tactic of invading their personal spaces, or even threatening their homes and families. (Something which caused Berkeley's rather decent City Manager to flee to the relative safety of New Mexico.)

I cannot overstress the effectiveness of these methods. Read Stanley Kurtz again:

Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers' dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor's home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.

Noting Obama's ties to ACORN are so deep that he calls him the "Senator from ACORN," Kurtz recites numbing detail after numbing detail:

Important as these questions of funding and partisanship are, the larger point is that Obama's ties to Acorn -- arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country -- are wide, deep, and longstanding. If Acorn is adept at creating a non-partisan, inside-game veneer for what is in fact an intensely radical, leftist, and politically partisan reality, so is Obama himself. This is hardly a coincidence: Obama helped train Acorn's leaders in how to play this game. For the most part, Obama seems to have favored the political-insider strategy, yet it's clear that he knew how to play the in-your-face "direct action" game as well. And surely during his many years of close association with Acorn, Obama had to know what the group was all about.

Do Atlas and Dreier dismiss Stern's catalogue of Acorn's disruptive and intentionally intimidating tactics as a set of regrettable exceptions to Acorn's rule of civility? Not a chance. Atlas and Dreier are at pains to point out that intimidation works. They proudly reel off the increased memberships that follow in the wake of high-profile disruptions, and clearly imply that the same public officials who object most vociferously to intimidation are the ones most likely to cave as a result. What really upsets Atlas and Dreier is that Stern misses the subtle national hand directing Acorn's various local campaigns. This is radicalism unashamed.

But don't let the disruptive tactics fool you. Acorn is a savvy and exceedingly effective political player. Stern says that Acorn's key post-New Left innovation is its determination to take over the system from within, rather than futilely try to overthrow it from without. Stern calls this strategy a political version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Take Atlas and Dreier at their word: Acorn has an openly aggressive and intimidating side, but a sophisticated inside game, as well. Chicago's Acorn leader, for example, won a seat on the Board of Aldermen as the candidate of a leftist "New Party."

(In light of that damning piece alone, little wonder that Team Obama went after Kurtz with both barrels when he dared to look into the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records.)

While it is right to focus on Obama's close association for years with Bill Ayers (and I have, in a number of posts), the ACORN connection is more than enough reason not to vote for the man. For that reason alone, I would never, ever even consider voting for him. He might be likeable and articulate, but his background indicates that he's a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who has not just talked the talk, he's walked the walk. (If he had just talked the talk, I wouldn't be as worried.)

There's also this crucial difference between ACORN and Ayers: if the Ayers matter ever heats up, Obama can always through the guy under the bus, per his usual pattern. But there's no way he can or would disavow or repudiate ACORN. It's part of his resume, his political heritage -- his living, breathing legacy. His political family tree (if you will) has strong roots in ACORN. Uprooting or cutting down that kind of heritage would be political suicide.

He'll have to live with it.

The rest of us will have to live with the mortgage mess.

(If only so many people didn't see it as a failure of capitalism....)