I don't see any indication that Obama has been involved in ANY shady dealings with ACORN at all. He hasn't dealt with them since 1993 as far as I can tell. And then, it was respectable work.

He HAS dealt with CSI more recently, and there was an error on the campaign's reporting, but it was corrected.

To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago ACORN leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and ACORN were ‘old friends.’”

He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities.

From a comprehensive and thoroughly researched piece by Stanley Kurtz in the National Review titled, Inside Obama’s ACORN, we come to understand that ACORN has its roots in the anti-capitalist tenets of the 1960s radical left group the National Welfare Rights Organization. This groups’ goal was to force a radical reconstruction of what they described as “America’s unjust capitalist economy” by forcing the elimination of eligibility restrictions for those trying to attain inclusion on the welfare roles, thus creating an overloaded system, a crisis, so as to affect that reconstruction.

In an article by Toni Foulkes, a Chicago ACORN leader and a member of ACORN’s National Association Board, published in Social Policy titled, Case Study: Chicago — The Barack Obama Campaign, Barack Obama is cited as being a key figure in ACORN’s yearly leadership-training seminars. Foulkes also exposes the fact that the much-touted Project Vote campaign which Obama takes credit for organizing was, in fact, in direct partnership with ACORN.

Barack Obama trained Madeleine Talbot’s budding ACORN staff how to organize people to action. He returned yearly to provide leadership-training seminars. And after ACORN employed the practice of coercing financial institution into providing low-interest loans to unqualified recipients Obama served as their legal counsel.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have acted as the mechanism for the initiation of today’s financial crisis, but ACORN and Barack Obama exist as the genesis, the single act that morphed into financial catastrophe for our country and, very likely, the world. To deny this elementary fact is to employ the math that got us into this mess.

Attempts to hide evidence of Obama's involvement with ACORN have included wiping the web clean of potentially damaging articles that had appeared, and were previously publicly accessible. Unfortunately, those behind the attempted cover-up failed to realize that in today's day and age, nothing disappears forever. There also exists another layer of the web, the hidden web, which is full of information included in proprietary scholarly databases where these very same "missing" articles can be easily uncovered.

"Obama took the case, known as ACORN vs. Edgar (the name of the Republican governor at the time) and we won. Obama then went on to run a voter registration project with Project VOTE in 1992 that made it possible for Carol Moseley Braun to win the Senate that year. Project VOTE delivered 50,000 newly registered voters in that campaign (ACORN delivered about 5,000 of them).

Since then, we have invited Obama to our leadership training sessions to run the session on power every year, and, as a result, many of our newly developing leaders got to know him before he ever ran for office. Thus it was natural for many of us to be active volunteers in his first campaign for STate Senate and then his failed bid for U.S. Congress in 1996. By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends."

But, said Blair Latoff, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee: "Barack Obama's failure to accurately report his campaign's financial records is an incredibly suspicious situation that appears to be an attempt to hide his campaign's interaction with a left-wing organization previously convicted of voter fraud. For a candidate who claims to be practicing 'new' politics, his FEC reports look an awful lot like the 'old-style' Chicago politics of yesterday."

Sen. Barack Obama “is lying” when he insists that he has never prayed in a mosque and was never a Muslim, a prominent Middle East expert and journalist says.