“We don’t want the Guantanamo people there,” David Munson, owner of the Summer Trail Inn, told FOXNews.com. “And we felt like the situation was moving way too quickly to bring the Guantanamo people here.”

Munson said the recent shout-fests at town halls across the country “influenced me to name it ‘town hall’ because it’s sort of a buzzword,” he said. He said he expects to attract at least 600 Standish residents.

13. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega went on a 50-minute anti-American rant, calling Obama “president of an empire.” Obama didn’t leave the room. “I thought it was 50 minutes long. That’s what I thought,” he said.

I’ve never quite gotten the outrage here, since the president’s response was so clearly backhanded. The alternative was for the president of the United States to flee the scene?

19. Nixes a “buy American” provision in the stimulus bill.

Which most conservatives were for.

41. Obama considers dropping the embargo on Cuba.

Which was always his position, and is politically popular.

61. Threatening to fire anyone the administration doesn’t like from any company.

This hasn’t actually happened.

93. Three prime-time briefings in his first 100 days, eating into television revenues and this Wednesday pre-empting “American Idol.”

Which appears on Fox, owned by the Post’s parent company, NewsCorp, but let’s not tell anyone.

100. “Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.” – Obama to Rep. Peter DeFazio, after the Democratic congressman voted against the stimulus bill.

Yes, cordial pressure applied to members of the president’s own party is a horrific blunder.

This list is, nonetheless, one of the most popular Post stories all year, if you don’t count their increasingly fishy “Ashley Biden cocaine” story.

When the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, announced yesterday that it had registered more than 1.3 million new voters nationwide so far this year, it was a cause either for celebration or dismay — depending on where you stand.

In theory, of course, voter registration is supposed to be a good thing, and ACORN has long been commended for its ability to effectively appeal to young, poor, working class, elderly and minority voters around the country.

But this set of community organizers is also a favorite target of the Republican Party and, most recently, of Fox News. As the Huffington Post recently reported, Fox has been hammering Obama’s alleged connections with the community-organizing group -– much as if it were charging that he’s consorting with terrorists. (Leave it to Gov. Sarah Palin to make Fox look restrained.)

But ACORN? When did grass-roots organizers trying to increase political participation through voter registration become something political candidates had to distance themselves from?

It all started with the GOP’s accusations that ACORN promotes voter fraud — a charge it’s been making for years but which it’s stepped up this campaign season with a vengeance.

Readers even cited the charges in commenting on my last story, which was about how actual voter fraud -– the kind that affects elections -– doesn’t really exist.

What the voter fraud fear-mongers neglect to mention, however, is that in most cases, the charges against ACORN have not been substantiated. Which means there’s no reason to believe they were ever true.

As we know from the U.S. attorney firing scandal under Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, chief prosecutors are not above pressuring their underlings to go after voter fraud that doesn’t exist.

But the most important reason why the unsubstantiated charges against ACORN are misleading is that even in the few cases where it turned out that people were wrongly registered, there is no evidence that anyone actually turned up on Election Day to vote on their behalf.

A voter registration may be invalid because someone signing up accidentally provided a wrong address or phone number; or because a worker provided false information.

But in the cases cited as evidence of voter fraud by ACORN -– most notably one cited as the worst case of voter fraud in the state of Washington, where seven people were convicted last year –- the prosecutor himself noted that it was a scheme by a few individuals to make money. No one was actually trying to influence the outcome of the election.

It turned out that workers who were paid to register voters had copied names out of phone books rather than going out and doing their jobs of signing up real voters. Of course, none of those people showed up to vote.

Seeking to prevent any more such scandals, ACORN officials told me the organization now has workers personally call each newly-registered voter to double-check that the registration is genuine. That’s a big workload for a non-profit organization run on a shoestring, but it became a necessary effort to fend off the relentless Republican attacks.

Still, it hasn’t stopped them. An announcer on “Fox and Friends” recently described ACORN as having “a long and storied past involving voter fraud across the country, widespread” and noted “Obama’s long-term relationship with the radical group.”

In fact, Obama was one of several lawyers representing a large group of organizations—all siding with the U.S. Dept. of Justice -– who sued the governor of Illinois for failing to follow the federal motor-voter law.

Not surprisingly, Fox, like the GOP operatives attacking ACORN, neglected to tell its audience the rest of the story.

The group, Color of Change, is a young civil rights organization that has already has some successes during this political season. It helped oust Democratic Congressman Al Wynn and scuttle a planned primary debate for Democratic presidential candidates that was slated to be cosponsored by Fox News and the Congressional Black Caucus.

“John McCain’s talk about integrity and supporting democracy is just that, talk,” said the group’s director, James Rucker, in an interview with TWI. “Right now, he’s staying silent on an un-democratic program undertaken in this country, for his benefit, and in his party’s name. McCain and the RNC leadership know about these practices, but they won’t condemn or stop them. John McCain can’t shout ‘country first’ on the campaign trail and then choose to ignore his own party when they threaten the most basic right an American has – the right to vote,” added Rucker.

The group is collecting signatures for a petition urging McCain “stand up against his party’s shameful” tactics. While the practice was exposed in Michigan, Rucker also stressed that it is part of a broader pattern:

Caging–the practice being used in MI–is also being done in other states, but in Michigan it’s particularly predatory: they’re going after folks who have been hit hardest by the economy and using that fact to challenge their right to vote. We believe that highlighting this instance, where the despicable nature of the practice is so clear, is a great way to start a national, public conversation, about the tactics.

Politically, Color of Change probably has less leverage over McCain than it had its other recent adversaries, such as Black incumbent Democrats like Wynn and the CBC leadership. Yet combined with the pressure of an Obama campaign lawsuit and mounting national scrutiny, as TWI reported Thursday, this is an effort that could help force McCain to finally answer for tactics that are so widely decried, even his own allies denied deploying them once they were exposed.

Fox’s tight and symbiotic ties with the G.O.P. are well documented, but that does not rule out a Democratic detente, since it is still owned by Rupert Murdoch, a pragmatic mogul who has famously made peace with liberal politicians here and abroad.

Fox’s Republican role is out in force on Friday, however, as the RNC began an offensive against Obama based entirely on Bill O’Reilly’s framing from The Factor. A new RNC attack file contends Obama offered “conflicting threat assessments on Iran” based on “his interview with Bill O’Reilly.”

Some Democrats were also concerned about the Obama-O’Reilly exchange on Iraq. “Instead of presenting a clear definition of how he will realize the promise of change after eight failed years of George Bush, [Obama] blurred the distinction between himself and John McCain on Iraq,” lamented a former aide to Chris Dodd, who thrilled liberal Fox critics in a more combative exchange with O’Reilly during the Democratic primary last year.

“He gave up his greatest strength – opposition to the Iraq War – on O’Reilly’s show,” the operative continued. “If Obama’s lucky, he gained enough new Fox-watching supporters to make up for the Democrats he just alienated.”

The Obama campaign had no comment on the appearance or reaction from Democrats.

Robert Greenwald, the director of the documentary, “OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” emailed a new video to supporters today. In it, he criticized Fox’s unbalanced treatment of Democratic politicians:

O’Reilly needled and interrupted Obama, trying to get him to simplify many of his answers — a far cry from the softballs O’Reilly lobbed at many prominent Republicans like Rudy Giuliani in the past.

In a separate interview with TWI, Greenwald said his new video shows how Fox News is using the same playbook this year that it effectively deployed against Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign in 2004.

“Those who don’t learn from history are forced to relive it,” Greenwald wrote in an email. “Here is proof positive of the Fox propaganda machine using the same language, the same tools the same attacks word for word against BO as they did against Kerry.” Raw Story, an alternative news site favored by the netroots, also criticized O’Reilly for a slanted, hectoring performance.