The Cleveland Leader reports this morning that Barack Obama is lying about his involvement with the group ACORN, which recently added Missouri to the list of states in which its activities are under investigation. While Obama's site maintains that he never trained ACORN activists -- whose training apparently encourages them to play fast and loose with election laws -- Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes has thanked Obama for doing precisely that:

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."

The Los Angeles Times has reported the same. Given all the improprieties with which ACORN has been associated in the past, as well as the accusations against it this year, it's easy to see why Obama hopes the media will ignore this issue.