Free Republic

ACORN sued the U.S. government Thursday for stripping the nonprofit of funding after employees were caught giving tax advice to a couple they thought was a pimp and his hooker. The lawsuit, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court, seeks to lift a funding ban put into effect on Oct. 1 in the wake of national outrage over the embarassing scandal.

Attorney General Jerry Brown, a likely Democratic candidate for governor next year, faces political blowback no matter how he rules on the undercover videotaping by conservative filmmakers at offices of the community group ACORN in Southern California. Brown is investigating the filmmakers, who posed as a prostitute and a pimp, for possible violations of state privacy laws. He is also investigating the group for what is shown in the video: an employee of ACORN apparently advising the filmmakers how to smuggle Mexican girls across the border to work as prostitutes. After the tapes were released, House Republicans used a series...

Those undercover tapes of ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) keep popping up, like these at the Big Government web site.. After a pair of undercover filmmakers impersonated a pimp and prostitute at ACORN offices, the Attorney General's office in California led by former Governor Jerry Brown has promised an investigation not into ACORN, but into the filmmakers. On October 15th, local ACORN spokesman David Lagstein was the special guest of the East County Democrat Club in El Cajon, CA. Lagstein is ACORN’s chief organizer in the San Diego area. The meeting was held at Coco’s Restaurant, a...

I attended the annual conference of the State Policy Network. This is a conservative, free market oriented group of think tanks from each state in the union. There were 500 participants this year, the biggest one ever. We saw James O'Keefe (the ACORN prostitution video maker), Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard and Fox News and a host of Tea Party activists and think tank operators. I have to thank Americans for Tax Reform for sending me out to the beautiful The Grove resort in Ashville, North Carolina to attend this great event. But I have to say one thing...

A New Jersey hospital is denying accusations that ACORN workers have been inside collecting absentee ballots for the state's gubernatorial race. East Orange General Hospital CEO Kevin Slavin said Tuesday that "all proper protocols" were followed as part of its program to allow patients to vote via absentee ballot, and that no third-party groups were signing up patients. "Other than the specifically designated and trained staff to hand out and collect these ballots, no advocacy groups were authorized nor allowed access to the hospital to hand out absentee ballots to patients as has been recently reported in unsubstantiated blogs and...

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the independent filmmakers behind the series of videos which swept the nation in 2009 and exposed internal corruption and illegality within ACORN Housing Corporation, were sued today in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the pair’s films. The plaintiff is Katherine Conway-Russell, a Philadelphia resident who has worked for ACORN since March 2008 as an office director. It was Conway-Russell who met with Giles and O’Keefe, posing as a prostitute and pimp as they had in ACORN offices nationwide during other installments of the undercover video series, for...

Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III, the independent filmmakers behind the series of videos which swept the nation in 2009 and exposed internal corruption and illegality within ACORN Housing Corporation, were sued today in federal court in Philadelphia by an ACORN employee featured in one of the pair’s films. The plaintiff is Katherine Conway-Russell, a Philadelphia resident who has worked for ACORN since March 2008 as an office director. It was Conway-Russell who met with Giles and O’Keefe, posing as a prostitute and pimp as they had in ACORN offices nationwide during other installments of the undercover video series, for...

Today, those of us watching polls were joined by embedded media teams. My media team was led by Hannah Giles of ACORN prostitute fame. She conducted a video interview with me which should be online soon. Our team is now convening for a meeting, but I promise that if you keep this thread appropriately bumped, I will report back in a new thread about the days activities. They include documenting polling irregularities at 5 or 6 precincts, and calling them in to both the Brown and Coakley "Hot Tip" line. (And if I do say so myself, she is hot....

2009 was an extraordinary year in which ordinary people did extraordinary things not because they were the easy things to do, but because they were the right thing to do. The people ranged from young Hannah Giles who jump-started her journalism career by donning a hooker’s garb to bring down the racketeer influenced corrupt organization known as ACORN, to Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III, who culminated the decades of his life that he worked toward airline safety simply by landing a engineless plane on the Hudson River. Michael Paul Mizzone, a carpenter’s business representative, pulled Josef R. Bruckuf, 82, out of...

GAO opens ACORN investigation By: Jake Sherman December 17, 2009 01:52 PM EST A top House Republican says the Government Accountability Office has opened an investigation into ACORN’s use of taxpayer dollars. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) made the announcement Thursday in the course of demanding a separate FBI investigation into the group. “Only an independent criminal investigation conducted by the FBI can get to the bottom of the nationwide allegations against ACORN,” Smith said in a news release. The GAO investigation will be completed jointly with the executive branch’s inspector general. More than 20 senators and several House members asked...

Big Government founder Andrew Breitbart has been summoned to New York for a grand jury appearance tomorrow morning, reports Andrea Shea King at the Radio Patriot.Breitbart's appearance is in regard to the sting operation exposing ACORN that was broken in the media by Big Government.Breitbart informed King about that the grand jury summons when he explained to her he was unable to appear on her radio show this evening because he would be in transit to New York at the time. King is a contributor to Big Government and its sister site, Big Hollywood.Breitbart did not disclose whether he would...

"DOORKNOCKING BASICS Some of the roles of an organizer are: • To help people steer their anger toward the system into collective action • To recruit new members for the organization’s greater political power • To give people a sense of their own power • To listen to their stories • To raise the expectations of what people should feel they should get • To paint a clear picture of who the enemy is • To organize to hold corporations and the government accountable to low & moderate income people • To bring in extra revenue to the organization •...

Just when we thought it was all over, the ACORN Pimp/Hooker Scandal rises again. Our heroes, Hannah Giles and James O' Keefe the fake pimp and hooker were in Philadelphia meeting with the folks at ACORN. Next Stop, Sunny Los Angeles. The first tape released from the ACORN of sunny LA was of Felix Harris Mr. Harris didn’t care about that the two were involved with prostitution in regards to a housing loan, but when the O'Keefe/Giles team started talking about underage girls, he said that ACORN did not get involved with things like that. Felix was the only person...

I should have known better than to doubt Patterico. Fifteen minutes of fun this time; if you can’t spare it, watch the highlight reel at the beginning of clip one and then 90 seconds starting at 1:45 of clip two. That’s where our heroine lets us know just how far she’s willing to go to prove her nonjudgmentalism about child sex slavery. Fair warning, though: If you don’t watch the whole thing, you’ll miss the part where she drops Larry Flynt’s name. What makes this sting a bit more special than the rest is that the star’s already been featured...

Lavelle Stewart, of ACORN in South Central Los Angeles, tells us she thinks we have to hook up with “someone who’s on that international sex business level,” that “14 and 15 year olds been traveling overseas for years,” that she can do independent research for us, and that she has had meetings with Porn magnate Larry Flynt. As for laundering the sex money into my faux political campaign, Lavelle says, “there are ways, people do it all the time. Yeah there are ways, especially out here in California.”

Citigroup has advised NLPC that Senior Vice President Eric Eve has resigned for ACORN’s Advisory Committee. In a September 28 letter to Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit, I asked that the bank sever its relationship with ACORN, including Eve’s membership on the Committee. In an October 29 reply, Citigroup also stated that it has “suspended our charitable financial support and program relationship with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway.”This is ominous, and certainly leaves open the possibility of continued Citigroup support for ACORN. The “independent audit” is no such thing. It...

Fearing a potentially devastating Democratic loss, the highly controversial Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) group and its affiliated organizations are gearing up to tip the scales and re-elect embattled incumbent in the hard-fought New Jersey gubernatorial race, sources tell Newsmax. "Acorn is heavily involved in Gov. Jon Corzine's get-out-the-vote operation, but is maintaining a low profile at the insistence of the Corzine campaign," Matthew Vadum, senior editor of the conservative Capitol Research Center think tank, tells Newsmax. "If Corzine manages to win reelection, he doesn't want the victory tainted by his close association with Acorn." Wall Street...

Some of my best friends have worked for ACORN. They are honest, dedicated and moral individuals who appreciated the mission of this group, which has done so much good for some of our poorest citizens. So I take it personally when Congress reduces ACORN to an object lesson about the purported immorality of some community organizers. ACORN isn't perfect. Both its loose organizational supervision and occasional zealotry of its organizers have led to abuses. But Congress has been extremely hypocritical and biased in cutting off federal funds. When two conservative activists posed as a pimp and a prostitute and with...

ACORN Video Creates New Conservative Star Breitbart wins following Web sites provide outlet to the right Perry Bacon Jr. October 31, 2009 Andrew Breitbart blew into Washington recently for what amounted to a victory lap. The Internet entrepreneur spent last week soaking up accolades from conservatives for having offered guidance to the two twenty-somethings who posed as a pimp and prostitute and took a hidden camera into several ACORN offices. The pair filmed workers from the national liberal community group appearing to aid them as they inquired about starting a brothel -- a move that has put ACORN on the...

Andrew Breitbart blew into Washington recently for what amounted to a victory lap. The Internet entrepreneur spent last week soaking up accolades from conservatives for having offered guidance to the two twenty-somethings who posed as a pimp and prostitute and took a hidden camera into several ACORN offices. The pair filmed workers from the national liberal community group appearing to aid them as they inquired about starting a brothel — a move that has put ACORN on the defensive and made the activists, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, instant conservative heroes. But in the end it’s Breitbart who may be...