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ACORN: Bizarre and Corrupt Allie Winegar Duzett, November 6, 2009 According to John Fund of The Wall Street Journal, there is one question above all that Americans should be asking with regards to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now): “How did they get away with so much for so long?” Fund posited two possible answers at Accuracy in Media’s 40th Anniversary Conference held on October 23, 2009, the first being a “presumption of good intentions. ACORN was a community organizing group,” Fund said. “When their offices were raided in Nevada,” he noted, they told the world, “We’re just...

John Fund: The state has received a flood of 180,000 absentee ballot requests. On some 3,000 forms the signature doesn't match the one on file with county clerks. Yet citing concerns that voters would be disenfranchised, Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey's secretary of state asking her "to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone." Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks "may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis" and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots. Those ballots, of course, would...

Same Day Voter Registration Re-Introduced WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and U.S. Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) are reintroducing legislation to "make it easier for Americans" to register to vote by allowing same day registration at polling places for all federal elections. By allowing voters to register at polling places the same day as they vote, the Same Day Registration Act would help increase voter turnout and voters would not have to worry about sitting an election out because they missed a registration deadline. And by having voters register in person, there is less of a chance that...

The two independent filmmakers who posed as a pimp and a prostitute and received advice from ACORN employees in five cities on how to skirt tax and immigration laws will hold a press conference Wednesday on their experience at another of the group's offices -- this one in Philadelphia. James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles will be joined by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative commentator who runs Breitbart.com and BigGovernment.com, which first posted the videos last month. "ACORN representatives claim James and Hannah were kicked out of Philadelphia," Breitbart said in a statement prior to the 9:30 a.m. ET news conference. "They...

ACORN,the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, faces still another high-stakes challenge — and more embarrassment — in Nevada, where it has been charged with 13 felony counts related to potential voter registration fraud during the 2008 campaign. This is the only state where ACORN, as an organization, is accused of criminal wrongdoing. Similar investigations in Pennsylvania and Florida have resulted in charges against individual canvassers the group hired to register voters. “With ACORN, one wonders how it could get worse for them,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group that has been...

And now, we see, there are groups attempting to commit voter fraud through absentee ballots: A state Supreme Court justice invalidated 39 absentee ballots in question for the Working Families Party primary in Troy after a court hearing last month. County Legislature Majority Leader Robert Mirch of Troy, working with private investigators, obtained affidavits from voters who said they did not cast the absentee ballots and that the ballots were fraudulent. Trey Smith, a former assistant district attorney, has been named as a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations. City Democrats and Republicans have fought over the Working Families Party...

Bertha Lewis is all done with apologies. Fresh off her ACORN Apology Tour, the group's CEO on Tuesday kicked of her new Denial Tour, charging that nearly every accusation lodged against the embattled community organizing group in recent weeks is not only false but downright racist. And for good measure, she threw in former President George W. Bush's adviser Karl Rove, arch villain and longtime whipping boy of liberals nationwide. "For many years, there've been folks who've disagreed with our ideology or methodology that has gone after us," Mrs. Lewis said in a speech at the National Press Club in...

Wade Rathke, the former chief organizer of ACORN, acknowledged that the organization he founded in 1970 is caught in a public storm that threatens its existence. "It's a Katrina-like storm for ACORN; they are in a perfect storm, " said Rathke, who left ACORN's leadership a year-and-a-half ago amid revelations about the alleged embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the community organization by his brother, Dale. The money has since been repaid. But Rathke, who lives in New Orleans where the national organization has had its headquarters -- it is relocating to Washington -- said he expects large and well-rooted...

September 29, 2009 With No Fanfare, Senate Hits ACORN, Again With no fanfare and no roll call vote, not even a speech -- the Senate on Tuesday unanimously approved an amendment by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-NE, that bars any funds from the Defense spending bill from going to ACORN.

With the revelation that White House Director of Political Affairs, Patrick Gaspard, has close ties to Bertha Lewis and to ACORN, Matthew Vadum and Erick Erickson appear to be onto something significant. While the Gaspard matter needs further investigation before we form any hard conclusions, it certainly seems to confirm that President Obama’s ties to a whole series of ACORN-controlled organizations are neither minor nor by any means long-past. In fact, making use of what Erickson and Vadum have discovered about Gaspard, we can trace these links still further. There’s been a good deal of attention to ACORN of late,...

Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group ACORN has a man in the Obama White House.This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush's White House.Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis's political director in New York.Lewis, the current "chief organizer" or CEO of ACORN, was head of New York ACORN from at least 1994 through 2008, when she took over as national leader of ACORN. -SNIP-Obama's statement...

Corporations that have given ACORN millions of dollars over the years are now cancelling their donations in the wake of videotape revelations of employees of the infamous community organizing giving advice on mortgage fraud, tax evasion, prostitution, and child sex slavery. Bank of America is reviewing its grant program, while Citigroup is waiting for the results of on-going investigations. JP Morgan Chase had previously ended its relationship with ACORN. Bank of America donated 28 grants totaling almost $3 million to ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC), since 2005, financial records show. A company spokesman said the activity exposed on videotape prompted the...

The new head of the Census Bureau said he decided to drop ACORN as an agency partner because the bureau's link to the community organization was hurting efforts to get Americans to participate in the count. Robert M. Groves, who was confirmed in July, said in a news conference Wednesday that census officials in the Chicago office had reported difficulties enlisting other community groups because of the controversy over ACORN. The bureau is trying to hook up with 100,000 local groups, some as small as neighborhood block associations, to help spread the message that it's safe and vital to fill...

It was one of the most popular topics among the questions you submitted to me for my interview with President Obama – the controversy involving ACORN. While the President said that ACORN "deserves to be investigated" in light of the "inappropriate" video that's gone viral, he did not endorse recent votes in Congress to cut off federal funding for the community group. Here’s our FULL exchange: STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the funding for ACORN? OBAMA: You know, if -- frankly, it's not really something I've followed closely. I didn't even know that ACORN was getting a whole lot of federal money....

We've been wondering why NBC has devoted hardly anytime to the snowballing scandal surrounding ACORN. What could be preventing them from covering one of the hottest topics in the past seven days? Well, Thursday morning, police in Connecticut were sitting outside the apartment of Raymond Clark, III, getting ready to arrest him for the murder of Annie Le, the young Yale graduate student who dissapeared a week ago. NBC's Today Show, with Meredith Vieira, was right there to bring us the latest with this exclusive interview of a neighbor, er... ex-neighbor. Their crack research staff, obviously pulled off the ACORN...

Here is video from Jay Leno last night where he made fun of ACORN with a spoof commercial that featured various people saying, "Thank you, ACORN." The tag line of the commercial: "ACORN. We'll help you get away with stuff." (VIDEO)

We've been wondering why NBC has devoted hardly anytime to the snowballing scandal surrounding ACORN. What could be preventing them from covering one of the hottest topics in the past seven days? Well, Thursday morning, police in Connecticut were sitting outside the apartment of Raymond Clark, III, getting ready to arrest him for the murder of Annie Le, the young Yale graduate student who dissapeared a week ago. Her body was found inside a wall in the research laboratory where she worked. NBC's Today Show, with Meredith Vieira, was right there to bring us the latest with this exclusive interview...

What does it say when John Stewart covers a story before Katie, Brian, and Charlie? ACORN suspended operations yesterday, calling the actions of their employees at four separate locations indefensible. This was after ACORN Bertha Lewis called the BigGovernment videos a scam, that ACORN employees were just "playing along", which came right after they claimed they were suing FoxNews for making ACORN their Willie Horton for 2009, which wasn't too long after they called this an isolated incident. Next up? Bertha Lewis saying "we would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids"? Zoinks! Read...

On the same day that the anti-poverty group ACORN announced the launch of an "internal review" after four undercover videos exposed its workers offering advice on how to skirt federal laws, a fifth video surfaced that purports to show a worker offering to help bring underage girls into the U.S. for the purposes of prostitution. The latest video was filmed in San Diego by conservative activist James O'Keefe, 25, and partner Hannah Giles, 20, who posed as a pimp and prostitute as they did in their previous undercover stings. In the latest video, O'Keefe asked the man if Tijuana is...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking to reporters during her weekly press conference just now, refused to say if she would support a Senate move to block ACORN from getting contracts from HUD -- suggesting that their behavior be scrutinized by a joint House-Senate conference committee instead. She did call the members of the group -- who were caught on tape apparently offering tax advice on how to set about a youth prostitution ring -- "despicable." But she portrayed at a few bad apples discrediting an organization with "hundreds" of honest organizers.