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Most
people have heard of ACORN by now. The
main TV networks say a little about it,
but Fox News and a number of Internet
sites have plenty to say. ACORN stands
for Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now. It’s a
left wing organization. Nothing wrong
with that—they are one of many. ACORN is
perhaps best known for doing voter
registration in many states. But it also
has other functions.
Syndicated
columnist Mona Charen writes, “ACORN
does many things under the umbrella of
"community organizing." They agitate for
higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart
school reform, try to unionize welfare
workers (that is, those welfare
recipients who are obliged to work in
exchange for benefits) and organize
voter registration efforts (always for
Democrats, of course). Because they are
on the side of righteousness and
justice, they aren't especially
fastidious about their methods. In 2006,
for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new
voters in Washington. The only trouble
was, with the exception of six, all of
the names submitted were fake. The
secretary of state called it the ‘worst
case of election fraud in our state's
history’…"The ACORN workers told state
investigators that they went to the
Seattle public library, sat at a table
and filled out the voter registration
forms. They made up names, addresses,
and Social Security numbers and in some
cases plucked names from the phone book.
One worker said it was a lot of hard
work making up all those names and
another said he would sit at home, smoke
marijuana and fill out the forms." the
Wall Street Journal noted: “In Ohio in
2004, a worker for one affiliate was
given crack cocaine in exchange for
fraudulent registrations that included
underage voters, dead voters and pillars
of the community named Mary Poppins,
Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a
congressional hearing in Ohio in the
aftermath of the 2004 election,
officials from several counties in the
state explained ACORN’s practice of
dumping thousands of registration forms
in their lap on the submission deadline
[to prevent them being verified], even
though the forms had been collected
months earlier.” This kind of thing is
bad enough, but the worst of it is the
fact that ACORN has been getting our tax
money to finance their activities.
In a 2008
piece Michelle Malkin wrote, “This
left-wing group takes in 40 percent of
its revenues from American taxpayers —
you and me — and has leveraged nearly
four decades of government subsidies to
fund affiliates that promote the welfare
state and undermine capitalism and
self-reliance, some of which have been
implicated in perpetuating illegal
immigration and encouraging voter
fraud.”
Many are
asking “who in government is going to
put a stop to this?” Don’t expect the
president to do anything; he worked with
ACORN as a “community organizer” and
legal representative. ACORN was an
enthusiastic supporter of his campaign
and of course his administration.
Stanley
Kurtz, a fellow of the Hoover Institute
wrote, “Important as these questions of
funding and partisanship are, the larger
point is that Obama’s ties to Acorn —
arguably the most politically radical
large-scale activist group in the
country — are wide, deep, and
longstanding. If Acorn is adept at
creating a non-partisan, inside-game
veneer for what is in fact an intensely
radical, leftist, and politically
partisan reality, so is Obama himself.
This is hardly a coincidence: Obama
helped train Acorn’s leaders in how to
play this game. For the most part, Obama
seems to have favored the
political-insider strategy, yet it’s
clear that he knew how to play the
in-your-face “direct action” game as
well. And surely during his many years
of close association with Acorn, Obama
had to know what the group was all
about.”
Part of
the Obama Stimulus money is an
allocation of $5.2 Billion that groups
like ACORN are vying for. It remains to
be seen whether they will get all or
just a part of our money. A piece in the
American Thinker says, “Incredibly, the
Democrats’ bill makes groups like ACORN
eligible for a $4.19 billion pot of
money for “neighborhood stabilization
activities.” Funds for this purpose
were authorized in the Housing and
Economic Recovery Act, signed into law
in 2008. However, these funds were
limited to state and local governments.
Now House Democrats are taking the
unprecedented step of making ACORN and
other groups eligible for these funds.”
Just what
does all this have to do with
stimulating the economy? How many jobs
does it create? Approximately zero. It
sounds like business as usual in
Washington, but now Chicago style.
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