Former SEIU president Andy Stern, a vicious Alinskyite thug, has accepted a plum post as “senior research fellow” at Georgetown University’s Georgetown Public Policy Institute effective Aug. 1.
Nevada’s Democratic attorney general, Catherine Cortez Masto, is moving forward with a criminal prosecution of ACORN even though the financially anemic group has dissolved its national structure and reportedly slashed its workforce from 250 to four employees. Trial has been scheduled for Nov. 29.
The charges relate to ACORN’s crime of choice: voter registration fraud.
ACORN allegedly enforced voter registration quotas with its employees and offered bonuses for extra registrations. Nevada law forbids the use of such incentives on the theory it encourages canvassers to file fraudulent registrations. No wonder: ACORN and its election fraud subsidiary Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, registers “Mickey Mouse” and various celebrities, out-of-state residents, and dead people, every election cycle.
Conrad Hafen, chief deputy state attorney general, was quoted in a news report saying neither bankruptcy nor dissolution would “necessarily protect (ACORN) from prosecution” in Nevada.
If ACORN is convicted it would send shock waves through leftist organizing circles across the nation and might embolden more prosecutors to take on ACORN and similar groups. Until it was charged by Nevada last year, ACORN had boasted about its ability to duck prosecution for election fraud.
Former ACORN regional director Amy Busefink is also charged with election-related improprities. Former ACORN Las Vegas field director Christopher Edwards is expected to testify against both ACORN and Busefink.
Charged with election fraud, Edwards cut a deal with prosecutors and has pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensation for registration of voters.
Lynne Stewart is a terrorist and a traitor and ideally she should have received the death penalty.
That wasn’t the way the pantywaist Clinton-appointed Judge John G. Koeltl saw it in 2006 when he sentenced the radical anti-American lawyer who became a willing participant in an Islamic terrorist plot to a mere 28 months in prison-a fraction of the 30-year term the government sought.
But things have changed. The septuagenarian Stewart has been resentenced, this time to a 10-year prison term. It’s about bloody time.
Note that some blogger and media outlets have been describing Stewart, an avowed Maoist, as a terrorist sympathizer. While it is certainly true that Stewart sympathized with terrorists, such a description does not get to the heart of her misdeeds.
Stewart violated federal prison procedures for dangerous offenders such as her client and deliberately conveyed orders from the client to his murderous terrorist group in Egypt. In doing so she became a terrorist in her own right and back in the good old days would have been put to death, as her fellow traitors the Rosenbergs were.
If there is any justice in this world Stewart will live out the rest of her natural life behind bars where she belongs.
When I was by interviewed by John J. Miller of National Review last month I learned for the first time that a paper I wrote on philanthropy for the James Madison Institute (JMI) of Tallahassee, Fla., helped convince the Florida legislature to pass a law banning the collection of race- and sex-related information from charitable foundations.
Miller posted the National Review article on his personal website. The JMI paper is available here.
Interestingly, low-rent race pimp Al Pina of the Florida Minority Community Reinvestment Coalition posted a defiant comment on Miller’s website. I’m sure we’ll hear from this fraud again in the future. These people never give up.
The easily excitable Pina had been leading the fight to force Florida’s foundations to begin collecting information on their employees’ race, sex, and sexual preferences. Pina’s goal, like that of his sponsor, the Berkeley, Calif.-based Greenlining Institute, has long been to effectively confiscate foundations’ assets in order to hand them over to his cronies.
ACORN demanded and received changes to a congressional report that –surprise, surprise– fails to find ACORN did anything wrong.
Longtime ACORN lawyer Arthur Z. Schwartz sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which was examining federal grants to ACORN, under orders from Congress. Schwartz’s demands appear at pages 32 and 33 of the report which is called “Preliminary Observations on Funding, Oversight, and Investigations and Prosecutions of ACORN or Potentially Related Organizations.” The paper is available at GAO’s website.
ACORN’s election fraud assurance division, Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, even threw in a few helpful suggestions in an effort to trick Americans into believing it no longer has anything to do with ACORN. Project Vote lawyer Brian Mellor’s letter appears at pages 35 and 36 of the report.
The preliminary -as in incomplete, insufficient, and downright superficial- is less than enlightening. I got the distinct impression while reading it that its authors hadn’t actually been following ACORN’s troubled history. You can’t expect much from a federal investigation when the question posed, namely, whether some of the grants ACORN received, were misused. Instead of doing actually shoe-leather investigating, all GAO appears to have done is talked to other government agencies and compiled existing data.
Table 4 at p.19 of the report indicates that of the six major federal agencies GAO asked questions of only ONE (!) has provided responses so far. Talk about “preliminary”!
It is amazing that GAO’s lukewarm threshhold-level probe is considered an investigation at all.
The real issues that have yet to be explored are whether ACORN engaged in violations of RICO through money-laundering of taxpayer funds designated for nonpartisan activities, engaged in partisan activities, and violated ERISA (the federal pension statute) by shifting pension funds around in order to conceal a million dollar embezzlement perpetrated by the ACORN founder’s brother (Dale Rathke) — for starters! ACORN’s criminal activities stretch almost all the way back to the group’s founding in 1970 in Arkansas.
Only a proper racketeering investigation will shed light on ACORN’s decades of lawbreaking.
Meanwhile, ACORN hagiographer and radical left-wing community organizer John Atlas, author of Seeds of Change, crows that ACORN has been “vindicated” by a new preliminary threshhold-level report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
When he’s not agitating people in the inner cities to rise up against their government, Atlas is a full-time unicorn breeder.
I just attended a Bradley Center panel in Washington, DC on the release of the annual Giving USA report. The takeaway is that giving is down but not too much. Things could be worse. Things will look up.
However, the panel and audience did a good job of unpacking some of the numbers. For instance, ten percent of all giving is comprised of gifts to grantmaking foundations. Because foundations are required to distribute only five percent of their assets annually such gifts are unlikely to have as great an impact on charity as one would imagine. It would be interesting to know whether the percentage of donor gifts to grantmaking foundations is increasing over time. However, it is hard to establish a trend when a tiny number of donors (e.g. Gates, Bloomberg, Soros) can have a major impact on the total amount of money going to foundations. Giving USA researchers note that even the total amount of giving by individuals is affected by a few gifts by high-net worth individuals. In 2009, individuals gave 75 percent of the $303.75 billion in U.S. charitable giving. (The remainder comes from foundations [13%], bequests [8%] and corporations [4%]. However, a mere five donors made gifts totaling $1.59 billion and most of that money went into their foundations.
Another interesting point: Giving USA acquires its data from the IRS, which acquires its data from taxpayers who itemize their contributions in order to take deductions. Using this data, Giving USA researchers have determined that donors are increasing their giving to international affairs, which they attribute to the aftermath of 9/11, the South Asian tsunami, earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and other signs of trouble in the wider world. However, Giving USA figures underestimate the extent of American generosity overseas, argued the Hudson Institute’s Carol Adelman, who was in the audience. She said that’s because its research does not take into account personal gifts to individuals (e.g. overseas remittances) for which the IRS does not grant a tax deduction. My gift to a cousin in Manila whose house was flooded by a typhoon has no way of being counted by Giving USA because it is not tax deductible.
There is much else to be learned from the Giving USA survey–not only what it reports, but what it does not report.
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has announced the recipients of the Bradley Prizes for outstanding achievement awarded annually to prominent scholars and engaged citizens. The recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C. on June 16. Each award carries a stipend of $250,000.
The 2010 Bradley Prize recipients are: Michael Barone, Senior Political Analyst for The Washington Examiner, and Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; Paul A. Gigot, Editorial Page Editor of The Wall Street Journal, and winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary; Bradley A. Smith,Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Designated Professor of Law at Capital University, and a former member of the Federal Election Commission; and John B. Taylor, Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics, Stanford University, and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.
“These accomplished and respected individuals are being recognized for achievements that are consistent with the mission statement of the Foundation, including the promotion of liberal democracy, democratic capitalism, and a vigorous defense of American institutions,” said Michael W. Grebe, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Bradley Foundation.
The awardees were selected based on nominations solicited from more than 100 prominent individuals and chosen by a Selection Committee, which included Terry Considine, Martin Feldstein, Robert P. George, Michael W. Grebe (Bradley Prizes Committee Chairman), Charles Krauthammer, Dennis Kuester, Dianne J. Sehler, Abigail Thernstrom and George F. Will.
Frequent Capital Research Center contributor Elias Crim has an excellent op-ed in the Washington Times touching upon the absurdity of the Catholic Health Association’s support for ObamaCare.
It begins
This Sunday, one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People will address this year’s senior class at Gonzaga College High School in Washington. For Sister Carol Keehan, here’s a suggestion for an inspiring topic: “How to make it big.”
As president of the Catholic Health Association (CHA), the largest group of not-for-profit health care facilities in the country, Sister Carol, as she’s called, delivered an 11th-hour endorsement of President Obama’s health care reform bill. Herseal of approval appeared to give the legislation a Catholic blessing. It even earned Sister Carol one of the 21 pens the president used to sign the bill into law.
However, the CHA’s endorsement contradicted the position of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a group whose commitment to health care reform is decades old. The bishops exercise oversight on Catholic moral teaching that transcends the legislative policy provisions over which politicians squabble.
So whom to believe? Which group represents authentic Catholic opinion? “Listen to the nuns,” urges columnist E.J. Dionne, a Catholic, like Sister Carol, who wins praise in the secular world by his redefinition of the word “Catholic.” His endorsement of Sister Carol is critical to politicians like North Dakota Democratic Rep. Earl Pomeroy, who cites the encouragement of “Catholic nuns” to defend his vote for Obamacare. [...]
Even after the million-dollar ACORN embezzlement scandal in 2008 forced the radical leftist group, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, to stop funding ACORN, CCHD keeps on funding radical left-wing organizations.
CCHD is the grant-making arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which acts on behalf of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops. CCHD and ACORN share a left-wing ideology that puts a premium on Saul Alinsky-style aggressive community organizing.
While CCHD poses as a mainstream Christian charity trying to help the poor, it uses left-wing euphemisms in its mission statement. It seeks to address “the root causes of poverty in America through promotion and support of community-controlled, self-help organizations and through transformative education.” “Root causes of poverty” is Marxist-speak meaning “capitalism is bad.”
The American Life League reports (PDF) that CCHD has been funneling money to:
Chicago Workers Collaborative (Illinois) $30,000, associated with the International Socialist Organization
LA Community Action Network (California) $40,000 — which supports same-sex marriage in violation of Catholic social teachings
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (Illinois) $40,000
Massachusetts Community Labor United $30,000
Plus, 31 grantees of CCHD are affiliated with the Center for Community Change, an ACORN-wannabe organization headed by former ACORN official Deepak Bhargava.
CCC’s board includes Heather Booth, co-founder and president of the Midwest Academy, which teaches tactics of direct action, confrontation, and intimidation. Booth (pictured above) heads a far-left front group called Americans for Financial Reform which promoted the recent “Showdown on K Street” — an attempt to intimidate bank lobbyists into supporting so-called financial reform legislation.
The Census Bureau dumped ACORN as a “national partner” in the 2010 head count last fall after James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s undercover videos spotlighting ACORN’s rampant corruption debuted here on Big Government.
In a letter dated Sept. 11 that terminated the Census Bureau’s relationship with ACORN, Census director Robert M. Groves wrote
Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts.
While not decisive factors in this decision, recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.
The Census had to act because it’s important to keep dishonest and incompetent workers far away from the nation’s once-a-decade Census.
The data gathered are used to help determine who gets what and how much in the nation’s federalist system of governance. Population figures arrived at through the Census decide which states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the redistricting of state legislatures, county and city councils, and electoral districts.
False or inflated population figures can water down or negate entirely the value of an individual’s vote just as effectively as stuffing ballot boxes.
That’s why Americans were outraged last year when they learned the Obama administration bent over backwards to give ACORN a major role as a “national partner” in the 2010 Census.
In March, after the Obama administration tried unsuccessfully to consolidate control over Census operations in the White House, officials downplayed the significance of ACORN’s participation in the Census:
Any charge or claim that a Census Bureau partner could influence or have direct input into census operations is baseless and inaccurate … the Census Bureau has strict quality assurance procedures in every operation to prevent the introduction of errors and/or fraudulent information into the national count.
The official statement was, however, largely beside the point.
After Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the administration the Census Bureau disclosed that ACORN’s involvement gave it ample opportunities to influence how the count would be conducted.
ACORN’s status as a “national partner” in the Census entitled it to “[i]dentify job candidates and distribute recruiting materials,” and “[p]rovide space to train new employees.”
Just what the Census needs: radical left-wing community organizers as employees, recruiters, and trainers.
The “national partner” status also would have helped ACORN to pose as a respectable group by allowing it to “[u]se census drop-in articles, messages and logos in newsletters, mailings, etc.” (See page 113 of the Census Bureau’s May 15, 2009 Freedom of Information Act response to Judicial Watch.)
“Given its history of illegal activity and fraud, ACORN should be nowhere near the 2010 Census,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said last year.
On June 16 the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal is co-hosting the 2010 Bradley Symposium: “Tea Time: Can There Be a Populist Conservatism?”
I suspect the answer is yes but the experts on the panel may beg to differ.
The symposium will feature a discussion with Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Wis.); Rep. Mike Pence (R–Ind.); FreedomWorks chairman and former Speaker of the House Richard Armey (R-Texas); Michael Barone, Washington Examiner senior political analyst and co-author of Almanac of American Politics; and Jonah Goldberg, journalist and author of Liberal Fascism. The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol will moderate the discussion.
Here’s a promotional video put together by the Hudson Institute:
There’s an extraordinary new book out that explains Democrats’ long-term strategy for winning and maintaining power.
It’s called The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans EVERYWHERE Should Care), by journalist Adam Schrager and former Colorado state Rep. Rob Witwer.
Drawing in part on the work of Capital Research Center, the book explores in depth the efforts of the Democracy Alliance, a donors’ consortium made up of left-wing millionaires and billionaires such as George Soros and Progressive Insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis. The mission of the low-profile Democracy Alliance is to build a lasting political infrastructure of think tanks, activist groups, leadership schools, and media outlets to help the left gain and keep power.
It was created after Democrats failed to reclaim power in the 2004 election — despite favorable polls and record contributions by high-dollar donors.
The Democracy Alliance, which counts both SEIU and AFL-CIO as institutional members, helped Democrats give Republicans a shellacking in 2008. Now it’s organizing state-level chapters in at least 19 states, and once-conservative Colorado, which hosts the Democracy Alliance’s most successful state affiliate, has turned Democrat blue. Colorado funders such as heiress Patricia Stryker, technology tycoons Tim Gill (Quark Xpress) and Rutt Bridges, poured money into state-level projects and it paid off. (Jared Polis, now a Democratic congressman representing Boulder, Colo., was also involved but it’s unclear if he is or was an actual member of CoDA — Colorado Democracy Alliance.)
The national Democracy Alliance funds key institutions on the left: Center for American Progress, Media Matters for America, Catalist, People for the American Way, EMILY’s List, (the now-dissolving) ACORN, and the Secretary of State Project which has helped elect the chief electoral officials in at least nine states.
The Democracy Alliance’s ultra-secretive “Committee on States” project has office space in SEIU’s D.C. headquarters a few blocks away from here in Dupont Circle.
To get a 35% discount (excluding shipping and handling) order the book through the publisher. The telephone number for Fulcrum Books is: 1-800-992-2908. The discount code is “Blueprint1″.
Liberty Central, which describes itself as a public square for concerned citizens, officially launches this Tuesday (May 25). (Its website is already active, though.)
The group is headed by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. Thomas is scheduled to appear on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace in the morning to outline what the new organization hopes to accomplish.
Liberty Central’s mission statement is simple. The group believes “limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, national security, and personal responsibility [should serve] as the five principles that best capture the foundations we, as a nation, need to preserve.”
Here’s an introductory video about Liberty Central that features conservative commentator Herman Cain:
Here’s the top of my article on same from the Daily Caller:
For a supposedly dead organization, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now sure has been busy.
Despite ACORN’s reported demise, the radical group’s flagship Washington, D.C., office continues to go about its business below the radar as state chapters across the nation form breakaway groups.
On May 5 ACORN’s new D.C. spinoff group, Communities United, held a founding meeting in ACORN’s office on 8th Street Southeast in the nation’s capital.
“Communities United is just ACORN’s way of thumbing their nose in the face of everyone,” sources close to ACORN say.
The D.C. office is important to ACORN because the embattled advocacy organization runs its congressional lobbying efforts out of it.
The same office is also home to Project Vote, ACORN’s voter registration arm, which continues to operate. In the 1990s President Obama trained ACORN activists and worked for Project Vote. [...]
Staff blogger David Weigel cites my report on Organizing for America which appears in the current issue of Organization Trends. He writes
Matthew Vadum, an editor at the conservative Capital Research Center who writes some of the harder-edged and more influential briefings in the movement, is out with a backgrounder on Organizing for America.
The Washington Times published an op-ed by Capital Research Center president Terrence Scanlon titled “Obama’s Goldman Game.”
Here’s the top of the article:
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent civil fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, the left’s favorite bank, are more than a little suspect – but not for the reasons you might expect.
It’s unclear what will happen with the case, involving an exotic investment gone bad, but at the same time, it’s clear that the unveiling of the civil action just happened to coincide with President Obama’s declaration of war on Wall Street.
There are other unusual “coincidences,” too.
Evidence has surfaced that as Goldman’s attorneys tried to cut a deal with the SEC over the potential charges, Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein visited the Obama White House at least four times.
The decision whether to sue the bank was so controversial within the SEC that members split 3 to 2 on filing the lawsuit. Chairman Mary Schapiro, an Obama appointee, and the two Democrats on the commission voted yes, while the two Republicans voted no.
Add to this that Goldman just hired former Obama White House counsel Gregory B. Craig, the lawyer who helped President Clinton send 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez back to communist Cuba a decade ago.
Then factor in that Goldman is a creature of the political left and a natural ally of the Democratic Party. It is a big-government lovers’ bank that despises the unbridled competition of laissez-faire capitalism. Akin to Fannie Mae in that it generates private profits but forces taxpayers to cover its losses, Goldman loves bailouts and feeding at the public trough.
Former Goldman employees – including Henry Paulson, President George W. Bush’s liberal, tree-hugging Treasury secretary – designed the $700-billion-plus “mother of all bailouts” in 2008 and then promptly steered $10 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the bank. Goldman veteran Neel Kashkari oversaw the doling out of bailout funds.
Goldman funds the left almost exclusively, so, as the left likes to say, follow the money. [...]
Here’s the top of my piece in today’s Daily Caller:
ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis praised socialism and said the Tea Party was a “bowel movement” filled with racists in a speech to a left-wing youth group, a new video shows.
The edited two-minute video surfaced on the Verum Serum blog Wednesday as a federal appeals court reversed a lower court ruling and temporarily upheld a congressional ban on funding the faltering community activist group.
The comments by Lewis came during a March 25 speech to the winter conference of the Young Democratic Socialists, which is the youth arm of the radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA is closely tied to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, an 80-plus member group of left-wing Democratic lawmakers.
President Obama worked for ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate, trained ACORN organizers and represented ACORN as a lawyer.
Although ACORN leaders typically refuse to be labeled as socialists because they realize the term carries with it a negative connotation in American culture, Lewis openly embraced socialism. [...]
The organized crime syndicate known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which has been making much ado about its feigned withdrawal from the national political stage, continues doing business as usual.
ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice. Over the past 40 years, ACORN members have been through a lot in the fight to empower working families and families of color — and it has been the commitment of people like you, regular folks doing extraordinary things, that has made it possible.
In the email (PDF here) the perennially truth-averse Lewis, whose lies throughout the undercover video saga are well documented, continues to play the victim card arguing that ACORN, dozens of whose employees have been convicted of election-related crimes, was set up by shadowy corporate forces.
Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, already admitted ACORN isn’t really going away.
ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up to carry on ACORN’s business, his leaked email suggested. At least a dozen of the group’s state chapters have already broken away under new names.
“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” Henderson-James.
The fiscal floodgates are opening for ACORN, the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.
In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.
The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.
The Heritage Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research group, will create a new 501(c)(4) advocacy organization to be called Heritage Action for America. It will promote legislation and pressure Congress, drawing on the foundation’s research and mobilizing support from Heritage’s 600,000 donor members. Heritage Action will not endorse candidates. Heritage Action will be led by Michael Needham, a former chief of staff to Heritage president Ed Feulner and former adviser to Sen. Jim DeMint.
The Heritage Foundation says it has a staff of 255 and an expense budget of $75 million. The Washington Post reports that Heritage Action for America will employ 8-12 staff in offices separate from the Foundation and will have an initial $1 million budget.
Below is the top of an article I wrote about Brandon Darby for the current issue of Townhallmagazine. Townhall kindly gave permission to BigGovernment.com to post the article.
From the April 2010 issue of Townhall magazine: Brandon Darby learned something from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Once a hard-core radical who sided with progressive revolutionaries, Darby prevented a left-wing terrorist attack on the 2008 GOP convention. Now, this America-loving patriot is the target of the domestic extremists he once called “friends.”
Did you know that a courageous former radical helped to avert a planned left-wing terrorist attack at the 2008 Republican National Convention that might have killed who knows how many Americans?
Neither did I until recently.
That’s because if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero; however, if you take the initiative to undermine a terrorist attack on Americans by supposedly well intentioned left-wing fundamentalists, you might as well be a terrorist yourself.
Left-wingers recently unveiled a new website, CrashTheTeaParty.org, aimed at sabotaging the Tea Party movement and inflicting harm on Tea Party supporters by doing Lord-knows-what with their Social Security numbers.
Michelle Malkin has identified the creator of the website as one Jason Levin of Portland, Oregon and posted a detailed account of his background and how the website came to be.
Levin told reporters his group has 65 leaders in major cities who are attempting to recruit members to infiltrate Tea Party events on tax filing day, April 15, when Tea Party supporters are planning rallies across the country protesting high taxes and out-of-control government spending. Said Levin:
Every time we have someone on camera saying that Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen, we want someone sitting next to him saying, ‘That’s right, he’s an alien from outer space!’
Do I think every member of the tea party is a homophobe, racist or a moron? No, absolutely not. Do I think most of them are homophobes, racists or morons? Absolutely.
Indeed, CrashTheTeaParty.org tars the Tea Party movement as a collection of losers and reprobates. Calling the Tea Party a “loose affiliation of racists, homophones, and morons, who constitute the fake grass-roots movement,” the website aspires “[t]o dismantle and demolish the Tea Party by any non-violent means necessary.”
Stern, a frequent antagonist of TV talk show host Glenn Beck, is reportedly stepping down from his post at arguably the most powerful union in America. It’s unclear why Stern chose this precise moment to leave SEIU. One theory is Stern’s high profile, high pressure job left him exhausted. “Health care getting done is a good culmination,” said one unidentified union official.
According to the Politico:
The SEIU has emerged as a central political player and has grown rapidly under Stern’s tenure, and some close to him had expected him to resign during the first term of the president he helped elect, and after the achievement he’d spent years focusing on, widening access to health care. But he’s also waged a series of bitter battles inside the labor movement, one of the nastiest of which turned in SEIU’s favor with a California court ruling last week. Stern also won a victory when Obama named his union’s lawyer, Craig Becker, to the National Labor Relations board over Republican objections in a recess appointment last month.
Regardless of why Stern’s calling it quits, it seems a sure bet that the Obama administration has a fine patronage plum in store for the New Leftist agitator who was instrumental in forcing ObamaCare down the throats of the American people.
We’ll have to wait and see.
A born hard-left street fighter, Stern has practically lived in the Obama White House. He’s visited there so many times that he’s reportedly being investigated for illegal lobbying.
Some weeks ago the U.S. Department of Justice filed an appeal of U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon’s (absurd) ruling on ACORN funding.
Gershon issued a permanent injunction against the U.S. government forbidding it from defunding ACORN. She held that the cutoff of funding to ACORN constituted an unconstitutional bill of attainder.
I had searched without success for weeks online to find the appeal documents.
I asked the DOJ to provide the documents today and the department promptly complied.
I have a piece in Human Events about ACORN’s rebranding charade.
It begins:
The radical advocacy group ACORN is playing the biggest April Fool’s joke of all time on the American people.
That’s because the leftist group announced plans to shut down its national operations on April 1 — of all days in the year.
Multiple sources within ACORN have already confirmed to me that the exercise is a hoax. ACORN intends to keep a low profile and then re-emerge in a year or two under a new name, they say.
For decades ACORN has maintained tight control over its supposedly independent network of affiliates through interlocking directorates and massive intra-network financial transfers. There is every indication it plans to use the same top-down management techniques under the new organizational arrangement, they say. [...]
The Free Enterprise Alliance has launched a new website, HaltTheAssault.com, which it describes as “leading the campaign to Halt the Assault on America’s free enterprise system.”
The Free Enterprise Alliance was originally founded by the Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc. to advocate for small business.
The merry pranksters at ACORN –who mere days ago said ACORN was dissolving on April Fool’s Day– continue to believe that you are too stupid to understand the organized crime syndicate’s tricks.
By contrast, Friends of the Earth sees nothing but sordid behavior. It refers to “President Obama’s Embrace of Dirty Off-Shore Oil Drilling” and urges him to “abandon his endorsement of this dirty practice.”
If the 2003 tax cuts are allowed to expire, the income tax on upper-income taxpayers will increase by 10 percent and the capital gains tax will increase by 33 percent. This is sure to have a negative impact on charitable giving, write former White House aide Scott Walter and Sandra Swirski in a recent legal backgrounder from the Washington Legal Foundation. Households whose wealth exceeds $1 million–7 percent of the population–provide half of all charitable contributions. Walter and Swirski observe that during the boom years 1995-2000 real income per capita increased by 12 percent while household giving increased by 54 percent. But charity will suffer as the economy slows and government deficit spending increases.
Unlike leftist shills John Atlas, Peter Dreier, and the pathologically truth-averse Brad Friedman (BradBlog), City Hall continues to provide cutting-edge coverage of the transformation of ACORN, the left’s favorite organized crime syndicate.
City Hall, which covers New York City politics, reports that as ACORN allegedly “dissolves” its national structure the group’s ”affiliates will no longer provide foreclosure counseling or help low-income workers apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit, two programs that were funded in part by taxpayer dollars.”
From the newspaper report:
“We’re not going to be a service group,” said Jon Kest, the former head of the New York chapter of ACORN and now the leader of New York Communities for Change, a local successor organization run by many of the same people. “The key piece for us is going to be community organizing.”
Refusing government funding and shedding their social-services components will also allow New York Communities for Change and other ACORN successors to more easily engage in electoral politics without opening themselves up to charges of using taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes.
Nationally, the group ran a political consulting arm called Citizens Services Inc. A local incarnation called New York Citizens Services was contracted by several Council candidates and the campaign of Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in last year’s elections. Going forward, though, New York Communities for Change will operate as a nonprofit organizing group focused on public policy. [...]
An inside ACORN source has just confirmed this to me: the Texas chapter of ACORN has pretended to break off from the national group and has incorporated itself under the name Texas Organizing Project.
While America is distracted by Democrats’ attempts to unconstitutionally ram government-run healthcare down the throats of the American people, the Obama administration began preparing to resume funding to President Obama’s favorite community organizing group.
The fiscal floodgates are opening for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.
In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.
The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.
The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.
It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.
Could the OMB be moving at lightning speed to restore funding for ACORN, which is under indictment in Nevada for election fraud, because ACORN is in dire financial straits? Perhaps it’s a reward for ACORN’s loyal support in the ObamaCare battle.
Here’s the top of my article in yesterday’s Daily Caller:
ACORN’s state chapter in Missouri is the latest to rebrand itself as part of ACORN’s national strategy to distance itself from its negative public image.
The creation of the St. Louis-based Missourians Organizing for Reform Empowerment Inc. (MORE) brings to five the number of ACORN’s state chapters that have shut down and incorporated themselves separately under new names.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is gearing up to begin funding ACORN again despite a congressional ban and an unresolved lawsuit. In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year apparently encouraging illegal behavior. The memo came after federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York, a Bill Clinton appointee, made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN. Gershon found the denial of funding to ACORN to be an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.”
The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal. In other words, the administration is pressing ahead with restoring funding to a group that President Obama worked for and represented as a legal client even though the legal case has yet to fully work its way through the judicial system. [...]
In today’s Washington Times I have an op-ed on ACORN’s latest legal troubles.
It begins
New election-fraud charges against employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Wisconsin are a helpful reminder that the scandal-prone, far-left liberal group remains as determined as ever to cause trouble come election time.
In Milwaukee, Maria L. Miles and Kevin L. Clancy stand accused of felony election fraud for reportedly repeatedly registering the same individuals on voter-registration forms. Both face up to three years’ imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Milwaukee ACORN canvasser Latoya Lewis already was convicted of election fraud in October. All three cases arise out of the 2008 presidential election cycle.
But ACORN isn’t worried. To the nationwide network of hundreds of tax-dollar-devouring nonprofit affiliates, it’s business as usual: another day, another vote-fraud scheme. Doing voter registration right is unimportant to ACORN because accuracy takes a back seat to volume.
ACORN routinely tempts fate by recruiting the dregs of humanity for its voter drives, often placing felons – including identity thieves – in positions of authority. It views the inevitable attacks from Republicans that follow its voter-drive free-for-alls as positive events to be used in direct-mail solicitations. ACORN views such attacks, in the vocabulary of social science, as encouraging cohesion within the group. In other words, volleys from rancorous Republicans boost morale within the group and help it get leftist charities such as Baltimore’s Annie E. Casey Foundation to keep writing big, fat checks.
And ACORN doesn’t mind offering up the poor, ignorant and gullible as cannon fodder in the class struggle. To ACORN, there are always more would-be voter-registration canvassers where they came from. [...]
ACORN’s lawsuit in Baltimore has been dimissed for want of prosecution.
The plaintiffs failed to serve their frivolous complaint on the defendants before Maryland’s 120 day limit ran out.
ACORN and its employees sued James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Breitbart LLC after O’Keefe and Giles caught the workers on video encouraging various illegal acts.
If you thought you sent representatives and senators to Washington, D.C., to exercise the constitutionally mandated power of the purse — you’re wrong.
Silly you. You wasted all that time in civics class learning a whole bunch of outdated claptrap about separation of powers and the lawmaking process for nothing.
The spending power belongs to federal judges now, regardless of what that quaint little document called the U.S. Constitution says.
That’s what ACORN’s favorite federal judge, Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York ruled Wednesday.
In December Gershon, a Bill Clinton appointee, helped ACORN out by offering the Obama administration political cover by issuing a temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN. She found that depriving ACORN of taxpayer dollars was an unconstitutional “bill of attainder” that singled out ACORN for punishment without trial.
Only in the through-the-looking-glass world of a leftist activist judge could the organized crime syndicate ACORN be deemed a victim because Congress decided to stop funding it. Only in such a world could a cutoff of such funding be deemed a penalty.
To give credit where it’s due, the Obama administration did the right thing and appealed the December ruling.
Gershon showed a similar contempt for the legislative branch previously. In 1999 she ruled then-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had no right to cut off city funding of the Brooklyn Museum of Art when it displayed dead animals and a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung. Gershon’s not exactly courageous, by the way. She managed to get out of taking accused Al Qaeda terrorist Najibullah Zazi’s case when a courthouse computer randomly assigned it to her.
If Gershon’s absurd new ruling remains undisturbed it will mean every parasitic leftist group in the country will have due process rights in the appropriations process. At worst, Congress will not be able to cut off any group for any reason. At best, Congress will have to jump through hoops in order to de-fund any group. The rights of tax eaters will become paramount to the rights of taxpayers.
The ruling should be music to the ears of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), a huge fan of ACORN who has given thousands of dollars over the years to the ACORN network. Nadler urged ACORN’s lawyer to sue the government, arguing that a ban on funding constituted a “bill of attainder.” Within weeks, ACORN took his advice.
The ruling also appears to mean that ACORN and other leftist activist groups are eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in President Obama’s $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint.
The $3.99 billion comes from a congressional slush fund known as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) $48.5 billion fiscal 2011 budget. CDBG grants, which are awarded to states and localities, flow indirectly to ACORN and similar groups that compete at the state and local level for grants.
