I have an op-ed on ACORN in tomorrow’s Washington Times.

It begins:

It looks like the congenitally corrupt, still-operating Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) won’t be getting any more U.S. tax dollars – for the time being.

That’s because in a startlingly unusual victory for common sense, a federal appeals court slapped down a bizarre ruling by Brooklyn-based federal Judge Nina Gershon. The life-tenured judge had determined that the U.S. government’s spending power belongs to federal judges now, regardless of what that quaint little document called the U.S. Constitution says. Judge Gershon ruled that Congress had violated ACORN’s “rights” and passed an unconstitutional “bill of attainder” punishing ACORN without trial when it decided to stop funding the group.

But the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Aug. 13 that Judge Gershon had overreached. The appellate court found that the “withholding of appropriations” is not punishment. “Congress’s decision to withhold funds from ACORN and its affiliates constitutes neither imprisonment, banishment, nor death,” the three-judge panel wrote. “In comparison to penalties levied against individuals, a temporary disqualification from funds or deprivation of property aimed at a corporation may be more an inconvenience than punishment.” [...]

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.

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.

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.

(crossposted at Big Government)

ACORN’s District of Columbia and Maryland chapters have rebranded themselves under one new name: Communities United.

Communities United registered as a nonprofit corporation with the District of Columbia government on May 4.

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. [...]

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.

Proof comes in the form of an email, which went out to ACORN supporters on April 16 and which came two weeks after ACORN’s faked dissolution on April Fool’s Day as a national organization.

Writes ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis:

ACORN is not dead!

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.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already restored full funding to ACORN, which used to employ President Obama.

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 memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is appealing 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.

(crossposted at BigGovernment)

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.

Here is the Notice of Appeal and here is the Motion for Stay Pending Appeal.

I updated my ACORN rebranding-as-performance-art chart.

Read it here.

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. [...]

As I warned in Human Events and at BigGovernment, ACORN isn’t going away anytime soon.

A New York Times report confirms it.

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.

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.

You read it here first.

Here’s a helpful chart I made:

From my post at BigGovernment.com:

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.

Now Judge Gershon has made the ruling permanent and it’s not yet clear if the administration will appeal it. (Here is the permanent injunction and the opinion and order she issued yesterday.) 

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.

ACORN’s rebranding strategy has been tried before. The Ku Klux Klan used it, according to historian Michael Zak, author of Back To Basics For The Republican Party.

ACORN has shut down its offices in Indiana, Election Law Blog reports.

According to a legal filing in ACORN v. Murphy, the remaining plaintiffs in the National Voter Registration Act lawsuit are giving the boot to ACORN apparently because it is pulling out of Indiana and “no longer plans to provide voter registration assistance in the state.”

Whether ACORN’s Indiana chapter will reemerge under a different name has yet to be seen.

ACORN has renamed its best-funded affiliate, ACORN Housing Corp., instead of shutting it down and re-opening it as a new nonprofit — as it has done to several state chapters so far as part of its rebranding effort.

The new name of the heavily taxpayer-subsidized ACORN Housing is Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc.

The name change doesn’t show up in many publicly available databases yet, but ACORN Housing filed name change documentation with the Florida secretary of state’s office indicating the name change was official as of Jan. 12 this year.

Other documentation shows the name change was planned by ACORN officials weeks before. A domain name registry search indicates that Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc.’s domain name (ahcoa.org) was registered on Dec. 8, 2009.

The rebranding effort is a sham, according to ACORN official Nathan Henderson-James.

(graphic above is from No Quarter)

The ACORN crime syndicate is not going away anytime soon, but it’s going to look different.

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 in the next week to carry on ACORN’s business, a leaked email from ACORN’s online director suggests.

“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,” writes Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, in an apparently authentic Feb. 22 email.

“Last one to leave turn out the lights and wipe the server,” he writes at the end of the message (which you may read in full here.)

In the email Henderson-James explains the subterfuge ACORN will use to lead Americans to believe ACORN is breaking apart.

“It is definitely true that over the next week or so we should see a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members. These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize low and moderate income constitiuencies [sic] without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.”

It is a “tactically smart…reaction to the global situation that helps the work of building power for poor people to continue,” writes Henderson-James, an ACORN employee since 1997.

The Saul Alinsky-inspired public relations hocus-pocus described by Henderson-James is consistent with earlier reports that ACORN is trying to pass off various state chapters as “new” groups. ACORN’s ruse is designed to keep tax dollars and foundation grants flowing into its coffers. With the fallout from the hidden camera videos last fall, congressional funding of ACORN’s election fraud and racketeering business is no longer guaranteed, so ACORN developed a plan that would allow the operation to keep going, albeit on a smaller scale.

ACORN veteran Marcel Reid told me in an interview yesterday that she wasn’t buying into ACORN leadership’s spin. Reid is a whistleblower who was expelled from ACORN’s national board in 2008 for asking too many uncomfortable questions about a million-dollar embezzlement perpetrated in 2000 by the brother of ACORN’s founder and covered up by management for eight years.

“The folding of ACORN isn’t happening because it’s simply going to restructure,” she said. “In the meantime they’ll give all of these new community organizations in the states an opportunity to flourish without ACORN’s legal baggage.”

At least three of these dummy nonprofit corporations that Henderson-James describes have surfaced so far this year. They are Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, and New England United for Justice. All three groups operate out of ACORN offices. The president of New England United for Justice, Maude Hurd, just happens to be the 20-year national president of ACORN. (Massachusetts articles of incorporation available here)

The Henderson-James email to ACORN supporters also encourages recipients to help rewrite the history of the embattled group.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he writes. The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

This argument must be fought, Henderson-James argues, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

Then comes the whining from ACORN’s cyber-warfare chief.

Henderson-James acknowledges that ACORN made mistakes, but claims it was primarily a victim of dirty tricks perpetrated by the political right. “[W]e were all up against a 24-hour propoganda [sic] channel,” he writes, in an apparent reference to the Fox News Channel, one of the few media outlets to closely follow the ACORN saga.

Progressives didn’t fight back hard enough “in a moment of extreme duress, orchestrated by propogand [sic] videos,” he complains.

The movement “stood by as ACORN got gutted, while we also handed the forces of pro-corporate politics a handy club to kick the shit out of anything that vaugely [sic] sounds progressive. And that comes with a license to go after the next group or groups that embody the progressive agenda. This went beyond ACORN. We were just a convienent [sic] target to make into a bogeyman. This was about everything progressives stood for. And when it came time to stand up, most of us didn’t.”

Marcel Reid, who also heads a reform group called ACORN 8, told me ACORN’s setbacks are the fault of the left, not the right. Progressives should have come forward to help fix ACORN, but they didn’t.

“We stood up in the organization to straighten out its problems before they got to this point,” she said. “When they could have stood up to save it they sat down.”

“It’s the left’s fault because when it was time for them to police themselves they would not do it. The left didn’t stand up to purge itself when it could have. They can’t blame the right when they didn’t clean up their own house.”

In the email Henderson-James also complains that federal lawmakers and the mainstream media didn’t do enough to help ACORN, bemoaning “the breathtaking swiftness with which the Congress condemned us on the basis of what have been clearly shown by real journalists to be nothing but the purest propaganda [sic].”

Left-wingers, he writes, now have to promote a narrative “that says the attacks on ACORN were part of a concerted attempt to demobilize key progressive constituencies because they banded together to take power and threaten the status quo and that the legacy of ACORN deserves that regular people stand up for themselves and organize to take power, to pass public policies that create an America we all want to live in. One in which organizing is about average people making their lives and their communities and their workplaces better.”

This left-wing spin “will be contested for a bit and you can be sure that it will be marked by serious right-wing triumphalism,” he predicts. “Our side needs to make sure our narrative wins, using the kind of pushback that’s taken place recently around [undercover video maker James] O’Keefe.”

“That’s been beautiful,” Henderson-James coos.

(originally posted at BigGovernment)

ACORN is attempting to perpetrate yet another spectacular fraud on the American people in order to keep tax dollars and foundation grants flowing into its coffers.

With the fallout from the hidden camera videos last fall, congressional funding of ACORN’s election fraud and racketeering business is no longer guaranteed, so ACORN is trying to pass off various state chapters as ”new” groups.

As part of the radical group’s fraudulent rebranding scheme, ACORN has renamed its New York chapter New York Communities for Change. Unlike on the West coast where ACORN is at least pretending its renamed California chapter (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment or ACCE) is not part of the ACORN network, New York Communities for Change shares the same Nevins Street address as ACORN’s Brooklyn office.

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts branch of ACORN has been renamed New England United for Justice.

ACORN national president Maude Hurd just happens to be president of the new supposedly independent group, according to articles of incorporation certified by Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Francis Galvin on Jan. 19, 2010. The articles show the office address of New England United for Justice as 196 Adams St., Dorchester, MA 02122, which happens to be the address of Boston ACORN.

More state-level name changes are expected soon while the basic structure of ACORN, which is controlled from the top using interlocking directorates, remains essentially intact.

The ACORN network’s interlocking directorates are deliberately organized to help ACORN escape legal and public scrutiny. “ACORN hides behind a paper wall of nonprofit corporate protections to conceal a criminal conspiracy on the part of its directors, to launder federal money in order to pursue a partisan political agenda and to manipulate the American electorate,” according to a report from the Republican investigators of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Under indictment in Nevada for election law violations, ACORN feels it can do all this in the light of day because the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress have no interest in a real investigation of its criminal activities.

These improprieties include but are in no way limited to:

*a nearly $1 million embezzlement by the founder’s brother that was covered up for eight years while the brother (Dale Rathke) remained on the ACORN payroll

*misuse of pension funds

*commingling of public funds

*illegal loan from ERISA-covered pension fund

*failure to pay excise tax on illegal loan

*use of public funds on partisan activities

*money laundering

ACORN doesn’t care about the growing mountain of credible allegations against it because ACORN thinks it is politically untouchable.

(NOTE: various versions of this blog post were crossposted elsewhere.)

WASHINGTON (at CPAC 2010) — On the campaign trail in 2008 then-candidate Barack Obama did his best to distance himself from his past involvement with the radical advocacy group ACORN, a new video of his explaining the relationship has surfaced.

He doesn’t say anything new. The significance is that there is now video footage of him saying the quotation that had previously only appeared in text form. The quotation, which surfaced in 2008, goes:

When I ran Project Vote, the voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it. Once I was elected there wasn’t a campaign that ACORN worked on down in Springfield that I wasn’t right there with you. Since I have been in the United States Senate I’ve been always a partner with ACORN as well. I’ve been fighting with ACORN, along side ACORN, on issues you care about my entire career.

Project Vote (a.k.a. Voting for America Inc.) is the voter registration/get out the vote arm of the ACORN empire of activism. Obama’s campaign paid another ACORN affiliate more than $800,000 to do voter work during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.

Here is the video, which was released here at the Conservative Political Action Conference by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.):

The Las Vegas Sun reports

Lawyers for the woman accused by the Nevada attorney general’s office of approving questionable voter registration tactics told a Clark County District Court judge Wednesday that the bad publicity swarming around her co-defendant – the grassroots organizing group ACORN – would make it impossible for her to receive a fair trial.

At a Wednesday hearing, lawyers for Amy Busefink asked for her case to be severed from ACORN’s so the two could stand trial separately. ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and Busefink are facing 13 felony counts related to allegations they authorized the use of cash incentives as a motivation for workers to register more voters.

Judge Donald Mosley denied the motion to sever, saying he didn’t see a need for two “carbon-copy” trials. He also said it would be impossible to try Busefink without discussing ACORN at her trial so there would be no way to insulate her from ACORN’s reputation.

If convicted, Busefink likely would face probation or less than one year in jail. ACORN could see a $5,000 fine.

Bradley Scott Schrager, one of Busefink’s attorneys, said Wednesday that the bad press ACORN has been subjected to would make it difficult for a jury to independently assess “Amy’s guilt or innocence (while she is) sitting next to what is basically an American pariah organization.”

He gave the analogy of a person standing trial in 1952 alongside the Communist Party during the Red Scare. As the human face on trial, Busefink would bear the brunt of any ill will toward the organization, he said.

“Sitting next to the most hated, most feared, most reviled organization in the country is in itself a danger to this process,” Schrager said. [...]

Anthony Stevens-Arroyo has an item at washingtonpost.com in which he bends over backwards to exonerate the radical left-wingers who run the execrable Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD).

Stevens-Arroyo is a leftist academic so it’s no surprise he’s willing to shill for CCHD.

He’s also defending ACORN which is proof he is a useful idiot. Or maybe he’s not a useful idiot — maybe he knows CCHD and ACORN embrace morally reprehensible anti-American goals and wants to be a part of the transmogrification of America.

On Feb. 11 the Senate confirmed Obama nominee Patrick Corvington as chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees Senior Corps, AmeriCorps, and Learn and Serve America.

Corvington was a senior official at the left-wing Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore, Maryland, which  granted funding to ACORN during his tenure. Although there is no indication that Corvington has any connection to ACORN, he comes to CNCS from the same cluster of organizations that provides financial and other support for the radical group that is a longtime fixture in the activist community.

ACORN has shut down its Michigan offices, Metro Times reports.

Another article of mine from the American Spectator.

It begins:

President Obama‘s radical union-backed nominee to the National Labor Relations Board lied to a Senate confirmation panel earlier this week about his ties to the embattled leftist advocacy group ACORN.

The nominee is Craig Becker, who, at least until recently, was longtime associate general counsel to SEIU. Becker is considered radical in part because he believes that “employers should have no role in the unionization process,” according to Brian Johnson, executive director of the Alliance for Worker Freedom.

During a hearing Tuesday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked Becker this question: “Do you perform work for and provide advice to ACORN or ACORN-affiliated groups while employed by your current employers or on a volunteer basis?“

Becker responded, “Senator McCain, I have never done so.“

But that answer – that Becker “never” provided advice “to ACORN or ACORN-affiliated groups” — is demonstrably false. Evidence abounds that he gave advice to SEIU Local 880, which, as I will show below, was part and parcel of ACORN before it merged with another SEIU bargaining unit.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, Becker acknowledged previously that he had “worked with and provided advice” to Local 880. [...]

Yes, you read that right.
 
Even with all its troubles, the ACORN organized crime syndicate is eligible for $4 billion (well, really $3.99 billion in CDBG slush funds) in President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget.
 
That’s because a federal court order issued by a Clinton-appointed judge prevents Congress and the Obama administration from cutting off ACORN.
 
Will the temporary injunction issued by U.S. District Court Nina Gershon be lifted?
 
Who knows.
 
Will ACORN boss Bertha Lewis, who is currently doing a victory lap across America’s TV screens as she celebrates the legal troubles of hidden camera videographer James O’Keefe, ever be investigated for her role in the cover-up of a nearly million dollar embezzlement within ACORN?
 
Who knows.
 
Read my article at the American Spectator.

Internet media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart suggests James O’Keefe will be cleared — or at least I think that’s what Breitbart’s saying.

O’Keefe, who masterminded the ACORN hidden camera sting operation, was arrested earlier this week with three other young men for something or other involving the telephone system in the New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.)

Does O’Keefe have evidence of some impropriety involving Landrieu, or perhaps ACORN, or both?

Is the mainstream media being set up by O’Keefe?

We’ll see.

A piece in the Washington Post suggests O’Keefe may have been running a sting against Landrieu:

[...] Conservative supporters say O’Keefe’s newest operation occurred just days ago. Federal prosecutors allege that he helped carry out a plot Monday in which two partners impersonated telephone repairmen to enter the downtown New Orleans office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.). O’Keefe, 25, waited inside the office and used his cellphone to record his two colleagues saying that the senator’s phone was not receiving calls, according to charges unsealed Tuesday.

Supporters say O’Keefe and his friends entered Landrieu’s office to conduct another undercover sting: to show on video that citizens trying to call Landrieu’s office could not get through. Now O’Keefe — a celebrated figure among some Republicans for his undercover sting last fall targeting the nonprofit Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) — and three other men face charges of entering federal property on false pretenses as part of a plot to tamper with the lawmaker’s phone. If convicted, they could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Michael Madigan, O’Keefe’s attorney, could not be reached to comment.

Opponents of health-care reform legislation had complained this month that they repeatedly heard busy signals when they called Landrieu’s office to register their views.  [...]

James O’Keefe has been arrested, according to reports.

O’Keefe has been charged with aiding and abetting a plan to wiretap the office of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), Fox News reports.

An FBI affidavit outlining the allegations may be found here.

(Note: This post was updated.)

Filmmakers Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe III are being sued by a Philadelphia ACORN employee in federal court, according to America’s Right.

Hannah Giles (left) and James O'Keefe (right)

Here is the legal complaint filed by ACORN’s Katherine Conway-Russell who is apparently attempting to salvage her reputation after being caught on hidden-camera video condoning illegal activities.

Or this could be part of ACORN’s larger strategy to stamp out its critics through litigation. We’ll see.

I forgot to post the document filed by the Department of Justice in its appeal of federal Judge Nina Gershon’s ruling which found a congressional ban on funding for ACORN to be a bill of attainder. (see previous blog post)

Here is the document, filed Dec. 16.

My latest article on ACORN is in today’s American Spectator.

Here’s the top of it:

With help from docile Democratic politicians and journalists, ACORN is attempting to perpetrate yet another spectacular fraud on the American people.

After the American public saw the true face of ACORN last year, hidden camera videos showing its workers across the nation bending over backwards to facilitate underage prostitution, fraud, immigrant smuggling, and tax evasion in the name of social justice, ACORN realized it needed to take emergency action to protect its revenue streams.

So among other measures the embattled radical advocacy group is changing the name of its largest state chapter in an effort to keep tax dollars and foundation grants flowing into its coffers. ACORN feels it needs to do this because California ACORN is a critical component of the ACORN empire, boasting 37,000 dues-paying members.

With the fallout from the hidden camera videos, congressional funding of ACORN’s election fraud and racketeering business is no longer guaranteed, so ACORN decided to reconstitute its California operation as the “new” group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE).

ACCE claims that it is “up and running as an independent state-wide organization with no legal, financial or structural ties to ACORN.”

Of course we know that ACCE is lying. [...]

If you believe California ACORN is really and truly breaking away from ACORN, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

Amazingly, ACORN actually believes Americans are dumb enough to fall for the scheme reported in today’s Los Angeles Times.

The new fake group will be called Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE).

Esquire writer John H. Richardson is a smart man and a good writer but he clearly doesn’t know much about the organized crime syndicate ACORN.

His interview with Bertha Lewis, chief organizer of ACORN, reads like Scott Levenson’s talking points. No discussion of ACORN’s million-dollar embezzlement, money laundering, abuse of government funding, or the role the group played in causing the subprime mortgage crisis.

Shame on him. 

And so Mr. Richardson earns a spot on the list of ACORN’s useful idiots (supplement to list here) alongside Joe Conason, Whoopi Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Michael Tomasky, Adam Serwer, Glenn Greenwald, Amanda Terkel, David Neiwert, Jamison Foser, Eric Burns, Jay Bookman, John Cole, and Charles Cooper.

This list is hardly exhaustive, by the way.

Apparently Congressional Research Service employees are as good at research as ACORN employees are at registering voters.

Not surprisingly, the new Congressional Research Service report on ACORN continues the Democrats’ coverup of President Obama’s favorite advocacy group.

I’m on vacation so I haven’t had a chance to go through the CRS report thoroughly but from what I’ve read so far the report commissioned by House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) and House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) –both longtime ACORN allies– is a whitewash.

The first finding Conyers and Frank crow about in a press release is this:

There were no instances of individuals who were allegedly registered to vote improperly by ACORN or its employees and who were reported “attempting to vote at the polls.”

This is demonstrably false.  Darnell Nash of Cleveland, Ohio, was registered to vote nine times by ACORN. After fraudulently casting a ballot, he was convicted of both vote fraud and voter registration fraud and sentenced to six months imprisonment. ACORN remains under investigation by the elected Democratic prosecutor Bill Mason in Cuyahoga County (at least according to Mason’s spokesman the last time I spoke to him).

And to think — our tax dollars paid for this worthless report.