ACORN PAY OFF from Democrats' ?

U.S. House
Republican Leader
John Boehner
sends out this warning:

The House Democrats’ trillion dollar spending bill, approved on January 21 by the Appropriations Committee and headed to the House floor next week for a vote, could open billions of taxpayer dollars to left-wing groups like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

ACORN has been accused of perpetrating voter registration fraud numerous times in the last several elections; is reportedly under federal investigation; and played a key role in the irresponsible schemes that caused a financial meltdown that has cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars since last fall.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) and other Republicans are asking a simple question: what does this have to do with job creation? Are Congressional Democrats really going to borrow money from our children and grandchildren to give handouts to ACORN in the name of economic “stimulus?”

Incredibly, the Democrats’ bill makes groups like ACORN eligible for a $4.19 billion pot of money for “neighborhood stabilization activities.” Funds for this purpose were authorized in the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, signed into law in 2008. However, these funds were limited to state and local governments. Now House Democrats are taking the unprecedented step of making ACORN and other groups eligible for these funds:

“For a further additional amount for ‘Community Development Fund,’ $4,190,000,000, to be used for neighborhood stabilization activities related to emergency assistance for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes as authorized under division B, title III of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (Public Law 110–289), of which—

“(1) not less than $3,440,000,000 shall be allocated by a competition for which eligible entities shall be States, units of general local government, and nonprofit entities or consortia of nonprofit entities[.]”

“(2) up to $750,000,000 shall be awarded by competition to nonprofit entities or consortia of nonprofit entities to provide community stabilization assistance […]”

The House Democrats’ trillion dollar spending bill also includes $1 billion for the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program. CDBG funds are given by the federal government to state and local governments which often contract with nonprofits for services related to the purpose of the grant.

ACORN knows how to secure CDBG funds. Audit reports filed by ACORN’s headquarters with the Office of Management and Budget show that ACORN spent $1,588,599 in Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program funds from FY 2003 through FY 2007. It is not clear from these records when or from what source the funds were awarded to ACORN. It is also not clear whether ACORN chapters or affiliates have received CDBG grants on their own.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) repeatedly urged President George W. Bush and other federal officials to withhold taxpayer funds from ACORN, including $17.2 million in federal grants awarded in December 2008 after numerous allegations of wrongdoing in connection with ACORN’s election activities were reported by the news media.

Leader Boehner also released a study of federal records in October 2008 listing tens of millions in federal grants received by ACORN. A new updated and more expansive study reveals that ACORN has actually received millions more than first thought. A review of the Federal Register and news releases issued by federal agencies showed that ACORN was awarded more than $53 million in taxpayer dollars. This amount does not reflect the millions more ACORN has received in federal block grant funds awarded to state and local agencies which passed them on to ACORN.

ACORN affiliate staffer links donor list to Obama

Fired ACORN affiliate staffer
links donor list to Obama

By Brad Bumsted
STATE CAPITOL REPORTER

HARRISBURG -- A fired staffer for an affiliate of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now testified Wednesday the organization was provided a "donor list" from the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in late 2007 for fundraising efforts.

Anita Moncrief, a former Washington staffer for Project Vote, which she described as a sister organization of the community activist group ACORN, said her supervisor told her the list of campaign contributors came from the Obama campaign

Moncrief said she has a copy of a "development plan" that outlines how Obama contributors who had "maxed out" under federal contribution limits would be targeted to give to Project Vote, and that it was her job to identify such contributors.

Moncrief testified for more than two hours in a Commonwealth Court hearing on a lawsuit brought by the state Republican Party, alleging voter fraud by ACORN in Philadelphia, Allegheny, Delaware and Dauphin counties.

The action mirrors efforts by GOP presidential nominee John McCain and national Republicans to discredit ACORN and attempt to tie Obama to the group.

The state lawsuit against ACORN, its affiliates and Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro Cortes asks the court for a preliminary injunction. GOP lawyers want the court to force ACORN to make its voter database available and to require voter education efforts. They want the Department of State to make its voter registration database more readily available to counties, something a Department of State lawyer said Pennsylvania does.

The Obama campaign said it wasn't involved in ACORN registration drives.

"Our campaign has not coordinated with ACORN whatsoever on any voter registration activities," said Obama spokesman Sean Smith.

The McCain campaign later in a statement used Moncrief's testimony to criticize Obama. Her statement "proves Barack Obama is guilty of lying to the American people about his relationship with ACORN," the campaign said.

An Obama campaign spokeswoman last week said the campaign has "no ties" to ACORN.

Project Vote national spokesman Michael McDunnah denied the donor list came from Obama's campaign, according to The Associated Press. Donor lists for candidates are public information and can be downloaded from the Federal Election Commission's Web site. The lists include how much individuals have given.

But Heather Heidelbaugh, a Pittsburgh lawyer representing state Republicans, said the computer disk she submitted to the court as evidence did not come from FEC documents.

"It's not an FEC document. I looked at the spreadsheet," Heidelbaugh said.

ACORN officials said Moncrief is not a credible witness. "Moncrief has no idea what she's talking about," said Pennsylvania ACORN spokeswoman Ali Kronley.

Moncrief acknowledged she was fired in January from Project Vote for running up more than $3,000 in personal expenses on a credit card. She said she has paid half the money back, and "I am really sorry."

Moncrief testified that ACORN and Project Vote were virtually identical. Under cross-examination, she conceded she had no personal knowledge of how Pennsylvania ACORN workers registered voters.

Moncrief, 29, who lives in Virginia, said she took a call from an Obama campaign worker inquiring whether it was the same organization Obama worked with in the 1990s.

Moncrief said she received repeated warnings to "back off" from testifying by people she knows at ACORN.

"I thought it was powerful testimony. She took a great personal risk," said Heidelbaugh.

Carol Hemmingway of Philadelphia, another ACORN spokeswoman, said the group sets aside problematic voter registration forms and turns them over to authorities. She called the lawsuit "an attempt to suppress voters."

Hemmingway said Moncrief was not part of "senior management" at ACORN and can't speak for them.

Moncrief said she does not have a vendetta against ACORN. "I do not think it is a bad organization," she said.

Moncrief said she came forward and contacted Heidelbaugh because she believes vote canvassers were not trained and then were "thrown under the bus" -- facing possible criminal prosecution -- for fraudulent registrations. She said that workers needed to meet quotas for voter registrations and that some were fired for not meeting them.

"The (voter) cards are tied to money. The more cards you get, the more money you get," Moncrief said.

ACORN officials denied that, saying in Pennsylvania canvassers are paid by the hour. They insisted the workers are trained.

Kira Gardner-Marshall, who oversees quality control for ACORN in Philadelphia, said in 2007-08 the organization fired 220 employees for voter fraud there. There were 1,100 voter registration canvassers statewide, but none of the ACORN spokeswomen attending the hearing could say how many were in Philadelphia.

Brad Bumsted can be reached at bbumsted@tribweb.com or 717-787-1405

Obama’s Rotten ACORN

Hat Tip to Liberally Conservative

Obama’s Hidden ACORN
by Liberally Conservative

Barack Hussein Obama the “community organizer” has never traveled far from the local tree he fell from.

While he is a skilled candidate, Barack Obama’s ability to surprise, stun and sweep over the vaunted Clinton Machine to capture the Democratic nomination was rooted in his background as a community organizer. He’s now turning those skills to the general election, writes John Fund at the Political Diary.

Should Mr. Obama be elected, he would become not just the head of the Democratic Party but also the inspiration for a large number of liberal groups. Some of them would no doubt lobby him to hand out taxpayer grants and contracts for their nonpolitical “community” efforts.

Mr. Obama has extensive connections with the granddaddy of activist groups, Acorn (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which has gotten millions in government grants for its low-income housing programs. In 1992, Acorn hired Mr. Obama to run a voter registration effort. He later became a trainer for the group, as well as its lawyer in election law cases.

Acorn’s political arm has endorsed Mr. Obama while its “voter education” arm has pledged to spend $35 million to register people this fall — despite a history of vote fraud scandals that have led to guilty pleas by many Acorn employees.

The housing bill now before Congress would set up a slush fund for community organizations such as Acorn. But Acorn has gone quiet in its lobbying for the bill this week with the news that one of its employees — the brother of Acorn founder Wade Rathke — had stolen nearly $1 million from the group. Mr. Rathke decided not to alert law enforcement or the organization’s board, and kept his brother employed at Acorn until last month.

“Is this the kind of group we want getting taxpayer money?” asks Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA)

“What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along?” asks Stanley Kurtz at National Review.

Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America.

Sol Stern at City Journal writes:

Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically. Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN. It promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor. As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future.

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism:

“We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak. “We will continue our fight . . . until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom.

The theory, explains Stern, was that an impossibly overburdened welfare system would force “a radical reconstruction of America’s unjust capitalist economy.” Instead of a socialist utopia, however, we got the culture of dependency and family breakdown that ate away at America’s inner cities — until welfare reform began to turn the tide.

In August 2006 Steven Malanga wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

The movement is not always what it appears to be. Though Acorn touts living-wage laws as a way to lift the working poor into the middle class, the vast body of academic work on wage laws shows that they end up hurting the poor by forcing businesses to eliminate some low-wage jobs. Acorn’s own leadership understands this principle perfectly. When California regulators sued Acorn for not paying its own workers the minimum wage, Acorn argued that this would endanger its mission—because it would have to hire fewer workers.

According to ACORN, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars, in turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his campaigns. Obama also sat on the boards of the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN’s coffers.

ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who “best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about” — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.

St. Louis County Election officials claim hundreds of fraudulent voter address changes have been turned in by ACORN, a group that’s been criticized for its voter sign-up work in Missouri. Election Board employees estimate hundreds of fraudulent address changes were submitted.

The address changes included forged signatures and are among questionable or fraudulent voter registration cards submitted to the county within the past couple of months.

County officials told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that most of the suspicious registrations and address changes were submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Similar fraudulent voter registration cards have turned up this month in St. Louis city and this week in Kansas City, as well as other states, including Ohio.

The cases are often similar. Voter registration cards were forged for a dead person, had false signatures and change of addresses or incorrect and missing personal information, Goeke said.

Eight workers for a get-out-the-vote effort in St. Louis city and county have pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards for the 2006 election, authorities said today.

The workers were employed by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), gathering voter registrations. U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway said they submitted cards with false addresses and names, and forged signatures.

D.C. Dateline writes:

But back in Chicago, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is more important than Iraq or Washington. ACORN and its associated Midwest Academy, both founded in the 1970s, continue to train and mobilize activists throughout the country, often using them to manipulate public opinion through “direct action.” It’s sometimes a code for illegal activities. Prior to law school, Barack Obama worked as an organizer for their affiliates in New York and Chicago. He always has been an ACORN person — meeting and working with them to advance their causes. Through his membership on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago and his friendship with Teresa Heinz Kerry, Obama has helped ensure that they remain funded well. Since he graduated from law school, Obama’s work with ACORN and the Midwest Academy has ranged from training and fundraising, to legal representation and promoting their work.

Barack Hussein Obama’s
“Hidden ACORN”
is slowly getting exposed. Indeed!