The great OklahomaWatchdog.org is starting to crack open the documents ACORN left behind in the Sooner state:

The internal documents obtained by Oklahoma Watchdog show how focused ACORN was in Oklahoma in 2007 and 2008, leading up to the presidential election.

For instance, a “Power Plan” document begins: “Oklahoma ACORN has been virtually non-existent since its glory days in Tulsa, over 20 years ago. 2007 is Year Zero.”

The document continues, noting that Oklahoma ACORN, in 2007, was looking towards a five-year plan to obtain power and that is the key term – power – that is evident is this particular document.

Note: “Therefore, the route to power is twofold: First, build powerful city organizations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa that can control these municipalities. Second, become an influential organization by shaping a handful of strategic legislative districts that, by themselves, can change who controls the state legislature.”

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Blogger Andrew Marcus has a timely piece over at his Founding Bloggers blog:

Founding Bloggers can exclusively confirm that as of 2000, ACORN listed the Working Families Party as an affiliate of ACORN. They also listed the New Party as an affiliate.

Click here or the image below to view full size:

To drive the relationship home for you, ACORN and Project Vote shared office space with Working Families Party and the New Party in NYC, Arkansas, and Illinois!

Are people supposed to believe that ACORN shared office space with Project Vote and these political parties, and they never talked or shared resources or funding? What are the odds that these arrangements led to an unhealthy, if not illegal, mix of federal tax dollars and political organizing?

Read the whole piece here.

You need an ID to board an airplane, cash a check, use a credit card and, even, enter many downtown office building. However, you don’t need an ID to apply for Medicaid and potentially receive thousands of dollars in government benefits. And it doesn’t look like you’ll have to show an ID anytime in the near future, either:

Grassley Amendment #C8

Purpose:

An amendment to require presentation of identification in applying for Medicaid benefits

Description of Amendment:

The amendment amends Title 19 of the Social Security Act to require an applicant (or the parent or guardian in the case of a child under the age of 18) to present at the time of application for Medicaid or CHIP benefits government-issued photo identification and that identification must be authenticated with the issuing agency.

Republicans

CHUCK GRASSLEY – yes, ORRIN G. HATCH – yes, OLYMPIA J. SNOWE – yes, JON KYL – yes, JIM BUNNING – yes, MIKE CRAPO – yes, PAT ROBERTS – yes, JOHN ENSIGN – yes, MIKE ENZI – yes, JOHN CORNYN – yes

Democrats

MAX BAUCUS – no, JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER – no, KENT CONRAD – no, JEFF BINGAMAN – no, JOHN F. KERRY – no, BLANCHE L. LINCOLN – no, RON WYDEN – no, CHARLES E. SCHUMER – no, DEBBIE STABENOW -(no vote) MARIA CANTWELL – no, BILL NELSON – no, ROBERT MENENDEZ – no, THOMAS CARPER – no,

Not Agreed to (10-13)

Fraud in Medicaid and Medicare is estimated at around $100 billion a year. Actually proving that someone is who they say they are when applying for benefits would surely trim at least some of that.

Today’s Pork Report from Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) identies at least $315 million in wasteful Washington spending:

Congress boosts its own budget by $250 million; Increase will pay to hire consultants, hold receptions, and send postcards to voters

Only 16% of Americans believe Congress is doing a good job

Medicaid spends $65 million on prescription drug abuse, including paying for thousands of prescriptions for dead patients

Puppet theater in Philadelphia receives federal stimulus funds

80% of Boston’s music festival being paid for with federal stimulus funds; The six-concert, three-day event plans to “jump-start the classical music season and the national economy”

Nevada spending federal stimulus funds to underwrite “crucial festival director position”

Despite being in good financial shape, Idaho festival receives stimulus funds to pay for next year’s festival

Yesterday, Rep. Mark Kirk offered a great illustration of the relationship between ACORN and SEIU. A part of that chart is worthy of a further look: The relatively unknown story of how SEIU and ACORN took their act from Illinois Southward to mess with Texas and allegedly threatened to kill one man’s business because he wouldn’t toe the union line.

Most people know that unions haven’t done as well in the South as in industrialized (and economically troubled) Northern states such as Illinois and Michigan. So, in 2006 SEIU decided it would bring its brand of “justice for janitors” to Houston to set up a new foothold in the South.

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From The Oklahoman:

A Republican state legislator released documents Tuesday which he says show the community-organizing group ACORN focused on helping Democrats in three legislative races in the November 2008 election and had developed a game plan to “take power” in Oklahoma within five years.

The documents, which include legislative district maps and various forms, were recovered from computers abandoned by ACORN workers in Oklahoma City, said Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City. Also found was a script apparently used in Houston to go door-to-door to encourage voters to vote for Barack Obama in November 2008.

“They say they’re not political, but one of the subdirectories was called political action plans,” Reynolds said. “It was their political plans to take over key targeted races in Oklahoma City to show how powerful they are.”

Read the whole thing here. Oh, and be sure to check Big Government often in the coming days for LOTS more on this story…

In Washington, a crisis isn’t real until it has its own budget line-item. The $3-odd trillion we’ll spend this year is, apparently, a ‘best-case’ scenario. Anything unusual happen; a hurricane, earthquake, wild-fires, or, say, a possible flu epidemic, and we’re going to need extra or ’supplemental’ appropriations. Our federal budget, it seems, is so lean and tight, there simply isn’t any extra money lying around to cover the unexpected ‘crisis.’

This scenario played out yesterday when Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified before Congress on the still-anticipated H1N1 ‘pandemic’:

The government’s disease prevention chief said Tuesday that a new vaccine to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus is expected to be widely successful but warned that cuts to state and local public health programs could hamper a nationwide effort to administer the shots.

Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee that “decades of underinvestment in public health and public health infrastructure” and the recent furloughing and firing of public health workers as a result of the economic downtown could make it “even more challenging to implement the vaccination program.”

Well, yes, vaccines do cost money. If only we had some money for health and disease prevention. Oh wait:

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The Federal Reserve’s purchase of $300 billion in Treasury debt, as well as its purchase of mortgage-backed securities, has aptly been described as “monetizing the U.S. government debt,” with appropriate concern that it will fuel inflation. 

If President Obama fancies himself a twenty-first century Abraham Lincoln, then we need Timothy Geithner to be his Salmon Chase. Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary was remarkably successful at financing the Civil War, with only limited inflation, and remarkable fidelity to the Constitution.

Chase was a radical Ohio abolitionist before the war (sometimes called the state’s “attorney general for runaway Negroes”), and a relentlessly ambitious rival of Abraham Lincoln. After Lincoln beat Chase for the 1860 Republican nomination, he made him his Secretary of the Treasury. Almost all historians regard Lincoln’s ability to keep Chase on board as one of the marks of his genius as a statesman.

Chase was also a hard-money man, and abhorred paper money—especially the paper emitted by state banks, excoriated (if somewhat exaggeratedly) as “wildcat banks”– creditors were said to have to battle wildcats to attempt to redeem the worthless notes of these reckless frontier banks. Chase believed that the United States needed a national currency, issued by a national banking system. As the Civil War’s costs grew exponentially, Congress pressed him to monetize the government’s debt by issuing Treasury notes unredeemable in gold or silver, and to declare them to be legal tender for all debts—the “greenbacks,” which color our paper money to this day. Chase stuck to his constitutional guns for as long as he could, but finally gave in. But he “hated the crime about to be committed,” as historian Bray Hammond put it. By the end of the war, Chase got his national banking system, and had eliminated unconstitutional state-bank paper currency.

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No, not his problem with the GOP. In an interesting piece at RealClearPolitics, Jay Cost argues that the Obama Presidency seems at odds with our republican form of government. We’re perhaps not quite at a ‘cult of personality’ stage, but we are probably as close as we’ve ever come:

Ultimately, this President stands a better chance of success if he embraces the republican character of the people who imbue his temporary position with its power and majesty. The fact is that we are a republican people who tend not to think that anybody is better than we. If we begin to intuit that the President thinks he is better, it could impede his efforts to rally us to his side.

It is also a fact that staunch republicans created the presidency, and the office reflects their preferences even after 220 years of intervening history. By explicit design, the President is not a leader-for-life. Instead, he must face the judgment of his peers just 48 months after he wins the office. The Constitution endorses the view of the supremacy of the people because it delineates a timeline for when the executive power leaves the President and returns to the people (originally, as represented by the state governments). As if that were not enough, the 22nd Amendment forbids a President from seeking a third term, meaning that the people of this democratic republic will be around long after the Obama Administration has come to an end.

Read the whole thing here.

Today’s edition of Sen. Coburn’s Pork Report identifies at least $108.4 million in wasteful Washington Spending.

Despite being in good condition, Hollywood’s Sunset Strip will get a $7 million face lift with federal stimulus funds

Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from government computers, grew sixfold last year at the National Science Foundation; The problems were so pervasive, the agency’s inspector general had to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars

Senior government executives earned higher raises and bonuses last year

Defense appropriations bill steers over $100 million to campaign donors for pork projects not wanted by the Pentagon

Pork Rx; Federal government would pay 100% of the cost of Medicaid expansion in the Senate Majority Leader’s state under new health care bill

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From the editorial pages of Investors Business Daily:

That’s why the Times got scooped by outlets such as Fox News, for which it has nothing but contempt, on revelations that led to the fall of community organizing behemoth Acorn.

The wound was self-inflicted, rooted in little more than the partisanship of protecting a favored president. It left the field clear for a couple of journalism students to show that Acorn staffers openly encouraged pimping, child prostitution, human trafficking, mortgage fraud and tax evasion.

It’s right there on tapes posted to Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com. Unlike the disdainful Times, Fox ran with it, toppling a behemoth of political power.

Read the whole thing here.

Earlier this month and despite the public scrutiny over the voter fraud and felony criminal activity associated with ACORN, the Department of Homeland Security went ahead and granted $997,402 to ACORN under the FY 2008 Fire Prevention and Safety Program. 

To most people, the timing and the amount of the grant would seem off base, but when you take into account the fact that DHS awarded ACORN–an organization with no clear expertise in fire safety and prevention–a fire prevention and safety grant, it’s just plain offensive.

With fire departments all over Louisiana – and the rest of the country – struggling to make ends meet and get the equipment and training they need to protect their local communities, the idea of a million dollar grant going to ACORN is unsettling, to say the least. 

I’ve had grave reservations about ACORN for some time, and over the past year we’ve seen numerous examples of serious allegations of wrongdoing on the part of this organization and its employees across the country.  I simply can’t see the logic behind diverting much needed funding from worthy fire departments to this organization.

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Just a few weeks ago, on September 4th, FEMA handed over $1 million to the ACORN Institute, an ACORN affiliate in New Orleans. The grant is for “fire prevention.” You can find the grant here. Virtually every other organization receiving “fire prevention” grants is a fire deparment or medical facility.

Here’s some background on ACORN Institute:

An affiliate of ACORN, the ACORN Institute, has been a participant in the IRS tax assistance program. The institute prides itself as a one-stop shopping service for low-income households seeking free benefits. In addition to tax preparation, it also provides information on how to secure government aid and to prevent mortgage foreclosure. Among the ACORN Institute’s partners are Citigroup, H&R Block and the Marguerite Casey Foundation. If even many Democrats in Congress are embarrassed by their history of support for ACORN, surely these entities can be as well.

Unclear what any of that has to do with “fire prevention.” According to FEMA, anyone with questions about the grants is urged to contact them at 1-866-274-0960, or via email at firegrants@dhs.gov.

This story from the Washington Times needs no introduction:

EXCLUSIVE: Porn surfing rampant at U.S. science foundation

Number of cases overwhelms watchdog, costs taxpayers

 By Jim McElhatton

 Employee misconduct investigations, often involving workers accessing pornography from their government computers, grew sixfold last year inside the taxpayer-funded foundation that doles out billions of dollars of scientific research grants, according to budget documents and other records obtained by The Washington Times.

 The problems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) were so pervasive they swamped the agency’s inspector general and forced the internal watchdog to cut back on its primary mission of investigating grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars.

 ”To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud,” the inspector general recently told Congress in a budget request. “We anticipate a significant decline in investigative recoveries and prosecutions in coming years as a direct result.”

Read the whole thing here.

This morning I filed the following Appeal with Obama’s Treasury Department over its continued withholding of documents responsive to our Freedom of Information Act Request seeking internal discussions over administering a possible cap-and-trade scheme that the president, as a candidate, made clear was intended to cause our energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket” and “bankrupt” numerous facilities.

The message of this is not to rehash what the documents reveal, about which those media outlets willing to report have already reported, and those seeking to make go away have already tried their level best. Instead, it is to follow up on Treasury’s vows of cooperation, after which they suddenly went silent, refusing to comply with the law in any meaningful way. It is clearly still hiding what are intended to be public documents.

If the administration had, for example, merely made a nod in the direction of complying with FOIA and provided an index of documents – even a sorry specimen claiming that all that is relevant is being provided except for those parts that are not – then that would only have prejudiced, say, a court against Treasury’s interest in openness and veracity with regard to our document Request. As I told any reporter willing to listen, following the first release of redacted (and within days, unredacted) documents, would have been the case had they attempted to convince a court that these specious redactions of merely embarrassing language were permissible under FOIA. I suggested they dropped those redactions as insurance against possible litigation, as that would have been tossed on our first motion and given the court an idea of their idea of compliance.

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The U.S. Census Bureau delegated work to outside groups for the federal 2010 census.  Following the release of undercover videos showing ACORN workers helping a fake pimp and prostitute illegally secure housing, the Census Bureau terminated its partnership with ACORN.  The House and Senate voted to block federal funding for ACORN and ACORN-related affiliates, including SEIU.  While the Census Bureau terminated its partnership with ACORN, it left its close connection with SEIU intact.

Given SEIU’s co-location with ACORN in Chicago and SEIU’s intimate financial relationship with ACORN, we should take action to protect the public from the corruption of the 2010 census. To defend the integrity of the process, the Census Bureau should end its close relationship with ACORN’s close sister organization, the SEIU.

Official filings show that SEIU, referenced in the U.S. Attorney’s indictment of Governor Rod Blagojevich, contributed more than $4 million to ACORN and its affiliates since 2006.  According to recent Department of Labor filings, the SEIU employs ACORN Founder and ACORN International Chief Organizer Wade Rathke.  Mr. Rathke was recently exposed for running a cover-up of an embezzlement scheme run by his brother.

In Chicago, SEIU Local 880 and SEIU Local 1 contributed more than $230,000 to ACORN groups in Illinois and Texas since 2006 – the most recent to “support election efforts.”

SEIU Local 880, which until recently boasted it was founded by ACORN, used an ACORN e-mail address on its Web site and tax filings, was co-located with an ACORN “tax center” and employed the former president of ACORN Illinois, according to official records.   Recently, the IRS terminated is relationship with ACORN tax preparation offices.

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Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) founder Wade Rathke wants to use the Internet to overthrow the capitalist system.

He said so in his new book, Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families, in which he serves up some community organizing war stories, and offers his thoughts on the future of organizing. Rathke’s currently on a cross-country book tour.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke (to the right of the microphone) at an ACORN-SEIU rally.

Rathke, a pioneer of the so-called welfare rights movement that aims to get Americans on welfare, devotes an entire chapter of his book to what he calls “The ‘Maximum Eligible Participation’ Solution.” It is a strategy for orchestrated crisis that savvy leftist groups across America are likely to embrace. He writes:

“[I]t is hard to believe that we cannot assemble the troops to mount a campaign for maximum eligible participation that harvests the opportunities and dollars already available if we could achieve full utilization of existing programs.”

Rathke acknowledges his support for the Cloward-Piven Strategy, an approach to radical social and political change articulated by Marxist university professors Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven in a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” The two academics called for “a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.]

The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name. “This wasn’t an accident,” Giuliani argued in a 1997 speech. “It wasn’t an atmospheric thing, it wasn’t supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare.”

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The Senate is currently working on the Defense Department Appropriations. The legislation provides the framework for spending $625 billion for the nation’s defense. Yes, even today, in Obamamerica, that is a lot money. No surprise, then, that this enormous pot-o-money attracts a load of earmarks.

Now, an earmark itself doesn’t necessarily increase the total amount of money being spent. It simply allows a Congressman or Senator to slice off a small chunk of money and REQUIRE that it be spent in the way they think best.  Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this (see Murtha, John).

The least bad is that the money isn’t spent effeciently. A slightly worse problem is that the earmark consumes money that isn’t then available for what may be more pressing needs.  Which makes earmarks in the Defense spending bill, um, troublesome. Are politicians really the best choice for deciding how to allocate specific resources to defend our nation and protect our uniformed men and women?

Let’s take a current example:

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