If you want to know what will happen to ACORN as a result of all the scandals and controversies, this story from Connecticut is a microcosm.

Its political allies fled. And with its national organization fighting for its life and unable to give any money, ACORN of Bridgeport is doing what other chapters have been doing across the nation, going independent, sort of.

This month, the group began a campaign to raise money and create two local nonprofits, one to concentrate on social issues, the other on political action. To be clear, the plan is to continue to work with other chapters on national issues through a federation, according to Emeline Bravo-Blackwood, a small business owner who is leading the effort to transform the group in Bridgeport.

So, more and more ACORN chapters are moving away from their current structure, which is one organization where all the local chapters answer to a national board, to a federation. Where have I heard that term federation in relation to ACORN? Oh yeah, it was in my interview with Wade Rathke. He explained that ACORN is one organization whereas COI, what Rathke now runs, is a federation. Here’s how Rathke described the difference.

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Perhaps Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) thinks of himself as a modern day John Sherman. In 1890, Ohio Sen. Sherman set out on a mission to establish “just competition” laws and level the economic playing field. His quest culminated in the dismantling of monopolies—such as American Tobacco and Standard Oil—and the passage of new laws prohibiting malicious competitive practices. In a similar way, Dodd now seeks the power to tear apart any company he considers a risk to the national economy. But unlike Sherman, Dodd isn’t out to create the best possible conditions for competition to thrive. He’s out for blood.

Dodd’s plan for overhauling Wall Street regulations, released mid-November, includes a proposed new organization: the Agency for Financial Stability (AFS). This new regulator would be tasked with identifying and addressing “systemic risks posed by large, complex companies as well as products and activities that can spread risk across firms.” This represents one piece of the most extensive proposal to reform financial services regulation—topping even the ridiculousness of the Obama plan and Barney Frank plan. Which is saying a lot.

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Washington News Observer recently sat down for an exclusive interview with acclaimed author and commentator Ann Coulter. In the second part of the interview, Ann Coulter  discusses the “victimization” of single mothers and minorities, the Fort Hood massacre and other hot topics. Coulter is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers. This interview is the final segment of a two part series. If you missed the first part, it is available HERE.

Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy, Phillip Carter.

It appears that Obama’s GITMO team is being systematically eliminated. One has to ask, why? The only real answer has to be that Obama is setting up some plausible deniability by firing or forcing the resignation of officials involved with GITMO policy. Once enough of these people are gone, Obama can look wide-eyed to the public and claim that he was badly served by his GITMO advisers and, therefore, it isn’t his fault.

Unfortunately for Obama the failure is not with the staff but with the chief himself, Obama.

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Yesterday, Washington Post columnist and former Bush II speechwriter Michael Gerson played a long slow violin solo over the death of the mainstream media. There’s nothing new in his piece. Dazed with panic as the circle of financial ruin closes in, we’ve heard this song many times before from our ink-stained dinosaurs. And true to form, Gerson can’t break the mold. It’s all there, the rose-colored glasses, denial, and a heaping helping of rationalization.

Once again, from that familiar MSM perch where one can look down their nose at the great unwashed who just don’t understand the magnificent tradition of journalism they’re about to lose, Gerson blames We the People for no longer wanting  to pay for our news and choosing partisan sources “that reinforce and exaggerate … political predispositions.”

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Many conservative politicians, radio hosts, and pundits have repeatedly stated their shared belief that the Republican Party “lost its way” prior to the 2008 election.  In their minds, the entire conservative movement believed in limited government and low spending and was simply corrupted by absolute power.  They may be surprised to learn that this is not the case at all.  The fact that party leadership turned its back on limited government and low spending was entirely predictable.  In fact, it should have been expected.

The conservative movement is not homogeneous.  Rather, the movement consists of fiscal conservatives, limited government conservatives, libertarians, pro-business conservatives, social conservatives, neoconservatives, and others.  When Democrats control government, these disparate conservative groups share many common goals. They all wish to reduce the power of government and they all wish to reduce taxes and spending.  As a result, they usually form a very effective alliance while out of power.

We saw this in 1993 and 1994.  Conservatives rallied around core beliefs like limited government, term limits, Second Amendment rights, and low taxes.  Party leadership rolled out the Contract with America to universal conservative acclaim.  Conservatives all rallied around statements like, “guns don’t kill people…people kill people,” while GOP candidates gladly signed term limit pledges and Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge.  United, the GOP won control of the House and the Senate in 1994, and later won the presidency in 2000.

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The alarmists’ reaction to CEI’s Notice of Intent to Sue NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for withholding data–now for nigh on two years–has been particularly shrill, as regards my inquiry into the clearance and other deliberations over the non-official activities for the nasty, deceptive, third-party advocacy blog RealClimate.org by one GISS spokesman Gavin Schmidt on official, taxpayer-funded time.

When considering that apparently unacceptable Request for transparency as to what NASA was thinking in agreeing to spend my money that way, our Notice and the alarmists’ reaction in the current “ClimateGate” context, also consider the following relevant excerpt from “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud and Deception to Keep You Misinformed” (pp. 104-104). That nice red cover would look great under the tree this year, even if what’s inside the cover is burning the retinas of the global warming industry right about now:

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An interesting document found its way to my inbox last weekend. It was a PowerPoint presentation of an analysis done by the New Jersey Education Association, regarding its efforts to re-elect Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine.

The document can be found at NEAexposed.com.

Citing “Electile Dysfunction,” meaning the polls were telling them that voters, including teachers, weren’t as enthusiastic about Corzine as they would like, the union’s Director of Government Relations, Ginger Gold Schnitzer, proposed a double-dose remedy: “A robust member-to-member campaign,” followed by “an independent communications campaign to inoculate the public.”

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President Obama’s first official State Dinner, in honor of the Indian Prime Minister, was crashed by two Northern Virginia socialites. Crashing an event at the White House is, um, shall we say, difficult.

That these two–Reality TV star-wannabes, natch–came within a handshake of POTUS and the Indian Prime Minister is astonishing. Stay tuned, as we think there must be more to this story.

On September 29th, when ACORN is under full public scrutiny in the aftermath of the undercover video sting, it announced with great fanfare that it was launching a thorough and independent  review of its operations. It named Scott Harshbarger, former Massachusetts Attorney General, to head up this review.

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On Friday, the Department of Justice released a ruling it issued Monday, outlining its arguments that federal agencies can continue providing taxpayer funds to ACORN.

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It’s a chemical that has been used in everyday plastic products like eyeglasses, medical equipment, bottles, and food can linings for over fifty years.  But the compound Bisphenol A (BPA) has been the target of scare campaigns over the last few years.  On one hand critics contend that BPA at low doses can affect endocrine systems and reproduction, and cause birth or developmental effects, as well as cancer.  On the other hand, a search of the literature finds no single case of illness or death related to BPA.

Most recently, BPA came under attack November 2 when Consumers Union, the parent organization of the respected Consumer Reports, sent out a press release announcing the results of its lab tests that purportedly showed high levels of the suspect compound in 19 food products.  The authors of the Consumers Report article did not claim that they had found any harmful effects in anyone, just that BPA had been detected.

The Consumers Union press release inspired panic-inducing headlines.  ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and the New York Times dutifully announced the “results” with alarm.  In a separate commentary, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff compared the danger of BPA to those he has faced as a reporter of “threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas.”

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A trial lawyer reading through the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) will immediately, almost unconsciously, begin generating a list of questions he would love to ask the authors if he were able to face them on the witness stand and under oath.  The beauty of the adversarial process is how cross-examination tests and challenges the other side’s position – precisely what the emails indisputably show the CRU and its allies in the climate change scam have gone to shocking lengths to avoid.

There are several lines of examination that come immediately to mind.  We can rest assured that it will never happen – as the emails show, the last thing they want to do is be in a position where they have to explain themselves.  But certainly asking leading climate change cheerleader Phil Jones about his email describing his use of a “trick” to describe the manipulation of observed temperature data to “hide the decline” in order to achieve the desired result would be amusing:

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Well, here’s yet another thing the unconfirmable Obama “Climate Czarina” Carol Browner got around disclosing thanks to, and one more reason for being stuffed into, a position of influence through the backdoor of a phony job not subject to Senate confirmation, even while lording over Senate-confirmed constitutional officers:

She was on the board of one of the leading carbon offset trading companies, APX.

That makes for one really big conflict of interest in her role guiding the administration’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide and force emitters to buy CO2 ration-coupons.

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Have you heard the one about the pimp, prostitute, politician and the community organizer?  Well, thanks to San Diego private investigator Derrick Roach, Californians are not laughing at what is turning into a political nightmare for California Attorney General Jerry Brown and ACORN.  On Tuesday, November 24, Attorney General Brown appeared on KABC’s “Peter Tilden Show” after it was revealed that some 20,000 documents had been thrown into a National City dumpster by ACORN employees.

The documents were thrown out in advance of state investigators arriving at the local ACORN office to conduct an investigation resulting from national media attention.  ACORN employee Juan Carlos Vera was videotaped giving advice to two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute regarding underage prostitution and human smuggling.  Without admitting any wrongdoing ACORN terminated Mr. Vera, or so they said.  Documents provided to BigGovernment.com show that Mr. Vera was not terminated but was simply laid off, implying that Mr. Vera is also eligible for rehire. (The document also notes that Mr. Vera was laid off due to “restructuring” related to “videotaping incident.)

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On Tuesday November 24th, the day after Big Government broke the story revealing tens of thousands of documents containing sensitive material had been unceremoniously dumped in a trash bin behind the San Diego ACORN office, Attorney General Jerry Brown appeared on Talk Radio KABC’s Peter Tilden Show.

Instead, Attorney General Brown offered a rambling and somewhat troubling political answer to a question of law and justice.

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Attorney General Brown cites a poll which claims that 52% of Republicans think ACORN stole the election for Obama.  The full results of this poll of 1,006 voters can be downloaded here.

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News from Dubai is rocking and rolling world markets today, as an $80 billion default could spawn a broad wave of activity and expose the tenuous status of the banking system. We’re talking global markets on the Black Friday edition of Coffee and Markets, a daily podcast from The New Ledger on politics, policy and the marketplace with Francis Cianfrocca, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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Related Links:

FT: Global Markets on Selling Spree Thanks to Dubai Default
Bloomberg: RBS Led Dubai World Lenders, HSBC May Have Most at Stake in UAE
Business Insider: Stop Freaking Out, the UAE Can Easily Save Dubai

Christmas. Who needs it? Not Best Buy, that’s for sure. After all, Best Buy is loathe to use that hateful word in its advertising. It’s so “religious” and tinged with racism, America, and tradition. It makes Best Buy shudder to think of using that foul word, Christmas. But, advertising for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha? Heck, why not? What could be more welcoming and tolerant?

And so, Best Buy has issued a Thanksgiving sales flyer wishing all good multi-cultural, Muslim loving Americans a happy Eid al-Adha this year.

Don’t you feel your heart warming already? Isn’t your PC bone tingling with happiness? And aren’t you secretly gleeful that those rotten, evil, reactionary, hatemongering Christians are getting theirs… even if Christians do make up about 75 percent of the United States?

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Today is the first official day of what will likely be a disappointing (in terms of retail sales)  holiday season: