Pete Yost of the Associated Press asked for my comment regarding the findings of the ACORN “internal investigation.”  Here is what I emailed him:

ACORN is a corrupt and criminal organization, and anyone with open eyes can see this. Yet SEIU’s Andy Stern and left wing puppetmaster John Podesta, of the Soros-funded radical leftist think-tank, the Center for American Progress, chose to architect a whitewashed ‘internal investigation’ by a Democrat Party hack from Massachusetts, and have put immense efforts into launching a two-pronged propaganda  campaign and legal assault against the filmmakers of the ‘pimp and  prostitute’ exposé and the story’s publisher. BigGovernment.com  continues to expose ACORN’s illegal activity and has helped to  illuminate how corrupt organizations like ACORN, SEIU and HCAN are coordinating the efforts to shove radical health care reform down an unwilling  majority of Americans throats.

Here is the sole excerpt from the above statement chosen for the article:

The report is “a whitewashed ‘internal investigation’ by a Democrat Party hack from Massachusetts,” said conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart, who is being sued by ACORN along with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, who played the prostitute and her boyfriend in the videos. Breitbart posted the videos on his Web site.

I wanted the BigGovernment.com readers to see that’s it’s not just the internal investigators who are whitewashing the magnitude of the ACORN scandal, it’s the mainstream media writ large.

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[Note: This is the latest segment in an ongoing series about Code Pink and its co-founder Jodie Evans.  Click here to read earlier articles.]

In a move by the Obama administration that is gallingly cynical and would be considered treasonous in a less progressive era, a message sent by Code Pink and an article published by the left wing online publication AlertNet indicates the White House is working with the left wing terrorist support group Code Pink to agitate the public and undermine President Barack Obama’s newly announced Afghanistan war policy.

Top Obama funder, Code Pink co-founder and terrorist supporter Jodie Evans wrote at AlterNet of a White House initiated phone call she received last week, two days after Obama’s Afghan war speech at West Point. The Obama official said the administration wanted to “consult” with Code Pink in response to the group’s e-mail campaign targeting the White House with opposition to the president’s surge strategy.

However, it appears that the Obama administration was already in consultation with Code Pink before this reported phone call. In its message to supporters, Code Pink guaranteed their e-mails would be read by someone in the White House.

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Well, ACORN retained a law firm to investigate its operations and, surprise, the law firm found that ACORN hadn’t done anything wrong in the undercover videos filmed by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. The review, overseen by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harschbarger, a long-time ally of ACORN, found that any problems within ACORN are, gosh darn it, simply because ACORN was too successful, i.e. grew too big and too fast. The problems are also mostly, conveniently, the result of people who are no longer employed by ACORN, i.e. Wade Rathke.

Full report below:

ACORN Report –

The entire report can be summed up: Wade Rathke really made a mess of things. The current management, i.e. Bertha Lewis, has been trying to reform the organization and she is really, really committed to it now. ACORN has a “roadmap” for reform that, while it may take a while to implement, will really fix everything you thought was wrong with ACORN. Just trust them.

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House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) released the following statement today regarding the report commissioned by ACORN released by Scott Harshbarger report on ACORN:

“How surprising is it that a report paid for by ACORN exonerates them?  There are numerous federal and state investigations currently underway that should ultimately produce a legitimate finding regarding ACORN’s illegal activities.  The reality is ACORN has masqueraded as charitable organization in order to fund and advance a partisan political agenda.  There is no mechanism in place to follow where the use of taxpayer and charitable dollars end and where funds used to pay for their political activities begin.

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So it’s time we asked the question: if not Ben Bernanke, who could be the next Fed chairman? And what are we going to do about job creation, since the president seems more interested in holding pointless conferences to waste time talking about job creation? Today’s the 100th episode 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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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Barnes: Infatuated with the New Deal
Politico: Strange Coalition Targets Bernanke
Three Strikes Against Bernanke

Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990. In 2007 Kevin Jennings was paid $273,573.96 as the executive director of GLSEN. Recently he was appointed by the Obama administration to run the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education.

On Friday, Scott Baker from Breitbart.TV and Co-Host of ‘The B-Cast‘ submitted a shocking report on Obama’s deviant Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings. This report was posted at Gateway Pundit blog. Scott explained:

I was recently approached by a team of independent researchers that I have known for some time and have come to trust. They prepared this report involving ‘Safe Schools Czar’ Kevin Jennings and the organization he founded, GLSEN, and asked that I find a way to help draw attention to what they uncovered. Knowing that Gateway Pundit has followed Kevin Jennings since his appointment, as we have on The B-Cast (here, here, and here), and on Breitbart.tv (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here), I felt this would be an appropriate place for this report.

Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings was the founder, and for many years, Executive Director of an organization called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN started essentially as Jennings’ personal project and grew to become the culmination of his life’s work. And he was chosen by President Obama to be the nation’s Safe Schools Czar primarily because he had founded and led GLSEN (scroll for bio).

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Undeterred by stubbornly high unemployment rates, and a stimulus plan that has fallen flat, talk of a second stimulus package is growing louder.  But to shed the unsuccessful “stimulus” moniker, Democrats and government labor unions have adopted a “jobs plan.”

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who’s never seen a government expenditure he didn’t like, Sunday  pointed to a “study” by the Economic Policy Institute, which alleges spending $40 billion over 3 years could create about a million “public-service” jobs.

In other words, Krugman and EPI would see fit to simply create government jobs, instead of trying to help the private sector.  That makes sense, given who supports EPI.

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We’ve learned that Keynesianism does not make sense and that Obama’s so-called stimulus was misguided. In the final installment of this three-part series, let’s discuss the policies that actually would improve economic performance. As this video explains, both Economic Freedom of the World and the Index of Economic Freedom identify sound money, rule of law, property rights, small government, low tax rates, open markets, and laissez faire as the key conditions for prosperity.

The simple summary of the video is that economic liberalization and small government boost economic performance, not “jobs programs” or “stimulus packages.” But things are never as simple as they seem. Many Republicans, for instance, act as if any economic problem can be solved by cutting taxes. That’s a laundable instinct, to be sure, but fiscal policy only accounts for 20 percent of a nation’s economic performance and it is unreasonable to assume good tax policy can solve the problems caused by bad monetary policy or foolish regulatory interventions. Moreover, there is a big difference between good (supply-side) tax cuts that increase incentives for productive behavior and useless gimmicks such as tax credits and tax holidays. If Republicans want to rebuild their credibility on economic issues, they need to apologize for the reckless statism of the Bush years and rededicate themselves to shrinking the size and scope of the federal government.

Today, in 1941, the Japanese Imperial Navy launched a surprise attack on the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Let’s take a quick look at numbers behind the Senate health care bill introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Reid claims his bill will cover 94 percent of the population at a cost of $849 billion over 10 years.

The population of the country is roughly 300 million.

At this point you need to understand one thing – there are two vastly different numbers used for the uninsured. The first number consists of all the people uninsured at some point in a given year, whether they are citizens or here illegally. The second number is the chronically uninsured, those who have spent an extended period of time (years) without insurance. The number for the former, the one I like to call the “kitchen sink” number, is one with which you are undoubtedly familiar: 47-49 million. The number for the latter, the chronically uninsured, is one you may not have heard before: 12-15 million.

How these differing numbers come to be is a story for another day, but let’s analyze both of them for the sake of argument.

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The Bruno jury in Albany is hung. After six full days of deliberation, the Jury has passed notes to Judge Gary Sharpe, a hard-drinking former U.S Attorney for this district, with questions that are all arguably favorable to the 81 year old Former Majority Leader in the New york Senate.

Joe Bruno the legendary longtime leader of the New York Senate Republicans stands accused of ” the theft of honest services, ” but the Feds never proved a crime at trial. New York’s political class is waiting with bated breath for a vedict.

Joe Bruno: Target of Political Hit Job

The Judge  in the Albany trial wanted to give the Jury an “Allen charge” – meaning a directive that they MUST reach a consensus when the have failed to do so. It gives juries the impression they cannot come back and announce they are deadlocked. It is a wicked pro-prosecution tool- after the first note requesting clarifications of the “reasonable doubt” standard- a true jump of the gun.

Supported for his job by Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sharpe has a son who is an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the same office and jurisdiction where Bruno is being prosecuted . Sharpe should have recused himself on that basis alone.

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Over at the Weekly Standard, the always impressive Steven Hayward has a good summation of where we are in Climate Gate:

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.’s upcoming Copenhagen conference–which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol–collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama’s magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a “communications” problem, but after Al Gore’s Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor’s New Clothes moment.

In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the public–either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the inside. The emails–more than 1,000 of them–reveal a small cabal of scientists who, in the words of MIT’s Michael Schrage, engaged in “malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings.” In an ironic twist, one of the frequent correspondents in this long e‑trail (University of Arizona scientist Jonathan Overpeck) warned several of his colleagues in September, “Please write all emails as though they will be made public.” Small wonder why. It’s being called Climategate, but more than one wit is calling them “the CRUtape Letters.”

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Massive fraud and multiple violations of Ohio’s voting law has been uncovered in a recent ballot initiative effort. Among other violations, 47 felons were hired illegally by the advocacy group SmokeFree America to collect signatures for issue five, a ballot initiative to ban smoking in Ohio’s small businesses. Kidnappers, thieves and rapists were hired to collect signatures and addresses despite the fact that Ohio election law prohibits felons from working petition workers. Additionally, the smoking ban was approved for being included on the Ohio ballot by state officials despite the fact that thousands of signatures were invalid and despite the fact that SmokeFree America did not meet lawful requirements. These violations were easily discovered and some of them were known by officials proving that complicit state officials quietly supported the ballot push and turned a blind eye to law breaking by the anti-smoking advocacy group.

Ohio election law prohibits convicted felons from working as petition workers, yet 47 felons have been discovered as employees of SmokeFree America in its Ohio effort. Of these felons several were convicted of rape, one accused of raping a child. Alarmingly, SmokeFree America exposed Ohio residents to rapists who were collecting their signatures and addresses! There were also forgers and thieves collecting signatures and addresses of Ohio residents. Other criminal actions by petition workers: arson, burglary, breaking and entering, weapons violations, kidnapping, drug violations, drug trafficking, grand theft, etc.

The petitions also had multiple violations of Ohio election law. Some petitions were signed by those paid to circulate the petitions — a violation of the law — and their addresses were given as hotels instead of the required permanent home addresses. Also some were out-of-state signatories instead of Ohio residents.

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No, we haven’t performed a miracle and resurrected Ronald Reagan to provide his take on the current health care debate. We didn’t have to, because the ideas underlying the current proposals, whether it is ObamaCare, PelosiCare or the Reid health care legislation, have been around for decades. This Reagan speech, from 1961, comes for the early days of the debate over Medicare and Medicaid. Well, here we are again. And, Reagan’s words are still relevant.

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If you would like a pre-Obama Care window into the possible future of American Health Care–if Democrats in Congress are successful in passing their sweeping health care legislation, you need look no further than government imposed rationing of heart disease prevention in this country. It is a travesty in the making and should demonstrate to everyone the capricious nature of government control over our health care.

I am writing of the Obama Administration’s – regulatory decision – to go ahead with a massive cut in Medicare payments to cardiologists. I emphasize that this is a regulatory decision because it was not made by the Congress legislatively (not that that would be ok) but, instead, it was made by the massive Health and Human Services Department of the US Government. Given the limited resources of the Medicare budget, in order to increase payments to general practitioners (in an effort to attract more such doctors – a good idea), bureaucrats needed to gore somebody’s ox and cardiologists were chosen (a horrible idea).

The decision to do so is astonishing.

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ACORN has been fairly criticized for its actions that led up to the mortgage crisis, which culminated in a huge rash of foreclosures last year.  While the tide appears to be waning, it’s a problem that is still occuring.

Specifically, ACORN strong-armed banks and worked with members of Congress, such as Barney Frank, to weaken credit standards in order for banks, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to fund risky mortgages.  Mortgages, of course, that stood little chance of ever being paid, as we witnessed last year.

But ACORN’s penchant for shaking down banks didn’t begin 2 years ago, or even 10 years ago.  Check out this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1988.  Grant Williams was an organizer for ACORN at the time ( I wrote here about his new gig at SEIU), and he managed to weasle ACORN into a bank’s proposed interstate merger.  From the article:

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Today, in 1922, the Irish Free State was born. (Full independence would come in 1937.)

Right now the battle over government-run health care is centered in Washington D.C. Numerous protests have been held at the Capital, including the massive 9.12 Project march, where hundreds of thousands traveled from all over the country to protest excessive spending, bailouts, and big government proposals for reforming healthcare. Another ten thousand showed up in November for a “House Call” protest, arranged on very short notice, specifically targeting healthcare legislation pushed by Democrats. These same activists are also burning up the phones before every major vote. Despite the unprecedented strength of this small government uprising, we must face the very real possibility that, while these protests will no doubt keep participants motivated leading up to the next election, they may not be enough to stop passage of ObamaCare. Depending on the outcome of today’s fight, tomorrow’s could very well be at the state level, and eventually in the courts.

According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, lawmakers in 24 states have at least pledged to introduce legislation modeled after their Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act, which nullifies an individual mandate to purchase federally approved health insurance. This amounts to a bold reassertion of the 10th Amendment, that long ignored protection of state sovereignty against federal infringement. Thirteen of these states have already filed or pre-filed constitutional amendments to protect the rights of individuals to make their own healthcare decisions.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: President Barack Obama outlined his new strategy for waging his surge-and-retreat style of war in Afghanistan Tuesday night.  Because that strategy will involve the expedited deployment of 30,000 more troops under the cloud of an announced timetable for withdrawal, I’m eager to offer the important guest post below.  Written by a friend, it’s especially timely in light of the news that broke one week ago about three Navy SEALs facing assault charges for doing their job in Iraq. For fear of reprisal, the author has insisted on anonymity.

Court-martial over a bloody lip?

The recent news regarding the U.S. Navy SEALs who are facing trial by court-martial raises many questions about the current mental state of America’s military, its civilian leadership and the thoughts and feelings of the American people in general.

Evidently, right and wrong have traded places on today’s moral compass.  What kind of military or government sends its finest, most well-trained warriors to capture a heinous terrorist, only to bring those special operators up on charges for “mistreating” the despicable enemy mastermind of the murder, disfigurement and desecration of the four Blackwater contractors in March 2004?

Is giving an enemy terrorist a fat lip as bad as shooting and killing four American contractors on a food delivery run?  Is a bloody lip equal to dragging dead American bodies through the streets of Fallujah and hanging them from a bridge?  Are a few bruises, normally associated with apprehending a non-compliant enemy combatant, as bad as lighting dead American bodies on fire and chanting while videotaping for the world to see?

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