From today’s Baltimore Sun:

A former leader of Maryland’s ACORN chapter said Monday the group will no longer operate in the state, doomed by an embarrassing national scandal six months ago from which the organization never recovered.

An undated sign hangs on the entrance to the ACORN offices at 16 W. 25th St. A former Maryland ACORN official said the office ceased operations late last year.  You may recognize this stoop from this golden oldie.

Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chairwoman of the state chapter of ACORN and a board member since 1999, said there are no plans in Maryland to rebrand under a different name, a move undertaken Monday by several ACORN affiliates across the country.

Maryland ACORN ceased operations late last year, Merchant-Jones said, and all the offices in the state have closed. The group has not held a board meeting in Maryland since November, she added.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now came under scrutiny in September, when videos recorded in Baltimore showed workers counseling two conservative activists pretending to be a pimp and prostitute. Two staff members of the Baltimore office were fired because of the video, which was broadcast on major networks throughout the country and showed the employees giving tax-evading tips to the man and a scantily dressed female partner.

The incident effectively shut down local and state offices, Merchant-Jones said, and the branches were forced to cease operations after dues-paying members fled.

Congress reacted to the video by stripping ACORN’s federal funding. Last week a federal judge upheld a ruling that a law blacklisting ACORN and groups allied with it was unconstitutional, but observers doubt ACORN will recoup any money.

Read the full article here.

Although the charity Corvington works for, Annie E. Casey Foundation of Baltimore, Maryland, has granted funding to ACORN during his tenure, it is unclear if Corvington has ties to ACORN.

Nonetheless, Corvington is part of the same cluster of organizations that provides financial and other support for ACORN which is a longtime fixture in the activist community.

Since 2001 the Annie E. Casey Foundation has pumped at least $1,705,500 into the ACORN network, according to philanthropy database information.

Of the $1,705,500, at least $850,500 was earmarked for ACORN operations in Baltimore, Maryland, home of the ACORN branch office first shown in the recent undercover videos that debuted on BigGovernment.com. Those videos show James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles pretending to be a pimp and a prostitute and receiving mountains of advice on evading laws pertaining to tax evasion and prostitution (among other things).

The Annie E. Casey Foundation is a major funder of other groups on the left.

Looking at just the first letter of the alphabet, its grant recipients are labor federation AFL-CIO, abortion rights think tank Alan Guttmacher Institute, and liberal policy shop the Aspen Institute.

Although most of its grants go to groups on the political left, the foundation has funded at least one think tank on the political right. It has provided a few grants to the American Enterprise Institute.

The clips give a basic overview of a lot of arguments that we’ll be seeing as the case unfolds. Breitbart chastises ACORN for infringing on free speech, Giles finds ACORN’s arbitrary $5 million dollar figure “funny,” and both make the case that it is at least a bit ironic that ACORN plans to waste more of our tax dollars in a law suit against the people who exposed the extent to which they are wasting our tax dollars….

Both also note that ACORN Chief Organizer Bertha Lewis thanked the filmmakers for exposing the corruption in her company—this will be hard for ACORN to reconcile in court when Bertha Lewis trots out two ex-employees she terminated to make the case for ACORN’s victimhood.

One item not addressed that might be filed under “OBVIOUS” was that questions are likely to be raised about the wholesale legitimacy of the ACORN Baltimore operation. According to documents obtained by Big Government’s Mike Roman, ACORN was operating illegally in Maryland at the time of the recording.  While this fact may not have any bearing on the legality of the videotaping, it certainly makes it easy to understand why nearly every Fox News host is giddy with the prospect of discovery in this case.  It is clear that ACORN is running the risk that this lawsuit will only serve to expose them even more.

BALTIMORE (AP) – Community activist group ACORN is suing the makers of a hidden-camera video that showed employees of its Baltimore office giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman posing as a prostitute.

The liberal group contends that the audio portion of the video was obtained illegally because Maryland requires two-party consent to create sound recordings.

The two employees seen in the video were fired after it was posted online. The lawsuit says the employees, Tonja Thompson and Shera Williams, suffered “extreme emotional distress.”

Read the full article here.

So far CNN has only reported on the breaking story on blatant ACORN CORRUPTION from angles that attempt to extricate the government funded “community organizing”  enterprise from the extreme crime we caught on videotape.

First CNN pushed the false ACORN line that “[t]his film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed.”

To set that record straight please check the Washington D.C. tape we dropped today at BigGovernment.com, which is also being aired on your cable news competitor with curiously higher ratings.

Now that ACORN lied to you, Jonathan Klein, what are you going to do?

Here’s what I have noticed from your coverage: You brought in the damage control crowd to FRAME the story. Before even airing our damning Baltimore video. You know your audience would turn on ACORN if you showed them the evidence. So instead you put your competitors in journalism in the crosshairs instead of airing a blockbuster report making massive waves elsewhere.

You even trotted out shameless Clinton era apologist Joe Conason to challenge the ETHICS of our expose. Unreal.

What about the ethics of those at ACORN caught on tape trying to help create a brothel featuring illegal immigrant age range 13-15 from El Salvador?

What about the countless laws broken on tape from a group that stands to get billions from President Obama’s “stimulus” package?

Why don’t we wait to have the Columbia Journalism School debate on “journalistic ethics” after you do actual journalism.

When you air the raw ACORN footage that is now viral on the Internet, and being played on FOX NEWS and countless talk radio shows, then and only then — when America can see, hear and smell the stench we have exposed — will I subject myself to a CNN hit job.

I thought I’d heard every possible charge about corruption at ACORN, a feisty, union-backed activist group that became infamous last year when it was investigated for voter registration fraud in 15 states. Just yesterday, 11 ACORN workers were accused by Florida prosecutors of falsifying information on some 900 voter registration forms.

But this morning brings a Fox News report that ACORN officials in Baltimore offered to help get a housing loan and falsify tax documents for a proposed house of prostitution that would employ underage girls from El Salvador. The episode was captured on tape by an undercover filmmaker, James O’Keefe, who wanted to see just how far ACORN would go. Watching the tape — which can be seen at Biggovernment.com — is a creepy experience. ACORN itself has told Fox News the episode represents “gotcha journalism” but wouldn’t comment further until it sees the full tape.

View the entire article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574404962227305566.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

From the transcript of today’s “Rush Limbaugh Show” show:

RUSH: Now, this is incredible.  Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, started a new website recently, BigGovernment.com.  And filmmaker James O’Keefe, 25-year-old independent filmmaker, has his own theory about how to expose people on the left and he’s using Alinsky rules.  One of the Saul Alinsky rules in dealing with your enemies is making your enemies live by their own rules will destroy them.  So O’Keefe’s theory is, hey, just calling attention to their corruption and disagreeing with it and demanding that it stop isn’t going to accomplish anything.  We’ve got to go encourage the corruption and illustrate how it happens.  So what happened was, James O’Keefe posed as a pimp with a 20-year-old woman named Kenya who posed as a prostitute while visiting ACORN’s office in Baltimore.  The couple told ACORN staffers that they wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business.

Now, ACORN advised the woman on two things:  how to avoid being caught paying taxis, how to avoid paying taxes on her business, how to cheat the IRS, and how to get away with running a prostitution business in Baltimore.  We have couple sound bites that illustrate this.  There’s video of this.  The whole video runs about an hour.  They got two long segments of it on O’Keefe’s site at BigGovernment.com.  This is your tax dollars at work, by the way.  ACORN employees, ACORN, four to five billion dollars in the stimulus package directly to them.  Remember, ACORN is Barack Obama’s training ground.  When he got to Chicago he became a community organizer with ACORN.  He taught them how to do things; they taught him how to do things.  We now have an ACORN-type community agitator as president of the United States.  So in this bite, this is the videotape, James O Keefe is posing as the pimp, his woman, Kenya, posing as the prostitute at the ACORN Baltimore office, and in this bite the ACORN employee advises the cameraman on how to hide a prostitution business.

…Now, there’s much more of this if you want to go to BigGovernment.com and see the entire video, but basically what you have is Barack Obama’s group being fooled here by a filmmaker, goes in posing as a pimp with his prostitute, and wanting advice on how to set up a business, ACORN advises them how to set up a business, how to avoid taxes, and at the same time ACORN had no problem with the forced slavery of underage girls from El Salvador.  So the point that O’Keefe’s making here is, look, we know that ACORN is corrupt, we know that they’re a bunch of frauds, 11 of them arrested or indicted down in Miami yesterday for vote fraud and so forth. Of course ACORN said, “We don’t engage in vote fraud, we’re happy these people got caught,” blah, blah, blah.  It is a totally corrupt organization.  They exist to overthrow the system.  They’re made up of people just as angry at this country as Barack Obama and Van Jones and Mark Lloyd are, and Valerie Jarrett and all the rest of them.

View the entire transcript here: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_091009/content/01125109.guest.html