Posts Tagged ‘ACORN’

Capitol Confidential

More Death Threats? Occupy St. Louis Sends YAF Chapter Threatening Email

by Capitol Confidential

Last Sunday a local chapter of YAF affiliated with Principia College organized a small and peaceful counter presence to the ongoing Occupy St. Louis demonstration at Keiner Plaza in downtown. According to the organizer the group of mostly collegians and minors was met with violent language, intimidation, and death threats. The police, says the organizer, were contacted after self-identified occupy participants called the school and left a message in the voicemail box of Principia’s main line. The school, we’re told, has the message and is reviewing its options with law enforcement.

The organizer details further via email:

As you know, on Sunday, October 16th a St. Louis area chapter of Young Americans for Freedom staged a counter protest against Occupy St. Louis in Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis. The message was one of freedom, capitalism, and limited government. The conservative group was met with a remarkable amount of verbal hostility while at the protest, however it remained physically peaceful.

The night after the protest, two death threats were made against the group of students (which includes a minor.) These threats were made through the students’ school, one was sent as an email, the other was a phone call.

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Matthew Vadum

Stephen Lerner, SEIU Neo-Communist Union Boss, Uses #OWS to Spread Fear, Economic Mayhem

by Matthew Vadum

One of the boldest labor thugs in America today is Stephen Lerner, a crafty economic terrorist who manages to sound like a folksy self-improvement seminar leader while he explicitly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.

“People are ready to move,” said Lerner, an organizer with the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “We have solutions. We just have to build it bigger and larger,” he said during a panel discussion Oct. 3 at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C.

If we are really serious about movement building then we think one part is we have to act heroically, that we have to inspire people by our actions and we have to be willing to take incredible personal and collective risks, that that’s the time and there’s moments where history shifts and we’re going to decide if it shifts. That’s where I think we are and it’s a wonderful place to be because for the last couple of years it’s been shifting the other way.

An SEIU board member, Lerner is one of the architects of a subversive plan that aims to destroy the nation’s financial system through intimidation, mass protests, and the mob violence that accompanies it. As part of it, Lerner targeted JPMorgan Chase for attack earlier this year because the bank would be “a really good company to hate.”

Lerner told a receptive union audience that it is necessary to demonize people like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in order to generate hatred and envy that will help to foment revolution. “We’ve got to be clear on the human beings who are bad,” he told the SEIU 775 convention in Seattle on Sept. 22. Wealthy corporate leaders must be made into social outcasts, despised even by their children, he said. “How do we make it so politicians don’t even want their money because their money’s toxic, it’s dirty, it’s evil.”

“It’s one thing if we say JPMorgan Chase crashed the economy. It’s another thing if we say Jamie Dimon makes $20 million a year, who is involved in the opera and all these philanthropies, and thinks he’s a nice guy, and he’s destroying our lives.”

Lerner also calls upon state and local governments to stop doing business with banks that refuse to pay their “fair share” in taxes, slash interest rates, and forgive overextended homeowners’ mortgage principal. He urges students and local governments –which employ many public sector union members— not to pay back “[u]nfair [d]ebt” unless interest rates are lowered. Such a loan strike “would threaten CEO bonuses and bottom lines of the banks.”

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Matthew Vadum

Working Families Party Recruits ACORN Rent-A-Mobs for #OccupyWallStreet

by Matthew Vadum

Evidence suggests that ACORN, the left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.

Left-wing billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.

The SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on Craigslist dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change.

The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.

WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET [sic] ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERNENCE [sic] GET PAID!” It states:

The WFP is seeking immediate hires.

You must be an energetic communicator, with a passion for social and economic justice.

Only outgoing, articulate dedicated, determined candidates will be considered for the positions.

For those candidates that qualify WFP offers substantial paid-training provided by senior leadership, on varied issues such as: advocacy, public speaking, mobilizing, fundraising, networking and organizing. We invest in passionate people with excellent communication skills and a full benefits package is offered to those candidates that qualify. In addition, there is opportunity for advancement and travel to our satellite chapters and out of state affiliates.

This is not a policy job! Through direct action you will be shaping NY state politics for the next 20 years.” [emphasis added]

As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.

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Andrew Breitbart

‘Crowdsource’ This: Emails Expose #OccupyWallStreet Conspiracy to ‘Destabalize’ Global Markets, Governments

by Andrew Breitbart

We’re in this for the long haul. There are no “solutions” that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It’s in those moments that we have to push the envelop [sic], pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabalize [sic], but maintain momentum. And when that’s the new “normal” then we go farther. That’s how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.

- Email in “Occupy” archive, “Re: Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party Movement?”; Wednesday, October 12, 2011

In keeping with the new media notion of crowdsourcing–enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream media when trawling through Sarah Palin’s emails–Big Government will be providing readers later today with links to a document drop consisting of thousands of emails.

The email archive, created by a private cyber security researcher, appears to contain messages shared by the left’s anarcho-socialist activists during the strategic and daily tactical planning of the “Occupy Wall Street” and broader “Occupy” campaign this fall.

Big Government received a tip about the existence of the archive, and we were able to contact the individual who compiled and posted it. He will describe the archive, and how he obtained the emails, later this morning exclusively on Big Government.

Through “crowdsourcing,” the media and the public will then be able to discover the truth behind the “Occupy” movement.

The archive includes emails, for example, from radical anarchist organizer Lisa Fithian, who was profiled earlier this week at Big Government, and who is one of the leading organizers behind the Occupy movement.

In one email, dated October 1, Fithian applauds the launch of “occupations” throughout the country. She also highlights an ACORN-style illegal home occupation in California, linking to a television news story that reveals the involvement of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which is apparently the reconstituted version of ACORN in California.


OWSMailList_0001-3

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Matthew Vadum

ACORN: Puppet Master of #OccupyWallSt

by Matthew Vadum

The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV.

The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

Working Families Party (WFP) organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement,” Flanders said at the protest in lower Manhattan.

We are “actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today because it’s not working for any of us,” Stamp told Flanders in an interview. Demonstrators are asking “how do we really reform and bring revolutionary changes to the states?”

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Matthew Vadum

Occupy Wall Street Jumps the Shark

by Matthew Vadum

It hasn’t taken long for the socialist-organized “occupation” of Wall Street to jump the shark.

In a surreal news conference at the United Nations, anti-American radical and rogue financier George Soros (net worth: $22 billion) threw in his lot with the thousands of Communists, anarchists, eco-feminists, malingerers, and professional protesters who have been baiting and taunting police in lower Manhattan as part of a mass demonstration that began September 17.

The protests, which have spread to other large cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” Not surprisingly, the remnants of the ACORN network are deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New York ACORN’s new front group, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by veteran ACORN enforcer Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the effort to turn America into one big socialist armpit.

Kest explained why NYCC is involved by using what has become the standard Marxist boilerplate about the financial collapse. “When the big banks tanked our economy they took away millions of people’s shot at achieving the American Dream,” he blogged. “It’s about time all these people come together and hold Wall Street accountable for what they’ve done to our futures and the future of this country.” Of course Kest didn’t bother to mention the role that ACORN played in creating the mortgage bubble by strong-arming Fannie Mae, pushing the financial affirmative action scheme known as the Community Reinvestment Act, and blackmailing banks that didn’t want to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism and drag the populace into economic misery. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. Last year George Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action, said that “the banking crisis” was “the next big thing,” and “the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

Soros said he sympathizes with the rabble. “Actually I can understand [the protesters’] sentiment, frankly,” said the preeminent funder of the American activist Left in remarks to reporters.

But anyone who has followed Soros’s life wouldn’t dare to describe him as a working class hero.

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Tom Fitton

Special Report: ‘The Rebranding of ACORN’

by Tom Fitton

Last week we released “The Rebranding of ACORN,” an important Judicial Watch special investigative report on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).  This is report is the result of an extensive JW investigation of the organization’s transformation into various “spinoffs” and affiliated organizations.

acornspecialreport08222011

The ACORN-affiliated groups existing today are ACORN in all but name.  These groups tend to occupy ACORN’s former offices, are staffed in many cases with former ACORN employees, and remain committed to ACORN’s corrupt mission.

Our investigation has documented 17 ACORN-affiliated organizations in the following states/regions:  Arizona, Arkansas, California, District of Columbia, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New England, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

Among the conclusions of Judicial Watch’s special report, which you can access by clicking here:

  • ACORN lives on in the form of numerous state entities and in such affiliated organizations as Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), The Advance Group, The Black Institute, and Project Vote.  In the words of Bertha Lewis, former chief executive officer of ACORN, “[T]hese entities are carrying on ACORN’s work of organizing low- and moderate-income folks…  [We have created] bullet-proof community-organizing Frankensteins that they’re going to have a very hard time attacking.”

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Andrew Breitbart

Name That H8ful H8er: I Told You Not to Touch Me-Twice

by Andrew Breitbart

The last thing I want for my dear readers is to burden them with the human filth that confronts me daily. But periodically, one of the voices in the comments section of our times comes to life right in front of me in such a way that I’m compelled to make an example of him.

After exposure of Palin-hater and hateful Bristol Palin confronter Stephen Hanks, it dawned on me that maiming and shaming is the only means to put rabid leftists in their place. Miraculously, perhaps over the sheer economics of his misbehavior, Hollywood talent manager Hanks has apologized for accosting 21-year-old Bristol Palin for the sin of being the daughter of a prominent public figure.

The gentleman you see in the picture below rudely intruded in my personal space on the event of my great friend from college Paul Raff’s Birthday lunch at the Brentwood Country Mart (I had the always delicious carnitas tacos and Paul had the chicken chipotle sandwich, extra green sauce). Everything was swell at our fiesta para dos until a cowardly anonymous buffoon disturbed the peace. After overhearing my private discussion, he yelped from 10 yards away, “Waaa, waaa, waaa!! Waaa, waaa, waaa!!”

I curiously responded, “Excuse me, are you talking to me?”

Said cowardly anonymous buffoon replied, “I know who you are. Waaa, waaa, waaa!! Waaa, waaa, waaa!! Always complaining, always complaining.”

It was clear he wanted a public confrontation, and a public confrontation he got. With my hands behind my back (to make it perfectly clear that I was a taking a non-violent tact) and our faces two feet from one another, he attempted to make the conflict about politics, ACORN, and Sherrod. He was trembling worse than Matt Damon after the Red Sox collapse. When it became clear he was light on facts, things got personal. He said, “I know why you act like you do. People in your High School didn’t like you and now you’re taking it out on the rest of us. You were a little guy who got beat up.”

I informed said cowardly anonymous buffoon (who apparently has access to a time-machine) that I played defensive line on Varsity football. “Who was beating me up?,” I said. Who do you know that I know? Who do you know who said this?”

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Matthew Vadum

Obama’s HUD Has Given $730,000 to ACORN This Year Alone. What’s Another $15 Billion More for Alinsky Groups?

by Matthew Vadum

President Obama has given ACORN $729,849 so far this year and billions more in federal cash may be in the pipeline.

The president’s new economic stimulus package, the so-called “jobs bill,” contains as much as $15 billion for radical left-wing groups such as ACORN (his former employer). Obama has been using his presidential bully pulpit to demand that Republicans in Congress “pass this bill,” even though there is no bill yet. Despite all the rhetoric, the proposed “American Jobs Act of 2011” apparently hasn’t even been introduced in Congress.

Credit: Leo Alberti

Meanwhile, longtime ACORN ally Shaun Donovan, who heads Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has been showering ACORN with your tax dollars. The money has gone to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (AHCOA), which is the new name for ACORN Housing. Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name last year.

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Jeannie DeAngelis

Obama Raffle: Dinner With Mr. Lonely

by Jeannie DeAngelis

During Bibi Netanyahu’s 2010 visit to the White House, in the middle of a tense settlement concession conversation an irritated Obama left Mr. Netanyahu sitting in a room to rush upstairs for din-din with Shelley and the girls. Abruptly walking out of the room, the President said “Let me know if there is anything new.”  Either the Israeli Prime Minister was being officially dissed, or Michelle refuses to tolerate any excuse for Barack showing up late for dinner.

However, in the future, should the Prime Minister desire another sit-down with the President of the United States, he’ll have the option of purchasing a roll of tickets for the “Sometime soon, can we meet for dinner/Reelect Barack Obama” raffle.

Before the “Sometime Soon, Can We Meet For Dinner?” initiative, Netanyahu didn’t stand a chance in hell of getting Barack to sit through an entire conversation.  Now, at least Bibi has as much opportunity as anyone else willing to contribute five bucks.

Now, if by chance Bibi’s ticket is pulled out of the spinning drum, Obama, albeit under duress, will be obliged to endure eating blintzes and can no longer escape a Jerusalem settlement discussion using dinner getting cold as an excuse.

The President of the United States selling dinner raffle tickets may indicate that the man is forlorn and in need of genuine companionship. Begging to be shown love by the people who just three years ago were showering him with confetti and weeping at the mere mention of his name, frankly, is both “creepy” and pathetic.

Barack Obama’s dine-with-me/love-me idea started when the 2012 reelection campaign sent out an email with this subject line: “Sometime soon, can we meet for dinner?” Why would an American president ask such an unusual question? Obviously, to goad supporters into donating money in hopes of winning face time with Mr. Lonely.

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Matthew Vadum

ACORN, Soros-tied D.C. Official Admits Apparent Voter Fraud

by Matthew Vadum

Only a week into the job, Washington, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray’s deputy chief of staff resigned from her position after admitting she committed what appears to constitute voter fraud. The resignation of Andrea “Andi” Pringle comes as several U.S. states initiate a much-needed crackdown on rampant electoral fraud.

Pringle acknowledged she voted in the September 2010 primary election in the District of Columbia even though she was residing at that time in Montgomery County, Maryland. The county abuts the District. In her resignation letter Pringle said she was quitting because she had “become a distraction from the important work of” Gray’s administration, the Washington Times reports.

Andrea Pringle (photo by Alan Suderman, Washington City Paper)

Like Mayor Gray, Pringle is a Democrat. She was campaign manager for former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) when she ran for president in 2004. Barack Obama helped to elect Braun to the U.S. Senate in 1992 when he ran a successful get-out-the-vote effort for ACORN unit Project Vote.

Pringle worked on both of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and for his group called the National Rainbow Coalition.

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Tom Fitton

Obama’s HUD Violated ACORN Funding Ban

by Tom Fitton

Time after time, we have found that this administration cares not one whit about following basic laws. What does it mean for Congress to pass and the president to sign a law banning a corrupt organization and its affiliates from receiving federal funds? Apparently the Obama administration could care less. As you will recall, the Obama Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded a grant of $79,819 to ACORN spin-off Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA), despite the fact that Barack Obama signed the ACORN funding ban in October 2009. (And despite the fact that the organization was nailed for misappropriating taxpayer funds!)

We want to know how the HUD can justify this decision. So we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on August 19, 2011, against HUD to obtain records related to the department’s approval of AHCOA as an official “housing agency.”

Pursuant to our FOIA request filed on June 8, 2011, we want access to the following information:

  • Any and all records concerning or relating to the approval of Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA) as a housing agency under Section 106(a)(2) of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968. This request includes, but is not limited to, a copy of all HUD-9900 forms and supporting documentation submitted by, or on behalf of, AHCOA, as well as all records of communication regarding AHCOA’s approval.
  • Any and all records of all applications(s) for grants submitted by AHCOA to HUD.

Judicial Watch’s FOIA request was received by HUD on June 13, 2011, (according to postal records). The agency was required to respond by July 12, 2011. This is about as narrow and simple a document request that Judicial Watch makes. But as of August 19, 2011, the date of Judicial Watch’s complaint, HUD hasn’t turned over a single document, or even indicated when a response can be expected.

AHCOA was previously known as ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc., an ACORN offshoot. ACORN filed for bankruptcy on November 2, 2010. However, as we’ve pointed out many times in this space, the organization lives on in the form of numerous state organizations and various ACORN-allied entities, such as AHCOA.

Importantly, none of these ACORN entities or spin-offs are supposed to receive federal funds! President Obama signed into law legislation known as the Defund ACORN Act on October 1, 2009, and other congressional actions that cut off most federal funds to ACORN “or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations.” Following an ACORN lawsuit challenging the funding ban, the federal courts in New York upheld the constitutionality of the restrictions on August 13, 2010. In June 2011, the Supreme Court refused to hear ACORN’s appeal of this funding ban.

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Matthew Vadum

BREAKING: Obama Dirty Tricks Operative Buffy Wicks to Run Campaign Unit Named After ACORN’s Voter Fraud Factory

by Matthew Vadum

One of the co-conspirators in a White House-approved plot to use federal resources to produce partisan propaganda to advance President Obama’s policy agenda has been chosen to lead an Obama 2012 get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort.

The Obama operative chosen to head the GOTV effort, Buffy Wicks, was deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. In that capacity she participated in a now-infamous 2009 conference call in which Obama officials urged artists to create art that would help advance Obamacare and the rest of the president’s policy objectives.

Wicks will head a GOTV effort named after the branch of ACORN that employed Obama in 1992. Perhaps to honor Obama’s radical roots, the “campaign-within-a-campaign” will be named “Project Vote,” according to Politico’s Mike Allen.

Obama’s storied performance as head of Project Vote in Illinois during the 1992 campaign was widely credited with getting the radical left-wing Democrat Carol Moseley Braun elected to the U.S. Senate. It also helped Obama cement his reputation as a master community organizer.

The original Project Vote is part of the ACORN network. It continues to operate out of ACORN’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, and works with the new ACORN front groups created after ACORN, the shell corporation that ran the network, filed for bankruptcy last November.

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Matthew Vadum

ACORN, Eh? Canadian Branch of Infamous Group Shakes Down Money Mart, Western Union

by Matthew Vadum

ACORN wants a cut of the huge international remittance business, valued worldwide at US$444 billion.

So the organized crime syndicate is trying to shake down the financial services companies that handle those international money transfers.

In Canada, the local arm of ACORN is trying to shake down Money Mart and Western Union. ACORN, which used to employ President Obama, is hitting these two companies because it wants them to pay it protection money. The corporate shakedown is just one of the dubious methods ACORN uses to victimize businesses.

ACORN Canada’s new president Kay Bisnath complains the fees banks and other companies charge for money transfers are “exorbitant.” Ostensibly to help poor people, ACORN is demanding that Western Union charge no more than 5 percent for overseas remittances.

Canada’s biggest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, which is left-wing even by Canadian standards, is helping ACORN’s Canadian affiliate by providing political propaganda disguised as news. (Canada’s taxpayer-funded TV network, CBC, is also doing its bit to promote ACORN.) The Red Star, as some Canadian conservatives half-jokingly call it, is home to America-hating socialist writers such as Thomas Walkom and Linda McQuaig.

The pairing actually makes a lot sense. Both the Star and ACORN are on the far left and both have an impressive record of union-busting.

In the latest in a series of pro-ACORN puff pieces, the Star’s immigration reporter, Nicholas Keung, wrote a feature article that used Rassel Mohammad, a Bangladeshi immigrant to Canada, as a prop.

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Matthew Vadum

Voting Early and Often in NC: Four Charged with Crime the Left Says Doesn’t Exist

by Matthew Vadum

We keep hearing from the usual suspects on the Left that voter fraud is virtually non-existent, a figment of the collective imagination of racist vote-suppressing Republicans.

And yet more evidence of voter fraud keeps surfacing.

In Wake County, North Carolina, Shelia Ramona Hodges, Kierra Fontae Leach, Brandon Earl McLean, and Lela Devonetta Murray have been charged with voting twice, a felony.

According to TV station WRAL

McLean and his fiancee Leach admit to participating in early voting in the 2008 election. Unsure about the process on Election Day, they said they went to the polls to make sure their vote counted.
“I was confused and did not know,” McLean said. “This is my second time voting for a president in my life.”
Leach said she even told a poll worker about it.
“We told her we had already early voted, and we just wanted to make sure it counted,” Leach said. “She said, ‘If you have a ballot, then go ahead and vote.’ And that is what we did. We did not think anything of it.”
McLean said they were not trying to cheat the system.

District Attorney Colon Willoughby said he’s not finished yet. “One of the bedrocks of our democracy is that we have fair and open elections, and I think this goes to the fabric of fairness and the public’s perception of the credibility of open elections.”

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Matthew Vadum

BREAKING: ‘Banana Republic’ ACORN Hit with Maximum Fine in Voter Fraud Scheme

by Matthew Vadum

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was fined the maximum of $5,000 in Las Vegas today for its role in a massive voter fraud conspiracy.

Judge Donald Mosley said if an individual, as opposed to a corporation, had been before him, he would have handed down a 10-year prison sentence. “And I wouldn’t have thought twice about it,” he said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Mosley criticized ACORN, which used to employ President Obama, for making a “mockery” of America’s electoral process. “This isn’t a banana republic,” he said.

In April ACORN pleaded guilty to felony-level unlawful compensation for registration of voters. With the full knowledge of upper management, ACORN illegally offered cash bonuses to its voter registration canvassers in a scheme called “Blackjack.” Canvassers received extra money if they hit the magic number of 21 registrations in a day. (ACORN, predictably, denies its upper echelon knew anything about the scheme.)

The organized crime syndicate probably won’t pay a cent of the fine. That’s because ACORN, the shell corporation that ran the corrupt ACORN network, is in bankruptcy.

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Matthew Vadum

Criminal Group ACORN Awaits Sentencing in Massive Voter Fraud Conspiracy

by Matthew Vadum

After pleading guilty to voter fraud in Las Vegas in April, ACORN will be sentenced Wednesday for participating in a massive conspiracy.

The organized crime syndicate, which used to employ President Obama, may be fined as little as $1,000. Because ACORN, the shell corporation that ran the corrupt ACORN network, is in bankruptcy, it may end up paying nothing at all.

ACORN was convicted of felony-level unlawful compensation for registration of voters. With the full knowledge of upper management, ACORN illegally offered cash bonuses to its voter registration canvassers in a scheme called “Blackjack.” Canvassers received extra money if they hit the magic number of 21 registrations in a day.

Senior ACORN executives Amy Adele Busefink and Christopher Howell Edwards were also convicted for their roles in the scheme. ACORN cared so little about the conspiracy that its voter fraud division, Project Vote, put Busefink in charge of the group’s national get-out-the-vote drive in 2010 while she was under indictment in Nevada.

Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins, and various celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long.

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Der Kommissar

Comrades! President Obama Is Just Another Black Man Redlined By Racist Credit Agencies!

by Der Kommissar

Racism! That’s what is to blame, comrades, for Standard & Poor’s dastardly downgrade of America’s credit rating. Don’t be fooled by the benign appearance of “AA+”. Those A’s are meant to make us feel better. But we know when we’re being graded on a curve just for the sake of affirmative action. We hear the racist condescension in that “plus.”

What S&P really meant to say was “F”–to which, comrades, we must declare: “F you, too!”

Decades of reckless federal spending and expanding government–and now the rating agencies have a problem with it?

Robert Henderson, Jr. said it best at The Grio–NBC’s segregated, er, special section for black opinion and commentary: “…America’s credit will have been downgraded for the first time, with a black man in the White House, potentially reinforcing the stereotype that black people are poor money managers.”

Could the racism be any more obvious? The moneylenders and their media–yeah, I said it!–have put up with the profligacy of irresponsible white presidents forever.

Every single white president for generations has raised the debt ceiling over and over again. George W. Bush declared war on the world at a cost of trillions of dollars we simply didn’t have. Along comes a black president–and look what happens. Panic! Downgrade!

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Tom Fitton

Can We Protect Our Elections From ACORN?

by Tom Fitton

With little more than a year before the 2012 elections, the press has started to sharpen its focus on the candidates. Judicial Watch, meanwhile, is deeply concerned about the integrity of the electoral process — especially given the rampant voter registration fraud caused by the “community organization” ACORN and its partner in crime Project Vote in the last several election cycles. (Do not believe the rumors that ACORN is defunct. As I’ve said before, the organization has splintered into organizations across the country and they are prepared to wreak havoc in 2012. Project Vote is going strong, and hasn’t changed its stripes.)

Last Tuesday, I moderated a Judicial Watch educational panel entitled “The Voter Fraud Threat to Free and Fair Elections” at Judicial Watch’s headquarters here in Washington, DC.

My guests were: John Fund, a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy and the upcoming The Threat of Voter Fraud to Free and Fair Elections; Christian Adams, former Department of Justice Attorney in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division; and Catherine Engelbrecht, Founder of both King Street Patriots and True the Vote.

It was about as good a panel as we’ve ever hosted, and viewing it will educate, worry and motivate you. You can click here to watch a video of the panel, which was also streamed live over the Internet. We will have a written transcript on our website very soon.

Following our educational panel, on Thursday we released documents obtained from the Colorado Department of State showing that ACORN and its affiliate, Project Vote, successfully pressured Colorado officials into implementing new policies for increasing the registration of public assistance recipients during the 2008 and 2010 election seasons. And, as you might expect, following the policy changes the percentage of invalid voter registration forms from Colorado public assistance agencies was four times the national average!

See what I mean by chaos and havoc?

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Matthew Vadum

Sarah Palin Hits Another Bullseye: If Tea Partiers Were Terrorists, Obama Would Pal Around With Them

by Matthew Vadum

It is a time-honored tactic of radicals to accuse their enemies of what they do in order to convert a negative into a positive, as the master of political agitation Saul Alinsky taught.

This explains the Left’s newfound interest in the lie that the Tea Party is comprised of “terrorists.”

Unless you think petitioning the government for lower spending is somehow akin to flying airplanes into buildings, you’ve got to agree with Sarah Palin, whose recent salvos on the topic are dead-on.

As President Obama and his merry band of Marxists continue driving America off a cliff, Palin (and columnist Charles Krauthammer) have been pushing back hard against the liberal talking point that Tea Party supporters are terrorists.

Her comments came after Vice President Joe Biden, Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and their socialist buddies at MSNBC recently breathed new life into the “terrorist” smear. Because President Obama, who himself has ties to real, live terrorists, has not upbraided the vice president, we can safely assume he agrees with Biden.

Said Palin on Fox News Channel:

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