There’s been a great deal made of whether the unemployment rate dropped, or if the number of individuals in the job market dropped by some 1.2 million. If the American Spectator is to believed, this has all been much ado about nothing. Owing to a once-in-a-decade adjustment based upon census data, they make the case that the workforce didn’t lose over a million workers, but neither did the real unemployment rate drop.

In other words, the participation rate (employment-population ratio) was reported to have dropped by 0.3%, exactly the amount of participation rate “drop” created by changing the population number used in the calculation (due to updated census data.) Without this once-a-decade adjustment, the change in participation rate would have been reported as…wait for it…zero.

(more…)

It’s becoming more and more difficult for the Obama White House to deny that White House political director Patrick Gaspard has strong, longstanding ties to the corrupt activist group ACORN.

Gaspard is a longtime operative for ACORN and one of its political parties, New York’s Working Families Party.

Internal ACORN documents show Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 over the past two years while he worked as an executive vice president of Service Employees International Union Local 1199 in New York.

That’s an awfully large tithe for someone who made $111,894 in 2007 and who has a wife and two children. The $111,894 figure comes from SEIU 1199′s most recent publicly available tax return.

Moreover, Gaspard hails from New York which has a crushing tax burden, especially for individuals earning six-figure salaries — and he lived in the upscale neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was unclear at press time if Gaspard’s wife contributes to the family fisc.

It is also entirely possible that the $40,000 Gaspard handed over to ACORN was SEIU money.

(more…)

Having purchased, rented, or placed a down payment on all the political influence up for sale in America, leftist troublemaker George Soros now plans to ramp up his war on markets worldwide by creating an “Institute for New Economic Thinking” (INET).

“The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” Soros told the Financial Times last month.

Soros said he wants Communist China to run this new financial system. “You really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, a financial world order,” Soros said.

If that doesn’t send a chill down the spines of freedom lovers in America and elsewhere, nothing will.

In an interview with Der Spiegel last year Soros said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful — but also very harmful to our society.”

(more…)

White House political director Patrick Gaspard met with ACORN spokesman and lobbyist Scott Levenson, a former co-worker, at the White House the Obama administration disclosed Friday.

Levenson’s inclusion in the newly released list of visitors to the Obama White House makes the president’s claim he’s clueless about his former employer ACORN — and its election fraud trials and tribulations — especially difficult to believe. That’s because Gaspard is President Obama’s right hand man. Some describe him as the new Karl Rove.

The purpose of the visit by Levenson (pictured below) who met with Gaspard in March was not disclosed.

The relentlessly combative Levenson, who is also a registered lobbyist for New York ACORN, was thrown out of Glenn Beck’s TV studio May 6 for suggesting during a commercial break that the TV host was racist for daring to challenge ACORN. Levenson’s been helping to coordinate ACORN’s public disinformation strategy which relies heavily on lies and misdirection.

(more…)

Washington has long been a place where ethics are flexible. If mainstream media outlets are snoozing, it’s easy to get away with a lot.

The mainstream media has paid very little attention to the ties between Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who chairs a House Judiciary subcommittee that might be called upon to investigate ACORN, and Nadler’s close working relationship with ACORN.

Nadler a longtime ACORN ally who has run for Congress on the ticket of ACORN’s political party, the Working Families Party of New York, is now offering advice to ACORN on how it should try to weather the controversies currently embroiling it.

(more…)

Did ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis say anything that was true in her recent speech at the National Press Club?

The embattled ACORN CEO deserved an Academy Award nomination for her virtuoso performance in which she not only depicted ACORN as an innocent victim but also as a whistleblower that tried to nip the subprime mortgage crisis in the bud.

She blamed everyone but herself: “We’ve seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you.”

She blamed Republicans: “The RNC…because we’ve been inflated as the boogeyman, raises almost $2 million a day, every day, and this form of modern-day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.”

Lewis’s statement about the Republican National Committee was immediately torpedoed by RNC chairman Michael Steele who defended ACORN.

(more…)

ACORN just can’t seem to stay away from hookers.

The activist group, which has long worked with criminals as it preys on the weak and the troubled, is on the verge of yet another public relations catastrophe. 

That’s because a cross-dressing Ohio male escort whom ACORN registered multiple times to vote was convicted of full-fledged vote fraud in addition to the lesser crime of voter registration fraud. A spokesman for Cleveland prosecutor Bill Mason (an elected Democrat) confirmed yesterday that a local investigation of ACORN remains wide open.

The conviction of Darnell Nash (shown in photo above), apparently known by several aliases including Serina “Sexy Slay” Gibbs, is hugely significant for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that ACORN has long maintained that vote fraud, as opposed to the lesser crime of voter registration fraud, essentially never happens.

It appears to be another historic first for ACORN.

ACORN’s Ohio chapter had a run-in with another alleged prostitute last fall.

A woman named Shari Bell who was allegedly a crack cocaine user, prostitute, and ACORN worker, was arrested on drug and prostitution charges in October. Bell was arrested by Cincinnati police after she allegedly offered an undercover cop sex for money. Police found a crack pipe in the pocket of her coat.

Real the full story at American Spectator.

Now that ACORN is drowning is an ocean of adverse publicity, its longtime ally the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) claims to have broken with the embattled radical left-wing activist group.

Last week SEIU international secretary-treasurer Anna Burger dropped this political bombshell that has been ignored by the mainstream media.

In response to a question from Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) posed during a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, Burger casually noted that her union “cut all ties to ACORN.”

In an interview Monday night I asked SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette what Burger meant when she said SEIU had cut all ties with ACORN.

Ringuette replied, “We have suspended all contracts and active work with ACORN,” pending the results of a panel of inquiry looking into ACORN. SEIU boss Andy Stern sits on that supposedly independent panel.

(more…)

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.”

(more…)

Over at the American Spectator, Big Government Contributor Matthew Vadum writes:

Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group ACORN has a man in the Obama White House.This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis’s political director in New York.

 Lewis, the current “chief organizer” or CEO of ACORN, was head of New York ACORN from at least 1994 through 2008, when she took over as national leader of ACORN. With Gaspard at work in the White House, Lewis might as well be speaking to President Obama through an earpiece as he goes about his daily business ruining the country.

Read the whole story here.

The activities of the radical, corrupt to the core, left-wing Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which has tangled itself up in an infinitely complex web of deceit, thuggery, and questionable financial dealings, are long overdue for a RICO probe.

Recent well-publicized events that I need not recount here show ACORN’s criminal propensities. In a moment I’ll explain how ACORN’s financial affairs ought to raise a red flag for investigators at the U.S. Department of Justice, but first some background.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was created to prosecute organized crime, allows the federal government to go after individuals who commit any two RICO-related crimes over a decade. The law allows courts to convict persons if it can be shown that they committed those crimes as part of an illegal enterprise and can order disgorgement of their ill-gotten gains from the enterprise.

RICO is the right tool for the job.

Perhaps it’s the only tool for the job because the ACORN network is deliberately structured to deter scrutiny. Its nebulous legal status and opaque corporate structure allow it to keep its activities largely hidden from public view.

(more…)

Rep. Babette Josephs, Chair of PA House State Government Committee & ACORN Member

Despite receiving a “cease and desist” notice from the Department of State to stop soliciting contributions, Pennsylvania taxpayers have given ACORN over $200,000 in state grants since November 2007.  Yet none of the mainstream media in the Commonwealth is bothering to cover this issue.  Nor has it reported on recent efforts to defend this rogue organization.

Jeff Lord, writing in The American Spectator, noted how Rep. Steve Barrar’s efforts to investigate ACORN’s activities in Pennsylvania are being stymied by Rep. Babette Josephs—a self-identified member of ACORN.  Josephs is the Chair of the House State Government Committee—the committee where good government legislation goes to die.

Nate Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation wrote about her blocking reform bills in May 2008, calling her the Cerberus of the Pennsylvania General Assembly.  Cerberus is the giant three-headed dog in Greek Mythology that guards the river Styx, allowing the dead to enter Hades, but preventing anyone—save a few legendary heroes—from exiting.  Josephs is that guard-dog that allows all types of substantive and good-government legislative proposals—like Barrar’s—but never again allows them to see the light of day.

Earlier this week, with the vote to de-fund ACORN in the US Senate and the Census severing ties with the organization, one would think such actions in Harrisburg would yield similar success.  Not so.  Barrar, in an effort to circumvent Cerberus, attempted to suspend House rules to amend a bill that would prevent taxpayer money from flowing to this nefarious group.  But House Democrats, holding a slim majority, stood shoulder to shoulder with Cerberus to thwart Barrar’s efforts.

Haven’t heard about this?  Unfortunately, neither have the people of Pennsylvania who continue to be forced to subsidize Babette Josephs’s organization.

Now, with a budget deal apparently and finally in place—Pennsylvania was the last state without a budget—maybe the media will finally get around to asking where all our money is going.