On Tuesday, December 13 a rally was held near the LBJ Library at the University of Texas, Austin to highlight the attack on election reforms launched inside by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder went to Texas to denounce the Lone Star State’s voter ID laws and claimed that simple voter ID laws were somehow discriminatory. Holder ominously claimed that he would use the power of his office to “enforce civil rights protections” during the upcoming 2012 elections.

Outside the LBJ Library nearly 200 citizens gathered to hear a multi-racial panel of six speakers denounce Holder’s partisan attempts to push the administration’s agenda to turn a blind eye to continuing voter fraud that consistently favors candidates from the Democrat Party.

The rally was sponsored by the Houston-based True The Vote, a grass roots voter integrity project staffed by volunteers. True The Vote is a nation-wide organization that has affiliates across the country, every day citizens interested in the integrity of the elections in their home district.

True The Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said she was thrilled by the turnout that was arranged on only a few day’s notice.

We gathered for the purpose of setting the record straight and people came from all over Texas to hear a host of speakers all representing different sides of the issue. All were clearly saying that the thought that photo voter ID laws would in some way suppress the vote or would in some way disenfranchise voters is on its face a farce. This is only being done to advance a politically motivated agenda that has at its core the themes of victimization and race baiting.

In his comments AG Holder cited one Republican in Maryland that was convicted of trying to trick black voters into staying home on Election Day, but what this single case has to do with voter ID laws was unclear. Holder’s intent, it seems, was to dismiss vote fraud from Democrats while shifting the blame to this one Republican. Holder did not mention such Democrat fraud as that seen in the 2008 Indiana primary, the New York Democrat that recently pleaded guilty to vote fraud, or any of the other such cases that can be easily found in the news.

(more…)

Voter fraud is not a figment of your imagination, says former Congressman Artur Davis (D-Alabama).

The use of absentee ballots makes massive electoral fraud possible, Davis told the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro in a startling interview.  Davis’s comments came months after a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted local NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots.  Sowers received a five-year prison term.

“Most voter fraud doesn’t happen on Election Day,” Davis said.  “Very few folks are going to walk into a polling place and claim they’re somebody they’re not.  It happens with the absentee ballots and counties in my old congressional district.  Sometimes 50 percent of the votes cast in Democratic primaries were absentee ballots.”

“There is no reason that half the vote in a community ought to be absentee ballots when the number is 0.01 percent in most communities in the United States,” he said. “How do you get 50 percent of the Democratic primary electorate being absentee in the natural course of things?  You don’t get that.  That comes about when there’s a strategy of cooking the books at the polls, voting people named Donald Duck and manufacturing ballots.”

Davis can’t understand why those on the left oppose voter ID laws such as the law recently enacted in his home state of Alabama.

(more…)

I am here in sunny Houston, Texas attending the opening night of the True The Vote Summit and what a time it has been. We heard some inspiring speeches for this sold out event, saw some interesting attendees, and met an awful lot of great folks.

It has been thrilling to see several hundred handpicked Tea Partiers and local concerned citizens from 27 states here to learn how they, too, can stop vote fraud in their own districts using the methods learned the hard way in 2010 by the King Street Patriots here in Harris County, Texas.

You might recall back in Sept. of 2010 when the KSPers discovered an ACORN guy that had registered over 23,000 fake voters for the 2010 elections here in Texas. That was only the beginning of their efforts to root out vote fraud in one of the most corrupt Democrat controlled areas in the state.

Tonight we heard from True The Vote Chief Catherine Engelbrecht, former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans Von Spakovsky, ACORN Whistle blower and American Majority Rep Anita MonCreif. All gave us spellbinding tales of vote fraud and how important it is to stop. Also in attendance was former Senate candidate from Alaska Joe Miller, RNC Chair candidate Saul Anuzis, and many others.

Today we’ll hear from John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, J. Christian Adams who blew the whistle on the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute the Black Panthers in Philadelphia, and the boss himself Andrew Breitbart — and I even get some podium time to speak on using new media.

What follows is the encapsulated thrust of the messages we heard Friday night.

(more…)

Contrary to popular perception, the criminal group ACORN (Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now) is not quite a’moulderin’ in the grave, folks. Many might recall that Congress turned off the spigot of federal funds flowing into the coffers of the organization responsible for federal election law crimes all across the country. Many might all recall that ACORN itself eventually said it would shutter its operations.

But even with all that recent history, ACORN’s Project Vote is still in operation and one of its main directors is a woman under a cloud of criminal charges in the state of Nevada.

Project Vote is supposed to be separate from ACORN, at least on paper. But as Matthew Vadum writes, “Although legally separate entities, in practice the two are the same, as the congressional testimony of former ACORN/Project Vote employee Anita MonCrief can attest. They share office space, employees, and budgets. Project Vote continues to operate out of ACORN’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.”

Vadum also reports that the ramrod that heads up Project Vote is one Amy Busefink. Busefink is an ACORN employee under indictment for violating election laws in Nevada.

(more…)

ACORN whistle-blower Anita Moncrief held a press conference Friday at the Right Online Convention in Las Vegas. She announced today that she will press FEC charges against the Obama Administration for the campaign’s illegal coordination with ACORN during the 2008 election.

Anita also rolled out her new website Emerging Corruption. The website will focus on fraud and corruption in ACORN and affiliated groups.

(more…)

Even if Congress does move decisively to cut off funding from the self-described network of community organizers who previously called themselves ACORN, the renamed entities are likely to remain potent and well-funded into the foreseeable future, former insiders say.

In fact, donors may find it easier to channel funds in the direction of liberal activists who describe themselves as community organizers now that the sullied name has been dropped, they suggest.

Shortly after ACORN’s leadership announced that it was dissolving on April 1, national and state affiliates repackaged themselves under generic sounding descriptions. ACORN Housing, for example, became known as the Affordable Housing Centers of America.

“Anyone who celebrates the demise of ACORN has celebrated prematurely because they are not going away,” Anita MonCrief, a former Project Vote/ACORN employee, said in an interview. “The network is repositioning itself so it can receive new donations.”

ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Activists for Reform Now, has received over $53 million in federal funds since 1994, federal records show. Although the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a legal challenge to last year’s congressional ban on public funding, there does not appear to be any concerted effort on the part of lawmakers to have it reimposed.

Moreover, it is worth noting that only four Democrats joined with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to oppose an amendment that would allow organizations with a criminal history to receive funding. The amendment was submitted as part of a mortgage bill several months before the videotape scandals broke.

“There’s a real boldness on the part of Democrats who want to keep funding ACORN,” Rep. Bachmann said. “They are incredulous about the possibility of losing their majority and they know which side their bread gets buttered on and ACORN is their friend.”

Even so, only a small-percentage of ACORN’s overall financial support comes from the government, MonCrief, explains. “The rest of the money comes from left-leaning foundations and there is no indication these funding sources will dry up,” she said. “There are also individual donors and you also have to include organized labor.”

MonCrief indentified Wellspring Advisors, Vanguard Charitable Endowment, the Rockefeller Fund and the Tides Foundation as the major conduits for facilitating anonymous donations.

“If someone wanted to contribute directly to ACORN without having their name attached to it they could give a  check to Wellspring Advisors, they can give to Vanguard Charitable Endowment, they can give to Tides Foundation,” she said. “There are so many ways ACORN can obtain money through these anonymous donors  and some are connected to the Rockefeller  Fund.  So long as there is an agenda they are going to make sure that money is funneled to them anyway they can.”

(more…)

The New York Times reported today that long-suffering Brooklyn homeowner Daniel Goldstein has finally been forced out by the state’s eminent domain abuse in the Atlantic Yards case. And the paper turned to ACORN chief Bertha Lewis for some gloating commentary:

Bertha Lewis, a housing advocate who supported the project, bid Mr. Goldstein “good riddance.”

“Low- and moderate-income people had to wait years for housing while he obstructed the Atlantic Yards project,” she said.

Of course, Lewis is much more than just a “housing advocate who supported the project,” she was the CEO of ACORN, a group that signed a contract with Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner “to publicly support the [Atlantic Yards] Project by, among other things, appearing with the Developer before the Public Parties, community organizations and the media as part of a coordinated effort to realize and advance the Project.” In return, Ratner pledged to include a certain amount of “affordable housing” in the project, units that ACORN stood to make a fortune from marketing and managing. As the New York Post reported, “Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN official-turned-whistleblower, estimates the anticipated deal could bring the group $5 million to $10 million annually over multiple years.”

And the money didn’t stop there.

(more…)

What does the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai and ACORN have in common?  Both of them have some bankers on Wall Street worried.  When brokers and traders returned to work after the Thanksgiving Holiday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went on a wild rollercoaster ride dropping as much as 233 points during the trading session due to an announcement that Dubai would be rescheduling the repayment of $3.5 billion in bonds.  This unexpected announcement was not what Wall Street wanted to hear on Black Friday when retail sales were already down by 8% compared to the prior year and Cyber Monday sales were less than robust with individual online purchases being 2% less than they were last year.  All of this at a time when brokers, traders and economists across the country are watching to see if cash strapped consumers are going to bailout retailers from what is shaping up to be a dismal retail Christmas season.

It is understandable why Wall Street would be concerned about Dubai.  Why would they be concerned about ACORN?  On October 24, 2009, Biggovernment.com revealed that the San Diego office of ACORN dumped thousands of documents into a dumpster in advance of an investigation into the organizations activities by California Attorney General Jerry Brown.  I retrieved the documents from a shared public dumpster located behind the local ACORN office.  The documents that were retrieved filled the back of my Suburban.  Much of what was retrieved was truly trash, items such as banana peels, coffee grounds and marketing materials. After sorting through the documents, though, the 20,000 documents that were retained included sensitive personal information, financial records and documents outlining the internal and political workings of ACORN.  One of the documents obtained by Biggovernment.com shows that ACORN had business relationships with 28 major financial institutions for the purpose of assisting homeowners whose mortgages were in foreclosure.

(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…)

Over the last week, Big Hollywood and Big Government have been extensively covering the August 10 conference call between the National Endowment for the Arts and a group of artists – a call on which the artists were encouraged to support President Obama’s agenda, with the tacit promise that they would be handsomely rewarded with government grants.  The NEA representative on the call was then-Communications Director of the NEA Yosi Sergant.

Now we have new evidence that the White House itself has been using its sway to recruit artists – not just to support President Obama’s “volunteerism” initiatives, but to support basic planks of his political agenda, including health care.  In fact, the White House has been tapping its extragovernmental political allies to work with artists with the tacit promise that NEA funds will be in the offing for those who join the Obama Administration political program.

According to a briefing report from Arlene Goldbard, the Pratt Center for Community Development, State Voices, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, on May 12, 2009, “more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery.”  Each of the sponsors of the meeting was contacted by – yes, you guessed it – Yosi Sergant, who had just been promoted from the Office of Public Engagement to serve at the NEA. (more…)

From the New York Post:

Despite a string of scandals that recently led Congress to cut off its federal funding, ACORN still stands to make millions of dollars off its support for Brooklyn’s controversial Atlantic Yards project, The Post has learned.

The left-wing organization — longtime boosters of the $4.9 billion NBA arena and residential- and office-tower project — says it expects to be tapped to market and help decide who gets to live in the coveted, but long-delayed, 2,250 affordable-housing units planned for Atlantic Yards.

This, after Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner helped bail ACORN out of financial trouble last September with a $1 million loan and a $500,000 grant, according to memos.

Although contracts are not yet been signed, Ismene Speliotis, executive director of ACORN’s New York chapter, told The Post her organization “expects to play a role in the marketing and lease-up” of the Prospect Heights project’s affordable housing to be underwritten by the city.

The work would include community outreach and screening people to determine qualified applicants, and then scandal-scarred ACORN would be entrusted with overseeing a lottery system to choose who gets the housing. Ratner’s firm is expected to manage the housing. (more…)