Earlier today, Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe and Shaughn Adeleye were guests on the Glenn Beck Radio Program.

In the first segment, Breitbart discuss various stories from Big Government and Big Journalism including the SEIU protests at the home of B of A executive Gregory Baer and Huffington Post & Media Matters unusual involvement in the coverage of that story.

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In the second segment, James O’Keefe and Shaughn Adeleye join Beck for a discussion of the latest video investigation surrounding the Census Bureau.

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$15 billion. That’s the budget of the 2010 US Census. Where to begin with how it has been misspent? When we look back at the past ten years, we can see how the Census Bureau is an institution in need of major reforms because poor work has been rewarded and PR spinsters have been left running the show to make it seem like everything is hunky-dory.

The 2010 Census is currently in the non-response follow-up (NRFU) stage of operations (to track down individuals who did not mail back their 2010 Census forms on time), which is the largest and most expensive stage of the 2010 Census. 635,000 workers are involved in this operation, and it is the largest peacetime civilian hiring effort in the history of the United States. Yet this operation has been plagued by failure from the get-go. Let’s first take a look at the now infamous handheld computer debacle:

In 2006 the Census Bureau signed a contract with the Florida-based Harris Corporation to design handheld computers (HHCs) that would be used for the 2010 Census. This contract was initially worth $600 million. Yet because of poor directions and incompetence from Census Bureau officials about what they desired and a the failure on on the part of Harris Corp. to determine what specifications the government needed, the designs that were used for this project were flawed from the get-go.

Rather than creating a “fixed price contract,” the government created a “cost-plus contract” that essentially gave the Harris Corp. a blank check to fiddle around as they wished to the tune of $600 million. And, they fiddled and fiddled and fiddled and failed.

So what did the Census Bureau do to correct this problem? They gave the same company an extra $200 million in 2008 and told them to try it again. Ultimately, Harris delivered some handheld computers that were able to be used during the Address Canvassing phase of 2010 Census operations, but employees have repeatedly claimed that these devices were extremely faulty, slow, and at times completely non-functional. (Had the Census Bureau decided to equip its employees with special versions of the Blackberry or I-Phone, such a debacle would have been avoided.)

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From May 3rd to May 8th of this year, I worked for the United States Census Bureau in Lafayette, Louisiana.  With the aid of a hidden camera, I witnessed and captured evidence of wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars–one systemic failure after another of this a Constitutionally mandated entity during a time of great recession and high unemployment.

The training course consisted of four three-hour days and one eight-hour day. I was paid for a total of 20.75 hours, 3.5 of which I did not work. I was paid with your money, money that was stolen from you.

On multiple occasions I was given three 15-minute breaks over the course of three hours and was instructed to fill out false ending times. When I confronted the supervisor about the discrepancy, she said she was just “giving us this time” and told me “I think you’re worrying over nothing.”  At any business, this would be theft.

We were also coached to indicate government phone numbers were in fact our personal cell phone numbers (a blatant lie) in order to prevent people from calling and harassing us. (more…)

From the New York Post:

You know the old saying: “Everyone loves a charade.” Well, it seems that the Census Bureau may be playing games.

Last week, one of the millions of workers hired by Census 2010 to parade around the country counting Americans blew the whistle on some statistical tricks.

The worker, Naomi Cohn, told The Post that she was hired and fired a number of times by Census. Each time she was hired back, it seems, Census was able to report the creation of a new job to the Labor Department.

Below, I have a couple more readers who worked for Census 2010 and have tales to tell.

But first, this much we know.

Each month Census gives Labor a figure on the number of workers it has hired. That figure goes into the closely followed monthly employment report Labor provides. For the past two months the hiring by Census has made up a good portion of the new jobs.

Labor doesn’t check the Census hiring figure or whether the jobs are actually new or recycled. It considers a new job to have been created if someone is hired to work at least one hour a month.

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The Census Bureau dumped ACORN as a “national partner” in the 2010 head count last fall after James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s undercover videos spotlighting ACORN’s rampant corruption debuted here on Big Government.

In a letter dated Sept. 11 that terminated the Census Bureau’s relationship with ACORN, Census director Robert M. Groves wrote

Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts.

While not decisive factors in this decision, recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.

The Census had to act because it’s important to keep dishonest and incompetent workers far away from the nation’s once-a-decade Census.

The data gathered are used to help determine who gets what and how much in the nation’s federalist system of governance. Population figures arrived at through the Census decide which states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the redistricting of state legislatures, county and city councils, and electoral districts.

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Article I, section 2, of the Constitution requires the populations of the various states to be enumerated every 10 years. The first such census was conducted in 1790; its main purpose was to apportion seats in the House of Representatives among the original 13 states.

The Founders scarcely could have foreseen the stunningly costly and politically sensitive undertaking the census now has become.

There is much at stake. Census figures will be used to shift representation in Congress from states where populations have declined since 2000 to those where they have grown. By 2012, every state also will have redrawn its own legislative district boundaries to reflect recent population trends.

Moreover, the 2010 headcount will determine how every state and community fares over the next decade when federal funds are allocated for a host of social programs, including health care and job training; highway, bridge and tunnel construction; public education; and much else. The jackpot of taxpayer-financed loot to be doled out based on census results now amounts to about $400 billion. With federal spending reeling out of control, billions more likely will be up for grabs.

How much will it cost to count noses this year? No one really knows. The Census Bureau began planning for 2010 immediately after 2000. It is not yet fully ready. Preparations for 2010 have been plagued by fraud, cost-overruns and failures of computer hardware and software.

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On Tuesday, May 4, 2010, the Director of the U.S. Census Bureau sent a welcome memo addressed to the part-time workers his agency had allegedly hired to complete the 2010 Census.  He referred the memo to his “600,000 new colleagues,” whom he called “the heart of the operations for the second half of the census” and “the face of the US Federal government.”

On Friday, May 7, the U.S. Department of Labor released its latest official monthly jobs report, which noted that “Federal government employment was up in April, reflecting the hiring of 66,000 temporary workers for the decennial census.”  This followed prior DOL reports of Census hiring in March(48,000), February(15,000), and January(9,000). Even if all those “temporary” Census workers hired as early as January were still on the job on May 4 when the Director sent his“welcome” note, the official data through April suggests the Census Bureau has hired 138,000 temporary workers this year, not 600,000.

Where are the other 462,000?

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Despite reports last fall that the Census Bureau had severed ties with community-organizing group known as ACORN, Americans might want to think twice before opening their doors to canvassers for the 2010 Census after reading what I discovered this morning.

According to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office Oct. 7, approximately 785 employees with disqualifying criminal records could still end up working for the Census Bureau this year. Excerpts (below) show the exact wording of the agency’s frightening information about the people who go door to door conducting interviews and collecting information for the 2010 Census:

The Bureau’s efforts to fingerprint employees, which was required as part of a criminal background check, did not proceed smoothly, in part because of training issues. As a result, over 35,000 temporary census workers — over a fifth of the address canvassing workforce — were hired despite the fact that their fingerprints could not be processed and they were not fully screened for employment eligibility.

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“Ever since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform in 1912, seven presidents — Democrats and Republicans alike — have taken up the cause of reform time and time again,” President Obama said in a statement hailing the Christmas Eve Senate vote to take over 1/6 of the nation’s economy.  “Such efforts have been blocked by special-interests lobbyists who have perpetrated the status quo that works better for the insurance industry than it does for the American people.”

Note the date of TR’s “calling” for reform. It’s 1912.  Nationalized health care was part of the platform of the Progressive Party that year and every year thereafter. Americans are more familiar with the name Theodore himself gave to that third party bid. After being shot by a would-be assassin in Milwaukee, TR said it takes more than a single bullet to stop a Bull Moose. Instantly, the colorful sobriquet was applied to the Progressive Party.

What did Theodore himself think of his new-found allies, the Progressives? He was sincerely committed to reform. And he certainly thought he had been cheated out of the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1912. After all, he had won all the state party primaries in the limited number of states that held them. But TR also recognized that some of his Progressive supporters went over the top. For them, he coined the wonderful phrase, “the lunatic fringe.”

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Think big. Gigantic. This is the latest from Charles Shumer, the Democrat from New York:

When he found out that Adidas was planning to outsource manufacturing of NBA jerseys he “called on the league to terminate its contract with the German-based sportswear giant unless it halts plans to transfer production of game-day jerseys from an upstate New York facility to Thailand.”

Great idea! Let’s make sure that we force companies to produce stuff at the highest possible cost in the name of some lame “buy and make American” nonsensical theory. I am sure that forcing Adidas to give up on the possibility to reduce its production costs will do wonders for this economy.

Besides, as George Mason University’s Don Boudreaux noted in a still unpublished letter to the editor of the New York Daily News yesterday:

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Journalists need to ask themselves, how did this happen? How could they miss the corruption at ACORN? President Obama was once an ACORN lawyer, so the group is certainly significant enough to warrant media scrutiny. Then how did all the seasoned professionals get scooped by two students–James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles–one of whom isn’t old enough to legally drink?

ACORN’s many problems have been well known for quite a while, at least to anyone venturing beyond network newscasts and liberal blogs. As an organization, ACORN doesn’t just limit itself to churning out forged voter registrations. It’s a full-blown racketeering enterprise worthy of The Sopranos, and it finances its operations with the help of taxpayer money.

So how could the major media fail to hold ACORN to account all these years?

I have my pet theory.

Political correctness has been slowly rotting the establishment media to its core, to the point where few professional journalists would dare launch a serious investigation into the exalted Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. Why? Simple: according to the tenets of political correctness, the racial makeup of the communities being “organized” automatically confers the presumption of moral superiority upon ACORN. So all those nasty rumors about ACORN must be no more than lies spread by racist propagandists.

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When ACORN was announced as a national partner with the Census Bureau, I had grave concerns that the accuracy and integrity of the 2010 census would be jeopardized.

One of ACORN’s responsibilities would have been to recruit census workers.  Given ACORN’s propensity for falsifying government documents, it seemed illogical that their employees would now be handling census forms.  The Census Bureau was, in effect, inviting fraud in the 2010 census.

As the Ranking Republican on the Census Oversight Subcommittee, I privately encouraged the Bureau to reconsider.  Subsequently, the Bureau and I engaged in a confrontational public dispute over their relationship with ACORN.

The Bureau would eventually listen to reason and agreed that ACORN could not be trusted to recruit census workers, but they continued to defend their partnership with this criminal enterprise.  When the despicable conduct of ACORN was caught on tape and broadcast on BigGoverment.com, the Bureau officially got out of the business of apologizing for ACORN.

New Census Bureau Director Robert Groves deserves our respect for doing the right thing.  Immediately following his confirmation, Director Groves pledged to me that he would seriously review ACORN’s partnership status.  It is clear to me that Director Groves had ACORN on a short leash. (more…)

FoxNews.com reports:

[ACORN co-founder Wade] Rathke has repeatedly blasted the news media and conservative groups for intentionally targeting ACORN because of its progressive agenda. In a posting on his “Chief Organizer Blog,” Rathke said the Census Bureau’s decision to break ties with ACORN showed “how willing the Obama administration is open to a cave-in to the conservatives on false pretenses on a completely fake ‘issue.’”

“This is all just more reputational McCarthyism as the rightwing and Republicans attack ACORN,” he wrote. (more…)

IRS ACORN doc –

From GOP Leader:

Today House Republicans, led by Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH), are sending the following letter to President Obama asking him to use his authority to end all funding to and break all government ties with ACORN:

Dear Mr. President:

We write to you today in the wake of new reports of potentially criminal activity involving associates of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) to respectfully request that you use your authority to publicly disclose and terminate all federal funding to ACORN and its affiliates.  It is evident that ACORN is incapable of using federal funds in a manner that is consistent with the law.  Immediate action is necessary to ensure that no additional tax dollars are directed to ACORN.  Simply put, ACORN should not receive another penny of American taxpayers’ money.

Congressional pressure, coupled with the impact of recent media reports, prompted the U.S. Census Bureau on September 11 to end its partnership with ACORN.  We support this decision by the Census Bureau, and believe it is vital that all other federal agencies with ties to ACORN follow the Census Bureau’s example by severing all ties to ACORN and its affiliates, whether those ties consist of partnerships or the awarding of federal funds, including federal funds distributed through state and local governments from federal block grants. (more…)

From FoxNews.com:

This story has everything you could ever want – corruption, sleazy actions at tax-funded organizations, firings, government ties, sex, hookers. It is a network news director’s dream. Imagine the ratings. But almost no one is covering it.

Bruce Springsteen once wrote: “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come).” I doubt he expected that story of love gone wrong would become ideal political commentary for the group known as ACORN.

The small scandal showing an embarrassing video of Baltimore ACORN staffers looking like they were giving tax advice on how to set up a brothel, is now national news. — This story has everything you could ever want – corruption, sleazy actions at tax-funded organizations, firings, government ties, sex, hookers. It is a network news director’s dream. Imagine the ratings!

Only almost no one is covering it.

This is the news media in the era of Van Jones and President Obama. The major outlets cover what they want and create the themes they want. When they find something inconvenient, they let it pass. They didn’t like the Van Jones story, so they ignored it. The network news media liked the financial entity known as Fannie Mae, so they ignored that scandalous organization for years. ACORN is getting the same treatment. (more…)

From the American Spectator:

Here’s the Saturday morning round-up on the Census Bureau story for the formerly mainstream media, checking out their home Web pages:

Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, CBS News, CNN Sucks — story isn’t there. WashPost did run a piece about the Big Government expose’ in DC.

MSNBC, to its credit, posted a link to an AP version of the story near the top of their homepage. Some of the others above have the AP story too, but they don’t headline it on their homepages. This is significant because all the major news organizations have an auto-feed of wire service stories to their sites — MSNBC just took the trouble to link it from their homepage.

Fox News of course has followed the story all along, and the Washington Times ran the AP version.

And kudos to ABC News (top of their homepage) and reporter Jake Tapper. Unlike the other lazy and indifferent bureaus listed above, Tapper stayed on the story doing original reporting, crediting Fox News and Big Government for their scoops, embedded one of James O’Keefe’s YouTube videos in his story, and got a response that no one else did:

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FoxNews.com reports:

After Census Severs Ties, ACORN May Face Scrutiny of Housing Grants
ACORN Housing Corporation received $1.6 million in federal money to provide housing services to low-income communities in this fiscal year

Conservatives have cheered the Census Bureau’s decision to sever ties with ACORN because it had lost confidence in the group, but the hidden-camera videos that prompted ACORN to fire four workers this week could raise more questions about the federal funding ACORN receives for housing outreach.

ACORN Housing Corporation received $1.6 million to provide housing services to low-income communities in this fiscal year, ending Sept. 30, according to USASpending.gov, a federal government Web site for tracking government grants.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development Grants has given $8.2 million to ACORN in the years between 2003 and 2006, as well as $1.6million to ACORN affiliates.

HUD could not be reached for comment. (more…)

TRANSCRIPT–Guest-host Guy Benson discussed ACORN with Charles Krauthammer on Friday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show”:

Guy Benson: Charles, I want to quickly shift, as we have just a little over a minute left here, to the home front, and a domestic story that is breaking within the last few minutes, which is the Census Bureau citing the brewing and growing scandal at ACORN, they have cut ties with ACORN entirely when it comes to the 2010 Census. Your reaction?

Charles Krauthammer: ACORN has all of the appearance of a criminal racket. This is graphic appearance, incredibly strong evidence, but it’s at the end of a long list of evidence going back years and years. I’m glad that the Census is cutting its ties. What I’m worried about is that the Stimulus package had millions of dollars, and there are loopholes in there which would allow it to end up in the hands of ACORN, and that’s what people ought to be looking at right now.

GB: Yes.

CK: That’s where our investigative journalism ought to be headed. Are they now going to be getting our tax money in large doses to continue their, what appear to be racketeering operations? (more…)