For his leadership, superior ethics, unwavering integrity, compassion for young women, and for serving as a shining beacon of inspiration for his fellow ACORN employees, I am honored to present Felix Harris, program director at ACORN Housing, with the humble award of ACORN EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR.

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Follow the rest of the LA Story:

ACORN: The LA Story, Part I

ACORN–The LA Story, Part II: ‘We knew we were gonna put in Obama.’

That’s why the Times got scooped by outlets such as Fox News, for which it has nothing but contempt, on revelations that led to the fall of community organizing behemoth Acorn.

The wound was self-inflicted, rooted in little more than the partisanship of protecting a favored president. It left the field clear for a couple of journalism students to show that Acorn staffers openly encouraged pimping, child prostitution, human trafficking, mortgage fraud and tax evasion.

It’s right there on tapes posted to Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com. Unlike the disdainful Times, Fox ran with it, toppling a behemoth of political power.

Read the whole thing here.

That leaves 305 members of the House who are silent. If you want to find out whether your Congressman has taken a stand against an organization whose employees are eager to facilitate a child prostitution ring, call the House switchboard at 202-224-3121.

As James O’Keefe noted in his latest post, “Keep on the pressure. Never let up.”

2009-09-15_ACORN_Letter_to_President_Obama-1 –

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The U.K. Telegraph reports on the ACORN scandal in today’s edition:

The US Census Bureau has broken links with the controversial community group Acorn, once a close ally of President Barack Obama, after it supported a purported brothel owner with a stable of underage prostitutes Photo: GETTY

Group once linked to Barack Obama taped giving advice to ‘brothel owners’
The US Census Bureau has broken links with the controversial community group Acorn, once a close ally of President Barack Obama, after it supported a purported brothel owner with a stable of underage prostitutes.

Acorn employees were taped giving advice on tax avoidance and employment of 13-year-old illegal immigrants to Right-wing activists posing as brothel owners.

“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,” said Robert Groves, the census director.

Acorn – the Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now – is a poverty action group with over 400,00 members that pushes for better housing, government grants and voters registration.

The group became a controversial 2008 election issue after investigations showed that employees submitted dozens of false voter registration forms, including some with names such as Mickey Mouse.

Mr Obama, however, vigorously defended Acorn, saying last year: “I come out of a grassroots organising background.

“I’ve been fighting alongside Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

Read the full article here.

ACORN Fires More Officials for Helping ‘Pimp,’ ‘Prostitute’ in Washington Office

Two more ACORN officials were fired Friday after a second video surfaced showing staffers in the community organizers’ Washington office offering to help a man and woman posing as a pimp and prostitute acquire illegal home loans that would help them set up a brothel.

The firings came less than 24 hours after another pair of ACORN officials from the group’s Baltimore office were canned for instructing the “pimp” and “prostitute” how to falsify tax forms and seek illegal benefits for 13 “very young” girls from El Salvador that pair said they wanted to import to work as child prostitutes.

Both of the encounters were videotaped on a hidden camera wielded by 25-year-old independent filmmaker James O’Keefe, posing as the pimp — tapes that have ignited calls for investigations of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

The group’s leaders said Friday they were “appalled and angry” at what their staffers had done, but insisted the videos were part of a political “smear” campaign and not representative of the institution as a whole.

“But that does not excuse the behavior of the employees,” wrote ACORN’s president Alton Bennet and executive director Mike Shea. “We have fired them and are initiating an internal review of practices and reminding all staff of their obligation to uphold the highest legal and ethical standards.”

Read the whole article here.

Hugh Hewitt: I think you’re right. It will come down to whether or not there are enough Democrats who will lemming-like go over the cliff for the benefit of President Obama’s vision for America. And that remains to be seen. Let me ask you about the ACORN story. Have you been following the story at www.biggovernment.com that Andrew Breitbart has loosed about…

Mark Steyn: Yeah.

HH: What do you make of this?

MS: Well, this is a story in which he’s got some amazing footage of ACORN officials telling a pimp and a prostitute how to lie to the IRS, and how to claim mythical, underage dependents in exotic lands as dependents for taxation purposes and various other things. It’s fascinating stuff, because it’s a glimpse of what community organization is in action. Community organization means bigging up your base. And if necessary, that means conscripting all kinds of peculiar figures, including pimps, prostitutes and their various fictional or real dependents in foreign lands, and claiming benefits for them. And it’s absolutely outrageous that actually more of this wasn’t exposed in the campaign, because Obama’s connection to ACORN, and his willingness to give ACORN a role in the United States Census, puts a huge question mark over the reliability of government data, and over U.S. elections, not so much in blue and red states, but in purple states, it puts a big question mark over the integrity of those elections.

HH: It was the second ACORN story this week. There was one in Florida about false registrations where indictments have come down, raising the specter perhaps of pattern and practice investigation by that U.S. attorney. But by itself, right now, we’ve got one corrupt ACORN official advising two young, undercover investigative journalists on how to import child prostitutes, and claim them on their tax form.

MS: Right.

HH: As it is, I don’t know that it moves farther. But if there are other shoes that dropped, does this become a major scandal?

MS: Yes, I think so, because what is odd to me, if you look for example at the way Republicans are always being called on to distance themselves from their so-called lunatic fringe, the pattern here is that on the other side of the aisle, there is a lunatic mainstream. ACORN should not be a respectable group, and should not be anywhere near the United States Census. But as we saw with the Van Jones story, no matter how radical you are, on the left, it’s very easy for the most extreme radical to get right up close to the levers of power in the United States. That is where, unfortunately, that is where Obama’s lived most of his adult life, and that is where most of his associations are.

Read the full transcript of the interview here.

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Representative Charles W. Boustany, Jr., (R-Southwest Louisiana), today called for a hearing to investigate the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and their tax filing assistance programs following evidence of suggested tax fraud.

“In light of the apparent flagrant and willful attempts to suborn tax fraud, I ask you to schedule a hearing of the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee as soon as practicable to investigate ACORN’s activities in providing tax advice and tax preparation services, as well as whether ACORN has conducted activities inconsistent with the requirements for retaining tax-exempt status under Code section 501(c)(3),” Boustany said. “These serious allegations involve the administration and enforcement of our Federal tax laws, which fall directly under the jurisdiction of the Subcommittee on Oversight.”

Boustany, Ranking Member of the Oversight Subcommittee for the House Ways and Means Committee, has jurisdiction over tax policy and the Internal Revenue Service.

The full letter follows:

September 11, 2009

The Honorable John Lewis
Chairman – Subcommittee on Oversight
Committee on Ways and Means
1102 Longworth House Office Building
Washington D.C., 20515

Dear Chairman Lewis:

I was deeply disturbed by a video that came to my attention yesterday in which an official for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) instructs individuals on how to violate Federal laws (including tax laws) in most disturbing and unsettling ways.  If you have not seen it, I urge you to review the video, which can be found at: http://biggovernment.breitbart.com/.

In light of the apparent flagrant and willful attempts to suborn tax fraud, I ask you to schedule a hearing of the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee as soon as practicable to investigate ACORN’s activities in providing tax advice and tax preparation services, as well as whether ACORN has conducted activities inconsistent with the requirements for retaining tax-exempt status under Code section 501(c)(3).

As the video clearly shows, a male and a female posed as individuals seeking housing and tax assistance from ACORN, whose staff coached them on how to commit Federal tax fraud.  In addition to advising these individuals to underreport their income to the IRS, when the filmmaker and his colleague informed ACORN officials that they intended to transport underage girls from El Salvador into the United States for illicit purposes, an ACORN official advised them that they could claim up to three of these girls as dependents for the purpose of claiming refundable child tax credits.  Such conduct shocks the conscience on many levels, and given the implications for Federal tax administration, further investigation by this Subcommittee into ACORN’s activities is most certainly warranted.

Unfortunately, evidence has mounted that ACORN has exhibited a consistent pattern of blatantly disregarding Federal tax laws.  A July 23, 2009 minority staff report published by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform found that, “By intentionally blurring the legal distinctions between 361 tax-exempt and non-exempt entities, ACORN diverts taxpayer and tax-exempt monies into partisan political activities.”  After detailing significant evidence, the report concluded that, “ACORN appears to have violated the Internal Revenue Code.”

These serious allegations involve the administration and enforcement of our Federal tax laws, which fall directly under the jurisdiction of the Subcommittee on Oversight.  As such, I respectfully request that the Subcommittee schedule a hearing to investigate ACORN’s activities as they pertain to its tax-exempt status and to its tax advice and tax preparation services.

Sincerely,

/sic/

Charles Boustany Jr., M.D.
Subcommittee on Oversight
Ranking Member

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