Minutes

December 24, 2011

OFFICERS PRESENT

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, National Chairleader

Mike Honda, Vice Chair, UAW Liaison

Donna Brazile, Vice Chair, Hemispheric-Americans Voting Rights Coordinator

Linda Chavez-Thompson, No Relation to Cesar or Fred

OTHERS

Akio Toyoda, President, Toyota Motor Company

James Clyburn, Emissary, Congressional Black Caucus

Diane Sawyer, Network Lackey

Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, Print Shill, New York Times

Eric Holder, Attorney General for Minority Rights

Dennis Kucinich, Director, Munchkins United for America PAC

Betty Friedan (1921-2006), Founder, League of Dead Women Voters
(Whoopi Goldberg, Channeler))

PROCEEDINGS

Ms. Wasserman Schultz called the meeting to order at 10:14 a.m. after police were called to settle a dispute between Mr. Honda and Mr. Toyoda.

On secure video uplink, President Obama spoke briefly from the Kauai Lagoons Golf Club putting green.  He warned of the hard road ahead.

AG Holder arrived at 10:23, claiming he never received a memo about the session.

OLD BUSINESS

1.  Ms. Wasserman Schultz announced that Planned Parenthood had submitted the winning design for the new Democratic National Committee logo.

2.  General Holder reported the DOJ has notified all 18,000 U. S. municipalities to eliminate pre-registration as a requisite for voting.

“The requirement is a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” Holder said.  “It disenfranchises our  homeless citizens, who can’t know in which community they’ll be living on Election Day.”

3.  Ms. Chavez-Thompson confirmed that friendly Federal magistrates in Pennsylvania and Ohio have agreed in advance to extend metropolitan area poll hours until midnight on Election Eve 2012 so that derelicts caught up in late sweeps by ACORN press gangs may exercise their franchise.

4.  Ms. Wasserman Schultz again expressed concern about growing public awareness of influence peddling by Congressional Democrats.

The Committee previewed a video scheduled for showing at House and Senate party caucuses in January.  It opens with former Congressman William “Cold Cash” Jefferson discussing integrity and ethics.  Barbra Streisand closes with a cautionary tune inspired by South Pacific’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Bought

You’ve got to wiggle your bum
Like a worm.
You’ve got to land those big fish
Term to term.
You need to show them
You’ll never stand firm,
So you can be carefully bought.

You deserve to be bought–
Take your share.
All your colleagues are bought;
It’s quite fair.
Yes, demand what’s your due;
Who’ll glean a clue
As long as you’re carefully bought?

You better grab the dough
While you can.
You know it’s the reason you ran.
Snag it in cash,
Mr. Government Man;
Stash it with forethought
Or poop hits the fan,
And your cunning might all come to naught.

Now, if you’re found out,
You must claim
That it’s all a political frame.
Just brazen it out,
And show no one your shame.
There’s a chance you’ll stay carefully bought.

NEW BUSINESS

1.  Ms. Wasserman Schultz queried Mr. Sulzberger on the status of the DNC newsletter, the New York Times.

Mr. Sulzberger said the paper is hemorrhaging money and readers.   He is disappointed by the poor response to a current promotion: dinner at La Grenouille with Paul Krugman for new subscribers who purchase a three month subscription.

Sulzberger also revealed he is in talks with Globe Magazine regarding a merger.  “The Times gets an instant shot of credibility if the deal happens,” he said.

Regarding a balanced profile of Newt Gingrich that appeared recently in the Times, Mr. Sulzberger said, “Normally, we’d spike such a piece, but we’re broke.  That edition sold out as a collectors’ item.  We sell more newspapers or we’ll wind up a Saudi billionaire’s trophy rag.”

2.  Ms. Brazile recommended firing DNC internet trolls striking for Carpal Tunnel coverage.  “Let’s outsource their work to internet boiler room drudges from Pakistan,” she suggested.  Tabled.

3.  Ms Wasserman Schultz read a poem she penned for the Party’s upcoming fundraising appeal.

The year ends well; the Pubbies caved.
We’ve gotten mostly what we’ve craved:
To gut our econ, sound retreat,
Color red our balance sheet,
Show lesser countries we’ll self-screw
to keep a lid on CO2,
And borrow money (since we’re broke)
to give to Gaia’s poorer folk.

We’ve brought our country to the brink
And shown we’re not afraid to blink;
Ahead: more change! tricked-up reform!
And by these measures Earth transform.

We’ll cool the planet, save the whales,
Tell our kids tall climate tales.
And when we’re through and temps are pleasing,
We’ll warm to threats of global freezing.

4.  Ms. Sawyer will interview Ms. Friedan next spring on 20/20.  Tentative title for the segment: “You’re Never Too Dead to Vote.”

5.  Ms. Brazile wondered how Party candidates might make more effective appeals to diverse ethnic groups.

Mr. Clyburn recalled Senator Obama receiving positive reviews for “talking Appalachian” at a Shenandoah Valley church supper in 2008.

Subsequently, Clyburn said, Obama hawked his redistributionist philosophy to Italians, Jews, and Poles in their own vernacular.

The Committee agreed to consider hiring ethnic speechwriters to help candidates pitch the Party’s socialist message to targeted audiences this election season.  Program code name: Marxist Dialectics.

Motion to adjourn.  Unanimous.

During Saturday night’s debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry challenged Romney on a passage in his first book, claiming an early edition had said the Massachusetts Romneycare program should be a model for the national plan. Romney disputed the claim, and when Perry persisted, he jokingly offered a $10,000 bet. “Rick, I’ll tell you what:10,000 bucks? $10,000 bet? “Perry didn’t take the bet, “I’m not in the betting business.”

The average American household has an income of $59,800 (gross) which means that Romney was not only breaking Mormon doctrine, which recommends against gambling, but he was also being casual with the equivalent of 1/6th of the cash the average family lives on. He might have just as well been amazed by a supermarket scanner as George H.W. Bush was, or suggested to the unemployed, “Let Them Eat Cake,” because Mitt Romney just announced that he was totally out of touch with the American people.

Barack Obama’s attacks on the GOP centers around a supposed lack of concern for the middle class. Should Romney get the nomination, expect to see that clip over and over, because whether true or not, last night Mitt Romney gave Barack Obama the ammunition he needs to show the former Massachusetts governor has no idea about the plight of the average family. That will probably include the first segment of the answer, when he talked about growing up wealthy. “I didn’t grow up poor,” Romney said. “But I grew up with a dad who had been poor and my dad wanted to make sure I understood the lessons of hard work.”

Almost immediately after Romney’s gaffe, former Obama aide Bill Burton, who now runs a Democratic party super PAC, was tweeting a preview of future Obama attacks.

“Not a lot of 99%’ers are out there making $10,000 bets,”

The DNC quickly fired off a mass email titled: “What the Average American Family Can Buy With $10,000.”

Romney had just lost any advantage he had on the “electability” issue.

One of the problems with the people running our government today is that they don’t treat tax dollars, which are actually the taxpayers’ personal money, the same way they treat their own personal income. After last night, the worry is that Romney will spend our money the way he spends his personal money, thoughtlessly tossing out $10,000 on bets.

Like it or not, in politics perception is sometimes more important than reality. Gerald Ford didn’t really mean, “There is no Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe”–he meant to say that the U.S. would never recognize the Soviet dominance. Nixon’s refusal of make up during the first debate with JFK made him look sweaty and sickly, so that (according to legend) TV viewers thought JFK won, while radio listeners praised Nixon. George H.W. Bush’s debate half-answers, his habit of checking his watch and picking lint off his suit, gave people the impression that he was disinterested. And Al Gore’s sighs during his debate with George W. Bush was seen (correctly) as arrogance.

No matter why Romney tried to make a $10,000 bet last night, it made him look like an out-of-touch, privileged man trying to show people how rich he is–a losing perception in this (or any) presidential campaign season.

My prediction here is that as of last night the Romney campaign is for all intents and purposes…over. Time to stick a fork in it, and I would be willing to bet anyone $10,000 of Monopoly money (20 crisp yellow bills) that I am correct.

On Friday, RedState’s Ben Howe broke the story of the Democratic National Committee discriminating against a Charlotte-area business for the 2012 convention because its workers were not unionized.

When John told him he was not, the Committee member told him, “We were just told that we cannot accept bids unless they are from companies that are unionized.”

Politico also had another Charlotte business owner who was told the DNC was looking to use union labor for its Convention:

He was told the Convention was looking to use local contractors to run the project, but union labor to staff it — and then, he said, he was told he would have to sign an agreement stating he would use union labor for the project.

“We asked the question, how do you want to use local when no one local is unionized?” Webb told POLITICO.

Although the DNC tried to downplay its discrimination against non-union businesses by stating that any firm could bid, it implicitly acknowledge it may discriminate in the awarding of its contracts.

“The notion that the Host Committee will only allow unionized firms to bid is categorically untrue,” said Committee for Charlotte 2012 Executive Director Dan Murrey in an emailed statement. “The Committee for Charlotte 2012 encourages all firms to submit proposals for goods and services. The Committee works to have an inclusive procurement process in which all firms are welcome to bid.”

“We put a priority on goods made in America and businesses that are based in the Carolinas, party to a collective bargaining agreement, and are minority, women, disability or veteran owned,” he said. [Emphasis added.]

Shortly after denying that it was discriminating against non-union companies, the DNC chose Washington, DC-area vendor, Hargrove, Inc. (a company with a history of using union labor for its convention, trade shows and expo work) for the DNC Convention—once again discriminating against Charlotte’s union-free workforce. However, it gets worse.

Late last week, we received a tip that the DNC was forcing the downtown-Charlotte hotels to displace their own existing workers and bringing in union labor to work during the DNC Convention. While the Hyatt Place denied the rumor, numerous calls were placed to general managers at other area hotels but were not returned.

However, at the Ritz Carlton, Charlotte, where President Obama is reportedly staying during the convention, employees did confirm that they had been told they would be laid off during the convention.

Here is one of the conversations that took place over the weekend with a Ritz-Carlton employee:

Note: The individual employee’s voice was slightly altered to avoid retaliation from the Ritz Carlton management or the Democratic National Committee.

As the DNC and Mayor Foxx continue trying to dodge the issue of outsourcing Charlotte’s work to their union cronies, it is likely that more stories of Charlotte employees getting the shaft will emerge in the days, weeks and months ahead.

________________

“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

Cross-posted on LaborUnionReport.com and RedState.com

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.

As I report in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers at least 54 ACORN employees and individuals associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. Voter fraud is a blanket term coined by lawyers. It refers to fraudulent voting, identify fraud, perjury, voter registration fraud, forgery, and a variety of crimes related to the electoral process.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself, as opposed to its individual employees, has been convicted of a crime.

But this is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water.

Judicial Watch just uncovered massive voter fraud by ACORN in Colorado and ACORN settled a racketeering lawsuit in Ohio out of court last year and agreed to leave the state. In the settlement with the Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, ACORN agreed to “cease all Ohio activity” and surrender all its state business licenses.

ACORN’s crimes committed in various states could give rise to a federal racketeering prosecution. Such action seems unlikely given that ACORN operatives now run the White House (and the Democratic National Committee).

All of ACORN’s crimes are exhaustively documented in Subversion Inc.

Despite the bankruptcy filing, ACORN continues to operate. Project Vote and ACORN’s mortgage bubble generator ACORN Housing (renamed Affordable Housing Centers of America) are still is business. ACORN’s state chapters now operate under assumed names such as Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, and Action United (Pennsylvania).

ACORN officials openly acknowledge the network is restructuring and soon will re-emerge to help reelect President Obama in 2012.

* * * * *

America needs to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

ABANDON ALL HOPE OF CHANGE

PALIN DELENDA EST

Democratic National Committee

Unposted Principals’ Meeting

July 5, 2011

OFFICERS PRESENT

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, National Chair

Mike Honda, Vice Chair

Linda Chavez-Thompson, Vice Chair

OFFICER NOT TOLD OF MEETING

Donna Brazile, Vice Chair

INVITED GUESTS

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader

Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader

John Zogby, Pollster

Brian Williams, Network Liaison

George “Daddy Warbucks” Soros

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: John, what’s the latest?

ZOGBY:  No change.  A commenter picked at random from Breitbart’s biggovernment.com would thrash President Obama next year in all 57 states, despite ACORN’s Get-Out-the-Dead-Vote project.  The down-ticket effects would be equally catastrophic.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: No turning back, then.  Ok, pass the cigars and smoke up the room.  Today, we honor the sainted Boss Tweed by choosing a challenger to President Obama.  Mr. Soros will fund our candidate in exchange for an office in the West Wing in the new administration.

SOROS:  Yah, und SEC Chief, too

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ: Oh, right. Mike, ask Mr. Gore to join us . . . . Welcome, Mr. Vice President.  Please sit.  Now, tell us why you think we should select you to  . . . .

GORE:  I have conditions.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Conditions?

GORE:  Which must accepted by all.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  And they are?

GORE:  The new Congress’s first act: expropriating Lafayette Park and authorizing construction of the world’s largest geodesic habitats for endangered flora and fauna: We’ll call them the Green House and Animal House.

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Hmm.  Research and Destroy assures me we’ll have enough dirt on GOP candidates to take both chambers if Obama’s not on the ticket.  Nancy, Harry?

PELOSI:  “The Green House”—the heart sings!  I’ll commit to the project when I’m Speaker again.

REID:  Me too, long as certain associates get the slots concession for both structures.  Anything el . . . .

GORE:  Karenna’s my VP and succeeds me in 2028.  Yes, it’ll take me four terms to undo the damage done by my predecessors.  You’ll have to amend the Constitution.

REID: [sighing] I guess.  Now . . . .

GORE: There’s more. My earth-centric agenda rules: returning America to its pre-industrial base; and offering the public option to all mankind, resulting in lower life spans and thus reduced pressure on the planet’s resources.

BRIAN WILLIAMS:  [sniffing] Hmmph!  Short-term fixes.

GORE:  I know.  Long term?  Our planet is hopelessly infested with  … people; Earth is the Sick Man of the Solar System.  But I am the Healer of Worlds.  My prognosis: Gaia is doomed unless we gradually breed out the rampant species—us.

WILLIAMS:  So, you’re talking, what, worldwide sterilization programs and zero reproduction mandates, in tandem leading to man’s extinction?  I can live with that.

GORE:  Eons from now, if humanity arises from the muck again, maybe we’ll get it right.

PELOSI:  Visionary.  But in the present, voters are concerned about energy costs.  Your thoughts?

GORE:  President Kennedy electrified America when he pledged to put a man on the moon in ten years.  The Gore Administration will inspire the country with an environmental crash program: harvesting methane from bovine flatulence, a major cause of global warming.

WILLIAMS:  Merde!  Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

GORE:  In one swell poop, we harness a dangerous greenhouse bio-gas for use as cheap fuel.

REID:  American entremanures will be all over it like flies on . . . .

GORE: If only it were just ruminants.  Termites produce methane, too, big time. Unrecoverable, unfortunately.   I’ll task Predators to take out the largest termite mounds worldwide.

WILLIAMS: Insect rights groups will go bugnuts.

GORE:  We also need to look at ourselves.  Billions use Earth as an outhouse.  To set an example, I’ll require waste recyclers in every home and public facility in America by 2018.  My first Executive Order: ”Harvesting Ordure: Operation Assimilative Heads.”

WILLIAMS: HOOAH?

ALL:  HOOAH!!

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Well, Mr. Vice President, you certainly have your finger on the pulse of today’s Democratic Party.

SOROS:  Vun more ting.  Vat iss bad blood you haf wit Clintons?

GORE:  Everybody knows they did me dirty in 2000 against Bush.  Well, in February 2008 I called Hillary and told her I would endorse her over Obama.  She sounded alarmed and requested a meeting.

REID:  Uh oh.

GORE:  I met them in a private room at a K Street motel Bill frequents, 32 Secret Service agents and the three of us.  The Clintons pleaded with me to endorse Senator Obama instead.  I refused, saying, “I helped you both get over the Lewinsky, uh, hump in ’98.  That and your lukewarm support in 2000 cost me the Presidency.  Well, here’s payback.”

PELOSI:  What happened then?

GORE:  It got pretty intense.  At one point, Bill’s face turned purple, and he jabbed his finger into my chest and growled, “All those times you swore you wouldn’t utter a good word about either of us, you were lying, weren’t you?  Obama put you up to this? Oprah? Ken Starr?”

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  That when Hillary obtained a restraining order against your endorsement?

GORE:  Correct.  I began offering advice to Obama.  But I never really liked him.  I just wanted to leave my big carbon footprint on Hillary’s back.  The Clintons and I are over each other now.  Oh George, if this gig doesn’t work out, I have a business proposal that you might find . . . .

WASSERMAN SCHULTZ:  Thank you, Mr. Vice President.  We’ll get back to you.

It should come as no surprise that on the campaign trail, President Obama refused to be interviewed about Saul Alinsky, the community organizing guru who wrote Rules for Radicals, a how-to guide for destroying American capitalism and democracy.

Presumably Obama, who taught courses on Alinsky’s brutal, sometimes violent organizing techniques, declined to speak to reporters about the late guru. He must have realized that such an interview would throw an unwanted spotlight on Alinsky’s radicalism, and by extension, his own. Such counterproductive publicity would also have undermined the candidate’s efforts to reinvent himself as a moderate. Alinsky’s adherents now dominate the modern Democratic Party establishment. Apart from President Obama himself, they include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, Federal Communications Commission diversity chief Mark Lloyd, Obama’s ex-green jobs czar Van Jones, former DNC trainer Heather Booth, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to name just a few. “Who the hell isn’t [an Alinskyite] in this administration?” asks conservative author David Horowitz.

And President Obama hasn’t been the only longtime ACORN operative working in the White House. There’s also the low-profile Patrick Gaspard who, until recently, was White House political affairs director, one of the titles Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

In a move that ought to disturb anyone who cares about the integrity of the democratic process, earlier this year Gaspard took over the reins of the Democratic National Committee as its executive director—just in time to begin initial preparations for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Gaspard hails from the same world of radical left-wing community organizing that made Barack Obama who he is today. Gaspard is an expert in the harsh, street-smart organizing tactics taught by Alinsky. He’s the hatchet man Obama sent to New York over a year ago to strong-arm then-Gov. David Paterson into dropping his reelection campaign. As executive director running the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard will oversee Organizing for America, a project of the DNC supposedly modeled on Alinskyite organizing principles.

Former Obama White House political director Patrick Gaspard is now ACORN's man at the DNC

Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haitian parents, not much is known about this Rasputin-like power behind the throne. Gaspard studiously avoids publicity and is reluctant to talk to journalists. Look him up on Nexis and you will find virtually nothing about this influential radical leader. But his colleagues hold him in high esteem. “Patrick is the best political mind of his generation in New York and maybe the nation,” according to Kevin Sheekey, a lieutenant of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “I wouldn’t dispute that,” added David Axelrod, at the time a senior advisor in the Obama White House.

Gaspard came to the White House from ACORN’s favorite labor organization, Service Employees International Union. (SEIU Locals 100 and 880 were, until recently, official affiliates of ACORN.) He had been executive vice president for political and legislative affairs for SEIU Local 1199 United Healthcare Workers East, which claims to be the largest union local on the planet, “representing more than 300,000 members and retirees in New York, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Massachusetts.”

Evidence suggests that before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis’ political director in New York. How do we actually know Gaspard, who goes to extraordinary lengths to shun the public spotlight and scarcely appears in Nexis searches, was Lewis’ right hand man?

Because Gaspard’s employment with ACORN was acknowledged by no less an authority than ACORN founder Wade Rathke himself.

Rathke wrote May 16, 2009, at his blog: “Tell me that 1199’s former political director, Patrick Gaspard (who was ACORN New York’s political director before that) didn’t reach out from the White House and help make that happen, and I’ll tell you to take some remedial classes in ‘politics 101.’”

ACORN founder Wade Rathke

The “before that” time period Rathke is referring to is 2003, when Gaspard was executive vice president for political and legislative affairs for Service Employees International Union Local 1199 (United Healthcare Workers East). It’s also worth noting that of all the entries in Bertha Lewis’ rolodex, a copy of which this writer gained possession of in 2009, the entry for Gaspard is the most extensive.

Gaspard’s ties to ACORN, SEIU, and Lewis go back at least to 1989, when he volunteered for the David Dinkins mayoral campaign in New York City. In 2003, he became acting field director for Howard Dean’s presidential bid. He was national field director in 2004 for America Coming Together, a now-defunct get-out-the-vote operation that received a $775,000 fine for campaign finance abuses. In 2006, Gaspard was acting political director for SEIU International. In 2008, Gaspard worked as national political director for the Obama campaign followed by a stint as associate personnel director for the Obama-Biden transition team.

As the old Washington saying goes, politics is personnel. Who knows how many administration offi cials were put in place by Gaspard with direct input from ACORN’s Bertha Lewis? It boggles the mind. Gaspard also worked for New York’s Working Families Party, an appendage of ACORN. Lewis is a co-founder of that party —which endorsed Obama in 2008— and has close ties to Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., who pointedly refused to have the House Judiciary subcommittee he chaired in the previous Congress investigate ACORN.

As news of Gaspard’s involvement with ACORN spread, Rathke changed his blog entry. Where he had written that Gaspard worked for New York ACORN, he inserted two new sentences: “This line used to contain a reference to Patrick Gaspard working for NY ACORN. This is untrue, he never worked for ACORN.”

But Rathke wasn’t able to shove all evidence tying Gaspard to ACORN down the memory hole. If Gaspard isn’t tied to ACORN, why did he sign a letter to the editor of the Nation magazine (dated July 2, 2001) on behalf of the Working Families Party of New York? (Lewis signed the letter on behalf of ACORN and the Working Families Party.)

The party is part of ACORN, according to ACORN’s website, which in 2009 confirmed that in 1998, “ACORN members spearhead[ed] formation of the Working Families Party, the first community-labor party with official ballot status in New York state in more than 50 years.”

Internal ACORN documents obtained by this writer show Gaspard gave ACORN $40,000 before he joined the Obama administration. While Gaspard worked as an executive vice president of SEIU Local 1199, he gave ACORN $15,000 in 2007 and $25,000 in 2008. 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 an SEIU 1199 tax return. (If salary and deferred benefits are combined, the total is $151,869.)

Given Gaspard’s longstanding links to ACORN, it’s not at all surprising that Scott Levenson, a lobbyist and spokesman for ACORN, dropped by the White House to visit with his former co-worker. The purpose of the meeting was not disclosed. Another New Yorker in the Obama administration, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan, has close ties to ACORN. Before taking office, Donovan was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s housing development commissioner. He worked closely with ACORN for five years on several projects.

ACORN's man at HUD, Shaun Donovan

“Perhaps no administration official has had more interaction with ACORN than” Donovan, according to the New York Times. Reinforcing the newspaper’s point, ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis praised the HUD secretary. “We grew to respect him, and he grew to respect us,” she said. Roll Call, a Washington, D.C., newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, reported Lewis admitted “ACORN has friends in high places for the first time in a long time.” Lewis acknowledged “that she has particularly good relationships with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and with Patrick Gaspard, the White House political director.”

This writer filed a Freedom of Information Act request with HUD last year seeking all correspondence between Secretary Donovan and ACORN. Instead of the maximum 45 days allowed, HUD responded eight months later. The letter said no such records of correspondence between ACORN and Donovan exist.

That’s hard to believe.

(This article is excerpted from “Subversion Inc.: A new book reveals how Obama’s ACORN friends are still ripping off American taxpayers,” by Matthew Vadum which was published in the May 2011 issue of Townhall magazine and is republished here with permission. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum.)

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Vadum is author of the new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books), from which this piece is adapted. Of the book Andrew Breitbart says, “For too long the institutional left has been allowed to operate under cover of darkness because the Democrat-media complex refuses to hold them accountable. But these radicals who have been sticking it to Americans for decades scatter like cockroaches under the harsh spotlight of Matthew Vadum’s great new book, Subversion Inc.”

When Barack Obama was a little boy surrounded by parents and grandparents and mentors sympathetic to communism, likeminded people were building ACORN’s parent organization, the National Welfare Rights Organization. Armed with tax dollars, left-wing extremists Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Alinsky were at play in the 1960s, wreaking havoc on society in an effort to induce revolutionary change. All three of these at the time relatively obscure figures labored to create NWRO along with a vast constellation of tax-supported groups determined to destroy the American society they loathed.

Changes in federal social policy in the early 1960s helped to lay the groundwork for this artificial activism and the welfare-related unrest it caused. President Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty in America” really should have been called an unconditional war on American values. For four decades, ACORN destroyed property, forcibly occupied banks, assaulted employees of the companies they targeted, intimidated executives and government officials at their family homes, and engineered home invasions in order to seize foreclosed properties. ACORN took money from powerful special interests to produce instant rent-a-mobs to harass their clients’ competitors.

But after various setbacks, including a million-dollar embezzlement in 2008 and a series of damning undercover videos in 2009 showing gross employee misconduct, the Democratic National Committee branch office known as ACORN filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy on Election Day last year. [The ACORN videos debuted here on Big Government. Watch them here.]

It was a carefully orchestrated public relations ruse. The now dissolving ACORN is not actually going anywhere.

America’s most infamous radical advocacy group and organized crime syndicate is preparing to rise up from the political grave and bring “Mickey Mouse” and the dead to the polls in 2012. ACORN organizers are quietly laboring to reconstitute a new version of the group in time to help ACORN’s former lawyer in next year’s presidential election.

So it turns out that November 2010 reports of the death of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, President Obama’s former client and favorite community organizing group, have been greatly exaggerated. With the help of loyal key staff members, ACORN has been playing possum, waiting in the shadows, hoping Americans will forget about it. According to congressional investigators, ACORN moved tens of millions of dollars out of its bank accounts. No one outside of ACORN’s accountants knows where the money went. Yet no new investigations appear to be in the offing on Capitol Hill.

ACORN has adopted a strategy to keep tax dollars and foundation grants flowing into the coffers of the “new” groups that would then use them to rebuild the ACORN network as a yet-to-be-named successor organization emerges. It is an act of the sheerest audacity for a lawless group that has long acted outside the legitimate political process. As I discovered in my research, at least 54 employees and individuals connected to ACORN have been convicted of election fraud and related offenses.

ACORN itself was convicted in a voter fraud conspiracy in Las Vegas last month. The conviction may cause an earthquake in leftist organizing circles across the U.S. and more prosecutors might be emboldened to take on ACORN and similar groups. Until it was charged by Nevada, ACORN had frequently boasted about how it—as opposed to its employees—had been able to duck prosecution for voter fraud-related offenses.

(Look on Big Government tomorrow for Part 2. This article is excerpted from “Subversion Inc.: A new book reveals how Obama’s ACORN friends are still ripping off American taxpayers,” by Matthew Vadum which was published in the May 2011 issue of Townhall magazine and is republished here with permission. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum.)

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. Vadum is author of the new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books), from which this piece is adapted. Of the book Andrew Breitbart says, “For too long the institutional left has been allowed to operate under cover of darkness because the Democrat-media complex refuses to hold them accountable. But these radicals who have been sticking it to Americans for decades scatter like cockroaches under the harsh spotlight of Matthew Vadum’s great new book, Subversion Inc.”