With the Occupy movement becoming increasingly confrontational nationwide, there are indications that the anti-capitalist movement is turning violent deliberately.  The adroit agitators intermixed among the idealistic but misguided young people, the street radicals bent above all on attacking the U.S. economic system, see violent revolution as a key route to the transformation of our country into their version of the socialist utopia.

A look at the organizers of the most recent pre-planned Day of Action spotlights a large, radical group, a latter-day Red Army of seasoned activists who have been discreetly guiding Occupy since the movement’s onset and whose history is colored with previous mayhem while their plans for the immediate future raise serious questions. Just yesterday, the Occupy movement posted online plans for “alternative forms of protest,” including flash mobs that can be deployed nationwide.

Just over a week ago, Occupy Wall Street held a three-day “Direct Action Preparation and Training” course in downtown Manhattan to gear up for the latest round of riots, including last Thursday’s three-course meal of in-your-face tactics aiming to block subways and bridges as well as shut down the stock market.

Revealingly, official resources provided on the Occupy site as part of the planning for last week’s chaos shows several manuals from the Ruckus Society, whose mission is to provide “environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals”; this includes training radical activists in direct action techniques.

The same Ruckus Society that helped to spark the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which devolved into violent unrest, was listed as a “friend and partner” for last week’s Day of Action.

The Ruckus training manuals provided at the Occupy site leave little to the imagination. Titles include: “Blockading for Beginners,” “Anonymous Riot Guide,” “Define White Supremacy,” “Uncle Sam the Pusher Man” and, of course, the (still!) Communist Party-connected National Lawyers Guild’s “Legal Observer Manual.”

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(Continued from yesterday)

Recap: Radical funder George Soros’s $1 million gift to Media Matters, a left-wing character assassination machine, underwrites its campaign to stigmatize conservative ideas. For weeks Eric Boehlert of Media Matters attacked Glenn Beck because a disturbed viewer plotted to shoot up the offices of the left-wing Tides Foundation. The shooter, Byron Williams, failed, but in December when a fan of Media Matters, the late Florida school board shooter Clay Duke, wreaked havoc, Boehlert and Media Matters remained silent.

Soros is also bankrolling a documentary that celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP convention in Minnesota. Even worse, you too are bankrolling the film through your taxes.

A trailer for the left-wing film Better This World suggests that it depicts David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder as idealistic activists who, according to the official blurb, “set out to prove the strength of their political convictions to themselves and their mentor.” In fact McKay and Crowder are convicted domestic terrorists who manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

You can be sure that if it was right-wing terrorists who were plotting to attack the Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” said Brandon Darby, who helped the FBI thwart the planned attack. (Darby’s essay on political violence appeared on Big Government over the past weekend. Read it here.)

The movie, which is expected to be released this year, attacks Darby, a true American hero who undermined the conspiracy by alerting the FBI. Filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega twist the facts to argue that Darby, a former revolutionary activist, manipulated McKay and Crowder into becoming would-be mass murderers.

It’s an easily disproved lie. During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

McKay and Crowder had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center. The goal was to shut down the democratic process by preventing GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

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(Continued from yesterday)

Recap: Radical philanthropist George Soros gave $1 million to Media Matters for America, a well-funded slander shop that roots out “conservative misinformation.” It’s all part of his campaign to suppress conservative ideas that stand in the way of pushing America even farther to the left.

The left has been hyperventilating about Beck ever since he moved from CNN to Fox News in early 2009 and quickly became the Obama administration’s most vociferous high-profile critic. In particular, liberals could not abide Beck righteously fulminating against the shadowy Tides Foundation, a pass-through entity that allows wealthy individuals to give to radical causes anonymously.
Eric Boehlert, a so-called senior fellow at Media Matters, seized an opportunity when a deranged would-be shooter named Byron Williams jumped into the headlines last year. After a shootout with the California Highway Patrol, Williams said he had been on his way to shoot up the San Francisco offices of Tides in hopes of sparking a revolution. Williams was never actually much of a threat to Tides. When police pulled him over on a Sunday when the Tides offices were closed, the inept insurrectionist was drunk.

Media Matters argued that Beck had blood on his hands because Williams claimed Beck’s program was one of his favorite TV shows. Boehlert blogged that Beck “has routinely smeared the low-profile entity [i.e. Tides] for being staffed by ‘thugs’ and ‘bullies’ and involved in ‘the nasty of the nastiest,’ like indoctrinating schoolchildren and creating a ‘mass organization to seize power.’” Williams “wasn’t able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization ‘nobody knew’ about until Glenn Beck started targeting it.”

Aside from the rhetorical flourishes, Beck had provided a more or less accurate picture of the Tides Foundation, its sister groups, and many of its grant recipients.

As Trevor Loudon wrote in the October 2010 Foundation Watch, “The Tides Foundation and Tides Center are the radical left’s best kept secret. Together they provide tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the most extreme, destructive charities in America. Their money has gone to an assortment of questionable groups including ACORN, Media Matters for America, and the Center for Constitutional Rights.” (The Center was profiled in the September 2006 Organization Trends.)

According to David Horowitz’s online encyclopedia of the left, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, the Tides family of foundations has also funded the violent anarchist group known as the Ruckus Society, United for Peace and Justice (a group headed by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan), the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), three of whose executives have been indicted for terrorism-related activities, and the National Lawyers Guild.

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He has conquered the world of finance and remains firmly on top of it. He writes bestselling books. He dominates leftist philanthropy. He co-founded the Democracy Alliance, an ultra-secretive billionaires’ club that wants to transform America into a European-style socialist state – or worse. He owns the Democratic Party. Now George Soros, who also fancies himself a philosopher, is positioning himself as a media magnate in order to continue his assault on America’s values and institutions.

Like the protagonist in the classic Orson Welles movie Citizen Kane, Soros can never have enough power. But unlike Charles Foster Kane, the haughty, imperious fictional media mogul, Soros views himself as much more than a mere leader. With a straight face he told reporters, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.” (The Independent – UK, June 3, 1993)

Although markets have helped make him a billionaire several times over, Soros has declared war on capitalism. He blames markets and something he calls “market fundamentalism”— and not the suffocating regulations and high taxes his funding of left-wing groups promotes – for the current economic slowdown. “The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up.”

“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 in 2009. In an interview with Der Spiegel the previous 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.”

Only in the twisted messianic fantasies of this octogenarian billionaire whose demeanor is that of a James Bond villain could such phantom armies of marauding free market fundamentalists wreak havoc on America. Perhaps these were the same laissez-faire legionnaires who brought us Sarbanes-Oxley, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, government bailouts of private industry, farm subsidies, ethanol mandates, smart growth, and the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in recent decades.

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Last week, Drummond Pike took his FOX News fight to a whole new level, this time painting all of the right with a scarlet letter. Coincidentally, Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald had also published a similar piece in much the same vein, only a week prior.

In his opinion contribution piece to Politico titled “Why Does the Right Hate Soros?”, the founder and CEO of Tides Foundation pondered aloud the imaginary reasons he’s fabricated in his mind for the animosity toward the Hungarian born billionaire.

His conclusion? Because we hate immigrants.

This is the typical left. When you don’t get the response you want, inject a new element of manufactured hate into the mix – when you can’t make it about race, make it about immigration. Drummond Pike even decided to step up the rhetoric, implying that George Soros is in danger because of right-wing media outlets and bloggers. But the sad truth behind this piece, behind all of these public letters, boycotts and petitions is that they are all coordinated, and they are all aimed at turning the public opinion against those who do not share the ideals of the leftist agenda.

Some highlights from Pike’s opinion piece:

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It’s official.  There have been whispers in recent days, but George Soros decided to go public today.  He’s giving Media Matters a million bucks.  Why?  Because FOX News and Glenn Beck must be stopped!

In a statement released today by Soros and Media Matters:

“Despite repeated assertions to the contrary by various Fox News commentators, I have not to date been a funder of Media Matters,” Soros said. “However, in view of recent evidence suggesting that the incendiary rhetoric of Fox News hosts may incite violence, I have now decided to support the organization. Media Matters is one of the few groups that attempts to hold Fox News accountable for the false and misleading information they so often broadcast. I am supporting Media Matters in an effort to more widely publicize the challenge Fox News poses to civil and informed discourse in our democracy.”

See, now there you go again, George Soros.  Making FOX News out to be the evil (deceptively named) Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s 1984, pushing out packaged Newspeak.

As Politico reported:

Soros figured prominently in the conspiracy theory that allegedly drove convicted felon Byron Williams to arm himself and set out to kill staffers at the Soros-funded Tides Foundation the ACLU this summer.  Although Williams said he had first heard of the theory from other sources, he told Media Matters in a jailhouse interview that Glenn Beck was a “schoolteacher” who “blew my mind” on such topics. He told the interviewer to watch Beck’s June shows to get more information about Tides.

On Friday, Drummond Pike, the founder and CEO of the Tides Foundation, said “there will be blood on many hands” if the next assassin succeed, and called for a network-wide advertiser boycott of Fox News in response to Beck’s rhetoric. This morning Media Matters launched a website to join the effort.

Might we remind readers that Mr. Soros has donated money to, among many other organizations, the Tides Foundation.

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This past July, in a formal request it filed with the prosecutors of Maryland state and the city of Baltimore, a left-leaning organization known as Velvet Revolution urged prosecutors to press criminal charges against James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles for what it says was a violation of Maryland’s Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act. But the letter also went a step further, naming Andrew Breitbart as a conspirator in masterminding the whole operation.

The accusation against Breitbart is of course patently false and baseless. No evidence exists to even suggest such an accusation, because it simply did not happen that way. Then again, this story’s not about Andrew Breitbart. It’s about Velvet Revolution, the source making the claim.

Progressives are also rallying behind Velvet Revolution for another of its most recent campaigns – AmericanCrossRoadsWatch, which, to the delight of familiar folks like Karoli at Crooks and Liars, has offered a $100,000 bounty “for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Karl Rove or any principal of American Crossroads for money laundering, election rigging, or felony campaign finance violations.” It features a WANTED poster:

Interesting, that the words “felony” and “Wanted” would be used. Again, considering the source.

You see, while Velvet Revolution has inspired quite a flurry of excitement from its progressive partners these days, who seem to be frolicking in their apparent muckraking efforts, their glaring omission and utter hypocrisy is absolutely astonishing. With so much dirt digging going on, one would be very hard pressed to believe that none of Velvet Revolution’s cheerleaders had any idea whatsoever that a convicted violent felon is one of its co-founders. In an environment today when the left has repeatedly falsely accused most opposition of being racist, hateful and violent, how convenient that progressives would fail to acknowledge the hypocrisy of their own implicit support of real violence and law-breaking.

The story behind Velvet Revolution begins with musician-activist turned immigrants’ rights defender turned voting rights activist, Brett Kimberlin, who also runs the “Justice Through Music Project (JTMP).” According to journalist Brad Friedman of the Brad Blog, he and Kimberlin co-founded Velvet Revolution together, a detail Friedman has specifically noted in a number of posts such as this one from 5/31/2007.

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Progressives and radicals decended on Washington, DC Saturday demanding more government spending as the way to fix societal ills.  Groups including the AFL-CIO, SEIU, NAACP, Democratic Socialists of America, Organizing for America, Communist Party USA, American Federation of Teachers, CodePink and National Education Association linked arms in a call for voters to keep Democrats in power.

Here’s a sampling of the sights and sounds of the day.

After milling in the crowd all day, I would estimate 80%-90% of attendees wore union-affiliated t-shirts. Some others wore ‘I Need a Job’ shirts. We talked to people who were bussed and actually flow in – the Tides Foundation spent a lot of money.

This blogger overheard an organizer shout into a cell phone that SEIU was supposed to send 695 buses but apparently didn’t.  While I did not attend the Beck rally and am not good at judging crowd size, today’s crowd was clearly smaller than Beck’s.  I walked about a third of the way towards the Washington Monument and the crowd grew thin.

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People on the left are constantly asking Andrew Breitbart who funds his “operation.”  It’s grown to become rather amusing, actually.  For those of us who are bloggers on The Bigs, we know the truth, we see how things operate. We know there’s no giant conservative-leaning lump of cash greasing this machine.  If that were the case, I for one think Andrew would probably be home with his family even more, rather than traveling around, worrying about advertising or other ways of self-funding this little “hobby” of his, as the left often like to refer to it.

But let’s just look for one moment at where some of that line of thinking comes from on the other side.  I’ve written previously about the birth of Media Matters as a spawn of Rob Stein’s Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix road show, from which the Democracy Alliance was born.  It’s through this organization from which much of the organization’s funding had come; in recent years, more has been spread out across other progressive organizations, but the funders often remain the same names in most cases.  For instance, The Tides Foundation gave Media Matters and their Action Network over $175,000 just last year.  In earlier years, groups like Montclair, New Jersey-based (hometown of Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert) Schumann Center for Media & Democracy gave the organization $500,000.

The donors’ list is vast and diverse, and we plan to cover that in detail in the future.  So I’ll focus in on one set of donors to Media Matters, which is the Labor Unions.  More specifically, in light of some recent posts regarding the Kenneth Gladney incident, I thought it appropriate to revisit donations made to Media Matters specifically by the Service Employees International Union.

When you look at the timeline of events and the media calendar in general leading up to the Gladney incident last August, it’s difficult not to conclude that there was collaboration amongst White House staff, components of Big Labor, and certain liberal media outlets.  However, we know that all will continue to deny it.

Further, just as the flurry of media activity finally starts to wind down a bit around October last year, this is when SEIU makes three separate donations to Media Matters totaling $50,000, under the classification of “Communications”, according to the SEIU LM-2 report. (In reviewing other LM-2s for several previous years, this appears at least to be the first time that SEIU has donated to Media Matters, and there does not seem to have been another donation recorded since these.)

This is the type of funding that I would question in return to Media Matters.  With their membership being so low and their unfunded pension expenses so high, can the SEIU really afford to be randomly donating funds to an organization like Media Matters?  Perhaps SEIU purchased advertising on Media Matters’ website, but then I’d think it would be categorized as such, as others ad expenses in the LM-2 were.  If not advertising, if not random donations,  then what’s the reason for SEIU having donated these funds?  One could logically conclude that Media Matters performed a service in return.  Only they can answer that.

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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.”

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Capitol Confidential and Jim Hoft have done an excellent job laying out concerns with the potential “compromise” bill that comes out of Sen. Bob Corker’s negotiations with Chris Dodd.  But when it comes to the destructive provisions that could come out of a Dodd-Corker deal, they may have just scratched the surface.

In addition to the troubling new powers for a new nanny-state consumer agency and possibly the Federal Reserve added to the prospect of billions more in bailouts for reckless financial firm, the bill may also contain the sneaky  “proxy access” power grab for unions, radical environmentalists, and other groups on the Left. This rule, inspired by Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, is contained in Dodd’s “discussion draft” bill from late last year.

As I detailed in BigGovernment last week, “proxy access would federalize and override decades of state law governing the structure of corporations and force publicly-traded companies to put shareholders’ nominees for a board of directors on a company’s proxy ballot along with the firm’s own nominees for those positions.” Many shareholder groups that are pushing this are union pension funds, the radical Tides Foundation, and other progressive groups — from animal rights to anti-Israel — who place their own political agenda items at the expense of ordinary shareholders.

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Not enough people know about the Tides Foundation, which is one of the original “philanthropic” donation launderers for donors who don’t want to be tied to fringe activist groups. Frankly, there’s too much to tell, but they’re the sugar daddy for ACORN (whose founder, Wade Rathke, is intricately linked within Tides official leadership).

[I'm including some grants of note below -- What will you find?]

Tides 990 2008

A look at their 2008 tax return, 160-plus pages, reads like a directory of the New Left. I’ve pulled out the donations to ACORN groups and Big Labor’s Working America Education Fund (not many people know unions take in ostensibly charitable donations) and one theme is clear: “general support” seems to be a popular phrase. Another theme: notice that states receiving money are critical to election-year success for Democrats. And finally, notice just how much money is being thrown around.

ACORN, Inc – 100,000 Latino voter registration and engagement canvass

ACORN International – 100,00 general support

ACORN Institute
49,500 – general support
25,293 – general support
10,000 – general support

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What would Saul Alinksy do?

In the wake of defeats for the Obama administration last month both with Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the bluest of blue states and the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that will let thousands of groups speak more freely about candidates positions’ in the 2010 elections and beyond, that’s the question President Obama and his allies are probably asking. It’s also the question that proponents of limited, constitutional government and free enterprise must be asking in order to anticipate the organized Left’s next moves.

Alinksy was the father of left-wing community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and other primers, which explained to would-be leftist organizers how to “search out controversy” and “fan the latent hostilities.” Seeing the world as a never-ending conflict between the “haves and have-nots,” Alinsky wrote In Rules for Radicals that “in war, the end justifies almost any means.”  One community organizer who took Alinsky’s words to heart was a young Barack Obama, who worked for an offshoot of Alinsky’s network of organizations in Chicago in the 1980s. Throughout his career, according to the Washington Post, Obama has “embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics.”

And one tactic in Alinsky’s arsenal dovetails almost perfectly with Obama’s new focus on so-called “financial reform” and his bashing of Wall Street to score political points. One of Alinsky’s most important rules for radicals was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” In this case, the “moral garment” is the supposed interest of shareholders.

Obama and Democrats are pushing legislation they claim would empower average investors against powerful corporate executives. They propose requiring a shareholder vote on everything from CEO pay to – in a move to limit the freedoms in the Citizens United decision — companies’ weighing in on political candidates.

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Attorney General Eric Holder has made it abundantly clear he has absolutely no interest in investigating his radical friends at ACORN.

Holder’s Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that allows the Obama administration to ignore the will of Congress which has voted overwhelmingly to suspend federal funding of ACORN until at least Dec. 18. He’s also ignored the 88-page report on ACORN’s systemic corruption and flagrant racketeering activities that was issued this summer by Republican investigators on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Apparently, public outrage at the continuing antics of the corrupt radical advocacy group that used to employ President Obama and White House political director Patrick Gaspard counts for nothing.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (center) with ACORN ally Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (left), and former California Gov. Gray Davis (right).

But Americans really shouldn’t be surprised that Attorney General Holder is bending over backwards to help his radical friends at ACORN.

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Yesterday, I finished the third part of my interview with Wade Rathke. I felt, correctly, or not that after spending several hours with Rathke, that I was starting to understand Rathke, his vision, and his goals. So, I tried to make these questions as pointed and interesting as possible.

1) What can the local, state, and federal government do right now to help the poor and middle class?

The answer that Rathke gave was both surprising and impressive. I expected him to rattle off several laws that could be implemented, maybe a moratorium on foreclosures, and other policy changes that he believed in. Instead, Rathke was practical and pithy.

He said that all government programs: unemployment insurance, welfare, etc. should be streamlined on the internet so that all citizens would be given access to electronic files. By doing this, the government would cut all sorts of red tape and save those in need all sorts of time and energy in receiving these benefits. For the money the government would spend in implementing these systems, the benefit to the people would come back ten fold.

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An ACORN affiliate that submitted applications totaling over $6 million in federal grant money for broadband projects has been declared ineligible as a result of guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The ACORN Institute, a 501 (c) 3 group founded in 2000, submitted two separate applications to the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) earlier this year. One was in the amount of $3,172,042 and the other was for $2,999,903.

Funding for the grant program was included as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and was set up to “help bridge the technological divide and create jobs building Internet infrastructure,” according to the NTIA.

On its web site, the ACORN Institute (AI) describes itself as “a nationally respected provider of training and technical assistance in organizing principles and methods, a center for research and public policy development on issues of economic and social justice, and a provider of various services to low- to moderate-income individuals.” AI also includes an “experienced team” of “financial educators,” “tax preparers” and “benefits assistance specialists.”

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What would be the result if someone walked into a psychiatrist’s office and disclosed their belief that the weather is out to get them? Should the doctor be compelled by the state to initiate a competency hearing, or would a prescription for a fist-full of Prozac do?

What if the patient were a cop? Should they lose their badge?

What if the patient were a teacher? Should they lose their classroom?

What if the patient were an entire political movement? Should they lose their credibility and status as an authority on any and all subjects, at least those related to the weather?

At first glance, this 2007 report pulled from the internet archives of the Tides Foundation would appear to be making the claim described above; however, the cause is not so much driven by delusion as it is pathologically fraudulent.

The basic thrust of the publication (a conversation between the Tides Foundation’s Catherine Lerza and Redefining Progress’ Michel Gelobter) is that the effects of “global warming” are disproportionately felt by disadvantaged minorities.

[Catherine]Lerza: The impacts of global warming highlight social and racial inequalities around the world. It certainly affects poor communities differently. We saw that clearly in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Could you talk about these different impacts of climate change depending on geography, race, and class?

[Michel]Gelobter: Communities of color and low income communities in this country clearly feel the impact of climate change and have been feeling that impact for over 20 years.

My organization, Redefining Progress, has conducted a number of studies on Latinos and climate change and African-Americans and climate change. Different communities bear quite a different vulnerability to the risks of global warming. Six years ago, we already had figured out that the greatest victims of climate change were the lower-income communities and communities of color. You can see it in the disparity in heat deaths in St. Louis. You can see there’s an impact on agricultural communities and on border communities and indigenous communities, particularly in the Arctic.

We have to address issues of justice: people have a right to health and to a secure place to live. They have this right whether they’re black, or white, or whatever.

This excerpt clears up at least one major misconception: that the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina was the result of nature mixed with systemic governmental failure at all levels.

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A friend of mine on Facebook recently wrote the following about an article on the life of the late Irving Kristol:

“Once upon a time, not too many years ago, the Republican Party was the party of ideas. Would even its staunchest supporters say so today? I think not. The sole substance of the Republican Party today is opposition to whatever the Democrats are for, period.”

Were it true, it would be damning.  Thankfully it’s not.

My friend, a former White House high-ranking employee in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, grew angry, very angry, about the direction of the Republican Party under President Bush 43, something upon which I agree with him.  But, unlike him, I prefer to stay and fight for what’s right within the party I agree with most, not abandon it. He grew so angry that he voted for Obama in 2008.  Now, I don’t claim to know how any human being works internally, but I don’t understand how someone who claims to be a conservative could make that sort of switch. Simply because your side didn’t live up to their ideals doesn’t mean, to my mind, that  you switch to the side that advocates explicitly the opposite point of view.

But that’s neither here nor there. My friend, and everyone else, is free to vote for whomever they want, for whatever reason they want.  What I take issue with his the common mantra of the Left, echoed by my friend, that Republicans are out of ideas and Democrats are a fountain new ones.

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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.

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