Acorns and Oaks

by bert

UPDATE: Jon Stewart is on it.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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http://www.thedailyshow.com/
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On a scale of depravity, how would you rank those federal contractors who gang-rape and imprison compared to those contractors who talk agreeably to actors pretending to want to pimp under-age immigrants?

Last week, as right-wing pundits were installing wall-to-wall astro-outrage over the airwaves based on the prostitute trick that some ACORN staff fell for, I was reminded of the case of Jamie Leigh Jones.

Good for the new guy Al Franken for bringing some light to one of the many, many outrageous cases that don't help The Right, and therefore seem to sink out of reporters' sight (like the murdered census worker in Kentucky, for example).

Two ACORN posts in one

It's About Time They Defunded Northrop-Grumman
by folkbum

Brilliant! Congress finally passes a law prohibiting the distribution of any funds to "any organization that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency."

That means, of course, the $53 million in the last 15 years that we sent to ACORN will be cut off (whew!), but so will the hundreds of billions we've sent to the fraudsters at Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Xe (née Blackwater) and Haliburton and ...

They Fired the Wrong Guy
by folkbum

Guy A: Doing his job when an Ashton Kutcher wannabe shows up with a hidden camera and eight miles of bull including a story about human trafficking. Guy A calls his cousin, a police detective, to report the conversation and seek help about the human smuggling--only to follow-up later that he'd been duped and there was no longer a need to investigate.

Guy B: Runs a website purporting to be "news," and had in fact worked for a long time as an editor on a popular news aggregator site and should know what he's doing. He gets the tape from said wannabe and does not follow up with Guy A, Guy A's boss, the police department in Guy A's city, or anything to find out if Guy A had attempted to stop the illegal activity he'd been told about. Guy B runs the tape without the due diligence, creating the impression that Guy A supported the law-breaking rather than reported it, which he actually did.

You can probably guess that hapless Guy A, who tried to Do The Right Thing, is the one who got fired. Guy B is making money hand over fist at the expense of honest guys like Guy A.

(Guy B also didn't run the footage from other cities, like Philadelphia, where the police were called in real time on the wannabe. No money to be made in that, either.)

Yikes! Now ACORN is changing registered Republicans into Democrats!

by folkbum

Or not.

Charlie Sykes: Delusions of Pander

by folkbum

I don't have a job that lets me listen to Charlie Sykes in the mornings. I'm not sure, anyway, that after teaching one bunch of adolescents all day I would want to listen to another on the radio anyhow.

But I am glad there are others out there who can keep an ear on Sykes. The Brawler, for example, caught Sykes saying that he believes Democratic "vote fraud" will be the deciding factor in the November election.

(Pause for laughter.)

All of this is hooey, of course; the whinging about ACORN and fraud are all designed to do one thing, which is to delegitimize a Barack Obama presidency. Charlie thinks he can convince himself, and enough of his listeners, that but for the likes of ACORN and "voters" named "Mickey Mouse," John McCain would be our next president--and that would make anything Obama says or does illegitimate despite what may look like a landslide and a mandate.

Has Charlie seen this? That's pollster.com, not ACORN, showing (as I type this) a nine-point composite lead in the polls for Barack Obama. Obama's at a majority, 51.2%, meaning if every undecided voter broke for John McCain in the next two weeks, McCain would still lose by a greater margin that Al Gore and John Kerry combined. pollster.com also estimates that Obama has 320 safe electoral votes right now, 50 more than needed to win the presidency.

How on earth does Charlie Sykes think that ACORN is skewing the polls? Could he really believe that every media organization on the planet is being played by Democratic fraudsters to show an overwhelming Obama lead? Does he think that the polls today are somehow being gamed as cover for the massive fraud that we have planned to execute on election day?

Or, more likely, is he just delusional? Maybe bitter and angry over the fact that this country has clearly left him behind? That Wisconsin will vote more strongly for Obama than for Gore or Kerry?

My vote is the latter--Charlie Sykes is losing it. He is, as a famous man once said, rejecting reality and substituting his own. The polls are meaningless. The truth is meaningless.

Well, here's news for you, Charlie: If that's the way you feel, you're the one who's meaningless.

ACORN-supporting candidate delivers rousing keynote at pro-immigration rally

by folkbum

But not who you think:

Leaders from a diverse array of sectors will hold a rally in Miami on Thursday, February 23, 2006, in support of comprehensive immigration reform in an effort to keep immigration reform at the forefront of the public debate. Leaders from both political parties, immigrant communities, labor, business, and religious organizations will gather to call on Washington to enact workable reform.

The rally will feature Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) as the headline speaker along with elected officials, immigrants and key local and national leaders. Sen. McCain is one of the chief sponsors of the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act; bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform legislation introduced last Congress and scheduled for consideration by the Senate in the coming weeks. A similar rally with Sen. McCain is planned for New York City on February 27. [. . .]

The rally in Miami is being sponsored by the New American Opportunity campaign (NAOC) in partnership with ACORN, Catholic Legal Services - Archdiocese of Miami, Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, Florida Immigrant Coalition, Miami Dade College, People for the American Way/Mi Familia Vota en Acción, Service Employees International Union, and UNITE HERE

As Bart Simpson would say, the ironing is delicious.

Blind squirrels don't find ACORNs this time, either

by folkbum

The right is in high dudgeon again because of ACORN, the community organizers who, as part of their mission, identify non-voters and register them so that those traditionally voiceless in the electoral process might find a voice--the vote being guaranteed in the Constitution and whatnot.

Most recently, there's the raid of an ACORN office in Nevada by state officials looking for evidence of fraud. Problem is, ACORN had been sending state officials evidence of fraud--no search warrant needed!--for months and officials ignored it:

As part of our nonpartisan voter registration program, we have reviewed all the applications submitted by our canvassers. When we have identified suspicious applications, we have separated them out and flagged them for election officials. We have zero tolerance for fraudulent registrations. We immediately dismiss employees we suspect of submitting fraudulent registrations.

For the past 10 months, any time ACORN has identified a potentially fraudulent application, we turn that application into election officials separately and offer to provide election officials with the information they would need to pursue an investigation or prosecution of the individual.

Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 "problem application packages," which involved 33 former canvassers.

On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.

Got that? Nevada officials have known for months that some ACORN workers had been turning in forms for, to name one example, the Dallas Cowboys. Nevada officials knew this because ACORN told them about it. And yet the Secretary of State there (a Democrat, no less) waited until a month before the election to stage a high profile media stunt and to accuse ACORN of engaging in fraud when, in reality, it was ACORN who tried to stop the fraud in the first place.

More locally, we have Republicans freaking out that ACORN used former felons in its voter registration drives, despite a ruling by the Government Accountability Board in April that such people were ineligible to act as registrars. Did you hear about that ruling in April? Neither did I, and neither, apparently, did the City of Milwaukee, whose job it was to deputize the registrars. They were going by the text of the law which says (.pdf) that "[a] qualified elector of the state may apply to any municipal clerk or board of election commissioners to be appointed as a special registration deputy for the purpose of registering electors of the municipality prior to the close of registration" (6.26(2)a). Since former felons may vote in this state (they are "qualified electors"), the statute clearly permits former felons to be special registration deputies, something the GAB apparently changed without legislative approval and without making sure that every municipality--like Milwaukee--knew.

So once again, ACORN is trying to follow the law both here and in Nevada, and trying to cooperate and coordinate with state and local officials to make sure the law is being followed and that anyone breaking the law is punished for doing so. And yet the right sees ACORN as the bad guys. I don't understand why; it seems like merely attempting to give minorities and the poor a greater say in the election is enough to earn a group like ACORN constant and undeserved scorn.