– attorney Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg Eisenberg LLP, in a prophetic legal memo to ACORN dated June 19, 2008, the day before ACORN’s national board ousted ACORN founder organizer Wade Rathke.

ACORN’s lawyer warned ACORN 15 months ago to begin fixing its massive internal problems or face certain catastrophe. ACORN didn’t listen. It let the problems fester.

The advice from Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg Eisenberg LLP came in the form of an eerily prophetic legal memo to ACORN dated June 19, 2008, the day before ACORN’s national board fired disgraced founder Wade Rathke.

The memo is a kind of Holy Grail for ACORN researchers. One source of mine keeps a copy in a safety deposit box. I’ve lost track of how many people have asked me over the last year if I knew how to get a hold of it. One source told me yesterday that there are many people who would “kill” to gain possession of it. This is a bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but not much.

In articles by investigative reporter Stephanie Strom, the New York Times has published excerpts of the document. Incidentally, aspects of the Old Gray Lady’s coverage of ACORN were top-notch last year until management made a conscious decision to suppress Strom’s reporting before Election Day, apparently for political reasons.

Bearing the subject line “Initial Report on Organizational Review,” the Kingsley memo is addressed to ACORN and major affiliates ACORN Beneficial Association, ACORN Housing Corp., ACORN Institute, ACORN Votes, American Institute for Social Justice, Citizens Consulting Inc., Citizens Services Inc., Communities Voting Together, Pennsylvania Institute for Community Affairs Inc., and Project Vote (formal name: Voting for America Inc.).

The complete memo will be posted at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com later today. It consists of sequentially numbered pages, but one page — page 14 — is missing, so in my file page 13 abruptly jumps to page 15. My source, who insists on anonymity, says the document arrived in that form via a fax machine. I have not retouched or altered the document in any way except where I superimposed the logo of the think tank I work for, Capital Research Center.

Underscoring how important the document is to ACORN, all pages except the first page bear lawyerly caveats at the top: “Sensitive Report — Do Not Distribute Beyond Initial Recipient List.” Perhaps that’s community organizer-speak for “TOP SECRET.”

The Kingsley memo paints a picture of a once-proud activist conglomerate in utter meltdown and confirms some of the most serious allegations about ACORN now being heard on Capitol Hill.

The problems within ACORN, she admits, are systemic.

Kingsley explains that her concerns fall into four major categories: “respect for corporate integrity, the necessary separation between different types of political work, the niceties of 501(c)(3) tax compliance and accounting for those funds, and a big-picture question about organizational capacity.” She goes to great pains explaining that she is not trying to single any person out, “but to point to systemic institutional concerns.”

Americans who follow the news know that the activities of the ACORN network, a tangled mess of interlocking directorates and affiliated tax-exempt groups that routinely swap seven-figure checks, have long cried out for a probe under federal racketeering laws. The undercover prostitution sting videos that began popping up at BigGovernment.com in mid-September made America intensely interested in ACORN for the first time. While the mainstream media is now covering ACORN, kind of, sort of, no longer can ACORN be said to be the exclusive preserve of Fox News Channel and conservative talk show hosts.

In her reference manual for left-wing activists, The Practical Progressive, Erica Payne reports ACORN’s total 2008 budget was $50 million. Surely that figure is too low.

The network has taken in at least $107 million in donations and $53 million in federal funds since 1993, yet it owes millions of dollars in back taxes and is eligible for up to $8.5 billion in federal funding this year.

No one really knows how big the entire ACORN network’s budget is. One of the reasons is that tracking housing and community development grants administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is difficult. HUD often distributes the money to states and localities, which then allot the funds to many different nonprofit groups. Getting a total financial picture would require enlisting an army of Freedom of Information Act requesters.

Kingsley seems to confirm my assertion that there is no meaningful distinction, no discernible institutional firewalls that separate ACORN and its hundreds of tax-exempt nonprofit affiliates:

There is no point in having these different corporations in place if they are not respected. If not properly operated, they create difficulties (e.g., potential conflicts of interest for lawyers, non-trivial administrative burden of state filings, and the appearance that someone is trying to hide something under a byzantine corporate structure) without generating the desired benefits, whatever those may be.

This is “the natural result of thinking of all these different corporations as part of the family, or ‘us,’” she writes.

Key ACORN affiliates argue they are not “‘affiliated,’ ‘related,’ or ‘controlled’ by or with each other, for various legal purposes, while allowing actual control to be exercised in a highly coordinated manner,” she writes. ACORN suffers from “an organizational culture that resembles a family business more than an accountable organization.”

She argues “it may be time to consider whether direct governance control and/or acknowledged connections are appropriate, rather than trying to pretend that these groups are not connected to one another and create control mechanisms behind the scenes.”

“The IRS says that it cares about governance because it finds good governance linked to legal compliance, and slip-shod or absent governance and internal accountability are red-flags for tax and other legal problems,” Kingsley counsels. “In this case, the IRS is right.”

She highlights the following policies or the lack of such policies:

• Whistle blower policy [priority: CRITICAL]
• Document retention and destruction policy (simple version prohibiting illegal destruction of documents) [priority: URGENT]
• Contemporaneous documentation of Board and Committee meetings [priority: URGENT]
• Conflicts of interest policy [priority: IMPORTANT]
• Documented process for determining compensation for the CEO and any other officers or key employees [priority: IMPORTANT]

Apparently ACORN doesn’t follow best practices.

Kingsley hits ACORN for its incestuous hiring practices. “Also, though we have not created a draft policy at this point, all corporations with staff should adopt an appropriate anti-nepotism policy,” she writes. But don’t go overboard.

This is not to suggest a draconian policy that does not permit hiring of related people…But a minimal responsible policy would probably require that immediate family members or people in a domestic partnership or dating relationship not be one another’s direct supervisors.… Critically, all staff must be required to recuse themselves from any decisions relating to the employment of their relatives.

Who knew ACORN headquarters on Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans was Animal House!

Founder Wade Rathke might have been wise to adopt an anti-nepotism policy. His brother Dale embezzled $948,000 from ACORN while working there. Even after Wade covered up the theft, he kept Dale on the payroll for eight years. Wade’s wife, Beth Butler, and reportedly, his two children also work at ACORN.

Kingsley slams her client for not keeping political activities separate from other activities. “It may be that activities are carried out with adequate independence, but without formal policies and separation of staff functions, there are potential liabilities and problems of proof.”

Citizens Services Inc. (CSI), an ACORN affiliate that received $832,598 from the Obama campaign for get-out-the-vote work during primary season, is a prime example. Kingsley writes that “[w]ithin both CSI and ACORN, there needs to be a formal policy adopted and implemented and enforced that separates independent political activity from anything coordinated with a candidate or party.”

This was so urgent that Kingsley insisted the new policy had to be in place “by the end of the month” or the following month.

Kingsley also warns of the danger posed by the affiliates’ lack of proper documentation showing that the ACORN network has been following IRS rules on nonprofit behavior. There is too much overlap between various employees representing different affiliates and confusion about who is controlling which funds and this can only lead to trouble, she argues.

She warns ACORN that “merely papering the transfer of money is not sufficient.” The nonprofits have to be able to show that their funds were used for appropriate purposes.

She writes that ACORN Institute and American Institute for Social Justice should not make further grants until such time as offices with outstanding paperwork for previous grants get around to filing the needed reports.

Suffice it to say, Kingsley lets her client know it is in big trouble. There are further serious questions about the use of pension funds and about the Dale Rathke embezzlement and coverup.

The expulsion of the “ACORN 8,” a group of national board members kicked out of ACORN for asking ACORN management to produce documentation on the embezzlement, came months after the memo. You could even say the group’s members were kicked out by Wade Rathke’s successor, Bertha Lewis, for following Kingsley’s advice.

I shudder to think what Kingsley would have to say about Lewis’s flagrant abuse of power.

ACORN, as it turns out, is an ugly, corrupt organization. It is just as bad, just as evil, as people said it was. If you don’t believe me, ask Elizabeth Kingsley.

The Republican National Lawyers Association, which has been in the forefront of the push to investigate ACORN, sounded just the right note. Said RNLA president David Norcross:

“ACORN should view their current situation as an opportunity to truly reform itself and place the interests of its members first and they can start by re-examining the report by Elizabeth Kingsley and addressing the malfeasance and dysfunction running rampant within their organization.”

by Glenn McCoy

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Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.

“Frankly, it’s not something I’ve followed closely,” Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn’t even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. “This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to,” he said.

Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group.

Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.

Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.

In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn’s leaders prior to their political arm’s endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: “I’ve been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

But the Obama campaign didn’t appear eager to discuss the candidate’s ties to Acorn. Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been. The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as “staging, sound, lighting,” only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.

Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama’s protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group’s latest scandal seem preposterous. Here’s hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it.

By Ginger Adams Otis and Tim Perone

Just how nutty is ACORN?

Very, say longtime watchers of the extreme leftwing group that sprouted out of a radical 60s anti-government movement.

For decades ACORN has presented itself as a grassroots network dedicated to improving the lives of the poor.

But there’s more to ACORN than its do-gooder veneer.

Just ask the banks, corporations and politicians who’ve been the target of ACORN’s shameless shenanigans over the past 40 years.

Here’s how the tiny seed of 1960s radicalism blossomed into a well-funded, national organization with political connections reaching all the way to the White House:

ACORN Undercover: In real life, O'Keefe is a Fordham MBA student and Giles a minister's daughter.

THE BEGINNING

*ACORN is rooted in extreme far-left activism that wants to shut down the US government by overwhelming it with demands for welfare benefits and other forms of assistance.

“They don’t like the American system of government, and would love for it to be overthrown,” said ACORN expert Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center in D.C.

“The whole goal is to transform America into a socialist country, or some form of socialist democracy. This group is dangerous.”

*Founder Wade Rathke was a student at Williams College in 1969 and a member of the leftist Students for a New Democracy group when he dropped out to protest the Vietnam War full-time.

*Rathke began working for fiery activist George Wiley, a black radical who started the National Welfare Reform Organization in 1969. NWRO was created to help poor people sign up for more welfare benefits, with the goal of clogging and eventually grinding down US government systems.

*In 1970 Rathke was charged with inciting violence by Massachussetts police after a welfare rally he was leading turned into a riot. He was then sent to Arkansas to open up a new chapter of NWRO. But he began to hear rumors that Wiley was going to oust him from the organization. So he decided to start his own group — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

*In 1972 ACORN launched its first political initiative and backed two of its members who were running for the Little Rock School Board. Its efforts proved so successful that the group expanded beyond Arkansas and opened offices in Texas and South Dakota. Before long, it became a national group and started pushing its progressive political agenda.

*In 1999 Wade Rathke’s brother Dale, also a major figure at ACORN, was caught embezzling nearly $1 million from the organization. His plundering was swept under the rug after the Rathke family promised to repay the debt. Both Wade and Dale Rathke remained on the payroll and the group didn’t inform any of its board members about the theft, or contact authorities.

*In June 2008 two whistleblowers demanded a full accounting of Dale Rathke’s embezzlement, and its subsequent cover-up. When news of it broke, Dale and Wade were forced to leave the organization, which employs hundreds worldwide. Wade remains in control of ACORN International and other subsidiaries of the main group. The two dissident board members were ejected from ACORN and labeled traitors.

HOUSING AND LIVING WAGE CAMPAIGNS

*In1986 the organization created the ACORN Housing Corporation to help poor people get into homes. The members started a campaign of targeting banks and businesses for sit-ins and large protests, alleging discriminatory lending practices. Critics of ACORN say the protests were little more than shakedowns to get grant money from the banks and force them to loan more freely to low-income families.

*1993: A vice-chair at the United Missouri Bancshares told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that ACORN tried to “blackmail” his company into lending $25 million to poor neighborhoods, and demanded payment for every mortgage their loan office helped set up.

“ACORN would invade a bank’s office, yelling and screaming, and it was pretty difficult for a bank not to say, ‘OK, we’ll give you a grant, just leave us alone,’” said Hans Von Spakovsky, an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“A lot of businesses felt they had to pay up just so ACORN would leave them alone. And ACORN hasn’t come under scrutiny for it, which is unfortunate.”

*In 1995 ACORN filed a lawsuit to try and claim an exemption from paying its workers minimum wage. The group had launched several successful campaigns to raise the minimum wage across the country and advocated heavily for fair pay and union wages from for-profit corporations. But it shouldn’t have to pay its workers a living wage because it would mean hiring fewer staffers, and make employees less in tune with the needs of the poor, ACORN lawyers said.

*In 1999 angry ACORN demonstrators showed up at the campaign headquarters of Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who at that time was running for mayor of Baltimore. The group chanted “What’s the difference between slum landlords and the Aryan brotherhood?” It was a reference to campaign money they mistakenly thought O’Malley had taken from a notorious slumlord, and their belief that a white supremacist group had backed the Democrat.

*O’Malley dismissed ACORN as “professional protestors” when they targeted him again three years later. The rabble-rousers dumped garbage on the steps of Baltimore’s City Hall and then rallied on his front lawn at home. “They unloaded a busload of people shouting pretty ugly things and scared the daylights out of my wife and kids. I thought it was a pretty cruddy thing to do,” O’Malley told the Baltimore Sun in 2002.

*In 2004, ACORN abruptly flipped its position on banks — criticizing financial institutions for being too quick to grant mortgages to poor and middle-income earners who couldn’t pay back their loans. It filed a class-action lawsuit in California against Wells-Fargo Financials. In the suit, ACORN said the bank engaged in unfair and deceptive lending practices, including “bait and switch” sales tactics. The same day it filed the lawsuit, ACORN brought 2,000 of its members to downtown LA to march against Wells Fargo’s “predatory lending” and “abusive loan practices.” ACORN’s housing director Maude Hurd said then that the group was determined that the bank would not “continue to swindle and steal from our communities.”

VOTER REGISTRATION FRAUD

*In 1998 an ACORN employee was arrested for falsifying voter registration forms in Arkansas. The next year, authorities in Philadelphia confiscated hundreds of registration forms because one ACORN employee wrote them all. This was the first of many voter registration frauds that ACORN would be accused of in subsequent years.

*Since 2004, members of the activist group in as many as nine states have been charged with crimes related to voter registration fraud. To date about 50 people have been arrested, and approximately 30 have resulted in guilty pleas for ACORN-related voter fraud.

*At election offices around the country, ACORN workers are famous for waiting until registration deadline to dump thousands of new documents on overworked clerks — making it harder for them to fully vet the registration forms.

“They have a long history of voter registration fraud, I don’t think we are even close to knowing the extent of it,” said John Samples, of the Cato Institute.

“A lot of it has been discovered by cursory checks or by accident. There’s a lot more out there to be discovered.”

In 2007, Washington authorities filed felony charges against seven people who committed voter registration fraud while working for ACORN — the worst case of voter fraud in Washington’s history. The organization had to pay officials $25,000 for investigative costs.

* During the 2008 presidential campaign “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck” were just some of the crazy names put on bogus voter registration forms submitted by ACORN. The group claimed to have registered 1.3 million voters, but more than 400,000 of those forms were later deemed fraudulent or incomplete by election authorities. An ACORN manager said the group hired “lazy crackheads” who needed money to collect signatures in Nevada. Convicted felons living in transitional housing in Las Vegas were recruited by ACORN organizers and were promised bonuses — which is illegal in Nevada — if they got 20 or more new voter sign ups a day. The organization was slapped with two dozen felonies by the Nevada attorney general.

*”Every time you turn over an ACORN rock, something ugly crawls out,” said Scott St. Clair, of the nonpartisan Evergreen Freedom Foundation based in Washington.

POLITICAL TIES

*ACORN claims to be non-partisan, but since the 1970s has backed mostly Democratic candidates in local, state and national elections. It has close connections with union groups around the country, most notably the Service Employees International Union, a powerful labor organization that has extensive ties to Capitol Hill.

“The Democratic Party has used them as foot soldiers, even if they claim not to be directly related to ACORN,” said Von Spakovsky.

“ACORN transfers money between its subsidiaries — and nobody knows for sure how many there are. A lot of these subsidiaries get paid by Democratic campaigns as consultants,” he said.

*In 1992 President Obama headed the Project Vote campaign — an organization affiliated with an ACORN subsidiary — to register 150,000 voters in Chicago. ACORN backed Carol Moseley Braun, the country’s first female African-American Senator.

*Barack Obama was one of the lawyers who represented ACORN in 1994 when it sued Citibank on behalf of “all persons who are African-American” and applied for a loan between 1992 and 1995. The group argued that Citibank wasn’t giving mortgages in a “race-neutral way.”

*A year later Obama again represented ACORN with a team of lawyers when the group sued Illinois, claiming the state was violating federal voting access law.

*In 2008, during the presidential primary, Obama worked with ACORN subsidiary Citizen Services Inc — a consulting firm affiliated with ACORN — to help with voter turnout. He paid the group $800,000.

THE FUTURE?

ACORN’s altruistic façade came tumbling down — possibly for good — this month after a series of videos showed staffers giving an undercover pimp and hooker tips on defrauding the government, laundering money, cheating on taxes and obtaining a mortgage to open up a home-based brothel.

The damning display put ACORN on the defensive again and even rocked its once solid base of support among Democratic lawmakers.

Both the House and Senate have passed bipartisan bills calling for an immediate halt to federal funding to ACORN, which a Republican tally puts at $53 million since 1994.

Governor David Paterson on Friday placed a hold on all state contracts with the agency’s local chapter, and the US Census Bureau kicked ACORN off its upcoming 2010 population count.

Yet ACORN needs more than just a slap on the wrist for encouraging people to commit mortgage and tax fraud, according to Von Spakovsky, a former Department of Justice investigator. The activist organization has yet to be held accountable for most of its actions — past and present, he said.

“Nobody knows for sure how many subsidiaries ACORN has, but many investigations have shown they’re mostly shell groups, used to transfer money around,” said Von Spakovsky.

“We’ll only know the true extent of their wrongdoing when the Department of Justice does a forensic audit, and we find out where those millions in federal funds have gone,” he said.

Now that a third ACORN video has surfaced, a pattern emerges of ACORN workers willing to help people engage in prostitution, tax fraud, housing fraud, and even human trafficking. Under federal law, a RICO investigation is now warranted. Three strikes and you’re out, ACORN.

Videos show ACORN employees offering to help two undercover reporters/filmmakers posing as a prostitute and pimp in falsifying tax returns and getting a federal loan to buy a house that they could use as a brothel for underage prostitutes smuggled in from El Salvador.

When the first video emerged from such a meeting in ACORN’s Baltimore office on Thursday, ACORN fired the two workers involved. When another video surfaced on Friday, this one from ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office, the two workers involved there were fired as well, and ACORN said that these two reporters had tried and failed to carry out this sting in other offices.

One such office where ACORN said these reporters tried and failed was New York City. Yet Monday, a third video surfaced from Brooklyn in New York City. Once again, the ACORN employees on the video advise the undercover duo on how to violate federal law by filing a false income tax return to qualify for a federal housing loan.

As one worker says on the video, “honesty is not going to get you the house.” — Well, not if you’re engaged in a host of felonies.

ACORN has the audacity to say that the undercover reporters may have committed a crime in the videotaping process, alleging that they doctored the tapes and that the reality is not what every viewer can plainly see and hear on the tape. (Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?)

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

The reality is, there are at least a half-dozen state and federal laws that could have been broken here. Even though the undercover young woman is not really a prostitute and there are no El Salvadoran girls here either, this could still meet the legal standard for conspiracy to commit these various crimes. At a bare minimum, depending on the state, it likely fulfills the elements for the crime of attempted conspiracy, which usually carries the exact same penalty as the underlying crimes themselves (prostitution, tax fraud, etc.).

What’s important about prostitution and human trafficking is that they are specific triggers for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO. The RICO law is designed to enable the Justice Department to go after criminal enterprises. It defines “racketeering activity” as including importing illegal aliens for immoral purposes, falsifying identification documents and immigration papers, mail and wire fraud, and the sexual exploitation of children, among others.

These are all implicated on the video tapes. The ACORN workers rattle off their how-to instructions on carrying out these crimes without needing to do more than skim a couple books that they have on hand. The clear implication is that these workers are seasoned pros who know how to carry out these crimes, subsidized by federal taxpayer money.

Although everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, a RICO investigation is now warranted. There are already multiple state investigations of ACORN underway, and thirty ACORN workers have already pleaded guilty to committing crimes. Attorney General Eric Holder should immediately order a RICO investigation, while we all wait to see if more footage is forthcoming.

Last week we noted that Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, had acknowledged her paper was “a beat behind” on the story of Van Jones, the Obama administration’s so-called green-jobs czar, who among other things once signed a 9/11 “truther” conspiracy petition. Times readers did not learn about Jones until he had already become the Obama administration’s former so-called green-jobs czar. Abramson pointed out that long before the Times reported the story, “it had been discussed on talk radio, Fox News and other venues.”

Our conclusion: “If you want to get the news ahead of the Times, watch Fox News Channel.”

On Friday, Fox delivered on Abramson’s promise by scooping the Times again. Early that evening, the network sent an email alert: “Census Bureau severs all ties with ACORN after hidden-camera videos expose 4 of group’s workers advising ‘pimp,’ ‘prostitute’ on subverting the law.” (Here’s the full story.) The Obama administration had invited Acorn (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to “partner” with the bureau as “advocates for census cooperation and participation,” as the bureau described it in its Dear John letter.

Readers of Saturday’s Times got only a short (225-word) report from the Associated Press, which began: “The Census Bureau on Friday severed its ties with Acorn, a community organization that Republicans have accused of voter-registration fraud.” It made no mention of the hidden-camera sting–although that was because of the Times’s editing. The original AP dispatch, filed contemporaneously with the Fox alert, was twice as long. Among the material the Times cut was this:

ACORN fired two employees who were seen on hidden-camera video giving tax advice to a man posing as a pimp and a woman who pretended to be a prostitute. Fox News Channel broadcast excerpts from the video on Thursday. On the video, a man and woman visiting ACORN’s Baltimore office asked about buying a house and how to account on tax forms for the woman’s income. An ACORN employee advised the woman to list her occupation as “performance artist.”

Those two employees had worked in Baltimore (the other two were in Washington), and a story in Friday’s Baltimore Sun reported that the investigators purportedly planned to traffic in child sex slaves:

The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requirements. The supposed pimp also appears to ask the employees how to conceal underage girls from El Salvador brought into the country illegally to work for him.

“If they don’t have Social Security numbers, you don’t have to worry about them,” the employee says.

The Sun noted that the exposé, by 20-year-old Hannah Giles and 25-year-old James O’Keefe, was published on BigGovernment.com, a conservative Web site run by Andrew Breitbart, before being aired on Glenn Beck’s Fox program.

It was a busy week for Beck and Breitbart. On Friday they claimed another victory when, as FoxNews.com reported, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that it was “reassigning” Yosi Sergant, its communications director. On his Sept. 1 program, Beck had aired portions of a tape from an August conference call with artists, in which Sergant exhorted them to push the administration’s agenda. The call was first reported on Big Hollywood, another Breitbart site, by a participant, Patrick Courrielche, who provided Beck the tape on which Sergant said this:

I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment. There’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service. Then my task would be to apply your artistic, creativity community’s utilities and bring them to the table.

Sergant also told the artists: “We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government, what that looks like legally. . . . We are participating in history as it’s being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together [to] move the needle and to get stuff done.”

Here is a reprint in full of the Times’s coverage of the Sergant story: “ — ”

It’s difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could employ an exponent of a crackpot conspiracy theory, “partner” with an apparently corrupt organization, or attempt to politicize an agency like the NEA without the mainstream media treating it as a major scandal. But with Obama in the White House? A quote attributed to the fired Washington Acorn employees sums things up nicely. The AP reported that they had advised Giles and O’Keefe that they “must be low-key about the business, or people could ‘call Fox’ “–not the New York Times, or CBS or NBC, or “the media,” but Fox.

To be sure, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart are advocacy journalists with distinct points of view. But the supposedly impartial mainstream media also claim to have an “adversary” relationship with the government. That they have left this field to a few upstarts suggests that they have a point of view, too–one that is, in the age of Obama, far more compliant than adversarial.