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.

The sensational undercover video showed ACORN Housing employees in the group’s Baltimore office trying to help the two journalists set up a brothel. The pair told ACORN employees that underage girls from El Salvador were ready to enter the U.S. and start working as child prostitutes.

The video, first shown on Andrew Breitbart’s new website Big Government, was featured that day on Glenn Beck’s TV program. Hannah Giles, who portrayed the prostitute in the video, told Beck she got involved in the project “to expose ACORN.”

“I saw them as a thug organization that was getting my tax dollars,” said Giles.

But guess who might be facing prosecution for exposing the group best known for its never-ending voter registration fraud scandals? You guessed it — the conservative journalists involved in the undercover reporting of course!

Obama supporter Patricia Jessamy, Maryland State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, released a statement saying the video might violate the state’s anti-wiretapping law that was used against Linda Tripp after she recorded telephone conversations with President Clinton’s Oval Office paramour Monica Lewinsky. The law requires consent to the recording by both parties in a conversation.

Always ready to smear conservatives, left-wing journalist Joe Conason said on the Sept. 10 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the filmmaker who portrayed the pimp may not be making himself available to the media because he feared prosecution for unlawful recording, as if the First Amendment’s press protections don’t apply in the state of Maryland.

Fox News contributor, former Judge Andrew Napolitano, said that’s bunk. The Maryland statute does not apply to videotape recordings — only to phone calls or other electronic “communications,” Napolitano said.

Meanwhile, the radical group and crime syndicate that is a longtime ally of President Obama went into damage control overdrive after the videos showed ACORN officials advising the pretend prostitute and her procurer about how to get taxpayer funds, launder money, commit tax fraud, and commit who knows how many other crimes.

When ACORN learned of the video Thursday it fired the workers, called Fox News racist for airing the footage, and threatened a lawsuit.

Stuart Katzenberg, lead organizer for ACORN’s Maryland branch, said that the employees were canned because they “did not meet ACORN’s standards of professionalism.” Sonja Merchant-Jones, head of Baltimore City ACORN, said that the workers were low-level part-time workers unsupervised by senior staff at the time.

Another video showing a similar scenario surfaced the next day. This time it was a slightly different undercover operation in which Washington, D.C. ACORN employees were only too willing to participate in the prostitution scam. ACORN promptly cashiered those employees too, screaming it was a victim of a “smear” campaign.

Marcel Reid, who is officially chairwoman of the D.C. chapter of ACORN, said that Katzenberg took over as lead organizer for Maryland and the District of Columbia after ACORN’s national board expelled her last November for asking uncomfortable questions about the group’s finances.

While Reid is chairwoman in name, she has been barred from the D.C. office since her expulsion from the board. She co-founded a reform group called ACORN 8.

When in charge of D.C. ACORN, Reid said she had no authority over ACORN Housing employees working in the D.C. ACORN office. Employees of ACORN Housing, a nonprofit legally separate from ACORN, share office space in ACORN offices across the country.

After Reid was booted out, Katzenberg became head organizer for Maryland and D.C. He was a key campaign official for Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) and ACORN Maryland went all-out last year to get Edwards elected.

It is also unclear why national ACORN officials such as chief organizer and CEO Bertha Lewis have gotten involved in spin-doctoring this latest corruption crisis. ACORN frequently likes to point out that ACORN Housing, which has taken in tens of millions of dollars in government grants, is a separate and distinct legal entity.

But that wasn’t the end of ACORN’s worst public relations week ever.

In addition to ACORN’s underage illegal alien sex slave scandals, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Friday it was severing ties with ACORN regarding next year’s decennial census. Census Director Robert M. Groves sent a letter to ACORN national president Maude Hurd explaining that “ACORN’s affiliation with 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts.”

Employing polite euphemism, Groves wrote that “recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.” Officials at the Census Bureau “no longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is being effectively managed through your many local offices.”

Just months earlier former ACORN organizer Gregory Hall warned of the dangers of allowing the group to be involved in the upcoming census while the Obama administration lied about the extent of ACORN’s involvement in next year’s national head count.

The administration had said the idea ACORN would be involved in any Census count was “baseless.” A response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Judicial Watch revealed that ACORN was given the opportunity to “recruit Census workers” to participate in the count and “organize and/or serve as a member on a Complete Count Committee,” which, according to Census documents, helps “develop and implement locally based outreach and recruitment campaigns.”

Next it was revealed that ACORN founder Wade Rathke didn’t have a problem with domestic terrorists trying to kill delegates at the Republican Party’s national convention in 2008, according to former radical community organizer Brandon Darby.

After Darby worked with the FBI to stop a left-wing terrorist bomb plot at the RNC convention in Minnesota, Rathke denounced him for breaking the radicals’ code of silence. In January Rathke suggested on his blog that it’s better to let innocents die than squeal on your comrades in the struggle. It’s “one thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks,” wrote the former organizer for the ultra-left Students for a Democratic Society, the same group that gave birth to Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground.

This is the same Wade Rathke who orchestrated an eight-year coverup of his brother’s nearly $1 million embezzlement of ACORN funds. When that conspiracy was unearthed last summer, Rathke was given the bum’s rush from the organization he founded in 1970. He remains unapologetic about the scandal, claiming that if it had been disclosed when it happened the “right wing” would have used it to discredit ACORN.

As an added bonus, ACORN’s name was thrown about as an epithet by speakers and other participants at the 9/12 national tea party rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday.

Who knows what the coming weeks will bring.

by Chip Bok

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When, if not now, will Republicans develop such a fighting spirit?

Democrats invest – with taxpayer money, mind you – in groups like ACORN that, among other sordid tactics, seek out Skid Row bodies and wheel them to polling places. All the Democratic National Committee needs are vans and smelling salts. Pop culture and the “education system” have done the rest, making “D” the default choice on Election Day.

Democrats brazenly take policy positions – think government services and even amnesty for illegal immigrants – not because they are the right thing to do, but because they are time-tested demographic bribes. Forget cigarettes and beer, Democrats would distribute needles, methadone, medical marijuana and biscotti in voter goodie bags if they could get away with it.

Democrats long ago jettisoned America’s melting-pot ideal – E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) – because it imperils their campaign for permanent rule. Splitting the country into separate identity groups and playing them against each other works a lot better. And anyone who disagrees is a racist.

Win. Win. Win.

One of the first things President Obama attempted to do after taking office was to take control of the Census Bureau, an act that could redraw congressional districts and ensure Democratic majorities for years to come. The new president also etched out an enemies list, focusing on conservative talk-radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh. He also appears to have singled out Fox News. Comedians and mainstream journalists who are usually contemptuous of government bullying and First Amendment threats also continue to do the president’s bidding.

These overt political gestures were done amid economic chaos and mainstream media delirium to ensure permanent victory for a newly radicalized Democratic Party. Moveon.org, George Soros and the ghost of Saul Alinsky are in charge now. It’s not just “tea party” protesters who think we’ve tilted far left. Self-avowed anarchists and open socialists proudly brandished Obama placards at well-attended May Day parades.

When elected, the Democrats dole out billion-dollar bonuses to their core supporters at taxpayers’ expense. Witness the $787 billion stimulus package, an orgy of special-interest payback for labor unions, liberal activist groups and multinational corporations. One would be hard pressed to name a Democratic policy that is motivated more by principle than by winning.

Where is the media to expose this blatant corruption when the media are in the middle of the pile? NBC News, whose parent company General Electric is getting billions in stimulus cash to perpetuate Democrat-friendly “green” technologies and health care information systems, is at the forefront of a bizarre campaign to act as a check on the party that is out of power, not the party in power. NBC anchor Brian Williams bowed to the new president; MSNBC is a Fellini-esque exercise in liberal triumphalism.

With Democrats holding comfortable majorities in the House and Senate, as well as controlling the executive branch, it’s only logical that the mainstream media to focus their scrutiny on Mr. Limbaugh, ex-Rep. Tom DeLay, former President George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, the governor of one of the least populous states. Right?

NBC News and MSNBC are certainly not alone among the government watchdogs that have been tamed. The New York Times expends its considerable yet waning clout to ensure that our future is in a one-party state. Vocal, liberal Hollywood celebrities – on the same page as the Huffington Post and Keith Olbermann – spread the venom by making membership in the Grand Old Party seem like an anti-social act for young voters.

Such brazenly reprehensible Democratic lawmakers as Nancy Pelosi, John P. Murtha, Barney Frank, Harry Reid and Christopher J. Dodd are not trotted before the media because of their telegenic appeal and oratorical skills, but to act as symbols of what politicians can get away with it. It’s a big-league taunt – like gang members in prison sporting “tear” tattoos under their eyes to brag about their kill count. Yeah … What are you going to do about it, Mr. Boehner and Mr. McConnell?

Yet Democrats at least wield a logical and workable strategy to defeat their enemy. And “enemy” is precisely how they view the Republican Party.

Republicans, on the other hand, act like a snobby condo board and appear to seek out potential voters for their savoriness. The party expects pre-existing respectable organizations, Protestant churches in particular, to do the heavy lifting. In this day of dwindling Republican appeal, the party’s ace in the hole is heard at the end of the polling day: “Have they counted the overseas military vote yet?” It’s amazing Republicans ever win.

Most disturbing, Republicans seem to think Democrats can be their friends. Not only does the Republican Party not have a Ronald Reagan, the Democratic Party has no Tip O’Neill. Washington doesn’t have end-of-the-day, cross-party social sessions over single-malt scotches. There is no bipartisanship that doesn’t end in Republicans acquiescing in defeat of their core principles. A coordinated Democratic campaign against mainstream middle-of-the-road Republicanism is here to stay. And our strategy, as best as I can decipher it, is to be more liked than the last go around.

In the next election cycle, things need to be drastically different. Democracy is not Augusta National Golf Club. It’s a messy free-for-all, and in a two-party system, the GOP will not survive if it doesn’t accept the fact that the Democrats are its enemy and that it must begin to play for keeps. That means finding another Lee Atwater – only meaner – and not apologizing when we get him.

Some coincidences live in infamy.

It would have been hard Monday for Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) not to understand how Bill Ayers felt the day the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked. Unforgiving history records that on Sept. 11, 2001, the retired domestic terrorist’s “I don’t regret setting bombs” comment ran in a New York Times profile.

While obviously of a much lesser magnitude, the House Judiciary Committee chairman’s May 4 statement exonerating ACORN couldn’t have come out at a worse time. “Based on my review of the information regarding the complaints against ACORN, I have concluded that a hearing on this matter appears unwarranted at this time,” Conyers said in a statement aired that night on CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

Just hours earlier his fellow Democrats in Nevada, Secretary of State Ross Miller and Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto dropped a bombshell. ACORN and two former senior ACORN employees in the state, they announced, had been charged with a total of 39 felony counts related to voter registrations.

“By structuring employment and compensation around a quota system, ACORN facilitated voter registration fraud in this state,” said Masto. “Nevada will not tolerate violations of the law by individuals nor will it allow corporations to hide behind or place blame on their employees when its training manuals clearly detail, condone and, indeed, require, illegal acts in performing the job for the corporation.”

Nevada alleges that last year ACORN paid canvassers between $8.00 and $9.00 per hour to register people to vote, but canvassers who fell short of the quota of 20 voter registration forms per shift were fired. This illegal policy was “clearly outlined in the training materials the organization used to train new employees,” according (pdf) to the state.

Nevada claims ACORN also offered canvassers additional compensation in the form of a bonus program called “Blackjack” or “21+” that paid canvassers a $5.00 bonus. Each canvasser who brought in 21 or more completed voter registration forms per shift would receive the bonus. Such schemes are illegal in the state because they give canvassers an incentive to file fraudulent forms.

Nevada alleges the bonus program “was created by employee Christopher Edwards, the Field Director for the Las Vegas office,” and that ACORN timesheets show the group’s management knew about it and “failed to take immediate action to terminate it.” The state claims that ACORN’s Deputy Regional Director Amy Busefink knew about the bonus program and “aided and abetted the scheme by approving” it.

An initial hearing in the criminal case has been scheduled for June 3 in Las Vegas.

But no hearing has been scheduled by Conyers.

When on Wednesday this reporter asked Conyers spokesman Jonathan Godfrey to explain the decision not to move forward with a probe, he declined to do so and instead emailed the same statement that was aired on CNN earlier in the week.

It’s unclear what exactly crystallized Conyers’s thinking, but his reversal is all the more puzzling given the enthusiasm the 23-term congressman showed for holding an ACORN hearing mere weeks ago.

On March 19, after hearing the testimony of GOP lawyer Heather Heidelbaugh about ACORN’s many misdeeds, Conyers said the allegations were “a pretty serious matter.”

Heidelbaugh testified the nonprofit group violated a host of tax, campaign finance, and other laws. She said the presidential campaign of Barack Obama sent ACORN its “maxed out donor list” and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group’s employees “to reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN.”

Heidelbaugh said the New York Times had the donor list story but editors there spiked it the month before the election, a claim she repeated on “The O’Reilly Factor” two weeks later. The newspaper told the Philadelphia-based Bulletin that “political considerations played no role in our decisions about how to cover this story or any other story about President Obama.”

Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the committee’s panel on the Constitution, civil rights, and civil liberties, said the Obama campaign’s alleged involvement with ACORN might violate federal election law. “ACORN has a pattern of getting in trouble for violating federal election laws,” he said.

He also slammed the Old Gray Lady herself. “If true, the New York Times is showing once again that it is a not an impartial observer of the political scene,” Sensenbrenner said. “If they want to be a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, they should put Barack Obama approves of this in their newspaper.”

Heidelbaugh also testified that ACORN has rendered protest-for-hire services for other left-wing groups and extracted donations from the targets of demonstrations by shaking down those targets as part of its “muscle for the money” program.

Back on March 19, Conyers seemed genuinely disturbed by the claims. He pushed the chairman of the subcommittee Sensenbrenner is ranking member of, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), to hold his own hearing.

A blasé Nadler said he “would certainly consider a hearing on ACORN, if I ever hear any credible allegations.” Referencing Heidelbaugh’s testimony, Conyers replied, “Whoa. Wait a minute. This is a member of the bar here that got a successful partial injunction against ACORN.”

A fortnight later Conyers reiterated his support for an ACORN probe, telling the Washington Times he still wanted to do it and he “probably will.” Conyers, whom the article called an “unlikely champion” for ACORN opponents, rejected arguments from fellow Democrats that his committee should steer clear of the issue.

“That’s our jurisdiction, the Department of Justice,” he told the newspaper. “That’s what we handle – voter fraud. Unless that’s been taken out of my jurisdiction and I didn’t know it.”

Alas, it was too good to be true. The investigative zeal of the Judiciary Committee chairman soon waned.

It was always hard to believe that the ultra-liberal Conyers, who is very sympathetic to ACORN’s policy goals and who as recently as October called the radical group “a longstanding and well regarded organization that fights for the poor and working class,” really wanted to investigate his longtime ally in the leftist movement.

Conyers, who received a 100% rating from ACORN in its 2006 legislative scorecard, showed how truly in sync he was with ACORN when he spoke at the group’s national convention last June 22.

“I’m through with deregulation,” said Conyers. “It doesn’t work because the capitalist predators who are waiting unregulated are going to take advantage of it.”

Last fall Conyers seemed on hair-trigger alert, ready to pounce on anybody who tangled with ACORN. After media reports surfaced that one ACORN worker was assaulted by an irate homeowner, some ACORN workers were threatened, and two ACORN offices might have been vandalized, Conyers speculated –in the absence of any evidence that the incidents were connected— that a massive anti-ACORN conspiracy might be afoot.

“If true, these reports appear to describe possible federal crimes such as criminal civil rights crimes [sic] including conspiracy to deprive the victims (and others) of federally protected constitutional rights, mail and wire offenses, and other more basic offenses such as assault and battery,” Conyers wrote in an Oct. 20 letter urging the attorney general and the FBI director to act.

“Depending on the circumstances and the possible involvement of a group of individuals, the conduct also raises serious questions under the federal RICO law,” he wrote.

Yet the allegations of racketeering made against ACORN at the Judiciary Committee hearing in March don’t seem to interest Conyers.

There is so much about the Alinskyite group that a congressional probe could explore.

Former ACORN employees say ACORN makes no effort to remove bogus voter registrations. “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances,” Nate Toler, who worked on an ACORN voter effort in Missouri told the Wall Street Journal in 2006. “The internal motto is ‘We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation,’” he said.

When accused of breaking the law, ACORN’s usual approach is to deny, deny, deny, and then accuse somebody, usually Republicans or law enforcement officials, of racism and voter suppression. In early October when the group’s Las Vegas office was raided on orders from the state’s Democratic attorney general and secretary of state, Matthew Henderson, ACORN’s southwest regional director, was glib.

“The raid was a stunt designed perhaps to make them look tough on voter fraud,” Henderson said. “We don’t think fraud is a rampant problem. This was a politically motivated stunt, that is all there is to it because those new voters can reshape the electorate of Nevada.”

On the May 6 edition of the Glenn Beck Program, after a heated interview about the new charges in Nevada, the host ejected ACORN spokesman Scott Levenson from the studio following an off-camera altercation. “I threw him out of the studio, get the hell out of my studio,” Beck told viewers he said after Levenson accused him during the commercial break of being “afraid of black people.”

Although ACORN is an enthusiastic supporter of government regulation of the economy, it can’t tolerate being burdened by those same regulations. In 1995, it sued California for an exemption from the law that requires it to pay its own employees a minimum wage. With a mendicant fervor, ACORN argued that keeping its employees in poverty helps to boost their zeal to help the poor. It lost.

The group also supports the continued imposition of equal employment opportunity laws on the rest of America, but argued it shouldn’t have to comply with those same laws. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had to sue ACORN to force it comply with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the crown jewel of the civil rights movement’s legislative accomplishments.

The taxpayer-subsidized ACORN network, which owes millions of dollars in back taxes, also played a role in the subprime mortgage mess that has undermined Americans’ support for free market problem-solving and set off a worldwide chain of financial troubles.

Then there’s ACORN’s eight-year-long coverup of the million-dollar embezzlement by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. When ACORN board members Marcel Reid and Karen Inman demanded to see the financial documents last year, they were expelled from the group. Reid and Inman have since become whistleblowers and formed a group called ACORN 8 that aims to reform ACORN.

And let’s not even get started on ACORN’s history of union-busting.

Surely Conyers has all, or at least some, of this information.

What happened in recent weeks that changed his mind?