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 Jeffrey Lord

And the Arthur Sylvester Award for Lying in Service to the Government goes to…Linda Douglass, the Obama communications director for the White House Office of Health Care Reform.

Who was Arthur Sylvester and for what did Ms. Douglass, a former ABC News reporter, win this dubious award?

Arthur Sylvester was once the one-man Washington bureau for the Newark Evening News, a prominent New Jersey newspaper that folded in the early 1970s. He had the good fortune to be one of a handful of journalists covering an underdog presidential candidate in the early stages of a presidential race, when access to the candidate was free and easy — long before the days of Secret Service coverage, mammoth staffs and 24/7 cable TV news cycles.

So it was possible for Arthur Sylvester in 1960 to get significant face time with the candidate, a Massachusetts senator named John F. Kennedy. JFK remembered, and as the New Frontier and its Band of Brothers gathered in Washington in 1961, Arthur Sylvester stepped up to glory wearing the new title of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. His new boss: the aptly named and now recently deceased Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara.

Mr. McNamara, as has been recounted all over again with his passing, was one of the architects of America’s Vietnam policy. Mr. Sylvester, the Linda Douglass of his day, was charged with explaining that policy to the journalists covering McNamara and the Pentagon, not to mention to the American people.

Alas, as the American people would slowly — very slowly — discover, the Vietnam policy being implemented by Mr. McNamara and JFK’s self-esteemed team of “the best and the brightest” was one of the worst debacles in American history. One of the reasons it took so much time to understand what was going on was that Mr. Sylvester (among others) was being less than forthcoming about what was actually happening as the policy moved along the track.

Sylvester’s role in all of this was immortalized in the 1972 bestselling book that begat the term, The Best and The Brightest. The book was a searing indictment by Pulitzer Prize-winning liberal journalist David Halberstam of all the “best and the brightest” who populated American liberalism in its governing heyday. The story was a meticulous tick-tock of those supposedly brainy liberals — the “whiz kids” as they were called in the moment — who flocked to Washington and wound up creating the bloody disaster of Vietnam policy that would define the Kennedy-Johnson era in American and world history. Or, as Halberstam himself said in a phrase that is an eerily appropriate assessment of the Obama-ites now trying to get control of one-seventh of the American economy, they were arrogantly devising and executing “brilliant policies that defied common sense.”

Sylvester’s job was to sell the whiz kids’ Vietnam policy to Americans in precisely the way Ms. Douglass is assigned to sell the Obama health care plan today. The problem? Let’s let Mr. Halberstam describe it:

In Saigon…Arthur Sylvester, McNamara’s press officer, was arguing with a young New York Times reporter named Jack Langguth over the government’s lack of credibility in its Vietnam statements. Sylvester said that although it was unfortunate, there were times when a government official had to lie, but that he, Sylvester, as a former newsman, had a genuine objection to lying. Langguth answered that if you had a real objection to lying, you would quit, and the failure to resign meant that you had a soft job where you could exercise power, and that your principles were secondary. Sylvester looked at him almost shocked.”If you believe that, you’re stupid and naïve, (said Sylvester) and you didn’t seem that way at lunch earlier today.”

On another occasion, Sylvester was even more succinct:

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, than you’re stupid. Did you hear that? — Stupid.”

On still another occasion, Sylvester asserted a “right” that most observers did not see in the Constitution: “the inherent right of the government to lie.”

Mr. Sylvester’s infamous tenure comes to mind as Ms. Douglass has put herself front and center to challenge video clips of her boss that have appeared on Breitbart.com TV (“SEIU Health Care Forum 3/24/07“). Contrary to the President’s new fable that his health care program is designed to preserve the right of Americans to keep their own private health care insurance, he is pictured pre-presidency saying something quite different.

Here is Obama speaking to the Service Employee International Union in 2007. As all can see from this once buried treasure now on Breitbart, it shows candidate Obama saying: “My commitment is to make sure that we’ve got universal health care for all Americans by the end of my first term as president….I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out.”

Shown as well on this tape is Obama saying at an AFL-CIO conclave: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan…that’s what I’d like to see.” There are others on the tape, but they are members of Congress and while they are saying the same thing as the President in fairness they are not Ms. Douglass’s responsibility.

What is her responsibility is to accurately and truthfully tell the American people what the President and his staff are really about, what their goals are, what they are doing and why they are doing it.

In response to the discovery of tapes showing candidate Obama explain exactly what his goals are in health care policy, Ms. Douglass answers with a White House video of her own. She says that the idea we have just seen Mr. Obama say exactly what he said with our own eyes is just not so. In fact “nothing could be farther than the truth”

What does Obama say in the Douglass video? He says: “Here’s the guarantee that I’ve made. If you have insurance that you like then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you’ve got a doctor that you like you will be able to keep your doctor. Nobody is trying to change what works in the system. We are trying to change what doesn’t work in the system.”

Now.

Notice the central untruth here. On the one tape, unedited and not shown by Douglass Obama says:

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be, potentially, some transition process: I can envision a decade out, or 15 years out, or 20 years out.”

Yet Douglass shows him saying something quite different:

“If you have insurance that you like then you will be able to keep that insurance….Nobody is trying to change what works in the system.”

In other words, back in the days when the presumed-Democratic nominee was Hillary Clinton and very few people were paying attention to Barack Obama as he prowled the left-wing caverns of his party, the future president felt free to state his health care plans in crystal clear language. His goal, he said, is to “eliminate employer coverage” although he admits there’s going to be a transition process that is “15 years out, or 20 years out.” He leaves no doubt at the SEIU and the AFL-CIO that:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan…that’s what I’d like to see.”

Single-payer, universal health care would, of course, eventually eliminate the private insurer, the backbone of employer-based, high-quality health care. It would effectively herd most Americans into a “public option” plan that would not be shared by elites, be they the wealthy, Members of Congress current and past, presidents and former presidents, Hollywood celebrities and so on. ObamaCare’s critics have used the term “Trojan Horse” to describe the Obama answers as presented by Douglass and the President himself. As in the ancient story, once the Obama “public option” is through the gates, private insurance will, as the President himself said when no one was looking, eventually be eliminated, even if it takes 15 or 20 years to do it.

While the President and his critics disagree as to whether this should be done, in fact they both agree that this will in fact be the end result if the President gets his way. The President himself says flatly that is his objective. Based on his actions since taking office, with government controlling everything from General Motors to banks to financial institutions, there is no reason to doubt his stated intentions on health care.

Having shown us one set of tapes but not the other, in wonderfully Sylvesterian style Douglass looks the camera in the eye and, assuming the rest of us are stupid, says: “It’s very important for you to have the facts.”

And with that, Linda Douglass wins her Sylvester.

The really disturbing part of this comes right about now, as it begins to dawn on startled Americans — as it was slowly dawning on the journalists covering Mr. McNamara in the early 1960s — that officials representing the government have made lying about policy a policy unto itself. In Sylvester-speak, they are watching another set of government officials who believe, like their Vietnam-era predecessors, that government has “an inherent right to lie.”

The only difference here is that instead of lying about Vietnam we’re talking about lying about health care.

It is now crystal clear that the Obama administration is lying about the president’s goal of achieving a single-payer health care system. Let’s be even more blunt:

The President is lying.

And Ms. Douglass has specifically gone on camera to lie for him — just as Arthur Sylvester lied for Robert McNamara and the two presidents for whom McNamara worked.

There are consequences for presidents who do this or who are perceived as doing this. LBJ and Richard Nixon lost their presidencies when it came clear to Americans that they had not been told the truth about Vietnam (LBJ) and Watergate (Nixon). George H.W. Bush’s breaking of his “read my lips — no new taxes” pledge opened him to charges of lying — and cost him re-election. Bill Clinton came within an ace of losing his job — and effectively lost most of his second term — when he lied over Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones. While there is not a single shred of proof to this day that George W. Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but lied and invaded anyway, the perception — deliberately pushed by people like then-Senator Obama — is that if he didn’t lie then he “misled.” However you slice it, the perception was damaging to the remainder of the Bush presidency.

And yes, as someone who served in the Reagan White House during the Iran-Contra affair, it must be said that while President Reagan never thought he was “trading arms for hostages” (and in truth, I’m not sure he ever did believe this in his heart-of-hearts, as he indicated), he finally went to a disapproving American people and said this:

“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages. This runs counter to my own beliefs, to administration policy, and to the original strategy we had in mind.”

With that apology, the American people forgave a president they liked a lot. Several staff members lost their jobs. The Reagan era proceeded, the polls stabilized and the President got back to his job.

Which makes the Obama lie on health care reform all the more ironic. Having reached the presidency propelled by those insisting Bush was a liar, to now be caught on videotape lying quite specifically and in detail about his health care objectives has the potential for being a torpedo amidships for the political ship Obama.

Just as it did with LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43, the perception of lying or the discovery of an actual, quite deliberate lie shifts the debate from one about the substance of the president’s program itself to the much worse and increasingly angry perception by average Americans that they are being quite deliberately lied to. “You’re lying to me!” barked a self-identified Democrat to House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer in a YouTube moment. Hoyer was in Utica, New York, to discuss high speed rail, a subject about as far from health care as one can get. The challenge to him by a fellow Democrat named Don Jeror came first on the stimulus bill — not health care. “I recognize a liar when I see one,” snapped Jeror. Hoyer’s response? To praise the construction of the Erie Canal in the 1800s.

At least Sylvester had the lack of 24/7 cable news and the Internet going for him. Linda Douglass doesn’t have that luxury, but it certainly hasn’t fazed her. With a seeming nonchalance if not eagerness to please her boss and staff seniors, she has quite deliberately gone on camera to assume the role of a 21st century Arthur Sylvester. She has looked the American people right straight in the eye and, in spite of the quite vivid video evidence to the contrary, told us all something that we now know to be a complete Sylvester-style untruth.

Which is to say: a lie.

The implications for the health care debate as it goes forward are considerable. As the understanding grows that the President’s staff, not to mention the President himself, is willing to deliberately lie about health care — just as Sylvester and his bosses did with Vietnam — an entire presidency can be undermined. “It’s only about sex” went the plaintive defense of Clinton aides during the impeachment imbroglio. While there were plenty of people who thought it was about other things — perjury being but one — if one accepts the Clinton standard — and many people did — one can only come up with bad news for Obama.

The “it’s only about sex” defense implied that the whole issue just wasn’t important. There is not an American out there who believes their health care isn’t important. It would be almost impossible to touch a more sensitive nerve in the American psyche. Even the controversy of war, necessitating as it always does the physical service of the mostly young and (these days) volunteers, doesn’t have the impact of messing with the health care of every breathing American. Millions of Americans may never get closer to military service than the movies. Not everyone has skin in the game in the sense of a family member or friend walking around Iraq or Afghanistan. But you can take it to the bank that every single citizen has skin in the game of health care. And they know it.

Which means that once they understand the President and his staff are, in the tradition of Arthur Sylvester, all too willing to deliberately lie — there will be hell to pay.

That hell is only now showing up in all these town meetings. And Obama’s allies, following the White House strategy for dealing with opposition (“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” says deputy chief of staff Jim Messina) are taking the Obama staff’s message to heart. At a Missouri town hall meeting for Democrat Russ Carnahan, union goons wearing SEIU shirts beat up a young black entrepreneur named Kenneth Gladney, sending him to the hospital for simply trying to make a buck selling flags and buttons to the crowd. Remember exactly where Mr. Obama made his single payer pledge on the video? You got that right: at a gathering of the SEIU.

Linda Douglass has apparently chosen to take the Arthur Sylvester approach to government service. If she wants to avoid being immortalized in history books forever as the Obama White House staffer who was willing to boldly look into the camera lens and lie for her boss — quitting now would help. Otherwise, she will lose her reputation and credibility in the same fashion Sylvester lost his, becoming one more person for whom, as Halberstam noted long ago, “the failure to resign meant that you had a soft job where you could exercise power, and that your principles were secondary.”

Failing that, Ms. Douglass would be better served if she advised her boss to simply tell the truth. And the truth for President Obama is that he’s a believer in single-payer, universal health care and he hopes to eliminate private insurance down the road.

He said it. He quite obviously believes it. He’s now trying to do it. Lying about it will not help his cause.

Or her reputation.

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?

Republican strategist Karl Rove called Vice President Biden a “liar” on Thursday, dramatically escalating a feud between Biden and aides to former President George W. Bush over Biden’s claims to have rebuked Bush in private meetings.

“I hate to say this, but he’s a serial exaggerator,” Rove told FOX News. “If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop.”

Rove added: “You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States.”

Biden’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although Biden spokesman Jay Carney told Fox on Wednesday: “The vice president stands by his remarks.”

Carney was referring to two controversial assertions by Biden, the latest coming Tuesday during an interview on CNN.

“I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office,” Biden began, “‘Well, Joe,’ he said, ‘I’m a leader.’ And I said: ‘Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.’”

The exchange is purely “fictional,” said Rove, who was Bush’s top political adviser in the White House.

“It didn’t happen,” Rove, a FOX News contributor and former Bush adviser, told Megyn Kelly in an interview taped for “On The Record.” “It’s his imagination; it’s a made-up, fictional world.

“He ought to get out of it and get back to reality,” Rove added. “He’s making this up out of whole cloth.”

Rove’s skepticism was echoed by a variety of other Bush aides, including former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Candida Wolff.

They also disputed a similar assertion made by Biden in2004, when the former senator from Delaware told scores of Democratic colleagues at a lunch that he had challenged Bush’s moral certitude about the Iraq war during a private meeting in the Oval Office. Two years later, Biden repeated his story about dressing down the president.

“When I speak to the president – and I have had plenty of opportunity to be with the president, at least prior to the last election, a lot of hours alone with him. I mean, meaning me and his staff,” Biden said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in April2006. “And the president will say things to me, and I’ll literally turn to the president, say: ‘Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don’t know the facts?’ And he’ll look at me and he’ll say – my word – he’ll look at me and he’ll say: ‘My instincts.’ He said: ‘I have good instincts.’ I said: ‘Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough.’”

On Thursday, Rove ridiculed the claim that Biden spent “a lot of hours alone with” Bush.

“Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than few moments,” Rove said. “There was staff in the room the whole time.”

Rove was equally appalled by Biden’s claims of having given Bush his comeuppance.

“If you notice, all of these incidents have the same structure: Joe Biden courageously raises the impudent question; the president befuddles the answer; and Joe Biden drives home the dramatic response.”

Rove scoffed at Biden’s claims that “he and the president were sitting there in the Oval Office, he was tutoring the president, he was asking him the critical questions that no one was willing to confront him with.”

“With all due respect to the vice president, these are the kind of things you can get away with if you are a United States Senator, or a backbencher in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Rove said. “You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States.”

Carney declined to specify the dates of his boss’s purported Oval Office scoldings of Bush. Nor would he provide witnesses or notes to corroborate the episodes.

Throughout his career, Biden has often been accused of boasting about his accomplishments, embellishing his credentials and even stealing the words of others. He dropped out of the 1988 presidential race after being accused of plagiarizing British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Last July, Biden came under fire for telling a questionable story about being “shot at” in Iraq. When questioned by the Hill newspaper, Biden backpedaled by saying: “I was near where a shot landed.”

Biden went on to say that some sort of projectile “landed” outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said.

“No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”

In September, Biden again raised eyebrows with another story about his exploits in war zones — this time on “the superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where my helicopter was forced down.”

“If you want to know where Al Qaeda lives, you want to know where bin Laden is, come back to Afghanistan with me,” Biden bragged to the National Guard Association. “Come back to the area where my helicopter was forced down, with a three-star general and three senators at10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains. I can tell you where they are.”

But it turns out that inclement weather, not terrorists, prompted the chopper to land in an open field during Biden’s visit to Afghanistan in February 2008. Fighter jets kept watch overhead while a convoy of security vehicles was dispatched to retrieve Biden and fellow Sens. Chuck Hagel and John Kerry.

“We were going to send Biden out to fight the Taliban with snowballs, but we didn’t have to,” joked Kerry, a Democrat, to the AP. “Other than getting a little cold, it was fine.”

By James Taranto

Rod Blagojevich, Illinois’s former governor, got the boot three weeks ago, but lawmakers in Springfield and Washington are still dealing with his aftermath, in the form of Sen. Roland Burris, whom Blagojevich appointed to fill the vacancy Barack Obama left when he won the presidency. Amid revelations that Burris was untruthful in his testimony before the state Legislature’s impeachment committee, Democrats all week have been distancing themselves from him, even urging his resignation.

The latest to do so, the Chicago Tribune reports, is Dick Durbin, Illinois’s senior senator:

Durbin, who was traveling on official Senate business in Turkey, told the Tribune the daily revelations about what Burris did and who he talked to among Blagojevich insiders are a serious problem.

“I am troubled by this and I hope he will call in some advisers he trusts and gets some advice about what to do next,” Durbin said of Burris. “At this point, his future in the Senate seat is in question.” . . .

“I’m troubled by the fact that his testimony was not complete and it was unsatisfactory,” Durbin said. “It wasn’t the full disclosure under oath that we were asking for.”

Durbin said he is following Burris’ evolving explanation during his trip.

“Every day, there are more and more contacts with the Blagojevich administration,” Durbin said. “Then there was the issue about fundraising and more information about what he did about fundraising.

He also said Illinoisans deserve a break from the Blagojevich scandal.

“I am so sick of this Blagojevich legacy, between his TV appearances and everything he’s done since he left office. I’m as anxious as everybody to close this saga. And now, it’s the Burris saga,” Durbin said.

The timing of all this has reader Richard Rein suspicious:

I think everybody is missing the boat on Burris. When he first appeared in D.C., even the Dems didn’t want anything to do with him. I suspect Obama, Reid and Pelosi quickly realized they needed him to be the 60th vote in the Senate for the Porkulus bill. All of a sudden he was accepted. He voted as required, and presto, Porkulus is law. Perhaps all the hustle and bustle to enact the conference bill with less than 12 hours’ deliberation occurred because the real slime on Burris was about to leak out. So the real catastrophe that was avoided with such haste was the loss of the oh-so-important 60th Senate vote.

Sounding similar suspicions is John Kass, a Tribune columnist and longtime critic of Chicago corruption:

Then Burris decided he may not have told the truth. He filed an affidavit about who he talked to and sent it to a Madigan flunky [i.e., a crony of Michael Madigan, speaker of the Illinois House], who kept it in her desk drawer by “mistake” until late last week, after the Real Roland voted for Obama’s near trillion-dollar spending bill. Jeepers. Isn’t Illinois politics just full of coincidences?

Would the Democrats really conceal evidence of corruption in order to keep the lawmaker in question in his seat until an important vote could be completed? We don’t know, but would you put it past them?

The funny thing, though, is that if they did this, it was unnecessary. It’s true that Burris provided the 60th vote and that, under Senate rules, this was decisive. But if he had resigned before the vote, the outcome would have been the same.

The vote on “cloture”–that is, to end “debate” and bring the bill to the floor for a vote on passage–was 60-38, the same as the vote on the final bill. It is usually said that cloture requires 60 votes, but the actual rule is that it requires the votes of three-fifths of all seated senators.

This is different from an ordinary vote on legislation, which requires a majority of all senators present and voting. If some senators are absent or vote “present,” a bill can still pass on, say, a 48-47 vote. But in a cloture vote, an absence is the equivalent of a “no.” Sen. Ted Kennedy, who is ailing, missed the cloture vote on the final stimulus bill; the effect was the same as if he had voted against it.

A vacancy, however, is different from an absence or abstention. The denominator in a cloture vote threshold is the number of seated senators, not the number of seats. Currently there are 99 seated senators, with one seat from Minnesota vacant pending litigation over last year’s election. Three-fifths of 99 is 59.4, so that it still takes 60 votes to achieve cloture.

But if Burris were to resign, the number of seated senators would drop to 98. Three-fifths of 98 is 58.8, so that in a Senate with two vacancies, legislation could be brought to the floor with 59 votes instead of 60. Thus, while Burris’s vote was decisive for the purpose of passing the stimulus, his presence in the Senate was superfluous.

Marion Barry wants the world to know there isn’t just one Messiah now living in Washington, D.C.

This irrepressible creature of habit seems convinced he is a living god, unencumbered by the laws of mere mortal men.

The dashiki-wearing Democratic former mayor of the District of Columbia who years ago aggressively led the capital city into insolvency, has yet again failed to file his personal tax return, the Washington Post reports.

Barry did this while on probation after being convicted in 2006 of failing to file federal and district income tax returns from 1999 through 2004.

This is just the latest incident in a lifetime of law-breaking for the liberal municipal lawmaker who now represents Ward 8 on the Washington, D.C. city council.

Barry was previously a member of the local school board and city council. He then served three terms as mayor until he was convicted and sent to prison on federal drug charges in 1990. He was videotaped by the FBI smoking crack cocaine with a woman in a hotel room and sent to prison.

After serving six months in prison he was released and, of course, ran for mayor again. Sensing his higher calling, the voters put him back in the mayor’s office again, this time for a fourth term.

While there he presided over unprecedented deficit spending that put the nation’s capital on the brink of total collapse. With the city’s bonds rated “junk” by Wall Street, Congress intervened in 1995, seizing power from the district’s elected leaders. Congress created a financial control board and gave it veto power over city affairs.

Under the leadership of then-mayor Anthony Williams, the district — with no help from Barry — balanced its budget four years in a row. The return to solvency caused the board to go dormant in October 2001.

In his brief stint out of office, Barry offered his services as a financial rainmaker to New York-based municipal bond firm M.R. Beal & Co. That firm disclosed in filings with the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board that it paid Barry at least $50,000 in 1999 for his expertise in parting the Red Seas of public finance.

Restless, the man who started his career in politics as a civil rights crusader for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, returned to politics again.

Barry is now a member of the D.C. city council, having returned to politics in 2005 as the council member for Ward 8.

He remains a recidivist.

In October 2005, Barry pleaded guilty to failing to file federal income tax returns and failing to pay federal income taxes.

At a February 2006 sentencing hearing I covered as a daily newspaper reporter, Barry arrived in the courtroom at the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse and greeted his fans. “Do I look good? Am I fresh?” he said.

Barry didn’t think it was important to bother bringing documents the presiding judge demanded. These included the delinquent tax returns that were the basis of the charges against the former mayor.

Surprisingly cheerful about Barry’s brazen contempt of her order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson postponed the hearing. Robinson seemed to care little that Barry had tested positive for cocaine and marijuana use in November while awaiting sentencing.

A month later Robinson sentenced Barry to three years probation, but refused to fine him. She could have fined him up to $100,000 on the federal count and $5,000 on the D.C. count.

She ordered the septuagenarian to pay $75 in court costs. She didn’t even scold him.