In what is tandamount to a PR press release, Kate Linthicum at the LA Times reports that ACORN California has broken away from it’s “embattled” national parent organization. Cited throughout the article are ACORN higher ups, expressing their concern over ACORN’s tarnished reputation, and their distraction with legal challenges interfering with the mission ACORN.
Yet the face of the new ACORN will essentially remain the same as the old… only the name has changed.
The new group will have the same mission, will be staffed by many of the same employees who worked for ACORN, and will be funded by most of the same donors, said Amy Schur, the former head organizer for California ACORN.
Schur sits on the interim board of directors for the new group, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, which was incorporated in California on Monday. ACCE is seeking federal nonprofit status.
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Schur said ACCE plans changes, including outsourcing accounting and forming an advisory council of 22 community leaders, in order to avoid the problems with finances and management that made ACORN vulnerable to conservative attacks.
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Schur said California members were looking for local control and were frustrated by a lack of transparency. In 2008, it was revealed that top ACORN leaders had tried to hide the embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the organization nine years ago by the brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke.
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Keith Rohman, president of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission and chairman of ACCE’s advisory council, said the new California group “is an opportunity to take what is best and leave behind what was not so good.”
Gotta love this…..a Clinton appointed judge has ruled in favor (pdf) of ACORN in their suit to stop Congress from defunding them and in essence saying that once an organization gets payments from the federal government then Congress can no longer decide to stop those payments unless a court rules they are guilty of some law breaking.
On the same day that ACORN’s violation of Delaware state lobbying laws was revealed, a liberal, Clinton-appointed activist Judge has ruled to usurp the prerogatives and authority of the United States Congress. This left-wing activist Judge is setting a dangerous precedent that left-wing political organizations plagued by criminal accusations have a constitutional entitlement to taxpayer dollars. The Obama Administration should immediately move to appeal this injunction.
Just more evidence that your common criminal is just plain retarded:
On October 1st, 2009 California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced that an investigation had been opened into ACORN’s activities in California, resulting from undercover videos showing employees seemingly offering to assist the undercover film makers with human smuggling, child prostitution and even tax advice to boot.
Although ACORN has denied any wrongdoing, some of the employees involved were terminated, and ACORN has publicly stated that they would fully cooperate with any investigations that followed.
Interestingly, the local head ACORN organizer in California, David Lagstein was caught on tape earlier this month speaking to an East County Democratic Club.
Mr. Lagstein stated: “…the attorney general is a political animal, but certainly every bit of the communication we have had with them has suggested that the fault will be found with the people that did the video and not the people with ACORN.” Read the rest of this entry »
Breitbart: There’s a lot of hypocrisy and the dust has settled for ACORN and at the end of the day they’ve recognized that Eric Holder, the Attorney General, has not initiated an investigation into ACORN after we now have seven tapes. There were five initially that came out, ACORN was defunded by the Senate, was defunded by the House, lost it’s link to the Census; while all that damage occurred, Congress didn’t come in to investigate them, obviously not the Attorney General’s office, and they’ve now realized let’s get back into business because they realized that the dust settled and they were not being investigated, it was Hannah, James, and me who were being investigated, that’s why we’ve been forced to offer this latest tape.
Before you swear and look for a cyber rock to throw, read and contemplate the wisdom of nursery rhymes that have withstood the test of time. Now the can be applied to the Obama administration in frightful clarity.
Obama’s Election:
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner
Eating a Christmas Pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, What a good boy am I
Little Barack Obama
Cursed by his mama’s drama
Given the Affirmative Action pie
He admired himself and learned to lie
He won the election plum
I can win, no matter how dumb
During consideration of H.R. 3126, legislation to establish a Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee voted to pass an amendment offered by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) that will make ACORN eligible to play a role in setting regulations for financial institutions.
The Waters amendment adds to the CFPA Oversight Board 5 representatives from the fields of “consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgages” to join Federal banking regulators in advising the Director on the consistency of proposed regulations, and strategies and policies that the Director should undertake to enforce its rules.
By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest. ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements. These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market.
Based upon that experience and my 40 years since then in and out of public life, I want to make what I hope will be taken as a friendly suggestion to President Obama and his White House, and it is this: Don’t create an enemies list.
Breitbart has been brilliant on this. Absolutely brilliant.
Release little pieces at a time. Give ACORN time to dash out and tell some lies, then expose those lies with more video. Then, after waiting for the media frenzy to die down, release some more tapes to stir things back up again.
Remember when ACORN was first exposed and they tried to tell us about the cities where this expose failed? They claimed that those cities included Philly.
Beck is completely right here. He is a bit upset that the MSM spends their time digging at his past rather then reporting on the issues he has been so right about. Van Jones? Yup, hit the nail on the head. Acorn? Yup, hit the nail on the head. (h/t Hot Air)
Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN (see Memeorandum) are not incidental nor are they casual. Bill O’Reilly displayed his fundamental ignorance on the matter last night when he pooh-poohed the notion of an Obama tie simply because “ACORN previously worked” for his campaign. O’Reilly acted like this was ancient history. Sorry Bill, but you do not know what the hell you are talking about. The latest saga of ACORN as an enabler of child prostitution, illegal immigration and tax fraud is not new.
The money given to ACORN through one of its front companies–CSI–was not a simple clerical error. The Obama Presidential campaign deliberately tried to hide its relationship to ACORN and funneling almost $1 million dollars to ACORN by using a group with no experience doing the task that it was ostensibly hired to do. The story is pretty simple–it is about Citizen Services Inc., a Nigerian director of CSI living in Minnesota and false campaign financing report.
I first wrote this story last August (see here). We passed this information first to David Brown, a reporter in Pittsburgh, who broke the story publicly in early August. So far the mainstream press has failed to investigate this matter. Here are the key details.
The Obama team gave Citizen Services Inc. more than $800,000 ostensibly for “staging and lighting.” We reported (our own intrepid Eastan MacNeal) the following: Read the rest of this entry »
Former employees of the beleaguered community activist group ACORN are planning to file a criiminal complaint in Baltimore against the creators of the series of videos that have spurred outrage against the organization, knowledgable sources have told Investigative Voice.
The filing could come as soon as Friday afternoon, sources said.
The criminal complaint will allege that recordings of the group’s employees giving advice on how to evade taxes and house underage South American sex workers to journalists posing as a pimp and prostitute were obtained illegally. Read the rest of this entry »
I have to give John Stewart mad props…as a white pimp would say…for not hiding from this story as other liberals are and actually took ACORN to task, and even more for calling out the MSM on their non-reporting. I agree with this guy maybe 1% of the time, and this is that 1%:
Glenn Beck just wrapped up what had to be the most compelling radio I’ve heard… and lately, most of his shows have been pretty compelling.
Whew, where to start? Well, how about this: you should make it a point to do two things today: watch his TV show at 5 ET this afternoon on Fox News, and hit the Big Government website an hour earlier at 4 ET.
Here’s what you’ll find – the latest video sting of ACORN. This one in a San Bernardino ACORN office where the employee can’t talk fast enough about the connections they have to politicians (naming them by name) and even an admission of murder.
Scott Baker of Breitbart TV’s The B-Cast was on during Glenn’s final segment, connecting the dots between POTUS advisor Valerie Jarrett and Obama’s past,
Monday evening, the Senate approved a measure sponsored by Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) that would block ACORN from receiving grants for mortgage counseling, Community Development Block Grants, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, and other programs.
Such a provision is not included in the House version of the housing bill, so it will not become law unless House negotiators approve of the change to the bill in conference.
With ACORN under fire for enabling child prostitution, tax cheating, voter registration fraud and embezzlement it’s about time Congress started to bar the group from collecting federal funds. ACORN has recieved $53 million in taxpayer funds. Under the similus bill ACORN is eligible for grants totaling billions of dollars.
What a shame that the U.S. Senate and House could not move forward with the same bipartisan spirit in other areas where strong agreement exists. Instead Democrats continue to try and force their radical plans like health care and cap and tax down our throats!
