ACORN blocked from Census, HUD funding

Charlie Rangel, Barney Frank and the Congressional Black Caucus will come to the rescue of ACORN.

As you know Charlie Rangel is the chair of the House Ways and Means committee which is responsible for writing our tax laws. Rangel is amongst the most infamous and forgetful of tax cheats. Chuck will simply write a tax law exempting ACORN from any investigation or prosecution.

Our Congressional Black Caucus will jump up then take to beating Americans over the head with white guilt while harmoniously singing, “Racism! This is racism, y’all!”

Johanns’ amendment will face fierce opposition in Congress. Charles Rangel wields a lot of power in Congress evidenced by Pelosi refusing to have Rangel step down from his chair position despite Rangel obviously committing a variety of tax crimes. Rangel also owns several Democrats on the Ethics committee charged with investigating Rangel for ethics violations.

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is well known as a strong supporter of ACORN. Many members of the CBC have much power; Hastings, Burris, Waters, Meeks, Jackson and, of course, Rangel amongst others. Readers can count on the CBC putting up a fierce fight in favor of ACORN.

Barney Frank will prove problematic. Previously, Michelle Bachmann introduced an amendment similar to Johanns’ amendment, introduced her amendment to the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act to prevent ACORN from being funded. Barney Frank is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee which, at the last minute, stripped out Bachmann’s amendment. Barney Frank is also a strong supporter of ACORN.

Between Rangel, Frank and the CBC there is a good chance Johanns’ amendment will be defeated in Congress. Pelosi, of course, will be a wild card; which way she votes will depend on how much botox is injected into her face and brain on voting day.

Personally, I am giving Johanns’ amendment a 50-50 chance of making its way into the wording of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill.

Okpulot Taha
Choctaw Nation
Puma Politics

It’s time to disband ACORN and replace it with a similar organization, one with better initial funding and a better grasp of supervision and training. And the Republicans will throw fits over the new group as well because the government should only fund Christian charter schools, sports programs (except midnight basketball), and training programs that teach you how to operate a deep fat fryer.

It’s amazing how hated people are when they try to improve life for people in our inner cities. ACORN was easy picking though. When your “base” consists of poorly educated people with few job skills, it’s not too hard for a smart-assed punk to run a scam on them. He’s just lucky he didn’t run that past a former prostitute. The fact a few ACORN employees got sucked in just shows how naive they were. Real criminals would have seen through these clowns and given them the bum’s rush.

Sure, Mark . . . these were just isolated incidents. SURE they were!

Uh, this wasn’t a Fox News sting. It was an independent filmmaker and a friend. Fox News took it and turned it into a story. Just clarifying.

Takes a sycophant to know one.

“FOX News sting operation”

“over a sting operation by FOX News ”

Wow, Fox is just the only ones reporting this. They have no part in creating it.

What blatant bias. (or crappy reporting)

I heartily agree, Okpulot.

Mark Gisleson angled directly towards the issue with the statement, “When your “base” consists of poorly educated people with few job skills, it’s not too hard for a smart-assed punk to run a scam on them.”

Smart-assed punks like the million-dollar embezzling Rathke Brothers, for instance. ACORN has deeply vested interests in appearing to help the downtrodden, while in reality it is the one with the boot on their collective throats. Collective, ha, I made a funny.

Forcing discount super-retailers like inner city Wal-Marts to run their wages up doesn’t force anything at all on the companies involved but a hike in their prices to cover more expensive operating costs. Then the inner city customers end up handing over more of their meager paychecks than before.

Forcing banks to make ill-advised loans to people who can’t pay for them does nothing but result in foreclosures and financial instability for those same people, who then need more “assistance” from ACORN and our outsized welfare system.

How well do you think the working poor are going to handle “necessarily skyrocketing” electric rates imposed by the cap and trade system? Quoted from the Dear Leader’s words, not mine.

These are the people who can least afford to wait even longer for medical care, and the current power grabbing proposal for healthcare “reform” will result in exactly that spectre for their future. Adding nearly 50 million people to a system with a finite number of medical personnel will result in exactly that sort of waiting, while scarce resources are allocated to those with the most pull, i.e. politicians, celebrities, executives and those connected with them. I’m sure

ACORN has a nearly endless list of legal and ethical transgressions among its various component organizations. It is far to extensive to go into here. I am certain that Okpulot Taha and other members of the Choctaw Nation and PUMA would be able to elaborate endlessly on the shortcomings of Federally managed healthcare. As a combat veteran, I can certainly attest to the significant shortcomings in the Veterans Administration system. I have been waiting since February to be scheduled for a simple physical.

The Dear Leader and his cohorts offend the sensibility and intelligence of any clear thinking American when they make excuses that they “didn’t know” these kinds of things are going on in ACORN, or that people like Van Jones, Carol Browner, Cass Sunstein, Rev. Wright, William Ayers, Jeff Jones, et al, ad infinitum somehow don’t point to a pattern. It is downright insulting when Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank etc., make the kinds of statements they do, attempting to tell us that they are going to spend us out of debt. It is absolutely moronic to subscribe to such a notion.

They need to stop insulting the Independents in this country, as well. They don’t seem to understand that they are trying to change public opinion about PUBLIC OPINION. These half-assed attempts to persuade the people that the protestors are some kind of criminals is futile. These protestors are the very people you are trying to convince.

If all of the Republicans had not voted, and all the Democrats did, you still would not have been able to elect Obama. It was the independents, who think for themselves, that hold the true voting power in this country. It was WE THE PEOPLE who destroyed the Republicans, not the Democrats. But the Democrats are squarely in our sights, and they have stepped neatly into the noose which was on the ground before them, and they will be snared the same way.

I extend an invitation to the PUMA member who started this round of comments, and your brethren, to join together with the Tea Party movement, the Libertarians, the Constitution Party, and other independent-thinking conservatives, Republicans and Democrats as well, to rise and trample these corrupt degenerates into insignificance.

Question: Put a Leading Democrat and a Leading Republican into the same room, and what do you have?

Answer: A two-faced lying crook.

Peace to all Americans of common sense.
-mike

isolated incidents of misbehavior should not condemn an organization, or both Democrats and Republicans would need be out of business.

ACORN has not committed intentional criminal actions, no conspiracy for defrauding anybody, nothing serious at all

This is all pure politics, wraslin over money flows to politically-favored non-profit and for-profit companies – time-honored, if crass from close-up

So the Republicans won one, AND while the Democrats were in control. Did the Democrats ever win won from 2001-2007, when the Republicans were in control? I can’t recall an example

Mill,

“isolated incidents of misbehavior…”? This attitude is where my statement above, about offending sensibility and intelligence originates.

Simply take an hour of your time and look for yourself. You seem too intelligent and educated to simply accept these various statements from our “leaders” and “spokespeople” of either side at face value.

As you yourself have said, “This is all pure politics, wraslin over money flows to politically-favored non-profit and for-profit companies.”

And that’s OK with you?

Watch out for that snare, it’s fixing to snatch you right up out of that tub of Kool-Aid you’re swimming in.

“So the Republicans won one, AND while the Democrats were in control. Did the Democrats ever win won from 2001-2007, when the Republicans were in control? I can’t recall an example”

And you wouldn’t have, Mill, as long as the parties and the media are controlled by the wealthy few. How much outrage have you heard over the privatized military contractors like Blackwater and the billions they have looted from the taxpayers since the beginning of the criminal Iraq War? Or Goldman Sachs, or Merrill Lynch? No, the outrage of the right, like Mr. Bailey here, is reserved for organizations like ACORN that actually are trying and do something for poor people in this country. People like Mr. Bailey think they are too smart to be manipulated by politicians. As they line up for their rations of truth from nutjobs, bigots and liars like Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, it’s easy from them to claim the rest of us are the one drinking kool-aid!

[...] ACORN tax advice sounded downright criminal on the videotape, and the reactions have been swift. The Minnesota Independent reports that the Census Bureau said ACORN is no longer a community partner and the Senate, by an 83-7 vote, [...]

I have no interest in Rush Limbaugh, who is just about as far out there as it gets. I don’t know who Glenn Beck is. I am not a Minnesotan and don’t follow politics in this state, I just ran across this online. If Minnesotans don’t like Mr. Beck, or Ms. Bachmann, I suggest you defeat them at the polls. The Iraq war was a complete mistake, the same as the war in Afghanistan is. These wars were exactly what the terrorists were trying to get the United States to do. Now we are playing by their rules on their court, and wasting money and blood for people who don’t like us. The current administration has renewed and extended the contracts for the Blackwater operatives.

ACORN is not trying to do anything for poor people except use them to further its own agenda. The way to help people out of a mess is to teach them self-sufficiency, not how to cheat the system. Goldman Sachs, General Motors and all these other mega corporations that received OUR money should have been left to fall by the wayside. We have unemployment, general assistance, food stamps and education programs to aid in the recovery of those affected by such failures.

It is obvious that charitable Americans should reach out to those in need of aid. This does not automatically mean that the Federal government is responsible for your welfare. They are to facilitate commerce between the states, provide for the common defense, and a very short list of other tasks laid out in a document known as the Constitution. The United States is a country based on individual rights and responsibilities, and tasks like helping the poor or taxing the rich, infrastructure improvements, and education are intended to be left to the States and their communities. The Federal government was not placed “above” the states in the founding documents. It is an association of the states and the people.

The Republicans are just as foolish and overbearing as the Democrats. I see very little to distinguish one from the other. Bush spent foolishly, said stupid things, and interfered with civil liberties with scams like the Patriot Act, just as Clinton did before him with the Brady Bill, and on back for a long, long, time. Now Obama says stupid things, does nothing to reverse the Patriot Act, spends even more money, lies about pulling out of Iraq(he plans on stationing 50,000 troops there), signs unread bills not shown to the public as he said he would, and messes with civil liberties with giant program proposals, appointing an entire shadow cabinet to circumvent Congress, while his appointments that require Senate confirmation continue to go unfilled. His Treasury Secretary is a tax cheat. He continues to allow lobbyists to work in his administration after he said he wouldn’t. NO DIFFERENCE. Whether it was McCain or Obama, it’s still a Bush Third Term.

Simply naming yourself a Democrat means nothing to civil liberty or compassion. Progressives like to point out that they are an extension of Progressivism of the early 20th century. Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat who laid the groundwork for the League of Nations, imprisoned over 150,000 people for their political beliefs and opposition to WW1, and segregated the Federal Government. FDR, a Progressive Democrat, rounded up hundreds of thousands of American Citizens and held them in concentration camps for years because of their cultural heritage. Harry Truman, a Progressive Democrat, unlawfully seized steel corporations and was ordered to relinquish his control of them. And don’t forget those little explosives experiments in Nagasaki and Hiroshima that he conducted.

I find it interesting that you would immediately throw the bigot label in there without a clue as to my racial identity. I expressed nothing in my viewpoints that has a thing whatsoever to do with either race or culture. Inflammatory labeling is one of the first reactions when there is little to support an argument. Think for yourself and don’t accept these people for what they say, only watch what they do. Right or Left, they are crooks and liars.

-mike

[...] want the free help. (On September 15, the Senate joined the pile-on, overwhelmingly passing a law blocking ACORN from receiving any funding from a number of federal [...]

Mike Bailey, I’m glad I came back to this thread, and I’m glad you kept commenting. Your first email stunned me, quite literally. The Minnesota tea party folks are uniformly pretty hard right and you were saying sensible things that I’ve never heard from local righties. That may sound pretty biased to you, but if you’re not from Minnesota I doubt you can appreciate how incredibly polarized this state is. (If you’re curious, go to the Pioneer Press newspaper website and read the comments on any political story. )

ACORN is frustrating to me because in the 35 years since I first encountered them, they’ve always been well meaning, but rarely effective. What they are trying to do is something that needs to be done, and if not by the government, by who? Do we write off our inner cities just like waves of white Americans did when they moved to the suburbs? Or do we work at trying to rebuild a UNITED States of America?

As for progressives, I do have to disagree with your Wilson comments. Woodrow Wilson has never been cited by any progressive I know of, and I’ve been active in the online portion of that movement since it began. Progressives don’t really own up to this, but they are to a surprising degree comprised of former Republicans (fiscally conservative, socially liberal). Kind of like Libertarians say they are but much more willing to use government as a tool in keeping this country strong. The presidents we identify with are both Roosevelts and . . . well, that’s about it. A lot of admiration for both Lincoln and Jefferson though.

Progressives trust the Democratic party about as much as you trust either party. We have that in common (Congressional “progressives” rarely are.)

And to the advice in your last post I would add, FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Mark,

I appreciate your open minded look at what I had to say. I will not make the claim that I am always right, only that I have given these things considerable thought.

The Tea Party movement has been portrayed by the media and the party powerhouses as a bunch of slobbering, gun slinging white separatists intent on murdering minorities. Like any other movement of upset political activists, there are plenty of targets to point a camera at. I will not insult your intelligence by pretending the movement is not conservative, or that it does lean to the right. But it leans only slightly.

It is a movement, not a party. It is composed of a broad swath of American viewpoints, some very liberal, others very conservative. It is not one homogenous philosophy. There are many different groups and philosophies within its boundaries. Most of the people involved have never been political activists or spoken out about much in their lives. You often hear Democrats asking where were these people when Bush was puttering around with people’s rights and being a military adventurist. Most of them were yelling at their televisions and casting punishment votes that they now regret.

The primary thing that ties them together is a simple feeling of uneasiness, that something isn’t right in this country, and that it’s not limited to one or the other party. Many of them have a difficult time expressing why they feel this way. We have people that are Republicans, yes, but most are unafiliated independents. Some are liberal Democrats who are upset that their party has been taken over by dishonest actors. There are a lot of Libertarians, who don’t fit into the system, because their views are a mixture of viewpoints found in both parties.

There are Constitutionalists, some who are liberal and others who are conservative, that just want a return to the fundamentals of our Constitution. There are a lot of Native Americans, Hispanics, blacks and asians involved. In the weekly meetings I go to, there are two former Obama state electors that feel they were duped.

We have a firm commitment not to let either the Republicans or the Democrats hijack our movement, and at many gatherings, politicians that currently hold office are not allowed to speak in front of the crowd. They can mix with people and protest alongside us, but not stand up in front of us. It’s mostly about broken promises, and about a sense of profound corruption running rampant in our system.

My branch of things is the Tea Party Patriots. We align along three principles. They are preserving the Constitution, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Enterprise solutions. The parties have co-opted the “liberal” and “conservative” tags. It is possible to be both. There is no reason you can’t express yourself freely and also believe in personal responsibility and governmental restraint and frugality.

Keep an open mind.

As already noted, it was NOT a sting operation by FOX News but thank goodness they report on it because no other network would. Why do people think that this should just be swept under the rug? I don’t get it.

Clearly, Charlie Rangel has been getting his tax advice from ACORN.

After re-reading this thread, I decided yesterday to go find out something about Glenn Beck. My wife, it turns out, has been listening to him on the radio for a while now, and today I found out he’s got a TV show as well. After looking around about some of what he has written and said, I have to ask how he could be equated with Rush Limbaugh. Where Limbaugh is totally a hard line Republican and Bush apologist, this guy seems to me to be a Libertarian, who’s primarily interested in corruption, wherever it may be found.

So now I do know that this is not some local Minnesota politician, and jonerik’s statement above makes more sense to me now.

I have to admit, I like what I have seen him saying so far, and I am going to check out if he is someone who’s been saying these things for a while, or if he’s just somebody who’s jumped onto our bandwagon, like a lot of politicians have been trying to do.

Also, I heard from a friend that there were several thousand Tea Party members who held a rally in Washington DC last weekend, and he said there were “a lot” of people there. I looked around on the web, and it looks like when he says “several thousand” what he really means is something like 50,000. ABC News went so far as to claim 70,000 were there, but I’m not sure there are even 70,000 people in the whole country involved in the movement. I have seen some pictures that members of my group brought back from DC, and there were a LOT of people there. I know that DC Police no longer make crowd estimates after the Million Man March, so any claims are only going to be somebody’s opinion.

At any rate, I am wondering where Glenn Beck was when we started this up back in February.
-mike

“The vote came on the heels of a decision on Friday by the Census Bureau to eliminate ACORN as a community partner. The Bureau severed ties due the growing uproar over a sting operation by FOX News that prompted an ACORN employee to assist undercover FOX employees in setting up a small business for a brothel.”

The above quote appears in a Sept. 15, 2009 article entitled “ACORN blocked from Census, HUD funding” on your website.

This quote is a lie. James O’ Keefe and Hannah Giles are not nor have ever been employees of FOX News. Their investigation was not part of a FOX News sting operation. You owe these two invidiuals an apology. This article is not journalism, but rather out right fraud and deception

I have to agree. The two kids who did this are independent operators whose story was picked up by BigGovernment.com. They contacted different outlets, including CNN. They consulted with the operator of BigGovernment, who also contacted CNN, and again they turned the story down. Then they did the job, and handed off the video and the story to the web site. That web site is run by Andrew Breitbart, who is a sometimes FOX contributor. Once he had his hands on the story, he got in contact with FOX, who apparently know what news is when they see it, instead of believing news is whenever Mr. Obama says, “Uhhh…”