From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

ACORN’s anti-democratic, un-American activities are not legitimate political advocacy protected by the First Amendment. They cry out for prosecution under federal racketeering laws. [The push for a racketeering probe got a boost in April 2011 when ACORN was convicted in a massive voter fraud conspiracy in Nevada. The felony conviction came after the book had gone to press. -MV]

Former Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott is a master of the bank shakedown. She bragged about “dragging banks kicking and screaming” into questionable loans. Talbott thought highly of Barack Obama’s organizing work in the Windy City and invited him to lecture her staffers. She also led a mob attack on the Chicago City Council during a “living wage” debate. ACORN demonstrators “pushed over the metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session.” Six people, including a defiant Talbott, were led away in handcuffs.

Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had a taste of ACORN’s stormtrooper tactics in 1995, when about 500 ACORN activists took over the Washington Hilton, forcing Gingrich to cancel a speech to 2,500 county commissioners. Demonstrators chanting “Nuke Newt!” grabbed the microphone and commandeered the head table, then cheered when the speech was cancelled.

“ACORN is part of the enforcement wing and the intimidation wing of the left,” Gingrich said in an interview.

Members of ACORN assaulted New York state Sen. James Alesi, a Republican, and his chief of staff, during a raucous 2009 protest. Alesi said an angry mob nearly knocked him to the floor of the chamber and spat in the face of his chief of staff. ACORN was protesting after two Democratic state senators switched parties giving Republicans control of the New York Senate. ACORN’s political party, the Working Families Party, had invested considerable resources in state senate elections in the Empire State. WFP took credit for ending “30 years of right-wing Republican rule” in 2008.

Republican Mike Huckabee is another of many Republican officeholders to be terrorized by ACORN. In 1998, while governor of Arkansas, Huckabee prepared to deliver a speech on civil rights. Like Gingrich he was silenced by hundreds of screaming ACORN activists armed with bullhorns who stormed a Little Rock hotel conference room and drove him away. “They surrounded not only the outer walls, but then, much to the dismay of the state troopers who were with me, they then mounted the stage,” said Huckabee, who cut the speech short and left abruptly. “It was a very tense moment. It was totally unnecessary.”

During the anti-Huckabee demonstration, Johnnie Pugh, head of ACORN’s Arkansas chapter, seized the microphone. “We want justice,” she said. ACORN is “trying to get the bills paid and make a living wage and welfare reform is not working.” ACORN members chanted “The people united will never be defeated,” “Justice for welfare; Huckabee don’t care,” and “We’re fired up; we’re not going to take it no more.” A dozen ACORN activists ran after Huckabee. Some jumped on the governor’s car and pounded on it as others attempted to prevent him from leaving.

When Arkansas State Police investigated to determine if the demonstrators had broken any laws, Pugh called the probe “retaliation” and a “witch hunt.” She even threatened to hit Huckabee again with more in-your-face protests. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” she said.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of ACORN’s wrongdoings.

Radicals believe their goals warrant criminal means and “can be relied on to lie, steal votes and justify murder when committed by their political friends . . . because they are engaged in a permanent war whose goal is the salvation of mankind,” according to former radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz. “In this context, restraint of means can easily seem finicky.”

ACORN’s violence inciting techniques still flourish, practiced out in the open by organized labor and countless other radical groups. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, an ACORN ally, is unashamedly pro-thuggery. (Trumka is at center in the above photo.) He told members of the United Mine Workers in Illinois to “kick the [expletive] out of every last” worker who violated the sanctity of his picket lines.

The outrageous behavior tolerated by police today would have landed a person in jail earlier in America’s history. Political incitements to riot, which occur almost exclusively on the Left, fail to move law enforcement. Why? Because as a society we have gradually become inured to these evil tactics. It is “defining deviancy down,” to borrow a phrase coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan to discuss the process by which society grows accustomed to antisocial behavior, rationalizing it away over time and redefining it:   “[T]he amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that accordingly we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is abnormal by any earlier standard.” Moynihan warned ominously that “we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”

Early twentieth-century Americans were horrified by anarchist and labor union-initiated violence. Many labor organizations at the time were revolutionary terrorist groups. They killed people, incited riots, and fomented rebellion. But over time corporations and governments began to ignore the cardinal rule: don’t negotiate with terrorists.

They took a short-term perspective, deluding themselves into believing they were buying peace by caving in to terrorists’ demands, all in the hope of gaining market share or a few extra votes on Election Day.

The left-wing, pro-radical media has played a role too, lulling Americans into complacency by telling them nothing’s wrong. Leftists using ACORN-style tactics are portrayed as well-intentioned mainstream activists, noble crusaders for social justice who have everyone’s best interest at heart. Activists may get out of hand every once in a while, according to journalists, but they mean well.

Of course when patriotic Tea Party activists, alarmed that America is being transformed into a socialist state by the nation’s Community Organizer-in-Chief, express their well-founded concerns by merely booing a few congressmen and holding protest rallies, the media labels them heel-clicking fascist storm troopers. If there’s one thing the Left cannot tolerate, it is diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Americans have become so desensitized to in-your-face protest and shakedown tactics that ACORN’s jackboot activism, which rightly horrified society in past years, hardly registers today. Unless ACORN or its lawless brethren in the so-called progressive movement are wrecking front lawns, obstructing businesses, burning bankers in effigy, or chasing politicians from a stage, such groups are boring to Americans.

Maybe that’s why, in the words of former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid, it took “a half-naked 20-year-old” to spark the nationwide backlash that erupted against the group in 2009. Without the undercover videos masterminded by conservative activists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles that showed ACORN employees offering advice on establishing an illegal brothel employing underage Salvadoran girls, Americans’ concern about the group’s persistent lawbreaking might never have reached a fever pitch that forced Congress to defund the group in September 2009, beginning its final slide into bankruptcy.

ACORN was only conducting business as usual, but the videos provided graphic evidence that the group’s business was not only unsavory but illegitimate.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

Voter fraud never seemed to be much of a problem in America until the left pushed “Motor Voter,”  its voter fraud-enabling legislation, through Congress with the help of President Clinton in 1993. Mail-in ballots, which don’t require the presentation of identification when a citizen is voting, are part of the problem.

Nowadays voter fraud is an epidemic. Every election cycle brings news of election fraud schemes. Recently in Paterson, New Jersey, more than a dozen people were arrested for allegedly tampering with “mail-in ballots and/or [voting] mail-in ballots on behalf of voters who did not receive the ballots or who did not authorize them to vote for them.”

The Working Families Party of New York, an arm of ACORN, was caught forging mail-in ballots. The investigation continues more than a year later.

It is no coincidence that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the Motor Voter law, which makes fraud relatively easy to accomplish, is ACORN’s greatest legislative accomplishment. The law was promoted by Marxist academics and activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. They envisioned the law as a way to help make big government bigger. The law also requires that welfare recipients be allowed to register to vote in welfare offices.

Voter fraud also seems to have grown as left-wing activist groups such as ACORN have become increasingly involved in the voter registration business. In 2008 more than 400,000 of the registrations obtained by ACORN and Project Vote had to be tossed because they were bogus.

Although some claim voter fraud is a myth “as common as unicorns and Sasquatch” and others insist fraud routinely affects election outcomes, “the truth lies somewhere in between,” according to J. Christian Adams. “The truth is that voter fraud occurs frequently, and it determines who wins elections infrequently.” He says the “integrity of the electoral process is perhaps more important than who wins and loses an election. Lawlessness in elections corrodes the entire democratic process.”

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In one pseudo-instructional online video supposedly teaching voters how to use the new ballots developed for New York this year, Matt Damon managed to squeeze in an endorsement: “So if you’re voting, say, for the Working Families Party—which you should be—then you would bubble in the oval next to their name, in Row E.” In a longer video that didn’t even pretend to be educational, Damon begged viewers to vote for the Working Families party, holding up a sign with the WF logo and telling them their support would be a wonderful 40th birthday present for him.

As part of the Vote Again 2010 campaign, rapper Jay-Z implored a live audience to “vote again” as they did in 2008, though of course he would swear he doesn’t necessarily intend them to vote for one particular party or another.

The perennial “Rock the Vote” operation this year featured such artists as Jason Mraz, Solange, and Sheryl Crow, the latter of whom offered this rather vague and inarticulate encomium on the group’s website: “I am so thrilled to be working with Rock the Vote at this very crucial time in our country’s history. This is our moment to wake up and seize our power regarding the future of this nation and what it stands for.” (The alleged neutrality of Rock the Vote is belied, not only by the well-known political affiliations of the overwhelming majority of its featured celebrities, but by the following headline, posted prominently on the site: “Republicans Win All Age Demographics but Under 30; Young Voters Resist Wave, Candidates Miss Opportunity.”)

The vast majority of Hollywood celebrities involved in voter turnout campaigns appear to have jumped on the Democratic bandwagon. Even the few documented conservatives in Hollywood don’t seem to get very involved in trying to persuade us to cast our ballots for some particular candidate or issue. A rare exception: on Election Day (not every day for three weeks beforehand) Republican Sylvester Stallone tweeted:

“I voted did you? Gotta get the Manchurian Candidate out of the drivers seat before were ALL soaring off a cliff into Oblivion… Be smart.”

So why are conservative celebrities so reticent about using their star power to drive turnout at the polls?

Perhaps conservatism is less of a trendy, “feel-good” political philosophy that leads people to be swayed by the positive associations they have with movie stars and rock musicians. In other words, perhaps conservative celebrities and voters are more mature than those who would let their idol worship determine their voting behavior.

A related explanation is that leftist voters tend to be younger, not as set in their beliefs, and less sure why they hold them, compared to conservatives—and therefore, for them, voting for a particular candidate because an adored celebrity says so is as good a reason as any.

Another possibility is that leftist stars are more pragmatic—in the ruthless, unethical sense of the word—and have no problem cashing in on their celebrity power by trying to trick politically naïve fans into supporting their causes and candidates.

Whatever the specific explanation—immaturity, thoughtlessness, ruthlessness—it seems that no good can come from heavy-handed celebrity endorsements that capitalize on emotional appeals and lack of knowledge of the whole range of issues.

Those of us on the Right should consider it a mark of honor that so few of our political brethren in celebrityland feel the need to peddle their star power in exchange for our promise to slavishly support their ideology.

–

Scott Spiegel blogs at http://www.scottspiegel.com. He can be reached at spiegelscott@yahoo.com.

Who can forget the ”pimp/prostitute” videos filmed at ACORN offices across the nation by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles? Especially #3 from the Brooklyn office showing three ACORN workers advising a prostitute how to hide her illegal income from the government and use it to fund her pimp’s future political campaign. In case you missed it or would like to refresh your memory, the video’s below or you can read the full transcript at BigGovernment.

Despite video evidence clearly showing ACORN workers aiding and abetting illegal acts, this week District Attorney Charles Hynes cleared ACORN of any criminality in the case. Apparently advising someone to cheat on their taxes isn’t illegal in the state of New York. I know, you’re thinking, “WTF?!” We all are.

But it appears D.A. Hynes has a little secret that may have contributed to his decision in this case. In 2009, Hynes ran on the Working Families Party (WFP) ticket. The Working Families Party is the political front group for ACORN in New York. So put in proper perspective, an ACORN Party prosecutor cleared ACORN and its workers of all charges despite unequivocable taped evidence! But wait, there’s more!  Hynes isn’t just a WFP politician. On their website, the Working Families Party describes Hynes as one of their

“Community Organizers Turned Candidates”

There you have it, in their own words. District Attorney Charles Hynes is a Community Organizer and ACORN Party candidate who failed to recuse himself from the case, despite his conflict of interest, and provided criminal immunity to ACORN regardless of the evidence.

Glenn Beck interviewed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman who is running for a U.S. House seat in New York state against a Democratic candidate and a liberal Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, who in the past has been endorsed by ACORN‘s political party, the Working Families Party.

Beck said

The Republicans have put their support behind a candidate who is pro-choice, was for the stimulus, has accepted endorsements from ACORN, and also for the Working Families Party, but, hey, you know, she has a chance to win, so who cares, apparently. The Democrat is basically the same as the Republican.

Beck introduced Hoffman as “a true conservative candidate.”

Hoffman said he never thought he would get involved in politics, but ”quite frankly, I was fed up.” He said he was fed up with ”the out-of-control spending, taxes, government regulations on us and businesses, and I thought somebody had to step up and do something about it.”

Hoffman also said he “didn’t like the candidates that were chosen, and I thought that I should step up and say something about it.”

The Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, was endorsed by Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the far-left hate site DailyKos, Beck noted.

Elsewhere, political journalist Michael Barone described Scozzafava as “a pretty dodgy character from a Republican point of view.” Barone said

I mean, this is a woman who was endorsed by the Working Families Party, which is basically front for ACORN … As we’ve seen, it’s an organization whose organizations have systematically aided and abetted child prostitution, as reported in the videos that Fox News ran — that other networks were finally forced to run, that Andrew Breitbart put on the Big Government website. There is some reason for principled Republicans not to back the Republican nominee in a situation like that.

On the “Glenn Beck Program,” the host recounted the sordid saga that has unfolded in the Judiciary Committee over the last few months.

On March 19, after a Judiciary subcommittee received testimony that ACORN had violated a host of tax, voter registration, campaign finance, and other laws, Conyers said the allegations were “a pretty serious matter.” After being urged to take action by Conyers, civil rights subcommittee chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-New York) said he would consider holding a hearing on ACORN if he heard credible evidence about wrongdoings.

On May 4 Conyers abruptly changed course and said he didn’t believe a hearing about ACORN was justified. In a case of bad timing, the same day ACORN and two former senior executives in Nevada had been charged with felony voter-registration fraud.

Beck said Nadler, who was endorsed by the ACORN-affiliated Working Families Party (whose goal is to help push the Democratic Party ever-further toward the political left), may have pressured Conyers to back off ACORN.

A month ago Conyers told a reporter that he wasn’t proceeding with an investigation of ACORN because “the powers that be decided against it.” It should be noted that Conyers is a longtime ally of ACORN.

The congressman refused to explain who “the powers” might be, but his spokesman claimed, implausibly, that Conyers was referring to himself as “the powers that be.”

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