The Mighty Acorn

In conservative circles, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, is the devil. This group mobilizes left-wing voters and champions liberal causes, sometimes using tax money in the form of state and federal grants to pay expenses. That makes right-wingers seethe with indignation.

ACORN employees across the country have been indicted for voter fraud, and by its own admission, the group has submitted at least 400,000 questionable voter documents, according to a New York Times report dated Oct. 24, 2008.

Now two whistleblowers, Anita MonCrief and Marcel Reid, who used to work for ACORN have testified under oath before the House Judiciary Committee that the organization took money to intimidate capitalist organizations like the Carlyle Group and H&R Block, and worked closely with the Obama presidential campaign to get voters to the polls. It is here where the story begins to rise to the next level.

According to MonCrief, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom was getting close to documenting a story directly linking the Obama campaign to ACORN through the "Project Vote" organization. Barack Obama worked for "Project Vote" in the 1990s. There is speculation that "Project Vote" did a number of illegal things last November during the voter registration process. Strom was allegedly zeroing in on the situation.

But the Times' investigation suddenly stopped dead, prompting a call from Strom to MonCrief, her source. A voicemail from Strom was left on Oct. 21, 2008:

"Hi, Anita, it's Stephanie. I've just been asked by my bosses to stand down. ... They want me to hold off on coming to Washington. Sorry, I take my orders from higher up."

The Times did run a story about ACORN's left-wing partisanship, but stopped there. The paper would not make Strom available to talk with me. Spokeswoman Catherine Mathis sent a statement saying: "Every day we make news judgments about which stories to publish and which ones not to pursue. Political considerations played no role in our decision about whether to cover this story."

The motto of The New York Times is "All the News That's Fit to Print." "Standing down" on a story with presidential implications does not seem to fit that motto. Or am I wrong?

But Congressman John Conyers, a fervent Democrat and head of the Judiciary Committee, is not standing down. He is calling for a full House investigation of ACORN's role in the presidential election and beyond. Good for him.

The story is somewhat technical, and thus does not hold much appeal for TV news operations. But it is important. According to the whistleblowers, ACORN is a corrupt organization with close ties to the Obama administration. That sounds kind of ominous. Let's hope Conyers continues to step up.

By:  Bill O'Reilly, Veteran TV news anchor and host of the Fox News show "The O'Reilly Factor" as well as author of  many best-selling books including  "Who's Looking Out For You?"

Pursuing the ACORN story is also important because the Obama government is now using ACORN to collect the census information.

ACORN, Obama and the Present Mortgage Mess

The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.

ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and "direct action" that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn't get tenure at universities wound up. That the bill-writing Democrats remembered their pet clients during such an emergency speaks volumes. This attempted gift to ACORN (stripped out of the bill after outraged howls from Republicans) demonstrates how little Democrats understand about what caused the mess we're in.

ACORN does many things under the umbrella of "community organizing." They agitate for higher minimum wages, attempt to thwart school reform, try to unionize welfare workers (that is, those welfare recipients who are obliged to work in exchange for benefits) and organize voter registration efforts (always for Democrats, of course). Because they are on the side of righteousness and justice, they aren't especially fastidious about their methods. In 2006, for example, ACORN registered 1,800 new voters in Washington. The only trouble was, with the exception of six, all of the names submitted were fake. The secretary of state called it the "worst case of election fraud in our state's history." As Fox News reported:

"The ACORN workers told state investigators that they went to the Seattle public library, sat at a table and filled out the voter registration forms. They made up names, addresses, and Social Security numbers and in some cases plucked names from the phone book. One worker said it was a lot of hard work making up all those names and another said he would sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out the forms."

ACORN explained that this was an "isolated" incident, yet similar stories have been reported in Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, and Colorado -- all swing states, by the way. ACORN members have been prosecuted for voter fraud in a number of states. (See www.rottenacorn.com.) Their philosophy seems to be that everyone deserves the right to vote, whether legal or illegal, living or dead.

ACORN recognized very early the opportunity presented by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977. As Stanley Kurtz has reported, ACORN proudly touted "affirmative action" lending and pressured banks to make subprime loans. Madeline Talbott, a Chicago ACORN leader, boasted of "dragging banks kicking and screaming" into dubious loans. And, as Sol Stern reported in City Journal, ACORN also found a remunerative niche as an "advisor" to banks seeking regulatory approval. "Thus we have J.P. Morgan & Co., the legatee of the man who once symbolized for many all that was supposedly evil about American capitalism, suddenly donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to ACORN." Is this a great country or what? As conservative community activist Robert Woodson put it, "The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN."

ACORN attracted Barack Obama in his youthful community organizing days. Madeline Talbott hired him to train her staff -- the very people who would later descend on Chicago's banks as CRA shakedown artists. The Democratic nominee later funneled money to the group through the Woods Fund, on whose board he sat, and through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, ditto. Obama was not just sympathetic -- he was an ACORN fellow traveler.

Now you could make the case that before 2008, well-intentioned people were simply unaware of what their agitation on behalf of non-credit-worthy borrowers could lead to. But now? With the whole financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to fund their friends at ACORN? And, unashamed, they then trot out to the TV cameras to declare "the party is over" for Wall Street (Nancy Pelosi)? The party should be over for the Democrats who brought us to this pass. If Obama wins, it means hiring an arsonist to fight a fire.

ACORN, Obama, and the Mortgage Mess by Mona Charen