Free Republic

“But whether you try to implement some or all of these recommendations, there must be someone committed to follow-up. There must be a review mechanism, and a means of holding people accountable after any final decisions are made. If you do not make some hard choices now and ensure they are carried out, they almost certainly will be made for you.” –Elizabeth Kingsley of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg Eisenberg LLP, in a prophetic legal memo to ACORN dated June 19, 2008, the day before ACORN’s national board ousted ACORN founder organizer Wade Rathke ACORN’s lawyer warned ACORN 15 months ago to...

October 1, 2009 ACORN, the troubled anti-poverty group, is fighting to survive in the aftermath of an undercover video scandal. Its government funding is threatened, and so is the money it receives from foundations and other donors. ACORN is fighting back, but that is also draining resources. ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis earlier this week made a simple plea in a letter to donors: "We need your help to survive." Lewis said in an interview that she thinks her 40-year-old organization will survive, but she's worried about what fighting the charges that ACORN is a corrupt organization will do to resources...

We are discovering that Obama's promised transparency only goes so far in reporting where stimulus money ends up going. The new tracking website, Recovery.gov, is supposed to let us all know where the federal "stimulus" money is going but apparently will not track money that goes to groups like the Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The Denver Post published a story by reporter Miles Moffeit that reveals that the stimulus tracking website will only report so far into the chain of agencies and organizations that end up receiving stimulus cash and will not report where billions of...

Why is ACORN's chief organizer friendly with the Marxist anti-American governments of two South American countries? Within ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis's storied rogues gallery of a rolodex may be found contact information for then-Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzman and for Sabine Kienzl, a professional propagandist employed by the Venezuelan embassy. The listing for Guzman contains what appears to have been a direct office telephone number.An ACORN insider I spoke with confirmed the authenticity of the rolodex which I have seen. Erick Erickson of the website RedState recently did an excellent job unveiling the rolodex.Both Bolivia and Venezuela are now headed...

In case you haven't seen a TV in the last month, here is some background. Bertha Lewis is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Organizer of ACORN, the largest community organization in the country. Appointed in May 2008, Ms. Lewis oversees the operations of its 400,000 strong membership, which is active in over 110 cities across the country. During the past few weeks while Lewis has been all over the press defending her organization, she has claimed that her first priority is ACORN's Clients, those poor people needing housing, medical care, etc. If she is so concerned about "the little...

The Working Families Party and local Democratic Party Officials are at the center of a massive voter fraud scandal in Troy, NY. According to the Times Union: Dozens of forged and fraudulent absentee ballots from people registered to vote on the Working Families Party line were filed in the Sept. 15 primary elections in Troy. Documents at the county Board of Elections show the fraudulent ballots were handled by or prepared on behalf of various elected officials and leaders and operatives for the Democratic and Working Families parties. There may be as many as 50 absentee ballots that were forged,...

As various charges and complaints have materialized over the years, it seems that ACORN uses the communities in which they are located as staging grounds for national power grabs. With multiple states and entities receiving federal funds, ACORN plays to win. Aiding ACORN are groups like DEMO’s, the Democracy Alliance, Soros Open Society Institute, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The Washington Examiner has covered ACORN’s: “Muscle for the Money” program:

With the revelation that White House Director of Political Affairs, Patrick Gaspard, has close ties to Bertha Lewis and to ACORN, Matthew Vadum and Erick Erickson appear to be onto something significant. While the Gaspard matter needs further investigation before we form any hard conclusions, it certainly seems to confirm that President Obama’s ties to a whole series of ACORN-controlled organizations are neither minor nor by any means long-past. In fact, making use of what Erickson and Vadum have discovered about Gaspard, we can trace these links still further.

Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group ACORN has a man in the Obama White House.This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush's White House.Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis's political director in New York.Lewis, the current "chief organizer" or CEO of ACORN, was head of New York ACORN from at least 1994 through 2008, when she took over as national leader of ACORN. -SNIP-Obama's statement...

With the revelation that White House Director of Political Affairs, Patrick Gaspard, has close ties to Bertha Lewis and to ACORN, Matthew Vadum and Erick Erickson appear to be onto something significant. While the Gaspard matter needs further investigation before we form any hard conclusions, it certainly seems to confirm that President Obama’s ties to a whole series of ACORN-controlled organizations are neither minor nor by any means long-past. In fact, making use of what Erickson and Vadum have discovered about Gaspard, we can trace these links still further. There’s been a good deal of attention to ACORN of late,...

Already facing the loss of federal government funding, the community-organizing group Acorn also has run afoul of one of its big corporate partners, Bank of America Corp. In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the banking company said it has "suspended current commitments" to Acorn Housing, an affiliated group, and "will not enter into any further agreements with Acorn or any of its affiliates," pending assessments by the bank of the organization's operations. Acorn, officially the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been under fire since the recent release of secretly recorded videos...

Patrick Gaspard, considered one of the most powerful figures in the Obama White House, is a "longtime ACORN operative" and former union official, according to a report posted Monday on the American Spectator's online blog. Gaspard's name recently surfaced as the official President Obama dispatched to urge beleaguered New York Gov. David Paterson not to run for another term. Paterson insists he'll continue to run for governor even without Obama's support. Gaspard has extensive ties to organized labor and community-organizing groups. One measure of his influence in the White House: He holds the same "political affairs director" title that belonged...

It has been two weeks since the shocking undercover video work of James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles was released to the world. Those videos reveal beyond any shadow of a doubt that ACORN is the very definition of a "corrupt organization." Furthermore, they demonstrated clearly that ACORN officials in several cities are more than willing to get involved in the most heinous kind of criminal activity – up to and including murder and white slavery rings involving the exploitation of helpless underage foreign minors. Nevertheless, since the astonishing sting operations were made public, no charges have been filed against ACORN,...

Abandoned by even many of its Democratic allies, ACORN hit back today at Congress after it slapped the latest penalty on the community advocacy group. The House voted today to avert a possible government shutdown next week by temporarily extending the current federal budget. But Democrats inserted a provision saying that ACORN could not receive funding under the stopgap measure or any prior legislation. “To include language in legislation that targets a single organization is unconstitutional and wrong," ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis said in a statement. Congressman Nadler said it best: “The punishment here did not follow some criminal or...

Acorn CEO: Block on Federal Money ‘Unconstitutional, Wrong’ Nomaan Merchant reports on politics. Acorn CEO Bertha Lewis made it clear she’s not happy with an amendment to a stop-gap funding bill that blocks any money from going to the community organizing group. “To include language in legislation that targets a single organization is unconstitutional and wrong,” Lewis said in a statement. But she saw a silver lining of sorts: “One unintended - and positive - consequence of the witch hunt against ACORN is that it could help rein in the likes of Halliburton and Blackwater and even Wall St. If...

WASHINGTON – The embattled community activist group ACORN appears to be collecting charitable contributions through affiliate organizations that it then uses for impermissible lobbying and political activity, says the Republican staff of the Senate Finance Committee. The assessment, in a memo to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, further fuels the controversy surrounding ACORN, formally known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The GOP staff memo says ACORN-affiliated charities are being used to raise money which is then funneled to other charities or other organizations for purposes other than what a donor may have intended. In response, ACORN chief...

ACORN’s mysterious sugar daddyby Ed Morrissey When life hands you lemons, find a sugar daddy to turn it into lemonade. That appears to be the axiom in play at ACORN today, which has sent out an e-mail blast hoping to turn videos of several offices offering assistance for child-prostitution and tax evasion into a bountiful fund-raising opportunity. Two sources have forwarded the fundraising e-mails to us today, one of whom is our old friend John Ziegler. John says he has no idea how they got his name and e-mail address, except that he donated money once to a Democrat Congressman,...

See video @ WDSU: IRS Leins on ACORN

As scandals concerning the left-wing "community" group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) continue to metastasize, the organization seems to think it can handpick allies to "investigate" its own transgressions. Fortunately for the rest of us, the growth of independent writers and researchers using modern communications means there are plenty of other outfits that can and will expose corruption. Case in point: The Pelican Institute think tank in New Orleans keeps unearthing examples of federal and state tax liens against ACORN's national headquarters in the Crescent City. The institute's indefatigable research broke into national attention yesterday via a...

The story in a nutshell: Bertha Lewis is the CEO of ACORN. In a review of Lewis’s contacts list, which was leaked to RedState, Bertha Lewis has the office, cell phone, home number, and private personal email address of Patrick Gaspard. Patrick Gaspard holds Karl Rove’s position in the White House and was Obama’s Political Director during the campaign. In addition to Patrick, Bertha has Patrick’s brother Michael in her rolodex. She lists Michael as working at the Advance Group. The Advance Group is ACORN’s lobbying organization. In other words, besides having Obama’s political director’s contact info, the political director’s...