Free Republic

A Housing and Urban Development Department lawyer asked the Justice Department whether the new law meant that pre-existing contracts with Acorn should be broken. And in a memorandum signed Oct. 23 and posted online this week, Mr. Barron said the government should continue to make payments to Acorn as required by such contracts. The new law “should not be read as directing or authorizing HUD to breach a pre-existing binding contractual obligation to make payments to Acorn or its affiliates, subsidiaries or allied organizations where doing so would give rise to contractual liability,” Mr. Barron wrote. The deputy director of...

ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring told the Washington Post that ACORN’s annual budget is $25 million. This cannot possibly be true. As I reported, ACORN had an budget annual of $50 million as of just last year. The budget figure is quoted in the ACORN entry in a helpful reference book on left-leaning activist groups called The Practical Progressive by Erica Payne. Based on all I’ve learned about the group over a prolonged period of intensive study and despite ACORN losing several funding sources recently I simply cannot believe it. Besides, there is all sorts of ACORN money floating around out...

TALLAHASSEE -- Two suspicious Seminole County voter registration cards became a flash point Wednesday in the Republican effort to suggest the community group ACORN is committing fraud in its historic Florida get-out-the vote efforts. An ACORN spokesman said the group spotted what appeared to be forged registration cards weeks ago and fired a worker over them. Seminole's election chief, Mike Ertel, said he was still "tremendously concerned," but stopped well short of calling the incident "fraud." The Republican National Committee, though, levelled the accusation and blasted the housing and wage advocacy group in a nationwide conference call with reporters, saying...