ACORN

[classicman]

Justice takes time and the decision is not mine.

Originally Posted by classicman

Justice takes time and the decision is not mine.

Still wont admit you've already pre-judged, huh?

[classicman]

nope, no more than you have.

Originally Posted by classicman

nope, no more than you have.

What a load of crap.

I judge innocent until proven guilty and you judge guilty until proven innocent.

You need cites of of your own words?

[classicman]

I have my beliefs - I have not judged - that is not my decision to make, even though there is a TON of circumstantial evidence against them.
The courts will decide... as it should be.

Originally Posted by classicman

I have my beliefs - I have not judged...

LOL....ok, if you say so.

Your obsession with, and presumption of, ACORN's guilt is a figment of my imagination.

[classicman]

Don't worry your head over it - they'll get out of it again. They have friends in high places. It'll all amount to nothing.
Whats the penalty anyway, if they were found guilty?

Originally Posted by classicman

Don't worry your head over it - they'll get out of it again. They have friends in high places. It'll all amount to nothing.
Whats the penalty anyway, if they were found guilty?

Im not worried in the least.

Just getting a good laugh out of the ACORN you have up your butt that has been driving you crazy for as long as I have been here.

[classicman]

They're the newest version of the "Teflon Don."

If I were advising ACORN (and no, I have no connection to the group), I would turn it into a political circus if it comes to trial....and raise the firing of the US attorneys (Attorney-gate)....and subpoena Gonzales et al.

Particularly with the circumstances in Nevada very similar to those in New Mexico, where the US attorney was fired by Bush/Gonazales.

While prefacing its results as incomplete because of the refusal of several key Bush administration officials to cooperate, a DoJ Inspector General report released last year found that David Iglesias, the US Attorney, was fired for not giving into pressure to pursue cases with purely partisan allegations despite a lack of evidence.:

"[...W]e believe the evidence we uncovered showed that Iglesias was removed because of complaints to the Department of Justice and the White House by New Mexico Republican members of Congress and party activists about Iglesias's handling of voter fraud and public corruption cases in the state."

As detailed above, many Republicans in New Mexico believed that fraudulent registrations by Democratic Party voters was a widespread problem in New Mexico, an evenly divided state politically that has had very close national elections. Beginning in the summer of 2004, New Mexico Republican Party activists talked to Iglesias about the “party’s . . . efforts” on the voter fraud issue, and sought to involve him in those efforts....

In sum, we believe the evidence shows that the complaints about Iglesias from New Mexico Republican politicians and party activists, both to the Department and to the White House, caused Sampson to place Iglesias on the removal list.

http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/s08...apter6.htm#IVB

The partisan nature of the DoJ's pursuit of "voter fraud" cases at the request of Republican party officials in numerous states, particularly swing states, in recent years and the resulting firing of the US attorneys including Iglesias and others who put the law about partisan politics and not going along with the plan would make a great side show at the trial.

[TheMercenary]

ACORN voter registration drive nets charges

A voter registration drive last year illegally required canvassers to meet quotas to keep their jobs and resulted in thousands of “garbage” registrations gumming up Clark County voter rolls, officials said Monday as they released a criminal complaint against the drive’s organizers.

The complaint names the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, as well as Chris Edwards, the group’s former Las Vegas field director, and Amy Busefink, who was regional director for voter registration.

In all, there are 26 charges of compensation for registration of voters and 13 charges of being a “principal” in the incident. An initial hearing has been set for 7:30 a.m. June 3 in Las Vegas Justice Court.

“In Nevada, it is unlawful for a person to provide compensation for registering voters that is based on the total number of voters a person registers,” said state Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto.

ACORN’s canvassers, she said, had to gather at least 20 voter registrations a day to keep their jobs. There was also a bonus program, known as “blackjack” or “21 plus,” which rewarded employees with $5 extra per shift if they brought in 21 or more completed registrations.

Canvassers under pressure to keep their jobs turned in registrations with fake names and phony addresses — even, in one case, the starting lineup for the Dallas Cowboys.

“These practices are clearly a violation of Nevada law,” Cortez Masto said. “By structuring employment and compensation around a quota system, ACORN facilitated voter registration fraud in this state.”

The organization is being targeted, she added, because it shouldn’t “hide behind or place blame on its employees” when the group’s policies required “illegal acts in performing the job.”

Scott Levenson, an ACORN spokesman, said the group cooperated in the investigation and that charging the organization is “frightfully absurd.”

“We’re a bit appalled at the political grandstanding on the part of the attorney general’s office,” he said. “This individual case is truly a situation where, the organization that was most harmed is the organization that is being charged.”

Both he and state officials said that the bonus system was instituted by Edwards, who did not respond to a request for comment Monday. That system was “in violation of ACORN’s national policies,” Levenson said.

“Incentives, bonus systems, are against any training that we do with our employees,” he said. Canvassers also don’t have to meet a strict quota to keep their jobs, he said.

“You expect someone to work,” he said. “If someone walks in every day with 17, their job’s secure. If we have a goal for an employee of 20 registrations, and they keep coming in day after day with two, there’s going to be an issue.”

In an affidavit supporting the charges, an investigator said that both ACORN employees and training materials set out a hard target of 20 registration forms per day for employees to keep their jobs.

“It was the policy of ACORN to terminate from employment canvassers who failed to obtain 20 (voter registration forms) per day,” stated Colin Haynes, an investigator with the Secretary of State’s office.

“However,” he added, “this was not uniformly enforced and it was left to each individual political organizer to deal with any of their canvassers who failed to meet this quota.”

Lisa Rasmussen, a local attorney representing ACORN, called the allegations against the group “patently false.”

“Even the state concedes in its charging documents that there was no 'quota’ system that was enforced by ACORN,” she said in an e-mailed statement. “Furthermore, the suggestion that a business cannot implement standards of quality control, performance goals and individual job performance tools is contrary to the First Amendment.”

She also said Busefink would not be available for comment.

The charges are Class E felonies, the penalty for which can be probation or one to four years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.

At Monday’s announcement, state and local officials strenuously emphasized that the false voter registrations didn’t translate to people being able to vote fraudulently.

“This is a case of voter registration fraud,” said Secretary of State Ross Miller. “There is absolutely no evidence that there was any voter fraud in the last election.”

Larry Lomax, the Clark County registrar of voters, said his office reviewed the 91,002 voter registration forms turned in by ACORN, verifying that information on the form matched information attached to the voter’s driver’s license number or Social Security number.

If it didn’t, those registrations were tagged as requiring identification at the polling place.

There were 28,097 forms that were duplicates or changes of name, party or address, leaving 62,905 new voters.

Of those, 23,186 actually voted in the 2008 general election, according to a report prepared by Lomax’s office.

That means almost 40,000 of the new voters registered by ACORN didn’t vote, and of those, almost 19,000 had information on file that didn’t match what was turned in on the forms.

“That’s 48 percent of those forms that I believe are clearly fraudulent,” Lomax said.

“This is individuals ripping off their bosses because they have a quota to make.”

This voter registration work is not easy, Lomax noted. Canvassers are working in the summer heat and reaching out to people in poorer neighborhoods, all the while making $8 or $9 an hour.

“There’s a huge temptation to take the easy way out,” he said.

ACORN, founded in 1970, is an international community activist group that works on a broad range of issues. Locally, those issues include foreclosure prevention, immigration reform, and concerns in West Las Vegas, a predominantly minority area in central Las Vegas, about the closure of F Street near downtown.

Criticisms of ACORN’s voter registration drives are not new. In previous elections cycles, officials in several states have looked into whether the organization was turning in fake voter registrations, and conservative groups have long criticized the nominally nonpartisan organization as a front for liberal interest groups.

Lomax said he raised concerns about ACORN’s voter registration drive in 2006. “I’ve been trying to get someone to do something about this for a while,” he said.

Bonnie Greathouse, the head organizer at the Las Vegas office, said she wasn’t worried about fallout from the charges.

“We’ve had bad publicity before, and all it does is inform the community that we’re here working for the community,” she said. “People always come forward to our defense.

“We’re just community organizers, just like the president used to be.”

http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/44307912.html

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Redux

Yep...I am a liberal..and even an apologist at times.

But I still believe in innocent until proven guilty....you know, the basic foundation of law.

But when you try and carry that to the extreme of ignoring or downplaying evidence, that is bad. C'man is saying he finds indications something's rotten in ACORN land, and you reply saying -- what? That somehow he shouldn't be finding this? You're spinning, Redux, and you're spinning like a dreidl.

C'man isn't going to be spun by your views.

[classicman]

These were sent to me from a friend and ex-supporter of acorn.

Former ACORN Board Members Speak Out

Investigating ACORN

Unfortunately both links are from Faux News, but who else is gonna investigate them, MSNBC? I don't think so.

These two women lay out exactly what happens when a wonderful program with a noble and needed cause is overtaken by power-hungry and money grubbing thieves.

Note the number of organizations under the acorn umbrella. Also, the Freddie & Fanny tie-ins and good ole Barney Frank.
I gotta run and get my

[classicman]

MCCRAY: Well, what I would say about that, Glenn, is that really what you need to look at in terms of ACORN is governance. I mean, what we have is an organization, a venerable organization that had a very beautiful mission and a lot of committed supporters. What's happened over time, though, is that there are certain leaders and senior staff members that have kind of, for the most part, hijacked the organization and they're using it for their own personal games.

MCCRAY: Wade Rathke is the founder of the organization, and he is an incredible organizer. And it was his vision that allowed ACORN to progress to kind of where it is today. Unfortunately, with, you know, absolute power comes some corruption, and the board members found out about eight or nine months ago that there had been $1 million embezzlement by his brother.

Now, what the board did at that point of time was that, once the full board found out about it, they immediately moved to terminate Wade and Dale, then they tried to put in place the young ladies that you interviewed on Friday — Karen and Marcel — in order to try to set the record straight and get to the bottom of what happened to the money.

MCCRAY: And don't you find it very interesting that even when after word that $1 million embezzlement came out and the fact that board members and executive committee members covered up the embezzlement, that the only people that had been punished were the people that were trying to get to the bottom of where the money go?

MCCRAY: Essentially, CCI — Citizens Consulting, Inc. — is basically the financial nerve center for ACORN and all its entities. So, if you really want to try to follow the money, that's why we requested a forensic examination and financial audit of CCI.

BECK: OK. CCI — can you put that back up on the screen, please? CCI shows one — what a surprise, it's in New Orleans. There's no corruption down there. It shows one address. This is the address that has — that all of the other ACORN entities, they all list this as their address.

So, if you are — correct me if I'm wrong here, Michael — but if you're in one of these organizations and you apply for federal dollars or any kind of dollars, the money goes there?

MCCRAY: I mean, that's the main problem. As a matter of fact, the money goes there first.

So, even if you are at a local chapter of ACORN that wanted to, say, you know, some good philanthropist wanted to write a local grant, the local ACORN chapter can't get the grant. Everything winds up being funneled through national and all of the monies come are dispersed from CCI.

Now, CCI says that they pay a small administrative fee. But the problem is, is without an audit, you know, we don't know if CCI gets 1 percent, 50 percent, 90 percent — we don't know. And that's what Karen Inman and Marcel Reid were trying to get their hands on.

And these are two more people being forced out of their jobs for trying to get to the truth. Why is that?

Apparently there are upwards of 200 different organizations under the acorn banner. There are BILLIONS of dollars at stake here, much of which was written into the stimulus package.

Acorn is also involved in gathering data for the next census.
I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with that.

[TheMercenary]

The second to last post is most telling. I heard these women interviewed on NPR and it was quite damming to ACORN.