Soros

President Obama’s new “green jobs” czar Van Jones, an avowed militant communist, had been on the board of the pressure group Apollo Alliance, which aspires to flatten the U.S. economy by having government fund “green jobs” scams, according to the “Glenn Beck Program” earlier this week.

Even worse, the green gangster group, which has ties to ACORN, SEIU, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta, has significant pull in Congress and helped to write the stimulus bill.

The Apollo Alliance “is designed to bring together the elements of organized labor with the community organizers with the green groups, the environmental groups, and to access all of the big foundation money that’s been supportive of those causes in the past,” explained Phil Kerpen, director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Jones described the group’s “mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes; it ties all these things together,” Kerpen said. He added

They really admire the Apollo mission, the moon-shot mission, and they think that we need a similar centrally-planned, organized massive mobilization to reorder society and take control of energy and their various other objectives. They admire that and they want it like a moon shot.

Beck asked if Wade Rathke, the disgraced founder of ACORN who was expelled by the radical left-wing group last year for covering up his brother’s embezzlement of nearly $1 million in ACORN funds, had been a member of the Apollo Alliance’s board.

Kerpen responded, “Yes. He’s on — he was until this year on the board of the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center, which are the parent organizations that host the Apollo Alliance.”

Loren Spivack of freemarketwarrior.com said that his Concord, N.C. shopping mall kiosk was shut down by a shopping mall chain because it carried anti-Obama and anti-liberal merchandise on the “Glenn Beck Program” Friday.  (The Charlotte Observer also reported on the story.) 

“What essentially happened was one of the largest corporations in the country decided to stomp on one of the smallest companies in the country, Free Market Warrior,” Spivack explained. The action was taken based on one complaint from “one person who was not willing to be in the same mall as material that she disagrees with.”

Spivack said his kiosk sold baby bibs that read “My parents chose life: thanks mom and dad,” and bumper stickers that read “Impeach Obama” and “Al Qaeda’s 2 favorite days: 9/11/01 & 11/4/08.”

Beck noted that the owners of the shopping mall holding company are big contributors to the Democratic Party but not did identify them on-air.

In fact, the Concord Mills mall is owned by the Simon Property Group Inc., which is run by Melvin and Bren Simon. Mrs. Simon is a member of the Democracy Alliance, a group of liberal plutocrats determined to turn the U.S. into a European-style socialist state. The Democracy Alliance is led by left-wing philanthropist and political meddler George Soros.

Teo Molin of Human Events has an interesting article called, “The ActBlue-Soros Complex.”

Here is the top of the article:

In an era when the most vehement proponents of big government happen to be the most politically active billionaires, it is not surprising that the Democracy Alliance, a collaborative of liberal donors led by George Soros and Peter B. Lewis, has set out on an offensive to pile funds into the liberal machine.

The tactics of Soros, his constituent investors and foundations are revealed easily — and in considerable detail — by an examination of the seemingly “grassroots” groups that this very non-grassroots collection of billionaires and bureaucrats fund.

In fact, staples of the “grassroots” political movement — especially progressive websites such as MoveOn.org and ActBlue — are not driven by the average Democrat, as their image may suggest, but are rather mouthpieces for the radical agendas of the likes of Soros and labor unions. [...]

After the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously rejected his lawsuit today, Republican Norm Coleman graciously conceded the bitterly disputed contest over the second U.S. Senate seat for Minnesota.

None of this changes the fact that as a senator Al Franken is not legitimate. The election was stolen at the precinct level, during the recount, and during the post-election litigation.

Never forget the role that ACORN played in this.

As ACORN-aligned Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a former community organizer, presided over the vote-counting process, Coleman’s original lead dwindled. The morning after the election, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes. Over the next five days, Coleman’s lead had dwindled to just 221. Election officials claimed they had to correct typos on vote tally sheets and that these corrections gave Franken 435 votes and took 69 away from Coleman.

There were mountains of other irregularities which I’m not going to bother detailing here and somehow in the end Franken came out on top.

Ritchie was elected Minnesota secretary of state in part because of outside help. He defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006 after receiving an endorsement and financial assistance for his run from a below-the-radar non-federal “527″ group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn’t have to disclose them publicly until well after the election.

The founders of the Secretary of State Project, which claims to advance “election protection” but only backs Democrats, religiously believe that right-leaning secretaries of state helped the GOP steal the presidential elections in Florida in 2000 (Katherine Harris) and in Ohio in 2004 (Ken Blackwell).

The secretary of state candidates the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist.

In 2006, the Minnesota ACORN Political Action Committee endorsed Ritchie and donated to his campaign. According to the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, contributors to Ritchie’s campaign included liberal philanthropists George Soros, Drummond Pike, and Deborah Rappaport, along with veteran community organizer Heather Booth, a Saul Alinsky disciple who co-founded the Midwest Academy, a radical ACORN clone. One article on Ritchie’s 2006 campaign website bragged about the fine work ACORN did in Florida to pass a constitutional amendment to raise that state’s minimum wage.

It was revealed during a panel discussion at the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver last summer that the Democracy Alliance, a financial clearinghouse created by Soros and insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis, approved the Secretary of State Project as a grantee. The Democracy Alliance aspires to create a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofits, think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups-a kind of “vast left-wing conspiracy” to compete with the conservative movement. It has brokered more than $100 million in grants to liberal nonprofits including ACORN. The aforementioned Pike and Rappaport, who gave money to Ritchie’s campaign, are members of the Democracy Alliance.

According to IRS 8872 disclosure forms, the Secretary of State Project received donations from Democracy Alliance members including Soros, Rob Stein, Gail Furman, and Susie Tompkins Buell.

Meanwhile, for conservatives, it hardly needs to be pointed out that this Frankenstein is a fundamentally unserious and untested figure worthy of ridicule. After being isolated in the echo chamber of the entertainment-media-academia complex where he got nothing but praise for decades, Franken is quite unsuited for the world outside. He cannot tolerate criticism and characteristically responds to it with over-the-top vitriolic attacks. He is the living embodiment of all the horrible things that conservatives fairly or unfairly impute to DailyKos bloggers.

A professional comedian originally, Al Franken remains a joke.

The Center for Independent Media has joined PolitiFact in smearing Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) because she dares to speak the truth about ACORN.

I’ve tried to educate Minnesota Independent (part of the Center for Independent Media) writer Andy Birkey about ACORN.

The exchange may be found at the Minnesota Independent website here.

Arianna Huffington (L) with Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans (R)

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The Huffington Post Investigative Fund is struggling, according to the Business Insider.

Arianna Huffington unveiled plans for her left-leaning gossip website’s foray into investigative journalism in March but so far the site is reportedly having trouble generating content.

The evidence of internal chaos is somewhat thin so far but respected writers claim they were treated poorly by the outfit. One unhappy writer suggests that the Huffington Post Investigative Fund doesn’t have much cash.

In March it was revealed that the program’s startup budget would be $1.75 million. The money would be provided by the Huffington Post and the Atlantic Philanthropies. The Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies is headed by Gara LaMarche, who used to be a vice president of liberal uber-philanthropist George Soros’s Open Society Institute. LaMarche is a member of Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that is organizing to turn America into a European-style socialist state.

Meanwhile, we’ve had two articles out in as many months on the state of American journalism.

This month Tim Cavanaugh penned “Bailing Out the Press: Can Non-Profit Status Save American Newspapers?” Here’s a summary of the Foundation Watch article:

Could a bailout of the newspaper industry be on its way? A new Senate bill would offer financially struggling newspapers non-profit status in order to save investigative journalism. Critics say it probably won’t work, gives nonprofit media a tax advantage, could subject the free press to IRS oversight, and could open the door to more serious government interference in the media. But when has that ever stopped a crusading politician?

Last month Cheryl K. Chumley wrote “ProPublica: Investigative Journalism or Liberal Spin?” Here’s a summary of that Foundation Watch article:

The press is filled with sad stories about venerable for-profit newspapers that have been forced to declare bankruptcy and shut down. So it’s striking that the billionaire liberals Herb and Marion Sandler have decided now is the time to fund a new nonprofit group called ProPublica whose mission is to serve the public interest by funding independent investigative journalism. Too bad Pro Publica churns out little more than left-wing hit pieces about Sarah Palin and blames the U.S. government for giving out too little foreign aid.

Was this photo taken at Shining Path headquarters? (just kidding) Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke (left) and ACORN enabler Drummond Pike (right) in an undated photo taken in Peru. On the wall is a large poster of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. (photo: Pike’s blog)

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John Podesta’s left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund has invited many liberal and radical groups to a meeting Thursday morning to discuss how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption. One of the groups, Alliance for Justice, is advertising the crisis management meeting called “Reframing the Attack on Voter Registration” on its website.

The intrepid investigative journalist Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner reports

Nearly a dozen left-wing advocacy groups are meeting Thursday at the Center for American Progress (CAP)  to discuss how to respond to a growing barrage of damaging news reports and editorial criticism of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform (NOW). [sic]

The strategy meeting at the liberal think tank is being described as a “briefing and discussion” on how to respond to the negative coverage. ACORN is currently under investigation for voter registration fraud and related allegations in at least 14 states.

Among the organizations expected to attend the strategy session are: Advancement Project, Alliance for Justice, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Center for Community Change, Common Cause, Fair Elections Legal Network, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and People for the American Way.

Bertha Lewis, billed as “ACORN’s new chief organizer and CEO,” is a featured speaker. [...]

Lewis is the ACORN executive who lied to Lou Dobbs on CNN last month. Lewis can’t stand controversial Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio and she said he claimed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan. As Newsmax reported:

What Arpaio actually said was that whenever he tried to enforce U.S. immigration laws, activists on the left accused him of being a racist, like a member of the Klu Klux Klan. He then went on to say he didn’t let the insults bother him.

Lewis refused to back down from her malicious lie, which is not surprising because when confronted, ACORN officials routinely lie, lie, and lie some more.

I suspect that ACORN and its allies will play the race card. Useful idiot Adam Serwer of the American Prospect summed up last fall what they’re likely to say in coming days:

The allegations against ACORN are part of a tangle of misinformation and insinuation that is being played out across the media, and within the Justice Department. ACORN, because of its advocacy on behalf of low-income and minority families, and its efforts to register voters in poor and minority districts, has become a focus for the right’s racial anxieties.

They’ll say conservatives and Republicans are sinister, racist scum who don’t want minorities to vote, and all the negative publicity is the result of a vast conspiracy that originated among scab health care workers on the planet Klendathu who all belong to country clubs that frown on same-sex marriage unless it’s solemnized by a non-union pastor who dines on endangered species and who enjoys maximizing his carbon footprint, yada yada yada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We’ve heard this fanciful narrative before but the difference is now a surprisingly large segment of the population is paying attention to ACORN’s illicit activities.

For what it’s worth, President Obama’s radical new nominee to replace Associate Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, used to serve on the board of LatinoJustice PRLDEF. (White House backgrounder)

Along with groups such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), LatinoJustice fought a war of attrition against President George W. Bush’s 2001 nomination of conservative Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born immigrant, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Democrats in the Senate filibustered the nomination and Estrada withdrew from consideration in 2003.

A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, LatinoJustice PRLDEF hailed the nomination of Sotomayor on the basis of her ethno-cultural heritage. “As the second largest and fastest growing population in America, with a large pool of qualified individuals to choose from, it was wholly appropriate for the president to nominate a Hispanic,” the group said in a written statement. (PDF)

According to the group’s website, it gets some of its funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

A search of philanthropy databases reveals other significant donors to LatinoJustice to be Carnegie Corporation of New York ($1,025,000 since 2000), Ford Foundation ($2,280,000 since 2001), Rockefeller Foundation ($1,275,000 since 2000), and JPMorganChase Foundation ($70,000 since 2001).

Among radical left-wing groups, it has a fairly garden-variety agenda. A captive of identity politics, it pushes for multiculturalism, diversity, bilingual public education, race-based gerrymandering of electoral districts, race-based employment quotas, tenants’ rights, and illegal immigrants’ rights.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF was known as the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund until last year when it filed Articles of Amendment with New York State to change its name. (See pages 35 to 41 of its IRS Form 990 for the group for Tax Year 2007.)

(Note: This blog post was updated several times on the day it was posted.)

Amidst the anti-market frenzy in Washington, D.C., President Obama today signed into law a bill that will drive up interest rates on credit cards and force people with good credit to pay more to subsidize people with bad credit.

The bill, which extends a big, fat middle finger to credit card companies by limiting their ability to price their products according to risk, swept through Congress this week at breakneck speed.

According to Edward L. Yingling, CEO of the American Bankers Association, provisions in the legisation “will undermine the availability of credit.” Credit cards are “a strong economic driver and are relied upon by consumers and small businesses to make payments and to bridge short-term financial gaps,” he said.

Yingling said the legislation “fundamentally changes the entire business model of credit cards by restricting the ability to price credit for risk.”

As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted, limiting consumers’ choices and interfering with sensible risk-based pricing practices “will result in less availability of credit and actually force card holders to pay higher rates in many instances.”

The attack on the credit card industry was funded in part by left-wing philanthropist George Soros through his foundation, the Open Society Institute, as shown in “Consumers and Credit Cards: Leftist Watchdogs Attack An American Success Story,” by Sara Wille, Foundation Watch, September 2006. (A related article is “Demonizing Subprime Lenders: Liberal Groups Oppose Consumer Choice,” by Melanie Sans and Matthew Vadum, Organization Trends, October 2007.)

To be criticized by the character assassination factory, Media Matters for America, is an honor and tends to suggest that the person criticized is doing the right thing.

I feel so honored to have had my research referenced in a report about the vast crime syndicate known as ACORN. The racketeers at ACORN also posted the report on their own website.

I was celebrated by these lefties for my influential American Spectator article, “SOS in Minnesota,” which is referenced under the subheading “2008-2009 Minnesota Senate recount” in the Media Matters report.

Both ACORN and Media Matters are funded by George Soros’s Democracy Alliance.