Briefly Noted: December 2011

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is demanding that the Obama administration investigate allegedly fraudulent fundraising practices that ACORN’s New York front group may have used to raise funds for Occupy Wall Street. The ACORN spinoff, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), “solicited donations from union members under false pretenses and misappropriated those funds to support the protesters,” Issa said. NYCC staffers reportedly collected money door-to-door for the group’s campaign to test schools for dangerous toxins such as PCBs but then diverted those funds to support Occupy Wall Street.

The George Soros-funded Alliance for Global Justice, is managing donations benefiting the communists, socialists, anarchists, and hippies occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. The Alliance has taken in about $250,000 so far. A hotbed of anti-American activity, the Alliance takes money from some of the most extreme left-wing philanthropies operating in America today. The Alliance has accepted grants from the (pro-Fidel Castro) Arca Foundation ($185,000 since 2001), General Service Foundation ($165,000 since 2001), and Foundation for Deep Ecology ($30,000 since 2000), an anti-science environmentalist group that regards human beings as a cancer on the earth.

The local branch of Occupy Wall Street invaded Freedom Works’ BlogCon “boot camp” for conservative bloggers in Denver last month. The “occupiers” attempted more than once to disrupt the proceedings but failed to do so. The conservative bloggers may be the first group yet to stand up to the radical occupiers who have set up camp in cities across the nation. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., occupiers knocked a woman in her seventies down the stairs outside the Americans for Prosperity convention. Outside the same forum, the D.C. activists also refused to allow a man driving an SUV to pass because they dislike luxury vehicles.

Election law expert J. Christian Adams reports that Soros-funded groups got together recently at an undisclosed location to plot new ways to undermine election integrity. The meeting was sponsored by the Fair Elections Legal Network, a group that received $105,000 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation since 2007. “These types of groups exist primarily to attack any effort to combat voter fraud or ensure the integrity of elections,” Adams writes. They are part of “an enormous and well-funded industry of voter fraud deniers that provides an intellectual smokescreen for this lawlessness.” Adams is author of Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department (Regnery, 2011) and of the October Organization Trends.

Color of Change, the extreme left-wing group that takes credit for getting Glenn Beck’s TV show off the Fox News network, has launched a new campaign trying to convince Americans that new electoral integrity measures adopted by states are some kind of a racist poll tax. Requirements that voters present an ID when voting constitute the “harshest attack on voting rights in decades” and are “threatening to disenfranchise millions of voters” who can’t bother to get government-issued photo ID.

Intrepid researcher Trevor Loudon launched his book, Barack Obama and the Enemies Within, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., at the end of October. Based in New Zealand, Loudon, who profiled the Tides Foundation in the October 2010 Foundation Watch, has won increased American attention as an authority on the radical Left.