Monthly Notes

Briefly Noted: September 2013


Cincinnati activist Melowese Richardson was sentenced to five years in prison for illegally voting in the names of four other people. Richardson was active in an ACORN-like Cincinnati-based activist group called Communities United for Action. She publicly boasted that she voted twice for President Obama in November, claiming she did nothing wrong by double-voting. “There’s absolutely no intent on my part to commit voter fraud,” she said.

Bono, lead singer of the Irish rock group U2, is well known as a philanthropist and in past years has often demanded greater government-to-government aid monies. But in a recent speech at Georgetown University he sang a new song. Clearly a bit embarrassed, he laughed at himself, saying, “Rock star preaches capitalism, wow!” But he added, “commerce is real … aid is just a stopgap; commerce, entrepreneurial capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.”

Author M. Stanton Evans drops a bombshell: Buried deep within the Senate-approved immigration reform bill there are provisions authorizing a new $300 million slush fund that could benefit National Council of La Raza and other Saul Alinsky-inspired radical activist groups. The slush fund would be designated “for left-wing nonprofit groups to provide services to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S.,” Evans writes. Those services would include outreach to illegals to advise them on claiming government benefits if comprehensive immigration reform becomes law. The fund would total almost $300 million over three years and grow over time. The bill is “chock-full of de facto earmarks, pork barrel spending, and special interest sweeteners,” according to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

In related news, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced $67 million worth of grants to 105 different organizations intended to help sell and explain Obamacare to individuals (and collect contact information for potential voters). CMS, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), set up the slush fund for “prevention and public health” and funneled money to groups to promote the law. Those promoting the law, Obamacare “navigators,” will have access to health and financial information of the individuals they deal with, and are then supposed to help them sign up for health care coverage through the newly created state “exchanges.” According to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, 13 state attorneys general have expressed concern regarding the security of Americans’ personal information with the navigators. Groups receiving government grants include Virginia Poverty Law Center and branches of Planned Parenthood and National Urban League.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said it is investigating Planned Parenthood’s use of taxpayer funds. The abortion-providing group received more than $500 million from the federal government last year, according to Fox News. More than 50 members of Congress demanded a probe of how the group uses tax dollars. In July a Texas affiliate of Planned Parenthood paid $4.3 million to settle charges it had committed fraud in billing a health program for the poor.

Larry Grathwohl, a patriot who suffered and risked everything he had by infiltrating Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground terrorist group for the FBI in the late 1960s, died suddenly at 65 on July 18. A highly decorated Vietnam War veteran, Grathwohl’s 1976 memoir about the infiltration, Bringing Down America, was re-issued earlier this year.

Matthew Vadum

The author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011), Vadum, former senior vice president at CRC, writes and speaks widely…
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