Briefly Noted: February 2012

Leftist Richard Cordray, beloved in the world of community organizing, was recess-appointed last month by President Obama to lead the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. The problem is that Congress wasn’t technically out of session, which means the appointment is unconstitutional, writes CRC trustee Edwin Meese III and Heritage Foundation scholar Todd Gaziano in a Washington Post op-ed. Cordray is a longtime supporter of the Ohio-based East Side Organizing Project (ESOP) whose members storm into and occupy banks and plant plastic sharks at the homes of bank executives. Cordray lobbied for state and federal funding for ESOP and publicly hailed the group’s funders as “the real heroes.”

The Obama Justice Department has found another way to help community organizers feed at the public trough. The Department strong-armed Bank of America into paying $335 million from a lending discrimination settlement to community organizing groups. Critics say it’s a sneaky way to subsidize ACORN “clones.” Former Congressman Ernest Istook (R-Okla.), who is a now a Heritage Foundation fellow, calls it “a shakedown” and “another political backdoor to use the government to channel money to your friends.”

Voter fraud, the crime the Left says doesn’t exist, keeps rearing its ugly head. Four persons associated with ACORN’s political party, New York’s Working Families Party, have entered guilty pleas in connection with an illegal scheme in Troy, N.Y., to forge absentee ballots in the party’s primary in 2009. The four men pleading guilty are former Troy Democratic City Clerk William McInerney, Democratic Councilman John Brown, and Democratic Party operatives Anthony Renna and Anthony DeFiglio.

Two former Weekly Standard writers have created the Center for American Freedom, which aims to combat liberal control of the mainstream media. Michael Goldfarb will serve as chairman and Matthew Continetti will run the group’s media outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. According to Politico newspaper, the group will also create a “campaign-style war room led by two former chiefs of the Republican National Committee’s vaunted research operation, and a media-monitoring shop that aims to do to MSNBC what Media Matters has done to Fox News.” Goldfarb is a partner in the lobbying firm Orion Strategies.

The Obama-backed “Occupy” movement worked nonstop last month in New Hampshire bullying, intimidating, harassing, and provoking the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. Occupy New Hampshire disrupted several candidate events and portrayed Mitt Romney as a job-killing capitalist and Rick Santorum as a “bigot.” The occupiers announced in advance that they planned to attack Republican candidates in order to focus public attention on the “growing economic inequality and the disproportionate economic and political power of corporate America and the wealthiest 1%.”