Monthly Notes

Briefly Noted January 2012


Leaders of the resurrected radical group ACORN are lobbying the Obama administration in what appears to be a concerted effort to game the electoral system to help Democrats, new evidence suggests. At least five ACORN leaders have visited the White House this year alone. One of those ACORN officials, Estelle Rogers of Project Vote, has been involved in vetting Department of Justice hires who may help to enforce the voter fraud-enabling National Voting Rights Act.

The Obama administration has showered its allies at ACORN Housing, which changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America, with at least $729,849 in 2011 despite massive accounting irregularities at the longtime ACORN affiliate. Watchdog group Cause of Action obtained an audit from taxpayer-funded federal nonprofit NeighborWorks America showing ACORN Housing had poorly trained staff, extraordinarily sloppy accounting procedures, and violated conflict-of-interest guidelines laid down by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Capital Research Center contributor Trevor Loudon warns in a column at the Big Government website that the radical Occupy Wall Street movement, whose encampments in cities across America have largely shut down, will be back in full force in the springtime. The movement, backed by Big Labor and infiltrated by anti-American extremists, will return “stronger, more disciplined and even more militant.”

America’s leading training institute for radical leftist agitators, the Chicago-based Midwest Academy, gave a lifetime achievement award to Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.). Frank, arguably an architect of the mortgage market collapse, has decided not to seek reelection this year. Frank has an “incisive mind and sharp humor” and has been “a progressive partner and champion for decades,” said the school. Midwest Academy was founded by 1960s radical Heather Booth, a huge fan of the socialist father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky.

Serious health and safety violations plague Head Start centers across the nation, according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services’s Inspector General. The federal government provides Head Start grants to nonprofits and other organizations to provide services to poor children. Of those grant recipients studied, most did not properly conduct criminal and background checks and close to 90 percent of the facilities had toxic chemicals within reach of children. Above 70 percent of the facilities had open or broken gates and more than 50 percent had playground equipment in a poor state of repair.

A delighted NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund announced that Philadelphia prosecutors have dropped their bid to have convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal executed. Abu-Jamal, a former journalist who has become a revered icon on the far left, is a member of the Black Panthers who was convicted of the 1981 execution-style murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Abu-Jamal is expected to have his sentence reduced to life imprisonment.

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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