Briefly Noted: November 2013

Operatives of the disgraced radical group ACORN continue to advise the Obama administration and guide its far-left policies years after the group filed for bankruptcy. Good-government group Judicial Watch discovered through Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests that former ACORN Housing official Bruce Dorpalen, now head of the National Housing Resource Center, has been meeting with and advising senior Obama administration officials on housing policy, the Breitbart News website reports. ACORN Housing legally changed its name in 2010 to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA) and then closed its doors for good last year.

“How is it, after the scandals of ACORN and its contribution to the housing crash, that this organization’s former leadership is still able to guide federal housing policy?” asked Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. The Housing Resource Center’s office is in the same space used for years by ACORN’s Philadelphia headquarters.

Thanks to a separate FoIA request, Judicial Watch discovered that educational materials the Obama administration uses on the military characterize conservative organizations as “hate groups” and Tea Party supporters as potentially dangerous extremists. The 133 pages of lesson plans and PowerPoint slides released by the Air Force came from a 2013 Defense Department diversity training center “student guide” entitled “Extremism.” It is “striking that some of the language in this new document echoes” language the IRS used to target conservative and Tea Party nonprofits for heightened levels of scrutiny, Fitton said.

Funding for clinical cancer trials and other life-saving research under the National Institutes of Health was suspended during last month’s partial federal government shutdown, but taxpayer funds kept flowing to TV’s Cookie Monster, Fox News reports. On the first day of the fiscal standoff, the U.S. Treasury handed over $445 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, thereby funding “PBS Newshour,” NPR, and “Sesame Street.” Media Research Center’s director of media analysis, Tim Graham, observed that in the weeks leading up to the shutdown, PBS hosted two “very friendly” interviews with President Obama.

Despite the shutdown, the Obama administration last month allowed its radical allies who support immigration amnesty to hold a large rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., even though the administration had closed the Mall to the general public at the time. The “Camino Americano: March for Immigration Reform” event featured Democratic politicians and was co-sponsored by CASA de Maryland, Center for Community Change, SEIU, AFL-CIO, and AeroMexico airlines.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), reportedly a front group for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, conceals donations from Islamist governments overseas by maintaining a complex web of shell organizations, according to the Daily Caller news website. A shady social welfare and lobbying organization recognized under 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, CAIR has reportedly been “washing” millions of dollars from oil-rich nations without disclosing the donations to the U.S. government, as the law requires. For example, court documents indicate the group, which has ties to the terrorist groups Hamas and al-Qaeda, has recently received $405,000 from the government of Qatar, $199,980 from the Kingdom Holding Company of Saudi Arabia, and $219,563 from the U.S. embassy of the United Arab Emirates.