ACORN in the news

That’s right, it’s time for another ACORN round-up. Humor me, dear readers(r), it’s a hobby of mine.

First off, From Ace of Spades:

We've long known one of the brothers who founded ACORN embezzled a million from the organization. They covered that up, and the other brother (secretly) promised to pay it back out of his own pocket. Which he, um, didn't.

Or at least we thought we knew that.

Turns out it might have been $5 million. So the secret embezzlement was a double-secret embezzlement.

Bertha Lewis calls the charge "completely false," and I'm sure that puts your minds at rest.

She also says you're a racist for even asking whether or not 1 or 5 million dollars was embezzled from a charitable organization, and that crime then covered up, and no authorities (like the IRS) informed.

Read it here. Also noted at Big Government ( Milbank: The Forest, the Trees and ACORN ), and at David Horowitz’s NewsReal blog ( Was ACORN Embezzlement Really $5 Million Instead of $1 Million? ), where Matthew Vadum also notes:

A small sample of the untruths that issued from her mouth:

CLAIM: After news of the embezzlement broke, ACORN “immediately hired outside professionals, no organizers. We may be brilliant organizers, but we needed real financial professionals, real legal professionals, to come in.”

FACT: If ACORN actually hired such people, it has kept evidence of those hirings under wraps. I don’t believe her.

CLAIM: Lewis says ACORN “began the decoupling of over a hundred corporations and organizations under my watch. We took apart that network with transparency and stability.”

FACT: I am not aware of any evidence supporting Lewis’s claim. Prove it, ACORN. Talk is cheap.

CLAIM: “And for nearly 40 years, ACORN has had the privilege to stand with our 500,000 member families fighting for those who typically don’t have a voice.”

FACT: ACORN’s own website says it has “over 400,000 member families,” whatever that means. Yes, 500,000 is more than 400,000, but you can’t just round up from an indefinite figure like “over 400,000.”

Those are just a few of Lewis’ lies from yesterday.

Nor did Lewis say much about her own role in covering up the embezzlement perpetrated by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. After news of the theft broke, Lewis drove out honest ACORN national board members who dared to ask questions.

Lewis, who has high-level contacts within the Marxist governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, also brought out the good ole stand-by smear yesterday, i.e. that everyone who criticizes ACORN is racist. Fortunately, now that the undercover sting videos last month showed Americans the true face of ACORN, the smear, which used to send Republicans and other ACORN critics running, isn’t working too well.

Of course the New York Times highlighted the only part of Lewis’s talk that appealed to it, namely her assertion that ACORN is somehow a victim of a new kind of McCarthyism. 

Read the whole thing here.

Second, the voter fraud story continues, as Pamela Gellar writes in Breitbart’s Big Government: ACORN Throws Out Republican Voter Registrations:

Here is a first-hand account of how it happens. In February 2008, Fathiyyah Muhammad of Jacksonville, Florida, heard that ACORN was paying people three dollars for each voter they could register. ACORN paid her three dollars for each voter she registered, but Fatiyyah Muhammad says that the group threw out her votes and fired her when she brought them registrations of Republican voters.

[…]

“This is my first experience” with ACORN, Muhammad said. “This was before Obama got the nomination, long before then….I heard about this group that was paying $3.00 per person, to go out and to get people to sign up to vote. So I went over, I thought that well this is a good way to make some money because I know everybody, you know. I went over there and this guy signed me up and everything, and gave me my little pad, all this stuff.”

Muhammad went to the ACORN office in Jacksonville. There she encountered a young man speaking to a room of about twenty people. “He was telling us, you know, about his experience, he was from Brooklyn, he wasn’t from this area. He was just here recruiting people to register people to vote. They had a big office here, and I would say maybe about ten or twelve people at there.”

She went to work: “Well, I went out and got a lot of people, homeless people, but of course I signed everybody up as a Republican, and I would have put people had they been Democrats.” She was not forcing people to sign up as Republicans: “You could put down anything you wanted.” But when she got back to ACORN, a group leader was not pleased: “So I showed what I had, and he said, “No, no, you a fraud, there can’t be any black Republicans,’ and oh, he just kind of hung me out to dry…. But of course their main aim was to register only Democrats. They’re not interested in registering Republicans.”

She saw ACORN officials in Jacksonville throw out the Republican registrations she made. “They just discarded those, they weren’t valid. All of the registrations… they just threw those out.” Yet she says that she is sure that the people she registered were actually going to vote: “Yes, they all were going to vote, I just didn’t want to get anybody just to get the three dollars, I wasn’t desperate for three dollars.”

Read the rest here.

Third, Jon Stewart does that thing that he does, and skewers the rather…underwhelming amount of work that has been devoted to this story by the ‘mainstream’ press. You can watch the video here. H/t to Brain Terminal.

Finally, Andrew Breitbart responds to his critics, and don’t forget to lend a hand to ACORN-exposing journalist extraordinaire Hannah Giles, who is, I might add, kinda hot ( has anybody else noticed this? ).