“NEW YORK (AP) – A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a decision that had barred Congress from withholding funds from ACORN, the activist group driven to ruin by scandal and financial woes.

The ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reversed a decision by a district court judge in Brooklyn that found Congress had violated the group’s rights by punishing it without a trial.

Congress cut off ACORN’s federal funding last year in response to allegations the group engaged in voter registration fraud and embezzlement and violated the tax-exempt status of some of its affiliates by engaging in partisan political activities.

Fueling the outrage was a video that caught three employees allegedly advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings.

ACORN responded with a lawsuit accusing Congress of abusing its power with what amounted to a “corporate death sentence.”

The appeals court disagreed, citing a study finding that ACORN received only 10 percent of its funding from federal sources.

“We doubt that the direct consequences of the appropriations laws temporarily precluding ACORN from federal funds were so disproportionately severe or so inappropriate as to constitute punishment,” the three-judge panel wrote.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which argued on behalf of ACORN, said it was considering asking the appeals court to rehear the case with more judges.

“We cannot let Congress be pushed around by the right-wing media machine into becoming prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner of politically unpopular people or organizations,” said Bill Quigley, legal director for CCR.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn declined to comment on Friday.”

Of course this ruling was expected. ACORN would have the court believe that it has a right to funding by congress. Congress isn’t a corporation and cannot be held to have “harmed” by withdrawing funding, it’s an absurd position, but indicative of the kind of audacity which is ACORN.

“The community organizing group Acorn announced Monday that it would close all its remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1.

The organization is “developing a plan to resolve all outstanding debts, obligations and other issues,” said a statement released by the group.

Acorn has been battered by criticism from the right and has lost federal money and private donations since a video sting was publicized last fall. Acorn employees were shown in the videos advising two young conservative activists — posing as a pimp and a prostitute — how to conceal their criminal activities.

In reaction to the videos, the Census Bureau ended its partnership with the organization for this year’s census, the Internal Revenue Service dropped the group from its Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program, and Congress voted to cut off all grants to the organization.

In recent years, the group has also been dogged by mismanagement and criticism — mostly from conservatives — for its handling of voter registration drives.”

Leave it to the Ny Slimes to gloss over ACORN’s numerous sins and blame it all on conservatives. Glossing over the mulitude of voter fraud cases – many of which occurred during the 2008 campaign season, corruption over the years, ACORN will go down as one of the most corrupt organizations in history.

Good riddance on this blight on American politics.

“The U.S. Census is supposed to be free of politics, but one group with a history of voter fraud, ACORN, is participating in next year’s count, raising concerns about the politicization of the decennial survey.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now signed on as a national partner with the U.S. Census Bureau in February 2009 to assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States — currently believed to be more than 306 million people.

A U.S. Census “sell sheet,” an advertisement used to recruit national partners, says partnerships with groups like ACORN “play an important role in making the 2010 Census successful,” including by “help[ing] recruit census workers.”

The bureau is currently employing help from more than 250 national partners, including TARGET and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to assist in the hiring effort.

But ACORN’s partnership with the 2010 Census is worrisome to lawmakers who say past allegations of fraud should raise concerns about the organization.

“It’s a concern, especially when you look at all the different charges of voter fraud. And it’s not just the lawmakers’ concern. It should be the concern of every citizen in the country,” Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland, R-Ga., vice ranking member of the subcommittee for the U.S. Census, told FOXNews.com. “We want an enumeration. We don’t want to have any false numbers.”

ACORN, which claims to be a non-partisan grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people, came under fire in 2007 when Washington State filed felony charges against several paid ACORN employees and supervisors for more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In March 2008, an ACORN worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for making 29 phony voter registration forms. The group’s activities were frequently questioned in the 2008 presidential election.”

Here’s a little background on Acorns history of voter fraud via MSNBC’s “Deep Background” back in October of last year.

“Nevada 2008

On October 6, a criminal investigator with the Nevada Secretary of State filed a search-warrant affidavit stating that ACORN workers used “fictitious and false information” on voter registration applications. Among the allegations:

–ACORN hired 59 state prison inmates to collect voter-registration forms. One was Jason Anderson, who currently is imprisoned for burglary and firearms violations at the state’s Casa Grande halfway house in Las Vegas, court records show. Anderson, who became a supervisory “team leader” for ACORN, told state investigators that some of his co-workers “hired by ACORN were ‘lazy crack-heads’ who were not interested in working and just wanted the money.” Anderson is the whistleblower who told state investigators that his inmate colleagues had registered the Dallas Cowboys to vote in Nevada, along with “large numbers” of other fictitious applications.

–Another ACORN worker, Darmela Jones, said “she submitted approximately 40 Voter Registration Applications while employed at ACORN and only 10 were real applications.” Her excuse? Jones said “it was very hot outside while she was getting people to complete a form.”

–Yet another ACORN canvasser “was caught completing forms using names and addresses copied from the telephone book.”

– Investigators also identified a Nevada woman, Roberta Casteel, who had not registered to vote but whose voter-registration application was submitted to the state by ACORN. How, then, did the ACORN workers find her name, driver’s license number and Social Security number? Here’s one clue: Casteel’s purse was stolen last year, she said. Now how would state inmates living in a halfway house know about that?

Ohio 2008

Election officials in Ohio’s most populous county asked a prosecutor Monday to investigate alleged voter-registration fraud. One local man, Freddie Johnson of Cleveland, testified before the bipartisan Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that ACORN workers encouraged him to sign 73 voter registration forms—all in his own name.

“They get paid off a signature,” he said. “So they just needed a signature and told me I wasn’t going to get into trouble.”

In an interview with the Cleveland NBC station, WKYC, after the hearing, Johnson said the ACORN workers paid him a few bucks and gave him a few cigarettes in exchange for the multiple signatures. ACORN said the workers in question were fired.

Washington State 2007

The King County Prosecutor’s Office filed criminal charges last year against seven ACORN workers accused of submitting 1,762 fraudulent voter registrations to the state in 2006. The workers–many of whom had prior convictions– went to the Seattle Public Library and filled out forms “based on names, addresses and telephone numbers taken from the telephone books,” state prosecutor Daniel Satterberg said.

In addition, one of the canvassers paid $8 an hour by ACORN “said it was hard work making up all those cards,” according to a probable-cause statement by a King County Sheriff’s detective. Another ACORN worker boasted “he would often sit at home, smoke marijuana and fill out cards,” the statement said.

Several of the Seattle-based ACORN workers had criminal histories prior to their employment. One had pleaded guilty to second-degree child molestation, and another had pleaded guilty to harassment for writing a bomb-threat note. Yet another had a crack-cocaine problem.

“We believe that ACORN’s internal quality control procedures were not just deficient but entirely non-existent,” Satterberg said. “This was an act of vandalism against our voter rolls.”

Acorn has done little to nothing to improve it’s methods and instead has made excuses. The pure and simple fact is that ACORN is a voter fraud machine and will simply use the Census as a tool to shore up data for the DNC, as other left wing activist groups have already done.

It simply cannot be allowed to happen.

Technorati Tags: ACORN, Voter Fraud

“Is McCain making a move? The three-day average holds steady, but McCain outpolled Obama today, 48% to 47%. He is beginning to cut into Obama’s lead among independents, is now leading among blue collar voters, has strengthened his lead among investors and among men, and is walloping Obama among NASCAR voters. Joe the Plumber may get his license after all. “Obama’s lead among women declined, and it looks like it is occurring because McCain is solidifying the support of conservative women, which is something we saw last time McCain picked up in the polls. If McCain has a good day tomorrow, we will eliminate Obama’s good day three days ago, and we could really see some tightening in this rolling average. But for now, hold on.”

My opinion is that the Governor should remove Brunner or at least suspend her. It all ready been previously ruled that she broke the law, the DOJ will most likely agree to Voinovich’s request.

“There are already investigations underway in nine states regarding the allegations of fraud in the new-voter registrations collected by ACORN, Obama’s preferred bunch of “community organizers”—-the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now. This is how Obama is going to “change” and reform Washington, by buying the election with stuffed ballot boxes?

It’s been reported that in Nevada, state investigators raided ACORN’s Las Vegas headquarters, seizing documents and computer data. The group says it has conducted the most successful voter registration drive in history, signing up 1.3 million voters in 21 states, enough to sway an election.

The people who are supposed to be uncovering voter fraud are instead allegedly perpetuating it. Case in point—-in Ohio, a federal judge has ruled that Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, is violating the law by refusing to allow county election boards to verify the identities of ACORN’s newly registered voters.

The New York Post has reported that one 19-year-old in Cuyahoga County admitted that under the auspices of ACORN, he’d registered to vote 72 times and was paid to do so with cash and cigarettes, a felony.

How come Obama isn’t commenting publicly about this attempt by ACORN to stuff the ballot boxes. Let’s not forget that the ACORN’s political action committee has endorsed Obama. ACORN has reportedly filed over three million new voter registrations since 2004—-and that could certainly tilt an election.

If you’re worried that Palin complied with her statutory and constitutional authority and acted legally, consider this:

Obama’s presidential campaign paid an ACORN affiliate $832,000 for voting activities during the primaries.

That Obama is the former Illinois coordinator for ACORN’s voter-registration group, Project Vote and as a practicing attorney, he represented ACORN in a voter registration lawsuit against the State of Illinois.

Let’s not forget that Michelle Obama’s former law firm represents ACORN in an embezzlement case involving the brother of ACORN’s founder.”

One could imagine the media stampede to “report the truth” if it were Obama and Michelle were exchanged to John and Cindy.

There IS a RICO investigation of ACORN and the Obama campaign underway – this has now been established by the mainstream media. Right now it’s rumored here in Chicago that Patrick Fitzgerald is heading it (confirmation on that has not come yet). There is a lot of activity in Chicago right now, with a lot of IRS agents looking into the finances coming in and out of this city, and across state lines (this was established on Monday when the GOP issued emergency press releases that much of Obama’s campaign contributions could very well be illegal foreign contributions – what appears to be deliberately poor record keeping designed to hide the true identities and monetary sources of online donors is at issue here). We see in 15 states now that ACORN is being busted for attempted voter fraud, and for fraudulent, illegal voter registratons in the hundreds of thousands, if not a million. The article below states, and we have confirmed this with people who know for sure, that the people who gathered evidence of Obama’s fraud and voter intimidation techniques during the primaries against Hillary Clinton are sharing everything they have with the Republican Party and the federal government.

What’s happening here is something we have never seen before: centrist Clinton Democrats and Republicans are working together to expose the DNC and Obama campaign’s illegal activities and orchestrated, coordinated fraud. Both parties are working with federal agents to investigate ACORN, which has been funded with upwards of $800,000 in questionable donations from the Obama campaign (in what appears to be the expressed and explicit direction to engineer voter fraud in the general election). The tactics being employed now in the 15 states currently under investigation are the VERY SAME TACTICS we saw on the ground in Iowa, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, Indiana, and other states working for Hillary Clinton in the primaries.

And all of this ties back to Chicago.

Where the Obama campaign and DNC are now based.

Where people we know tip us off to little things to pay attention to that, when pieced together with all the other little pieces that are revealing themselves, leads to a single conclusion: there will be indictments for all of this.

We don’t know when they will come – but they will come. There is just too much here to ignore.

“Why didn’t the federal government get involved in the primaries?”, some people ask in comments. Well, we aren’t lawyers, but someone told us yesterday that the primaries are party affairs and are not governed by federal election laws. We’re sure a legal scholar will comment on this and set us straight. The parties set the rules for their primaries…but the general election IS governed by federal election law. This is why Florida and Michigan were allowed to be such a mess for Democrats, and why Donna Brazile and Howard Dean got away with taking delegates away from Hillary Clinton and giving them, unearned, to Obama for Michigan: no federal agency had any ability to step in and ensure a fair resolution of the Michigan and Florida votes. This was 100% in the hands of the Democratic party, which intended to award Obama its nomination since 2004. The party never intended to allow Hillary Clinton to win this thing – they always wanted Obama, and the party thus turned a deaf ear to our constant and repeated complaints of voter fraud, intimidation, and other thuggery by the Obama campaign from January through June.

That means, technically, nothing Obama did during the primaries was illegal…if our understanding of election law is true and political party primaries are not safeguarded under federal law. Tthe things his campaign is orchestrating now, however, ARE violations of the law.

Thus, all the evidence Clinton supporters and Republicans have gathered of fraud and voter intimidation during the primaries establishes the pattern of behavior that’s allowing RICO investigators to clearly discern a national conspiracy, rooted in Chicago, to hijack this election and defraud the will of the people. It’s all background information, with the RICO case seemingly evolving from the 15 separate investigations now underway in all states busting ACORN offices.

The Obama campaign, meanwhile, is in damage control mode, trying to amend FEC filings to erase ACORN from all of its paperwork – including claiming the $800,000 the Obama campaign paid ACORN for voter fraud (including registering the dead and enlisting homeless people and college kids to illegally multi-vote in multiple states or multiple intrastate polling places) was actually awarded to an unrelated, though wholly owned, subsidiary of ACORN.

“More than 30,000 Florida felons who by law should have been stripped of their right to vote remain registered to cast ballots in this presidential battleground state, a Sun Sentinel investigation has found.

Many are faithful voters, with at least 4,900 turning out in past elections.

Another 5,600 are not likely to vote Nov. 4 — they’re still in prison.

Of the felons who registered with a party, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.

Florida’s elections chief, Secretary of State Kurt Browning, acknowledged his staff has failed to remove thousands of ineligible felons because of a shortage of workers and a crush of new registrations in this critical swing state.

Browning said he was not surprised by the newspaper’s findings. “I’m kind of shocked that the number is as low as it is,” he said.

Asked how many ineligible felons may be on Florida’s rolls, Browning said, “We don’t know.”

The Division of Elections has a backlog of more than 108,000 possible felons who have registered to vote since January 2006 that it hasn’t had the time or staff to verify. Browning estimated that about 10 percent, once checked, would be ineligible.

“This is part of a big mess,” said Jeff Manza, professor of sociology at New York University and author of a book on felon voting. “It’s almost certain there will be challenges if the election is close enough that things hinge on this. Both parties are armed to the teeth with legal talent in all the battleground states.”

Florida’s felon ban originated before the Civil War, and today the state remains one of 10 that restrict some felons from voting even after they’ve served their time. The law requires state and county elections officials to remove felons from voter rolls after conviction and add them only when they’ve won clemency to restore their voting rights.

In 2007, the state eased the restrictions by granting automatic clemency to most nonviolent offenders who have completed their sentences. Others, including people convicted of federal offenses, multiple felonies or crimes such as drug trafficking, murder and sex charges, must still apply for clemency and have their cases reviewed.

The felons the Sun Sentinel identified never received clemency, but their names remain on Florida’s voter rolls. Some are well-known: ex-Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne and ex-Palm Beach County Commissioner Tony Masilotti, for instance, both convicted last year of public corruption.

Browning said the state painstakingly checks all voters before removing them to avoid inadvertently taking off eligible voters as happened in two previous large-scale purge attempts.”

Not surprising since ACORN has been canvasing Florida since 2006 in massive “Get Out the Vote” drives. Two weeks ago suspicious registrations via ACORN were discovered in Seminole County, and other Florida counties.

On Friday the GOP took the offensive, noting that the Florida Attorney General’s Office is investigating.

“Depending on your politics, the nonprofit group ACORN is either the
nation’s largest organizer of low-income and minority consumers and workers
or a corrupt arm of Democrat Barack Obama’s urban political machine.

Its voter-registration drive in Brevard County was part of a national
effort that signed up 1.3 million people in 21 states, says the group,
whose full name is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now. The drive also has spurred accusations of voter fraud in Florida,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Colorado — swing states, in other words.
Allegations have centered on workers who were paid per registration and
might have faked applications.

Here in Brevard, the Supervisor of Elections reports:

— About 1,320 voter-registration applications were delivered by
“third-party” workers for ACORN from last Friday through Monday.

— Up to two-thirds of those “are people who were already registered,”
said Assistant Elections Supervisor Duwayne Lundren.

— The elections office referred 23 applications, or 1.7 percent, to
the State Attorney’s Office for investigation of possible fraud.

For instance, two applications appeared to come from the same man at
the same address, but with two different signatures, Lundren said. When the
election office contacted the man, he said he never completed any
application.

“There is an investigation in process,” State Attorney Norm Wolfinger
told me. “It shouldn’t be that long before we move on this.” …”

“King and Pierce County prosecutors filed felony charges today against seven people who allegedly committed the biggest voter-registration fraud in state history.

The defendants, who were paid employees and supervisors of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, concocted the scheme as an easy way to get paid, not as an attempt to influence the outcome of elections, King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said.

“This was an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls of King County,” Satterberg said.

In addition to filing criminal charges, Satterberg said state and local officials had signed a five-year agreement with ACORN that requires the organization to beef up its training and procedures for detecting and reporting fraud.

ACORN agreed to pay King County $25,000 for its investigative costs and acknowledged that the national organization could be subject to criminal prosecution if fraud occurs again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history of the state of Washington. There has been nothing comparable to this,” state Secretary of State Sam Reed said at a news conference with Satterberg, King County Executive Ron Sims and Acting U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan.

ACORN President Maude Hurd said in a statement, “It appears that a handful of temporary workers were trying to get paid for work they hadn’t actually done. While we don’t think the intent or the result of their actions was to allow any ineligible person to vote, these employees defrauded ACORN and imposed a burden on the time and resources of registrars and law enforcement.”

The announcement of criminal charges came after the King County Canvassing Board revoked 1,762 allegedly fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN employees.

Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Stephen Hobbs told the board that six ACORN workers had admitted filling out registration forms with names they found in phone books last October. The canvassers filled out the forms while sitting around a table at the downtown Seattle Public Library, Hobbs said.”

Yeah, “We’re innocent!”

Pay no attention to the previous frauds in St. Louis, Kansas City, and numerous other places around the country.