Archive for the ‘ACORN’ Category
ACORN Throws Out Republican Voter Registrations
Posted by Pamela Geller in ACORN, Featured Story on October 7th, 2009
ACORN wants people to register to vote – as long as they’re Democrats. Republican registrations go into the trash.
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.
Fathiyyah Muhammad voted for Obama. “I’m a Republican,” she says, “and this was the first time that I voted for a Democrat since JFK…. I’m one of those rare birds, a black conservative Republican, and actually this is the black conservative capital of the country, Jacksonville, Florida.” She is an entrepreneur and a great American: she makes custom caps for her businesses Bilal’s Custom Caps and Only in America. She and her James have made custom caps for politicians, sports heroes, musicians, and others. “America,” she says, “is the place you can live your dreams if you work at it.” She’s a can-do woman with a great American spirit, and when she saw what was breaking in the news about ACORN, she came forward; I interviewed her Monday morning.
“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.”
ACORN did not honor its agreement to pay three dollars for each registered voter. “He took my papers,” says Muhammad, “didn’t pay me anything and I just left, I just figured that this is just another scam…. Everyone else got paid, all the other people got paid, but I didn’t. And I didn’t make a big deal about it, I just figured that it was another one of life’s experiences.”
Fatiyyah Muhammad didn’t know anything about ACORN at that time. She didn’t know that ACORN has been doing this for a long time. As far back as November 2006 the organization was indicted for some 40,000 illegal voter registrations, and that was before any of the recent revelations.
Now Fatiyyah Muhammad says: “I can’t believe that they got away with it for so long.” And she wants her story to be told: “How are you going to shine a light on the laundry if you don’t want to come out and say what happened?”
Fatiyyah Muhammad is unafraid to shine that light. And her testimony is another nail in the coffin of the community organizers of ACORN and their stealth agenda.
ACORN Throws Out Republican Voter Registrations
Posted by Pamela Geller in ACORN, Featured Story on October 7th, 2009
ACORN wants people to register to vote – as long as they’re Democrats. Republican registrations go into the trash.
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.
Fathiyyah Muhammad voted for Obama. “I’m a Republican,” she says, “and this was the first time that I voted for a Democrat since JFK…. I’m one of those rare birds, a black conservative Republican, and actually this is the black conservative capital of the country, Jacksonville, Florida.” She is an entrepreneur and a great American: she makes custom caps for her businesses Bilal’s Custom Caps and Only in America. She and her James have made custom caps for politicians, sports heroes, musicians, and others. “America,” she says, “is the place you can live your dreams if you work at it.” She’s a can-do woman with a great American spirit, and when she saw what was breaking in the news about ACORN, she came forward; I interviewed her Monday morning.
“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.”
ACORN did not honor its agreement to pay three dollars for each registered voter. “He took my papers,” says Muhammad, “didn’t pay me anything and I just left, I just figured that this is just another scam…. Everyone else got paid, all the other people got paid, but I didn’t. And I didn’t make a big deal about it, I just figured that it was another one of life’s experiences.”
Fatiyyah Muhammad didn’t know anything about ACORN at that time. She didn’t know that ACORN has been doing this for a long time. As far back as November 2006 the organization was indicted for some 40,000 illegal voter registrations, and that was before any of the recent revelations.
Now Fatiyyah Muhammad says: “I can’t believe that they got away with it for so long.” And she wants her story to be told: “How are you going to shine a light on the laundry if you don’t want to come out and say what happened?”
Fatiyyah Muhammad is unafraid to shine that light. And her testimony is another nail in the coffin of the community organizers of ACORN and their stealth agenda.
Rep. Issa Responds to ACORN’s Bertha Lewis
Issa Responds to Bertha Lewis Charge that ACORN the Victim of Republican McCarthyism
WASHINGTON. D.C. – House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa (R-CA) issued the following statement today in response to comments made by ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis at the National Press Club where she accused Republicans of ACORN McCarthyism:
“Was it Republicans who embezzled millions from within their own organization and have yet to report the embezzlement to the IRS or Labor Department? Was it Republicans who conducted the internal review that highlighted the lack of firewalls between their charitable and political activities? Was it Republicans who hired a man convicted of multiple counts of conspiracy and money laundering to raise funds and register voters in Oklahoma? The fact that ACORN’s leadership refuses to even acknowledge and accept responsibility for the state of their organization is disturbing and brings into question the sincerity of ACORN’s pledge to reform their organization.”
While ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis addressed the National Press Club, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Republican Staff were reviewing new internal ACORN documents that shed further light on ACORN’s intent to capitalize on the opaque nature of their funding structure in order to fund its partisan political activities.
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]
On Fox News’ America Newsroom: “ACORN is so opaque to all of us because of its unique status as a non-profit taxable entity that really we have no way of knowing and if you’ll cover up a million, you’ll cover-up five million. Our bigger question is not how much opaque they were in the past; it’s whether or not Bertha Lewis as CEO is ever going to change the company to be more conventional as a non-profit the way the Red Cross or other organizations are which tend to be very transparent.”
CBS: Bertha Lewis Rails Against ‘Modern-day ACORN McCarthyism’
From CBS News:
Bertha Lewis, the chief executive of embattled community group ACORN, told reporters at the National Press Club today that her critics are engaged in “modern-day ACORN McCarthyism” born in part from the group’s history of “going after the rich and the powerful,” the New York Times reports.
While defiant, Lewis did acknowledge that her group had its problems: She said videos showing ACORN employees advising conservative activists posing as a pimp and prostitute “made my stomach turn,” according to CNN. “It just made you sick,” she added. The group has appointed an investigator to examine why the behavior took place.
But Lewis refused to make apologies for her 40-year-old organization, which she said wasn’t going anywhere. Congress, she said, can’t destroy the group by withholding federal funding: “We didn’t have government funding for years,” she said to illustrate that point, according to Politico. “We may not have government funding in the future.”
ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has been receiving about $2.5 million to $3 million each year from the federal government, Lewis said – only about 10 percent of its annual budget. The rest of its funding comes from membership dues and private donors.
Read the full article here.
ACORN and SEIU Have Been Going Steady a Long Time: Did They Break Up?
Posted by Matthew Vadum in ACORN, Obama, Politics on October 6th, 2009
Now that ACORN is drowning is an ocean of adverse publicity, its longtime ally the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) claims to have broken with the embattled radical left-wing activist group.
Last week SEIU international secretary-treasurer Anna Burger dropped this political bombshell that has been ignored by the mainstream media.
In response to a question from Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) posed during a meeting of the House Financial Services Committee, Burger casually noted that her union “cut all ties to ACORN.”
In an interview Monday night I asked SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette what Burger meant when she said SEIU had cut all ties with ACORN.
Ringuette replied, “We have suspended all contracts and active work with ACORN,” pending the results of a panel of inquiry looking into ACORN. SEIU boss Andy Stern sits on that supposedly independent panel.
Of course, SEIU –which is President Obama’s favorite union– could still be providing help to ACORN behind the scenes even if it publicly distances itself from the embattled activist group. Longtime lovers often sneak around together during messy breakups.
I’m skeptical that the two actually split up given the strong ties between ACORN and SEIU over the years. It’s gotten to the point that ACORN and SEIU overlap so much that they are virtually indistinguishable.
The full article is available at American Spectator.
Two Fish, One Barrel: Deconstructing Andrew Sullivan’s ‘The Breitbart Standard,’ Demolishing Conor Friedersdorf’s ‘The Right’s Lesser Media’
Posted by Andrew Breitbart in ACORN, Featured Story, Politics on October 6th, 2009
To which I respond to my unofficial biographer Conor Friedersdorf’s Daily Beast criticism of your’s truly and bigger fish Andrew Sullivan’s two-thumbs-up to it:
Andrew Sullivan (left) and Conor Friedersdorf
In the piece you link to and affirm in the Daily Beast, “The Right’s Lesser Press,” Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions. It’s sloppy and you, of all people, should know better.
Breitbart.com is MOSTLY a news aggregator. It carries the Associated Press, Reuters, even, Agence France Presse, from those dreaded croissant eaters!!!
It even carries the New York Times on its front page — a benefit that even Big Government and Big Hollywood don’t receive.
Big Hollywood is what it is: a counter-voice to the virtually monolithic Hollywood left. How dare I grant a platform, and a means for the defense of those in Hollywood who would dare go against the strident and intolerant Hollywood left.
Big Government, too, is providing an outlet for voices and ideas that are not proportionally represented in the traditional and mostly biased mainstream media.
Two Fish, One Barrel: Deconstructing Andrew Sullivan’s ‘The Breitbart Standard,’ Demolishing Conor Friedersdorf’s ‘The Right’s Lesser Media’
Posted by Andrew Breitbart in ACORN, Featured Story, Politics on October 6th, 2009
To which I respond to my unofficial biographer Conor Friedersdorf’s Daily Beast criticism of your’s truly and bigger fish Andrew Sullivan’s two-thumbs-up to it:
Andrew Sullivan (left) and Conor Friedersdorf
In the piece you link to and affirm in the Daily Beast, “The Right’s Lesser Press,” Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions. It’s sloppy and you, of all people, should know better.
Breitbart.com is MOSTLY a news aggregator. It carries the Associated Press, Reuters, even, Agence France Presse, from those dreaded croissant eaters!!!
It even carries the New York Times on its front page — a benefit that even Big Government and Big Hollywood don’t receive.
Big Hollywood is what it is: a counter-voice to the virtually monolithic Hollywood left. How dare I grant a platform, and a means for the defense of those in Hollywood who would dare go against the strident and intolerant Hollywood left.
Big Government, too, is providing an outlet for voices and ideas that are not proportionally represented in the traditional and mostly biased mainstream media.
When lefties have asked to challenge something written at either site I have granted them the ability to do so.
Read my entire response here.
Read Conor Friedersdorf’s piece here.
Read Andrew Sullivan’s affirmation of Friedersdorf’s piece here.