ACORN
IIRC, entire ACORN scandal consists of:
1. Out of 2 million low-income voters registered, a small percent of the workers turned in bogus forms with bogus names like Captain Crunch. Acorn was required by law to turn in ALL of the forms rather than arbitrarily discarding some of the forms at their discretion (because if the law were otherwise, people who register voters could throw away half the forms and disenfranchise half the people who thought they had registered). Not one vote is known to have been cast under any of these bogus registration attempts.
2. Some people dressed up as OBVIOUSLY fake pimps and prostitutes, strolled into dozens of ACORN branches until they found someone who put them on (OBVIOUSLY bullshitting them) and they took it completely seriously. Later, they took the videos credulously to Fox news, which also believed every word in the videos was serious, because they're a bunch of morons with no sense of humor.
3. Republicans have a ragefest and try to treat organizations as guilty until proven innocent if any ONE of their employees has been indicted for fraud (i.e. arbitrarily accused by one prosecutor, not yet put on trial or anything). This rule inadvertently bars the gov't from funding a shitload of defense contractors, but that part is not really going to be enforced, because all they really wanted was an unconstitutional bill of attainder against ACORN.
Am I missing something?
3 Comments
The movement against Acorn has more to do with the fact that they are very successful at helping the working poor to organize and register to vote than any of the trivial charges you've listed above. Netrunner posted and excellent video on the subject that you can find here --> http://www.videosift.com/video/FOX-News-Isn-t-News-It-s-a-Political-Operation
Yeah, of course that's the real reason, but the overt pretext is a ridiculous exaggeration of #1 and #2.
McCain made up a few more lies to slander ACORN. He blamed ACORN for the subprime mortgage crisis. That couldn't be further from the truth, considering ACORN counseled poor people on how to avoid predatory lending and obtain cheap housing (and THAT operation of ACORN in particular is the one that got federal funding).
Acorn (registering voters) is a direct threat to the conservatives. nuff said.
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