As usual, they’re lying.

Protesters on May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, are going to commit “a lot of violent acts which they’re then going to blame police for,” former community organizer Brandon Darby, a leading expert on leftist tactics, told me in an exclusive interview.

As I revealed in my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, Darby has been a target ever since it was publicly revealed that the former left-wing anarchist saved the lives of innocent Americans by thwarting the planned fire-bombing of the 2008 Republican Convention by two anarchists.

Occupy Wall Street and the satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world have been spectacularly violent. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of serious crimes, including murder, assault, gang rape, arson, rioting, and robbery.

The actions planned for May 1 are part of what left-wingers are calling the “99% Spring.” They are designed to disrupt the U.S. economy and ultimately to extinguish what remains of Americans’ cherished economic freedoms in the increasingly socialist Obama era. Leaders also hope to press lawmakers to promote the fraud known as “green energy” and to give those with student loan debts a massive $1 trillion bailout at the expense of taxpayers.

MoveOn and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones’s “Rebuild the Dream” group are just two of the major left-of-center organizations that are gearing up to inconvenience Americans and manufacture chaos next week. Though activists in various urban centers have different plans for this Tuesday, they are all united in their hatred of the economic system that made America great while uplifting its poorest citizens.

Los Angeles activists claim that on May 1 “[p]eople from all sectors of the city will have a chance … [at] helping to shut down the flow of capital while addressing the 99%’s major grievances.” After a day of agitation “that cripples capitalism in the city,” Occupy Los Angeles supporters will have yet another opportunity to perfect their up twinkle and down twinkle consensus-seeking hand signals at “a special General Assembly” in Pershing Square.

A spokesman for activists in New York told BigGovernment.com that Occupy Wall Street has been participating in “99 Pickets” since April 18 in an extended action that will conclude on May 1. Targets include Chase Bank, Standard and Poor’s, the New York Times Co., ABC, Wells Fargo, Blackrock, Fidelity, and Lazard.

SEIU, National People’s Action, and the ACORN front groups called Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) have all announced they will participate in the May Day protests.

Darby said that May Day activists will carry out “very deliberate provocations all across the country” and they will claim that whatever violence follows was instigated by police.

Few politicians combine ignorance, obstinate self-righteousness, racial demagoguery, and extremism quite as perfectly as the congresswoman from South Central now poised to become a major force shaping federal banking policy.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a longtime cheerleader for Fidel Castro, was only too happy to use the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a political advertisement. She viewed the 53 deaths, thousands of injuries, and $1 billion in property damage as a shining example of participatory democracy. The word riot never escaped her lips. She called the unrest a “rebellion” and “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.”

Waters then blamed the violence on Republican tax cuts. “The Reagan-Bush administrations have taken away programs that have been very helpful, very empowering,” she told CBS News. “In addition to that, the recession and the tax policies that are allowed for the exportation of jobs to Third World countries for cheap labor—all have caused us to come to the point where we are today—desperation, hopelessness. I lay the blame squarely at the foot of Bush and Reagan.”

With a straight face Waters has accused the CIA of encouraging drug use in the inner cities in order to hurt black Americans.

“She is one of the most self-serving, hate-filled, race-obsessed politicians in America,” says columnist Michelle Malkin. “The Democratic Party doesn’t just embrace her. It kneels at her feet.”

Waters is next in line to take over on the minority side of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.

Barney Frank, the thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, is leaving Congress, freeing up the top Democratic post on the committee.

Frank’s surprise announcement that he won’t seek another term clears the way for another thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, the scandal-plagued Waters of California, to become ranking Democrat on the panel.

It remains to be seen whether the change in the Democratic lineup on the committee that oversees the banking industry will make any difference at all in the day-to-day operations of the panel. In the event Democrats retake the House in the 2012 elections, a possibility that currently seems unlikely, as committee chairman Waters would offer much of the same as Frank offered.

The difference is largely in style. Frank is an intelligent, occasionally witty spokesman for socialism but he is also haughty and arrogant. When I interviewed him in his Capitol Hill office in 2005, the entire time he remained seated at his desk holding his morning newspaper while talking to me. A few times he lowered it slightly so he could scold and lecture me for daring to asking questions he deemed dumb.

Waters is simply an angry thug who could never be accused of thoughtfulness. Waters is Wanda Sykes without a sense of humor.

Both Frank and Waters were content in the decade-long run-up to the mortgage market collapse to pretend nothing was wrong even as signs that a huge bubble was about to burst became impossible to ignore.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., John Sweeney, Leo Gerard and Daniel De Leon.

In the connect-the-radical-dots evolution of radical leftists and their thuggish tactics, from the anti-Vietnam war protests of the ’60s to the OWS movement currently afflicting the American landscape, few men stand out more vividly than Wade Rathke.

Despite the fact the Rathke’s family members were prosperous ranchers from Orange Country, California, Rathke describes himself as a “professional organizer for over 35 years” who has “worked for and founded a series of organizations dedicated to winning social justice, workers rights, and a democracy where ‘the people shall rule.’”

His first use of those skills was his organization of draft resistance for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) after dropping out of Williams College in Massachusetts in the late ’60s. From there he moved onto a career with the NWRO (National Welfare Rights Organization) in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the direction of the late George Wiley, a black militant. Both men were dedicated to the Cloward-Piven Strategy, formulated by Columbia University sociology professors Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to implement the overthrow of capitalism by overwhelming the government with so many entitlement demands that the entire system crashes.

Thus it should come as no surprise that Rathke, who was sent by Wiley to Little Rock, Arkansas to begin organizing NWRO chapters in the South, would take it one step further after he fell out of favor with members of the NWRO who objected to a white man being in a position of power. In 1970, he formed the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which as the acronym indicates, became the first chapter of the now infamous Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Rathke began training members of ACORN using a Syracuse University program that was part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty efforts. A Community Action Training Center was created at the University, and it hired none other than the godfather of community activism himself, Saul Alinsky. Thus began the implementation of the “Alinsky Method,” which Alinsky described as one in which a community organizer “must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.” (It should be noted that during his own days as a community organizer, president Barack Obama taught the Alinsky method. A photo of him doing it can be seen here.)

Rathke served as ACORN’s Chief Organizer until 2008 when he was fired. A month later it was revealed that his brother Dale had embezzled almost a million dollars from 1999-2000, and that board members kept the scandal quite for eight years. The money was repaid personally by Drummond Pike, who founded the Tides Foundation in 1976, a public charity that funnels money to radical left-wing groups. Why would Drummond make the payment? It might be due to the fact that in 1996, he created the Tides Center to help other organizations get a tax-exempt status under the umbrella of the foundation–and Wade Rathke was made chairman of the board. Rathke also sits on the board of the Tides Foundation as well.

Yet it was ACORN where Rathke had his most enduring success. At is high point, the organization boasted more than 400,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 1,200 chapters in 110 U.S. cities. And under Rathke’s leadership, thug-like behavior became a regular occurrence. Noisy and sometimes violent protests were organized against financial institutions, businessmen and public officials, much of which centered around living wage laws, voter registration and affordable housing.

Each initiative has been marked by either hypocrisy or disaster. With respect to living wage laws, a 2003 study by the Employment Policies Institute revealed that, despite advocating for job-killing, municipal budget-busting living wages that were often double the prevailing rates, ACORN was paying its own workers only $5.67 per hour. Furthermore, despite supporting “card check” for union organizing, which would have resulted in the elimination of secret ballots for workers, ACORN itself unlawfully blocked its own workers from organizing in 2003, according to the National Labor Relations Board.

With respect to voter registration, ACORN has been at the center of multi-state investigations into voter fraud. The low-water mark for such fraud came during the 2008 election cycle, when Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee, testified in a Pennsylvania state court that the organization’s quality-control efforts were “minimal or nonexistent.” Less than two weeks before the 2008 election it was also revealed that ACORN’s claim of registering 1.3 million new voters was wildly exaggerated–but that 30 percent of ACORN registrations were self-admittedly “faulty.” The group managed to avoid direct convictions for vote fraud by claiming they were not to blame for the actions of people they hired. Last August, however, Nevada District Court Judge Donald Mosley fined them the maximum amount allowed by law after ACORN’s Nevada field director, Christopher Edwards, who had previously pled guilty, testified against them in court.

Yet perhaps the most damaging aspect of ACORN’s activism was its involvement in affordable housing schemes which began in the 1980s, when ACORN activists in several cities seized abandoned properties and promoted “squatting” in them by homeless people. It was a ham-fisted attempt to force local governments to salvage and convert those properties into affordable housing. Yet their greatest success was their ability to get changes made to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) by successfully arguing that any discrepancy between lending rates to “people of color” and whites–regardless of credit-worthiness–was de facto evidence of racism.

The House of Representatives’ top investigator has asked a federal prosecutor to look into fraudulent fundraising practices that ACORN’s New York front group allegedly used to raise money for Occupy Wall Street.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants to know if New York Communities for Change (NYCC) “engaged in fraud through its participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests.” (Front Page Magazine reported a month ago that NYCC was raising money for Occupy Wall Street.)

In a letter Monday Issa asked Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to initiate an investigation into claims that NYCC may have “solicited donations from union members under false pretenses and misappropriated those funds to support the protesters.”

NYCC staffers reportedly collected money door-to-door for the group’s campaign to test schools for dangerous toxins and then commingled those funds with cash raised for a teachers union and to support Occupy Wall Street. One NYCC source was quoted saying money raised to help schools “isn’t going to the campaign … it’s just going to the protests, and that’s just so terrible.”

To cover up the funding funny business, NYCC executive director Jon Kest has reportedly threatened and fired employees, destroyed documentary evidence, ordered staffers not to speak to the media, and ordered the installation of surveillance cameras and recording devices at NYCC headquarters in Brooklyn.

NYCC is also reportedly destroying items that reference ACORN in an effort to cover up NYCC’s intimate working relationship with the ACORN network. Kest is a longtime ACORN operative. So is his brother Steve who was executive director for the national ACORN organization.

Staten Island congressman Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.) supports Issa’s call for a probe.

Even more convincing evidence linking the ACORN network to Occupy Wall Street has emerged. The protests, which have spread to dozens of other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

After I reported a month ago that ACORN front group New York Communities for Change (NYCC) was raising money for Occupy Wall Street, NYCC is in turmoil.

FoxNews.com is reporting that NYCC executive director Jon Kest, a longtime ACORN activist and brother of former ACORN executive director Steve Kest, is in panic mode. “They’re doing serious damage control right now,” said a source inside NYCC.

Instead of responding to allegations, NYCC is spending its time demonizing Fox News. According to NYCC board member Jean Sassine the group is blameless:

New York Communities for Change participates in protests, direct action, social activism and campaigns that promote social and economic justice. We see FOX as the enemy to those efforts. For the record, this is consistent with Fox attacks on Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod, George Soros, Citizen Action, Planned Parenthood and all those who stand for social justice. Once again, FOX entertainment poses as FOX News. Once again, FOX makes a series of false, unsubstantiated claims and accusations which have no basis in fact. Once again, through a series of sources FOX structures a story which is nothing but a series of lies.

Lying in order to misdirect its adversaries has long been ACORN’s public relations strategy. All throughout the pimp and prostitute video saga in 2009 ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis told blatant falsehoods about the unethical behavior of ACORN employees. The leaders of ACORN and its successor groups know they can lie and cover up because the mainstream media will never call them to account.

Meanwhile, Kest has threatened and fired employees, destroyed documents, ordered staffers not to speak to the media, and is installing surveillance cameras and recording devices at its headquarters in Brooklyn.

NYCC’s draconian crackdown on its own workers has a precedent: ACORN had a lousy employee relations track record too. It habitually stiffed workers, told workers to commit voter registration fraud, busted attempts to unionize the group, asked to be exempted from paying the minimum wage, and sent women to canvass alone at night in bad neighborhoods, as I documented in my new book, Subversion Inc.

NYCC officials “reminded us that we can get fired, sued, arrested for talking to the press,” said an NYCC insider.

At an emergency meeting NYCC organizing director Jonathan Westin played semantic games. According to a source:

It was pretty funny. Jonathan told staff they don’t pay for protesters, but the people in the meeting who work there objected and said, “Wait, you pay us to go to the protests every day?” Then Jonathan said “No, but that’s your job,” and staffers were like, “Yeah, our job is to protest,” and Westin said, “No your job is to fight for economic and social justice. We just send you to protest.” Staff said, “Yes, you pay us to carry signs.” Then Jonathan says, “That’s your job.” It went on like that back and forth for a while.

As I previously reported, the Working Families Party, another ACORN front group, is participating in the protests by raising money and paying for rent-a-mobs in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner and Daniel De Leon.

Andy Stern is one of the most outspoken, cocksure neo-communists of the American labor movement.

“We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first,” Stern said, channeling Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky. “If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

Stern quotes Karl Marx in television appearances. In 2007 the wannabe Bolshevik told Bill Moyers that his Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was expanding to Australia, Switzerland, England, South America, and Africa.

We’ve been working with unions around the world. And what we’re working towards is building a global organization. Because “workers of the world unite,” it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re going to have to do our work.

Stern loves government slush funds that advantage the Left. He enthusiastically supports President Obama’s so-called jobs bill that would provide $15 billion for ACORN and its 20-odd new front groups, other radical left-wing groups, and state and local governments.

He also seems blissfully, willfully ignorant of the many misguided government policies and programs that helped to cause the current financial crisis. To him everything is the fault of investors.

“People burnt this economy to the ground with irresponsible speculative behavior,” Stern said in January 2010 at a labor forum sponsored by the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund. “And I would just say for the record that if American justice is really equal for everyone there are a lot of people that deserve to be called into account for what’s taken place up to now.”

As punishment, he supports enacting a stock market-killing tax on financial transactions that backers say could net $1.7 trillion over 10 years. The tax is being aggressively promoted by fellow neo-communist Heather Booth, the founder of the Alinskyite training school called the Midwest Academy. (Booth recently led Marxists in a stirring recitation of “Solidarity Forever” at a conference in Washington, D.C.)

Stern is also well-practiced in the dark art of Alinskyite vilification. At the 2010 forum he excoriated lawmakers for not passing the then-stalled Obamacare bill. Stern called senators who refused to approve the legislation “terrorists.”

“We should send the national security people over and explain to them why we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he said. “There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we’re supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met.”

Under Stern’s leadership, SEIU became the fastest-growing union in America. His brutal, in-your-face tactics apparently helped to add a million dues-paying members to the rolls, bringing its total membership to 2.2 million.

Stern’s radicalism and love of thuggery permeates virtually every aspect of SEIU, which he led as president from 1996 to 2010 before leaving under an ethical cloud two years before his term of office was to expire.

With Stern at the helm, SEIU harassed and harangued companies into signing agreements to make the union the representative of their employees. Companies that dared to resist were subjected to “corporate campaigns” that included picket lines, boycotts, and actions calculated to generate negative publicity for employers.

The racketeers of SEIU use an intimidation manual to guide their vicious attacks against targeted companies. As labor watchdog F. Vincent Vernuccio reported,

The new union tactic is to use pressure on corporate boardrooms as a means of organizing entire companies nationwide rather than recruiting workers on a site-by-site basis; in short, to organize employers rather than employees. To create this pressure, unions attempt to push businesses to the edge of bankruptcy, with little regard for the welfare of employer and employee. They attempt to strong-arm businesses into agreeing to take away the secret ballot for employees in union-organizing elections via card check. They also try to force employers to restrict their own speech on union issues so that workers will not get both sides of the story on unionization. Among the SEIU’s demands is that employers agree to bargain only with it, to the exclusion of all other unions, regardless of what workers want.

Launched a month ago in Lower Manhattan, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has since spread to more than 140 cities nationwide while winning the hearts of leftists everywhere, most significantly in the Democratic Party‘s mainstream. By now, many Americans have seen some of the photos and film footage of OWS demonstrators spewing anti-Semitic diatribes; shutting down traffic in busy urban areas; engaging in public nudity, copulation, defecation, and illegal drug use; and defacing their environs with colossal mounds of trash that are utterly incongruous with the protesters’ professed concern for responsible environmental stewardship. But beyond their penchant for the bizarre and the odious, what exactly animates the OWSers in New York, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between?

While they have been widely described as a motley crew without a unifying agenda, the OWSers are in fact bound together by a strongly anti-capitalist worldview that characterizes America as a “ruthless,” materialistic society where the chief objective is to “always minimize costs and maximize profits”; where “lives are commodities to be bought and sold on the open market”; and where “the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating to the culture and artifacts of human civilization.” The “deep spiritual sickness” that necessarily results from this repugnant philosophy of perpetual economic “growth for the sake of growth,” says OWS, has caused “vast deprivation, oppression and despoliation … to cover the world.” OWS’s prescribed remedy is to replace the foregoing arrangement “with a society of cooperation and community” – i.e., a socialist economy. Thus it is not at all surprising that the Communist Party USA, the International Socialist Organization, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America have all embraced OWS and its objectives.

OWSers, casting themselves as the victimized “99%” of the population who “will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the [wealthiest] 1%,” advocate the imposition of a “Robin Hood Tax” on most goods and services, with the aim of using its generated revenues (taken mostly from “the rich”) to fund social-welfare programs for “the poor.” Among those joining the “one-percenters” in denouncing America’s purportedly contemptible “millionaires and billionaires” are filmmaker Michael Moore, actress Susan Sarandon, actor Alec Baldwin, film star Jane Fonda, activist Yoko Ono, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Marxist professor Cornel West, New York councilman Charles Barron, socialist radical Frances Fox Piven, TV personality Keith Olbermann, congressman John Lewis, congressman Charles Rangel, financier George Soros, labor leader Richard Trumka, former U.S. senator Russ Feingold, entertainer Roseanne Barr, left-wing preacher Jim Wallis, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee director Robby Mook, and revolutionary communist Van Jones. Notably, most of these self-proclaimed champions-of-the-oppressed are themselves millionaires and billionaires. And yet another very wealthy man – President Obama – has likewise praised the OWS protesters for “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV.

The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

Working Families Party (WFP) organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement,” Flanders said at the protest in lower Manhattan.

We are “actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today because it’s not working for any of us,” Stamp told Flanders in an interview. Demonstrators are asking “how do we really reform and bring revolutionary changes to the states?”

The WFP is part and parcel of ACORN. In 1998 the party was officially recognized in New York State. WFP’s headquarters is at the same address as ACORN on Nevins Street in Brooklyn. WFP’s executive director is longtime ACORN operative Dan Cantor.

One of the SEIU-funded party’s co-founders is ACORN’s former national chief organizer, Bertha Lewis. Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard also contributed to the creation of the party and sat on its board. Gaspard was a political director in the Obama White House and is a former SEIU executive. Gaspard was also an organizer for the radical New Party in the early 1990s. That party’s membership consisted largely of individuals from the Democratic Socialists of America, SEIU, and ACORN. The party endorsed Barack Obama when he ran for the Illinois State Senate.

WFP takes credit for raising taxes both in the city and state of New York and for pressuring the state’s congressional delegation to oppose Social Security reforms. The party has sister WFP-branded parties in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont.

Working with its radical friends at SEIU, WFP advocates more government spending, higher taxes, universal government-run health care, campaign finance restrictions, free universal higher education, oppressive rent control, same-sex marriage, amnesty for illegal aliens, “greening” the economy by creating heavily subsidized union jobs in the energy sector, and mandatory paid sick leave for all workers.

In 2009 Connecticut WFP sent busloads of thugs to confront American International Group Inc. (AIG) executives at their homes. The protests were calculated to intimidate executives who had been receiving death threats after the company reportedly paid out bonuses using taxpayer bail-out funds.

ACORN allies are also involved in protests aimed at destabilizing the nation’s financial system.

Leftist guru Noam Chomsky has been awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

This is yet more proof that we live in an age in which “peace prizes” are worth less than the prizes kids find at the bottom of Cracker Jack boxes.

Look at the case of President Barack Obama. A few months after he was inaugurated, Obama, who is now presiding over three wars on two continents, received a Nobel Peace Prize. His most significant accomplishment when nominations for the prize closed on Feb. 1, 2009, just 12 days into his term of office, had been to throw a Super Bowl party.

The Godfather of Terror, Yasser Arafat, received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Serial liar Rigoberta Menchu, a Communist agent who worked for the same terrorists who later killed members of her own family, somehow hornswoggled her way into one in 1992.

Now, the lesser-known Sydney Peace Prize has been awarded to the Chomsky, who routinely argues that the United States is worse than Hitler’s Germany and consorts with genocidal Jew-hating terrorists. It is unclear which peace Chomsky, a soft-spoken version of Ward Churchill, has actually secured.

“The choice of Noam Chomsky continues a pattern of Sydney Peace Prize recipients who have demonstrated questionable credentials as legitimate peace-makers,” said Vic Alhadeff, CEO of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. “It does nothing to enhance the standing of either the recipient or the prize itself.”

The Australian honor, awarded in 2003 to Palestinian terrorism apologist Hanan Ashrawi, was bestowed on Chomsky “for inspiring the convictions of millions about a common humanity and for unfailing moral courage.”

Perhaps in the leftist lexicon “moral courage” is the same as shrugging off the murder of innocent Americans. If so, then Professor Chomsky certainly deserves the prize.

Because Chomsky considers America to be “the world’s greatest terrorist state,” he finds it difficult to get around to condemning those who kill Americans for political purposes.

When Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops in Pakistan last month, Chomsky was brokenhearted. It’s understandable: a few years ago, the al-Qaeda chieftain followed the lead of Hugo Chavez and praised Chomsky as “one of the most capable” citizens of the United States.

Chomsky repaid bin Laden by defending him with characteristic aplomb.

Sounding like an ACLU lawyer, Chomsky protested the “planned assassination” of bin Laden which he said contravened international law. “There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim,” he said.

And the rumors of ACORN’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The radical group declared bankruptcy at the end of 2010, but its leaders acknowledge that they are building a new network of activist groups to continue ACORN’s work undermining America’s free institutions.

As predicted in my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer.

ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis has created a group called the Black Institute whose agenda is essentially identical to ACORN’s. ACORN founder Wade Rathke is spreading the gospel of Marxist social justice around the world through his offshoot group ACORN International (also known as Community Organizations International).

State chapters have incorporated themselves under new names. New York became New York Communities for Change. California became Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Texas became Texas Organizing Project. ACORN’s vote manufacturing division, Project Vote, still operates under the same name and small-c communist Frances Fox Piven still sits on its board. ACORN’s housing bubble generator, ACORN Housing, changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America. It’s the same people in the same offices and it just goes on and on.

ACORN insiders have admitted that the “new” groups will re-federate under a new name soon.

ACORN is a “boiler room” operation. Once the authorities get wind of it, it moves and assumes a new name while it seeks out fresh victims. Long before two conservative activists captured ACORN employees on video offering to assist in the creation of a brothel for pedophiles, ACORN insiders knew the game plan. They knew the day would come when the ACORN brand was so tarnished it was time to go underground. After the videos revealed what ACORN was really about, its leaders set about laying the groundwork for ACORN’s rebirth.

Now the day of ACORN’s resurrection is at hand.

Recently I discussed with nationally syndicated talk show host G. Gordon Liddy what I found out about ACORN and its radical, terrorist roots in my three years of research and hundreds of interviews.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

As social justice becomes the new meaning for church among radical progressives, ACORN’s own Bertha Lewisseems to have found a home with Rev. Billy Talen and his anti-capitalist, revolutionary, Earth worshipping Church of Earthalujah. Many of us were treated to the video of her now infamous “Walmart sucks” performance at the church, but are left wondering what kind of church sings anti-capitalism hymns at their services? Is this what church is all about now for the progressive movement?

It was, not coincidentally, May Day when ACORN’s Bertha Lewis was declared a saint as described online inpromotion of the big event:

On May Day we stand with workers and immigrants and take to the streets! We’ll be marching as Reverend Billy and the Stop Big Boxes Gospel Choir along with Bertha Lewis, who will be our saint later that night at 7:30pm at The Church of Earthalujah!

And now, as so many New Yorkers are awash in sentimental Wal-mart ads, Bertha is not among those who are resigned to the arrival of this Giant Devil to the city – she’s leading the charge against the right-wing big box. For that, she will be our newest Fabulous Saint!

When the Rev. Billy Talen brought Bertha up to accept her “canonization,” he spoke of the importance of the attack on ACORN and promised they would “attend to it.”

Speaking in the flamboyant style of Jeremiah Wright, Bertha spoke to the congregation/ticket holders/Marxists or whatever the audience calls themselves:

Acorn is recognizing the struggle, the attacks that the Devil put upon us which was a precursor to Wisconsin. But there’s a New Deal going on right tonight…

She then launches into a moving diatribe (worship song?) about the evil Walmart and its’ oppressed, discriminated-against employees, crescendoing into a rousing chorus of “Walmart sucks.”

As it winds down, she declares:

…as long as I am a saint of the church of Stop Shopping Now, ain’t nobody gonna be shopping there. Amen.

We have to wonder what kind of church would bring out the passion in Bertha like this, and just what are they all about? Let’s start with their leader, the colorful Billy Talen, who ran for Mayor of New York against Bloomberg in 2009.

Rev. Billy is always on the go, as he has been for years. In his latest performance on May 11th, he was arrested for tresspassing at an anti-Koch brothers rally. Rev. Billy relates the horrifying incident this way:

The “Guerrilla Drive-In” at Lincoln Center was an experiment that many of the activists of New York attended – as if this cliff-hanger protest might reveal the future (which, yes, it has). Brave New Foundation, Agit-Pop, The Other 98%, Yes Lab, Critical Mass, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and our own Church of Earthalujah worked in concert.

I enjoyed a role like that of a band-leader, motioning the congregation toward the west wall of the New York State Theater Building, preaching there a while from the top of a planter. Meanwhile guerrilla projectionists focused giant and savagely funny images of the Koch brothers on the white edifices.

The whole thing was over in a little more than an hour. As we were walking toward our car with our troupe’s director and my partner Savi, who carried our 13 month old Lena, we noticed three muscle-men running toward us through the darkness of the Avenue. SWAT-team-like, they pushed around a while shouting in my face, cuffed me and pushed me into a black car. I vanished into the system for 24 hours in this continuing fetish the NYPD has for jailing the “Billy preacher guy.”

Here are some recent ponderings from Rev. Billy’s blog which should clarify the stance of the “church”:

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

ACORN’s anti-democratic, un-American activities are not legitimate political advocacy protected by the First Amendment. They cry out for prosecution under federal racketeering laws. [The push for a racketeering probe got a boost in April 2011 when ACORN was convicted in a massive voter fraud conspiracy in Nevada. The felony conviction came after the book had gone to press. -MV]

Former Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott is a master of the bank shakedown. She bragged about “dragging banks kicking and screaming” into questionable loans. Talbott thought highly of Barack Obama’s organizing work in the Windy City and invited him to lecture her staffers. She also led a mob attack on the Chicago City Council during a “living wage” debate. ACORN demonstrators “pushed over the metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session.” Six people, including a defiant Talbott, were led away in handcuffs.

Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had a taste of ACORN’s stormtrooper tactics in 1995, when about 500 ACORN activists took over the Washington Hilton, forcing Gingrich to cancel a speech to 2,500 county commissioners. Demonstrators chanting “Nuke Newt!” grabbed the microphone and commandeered the head table, then cheered when the speech was cancelled.

“ACORN is part of the enforcement wing and the intimidation wing of the left,” Gingrich said in an interview.

Members of ACORN assaulted New York state Sen. James Alesi, a Republican, and his chief of staff, during a raucous 2009 protest. Alesi said an angry mob nearly knocked him to the floor of the chamber and spat in the face of his chief of staff. ACORN was protesting after two Democratic state senators switched parties giving Republicans control of the New York Senate. ACORN’s political party, the Working Families Party, had invested considerable resources in state senate elections in the Empire State. WFP took credit for ending “30 years of right-wing Republican rule” in 2008.

Republican Mike Huckabee is another of many Republican officeholders to be terrorized by ACORN. In 1998, while governor of Arkansas, Huckabee prepared to deliver a speech on civil rights. Like Gingrich he was silenced by hundreds of screaming ACORN activists armed with bullhorns who stormed a Little Rock hotel conference room and drove him away. “They surrounded not only the outer walls, but then, much to the dismay of the state troopers who were with me, they then mounted the stage,” said Huckabee, who cut the speech short and left abruptly. “It was a very tense moment. It was totally unnecessary.”

During the anti-Huckabee demonstration, Johnnie Pugh, head of ACORN’s Arkansas chapter, seized the microphone. “We want justice,” she said. ACORN is “trying to get the bills paid and make a living wage and welfare reform is not working.” ACORN members chanted “The people united will never be defeated,” “Justice for welfare; Huckabee don’t care,” and “We’re fired up; we’re not going to take it no more.” A dozen ACORN activists ran after Huckabee. Some jumped on the governor’s car and pounded on it as others attempted to prevent him from leaving.

When Arkansas State Police investigated to determine if the demonstrators had broken any laws, Pugh called the probe “retaliation” and a “witch hunt.” She even threatened to hit Huckabee again with more in-your-face protests. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” she said.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of ACORN’s wrongdoings.

Radicals believe their goals warrant criminal means and “can be relied on to lie, steal votes and justify murder when committed by their political friends . . . because they are engaged in a permanent war whose goal is the salvation of mankind,” according to former radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz. “In this context, restraint of means can easily seem finicky.”

ACORN’s violence inciting techniques still flourish, practiced out in the open by organized labor and countless other radical groups. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, an ACORN ally, is unashamedly pro-thuggery. (Trumka is at center in the above photo.) He told members of the United Mine Workers in Illinois to “kick the [expletive] out of every last” worker who violated the sanctity of his picket lines.

The outrageous behavior tolerated by police today would have landed a person in jail earlier in America’s history. Political incitements to riot, which occur almost exclusively on the Left, fail to move law enforcement. Why? Because as a society we have gradually become inured to these evil tactics. It is “defining deviancy down,” to borrow a phrase coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan to discuss the process by which society grows accustomed to antisocial behavior, rationalizing it away over time and redefining it:   “[T]he amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that accordingly we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is abnormal by any earlier standard.” Moynihan warned ominously that “we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”

Early twentieth-century Americans were horrified by anarchist and labor union-initiated violence. Many labor organizations at the time were revolutionary terrorist groups. They killed people, incited riots, and fomented rebellion. But over time corporations and governments began to ignore the cardinal rule: don’t negotiate with terrorists.

They took a short-term perspective, deluding themselves into believing they were buying peace by caving in to terrorists’ demands, all in the hope of gaining market share or a few extra votes on Election Day.

The left-wing, pro-radical media has played a role too, lulling Americans into complacency by telling them nothing’s wrong. Leftists using ACORN-style tactics are portrayed as well-intentioned mainstream activists, noble crusaders for social justice who have everyone’s best interest at heart. Activists may get out of hand every once in a while, according to journalists, but they mean well.

Of course when patriotic Tea Party activists, alarmed that America is being transformed into a socialist state by the nation’s Community Organizer-in-Chief, express their well-founded concerns by merely booing a few congressmen and holding protest rallies, the media labels them heel-clicking fascist storm troopers. If there’s one thing the Left cannot tolerate, it is diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Americans have become so desensitized to in-your-face protest and shakedown tactics that ACORN’s jackboot activism, which rightly horrified society in past years, hardly registers today. Unless ACORN or its lawless brethren in the so-called progressive movement are wrecking front lawns, obstructing businesses, burning bankers in effigy, or chasing politicians from a stage, such groups are boring to Americans.

Maybe that’s why, in the words of former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid, it took “a half-naked 20-year-old” to spark the nationwide backlash that erupted against the group in 2009. Without the undercover videos masterminded by conservative activists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles that showed ACORN employees offering advice on establishing an illegal brothel employing underage Salvadoran girls, Americans’ concern about the group’s persistent lawbreaking might never have reached a fever pitch that forced Congress to defund the group in September 2009, beginning its final slide into bankruptcy.

ACORN was only conducting business as usual, but the videos provided graphic evidence that the group’s business was not only unsavory but illegitimate.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

Community organizing guru Saul Alinsky’s lust for violence was not lost on ACORN founder Wade Rathke (pictured above).

Rathke is usually quite careful about what he says in public. He soft-pedals his radicalism with positive-sounding phrases such as “citizen wealth” and “participatory democracy,” but from time to time even a master manipulator can slip up. His essay “Tactical Tension” is a case in point. It dates back to mid-2001 when the Left was in a stupor.

Liberal and radical activists were angry and demoralized because their would-be savior, Democratic candidate Al Gore, had just barely lost the presidency to George W. Bush. Although there has never been any credible evidence that Republicans stole the election, it became an article of faith on the Left that the GOP had deprived the American people of their rightful president. Many on the Left had high hopes for Gore after Bill Clinton tacked toward the political center and now those hopes were dashed.

To this perceived affront to democracy, Wade Rathke offered his comrades a declaration of war. His militant rant is very revealing.

Rathke argues that the Left is losing and needs to get more aggressive.

“We need an edge, some harder steel on the rim,” he writes. “If some day we want to make more just laws, then today we may have to just learn to break more laws.” In a “wish list,” he includes “[t]actics that include civil disobedience and political defiance” and “[t]actics that include extra-legal activity.”

He praises the rioters in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting as “progressive forces.” Their civil disturbances were “a colorful, exciting, smoky, hazy amalgamation of helmeted police, broken glass, and righteous rage.” He continues admiringly, “Dispersed affinity groups operating on ‘street’ consensus [were] making a range of tactical decisions and holding ground in a way that made the momentum of the actions impossible to immobilize in spite of rain, gas, and cops.”

Rathke then attempts a delicate rhetorical balancing act, denouncing violent tactics in general while at the same time advocating specific examples of it: “We do not embrace violence, quite the contrary, but we need to create chemistry containing the elements of more explosive combinations in order to create more force and power through the equations of action and reaction that we push to the target.”

Despite this perfunctory condemnation of violence that fosters an illusion of respectability, the rest of the essay is filled with explicit endorsements of violent and illegal tactics. He praises the violent Black Panther Party of the 1960s and longs for some computer hackers to come to the aid of the labor movement.

Crazy, computer viruses are started by young kids around the world or hackers bored out of their skulls that live right down the street. As union organizers we are still doing 8 point difficulty dumpster dives for alpha lists of employees, when theoretically some good geeks could tap in, load up, and download the whole thing and throw it over our transom window. What a waste of talent when such a huge contribution could be made to the labor movement.

“Simply put, why isn’t there more ‘monkey wrenching’ in our world? Where is our Earth First!” he writes. Monkey-wrenching is a form of eco-terrorism or ecotage (eco-sabotage) that consists of harming the economic interests of those who are perceived threats to the environment. It might be arson, destruction of crops or sport utility vehicle dealerships, bombing, or tree-spiking, in which an activist drives metal rods into trees in order to prevent them from being cut down for commercial use. Tree-spiking has led to the injury and death of lumberjacks.

It further enrages Rathke that some of ACORN’s targets have not only defended themselves but have dared to fight back. ACORN’s founding Caudillo-in-Chief, whose stock-in-trade is thuggery, denounces these acts of self-defense as “intimidation.” Some targets filed lawsuits against ACORN “designed to sap resources and chill membership organized campaigns,” he huffs.

The nerve of those people! Hmpf.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

For ACORN, anything goes, from rude protests to crude intimidation and violence. The bigger, the louder, the more obnoxious, the more destructive, the better. ACORN founder Wade Rathke summed up ACORN’s approach to doing business in a single sentence: “One can almost taste the adrenaline when people take a crowbar to a door and pop it open to begin squatting.” ACORN leadership doesn’t care if people get hurt or property is damaged: as long as the action advances the cause, it’s fair game.

“ACORN protests have turned violent, at times as soon as the rallies began,” writes Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute. “Some protests disrupted Federal Reserve hearings and busted into closed city council meetings.” In Stern’s opinion ACORN embraces “undisguised authoritarian socialism” when it demands that large companies that desire to leave the community be coerced into getting “an exit visa from the community board signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to relocation.”

ACORN’s legacy of destruction and lawlessness traces directly back to the fiendishly brilliant Saul Alinsky. Born in 1909, the group’s spiritual sherpa into the abyss of planned anarchy was always fascinated by violence. His defenders present Alinsky as an advocate of civil disobedience who rejected violence as a political tool. This is rubbish. Alinsky adored violence.

By the time he died, Alinsky had created an astounding 44 community organizations that aspire to pulverize the American system. ACORN founder Rathke worked with Alinsky, who trained activists from the Massachusetts chapter of ACORN’s parent organization NWRO and other groups before he died in 1972. Alinsky “had done sessions with my staff at Massachusetts Welfare Rights in early 1970 and various other things,” Rathke blogged.

According to one of Alinsky’s senior organizers at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Nicholas von Hoffman, Alinsky played no direct role in the creation of ACORN. But von Hoffmann believes the master, had he lived to see it develop, would have approved of ACORN’s approach to agitation.

The group’s “cheekiness, truculence and imaginative tactical tropes have an Alinskyan touch,” according to von Hoffman, a journalist who wrote a particularly nasty biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s counsel Roy Cohn. Von Hoffman soft-pedals the damage that Alinsky-style organizing does to the body politic, claiming Alinsky was sounding “the trumpet blast for democracy.”

If democracy includes “conking” picket line crossers on the head—something he admits Alinsky favored— then he’s right. Alinsky shied away from praising violence in public because “[t]he subject was too touchy and to bring it up was to invite misquotation and distortion.”

But in private “he would say that violence has its uses.”

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization. Much of the time it operates outside the legitimate political process, waging war against the framework of society. ACORN is in the business of subverting the American system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the office at ACORN.

But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now.

ACORN, which until it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year was America’s largest poor people’s group, was founded on political violence and intimidation.

ACORN grew out of another notorious group called the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). NWRO was founded in 1966—the same year Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s seminal article “The Weight of the Poor” was published in the far-left Nation magazine. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy called for activists to double America’s welfare rolls in order to destabilize the American system of government. Placing impossible demands on states and localities would force them to ask Congress for a guaranteed annual income scheme and thereby set in motion the transformation of America into a socialist state.

NWRO grew out of the organizing efforts of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky and other veteran radical agitators. Cloward and Piven also helped bring NWRO into the world. They acknowledge they “were intimately involved in the affairs of NWRO: we participated in discussions of strategy, in fund-raising efforts, and in demonstrations.”

In the late 1960s Wade Rathke signed on as an organizer for NWRO’s chapter in Springfield, Mass. A few months after arriving in Springfield, Rathke had built up a local empire of activism. He constructed an influential welfare rights organization consisting of 20 neighborhood groups with a combined membership of more than 2,000. The Springfield chapter of NWRO secured millions of dollars from the local welfare agency and encouraged hundreds of non-members to seek welfare benefits.

NWRO was also doing its best to swamp welfare departments nationwide. Between December 1960 and February 1969 the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) welfare program had grown 107 percent but in the 15-month period from February 1969 through October 1970 the program grew a staggering 55 percent as an extra 1.5 million families joined the rolls.

Rathke was arrested after he led an invasion of the Springfield welfare office with 250 or more women and students armed with signs reading “More for the poor, less for the war.” The welfare director refused to give in to the crowd’s demands for winter clothing, benefits to which they were not entitled.

That provoked two days of unrest in which millions of dollars of property was destroyed. The Soviet government used Rathke’s riot as anti-American propaganda, publishing an article about it in Pravda. Rathke’s experiences “reinforced his belief that one important resource for poor people was their ability to disrupt.” He realized that despite the failure of the action to achieve its objective, his followers felt empowered by violence directed against the system.

This empowerment by rioting became a staple of ACORN’s playbook.

Over time Rathke came to agree with Alinsky that single-issue organizations were doomed to fail. He felt a multi-pronged approach was needed to radically transform the nation. Rathke moved to Little Rock, Ark., and got down to work trying to turn the Natural State upside-down. ACORN was born with the irretrievably corrupt Rathke in place as its chief organizer, a position he was to hold for just shy of four decades.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

Au contraire. You don’t have to be a member of the Communist Party USA (or similar American parties such as the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party) in order to be a communist. People who sympathize with those organizations are small-c communists, that is, fellow travelers, who for whatever reason never got around to joining a communist party.

Saul Alinsky was one. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is one. So is, or was, President Barack Obama. Obama’s college classmates described the future president as a humorless, intolerant Marxist-Leninist. Sanders claims to be a socialist, not a communist, but the senator from Ben and Jerry’s is straddling a very thin semantic line.

As I argue in Subversion Inc., which will be published this month, communism is a political movement whose adherents believe that markets are fundamentally unjust and that physical force should be used to attain a classless society. When the legitimate political process allows groups like ACORN to achieve their goals, they support American-style democracy. When it doesn’t, ACORN steps outside the legitimate political process and uses physical force and intimidation.

Socialist is simply not a strong enough adjective to describe ACORN. ACORN is not a debating society. It is not a collection of coffee klatch bohemians pontificating about making the world better. ACORN is about taking action to tear down the American system.

Besides, is socialism much different from communism? Karl Marx thought of socialism as a necessary weigh station on the road to the supposed utopia of communism. Socialism versus communism is a never-ending debate in academic circles, and it is one that is too involved to get into here. (Fellow ACORN chronicler Stanley Kurtz agonizes over the definition of socialism in his wonderful recent book Radical-in-Chief. It is so unnecessary.)

Suffice it to say that socialists and communists all want government or the collective to be master. They all subscribe to bad, un-American ideas, are all in the same ideological camp, and all tend to believe that the ends justify the means. In ideological terms, there is no bright line dividing socialism from communism.If a government nationalizes an industry does it really matter whether that government was elected or seized power by force? The fundamentals are more or less the same.

Communists, small-c and otherwise, attempt to marginalize adversaries by calling them crazy when they point a finger at actual communists, as if communists were figments of someone’s fevered imagination. “In a stunning demonstration of the power or propaganda, accusing someone of having been a Communist makes you the nut,” Ann Coulter opined in Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

It’s time to start calling these people what they are.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, which will be published this month.

Rachel Maddow got very giggly and over-amused last week reporting that some Republicans offered to buy shots in exchange for signatures on a recall petition. She seemed to think it was illegal, or something. Unethical, maybe. Illegal? No. Alcohol is a legal substance and the people offered it were of age. Was it the best strategy? Maybe not, but I’ll give them points for creativity and a go-get ‘em attitude!

What struck me as uproariously funny here is that Democrats invented and perfected bribing people to win elections. That Republicans are finally taking note and getting in the game is only evidence of their arrested development in creative strategy. For decades we’ve been plodding along playing fair and whining when the ballot boxes get stuffed and buses of homeless people are shuttled to the polls and dead people rise from the grave to vote for their favorite Democrat.

Maddow, so concerned about ethical behavior by Republicans during elections, left out the many examples of Democrat tomfoolery that have been an integral part of election techniques used by the Left.

In the county of my birth, Cook County, IL there are still senior citizens who remember the election of 1960 when union thugs entered the polling places just as they were closing, locked the doors and demanded the election judges change ballots in favor of Kennedy. It’s the stuff of legends. But there are many more instances where the Left has been caught red-handed playing fast and loose with election law.

King County prosecutors filed felony charges Thursday against seven people in what a top official described as the worst case of voter-registration fraud in state history, while the organization they worked for agreed to keep a better eye on its employees and pay $25,000 to defray costs of the investigation.

The seven submitted about 1,800 registration cards last fall on behalf of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, which had hired them at $8 an hour to sign people up to vote, according to charging documents filed in Superior Court.

Secretary of State Sam Reed told a news conference it was clearly Washington’s most serious instance of voter registration fraud.

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

Vandalism is a great way to describe what ACORN does to communities.

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. President Obama’s perpetual campaign cash-o-matic machine kicks into high gear again this week as the celebrity-in-chief heads to Hollywood for several high-priced fundraisers. But while the Democrats’ 2012 re-election team stuffs its hands into every liberal deep pocket in sight, questions about the Obama 2008 campaign finance operation still fester.

Last week, the laggard watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission announced an audit of the Obama 2008 campaign committee — which raised a record-setting $750 million. White House flacks are downplaying the probe as a “routine review.”

But there’s nothing routine about the nearly $3 million Obama has spent on legal expenses to address federal campaign finance irregularities and inquiries. Roll Call reports that Obama’s campaign legal fees have exceeded all other House and presidential campaign committees, including members of Congress under ethics investigations.

There’s nothing routine about the whopping $6 million that Team Obama has refunded to individual donors since Obama took office.

And there’s nothing routine about the 26 warning letters to Obama for America totaling “more than 1,500 pages of questions and data that outlined compliance concerns — including the longest one ever sent to a presidential candidate,” according to Roll Call.

Among the Obama 2008 campaign committee’s shadiest transactions that have gone unpunished:

— Foreign funny money. Federal election law bans foreign nationals from contributing to American candidates. But during 2008, the Obama campaign was forced to return an illegal foreign donation worth $31,100 made by two brothers in the Gaza Strip, and even mainstream news outlets reported that candidate Obama’s money-handlers had routinely failed to verify citizenship by checking donors’ passports. As the Associated Press reported at the time: “One donor, Tom Sanderson of Canada, made clear his $500 contribution came from a foreign source. He included a note that said, ‘I am not an American citizen!’ Obama’s campaign took the money anyway…”

Another illegal foreign donor, Australian Richard Watters, contributed $1,000, “entering a fake U.S. passport number — a random jumble of numbers and letters” onto the Obama donation website. “He said he also checked a box stating that he was an American living overseas, ‘because I could see it wasn’t going anywhere if I didn’t do that.’”

Obama raked in at least $2 million in overseas donations.

— Online donor credit-card fraud.

Weeks before the 2008 presidential election, investigative journalist Ken Timmerman blew the whistle on rampant phony straw contributors slipping through the Obama donation site. Just one example: “Mr. Good Will” from Austin, Texas. Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You.” Timmerman’s analysis of 1.4 million individual donations to the Obama campaign discovered “1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25. In total, Mr. Good Will gave $17,375. Following this and subsequent FEC requests, campaign records show that 330 contributions from Mr. Good Will were credited back to a credit card. But the most recent report, filed on Sept. 20, showed a net cumulative balance of $8,950 — still well over the $4,600 limit.”

Hailing Obama’s budget address this week as “a victory for math” Rachel Maddow proclaimed that Obama had brought needed arguments to the table that were “sorely lacking.”  Maybe she meant clarity of language like this, which would have George Orwell scratching his head:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA  “… It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion dollars in tax expenditures—spending in the tax code.”

Guess what that means.  Think it through.  Give up?  Maybe that’s because you don’t think every dime you have is at the good graces of government which “spends” it by letting you keep it.

Tax reform usually means lowering rates and closing specific breaks… now think exactly the opposite.

Yep, that’s how Barack Obama describes a $1 trillion tax increase!  And you thought Clinton’s “contributions” phraseology was Orwellian.

But Obama’s view of the world is forever informed by his days as a Chicago community organizer.  ACORN’s view of the world is that people are poor because the rich have taken too big a slice of the pie and left nothing for the proletariat.

That is precisely the point of Barack Obama’s budget speech—perhaps the most class war-driven speech any President has ever given– and the reason for the ecstatic reaction from MSNBC socialists Rachel, Ed, and Lawrence.

Here is Rachel’s complete True Twit Two-Step happy dance after the speech.  It’s long, but informative as to how these people view the world, the economy and just how little regard they have for the idea that Americans can make any economic decisions for themselves.

Rachel started off with a weird stretch of an analogy that made Chris Matthews strangest movie clip seem apropos…

MADDOW”  There are a few problems in American public policy that cannot be explained a little better with help from the great allegory that is “Three‘s Company.”(VIDEO CLIP PLAYS)

MADDOW:  Sorry. Imagine if you will that our roommates in this allegorical case are Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Barack Obama, and your adorable but unemployed and desperately broke cousin, who in this case looks a little bit like Suzanne Somers.

OK.  So, technically it is four‘s a company, not three‘s company.

Maybe Mrs. Roper lives them or something, whatever.  We give a break.

In any case, these are the roommates, and the roommates‘ problem is that their rent is too high.  They can no longer afford the place that they are all staying in.  It was all right when they moved in, but the rent has been going up and up and up.  And now, it‘s just too darn high.  They cannot afford the rent anymore.

So, roommates John Boehner and Paul Ryan go away together and come up with a plan for dealing with the too darn high rent.  They say their plan is that roommate Paul Ryan, roommate Barack Obama and roommate John Boehner should pay less rent than what they are paying now, and the difference should be paid by your cousin.  They say that‘s their plan for making the rent cheaper.

Does that actually make the rent cheaper?  No, no, it does not.  But as far as they‘re concerned, it does.  If nobody is really looking out for your cousin‘s interests, then you‘re sort of getting away with saying that it did.  Thank you “Three‘s Company.”

But that is what the Republican budget does about health care.  It doesn‘t reduce health care costs at all.  It just makes cuz pay for more of those costs and thereby calls it cheaper for everybody else.  It looks at the problem of rising health care costs over time and says the government should stop paying its share of those costs, and let poor people and old people and disabled people—let them just pay more for it on their own.  Sorry, cuz. (Ummm, Rachel, since it’s the people using Medicare that you claim are going to have to pay so much more, this is an inane analogy.  In reality, Cuz has been living there for less than his quarter share, because Cuz doesn’t make as much.  Cuz is the one using all the hot water, has the TV on all day running up the electric bill and eats twice as much as everyone else.  Now that the rent is going up, you think the three roommates who work should continue to pay more… because they can.)

That‘s how Republicans deal with health costs—or rather how they do not deal with health costs at all.  And that rather brutal but true point was one of the many brutal points made today by President Obama in his big, perhaps unexpectedly satisfying speech on the budget and spending, and what is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat in America today?

Now, as I say, I think this point about Republicans and health care was a brutal point.  I demonstrated this brutality by putting in the context of “Three‘s Company.”  Listen to how the president did it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:  The third step in our approach is to further reduce health care spending in our budget.  Now, here the difference with the House Republican plan could not be clear.  Their plan essentially lowers the government‘s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead.  Our approach lowers the government‘s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself.  (END VIDEO CLIP)

 

MADDOW:  He could not have sounded more genial and professorial when he said it.  (Yes, Rachel, we can see where you would call a smug lecture “congenial.”  That would make you Miss Congeniality) It could not have sounded any less blunt.  But the point he was making there was both blunt and confrontational and important, and it needed to be said.  And that‘s what the speech was like today.

Whether or not you saw the president‘s speech, my advice to you is to read it at some point.  It‘s not very long, it only prints out to eight or nine pages long.  But you can actually print it out from our Web site tonight, we posted it at MaddowBlog.MSNBC.com.  We got the full text of it there.  (But somehow you haven’t included the Orwellian way of discussing tax increases above in your long discussion here…)

If you did not see the speech and your first contact with it is going to be reading it.  You will think when you‘re reading it that when he gave the speech, he must have been breathing fire and pounding the podium.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He was utterly sedate.  It look like a Rotary luncheon address.

But the message was less rotary and more roundhouse.  That point about the Republican‘s plan for making health care cheaper by making old people and poor people and disabled people just pay more for it, that is a blunt confrontational point and it is a good point.  (Yes, he bluntly called Paul Ryan “un-American.”  For trying to enforce some minor budget discipline.  Remember the outcry when people hinted that openly rooting for the other side in a war was un-American? )

The president‘s next point on that was that the whole point of health reform is to bring down the cost of health care.  (No, the whole point is to take it over and make in an entitlement.  No one still believes it will cut costs, unless there are wholesale death panels…) Republicans are still attacking that, even as they have no plan of their own on health care costs.  (The fact that you don’t like their plans, that trial lawyers who fund the Democratic Party especially don’t like their plans, that their plans are market based and won’t socialize medicine does not mean they don’t exist.) That is a good point that is both true and has been sorely missing from all the political complaints about health reform. 

The president made the point today that the Paul Ryan proposal to privatize Medicare kills Medicare.  That intrinsic to the whole idea of Medicare is that it is an entitlement, that is it exists as a safety net that everybody can defend on it.  Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid are entitlements for a reason, and by the way, they work.  That was a good point  from the president today and one that has been missing from the debate over budgets and deficits.  (Actually, it hasn’t been missing, this lie is as everpresent as oxygen, it has been screamed from the rooftops by such geniuses as Elijah Cummings ad nauseum, and repeated in every MSM news show on the planet.)

Amid the nonsense arithmetic-free rhetoric about deficits and debt, the president made the point today that historically, you know, it makes sense to run deficits when the country is at war or when the country is in a recession.  But that when you are not at war or in a recession, you should aim to get back in balance.  In other words, deficits themselves are not evil.  They have a purpose.  They should be used strategically.  (That was an arithmetic free argument… it was also economics free, but not intentionally.  There is no evidence that government spending brings anyone out of a recession—unless you count tax cuts as spending, oh, right.  I forgot, you don’t know the difference.)

That, again, is a good point and one that has been sorely missing from the debate about deficits and debt and the budget.  The president made the point today that after the huge Reagan deficits for the 1980s, we actually did get back to balance in the 1990s.  We even got back into surplus.  (Wait, the Reagan tax cuts worked?  Uh, wasn’t that “supply side?”  Yikes!)

He made the point that America‘s finances were in great shape by the year 2000.  Quote, “We went from deficit to surplus.  America was actually on track,” he said, to becoming completely debt-free.  (Yes, and here is the point that Democrats love to forget about.  Clinton did raise income taxes slightly, but he also made trade deals and brought down tariffs faster than any president in recent memory—which were all effectively tax CUTS.)

And we were prepared for the retirement of the baby boomers, (No, we weren’t.  This ticking time bomb has been there ever since birth rates dropped to replacement rates, and probably before then.  It just depends on what accounting trick is being used in what year to put the date Social Security goes broke wherever somebody wants it to be.) but then what happened?  After Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, he lost, we lost our way in the decade that followed.  Yes, bingo!

Mr. Obama continued, “We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program. (Which was about HALF THE COST OF THE DEMOCRAT PROGRAM) But we didn‘t pay for any of this new spending.  Instead, we made the problems worse with trillions of dollars in tax cuts—tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country, (and everybody who pays taxes.  Ummm, gee Barack, remember when you said if you didn’t extend the Bush tax cuts, it would be a big tax increase for the middle class, so big that you had to renew them, even if it would help the hated rich?) tax cuts that will force us to borrow $500 million every year over the next decade.”

“By the time I took office,” Mr. Obama said, “We once again found ourselves deeply in debt and unprepared for a baby boom retirement that is now starting to take place.  When I took office,” he said, “our projective deficit annually was more than $1 trillion.  And on top of that, we faced a terrible financial crisis and a recession.”  (and when Nancy Pelosi took the office of Speaker, it was about $150 billion and shrinking…)

And what do you have to do in a recession?  Like he said, before, right, earlier in the speech, in a recession, you are supposed to be able to run a temporary deficit in order to keep the economy ticking.  (By cutting taxes and boosting the private economy, not by growing government and making the overhead and expense to the economy heavier and permanent!) Having to do that itself makes sense, he made the case for that today.

But having to do that while starting from an already catastrophic fiscal position that George W. Bush left the country in, that‘s what does not make sense.  That is the disaster.  That is true.  And that‘s a good point.

And that has been missing from the debate about deficits and budget.  Just naming that the Bush tax cuts were unpaid for, that the Bush tax cuts exploded the deficit—just naming that, frankly, is a hallelujah moment.  That is a victory for math.  Cutting tax revenue reduces tax revenue.  I know, I know, it‘s barely even math.  It‘s almost an axiom.  (Here’s some math, if you taxed millionaires at 100% it wouldn’t take care of this year’s deficit.  Forget about the fact that they would stop working, so you’d only get it for this year…)

But at this point, it is a point that has been almost from the debate.  And the president saying it today is a good point, and one that really should re-center the way that people talk about this stuff.

Mr. Obama today confessed to signing an extension of those tax cuts this past December.  But he again said that he didn‘t think it was a good idea.  He only did it under duress in order to stop something worse from happening that the Republicans were going to force.  (Again, what consequences.  Oh, right, the BUSH MIDDLE CLASS TAX CUTS WOULD HAVE BEEN REPEALED.)

Will he let those tax cuts get renewed again?  Mr. President?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)OBAMA:  We can‘t afford it.  And I refuse to renew them again.  (END VIDEO CLIP)  (Just for clarity’s sake, do you refuse again to renew them, or refuse to renew them again?  You said you wouldn’t once before, and you did…)

MADDOW:  I refuse to renew them again, cut that out and stick it to the fridge.  (That’s right, middle class, you have a date certain for a tax increase if you re-elect the economist from ACORN) Beyond nailing the last Republican president, though, for the disastrous impact of his unpaid for tax cuts, President Obama today nailed the Republican Party for proposing even more of the same, fiscally irresponsible, arithmetically challenge tax cut nonsense.

“House Republicans,” he said, “are calling for $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.”  “Think about that,” he said, “in the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined.  Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each.  And that‘s who needs to pay less taxes?” (Note, he didn’t say their taxes went down, just that their income went up.  This is pertinent to the discussion HOW?  There income didn’t go up the mere 3% that their taxes went down, so therefore, the tax cuts stimulated economic activity… ooops.)

Again, when you read this speech, you would think he would be fire-breathing here, right?  I mean, he‘s making fire-breathing points.  He was not fire-breathing.  He could not have been more calm, cool and collected.

He was doing math out loud—math out loud.  But it is devastating math.  Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)  OBAMA:  That‘s who needs to pay less taxes?  They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that‘s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.  That‘s not right, and it‘s not going to happen as long as I‘m president.  (APPLAUSE) (END VIDEO CLIP)  (Now the LAST part of that is a promise I can live with!)

MADDOW:  And that was as wild as the crowd went during the whole speech.  (Maybe they liked the talk of the end point to this disaster too?)

Again, this does not sound like barn burning stuff.  But the point President Obama is making here, is exactly the point that the president‘s supporters have been waiting for him to make.  You almost have to telestrate the arithmetic while he does this.  But if you are willing to do it, the impact of what he‘s saying really can hit you.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut.

MADDOW:  OK, stop.  So, a $200,000 tax cut.  OK, keep going.

(BEGIN VDIEO CLIP) OBAMA:  That‘s paid for by asking, 33 seniors – (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  OK, wait, wait.  Thirty-three seniors—do we have an icon for seniors or something?  Yes!  OK, 33 seniors.  OK, keep going.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  That‘s paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs.  (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  Freeze.  Stop it.  Thirty-three seniors pay $6,000 each.  The math—(Really, are you afraid that none of your viewers have finished 3^rd grade?  That simple division is a new concept to them?) OK, finish it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  That‘s not right, and it‘s not going to happen as long as I‘m president.(APPLAUSE)  (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  What he‘s saying is that in order to get his $200,000 tax cut as one of the richest people in the country, right, the way Republicans want to finance that is by extracting 6 grand from 33 different old people.  (How about this, the failed stimulus plan that went to bail out public employee unions and push the problem down the road to the current crop of governors was like having around 162,000,000 – for those of you in Rachel’s audience, that’s 162 million—seniors pay $6000 more for their health care.  That did happen, and it happened while Barack Obama was president.  Rather because Barack Obama was President.)

He is right about that.  That is a good point.  That is exactly what the Republicans are trying to do.

They are claiming to reduce the deficit enough to afford this kind of thing for rich people by squeezing that money out of old people (Are Warren Buffet, Ross Perot and George Soros YOUNG people),and disabled people and other people (who are you callin’ “Other people?”) who this country has historically made a commitment to take care of.

Now, whether or not you can tell us straight out in your head while he‘s saying it, it may not have hit like a ton of bricks when he said it, but the president here is making the case that the Republicans‘ proposal for America is transferring resources and money from people who really do not have it to spare in order to give a ton of those resources and money to people who are already rich.  Good point.  (No, not taking something from Person A and giving it to Person B, is most assuredly NOT the freaking same as taking it from Person B and giving it to Person A, it just isn’t.)

And because that is a transfer of resources, and not a saving of resources, it not only isn‘t courageous or brave or serious, or any of the other things that the Republicans are getting called right now on the Beltway media.  It‘s not brave or courageous.  It‘s not even those things.  It‘s not even a real plan to reduce the deficit.

Oh, and the president said that, too.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA:  There‘s othing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending $1 trillion on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.  And I don‘t think there‘s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don‘t have any clout on Capitol Hill.  (Old people don’t have clout on Capitol Hill?  Ask Dan Rostenkowski, ask every congressman who spends half his campaign budget on absentee voter programs, as the Republicans who joined George W. Bush in promoting even the tiniest privatization of Social Security for those who volunteered to participate— and boy, that would be a LOT of wasted AARP contributions. That‘s not a vision of the America I know.  (END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  It is about transferring money from politically powerless people, who don‘t have much, to rich people, and claiming that‘s about the deficit when it is plainly not.  (It’s about NOT  taking from those who have and giving it to those who don’t, so they can afford to employ those who don’t, and oh, because they EARNED IT.) That is not serious or courageous.  In fact, it is radical and it is something that does not resonate with American values—so said President Obama today.  (It doesn’t resonate with Swedish values or French values anyway.)

Whatever you heard about this speech, whether or not you believe the way that I am describing it, whether or not you watched it today, I never say on this show—print out and read this thing, or very rarely say it.  In this case, if you have a second, print it out and read it.  Print it out and keep it around, so if you have minute, spend a few minutes reading it.

If you are a liberal or if you are a centrist, if you are a person who voted for President Obama, if you were worried that President Obama would not confront the Republicans on what they are trying to do with the economy and instead would triangulate against it—Mr. Obama did not do that. (Really, that’s what CENTRISTS were worried about?  Center of WHAT?)

If you were worried the President Obama would sell out Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and say we can‘t forward them any more, like the Republicans wanted him to say—Mr. Obama did not do that.  (If you were worried about that, you haven’t been paying attention.)

If you were worried he would let the Republicans and the Beltway media get away with this bogus assertion that they make constantly that Social Security is causing the deficit, when it is not—he did do not.  He, in fact, called that out as bogus today.  (No, he pretended that the tax cut to the rich was bigger than the looming payouts to Baby Boomers in Social Security demagoguery of the worst order and not even in the same classroom with Math.  Maybe a Philosophy Course at Berkely…)

If you were worried that Mr. Obama would follow the Republican line that deficits themselves are always evil, that he would ignore the fact that Republicans are the ones who create the worst ones and at the worst times, Mr. Obama emphatically did not do that.

I am a liberal.  I am a liberal, and, therefore, I am a professional worrier about Democrats talking smack about what liberals value, and about Democrats trying to sound like Republicans, and about Democrats who are afraid to confront Republicans and who instead eat Republicans‘ framing about what‘s wrong with the country, in particular what‘s wrong about the economy and what are available options are.

You know, coming out of this last deal on the budget that President Obama made with the Republicans on Friday night, frankly this president gave liberals reason to worry all over again.

But today, if this is the start of 2012, if this is how the rest of this term is going to go, leading up to his re-election effort, if this is how President Obama is going to run for re-election, if this is the way he‘s going to call Republicans out for what they‘re for and explain what‘s really going on in the economy and speak up for his own values and explain to the country why he believes Democrats values are the right ones on this stuff—then as a liberal, I am less worried than I was.

My only worry really at this point is why did he give this speech at 1:30 on a Wednesday and sort of whisper it.  (It was because this kind of blatant class warfare doesn’t work with the majority of the American people who, despite a generation of neglecting economic education, still don’t believe the government can spend us into prosperity.  But Obama knew that no matter when he “whispered” it, you would be listening Rachel, you and the rest of the restless twit base, and that you would make sure all of you got the word. With a little fine-tuning, I think this could be a barn burner.  I could imagine this one in a stadium over and over and over again!  (See it worked, now you will quit badgering the guy for a while– until the next time he stumbles into doing something right, or is forced to by reality.)

We‘ll be right back.

VIDEO CLIP, BARACK OBAMA:These aren‘t the kinds of cuts you make when you‘re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget.  These are the kinds of cuts that tell us we can‘t afford the America that I believe in, and I think you believe in.  I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW:  “These are not the cuts you make when you‘re trying to get rid of some waste or find extra savings in the budget,” he said.  So why would you find them then?  Implying these are the kinds of things you do when you‘re trying to fundamentally change the country.  (Wait a minute, “fundamental change” was what Obama promised and that’s a promise he is doing his damndest to keep.) In other words, it‘s not about the budget.  (That’s right Obama could give a rip about the budget.  Fundamental change from a private sector economy to public sector-driven economy is the goal.)

The president also today called out the Republican‘s plan for claiming to reduce the deficit while also giving away another $1 trillion tax cut to rich people, which means that the president committed math live on television—very dangerous.  (What the President committed was Mathicide.  His cuts are fictional and happen after he leaves office– long after.  Therefore the savings on the debt are fictional too– especially since they assume ludicrous “savings” from Obamacare’s implementation.  The “tax reform” i.e. tax increases, however are real.  You can take it to the bank.  Whenever Barack Obama says he will raise taxes, he means it– even if he can’t quite bring himself to actually SAY it.

The president‘s brushback in criticism of the Republicans today was, I think, stronger than most people expected.  Does that buy him from his own party, his supporters, more faith that his assurances that he will defend and protect Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security even as he said today that they need reform?  (Of course it does, check out all your rave reviews above.  You were the audience he had to fool.  And fool you he did.)

On April 6 the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), that is, the organization itself as opposed to its employees, was convicted in Las Vegas of felony “compensation” for registration of voters. Sentencing is scheduled for August 10. Nevada forbids compensating voter registration canvassers because it creates a financial incentive for fraudulent or sloppy registrations.

Significantly, this is the first time ACORN itself has been convicted of a crime. The fact that the nonprofit entity was found guilty strongly suggests that ACORN’s ambitious voter-fraud schemes were sanctioned at the highest levels.

The conviction came after the 2008 election cycle during which Las Vegas ACORN officials emptied the local jails to fill voter registration canvasser slots and even put individuals convicted of identity theft in charge of the registration drive. At least they hired experts, some locals quipped, according to John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.

Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins and celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long.

But this is not the first time that ACORN has found itself in legal hot water. In 2010 ACORN settled a racketeering lawsuit in Ohio out of court and agreed to withdraw from the state. In the settlement with the Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, ACORN agreed to “cease all Ohio activity” and surrender all its state business licenses.

As Judicial Watch reports, “The group has been busted for forging voter registration applications in key battleground states and submitting falsified forms in more than half a dozen others. In 2007, ACORN settled the largest case of voter fraud in the history of Washington State after seven workers were caught submitting about 2,000 fake registration forms.” Moreover, there are scores of ACORN employees who have been convicted of election fraud.

ACORN’s conduct is habitual and has taken place in dozen of states. It’s time for these gangsters to face the full weight of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

On a personal note, my op-ed in the Friday Washington Times is the #1 most-read opinion article on the newspaper’s website (as of Sunday morning). It’s gratifying to know that people still care about the threat that ACORN and similar groups still pose to the American republic.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my upcoming book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.