Funding is just one underage prostitute away
According to their corporate web site, ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in about 75 cities across the country.
In an sting operation that brings to mind your finest Saturday Night Live skit, ACORN employees were caught giving advice to persons they believed to be a pimp and prostitute on how to manipulate the system in order to receive funding for a house that they intended to use as a brothel and where they would employ underage girls from El Salvador.
According to New Jersey Voices blog, James O’Keefe, dressed as a pimp and accompanied by a scantily clad 20-year-old woman posing as a prostitute, visited ACORN offices. Employees in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington, and California were video taped counseling O’Keefe on starting his business and manipulating income reporting to minimize tax liabilities. One ACORN employee paged through guidelines and finally settled on freelance performing artist as the proper job description for the prostitute. Later the pimp was counseled to consider claiming the brothel employees as dependents.
FOX News reported that on Friday two more employees were fired after a second video surfaced, less than 24 hours after the firings of the two ACORN officials from the Baltimore office.
The tapes, found in multiple postings on YouTube, have ignited calls for investigations. The United States Census Director has sent a letter to the National Headquarters of ACORN notifying the group that it will no longer help work on the 2010 census.
The video is seen as a serious setback for Obama, who has previously worked for ACORN, when he helped represent the organization in a 1995 lawsuit against Illinois that forced enactment of the motor-voter law (making it easier to register to vote). ACORN’s political-action committee endorsed Obama for president and his campaign gave an ACORN subsidiary $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities.
Quoting an article posted by the Associated Press this morning, “Republicans are using ACORN to portray Democrats as corrupt and distract Obama from his policy agenda, the same way Democrats used issues involving Halliburton, the giant government contractor and ex-employer of former Vice President Dick Cheney, against the GOP during the Bush years. Top Republicans from congressional leaders to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger want criminal probes of ACORN and conservative voters are pressuring news organizations for coverage.”
In response, and as reported by the Boston Globe, the House voted yesterday to deny federal funds for ACORN in a GOP-led strike just three days after the Senate voted 83 to 7 to deny housing and community grant funding to ACORN.
In the video, the ACORN staffer tells O’Keefe on how not to get caught by police. “Be careful. Train them to keep their mouths shut. Always keep your eyes in the back of your head.”