I’m SO SO GLAD someone brought this up–I had no idea! If I’d known that, maybe in the very bit you fucking quoted I woulda fucking said that.
You rock, gonzomax, you really do.
Happens quite a lot, dunnit?
Well, speaking personally, I think we are largely in agreement - except that you were a supporter of ACORN and I was for the most part an opponent. But even with all of this I thought they simply had to get their house in order - a point advanced by their more honest friends.
So apart from correcting the misconceptions of others (which you are doing a pretty good job of yourself) that might be it for me.
Fair enough. For myself, I support them for two reasons:
- When I worked alongside them, they had a great organizing model. Specifically, they’d go into a community and ask the people there what they needed, whether it was repaired streets or community police officers or better lighting or whatever, and then they’d help the neighborhood achieve those aims. That sort of bottom-up, rather than top-down, political action really appeals to my sensibilities.
- Getting poor people registered to vote is huge. For a variety of reasons that we’ve hashed out here ad nauseum, poor people are underrepresented at the polls; this is a social ill that I’d love to see reduced or eliminated, and ACORN worked toward that goal.
I will also say that, while they needed to get their house in order, that’s only true for very high values of house in order. Compare them to, say, Halliburton or the Catholic Church or other bodies that get federal funding despite employees who do much more harm, and it’s difficult to see a reason besides rank politics that ACORN was so heavily targeted.
Is anyone’s house in such perfect order? But its not about ferreting out some trivial infraction of the law to exaggerate out of all proportion. It is about the Bush Administration using the instruments of law and justice to advance and protect their political advantage. It is the same sort of thing as using Federal attorneys to selectively enforce the law to the same advantage. Its a disgrace, and to the extent that we have tolerated it, it disgraces us. Hell, at this point in time we know that they subverted the Justice Dept to their political advantage, and whats been done about it? See any scalps hanging from teepees? See any meaningful consequence of any sort? TG, IANAL, so I’m willing to defer the technical issues of legality to our in-house counsel, but I’m willing to go way out on a limb and suggest there are likely to be some Federal laws against such willful perversion. Call it a hunch.
And let us not shrink from calling out the Dems who let this thing happen without raising a finger to help. I suspect it is largely because centrist, wimp-ass, mealy-mouth, triangulated Dems were perfectly content with feeding ACORN to the wolves.
I am also struck by how much of this same material was gone over with equal fervor and intensity in the thread linked upstream. How the very same half-assed justifications and bald faced lies were unmasked therein, and seem to have been forgotten by some of our tighty righty correspondents. Perhaps you guys oughta smoke more weed, or at least some, to forestall such memory issues. Apparently, abstinence isn’t working.
And finally, a trivial note in reference to the late ballots in Florida. The Dems did the right thing in letting those ballots be counted, when, to strictly enforce the letter of the law, they should not have been. I would not like to see service members denied their voting rights over a technicality. But, and this is a very big but! the law was the law, both parties agreed to suspend enforcement of the law, which, of course, they are not empowered to do, however well intended.
So those Democratic prosecutors in Pittsburgh and Las Vegas looking at the registration issues with ACORN now - you’re cool with that, or not cool with that? Because one really can’t grasp your meaning from your post.
Personally, I’m on board with them enforcing the law.
Yeah, let us know, won’t you, if this turns out to be anything other than an excuse to exaggerate puny technicalities into crimes. Frankly, I’m surprised you are not embarrassed to offer them. I suppose that is one of the drawbacks of sympathy for a political party that is the very embodiment and paragon of civic virtue and fair play. Yes.
They can look all they want. Who’s stopping them? Who’s saying the law should not be enforced. The issue is that no one has proven ACORN broke any laws. These invesigations are not about searching for suspects in a crime, it’s about searching for crimes to pin on a suspect.
Be careful, sir! You are very close to suggesting that this was nothing more than a political stunt, rather than a stern exercise in political virtue! Take care!
After all, they already knew who was guilty, and that the crimes were grievous. It was simply a matter of discovering which specific crimes the malefactors had committed, which, you must admit, is much easier when you already know who the guilty parties are.
No dog in this fight, but what does this mean exactly? Is it a reference to something? Just seems so mysterious…
I tried it delicately once, now I can only point you to Chris Rock’s routine entiled “The Tossed Salad Man.” Decorum, and my company’s software, prevents me from linking directly.
Not all ignorance need be fought.
With respect, sir, I must disagree. Once we accept that premise, we must then decide what ignorance need not be fought, and who should shoulder that burden? You, sir?
I remember when I was growing up the “don’t litter” campaigns was just getting going. On the first Saturday of June people would gather in a local park to clean up litter and get the park ready for summer.
Lots of local corporations got involved providing coffee, snacks, and supplies, including McDonalds. They provided jugs of that weird orange drink, but also an incentive program. McDonald garbage bags (McBags) were given to kids, if they filled it with garbage they got a token for a free Mcdonalds icecream.
Take a guess how long it took us to figure out that we could fill the bags with anything and still get that free icecream.
Sometimes incentive programs fail, I’m curious how culpable you see McDonalds in that example. Were we at that point McDonald’s employees?
I’d also love to see a massive chart showing what all of the allegations against ACORN are, the locations, and actual convictions. Honestly I have no idea at this point. Quotas, incentives, gang rape, theft, voting for the Green Party. All I know is that when someone asks about one, they get a half-assed answer to a different one. Probably the most disingenuous debate I’ve seen in a long, long time.
accusations have become convictions
voter registration fraud has become voter fraud
individuals acting on their own have become a massive organizational conspiracy
All over what? Compared to the Catholic Church and it’s charities this little shit of an organization is meaningless. Compared to the billions dished out to defense contractors none of this should even register.
We are so obsessed with this little pimple on our ass we’ve ignored the tumors ravaging our lymphatic system.
Sure! Good as any.
Quite. Are you not a more knowledgeable, better informed, broader minded, in short a better and wiser person for having Googled that, any momentary discomfort notwithstanding?
I assume that McDonald’s then passed the trash bags along to the local dump. To the extent that their poorly-considered incentive program created extra trash for the dump, then yeah, McDonald’s was culpable for that foreseeable result. If (to continue the analogy) it were illegal to offer people a reward for turning in trash, then it’d be appropriate to prosecute McDonald’s as a corporation, even if it were only a local manager who came up with the program as part of the official duties.
And of course you weren’t McDonald’s employees, but that’s totally off-point. From what I’ve seen, nobody except a few Doper nutcases dispute that the people collecting voter registration cards were ACORN employees, even if only temporarily so.
It’s sort of like blaming McDonalds for offering that incentive program and then not doing enough to combat the dump overflowing with needless trash if there were also a law that McDonalds was legally required to take it all to the dump and say “hey, I don’t really think this was collected properly, but here ya go!”
Arguing by analogy is really confusing. But imagine these circumstances:
-Given the overworked nature of our landfill staff, it’s illegal to pay people based on the amount of garbage they collect.
-Some day manager at McDonald’s, unaware of the laws, enacts the aforementioned program.
-There’s a lot of extra trash that therefore shows up at the landfill.
-McDonald’s gets charged for the actions of their employee (as is typical), and people suggest that there should be better training put in place to avoid such an event in the future.
Yes, of course McDonald’s should have brought the trash to the dump. But better yet, they shouldn’t have given an incentive for people to create extra trash in the first place.
Where’s the problem?
You’re probably better off not knowing, but google for “prison salad tossing.”
Turns out voter fraud has nothing to do with any of this, ACORN caused the mortgage crises. The pimp thing was just a distraction.
Bank intimidation tactics to make bad loans that Fannie Mae then bought up.
Bricker was also nice enough to post the list of reasons why Congress killed them: