The OTHER problem with ACORN

As ACORN officials issue one defensive statement after another in response to the devastating revelations about their criminal enterprise, they're revealing to the public what the Right-wing Noise Machine™ has known and been trying to call attention to for a long time: that ACORN is nothing more than an extension of the Democratic party and exists mainly to serve their agenda. Take, for example, this closing paragraph from ACORN's most recent statement announcing suspension of some services:

Said Ms. Lewis: "We have all been deeply disturbed by what we've seen in some of these videos. I must say, on behalf of ACORN's Board and our Advisory Council, that we will go to whatever lengths necessary to reestablish the public trust. For nearly forty years, ACORN has given voice to communities, and gotten results. Right now, our nearly 500,000 member are working their hearts out for quality, affordable healthcare for every American and to help stop the foreclosure crisis. We must get this process right, so the good work can go forward."

Huh-what? Passing the health care reform bill the Democrats so desperately want? Stopping the mortgage crisis of the Democrats' making? When the hell did those two things become ACORN's job? Oh, right...some time around 20 January this year, I guess. I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that ACORN probably wouldn't be too excited about pushing something from the Republican agenda, no matter how good it would be for everyone. Like tort reform, let's say. Or school vouchers. Or building nuclear plants and expanding domestic oil and natural gas production.

And that's the other problem with ACORN. Not so much that they're relentless advocates for the Democrats' agenda, but that they receive taxpayer funding to be advocates for the Democrats' agenda! They have zero accountability to Congress and therefore to the taxpayers who fund them.

So here's a challenge for the two or three people who might read this...name a non-profit community organization pushing a Republican agenda receiving taxpayer funding.

Name That Party, Hartford edition

So, I'm in my old home state of Connecticut this week on business, and ran across this article in the Hartford Courant this evening. Cliff's Notes version: Hartford mayor Eddie Perez has contractor renovate home for nothing, contractor later gets lucrative city contract. Try finding any reference to Perez's party affiliation in the article.

Mayor Eddie A. Perez sat in his office at city hall on a late June day in 2007 and assured a pair of state criminal investigators that the rumors weren't true, that he had long ago paid in full for the $20,000 renovation at his home by city contractor Carlos Costa.

He could even get them the canceled check to prove it.

But barely an hour and a half after Perez said goodbye to the investigators, the mayor was in the offices of the Hartford Federal Credit Union filling out an application for a $25,000 home equity loan. It fell to Perez's lawyer nine days later to tell investigators that the mayor, in fact, had never paid Costa for the work that had begun more than two years earlier.

As a former denizen of the Hartford area, I can say with confidence that Hartford politics is just a bush league version of Chicago politics.

Oh, yeah...Eddie Perez is a Democrat...and a former gang member, to boot.