Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Pennsylvania ACORN worker sentenced to house arrest and fine

http://www.examiner.com/a-1710464~Ex_ACORN_worker_gets_home_term_in_voter_fraud_case.html

The 34-year-old Chester man must serve
six to 23 months of home confinement after his sentencing Monday in Delaware
County

Barksdale must also pay the group $574 restitution after pleading
guilty to forgery, theft and other charges. ACORN officials say Barksdale is a
"bad apple."

Not bad for an admitted forger. This genius registered names like "Ben Dover" and didn't think he was going to get caught. Looks like he could be out just in time for the 2010 election.

8 comments:

Joe McCaffrey said...

In this case, the man sentenced to house arrest was identified by ACORN officials and reported to law enforcement authorities. ACORN was actually the victim in this case, but the author of the blog tries to turn it around and make it look like ACORN perpetrated the fraud, in typical Rove-Republican fashion.

Jay said...

Mr. Magoo-
Clear your glasses and read it again. Where does it say ACORN perpetrated the fraud? We're all victims when election fraud occurs. In this instance, as has happened so many times before, the fraudulent registrations were paid for by ACORN.

Jay said...

And by "paid for by ACORN" I meant paid for by the taxpayers who largely fund them.

Joe McCaffrey said...

Paid for by taxpayers' funds? Hardly, ACORN operates from donations, not taxpayer funds. I suggest you go to the same eye doctor Mr. Magoo goes to, either that or do your homework.
ACORN hired people to do a job, and they didn't do the job, thus cheating ACORN, which in my book, makes ACORN the one defrauded. ACORN, in most cases where this happened, flagged the fraudulent registrations before they got into the system. The Rove-Republican smear machine, however, turned that around to make it look like ACORN was behind a well-organized fraud. The Rove-Republicans have one goal, and that is to prevent poor people from registering to vote since most of them register and vote as Democrats.

Jay said...

I suggest you do your homework...

From a June press release from the Consumers Rights League:

"WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the Consumers Rights League (CRL) published a collection of
whistleblower documents that suggest the Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now (ACORN) has reaped substantial financial gains by misusing taxpayer dollars for political ends
and by attacking lending corporations for the same “predatory” lending practices it regularly engages
in.
The ACORN Housing Association (AHC), an ACORN affiliate that receives over 40% of its
funding from government sources, claims to be a consumer advocate. In a newly-released report
from CRL, however, a series of documents obtained from a whistleblower source reveals
hypocritical and potentially illegal use of taxpayer dollars by ACORN and its related organizations.
These documents – which include staff emails and internal organization policies – suggest that
ACORN has failed to maintain a proper distinction between its tax-exempt housing work and its
aggressive political activities."

Want the link?
http://www.consumersrightsleague.org/uploadedfiles/ACORN_release.pdf

I don't know anyone who wants to keep any eligible voter from voting. We just want to make sure they only vote once.

Take your class warfare talking points somewhere else. They ring hollow around here.

Joe McCaffrey said...

And the beat (smear) goes on.

From "The Truth about ACORN" www.ACORN.org

ACORN And Federal Funding

Does ACORN Recieve Federal Funding?

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now does not apply for nor does it receive any federal grants.

ACORN has had contracts with other nonprofit organizations to perform work on projects which received federal grant support. For example, ACORN has received contracts to:

Identify families eligible to receive food stamps and assist them to apply.
Identify homeowners facing foreclosure and deliver them for housing counseling and loss mitigation services.
Provide lead paint remediation services to households with children living in older neighborhoods.
The contracts that ACORN receives on these projects are for delivering specific activities, all of which are tax-exempt qualified in accordance with federal grant guidelines. No payments are received until work product has been delivered.

None of ACORN's contracts to perform work on projects receiving federal grant money has provided funding for voter registration.
ACORN And Federal Funding

Would ACORN Have Received Any Funding From The First Bailout Bill?



Several false claims have been made by members of the right-wing echo chamber that ACORN stood to gain as much as 20 percent of whatever profits would have come from the future sale of the mortgage assets the first version of the so-called bailout bill would buy.

Of course, this was soon exaggerated to "20 percent of the bailout", then tagged at $700 billion, implying that somehow ACORN was on the verge of receiving $140 billion from its "Democratic friends" in Congress.

ACORN can only dream of a windfall about equal to the annual budget of the entire state of California.

The plain absurdity of this claim did not stop it from being amplfied across the media. From Media Matters for America:



The following media figures have recently falsely claimed or suggested that congressional Democrats have attempted to direct funds to ACORN:

During the October 1 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, host Steve Doocy said: "There was a story out there that the Democrats were trying to give ACORN 20 percent of those almost trillion dollars, so that's extraordinary." Former Ohio secretary of state and Townhall.com contributing editor Ken Blackwell replied: "It was a classic payoff. It was a classic payoff. It was political graft at its worst."
In an October 1 column, syndicated columnist Mona Charen wrote that "Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN. ... With the whole financial world and possibly the world economy trembling and cracking like a cement building in an earthquake, Democrats continue to try to fund their friends at ACORN?"
On the September 29 edition of CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, host Lou Dobbs claimed: "ACORN stands to reap hundreds of millions of dollars from a government bailout of Wall Street." Dobbs added later: "This is a straightforward deal for ACORN and other groups, left-wing groups, set up by the Democratic leadership of Congress. They're not interested in the bailout per se. They want to spread this out, and many people believe that this bailout in part is dear to the Democratic leadership because they want to advance a social agenda here as much as much as an economic bailout of Wall Street."
In reality what the Democrats tried to do was direct 20% of the future profits into the newly created National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF), created to pump dollars into non-profit affordable housing development across the country.



Conservatives, who have oppsed the Fund's creation for years, are now trying to strangle it in its infancy before it can develop a strong, dedicated funding stream. They have been using ACORN as a kind of bogeyman to whip their supporters up and create the political will to block funding.

The irony of this is that this fund is not something that ACORN would ever apply to or draw money from. Further, despite the cries of a give-away to supposed Democratic allies, the funding from the Fund would be given away via a competitive grants process, rather than by Congressional earmark, as conservatives implied.



Here's Media Matters again:



In recent days, media figures have accused Democrats of attempting to direct millions of dollars in government money to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in the financial bailout bill. The accusation is false. Neither the draft proposal nor the final version of the bill contained any language mentioning ACORN. Those making the false claim were misrepresenting a provision -- since removed -- that would have directed 20 percent of any profits realized on troubled assets purchased under the plan into two previously established funds: the Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund.

Under the now-removed provision, the money going to the Housing Trust Fund would have been distributed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the form of block grants to states, which would then award grants to qualified applicants. Money going to the Capital Magnet Fund would have been distributed by the U.S. Treasury Department through a competitive grant application process.

Salon.com's Gabriel Winant reported that ACORN's legislative director said the organization's housing advocacy affiliate, ACORN Housing, is unlikely to seek any grants, and even if it did, it would have to go through the same application process as any other group:

Thursday night, Sen. Lindsey Graham [R-SC] told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that 20 percent of the funds for "the retired debts" in the Democratic proposal would go to the progressive organizing group ACORN.

[...]

There's not even any reason, at least at this point, to believe that any of the money allocated to the Housing Trust Fund would end up with ACORN.

Brenda Muniz, the organization's legislative director, told Salon that Graham's claim is "just ludicrous." ACORN itself claims to take no money at all from the government. ACORN Housing, an affiliated but ostensibly autonomous nonprofit that provides free housing counseling, is considering applying for funds from the Housing Trust Fund, but will probably not choose to do so. "It's unlikely that we stand to get anything," Muniz said. Because ACORN Housing's primary area of expertise is housing counseling -- which is not what the Trust Fund's grants are for -- Muniz said that it's "unlikely that they would take on something like that."

Even if local ACORN Housing affiliates did choose to apply for money from the Housing Trust Fund, they would have to go through the grant proposal process at the state and/or local level. The fund allocates money to state and local government agencies and trust funds, which in turn grant it to housing development organizations that make it through the application process.

Source: "Fight Back, The Truth About ACORN www.ACORN.org

And the Republican smear and misinformation campaign goes on, simply because ACORN has the audacity to register poor and black people to vote, most of whom vote Democratic.

Joe McCaffrey said...

And who is the "Consumer Rights League?" The associated press identified them as a "Front Group" for predatory lenders. CRL is an association of credit card companies trying to disguse itself as a legitimate consumer protection group. Yet another fraud.

WASHINGTON (Map) - WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A predatory lending industry front group, the "Consumers Rights" League, emerged today to derail reform of reckless practices that have ensnared Americans in harmful payday loans, fostered hundreds of thousands of family foreclosures, roiled international markets, and put our country on the brink of recession.

The primary targets of this fake grassroots effort are the Center for Responsible Lending and its affiliate, Self-Help Credit Union. For the past 25 years, Self-Help has provided over $5 billion of financing to 55,000 low-wealth families, small businesses and nonprofit organizations in North Carolina and across the country, with an annual loan loss rate of less than one percent.


I engage in class warfare, alright, warfare against that class of shady businesses that try to exploit the poor by disguising themselves as people who actually help the poor. A little more research on the part of those that write this blog might result in a little less egg on your face.

Joe McCaffrey said...

It looks to me like "The Wit Hits The Fan" is really a public relations front for either the Rove-Republicans or the predatory lending industry. It's like when Exxon hired a PR firm to pose as an individual blogger to post comments against the scientific findings on global warming.

When a blog like "The Wit Hits the Fan" continually comes out on the attack against ACORN and goes to fraudulent groups like the Consumer Rights League for it's ammunition, it can only be a fraudulent industry shill.

I hope you feel good about your PR firm earning it's tainted money by trying to destroy a good organization like ACORN. It's a despicable practice you engage in.