ACORN's snowballing troubles

"In the news business, we call this a story with legs," said Kate Philips and Maria Newman in The New York Times. ACORN, the community organizing group, has been losing allies since some of its workers were videotaped offering advice on getting a housing loan and evading taxes to conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute. ACORN is "so radioactive" that Democrats have joined Republicans in banning it from getting federal funds—and again Tuesday Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) "forced a voice vote to ban any funds in the defense spending bill from going to ACORN."

That's not ACORN's only problem, said Rick Moran in American Thinker. Judges on Wednesday are looking at allegations of voting fraud connected to ACORN in New York and Las Vegas, where an ACORN field director testified he gave $5 "blackjack bonuses" to canvassers who turned in 21 or more voter-registration cards in a day. "This is the tip of the iceberg of course. But the more malfeasance exposed, the more ACORN employees start flipping."

"One of the problems with witch hunts," said Rich Miller in The Capitol Fax Blog, "is that they eventually start to burn those who merely associated with the alleged witches." That's what is happening with the ACORN thing—critics are "not content to just bash" ACORN, now they want to demonize everybody who has ever been associated with it. So now attackers are going after the Service Employees International Union because it has supported ACORN in the past.

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ACORN's enemies may be creating problems for themselves, too, said Mary Phillips-Sandy in Comedy Central's Indecision Forever. The House bill blocking ACORN funding covers anyone who has submitted fraudulent paperwork—which would deny money to some of Congress' "favorite pals, like Boeing and Northrup Grumman" and anyone else who has been caught selling defective gear to the Army. What a shame—after all, it's "middle-aged ladies in community organizers' offices who are the real threat to democracy"—not the defense lobby, right?