Another day, another hit piece on ACORN from Fox News. This time from Sean Hannity and Michelle Bachmann. Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Independent has the breakdown on this segment:
Rep. Michele Bachmann continued her campaign against Rep. Barney Frank and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) on Fox News’ Hannity on Wednesday. Despite Bachmann’s claims on the show, a new bill introduced by Frank will not funnel money to ACORN and ACORN is not “under indictment” in 12 states for “voter fraud.”
Frank recently introduced a bill to “use amounts made available under the Troubled Assets Relief Program of the Secretary of the Treasury for relief for homeowners and neighborhoods.” Described as a neighborhood stabilization program, the funds would go to help depressed communities hit hard by the foreclosure crisis.
But Bachmann sees an evil scheme to give money to ACORN.
“Now Barney Frank thinks that [TARP funds] should go out to his friends in ACORN,” she told Sean Hannity. “He is serious about this, about funneling this little bit of money back out to ACORN.”
That little bit of money? “This would be an additional $1.5 billion for ACORN,” she said. “And don’t forget, in over 12 states so far this year ACORN has been indicted for voter fraud.”
The bill itself never mentions ACORN. In fact, it specifically spells out who gets the money:
the Secretary of the Treasury shall transfer $1,500,000,000 to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and such Secretary shall use such amounts for assistance to States and units of general local government for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes
And as noted in the article, ACORN has not been accused of voter fraud. Some of their employees have been accused of voter registration fraud. There is a big difference. There has been a raid on one of their Nevada offices, but after reading TPM's reporting on the topic, I've got to wonder if that was politically motivated as well. The right loves to demonize ACORN since they'd prefer as few poor and minority voters as possible actually get registered and have a chance to vote.
It's not up to the ACORN workers to verify those registrations. They can't throw them out because they think there are problems with them, and as BradBlog noted, it was the ACORN workers themselves that alerted election officials about the potential problems with some of the registrations they submitted in the first place.
They have to turn them in and let the local election offices sort them out. If that wasn't the case, I could decide to go volunteer for ACORN, and then proceed to throw out every registration from someone I assumed was a Republican because I didn't want them voting.
It's really disgusting to see these right wingers on Fox "News" turning ACORN into a dirty word day after day. I've got to wonder if it's not bad enough that ACORN might actually have a case against them for slander.
