Thursday, March 19, 2009 11:00 AM

By: Ronald Kessler Article Font Size

More than half the voter registrations turned in by ACORN canvassers during the last election were not valid, according to testimony to be presented before a House Judiciary subcommittee.

The testimony is from Anita MonCrief, a former employee of an affiliate of the Association of Community Organizations. MonCrief, who was fired for improperly charging personal expenses to the ACORN affiliate, originally testified under oath as part of a request by the Republican State Committee in Pennsylvania for an injunction against ACORN. The request was denied. The FBI has been investigating the liberal community organizing group for possible voter registration fraud.

MonCrief will appear at the congressional hearing Thursday with Heather Heidelbaugh, who represented the Republican committee in the civil suit and is on the executive board of the Republican National Lawyers Association. She will provide a legal analysis of MonCrief’s testimony.

“We will be presenting evidence that ACORN is engaged in voter registration irregularities and fraud,” Heidelbaugh tells Newsmax,

According to MonCrief, ACORN considered 40 percent an acceptable level of accurate voter registrations turned in by its workers. She said ACORN barely trained its workers in how to register voters properly and would fire employees if they did not meet a quota of 20 new voter applicants daily. If the registration cards turned in did not meet the quota, supervisors were told to “fire them right there; don’t let them waste your money for the day.”

If a canvasser was caught committing fraud, ACORN threw the individual “under the bus,” MonCrief said. ACORN employees were briefed on how to deny that voter registration fraud existed, she said.

According to MonCrief, the Obama presidential campaign called her in October 2007 asking for coordination in soliciting donations from people who had already made the maximum contribution to Obama allowed by election laws. MonCrief testified that she was given a massive database of Obama donors who had already reached the limit. Her task was to cull it for potential donors who would then donate to Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate which targets individuals and entities to solicit donations.

If true, MonCrief’s allegations constitute violations of the Internal Revenue Code, federal campaign finance laws, and laws against voter registration fraud, according to a memo by Cleta Mitchell, co-chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

MonCrief said she worked as a development associate from 2005 until early 2008 for Project Vote. Project Vote was so closely aligned with ACORN that they were essentially one and the same, she said.

Project Vote national spokesman Michael McDunnah has denied that the donor list MonCrief worked on came from the Democratic nominee or his campaign. The Obama campaign has denied the allegation.

Two ACORN officials from Pennsylvania have insisted that the group has policies in place to train new employees and to spot and flag applications that appear to be fraudulent.
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It therefore follows that we should be giving this organization billions in taxpayer money under this stimulus plan? Only to a criminal mind like Obama.

March 24, 2009

It has been reported that House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was invited by Illinois’s own Representative Luis Guitierrez to speak before a group of immigrants gathered in San Francisco.
There she praised the group, a large portion of who were in the U.S. illegally, as “very, very patriotic.” She then went on to make assertions, not supported by the facts, that Internal Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were engaging in inappropriate conduct toward these immigrants and she condemned ICE for enforcing U.S. laws by rounding up the criminals in their homes or workplaces.

In Pelosi’s view, the enforcement of U.S. laws by an agency of the federal government must be stopped. “It must be stopped…what value system is this? I think it’s un-American. I think it’s un-American.” Mrs. Pelosi represents California, a state overrun by illegal immigrants who are sucking the life’s blood out of state resources. And Pelosi must not have read the story that appeared in the Chicago Tribune about the illegal immigrant who stole nearly $600,000 in medical services from taxpayers by producing fake identity that showed she was a U.S. citizen. Had she read it, I doubt that she would care. We can see from her authorship of the idiotic stimulus bill, and from her flagrant use of corporate jets at taxpayer expense that she has no interest in and zero capability for protecting the fiscal health of our nation.

Illegal immigration has been a problem for years. Congress has no interest in solving the problem. They can write and pass legislation in 24 hours to limit corporate executive bonuses, but they can’t ever quite get around to enacting and supporting laws that would better protect our borders, our national safety and our financial resources.

In my view, Pelosi is un-American–as are those who agree with her position. Further, she is a walking advertisement for the need to have a competency test for anyone taking a seat in congress.

chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/letters/chi-090324falk_briefs,0,4142914.story

By Brad Reed, March 25, 2009.

The corporate media’s coverage of the administration’s bank rescue plan comforts the comfortable. Our press corps has discovered an important scoop: Rich people approve of using taxpayer money to help rich people.

Immediately after the Obama administration unveiled its cunning plan to help the titans of Wall Street avoid the hit that should result from their bad decisions, members of our national press corps fanned out across the land to ask investment bankers, hedge-fund managers and stock traders whether Obama’s plan went far enough in lining their pockets with taxpayer cash.
Setting the tone for the rest of our media, CNBC dutifully dubbed President Barack Obama’s plan a potential “game-changer” because it got a big thumbs-up from people like Quincy Krosby, the chief investment strategist at the Hartford Financial Services Group. Krosby said that the investment community’s response to the plan will likely be “positive,” although she cautioned that the government would have to provide “written guarantees” that it wouldn’t do anything silly — such as, say, heavily taxing the undeserved bonuses of executives living on corporate welfare.

Politico’s Eamon Javers similarly declared that Geithner had “cleared the bar” with his new bailout scheme because it had received an “important endorsement from the Financial Services Roundtable,” which deemed the government’s plan to help Big Finance artificially inflate toxic assets above their market value a home run. Who would have thought? Similarly, Javers discovered that the CEO of a hedge-fund trade group — whose members stand to make a killing by using government cash to subsidize and insure their purchase of the assets — also thought the plan was a swell idea.

There was some trouble in paradise, however, as Javers also reported that a few members of the investment community opposed the plan because it didn’t do enough to benefit the banks. Patriarch Partners CEO Lynn Tilton told Javers that while she was pleased to see the government willing to pay the banks cash for their worthless assets, she was worried that banks would not “share in the upside” if their worthless assets ever somehow regained their value.

Elsewhere in Media World: Fox Business reported that Geithner’s plan to bribe investors to purchase trash had “removed a huge cloud of uncertainty hanging over Wall Street” by offering “clarity over how the government will help banks get rid of up to $1 trillion of their toxic assets.” Reuters, meanwhile, boasted an “exclusive” interview with Bill Gross, the founder and co-chief investment officer of the PIMCO bond fund, who called the Geithner plan “perhaps the first win-win-win policy to be put on the table” and said that his company was “intrigued by the potential double-digit returns as well as the opportunity to share them with not only clients but the American taxpayer.” And CNBC analyst Marc Chandler said that there was “a sense of relief” that private assets managers who bought toxic assets “will not face the compensation limits of other Fed programs.”

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a common thread throughout all of this coverage, which is that Geithner’s plan cannot be successful unless it wins the enthusiastic endorsement of the very rich people who drove the broader economy into the ground in the first place. Our press corps’ primary gauge of measuring rich peoples’ happiness is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which it uses as a general substitute for actual economic statistics.

alternet.org/workplace/133246/brain-dead_economic_reporting:_if_wall_street_approves_of_obama’s_plan,_it_must_be_a_winner!/

By David Gollust
Washington
24 March 2009

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flies to Mexico Wednesday for a two-day visit aimed at showing support for Mexican President Felipe Calderon and his government’s crackdown on drug cartels. On the eve of the trip, the Obama administration announced new steps to curb border traffic in drugs, illicit money and weapons.

Secretary Clinton will be the first in a parade of senior administration officials to visit Mexico to lay groundwork for President Obama’s two-day visit in mid-April for talks with President Calderon.

The two neighbors have a heavy load of problem issues including trade disputes and illegal immigration. But the agenda has recently been dominated by drug-related violence mainly in Mexican towns along the border spurred by a crackdown on drug gangs by the Calderon government. Clashes between traffickers and security forces and internecine fighting among rival gangs has killed an estimated seven thousand people since the beginning of last year and spurred concerns by some analysts about the overall stability of Mexico.

Administration officials say a principal aim of the visits, and the new U.S. efforts along the border, is to underscore support for Mr. Calderon and dispel concern about Mexican stability.

At the White House roll-out of the border program Tuesday, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg said the new administration sees relations with Mexico as a critical partnership and one that requires as much high-level attention as any relationship the United States has. “The President has already developed his own ties with President Calderon, the fact that he will be making an early visit himself to Mexico before the Summit of the Americas, really represents the importance that we attach to it. And the Secretary [Clinton] really wants to stress that while we have a critical set of issues that we need to deal with in terms of law enforcement, counter-narcotics, guns and the like and the violence problem, that we really value Mexico as a partner across-the-board and the leadership that President Calderon has shown in courageously taking on this challenge,” he said. The administration plan announced Tuesday calls for the deployment of more federal agents, experts and equipment to the Mexican border region to curb drug shipment headed into the United States and weapons and drug payments going the other direction.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who will visit Mexico with U.S. Attorney-General Eric Holder next week, says the United States will provide $700 million worth of aid this year – including helicopters – to help Mexican forces apprehend and prosecute drug criminals.

Clinton will meet President Calderon and Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa in Mexico City Wednesday and visit the industrial city of Monterrey near the U.S. border before returning to Washington late Thursday. A senior State Department official said she added the Monterrey stop to highlight Mexican high-tech companies and research on renewable energy and show that the bilateral relationship should not be pigeon-holed (defined) by the media focus on issues like drugs and crime.
Clinton and other administration officials are aiming to resolve, before President Obama’s visit next month, a simmering dispute over access to the United States by Mexican truckers that has prompted a retaliatory set of Mexican tariffs on U.S. goods.

voanews.com/english/2009-03-24-voa72.cfm

2009-03-25

WELLINGTON, March 25 (Xinhua) — New Zealand Foreign Minister Murray McCully will meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when he visits Washington on April 6-8.

“The United States is one of New Zealand’s oldest friends. We share common values and interests, as well as a commitment to promoting a free, democratic and secure world,” McCully said in a statement released here on Wednesday. He said he will discuss with the U.S. secretary of state the bilateral cooperation in the Pacific, the global financial crisis, the role of international trade, New Zealand’s involvement in Afghanistan, and the U.S. role in the Asia Pacific region.

During his stay in Washington, McCully will chair a session of a ministerial meeting of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. The Antarctic Treaty is 50 years old this year and up to 30 foreign ministers are expected in Washington to mark the anniversary.
McCully will also meet members of the U.S.-New Zealand Council, which will host the next Partnership Forum between New Zealand and the United States in October, and he hoped to meet with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-03/25/content_11070281.htm

ATTN: GONZO: Just so you know the reason I’m not at bitterx anymore. She banned me cause I said I’d like to beat the shit out of Maureen and that I might consider starting a fund. NO SHIT. I’m not board dragging but I’d hope you let NJ and a few more know. Miss you guys.

March 25, 2009
Australian Associated Press

THE US had no better friend in the world than Australia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during Kevin Rudd’s visit today. At a working lunch in Washington DC, Ms Clinton and the Prime Minister discussed a range of issues affecting the two countries.

At a later media conference in the Benjamin Franklin room of the US State Department both reaffirmed their commitment to close co-operation on foreign policy. “America doesn’t have a better friend in the world than Australia, a friend through good times and hard times on so many of the historic and difficult challenges that have faced the United States and Australia, both singly and together,” Ms Clinton told reporters.
“We have reaffirmed our commitment to working closely on the range of difficult problems, but also exciting opportunities that lie ahead.”

Mr Rudd said Ms Clinton was “a genuine friend of Australia” and that her recent visit to east Asia had sent “a very strong positive signal to our part of the world about this administration’s engagement in the Asia-Pacific. A spokesman for Mr Rudd later said the two reaffirmed the importance of close foreign policy cooperation between Australia and the US and they also discussed the future of the Asia-Pacific region.

theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25239739-5013871,00.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUQI5PzKPPs&feature=player_embedded